Two Tugs In Gray Mist

Two tugs in gray mist out on the sound. I’m soaked to the bone. I see puddles everywhere. Some of them human, tidepools of blood & mucus wearing Stetson hats & glasses. I smell marijuana emanating from a parked car. It smells like philosophy. Earthy, yet otherworldly, like a philosophy of earnest disengagement. And speaking of philosophy, tonight in Gaston Bachelard, I discover roots. The sinuosity of roots, the earthiness of roots, the subterranean mystery of roots. Roots on the reverse side of a church. The sound of water roaring through subterranean chambers. Will anyone notice the look of Cubism on my face? It’s comforting to think of your hands as within reach. Contact is good. Touch as much as you can. Squeeze it. Ease it. Please it.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real. (Herbert Marcuse). Van Gogh’s huge delirious stars are the luminous bacteria lighting my skin up. Who doesn’t love pajamas? It’s why I read Frank O’Hara: the dissonances are delicious. I look at my neighbor’s backyard & wonder what in God’s name is trying to evolve there. All we can see after two cement truck deliveries is a big pile of splintered wood & dirt. Perception isn’t everything. I dangle like a bat shrouded in vanity & look up and blink at the sun. It helps me understand why Nietzsche’s affirmation of life is so radical it requires marshmallows & flying. 

Something will happen if we let it. For example, I strain to understand the garnishments on my plate as they languish in rhetorical superfluity. Floating signifiers, every one of them. All you need to do, I tell myself, is sit back in your chair and let it happen. Let the world fall over you. There’s a power in me that drools with the meat of a thousand televisions. I cry to plaster the wall with Corot, but the seashore has no glue. I’m hanging my brain from a few words hoping that it will help restore the basic principle of this sentence as it glides into Nashville looking for a good hotel. A person isn’t just the sum of the chemicals in their brain. Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction. Said Francis Picabia. Whose head was an epicycloid.

It always amazes me how quickly something gets lost when it drops on the floor. Especially a word. That drops into someone’s mind. And becomes a shoe. Or a revolution. Each word is a tegument, a site for sensory receptors to detect peppermint, damascene, and sunset boulevards. The magic is in the imagination. The magic is in the gathering, the folds of the mind, which are waves, which are energy in movement. But is there a tangible relation between language and external reality? No, of course not. And yes, of course there is. Both are true and not true. Reality doesn’t stay still long enough to get it into focus. It drops on the floor and rolls under a big idea.

Space is the seat of death. Life doesn’t lead to death, it’s death itself which comes to life. She arrives stretched, on tiptoe, arms raised as if to grab onto a nonexistent support. Thus begins an odyssey from the void to contemporary dance, Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan, & Mick Jagger. “Baby, baby, baby you’re out of time.” Outside time, outside linearity. Happiness is fine. But it’s notoriously fleeting. There is always something giddy & silly about happiness. It’s a tease.  If you Google happiness quotes you’ll get 14,142 citations, the vast majority of them completely inane & a few that make no sense at all. Emotional pain is the hardest to describe. It needs a mouth. A pretty hat. A bed of topsoil & a load of compost & wait to see what grows out of that.