Bomb Cyclone

10:09 p.m. December 24^th. It felt good to run today. All the ice had melted. Yesterday there was so much ice I couldn’t make it to the end of the driveway. It was much warmer today. About 45 degrees. It was raining heavily but I had to go. I hadn’t run for three days. I don’t even want to weigh myself. I’ve been gobbling food like there’s no tomorrow. R's mince cookies especially. R's rain jacket was too thin to do much good but she brought an umbrella. She ran ok with the umbrella but the awkwardness of the umbrella combined with the bag of peanuts she was carrying proved too much and she turned back home. The combination of it being Christmas Eve day and the rain emptied the streets of pedestrians. Not much traffic either. So it was much more relaxing than usual. And no crows begging for peanuts. They remained high in the air having fun with currents. I left a few at a couple of key spots, in case they come out later. 

And to think that less than a month ago we had to get up early to for a run and avoid the heat. It was always in the 80s in Kauai. I carried a bottle of water. Palm fronds trembled in the breeze. Roosters and hens and their progeny dashed across Lawai Road. Early morning surfers returned to their cars. I dove into the Pacific when we returned. The water was warm. It felt fantastic. 

I watch a large white snake coil itself around a young woman in a black dress. Chelsea Wolfe.  Singing “Hypnos.” “I licked your hatred. You set me free. In summer, in the boiling blood.” 

Bomb Cyclone Leaves America Powerless reads a headline on YouTube. Eighteen dead. Buffalo, New York got 22.3 inches of snow in one day. Cars and trucks sliding all over highways and freeways. Collisions everywhere. One small hill in our neighborhood got four crashes within hours of one another. Scenes of powdery ethereal snow blown wispily and crazily over dark asphalt as if in some apocalyptic dream. Thousands of canceled flights. People sleeping on the floor at international airports. Icicles on bridge railings. Transformers exploding from the cold. In Texas a homeless man in a wheelchair fell into a fire pit. Sedan spins down a street hitting two parked cars. And day before yesterday I saw a man driving without chains down icy 8^th Avenue West and turn toward an oncoming car while gazing at his smartphone. A train derailed after hitting a truck in Collegedale, Tennessee. Train 55 from Ottawa to Toronto stopped after a tree fell on it. Emergency services provided food & water, but those supplies soon ran out, & the toilets had stopped working. A train derailment near Grafton blocked all trains in Kingston. Iguanas dropping out of trees frozen and dead in Florida. Homes buried in snow in Buffalo. 

It's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can cause so much mayhem. One might think of it as an equation of collective action. There are roughly 22,400 snowflakes in a pound of snow. Multiply this by a factor of infinite flakes in a cold uncaring universe and you will begin to see the problem of existence as a problem of precarious quantification. In physics, a jerk equation is the minimal setting for solution showing coffeehouse behavior. Try it with rubber. This will only work if you forget everything you know about dynamical systems & stretch it as far as you can. Then, after you let go, you won’t notice yourself crashing through the window. And what will you have proved? The anxiety of death is a farce. Said the Snowman.

 

I'm A Yo-Yo

Consciousness means we’re involved in the creation of the universe. It’s a process. What you’re going to need is a philosophy, a shovel, and a bag of cement. Romance, precision, generalization. Quills and calculus and pliers and a caulking gun and motorcycles and a big garage. A drummer. A bass guitarist. A case of beer. The voice of Merle Haggard. The spirit of Moses. The linguistic prowess of Cleopatra. A stiff felt hat and a whirlpool of upholstery in somebody’s basement. Lights are good and a Persian carpet and a roll of duct tape. Include a peninsula and a noontime snooze. Everyone is here. Everyone is involved. It’s time to get started. This one’s all but gone. But we can salvage the nails and lumber. It’s going to be a kick-ass universe. Timeless as string. If we do it up right, it will echo the cravings of the spirit. And walk in beauty like the yo-yo.

I’m a yo-yo. No doubt about it. It amazes me the number of times I have to get up and piss. The night becomes a pattern of up and down, up and down, up and down. Pissing has become an occupation. I’ve had to cultivate a new relationship with my body and its organs. In youth I flew around like Ariel, hardly aware I had a body at all. Unless I had a hard-on. Or I was getting punched in a fight. Because some guy’s girlfriend took a liking to me. And gave me a hard-on. But sometime after passing 50 things changed. And by the time I was 70 I became the caretaker of 170 pounds of elements like hydrogen and sulfur and phosphorous and an amalgam of muscle, gum and bone. I do what it wants. What it needs. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to piss.

Remember when people used to say stupid things like job satisfaction is a cause of well-being? They don’t still say that, do they?

I’d rather shoot myself. I hope to God I never become that person. Which, considering my age, is highly unlikely. I’m a different species of asshole. I’m the kind that goofs off all day, and then blames it all on Arthur Schopenhauer.

The spawn of John Calvin is everywhere. Original sin. Predestination. Humility and obedience. Hard work as a religious duty. Jesus. What bullshit.

Those forced grins you used to see everywhere, at least that’s gone. Now that the corporate juggernaut has achieved its goal of hijacking governments and prosecuting a plan of neo-feudalism for the masses, it’s ok to show your despair and look askance and not engage customers in conversation. Those self-serve aisles at the grocery store have become a remarkable success. It’s got work, martyrdom, and debasement all over it and as an added bonus you don’t have to engage with anyone.

Whatever happened to well-being? For a lot of people, people fleeing Afghanistan or Ukraine or Syria, it's a luxury. It begins with shelter and food. And for a lot of people - many of them living in the United States and Europe - shelter and food have become a luxury. 

There’s no such thing as well-being. Being is a meaningless term. It’s not an entity. Not a cotton swab. And what does ‘well’ mean? Skilled, competent, good, healthy, strong, vigorous, shrewd, judicious, fit as a fiddle. In other words, an asshole. Non-being is a form of well-being. If there’s no being there’s no worry, no purpose, no agenda, no target, no intention, no weaponry, no animus, no machinations, no aim. Therefore, non-being is the nebulous chew of reverie. Blue rubies. Black Beauties. Musical breweries. I’m done now. Done with being. This is clearly the moment to talk about something else. Eccentrics in Africa and the greenery of rattling shirts. Cherry blossom pink is the nipples’s friend, and this involves easels and paint, and a sense of non-being.

It's a simple formula: if you have non-being, nobody can get their hooks in you. When well-being becomes a commodity, non-being is a way out: ownership is suffering. When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. 

Normally, I don’t get this preachy. But every time I see a white blank sheet of paper or word document I see a theater. I see a stage. So here I am. To be or not to be, that is the question. Everything pivots around that.

The Universe Isn't Empty It's Just Sleeping

Nothingness feels like velour. Velour ain’t nothing. But it is velour. And that’s saying something. Something velour. All things verifiable are germane to velour. The purpose of velour is to educate the fingers. The purpose of fingers is to educate velour. This is a funny universe. It’s all velour. Velour all over. The universe isn’t empty. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence. And they’re all velour. The truth is velour. Lies are velour. This is a lie. I’m telling the truth. This is velour. All velour. Except for the parts that aren’t velour. They walk around like they own the place. They fold themselves into nouns. They glitter and endure. And they like to spin. Spin is an intrinsic degree of freedom. This is called a wave function. It describes the wave characteristics of a particle. So you’d better put something on. Something red. Something velour.

This sentence is around here somewhere. I know it’s somewhere here. Or maybe it hasn’t been written yet. Maybe this is the sentence. It’s delicate making these decisions. Ask me where the femur resides in the mammalian anatomy and I’ll hand you a jacket and a can of spam. This is my way of saying I don’t know where it is. This so-called sentence. This subterranean toolbox of chthonic wrenches and seventeen neologisms based on a principle of monarchic rule. I know the sentence I’m looking for I can feel it I can even smell it it smells like a Memphis recording studio after Bob Dylan got done recording Blonde on Blonde in June, 1966. There were a lot of sentences around then, a lot of them hanging from the mouth in psychedelic colors, syllables flashing colors and rolling dice, a quirky syntax moving in untidy bones across a sheet of ice.

