Stoner

Mornings now, the first thing I do is turn on the heat. By the time I sit down and take my first sip of coffee, the room is deliciously warm. Is it a stretch to call a flavor serious? No, I truly believe there’s something inherently solemn about coffee. Tea gets perky from percolation. But coffee gets serious when it diffuses throughout a black powder of ground beans and drips through a filter into a porcelain pot. It’s as if it were thought itself penetrating and diffusing throughout a substance, meditating on it, saturating it, then dripping its infusion into the pot. This why coffee is hot and rectifying and serious. It makes me feel corrected. Specific. Palpable. An unequivocal being newly arrived from the nebulous oblivion of sleep.

Consciousness seeps in slowly. Coffee helps with that process, because it’s something to react to, immediately, and conveniently. Habit makes it easy. I could do it in my sleep. This works out well, since I’m half awake. Same with the cat. She wants attention. Affection. Which I give freely, and pleasurably. She lies down, fully extending her body and lying on her back, exposing the white warm fur of her belly. There’s an ease to this that allows consciousness to enter the skull without crashing into too much furniture. Whatever clutter a dream, or series of dreams, have left behind. Dreams are messy. Disorganized. The spoor of something beyond the material world trying to communicate with you in a language of labyrinths and tapioca helicopters.

1:30 p.m. We go for a run on upper Queen Anne. There aren’t that many crows out today. After numerous conflicts with the neighbors, we stopped feeding them. But the crows still remember us and get excited when they see us. Most of all, they still expect peanuts. It’s a bit sad, and more than a little aggravating. Today there’s only been a couple here and there.

We stop by the library. R picks up The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and I drop off Stoner, by John Williams.

Stoner was an odd book. Not at all what I thought it was going to be. All I knew was that a few days ago on Facebook a lot of people were raving about it. Naturally, I was intrigued. The book is titled Stoner. How could that not be intriguing? When I saw it had been published in 1965, I grew even more intrigued. I’d never heard of it. I was a senior in high school in 1965. I graduated that summer. That was a time when quite a few celebrities were writers. Kerouac, especially. But also Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut and Ken Kesey. Sylvia Plath and John Updike. Betty Friedan and Harper Lee. Truman Capote was a frequent guest on late night talk shows. And spent some time wth the Rolling Stones. Which appears not to have gone all that well. But not as disastrous for Capote as Answered Prayers. Lots of writers were engaged with, and influential of, mainstream society in the 60s. Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America turned him into a rock star. It was thanks to Bob Dylan I discovered writers like Gertude Stein and Arthur Rimbaud and movements like Dada and Surrealism. So it struck me as odd I’d never heard of an extremely popular book published in 1965 called Stoner.

As I said, Stoner wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. It had nothing to do with drugs. Stoner was the surname of the main character. The story begins in the early 20^th century. The tone, as well as the architecture of the narrative, is stark and dreary. A courthouse, not a Grand Palais.  Stoner’s parents are tough, enduring, hard-working people maintaining a small farm in Missouri. They’re laconic, in the extreme. They seem locked in their bodies, holding tightly to whatever helps keep them sane, and most importantly, alive. Their son, William Stoner, attends college and so leaves home for the first time. He worries if his parents will be ok without his help. He’s that kind of son: dutiful and loving. His intention at college is to earn a degree in agriculture, so that he can help his parents run the farm more profitably. But he falls in love. Not with a woman, but an idea: literature.

I wasn’t gripped by the story. Not at first. What kept me going was the phrasing, the beautifully crafted sentences. They were a pleasure to read, soothing and reassuring. The book’s dependable, comfortable rhythm pulled me along in a kind of trance, a stillness like the surface of a puddle on a windless day, reflecting an elm or the gnarly entanglements of an American sycamore.

After Stoner confesses his change of major to literature to his parents (you can feel their deep disappointment, their dreams collapsing, but they abide by their son’s decision with a respectful acquiescence), I was expecting fireworks. He’s a young guy in college. Heterosexual, bisexual, or gay, I was ready for some action. None came. The five years Stoner attends college he makes two male friends, neither of whom seem to have much interest in libidinal distractions. Or even sports, which is really unusual. I kind of liked this. I felt comfortable with this guy and his two friends and their monastic demeanor, their quiet asceticism. The student as monk. Or anchorite. Frivolity kept to a minimum. Sly jokes and witticisms were the order of the day; the occasional Animal House bacchanals and heroic quantities of booze I remember from my college days are strangely absent.  So are the maniacal outbursts of sports events. These are people who dress formerly for their classes. Who have a strangely mature outlook for people so young, a wry understanding of life. Who immerse themselves in books. Any book. Any day of the week. Any hour of the day. And reemerge from its chrysalis in a blaze of wonder. Gazes glazed with reflection, with the ineffable gleam of elsewhere in their enraptured faces.

Stoner rents an attic with an older couple who also provide food in exchange for his doing a few chores on the property. Stoner complies easily. He’s a nose to the grindstone kind of guy. Stoic as a hunger artist. Ascetic as a Hindu sannyasi.

What I was really waiting for was Stoner’s passion for literature. I was anticipating dithyrambic raptures, a long, beautiful unfolding of nuances and flowers of verbal fire, roses plucked from the air and placed in a Qingbai porcelain vase, panegyrics for Melville and Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson and Whitman. Inebriations of air. Raptures of language. A slow dance with syntax. But none came. I read, instead, that Stoner has no instinct of introspection. Say what? How can that be? How can anyone have a love of literature with no flair nor inclination for introspection? Literature is introspection. What the hell kind of book is this? Were it not for the soothing musicality of its sentences – and an obsessive drive to complete any book I begin - I doubt I would’ve continued.

