THE TROUBLE GENE
One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitchen, airport, elevated train, last week, two months ago. We thin out and make room for what we read or write. That trouble orbits the oldest stone in us, back where quietude hides. And poetry is in there with it, our own trouble gene working overtime to pick up its sound and shape.
Which is to say not too long ago at a gathering of 30 or so who loudly laughed and talked, a guy I hadn’t met seated next to me—mid-50s I guessed—seemed to cherish such a stone, even be one, eyes down, eating supper, no attempt at the usual chit-chat over the bedlam in that bad-acoustics room. I tried to talk to him. No luck. I tried again. Finally he looked my way, waved his hand—“too much ambient noise”—pointing to a device matchbox-small between his knife and spoon and my fork. I followed its wire to the small silver disc fixed to the side of his head. “My cochlear implant,” he said.
A secret weapon for sanity then: he had tuned right out, this artist/graphic novelist from Detroit, Carl Wilson, brilliant self-taught printmaker, his work documenting many violent troubles from his own experience, but endearing ones too. Shortly I would learn of the most unimaginable mic in the world, that cochlear implant as ear trumpet gone hip-digital and 21st century talking straight to his brain via a magnet, how it had been slipped under his skin to link up that little gadget on the table to funnel in sound. That magnet business, as if words were steel shards, syllables as tiny lightning bolts pelting him. He realigned his wires, clipping that gizmo on the table to my shirt pocket. “I’m not being fresh,” he said, “or maybe I am.”
Thus began the et al.
