Unsettled

I got stung by a wasp. I was out running. It was mid-summer. Warm. A noticeable amount of humidity in the air. A sense of urgency, of crisis. Are there moods that inhabit the air like spirits? The wasp got me on my left thigh. Stung me through my running shorts. “What did you do that for, asshole!” Was he pissed against humanity? Intrusion? Stupidity? Habitat loss?

Life is complicated. Multi-layered. Everyone has this problem. Realities we intuit, realities we suppress. Realities we deny, realities we invent. And then, one day, unexpectedly, we get stung.

The best thing we can do for now is to keep the equipment clean. A few of us still tremble to see the sun rise. Rags are strewn on the ground. A helicopter thrashes its way through the sky. A mimosa reaffirms the quotients of prayer.

Magnetism sprints across my mind. It might be a good idea to oil the door. Is there anything better than floating? I’m lucky to have vertebrae. My wings beat against the ceiling creating a melee of words and fulmination.

There was no damask in the room when I arrived. The sun shined through the fabric of my parachute as I descended on the back of a hippopotamus. Most things finish by becoming absent to themselves. They mutilate logic. They create magicians.

Some of us continue to write, to put our words into forms that self-propagate and so overflow their template that they cease being effective instruments of description and become wasps of a larger reality than we originally suspected. Our correspondence runs to the lake and dives right in. It’s that kind of vibe, that kind of rapport I’m talking about. I’ve often felt that there is an overall connecting tissue. This might suggest a certain tremulous confusion but nothing can be further from the truth. The stickier the ambiguities, the larger the web. There is a world between us. But if you go to the end of the dock and look down, you’ll see what I mean.

You’ll need to focus, to be sure. But you’ll see it. It will be larger than you imagined. And its contours will be rounder, a little more undetermined than anticipated. You’ll wonder why you didn’t see it earlier, and why the inexplicable folds of its beauty continue to elude the most exquisite apprehension of its potential. Instinct with the beauty of uncertain light, the mists of the Adriatic move and mingle among the stone spires of Venice.

Sandra Bullock, meanwhile, goes tumbling through space. Jeff Bridges strums an acoustic guitar in a seedy motel. And in the fog at Angkor Wat a Buddhist monk lifts his arms in prayer.

It helps to be scrupulous, but not so punctilious that the phenomena get lost in the act of reflection. I’m not absolute about anything, nor am I always unequivocal. I can be fussy. It’s just that I’m not that heavily invested in an any ideology. There is always the possibility of almonds and walruses, I have a lot of feelings on this subject, I have a fondness for conjecture, but I won’t go to the dark side of the moon to bring shadows home in a basket when there’s a perfectly good bowling alley next to the pet store.

I’m not really all that platonic, either. I can tie the air into a knot and hand you a strawberry. I can do that. But I can’t prove the existence of cabbage. Nobody can do that, not without a word processor and a good lawyer. This is about metaphysics, though, isn’t it. We’ve given our minds an appetite for wanton leaps and an equal amount of smoke and mirrors in order to achieve what our senses fail to provide. Every philosophy eventually comes to discover its real limits. And that’s when it begins to breathe. When it begins to churn into actuality. The ears begin to see. The eyes begin to hear. The feet feel the ground and the insects go quiet. I’ve never seen such strange fungus, such iridescent moss.

There will be further amusements for our feelings. We know that now. We know it like the crumbling of dirt in our hands. We know it like the haunted look in everyone’s eyes. We know it like bone. We know it like loss. 

The Act Of Painting

The act of painting suspends time, then explodes it in jets of color. The movement is played in one second, a flash of joy, the escort of hyaline nuclei. The representation of noise really becomes noise and the grotesque assumes the proportions of broken and chaotic sentences. This is painting in words, or what might be called gurgling. Textured being, forge of luxuries, the total evocation of the tactile. In this way, everything is organized and disorganized, dismantled and mantled, each sound a symptom of chromatic brocade, the disease of elaboration.