The story plods along like a mournful adagio. Events have an almost mechanical inevitability to them. Until, subtly, quietly, slyly, they don’t. Things start to get real. And a little surreal. Stoner meets a woman at a faculty party, Edith Bostwick, the daughter of a banker, and falls in love. Edith, on the other hand, seems a little dismissive and indifferent. Theres nothing spontaneous about her. Nothing done on impulse, or out of a burst of emotion. She seems gloomy and uninterested in anything. She may as well be a mannequin in a department store window. When Stoner asks for her hand in marriage, she consents. This perplexed me. I felt sure she was going to turn the guy down. Nevertheless, it’s weird, this consent. It’s given grudgingly, with a certain contrecœur, as the French put it. Its sober neutrality is markedly bare of emotion. It’s like a nod to a legal agreement. There’s no description of what she’s feeling, no clue as to her mood, or designs, or plans, or the remotest enthusiasm. She doesn’t seem to be feeling anything.

The marriage, of course, is a total failure. A loveless marriage in a modest apartment on a professor’s dismal salary. As things evolve, the one constant is Edith’s resentment toward William. The best they achieve is an amiable indifference toward one another. And even manage, out of that fog, to produce a daughter, who is named Grace, and who becomes an alcoholic in her adulthood.

Three-quarters of my way in to this strange novel I began to respect Stoner. Or Bill, as he was sometimes called. The events in Bill’s life, the weight of mediocrity and easy compromise measured against his deep respect for excellence and legacy, was beginning to reflect an evident toxicity in American culture and education I hadn’t been expecting, even though the book had been leading up to it all along. Its observations were being so quietly and gently dispensed that its disquieting insights entered the bloodstream like a timed pharmaceutical. The core revelation at the heart of this book is extremely pertinent. It had to do with quality, with high aesthetic value and intellectual integrity, and the nearly impossible stance – the heavy sacrifice - required to maintain a body of high aesthetic worth, especially when corruption begins to quietly infiltrate and erode an institution, or an entire culture.

“Art from the west becomes more and more a shriek of torment recording pain,” writes Doris Lessing in her introduction to The Golden Notebook. “Pain is becoming our deepest reality.”

Stoner enters into a conflict with Hollis Lomax, the chair of the English Department and a former friend of long time standing. The conflict stems from Stoner’s refusal, as a committee member, to pass an incompetent graduate student named Charles Walker, who is also Lomax’s mentor and gains sympathy from a physical disability. Lomax seethes with resentment over this and punishes Stoner’s adamant refusal by giving Stoner a grueling teaching schedule and hindering his career progression. Stoner takes this within stride, handling these inconveniences and insulting status with quiet dignity and stoicism; he remains a popular teacher, which further fuels Lomax’s animus. Nor does Stoner receive any support from his colleagues. It’s a situation that reminds me of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, or movies like High Noon and Serpico, conflicts in which the protagonist addresses a morally challenging situation with singular courage and commitment to principle, and earning nothing but derision and discouragement from the community.

This conflict hit home for reasons that should be obvious. We live in a time of overwhelming corruption. Governments, so steeped in venality and cowardice they’re unable to serve the public, a situation in the U.S. that has manifested in the public spectacle of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the well-documented work of Whitney Webb revealing the stupefying amount of blackmail in U.S. politics in her book One Nation Under Blackmail.

I see it in academia, too. Works of poetry and fiction that are manifest mediocrities – at best – that are not only published but touted as being works of supreme innovation and quality. It’s all about schmoozing now, performance and personality over true merit and quality. Those with high positions in academia are also given a supreme advantage in institutional backing, invitations to appear on panels and symposiums and lectures which gives them high visibility and a consequent ascendency to receiving prestigious literary awards. Those in the margins must lapse into obscurity while pompous academicians “humbly” accept prestigious and rich rewards.

Social critic Curtis White wrote a book about the spread of mediocrity titled The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, as far back as 2003, in which he writes “my intention in this book is to explore this poverty, our poverty, through the media, academia, and politics, the three areas of public life that provide the vehicles for the great antagonists of the imagination: entertainment, orthodoxy, and ideology. But I also want to think, more positively, about the present condition of our religious and civic spirit, as well as about something that I will call the sublime, that which beckons us beyond the suffocating if familiar activities of entertainment, academic orthodoxy, and ideology. The sublime is that indistinct but essential thing that Stevens called the ‘necessary angel.’ It has something very simple if curiously distant to say to us. It wants to tell us that change is real and the world can be other than it is.”

America and Europe – the so-called western world - has been so fully corporatized, so fully bent to the toxic prerogatives of corporate greed and technofeudalism, however manifestly destructive and dystopic its continuing enslavement of world cultures, and destruction of nature and fragile ecosystems, that the younger generations now have no frame of reference outside the wake of the capitalist juggernaut. And now, with the advent of AI, no one even knows what’s real anymore. One wonders, at this point, what is even left. The last time I stepped into one of Seattle’s biggest bookstores, what few books were on display were dwarfed by a gift shop tchotchke mentality, T-shirts and coffee mugs. Nobody reads anymore. Even celebrated authors have a peculiar, aw shucks, me too, I’ve lost my ability to focus on things, as if none of this really mattered.

Nor does it help that the U.S. now has a ridiculously high rate of illiteracy, a problem no one seems to give a shit about, despite all the numerous books and podcasts and essays identifying the problem – which is pretty obvious to begin with – that attention spans have been decimated by the new cybertechnology, and especially smartphones, which have become a supplementary appendage. This deterioration in focus and learning even has a name now: brain rot.

I’m not big on solutions. Things often have a way of evolving in surprising ways. And often, the so-called solutions have more to do with profit than healing. But the world could sure use one. I’d go so far as to say the solutions are as obvious as they are easy: put your smartphone down and open a book. Start a conversation. Rent a kayak and put yourself in a large body of water, feeling the waves, and rocking in the sway of your own emotions, the undulating and boundless expanse of reverie in a universe of endless fascination.

