To Drive, or Not to Drive

One afternoon, after getting off the number 4 bus on Galer, we heard the wind whistle through the radio towers atop Queen Anne. There are three altogether. The third is further to the west. These two rose high in the sky humming the rough overtones of a tempestuous sky. Rags of cloud blew through the girders. These three radio towers, seen from a distance, have always given Queen Anne hill a regal look. The hill itself has an elevation of 456 feet, making it the tallest of Seattle’s seven hills. The tower furthest to the east, the KING TV tower, is the one chosen to hang Christmas Lights on every winter, the day after Thanksgiving. The tower was erected sometime in 1947 and made its first television broadcast on November 10^th, 1948. Seattle had six hundred televisions. A crowd gathered downtown at Frederick & Nelson’s department store. In order to strengthen the fuzzy image within the studio, the crew applied white powder, which gave them a cadaverous look. For further contrast, and so that it might be apparent that mouths were moving and words were being shaped by animate skin, men applied brown lipstick, women blue. They looked like zombies. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I’ve begun daydreaming about owning a car again. I get headaches from it. I’m heavily conflicted. The idea of getting into a car again, a car that we own, that awaits our every whim in the back parking lot, fills me with joy. But I’m against cars by principle. They’re destroying the planet. The consume gas and oil and emit toxic fumes. Thousands of arable acreage is covered with asphalt and concrete to accommodate their grease-leaking hulks of rubber and steel.  Instead of soaking into the earth the way rain is intended to do, percolating down to nourish roots and worms and microorganisms, it flows into the sewage system and thence into Puget Sound where it creates a contrasting brown with the sound’s usual midnight blue of white-capped waves. But we have come to find that riding the bus is effortful and time-consuming and I miss driving. I miss shifting rears, maneuvering in traffic, listening to my CDs at full volume, and subverting time and space with heady accelerations. I miss the convenience of having a car at our immediate disposal. It’s an addiction. The walk to the bus stop, the wait for the bus, the gymnastics of riding the bus, are not that bad. And you don’t need to pay insurance or get speeding tickets or parking tickets or search for a place to park. Yet I long for the complexities of a car, and cannot get the image of a shiny Subaru Impreza out of my head. The delicious curve of a steering wheel. The sound of a seat belt clicking together. The wistful glow of dashboard lights.

Roberta signed up for a Car2Go. We haven’t been able to use it yet. It takes days to get the card, or whatever they send you in the mail that will allow her to activate one of their cars. It’s like applying for a passport. The Car2Go gives me a lot of anxiety. I’ve read less than enthusiastic things about their call center. And the range of things that can go wrong is quite formidable, including not being able to log off while the clock is still ticking and you’re being charged by the minute and the call center has you on hold for an interminable amount of time, or being immobilized in Seattle’s dense immovable traffic, or getting into a fender-bender with a clueless adolescent with no insurance, or an attorney in a brand new BMW. What happens then?

Today the sky is a mottled disarray of blue and gray. The day feels neutral and vague. I make some scrambled eggs and slather some strawberry jam on a piece of toast and watch some people in Switzerland argue in French on TV Monde. I can only pick up certain phrases. The thin woman with the thick black shoulder-length hair appears to be in distress concerning some beach property that belongs to the family. She has a son with a mental disability. She talks to a young man full of hope and enthusiasm who tries to encourage her to take some form of action to defend the beach property, though I can’t tell what it is specifically. Another man, who appears to be her husband, is a sourpuss. He appears to be in a lot of pain. He’s never happy. He’s always at work and when he’s interrupted by the woman he gets angry. Abruptly, there is a scene in which she’s swimming in the lake. The water must be freezing, but she appears very relaxed.

I will not be swimming in Lake Washington this year. I don’t want to get sick like I did last summer and spend an entire day in the hospital having antibiotics dripped into my veins. I will go swimming in the imagination. I will twang and twinkle and dream. I will weave sensations of the outer world into inner worlds and roll the inner worlds into the outer world by way of language. By way of sentences. By way of a brain crawling toward a thought, delicate as the heart of a bubble. Is there anything more explicit than a human leg? There is meat loaf. There is a man playing a lute. There is the clash of cymbals.

Yesterday I saw a fire engine on fire. Black smoke billowed out of the cab. The fire engine was parked right in front of the station, a temporary station, which is a large white tent. I wasn’t sure if this was intended as an exercise or not. The firemen were dressed in their fire-fighting gear and running a hose of water into the cab to the put the fire out. How in the world does the cab of a fire engine catch fire?

I think about fire. I think about words. I think about money. James Kunstler writes that the Federal Reserve intends to juice the financial markets with U.S. Treasury bonds and miscellaneous securities with the goal of putting downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and thus supporting economic activity and job creation by making financial conditions more accommodative. Which is a polite way of saying fake wealth. Smoke and mirrors.

There is often a kind of poetry to finance. Their operations are so delightfully abstract. And unreal. Money has no reality. Its value has no reality. You can’t eat money. You can’t eat gold or silver. Where does value come from? Who makes value? What is extrinsic value? What is intrinsic value? Intrinsic value is value that something has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “in its own right.” Its value does not derive from anything else. Thomas Hobbes believed the goodness or badness of something to be constituted by the desire or aversion one may have regarding it. David Hume also subscribed to the view that all ascriptions of value involve projections of one’s own sentiments onto whatever is said to have value. This makes it the whole argument subjective and muzzy. It does not help me decide whether having a car is of higher value than not owning a car. Neither Thomas Hobbes or David Hume drove cars.

