Kicker

Puppets are creepy. Politicians are puppets. And are exceptionally creepy. But they make a good dinner. Drizzled with lemon juice. But use some discretion. Language is a puppet. If you dangle it over a canyon, it will echo through the centuries, vibrating on the canyon walls like a predicate poised to do something meaningful. Surround yourself with healthy advantages. Mountains & rivers without end. Big juicy asterisks. Let’s go searching for mushrooms in Iceland. What you want to do is get reborn. Take a giant sip of universe. Imagine what you could do with hooves.

I enjoy the weight of a book in my hands. Each word is a palimpsest, a landscape. It can lead to musing on the grain of wood of an old dark bar. Or as I like to call it: the language of earth as it is spoken by wind & rock. My eyes fill with the light of a thousand bright yellow leaves stuck to the sidewalk. Why is it that the things over which I have the least amount of control are the things hardest to let go of? I dip my pen in the ink of sleep & write my name in water. A mollusk has a round purpose & a nacreous soul. Need is an angel with the etiquette of a carnival. Everything drips with reverie. A dragon roars. I give you a sheaf of words frosted in darkness.

Reality is a coat thank you for coming. Are we enigmas? I believe we are. But we have clothing. We have socks & a warehouse of wool. Anything with a reason to open or zip up or zip down is an extraordinary affirmation of camouflage. Bienvenue au Palais Idéal. This is my chair, & this is my whistle. How is it possible for one mind to know another? Is there a phenomenology that may be assembled out of coat hangers & sequins to exclaim the exquisite perturbations of an insect cycling around an apple? Yes: our eyes are the eyes of the universe contemplating itself. This is a large feeling & needs to extend into space pulsing with stepladders & gods.

I feel like screaming in my head. The future looks good if you’re a microbe. Would life be a simpler as a gnat? Probably. It would also be a lot shorter. And you can’t even fly. Except Superman, and what’s he up to these days? He’s never around when you need him. But he’s really good at social distancing. Meanwhile, everyone’s real god – money – is busy these days. The Feds keep pumping money into Wall Street. Money they pulled out of the air. How is that done, exactly? With zeros? Didn’t Mallarmé do something akin to that when he said “I say: flower! And there arises, pure idea and sweet, the flower that is absent from all bouquets.”

Every day we see our lives play out against an array of invisible threats. Viruses, homelessness, lack of medical care, bankruptcy, totalitarianism, & elevator farts. I learn to develop an attitude, a reinforcing mindset John Berger calls “undefeated despair.” “Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat, makes for a stance towards the world.” So you let despair happen. It’s just despair. Which is infinitely less toxic than “positive thinking.” Positive thinking is Norman Vincent Peale’s idiotic grin on West 29^th Street. In a nation of murder &violence. And the oligarchic theft of trillions of dollars, leveraged out of the misery of a biological crisis.