Diffraction, noun:
The process by which a beam of light or other system of waves is spread out as a result of passing through a narrow aperture or across an edge, typically accompanied by interference between the wave forms produced.
Examples:
Silver linings. The visual effect of sunlight bending around the edge of clouds.
Cloud iridescence. Various colors observed in clouds as water droplets are diffracted differently and scattered.
Coronas. Rings of light around the sun, caused by light wave diffraction of small particles in the atmosphere.
The blue sky. When sunlight hits earth’s atmosphere, colors of longer wavelengths pass through. Blue, relatively short in wavelength, diffracts and scatters on collision with the atmosphere’s molecules.
20 years ago, I dreamed the island where I was living at the time was engulfed by a tsunami. I lived then as a caretaker in a condo development right on the beach, on a narrow strip of the island called the Neck, because it extended off the main body of the island. Body, head and neck of the island all gone, nothing but blue ocean in sight.
The ocean was calm, not frightening at all. The storm was over. And there were others bobbing in the water with me off in the distance. Unafraid and curious, I looked down through the clear, deep indigo depths and saw the roofs of the condos undulating far below.
As I didn’t know what happened before I found myself floating in the water with no island to set my feet on, I also don’t know what happened after. The dream dissipated and I woke up in my first floor bedroom in that condo and walked outside, stepping onto the grass with reconsecrated feet, and heading toward the path through the dunes.
But I wonder—did I ever make it to a shore again, or am I still drifting on the open ocean? And what about the others in the water with me ? Faces to the sun, are they still treading water, or did cold claim them when night fell? Did they slip beneath the surface, sinking to the bottom like whales that feed entire ecosystems?
15 years ago I left that island and traveled to Peru where I drank ayahuasca my first week landing in Pisac. The Sacred Valley was a magnet for people wanting to learn from this plant medicine at the time. I could have been in a ceremony every day, but what happened in the first ceremony was so terrifying I said no to most invitations of any sort for the rest of my three months there. For once, I was sensible. I knew what I’d encountered was far beyond the ability of my body to integrate, and instead of blasting through with more medicine, took to my bed with books while ceremonies went on literally all around me. Sometimes I was reading a novel listening to rattles and icaros in the room next door.
I did go back once more to drink the medicine, mostly to face my fear. This time I prayed like crazy that I would be granted a less terrifying experience.
My prayers were answered. That second ceremony, I was surrounded by light and received ecstatic and reassuring visions of the goodness of the universe, and I am grateful for that. Those visions did not, however, explain the very real thing that happened to me in the first ceremony, which I’ll describe now.
As the music swelled and began to fill all the space in the completely dark room, another voice began to sing just for me. She was not a woman in a physical body—I knew nobody else could hear her—but she was also not “just in my head,” although that’s where her song penetrated. Drilling is perhaps a better word. Her high-pitched tones in a language I couldn’t understand bored into my brain.
I couldn’t see her, but a mental picture, brief as a camera flash, let me see without eyes that she was very ancient, her face eroded by time to match the clay bluffs of my island home, and her eyes tuned to a world that I wouldn't be able to see even if the room wasn’t completely dark.
It was the pressure that was the most terrifying. As her song bored into me like a wasp, pressure built and I knew I was going to be annihilated. The feeling of fear is really beyond my ability to write. It was a fear more suited to cinema where all the senses save touch come into play. Except it wasn’t a movie, it was real and I was being led to the executioner’s block, a blood-stained slab on a platform above a crowd of people gathered to watch my unjust death as entertainment.
The stairs were in front of me. Two men held my arms and dragged me forward. I had no choice. In a few seconds I would be dead.
I walked up the stairs. The men pushed me onto my knees and notched my head in the block, pinning me down until I finally went numb. The crowd roared and went silent as the executioner whose thick thighs I could see from the corner of my eye raised the axe.
And then it was over. My neck severed. Head dropped with a thud onto the boards, and blood spurting into the open mouths of the roaring spectators in the front row. I was their sacrifice.
This is not a scene that played out in my mind in the ayahuasca ceremony. It’s the feeling of what happened as the old woman sang, and if this was an actual movie, my actual death would not be on film, because I didn’t see it. I just woke up after it had happened, knowing it had happened because: 1. I was no longer afraid. 2. There was a thin stream of vomit I could smell rising up from my cream-colored alpaca shawl I’d bought earlier in the week in the Pisac market and 3. The pressure was gone.
