The Brain Is a Boundary

Review by Fred Dennehy

Imagine you are driving home along a familiar road one evening. As you approach a well-lit underpass you suddenly see a large animal lumber off the curb in the path of your car. As you slam on the brakes—too late—you see an alligator directly ahead of you! But somehow, in the seconds that elapse before your car screeches to a stop, there is no sudden jolt or bump, nothing to mark the collision that had to have happened. You get out of the car and you look around, back and under. No alligator. Nothing like it. The only jolt was to your sense of reality.

The Brain Is a Boundary: A Journey in Poems to the Borderlines of Lewy Body Dementia; by Alexander Dreier, Lindisfarne Books 2016.

This encounter with a non-existent alligator happened to Alexander Dreier in 2011. It was the catalyst leading him to a focused path of diagnosis for what had been a long-standing and baffling condition of debilitating fatigue, one that had been ascribed variously to Lyme disease and to that ne’er-do-well cousin scratching at the door of diagnostic legitimacy, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

But fatigue had been only the most alarming of a number of seemingly unconnected symptoms. Years earlier, Alexander had lost all sense of smell. And for some time, he had been experiencing intermittent visual distortions—seeing, for instance, in a granite outcropping, a rendering of Richard Nixon’s face, jowls and all, or the stunningly clear outline of a polar bear. Alexander had also developed a sleep disorder in which he found himself physically acting out violent dreams, and often finding himself caught in the nether world between wakefulness and sleep.

After the alligator incident, Alexander followed the modern path of self-diagnosis—Google. He came to the conclusion that he might have Lewy Body Disease (“LBD”), a progressive brain disorder having a family of symptoms including visual anomalies (ranging from mild visual distortions to outright hallucinations), problems with “executive functioning,” loss of the sense of smell and continuing low energy. After a dismissive (but in Alexander’s personal recounting, hilarious) non-diagnosis from a neurologist at a local hospital, who deemed Alexander too smart, articulate, and stable to have anything pathologically amiss, he received a sudden and alarming reversal of opinion from the same source—early onset Alzheimer’s. Nothing to be done. But Alexander had had experience with Alzheimer’s in his own family, and he and his wife Olivia concluded—correctly—that the diagnosis was wrong. He made an appointment with Dr. Bradley Boeve, one of the world’s leading experts in LBD, located at the Mayo Clinic. After a visit to Rochester, Minnesota, Alexander’s own two hour internet diagnosis was fully confirmed.

What is LBD? It is (at least in Alexander’s case) a very slow, progressive form of dementia. Small balls of protein called “Lewy bodies” form in the neurons and block the brain’s production of neuron transmitters that allow impulses to cross from one end of a synapse to another. In Parkinson Disease, these protein balls first strike the motor neurons, while in LBD they enter the inner recesses of the brain and especially affect those parts concerned with visuospatial processing, and so produce visual illusions and hallucinations. They also appear to be related to parts of the brain differentiating among wakefulness, dreaming, and deep sleep.

Without question, this is a sobering diagnosis to have thrust upon you. But along with the frightening decline you experience in performing ordinary tasks and in visual processing, you may experience a distinct increase in creativity. In Alexander’s case, the creative flowering did not come out of nowhere. For years (and it may be that the onset of LBD was decades long) he had been one of the funniest, wittiest persons any of us knew. He had been, among many other things, a stage comedian. His gift (sometimes it seemed like an affliction) for instant word play was amazing. What many did not know was that he was also a highly-skilled poet.

What does LBD do to a person already gifted in the expansion of word meanings and the quick (in every sense) perception of the confluence of the absurd and the meaningful? Does the distortion in perception caused by LBD cause a poet to move “backward” in the process that Owen Barfield termed “figuration”—from the ice crystals to the water, from the cheese to the milk, from thoughts to Thinking—closer to the Source? Alexander, who may know the answer to those questions better than anyone, thinks the answer is “yes.” “Every day,” he says, “I encounter another possibility of seeing, hearing, or simply observing some object that presents itself in a cloak of newness that radiates previously unknown features or knowings. Where yesterday there was a stout old apple tree in the orchard, today I notice a large-bottomed middle-aged dancer of indeterminate gender, seemingly engaged in rhythmical, gestural symphony with unseen companions.”

