Like A Rolling Stone 59 Years Later

 

Cold today we passed someone curled up against the side of the QFC on Mercer under two black umbrellas I’m still not used to seeing people in tents around the city it still shocks four years ago a young woman froze in a tent in February in a small park a few feet away from homes worth millions

9:21 p.m. the bathroom light goes on I’m on the bed in the bedroom with a laptop on my lap tonight’s trending searches on Google zombie deer disease rogue wave norwegian cruise ship gs pay scales covid 18 coronavirus houthi rebels red sea alex batty missing

59 years later Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone still excites it’s weird the song has such a triumphant sound but it’s referring to tragic circumstances back then homelessness had a very odd chic attached to it young people from good homes joyfully throwing themselves into vagabondage it was a little insane but everyone also knew deep down they had places to go if the road got too tedious or frightening or weird Like A Rolling Stone served as a very robust and peculiar anthem for that level of heedlessness but if you get past the music and listen closely to the words something very different is occurring to the protagonist of the song nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street and now you're gonna have to get used to it that’s fucking scary because everyone gets a close look at it now on their way to work or the grocery store and it’s not pretty and it’s certainly not chic

Susan Sontag on Antonin Artaud whenever behavior becomes sufficiently individual it will become objectively anti-social and will seem to other people mad all human societies agree on this point they differ only on how the standard of madness is applied and on who are protected or partly exempted for reasons of economic social sexual or cultural privilege from the penalty of imprisonment meted out to those whose basic anti-social act consists in not making sense

We live in two parallel worlds now the luxurious privileges of the elites and the dog-eat-dog brutalities of the working class or what’s left of it

Poetry has returned to the universities the only place where it continues to receive high status and serious attention but the bebop spontaneities of the jackhammer streets have been elided by the elliptical refinements of a language groomed with symposiums and discourse

The aristocrats of academia ain’t got nothin’ on me I live in a conch shell at the bottom of the sea smoking opium on a red velvet couch and watching reruns of Taxi one day I hope to shake off all ambition all pretense and pomp and rise to the surface long enough to take a course in Taylor Swift at Harvard

7:27 p.m. Christmas Eve I drift off asleep in my chair reading Proust with my new suspenders we had roast beef cooked in a slow-cooker all day mashed potatoes and gravy and watched the final episode of Tulsa King starring a 76 year old Sylvester Stallone a show in which reality is stretched so thin that whatever occasional bits of concreteness behind the silliness and outrageous contradictions of the plot appear seem almost borrowed from an actual Tulsa the city Ron Padgett Joe Brainard and Ted Berrigan once called home a hand on a steering wheel entanglements of fear and loyalty now and then some really good dialogue pissing contests among Mafia capos cowboy ex-cons motorcycle gang led by a crazy Irish psychopath bullets breaking bottles in a bar not your average Christmas movie but it filled the eyes and ears with moving images while we filled our mouths with luscious morsels of beef marinated in time and balsamic vinegar 

Arable Parables

 

There was a pageant of salmon at the McFadden Hotel Matisse showed us that there’s greatness in struggle I feel Matisse in my feet I go around hungry for the fulfillment of inexplicable desires I enjoy the immodesty of rain and the hilarity of snow I feel incidental to a soulful drama like that scene where King Kong is blinded and enraged by paparazzi and breaks free of his chains on the New York stage and goes on a wild spree scaling buildings and flirting with women is this really a good time to talk about refining the senses the way that a reader’s eyes glean the words and make of them what they will was upsetting to Plato who saw in this a danger inimical to the homogeneous structure of society since words are only substitutes for a reality that is neither actual or present and so may be easily manipulated to create illusory phenomena  

Susan Sontag on Artaud writing is conceived of as unleashing an unpredictable flow of searing energy

I’m guessing flippancy doesn’t go over well in prison I like to engage in sketchy activities fiction assembles a reflection and calls it a forehead poetry being first and foremost a form of wrapper a way of framing and preserving phenomena in phonemic cellophane though it could also be argued poetry is a vehicle for pursuing the collisions and collusions of the intellect moon river moving silently through the night I can hear you screaming to get out music is nothing if not universal it can lift us from our predicaments with the grace of angels and the force of a 200 hp Yamaha

I dwell in hypothesis like a trombone think of this as a cylinder that will push any problem wherever you want that problem to go if I’m being reckless against demand it’s because I’m infrared I can iron steam with mutton and button steam in iron I’m modern as licorice and ancient as yeast the Woke doing polka in a graveyard of dead languages

