A Happy Disorder

Nature has given us the use of language. But why? What for? I have made a thesis of this. And glue. Syntax is the glue of words. Secretion is how our bodies communicate with the outer world. Corduroy makes excellent pants and the moon just hangs around all day. The wind is the wind. Clothing, meanwhile, drools from our drawers, listless and hungry for use. Syllables chisel redemption from the air. Am I a fiasco, we sometimes ask ourselves, or just another convolution of skin and anguish? My dream is to one day utter a sentence so long and complicated that our little village will levitate and jingle when I walk. Each day has its own excuse. Today’s excuse is late summer, lightly peppered with eyes and hinges and a dash of idealism. When Mick Jagger asked me to join the Rolling Stones I had to say no. Why, he asked. Well, I said, I don’t know how to play a musical instrument. I hear the sound of machinery and want to replicate it like Keith does on his mighty guitar, but I can’t do it with spoons or strings, I have to use my mouth, I have to form words with my mouth, and let them drip into the world like Delaware, like analgesics from heaven. I am hectic with tin, Mick, and I want to join the Rolling Stones, but I must go it alone, yes sir, just like Samuel Beckett when he stood on top of a hill and shook his fist and berated the earth for its miseries and mud. We all have a need to escape ourselves. There are often miscarriages, but in the end it is the politics of the potato that must remind us how malleable behavior can be, how remarkably like henna as a dye and how, during summer, words smell of rum. Proximity is a form of approximation. This we know. But the burden of being human attracts totalitarianism if it isn’t watched closely. Insecurities do this. Insecurities cause insult and statues. The sublime makes its demands, I know, but it doesn’t hurt to drop a nail occasionally while you’re building a new salon and play with perception as it were shapes of crystal and elevated our existence from our habituated empires and saw space for truly what it is, an autumn in the bones, a roller coaster full of screaming teenagers, a break in the sky from which thunder rolls, and rain, and the darkness of night when the horizon drags itself out of the sun and into the sugar of a happy disorder. 

Our Books of Poetry

Detail is cesarean. Denim dollars of the music twig. My despair, on the other hand, comes furnished with sandstone. Each worry has a personality and conveys shape and motion. I spin faster and faster among the stars. Breakfast is powder blue ovals accelerating the noise of my skin. Processes of hair emerge from my head as Albert Einstein plays the accordion. Assumptions of gravity are implicit in a Martian’s ear. I feel monstrous, blessed, and useful. Each sentence gives birth to itself on the tongue of a moment. Life causes description, which is effervescent, and smells of evergreen. I don’t like broccoli. But I can lift a thought into utility with a little straw and glue. Reading is complementary. A few people continue to read and think while the rest of civilization unravels in dead ideologies. My arms continue the idea of my shoulders to the tips of my fingers. I hold a book in my hands that says that substance is literal and paradise is dreamy and soft. The mind is a soup of pharmaceuticals and syntax guides us to feeling. Those of us with a taste for oblivion endure waves of personal water. Our wings are ourselves. We gather abstractions in baskets of kerosene and light them on fire. The spectacle swims with the veins of purity. I study the flow of blood. I carve a life out of the mountain. A strand of blue rag dribbles down the bathtub mirror. The amoebae moan. Television jingles and twitches in unexpected snow. Television is a box that acts like Technicolor. Our books of poetry tell us something different. Our books of poetry tell us that pronouns are forceps for the illusion of identity and that prophecies of flight amplify the engines of inspiration. Our books of poetry smell of railroads and creosote. Our books of poetry offer properties of meaning that glow in consciousness like incidents of rib and rhubarb. Writing is not always paper. Sometimes it’s vermilion and cries like an anguish suckling a headlight of words. Semantic fiber. Autonomous ornamentation. Anthologies of throat. Whipped cream in a red mug. The experience of spars beneath the stars.

