Metaphysical Travel Agency

The shaving lather sleeps in my hand like the tongue of oblivion. I lift my hand and smear it all over my face. This is how I kiss the morning. My fingers find their true vocation. They like it when grains of sand pass through them. Today they came in handy when I used them to tie a knot in a small piece of twine that I used to tie a corner of a towel down to the leg of the chair to protect the newly reupholstered seat from our cat's claws. I have a table to wipe and a sense of purpose in doing it. I have somewhere to be when I feel like going somewhere. And if I don't I create a destination. Creating a destination is easy. Drink a pint of whiskey, then throw a dart at a world map. If the dart keeps missing the map, you should probably stay home. But if the dart hits China, I would start packing and picking which socks to bring to Beijing, which shirt to wear in Shanghai, which tie to wear in Tianjin. Something multicolored, I think, and feverish, like an abstraction culled from the brain of a coffee table. Or, if you really don’t feel like going anywhere, but, on the other hand, you really do feel like going somewhere, you just can’t make up your mind just yet, you can always elect to put on airs and pretend you just came back from Mars with a golden pterodactyl tie pin & angels of music weeping on your lapel. Like I say, you don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t feel like it, you can just fake a Martian tan by hyperventilating & rattling your emotional trinkets. Travel is the work of the imagination. It's easy to imagine travel when you’re in a chair. It's hard to imagine travel when you travel. When you travel, traveling consumes the imagination. The archaic becomes literature. Reality breaks its chains like King Kong and does things that no one expected. It gets undressed. It drinks a glass of water. It misses its place of birth. It yearns for love & acceptance. It does a tap dance on the eyelid of an Indian deity. It describes Spain with a cante jondo. Are these words going anywhere? Yes, they were minced to fit the density of mass & make it explode into light & shadow. I like objects. Objects make good subjects. So let's go look for sapphires in the plains of Asimov. Let travel come to you. Don’t go to travel. If you let travel travel you can sit and gaze out of the window of the moving train you just imagined & put on the palm of your hand. Travel is easy when you don’t go anywhere. It’s when you go somewhere that travel gets sticky and the maps get crazy and the glove compartment gets stuffed with the weirdest souvenirs available to your imagination. Imagination is where it all begins. The scarf flaps, wrapped loosely around the neck, here at the end of the world. Here it is: the final destination. Already pregnant with time.

 

Bringing The Museum Of Flight Home

We went down to our storage locker as the afternoon stood next to me – smiling like a lunatic – and which has been nominated for a Rough Rider award and it rolled around briskly excited. I refocused. We asked for whatever material we could provide for others. There are problems overhead in running clothes we think they are demons but when we stepped outside a silver-grey SUV backed in and this caused me to change back into my street clothes. I heard something about a gurney and shouted back from our home. R got out and opened the door and after three young men retrieved their items from the chains I backed into a dark space with the car. Oh good, I muttered, we all get to die slowly but I still managed to hit the loading dock. The other men got around to opening the garage door and I didn’t see any obstructions so we proceeded to take more pictures. We gave up on the third illustration I’m guessing someone scraped the Museum of Flight in a parking lot at Safeway. I shifted my attention to the same problems I had yesterday and the day before, wherever I put a picture in my head I try to find frames for it, generally in prose, but sometimes in faces or furniture I can remember when they reach out for me and then I do it slowly in smartphone reflections on the ceiling. My father rendered the gentle snow-laden hills in watercolor and this was the easiest to modulate. I like this watercolor of space and I held my jacket over it to bring out the light at the top of a copse of bare-limbed trees as an aged woman climbed out of the sky and asked to take her picture when I heard a loud crash. This is how bitter cold it was I went back to the light on the loading dock which raised itself on a spine of carbon riddled with heavy scratches and I felt sorry for it and went to check for damages. Hip-hop thudded out of a space shuttle docking at a space station and I brought the memory home to paint it. I dimmed the light on our arms and faces and found it serene and gentle resting on the other gurney. And I got absorbed in the light of our bedroom where the Museum of Flight and its legendary problems snored, streaked with variations of mist & cloud.