Sometimes it’s really objective, the first white background. I take notes. In fact, I aim for the perfection of gesture in the moment. The moment of painting is a spatio-temporal bubble. I watch the canvas that is a moment in time slow down and realize itself, gel, inspissate in goop, separate from reality. Gestate, beckon. Time doesn’t matter anymore. The essential is a coincidence with itself in a relationship blossoming into what the Greeks call kairos, a way of seizing the opportunity when it presents itself. The experience is there. Here’s the creation: a back and forth between languor and lightning.

Beauty pants for a woman. The scientific lipstick languishes for expression. The shelf is glass. The friend of my character creaks into view. I become a pterodactyl and begin sinking into darkness. Here is where painting becomes a little flame pillow. My soft shoulder is a beard of foliage. My almanac behaves like sleep. I’m frankly all for appliance, especially dishwashers, if they contribute a little intelligence to the sexual detergents of struggle. The tamarind has been splendidly embalmed in Peru. Wednesday’s business hangs out of the window like a thesis of thirst, a radically gnarled lawn.

My car is in the sparrow cave. I have a poetry coupon that can be redeemed at any gas station. It’s a language of combustion. It helps me to understand foreign realities. I can endure your odor, but please don’t plug yourself into another silly illusion. I can only take so much dementia. I need to comb my body. The scorpions have been frightened from the shore. The parcel kisses the music of the attic. I unpack the comforts of structure. I stroke the legs of a blind hippopotamus and find something in my being that yearns for recognition. This could be a music I can paint. The geometry of the hive affirms the journeys of the bees. The camel moves downstream on a barge. The painting becomes a crisis of sobbing revolt.

Shall we continue to regret the three-dimensional illusion in painting? There’s more than one way to simplify the credibility of the ovoid. Space is there to be shaped, divided, enclosed, but not primped into a frizzy nimbus. The literal must not be allowed to stomp its way into calligraphy unless the weather calls for a flat and linear handling. Don’t worry about the violent immediacy of the wallpaper. I think I know what it’s doing. It’s making itself more realistic by approximating a self-evident tautness for the sake of the public. We can relax it by academic softening. The plum is combing the helicopters. I’ve got a mixed feeling about the knife. Its intent is clear but the edge is scarily incisive. It’s a little too intractable, a little too blatant to be brought within the scope of aesthetic purpose. But what would that be, exactly? A more immediate surface? Yes. Let’s have more of that. The closet says a man is here. These are his sleeves and leather. Please, come see the eraser. It’s a small thing to lift it to your lips. The crime knot makes a coconut tree. Gelatinous iconoclast. Mouth oozing suns. 

The Declarations Of The Ladder

Solitude and society must come together and succeed one another, to be green, to get green, to become green, to go on fasting, to go on learning, to go on going on. Solitude feeds the instincts with everything exultant. Because I don’t know. You’re alone. The world is by your side, stabbing the bureau. Clobbering it with light.

I know what to do. Hold this sentence a minute while I write it. Ok? Ok. I think it’s done. The crust is language, but the inside is totally shiny.

While someone is in danger of dying, I’m upset. But I try to take someone aside and explain it pedagogically, like an engagement ring. I get all sparkly and serious. Life is a whisper. We’re just whispered into this life and then we come out all goopy with blood and a doctor slaps our butts and then we spend decades trying to figure it all out. Or at least give it meaning. If you can find meaning, great. But a lot of us have to make our own meaning.

I’m on call two weekends a month. I accept it because I love what I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have struggled to stay in this very harsh environment, especially for the elderly. The bones are arthritic and the muscles are sore. But the benefits to be derived from achieving the religious goals of life or, in non-religious contexts, the search for ultimate meanings, is involved in the care of a person or a group or oneself, oneself in particular, and by that I mean the inner experience, the romance with existence which, by the time one is reaching old age, has become a constant web of sticky thread and concentrated activity, the structure of experience studied from the point of view of one’s subjectivity, which can only be escaped through language, but not any language, the language of éclairs, the language of sloops on the open sea.

