Solipsism for Dummies

There is red behind the vertebrae, sweat at the mountain at dawn. Let us languor, then, in ambiguity a while and grow a paragraph over its peculiarities. Occurrences of incense hiccup personality while the weight of perspective spoons the imagery of noise. We shall call this bone, and form a camaraderie around the slither of sleeves, a conference on kitchen drawers. The jangle of forks the honesty of knives. The despair of wives the steadiness of grain. A spoon testifies to the noise of the kitchen in its whisper of steel. Nothingness in the stink of eyes. The seamless willingness of things to maneuver daylight into positions of friction and preposition. Prepositions are implications of area, ghosts of string and volume. Winter murmurs its cream in exultations of snow while summer swells into memorials on another part of the planet. Name me one thing that isn’t ambiguous and I will send you a cactus wrapped in experience. Butter is just an excuse for orange. But orange is orange: it doesn’t need green to telegraph a potato. Oddity is a surge in the spaghetti of time. Noodles teach the air. Silk arouses the symmetry of milk. Roses in a wet garden dripping the rope of sculpture. It is enough to cough up a wave in bas-relief, but superfluity calls for the embroidery of romance, garlands of words shouting out of the neck. An umber burns to simulate a desert. The debris of thinking creates a story of rubber. A light bulb can joke about itself because the ambiguity of canoes points to the clarity of water. Nevertheless, it is the paddle that wins the waves. The shine of acceleration that honors Euclid’s banana. Think of a timeless Parisian street as a plot for a narrative whose balconies are abstractions and whose parables of morning ecstasy patch our other emotions with bones. The truth wears out eventually and becomes another form of upholstery. This is why fiction is so vital: it offers us the spectral molasses of language in the form of a tin mosquito. I have only just hired Georges Braque to come and paint the rest of this sentence. Meanwhile, I will continue with this sentence, which is bursting with hallucination as it rolls toward completion, attempting, simultaneously, to escape itself, and earn the sheen of mutation, because butter is gradual and rivers divide space into arms and stars. If a cake isn’t arthropodal, then my name isn’t Percy Bysshe Shelley. But there is a coolness in the absence of proportion when consciousness is washed with ideas and the conifers appeal to our sense of atmosphere, the big wet bug outside the puddle, there at its edge, just where the chrome bumper of a BMW is reflected, and wobbles each time a pebble is dropped in it. This is what I call gravel, or the photogenesis of feeling as it exudes various kisses of sunlight and nourishes the silent bells of a gregarious bacteria. I am prodigal as the stars, shouts a little man on television. I rattle my Etruscan nerves and move into the parlor where a conversation is happening between a chair and a table. I can barely hear what is being said, but it has something to do with wood and glue and the thousand nails of destiny holding the world together. Personally, I don’t understand destiny, though I do like the word. There are times when I infringe on myself and a certain weird enthusiasm for studs dilates into a junkyard of implausible doors. And then it happens: diversion squirts its pronouns at the echo of a dead reality, and the birds take wing, and another reality takes its place, mounting the treetops and shouting caboose! caboose! caboose! And I know it. It’s true. Infinity is blue. Blue and white as an eyeball dragging a forehead to a cognition squeezed for its proverbs. Some Hinduism floats by cute as a wire. The hills drift into hirsute violins of anarchic escrow. Azaleas authorize azure. I like you, dear reader. I like you very much. But it’s time now to open the door and enter the world. The brave new world, the one that Shakespeare created, or was it Prospero? It was Prospero inventing himself by way of Shakespeare. Or Shakespeare inventing a Prospero to reinvent Shakespeare. Or I don’t know. It’s all so curious, these many folds and wrinkles, this elevation, this deformation, this life lived alone, and with other people, alone among others, each alone, but not alone, each that is alone in a world their own, until their being finds its straw, and delivers themselves to a formula they can understand, one that involves salt, knots of tricky calculus, and at least one adjective to slip between some nouns, and call it a day, or a potato, or an airport stuck to the edge of a hoe.