 

How To Hang A Thing In Speech

Islands fascinate me. They are isolated worlds - not in the scientific sense, but the wildly nonspecific sense - from the rest of the planet. The rest of the planet is, of course, teeming with human beings, and the occasional misfit grumbling in his rags the same question over and over to a thousand wrong answers. Life is different on islands. The problems are less monumental. The sky solves everything. Awakens a carpenter's grammar and builds a glass vocabulary. For housing humanity. Everyone has their own preferences, ideas, and sense of time. So they become islands. Talking to strangers. Every argument in favor of hair dyes is a statement tinged with a million desires, and not a little anxiety. And every blow is worth at least one antenna. A shaky vision and a gothic redemption. Ibiza at night is a crazy place. Not so much Grimsey. Which is stark, and desolate, and surrounded by humpback whales. It’s Gothic. Mythic. And cold. It’s a place for philosophers. Old woman gazing at the gloom of thunder in a cube of Icelandic spar.

I sense, get the feel of the cage, with this work, this frigate ahead of me. With which I will make volleys of what is funny and strange. I will fold my life into a bomb and explode it in somebody’s porridge. Or mind. Not because the mind is a form of porridge, but because it has language at its disposal, and subjectivity. The mind cooked by English is a polyglot porridge. The recipe is apparent in every jaw. Every beard and spice rack. Caraway. Nutmeg. Thyme. Glass slides depicting arrays of stained protozoans. Which is crazy in a way. Bacteria are why the men around here wear ties. That, and a paycheck. The way water eats a continent shore by shore is precisely how everything human gets shattered by inconvenient realties. Pavement, rainy nights in San Francisco, ancient coins unearthed on the property of a former rock star, the subjunctive case clenched in the hand of an ugly preposition. It’s always good to have a graceful look above the neck, no matter what lumpy old bag you have in your hand. To those who don’t know you, you will appear suspicious, and silly. And to those who do know you, you will appear lost in mystical absorption. No matter. Subjectivity is prodigal, and fits in a single pronoun. Like an island.

I like a long thin faucet that curves upward in a kitchen sink. Arches. And lets the water down in a long thin column. And is mute in its dream of service like an elephant. Whose trunk sprays water over its head. And views the world with two sad eyes. It's an odd thing to sweep a floor while listening to Eric Satie. There’s a simplicity in the action that parallels the simplicity of the music. Which isn’t simple at all. The notes are sprinkled into the world like pearls from a broken necklace. It's a strange syncopation that awakens the nerves to the things they carry around. Emotions big as planetariums. James Dean with a grievance and a knife. It explains it. What we fight about. Let’s face it, a real antagonism at root. That old chestnut: what are we here for? Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong. But they keep getting up, starting the car, scraping frost from the window, and heading to work, whatever meaning happens to be sleeping in those syllables, they’re awake now, your eyes are mingled in these words, as are mine, looking for you.

Don’t be shy. You know who you are. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim once said all things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. Ok, gotcha. So what’s your poison? I’m a fiend for marshmallows. Cannabis gummies. And Ritz crackers.

TV is a poison. I grew up with it. I love TV. I have a great respect for propaganda, even though I know it’s toxic. It’s a guilty pleasure. A very, very guilty pleasure. Propaganda is the sweet syrup of confirmation bias that bloats the ego, appeases a troubled conscience with a wonderfully plausible alibi, and kills societies, rots them from inside out. How many cop shows show so-called conspiracy theorists as QAnon wackos with a maniacal hatred of rules, hair-trigger tempers, huge gun collections, garages full of survival gear, deep delusional passions, sooner or later caught up in the inevitable terrorist plot, à la Ted Kazinsky, and brought down by well-meaning detectives doing their heroic, self-sacrificing best to prevent us all from descending into the chaos of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. A good fiction has the capacity to charm. To make you believe in its virtues. However distorted. However delusional. The gaslighting is sweet.

He can't stand any image of himself, he suffers from being named. He believes that the perfection of a human relationship lies in this absence of image: abolishing adjectives between oneself, between one and the other; a relationship that uses adjectives is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

Wrote Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Raw, simple being. Undefined. Unconfined. Naked. Is this what is meant by absence of image? Because I’ve just used four adjectives to define the undefinable. And gotten nowhere. The first thing to come to mind are descriptions of near-death experiences, in which being, no longer contained by a body, diffuses into a boundless, nebulous energy of pure consciousness. Pure love. A pure ego-less state of pure energy. So that throwing a net of adjectives over it is like trying to capture a solar eclipse with a shoebox. You’ll capture none of the silence, this visit from the sublime, moon shadows rolling through prairie grass, and hole of night in the sky.

The central drive of everything is insemination. Pollinators and poets.

Propagation begins with a cerebral whirlwind. Inspiration. Something must inspire its creation. Mountains, forests, cranberries. We went hiking, inflated and cleaned. And this happened. A steady pulse haunted the totem. The faces looked ready to say something. We are the colors of contingency. Stop thinking! Just ask yourself if the work has allowed you to walk outside of yourself into an unknown world. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s about movement, emotion, holistic correspondence, and wild speculation. Conjecture is the way to the possible. The beehives that mouth their seeming chaos among the houses of genre. The biology of pink waddles around in brown. There are fires in black unleashed by alluring hues of gray. We’ll have things to do when green turns blue. But prose? You need space for that. Freer, more open language, and sudden curious sensations. The feeling that, after dying, the soul diffuses with a universal consciousness. There is, for example, tangible evidence that syllables discharge lightning and thunder, and will sometimes attain the status of a bold perfume, depending on the circumstances, and the magnitude of the impulse that keeps popping up in all these bubbles, smiling at the spectral autonomy that allowed these raptures, and how to hang a thing in speech.