John Dewey, who did drive a car, at least once (he hit a tree), suggested that since the world is always changing in such a way that the solution to one problem becomes the source of another, and that what may be an end in one context is a means to an end in another, it is a mistake to seek a timeless list of goods and evils, of goals to be attained for their own sakes.

Which makes intrinsic value all the more elusive. This is I know: rivers inspire reverie. Sunlight penetrating the foliage of a thick forest is beautiful. When a hedge of wild lilac loses its petals the sidewalk gets a thick coating of deep blue petals. A window without a dream is just a window. When an image crashes among its words the sentence convulses into a coat hanger. Removing a hinge pin and coating it with olive oil will quiet a squeaky door. Chaos gets our attention. Car rental agencies never give you the economy car you request but a much bigger car which also happens to be the only car available at the moment take or leave it. Perceptions wander my skin when I shave. A horse is virtuous and paper when it is written in blue ink. Cézanne discovered a universe of cubes on a prominence of rock. There is a pivotal point in everyone’s life where one’s narrative trajectory alters quite dramatically and goes in a different direction. Nature is a riddle. There is a latent pterodactyl in all of us, and DNA is a helix.

Why is DNA a helix? I find that curious.

So are fingernails. Fingernails grow with a strange rapidity.

The good news is that my Achilles tendon has stopped hurting. It stopped hurting the exact same day I ordered an aerobic step bench to exercise the tendon and prevent it from hurting. It had been hurting each day for over a month. And stopped. The very moment the sent for article was charged to our credit card. Some things are magic. Some things are not. They’re not exactly magic. They’re another phenomenon. One that involves coincidence, and credit cards, and luck.

 

 

The World Is Everything That Happens

Four Elemental Bodies, poetry by Claude Royet-Journoud. Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. Burning Deck Press, 2013.  

The ability to write a clean line with no shadow or metaphor is a testament to the ineffable grace of the Real, to the unrepresentable. There can be an object so real in a poem that it cannot be anything but itself, and so intensely itself, that the mystery of it leaves one speechless. Such is the work of Claude Royet-Journoud.

Four Elemental Bodies is a tetralogy consisting of four previous books by Royet-Journoud originally published in France by Gallimard: Reversal, The Notion of Obstacle, Objects Contain the Infinite, and Natures Indivisible (Le renversement, La notion d’obstacle, Les objets contiennent l’infini, Les natures indivisibles).

The title is apt. It has a scientific ring. Zukofsky, a clear influence on Royet-Journoud, brought a scientific attitude to poetic construction. “To the poet acting at once as observer and instrument the scientific standards of physical measurement are only the beginnings of images of poems… The poet, no less than the scientist, works on the assumption that inert and live things and relations hold enough interest to keep him alive as part of nature.”

Gustaf Flaubert urged a similar approach to this intensely objectified view of language over a hundred years earlier in a letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie dated December 12^th, 1857: “Art ought to rise above personal feelings and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to give it the precision of the physical sciences, by means of a pitiless method.”

This scientific disposition toward objectivity, however, carries a hazard. If a language is too perfect, too precise, we cannot use it to think. It would be too constricting, too punctilious.  Wittgenstein’s famous axiom from his Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” remind us that language is an adjustable medium and that by disrupting its structure we can investigate and confront those limits.  

“There is always a play between representation and the unrepresentable,” Royet-Journoud observed in an interview with Éric Pesty. “Yes, the unrepresentable. There is always this limit to language. This impossibility of at once being before and behind. One is always in language, one can never extricate oneself, it’s impossible. So, what can one do along this wall, without ever managing to get around it? One is effectively returned to this limit.”

The strategies Royet-Journoud employs for dealing with this dilemma are a reversal of the usual poetic devices. He eschews metaphor, assonance and alliteration. He writes in a tone of scrupulous neutrality, effacing the sovereign voice of the author and assuming the aspect of an elusive cicerone or phantasmal counterbalance to the reader’s or listener’s attention. His fragmentary lines have the flatness of surface to be found on a tabletop or sheet of paper. He lauds the “clear line” of Hergé, the Belgian comic book writer and artist best known for The Adventures of Tintin series. Hergé developed the “ligne claire,” a style of drawing that uses strong clear lines of uniform value in which shadows are often illuminated, and so lose their identity as shadows.

“The problem resides in literalness (not in metaphor),” Royet-Journoud remarked in an interview with Mathieu Bénézet, the need to measure language by its ‘minimal’ units of meaning. For me, Eluard’s verse ‘The earth is blue like an orange’ can be exhausted, it annihilates itself in an excess of meaning. Whereas Marcelin Pleynet’s ‘the far wall is a whitewashed wall’ is and remains, by its very exactness, and evidently within its context, paradoxically indeterminate as to meaning and so will always ‘vehiculate’ narrative. This might be experienced painfully.”

I am reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s allusion to the tale of Peter Schlemiel in the Philosophical Investigations, in which the devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground in exchange for a bottomless wallet. Wittgenstein uses the story to propose a form of expression in which all the components have equal value, no element casts a lesser shade, but also to underscore the impossibility of separating thought from language: “Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground.”

Thought and language are as interrelated as valves on a trumpet or buttons on a shirt. “Look at the sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment,” Wittgenstein observed in section 421 of his Philosophical Investigations. Words are defined by their use, in the same way a piston is defined by its use as a moving component in a reciprocating engine, and whose purpose is to transfer force from an expanding gas to the crankshaft via piston rod and so move the sentence down the highway, or cause it to lift from the tarmac and enter the clouds.

