Here I Am

Everyone knows how life happens. It’s over in a flash. Meanwhile, there’s soup and mythology. Light gleaming on the Seine as it roams through Paris. Bombs and machine guns everywhere the U.S. claims empire. A woman in Rome bending over to pick up a beach ball. It’s 7:27 p.m. November 14^th and I’m sitting on a bed with a tuxedo cat reading Persian Pony by Michael McClure, “THE SOFT NEW SOUL / with its capsule of masks / tender and quivering / ascends into matter / and here I am.” Fingers, fingernails, laptop, breath. A presence to myself until the absence I try to imagine occurs, and I cease to occur, hopefully before the arctic ice melts, and tens of millions of tons of methane are released into the already stressed and out-of-balance atmosphere. You can’t stop extinction. You can’t stop habitat loss. But you can focus on the present. The slippery, elusive present. Now it’s here, and now it’s gone. Here again, gone again.  

And so some words walk around trying to be a pineapple. Let’s let them. Welcome to smart investing. Welcome to the play of the concertina. Opinions shaved in the rain. Indigo octopi.

Curls, corkscrews, swirls, convolutions. Nothing in life is linear. It’s waves and oscillations, embellishments and sleep. It’s the weight of a dream, the murmur of wind in the trees. Cool water in a Peruvian jungle. A scratched Parisian angel. The mercurial spur of gossip, broken rain crumpled into gold. Theorems in serums. Sandstone arch in August heat.

We live in a world of flux. We are flux. Everything is soaked in phenomenology. Some say it’s the singer not the song. I say it’s elves riding on the backs of swans. Running over tree roots to avoid puddles. The opinions of a lotus. The force of subtlety in a drug taking effect. Truffles in the Dordogne. The thunder of giants punching eternity with improvisations of water.

Neon chrysanthemums. My bare feet resting on the blue sheep of a white blanket.

Eager fingers on a limestone ledge.

Puff on the seeds to be born into myth. The tongue is soaked in redemption. The stones of Iceland aren’t there to glitter in idleness they’re a punctuation of convergences, druid moons and Viking purgatories. Lug the pilgrim to the call of the lake. The singer of the song is unknown, but the song itself is exempt from agriculture, and paddles like a swan across a pond of belief.

Belief is a diversion. Agriculture was a mistake. Let us convene instead with the spirits.

Remember the spirits?

The spirits of water, the spirits of lingering, the spirits of sustenance and fever. Rosie and The Originals. Angel Baby.

I have a silver buckle and a hat of chaotic mahogany. Streams of consciousness percolate through the roots. A musician buys diamonds for his guitar. I talk about the problems of aging and mortality with a friend while a foreign melody gets dressed in a person with leprosy. I don’t feel like ironing today.

I’m the Rembrandt of butter. Regret is a drawer in my skull. If I see the weirdness of wax drooling down the stick of a candle I want to paint it. There’s a momentary pause in time that sometimes reveals itself as a pale morning sun. It’s that moment of stillness right after the waitress has cleared and wiped the table and no one has been asked if they want more coffee yet.

Pains have personalities. Some of them emerge in music and some of them enter into Being like 150 pounds of pressure in a tire designed for 125 pounds of pressure. I like the ones that float in the air like astronauts looking down at Planet Earth weeping. The ones I don’t like churn in the brain unendingly with no resolution. They’re like the entanglement of vines in a blackberry bush, the insane repetitions of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe.

Rumination is a dead end. Time suspended in a cuckoo clock. A stuffed wildcat with its mouth open. Mickey Rourke gazing into a tank of rumble fish.

Think of chiaroscuro as an old man scrounging for change. The soul of white is black. Defining anything is a delicate process.

I’ve always loved the effects of darkness and light in Rembrandt’s paintings. Among my favorites is The Philosopher in Meditation. An old man sits by a window through which a golden light diffuses its warmth. To the immediate right is a spiral staircase. And to the right of the staircase an old woman bends over to tend a fire in an open hearth. The philosopher is very calm, hands folded, head tilted slightly forward, as if with a weight of thought, or immersed in reverie. All around is darkness. It’s the darkness that makes the light so voluminous and alive.

How does one get to the essence of something? We all want to see the interior of things. Interiority is a constant fascination. Everyone feels deceived on some level. Everyone seeks quiddity. The vital truth of a thing. A chair, a table, a person, a cat.

Though perhaps not its essence so much as its whatness. Its presence as a thing in itself.

Time walks around in my head dropping memories. Some of them are long and delicate, and some of them are abrupt and brutal. A few are dopy. A lot of them are thematic. There is one in which I am crowned King of England and introduced to the dining room staff. I take long steps of introversion in a royal chamber of books and ledgers. Liquids bubble in tubes and flasks. I create a new velocity for the indecisions of purple. Malachite and jasper sparkle around my neck. A jet flies over a Fed Ex Office. I keep trying to write my way out of this world. Autonomy is a prompt solution. I use it carefully. But even that is a mistake. The train is a hymn of steel feeding on its own reverie.

Throw another log into the fire. The poem is ample that never loses it clarity. But you’re not going to solve any riddles that way. What you need is a salute to nothingness, the superfluity of leaves blowing around in the wind. I can offer you a place to sprawl and dream. Do you feel the sting of a needle? Don’t worry, it's just a spark from the foundry of apples.