The Sparkle Of Candy

The sparkle of candy in a Parmigiano Reggiano jar. Snickers. Milky Way. Three Musketeers. Twix. The winter solstice approaches. Darkness comes early, daylight comes late. Sitting in the car, parked near Bartell drugs, upper deck of the parking lot, very cold day, reading Ponge, seeing how long I can go before turning on the heater, which means turning on the engine, in the minutes before R arrives and we go to the Mail Box on upper Queen Anne to mail copies of Mingled Yarn to friends. I wet my index finger in the laundry room sink to rub the small amount of lint from the dryer filter. I used to wet it a bit with my tongue but I don’t do that now that Covid is here. Every time I hear Jimi Hendrix play it sounds like the whole universe is coming out of his guitar. Resting my arm next to the Bluetooth radio on the filing cabinet so that I get better reception while trying to fall asleep to Antonín Dvorák’s Piano Quintet in A, Op.81, B.155. What is it to think? It is to fill the brain with uproar. The weight of the sun is impossible to calculate because weight is relative to local gravity, and since the sun is its own source of local gravity, it doesn’t sit on something else, and cannot be landed and sold at the local fish market. This is the ovum I meant when I said ovoid. The poem is the scrotum of the spoken. The sentence is the semen of the semantic. The staunch is the probe of the good. The cat’s claws penetrating my jeans as she tries to pull me out of my chair to give her some food. Some feeling has returned to the patch of skin on my right knee. I must’ve pinched a nerve while doing deep-knee bends with ten-pound weights. I don’t mind saying that I’m a little edgy these days. What’s wrong with edgy? I like edgy movies, edgy poetry, edgy art, and edgy ravines. Edgy: “meaning ‘tense and irritable’ is attested by 1837, perhaps from the notion of being on the edge, at the point of doing something irrational.” [Online Etymology Dictionary]. Or, simply, ‘edge.’ “O, who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus, or cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.” I love these lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II. It’s a precognitive criticism – albeit unintentional – of the simplistic message of the premise of cognitive behavioral therapy that changing one’s outlook or attitude about a situation will defuse it of irrationality and bring you into a state of well-being. Which is total bullshit. But if it does help people, who am I to criticize it? Words can paint reality. They can’t change reality. But if someone can alter their perception by altering the language they use to describe their experience of the world and the people in it, isn’t that a valid indication that some form of magic is occurring? Isn’t the interphase between language and reality as ambient and penetrating as air? “Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, and breath of life, I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me,” Gertrude tells Hamlet. Who gets up and drags Polonius out of the room. “This counselor is now most still, most secret, and most grave, who was in life a foolish prating knave.” So much for language. Worry, apprehension, rumination. What’s it all about? Nothing.