The News Gives Me Nausea

The news gives me nausea. I escape into music. “Don’t Worry Baby.” “It’s All Over Now.” “And Your Bird Can Sing.” YouTube is my time machine.

My God this world has gotten to be a scary place.

They never did find Lew Welch’s body.

I woke up this morning listening to a report on BBC 4 about St. Kilda Island, home to millions of sea birds. Puffin, fulmar, gannet, shearwater, petrel, kittiwake and shags. When the island was populated by people, no man was allowed to marry until he had woven a horsehair rope, thereby proving that he could maintain his wife by being able to hunt for the sea-birds living on the great cliffs. Mail was sent to the mainland by ocean current. The mailbag was thrown into the sea to be washed up eventually on the shores of Norway or Scotland. Which means it had a better chance of reaching its destination than anything mailed now in the post-Covid world.

Warm fur of cat back of my legs as I splash my face with warm water.

Each of us is a universe of cells connecting us to one another.

Last night I fell into a pool of time. I climbed back out dripping with minutes. It took a long while to regain my footing. Normally, I walk around in a bubble of exquisite negligence. I pay little attention to physical laws. I prefer the laws of art and poetry. It’s a special kind of arrogance. It is, in fact, a defiance. And it is out of such defiance that art is born. Time and gravity are suspended like people on a crowded bus holding on to the stanchions and swaying back and forth as the bus negotiates heavy downtown traffic. Which is to say, everything in the universe is reproducible as a comparison, or untucked shirt.

I would be nothing if I didn’t write, yet when I write, I fade away. And this is what I most desire: to thaw, to resolve into a dew. The rustle of wind in the trees as I turn the thermostat up for heat.

I ate too much. Greek pasta. Love that stuff. Now my stomach hurts. Burns. Aches. I think of that lava flowing down the slope of Cumbre Vieja, old mountain of La Palma, which became active September 19^th, 2021. The beauty of it, and the tragic consequences it’s had for the people who’ve lived there many years, made a life, spent mornings with a cup of coffee in the hand gazing out at the Atlantic, warm breezes blowing over the skin.

Can’t grasp it, this tenuity, this flash, this poem that might’ve been. My whole life has been a hunt for chimeras, elusive insights, thoughts, images that never quite congeal, or flit through the mind when I’m hardly thinking of anything at all, and as soon as I try throwing a net of words on it, it’s gone, vanished completely. And if words do catch a bit of it, it’s not the same. Steam becomes tea. Tea becomes dregs. The dregs go into the compost. The empirical world clings to everything. All but those random abstract patterns on sidewalk and street. What are they? Equations for a mind more agile than mine, perhaps. Paul Dirac watching Cher on a Florida TV.

Sometimes I’ll read something, a poem or sentence or paragraph in an essay, and I’ll understand it without understanding it. I’ll know what it means, I can feel it, intuit its meaning, but I can’t articulate it. There’s something in it that resists daylight, rational analysis, but not completely, there will be just enough coherence to make it chewable, an object of contemplation, but the essence will exceed a fully fleshed statement. It won’t have gears, but it will have momentum. And I like that. It opens up a space in your mind. It’s an energy that can’t be caged. It sparks a certain wildness in you, the turbulence of air in a cloud animating it with a luminous ambiguity.

Because of the outage tonight, scented candles burn serenely in the bathroom, and the peace brought about by the lack of access to the internet is sweet and uncomplicated. It just is. How wonderful is is. The question is, the quotient is, the emerald is, the fizz and fuzz and thistle is. 

This thistle this thorn. This thrift. I like this. This this. This morsel of grammar. This demonstrative adjective. This implicative this. This fist of this. This bucket of this. Those sounds buckets make when they’re full of impertinence. This reliquary of irrelevance. This butte. This mine of crystal. This Bristol epistle. This bristle. This whistle. This vision on the verge of epiphany. This moment in time. This germination of manners in a meat locker of the mind. But no. This isn’t it. Not it at all. This is.

I love it when time is perforated, and a piece of time can be ripped from the daily routine, and a creative impulse brings words into being, the energies that were formerly trapped and buried flitter out like moths from a closet in an abandoned house. And I’m the house. And I’m the closet. And the moths fly out of my mouth. And my mouth flies out of my mouth. And I lose my head. And a nebula of interstellar clouds flowers out of my neck & begins feeding on the void.

Think of the books, the mighty thoughts, thunderous words, had Shelley learned to swim.

I’ve got a tendency to put a little too much drama into things. Even the trivial gets flamboyant treatment. A bottle of water becomes a mythology of optics, a facet of infinite life. Even as it lies on the bed, sloshing side to side in a cylinder of transparent plastic, a reminder I paid for the stuff, and shouldn’t, the merchandising of water is an affront, but so, so good. It goes down like nothing else I can say.