For Its Own Sake

When the external turns internal the internal turns nocturnal. The crickets get thickets and the classical gets radical. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Is the sound the spoon makes when I knock it against the rim of the cat food container while trying to get the gooey little cubes of salmon off of it. Then I rinse it and put it back on the breadboard for future use. It’s a continuum. Of action. And satisfies hunger. Thus it came to happen that I watched Peter Jackson’s Get Back movie on YouTube and wondered what theatre it will be in. There’s only two in Seattle now. Jesus the Beatles sure had energy. And what appears to be an infinite ability to put out great innovative songs. It would’ve been terrific to see the movie at the Seven Gables, which was a tiny theatre with a huge lobby. There was a backdrop where the curtain came down a painting of two lovers on a stone bridge between two mountains and a deep ravine below and a huge castle in the distance. It was fun to stare at and imagine a story that might fit that scene and give it momentum and flesh. Or marvel that there was a time when romance still had some currency. If, for example, you allow that external reality is more than matter, and put the threshold of inner and outer in imaginary space, which is a different reality, and irresistible, considering its boundless dimension, you imply that skin is the connective tissue between being and reality, and so incur the euphoria of mass, when it has no density, and is a field of electrons in drift velocity, amorphous as a rag, specific as a flag. The T-shirts I folded last Sunday are still on the bureau. A torrent of documents and bills reside by a straw duck repurposed as a basket. One has to believe that this world has a rear admiral at the stern guiding us through dark times and melting glaciers into a future of calm lagoons and tropical flowers. The reality is, of course, something entirely different. It’s not a rear admiral it’s a nihilistic priest in a black robe and the boat isn’t a boat it’s a raft and everyone still clinging to it is desperate. And yet the voyage is magnificent and full of marvels. Go figure. All pain is exquisite. It is a hallmark of existence. The sensations on the outer surface of the skin are different than the feelings within, the proprioceptive third dimension and the rumblings of indigestion and the hum of circulation and the giving suppleness of the body to the pressures of gravity and the support of the floor, or a chair, or a bed, and the more chimerical moods and reveries that shift and churn in the chambers of the mind and heart. It’s that magnificent difference that generates all the energy, the desire to meet those charms with one’s entire being and attention. And this is known as weight. Which is a product of light.