The research that I’ve conducted on crystallizing the ambivalence of the world over a specific area of practice so as to ward off fear and uncertainty, all that escapes us in our lives, has been achieved by framing. Take the car, for example: it has four wheels and an engine. This is what is known in phenomenology as a temporal awareness within the stream of consciousness. The frame is made up of the contextual aspects of intentional activities. If the light is red, we stop. We might take the time to change a CD or look at the car next to us. But when the light is green, we press down on the accelerator pedal and our life assumes velocity, our dependence on the quantum-mechanical systems to which we may belong lead us to assume some awareness for the conditions of our experience.

The rest is clocks and closets and Independence Day. That can have many meanings. But the elemental drift of it all will sparkle like rails in the Mexican sun when the legs find their ground and the dotage of dream and duodenum become our eyes, our vision, our silk shirt and extreme modesty focused on the sinuous movements of a rattlesnake as it glides under a rock.

This is when solitude becomes aesthetic. When the incandescence asleep in the house of our mind awakens to the gestures of the dark, the spin of the planet, the declarations of the ladder rising into the first glimmer of stars on the ever-elusive horizon. You know? Over there, by the barn. The red one, with the horse in front. The black mare with fire in her eyes. 

Probably

I would achieve nothing by writing except a molecular Guyana. And yet I must write, because to do otherwise is hirsute. You know what that means. It means words in succession are implausibly auburn. I mention this because the river is upside down and the clocks are crude.

My thoughts on time overflow, sparkling like forks. No one can truly perceive the color yellow except by becoming blue. Our habitat is justifiable, but only from the point of view of blueberry. Everything else is shy, too modest to present itself as iodine, or the semantic equivalent of hope. We must rattle our funerals at the future of probability. Our language depends on the carpentry of pain. How many nails, how many shutters, how many doors and windows?

If I speak in the language of enigma, it’s because I’m dressed in bells. The raft is perfect. We can display our feelings later. Right now, the sun is pouring its heart out and the winds are southerly.

These words have no referent. I put them here for a reason. I put them here precisely because they have no referent. Words without a referent are solid words. They’ll ransom a king. They’ll redeem Wisconsin. They’ll stir up a little polytheism. They’ll come running when you call. They’ll drift sideways into insinuation.

The air is charged with perfume after a summer rain.

Do we have any candles? A supply of water? I worry. I worry about earthquakes, social collapse, ecological collapse, the rise of militarism and corruption in Little League.

The King of Time goes by in a carriage of gold.

Is this the road to Spain?

This is the road to the road to Spain. This is the road of Rhodes. When I say road, how do you know that I don’t really mean highway? Because I meant to say highway, I would say highway. I would say iconoclast. I would say anything that came to mind. I would say pseudonyms are the midlands of the future.

I say what I mean, and then I wonder what I mean, and what meaning means. Meaning means meaning meaningfully.

This is probably happening to me right now.

This is probably nougats described by semaphore.  I’m probably at home. I’m probably soaking several oven racks in hot soapy water in the bathtub. There is probably life on other planets. If you are life on other planets, please indicate so by waving your appendages. You may look like the Beatles forming the word ‘help,’ but that doesn’t mean life on other planets is going to resemble anything we’ve ever seen. It’s more probable that it will resemble nothing we’ve seen, which is no resemblance at all, but a simple miscarriage of chocolate.

What I intend to argue is that probability theory is fundamentally basil, particularly when it comes to spaghetti, which must be cooked right to allow the sauce to stick to it, or else it’s just noodles and semiology. And while it is true that the simplest random variables are gangways to action, one’s expectations are a private matter. The surest way to find a little guano is to summon a rock the size of Pluto, stand back, and wait for the pterodactyls to find the peanuts I’ve strewn at the bottom of this paragraph. This is certain, but this is probably just glue. 