There was once a forest guide with a cold hard face under the glitter of a postmodernist Stetson who parachuted into the Black Forest and was never seen or heard from again

This is what Lautréamont calls mechanically constructing the brain of a soporific tale heavy duty meringue commitment is a technicolor triangle you’ll find chatter and oboes at the end of your arm have you ever had a bear stare at you screaming is worthless detachment has a latch that can separate colors it is our resistance against lyric intensity this isn’t Theodore Roethke this is a dense fine-grained heteropolyhedral paroxysm of sensory membranes evangelistic earrings and intuitions of infinity draped in supernatural grammar

The raccoons would appear at night and put their tiny hands on the window and stare at me at my desk trying to write like Robert Creeley brutal concisions of emotional rubber interchange is essentially a parody of sunlight I never lost my fascination with Cyndi Lauper there are no indignities attached to singing singing has stochastic properties the horizon is a horizon of words beyond which there are still more words

The book exists so that we may insert ourselves into the body of a monumental object a lot of things seem to be instinctual like that moment when staring at a sheet of paper becomes a slide into a ghostly panorama of backpocket silver and Viennese fountains and the first thing that comes to mind is to bite into the void and tear off a big piece of nihilism

Good readers pollinate bad readers look for content space is what a forehead does in front of a brain consider this lobster for a moment no it is not a real lobster a real lobster would flick its antennae and dance around the sentence like Fred Astaire this lobster has a mind of orchids and remains below the liniment kissing the skin

The bartender had a face like the cover of a sci-fi paperback the myth of its existence circulating the used bookstores from here to Timbuktu exploded my fingernails as they typed away at the giant mode incomprehension employed to pass from judgment to accepting the reality of lacquer and the generous new look of gnosis with tits to match

I can give you a ride to Tulsa I’m heading toward disaster beauty seems so tenuous these days England broods in my writing there are other dimensions of being that elude me what allegory beyond eggnog exhibits bamboo I climbed in through the bathroom window with huge bulging eyes and a sweet melody on my lips what makes Euclid spatial are bananas and gas but go ahead insinuate insects if you must clench your fist in amber leaning forward like a resistance it isn’t scientific to rinse grisaille with punctuation if you can imagine bracken you can imagine bracken breaking into abstractions whose quality of light streams through the rosary window dropping photos of Billy the Kid playing croquet by a schoolhouse

What in this world keeps us from falling apart 30 gallons of gorilla glue and a big rubber band cod is a species of God but so is the eternity dangling at the end of your dock consider the variables castigate the unbearable I remember the night I stood in the bar looking up at a TV in which Ricky Lee Jones was singing and downed a shot of Wild Turkey a few days later the universe fell on my head and I had to get 20 stitches and a clothes iron all I know is that when I got to the end of the street I felt exposed as Picasso painting in his underwear and the sun was coming up and together with the mountains I drew my own conclusions concerning muskrats 

 

 

 

What It Means To Be Bohemian

 

I must learn the art of the broadsword I had everything I needed to make a break for the hills a waterfall splashes the things I put off to the side a man can only do so much ferns always look ancient the growl of a big cat interrupts the soughing of the wind in the pines

I thought about growing a mustache deranged and frenetic like a paragraph of stars after going down the Wenatchee River in early April I rode an appaloosa named Apache in the Pacific surf I learned to juggle in Snohomish there’s not much you can do to save a language from decaying Rimbaud kept pace with the camel on the sandy soil of the Guban desert there at your elbow stands the long cool drink

When you put words together they begin to do things in the mind this tender ache which is all over you like a voluptuous feeling no but seriously what did I achieve during all these years before the troopers who were busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them you hope for the truth when talking to a mechanic but it’s a very thin and whispery hope the camel is for background as I wait for a vision the exquisite diminuendo of consciousness in good clean linen

It's complicated to find annoyance in a meeting I always like to imagine what people on the other side of the horizon might be doing dousing a candle feeding a cat starting an engine the last time I saw optimism I must’ve been in my early 20s when that happens you go somewhere else and hope for something better cravings associated with deep satisfactions that never follow should teach you something about compression sleeves for ankle support one’s whole sensuous being is immersed in portulaca as night falls here dawn rises on the other side of the equation soap and dizziness and pain are all part of the path to glory

