Ontology 101 Part Two

What is existence, i.e. what does it mean for a being to be?

Existence is a feeling. It is to be gallant as a whale, a dream hatching out of a paragraph, the incisions of surgery left in the skin as a mark of unction.

The hospitals are full of people injured in the coarse of existence. Existence isn’t easy. It invites eloquence. It is a matter of fencing ghosts. Illusions. Folds of air.

Need begins us. Need is a staircase huddled against the wall, steps creaking as someone rises to tend the dying, or the agonies of birth.

Steel rails guide the locomotive. Attraction guides the heart. Attractions draw the escalator upward.

And downward.

Alpaca feels parenthetical against the skin.

History is the denim of consciousness. Mosquitoes plague the neck and arms. Incense swirls when the door opens. These are the rhythms of existence. These are the rhythms of being.

Imagine yourself as an extraterrestrial, deep in the quiet of reflection. You would look good in court in such manner, in a costume of wizardry, encrusted with jewels, as outside a rocket ship lands, bringing a wealth of information as you climb into yourself, and prepare to explain the paraphernalia of peacocks to a room of beings in a hive of honeyed thought.

Action is where we find the animal within. The brightness of Brighton, rocks and butter, the pigments of dawn breaking over the crest of a mountain. Waves slapping against riprap. The slop of elements. Images created by brush. A bowl of chowder blushing with butter.

Experience yourself as a living entity of bone and blood, muscle and skin. Propellers churn the water as lightning illumines the waves. The world is a ripe, resplendent logic of illogical buds and bubbles. Fire is a paradox. Quarks are quirks.

For example, birds.

Most things begin with an abstraction. An idea held in the hand like an eyeball. A late, midnight lyric squirting horses in pink anticipation of a light traveling through the nerves, an impulse dripping words of one’s existence. Each word is a fist of thunder. If anything, for the sake of teasing gravity, which is the same as sweating as a feeling rises upward through the spine. For the mind is for thinking, and the throat is for sounding diversion.

Slow words lead to fast thoughts. Fast thoughts lead to slow words.

Opposites, expansive as a barn, generate the play of embryonic colors. Apparitions in the straw. Horns, powerfully kinetic and smooth. A philodendron on a neck of green. Elegance and sweat.

The horses gallop in panic as a form develops in the sky. The sky lowers and walks on the hills, singing. Its image excites the nerves. An old man plays an old guitar. Gravy flows over a mound of mashed potatoes. Mosquitoes brocade the air. The horses slow to a stop, and begin to graze. The sky combs through space leaving trails of orange and pink and gold.

Bolt this dream to the door in blots of damp thought.

The grapefruit merits attention. And the desk has a skull on it. The skull of a human, which now grins, its sockets hollow and dark.

Admire fingers. Admire thumbs. Admire everything that grows into maturity and labors and dies. Admire the cartilage in a spine as a body rolls into a somersault.

Syllables puddle into images. A pyramid under the stars. A destiny predestined in a tattoo. A cap on a bottle. The peristalsis of intestines. Cézanne working a texture into granite.

The mysteries of existence are opened by spirit.

Death is an insult.

And a balm.

The incongruity of it all tastes of peach and dough and rolling pin.

Wrinkles and cuts on an old man’s face. A woman dancing on the wings of a biplane. The feeling of silk against the skin.