The Place

I write for people who don’t exist. Readers that don’t exist. How exciting is that? Consciousness is exhilarating. This is why I live on the moon. Do you know that feeling of floating in space? It’s good, isn’t it? Life is otherwise grounded in grammar. When you’re all alone in your lonely room there’s always something churning, something agitating, something that wants out. Be it an infinitive or a mood, it wants out. Let it out. Let it jump into life and swim. Being requires a constant becoming, even if you don’t own a pottery wheel.

Our house is in space riding a ball of rock. The prisons of social reality do not meddle here. Do not matter. Images are baked by desire. I feel the geometry of bone at play in my shoulder and knee. This is where pain resides. This is why I like to think about things. I like to put them into words.

For people who don’t exist.

Do objects speak to you? What do they say? Sometimes I will find an emotion buried in Spanish and dig it up and reanimate it with my mind. This is how language works. You keep tossing words into space until something assumes life and the luminescence of its thought can be seen glowing through the undulations of its profligate claims.

What do you feel when you get out of bed in the morning?

This is something I’d prefer not to talk about.

How do you put into words an experience said to be ineffable?

I want to envelop you in my arms. I want to wander a castle in Denmark pondering the visitation of ghosts. I’m often amazed by the accuracy of instinct. The man sobbing on the sidewalk is a violinist named Morel. He lives in a novel by Marcel Proust. Say hello. Bon jour, Monsieur Morel.

How do you explain the subjective quality of experience? I try everything: hammers, drills, washers, dryers, shovels, algebra, calculus, festival events, incense and gardenias.

The words will never be what I want them to be: boats, pumps, seeds.

Fish, ribbon, Renaissance art.

I can’t really control what an entire language wants to do when I begin to express myself using that very language. It got Hamlet into trouble and he knew how to see through people and fence and direct plays.

I see an army disappear into the hills. Who, at this stage in earth’s history, isn’t worried?

What can you do?

If an agate favors us with the shape of a camel, I will accept that as a sign of grace. Until then, I’m going to keep going on. Storms are much more intense now. It’s true that words set free can free us all. But they can’t repair the damage done. Reality is too obvious to be true, and yet nobody sees it. It’s too obvious to be seen.

This is the song of the misanthrope. This is the language of water. This is the place where the separation between the organic and inorganic ceases to exist. This is where reality comes to question itself.