“Rain makes the form appear,” appears on page 43 of Reversal. Reversal appeared in 1972 and was translated into English by Keith Waldrop in 1973. It’s a fascinating way to begin a series. Reverse position. Reverse ideas. Reverse verse. Reverse the question. Reverse the answer. Reverse the image so that we see impressions the letters make from the other side. “I would love to be here” writes Royet-Journoud at the bottom of what would be page 46 (it has no number), reversing the writer/reader relationship. What is here (there) are those six words, “I would love  to be here.” The reader is there. The writer is not. The writer’s words are there, if it can be said that those words belong to the writer. The conditional tense makes them even more tentative. Which is all any word is anyway: a tense, a tension, a tender.

The Notion of Obstacle makes evident what is a uniform and primal element in all of Royet-Journoud’s work, which is the whiteness of the page, the amount of space between the words and lines, which may also be registered in the air as silence. Silence, Royet-Journoud has claimed elsewhere, is a form. Silence is as definitive as the holes in a harmonica, or wings on a crane. Here, the word ‘obstacle’ may be taken literally, to mean a wall, a door, a rock, or a group of words that must be encountered on the page. Though if I break ranks with the literalism of the objectivist program, and give it a more abstract spin, it might be said that in Indian philosophy non-representational feelings are considered to be an obstacle to rational thought.

Até appears as a single word after the section titled “Name-Work” in The Notion of Obstacle.  ‘Até’ is the Greek goddess of mischief, delusion, blind folly and ruin. She was the eldest daughter of Zeus, forced to remain on earth as punishment for persuading Zeus to take an oath which enabled Hera to confer power on Eurystheus rather than Hercules. The starkness of this single name on the page is followed by a blank page on the reverse side, and the lines on the adjacent page: “that / blue / and unwithdrawing.” The words, each italicized, are separated by inches of blank space. The demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ gives the word ‘blue’ a perplexing intensity. Could it be the sky? The puzzling line “and unwithdrawing,” which appears some distance below, un-italicized, adds enigma and persistence to the word ‘blue.’ We do not know with certainty whether ‘blue’ is intended as a noun or adjective. My own addiction to metaphor runs contrary to Royet-Journoud’s eschewal of resemblance and comparison and I begin to read my own narrative into it: the words are remnants, bits of wood, rag, something washed ashore, providing clues to a former narrative.

Royet-Journoud has often referred to detective work as an explication for the enigmatic quality of his work, in particular the “minimal units of meaning” we find on the page. “I think that there is a narrative, as I said  -  a plot in a detective story  -  in the sense that there is always a search for a missing body,” he revealed in an interview with Mathieu Bénézet in 1981.

To state it concisely, there is an accident which permits legibility. How can I explain it? It’s rather like the restoration of a painting when a crack in the surface reveals another image underneath. At this point the real investigation begins. In order to find out what the nature or state of the hidden image is, the restorer scratches the surface in various places, provoking himself those accidents which permit the image to be deciphered. He needs to know if the covered painting is complete in order to proceed…Should he efface or restore the surface image, uncover or blot out the second image. It is not, in fact, a question of choosing between a real but imperfect surface image and a second image which is virtual but solicited. What counts is the “passage” from the surface accident to the virtual image; as the accident changes position, the investigation becomes integrated into the surface, which as a consequence becomes self-narrating. It is not surface and depth - old and new image, which defines my work, but this mobility constituted into the book.

It takes a great amount of time for Royet-Journoud to produce a book. He excludes himself from the population of writers who find themselves “inhabited” by language, writers who have been captivated by the spellbinding properties of language, its charms and enchantments, its Circean allures. It is his practice to write a great body of prose over a long period time, prose with no literary value, prose which he refers to as nothing, “Je passé mon temps avec rien et je m’obstine et j’insiste sur ce rien, et donc il y a d’abord ce travail qui est très corporel, qui consiste à écrire une grande quantité de prose sans valeur littéraire [“I pass my time with nothing and I persevere and I insist upon this nothing, and so there is at first this work which is very corporal, which consists of writing a great quantity of prose with no literary value”]. By “nothing,” I presume Royet-Journoud refers to the accidental, the everyday, the matter-of-fact, the barely perceptible. Details that do not appear to be charged with meaning in any way. He then culls through this material, extracting certain elements and distributing it over several pages, facing pages as well as recto-verso. In the next stage, he begins to work on the language, neutralizing the text, suppressing metaphor, assonance, alliteration, remaining attentive all the while to whatever narrative begins to emerge, whatever language begins to demonstrate carnality, physicality, embodying, as he puts it, “this language within a language.”

Hence, each of the books in this series is separated by five or six years. Objects Contain the Infinite appeared in 1983. The title comes from a paragraph in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks:

In some sense or other, I must have two kinds of experience: one which is of the finite and which cannot transcend the finite (the idea of such a transcendence is nonsense even on its own terms) and one of the infinite. And that’s how it is. Experience as experience of the facts gives me the finite; the objects contain the infinite.  Of course not as something rivaling finite experience, but in intension. Not as though I could see space as practically empty, with just a very small finite experience in it. But, I can see in space the possibility of any finite experience. That is, no experience could be too large for it our exhaust it; not of course because we are acquainted with the dimensions of every experience and know space to be larger, but because we understand this as belonging to the essence of space. 

“To speak is to see your body,” Royet-Journoud writes in the section titled “Updated as Required.” Reading is spectral, hallucinatory. We can feel the weight of a book in our hands, but the letters carry desire in silence, and engorge it with imaginative energy. Language is a mediating instrumentality. It can limit and exclude, but it may also extend and open. It can cut. It can bleed. It can serve as a fulcrum of primary being. But here, I fall into the error of metaphor.