If you feed a sentence nothingness it will feel like velour. But I don’t want to go into that just now. I want to listen to the beat of drums. I want to dig holes in the air. Deep holes. Holes of elsewhere. And fill them with words. Move away twisted eye. Dry mechanical fingers join the rattling percussion of a hummingbird to the fox of the poetry chickens. I light up my knee with the jewelry of movement. I have a beehive wardrobe and a shawl of informal temperatures. Dazzling admonitions help lend beaks to the management of noble emissary hums. Genitals are glorious answers to the injuries of existence. Iron denials. I rattle like a blister and go where the poplars smell of rain. Rafts of weariness carry us into sleep. And the night swallows our pain.

The Voice Is An Instrument

It puzzled me to hear that Sarah Bernhardt would often request a pitcher of hot water to be placed discreetly near her somewhere on the stage to keep down the dust. Why dust? Who cares about dust? Then it hit me: because she’s performing. She’s inhaling deeply to give her voice power. How cumbersome that would be, to try to send her words soaring into the theater while suppressing a cough. Her voice was described as a “golden bell.” It mesmerized people. And she had a personality to match: grace, beauty, and charisma. The voice is an instrument, she said, which the artist must use with suppleness and sureness, as if it were a limb. Or a bell.

It’s a mystery to me how singers are able to give so much expression to their emotion, and make it bold and intimate. It must be like getting naked in front of a crowd. I could never do that. Which is why I write. When I’m in public, among strangers, and often even among friends, I have to keep the full weight of emotion within reins. In writing, emotions can be dealt with more abstractly, even if the words get a little ornate. There’s probing & exploration. Groping, like for a light switch in a hotel, when you get up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of water. You can’t sing that. But if you do, let it puzzle the ears. And pull the mind into the light of a bedside lamp.

Actors leave their personalities behind in the dressing room. Maybe singers do that, too.

In Tombstone, thespian Mr. Fabian (Billy Zane) delivers – quite commendably -  the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V while rowdy cowboys take potshots at the stage.

I’ve always associated Bernhardt with the American West, although she was a longtime resident of Paris. On February 6^th, 1881, on her way to New Orleans aboard a train, she paid the engineer twenty-five hundred dollars, who sent the amount to his wife, should he not survive crossing a bridge whose piles had been weakened by floodwaters. She paid the amount in gold pieces. The train sped across and the bridge collapsed after it reached the other side. Thinking about what might’ve happened – what almost happened – gave her nightmares. Generous souls often act on impulse. Regrets come tumbling down later. Off stage. In the glare of a mirror.

In 1887 she entered the U.S. in Texas, bringing with her a pet tiger. She also wore a live garter snake around her wrist, the one she substituted for an asp while playing Cleopatra.

According to Plutarch, Cleopatra – the actual Cleopatra - spoke at least nine languages: Ethiopian, Troglodytic, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Median, Parthian, Egyptian and Greek.

History is neither chronological or ontological. It’s not even logical. It’s lopsided and beige.

In June, 1876, Wild Bill Hickok wrote to his wife – Circus Queen Agnes Lake Hickok – from the Omaha Metropolitan Hotel. He wanted to put his big hands on her shoulders and kiss her smile. I can feel all the generosity of feeling in that and it makes me feel good about the man. I always wondered about that guy. He came into my awareness when I was eight or nine in Deadwood. I remember the afternoon. The air smelled of pine and there were old cabins that might’ve been around when Wild Bill pulled out a chair and sat down to play a game of poker at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon. Wish that fucker hadn’t shot him. Bill was only 39. If he’d lived another 41 years or so he would’ve made it to 1917. The year the U.S. declared war on Germany. The October Revolution in Russia overturned the tsar’s government and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Jazz recording “Liberty Stable Blues” was released. And Marcel Duchamp submitted R. Mutt – a porcelain urinal - to the Society of Independent Artists who were to stage an exhibit at the Grand Central Palace in New York city. They said they’d accept any artist’s work as long as they paid the entry fee. But R. Mutt wasn’t. Upon which Duchamp resigned.  

The world lacks rebels these days. The public has become spookily compliant. Except when they get drunk on a passenger plane and are dragged off by security, shouting, screaming, trying to bludgeon the perceived injustices of the world with their voice. Which can be a scalpel or gun if used wisely. Shouting doesn’t do much, unless you’re Tears for Fears, or Lulu. A voice is useless without the precision of words. Each phrase an incision, each word a bullet fired from the mouth. 

The Smile Of Art

Desire doesn’t make miracles. It creates problems. Les Misérables is a tempest in the skull. It’s choc-a-bloc with problems. Cobbled with problems. Will Jean Valjean return to the Buccaneers for the foreseeable future, or will he promise Fantine to take care of Cossette? Fishing doesn’t always involve getting your line wet. Sometimes all you need to do is to look at things from another perspective. Inscrutability always works, as do fugues and sonatas in which we see everything going on at the airport has something intrinsically meaty about it, padded and chewed, glowing through and through with the smile of art. The ceremony of noise is coming at us from the north with sharp quills. It will take some understanding. I miss the monarchy. There wasn’t quite so much military propaganda. The mind leaps from problem to problem, brownish black and soft as coal. Words are deposits of sound from which molten rock and steam come out and shake the air with testimony. Leaves smashed in medicine, espousals of likelihood in the jungles of the telephone. This is why it’s so hard to write without being intoxicated. You keep lighting fuses until something explodes. The old world crumbles and a new world emerges. The new world is so new it doesn’t know it exists. You have to look for it in your voice. Or somebody’s eyes. When they’re not looking. And the wind is blowing. And you’re waiting for the check. As a train goes by. The world looks the same. But different. And it’s not on the menu.

The Pataphysical Tourist

We all get in a carriage of tin and volcanic glass and go a-touring. We had quite an itinerary to fulfill, all of it loosely applied to the principle of serendipity. We toured Luxembourg and tossed pretzels to the bankers who did tricks for us, somersaults and complex credit transactions. By we, of course, I mean the royal we. I am, in fact, a creature of solitude. But also, it can be remarked, a constellation of cells, a distressed vessel of mitochondria and protoplasm in a quest for meaning at the frontiers of destiny, freedom from the anxiety of death and pettiness of habit. We saw an Andy Warhol android eat a bowl of tomato soup in Wankendorf, Germany and last night, in a little town in Scotland, I swirled around in bed forsaken and Gothic, longing for a still pasture, a sweep of land steeped in glorious history, where I could cease my dromomania, and immerse myself in germaniums and grapefruit. I got down on the carpeted floor and began a dissertation on the profligacy of the swimming pool. This was fatal. For it clearly indicated that my odyssey had hardly begun. I performed a series of breaststrokes until I fell back asleep. In the morning, after a fine breakfast of sweet jams and local honey, I renewed my determination to pursue that ignis fatuous we call sightseeing, which is really just a gallivant, dressed up as a pilgrimage, & consummated in a Senegambian stone circle, with dancing and impromptu cries, a ceremony drawn from the Druids, & practiced in the open. I studied a rococo faucet in Antwerp & stood - enthralled and discombobulated - by the abounding Farin Ruwa Falls in Nigeria, when I was exhausted from the heat, and meeting so many new people, many of them, as it turned out, the product of fever and hallucination. The bedspread in Haapsalu, Estonia had potatoes all over it. The bedspread was dirt. But then I realized my error. I’d mistaken a farmer’s field for my hotel room. It’s the mists. They play havoc with one’s sense of direction. The pansies in Pucklechurch, England spoke to me in some privacy, and I blushed to hear their thoughts. I kissed a gypsy in Arles. I heard the music of the spheres above Woolloomooloo. And wherever in the world I went the chimeras whispered their needs and drew me further into the mist. 

Vision Is The Carpenter's Balm

Vision is the carpenter's balm. Nails are the carpenter’s supreme court. The juicy iron of the sediment gives his shadow a peach beard. The land begins to cross itself and air out the earth sticks. I think to calculate round by mending a hat. The wind scratches a palm as it approaches the border. The laws here are swooning. Everyone has gone to the moon. What is the mind? Our closet needs commas. I know that because the sauce is sweet tonight. It's high time to invent something for the flaming bohemian in all of us. The restlessness is perfectly normal considering how long it takes for the hour to hatch into daylight. Time is the same everywhere except prison which is a puddle of smashed green water. The fourth dimension is waiting. It’s our only hope, a shovel full of almonds in a tincture of lightning. Maybe we can speed it up by tangling away at the chasm. I know a place where the drawers are metal, the offices are whispers & the parabolas rattle with solar winds. The warehouse is to the south. We feel the acute benevolence of angels. I know I’m due to do something, sink into cavernous reflection or go spinning through various careers mixing a savage clarity with the long slow sway of swamp pendulums, which is not going to win me any awards, but it will help with the process of reconciliation, and bring bullets if it fails. Peacocks need plenty of space. I’m getting away if you get interested, and we fly into elements believing in ourselves even when everyone else has left the room. You be zinc. I’ll be brass. And together we’ll shine. This could be a song. But it’s not. It’s a plea for justice. And a field of lavender at the end of a rainbow. The dear coffee of the hardware store will be our fun little elf. They don’t call it the nervous system for nothing. It’s lonely up here in the percussion section. I have to be able to make thunder when thunder is summoned. And this gives me being. Otherwise I’d be another loop in the woodwinds, an inveterate misdemeanor getting by on regret. 

