What Vowels Do

What do vowels do? Vowels rouse consonants. Vowels are the faucets of the sentence. They fill the sentence with water. They float ideas. They slap against waves. They sleep in linen and awaken in curls. They’re bulbs that light the room with horses. Luminous horses. Luminous snakes. Luminous embryos of meaning. The sound of yearning. The creak of embellishment.  

What, for instance, can I do outside besides enjoy a conversation with asphalt?

I can manifest a little effervescence.

If I’m feeling effervescent. But if I’m not feeling effervescent, I can pump some gas into the car and go to Mexico. I can become invisible. I can be explicit. I can be implicit. I cam be illicit. I can exasperate someone. I can learn to fly an airplane. I can write a sentence. I can amplify it with adjectives. I can distress its meaning with fog. And why would I do that? Because I can. Because I’m wearing all these ribbons underwater and forgot to mention the depth.

It’s deep. I’m deep in hammerhead village.

Here comes another sentence: it’s wiggling its way across this field like a spermatozoon on its way to Ovum City.

Which is an imaginary realm accessed by drinking snake oil, or the placebo if your choice.

I like to yank sentences out of my mouth and toss them into the most immediate river, which is the gesture you’re making by reading this. Rivers flow. Reading is a form of flowing. Ergo, reading is a river whose oxbows are mental constructions made by popping ‘p’s in a microphone.

Palouse. Pamlico. Pasquotank. Paw Paw. Pawtuxet.

Pascagoula.

Pawtuckaway, New Hampshire.

The Pawtuckaway is only 3.6 miles long and feeds into the Piscataqua River watershed leading into the Atlantic Ocean. It joins the Lamprey River near the village of West Epping. And then it steps easily into itself and maintains itself as water, as current, as force and momentum, as something wet and inevitable.

I find rivers more fascinating than lakes. But not always. Lake Superior is a pretty interesting lake. It’s 1,322 feet at its deepest point and is the largest freshwater lake on planet Earth. It’s full of walleye and trout. Historian Mark Thompson estimates that there are more than 25,000 wrecks resting on the bottom of the lake. The Mystic sank off Long Point in 1907. The Sultan was lost in a storm off Cleveland in September, 1864. Think of them. Those hulks in the murk at the bottom. A rock sturgeon moving out of the wheelhouse of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

But don’t you worry: Insight will study the deep interior of Mars. And later this afternoon The Rolling Stones will arrive in a hot-air balloon and take a look around. It’s not always easy to find happiness in ourselves, but if you look in the future you may find a hidden treasure outside the folds of time and space, dimensions beyond our limited view. The Rolling Stones can help with that. They’ve been around the block a few times. And London wasn’t always calling. Sometimes it just brooded in the fog, even as Shakespeare strode down the south bank of the River Thames dreaming of courtesies and suits.

And here I am, Seattle, December 1^st, dreaming of Shakespeare dreaming of Hamlet dreaming of Ophelia dreaming of traveling by canoe up the Ottawa River. I’m warm and safe among the Huron. We sing. We chant as we paddle. Water slaps against our bow.

If I were to frame this moment in a single image, I would call it a wave and ride it into the infinite. Here comes Neptune: it’s a big bright ball of azure. We see the spirits of the dead ride on a roller coaster, and a monkey play a piano of coconut shells. Mermaids X-ray yaks. Being is a color of galactic splendor, a masquerade heaped into omelets of mad luminous contrariness.

But why does it take so long for my hair to dry? We walk around with oceans in us.

The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” Everything is incidental. Nothing is permanent. Everything is interrelated. All formations are ephemeral. The quality of your being depends on the qualia of your being. Being is a wave moving through water. When it reaches the shore, nothing happens. It doesn’t get up and look for a job. It sinks like consonants into the vowels of the sand until the sun lifts it into the sky to become a cloud.

A painter mixes blue with green to make a turquoise knob. A bee lands on a yellow cosmos. A yolk diffuses into white from an imperfectly broken egg.

This nothingness of which we speak flows through me like the sound of a doorbell. I frequently don’t know what I’m saying until I spin around in the room a little and shape the air into words yearning for expression as boardwalks and clouds. One needs the strength of a mahogany before writing a treatise on the mathematics of light. The way a certain light at a certain time of day penetrates and diffuses through a cloud can be quite subtle. If our passengers are bored, we need something strong to stimulate the blood. The paragraph persuades itself that the monotony of most emotion can be fixed by provoking hysteria. But – being only a paragraph – begins to rain. The cypress on the steep rock walls of the coast reveal the caprices of the wind. Seagulls draw our eyes upward, to a sky of constant motion. At this point, the paragraph rises into the air and delivers an image of angelic lingerie.

This is what vowels do. They become crows. They come swooping down in a flock from haunts little suspected in the trees and eat the peanuts tossed out onto the grass. There, where the blades have thinned and there’s mud still gooey from the rain. Consonants are hungry for vowels. O sounds and i sounds and e sounds and a sounds. W wants two short o’s for wood. Wood wants air for the fair recreation of limbs in windy motion. Vowels can make a harpsichord moody as a moon and persuasive as sugar.

Vowels are cool. They ride around in consonants.

Ease feed eels. ʻO nā leo o nā hua'ōlelo e ho'āla i ka manaʻo o nā manu. 

The wind is its own vowel. It passes over the consonants of earth with fingers of rain.