The Brain Is a Boundary: A Journey in Poems to the Borderlines of Lew Body Dementia

This unique volume explores the experience of the “boundaries” in consciousness that permeate our lives―for instance, between sleeping and waking, language and reality, life and death, lover and beloved, observer and observed. We often take such boundaries for granted. But there is one boundary that most of us are spared: the boundary between reality and delusion, sanity and madness. This little book touches upon all of these thresholds in a singular way.

The author, a poet, comedian, and student of consciousness, finds himself gradually slipping from observing and noting such boundaries to crossing over from one world to another: from the world of ordinary, if enhanced, intuitive or poetic reality and perception to that of Lewy body dementia. The Brain Is a Boundary records his journey.

These fifty-two poems―along with an introduction by Arthur Zajonc, former President of the Mind-Life Institute, an afterword by Bradley Boeve, a renowned specialist in neurology, and an essay by the author recounting his Lewy body experiences in prose―constitute a remarkable and unique testimony that gives voice to an aspect of human experience that is all too often mute and ignored. 

Arthur Zajonc, Ph.D., is the Andrew Mellon professor of physics and interdisciplinary studies at Amherst College and is currently the director of the Academic Program of the Center for Contemplative Mind, an organization of 1500 academics supporting the appropriate inclusion of contemplative practice in higher education. Dr. Zajonc is the former General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, a cofounder of the Kira Institute, past President of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute. He has served as scientific coordinator and editor for several dialogues with the Dalai Lama: The New Physics and Cosmology, held in 1997 and published in 2004, and “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life” (2002, unpublished). He was also moderator for the 2003 MIT dialogue, published as The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006). Dr. Zajonc is the authorCatching the Light (1993, 1995), coauthor of The Quantum Challenge (2nd ed. 2005), and coeditor of Goethe's Way of Science (1998).