Before The World

Before the world turned illiterate, and the country I live in went to war with everything, ostensibly to bring democracy, or liberate people, or some other narrative we all knew was false, but went along with it anyway, because those big overarching narratives feel better than the truth, & we all know how slippery the truth is, especially when it’s covered in oil, and blood,  and the ritual judgment of solemn faces give lies the gravitas of truth, and they do it in public, on TV, and that’s all anyone needs, a beefy simulacrum, like that word I’ve been hearing all my life, democracy, and freedom, those sacred shibboleths, ever since grade school, long before the era of mass shootings, when we rose to chant the pledge of allegiance, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That time. The time before iPhones. Before Androids. Before YouTube and American Idol and the books were donated to nursing homes or boxed and put in the garage. And Walter Cronkite looked into a camera to say the president was dead. And David Foster Wallace hung himself from a beam on his back porch in Claremont, California. And Julian Assange was put in a cell at Belmarsh awaiting extradition to the United States. And hundreds of thousands of bookstores have closed. And high school graduates entering college can’t identify the subject of a sentence. And banning books has become a national pastime. And Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. And a few keep going. Keep putting it out there. Though there is no “out there.” What is out there is still out there. But it’s a place of guns, not books.

Symbols Are Cymbals For The Drums Of War

Humans are funny about symbols. They go nuts for symbols. For flags and medals. Signs and banners. Chants and slogans. The dollar sign and swastika. Lingam and yin yang. Gorillas pound their chest. Homo sapiens pound the air with the rhetoric of war. Words can be squeezed, distorted, mishappen to produce the needed intoxicants, the meth and myth of exceptionalism. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams waxing rhapsodic for the Tomahawk missiles launched at Syria from the deck of U.S. Navy ships, exulting “I’m guided by the beauty of our missiles.”

Two years ago it was BLM signs everywhere taped to windows painted on walls and staked in the lawns of the affluent, all of it as vapid and bereft of true meaning as a bromide for selling pharmaceuticals on TV. Now it’s Ukraine flags bedecking the houses of the affluent in high tech west coast cities & elsewhere. Why the Ukraine? Where were the flags for Afghanistan when the U.S. abruptly pulled out leaving the people to the brutal retributions of jihadi extremists?

A photo of a smiling Mitch McConnell standing in front of a U.S. flag shaking hands with a solemn-faced Volodymyr Zelensky that appeared today in the New York Post gives you the full reality of the war in Ukraine and what it’s really about. In a word, profits. Humungous profits for arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Humongous profits for the oil companies. Profits for Exxon Mobil and Shell have bloated already by the billions. Countries like Estonia and Lithuania that have relied heavily on Russia for energy now look to the U.S. market. The pipeline that carries Russian oil to Germany has been a longtime lifeline.  That umbilical is about to be snipped. Meanwhile, oil exports from the U.S. have surged. 

The Ukrainians are a tough people I can see it in their eyes the hard bright glitter of endurance even when they’re crying there’s no surrender in it. I see them on the news huddled in basements no electricity or running water weariness and fear on their faces, bombs blasting within range.

But is this iron-like endurance this inexhaustible stamina unique to the Ukrainians? It is not. I see it in the eyes of the Afghan refugees on their slog through eastern Europe the stubborn determination with which they endure the indignities of being stateless homeless rootless I see it in the refugees from Syria gingerly negotiating barbed wire with slow steady resoluteness I see it in the determination of a woman in a black robe dragging a tub of water to her camp in northern Yemen or the Madonna-like tenderness and concern in the face of a mother gazing at her 18-month-old child suffering from acute malnutrition what is the difference what is it that separates them from the refugees of Ukraine? Who is worthy and who is unworthy? And why?

It amazes me the stamina and courage of Ukraine to take on a giant military power like Russia. I thought Russia would be in control within a month. Stomp them into abject submission. The Ukrainians are tough. It’s easy to see how they’ve captured the imagination and sympathy of the U.S. and Europe. It also helps that they’re white and closely resemble the populations of Europe.

The core of the Ukrainian miliary in the Donbass region are the Azov battalions. The Azov battalions are a far-right neo-Nazi group associated with white supremacists. They use the  Wolfsangel insignia used by divisions of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht during WWII, including the notorious 2^nd SS “Das Reich” Panzer Division. The symbol – also known as the Wolf’s Hook or Doppelhaken - was inspired by medieval European wolf traps that consisted of a Z-shaped metal hook hung by a chain from a crescent-shaped metal bar. Medieval pagans believed the symbol – originally a Viking rune - possessed magical powers and could ward off wolves. It became a symbol of German liberty and was adopted as an emblem in various 15^th century peasant revolts, and was used again in the 17^th century by protestant Bohemian and Austrian nobles fighting against the authoritarian measures imposed by the Holy Roman Empire.