The Twisted Bear Is Having Fun

The twisted bear is having fun. The twisted bear is eating a bowl of conversation. The cool magnet is an admonition. But the twisted bear pays no mind. The twisted bear thinks perforation is an unfulfilled abstraction. We find evidence of this in thundershowers. The shovel is overflowing with horses. The curb is beaded with noodles. I stand here with a can of varnished gelatin wondering if I can handle the cab of hems and their dispositions without a proper work visa. I shall seek the wisdom of doors. I shall seek the wisdom of chairs. I shall seek the wisdom of the twisted bear. The twisted bear is having fun. The twisted bear is a palace of quintessence and claw. The tamarind stands nearby with a scorpion’s temperament and a small area affirming similarities among the rocks. The peach is tangled in loops of eccentric ontology. Clouds have effectively remedied office culture and left us dripping with radar sugar and boomerang gum. If you lean in and listen closely you can hear the fish swimming in my incision. What would you call it? I’d call it a wang dang doodle and pack my bags and head out to the open sea. I don’t want to see you go but if you’re going to go please go now. I have things to do. I must blow. I’m a breeze lugging a crate of monastery knots. My dream has roots in Africa. The fin is a vintage shape but no genital is completely solitary. Every beak and mouth is connected to a stomach by way of an esophagus, and it is there that things happen. Swirls curl into compliments and language is the serum of rostrums and a romance burning with deviations. Aberrations. Like the twisted bear. Like an engorged preposition. Let me roll it to you. The twisted bear is having fun.

Let's Get Spectral

I don’t oppose the ooze of a rawhide collar stud, nor do I spurn the flutter of a proposal if it drops to the floor in a sudden apoplexy of incompatible subjectivity. I see a stirring beam amid the gossip that the algebra of the socially maladroit expands into a canoe. Therefore, it behooves me to redeem the time with a little transcendence. Let’s get spectral. I’ll hymn an itch we can texture. If you play with experience an absence with meat on its bones will grab you and burn you. Afterwards, an eager reflection will climb on your back during your metamorphosis and make you circumspect. I’ll fire up the forge and make a padlock. The fly the dissolve the alpaca. Everything I shape shouts tulip. Tumult is a cartoon your string has caused to thrive. I think you have a beautiful throat. You look good with a wild skull and a clean curl.

Beauty slides its sugar into the unknown excursion some consider worth a few candles and a little money. Too many thorns in the kitchen will spoil the poultry. Distance is such a mournful thing. Few consider it comprehensible. Last night a memory blew through my mind and left a kettle on the ceiling. There’s a reason for everything. Except regret. No enigma is hollow. The very effort to solve it gives it a meaning and an interior celebrity. François Hardy or Charles Bronson. An unresolved problem will swell into a mailbox and fill with letters from all thirteen colonies of my tablecloth. The man with a mended eye is the one to see what’s wrong and so misunderstood about understanding. And I stood there blinking at the brightness of the foundry.

I’m feeling bullish and so hum a yellow song. It was written by a sewer rat in Paris who knew Victor Hugo personally. It’s a beautiful song, and yellow as the advocacy at the core of the sun. Humming helps me understand the parsley family. No foam or agitation of the sea has as much sheer aggression as the carrot. Can you smell it? There’s a bear in the oyster farm. I love ovals. And cubes and cones and cylinders. Cylinders especially. These are some of the shapes I’ve learned while making guitars for the Rolling Stones. I study closely how women apply lipstick with careful loving strokes, and then imitate it when I’m playing hockey. I can’t, for the life of me, understand how anyone could put their trust in a government. Life is an equation served cold. It takes more than calipers to anatomize its features. The laws are created to protect money. I didn’t discover ethics until I discovered flight. I joined the Chippewa of the Turtle Mountains and kneeled in the mud of the Missouri getting a drink. That’s what I mean by fulfillment.

There are songs I can listen to repeatedly without getting tired of them. “The Song of the Muddy Banana in the Dirty Bandana” performed by Steady State Slim and the Merry Variables is one. It helps me achieve the somnolence of stone, and the celestial wisdom of elephants in the forests of Ghana. I remember my nervousness around guns. We pay a heavy price for subtlety. Each word is a nail. Each kitchen drawer a monad. The sound it makes when I open it is a brightness felicitous as a glowworm. I call it “The Song of the Siren Knives.” Though it’s mostly about forks, with an epilogue of spoons. Sometimes I can hear the fruit rotting on the ground and it makes me want to dance a bunch of words into a paragraph where there’s a chance to be reborn as a temperament or a corkscrew. It ends with a mournful cream, and a referendum of intimacy. 

Interview With Tristan Tzara

Q: Do you like to make your bed in the morning?

A: Absolutely. I use a sledgehammer. I get insights by reaching for the pillows. I keep a trapeze under a stuffed horse. I use it to swing back and forth like a trombone stuck in a jujube.

Q: What do you think of today’s propaganda?

A: I think it’s terrific. I’ve never seen so many brainwashed people. I mean, what an achievement! We’ve finally reached a point where someone with a different viewpoint is persecuted like Joan of Arc. No society can function like this. Therefore, propaganda should be the national religion. All it requires is a ruthless disregard for truth. Propaganda is a virus that will bring the so-called civilized world down. Our species will be erased. The world will become pristine again. We are a failed species, but we did help bring newspeak and agitprop into being, which proved to be the DNA of our undoing. Propaganda is the wicked genius of fiction. It is to be regarded with great respect, and the flourish of a hand in a white parade glove.

Q: Have you ever worked in a mine?

A: Do you mean mine, or mind? I’ve worked in a number of mines, and minds. I discovered a vein of gold in a bus driver once. He was totally incompetent. He kept driving the bus over the sidewalk. I descended into his mind and discovered his whole secret depended on pessimism.

Q: How do you feel about the American embassy in Morocco?

A: It’s a crumpling temperament, a fragile disaster of soap. I can taste the apricot in the mouth of the traveler at the end of a long day exploring the streets of Tangiers. I see William S. Burroughs seated behind the desk, fanning himself with a multicolored bamboo fan and offering a lump of hashish on a silver platter to his guests and applicants. I offer a salute. And thank him for his service.

Q: What are your feelings about music?

A: They’re mostly red, the kind of red you see at Christmas, or on the nose of an alcoholic butcher with a passion for Bach. When I listen to Karen Carpenter I want to run around the house naked trailing a bright red scarf. Jimi Hendrix makes me foggy, like tomorrow’s pants, red of course, with hundreds of pockets and a parachute. John Cage opens my mind. J.J. Cale blows my mind. Keith Richards conducts mass with a boogie piano and a bell tower of chapped percussion.

Q: How do you feel about Jerry Lee Lewis?

A: I become incandescent and masturbate.  

Q: Do you understand electricity?

A: I don’t, no. I think it’s got something to do with electrons or something. Is it onions? It’s a dramatic medium, isn’t it? It’s not exactly Dada. It’s so purposeful. All those wires leading up to something. Toasters, tortillas, and tacit assumptions. Have you ever been shocked? The muscles ripple with its energy. I don’t know. Maybe the secret of electricity is Dada. Electricity is the mother of Dada.

Q: What do you think Heidegger meant by “Transcendence constitutes selfhood?”

A: I haven’t the faintest idea. Let me ask you something: what are you doing this for?

Q: Doing what?

A: Interviewing a dead man you’ve never met and trying to pass it off as some sort of journalistic  éclat or literary feat. Don’t you think that’s a little pretentious, not to mention dishonest?

