This Is the Story of His Life

Poetry. In his own Confessions, St. Augustine wrote, The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder. This is the story of his life–is just this: a rite of reconciliation, a penance of prayers that might pull a new order out of the chaos of any ordinary, twenty-first-century Self. The aspiration: a new set of psalms in the voice of a ventriloquist, shouting into the residual wind God used to exhale the whole world. The realization: one small poem or mantra–recited, re-seen, re-made, over and over and over again–can somehow make this a life worth living.