 

The New Antipathy

The new antipathy was a clean hypothesis. It was an operation propelled by participle. It had nothing to do with broccoli. This was about luminosity. The tumble of photons about a sewing kit. It had the flavor of anger seasoned with a little disrespect. I could feel the heft of its implications in every word. Imagine two detectives backing away from a radioactive predicate. They move cautiously, so as not to disturb the circumstance of its combustion, this spondee of pickled helium. Poetry is the cesium of capitalism. We’ve known that all along. And yet the old paddle wheelers continued going up and down the rivers. And a pesky little particle intractable to grammatical analysis exploded into an eyeball. A pretty one, with an iris the color of exoneration. Each time I feel swelling in my ankles I know that I'm about to try and explain something that I don't fully understand myself. I don’t even know what it is yet. Whether it’s a substance, a proverb, or a feeling new to this form, a radical new manifestation of beauty as light as gravity and violent as a thermostat. Truth is, I just don’t understand anything anymore. Not even jock itch. My line of work never required an office. But it did require beams of light intermingling with one another like words in a tugboat. I had to do something, or the whole virtue of the thing, the principle, you might even call it an appliance, a dishwasher or iron, would evaporate in wire. This wouldn’t be the first time my intentions became overly ambitious and spread its lather leeward, in the direction of Steamboat Springs. Hesitations can hesitate for so long they become sensations, semaphores on a flightdeck. If you’re going to land, land now. It’s time our feet felt something other than mountains. I’ve been swinging back and forth on a trapeze all day, looking down at all that sawdust, all those rash decisions and warm embraces wrestled to the ground like escalators. I want to get down and walk the ground again, like a real narrative, with eggnog skulls and long secluded strolls along the coast of a thrashing indecision.

What I’d like right now is a bubbly metamorphosis. I feel ready for something. Not sure what. Something with wings. Something slithery and supple and preposterous. My hammer glows amidst the many mental calls to my gut. Much of life is like that. Shoegaze. Kabuki. A guitar can alter one's sense of being. You can stand on a stage in front of a million people and still feel upside down. Employment is the monotony that usurps our expansion. Experience is the barracuda that echoes our scope. Aching is the stir that institutes our reach. Instinct is the syntax that spangles our luxuries. Then there’s the really naïve hope that a postage stamp can carry the weight of my mind to a wet sweater in Lowell. Like the old days. When Emily Dickinson rode a Harley up and own the streets of Amherst. Now we have bandwidth. Minds tethered to security issues. I remember owning a baseball glove once, but that’s as far as I got to understanding Jung, and the vital importance of third base. Until I solve the problem of how to get the energy of a man – me – into narrative, this will have lost its relevance, and I’ll sit here as usual, taking in the Stones, reminiscing, scribbling, stirring some form of soup, entwining a frayed mythology, thinking hard about the future, the one I left behind in 1976, on the freeway to California.

Don't let yourself be carried away by superficial reactions to a dark thought. Explore it as you would an underworld. There are things there that can fulfil or kill a grammar with a single mushroom. The key property is movement. The convergence of hands on a sticky substance. A kneecap embodies the fulcrum of ingenuity among the strippers. It’s all so meridional. I think of Napolean strolling the shores of Saint Helena. Euclid drawing shapes on scrolls of papyrus. Morning in the throat of a paradox. Words born from a luminous consciousness. Tumbling down the spine of a paragraph. Stumbling around in a slippery metaphor. This glitter of drug nebula in my balcony headlights is entirely salsa. Winter is the perfect time for rides in competitive forklifts. I heat by generating incidents as toward happens. The warp finger is insoluble below the fullness of your antifreeze. Think of it as an ear eating a toccata sandwich. A conquest by sudden crease of the sugar pronouns. I dwell in the yell of a reach to think it. I have fenced off the personality house for everyone's safety. The time of nutmeg is here. There are signs in the men’s room. Life is preoccupation with itself. Get used to habits. Make use of them. Lift what you value into a Technicolor future. Pedal to the metal. Merge with oncoming traffic.

Now, here’s the kick. I write this stuff for no particular reason. I spill my brains without incident not because it makes me happy but because I’m against the restraints of seclusion. I can feel myself drifting out to sea a little more each day. The horizon is dripping with thought. Clouds veined with lightning. Things are beginning to seesaw. I like dealing with these things straight on, like Dostoyevski. Meditating on the universe with the look of bad intent is bound to create a disturbance. It makes people nervous. The Zoo was one of the bars that lets you know the instant you walk in nobody here is interested in your aspirations. All they want is your utter indifference. The guts are a poor source of moss. Nobody fondles their shield. They clench it. I am more fucked with the devious than the genial. The genial are everywhere they know is there because it’s there not because it’s whispered into the ear like a secret. We have no secrets. Secrets age in old age. They become strains of old melody. And die in the drafts at the airport.

Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle

Now I know what Walter Benjamin meant by aura. Sometimes an image will seem to have a soul, so powerfully affective is its halo-like quality, its uniqueness, its presence, its authenticity and unabashed display of beauty. Such was an image I viewed last Tuesday at Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery near Olympia, Washington. The image was titled Foggy Sunset and is a photograph. Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction eroded an artwork’s aura by its one-step removal from the immediacy and inimitable singularity of its moment in space and time. Reproduction is, by default, a degradation. To listen to a CD or streaming service of Miles Davis’s “So What” isn’t the same as hearing Davis perform live at the Village Vanguard. You’d have to be a bit old to make that claim, but so what? The point is a lesson in discernment. Nothing beats immediacy, the qualia of a particular moment. We live in a universe of improvisation. Spinning yo-yos and spilled sugar. Orb webs beaded with dew. These things are true. But isn’t it possible, as with this particular photograph, that the aura has in no way been harmed by a perceived detachment from its original setting, but generates, out of its own uniqueness, its language of light and shadow, its liminal and irreproducible position at the threshold of the divine, an aura redolent of an individual’s diffusion into that beauty, and its uncanny stillness?  The act of creation has its own immediacy. The camera registers the visible in a simple click of the shutter, but it’s the dilation of an enchanted mind that carries its visions and apparitions into the light. “To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy,” declared Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

The mood is serene, crepuscular. A bright sun crosses a narrow wooden bridge traversing a small narrow pedestrian bridge with two towering evergreens to the far left, a cluster of shrubs, dark and well-defined in the immediate foreground, a tree in the center receding, phantom-like, into the mist and off to the far right – muted as a parenthetical remark - the limbs of a tree just barely visible, so veined and delicate they could be the nervous system of a very pale ghost. Also faintly bordering on invisibility is a streetlamp and a street sign. Most of the scene is void, nothingness and mist. The world appears softened, hypnotized into an exquisitely serene Elysium so pure in its twilight vision the ugliest despair couldn’t crawl its way in, or eat a hole in the glamour. And there goes the sun, rolling homeward to night, and dawn in another part of the world.

