Whoosh

It’s 3:24 p.m., Tuesday afternoon. Just showered after a short three mile run around the crown of Queen Anne hill. The apartment smells richly of peanut butter. R is making a peanut butter cake. The clouds were remarkable when we left, cirrocumulus & some other wispy formation of cirrus with an odd color, not white as usual, but pinkish, otherworldly. I wonder if that’s due to the added amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which was at 407.4 parts per million in 2018.

I asked R what word she would invent if we didn’t have a word for wind. Whoosh, she said. As in whoosh-mill. It’s a whooshy day. The whoosh is from the east. Gone With The Whoosh. “Blowin in the Whoosh.” “Candle in the Whoosh.” “Any way the whoosh blows.”

We eat potato chips, ham sandwiches, peanut butter cake & watch Season 3 Episode 3 of Lilyhammer (the one where the Lithuanian woman accidentally gets shot in the head with a flare gun) & try to find the Norwegian folk music theme that begins each show. It appears to have been composed by Steven Van Zandt.

I eat a passion fruit flavored marijuana gummie & listen to Yo Yo Ma play a Bach cello suite & read Le Temps retrouvé by Marcel Proust.

The cat sleeps on a blanket ornamented with sheep. Big fluffy sheep. Fluffy like clouds.

I begin feeling sharp little pains in my stomach & worry that the ham sandwich will affect me like the roast beef French dip sandwiches that caused me to explode with diarrhea. It’s difficult finding food to put into this old body that doesn’t mess with the metabolic machinery. Everything is old & fragile & cantankerous. Cells seem to do their work more sluggishly. I feel more & more like a constellation of organs & organelles. How does a coherent identity emerge from all this? When did the first eukaryotes appear? 2.7 billion years ago. I’m a colony of mitochondria. With a brain. And a tongue. And a curious need to write things down.

Things like abiogenesis, arabinose, erythrose, fructose, galactose. Autocatalysis. Polysaccharides. Agar agar.

Enzymes. Peripheral proteins. Morphogenesis.

Research suggests eukaryotes developed as a result of one primitive cell – called a prokaryote, like a bacterium – absorbing another, two billion years ago. (Mitochondria and chloroplasts are descendants of independent prokaryotes that entered symbiotic relationships with larger cells.) A little later, along came you. And here you are. Reading this. This spasm, this thesis of life, this hot little sentence, which is evolving, it’s growing, look at it now, look what it’s doing, it’s trying to lift something into the air, an idea, a thought, a little action, something like a eukaryote doing the mashed potato in a poodle skirt, or a carload of teenagers headed to Houston.

Chaos is a tear in the fabric of form. But that’s not really what it is. Chaos is a misnomer. Within the evident volatility of elaborate chaotic systems there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, feedback loops, repetition, fractals, & islands of predictability.

Someone has glued my castanets together. Oh well. We’ll have to do without them. Are you still with me? Yes? Welcome to Ibiza. Over there you’ll find a jamboree, & see this? It’s a unique arrangement of lights on the head of a turtle. We need this for philosophical reasons, which will be explained later, when the woman on stage is done singing, & the yachts begin jockeying for position behind a starting buoy. I do wish I had my castanets in working order. I could sing to you, & dance for you, & tell you all about waterfalls of Cova de Can Marca, which are in a cave, & except for the myriad sounds of the sea, everything is stuck together like castanets.

It can take a long time to work one’s way out of a faulty system of habitual thought. Intuition helps us transcend the limits of thought & culturally derived biases.

There’s a tiger following me. But I don’t feel like I’m being hunted. Maybe I should be. But I just don’t feel it. And how do I know there’s a tiger following me? Can I see the tiger? I cannot see the tiger. But I know the tiger is there. And the tiger has intent. And motion. And stealth. And two bright fiery eyes. Could it be that I’m the tiger? Is a tiger awakening in me? No. I don’t think I’m a tiger. I think I’m Joan Baez. I think I’m Wyatt Earp. I’m Wyatt Earp singing like Joan Baez. I’m Joan Baez putting Wichita to rest with her beautiful voice. I walk into the saloon. And there she is: the tiger. Coming toward me. Eyes like fiery opals. Claws like pure cocaine.

Heaven is a confusing place. First of all, is it a place, or is it a state of mind? Can the same thing be said of hell? “The mind is its own place,” said Milton, “and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” I question these polarities. I distrust polarities. On the other hand, I tend to get lost easily. I have trouble understanding my own preferences. My own backyard.

Have you ever had to read a book to explain yourself to yourself? What was the book? Did you walk away feeling that you understood yourself a little better? Did you walk away feeling like having a self is a little silly, in the same way that having a receptionist doesn’t automatically make you a dentist? Have you ever awakened in the morning to discover that you’re the true heir to the kingdom of Bulgaria? Did you ever find yourself singing “Blue Velvet” in the shower & find teenagers lined up at your bathroom eager to get an autograph? Was it a problem keeping the towel in place? Were you able to write ok with a trembling hand & a head full of confusion?

I feel theoretical today, & particular. Beads drool from the séance in my knee, as the sunlight walks around in a pickle. I can’t understand the arroyo when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. Is it possible that the universe may be sung by a limb of rhinestone? My arms are on loan from the New York Public Library. This is a lie. The fact is, I grew them out of a cereal box. Then I attached them with a welding torch, using my feet, which I had assembled from junkyard epithets & a little blue hammer I found sleeping in a cello one night in Budapest. Give my leers a chance to retort. If I’m taciturn it’s only because the complications of life have ground me down to a mutiny, & I must rummage through the immaterial until I find a way out of here.