A Shadow Climbing a Cornstalk

Sense experience has once again become an adventure for me. A bell, a syntax, a grandeur. Empiricism emptied it of mystery, but then I saw a sentence have sex with a predicate, and the world dilated. I won’t say language is necessarily implicit in sense experience, but I will say that a bazaar is full of people and objects, and many amphibians have a mucus layer covering their skin. Touching things is one way to progress and discover the texture of a pathos or bubble in terms of how it is connected to the raw material from which it is made without focusing on the surface. This is called conceptual analysis and is a form of listening and glistening when the object in question howls its symptoms up and down a spinal cord.

Between touching and feeling experience establishes a difference which is sensible and hypnotic. It attracts the attention to a supermarket where one’s reflections sway with contrary perspectives. A sharp cry is no more no less than a green thumb. Neither is a body in repose the same thing as a body in which opposing forces are in equilibrium. Faith fulfills the destiny of hair and gravity provides a tire.

Reality is already inhabited by signification which gives it humidity and skin. Sense experience invests the quality of this word with enough thunder to power a forklift. If I can feel it, I can condemn it. The problem is to understand the strange relationships between things and make something of them, a moral or a pair of moccasins. Sense experience is, essentially, a vital communication with the world which renders it present and immediate and dripping with medication. One must be supple and full of the steam of capacity to play with the many parts that comprise the machinery of marriage. It cannot be said that a reality is analogical when it spouts fresh cream. It only dribbles. It does not moan.

The first philosophical act appears to be to return to the world of actual experience a little of the enamel which is anterior to the objective world, and endure the ensuing calypso. The drill is only as good as its bit. It is by way of experience that we can restore to subjectivity its inherence in stucco. The phenomenal field is not an inner world. Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see. Cotton turns Technicolor when it crawls toward its realization in shirts and towels.

The tacit thesis of perception is that at each instant one can feel the exultation of existence. There is something brass about it, and wire and bonbons. One must learn how to kill time. Get a facelift. Leak information. Fulminate. Garden the mind. Existence is creative, and intersubjective. What we see is not always what we get. That which is indeterminate can become a wrinkle, a carp, a handful of coals softly glowing in a hibachi on a balcony in Alabama. Definition is assembled by mimicry and hardware. Knowledge is realized in the thing itself when perception bumps against the brain, and a thought pops out, a notion of wool, or a shadow climbing a cornstalk.

A Sweet Preparation

Experience tastes like chicken. Even chicken tastes like chicken. But this isn’t about chicken. This is about experience. Right now I’m experiencing ramification. Paper, architecture, space. You name it, I will experience it. All it takes is a little physiology. Bones, blood, skin. Nerves. Medulla oblongata. Sulcus of corpus callosum. Legs, arms, fingers.  

Let’s talk about fingers.  

Fingers fascinate me. I have two handfuls of them. And two thumbs. Thumbs are the senators of the hand. That is to say, thumbs are pivotal to the enactment of fingers, which is to grip, to hold, to curl around knobs and open doors. That sort of thing.  

Few adjectives are required to experience dinner. It is only afterwards that adjectives are required to describe things like coleslaw and potato chips.  

Mirrors are good for the face. You can put your face in a mirror and open a door in your head. This is called memory. If you see any wrinkles it means you’ve been around for a long time. Maybe longer than you expected. Nobody really expects to be an old person. At first, old people seem like a different species. Like they came from outer space or something. Then you realize old people were once young people. And so one’s experience of the aging process becomes navigable. One begins to feel the hills of distance, whole highways of vanishing perspective. The horizon is composed of gold. And suddenly experience turns sexual as a dashboard. Knobs and nipples and rock ‘n roll. 

Bohemia, rumination, Ted Berrigan’s sonnets.  

The experience of puddles is both light and dark and full of contingency. 

Ethiopia is where Rimbaud went when he had his fill of snobbery and mediocrity. Which is why I have chosen to endorse introspection. No experience is fully experienced until it is experienced as an exploration of consciousness. In other words, candy.  

Candy is serious. It’s why people tend to suck on it. Candy can be anything that is sweet, superfluous, and vivid. Leaving the house and going for a walk can be sweet, superfluous, and vivid.

