The Politics Of The Fairy Tale

What is the hardest lesson that life has to teach? I mean, apart from the obvious, which is death. Getting across that parking lot at Disneyland? Maybe the first is that life isn't a teacher. Life is life. The central goal of life seems to be to reproduce. That's neither romantic nor fulfilling. Maybe for others. Not for me. One man’s mission is another man’s sedition. Nowhere is it said that one must accumulate wealth. Worship wealth. Weaponize wealth. Kill for wealth. The sun just does what it wants. It explodes. Now that's a way to live. Continually explode. Exuding light and heat and polarized sunglasses. Feelings complete the picture with birds & pretzels.

Because that’s what feelings do. They tenderize the hard thick gristle of blunt reality. Whatever that reality happens to be. There’s no single reality. Realities are socially constructed. And filtered by the senses. More than filtered. Shaped. It all comes down to the body. This thing I walk around in. This thing of bone and skin that I seem to be looking out of, through these eyes.

Or smelling. Or touching. Or hearing. Or squeezing. Or sucking. Or walking around in a daze. Dazzled. Frazzled. Baffled.

That weird tendency to talk about my body as if it were separate from me, a fragile & cumbersome bag of water held together by bones whose injuries & illnesses prevent me from doing what I want to do, which, at present, is run. Achilles tendinopathy. So I get mad at it. As if I could do better without it. Which would be weirder yet. No legs, no arms, no eyes, no ears, no fingers, no nose. Just energy. Like Ariel in The Tempest. Instead of Caliban shoveling potato chips into my mouth. A plague upon the tyrant that I serve! But which is more of a tyrant: the mind, or the body? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? Asked Whitman.

Love is anhedral. Wrote Tom Raworth. In a short asymmetrical poem. Titled: “Sky Tails Putschist.” Adjective: (of a crystal) having no plane faces. Nobody has a plain face when they experience love. The face becomes eccentric. Under the influence. Head down. On a barroom table. In Moscow. Idaho. Where the wind is elastic. And the fences are rectangular. And the moon is spherical. And the sky is unpunctuated & so goes on & on into space until there’s no sky there’s just space. Which is voluminous. And infinite. And planet Earth is supported by a turtle.

There’s always a mess in message.

I don't know which is worse, a stomach ache or a headache. You can ride out a stomach ache. As soon as the food that caused the stomach ache is digested, the stomach will generally return to a state of relative tranquility. Headaches are more unpredictable. The brain is digesting something - a bad idea, a tough morsel of cognitive dissonance, a bitter sauce of disillusionment, the dregs of an old argument - and struggling to deconstruct it into a more palatable form. Brains are more difficult to appease than stomachs. You can try wine. Predicates are good. They go with anything. Parables. Bonfires. Resentments. Balloons in the rain. The politics of the fairy tale.