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.