 

Pesky Reflections

We went down to our storage locker this afternoon to take pictures of my father’s artwork. He has been nominated for a Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider award in North Dakota and I’d been asked for whatever material I could provide in support of his eligibility. I was going to go in my running clothes but when we stepped outside and discovered how bitter cold it was I went back in and changed back into my street clothes. The locker is in a three-story building several miles from our home. R got out and opened the door to the loading dock which raised slowly on its chains as I backed in. It was dark inside the spacious entry and I could barely see. I backed up slowly but still managed to hit the loading dock bumper hard. I got out and checked for damage and didn’t see any from the loading dock but there was a heavy set of scratches on the right side of our car bumper. I’m guessing someone scraped it as they entered into an angled and narrow parking slot at Safeway. I shifted my attention back to the more pertinent project at hand, which did not go as easily I’d imagined. We had a hell of a time taking pictures of my dad’s illustrations. They’re all framed under a highly reflective glass. Every shot R took with her smartphone contained reflections of the ceiling or the walls or our arms and faces. We took one of the space illustrations out to the loading dock area for the dimmer light. We positioned it on a flatbed gurney and I held my jacket over it while R looked for a good shot. Meanwhile, a middle-aged woman backed in, got out, and asked if we were using the other gurney. No, we’re not, I said, as I went back to concentrating on our photo problems. I was absorbed in shading the picture when a loud crash startled me. The woman stood next to me – smiling like a lunatic - after she threw her items hard on the gurney, rolled it around and briskly exited. I refocused. We got a fairly decent picture and went back to do the others. Same problems with the overheard lights. We went back out to the loading dock. This time a silver-grey SUV had backed in and three twenty-something men got out and grunted something about the gurney and I shouted back, no, it’s free, we weren’t using it. They seemed sub-verbal. After they retrieved their items from storage one of the young men got in and started the car. Oh good, I muttered, we all get to die from carbon monoxide poisoning. One of the other men got around to opening the garage door and they left, hip-hop thudding hard from a woofer. We gave up on the third illustration – a space shuttle docking with a space station and the legend Museum of Flight at the bottom – and brought it home, where we went through all the same problems. Wherever we put the picture or angled it or held it or dimmed the lights our blinds or our faces or our furniture would obscure the illustration. We finally settled for the best, which was clear, save for R’s outstretched arm. The snow laden hills of the Turtle Mountains my father had rendered in watercolor was the easiest. It hangs in our bedroom, where the lighting is easiest to modulate. I like this watercolor very much, it’s serene and gentle and the fading light at the top of a copse of bare-limbed trees lining the ridge of two soft hills green and gold and streaked with variations of mist and cloud.

 

 

 

Universe In A Black Wool Hat

A thick flat layer of cloud over the Olympic peaks to the west, but with such an even space between the peaks of the mountains and the bottom layer of cloud it looked like a curtain that hadn’t been pulled all the way down. Three band-aids on R’s arm. Athena got provoked, either by a sense of play or a sense of fear at not understanding what was transpiring, when R was doing her exercises on the floor. Athena pounced on her arm and dug her claws in. It’s enlightening when one considers the fear people have when they encounter anything they don’t understand. Towels feel wonderful when they come out of the dryer, and they’re easy to fold. I like that about towels. Socks and underwear, on the other hand, are a drag. Visions de l’Amen, by Olivier Messiaen. It’s like listening to somebody build a house of sound with twinkly nails and wavelengths of string. Medallions of pork roast on a bed of Greek spaghetti for our anniversary dinner. Delicious. There were so many crows today, well over a hundred. It’s getting ridiculous. We’re now feeding about a pound of unsalted peanuts to crows per day. This has to come to a stop. But how? Where can we run where the crows won’t find us? I mainly just want to feed Louise, the crippled crow, and her immediate family. Is ambiguity a good antidote for timidity? What would Lulu say? She’s still shouting at age 72. Ambiguity stumbles on a treasure of frogskins and ducats and buys a ticket to the aluminum in your eyes. But remember: good love is hard to find. Salvation is anywhere the divine shows its pullulations and sniffs at your beautiful remarks. The sublime might be subtle in some ways, but it is not innocent. Innocence is ruptured by the pain of existence. And then it becomes fibrous and fiduciary. Have you ever felt the lightning in your head shoot out of your eyes and mouth at a wedding? Or a funeral? Have you ever sat in the back of a Greyhound drinking whiskey with a cowboy from Laramie listening to Wipeout and other hits from the early 60s? I’m so full of questions I could be a fidget. What’s a fidget? It’s like a heat wave. Bach on the back of my tongue. The big groan of the organ at the Church of John the Baptist in Lüneberg, Germany is a luxury of sound on the divine palette of music. Light, physicists say, comes in discrete packages called photons. So the light emanating from a computer screen: packages hitting my eyes. The light from my lamp: packages. Open a photon, and what do you see? Energy oscillating in waves. Click of the plastic Ocean Spray Cran-Cherry bottle after I stomped on it, reducing its volume before tossing it into the recycling bag. The bottle returns to its original shape. Or tries to. Reminds me of an afternoon in a hotel cocktail lounge with my father and him gazing at a swizzle stick and bending it and telling me plastic has a memory as the stick resumed its original shape. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, say the Buddhists. It’s like, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, seeing the sunlight and rain and even the logging industry in a sheet of paper: everything that went into the making of the paper, trees, dirt, labor, air. It contains everything in the universe. Black wool hat stuck on a wooden stake plunged in the grassy street divider at West Prospect and West Kinnear Place. Details at six.

