CNF: Private Access

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Private Access”?

While observing a colleague teach Stevens’ “The Snow Man” to college freshman, the phrase ‘mind of winter’ evoked for me the concept ‘theory of mind’ in philosophy and cognitive psychology. Once the rhyme ‘mind/rind’ came into my head, the first draft was off and running. The related idea of ‘private access’ follows from the observation that certain 1st person experiences, a headache, for instance, are knowable only to the self; ‘ordinary language’ philosopher J.L. Austin captures the idea perfectly. I also have long been interested in the Nepal Bhasa language, which has a specific grammatical suffix reserved for action verbs with 1st person inner volition, obligatory in the same way other languages have ‘agreement’ or ‘tense.’ As a sidenote, I was living in Lansing, Michigan when Magic Johnson was a local high school star. Finally, while the poem was fermenting, along came a garbage truck with a robotic hand, which instantly reminded me of one of the handshapes in Buddhist iconography. The real trick was to keep myself from nerding out on the expository and instead try to relate the ideas to concrete instances. I also want to add that I’m very grateful that JCCA supports such hybrid writing.