I lean into walking and let the sidewalk emerge as an experience of symmetry and cement. One thumb is an airplane. The other is a violin concerto in B minor by Bela Bartok. I’ve got the sparkle of music in my head. I remember the first time I heard Jimi Hendrix. The song was “Purple Haze.” The place was a bedroom in a Victorian house with high ceilings and ornate molding near downtown San José. It blew my mind. My emotions rolled across the floor like earrings whispering hair. I was stunned. It was then that I discovered experience is enhanced by description. But that happens later, after the experience is experienced and the next song begins.

In Search of Lost Qualia

English philosopher C.D. Broad hypothesized that if a mathematical archangel endowed with unlimited mathematical skills and knowing exactly the microscopic structure of ammonia would not be able to predict the smell of ammonia in a human nose. The most that such a being could predict would be certain changes that would occur in the mucous membrane and olfactory nerves and so on, but not the actual sensations that ammonia would bring about in terms of taste and smell. What this suggests is that there is a profound difference between matter and mind. Whatever qualities a sentient being can experience apart from physical structure seem to exist in a dimension uniquely and alluringly non-physical. Not necessarily ghostly or disembodied, but indefinable according to the measures and instruments of science. This domain of phenomena is referred to in the plural as qualia and in the singular as quale. Qualia refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. They are what give life its heat and charm.

Science is concerned with empirical data. Art is concerned with ineffability. Phenomena that cannot be easily categorized. Phenomena such as sand. Geology can tell you what causes sand, where the sand is from, how old the sand is, the exact number of grains in a vial, but not the sensation of sand in your shoes, the feeling of it beneath bare feet, the fineness of it as it slips your fingers, the slant of it in a castle pounded into place with the palms of the hand.

Marcel Proust was exceptionally gifted in this area. His entire work is concentrated on the intensity of focus and attention he brought to sensation, emotion, experience. This is particularly true of the volumes titled À la recherché du temps perdus (In Search of Lost Time). The work begins with a sensation: the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea.

In the volume titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), there’s a magnificent paragraph in which the narrator (presumably Marcel) sits at a table in the Grand Hotel of Balbec, which in actuality is the town of Cabourg located on the northern coast of France. He has been spending several days in the company of a well-known painter named Elstir, who has introduced him to a group of village girls with whom he has grown quite infatuated. He becomes particularly enamored of a girl named Albertine. These experiences of art and romance combine to give his time at the table a flavor of intense sensationalistic splendor. Here is the paragraph:

At the end of lunch, I was inclined now to stay on as the tables were being cleared; and if it was a moment at which the little gang of girls could not be expected to pass, my eyes looked on things other than the sea. Since seeing such things in the watercolors of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, with which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of “still life.”

The cumulative effect of Proust’s words is stunning. Details work symphonically to create a lush experience of gustatory communion. This is unqualified quale.

“We have ground to hope,” observes Saul Bellow in his novel Herzog, “that a life is something more than such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives light.”

I could not agree more. We have similar experiences, but never identical experiences. There is no one pure sensation that is absolute in its effect on a living organism, be it a frog, a shark, a penguin, a grasshopper or a human being. Real problems begin in communicating such phenomena. Communicating the incommunicable is precisely the mission of art. Of poetry.

“Experiences and feelings,” observes Michael Tye in a section titled “Qualia and the Explanation Gap” for the online edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “are as much a part of the physical world as life, digestion, DNA, or lightning. It is just that with the concepts we have and the concepts we are capable of forming, we are cognitively closed to a full, bridging explanation by the very structure of our minds.”

Maurice Blanchot presses the situation further. He expresses the impossibility of experiencing the totality of any phenomena. “We rarely encounter the world,” he avers somewhat pessimistically, “we rarely touch existence, we do not experience our own situation as a being who is seized utterly and likewise seizes everything there is to know and feel in the event.”  As pessimistic as this may sound superficially, it also galvanizes in its challenge, gives one further scope in its admitted limitations. It leaves one feeling wow, what else is out there? I want to find out. I want to give it a shot. Break on through to the other side as Morrison sang.