 

 

 

A Room With A Hue

The closet has doors because the ceiling is white. There are mirrors on the doors because sometimes it is physical to soak consciousness in bubbles. Tumbling is configurational and this sentence is empty now. Do you know what I mean? I mean to say that thrashing distills the tendency to walk outside if the emphasis is on intent and the garbage needs taking out. These are some of the words I use to describe arrival. I flail about trying to find my mosquito. I put a word here yesterday and today it has grown into a scrub brush. This was not my intent. My intent had a lacquered box and a Ponderosa pine united by percussion. Intentions are sometimes pushed into conversation where they are awkwardly intermixed with caviar. Someday I want to build a chutzpah using only a helicopter and a screwdriver. This will achieve maximum absorption when it unravels its antiques. Everything else is either pewter or loam. I lift my eyes up from “Windowpane” by René Char to see the rain blurring our windshield. There’s beauty in an infantry if the infantry has beauty. Otherwise, the despair requires whiskey and the squirts from the meaning machine are what bring us into a deeper perception of wickerwork. Neon catches our wonder and throws it back at the garage. My other car is a walnut. And it’s religious if you find ultimate truth anywhere near a boson. The words come out and give us silk. The hedge is for development and the stethoscope is cold against the chest. If I touch your supposition will you warm the philosophy with a spot of profit? We need more stone. The sand is shifting and the ocean gulps its weight in possession of itself and howls above the silence of lobsters. This is the shadow I was looking for. I’m feeling athletic. Therefore, the implications are all balanced and the smears absorb our attention. Leave your oasis on the counter and choose a mushroom.

 

Hegel's Pocket

Poetry is best achieved by a return to childhood. And then you get rich. The money just flows. Bubbles, all of it bubbling, all wrong, all stupid, but globules of vague green narrative bobbing up & down in your mind. I have a thin piece of word. It was put together by monks 2,000 years ago. You must glean from yourself the nurturing knots that come undone like hair. And then walk backwards out of the horror of eternity. We would all like a hole to crawl into. I can sprint toward it & speak another language. I can jump in & out of time. I can show you some feelings. This is one is blue & spins around shooting sparks, & this one lurches toward you like a Saturday night in Australia. 

     I take balance very seriously. The last time I lost my balance, I sounded like racketeering. Income inequality is grotesquely asymmetrical. I’m stepping up to the plate to defend the problem of civilization. Let’s start by taking it apart. Water, dirt, minerals, forests. Godzilla with blonde hair & a fake tan. Maintaining power is easily exploited. Musician Patti Smith was asked what advice she had for young people trying to make it in New York City. Get out. New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling. New York City has been taken away from you. 

     How do you make something free of chaos, something all pattern & control, control of the pattern, control of the sounds, as in a symphony, but still have the beauty & thrill of chaos? Here’s what you do: get out a tin sandwich & play it like you’re Charlie Musselwhite. Or be flexible. A muscular mussel with musical instincts & a rubbery soul. Everything in the quantum world is elastic. Stretchable, like human skin. Or thought. Or ideas. The void is full of consciousness. Whose consciousness? Who knows. Maybe it fell out of Hegel’s pocket. 

