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PASTILLES

… fruits …

— TED BERRIGAN, The Sonnets, LXV

Sheew Gweatness

Although his buddies adored him, and candles nightly burned in each window and “makepiece” of every rude shack in Corsica against his victorious return, Berrigan’s adventures, or many of the more famous among them, may well have been optical illusions. One may consider the celebrated opossum story, for instance, as an example. Optical illusions occur when light strikes the subcutaneous fibroid tissues of the eye — actually, the cornea — in such a way as to make certain things look different from the way they look in actual life. This has to do with inverted images, a concept but barely understood in our subject’s day, or, perhaps, “heyday.”