Proust lends further drama to this immersion in phenomenality. In The Guermantes Way (translated by Mark Treharne), the volume which follows In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust describes the spectrum of emotions and sensations of staying in an unfamiliar hotel room. Here is the paragraph:

Inside my hotel, I retained the same fullness of sensation I had experienced out of doors. It gave such a full and rounded appearance to the surface of things that normally seem flat and lifeless  -  the yellow flame of the fire, the crude blue paper of the sky on which the evening light, like a schoolboy, had scrawled wiggly pink chalkmarks, the oddly patterned cloth of the round table where a ream of essay paper and an inkpot awaited me in company with one of Bergotte’s novels  -  that, ever since that moment, these things have continued to seem laden with a particularly rich form of existence, which I feel I could extract from them if I were given the chance to set eyes upon them again.

How do we apprehend such quale? Is this why at times we feel lost, or something precious has been lost, a keener sense of the world blunted by daily habit? How do we gain this “fullness of sensation,” this ability to penetrate the “surface of things that normally seem flat and lifeless?” Elsewhere within the same volume Proust writes that “the same is true of sleep as of our perception of the external world. It needs only some modification in our habits to make it poetic.”

Paying attention helps. “Now there is indeed one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to stand in the full light of truth,” observes Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception. “This act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existences. When I begin to perceive this table, I resolutely contract the thickness of duration which has elapsed while I have been looking at it; I emerge from my individual life by apprehending the object as an object for everybody.”

We make perceptions out of things perceived. This seems absurdly simplistic, but what it entails is profound. It means that our delimiting sensation is integral to the experience itself, that the quality of such attention is as rich and mysterious as the object reveals itself to be. “Even if what we perceive does not correspond to the objective properties of the source of stimulus,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “the constancy hypothesis forces us to admit that the ‘normal sensations’ are already there. They must then be unperceived, and the function which reveals them, as a searchlight shows up objects pre-existing in the darkness, is called attention. Attention, then, creates nothing, and it is a natural miracle…”

But what in tarnation is a “constancy hypothesis?” The constancy hypothesis makes the claim that the basic inputs to consciousness have a constancy in their correlation with stimuli such that the same stimulus will produce the same sensation. But this can only be true if our sensory apparatus is precisely the same for everybody, which is not entirely correct. We all have noses and ears, fingers and nerves, tongues and eyes and ears and thumbs and skin. It’s all pretty much the same thumbs and noses and eyes, etc. But they’re not. No two eyes are the same. No two noses are the same. The variations are crucial. Nerves aren’t wires. We’re not zombies hooked up to the same power grid. That is to say, if you’re eyes are focused on these words chances are good that you’re not a zombie. A zombie is a molecule by molecule duplicate of a sentient creature, a normal human-being, but who lacks any phenomenal consciousness. The zombie experiences nothing at all. A zombie has the ability to process stimulus and produce similar patterns of behavior. A zombie might have recognizable beliefs, thoughts, ideas, desires, etc. But if we reject the idea that phenomenal states are identical internal, objective, physical states and that there is more to experience than fixed microphysical facts than we must open ourselves to the importance of introspection. This is where quality (i.e. qualia) are processed and distilled into poetry and art.

The qualitative features of mental states, that which we call qualia, and which authors such as Proust base volumes of writing upon, are supplied to us by introspection. It is more than a cluster of idiosyncratic dispositions. It involves a disposition toward contemplative incandescence. The stoking of an inner light.

I would like to conclude with this paragraph from Proust’s The Guermantes Way:

If I wished to go out or come in without taking the elevator or being seen on the main staircase, a smaller, private staircase, no longer in use, offer me its steps, so skillfully arranged, one close above the next, that their gradation seemed perfectly proportioned and similar in kind to that which in colors, scents, and tastes often arouses a special sensuous pleasure. But the pleasure of going up- and downstairs was one that I had had to come here to learn, as I had once learned in an alpine resort that the act of breathing, to which we habitually pay no attention, can be a constant source of pleasure. I was exempted from effort, an exemption usually granted us only by the things with which long use has made us familiar, the first time I set my feet on those steps, familiar before I even knew them, as if they possessed something that had possibly been left and incorporated in them by former masters whom they used to welcome every day, the prospective charm of habits I had not yet contracted, which could only pale once they had become my own.