Ontology 101 Part Six

How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself?

Fingers are fiercely particular. There are no universals for fingers, except fish, and planetary spheres, and doorknobs and handles on buckets that make a loud clattering sound when you set the bucket down.

I wonder if Aristotle ever carried a bucket and set the bucket down and found something embryonic in its declamation?

A subject (hupokeimenon) is what a statement is about.

A predicate (katêgoroumenon) is what a statement says about its subject.

Bacteria follow the hands. The pack mule follows her human. The sublime unpacks her suitcase at the top of the mountain.

Time is a universal ticking in lyrical hickory.

The night is anarchic and soft as moccasins. And long and forceful and the cocoons dangle from branches and inside them new life churns in squiggly metamorphosis. A congenial worm grows colorful wings.

My interpretation of universals is subjective and weird. That’s because I have skin and weight and density and volume.

Perception is flimsy until it turns licorice.

The weight of a thought is shaped into hymns. And a refractory universal hungers for enhancement by the particular.

Contraption, conception, and butterflies.

Let me touch you.

Let me fill the air with the heat of my breath.

Let me fill the air with the taste of predication.

The properties of water, and things like skin. Beads of amber on an ebony belt. Kitchen drawer full of flashlight batteries. And beautiful spoons. And beautiful forks. Knives and pliers and postcards from North Dakota.

Pennies, keys, cellophane, bills.

Struts on a wing.

An ounce or two of Dr. Pepper left in the bottle I put in the frig three weeks ago after returning home from a session at Alliance française.

Muffins and Plato.

The photograph of an odor. A glass of water painted by Jean Baptiste Chardin. So beautiful it reminds me of your voice. And eyes. And a path surrounded by towering pines, garish and pink in the sparkling rain.

Steam rises from my body. Gold comes in flakes of supernatural beauty, the taste of predication. I am fascinated by sidewalks. The mountains speak to our hands and feet.

Represent yourself as you would a king. Or queen.

Or orangutan.

Abstractions sleep among the adverbs. There are meanings harnessed to my words. Crustaceans. The mind boiling in indigo. Warm eggs warming the curl of our fingers. I fall through a hole in my personality. The photograph of an odor. Jellyfish washing ashore. I hit the table with my fist and the cutlery jumps.

What is a moral? What is morality?

Let me watch you as I chew meat and crinkle potato chip bags.

Desire opens us to the world. I must rescue the cabbage from its introversion.

Experience shapes perception. Perception shapes experience.

Or is it the other way around?

The hair on my head is wild. I rarely use a comb. I prefer to use a brush. And sometimes I drive to the end of the night in a Buick of prodigal fire. Grease envelops the axles. Morning is revelation. The birds are sweet to hear.

I swim among syllables dreaming of the chemistry of whales, outboard emotions, the hinge on the bathroom door bright in its metal.

There is no such thing as a subtle tattoo. Power comes to those who are drunk with ambition, and must be maintained by violence, and fear.

Power is a disease. The largest throat does not necessarily produce the deepest sound.

If my skin breaks, I discover an ocean of blood beneath it. The nostrils of my horse flare. My feelings explode into art. I forge words. I assemble fictions. My running shirt trembles above the baseboard heater. Heat fills it with life. Not my life. Another life.

I have a piece of string with which to operate my eyebrows.

The lake is crazy with diamonds. I hear someone walking upstairs. The spoon is a luminous milieu, a silk robe on a tin skeleton.

Do we have candles? I am amazed by light.

Skin is malleable. Fat on a globe named Falstaff.

Adjectives so burden the sentence that its weight causes it to sink and appear on the other side of the paper.

Someone, somewhere, is building a barn. Creating energy, thread, and DNA. The clouds are boiling with purple. Crickets pull our wagons, our words. A sweet blue exaltation of the sun at the end of the day.

It’s curious the way rooms are connected, how one room leads to another room and in between is nothingness and motion and ghosts.

There is a ghost on the road carrying a gallon of gasoline to a car that no longer exists.

Ghosts are symptomatic of the failure to believe that there is an absolute end to existence. So that a glowing entity might implore a biography. Or the history of a knife. Or an animal chained to a crumbling wall.

The mind has neither shape nor substance. It is pure energy. And loves the verticality of things.

Water in a green jug on a blue table.

The universe crashes through the window, tasting of acceleration. And doughnuts. Mahogany in Madagascar. The weight of your voice. Tree branches clacking in the wind.