Let's Go

Hop the blot crack. Wrinkle a trigger to Pythagorean hammers. The root stirs wallowing. Apollinaire’s faucet appoints the flow of water to a care of the face. I’ve considered an epilogue for the grandeur of the sideboard. Cut the light into trickles and you’ll find hills. Punch constructs a palette in the mind. The attraction jungle is sheer enkindling. A palatable fall there is that chronicles the residual effects of time on a bruise. I hover the table insinuating oysters. I’m a teeming boil of perforated thunder. That’s me whistling. I have a basket full of bikini pegs. I stir the horizon with hope. Visit the drug and rise. The smear in my heart is the hope left over from the last hope. I’ve remembered a concentric artist and walked alive to wash my sight and see the wind lift the water. I’m rounded riveted and deepened by the rumble of connectedness. The magician’s jellyfish explodes. I’m going to argue my brain to France and back. I have a strength mint and float a dream while I eat it. I open the suitcase in piles. The sweater is crucial to my view of mimicry. Dig the study and hold it deep. Sing a slow resistance. The oak is leaning into the horizon. Boom in the herd sense. The headlight pumps flowers into view. Moccasins accordion the bare heart to a confusion in the garret. The red rain is a simulacrum. Our tastes are diffused in tuna. The exhibition, however, swelled with despair, the kind that hope feeds on, and builds it in space. Gasoline does the rest. Start the car. Let’s go. Kineticism gets our biology hot.    

Insoluble Solutions

Is there a philosophy of rejection? Ways to cope with rejection? Things to be learned from rejection? Is there anything to take the sting out of rejection? Is there a way to reject rejection?

I don’t really have any answers. What I do have is a moment in time to sort out all my little operations. Various emotions trickle through my ribs. I wear a necklace of mastodons. If existence is wet, existence gets me wet. If existence is existential, existence makes me existential. If existence is a synonym for being there, I’m here, trying to solve life with a lubricant and a film projector.

Can I be personal for a moment? My eyebrows have a myriad conspicuous hairs corkscrewing out of my brow. This is how I describe reality. I see it as a diffusion of gradients. Then some gravity comes along and exaggerates the weight of morning. The gradients get squeezed into tangents, Yorkshire canaries and springs. Some become ridges and knolls. A few get stratified. They become laminated. They become glazed and delicious. Fortunately, we have forklifts for these things. And packaging and aisles and three-bean salad.

Not all gradients are granite. There are giraffes. There are greyhounds and Indiana. Goodbyes on the porch, obsessions on the road, discrepancies in road construction and drug sensitivity. Eggshell, ivory, and cream. Outer space, onyx, and midnight blue. Some gradients are ice and show necks of themselves floating in arctic water howling in preternatural silence to the indifferent stars.

What happened, exactly, in 1967? The world got weird and weirder and then it got cooked in various conversations. Conversation is what people used to do when they got together. They didn’t have gadgets in their hands. Nothing to stare at but the lines in their hand, the hair on their wrist, the time on their watch. So they talked and shared experiences. The raw experience of life became tasty morsels of narrative.

And there’s plenty of that to go around.

When one thinks of the infinite number of infinitesimal elements and infinitesimal causes that contribute to the genesis of a living being, and that the absence or deviation of any one of them can affect the stability of the overall evolution or result in an inflammation of musical notes that can humor a feeling into a public exhibition of tiny sea polyps and crackleware, the chandeliers of the unconscious burn a little brighter.

The world is largely imaginary. You can’t see darkness with a torch. You have to experience the darkness in its natural state, which is a swimming pool late at night in the Hollywood hills imbued with underwater lights. The shimmer is hypnotic. But it’s not my pool. It’s an imagined pool. I imagined it for my imaginary life as a movie director. That life lasted for not quite a minute. Then I decided to become an astronaut. And now I’m 167 pounds of dark energy pounding images into a laptop screen.

Lately, I’ve been tossing peanuts to crows. They’re among the few birds we have left. I want to make life a little easier for them. But I have to pay attention. Sometimes I wait to see if they go for the peanuts and trip over a tree root or irregularity in the sidewalk. I now have scabbed knees. I haven’t had scabbed knees since I was nine.

