Pickled Ripples

Time to write simply now, simple like Beckett, Beckett in his elder years. I want Beckett’s craggy old face, the eighty-something Beckett, a face of crags and crabs and wrinkles and runnels and ruts. The eyes of a hawk. The bristle of a thistle. Simple dimples. Pickled ripples. Giggly tinkles. Piano keys in olive sonatas, refractive galactic galvanic octaves, emotions in notes, phrases in stages. Words in herds. Herd heard by the ears in an acoustic chew stick. The ear of the seer is here to hear. The stick is to chew. The chew is to strew the stew to the throat. And what’s a way to say swallow.

So much for keeping things simple. I don’t know how he did it. It isn’t simple to keep things simple. Each moment should be a haiku, an instant of stunning lucidity. Uncomplicated as a cat asleep on a blanket. A glass paperweight with a yellow flower frozen inside. All the morbid disturbances of the intellect crumpled up like a sheet of paper and tossed into a recycling bin. Detachment from circumstances. The mind like a puddle in which the limbs of a tree ride the shine of light on a misty winter day. Until time. And wind. And money and worry and anxiety for the future intervene.

How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now.

Time is a slime in the grime of a dime. A penny is plenty if you have more than twenty and a nickel to trickle into a meter when the cost of a space is softly and calmly valid. A salad of curb and chrome and asphalt and verb. A verb is either a noun phrase or a blaze of Motown. A verb is a word that expresses being and what does it do it does nothing if there’s nothing to do. Otherwise a verb must work its way forward through a sentence undulating in the nudity of a moment. We’re in a continual dialogue with the world. Can there be such a thing as an objectified subjectivity? Yes. I believe there are ways to objectify the sauce of my secrets, my secret sauces, which are bogs in a bag or a bag of bog, either way, a knob or a stratosphere. Weight, density, volume, heat. World haunted by cream. A subjectivity crammed with yolk.

Change is either something that alters or is a gob of metal in the hand.

The modern quarter is 75% copper and 25% nickel. The profile of George Washington is on the obverse. An eagle is on the reverse. E Pluribus Unum is inscribed above its head. Why an eagle? Why not a pigeon? A sparrow? A turkey? A robin? A crow? A heron? A pterodactyl? A spondee? A trochee? An anapest?

I believe the image that best serves the object at hand is a dirigible. A fissionable pyramidal cetacean of the air. You might picture it as a hat, or a half sister named Render.

Or a ramble through the ways and trays of life as it throbs in utter effusion.

When the whisper is whispered the engine is in session.

I feel everything with a pair of eyes, a nose and a head of steam. I might also mention argyle. Argyle is a pattern. I trust patterns. I trust my senses. I trust the pattern of my senses. I choose not to argue with smells, sights and textures. But I am a little intrigued by dreams. Dreams are a fascinating way to experience alternate realities.

Is that what we want to call them? Alternate realities? Isn’t there just the one giant reality of push-ups, thermometers and trying on new clothes? Isn’t reality just an idea? A word? A mode? A way of being? As quantum mechanics says, reality is what you choose it to be. But that doesn’t sound simple. Or real. It sounds like a glib and rather distorted view of quantum mechanics. Atoms are real. Quarks are real. They carry a fractional electric charge and come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. It’s a mistake, however, to assign reality to something because it has matter. Are there realities without matter? Are there realities that don’t matter? Aristotle would argue that motion, time, void, and change are all aspects of reality, as are mind, soul, intuition, imagination, potentiality, happiness, virtue and friendship. Nor is Aristotle alone among philosophers in believing ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being.

“I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me,” said Descarte in a letter to Guillaume Gibieuf dated January 19^th, 1642.

I believe that whatever reality turns out to be it will include pickles. Tidepools perturb the mailbox. Junk mail anemones. Pins and needles. Ripples and pickles. Health insurance. Real estate. Invitations to cruise the Danube or the Rhine. This is it. This is not it. This is and isn’t what reality is about. How could it be? Reality is the slipperiest eel in the bucket.

Beckett would, of course, express all this in much simpler terms. But the reality is, I’m not Beckett and have never been Beckett. My bucket isn’t a Beckett bucket. My bucket is a plain bucket. A bucket bucket. Bucket of buckets. Pickles. A bucket of pickles.

A jar of pickles is a testament of age. Ripples of light. A lake in the mountains of China. A man guzzling a beer in Munich. A rapier on the wall. Chiaroscuro in a painting of devotion. A garden sent through the mail as sunlight. Anything preserved in the vinegar of words. The vigor of words. The veracity of words. The veneer and ventilation and adventure of words. Jiggle and swivel and ripple of words. Ripples in pickles. Pickles in ripples. Drizzle on a nickel on a nipple of tender human skin.