The entire scene would repose in a serene uniformity of mist were it not for several more contrasting details that excite a deeper reading: in the far upper left is a sharp, steel-like, triangular section of what I’m guessing is the overhang of a roof. It’s aggressive, a Darth Vader-like thrust from the industrial world of commerce and finance into this nirvana of fog and ease of letting go. The triangular section – shaped somewhat like an arrowhead - is matched by a smaller version lower down. Together, they seem more like clumsy intrusions, awkward displacements, than a deliberate attack, or an aggressive, colonizing force. They’re just there. Twin architectural forms remindful of what everybody loves calling the real world (overcrowded freeways, healthcare snafus, broken pipes, hysterical outbursts, greasy combs, existential dilemmas, supervillain tech giants, drug gangs, military strikes, drones, arcades, helicopters, etc.), caught in a moment of harmless tranquility like two corporate moguls peeking into the ultramundane.

I became engrossed in a number of photographs – a very up close and personal view of a clematis in one photograph, and a rose in another, both highly sensual, intensely actual and detailed – and a large, open view of two American battleships off the coast of Vietnam, circa the late 60s or early 70s, in other words the Vietnam War, with a Vietnamese fisherwoman in the foreground wearing a broad-brimmed nón lá, or “leaf hat,” maneuvering a small boat with a long bamboo pole, poised with seeming unconcern. Her face is shadowed by the broad brim of her hat and completely hidden, so we do not know what she might be thinking, or if there were visible on her face any expression revealing her mood, or disposition. This makes the photograph a hallmark of wartime ambiguity. There are no explosions, nothing ripping the air apart with death and shrapnel. It’s simply a moment of calm in a universe of spectacular volatility.

In the middle of the gallery was a dugout canoe crafted by hand and using an array of tools such as an adz for rough shaping, chisels and gouges for fine details. The canoe is named Flicker, and was the first dugout canoe Red Eagle worked on, setting up shop in 2005 in the Tacoma Art Museum parking lot. Work was finished in the summer of 2008. Flicker was put in the water and paddled up to Cowitchen up on Vancouver Island. “Merrie was skippering,” Red Eagle relates, “and was not happy about taking so much water while traveling thru the San Juans, so we added the cover on the stern. We also thinned out the hull and used her on the journey to Suquamish where we gifted it to our lead carver, David Wilson (Lummi).  He used her on several journeys.  Recently, Flicker (Dave renamed her ‘The Gift’) had been sitting a lot at his house. When we asked to use her for the exhibit, he noted that he was getting ready to refurbish her and start using her to do some traditional style fishing.”

My father was a designer, so I grew up with an appreciation for good design, and a particular fascination with the fusion of functionality and beauty. On display above Flicker was an array of paddles, and above them – hanging like scrolls – were drawings of the paddles, very precisely drawn, with numbered sections for aid in the carving process. Red Eagle picked one up and handed it to me: I was struck immediately by its sensuous shape and texture. It was wonderfully smooth and the curves were a pleasure to run my fingers over and around and under and across. I can only imagine the added pleasure of moving one of these paddles in the water and watching the swirls pass by in a sunlit glitter. “For the paddle blanks I used a grid form to make it easier to cut away the wood to make the paddle,” Red Eagle relates. “I started when I had heard about the Chief Leschi paddle that was at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. I knew the director from Udub and she agreed to show me and further allowed me to make a drawing and thus come up with the Grid Layout of the paddles. I have made several designs using this method. I used this methodology to teach the Udub students for carving their paddles.”

Red Eagle relates that he began his work in photography in the summer of 1976, when he was living in Sitka, Alaska. He used a Canon F-1 35mm camera loaded with Kodak Kodachrome ASA 25 film. One photograph in particular – a panoramic view of an intensely bright sun blazing through a thin, diaphanous mist over a range of mountains. The sun is moving over a range of mountains and shooting a streak of phenomenally bright light across the water; a few dark rocks accentuate the celestial power of the light, creating a dramatic contrast between the romantic splendor of the atmosphere and the silent dignity of earthbound objects. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson legendarily put high value on what he termed the “decisive moment,” a perfect, fleeting moment that reveal a deeper truth about life. I see that same principle here. Red Eagle’s photographs are éclats of sudden recognition, epiphanies of light that evoke occasions of sublimity and deep spiritual connection with forces external and supernal.

Other photographs, taken, I assume, at a much later date, are more human oriented, focused especially on the female form. One in particular perplexed me a little, it seemed so at odds with the serene intimacies of the other photographs. A beautiful woman with long black hair sits next to a tall accent table supporting a large Oriental vase with a bright white chrysanthemum in it. The woman appears to be in a state of crushing despair. Her head is bowed, and supported by her right hand, which is clutching her hair, and her pale left arm extends down, bends at the elbow as her forearm rests on the arm of her chair. Her upper torso is bare and a breast is partially revealed under her arm. The woman’s form is so gracefully curvaceous it feels like music, soft, sorrowful, and fascinating, a kind of stillness in movement. My wife and I both agreed that there was something Pre-Raphaelite about it; it evinced the kind of Gothic, aestheticized realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, artists like Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and John Everett Millais. I was surprised to discover the photograph was part of a project Red Eagle was working on in 1988 called American Kimono. Kimono, in Japanese, means something to wear, and there was something incontrovertibly bare and unadorned about this woman, not just physically, but emotionally. This was a woman open to view under a sheet of glass in a deeply private moment, an individual experiencing a level of emotional distress familiar to everyone, but doing so with a posture and gracefulness so remarkable it felt rude to look, and even more rude to walk away.