     I’m a little nervous about where this sentence is going, where it’s going to go, once it gets written, once it comes to an end & there’s a period & a chair at the end, or at least another sentence able to continue, able to complete the thought of the first sentence, before it got lost in its flowers, lost in the hypnosis of flint, guano on a boot, in the whipped cream on a slice of pecan pie, in articulating the rhythm of a man getting into a red Mazda while taking a sip of universe, & turning bright with the wonder of it all, & feeling that sentence dissipate into stars. 

     The hammer is immersed in its purpose. But I can’t give it to you. Not in a real way. I can give you anything as long as it’s an abstraction. Abstraction feeds on reverie. I can afford that. Anything more expensive will have to soak a long while in someone else’s phenomenology. Who knew that everything in the world was so delicately interrelated? This is why all the electrical cords get tangled. We all correspond to something. My fingers drink the heart of the curvilineal. The body embodies a choir of correspondences. Mountains & rivers without end.

Hygga

Hygga was on the French news tonight. Hygga is big in France. And Scandinavia, of course. I’d never heard of it. Hygga comes from a Danish word meaning “to give courage, comfort, joy.” It stems from hyggia, which means to think in Old Norse, and is related to hugr, which later became hug – Danish hug, not our hug, meaning to embrace, though why not, no reason to rule it out – and means the soul, mind, consciousness. Now there’s a hygga movement, a set of behaviors marshaled to mitigate the stresses of the pandemic. The news item showed a woman lighting scented candles, putting some mellow music on, dimming the ambient light and lying back on a couch to read a book. All the people in the piece seemed pretty well to do. Financially comfortable. That would make me pretty hygga right there. Enough money to provide access to healthcare. Or if I could just reach out and grab time and pull it back and keep it from moving so damn fast. I feel like I’m sitting in the cockpit of a formula one car on a highway toward a fatal destination. No U turns. No exits. I’m not even driving the car. I don’t know who or what is driving the car. I’m just a passenger. I don’t even have a map. Or a spare tire. It would be nice to stop occasionally. Long enough to get out and stretch my legs. Take in the surrounding air and landscape. Grab a bite to eat at a nearby diner. My boots crunch on the gravel. I can hear a distant voice. The sound of an angel. And words are said that serve as bread. I like bread. I like words. I know why I like bread. But I don’t know why I like words. Words are served as bread when I feel like loafing. Each sentence is a slice of Monk. He sits down at an old piano with cracked ivory keys and plays “Bemsha Swing.” Heavy metal angels add some gutsy hymns and backflips. I have a quiet old road disappearing into Arkansas. I keep it under the rug in case I might need it someday. Here’s my whole setup: an imaginary suite in a handful of words. Would you like a glass of quarks to go with your Rembrandt? I feel the pungent wealth of the external. There’s the aroma of sage near Reno. The value of the internal goes deep into language. If you open your mouth the universe will walk out. This isn’t entirely hygga. I don’t know what it would be in Danish. I don’t know how the Danish feel when they see a universe walking down the street. Does it give them hygga, or Hamlet? Don’t get me wrong. I think the universe is pretty. But it’s hard to hug. Hard to hang in the shower like a bar of soap, & rub it all over. 

 

 

The Ever-Elusive Return To Normal

I’m sure that I’m not alone when I say that I’m sick of this pandemic. Tired of dodging people in the street. Tired of the anxiety when I accidentally get too close to someone. Tired of the demoralizing frustration at seeing crowds at Kerry Park jammed together or one of our neighbors inviting people over for a visit. Frustrated with not being able to check books out from the library. Worried about the state of the arts, the devastation and erosion of culture. The growing divisions and atomization of people. It's been almost a year old now. I keep looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. But I don't see one. I wonder if I'll ever see a return to normal. When was the last time I saw anything that looked normal?