Since metaphor is a reference to something else, it detracts from the reality at hand, that which is most immediately there, within our field of perception. Royet-Journoud seeks a pre-meaning, a disequilibrium of incompletion in which the book is in perpetual movement, which he refers to as a “denudation successive,” a continual unveiling which generates the fiction that is at the heart of language. The goal, in other words, is to arrive at a self-generating narrative that keeps meaning indeterminate and in constant motion. There is a paradox here, because by revealing language to be a fiction, there is equally an attempt to contradict that fictionality and use that very resource to arrive at something real. “On tourne autour d’un drame, d’une éngime,” Royet-Journoud revealed in an interview with Éric Pesty, “De la suture de la fiction et d’un reel hypothétique. C’est en ça que la construction est extrêmement delicate. Le moindre soufflé peut tout bilayer.” [One turns around a drama, an enigma. Of a suture of fiction and a hypothetical real. It is there that the construction is extremely delicate. The least puff of air can sweep it all away].

Merleau-Ponty expressed this value in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception,

Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their “facticity.” … It is also a philosophy for which the world is “already there” before reflection begins  -  as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world… It is the search for a philosophy which shall be a “rigorous science,” but it also offers an account of space, time, and the world as we “live” in them. It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is. 

The section titled “Love in Ruins” is highly unusual as it consists of blocks of prose rather than single lines or individual words acting as electrons within the magnetic field of the page. “He brings to his books the truth of a body at a given moment,” Royet-Journoud writes on page 237, “Between sleep and fable.” What would that space be? The space between the stillness of a sleeping body and fable, a fictive realm? The theater comes to mind, the stage and its components. The jingle of a fool’s costume, a blind man leaping from a shallow bank.

The title Natures Indivisible brings to mind the atomism of the Roman poet Lucretius, and especially his magnificent poem De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things. But there the analogy lies inert, a curious possibility, “another grammar.” Royet-Journoud does not predicate, or speculate. He presents. He unfolds. He uncovers. In the section titled i.e., which is Latin (id est) for “that is,” or “in other words,” are the lines “like thought / the resemblance / is at syllable’s edge.” The image creates its own vanishing. It is seemingly there, then not there, as our eyes drop from the edge into space, into the whiteness of the page. There is no resemblance, there is only the anticipation of resemblance. The final line of the poem on this page, “a nerve discerns daylight,” holds the attention to the geography of the page. But there, with the metaphor of geography I let the line slip away. Nerve, I remind myself, is a word. Word and nerve tangent to what is at hand. “something like sharpening a knife.”

 

In Which the Universe Gets Tossed

I’ve been sleeping closer to the ground lately. We dismantled the iron frame of the bed so that it could be refinished. The bed frame is iron with small brass finials in the shape of balls. The universe also got tossed. The universe was an inflatable black ball imprinted with the known constellations and galaxies. It was a mnemonic device for an astronomy class. Over the years, it had acquired a thick coating of dust. We kept it perched atop a pitcher and bowl I inherited from my grandmother. It nested perfectly there. The pitcher and bowl are porcelain and printed with blue flowers. The bowl reminds me of those scenes in westerns in which the gunslinger or sheriff or cowboy stay at a hotel with pretty white curtains and dip their hands into the soapy water and splash it on their face and wipe it off with a towel. Then they go and get in a gun duel.

Sleeping closer to the ground is not demonstrably different from sleeping a few feet higher. It has not had much effect on the quality of my sleep or dreams. The clock is harder to see; I have left my body up to get a look at it. I also have to reach a little higher to press the buttons on the CD player. I did get a terrible allergy from the dust when we dismantled the bed. Or at least that’s what I believe triggered the allergy. That, in combination with the tons of pollen floating in the air. The four day Pollencast on the Internet Weather Channel registers a very high amount of pollen.

Sleeping near the floor is a little like being on a raft. The bed is an ontological machine. We are born in a bed, often die in a bed, make love in a bed, get a taste of oblivion in bed when we fall asleep. We discover the essence of existence in bed. We lie in darkness. That’s when the carnival of thoughts and worries in our head light up and whirl around and keep us from sleeping.

I look up histamine on Wikipedia. Histamine is an organic nitrogen compound involved in local immune responses as well as regulating physiological function in the gut and acting as a neurotransmitter. Histamine triggers the inflammatory response. Don’t I know that! I’ve been sneezing up a storm and have gone through a box of tissue blowing my nose. I write a check to renew our Harper’s Magazine subscription. I blow my nose. I get a stamp to put on the envelope in which I have inserted a check. I blow my nose. I discover that the envelope has been prepaid. I don’t need a stamp. I return the stamp. I blow my nose. I take the letter out to the mailbox in the hallway. I come back. I go to the bathroom. I blow my nose. I blow my nose into a paper towel. Blowing my nose into a paper towel is so much more satisfactory than blowing my nose in a Kleenix tissue. The tissue is soft and falls apart. I can really let go with a paper towel.

The next day, I go for a run. I must be immune by now. In any case, the damage is done. Pollen or no pollen I’m going for a run. It’s too beautiful outside not to. Everything is dripping with haiku. I hear some wind chimes hanging by someone’s door on a white porch, see buds beginning to appear on the chestnuts on Bigelow. Pink blossom on a green Corolla. A police cruiser passes me as I run down 8^th Avenue West, the street with a panoramic overlook of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. The cruiser stops near the intersection of 8^th Avenue West and West Galer Street and a police woman gets out and goes searching for something in the trunk. I wonder what’s up. I pass her and see a motorcycle cop giving directions to a driver. His motorcycle is parked nearby, on Galer. I try to make sense of this narrative. They must be preparing for something, but what? This isn’t the place for marching or demonstrations. There are no banks to rob. Has there been a burglary? Was the suspect caught?