Another nude featured a young woman sitting in a lotus position on smooth floor, her arm reaching behind as she leans back in voluptuous ease, breasts exposed, a Japanese fan splayed by her side. She is wearing a shirt or robe, unbuttoned and loose as an afterthought.

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart,” remarked Henri Cartier Bresson. I can think of no simpler way to describe my immersion in Red Eagle’s photographs. They tend to coax one into a fuller state of being with their seductive intensity, their depth of caring about a world whose beauty is generously offered daily to anyone disposed to enter into that proposal. I’m glad we made the drive down to Olympia, and were treated to iced tea and the best cheesecake I’ve ever had at the Cascadia Grill on 4^th Avenue West, surrounded by hundreds of photographs, people, mostly, who’d come from Olympia: Dave Grohl, Judy Collins, Matt Groening, and many other less familiar faces. Time felt open and broad and generous, like a canoe on the Salish Sea.

Enjoy Your Problems

I have a wandering mind, active as a foundry, even on Saturdays, when there is no one there but Shunyata. They say a dullness of mind is seasoned with travel. If that's the case, then pack some extra underwear. Let’s put on a show. Inhibit nothing. Not even moisture. The humidity of passion. Which leaves a glaze of satisfaction and a rose by the window. Egos and eggs are similar contingencies. Eggs need a nest. Egos need a pageant. I’m trembling now with a giant palpability. It started when I noticed a shadow following me from behind. And when I turned around it walked in front of me. I was numbed by the sheer audacity of this manifest phantasm, this mockery of my Being and mitochondria. Emphasis is a form of testimony, butterflies in Fanny Brawne's bedroom. If you saw Bright Star, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Negative capability. Insidious secrets. Beaded bubbles winking at the brim of some brawny mint julep. Darkling I listen, and for many a time, I have been half in love with easeful death. The I is the eye of the cavern. The sole proprietor, as it were, of a body, replete with fingers and toes and a willingness to spring into action in the middle of Swan Lake, supple as a geistesblitz. Deep down, I’m a monster. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. It makes me irritable, especially when I’m chased by villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.

Sometimes I feel like 72 people scrupulously maintained by 93 lips. It’s a residual effect of choral singing for the Church of Holy Skillets. The costuming is by Arachne of Hollywood. Swimming swimwear for swimming or bringing singing to spinning in Stimmung by by Karlheinz Stockhausen. I like to create loopholes in legal briefs for certain ferocious or fabulous animals. Silly interdictions. Prohibitions against wearing cowboy boots without owning two cows. Double proxy marriage in Montana. Selling dyed ducks in quantities of less than six in Kentucky. Stimmung is an aid to my focus and reputation. Every time I pass a certain door the pocket of my cardigan sweater gets caught on the doorknob. I know there’s a reason for this, I can feel it in my bones, but there’s nothing I can do to guarantee its survival. When chaos is hungry for action chaos must be fed. Am I what I can do? What would life be like as an oboe? Enjoy your problems, counsels Shinryu Suzuki. The art should be in the way, not the content.

The luminous force under my arm is immaterial, and will not stand in a court of law. I can’t always tell what someone’s trying to do in their writing, mine especially. That odd moment with a pen in the hand, not even warm yet, still cold plastic and metal, waiting for something to come out of it, an answer fulfilling the quest of existence, which is a crisis, of sorts, is suddenly in motion, scribbling words into ensembles, outside the Poultry Building. It’s extroverted to defend products around depth. That is, stand up, take a swing, hit a ball, and make it all happen, able to absorb large amounts of raw experience. Holding still while a grizzly sniffs your body. Seeking the source of things. Of beauty. Of jurisprudence. The undulation of fins. Tents in a muddy lot. The epiphany of a hoofprint. And not for any other reason would I say this. And expect a mint.

I wonder how life feels as a jellyfish. They don’t have a brain. They react to stimuli, but they don’t think about it. Ostensibly. Consciousness is a funny thing. I mean, it evolved a mouth to say things, how crazy is that? So many organs. So many things to say. Some jellyfish species have specialized sensory organs called rhopalia (plural in Latin for club) which are located around the edge of their bell and contain eyes. This kind of thinking can distract you during a time of dissolution and stress. I often wish I lived closer to an airport. The interaction of people in airports is a never-ending fascination. The King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has the world's largest airport aquarium. You can sit and watch Goldsilk Seabream, Red Sea Spiny Basslet, Indian Threadfish, Persian Mullet, stingrays and sharks and sometimes your own thoughts undulating in fantasias of milky oblivion, artless and free.

I will enclose a copy of my mood to show you what happened. What happened when I was 12. What happened when I was 15. And so on. The whole damn show. The whole freaky mess. First time I got drunk. Last time I got drunk. First time I got drunk I couldn’t believe you could change a shitty mood so easily. So pleasantly. Last time I got drunk I couldn’t believe how hard it is to shake off a nagging sense of despair after trying to drown it countless times. Such things are expressed, at times, in front of microphones, before an audience of people, bewildered, flatulent, bored out of their skulls. It’s all too easy to make a theater out of your grudges. But it’s hard to gaze at the world without a brave expansion of one’s pituitary. Temptations will curl their tentacles around you every random moment. It’s about this time, or any time, really, the idea of travel, anywhere, gets to be an obsession of sorts, and rains down on you like a jungle. Interaction, like sugar and water, comes across as optimism on the radio. And the world is a ball of rock orbiting a ball of heat & light. Wood to cut. Break to bake. Milk to squirt. Things to say. 