Tools are fun chameleons are a little less fun but amusing in their own way sensations during fever are barely distinguishable from mockery I feel like I’m administering CPR to the English language infinity can’t be comprehended with human intelligence I bang on expandibility much to the annoyance of everyone in old age cynicism is as routine as cataracts and rheumatism spring is a time very far from here

Swimming makes me feel parenthetical I remember those calendars that used to hang in every car repair garage in America a young busty woman in a big straw hat and red bikini at the beach I can smell mud all the way to the roof it was the era of suitcases and whispers neurons are expressed in sparkling eyes words come later if they come at all I tried ordering a hamburger and couldn’t stop laughing at the word hamburger somebody else had to order it for me the world had three and a half billion people in it not to mention swim meets universities rock stars amoebas diseases slides emergencies and prizefights

In the winter of 1966 I traveled east to North Dakota all the men on the train wore thick winter coats and astrakhan hats fifty-eight years later I hear the breath of a woman doing yoga the room grew quiet when Proust entered the room no one expected the supernatural could do such things jump around in a frenzy while Gimme Shelter floods the room with urgency sex drugs and rock ‘n roll one cannot pray insincerely in candlelight things remain close to a window after an earthquake no reason no reason at all for any of this it just happened

Before everything on the planet fell prey to technofeudalism we had opinions we could share in private and now there are piles of towels on the old straw chair and apps and scooters and streaming services the cross is a symbol of hope in Vaticans of dope the feeling of warm ocean air passing over your skin in silken fluency there are no conceptions everything exists life in the foundry was hot and noisy as the language shrinks the minds that feed on its shores shrink with it the sound of a bullet ricocheting off of a rock the almanac is ash this is the language I use for making a skeleton the castle of Lindisfarne comes to mind the Vikings ripped jewels from the books they could not read I remember a puppeteer in downtown Seattle a tall lanky guy he had a Jimi Hendrix marionette that played guitar I don’t see that kind of flexibility in the stars but I do see Being

Denture stomatitis is characterized as inflammation and erythema of the oral mucosal areas the denture covered I put it in a small jar with a lozenge of Efferdent Deadwood is quiet in the morning cowboys sitting around a fire discussing Spinoza I plead with the air to understand the wind as soon as you pushed pass the big revolving door at Macy’s you would be seduced by dozens of fragrances the air passing through itself creating an embassy between two worlds I wish I could demonstrate what it means to be bohemian some people are open to vision others struggle to find kindness no one likes to be morose the one question you don’t want to ask yourself is why am I doing this what’s the point Arthur Rimbaud holds the elevator door open for me as I rush to get in

  

 

 

Tattered Chair

Consciousness is not caused by sugar. Consciousness is caused by a static electric charge. And two pounds of flour. Believe me. I’m just as anxious as you are to get out of here. It’s sad to see a culture die. Keep the windows closed. Being is everywhere. Would you like anything? A glass of water? You’ve come this far. For which I am thankful. This makes all my emotions happy. Palm fronds tremble in the breeze. I like belonging to the parable of an experience. The green heat of a chameleon, for example, has the power to inseminate any situation with the sugary claws of pliancy. Pondering anything, really, makes it less real, makes it richer, makes it teeter and twirl in greenery, makes it uniquely beautiful in ways that elude categorization. Dark conflagrations salt themselves and flee. The world is so different from what it used to be. It used to be earthy and musk and now it’s as cold and excluding as diamonds. I go from door to door selling pendulums. Invisible pendulums. That swing from nowhere to nowhere, emphasizing the futility of it all, and the ironic pragmatism of that, of being fatalistic, and how optimistic it is to think of non-existence, which is how I dressed before I got here, zipped in the immediacy of the moment. Deficiency strains what squirms in the Rembrandt brown, and gives us a feeling of soft black artless locution. Here, open this: an anthology of the light swarming with hungry ganglions. It reminds me of dirt. Gardeners fulminating over a philodendron in Madrid. Affluence is a mixed religion. Some worship gristle, others worship lace. Chaos is not the disaster. Time is the disaster. The language of nerves leads to the well-being of yesterday. The current moment is raw. It's a perfect day for poetry. I’m in a foggy state leaning over an abyss of darkness. It’s something I’ve always been good at doing, though considerably harder to turn a profit with it, or apply for a job in the aeronautics market. I feel the cosmos in my shoulder, a living embassy of bone and cartilage. If you’d like a ride to the end of this sentence, I’m here for you, rummaging around in an agate, looking for wasted time. I know what I’m doing. I used to write articles for the daily cynical. I couldn’t find a single thing to believe in, except holidays. I love holidays. They’re always so rubber. I blow a profligate era of aesthetic dilemma across a sheet of paper so that it’ll pop up in somebody’s eyes one day. It is not a dignified profession. Not like plumbing, or carpentry. But I can sing rhapsodies to the chestnut king, and convulse on the floor like a hammer. Each word is a nail. Each sentence a crane lifting the names of things. The meaning of the clock is purely cosmetic. There’s no time to tell here. Only a tattered chair.