Q: Ok, you got me. I’ve been exposed. But isn’t this fun?

A: It’s fun. Yes. I’d like to go back to being dead now if you don’t mind.

Q: Sure thing. Thank you for your patience.

A: hi ho Silver! And away!

 

 

A New Way Of Seeing Things

R reminds me each day how much time before we leave for Kauai. I’ve been trying to get in the mood for travel. Psyched, as they say. I’m not big on travel these days, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s the disintegration of everything, the ravages of pandemic and climate change catastrophe and war and neoliberal economics, the sadness, the despair and graffiti and prostitution. I try turning all that around like a lazy Susan to look at the benefits of travel. There are constants. Travel is stressful, but also stimulating, I mean hugely stimulating, everything is new, dislocated, you’re outside time, outside your anesthetizing habits, the structure of events and people you’ve built around your life, the architecture of the everyday. You’re displaced. Tired. Craving rest. Quiet. There’s excitement as soon as you enter a lobby and go through the usual ritual. Get a key card, open the door, walk in, and the quiet embraces you, pulls you into its comfort zone. Flop on the bed. Ignore the luggage. Wallow in that interval between disarray and hurry and pandemonium. That’s what I love about hotels: the voluptuousness of anonymity.

Take that Edward Hopper painting, for example, Hotel Room, with the woman sitting on the edge of a freshly made bed wearing nothing but a slip and holding a thick paperback on her lap; it’s such a wonderful moment, so relaxed, her luggage still on the floor, unpacked, plenty of time to get to it later, but for now what’s important, is this book, this riveting passage, this loaf of time. The writer said this is a painting of loneliness. No it’s not. Does this woman look lonely to you? Is this an American obsession, loneliness? Like there’s something weird about being alone, or feeling comfortable in whatever solitude one can grab for oneself, and simplicity, the wonderful simplicity that comes with solitude, when the madhouse pandemonium of the social arena has been shoved sweetly aside and the time has come to focus, to let the senses dilate, and discover life.

Hotels are inherently literary. You sense it immediately as soon as you step into the lobby. If it’s a big lobby you’re in a big production. Expect to see Fred Astaire tap dance toward your luggage. Mae West will hold the elevator door for you. If it’s a small hotel there’ll be a little bell on the counter and a woman in a polka dot dress reading Sense and Sensibility on Kindle. Always, Ritz or Ramada, is a desk in the room. It’s inviting in a strange way. It seems to be saying come here and write something. Something full of Weltschmertz and charm. Insights are the flowers of inquiry. Regrets are the currency of the street. The coinage of alienation. And so I made my decision. I’m mailing myself to the Kuiper Asteroid Belt, c/o God, or anyone willing to take me. Dear Universe I’m a refugee stuck at the border between grim acceptance and Edward Hopper can you get me out of here I’ll do anything you ask (within reason).

A change of medium can be psychotropic. I recommend water skiing when it comes to anything boisterous and fun and maintaining balance. Parasailing whenever you feel cherubic like Reubens. And when it comes to the supramundane we have romance, knights with lances in good humor, exchanging jokes and making light of the situation, the dark ages and all of its underlying factors, such as the sheer irrationality of human behavior, and the need for armor. Dragons are a blessing. They bring a vivid energy to our discussions around the fire. So please. Enjoy the conjecture. Electrical current is a circular flow. The electric field that is applied to the wire causes the electrons that are inside the wire to move. This movement involves electrical resistance, which in turn causes heat, and the emission of photons, or Huckleberry Finn. You and a book under a lamp. You and a lamp and Vivaldi riding the canals of Venice with a violin.

I watch a YouTube video about Edward Hopper. I have a poet friend very much interested in Hopper and we exchanged some email concerning Hopper and the knee-jerk assumption of loneliness in his paintings. There’s so much more than mere loneliness going on in his paintings. As for YouTube, it’s become a major feature of my life. I listen to music almost constantly. When I saw the reference to Hopper in the YouTube feed, it was a little disquieting, a sure sign of surveillance. Most of the time, I’m amused by the choices the algorithms cough up, depending on the patterns of my listening history. Lots of classical (Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi) and lots of rock, The Kills, Mark Lanegan, Bob Dylan, Karen Carpenter. Yes, Karen Carpenter. That one surprised me. But her voice is sublime. Likewise Yvonne Elliman, Etta James and Aretha Franklin. And whenever the upstairs neighbors starts banging around in the kitchen I go in search of big sounds, full sounds, a density of music whose volumes and intricacies are oceanic. 

I listen to music a lot, generally on earphones. It’s become an environment, an immersion, like Jonah in the whale. In a real whale you’d be mucking about in krill and hydrochloric acid. But this is an allegorical whale. The immersion is biblical. It’s in the belly of the whale that Jonah finds revelation, a dissolution of the ego that leads to a divine understanding. Immersion is conversion. Consciousness becomes cosmic. Oceanic. And when the whale vomits Jonah on a beach, he becomes a mighty surfer, and people come to listen to his story of immersion at night before a flaming bonfire, which I just now added, because I like bonfires, they remind me of good times, and because I’m a whale. The universe is a perpetual, protean swarming of things, a theatre of ephemeral phenomena. We’re processes. We’re flux. And 180 tons of blubber. 

Day Of The Dead

8:14 p.m. Wednesday. R and I went for a run down by Westlake this afternoon. It was much colder, mid-40s. We decided, rather than stop and turn around at Diamond Marina and go back the way we came, as we usually do, to continue along Westlake to the intersection at Dexter and Nicholson, by the Fremont Bridge. We walked down a small road with virtually no traffic (one car went by) where there are rows of houseboats that extend all the way to the Aurora Bridge, which arched above us with its immense network of steel girders, reminding me a little of looking up at the network of steel girders on the Eiffel Tower. R reminded me of a suicide that had recently occurred. A young woman had somehow managed to climb up the protective fencing along the bridge railing, and jump to her death. How strange that must be to live in such close proximity to such tragedy. Imagine, I said, having a suicide suddenly appear on your dining table.

It was the Day of the Dead. All Souls Day. The dark asphalt was constellated with huge yellowish leaves. The lassitude of late afternoon was filled with gleaming correspondences. Is there anything more radical than a shovel full of fungus? If I ever get a tattoo on my back it will be a canary or an armadillo. That’s how I felt about the breeze at that moment. Sad as a banana.

I thought there was a flight of steps on the west side of the Fremont Bridge which would’ve allowed us to skip one of the lights of the intersection, but there wasn’t. We had to wait for two lights. This intersection is insanely huge and complicated. Seattle is a city of intersections. It’s also a city of improvisations, having to accommodate sudden growths in population, first due to gold, then Microsoft and the tsunami of electronics that followed. The lights are long. I could set up a folding chair and read Tolstoy’s War and Peace while waiting for the light to change.

We walked up Fourth, which is astonishingly high and steep. Just walking up Fourth is like flying in an airplane. You go up so fast. It’s fun. You can turn around and look all the way over to Phinney Ridge, where the Woodland Park Zoo resides, and the poet Philip Lamantia once lived, and could hear the lions roar in the morning. I mean Phinney Ridge the neighborhood, not the zoo. Philip did not live in the zoo. But he could hear the zoo. As I do now. In the still of a November night. Not a real zoo, no. A zoo of metaphors. And spider monkeys. And trumpeter swans doing Miles. And giraffes nibbling glissandos in the dampness of funny Phinney Ridge.

We walked down Bigelow and I thought of Kauai. Because I was cold (sweaty than still equals cold) and to imagine a warm tropical climate smeared my mind with glorious sunlight. The gossip of palm fronds in a tropical breeze.