I’ve never really learned to sew. But so what?

The paintings of Vermeer are spellbinding. The lucidity is stunning. Women read letters, pour milk, gaze affably at the viewer or focus on a piece of needlework. In The Astronomer, a man with extraordinarily long hair and wearing a large heavy robe is seated at a table. It is said that the man might be Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the “Father of Microbiology.” He leans forward in the light of a window with one hand on a globe, the other on a corner of the table. The scene is imbued with the spirit of inquiry. 

Our past undresses in our emotions. Or is it the other way around? Our emotions undress in our past. No one can predict the future. That’s good. Let’s keep it that way. It’s good to comb the fibers before spinning them, if you get my drift. It’s ochre o’clock and the tide is beginning to walk onto the land and cover the mud with the dream that is water.

Conception grows by contrast and heat. For example, I need a flashlight to search in the closet for a bottle of white vinegar. If I find a rainforest instead, it’s generally not a problem. What worries me is losing an entire planet. What kind of species destroys an entire planet?

It’s not amusing to watch a society collapse. Do you believe in something greater than yourself? I don’t believe I have a self. Not really. I think I’m a constellation of cells that evolved out of nature like anything else crawling or walking or slithering around looking for food and comfort.

Because it’s all just a dream. And the clowns weep softly.

The Creak Of Bedsprings

 What divides the organic from the inorganic? Is it a mysterious Vital Force? Is it a chemical process? Is it Philadelphia?

Everything is a process. Moods are a process. Pressure is a process. Eyes are a process. Processions are a process.

The Fleetwood Mac of 1972 is vastly different from the Fleetwood Mac of 1977. Future Games is a very different album than Rumours. Clearly, a process was involved, an evolution including divorce and conflict and diamonds of sound. Romantic entanglement, emotional tumult and mountains of cocaine. Band members quit. Band members joined. Danny Kirwan’s pre-Raphaelite reveries opened the way for Bob Welch’s silky otherworldliness which blossomed into Stevie Nick’s gypsy scarves. The band morphed from a serious blues band in the late 60s to a pop music salvo in the latter half of the 70s. You can’t step into the same river twice. And the banks are muddy. Very, very muddy.

The organic is inherently messy. It’s in a state of continuous transformation. Life is unceasing creation. Ergo, it’s continuous variations are polymerizations of the long chain of being, accommodations to the humors of arousal and the warp of disproportion. We live in a volatile universe. The birth of stars. The death of stars. If you’re alive, you’re going to be wary. Living is easy, but staying alive is dicey. There is always worry. Apprehension. Unease.

Lately I’ve been subsisting on a steady diet of westerns, hypothesis, and cortisol. It all gets easier when you learn to let go. Letting go is half of the solution. The other half is getting it back.

We live on the edge of chaos, a region of bounded instability that engenders a constant dynamic interplay between order and disorder. If you don’t believe me, just look under our bed.  

Modification roars at the incubation of worry. The walls mediate the long slow odors of ceremony. The sculptor stands in his workshop caressing the transcendent form of the chisel.

There was a time I wanted to sound like Bob Dylan. It was an impetus. And then it became a puzzle. And then it became a mermaid. I learned how to make things go horizontally across the page rather than imperially like a physician’s assistant. I was not in the business of taking anyone’s pulse. I just wanted to break the sound barrier and create a phantasmagoria of breasts.

On Monday, we went for hamburgers. I noticed a painting on the wall above our booth, a mural by Myrna Yoder, who does all the murals for McMenamins.

Which is where we were: McMenamins.

There was a bowl of water with a goldfish in it. The water was non-existent. No attempt had been made to paint water. How to you paint water? The goldfish implied water. There was water by implication. That’s all it took, a single goldfish to create the miracle that is water.

By implication.

Which is also a miracle.

The hamburgers, incidentally, were really good. Moist and flavorful.