Symbols are strange. They have a tenuous relation to the actual world and – unlike an indexical sign in which signifier and signified are in firm correspondence – the symbol is arbitrary and must be learned. Hegel – who believed war was a positive moment wherein the state asserts itself as an individual, establishing its rights and interests and is a universal duty -  pointed out that a symbol is “a certain viewing with an essence and meaning that is more or less corresponding to the essence and meaning of the object it refers to; on the other hand, when it comes to the sign and its nature, the essence and the meaning of viewing and the ones of the object it refers to have nothing in common.” This means they occupy a part of the mind that is susceptible to building constructs divorced from the world of rock and iron and are wholly cerebral, but with an emotional charge. There’s a level of disconnection that is disturbing in its magnitude. It borders psychosis. It’s a realm of chimeras, ideologies and religions, priests & ritual sacrifice.

People have begun calling the conflict in Ukraine a proxy war with Russia. Proxy means substitute – having the authority to act on another’s behalf - but what happens when the substitute is instituted as a reality and assumes lethal autonomy? When symbols clash and the drums of war are furiously pounded? When Putin or Biden feel backed into a corner and release the kraken from the chains of sound judgment and the missiles on both sides blast from their holes and rise to their trajectories to wreak final destruction on a world drunk with flags?

The final symbol will be the mushroom cloud rising above what was once a habitable planet.

 

 

My Brochure

Here’s my brochure, the brochure I intended long ago, hors d’oeuvres making migrations quaint and nuclear across an expanse of choice, mute indications of mystical obfuscation answering deep howls of basement statuary, mutterings refrigerated by pulsations of ice, something hollow and equal to a loop in a dead man’s pupil, all of it on fire, all of it coming down in ash as flames of information rise to the sky, and all of it handily informational, like all good brochures. Please, come visit my islands, their beautiful shores and guano, their tremendous declensions and unstoppable mastication. Feel private in yourself. Explore the weird geology of my teacup, upended billons of minutes ago by an index finger, and presented to you with open combustion and a maniacal smile. Bathe in a waterfall of pure invention while ice skates nibble on your feet. All this and more will be yours once you arrive, where nothing exists without a little imagination, and the airfare is hypothetical, & the rooms are adorned in a soapy elocution.

Sentences Are Thickets

Sentences are thickets. We walk through them gazing at the various gestations, things that arise in the mind and begin to float on its energy, its continuous spurts and sports and spores and speculations, the wildfires of the millennium providing background for a gazillion unmoored thoughts, and one’s thinking gets tangled at the end of the dock, which wasn’t there at first, but now it’s there, extending into the lake the way a line in a Robert Duncan poem might extend into romanticism, and sets the mind free, its scales a fleeting shimmer as it glides into deeper water, and finds jewels and skirmishes, twists of papyrus in an ancient library, and thrives among the symbols. The drift of conversation. Voices echoing in a hall of marble. Pistachios on the ground.

I ask the unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth in the language as I make it, writes Duncan. This morning I am dunked in Duncan. And find that each sentence that emerges from the power of words to draw more words to their side magnetically, so that an electromagnetic field becomes a self-propagating proposition proportional to the whimsy of a moment, and interacts with the charges and currents of invisible powers such as might exist in a supernal world, a world of metaphor, a world of pinafore and semaphore, and rushes out more words in a stand of reeds.

And so to read a work written by someone Duncan, Stein or Virginia Woolf, is to awaken their thought, pollinate their pistils, stigma, style and ovary, and the rapport flowers into meaning, into image and horse, the hiss of a snake the gloss of a rock. Whatever timber took seed at that time, the time of the writing, the occurrence of words on paper, or in air, or on air, the transmission turns incandescent and lights a room at the back of the mind, and a landscape at the window nibbles at the glass like the branch of a sumac. And the author appears at your table, a jester with bells, and sprinkles the tympanum with twists of syntax, tufts of thought on a stem of glass. 

