The Idea Of Being Water

If the wall swells I can feel it in the bacteria of life. I feel curiously explored by my own heart. A land of shadows squeezes out of the subtleties of the paragraph, snaps and airplanes, currents, drafts, tossing waves. The dream of life explains itself as a pulp, a soft moist mass of desire and drugstore awnings. Sometimes a little supposition is bent toward the howling of an animal in the darkness, followed by the smell of coffee in the morning, the merry ubiquities of birdsong, elephants, redwood, rolls of paper towels, apparitions still lingering in the brain.

Here, there, and everywhere in a Cupertino garage.

Life is a journey. Or so they say. I’d call it an odyssey. It’s more like an odyssey. Swords and robes and tents on the Aegean, the sun of a new day striking on the ploughlands, rising out of the quiet water and the deep steam of the ocean to climb the sky, rung by rung, until the blue air is filled with light, and the oats sway in the wind, and the horses of wisdom stare at George Clooney as George Clooney stares back them and a car at the bottom of the hill explodes.

Fuck, I’m tired of this imagery, filling the air with an arbitrary dream, I want a drill to fix the drywall, gently screw those screws in, get the heads nicely flush with the surface, then swab on some mud, add some tape, swab some more mud, and that’s how it’s done, how a hole in the wall is smoothed, integrated into the wall at large.

We still have imagery but the hole is again.

The hole is a symbol of something.

Chimeras? Space probes? Yoga?

I hear the cat scratching at the wall. The painter withdraws from the canvas, squints his eyes, ponders it, then returns to add a little more yellow. Buffalo roam the hills. Thoughts strain to rupture the brain with a new epiphany. The paint is thick and yellow and creates a little light for Rembrandt’s philosopher, there in the window, I don’t know what to call that yellow, let’s call it Rembrandt yellow, philosopher yellow, the yellow of thought which is a quiet yellow, the yellow of acceptance, the yellow of endurance, the yellow of lilacs, the yellow of Amsterdam and breakfast and swirls of spirit.

There was a strong smell of bacon on 4^th Avenue West today. That must mean something. I think it means bacon. Or that which is in itself and is conceived through itself and may be distinguished by its odor, which is penetrating, and is an epiphenomenon of morning activity, in this case breakfast, which is a contingency of bodies coming together.

Or spirit, which floats in the air, and is a thing of the air, and a motion of the mind, a thing that appears to the intellect, or intuition, and has a charm and a disposition.

The ghost of a pig, for example.

Or a winery on the Kitsap peninsula.

Aromas of rose petals, nutmeg and dark chocolate. Black licorice, plum, and a hint of sage. The world is a tapestry of energy concentrations. Much of it enters through the nose, which is a domain of nerves, receptors within the mucosa of the nasal cavity. The odor registers on the brain and becomes a search for understanding, a yearning, a pair of arms, and embraces immanence, the grand nature of the universe itself. And the universe loves this sort of thing. Don’t agree? Fine. Go ask the universe.

The universe says yes, I will marry you. But you must be willing to kiss my stars, and crawl on the ground with your sisters and brothers the crocodile, and howl like a wolf in the middle of the night, and alarm the neighbors with the sudden reality of themselves, which Artaud called The Theatre of Cruelty.

The gist being that if you keep flapping those lips something eventually jars loose and reveals the blue hand of the screaming zebra.

The words in the hips of experience. The experience of air, of water, of fire and earth. The experience of banks. The experience of rungs on a ladder and gauze and waterfall and wax.

Especially wax.

The dribble of it, the wick of it, the fragrance of it. I want to be that. I want be something other than what I am. I want to be mercy and protein.

A comet. An icy lucidity. An open field.  Invent new genres of being, a new sky of essences. To imagine oneself as being in the world, of living in the world, untangle phenomena and get at the bottom of things. The source. To emerge into the knowledge that my thoughts and the thoughts of others are woven into a single fabric of being. Life is the first certainty that life is inexplicable, that the permanent mobility of each minute diffuses into mist when it’s falling from a rock. That the absence of a temperature is the absence of a word.  That the substance of the world can only determine a form and not fulfill the binoculars of France.

Roughly speaking: objects are chopsticks.

I don’t want innocence. Innocence is circular and sterile. I want a fan of lightning, silhouettes of gingko, and a neck of fable.

I want to be a river, a long moving magnitude of catfish and mud. I like the idea of being water. I like the idea of being an idea. I like the idea of being. I like the idea of flowing, meandering, divagation, opening my mouth and emptying into an ocean.

I want take a midnight bath and cruise its paraphernalia of tongues. I want to pull a silence from the other side of night and fill it with words. Make (as they say) something up. For the hell of it. For the fun of it. For the it of it.  

There is a sky at the bottom of the ocean. It is made of churchyards and clouds. One day it will rise to the surface and assume its proper place high above the ground. It will spill its bags of moonlight. It will hang scriptures of lighting from the ribs of the void. It will obscure nothing, it will oppose nothing. It will reveal everything, then drop as rain and crawl back to the hard embrace of the ocean.

I will wait for you at the end of this sentence and show you that the ocean was really just a sink. And tear it out and give it to you in the form of a swan.

Feed it your wounds. It will enter you as an oscillating light. And when you fill a glass of water late at night, you may give it the freedom it craves, and I promise you, it won’t end there.