As far as I know, pressure is one of the conditions of coming into this physical world. Males release semen that unite with females’ eggs through a build up of pressure we call ejaculation, and the fetus resulting from that union of sperm and egg, is propelled by contractions from the accommodating, expandable roundness of the uterus down the straight, narrow channel of the vagina into air, where to live and thrive, is a coming to terms with the limits of gravity, both a pressure from above holding us to earth, and a pulling from below that ultimately claims our physical forms in the form of corpses. In between, if we are brave enough to open our hearts to the difficult experiences that help us recover from the amnesia of birth, we remember we have the ability to cultivate buoyancy, which gives us some ability to navigate in those waters where we began this essay.
You may be asking, once again, what any of this could possibly have to do with writing a poem, which was my stated intent in the beginning of this series. Here we go.
A poem as a written artifact, begins with the hand, though it’s summoned before that through the air, and even before that through the ether, the invisible realms that can’t be measured by science, and never will be, that place where I went when the old woman trepanned my skull with her song and catapulted me down the birth tunnel, which I’ve come to understand over 15 years of processing the experience, was a literal journey into a singularity.
Yes, I passed through a black hole, was crushed, and pushed out the other side in a new form, all while staying in the same body, this one with the two hands typing these words to you. I don't remember it, because there is nothing to remember there. Time does not exist in that dimension and thus cannot be archived. I “blacked” out. Back still upright against the wall, without anyone noticing, the whole spectrum that comprised me went off-line.
Did “I” go somewhere else? Who am I without my ego and identity? What does it mean to go somewhere, anyway? How can I go somewhere that doesn’t exist in the physical or in time? I don’t have answers for this, and I don’t want to make them up. I could say my soul went, but even that feels too bound in time’s narrative. All I know is one second there was a pressure I knew was going to kill me, then a space where my mind turned off that I only know from the evidence I discovered after I was returned to my body, that trickle of vomit on my alpaca shawl.
For those who don’t know, vomiting in an ayahuasca ceremony is expected and called purging. It’s also called “getting well,” and that’s exactly how I felt when I came back from wherever went. In a pitch black room with my back still straight against the wall, sitting on the packed earth with a group of strangers singing and crying. I had no desire to be anywhere than I was, felt completely at ease, insecurity and anxiety erased, replaced with contentment and awareness of the beauty of everyone in that circle.
In Heka, diffraction is the final four of establishing the physical in the creation of magic. It provides a spell with flexibility and tolerance.
In a poem, this made me think of my former teacher, the astonishing poet Dean Young who died from COVID-19 complications in 2022, eleven years after receiving a heart transplant. One day we were talking about music, and I mentioned how much I loved the Bach Cello Sonatas and had been experimenting writing in from with the sestina. Dean looked at me in horror and confessed listening to Bach made him feel like he was in prison, and that he loathed the sestina. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a highly regulated form that lends poems a tightly woven quality that I find interesting, and. yes, reassuring, which is also why I like Bach’s cello sonatas. I’m a Capricorn. I like order.
However, I appreciate chaos, too. Eros, the god of Creation, was born of Chaos, the personification of the undifferentiated darkness before time bound us humans to its wheel, known in Hawaiian culture as Pō. The best creations, the ones that really move me, contain elements of chaos, which in the case of a poem can be as simple as letting the present moment in while you’re writing it.
When you allow the situations and circumstances of the poem’s genesis into the poem, you are not only letting the present moment in to affect the past (what you’re writing about, even if you’re writing about what’s right in front of you), you are also archiving that moment and expanding the boundaries of time to reflect a truer vision of reality.
Time does not operate in lines, or it does for a while—eventually it bends back on itself and forms circles that become loops and spirals, collapsing into that singularity of a black hole that compressed me in the beginning of this essay and spat me out expanded on another side. Not the other side, because there are many other sides. Time is not one straight line, but multiple lines, and as a poet, the more timelines you can include in a poem, the greater influence you will have on physical reality. Your poems will become spells to enchant your readers, not to get them to do what you want, but for your words to connect them with the great possibilities of creation within themselves.
We need more poets capable of expanding time in this world where so many are stuck on a timeline that predicts doom from climate collapse, species extinction (including our own), and competition as the only way to have a comfortable life while everything burns. We need to remember that war is not a god.
Reading a poem that allows the present moment of its creation in (not just a poem written in the present tense which is still an archiving of the past), is the difference between a poem that reads like a room with no windows, or one where the window is open to whatever is wafting through, and available to be moved by it. A poem like this mirrors the fundamental nature of reality, something we’ve collectively forgotten—creation is reciprocal.
This could be the intoxicating aroma of lilacs, sinus-stinging fog, or exhaust fumes from a steady stream of cars passing below on 2nd Ave in New York City, where I once lived for a few months and had to sleep with ear plugs.