Halloween

It’s 6:37 p.m., October 31^st, Halloween. Earlier, we walked around the top of Queen Anne hill and noted all the tombstones and skulls and skeletons adorning people’s lawns, including a Mariachi band and a flock of skeletal flamingos. The crows were numerous. They turn fiendish for peanuts this time of year. I’ll frequently hear the inimitable sound of their wings passing near to my head, almost like the sound of a woman’s silk gown. What kind of world is this where death is mocked and celebrated? Well why not. What else is there to do with death? It won’t bounce like a basketball. Death is only a word. Until I die I won’t know what the fuck it truly is. I do know people disappear, and disappear for good. I’d love to see a ghost. There’d be proof, first of all, that there is, indeed, a further existence after death, though I can’t imagine how strange that would be, to have a numinous existence, a sense of self, but no body to contain it. According to Swedenborg, every person living on earth is already in contact with angels and evil spirits, even if we don’t realize it. This awareness, for lack of a better word, most often comes in the form of a stray thought or impulse disguised as our own inner voice. That’s pretty vague. I’m not sure how to deal with this information, jettison it as worthless (I won’t) or try and ponder it, persist in exploring it until it asserts enough of its own reality to hold our attention and become – in some fashion – real. Swedenborg cautions against speaking with ghosts. I mean, look at Hamlet. That didn’t go well. Swedenborg warns that some of the spirits out there are evil. You really don’t want to engage with those. He also emphasized – and this is welcome news – that the Divine is stronger than any evil influence. He also said that things in heaven are more real than things that are in the real world. Which would include, no doubt, a lawn adorned with skeletal flamingos and a mariachi band whose songs cannot be heard, except by the dead.

See What I Mean

We go for a walk. The light on the lake is thin. It flirts with the docks and disfigures the water.

New doesn't happen to me often. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm so accustomed to being old that I tend to see everything as old. Except food. Our food is new. We discovered something new about food tonight. R got an app for a food delivery service called Ouroboros. We ordered dinner from a local teriyaki restaurant that specializes in delivery. After R worked out the details and sent the request I settled back expecting a wait of 15 or 20 minutes, quite possibly longer. But no. Seconds later the guy was here. R went out to greet him and get our meal, which had already been paid for, including a tip. This is new. And quite amazing. These services have been truly accelerated after the pandemic. Talk about paradigm shifts. This is one of the better ones. Tremors in the fabric of daily life tend more usually to be demoralizing and discombobulating, but this one is nice. The rest of the evening was modern, indelible, and kind.

I’m full of adjectives tonight but I don't know if I've got the energy to airlift them to safety. The nouns around here can get rough. Especially the hairy ones with fangs and appetites. Nouns like cloak and factory. The mesh of gears in the commission of thought. I get listless just thinking about the principles involved. If you mismanage a rhododendron the entire universe weeps. It doesn't require much. Just a few kind words, a tropical architecture, and a sprinkling of tongues.

Lately, I’ve begun feeling a deep sadness whenever I look at my books. This is not the world for which they were intended. They're as good as museum pieces representing a bygone era. This is not a time of reflection, of subtlety of thought or openness of mind. The times are barbaric. The babble of celebrities far exceeds the mutterings of a wise old man in a chair by the window. But I’ve known this for some time and it didn’t seem to bother me as much. For a few years people would gaze admiringly at them. I’d even have to worry about the inevitable request to borrow one. It pained me to lend books. I’d never see them again. So I learned French. Half my library is in French. Loaning books, meanwhile, has long since been a problem. It ceased being a problem at the beginning of the new century. Right around the time I started getting obsessed with poet Lew Welch. He felt it too. This poisonous obsolescence. For which there’s no cure but more immersion, a defiance in which the flutter of paper whispers light utterances on your face.

I often feel like a monk circa 793 AD gazing out of a window at Lindisfarne and seeing a Viking ship land ashore and the men getting out, a glint of light on a sword and wondering what the fuck, what are those shits up to.

See what I mean? The interface between sensation and image is a transitional zone where the actual, swarming materium of life becomes visceral. One must curve up and down like a wave if one is to expect anything to come of potash, or postulation. Step back, and watch it explode into handsprings.

 

The Fall Of Fall

What happened to October? The entire month felt more like late August with temperatures in the 80-degree range, while a ghostly, apocalyptic shroud of wildfire smoke hung – stale and motionless – over the city, forcing us to remain indoors despite the warm temperatures. The AQI just last week was scary. 273, very unhealthy. A reading of 28 more units for concentrations of particulate matter would’ve put us in the hazardous zone. We kept our air purifier going the entire time. Lord knows what the filter looks like. Most of the smoke came from fires to the east, chiefly the Bolt Creek Fire.

“Fire crews cleared out fuels while others bulldozed and hand-cut containment lines. They also relied on and monitored existing barriers like roads, rivers and streams, to act as containment lines.

Small planes and helicopters have intermittently dropped buckets of water on problem areas, Johnson said. The fire has mostly burned freely on the north side into the Wild Sky Wilderness.

As the sun began to set Monday, Kris Pflugh of Chewack Wildfire was using a pickax to pull up hot ash and dirt, exposing orange embers. Beside him, Kenny Dickinson sprayed down the hot earth. They were mopping up hotspots as they made their way down Beckler River Road, north of Skykomish.

Soon, crews like this one from Spokane, will get to go home. Officials hope the rain will subdue the fire until finally snow snuffs it out later in the year.”

-          Isabella Breda for the Seattle Times, October 19, 2022.

I see the firefighters in France, who fight fires with a passion, a ferocity that matches the roar of the fire itself, and wonder what sage design there is to their strategy, as the aggressions of the fire go wild at night, radiating into the sky like the fingers of an insane deity. I’ve never had that experience, that devotion to conquering an entity so huge and overwhelming the trees crack and thud to the ground in abject defeat.

The crisis in which humanity finds itself – endless war compounded by the catastrophes linked to climate change – is one of tentative survival, wholly dependent on the caprices of a gas. It’s an existential crisis, a crescendo of angst in the face of chaos. There’s a weird thrill to it, the lifting of a veil of familiarity in which the reality of forces working in a manner that doesn’t serve our interests has become cruelly vivid. I feel akin to it, it’s what brought me into existence, but also outside it, alien to it, which may be a fault of culture, a moldy, anthropocentric view.

But what then am I? A thing which thinks.

A thing which doubts, tries to understand, conceives, affirms, denies, yearns, wishes, strategizes, defies, refuses, negates, squats, scrapes, scrawls, and can use a fork in the proper mode, pointing the tines down in the continental style.

I interact with a body and do what I can to satisfy its needs, give it food, slather it with soap and keep it clean, exercise it to prevent it from getting fat and frail and allow it repose when its muscles ache and – this above all - keep it dry and warm when it rains and the air bites shrewdly against the skin. Reproductive interactions come and go like snow. At first you’re not sure if it’s going to snow, you sense it, and then one by one a flake falls, and hours later the world is white and soft and uniform. Some form of magic has occurred. You don’t know how it happened so that the formula may be repeated again, at will, and this is life, the errancy of it, and emporium. 

In exchange for these services, my mind is given a room at the top in a spherical dome called a skull, two windows with which to view the world, a tongue with which to mold and chisel words, ears for hearing, and a nose for breathing and smelling.

Sensations are ephemeral as mosquitoes in Mukilteo, but when they rub shoulders with the muscle of knowledge, they agitate – wildly - like the flapping of a scarf.

When particles with one or another degree of spin interact with the nerves of the retina, they cause those nerves to jiggle in a certain way. This jiggling is conveyed to the brain where it affects the animal spirits, depositing these things into the brain where they lay around like puppets and stuffed animals until the mind stops rowing its ratatouille around in a never-ending circle and extends its annoyances into furrows of color. This causes light particles to spin into sensations of shape and jelly. The mind grows wide-eyed with wonder, catches a train of thought to New York City where all the museums are, and delicious Reuben sandwiches, and flickers like a hiatus high on medication. When the theatre is closed, the mind (which has been asleep for some time now) is asked to leave, informs the body of these intentions, which is somewhat slow to apprehend them, and together they rise and make their exit into the world, where there’s significantly less traffic due to the lateness of the hour, and philosophy in the sting of the air.  

 

Rain Dance

Chewing is fun. Almost anything to do with the mouth is fun. Especially talking. Talking to someone with whom you feel comfortable talking. Talking requires that qualifier. Talking to strangers, especially in the U.S., can be a chore. People don’t open up readily. They do in California. You can talk to almost anyone in California with the kind of ease and daring that the language appreciates, it’s everything a language lives for, the spontaneity of speech. Among friends. Among strangers. In bus depots. Airports. Conversations in airports are always a little subdued. It’s the high security. All the humiliating things they – the powers that be – force you to do for security. It’s not working. These measures don’t augment my sense of security they erode it. They give me the heebie-jeebies. Bus depots and train stations are much more conducive. Music explodes it. You get people around music and they’re either going to dance or talk a lot. Shout things. Most people trying to keep the mood buoyant and avoid touchy subjects. I don’t. I can’t. I’ve got an allergy to small talk, but even in social groups where I should know better, I end up saying something that provokes, inflames, disturbs, causes people to walk away. This is why I like writing. There’s nobody there to offend. You’re not going to disturb anyone. But if you do (and yes, it’s a distinct possibility these days) they can just put the book down and go elsewhere. This is a disappointment to language which wants everyone to join in no matter what and bring as much opposition and nuance and difference of opinion to the mix as possible. Homogeneity kills. But what can you do? Gavage is unethical. You shouldn’t force-feed people one’s opinions. But hey. You can climb into a sentence anytime and go on a journey. If you use the same kind of attention as going down a wild river in an inflatable raft you’ll be amazed at what a few words can do. Right now there’s a lot of drought. Think of this as rain. A rain dance.

