The sentence is a device for indulging the cuticles
of the crow. The miniscule, the huge, the ugly, the beautiful, the beautifully
ugly, the disgustingly beautiful. It is the gargantuan revelation of an
abstract interior clarified in coffeehouse butter. Sensations cemented
sympathetically in a Pullman raspberry. Iron succeeds in evocation precisely
because of this. The same might be said of the stethoscope. It, too, is a
device. It, too, yields the heartbeat of a long lost highway. The geography of
nerves surrounding a shaker of salt. The weirdness of pain. The glamour of
signs refining the havoc of speech.
It must be supposed that experience is not merely a
passively received phenomenon but a creatively structured aggregate of
sensation and string. Plaster and incense and the friendly chiaroscuro of
caramel locomotives reposing in a Tuscany barn.
If the predicate appears to assume mass, you must attach
it to a subject before it stiffens into refrain, or gravitates into theory.
If the dime were orthogonal, its surface would be
velvet.
Time and distance bind the pages of the universe. Processions
of words cohere into shadow and thorn.
Talking Lobster, fifty miles ahead, said the sign.
The lobster turned out to be this real fat guy
floating in an inner tube with two huge Styrofoam pincers and a bottle of
tequila tucked between his legs. But what’s strange is that the guy really did
say some pretty stunning things. He said that eyebrows were profligate
allegories visiting the forehead with the express purpose of evacuating blood
to the nearest fedora.
If you cannot find a fedora, one will be provided.
Sometimes a sentence will have a fragile
translucence, like a glass railroad, and plunge forward in a syntax of sheer
momentum, the glitter of a locomotive chandelier swarming with ravenous eyes.
Daub is such a lovely word, I will not use it in a
sentence, unless it is a sentence of vertical embroidery, like a breakfast
tumbled into a kitchen sink and abandoned until afternoon, when someone finally
gets around to doing the dishes. The crab abandons its body and flutters into
maturity. The sensations are cemented in sympathy and put into circulation.
Abstraction’s palette elevates the scene into a drama of doublets and rapiers.
What you would hardly expect, this being Wyoming and all.
Here I am in the doorjamb, leaning into the light,
like in a Bob Dylan song, when someone leaves in a fit of pique and sorrow and
the atmosphere becomes electrically charged, the elation of muscle twisting the
bones of a poetry engine into a simulacrum of grace.
Or the sentence bursts into asphalt, and succeeds at
mindful clean singing, coffee tossed to the back of the throat while the
morning is still young and beautiful, and the stethoscope sparkles, hanging
from the rearview mirror, while a leviathan sixteen wheel rig approaches from
behind.
Many sentences can be explained by the art of
persuasion, for that’s what life does when it begins to grip the controversy of
diagnosis, and the modification of meaning by way of the goldfish propellers,
as clarified by the roles in predication. Good purposes are often served by not
tampering with vagueness. Vagueness is not incompatible with precision. A
painter with a limited palette can achieve more precise representation by
thinning and combining her colors than a mosaic worker can achieve with a
variety of tiles, and the skillful superimposing of vaguenesses can persuade
even the most dubious that a dollop of bells decrees the advantage of eggplant
over the demands of Goya’s monsters.
We discover that the universe is not static, it is
expanding.
For further information, contact Guillaume
Apollinaire, at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, 15 Boulevard de
Ménilmontant.
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