The human mind is a compliment. You have to think of it as an epiphenomenon, a compilation of knotty pine and the exuberance of thingness. If the depiction of a goldfish is enough to suggest water, the human mind must be a category of gas, tending to expand indefinitely until the meal arrives.

Nothing soothes anxiety like food.

Or Xanax. That works pretty good, too.

Opium breaks Chicago in half.

Do you ever have feelings so powerful you can’t share them with anyone? Anxiety is to fear what steam is to steel. One is vapory and moist and the other is a parable of heat and casting. Sparks fly. This is a process known as smelting, which is a form of extractive metallurgy, heating out impurities. Poetry does the same thing, but with less overhead. A man comes out and dissolves in a pool of emotion. The resulting extract hisses like a thousand snakes. Ropes of glowing metal create a ring of luminescence.

The mouth is a vagina in reverse.

I know you’re out there somewhere. I can feel it. I can feel the way the dirt explains squash and the idea of roots finds expression in cotton and rhododendron. I can feel the way clothing forgets the body and becomes a whistle. I can feel the way a hot woman lingers by a piano in a dark room in Miami, fanning herself with a real estate brochure.

I raise my eyes and experience a sudden sharp sense of depth. The stars are stupefying. The mathematical order of things possesses a positive reality. If the shoe doesn’t fit, I throw it at the president. This is how life repairs and rejuvenates itself. Climb into yourself and pepper your heart with the debris of heartache. Things viewed from a distance become pyrotechnic. I’m a little bit powder, a little bit water: shake me. I’ve always wanted to write a rock and roll of words. Philosophy borrows it from every day life. The energy of chaos, the beating of wings.

I apologize for the geometry. Let’s boil these sounds into paradise. The spoon displays a distortion of trees. The air is an engine of liberation. I hold the sun in my hand. You can’t film a feeling, but you can wander the Louvre in search of beauty. You can relax the tension in your body until the sense that is buried in the sounds becomes material. Becomes cartilage and bone.

Until then, there is process. There is gauze and hay. The horses describe the hills. The trails feed our imagination. Our education is unearthed from candlelight. It is time that puts a stick in the wheels. Living matter presents enough plasticity to take in turn such different forms as those of a fish, a reptile and a bird. The embryo of a bird or reptile is not initially that different from an elephant or human. It is in its development that it becomes a bird or a snake or a human.

A single cell accomplishes this by dividing. In this privileged case, what is the precise meaning of ‘exist’? I pass from state to state. Sensations, volitions, feelings, ideas are the changes into which my existence is divided and which colors it in turns. Nothing is permanent. Everything is flux. I need a thousand wild horses to say a single meaningful thing. Something like the seed of a sequoia catching a little rain, or the quality of light in the skeleton of a whale on the beach. Something like this, like words, like the creak of bedsprings, like the resolution of a worry rattling around in my brain.

Reading fills the canvas of words with wind. I drift through life like a ghost.

The Great Superpositions Of Life

They keep getting lost. First, it was André Breton. He disappeared from the shelf. I looked everywhere. Under the bed, behind the refrigerator, even in the refrigerator. I might’ve mistaken him for a piece of ham. I hadn’t. I found the book in the exact spot where I’d put it, where I’d looked a dozen times, but missed seeing it, like all the typos and misspellings I don’t see until a book is published.

Then it was Henri Michaux. I looked everywhere. Same routine. Under the bed, behind the refrigerator, and in the refrigerator, thinking he might be there, picking his teeth, combing his hair, masquerading as a cube of goat cheese.

He wasn’t there. There was a bottle of grape juice, a jar of kalamata olives, a jar of strawberry jam, but no Michaux. No jar of Michaux. No jar ajar. No slap gun, no jetty, no camels. I took a swig of juice and renewed my expedition.