As soon as Roberta gets home, I find out what happened. A 35-year-old man got in an argument with a 50-year-old man at the bus stop at the corner of Denny and Aurora Avenue. The 35-year-old man assaulted the 50-year-old man and the police were called. The police arrived. The 35-year-old man somehow managed to steal a cruiser and the police gave chase. The man crashed into the retaining wall at 8^th Avenue West and Olympia Place. It must have happened shortly after I ran by. We look up an article about it online. There is the cruiser, hanging over the rise in the street, the railing smashed.

At around 11:30 p.m. we go to bed. I put on CD number 4 of Mark Twain’s Roughing It and get under the covers. “On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless.”

The Treasures of Kenwood House, London

Earth Day, April 23rd, 2013. 9:35 p.m.

I go online and post a paragraph on Facebook, an excerpt from an essay by Walter Benjamin titled “Experience and Poverty,” in which he refers to the joyless properties of glass: “It is no coincidence that glass is such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed. A cold and sober material into the bargain. Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.”

I add a photo of Dale Chihuly’s Garden and Glass exhibit beneath it to underscore Benjamin’s point. But just to be sure everyone gets the connection, I add “That this aura-less, cold, sober chapel of bourgeois vapidity has replaced the ebullience of the Fun Forest is an injury to the spirit. It speaks to Seattle's sea-change from affordable, art-friendly city to a cheerless, affluent dysphoria of clueless Bobos.”

I loved the Fun Forest. This was a carnival-like zone left over from the Seattle’s World Fair in 1962, the identical place where a 10-year-old Kurt Russell kicks Elvis Presley in the shin in the movie It Happened at the World’s Fair. There were rides such as a jeweled Borrelli carousel, a Windstorm roller coaster offering a smooth fast ride laid out in a multiple figure-eight configuration, Wild River log flume, bumper cars, kiddy galleon, rainbow chaser, and an Orbiter which featured a cluster of cars mounted on arms radiating from a central axis that lifted into a 90 degree horizontal position when the ride was spinning. There were games of skill offering stuffed animals as prizes, stands selling hot dogs and cotton candy, and a Flight to Mars ride whose interior décor was studded with black lights and glow paint. It’s all gone now, replaced with the cheerless Chihuly exhibit with its strong commercial appeal and shabby pretense at art.

Tuesday, April 24th, 2013. 1:00 p.m.

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon and the temperature is starting to rise into the lower 60s. Roberta and I decide to hop on a bus and go to the art museum to see Rembrandt and a few other Dutch masters. I love 17^th century Dutch art. Alas, there will be no Vermeer, but there will be some canvases and techniques similar to Vermeer.

And there are: I’m transfixed by View of Dordrecht by Aelbert Cuyp. The delicacy of the ships, the beauty of the clouds, the feeling of reality in the serene water. The effects of the light are like sweet soft theorems of illumination in paint. He has distorted reality to depict reality. He has obscured reality to illumine reality. Cuyp was skilled at altering the direction of light in a painting, bringing it to a diagonal position from the back of the picture, so that the viewer faced the sun more or less directly. The light appears to be emanating from the paint. This also gave a greater feeling of depth to the space. I could dwell on this one painting for an hour. But I continue. The gallery shines with 17^th century light.

I see Family in a Mediterranean Seaport by Jan Baptist Weenix, A Canal in Winter by Isack van Ostade, and Old London Bridge by Claude de Jongh. All the paintings on display are from the Kenwood House collection in Hampstead, London, on the northern boundary of Hampstead Heath. It must have been there when John Keats lived nearby. The collection was once owned by Edward Cecil Guinness, the first Earl of Iveagh, an Irish philanthropist and businessman. He died in 1927, bequeathing his home and collection to the nation.

The highlight of the show is Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Two Circles. I’ve seen this painting many times before, but the reality of it, and its immense size, is stunning. Rembrandt appears so astonishingly real and present and soulfully available for meditations on art or philosophy or just the dubious ritual of visiting an art museum that one’s own presence becomes unavoidable and real. Whatever shadows and distractions haven been clinging to you throughout the day dissipate. It is you and this old man.

And he is old, no question of that. His jowls sag, his nose has the bulbous fleshiness associated with heavy drinking, his hair is white and long, his body is corpulent and heavy, an effect heightened by the heavy fur-lined robe he wears, and the white nightcap is a clear signal that he has entered the nighttime of his life. It will soon be lights out and sleep forever. But there is still great light and energy in his eyes and the way he holds his mahlstick and paintbrushes and palette is nothing less than regal. His face is highly expressive. There is great sadness and maturity there. He has experienced the inevitable losses and disappointments of this all too mortal life, and he is burdened with poverty and debt. But he is triumphant. He has his creativity. It’s still going strong. This painting is proof of that.

After taking in nearly all the 17^th century paintings I entered the adjoining galleries which segued into the 18^th century, featuring work by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. I’ve never been too excited about this phase in western European painting, but now that the same disparities of wealth and poverty that led to the French Revolution are in play again, it is particularly galling to see these aristocratic pricks and their progeny. The conventions of 18^th century painting with their values of harmony, cool elegance and casual grace, are pleasing to the eye and give one a sense of balance and meaning to the universe, but this is a reflection of aristocratic wealth, the people who employed painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds. The work of poets and painters such as William Blake during this era give a very different view, a critical perspective that I happen to share. I feel like Jean-Paul Marat wandering these galleries.

