Bad Hair Day

Not all languages are composed of phonemes and grammar. There is also the rhetoric of rock and the syntax of roots and branches and leaves. No one edits the thunder. No one censors the sun. No one proofreads the wind. Everything is expressed in interrelation. Everything is a language. Chromosomes and nucleotides and phosphate molecules and cytoplasm and hydrogen bonds and magazine subscriptions. Sometimes there is a disturbance in the water and you wonder what’s down there what form of energy is agitating and convulsing and disturbing the water maybe it’s just an idea that hasn’t fully formed and is gestating wildly and rapidly so that it becomes a fully fleshed postulate. Who can tell? It’s hard to see clearly, hard to ferret out anything coherent when the metaphors turn umbilical & there are riots in Malta. Nothing ever made sense at the roller rink, except the floor, and even that sometimes seemed mootable, a little too smooth under the power moves. There’s something to be said about chaos. There are patterns within chaos that elude perception because they’re obscured by a predetermined system based on linear models. Fractals, for example. Or garage sales. Jokes. Arguments. Methane. Swirling colors on Jupiter. The word ‘gas’ comes from Dutch ‘gas,’ which comes from Greek ‘khaos,’ which means “empty space.” The Butterfly Effect, an underlying principle of chaos, is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system – a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input – can result in large differences in a later state. A metaphor for this phenomenon is the fluttering wings of a butterfly in Brazil creating a tornado in Texas. Imagine the effect a sponge squeezed in a Brooklyn apartment might have on a wedding in Barcelona, or an enzyme in the brain of a toad. A quarry of old wind making a white hour turn taffeta with undertones of Viennese waltz. Mountain brooks led to fulfill the ceremony of waterfalls flying upside down in the eyeball of a Martian. Nothing ever turns out the way anyone expected. That’s impossible. Because nothing is impossible. Muddy Waters at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in 1968 has only just reached the Ort clouds. If I get lucky and win my train fare home I believe I’ll go back down to Clarksdale little girl that’s where I belong. And this creates a ripple in the space-time continuum that comes quivering back from a D minor 1958 Fender Telecaster & a very bad hair day on top of my head.