This search continued longer than the one for André Breton. I started to wonder if I had actually bought the book. Maybe I’d only imagined buying it. Maybe I imagined the book itself. Had I imagined a book that didn’t even exist? Had I written a body of work for a book by Henri Michaux? Had I done this in my sleep? In a waking sleep? Had I scribbled notes and rhymes while riding a camel across a hypnopompic Sahara?

Have I lost it? Am I nuts? Have books done this to me? Have books opened more dimensions than I can handle?

I have a lot of books. Hundreds. It’s a huge collection. All of it disorganized. Why have I not organized my books? Because I spend all my time reading them. I find nooks for them where they seem to belong, neighborhoods of books where the writing seems to harmonize and contrast with one another in ways that make sense as a carnival of words, a large quantum superposition, so that Shakespeare and Henry Miller can coexist like pyromaniacs in a match factory, and Schrödinger’s cat can wander freely among the great superpositions of life.

It’s a chaos with an inner, intuitive logic. But there are times when that intuitive logic goes awry. I can’t find a book and go crazy looking for it.

I send my eyes on frantic journeys back and forth, back and forth, title upon title upon title, where is it? Where is that infernal so-and-so? I swear I put it here. Right between Lucretius and Dylan.

It’s so odd, living among all these books. What am I doing with all these books? I can’t possibly read them all. It’s frustrating to see them. They’re all so enticing. And now that I’m nearing the end of my life, there’s a greater urgency to take them all in. We’re in a twilight together. They could end up in the hands of other readers when I’m gone, but I doubt it. The planet itself is in jeopardy. The polar ice cap is melting. It’s been reduced to the size of a welcome mat. The glaciers are disappearing. The oceans are dying. The coral is bleached. The starfish are mush. Greenland looks like someone pulled the blanket away from an old dying man. It’s unlikely there will be libraries in the future. There are more apt to be deserts and craters.

There was a time people prided themselves on their books. A few books meant you had a mind. A lot of books meant you lost your mind.

Now they just seem weird. They have a feeling of obsolescence. You very rarely see books in people’s houses anymore. You see smartphones, plasma TV screens, laptops and video game accessories. That’s our culture now.

Maybe that’s why I go crazy when I lose a book. I think I’m feeling frustrated and sad for something larger that’s been lost.

  

Synoptic Nostrils

Sometimes I see a prose poem and ask myself why anyone would write such a thing. There are so many words. We must not rush things. We must take our time and linger among the assumptions. Ruptures will occur, and moons. Mongolian yurts drift through a sleepy sister hanging below my waist. Bedsprings creak me to Paris. My arms meet their own correspondence when I roar.

The sun bubbles in its bullion and overflows. Intentions are cut into oarlocks. I rummage the heat for a thump of metal. I want rivets for my bridges and Norway for my shoes. Harmonica bombs converse with the mustard. Handles are powerfully tried by men who wear somnolent expressions of trudge.

The stew crackles on hiatus. The jug swerves to miss a stepladder. I carry a thought of titbits to a sheet of paper and put them down in bombast. The effect is fossils. The past is in the future and the future is in the past. The clouds are packed in a box and the accordion wheezes jelly. 

For almost twenty years, I have been a journalist in the digital environment, a land of mirages and runaways, of enormous excesses. It was a mirror to larks and, for me as for many others, the place of a mad hope. That I attribute a colossal power of transformation to a trifle, that I am blinded by the very symptom I both laud and despise, I fully admit. But this hybrid technology is coupled with a reverse phenomenon. What brings the meaning of technology now to its fullest expression is its erasure. It tends to hide itself. One could say that that is its ambition, the meaning of its story: to blend in with the landscape. And by disappearing, it invades everything.