All this is by way of background to a remarkable collection of poems, some of which were written after Alexander’s diagnosis, but many of which were composed in the decade before. Some are directly about the experiences undergone by the poet as a result of LBD. Perhaps the most striking of these is “Chronicles of Lewy IV: What Happened”—an objective, sometimes ironic and always wonder-laden account of a real, day-long encounter at the boundary of the physical and elemental worlds experienced by Alexander on an island off the coast of Maine. Like “Lewy Body Chronicles IV,” most of the poems in this volume are of intimate and personal experiences, but viewed from a lens very different from the film of familiarity through which most of us recollect the event of our lives.

The poems touch upon Alexander’s remembrances of his mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, her death on the winter solstice, her memorial, and his subsequent recollections. There are poems about war, about ordinary life on the farm, and some of the most touching love poems that I have read. Finally, there are poems specifically about boundaries and thresholds, liminal meditations that confront, struggle against and play with the delicate meetings of percept with concept. Of these, one in particular will call to mind for many readers the longstanding yearly retreats with Georg Kuhlewind which Alexander attended for decades:

Flossing My Mind

Flossing my mind, a word

came out, fell to the floor,

and with a barely audible

- ping –

bounced up to land dead

at the side of the sink

in a pulsating splatter of

reddish pink at the edge,

evidence of recent life,

more recent dying,

So sad, and yet,

in the painful words

of another stock phrase,

dead words happen

It’s why we can’t think,

Indeed they die so young,

so attentively ignored,

that we take little notice

even as their solidified corpses

are paraded up and down,

as if by sleight of hand they’d re-inhabit

the word-souls long since departed

to their moist and shadowy reward.

This one was different.

I saw it die, I felt it struggle

for that moment like a fledgling

just about to fly, before my

mindless efforts plucked it

from a thicket of supra-cranial energies,

ripped its nascent self out of

the womb of words, ejected it i

nto this, our cold, clean, analytic world

where the flag of stone and gravity

stands unfurled, a realm where t

ranslucent word-flesh

cannot for more than moments

stay meaningfully alive.

But I did notice this time

And cradled its corpse

with a new reverence.

Alexander’s poetic voice is distinct. After reading this collection, you would be able, I think, to identify a new poem of his if you happened to encounter one without attribution. If pressed to select a well-known poet for comparison, I would choose Robert Frost, who so often confronts universal themes through reference to the natural and the ordinary, and who sometimes seems to speak with two voices, one welcoming and conversational, and the other somewhat darker, suggesting at once both fright and childlike wonder.

I do not know which is my favorite of Alexander’s poems, but this is one of them:

Believe In The Silver Egret

Try to believe in the silver egret \

resting in still blue water.

If you escape the shackles of time

you will come to know that behind her eyes

is an impossibly high mountain

layered over with sheets of gold.

Give of your all to her,

unwittingly, without concern.

She will be neither embarrassed

nor embraced by your attention.

At length will you sense the wind

as it brings in a great four-masted schooner,

sails covering all the sky,

their fabric drawn taut with purpose.

You will be startled by thunder cracking behind,

bolts of lightning tearing the sky ahead,

and, you may notice smaller white birds fluttering

voer foam. At this moment, above, all,

believe in the silver egret

resting in still blue water.

"The Brain is a Boundary" includes a prose section by Alexander detailing his experience with his diagnosis and the disease, and a medical afterword by Dr. Boeve, the physician who confirmed Alexander’s diagnosis and is currently treating him. There is also a wonderful and personal introduction by his friend Arthur Zajonc.

Fred Dennehy is an attorney in practice in New Jersey, serving as General Counsel to a large law firm and specializing in professional responsibility. He earned a PhD in English and in recent years has performed in more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. He is a classholder in the School for Spiritual Science and editor for reviews in being human.