My heels are dogged by a tour group that began at approximately the same time that Roberta and I started our viewing. An elderly woman leads a group of some fifteen or twenty people of differing age and sex, though few are younger than thirty. She seems to know her stuff and speaks with enthusiasm about the paintings, parenthetically inserting allusions to the European collections and museums she and her husband have visited on their travels. Her group caught up with me at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra dissolving a pearl. According to Pliny, in an effort to impress Marc Antony with her prodigality, Cleopatra put out a great feast and at the end plopped a pearl into a goblet of vinegar and then drank it after the pearl dissolved. Reynolds chose this story for a particular reason, and I was eager to hear about it. I was listening to the story of Kitty on the little audio wand the museum provides at the entry to the show, how this remarkably beautiful and charismatic woman rose from a humble life as a milliner to become one of London’s most notorious femmes fatales, known for her affairs with men of wealth, such as George William Coventry, 6^th Earl of Coventry, when the elderly woman with her flock of tourists intruded on me and began speaking as if I weren’t standing there. I moved on, and went to find a painting that the tour group wouldn’t reach for a few minutes.

This turned out to be one of the strangest paintings I’d ever seen. Hawking in Olden Time by Sir Edwin Landseer presents a ball of feathers and fury at the center of the picture with a group of medieval hunters faintly represented off to the right margin, riding up a knoll, stunned to see the sight of their falcon bringing down a heron. I couldn’t quite make out which eyeball belonged to which bird, so furious and energetic was this conflict. It looked like a whirling asteroid of feathers. I lingered long enough for the tour group to arrive and listened to the guide explain the nostalgia for the past people felt during the time this painting was achieved, in 1832, right at the beginning of the industrial revolution. I saw something other than just nostalgia. The birds were so engulfed in a frenzy of survival and predation I could not help but feel a high level of anxiety. One world was ending, another was beginning.

I did not expect to see Turner. I did not at first that I was looking at a Turner. When I think of Turner I imagine dramatic atmospheric effects, black engines in radiant mists, imposing buildings engulfed in flames. Dramas of air and light in which the overarching mood is clear as a Wagnerian opera but the specifics of what is occurring are ambiguous. A Coast Scene with Fishermen Hauling a Boat Ashore was highly detailed and offered a very clear narrative: two boats have been run ashore and a third is at the mercy of breakers during a mighty tempest that is pounding the shore with unabashed fury. A group of men struggled mightily with muscle and rope to keep the two boats from being swept back out to sea. I could feel the wind. I could feel the wet salt air sting my cheeks. The dark mingling grays of the sky and the white gnashing waves were sublime and merciless. I was trying to make out the fish and detritus on the beach but the tour group engulfed me and the guide’s opening words capsized my attention. I made for the exit.

When Roberta and I arrived home E was at work on the front porch, scraping it with a stainless steel palette knife and a wire brush. This was the third time in two years she was painting the porch. It’s been a frustration for all of us in the building, but for her especially, since this has been her project. The paint keeps chipping and flaking, resulting in a calico surface of sour yellow cream and battleship gray. I offer to help. Roberta and I go in, change our clothes, and return, each of us provided with a palette knife from my toolbox. It’s hard work. We spend an hour at it. We tell her we visited the exhibit of Dutch art at the Seattle art museum. I tried to describe the power of the Joseph Turner canvas, since her husband K is a fisherman. E tells us she and K visited the Chihuly exhibit recently. She didn’t seem that enthusiastic. It occurs to me to share my recent posting on Facebook, and my opinion about Dale Chihuly’s glass art, but decide to keep silent on the subject, and keep scraping away at the porch. 

Romper

If a dynamic impertinence impels the greenery, than the sensation of flipping will pleat the damask. Rain’s illusionism circulates it. Your pamphlet makes nothing but sense. A stepladder walks the transformation to the end of the wharf and plummets into grammar. The strain of everything emerging brims with chiaroscuro and so confirms the enormity of Rembrandt.

A metaphor fulminates along the next line, this line, and enters the book in the form of a leg, my leg. I have four legs since blazing into conquest. My elevator embarks at dawn. Inventions tease the paint. A paraffin yardstick drips with sexual innuendo. I push it to the back where it educates a knob.

I have the duty to convulse with breakfast. This concerns simulacrams of space. The bikini burns quicker under the hive of antiquity than the oil of hereafter. The proverb has mentally adjusted itself to wax into gravity and assume the camaraderie of prose. The harmonica is an incarnation of rumor.

I am eager to equip our experience with bone. Black manipulates our summer fugue. I scrub the candlelight to believe in yellow. A wave is because fiddles are moonlight. The fat around the sweat of the world stirs with life as it slithers through space stealing glimpses of heaven.

We basket a Corot and split through the lobby. I rattle a spur and the grebes make echoes. I have greased this odor into dream. Religions smear my sand into a life of farming. I rock the garbage to jewel my concentration.

We stab the broken wind and grapple with rain. The mosaic butters its energy in an armchair designed to catch meditation. The brain beneath the drill sews ruffles into banging vermilion. A radical empiricism occurs with the percolation of morning at the forehead station. The train beneath my steering embodies a story of turbulence and spit.  

The monotonous lamp is blackened by burning. I patch my ancestry and carry the spin past the resilience of history. There is an upheaval at the car wash. The nails snatch a door and grip a new frame. The flower is incidental to its seed.

Poke purpose and it will splash the orchard. I fall through a paradigm cooking rice on a blue fire. Your tongue is a blade. You cut the air and a sentence falls out. This is how we talk.

The wind grieves for the paint flaking from the barns of Montana. I happen to clapboard a house I imbue. A mountain circles its telling of rock and I believe it. The bitumen is new. I agree to haunt the abstraction until it projects an airport.