 

Poetry Is An Egg With A Horse In It

I find it both reassuring and somewhat dubious that at 78 I still harbor affections and enthusiasms that I enjoyed in my rebellious 20s. I’d be in a sorry state of deep remorse were it otherwise. Chief among these early affiliations is French symbolism, followed quickly by Surrealism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, hypnopompic kabuki and the circumference of insanity. I had a special appetite for the work of Stephane Mallarmé, which was unabashedly difficult, and playful and sly and erotic and prodigiously self-propagating. My temperament matched Baudelaire’s antagonistic fillips to the inane and vacuous presumptions of bourgeois sanctimony. He had a genius for finding beauty in squalor and luxury in stark privation. He prepared me, at age 18, for the visionary deliriums of Rimbaud, whose defection from poetry for the louche commerce of guns and coffee in East Africa came as a big disappointment and an unending state of perplexity. Why? Why would anyone deny expression to the genius inhabiting them?

I believe the denial of the poet in Rimbaud for the pursuit of normalcy had lethal consequences. I believe it also accounts for Rimbaud’s evident dromomania. Even his brief flirtation with photography.

It wasn’t until I was much older that the lush orchestrations of Mallarmé’s poetry and prose poetry began to hold a certain fascination for me. He wasn’t as overtly exciting as Rimbaud’s psychedelic Illuminations, with their colorful imagery and robust deliriums, or Baudelaire’s dazzling sensuality, his silken orgies and gleaming boa constrictors and vague perfumes, but I find a deeply abiding intellectual stimulation in my Mallarméan immersions, a feeling of inner liberation, of unfathomable hungers and chance encounters. I’m drawn to the intense musicality of Mallarmé’s work, his subtle and tortured syntax, his fragmented phrasing and abrupt non-sequiturs, his ability to imbue the power of language with the vivid presence of the void.

Stephane Mallarmé's prose poems define the indefinable with a nimble fracturing of banality. The tight grip of academic rhetoric. It's one thing to deliberately obfuscate a point for the appearance of sophistication and another to reorganize perception altogether.

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

Wrote Russell Jacoby.

Russell Jacoby famously coined the term "velvet prison" to describe the intellectual stagnation of academics who are insulated and complacent within the university system, leading to a situation where "the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged". He argued that this institutional comfort breeds an intellectual decline, making it difficult to think critically or challenge the status quo. 

States the AI Overview on Google.

In Book 20, Part Four of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe describes the phenomenon of Dämonisch (the daemonic) – which he attributed to the artistry of violinist Nicolas Paganini - as a "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher has explained.” Lorca referred to this in his essay “Theory and Function of the Duende,” where he describes the duende as a “power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist master say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means that it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.” It is not something anyone needs to go into debt for at a university. “No,” Lorca continues, “the dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendent of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock; a descendant also of Descartes’ melancholy daemon, small as a green almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing.”

My first taste of duende occurred one summer afternoon in August, 1965, two months after graduating from high school, in the backseat of a friend’s car, a speaker in back of my head, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” came blaring out, galvanizing me with its startling imagery. This prompted a search for poetry that had the same wildness as Dylan’s lyrics. A professor at San José City College revealed what I was looking for: “Le Bateau ivre,” “The Drunken Boat,” by Arthur Rimbaud. This adventure eventually led to the poetry of the beats, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso. Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism.

I aligned myself with the beats decades ago. I never liked hippies all that much. Most of the ones I met were shallow and pretentious and somewhat theatrical; many of them had enveloped themselves in the disarming gauze of a faux innocence to challenge the dreary, soul-killing controls of capitalism, or embedded themselves in fantastical Tolkienesque worlds weirdly superimposed over the bitter realities of the industrial world. Many of them named their children Rainbow and Moonbeam and danced like fairies in the moonlight. It’s rather sad, what happened. And it happened so quickly. When the spartan conditions of poverty inevitably soured to such an extent that the toxic predations of wealth suddenly started looking attractive, the most vigorous of these radicals were first in line for Reagan’s Good Morning America mode of unbridled consumerism. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker. Tom Hayden transitioned into mainstream politics. I remember a lot of friends and acquaintances suddenly working for corporations. They rationalized this move easily with the phrase, “we can change things from the inside.” And how did that work out? It’s little wonder Gen Z has so much contempt for boomers.

I admired the beats for their intellect, their candor, their sense of adventure, their embrace of Dada spontaneity, and their fearless and sometimes nihilistic, sometimes Dharmic embrace of ways and means contrary to the delusional pursuits of the American Dream highly unpopular in American culture, such as harboring an openly adversarial position toward conformism and the kind of soulless, bourgeois complacencies that have resulted in our current dystopic landscape.

Most of the beats are dead now. Gary Snyder, who was a central figure not only to beat culture but a strong advocate of wilderness preservation and ecological health and integrity, as well as a highly disciplined practitioner of Zen, is still alive, and still revered as a public figure, even in mainstream culture. As of this writing, he is 95.

Snyder wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. It’s titled “What You Should Know To Be A Poet,” and is short enough to include here:

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                        and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden–

& then love the human: wives     husbands     and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
                              hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger.     gambles.     and the edge of death.

I’m 99% on board with the recommendations of this poem. Everything. But one. The “work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted / and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion, hunder, rest.” That part is utterly foreign to my nature. I’ve had a lifetime of working long dry hours of dull work and hated it. Love it? Are you frigging kidding me? Every job I ever had never served as anything other than a source of money. End of the work shift, I felt like a turd squeezed out of the sphincter of commerce. It added nothing to my life but anguish, despair, and exhaustion. The nicest thing to ever happen to me was retirement and social security. I was finally – in old age – able to have time to create, reupholster my self-esteem, and do my writing. 