Here Come The Organisms

Here come the organisms. All creatures great and small. Led by Captain Beefheart. You can’t keep a man like that down for long. The Beefheart organism is choc-a-bloc with organelles. Donkeys with doubts and doings and dongs. Guinea pigs pirouetting on the backs of elephants. Ichthyologists swimming libidinal waters. Shy quiet pools of turquoise ringed by Sonoran desert toads. Zebras in skirts. Giraffes in drafts. Crows in ice cream bowls. Mosquitos with proboscises as big as phonograph needles. The Animals. The Monkees. The Eagles. Iron Butterfly. The Stray Cats. Blue Oyster Cult. The Byrds. T Rex. Government Mule. Grizzly Bear. Atomic Rooster.

The joy of a vinyl record is a groove. Sad movies make me cry I don’t know why.

Here is what I can do for you: nothing. I can't do a thing for you until you tell me what it is you want me to do. I can be a boxing partner or float you into the trees with my ambient charm.

I want to be like a wilderness of snow and provoke the jingling of reindeer.

I want to be rocks. I want to be sleep. I want to be a tree that rocks in the wind like sleep.

You want language to attain music. It attains the sense of music not in sound but in its attitude. Attitude in aviation means orientation to the horizontal plane. It is much the same in music, as when the rhythm mimics the landscape of the human heart, and all the buffalo scatter as the train moves down the rails, the ties still reeking of creosote, I’m guessing that odor may have been in Neal Cassady’s nose before he collapsed from exhaustion and died. There is music for this and the music is inconsolably sad. But underlying all music is a sense of defiance. Music is not of this earth and it knows it and flaunts it, flaunts it beautifully in the angelic voices of women and the source of all voices which is breath, which is air, which is so thin and delicate you can’t see it, but it’s strong enough to support a cargo plane weighing over a ton, and that’s just the wind.

If it’s Lizst it spits if it’s Bach it’s back to back and if it’s Mozart it’s more than art it’s linen.

Down here in the dirt nothing hurts. The music of dirt is a music of worms. Roots and mushrooms. Correspondences. It’s a big all-encompassing melody sewn with the stars in the still of night, Juliet in the mausoleum, on her knees with a knife. This is the music of yearning. Tim Buckley's “Song to the Siren.” Sung by Elizabeth Frazer. The call of seals on the shores of Moray Firth. Music isn’t mere sounds. It’s a zone, a place where nothing hurts.

The Philosophy Of Furniture

I subscribe to suede when it rains in Paris. Gargoyles dance around my knob. People wander by like minstrels in a penal colony. The corn is hulled in voluptuous neutrality. All the solids are pulverized by description. Nothing is so familiar it can’t be transformed into crystal. Containing water teaches insects how to profit from sudden sharp pain. This came to me in a dream dressed in bird claws and wheels. Now I know what it means to write a novel underwater in my pajamas.

The story begins at home. A man with a vampiric intonation and a transparent body finds an eyeball in his martini and hurls it at a wall where it explodes into kangaroos. The clock paddles forward on grooves made of family picnics. I think I understand glue now. It coheres in silence and sometimes reveals tiny bubbles, each of which contain an empire of haiku, and rudiments of something I call suction. The tinier feathers are from a presupposition. The teeth are a narrow part of otherwise, which just happens to have a mouth all ready, carried on the arm like a tattoo.

I write this out of jealousy for Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote “The Philosophy of Furniture” 182 years ahead of me, when I was still dead. Not fair. Tonight is going to be different. Tonight I ignite all the phobias, each pinch of privilege, and give myself to you. I feel a multitude coming on, and some opprobrium, which I will use to season my chagrin at all these interruptions, which waiters are really good at, but what was I thinking, before I was interrupted? I’ll have the cognate supreme with a side dish of quarrels. Life is so lonely without spying on my adolescence. I still see it, off in the distance, working hard on an essay about Poe, the bastard.

One day I will finish with regret and it will leave a trail of absinthe and lilies, otherwise known as French symbolism, which is central to the idea of fetish, a pretty Indonesian hat made of abrasion and implication. The sunlight got me started. It stirred my chlorophyll and I blossomed into a sweet sticky substance with a hammer-like head taught by Heidegger. It felt like wool and fur during a hard Bohemian winter. I questioned an isosceles with a whirlpool and the answer provided medicine for everyone in the lobby. Foreknowledge is a rooster. But we can’t have eggs without chickens. I feel useless surrounding summer like this, but winter is still distant, and I’m in need of a conveyance to get these planispheres to the villa, late at night, in my sleep.

Now. About the furniture. The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind, and I set to work at once. I built a table made of brooding inflammation and a chair that wandered through itself celebrating inertia. A carpet is the soul of an apartment. If anyone gets vertigo they can lie on its plush tenderloin and fall asleep. Pots of mussel shells, arranged marriages, people cut from magazines and turned into puppets enliven the salon, where I also keep a parakeet, a portrait of Benjamin Peret, and doilies which have lost control over their feelings and resemble the random utterances of a vagabond. The player piano plays Booty Wood. Undue precision spoils the appearance of many a room. Therefore, everything will be chosen for its vigorous asymmetry and riotous coastline, & the mirrors reflect nothing but naked artifice.

 

For All The Louvers Of Cubism

My hat beside my hand bundles in the throat teasing out a description in scruples and jars. My bacteria are mostly friendly but my grasp chops anchovies into little green words below my goad, which is either a blood bank, or paragraph. It all depends on the wind direction and our collective temerity. A creeping suspicion has shaken my rib. I do this for the splendor of your grape and rip it into gravity. We feel a boom in the wheel because it echoes distinction among the organs. I obtain ecstasy from brushes. We crash Yeasts into velvet. My bang has a clap to sculpt. The boat is for folding our thoughts into water. Examine pyramids. Their geometry is unraveling now that Egypt has airplanes. Everything wise and beautiful happens in shoes. Writing is more like agriculture. It needs dirt. It needs sunlight and rain. It needs to be ploughed and seeded. Think of the pen as a tractor and a laptop as a grain elevator. The pepper has been tilted to lament the murmur of the mosaic plunged into art like a chandelier. The hills cause us to strike against the pumice, which is soft, and crumbles easily, like compliments. I will send a pulse to the headland if it abandons its denial of a source. This is a parallel that I can put down on paper and grow into knives. I’m beginning to feel the circulation of things. Perfume is a muscle. It lifts the spirits when it's sipping glory from a well of memory. The fence tilts toward the fire. This is our future. A fountain in me chokes the smell of common sense in order to see everything as it is. The logic of balls inches toward remembrance. The engine yells at the garage with fiery sideburns. I feel the weight of nails in a paper bag and am propelled at last into experience. Our noses twinkle with it. I like to carry a belief to its natural destination and then untie the rope and let it go. The rattlesnakes strain to become morals in a world of balconies. And this turns to zoom like so many other prickles, which just goes to prove the louvers of Cubism.

Meaning Is Expensive

Bitter can be mechanical. But the bitter is frail. It's a frail machine. As felicity. Or neon blinking in the Kansas night. Vacancy. Vacancy. Vacancy. Things have meanings. Tables are gallant. Chairs are supportive. Embryos are guests. They develop into autonomous beings who will later start out in life doing the hand jive and then getting married with champagne dribbling from their chins. The eyes are the chaos of vision shaved by the smell of fever. The huge overflow of muslin in a frontier clothing store. The feeling of being subjective when it turns into a wild energy you can't understand. The enduring softness of a woman’s voice coming from a late-night bar near Alamogordo. I hear an element in the needle. The melody of water in the Rio Chama.  Unlike the casino. Some things don’t have meaning. What they do have is geometry. And bank loans. If something has a cost that’s not a meaning that’s a price. Meaning is expensive.