Thus, in theory, there is a species of absurdity to want to know things otherwise than by intelligence; but, if we accept the risk frankly, the action will slice right through the knot that reasoning has tied so firmly it will not come undone. The metaphysics or deep thinking that philosophy reserves to do in a quiet nook at the library, will receive their evidence ready-made as positive science, already contained in the descriptions and analyses from which they gave the philosopher buckets of slippery worry.  For not having wanted to intervene, from the beginning, in the questions of fact, philosophy is reduced, in questions of principle, to formulate purely and simply in more precise terms the metaphysics and arcanum unconsciously, hence inconsistently, that draws the very attitude of science vis-à-vis reality. The form is no longer quite isolable from matter, and he who began by reserving philosophical questions of principle, and who wanted, by this, to put philosophy above science as a Court of Last Resort, will be led, step by step, not to make it a mere kangaroo court, charged at most to spell out in more precise terms the sentences that arrive irrevocably rendered.

Everything in life is ephemeral, permeable, and cork. Duration protects the shell of dissonance, which in turn serves the distribution of deviled eggs.

I’m not even sure what a horsefly is. I think they’re bigger than your average flies, the ones you find in poorly tended kitchens, or banging against the window glass in a stuffy living room. This is why the symbolic flirts with innuendo, glimmering with manuscripts in a paregoric motel. All one has to do is think of Wyoming and then compare it to a submarine. Clearly, the road ahead is more than a little prepossessing, it might also be a little long in locoweed.

Roll the window down and smell it: sage. Hank Williams is on the radio. Whatever one may think of thunder, it’s uncanny how it rolls across the distances seconds after the lightning has flashed, providing what appears to be a second opinion, a mumbling over the realities we’ve just witnessed. 

The Fallacy Of Misplaced Concreteness

The mushrooms tell me I'm broken. I hop into a dream and peg a penumbra to the purge display.  This helps tug a small round hill into place. I chop the invectives into a butterfly slap. Things proceed merrily. Even the rafters have a sheen of spectral dispatch. We slither through a world that is partly the invention of our perceptions and partly the harp of a towheaded python named Trinket the Mighty. And then I ask myself: why do I do this? Why do I constantly search for outer space? Why do I search for a semantic portal to another dimension? I’m guess I’m just not satisfied with the results of arbitration. The trade talks have collapsed into the basement releasing a colony of bats. Fortunately, I have two thumbs and a load of fingers that come in quite handy when it comes to grabbing things, or catching the weight of my body when I fall trying to grab things. Some things cannot be grasped by the hands. These would be invisible things, imponderable things, things like paradigms and summer vacations. It is what Alfred North Whitehead called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, though I prefer to call it a sandwich. I feel elemental at times like this, the vibration of electromagnetic forces creating a hotel for my mind. Your mind, my mind, makes no difference. Maybe there is no mind. Maybe there is only mu, non-existence, non-being, the original non-being from which being is produced, which is sometimes strangely sexual, sometimes strangely swollen. But thank you for sending the parrots, I appreciate it. The water in the bowl differs from the bowl, but the lamp oil burns cleanly and is superior to kerosene. I can hear the insoluble yell of chemistry as it walks beneath the muffins. I shall consider the abalone as a shout to communion, and will carry a bubbly insinuation wherever I go. If the ignition is dusty it is because the revival of classical culture is still blissfully incoherent. In the meantime, we have Beowulf and New Brunswick. Cooperation is a great asset for any team, but sometimes too much collaboration can get in the way of one’s personal iridescence. I need to revisit the question of antennas, how they manage to interface between radio waves, bringing in sounds of the external world and sometimes emitting the chirps of a stubborn cricket, that thing I call a heart, and the poetry of Frank O’Hara. Once I understand a thing I will tell it to authorize a willow, or wallow in a willow the way the willow itself wallows in willowing. When we dream, feathers and wings lift us into a rain we cannot grasp and it is here that anguish is found, and the bristles of dogs and hairbrushes. You can take the world upside-down or sideways but one way or another you should fasten your seatbelt. It’s a rough ride. Look how ravenous the crows are, how various bruises fly through the house looking for arms and legs to inhabit. We can pin this sleeve if we just find enough structure. Until then, I will pull as hard as I can on the wheel until this next swerve is over, and stop for some gas in Ukiah, which means “deep valley” in the Yuki language, and can be found along U.S. Route 101.