Memorandum Of Understanding

What is unregulated capitalism up to today? Never mind. I’d rather not know. Let’s talk about something else. Last night, the impact of a meteor ignited everything in the city except the harbor. It was extraordinarily beautiful. it sometimes happens that disaster and various other cataclysmic events are quite beautiful. There seem to be a lot of catastrophes lately. Wildfires, wars, gargantuan chunks of ice breaking off of Antarctica, rivers drying up, houses cracking, whales and sharks capsizing pleasure craft. We live in apocryphal times. This is a boon for language, which is always hungry for crises. Anything to break the monotony of sequence. It’s clean below the problem but none of the hats fit. We need new formulas for everything. Tear the van apart from top to bottom: we are my own construction. It began when I was four, and president of the floor. I saw a cake rock back and forth and assumed it had consciousness smeared all over it. It didn’t. It was just frosting. Consciousness is not caused by sugar. Consciousness is caused by a static electric charge. And two pounds of flour. Believe me. I’m just as anxious as you are to get out of here. I know what it’ll take to get us to Hypatia, about 101.2 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. But I don’t know what will be required of us when we arrive. Perhaps nothing. We’ll get around. Pay attention to the local vibe. I have a motor of plywood and this is my zoom. The next time you see me I’ll be across the room. It’s sad to see a culture die. Keep the windows closed. We’re the blossoms it’s incongruous to kiss. Life’s continuous bobble approves the beat of the unprecedented. We move forward. We find time to think. And paint. And talk. And raise philodendrons. I thirst to think is as good as to say try a car next time you feel like a praline. I was raised by a paradigm and lived in a brain. When I arrived at the age of mutual consent I braced for the crash. In the end, all my misperceptions had been perforated. I found wisdom among the amphibians. Or sometimes I’ll imagine I’m in a hotel room. Fresh white towels. Escritoire. Queen-size innerspring mattress. The puddle I left in the bathroom reflects a kinetic sculpture of bicycle wheels, phonemes, trampolines, bus tokens, cloudbursts, coil inductors and homographs wandering around in circles. I believe it was some form of towel rack. Shower curtains have always been a problem for me. As well as faucets, forceps, four-way stops and mezzanines. The wallpaper is pure Dada, and consists of fornicating airport runways imposed on a theme of banjos. It happens that our life beats inside, and when we see such things as devotion, it makes us go sanguine. All else is, by comparison, an ill-fitted window. A torn bag hangs from my elbow. It’s true. I like throwing distortions at the wall. I keep hoping a door will open. And when it does, I’ll open it & enter the journey of words it brings.

The Human Condition

What is the human condition? Four features of our condition: our awareness of our own awareness; human existence precedes its essence; the occasional use of semicolons to make a point and the deep-seated sense of alienation that follows from all this. Here it comes: the Columbia River Gorge. It was there all the time. It just required our assent. Our assent to descend. Our assent to ascend. Our ascent to assent. By which we ascertain multiple layers of rock. And this is another condition: the rate at which the car moves with a bad ignition coil. This will need some looking into. Continual searching is all part of the human experience. The search for lost reading glasses (which one is wearing). The search for a charming melody. The search for oil. The search to get away from oil. Or just plain oil. It’s a diphthong, after all, which is the equivalent of being good at ping pong. Diphthongs are fluid, and towns and clouds and deer. The search for love and understanding. Understanding the search for love. Loving the understanding that comes with sharing a bed. The softness in any alphabet based on a cosmology of linen. It was only real when seen from a distance; up close, it resembled pancakes. If you see a compass swollen with syntax please write to William Wordsworth, Romantic Movement, my head. Area code E = mc². Name one compelling thing that doesn’t require an allegory to go with it. Everything in life gives us something to decipher, be it a coffeehouse or an airport. You ask: what is kinetic energy? It's a drive in the country. It coordinates the private walk we do at night when the moon is full and our glass is empty. We freely grant what our requirements emit. And this is how energy becomes an eager participant in our lives, creating matter when nothing matters, and holes where they do. My taste for flying is coming. I can feel it in my toes. But mostly in my imagination. I have a pact with gravity: don’t bother me when I’m sleeping. It invites a bone which brings forth a simulacrum. When this happens, example sees what we beg from the beyond. Swans glide into thick mist. Alchemy greets the rise of my crisis. Everything feels Victorian, with a touch of ice hockey. I think the word is anachronistic. Or is it pantheistic? You decide. I’m done with decisions. From now it’s all about indecisions. Incisions. And peyote visions. Do you understand what I’m saying? Me neither. It appears, so it would seem, that between the two of us, we’ve aroused a different language, a flow of bark and French ochre. I feel an apotheosis on the way. And a new paradigm. And a new sign. To say nothing of puzzles, which will be worked out with predicates, and dragged across the river, without getting wet.