Whoever invented Hawaii was a genius. But whoever invented tourists must’ve been bored to the point of sadistic. The torpor is seismic that spends all day in a pharmacy. That happened to me once and I got wrapped up in comic books and stamping liquor bottles. Later in life I discovered joviality. This was mainly in California, long before half the population began living in tents under bridges while the other half watered acres of golf course. They say water seeks its own level but sometimes it doesn’t. Water does what it wants. And that’s how swimming was invented. Robert Mitchem and Marilyn Monroe arguing all the way down the river of no return.

Terrible how uncertain everything feels right now. I see icicles in Europe’s future. People freezing. Pubs closing. Children too cold and hungry to study. Horseshoes on doors mermaids in black ice. Oboe in the corner too cold to play. Adagio and rondo for glass harmonica crystalized in someone’s breath. Dead to the world. Wood is the new gold. Gold is gold. Still can’t eat it. Can’t burn it. Can’t cuddle up to it and expect a kiss. Can’t wear it. Well, no. That you can do.

A white octopus in black depths swims toward you, tentacles undulating in greeting. Hug the void it wants your love and understanding. The gunslinger will sleep in the barn tonight. We’ll group together in the living room and listen to Arvo Pärt. I make this in a forgiving presence. The past is on my heels. The future is full of zeal. Or is that madness glinting around the eyes? Heaven is all about mercy and peace. Hell is about military strategy. And weaponry and size.

I work in a language where I claim nothing as my own. Ownership is a strange idea. Being alive is hard enough without those kinds of complications. If you’ve ever been fired you know how that feels. Adam and Eve fleeing the garden. Though no job I ever had came close to paradise. It was mostly mops and buckets and unadulterated tedium. I hated the day I was born sings John Lee Hooker. My God what a thing to say. But the way Hooker sings it it’s not hate is that hate no it can’t be hate the song is too beautiful. Whoever it is playing piano the notes swirl around like a big ocean wave crashing into a colossal rock. That isn’t hate that’s exuberance. That’s transport. Get out of jail free card. Bass guitar like an ulcerated windmill eating a slice of wind. If you listen hard it will make you present to the voluptuousness of honey on a loaf of warm bread.

 

 

 

From Proust To Porn In Less Than A Minute

Late summer, early September is when these tiny gnats begin to appear everywhere, especially in our apartment. Not in great numbers, thankfully, but occasionally one, only one, will appear and – like a sudden burst of notes in a Liszt piano piece – nag at your attention. Like the one just a minute ago who appeared as I was reading a passage in Proust that takes place in a brothel and my irruptive little buddy decided to land there. This by itself didn’t bug me so much; it was when the gnat began a conversation with the madam and requested a fresh young flame skimmer dragonfly. The madam smiled and returned with the brightest, twinkliest, prettiest and – if I may dare say so – sexiest insect I’d ever seen. She had a flame red body and wing veins black as obsidian. And that’s how it happened. How I went from Proust to porn in less than a minute.  

Genitalia come with all sorts of drapery. You can expect anything from a snowball vulgarity to a tube of fungus glue. We’re in science fiction now. Up to our antennae in pure astonishment. We’re just axles open to darkness, aren’t we? The bohemian stage suggests the hive is stirring with configurations. Like when we went to see Bob Dylan and found Bob Denver instead. I felt my chin fizz with newborn whiskers. I stood there and twirled a bright new baton. It’s how mass got massive. Densities formed badminton nets and drove the physicists nuts. You want to know what dark matter is? I’ll tell you what dark matter is: it’s dark. The kind of dark that matters. I want the sugar arms of twilight to melt into your tea. You sip. I sip. We get up and walk around. We whistle. We grow fins on our arms. We swim and swim and swim. And this, too, matters.

There should be people to welcome us into life. Like they do in hotels. Extend welcome courtesies. Give us a key and a map of the city. Here's what to expect. Here's what to avoid. But that isn’t life that’s a lie. The reality is way bigger. The reality is the shock of cold water when you enter a beautiful room. A swampy sweating bickering ensues. And the fall of a shoe.

Swann’s Way concludes with a broad spectrum of emotion, a bouillabaisse of conflicting feeling, everything ranging from saffron to crab, joy to betrayal, squid to fennel, remorse to resignation. And that’s the way it is in life, eternal dismay and confusion with fugitive hues of exquisite pleasure, a bizarre commingling of soupy incongruities, so that just sitting quietly can sometimes feel like you’re groping around in the dark feeling things, chairs, walls, light switches, anything familiar by which you can orient yourself. Swann feels the acute remorse of a backfiring epiphany, the realization that he’s suffered absurdly for a woman who did not please him or enjoy any real rapport, and with whom he felt a deep abiding love. He makes another discovery: the ability to view things from an objective distance, as if he were the writer of the story in which he’s trapped, so that he’s simultaneously in the thick of things, but also outside looking in.

Caravaggio’s musician comes to mind, the dreamy look of the lute player. He looks like he just got some bad news. But it’s probably a musical problem he’s trying to work out. Because music makes life endurable. Like Nietzsche said: without music life would be a mistake. It’s all about walking to the end of the world. The closer it gets, the more radical it gets. A colossal C minor.

 

Writing As A Form Of Blackberry Bramble

I was George Harrison once on TV and then I became anonymous for the sheer joy of it. This is a true story. I have a hundred complexions and a look. This is what I do in private I eat melon and go backward in time. I use subterfuge and lust to interrogate letter carriers. And then I sit back and sigh with a quiet desperation. Who am I without you by my side? Guilt lingers in the mind as if it were looking for a place to sit down. Everything here is true. My head is a barn. I sit down and milk words. Their meanings squirt into buckets. The wood smells of ulterior predicates. The light is fat as an adjective. And the words wag their instructions. This occurs at the end of a dream, as the world emerges, and the inundations are a shock to the understanding.

What do I think of Deadwood, South Dakota? I think it’s possible. Yes. Possible. Possible as a popsicle is possible. And drips. Deadwood drips. When it rains Deadwood drips. This includes roses and elms. Rhododendrons must be performed with plumes and pearls and all the incisions must be housebroken. I’ve been alive a long time and I still have no answers. But I do have dirt. 

We transplanted the hydrangea today. I shoveled around it, trying not to destroy too many roots. I was quite amazed at how long and thick and tough some of the roots were. K brought some pruning sheers and managed to sever one of the bigger ones. I rocked it back and forth to see how loose it was and if there were a way to work my hands under it and lift it out. K went and got a snow shovel and together we managed to get it out. The process felt like surgery. The plant needed to be transplanted because a crew were coming soon to jackhammer the walkway and remove a root from the sewer pipe. E and R dug a hole and filled it with compost and rich new dirt and water. We let the plant down slowly into its new home. Everything had felt so deliberate in making its transition the least traumatic. Like performing a coronary artery bypass grafting.

Writing feels that way sometimes. Like transplanting a vague idea into the rich dark soil of language. The idea may seem vague but there is often a surprising quantity of roots attached. The idea was being nourished but hadn’t blossomed yet. So that when it’s enveloped in words it blossoms. Unless, of course, the writing fails to connect with the idea and so nourish it. For example, I have an idea that velocity and blood are involved and that the plumbing is crucial as is the process, which should be round like a goblet filled with Madeira, and ring like crystal. This wasn’t my original idea, but here it is, an idea the language coughed up when I was looking elsewhere, trying to spot my idea. Language is tricky that way. It will take your idea and inflate it into a python, or quadrangle. It all depends on the humidity, wind direction, and syntax.

When I was George Harrison I liked to play the ukulele. But then I lapsed into anonymity and let go of Mr. Harrison like a balloon. It takes a real George Harrison to be a real George Harrison. Who, incidentally, liked to garden. I don’t. What I like about the wilderness is that it takes care of itself. It finds balance and sticks with it. This is why I’ve chosen the wilderness for my education. Wilderness is a bodhisattva. Ferns? Bodhisattvas. Oaks? Definitely bodhisattvas. Blackberry bramble? Blackberry bramble is blackberry bramble only blackberry bramble can be blackberry bramble. This entanglement, this confusion, is brought to you by blackberry bramble. 