The gulls are funny. They stab the sky to watch the sublime. I stiffen from what I feel is real and brood in cogitation near the trash bins. There is a description of boxing that has been sewn to a wedge of library storm. Some debris has been added to make the clouds look cut and bleeding.  

I have dangled scrupulously above this paper causing words to come into being and be here and describe something, anything, a feeling or grosbeak. This spring I shake with papier collé. I stand on the locomotive and rub. Here I must excuse the trembling. We are all enigmas of insult and yearning sailing out of subtleties of gabardine and mind. 

 

And Now For Something Completely Efferent

The sound of the rain can be heard through the cracks in the windows. These aren’t actual cracks. There are no cracks in the glass. The windows are open a crack. This prevents condensation. But there are cracks. There is a crack in the drywall of the window frame, and another in the northwest corner of the bedroom. I will fix it later.

We decide not to move. Taking on a mortgage is too scary. Roberta adds an article in the New York Times today to our “favorite” list. The banks are at it again, creating dubious financial products, such as “collateralized debt obligations” which evade the few regulations imposed after the collapse in 2008. The old excesses are creeping back into the market.

I escape into language where the words sag with hope and valentines. I boil the vapor of appearance in the spongy mass of a wool piano. The syntax squirts. Palominos rip the sod. Gravity hammers a stone guitar.

What paradox is the art of manipulating objects with signs which are exterior and alien to them! and of which even the correspondence with them is altogether arbitrary! It’s necessary that each thing be doubled by a phantom where the sign attaches itself, another phantom. The signs combined, combine the phantoms  -  and a special machine permits the return of phantoms to things  -  and by their imposition on things, awaits the same fate that the accommodating phantoms have endured in that bizarre location where they’re slaves to the signs. So writes Paul Valéry in his Notebooks.

Syllables: everything is syllables. For instance, here is an emotion: it tastes of clairvoyance, but looks like a stew. There are no monotonous odors in our house. This is why I prefer wearing denim. I write for the sheer pleasure of folding my opinions into quadrilaterals and bagpipes. For the exploration of nothingness. For adapting my grammar to the grammar of the world. Or not. I press my ear to the blood of a cat. The biology of a consonant glides through the anatomy of a dollar and gets hooked on a murmuring phantom. This results in insemination.

I move my hand across a sheet of paper. Words come out of my hand. An elevator arrives and its doors slide open revealing a shepherd and his flock. I scrub the distance between a bistro and an explanation for light. The definition for twilight is warped by fatalism. The flowers all thrive in a sulky anonymity. I search for your caress as aggressively as an asterisk in a liter of swallows. The waves unroll their scripture of foam on the absorbing sand. A sense of autonomy collides with a stain of adjectives spread across the giant nipple of an acoustic emotion. Faith runs across the Mediterranean and delivers a granite baby. You might think that none of these sentences are connected but I assure you that they are. I’m braced for anything. The death of a planet. The strain of a glockenspiel. A pile of words writing themselves into rooms and embassies.

Looking Back at Don't Look Back

Last night Roberta and I watched Don’t Look Back. I hadn’t seen it in a few years. The movie still has tremendous energy, though now it’s a different energy, not the revolutionary energy that galvanized me when I first saw the movie in 1967, that revolution had long ago fizzled out, but the dynamic flux of a singular event caught on film in a manner so raw and natural that it doesn’t seem so much modified by time as intensified by time. The movie hasn’t lost any of its freshness or pizzazz. It’s not like looking at something that occurred decades ago where everything is quaintly dated and irrelevant but looking at something in a parallel universe where the events are occurring simultaneously, a bit like the time disruptions in Chris Mark’s La Jetée, and still have the thrill of consequence.  

I get that sense from the way Dylan is marketed in general. It’s not uncommon to enter a music store and see an array of Dylan’s image as it is morphed and mutated over the years, beginning with the tousle-haired fresh-faced Dylan of Greenwich Village when he was first starting out and modeling himself on Woody Guthrie to the saggy-faced pencil-mustachioed Dylan in his mid-60s to early 70s with his louche carnival huckster foxiness, one part hustler, one part desperado. There is no sense of linear progression to these images, they all seem to be occurring at once, as if time didn’t matter, as if time were a malleable, unstable element in the cosmic roulette wheel. Wherever that little ball randomly plunks is the Dylan you’re going to get. They’re all the same man, or are they? Even Dylan is mystified by his transformations.

The movie kicks off with the energetic “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” defiant, witty, provocative, Dylan holding the lyrics to the song on cards he lets drop as the song progresses. He is standing in an alley of what appears to be lower Manhattan; off to the left margin a bearded and rabbinical Allen Ginsberg stands under a rig of rickety scaffolding in a heavy overcoat engaged in conversation with Bob Neuwirth, who walks jauntily on screen as the song ends and the conversation ceases and Neuwirth and Ginsberg each go their own way. Dylan himself looks frail and androgynous but also curiously diamond-hard and indomitable. You wouldn’t want to mess with him. He is wearing a pale, long-sleeved shirt, black vest and a pair of slacks. His hair is thick and wild, exploding from his head as if from too much amphetamine, or sheer excitement. It’s an odd 19^th century look, a nod to Whitman and post-civil war America.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the only electric number in the movie’s songs. The other songs, most of them from the very early stretch of Dylan’s career and rooted deeply in folk tradition and the intensely original poetry that was the core inspiration for these songs, are performed solo on stage in black leather jacket, harmonica and acoustic guitar. This is Dylan just as he was beginning to morph into the Warhol Factory cosmopolitan Dylan of Blonde on Blonde with its uncannily vivid imagery and intense amphetamine surrealism. He had already begun to play with a band and electric guitars but for this concert he was willing to appear as the Dylan people had grown to recognize and beleaguered him with labels such as prophet and protest singer. This is apparent during the scene in which some very young girls with the heavy accents of northern England question him about his new way of performing and Dylan responds with with goodnatured, non-condescending wit and tells them, “You know, I have to give some work to my friends, you know. I mean, you don’t mind that, right?”