Not to say every poem has to have open windows. You could be a poet who wants to give readers the experience of being in that closed-off room, but I am speaking to the poets and the readers who know in their bones that we come to Earth as part of the human experiment to experience wonder and awe, and to learn how to channel those emotions to become conscious, participatory creators with the physical down to the atomic level. Next time you’re writing, open a window and tell us if there’s a bird singing in the hawthorn bush (Hawthorn berries are a remedy for heart conditions. I pass a handful back to Dean Young on a timeline where he’s not yet come into this world), or a gender non-conforming rapper bopping their head to music you can’t hear as they walk past your café table because they are wearing ear buds, or a man with glasses drawing those atomic unseen realms with a ballpoint in a notebook balanced in his lap as he rides the subway to work. You could show these drawings to a Shipibo woman in the Peruvian jungle and she would recognize them as patterns that came to her through a song she embroidered on pieces of cloth purchased by some hippies who took it back to Austin, TX and sewed as patches on the back of denim jackets worn by a newlywed couple wheeling their luggage through the airport on their way to a Tulum honeymoon, where I used to lie in bed waiting to hear the duende cry of the man who rode his bike through the streets selling oranges, an event I’ve attempted to document and archive in at least a dozen poems who still resist my longing to document those lonely late afternoons.
Poets, ask yourselves, who is resisting—you or the poem? Stay flexible. Tolerate a no. If the now doesn’t want to make an appearance, don't force it. Same goes for the past and the future. Readers know when a word is false. Spare yourself some cringing and let it go.
With this fourth essay, we have completed the physical foundation of magic, grounding ourselves in Revelation, Reflection, Refraction, and Diffraction.
To review:
Revelation is the act of disclosure.
Reflection is the act of exposure.
Refraction establishes our velocity and momentum.
Diffraction provides us with flexibility and tolerance.
Can you see how these four qualities, these principles of light, can help you create poems that move a reader and open up new possibilities through wonder and awe in the world?
Before I go, I want to say that I am not offering your these essays as a formula. As I said, this is an anti-manual, not a set of instructions to follow. We have computer programmers, and now AI for that. We need your organic human voice in the world, the unique tones shaped and channeled by your blood, bones and organs. The body is a cathedral.
What I’m offering can best be absorbed into your own work through osmosis in the writing of first drafts. You’ve read this, now stop thinking about it. Allow your right brain to dissolve that gap between your left brain by not trying too hard. Let it flow, then come back and navigate the river with a paddle.
Where these principles of Heka can really come in useful is the revision process. In these days of Instagram, a lot of people are writing poems to be read once quickly on a tiny screen. That’s fine, but like so much of our culture, this medium makes the poems too easily disposable. In order to be an act of magic, to be a spell that can alter the physical world, which in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is what I’m going for in my own work, and encouraging in yours because we need to radically change our relationship with the physical world if we are going to survive on Earth, revision is usually necessary. I know the ancient Buddhist poets and Allen Ginsberg said first thought, best thought (Ginsberg claimed not to revise), but let’s be honest. Even since the heyday of the Beats in the 1950s and 60s, we have a lot more demands on our attention now. Our first thoughts may not penetrate to the same depths they did, even fifty years ago. I’ll confess, in my case, I can say that’s true for even ten years ago, about the time I got first my smartphone.
So revise. Take many different lenses to your poems—macros, wide-angles, magnifying glasses—do not apply filters too soon—and ask yourselves if your poems are
Disclosing something that, if revealed, will truly make the world a better place.
Are exposing a vulnerable truth that will expand a reader’s heart.
Have the momentum and velocity to move off the page and move and inspire a reader.
Are flexible and tolerant enough to encompass more than your vision of them. (Poems have their own life and you are not the one in control.)
Ultimately, the poems should not be about you, they should be about themselves. We as readers, get to receive the gifts of them and go forth into the world expanded and more available to encounter life as equals. Relegating submission to an extinct timeline, we claim our roles as creators and inhabit the world of infinite possibilities that has been here all along.
Belief in Magic
by Dean Young
How could I not? Have seen a man walk up to a piano and both survive. Have turned the exterminator away. Seen lipstick on a wineglass not shatter the wine. Seen rainbows in puddles. Been recognized by stray dogs. I believe reality is 65% if. All rivers are full of sky. Waterfalls are in the mind. We all come from slime. Even alpacas. I believe we're surrounded by crystals. Not just Alexander Vvedensky. Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard's bullet did him in. Nonetheless. Nevertheless I believe there are many kingdoms left. The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather. A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life even though even though this is my second heart. Because the first failed, such was its opportunity. Was cut out in pieces and incinerated. I asked. And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart in a jar. Strange tangled imp. Wee sleekit in red brambles. You know what it feels like to hold a burning piece of paper, maybe even trying to read it as the flames get close to your fingers until all you're holding is a curl of ash by its white ear tip yet the words still hover in the air? That's how I feel now. First published in Poetry, July/August 2014
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light