 

The Birthday Of The Moon

My eyes look backward into the encyclopedia of my head. It’s raining in Kauai. I feel ethical, like a jurisdiction of submarines. It’s a new way of feeling. There are no ceremonies or fists involved, no flags, no swords, no salutes. There is only a pool of stunningly clear water at the base of a statue and the geology of a loan set in a locket. Writing often feels like this, like a quorum, or an aquarium. This illustrates nothing, except the folklore of my anxieties. Picture a room full of bats and a man in a top hat juggling words on a long red tongue. There are no pirates in the placenta, but we do sometimes find pleading, cardboard perimeters and static. When the radar failed, we substituted rapture, and yo-yos. This is when the deer emerged from the forest. It was the afternoon of our evolution, when innocence isn’t so innocent and the air breathes freely. I don’t know what to say about the light, except that it smelled like spider lilies. Cause and effect aren’t as obvious as one might believe. Sometimes a door opens and a man walks out blazing with truth. Nobody knows what to say. What can you say? What can anybody say? The truth is a former sugar plantation. Just keep talking. Pretend not to notice. Those women are naked. That man removed his head. Rhinestones swing from a silver chest, and it’s the birthday of the moon.

Some Bitter Thing

Some bitter thing, some mean lean spleen, made me make a fist tonight. I owe nothing to science. I owe everything to science. The result is a soulful expansion of possibilities of feeling. The cat on my lap licking my forearm silly. Once I form an image in my head I sprinkle it with words. The keynote expresses contingency, but the setting calls for banisters. Physical weight is an admirable thing among rocks. It’s why I like to empty the dishwasher when everything is still warm. If you tell me something nice I’ll give you a bowl of rice. But if you tell me something mean I’ll give you a soggy saltine. Emotion becomes the sound of weirdness crystalized in words. The sputter of something nameless. I’ve got a feeling cupidity is just another muzzle. The way Nicolette Larson sways at the microphone says everything you need to know about the 70s.

These days, I feel utterly incompatible with the zeitgeist. It’s a relationship we find easiest to endure by ignoring one another. I eat my yogurt with strawberry jam and blueberries, read Marcel Proust in my underwear, and listen to the croaking of frogs on YouTube. The past is the only country where you can still tell stories: buffoons, saints, and motorcycle gangs. Whenever I write I try hiding the subject in false reassurances that I’m on the verge of saying something important, which I never do. Importance sucks the energy out of everything. I like coconuts. I’m temperamental. Coconuts are not. This is important. But really it’s not. It’s just miracles & milk.

I feel disheveled inside, like chlorophyl at midnight. People think I’m a tree but I’m not I’m not a tree I’m a rose. These are my thorns, these are my petals, and this is my tongue. I’m reaching across the universe to lick your cheek. Most guidebooks are monolingual and therefore acrid. What I need is a lump of coal and an ounce of slush. I’ve come a long way to say these things to you. I studied romantic poetry in Trieste. I learned to play the electric guitar in Memphis. And now I have nothing to say. My horse is everything. I named her chlorophyl and together, at night, we fly over the trees.

 

Here I Am Fumbling

Here I am fumbling among mental concepts of space. If we can’t bend reality, it’s up to us to do something other than submit to it. To give in to one's desire is to give in to the fear of what might happen if one assumed this "I," from which desire arises and pushes us. The walls are closing in. And moving back out. This means that the space is breathing. There are lapses in time that are out of my control. Space wraps itself around a world and breathes in its jasmine. Traveling requires filling the tank. The map is accurate. But the terrain is not. Energy sometimes disguises itself as mass. It does this to make us believe that life has a purpose and that our opinions matter. They don't. They shine a light in daylight, but don't light a thing at night when you need it.

The colors around here work hard. I'm not kidding let’s all cry out and call it a craze. Pink serves a beast of fire in a warehouse in Copenhagen. Red is the water talking to itself in a war. Black is the logic of the padlock. You need the eloquence of seaweed to open it. I can’t tell you how much I love the ceiling. I let my eyeballs do the walking, rather than my feet. It’s a bitter thing to be so opposite to the phenomenon we call a shadow. I envy the spiders that walk around up there. Pedestrians sip grenadine at the periphery. I don’t know what we’re looking for, or what we hope to find. The magnolia is not a stereotype. When it opens its mouth a universe spills out.

Sweet reason is a pin. A fish in a storm of flames. The tibia dwells in ignition.

We went out to look at the wildfire smoke. It was 7 p.m. and already dark as night. You could smell the smoke immediately. A dark haze filled the air. Capitol Hill was obscured by the haze. Lights twinkled on two buildings under construction downtown. There was something off-kilter about the lights, almost preternatural. They contributed to the irreality of it all. Sign of an empire in decay which – like the mycelium on a fallen log – can be quite beautiful. Odd paradox. The haunting beauty of smoke from the raging hell of all the fires consuming the world’s forests.

This was once a world of flowers. Roses and jasmine and heliotrope. Lilies and daisies and foxglove. You get the picture. Cocaine swallowed its weight in wealth and property. Hanging out was a study in circumspection. Circumference was a milk that only a breast could understand.

Today is the apotheosis of a species tormented by desire. Some have even worse torments: the hell of getting what you want. This is where all the answers to life rub up against chimeras of savage illusion. This is where a glass cat sits on a glass chair and the tea smells of burnt sugar and thought. This is where the fish think water is a mystery. Where floating works out in a cloud gym. Where mass clutches its pants. Where carrots wheel around in expandability. Where everything in a cave smacks of geometry equations and all the peacocks come with pedestrians hugging them. Where the luggage lugs itself and the vibrations are tinted with the texture of sloth. Where chrome is the story and iron is unironic. Where it happens. All of it. Even this.

 

 

A Crisis

A crisis is destroying the old patterns. Longitude and latitude are obsolete. The lattices are no longer arranged in Euclidean space. I’m not entirely about reform, but I don’t want to get too reckless. I don’t want any haar in my hair. Or flotsam. Keith Richards enters in an elegant frock coat. What’s he doing here? Where’s his guitar? Where’s your guitar, dude? Jesus, it’s happening all over again. Hear that? They’re bringing up the chains. Watch your step. This part of the dock is a bit rickety. The fire is out but the smell of soot persists. That smoke is caused by an excess of subjectivity. Don’t get too bogged down in details. Almost every sentence reads like a novel. Can you please hand me that mirror? You can find your fate in the dregs at the bottom of the cup. The heavy pounding of drums mean that a baby is being delivered. Otherwise, nothing much has changed. Seagulls, as always, circle the landfill. Look out now, I’m going to send this football spiraling. Check me when I get back. I need to see if my nose is still attached.

Because here is what is at stake: managing to find the words to reflect reality and to tell the truth without getting completely bogged down in it. Whether in writing, in philosophical practice or on the couch, what is seeing clearly, if not succeeding in giving form to what could not be articulated, in formulating the unnamable?

I hear the man upstairs chopping. He’s a chopper. This is a chapter of chopping. This is chopped. This is not. This is a not a knife. Now this, this is a knife: feel its edge sever the air.

Sometimes you need to tell the poem to get going, get out there and do something, save the world, inspire people, jail the billionaires, wobble some jelly, get drunk and sing like Bjork, or a cat, embalm time in a hymn to eternity, sprinkle commas on a distressed fly, let it pause, then fly away with a white goatee of aggression. Be the high green cheese of the century. Shoot lightning from the ass of desire. Be the bones of an eccentric book with an eccentric spine. Give Saturday a kick in the pants. Build a fire with the vertebrae of ancient tornadoes. But please. Get going.

I love nature because it’s careless with pomegranate and rolls around in the grass and spreads itself everywhere and for a brief time walked around in the skin of humans feeling the air and smelling the strain of the delirious and unhinged. Yes, we’re in the midst of a crisis. A crisis of understanding. A crisis of value. A crisis of biodiversity, of diversion, the backwash of honest laughter and sunsets at the Café Canvas. And this will turn out to be us in conversation. We were here for a brief time. Metaphors hung like Finland from the reality of one’s skin. There were images in the street for our songs. And one time I took hold of a big fat sentence and pulled it out of my mouth. That’s it, I said. I’m done. Can one be well in a dying world? Don’t know. But you you can love it all with eyes and bones until it’s all just a tibia in the leg of a crippled universe.