In their strange cosmogony predating Copernicus by two millennia, the ancient Greek scientific sect of the Pythagoreans placed at the center of the universe a ball of fire. It was not hell but the heart of creation. Hell, Milton told us centuries and civilizations later, is something else, somewhere else: “The mind is its own place,” he wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.

That is what the non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson celebrates in her shamanic poem “Center of the Universe,” found in her extraordinary collection The Kissing of Kissing (public library), song of the mind electric, great bellowing yes to life.

CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
by Hannah Emerson

Please try to go
to hell frequently
because you will
find the light there

yes yes — please
try to kiss the ideas
that you find there
yes yes — please

try to get that
it is the center
of the universe
yes yes — please

try to help yourself
by kissing the hot hot
hot life that is born
there yes yes — please

try to yell in hell
yes yes — please
try to free yourself
by pouring yourself

into the gutter all
guttural guttural yell
yes yes yes — please
try to get that you

become the being
that you came there
to be yes yes — please
try to go to the great

great great fire that you
created because you
become the light
that the fire makes

inside of you
yes yes — please
try to kiss yourself
for going there

yes yes — please
get that you are
reborn there
yes yes — please

begin your day

Drink in more soul-slaking poetry here, then revisit the story of how Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, found himself “regenerated into a new form… reborn for the better.”