BPR 52 | 2025
Christoph Scheiner (1575–1650)
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
Thanks to Jesuits like the medieval physicist who
mistook the eyeball for a library of one-page picture
books, each book titled What I Saw Just Now, each
book available to the eternal occupant of our mortal
minds and anyone else with a scalpel, we can harken
back to the olden days when chevaliers and musketeers
hunted mature toads for the swampland zen thought
to lodge congealed like caramel candies with sage
and healing properties, in their shovel-shaped skulls.
This charm doesn’t need us to believe that our Jesuit,
Christoph Scheiner, hungered for this fabled “toadstone”
as he groped his way to his discovery through
the double arches in a hopper’s head, but he must
have had a reason to dissect the animal when, to his
surprise, something hinted of its picture book, if not
all its lived experience, printed on the tiny bijou
of the frog’s eye. God in all things! he must have thought,
astonished. What could be more intimate
or holier than sharing another creature’s
vision? This charm derives from Scheiner’s science.
Its magick grants us access to other minds the way
a book would, this consummation, its take on the
empathy lacking in dark ages that emerge
whenever books are feared more than guns. Health
food for the mind, this charm works best with
croakers pilfered from biology labs while idle
students graffiti empty shelves in their study
halls. Be mindful of visions that flicker brief as snap
chats as quickness dims and souls escape though
windows of no return. Splay the animals and free
their crystal balls. Appraise these as a thief might:
Pinch them in the light that splinters future into
the faces of kids forbidden reading rainbows.
Repeat the African proverb that says when
an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.
Use this charm to rebuild the bridges that books
otherwise provide. Think of reading as resurrection.
This charm is CPR for lives trapped in histories
stagnating into fable. This charm feeds the hunger
for communion that twinkles every reader’s eye.
From Spectral Evidence (2024), Alfred A. Knopf