 

The Seductions Of The Road

I’ve developed a fascination for RVs, don’t know why, it happened mysteriously, like a new feeling crawled into me and spread its wings and I began to muse upon the coziness implicit in these creations, a space small enough to pull behind you on the highway but with enough room for a bed and a table and refrigerator and even a bathroom with a toilet, sink and shower. A mobile home. Unattached to any property and the taxes and woes and fussy neighbors that go with that. You see a lot of RVs these days, most of them rundown, dilapidated and sad as a grey day in Ireland. For some the road isn't a choice. It's not a lark or retirement dream. It's a brutal reality. That said, I don't want to editorialize or sentimentalize the gypsy existence thrust on the unfortunate. My fantasy is a different kind of narrative making its highways in my brain. That's what makes it a fantasy. It's a strangely precarious flirtation with the unrooted and nomadic. What a wonderfully joyous feeling that must be to go places change the scenery change the reference points and people change the markets and main streets and stores and still have what feels very much like a home. Sweet. Could be this fascination has emerged from what are very stressful times, or age, getting on in years without any real future, things to strive for, ambitions to feed, careers to pursue, and so on. That world is no longer pertinent. What is relevant now is gently fading into the sunset, learning how to let go of things, not material things, but things like, I don’t know, hard to put into words the deeper feelings, those currents are tricky and strange, but those closer relations, they begin to fade because people die, and that community shrinks, and then you’re left feeling marooned in a time and a place that you cease to understand, the technology is dizzyingly complex, and the people don’t share quite the same values. That’s when being in movement begins its seductions. You turn into a tumbleweed. And it's the simpler pleasures in life, good food, a warm bed, a place to sit and read a book become paramount. It’s a nice fantasy to occupy. And realizable. Tangible as common sage. And so I shepherd those feelings and nurture them with floor plans and maps and the exodus of age.

  

The Kingly Ostrich Outboard Motor Society

Relax when you’re dealing with a petulant dot, advises the kingly ostrich outboard motor society. Whirls of water will not make you pacific. Some people are more doctrinaire and protozoan than others, and you don’t need to take a fingerprint for a personality. Look for other ways to express your inner plumbing. Learn to enjoy your cranium. Look for ways to express your credentials. For example, when you sit down to stew and your hair is made of glass, do you really want to learn Portuguese, or is this another passing fancy, like the time you crushed a grape and assumed the life of John Keats? Maybe you should grab another table and connect an idea to the top of your head. Good communication begins with a detour. Open your mind and let the sugar loose to reclaim a piece of the pagoda. Select some variables. Apply your face to a towel. Objects require our attention. The hammer needs to be used for its thingness to be noticed. Otherwise, everything just sits in the toolbox while the seagulls remind us of loneliness, and tripods & thatch.

I Dwell In A Wallow Kitchen

I dwell in a wallow kitchen. I blow blue to build green. My extension is a windy shawl. I’m hip to the food of ecstasy. Kindness is a hope lake.

Here we are. We are here. Here are we. Are we here? We are hair. We are heretic. We are hermetic. And a wad and a wade and a weather and a kick.

The spade is a shore rinse. The climate in shambles congratulates the ivy. A frantic glass chicken pecks at a peccadillo. Redemption fizzles hard. The lung window has no stomach for squalls. And is therefore pink.

I hide my support from wandering. A similar cosmos shatters into agenda. Polynesia favors rent over grandiosity. And so chrome rubs shoulders with paper, finds grace in remembrance, coconuts in trees.

My tie is a tamarind fleece knot, and a pilgrimage for my fingers. Foam suggests flambé, does it not? This is an ink toting craze, a fermentation of thought, a testament to writing technology in the guise of a rosy-faced lovebird. There’s a man on the ceiling. I think it might be me.

What can I tell you concerning the awesome middle of initiative, the mud bordering the foliage of a terrible need to stop beginning to begin and begins to begin beginning, and leads to mountains and imports and apprenticeships? Cats are complicated creatures. But so are swans and clocks and honeybees. The bolus of sweet nerves eating the sunset of a western sky saunters toward the jelly of existence. The antenna hammers the sky with ants. Seaweed flaunts the shores of Louisiana as a bearded chin slips through its clouds singing Hallelujah. And everyone dances.

I have my diving board pay and I’m feeling pleasantly immoderate, like the puzzling side of a whale. I tap my clothes for luck. The sequelae go off fetching lipstick. The king’s head is liquid. But the realm is unimpeachably unilateral, and blinks with disaster. I see redemption in sticks.

Thinking is outmaneuvered by art. Glass, constellated by rain, induces trickle. The diamond canaries of autumn overflow the crumpled ground of night. Panaceas ooze mutation. Adaptation becomes angular and tubed. The membrane of a thoughtless leg goes cotton. What is it, this vocabulary? Is it a voice, a vestibule, or a sit-com? It is this. It is voluble, yet silent. The olfactory of recuperation, which is cousin to the apple, and cannot be expressed in words. 

