The Folding Chairs Meditation

About the Book

Dropped Off… in a desert bardo after a rigorous affair with his beloved has crashed, a man scrambles to collect the parts. He even votes in a national election to appear normal, and that launches a downward spiral into displacement and suspicion. fear of censure…fear of rebuff he’d jotted on an index card under the woman’s bed. The Folding Chairs Meditation is a portrait of a reasonably sane person who crosses party lines to vote for president. The next day his mistress ab aeterna cancels their engagement on grounds of alienation of affection. Here he deviates from his self-told story and starts over from the ground up. What follows is a series of “meditations” conducted alone and in the company of “witches” who arrive in time to re-set the timer on the man’s life and launch him on a new course. Peterson’s latest delves into the personal side of the latest national election in which issues and attitudes divided the U.S. to a degree perhaps unmatched but in the dark recesses of the psyche.

About the Author

Geoff Peterson admits to grave uncertainty about the future. Author of novels & multifarious texts (The Literature of Missing Persons), the man’s central l’image obsessif remains himself in a room, gazing through blinds at a wall. Asked about promoting his latest work, he demurs. It’s too late for that, he knows it and we know it. From the encyclical of stormy nights, he persists in his mission of dressing old wounds. One fact above all else brings him face to face with the past: shock treatments in the year of the Moon landing. It proves that one’s real life goes on elsewhere. Often it makes for a life of starting over. By what design does a man end up in a desert town, he asks, with locals who eat lunch in the same booth every day? No man can answer his own question.