Ecstasies Of The Forest

There are no pedestrians in the ecstasies of the forest. I give a good shake to a can of lather, press the button and hear the creamy lather hiss into the palm of my hand. It feels soft and wet.

I never know how to display my emotions. Some of them are relatively calm and normal, others are colossal and fierce. Enough, certainly, to frighten people.

Intensity is laudable in a rock star. In real life, people tend to avoid it. Incandescence doesn’t go well with small talk and wheat thins.

Intensity is easily mistaken for madness. And why wouldn’t it be? Is logic calm? Logic does, it seems, tend to be calm.

Fuck logic.

I was a young man in the sixties. Perfect time to attain adulthood. Like A Rolling Stone. Norwegian Wood. Jumpin’ Jack Flash.

Four months, a tiny pair of scissors, and a lawn mower are all you really need to produce a meticulous homage to the bacteria colonies that live inside humans. Everything has to be refracted through the prism of the imagination, or else it’s just another Mod Squad, a sitcom involving black volcanic rock and a sloppy array of puppets.

As a kid I watched Gunsmoke and wondered how Matt Dillon always managed to seem so sure of himself. He did not seem to have moral quandaries, ethical dilemmas. And if a conflict did arise, something freakish and unparalleled in the frontier weirdness of the American west, something that wobbled the needle of his moral compass, he consulted Kitty, the wise madam of the Long Branch Saloon who always conducted herself with poise and savvy understanding.  Such a romanticized vision of the American west seems very strange to me now. The frontier is gone, swallowed by Walmart and Amazon.

Consciousness rolls around in my head like an art gallery. I envision my head as a pumpkin with a candle flickering in it. A current without a river.

There’s a crustacean on the ceiling. I carry my hair around on my head. It’s a good place for hair. It’s not heavy, but it does get messy. I have a brush for such occasions. It has a handle and a forest of bristle. The bristle is bristly. It is steadily stubbly and thistly.

Elsewhere in the world someone may be teetering between life and death on an operating table. The mind hovers over the body watching the surgeon perform his critical work with acute attention.

What is a mood, a mood is a trapeze of the brain. The ghost of an exuberance. The immobility that sometimes occurs on a fast-moving train, or jet, or car on the freeway. It’s an odd serenity. Chimeras visit me in the quiet of the afternoon. The clouds are hungry for wind. The ocean stumbles onto the earth and a pork chop arrives at our table dressed in a tutu.

I have two sets of keys, one for the apartment and mailbox and one for the car. Often, when I think of the membranes and molecules of which I’m composed, it astonishes me that a single coherent identity emerges from that. Meaning isn’t limited to the brain. The mind, any mind, is larger than what appears. The more we think, the more we become immersed in a ruminant murk. The less we think, the more the objects and phenomena of our attention lose their names and become wondrous blossomings of amiable qualia.

The sky walks through my head. The taste of its mushrooms is ghostly and calm.

There are indications everywhere that reality resists the claims of empire. The universe does not necessarily conform to our language. Weather has its own grammar. Morning stirs in the shine of the knife. Consciousness is essentially Gothic. I feel the heat of the sun in my blood. I see an Asia of variability in the puddles of the street. A bee pollinating a mimosa. A shovel breaking the earth. Sunlight breaking in the shallows of a lake. The cinematographic tendencies of perception and thought are everywhere a fugue of blur and clarity, a chiaroscuro of movement amid a simultaneity of time, past, present, and future splayed like a bridge above a river.

I seek the fluidity of clouds. If sandpaper is a parody of Utah, then what is the value of X? Log on log is a logo of blaze. The brighter the fire, the deeper the darkness.