Bamboo Hairdo Breakthrough

Nothing is better than improvising thought. It’s a euphoric occasion. The mettle of the mind is experienced as a phenomenology of the soul, a forge of creativity creating meaning that is constantly changing as interpretation grows & develops. One day sooner or later it happens to everybody. The forehead folds into a toaster & the mind makes up its mind to spend the day lying around or go mingle with the crowd. Hope is a painter loading phenomena into a boat for a voyage across the River Styx. This is what it looks like: a reflection on a downtown window.

One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. We kiss behind the stepladder. The world continues to turn. We hold the nipple of a wet feeling. We push it to the end of a sentence. It drops on the floor & explodes into clouds. Everything drips opinion. I encourage the park & watch the evening sky grow dark. I like to feel water by watching the lake break our eyes into radio dials. I’m undone by intending to go somewhere & then not going. Let’s just say not all ambitions reach fruition. Sometimes they feed on words & get fat. A thousand themes enliven the frogs of Texas, but I don’t know what any of them mean, & that makes the world beautiful.

Aldous Huxley thought Joyce’s fascination with etymology & words as magical powers a bit strange. Well I find that strange. Huxley discovered there an immersion in language so deep & so intense that it becomes its own reality. He found this disquieting. Not mescaline, not LSD, but language. How can this be? Language is born of absence. Who needs airplanes when you’ve got verisimilitude? This is how our biology speaks to us. Not with whispers, but burps & declarations. So this is my world: 93 words quarantined in a paragraph of glass & horseradish.

Can I have your opinion on herring? Have you ever had herring? Do you have good herring? My herring isn’t what it used to be. I often endorse stampedes of words as they gallop into my head carrying news of the outer world. The outer world is what I like to call that stipulation out there in its heavy-duty boots & helmet playing the oboe at a construction site. Harmony is precisely why I sing. If I’m feeling stentorian I will also hold moraines of hearth & heaven, cradling them in my arms like baptismal palettes, gobs of color in monstrous shawls of zodiacal vertigo. And this is what I call a quadrant, or sundial. The integration happens later, largely in the nude.

If I have a codicil I have a monocle. This is because icons flash with comical hairdos & strange epiphanies. You know what I mean. The monotony of monuments. The botany of consonants. This is what time does: it manacles pianos of sunlight to the prattle of a spectral ambiguity. Which happens a lot around here. It’s a process, not a neoteny. Neotony is not for nothing. The adolescent in us never dies. I’m sometimes so intimate with a sentence that I come to my senses at night & occupy the quiet mathematics of the air. The world of language is not its traffic lights, but the musk of its investigations. The hum of neurons mediating the smells of the kitchen.