How Plywood Happens

The bulb flickers, disrupting bedroom shadows. There is nothing so elemental to the mind as light. If thoughts are shadows, what is the light of the mind? What lights the light? What is the source of the light? Is it a candle, or a sun? Is it a wick, or a constellation? Is it God, or a homunculus holding a kerosene lantern?

The orchard is a fiction. Forget the orchard. The orchard is insoluble. There is no excuse for the orchard. The orchard leans into itself causing fruit and exemplification.

I am open to anything except exemplification.

In fact, here comes an example now. There is nothing I can do to stop it. It has a certain aplomb, a singular weave, an unparalleled warp in the fabric of being that demands expression in abstract terms. It wants existence as a sample of what might be rather than what is. This is what gives it power. Pea soup. Plain and simple. Not a bowl, but a sip. Not a spoon, but a zone. Let us give it thought, and say it is an example of thought, and that if it is thought, as we might think a thought, or as we might think a sample of thought if we did not want to commit to a thought in its fullness, in its entirety, which would be broad and expansive in scope, maybe white like the snow of the Himalayas, or swirls of purple and gray like the rain of Cameroun.

Or not. Let me describe it: it’s brown like Rembrandt and smells of opium. It could be an example of differential calculus. It could also be an innkeeper. Examples of things are hydraulic and creamy. 

Examples are jars of abstract glass that spill their specimens in ovals and trapezoids.  They may be described as morsels of property which, properly labeled, offer a glimpse of icing on the general idea of paper. Paper is where I like to put things. Things like words and paradigms. When I think of a thing I like to find a sample of it and write it down so that it sticks to the paper in ink and serves not only as a mode of transport, but of symbolization, a rattling of beads, a curl of incense, a glass vial and a sample of sand. The sand is from a nearby beach and exemplifies beach, or shore, if you prefer shore, it shall be a shore, a combined odor of rot and salt, the splatter and heave of life, of things that swim, things that fly, a salvo of feathers, gulls mainly, which have just taken to wing, and are making a lot of ruckus.

I think I may have used a little too much butter this morning. It happens. Butter happens. Doctrine happens. Resource happens. Plywood happens.

Plywood is an example of butter. It is butter that has become wood, and then clenched its constructions using nails and verbs.

Resources are available for the construction of crickets. Anything else that may occur within the radius of this paragraph must be considered hysterical and immense. Thank you for your cooperation. This paragraph is hitched to a large old horse named Achilles. Let it go its way. It’s time now to enter a fresh new domain.

Can you smell it?

Precisely. It is the smell of existence.

This is how plywood happens: it begins as an odor then scratches itself with a metaphor and inserts itself in an inference inflamed with chaos.

And cellophane. Let’s not forget that.

The issue is one of transparency. Some things are transparent and some things are not. The interchangeability of opacity and transparency in artistic works illustrate the sway of shadows such as they might exist in a banana or gun. Coffee, to use another example, is best when it’s been freshly roasted. Mathematical expressions are often shown to be short and thick when in fact the sum is in the box marked mushrooms. Who would’ve guessed that spring is a subcontinent of hockey? The aurora is loveliest when the sparrows percolate from the ground and the animals vanish into the forest. We see a woman mount a ladder and dive. Her arms spread against the sun. Her body glides into the depths after penetrating the water.

Artifice is always assumed to be stiff and pretentious but sometimes it’s runny and stucco.

A woman surfaces, gasping for air.

The very alphabet is an amalgam. What sounds might be focused into the birth of a new feeling? Who made the first sound that meant me, or sunlight, or heaven? The idea of heaven must come from our dreams. We become unconscious and travel elsewhere. We do this every night. And in the morning the feelings from yesterday reemerge in languor, expanded or sharp, fractious amid shards of dream.

Plywood’s laminated structure distributes loads over a larger area than other building material, reducing tensile stress and surrounding the dream state with the sound of passing cars.

Therefore be glad. Let our gaze call forth the travel of tenpins, the gargoyles of Saint Jacques and the splash of rain on midnight streets. Memory is a form of exhumation. My youth is buried somewhere in my age. A certain kind of music will awaken it. I can feel better versions of myself echoing among my bones. Reality is mostly breath. Everything else is either a form of fish, or crucifix.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: all bath towels are bilateral, it feels good to be clean (however there is nothing wrong with being dirty if the dirt is prehistoric and topical), and the giant sequoia comes from a tiny seed, which is marvelous and strange.

Like plywood.