     I don’t want to get into a debate about what’s normal and what’s not normal, who or what body of medical authorities decides what’s normal, or the various asphyxiations to the spirit in trying hard to be normal, particularly in a sick society. That’s a discussion for another day. I’m talking about that time when going to a restaurant was a relaxing diversion, or going to a concert, big or small, was a ton of fun and there was no need to wear a mask. Or just going to visit friends was a lighthearted affair that didn’t require any precautions or rationalizations or argumentation. 

     I thought the pandemic would be well under control by now. Vaccines distributed. A robust percentage of the world population already vaccinated and life back to normal. Instead, it keeps getting worse. Over 100 million dead worldwide, 425 thousand dead in the United States. More super-Covid mutant strains are infecting people at a faster rate with a higher viral load. It’s beginning to seem as if the virus – acting on behalf of the planet – is determined to see our species go extinct. 

     What the pandemic has revealed is more disturbing than the pandemic itself. Every day I’m stunned at the dysfunctionality, the negligence, the incompetence, the selfishness, the lack of courtesy, the open hostility, the sheer stupidity that is more pandemic than the pandemic. The Biden administration has learned nothing. They’re more concerned with funneling greater quantities of money to Wall Street, giving nothing to the working class or small businesses, and already pumping more money and troops into the stupid, meaningless wars started by the previous administrations. 

     The U.S. government has been taken over by corporate entities. There’s really no government left, not the kind of government that concerns itself with the welfare of its population. The government, for lack of a better word, has one goal: protect property. Use whatever force and power is necessary to maintain the wealth of the faux-meritocratic elites and billionaires. The public can go fuck itself. 

     Normalcy was gone before the first Covid victim sneezed and began struggling for breath. A lot of businesses in Seattle were already closed. The theatres where we used to go see movies outside of the Hollywood blockbusters were already defunct: The Guild 45th, the Seven Gables, the Harvard Exit, the Neptune, the Ridgemont and The Crest had all either closed or – as in the case of The Neptune – ceased showing movies and become a venue for comics and music acts. The Seven Gables has since burned down. 

     The Northgate shopping mall, home to JCPenny and Macy’s and Radio Shack, among many notable retail chains, was already slated for demolition to make room for 1,200 “housing units,” a “Central Park,” and a hotel. In other words, more ridiculously priced real estate for the moneyed class employed at corporations like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft. It will, no doubt, be ringed by the squalor of tent cities, people bankrupted by a heinously extortionate healthcare system or laid waste by drug addiction in a society so toxic and pathological that it takes a shot of heroin or methedrine to get through the day. 

     None of that is, was, or ever will be normal. When was life truly normal? Never, if you’re talking about life in the U.S. It has always been a heavily militarized police state founded on slavery and genocide. But there were recognitions of another opposing, more utopian vision, running contrary to the obsession with commerce and market dominance. There was an active awareness of philosophers, poets and thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Mumford, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Emily Dickinson. Books like Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag and Go Tell It On The Mountain and many others by James Baldwin – perhaps the most notable intellect of the 50s and 60s, although at age 24 he’d given up on the U.S. and gone to live in Paris. 

     Also, great orators like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Trudell and Chief Joseph. 

     There have been far more benign alternatives for the human spirit on the North American continent than the obsessive push for wealth and real estate. 

     I was lucky to come of age in the 60s, that brief window in time in which eccentricity and poverty weren’t treated like leprous diseases and people – however vulgar, shallow and sociopathic – weren’t respected because of the amount of money they had. I don’t know why so many people were traumatized by having Trump as president; he is, by far, the purest embodiment of the American ideal as it evolved into its greatest expression in the 80s and 90s under Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton. 

     The kind of normal that gives me a sense of nostalgia has never really existed. The closest I’ve come to finding an environment that has been the least hostile to artistic and intellectual endeavor is France. But that’s only because I haven’t traveled in that many other countries. And until the pandemic slows down enough for various countries to open their borders to U.S. citizens, I won’t be visiting any too soon. 

     So let’s just say the normal I envision for now is a simple trip to La Palma on 15th Avenue West for a plate of enchiladas and a stop at the branch library in our neighborhood on the way back home to pick up a book. Or visiting friends in someone’s backyard. Or attending a literary reading with an actual audience instead of ghostly, disembodied faces on Zoom. Or boarding a plane to Paris for an extended visit. And by extended I mean indefinite.