 

The Vagaries Of Oysters

We run willow to my friendly heckle. Below the ultramarine wheels behind the throat is a laugh. It’s gestating. Attach yourself to a fasten batch before the zipper cracks a slide open. Pigeonhole the pimp pimple. I want to tell you something. Writing is a bundle of imponderable brocade for my fingers to do. Often, while doing automobile explorations, writers choose paragraphs to do the harder sensations. I use contraptions if I need to change the epilogue. Formulas, foreknowledge and fountains. Sensations persuade us to go on tours. As I am I am as a flap of mohair. I will go anywhere. Even Reno. While the candy stings, our touch will be supernatural. Open your eyes. Look around. One step is busy while the other one squirts. A limousine will greet you at the next artery. My nebula pulls on it subversively and creates espresso. Feels like my soul has turned into steam. So chew right, we modified a violin. Cod over what hope bungles. Cod on what hope wastes. Good cod. I just saw Milwaukee. It was so completely charming I couldn’t stop smiling. And now I go around clinging affectionately to bicycles. Abstractions waxed our rumbling summer. Later, when no one is looking, in slips the inspirations that we wrinkle. The within lifts our deliverance. A voyage without a phonograph like butter without jam. So I stayed home. And lied down on the bed. And voyaged the ceiling. I saw a big red truck. The motor made a noise by smelling its own velocity. And lowered itself on a thin silk thread. Just to say hello. Then go back up. Twist the old contrasts in a Spanish hotel. I’m growing myself as I hold it together with a woman. There are lyrics to manage the dashboard of my private accent. Waste nothing. Except waste. However spectral my bang, they expand it toward the end. Gasoline this mingle cake to our benefit. Some wobble will be needed to achieve climax. My mind is bouncing around the room. It’s out of control. It could use a theorem. Or the harsh realities of winter, which are out there now, howling. It’s the junkyard grammar that forces us forward, and causes iron to brood. Grope the dance we bruise with our museums. The lobster tugs on my impenetrable gloom and makes an art out of it. And this is where the tuna comes in. My boat is out broken on the shoal this morning. The interior is insinuating, but generous in its conceits. The landscape is crucial to a decision involving a sudden clarity. But it’s even more important to pay attention to the weather, the shape of the hull, and the vagaries of oysters.

And This Is Why The Poem Must Come

 According to Empedocles, there’s a distance infinitely removed from the day, which is also what is most intimate to us, more interior than any interiority.

The poem is what opens, what in opening is a call for everything else to open, to enlighten itself, to come to light.

You have to know where to look. It could be in a bin of lettuce. Or a pharmacy in Pocatello, Idaho. A sex worker washing windows on a brothel out on the alkali desert 30 miles east of Sparks. A timber king sitting down to a plate of juicy roast beef. Who suddenly takes a dive into the mashed potatoes. Death by myocardial infarction.

You never know just where or how it’s going to happen.

I’m not sure what anything is anymore.

I never really got into religion much. But I do believe in ghosts. Not like the one in Hamlet. More like qualia that stir the blood. Churn of starlings over barren earth. That urge to call a friend or brother or sister that’s been dead for years. That hummingbird hovering inches from your face. That horse on the other side of the mirror. That monkey wrapped around your leg at Angkor Wat. That elusive haiku waiting to be discovered among the ferns in a stand of redwood.

Think of it as a can of soup. You’ll need a can opener. And to escape the prison imposed on you in childhood.