Bu the other stuff, about being a bad-ass passionate ecstatic shamanistic visionary fucking fun-loving philosopher with one foot in hedonism and the other foot in minstrelsy mischief and eccentric mystical phantasmagoric pursuits is terrific advice. Nor do I see any of that as a job recommendation.

Poetry was not an activity relegated to a quiet scholarly vocation, oak-paneled rooms, leaded windows in ivy-covered towers, awards, retreats, lectures, sabbaticals, academic panels and conferences, the polite society of the professoriate. That’s were poetry turns curdled and careful and stylishly chic. Poetry – the kind of poetry Snyder’s poem evokes - was the province of the desperado. The gambler at the edge of death. King Lear’s sad, forbearing clown. Ophelia’s lunatic rage against the abuses of fate. Hamlet’s scathing to be or not to be. Charles Bukowski’s inebriated smile.

I see the poet as a seasoned detective. The world is a crime scene. The human spirit has been murdered. There’s no lack of suspects. No accountability either, for the thousands upon thousands of zombies walking the streets, heads bowed, faces expressionless, voices corralled by fear and censorship.

Marianne Moore once defined poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But a moment ago R shared a definition of poetry she saw on Facebook today, written by a fourth grader: “poetry is an egg with a horse in it.”

That’s brilliant. I can’t top that. All I can do is keep it warm, and wait for something to hatch.

 

It Can Kill A Man

It can kill a man. Said Wallace Stevens. That’s what misery does. Ergo, you should buy some insurance. This is how poets make a living. And it’s not too miserable. I’m available on most days of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, which are relegated to sleeping, and leisure, and gratifying my appetites. On Monday I am like a man in the body of a violent beast. I keep a thesaurus in the bottom drawer of my desk in case I need to describe something elegant and queenly, a balloon rising to the ceiling of somebody’s wedding, Elizabeth Taylor on one side, Richard Burton on the other. This is their planet, their world, now in ascendancy, and rich and limitless, but also a little taut with risk, like a bank robbery, or a Mardi Gras float moving in the direction of things as yet unknown. This is the skin of the poem. The bones are angular, and shaped toward their function, which is ejaculatory. You know. Like opening a book, and finding a wad of cash. The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

As an adult, you learn to avoid certain things. Invisible things. Subtleties. Like the embarrassed side glance in a crowded room when you tell someone you’re a poet. You have a badge. And enough poetic license to start a family. But nobody takes you seriously. Don’t worry. It’s all just a matter of orientation, disorientation, and blunt polytrauma. Each minute something new scurries across the ocean floor. Just holding a guitar is cool. There are surges, occasionally, of windows. Popcorn is a mood waiting to come to life. When there are waves, you learn to swim, and when there are swans you let the boat drift. It’s as simple as that. The oars are all yours.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. It’s not like that speck on the screen you wipe off with a soft cloth that turns out to be a period, or more accurately, a fistful of pixels clenched in a dot, otherwise known as a period, which stops sentences from growing into a lot of weeping blubber, bookmakers subject to changing moods, sacrifices, slumps, illiteracy, the full panorama of someone’s life unfolding, catching fire, and attracting UFOS. Though I think you can make a case for it. Statutes related to the metaphysics of calico, criminal code, criminal procedure, real property and conveyances, luxuries, like reading, having the time to read, and the lips of a distant cobweb. Here in Washington State there are laws against harassing bigfoot, sleeping in someone’s outhouse, pretending your parents are wealthy, whaling on Sunday or buying a mattress, lick lollipops in cars, use X-rays for shoe fittings, disguises for teachers, abandon a refrigerator, and (if you live in Everett) display a hypnotized person in a store window. How many laws have you broken? I’m not going to say, for fear it may implicate me in the bismuth of a jellyfish. I’m boiling up something this minute, in fact. Definitions. Secrets. Collisions. Big gray blocks stepping on absence. And a huge spatula. Straight from eye to paper.

I begin to feel ultramarine when I travel. And geographical. Spreading out on a bed honors the muscles. The best way to travel is to scatter abroad above the earth's atmosphere, that place where the sky ends and prophecy begins. It’s a trip, baby. There are trillions and trillions of stars and nebulae and a sigh bursting out of a pack of allegories. Birthdays counted in light years. I’m not appreciably different at 79 then I was at 18. I like those movies where a troubled boxer takes his ire out on a punchbag. The strange elegance of a boxer suspended in a photograph. Contrasting things makes them tremble. The potato has an immediacy only a Bach could appreciate in a potato concerto, fingers prowling the keys for a look at the sublime, and finding sea salt and rosemary. There’s always the element of surprise. Counterpoint and fugue. Mood dynamics and tempo. Tornados and strange loops. If the potatoes are going into the oven, so should the bacon. You don’t want stand there by the sink looking like Lady Macbeth. Think of something like wage satisfaction.  The mysteries of the Dirac equation. As soon as I found myself dogpaddling in a paragraph, I looked down to see the bottom, and discovered objects I didn’t understand. I would have to dive deeper. Buy a shovel. Buy some land. And plant some potatoes.

I didn’t discover how important it is to have a purpose until I didn’t have any. And yet something is there to push me, get me to roll out of bed, brush my teeth, brush my hair, feed the cat and sit down at a desk with a book. I think of Matthew McConaughey. That speech he has in True Detective. “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect separated from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion that having a self. This secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling. Programmed, with total assurance, that we’re each somebody. When, in fact, everybody’s nobody.” A normal person would so this as a slur of words with a pompous attitude toward the miracle of masturbation. I became difficult to categorize. Was I a mammal, or a crustacean? The antennae on the top of my head confuses people. Why is it always in motion, people ask. The vibrations of other stars produce eerie songs that I like to convert to words. There’s an eschatological dimension to it that I find difficult to put into palatable and wholesome dishes. This is why I was once so attracted to bars. The quieter the better.