 

Signals On An Empty Street

Calorie fox storm. Dirty little radiation. Swan of aromatic redemption. Veil of cloud plaster. Butte in the middle of a city teeming with canaries and sparrows.

I have questions. I have outboards and outcomes. I have a bandage with a flair for thinking. And a season that equates chamomile with Bulgaria. Yet nothing seems to work. I know I’m being furtive. But the fleet needs a reason. And the skein needs a swagger.

Old scarlet collisions. A daily wavy plate of sauerkraut. Mesdemoiselles, are you here for the epithet, or the casket of raillery?

I know there are words available to say fairyland. But none of these are dumplings. When I nuzzle the meaning of death I want to smell the perfume of time.

What can a language carry and how long can it carry it? Straps may be required, and metal, gas stations may be stingy, it is in their nature to be geometric. A language can carry a lot if it’s a truck, or has members and professors, the loss of owls means there is ice on the prairie, be careful, and carry yourself with delight and unreasoning devotion.

I like to slip around in perceptions until I see a punt hit a white-collar yeast infection. I’m all embryo inside. Look into my eyes. You’ll see a beacon of maladjustment advocate vacuity.

Power concedes nothing without a delicatessen. Pistachios signify authority. Cold cuts curtsy to the unconscious. Can I intrude here a minute to recommend the bologna? Time goes by so slowly. We need one another’s love. For example, the Falcon 9 rocket from Space X uses around 902,793 lbs. of cognac from the Fins Bois region north of Bordeaux.

Pillows of snow complete the structure. There is talk of backwater maneuvers among sticks of musk and lavender. Dazzling ants from an unknown source. The din of old rice as a breeze stumbles by on stilts. Nearby, a vertebral amalgamation of eyes gaze at a conflagration of words in a plump dictionary of the Martian language. And the world grows still for a second.

I’m tired of war. Aren’t you? The wind is forged in a valley of shovels. Onion admonitions rinse the foundry. There is thunder coming from the gymnasium. A similar tomahawk was found in a package of gerunds. One of them was discovered swimming across a description of glass.

The cry belongs to providence. We hear it in our sleep. We hear it in our beer. It sounds like frosting on a sweater. Fireflies in a jar. Olives on a branch. Signals on an empty street.

 

Mirrors

Mirrors are tricky. In Japan, they were considered potent symbols of power, revered as sacred objects representing the gods, with intricate designs on the back displaying auspicious motifs like the crane. An uncovered mirror was considered bad luck. The mirrors I have the most trouble with are the ones on our car. The rearview mirror especially. Objects always look larger. So when I park the car and it looks like my rear is about to collide with the back of the building, I discover that the car is still four feet distant from the wall. This makes parallel parking truly perilous and awkward. Like the time I backed with extreme slowness and touched – touched – the front end of the Tesla behind me the woman sitting behind the wheel got out with her smartphone to take a picture of the anticipated damage. There was no damage. “I didn’t hit you,” I insisted. “Yes, you did,” she insisted. Do you see what I mean? Mirrors are up to no good.

In Cocteau’s Orpheus, the mirror is a gateway to the underworld. Orpheus is able to enter the mirror and pass through to the underworld by the power of magic invested in a pair of rubber gloves. They look like dishwashing gloves, though perhaps a bit shinier. He doesn’t struggle to get them on. They nearly leap onto his hands, as though they were alive. Orpheus hesitates, then – encouraged by Heurtebise, chauffeur to Death, played with elegant charm by Maria Casares – he puts his hands forward and enters the mirror whose surface shimmers like water. I’ve known for a long time that dishwashing gloves had magical powers. My first real job, age 15, was as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. This was my baptism to poetry. As soon as I got those gloves on, nothing could stop me. I could go anywhere. The underworld became a second home.

One of the most charged scenes in Shakespeare’s Richard II is when the newly dethroned King Richard is brought before Bolingbrook to humiliatingly relinquish the crown and read a chronicle of his malefactions. He has been stripped of his identity. He asks for a mirror. A mirror is brought forth. Richard gazes into it and asks “was this the face that every day under his household roof did keep then thousand men? Was this the face that, like the sun, did make beholders wink? Was this the face that faced so many follies, and was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke? A Brittle glory shineth in this face: as brittle as the glory is the face,” and smashes the mirror on the floor, “cracked in a hundred shivers.” I know that feeling. It’s hard, like glass, and goes nowhere. It stays fixed to the wall, while life occurs elsewhere, in a mirror of words.