What amazes me throughout this movie is Dylan’s frailty coupled with his abrasiveness, his confrontational style. His movements seem odd and out of balance, are heavily concentrated in some self-conscious manner that causes him to move awkwardly and affectedly when he's without his guitar, coupled with his diminutive size and overall delicacy. It did not seem at all strange to see Cate Blanchett play this phase of Dylan’s career in I’m Not There, he was truly that androgynous, that good looking in a dark, defiant, electrifying Jean Harlow kind of way. There is a mystique to it. It’s exotic and freakish and thrilling to watch, though it amazes me he doesn’t get the crap kicked out of him, considering his open mockery and disdain for a lot of the people he encounters outside his immediate group.

There’s the famous scene in which he goes ballistic over some broken glass in the street outside his hotel and gets into an argument with a drunken man roughly his own age. The rage appears real, and you’ve got to wonder if he isn’t exploding out of the tension of a grueling performance schedule and the demands of a very sudden and colossal fame. The other point of interest in this scene (besides Donovan; in fact, contrasting heavily with Donovan) is the old folk singer Derroll Adams, who looks down and out, a true hobo, rider of the rails, the real deal. Adams willingly takes a backseat to Dylan’s punkish pole star, sits on the floor and settles back against the wall in the crowded hotel room and comes across as genuinely humble and raggedly authentic and not a little drunk. He had, in fact, taken Donovan under his wing and seems better aligned with Donovan’s evident innocence than Dylan’s edgy surrealism. Perhaps in actuality he wasn’t all that destitute, but you can see the aging man needs dental work and new clothes and wonder how he’s managing to get by. He seems to be eking out an existence and earning just enough money from busking and doing gigs in the hubbub of England’s pubs to feed himself and buy a little booze. And you realize this is the true fate of someone who takes up a guitar and sings songs for a living. It is a fate far closer to the life of a poet, struggling to get by outside the sheltering walls and income of academia. This would have been Dylan’s, and Donovan’s, fate had not the weird moment in time that was the 60s made it possible to reach a giant, highly enthusiastic audience in at least two continents, if not all of the western world.

The question that always goes through my mind and grows larger as I age each time I see this movie is: what happened to this guy, this particular Bob Dylan, the iconic Bob Dylan? Where’d he go? The body of songs Dylan composed up until Nashville Skyline is stunning. The poetry is incandescent. The songs on John Wesley Harding are not as intense or nearly as expansive but they’re still intellectually appealing, simple yet enigmatic in the way William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are deceptively simple parables about social injustice, hypocrisy, oppression, and the moral fiber of the universe. The music and lyrics since then are spotty. There will be, occasionally, a work of genius like “Blind Willie McTell” circa the 80s or “Not Dark Yet” from the late 90s, but by and large, take the music away and the lyrics on their own are often quite bland and cliché-ridden.

I’m fascinated by an interview Dylan gave to Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes in 2004, in which he admits that he can’t write the same quality of poetic intensity now as he did back in the day. “Those songs seem almost magically written,” he confesses. “There’s a magic to that….and it’s not the Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic, and I did it at one time.” “And you don’t think you can do it today?” Bradley asks. Dylan mumbles no. “I can do other things now, but I can’t do that.”

I don’t know what he means, exactly, by “other things,” but although his more recent songs lack the lyrical ferocity of his early years there is still something often very quirky and fascinating about them. The lines taken individually are sometimes flat as can be, neutral in tone, bland and prosaic as a bag of nails or a cotton swab, but the way the songs are structured they can compass a very broad and evocative range, evoking a terrain not unlike a short story by Larry Brown or Raymond Carver. For example, in Duquesne Whistle, are the lines “Can’t you hear that Duquesne whistle blown’? / Blowin’ like the sky’s gonna blow apart /  You’re the only thing alive that keeps me going / You’re like a time-bomb in my heart.” It isn’t great poetry, but taken as a song, these lines are pretty damn interesting. They have a timeless quality; they could be a song from the late 19^th century. But they’re also modern, quietly eccentric. Nobody really talks this anymore, and the very name Duquesne, with its French sounding syllables, seems to reference a time and place more akin to William Merritt Chase than Oprah Winfrey or Jon Stewart. But the outrageousness of a sky blowing apart, as an image of goofy urgency, romantic crisis in a cockeyed mode, suggests a milieu of colorful distortion like the work of Red Grooms.

So no, the Dylan of Don’t Look Back didn’t disappear entirely. But he did get old. Old in a funny way. There is still that unmistakable gleam in his eye. The often cocky, arrogant prick of Don’t Look Back, openly mocking and insulting people, is now the strange old man police officer Kristie Buble had sitting in the backseat of her cruiser one rainy New Jersey afternoon in August, 2009, picked up for vagrancy, for being an old man in the rain, an eccentric looking old guy wandering around in somebody’s front yard. He gave her his name as Bob Dylan, but this was far from the iconic Bob Dylan we’ve all grown accustomed to seeing, the man with the penetrating eyes and hair exploding out of his head. And he wasn’t carrying any ID. She took the guy in black, soaking wet sweatpants, floppy rubber rain boots and two separate raincoats, one with a hood pulled over his head, to be a crazy homeless man. A complete unknown. With no direction, or home.