Books for a February Reading

[Don Schaeffer]

I'm doing a reading on Feb 5. It will cover three books. These are the book summaries I wrote for it.
The Evolution of Bodylessness

I know more and more people, talk to them without auditory speech, and map their inner lives into the master diagram of the world that continuously forms in my brain. It doesn't matter to me that much of what I come to know and what I paste into my map of the world is false. I treat the ghost people from all over the planet in as real a way as I treat the people that live with me and the people I never speak to who sit at nearby tables in restaurants and on buses. Something is happening to reality. It's evolving.

Prayer

Ok., if the world is a strategic model with gazillion layers and pathways stretched over the surface of the brain (or stretched over something we don't know about yet), and the model is simply fed its detail by the senses stretched over the surface of time and space, then anything can happen. Poetry is the only way to talk about this. Poetry is not a very good form of prayer, but it is halfway between prayer and discourse.

Until I Got to New York

My wife was in a home nine years ago, and my Winnipeg life was ending. A woman from my 1970s past, then married to a man whom I considered a friend, found me on the internet. We began not only conversing in the soundless form of bodyless communication, but also toying with each other's imaginations. I went to visit her in New York and lived with her eight years until she died of an aggressive cancer. I am now back in Winnipeg with my family. This is as much an epic as a minor poet can put together, 478 pages of travel through time.