When I was 13, I became obsessed with fighter jets. I remember staring at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It was the power, the roar of jets. But I was slow at math. And captivated by music. Green Sleeves. Green Onions. He’s A Rebel. Twist and Shout. The One Who Really Loves You. Blowin’ in the Wind.

The quality of the highway surface on I-90 worsens markedly once you leave Ellensburg and begin to rise into the Cascades.

Why is that? Why are the highways to the east of the Cascades better maintained than the highways to the west?

We stopped for gas in Moses Lake and headed into the night.

The surrounding country was desolate, flat, and lonely.

I saw Mars to the east.

A glowing red dot as desolate as the highway we were driving on.

I enjoy following the data coming into Nasa from the Mars Rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. The desolation is so stark, so immaculate in its austerity, it’s spellbinding. It looks familiar and strange at the same time. Reddish dust with the character of iron under a pink sky with a shrunken sun gives the mind a craving for life. The drama is quiet. It’s a funny drama. This is a place of giant soliloquies uttered by a phantom life that may once have existed. Rocks resembling faces and bones mock the familiar comforts of a carpet and chair. How did this happen? These fingers typing these words. These words. These feelings. These longings. Propinquity and protein. Kinfolk and kneecaps. Illusions and disillusions. Primal mutterings. Dogs wagging tails. Orioles on a prairie. Clean bedsheets. Egyptian mummies. Nonsense and noodles. Gothic architecture. Tearful goodbyes to the dying.

The sound of our sun is an eerie howl.

The sound of the universe is a low-pitched hum. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ.

But there are no molecules to carry the sound. “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Alien.  Ridley Scott.

Man in a Chevy Silverado doing 90. Hard, determined look. Takes the exit to Ritzville.

A dead coyote at the side of the road.

There comes a point where reality is so hard, so brutal, so unforgiving, so absurdly merciless, it makes you want to laugh.

This feeling of an es tagt, of "the day is breaking," which makes possible - as much of the night as the day - the chaos as well as the gods, this font of divine light that radiates through all of Hölderlin's work, drawing it up with light, pure light, the allure of the pure ray, and because of this the words are suffused with a light beyond the light, which is clarity itself, and all clarity.

For the jubilation of the Universe always tends to distance itself from the earth and leave it stripped; if humans don't hold it back.

…that is to say the poet, calls it so as not to get lost in the expansive infinity that it derives from its origins: as it is, it is indeed a limitless totality and that must be, but it must also be that "without limits" becomes its limit, is integrated into the totality, and this is why the poem must come.

               *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * 

*Lines in italics from La Parole “Sacrée” de Hölderlin by Maurice Blanchot. 

Frequencies Of Atomic Scallop

Blithely configurational, we lobster against aesthetics. We have nothing against aesthetics, we just want to flirt, spend time in a laboratory mingling chemicals and brains. The lobster is a totemic spirit. Insults are crucial to my stock of photos. If I want to capture a look of despair, I don’t have to go far to do it. Repose is more of a challenge. Repose is private. It has to be coaxed. It cannot be coerced. A linen of Egyptian silk spreads in easy testimony. The eyes are closed. The breathing is easy. Except for bingo, I like to spew my guts and write sonnets. To mix the anonymous with the notorious, the serious with the delirious, the lyrical with the spiracle, the chimerical with the regrettable. If you’re tied up, hurry up, and give your casino a name. Gambling is a conversation with folly. Dark nights full of risk and inspiration. Gerry Marsden pulling to the side of the road to write “Ferry Cross the Mersey.” Wyatt Earp immersed in Middlemarch. It takes a special kind of focus to read a novel during a gunfight. No palette is a calliope. Try getting Jesus on your smartphone. We can do this all night. If there is but one thing worth isolating it's the sound of improbability. Put your pants on backward. Jiggle your qualifications. Frequencies of atomic scallop clip to the breast pocket in a perfect renunciation of irony. Scratch the entrance as I pull it into the sentence kicking and screaming. I shall do a structural dance around the ovulation of your umbrella. I must draw a little pollen from these phonemic anthers to create the nectar of propagation. Fertilization is a complex process beginning with thunderous interactions and climaxing with union. I believe, now, we’re getting somewhere. The possibility of achieving a fresh new perception trembles in the eyes of the reader like a flock of honking geese flying in a V formation over the meadows of Nova Scotia. The atmosphere grows thick with foreign energies and skittish intuitions. It seems we’ve aroused the suspicion of the guards. No matter. We shall disappear through the window I’ve placed here. The sky is the saga in which we sink to fly homeward. I put it on the coffee table. The coasters have sayings. Things like saws. Stilts and guided tours. Our curiosity is the boil of intellect, but our lineage is the sputter of blood on the lips. Burst grapes and decadent banquets. The point I’m trying to make is stuck in the wall. I threw it there in a rage. It only makes sense if you drape it with gauze and wear it like a gymnasium. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s like I said. The point is stuck in the wall. But there is no wall. It was summarily demolished behind these words.  