Crossing paths with an old friend or friend whom one has not seen for ages means proceeding on both sides to an operation of facial recognition like those witnesses who must identify, behind one-way glass, the perpetrator of an attack. This is fate, said Hegel: oneself in the form of another. So writes French philosopher Pascal Bruckner of this peculiar form of mirroring one another. Aging is such a subtle, incremental process occurring over a period of years that we get a shock of recognition when such an event occurs. Why is it I don’t see this in a mirror? I can in a photograph. Years ago, a woman was quitting the mailroom in which I worked. She went around taking everyone’s photograph, ostensibly for sentimental reasons. When the photos were developed (this precedes the Age of the Smartphone), they were laid out on a table. I looked everywhere for my picture and couldn’t find it. Everyone insisted I was there. I kept looking. And then I saw it: that old guy sorting letters was me. How did I not see this in the mirror? Is glass more benign than silver bromide? This is what a mirror does: it flips the face into a perspective more flattering to our acknowledged progress through the ravages of time. Also, the lens can distort certain features, à la Pablo Picasso. And because cameras don’t show the 3-D version of you, you get the ruin of the face, not the stunned youth smiling out of the rubble.

Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror. Wrote Jack Spicer. So go. Stand there a moment. Take a look at yourself. The mirror does the rest. Here you are, my friend. The reflection of you. You in reflection. I have made a weather vane of your face, says the mirror. One day is gloomy and introspective, the next day there’s a dense fog and an occluded front crashing around in the head, a wind is rustling in the ivy and your eyebrows are raining. Lightning shoots from your eyes and cracks the glass. All because of a pimple. But that’s ok. The second law of reflection states that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Every incident has an angle. Lawyers are adept at this. A good lawyer studies a case from all angles. Find an angle, find an angel. Find an angel, find a face.  

 

Dialectics Licking Your Ears

Do fish ever get seasick? Maybe in a whirlpool. Round and round and round and round. Dizzying. Reminds of the Seattle World’s Fair, 1962, that ride called a rotor, big cylinder you got in and when it spun the floor went away and you were stuck to the wall. I exited with an intense case of nausea. Didn’t puke, though, thankfully. Wonder if anyone did. How does Dramamine work? Vaguely recall it’s an antihistamine. Reduces the effects of histamine in the body. And what is it histamine does? Or is it do? What does histamine do? Don’t have a clue. Something to do with the dilation of blood vessels. I’ll bet astronauts take a ton of Dramamine. And you’ve got to wonder what that’s like, floating for six months. Doing what? At no point in my life did it occur to me to become an astronaut. Why is that? Never had the urge to be a cop, not until I got holder. People on the bicycle lane at Westlake whizzing by on ebikes at 40 mph make me nervous. How strange that must be to have the power to tell people not to do something. Because why? Because they might harm themselves, and others. Or people that drop their pants and shit in public. Never used to see that. Common now. Something wicked this way comes. Civilization is unraveling. Good time to be an astronaut. Float up there looking down at that big blue and white marbled ball with its swirly hurricane clouds and crazy land formations. Nobody, far as I know, has had sex in space. Sex in weightless conditions. How does that work? Hard to do anything without resistance. Traction. I remember running in sand. Effortful. And years ago the white sand of Carmel, California, same year all that great music appeared, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dylan, Donovan, Moby Grape. Remembering those sounds and smells and afternoons and the entire gestalt of a generation the people and circumstances characterizing that time. It’s like having a travel agency in your head. Memories are such strange things. Images and feelings from the past dredged by contemplation into reflective ponds of eerie clarity. Like that pond I saw up in the Cascades some years ago. A long hike in early summer. I stood there riveted. The clarity was stunning. Tangle of branches in silt. Which is now a memory. A stunning lucidity in my mind. That serves no purpose. It’s just there. There are a lot of other memories in which I play around with dialogue. Things I could’ve said. Things I shouldn’t have said. Things I said awkwardly. Wrong decisions. Right decisions. It gets to be a mess after a while. A capharnaum. What a word. An attic of the head. Stacks of National Geographic. Old vinyl records for which no phonograph exists to play them. The sounds asleep in the grooves. Everything YouTube now. iTunes. People cocooned in music. Siloed in private listening. Even on planes, right next to people. Not the shared experience it once was. Maybe in clubs. Bars. Haven’t stepped into that culture in years. Those booths smelling of beer. Big casks. Big smiles. Ebullience of foam. Bubbles rising. Nice thick fluted glass in the hand. Glow of a jukebox. Juke. A Gullah word, meaning wicked, disorderly. A box of disorder. Which shines & glows. Punch a button and the record comes down, needle goes in, song comes out. Dialectics licking your ears.