The Universe Explained - June 8 2025

 

The Universe Explained

June 8 2025

This writerly life

is unforgiving.

Must everything turn into words?

And must the past be so indelible?

Because there’s no taking back

the short stories

that now seem never-ending,

pretentious poems

that still exist somewhere.

And I cringe

at the self-righteous essays I penned

with adolescent zeal.

How I go through the world

detached.

Distancing myself

like an anthropologist

or worse, a photographer;

taking mental notes

protected by my lens.

Always guided by the cardinal rule

of non-interference

in my subject’s affairs;

all these years

no butterfly wings

to call my own

and cause a stir.

The child who loved escaping into books.

And now, constructs sentences

he takes refuge in;

if not a paper edifice

then a screen made of glass.

The power of words seemed a given,

the printed word

invincible.

As if words could change the world

if enough people heard.

Even have,

if too often for the worse.

But I had no illusions of influence.

It was more delusions of control;

as if anything, once captured in words

could be tamed

and understood.

The universe explained

in the countless permutations

26 letters can make.

But delusion or not

there’s still the satisfaction

of a beautiful line.

Crafting a sentence

as balanced as a jeweller’s scale,

as smooth

as well-aged Scotch;

poured straight

then slowly savoured

before sipping again.

And how convenient to hide

behind their pulchritude;

the emperor with no clothes

who drapes himself in words,

hoping his nakedness

never shows.

This poem was inspired by a recent piece the New Yorker about the oddly frequent phenomenon of doctors who write. The impression I took from the essay is of a common need to process, reflect, and distil complicated experiences that come too fast or too intensely to contend with in real time. Because writing provides distance, gives space for contemplation, and is the medium of thought. And because, by means of the alchemy of a social animal, sharing somehow lessens the burden: like lancing a boil or bleeding with leeches, it feels better just by telling someone else.

My writing, though, rarely touches on the practice medicine (from which I’m long retired). So I don’t write to process deeply affecting clinical experiences; I write because I always have, and because it has become an absolute compulsion. I have to write every day, or I’m left with this unsettled feeling of something unresolved. Which is why the line must everything turn into words? came so unthinkingly to me.

So while I’m not the “doctor writer” Danielle Ofri is, or finds so interesting, perhaps she would include me as an honorary member of the club.

Why Do Doctors Write?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-do-doctors-write