Funny Name For A Lather

Like a lot of people, I resist wisdom. If a bit of advice is not to my convenience, I will ignore it. And pay the consequences later, as I do now, with a stubborn case of insertional peroneal brevis tendinitis. There are 19 muscles in the human foot. If you strain them too much they fray. They become inflamed. You can’t run. You’ve got to rest. Hope the damn thing heals.

So. I bought a pair of Brooks’ Ghost. DNA Loft foam (a combination of closed cell ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer foam, rubber, and air) is a premium cushioning material that is a soft, lightweight and durable compound that absorbs and reduces shock as the foot contacts the ground. So far so good. I did two miles on Westlake. Minimal pain.

Flaming candles on a stone wall. Witches gathering moss. The Cranberries. Dreams. Official Music Video. Tiny woman in a white dress, long eyelashes, dreamy look. Dancing with a microphone. And oh, my dreams. It's never quite as it seems. Never quite as it seems.

You can’t live without distractions. Not in this world.

Barbasol. Funny name for a shaving lather. Sounds like the name of a pirate. Or a famous philosopher who never existed. Barbossa Barbasol. Bertrand Barbasol. Beverly Barbasol. Her theory on the criticality of naming things concretizes the human condition with a white blob of ambiguity.

Why would anyone want to put their ideas in order? Thoughts are messy. Thoughts are amorphous riots. Ideas roll out of the madhouse in flames. Ideas are gloves, painkillers, derivatives, regenerative agriculture. The kneecap is genius. Phonemes are phenomenal. Needles and pins. Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. A giant mutinous thread. Flowing freely like water.

You get to a point where it colors your entire life. Every mood. Every thought. You can’t escape it anymore. This profound evil. This season of atrocities. And that’s it. It’s in you like a virus. There must be palliatives. No one anticipates a cure. Not this far in.

The Talisman of Charlemagne has a large glass cabochon on the front, a large blue-gray sapphire on the back, and an assortment of garnets, pearls, and emeralds. But does it work? That’s what I want to know. Will it keep evil at bay? Can I sleep with it? How do I spread its energy around?

You can feel done with this world, but it won’t let you go. It’s like when you get ready to leave a party and no one wants you to go and conversations keep happening, even though, deep down, you know there’s deep undercurrent of fear and panic. Enough to wade in. And everyone’s feet are wet. Wet like Jean Valjean escaping the barricades of the June Rebellion in the sewers of Paris. And not like that at all. If the room suddenly turns quiet and people are staring at you, congratulations. You’ve said something honest. 

A Tale Of Infinite Variables

The sky sparkles with beatitude. A section of gauze brushes my consciousness. I can see through everything, but it’s all quite vague. This is a journey that progresses by sips and swigs and mimics the bursting of long suppressed emotions, each one of which holds up an insult with monumental aplomb. I need to do something totemic and intravenous. I tremble to weigh a vending machine. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since birth. I look to the sky for support and wisdom. Distant rock trinkets hang from an asteroid belt. Swoon hammers find a parable. I was never so glad as when I discovered tiptoe. Furrows in the field make pillows of the earth and fill my genitals with a storm of relevance. I think I've come as far as I can go without overflowing with huge overcoats. I crave to do something on the grass. Mud sucks the soul of the island until it becomes big and maternal like a tabloid. Everything on this planet is so weird all the time. Pain visits my knee in the form of a patellofemoral pain syndrome (everything is a syndrome here, or a syndicate or a synthetic), and smashed icicles make trails of mimosa silver. It must be obvious that to see something growl its way into palpable form can be a traumatic experience. This is why we use language. It speeds up the process and minimizes the level of pain. I can smell the earth sweat when tar is applied to a highway or a book struggles with its own perplexities. I sometimes forget that snow is the sugar of the gods. Close your eyes. Look deep in your mind. Ideas sparkle when they revolve like decadent aristocrats at a masked ball. This is a function of infinite variables. The stone is nothing until it creates a quotient. A stick divided by a shadow equals a moment in time. But when we do it, we are always amazed at how kids respond, especially those living deep in the bayou, where all the integers are divisible by moonlight. I once had a vision of the body as a coconut palm making out with the wind. I took an old dagger and stabbed the darkness. Night collapsed and spread its blood like starlight over the waves. I do these things not out of spite, but because I must, & because all my remaining needs require vivid descriptions to keep going, acts of desperation disguised as prose, otherwise what’s the point? I was mad to leave Norway. But the oysters here are delicious, & taste like madrigals of meat.  

