I found the first three quarters only mildly interesting, his travels and interactions with various artists and fellow writers...Joyce, Stein, Man Ray, and of course his buddy Pound (the chapter on his visits to Pound in the mental hospital are quite moving). However, when I finally got to chapter 43, Of Medicine and Poetry, I was excited to read his thoughts/philosophy related to this topic...
"When they ask me...how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing. Any worth-his-salt physician knows that no one is 'cured'...a cure is absurd, as absurd as calling these deployments 'diseases'. Sometimes the home team wins, sometimes the visitors. Great excitement...We want home runs, antibiotics to 'cure' man with a single shot in the buttocks.
...I found by practice, by trial and error, that to treat a man as something to which surgery, drugs and hoodoo applied was an indifferent matter; to treat him as material for a work of art made him somehow come alive to me.
This immediacy, the thing, as I went on writing, living as I could, thinking a secret life I wanted to tell openly-if only I could-how it lives, secretly about us as much now as ever...I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into those gulfs and grottos. And the astonishing thing is that at such times and in such places-foul as they may be with the stinking ischio-rectal abscesses of our comings and goings-just there, the thing, in all its greatest beauty, may for a moment be freed to fly for a moment guiltily about the room."
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