Hot Air

Old walls fascinate me. Especially if they're covered with moss and lichen. Or cracked. It makes me want to sing. But the song must be cracked. And covered with moss and lichen. And the voice must be cracked and burdened with regret. Or creamy and resigned like Billie Holiday. Or ripped apart like Janis Joplin. Or warm and silky like Etta James.

When was the last time I trembled with emotion? Was it in Ecuador? Have I ever been to Ecuador? Given the right context, trembling can be quite romantic. It can also be awful. Trench warfare. Bombs. Shrapnel. Barbed wire. Tanks. The world Jacques Vaché occupied for four years. And helped give birth to surrealism. Interesting response to a world gone mad.

I smell pineapple-upside-down cake in the kitchen. Sweet, like a harmonica answering nocturnes during a sibilant horizontal anticipatory knickknack exhilaration.

The hibiscus is a member of the mallow family. Ponderation opens by writing. Apricot cargo in a state of fog. Where do we go from here? I scratch the air. Objects fall out. Things I never thought were there. Things I never expected to see fall out of the air. Like passports. Stamped with heaven. Sounds like a nice place. Maybe I’ll get to go there one day. Fantasy is easier. Though not quite as satisfying. Things need weight to make them real. Substantial. Thought is weightless. But not the brain. The brain is eight pounds of daylight. And chrome is everywhere.

The jungle is thick with moisture and vines. Chili flaunts its beans. Peru goes by in a bamboo airscrew. Words get dressed in a salad fork. The outcome is hazy, but briefly gustatory. A leopard prowls the long eelgrass proud as a regal duke. We dive in the water. The clarity is so strong we mutate. We become more vivid versions of ourselves. And fly to the forest canopy.

Campo Viejo: pine box under the coffee table. Two different tones of wood. I see it peripherally. Sitting on a couch. Watching a movie: I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, with Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons. Kaufman’s movies are strangely absorbing. Not much happens, but when it does, it doesn’t proceed from anything logical, it makes unexpected turns. Time is folded. Space is expanded. People appear haunted by their own desperate need to feel real. Which eventually entails a trip to the basement. Or orchids. Or crawling through the mind of John Malkovich.

I needed to shut the water off to the toilet a minute. I turned the valve clockwise as far as I could and the water still wouldn’t shut off. Plumbing is maddening but not as maddening as computers. Plumbing, if you work hard enough at it, will eventually begin to make sense. Computers, on the other hand, lure you down rabbit holes so deep and convoluted they collapse into metaphysical slinkies and slink away into darkness as your wallet empties of money and your patience empties of sanity.

It’s only natural to become domestic in one’s later years. The world outside is moving too fast. The world inside keeps retreating to the past. But it can only go so far. The visions are vivid, but nobody’s skin is real, nobody’s voice is audible, nobody’s eyes are looking at you again, the way they used to, alert, bright, and full of glee and imagination.

Every symbol of love deserves protection. But keep in mind, it’s only a symbol. Symbols get lost in symbolism. The junkyard is full of them. The junkyard is a symbol. The seagulls are talkative. They make very poor symbols. Toss one a French fry and it’ll drop on it immediately. This is unbecoming of symbols. Symbols don’t do well in reality. Too many ambiguities. Too much mud and junk. This is the province of the seagull. The unsymbolic gull. Gourmand of refuse.

I can’t in all honesty say that I know what it is I’m doing. Shall I assume that a lifelong investiture in books makes me a proponent of language? I shall assume that I’m a clangor of symbols. And signs. How do you jingle a symbol? How do you pickle a sign? A symbol is an idea packed in the Styrofoam of the unconscious. A sign is a sign that signals are significant. Me, I’m looking for a metaphor. I’ve heard the air is full of metaphors. Air itself is a metaphor. It’s invisible but it’s there. It’s a function of breathing. It’s a function of life. It takes air to say air. If I hold a balloon & blow, the form of the balloon is fulfilled by breath. It is the same with words: they need breath to be heard, to become unfurled, to go sailing into someone’s consciousness.

I have reevaluated the evidence of Plato and Aristotle for ecpyrosis, periodical conflagration, in Heraclitus. Right around the time Mobil began to sponsor Masterpiece Theater on PBS. And what I’ve discovered since then is simply astonishing. The conflagration was required to cleanse the universe. What an idea. But really, not entirely surprising when one learns early on that a big part of creativity is destruction. One must destroy to create. Is that what we – humankind – is doing? Doing unconsciously? Every time I hear a siren I think: ecpyrosis. And sometimes – oftentimes – the sirens are silent. Or tiny. The tiny sound of a fire crackling through a sequoia. But is there? Is there a moral force to this? Or are we just supremely talented at telling stories? Baptiste. Miss Scarlet. Unforgotten. All Creatures Great and Small. Brought to you by ExxonMobil.

Just imagine how people felt about mosquito noises in the heyday of yellow fever.

There’s a parallel between anatomy and music: Sticky Fingers, Lord of the Thighs, Balls to the Wall.

There are no credibility gaps in poetry, but there are incredible expressible tentacles.

Rousseau perceived that technological progress was not taking us in a good direction and if the brakes weren’t applied to slow it down it would cause humankind to forget what it is essential. Rousseau is one of the first to point out a malaise in civilization. It's paradoxical: you might think that the faster things go, the more movement there is, the more dynamics there are, and the more one is on the side of the living. But this hyperactivity is rather the order of a panic which turns against the living. The proof: carried away in the panic of an obligation to accelerate, we lose the feeling of life.

Warm meaty air blowing from the ventilation duct at Molena’s Taco Shop on West McGraw.

 Cold, wet, rainy day today. Only one zombie. Long fronds of a fern sticking out from a rockery, wiggling in the wind. Sound of a foghorn, wet sand beneath my feet, tingle of moisture on the skin.

I thought I understood life but maybe I don't. When I think of all the people I've known during my life, each one taught me something, each one opened a new dimension in me that I didn't know I had. In some I discovered a poet. In others I discovered a grump. In some I discovered compassion. In some I discovered rage. One person is many people wrapped in a single body. And it takes one person to unwrap it, and people the air with words.