Words As Cubes In A Tray Of Abstraction

Ice implies preservation. Freezing things inactivates microbes. Bacteria, yeasts, molds. It also means preserving the polar ice cap, which stabilizes the jet stream, which stabilizes the climate, which insures the growth of food crops. We’re losing the ice at the north pole. I write during a period of immense crisis. Not that words preserve anything. Words aren’t ice. Words refer to ice. Stand in for ice. They are not ice. But they could be. If imagined as such, these words could be hard translucent cubes that clink in your glass. But they won’t save the world. Nothing can save the world now but Superman. And a colossal quantity of ice.

Yesterday I discovered a city of elves beneath the bed. It’s nothing unusual. I find strange things under our bed all the time. I find everything except what I’m looking for.

Does fragility awaken a sense of beauty? Yes, I believe it does. Beauty is often fragile. But to what extent does frailty create beauty? It’s generally hue and nuance that dazzle the eyes with beauty. But aren’t mountains beautiful? Are mountains frail? There’s often frailty in the mountains, but the mountains aren’t frail. Mountains are enduring. Mountains are sublime.

A lot of experience eludes words. There just aren’t words for certain perceptions and feelings. There may be whole dimensions of experience and physical laws that puzzle our grammar and sounds. Our own biology may have limits to what we can and cannot experience. And yet I keep putting words down, putting words out there, pushing words forward, trying to sound what’s out there, what new thing, what new perception, what new insight might save us from imminent peril, might save us from ourselves.

If ice didn’t exist, but a cube of words, a paragraph described ice so perfectly that it created an idea of it, we could say that ice had a potential for existence. Can we say the same of gods and angels?

I like writing paragraphs that cohere around a thought, a motif thematic as mushroom. Paragraphs full of anger and sunlight. Methane embedded in permafrost.

I like the idea of words lifting things. Lions, lips, solutions. Lift your lips and say distend. Timber. Vivacious.

What would you do if a foreign language followed you home? Would you give it a bowl of milk and a pat on the back? Would you try to speak and understand it and ride it around the room?

You could knit a gallant canary.

Here’s a whisper of something knocking on your brain. What is it? Georges Braque rattling a shape at a palette of paint.

I keep seeing a pair of socks at the end of the bed. A colony of meaning floating in the room. Music on my earphones. “No Stars,” sung by Rebekah Del Rio.

Music soothes the lonely. Though it also helps to be palpated occasionally. Massaged by someone.

The signals of night are naked and strange. I consider living in Senegal. It’s a nice fantasy involving warm, friendly people and walking down streets of lively activity and the scents of a thousand different flowers and foods. The fragrance of tea, the pungency of garlic.

My body likes to float. Whose body doesn’t feel good floating? Making and drinking coffee in weightless conditions is quite difficult, but it can be done.

Biology has a face of papyrus. It’s ancient and holy. Yet no one is satisfied. I hear the constant sound of construction.

You know that feeling you get when you shove a shovel into the ground? It’s a rich sensation. Sometimes it’s a matter of planting something and sometimes it’s a matter of burying something. The context can be a broad range of things. But the actual sensation of sinking steel into the dirt is a divination of subterranean forces. Worms and roots. This is the world in its rawest form. Not even the chronology of a bottle or the sound of thunder has the force of a worm seeking direction in a sudden exposure to cold and light.

The great, wonderful physicality of the sun. Those constant explosions. Day after day.

My neighbor pounds the dirt. He’s putting in a patio.

I choose my words carefully. Amphetamines are pretty. I have an antique disposition. The habit of doing dishes. I can be shrewdly obtuse or obtusely shrewd. Each life is a novel. The narration might change from day to day. It’s an ongoing project.

I think of the thousands of juices and liquids that compose the functioning of my biology and wonder how it is that the amalgam of all these cells and membranes has found a story to pursue, a shore to explore.

What place is this? It’s a place of dislocation, a grave unreality. Yet some of it remains real. Pain in my right arm from a dislocated shoulder. Pain in my heart from a dislocated country. That country for old men in the Yeats poem. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees.