Rain Wind And Paper

Writing aspires to the mystery of music. Every pain painted with the brush of a cymbal, a splash of sound propelled into the darkness of a cocktail lounge, where the heart is a dungeon but the napkins are pretty, & the glow of the candle reminds you of Georges de la Tour, & occasional rhapsodies of mirth erupt in the back, & the smells of alcohol are rhymed by the shyness in silhouettes, those moments when the chiaroscuro of our drama assumes the malleability of wax, & the equations solve themselves with a sweep of chalk & a loss of control.

No amount of logic can explain a clam. But I can tell you the mind dilates under the influence of certain phenomena. A crinkly old dollar. Zen mosquitos on a hairy arm. Speaking of which, there’s an unseen power that creeps from flower to flower like moonbeams on the loose. It wandered out of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley & appears to be lost. As for me, I like the little bulbs at the top rim of the mirror in the bathroom. This is where I get my face going. And think about how weird the world keeps getting. And what to do next. And wondering how it all began.

Consider electrons as a collective ocean. You can see this displayed by a field ion microscope, but the boundary isn’t perfectly defined. It’s a bit fuzzy, more like the surface of a piece of fur or a cloud. Electrons are like a very low-density glue-like viscous fluid surrounding the nuclei & making the spatial extent of the atom transparent for neutrons but not for other electrons. This promotes the idea of a sexual revolution that doesn’t depend on context for its magnetism & charm, but grows it, instead, into a saxophone.

Try to think of reality as a fir tree, or somersault. Plurals make a plurality but a chord is to music what an episode is to a continuation, or something long & wiggly & protoplasmic.

The black cord of the hairdryer has a tendency to curl, as anything does in the pervasive humidity of the Pacific Northwest, but it’s also in the bathroom, which has its own special brand of humidity. There are loops & curlicues added into the mix, so that the entire cord looks like a Cirque du Soleil act, a strand of loops & flections & squiggles whose energy is anything but static. It’s a manifestation of energy, an actualized display of tensions that have to be smoothed out every time the hairdryer is in use, so that the full length of the cord can be obtained. Hair is a different matter. It’s weird it’s even there. What’s hair for anyway? It’s thinning. I know that.

I like it when my hair dries during a voyage. The linen smells of lavender, & the roundup is easily detached from the muskrat, making discussion a refuge for syntax. This is what makes furniture so compelling. We halt to look at the tirade, & go take a shower.

It's always a delight to find a small desk for writing in a motel room. It’s such a wonderful touch. Like finding a Gideon Bible in the drawer of the end table by the bed. I sometimes pick it up & begin reading it because I love books & I’m surprised to find how good the poetry is it’s as good as anything by Jack Kerouac or Clark Coolidge or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. And then I think about what a great bible Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven could write. Why do I assume she has the right instincts for writing biblical poetry? Because she’s an angel of poetry. And then of course there’s porn, ice machines, complimentary breakfasts & a small writing desk & chair in case the urge to write a bible in the middle of night awakens me & guides me to revelation, like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, or John Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Not all phenomena are for giving histories of our lives. Most of it just bubbles in the corner like Nathaniel Hawthorne with smoky eyebrows & foxy red eyes.

Space smells like burnt steak. Gravity smells like a bowl of opium in a Costco parking lot. Width smells like a pregnant stenographer in a Spanish courtroom. Height smells like coca leaves. Depth smells like the death of Cézanne. Volume smells like an iguana eating lettuce in a Reno casino. Calculus reeks of variables & curves. Black holes smell like literary contests. Time smells like prison. Weight smells like a chocolate donut. Feeler strips smell like teen spirit. Distance smells like the coast of Sicily in the summer. Circumference smells like pi.

What was it Rimbaud said? “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.”

I have conversations with Arthur Rimbaud at least once a day. He’s usually in Ethiopia, getting a caravan ready, looking sour, as always, cursing at the camels, glancing at me nervously, a little angrily, he doesn’t want to talk about poetry, but even when I don’t, even when I try to help with the caravan, it isn’t long before we get into an argument. I’m not sure where the hostility comes from. And when I think I’m talking to Rimbaud aren’t I really talking to myself? “What did you say, you stupid ass!” shouts Rimbaud. “Nothing. Go fuck yourself,” I shout back. I’m not going anywhere. Let him run guns. I’m eating a gummy & reading Gertrude Stein.

There’s a difference between rain wind & paper. And it’s this: there’s wind in wind & rain in rain & rain & wind in paper. But the differences are pitiless, unparalleled & monstrous. You can take the greatness of a great lake & crumple it up in your mind & toss it into the landfill of everything else you’ve rejected ejected projected disconnected neglected misdirected disaffected or redirected or you can take the greatness of a great lake & appreciate the extent to which sand & mud are going to get up & walk away from it. This is called desolation, & tastes like a warm beer on a Sunday, staring out of the window noticing the differences between rain wind & paper.

Rain wind & paper are invoked to describe my mania for fabric, havoc, & fabrication. 

I like brocade, I like the idea of brocade, which is itself a brocade, a fabric of thought woven in the mind, which is a loom, the mind is a loom that works by holding several threads in vertical lines, or by having a rigid heddle reed by which the warp yarns are threaded alternately, so that everything is a cross-crossing of contrasts & imputations, implications & filiations, crustaceans & wars, agonies & ecstasies, everything life tosses into our individual stew, I’m mixing metaphors, which is what you do, what you do on a loom, when a loom is a looming collation of senses & tenses, pelicans & skeletons, the shuttle going in & out, in & out, in & out, & the mind is none of this, of course, it’s the energy that weaves such ideas, then wears them in words.

I don’t paint I point. I can point to paint but I can’t paint a point. I can paint a point if the point is paint. But if the paint is pointless I can’t paint a pointless point with pointless paint. The pollen that possesses a power has a potential for flour. Pragmatism is the poultice of the pothole. But the practice is private & the prisms are pretty. The sloops slur the sluice with sludge & the snarls are stiff that snicker at a nosebleed. Everything is twigs. I must say something horizontal but it’s not parallel unless the freeway maintains its slant. The irritations can go on now. Let them breed.