Lately It Has Occurred To Me

Lately it has occurred to me that if I hadn’t made all the dumb choices I made in life, really stupid decisions, completely irresponsible, utterly mindless, that are somewhat compensated by some of my more prouder decisions, that if I had given into temptation on such and such an occasion, or if I’d not given into temptation on such and such a whim, or said this, or said that, or quit that job, get fired from that job, and so on and so forth, I would not be at this place, this circumstance, this adventure, this kismet, this karma, this eudemonia, which feels perfect to me.

Outside our gloom we can sometimes redeem ourselves through vagueness and fabrication. A gothic mailbox grows a beard and we call it a letter from God. Treasure this rapture. Map it. Smack it. Toss it like a stone among the beatitudes. It may not make a ripple. It may not make a wave. It may seem a little questionable, a little too sweet and difficult to digest. It may produce a fish. Sometimes a trout may seem like a donation, or a Hittite. You may call me wrong. You may call me pretentious. But is that any different than two suspicious characters in the park dismantling bikes? You can’t stop a perception from meaning something. All it takes is a smell, a pendulum, a face, or a stick of gum to send the imagination on a mission of import and daring. There is a room nearby in which I can dedicate my life to cinnabar. Please join me. Bring a cave. Bring a buddy and a crowbar. Together we will decipher codes from the death of the traffic light.

Some things in life are achieved through chicanery. Swelling, bloating, turgescence. All of it an act, of course, a representation possessed of sabotage and sackcloth calculated to arouse esteem and opportunity in the eyes of the pious. I think you know where this is going. If your answer is the latrine, I salute you. We can laugh now, and relax. No, this isn’t a survey, it’s more like a filiation mulled in balderdash with a dollop of bunkum and a side order of flapdoodle. These things come in handy when you’re attempting to swagger across the barroom floor with your spurs jingling and your conjectures lagging behind like a three-legged dog. And don’t you know that literature has gone the way of the deadlight? If you’ve spent any time at all eavesdropping on Kerouac’s letters, you’ll know there’s a place for ecstasy, and is revealed to you by flashlight. 

If you see a mountain in the distance, don’t rush towards it. Let it come to you. Point a stampede at it, of words and definitions. Write things down. It is with pleasure that I splash the notation with nouns. The immense sleet that blew it there continued its journey north. I felt within me a feeling of humble beginnings develop into a story. I was somewhere south of lethargy coming to in a bar in the Black Forest of Germany. I could hear a gust of wind outside, and injustice and clamors of deification. A flash of lightning as The Elves of Redemption thundered across the bridge. It has always been such. Some people want to know what. Others want to know why. I want to know what distant green knowledge is harbored in the skull and why it’s so hard to find. 

 

Facts The Heart Can Feel

There was a suicide in the park this morning. I was sitting at my desk reading an article online when R returned suddenly from her morning walk in tears. My immediate thought was that the park department had chopped down the rhododendrons we’d been watering, lugging gallon jugs of water up the switchback trail in 90-degree August heat and letting it pour slowly into the stubborn, hydrophobic dirt. The region had been suffering drought conditions for several years, as well as shrouds of wildfire smoke from Canada to the north and the Cascades to the east. The park department refused to water the rhodies because the sprinkler system had been dismantled and removed. But that wasn’t it. She said there’d been a suicide on the upper tier of the park. The police stopped her as she was going up the trail. Had she not paused to redo the laces in her shoes she may have seen the body, if not the actual moment the man had taken out a gun and shot himself in the head.

A neighbor had seen the man. He’d been sitting on a bench on a viewpoint in the park overlooking the city and mountains and the boats and ships on Lake Union. He’d been sitting there a long time. His car was parked nearby. The neighbor hadn’t seen the man shoot himself, but she’d heard the gunshot. A number of houses cluster around the upper tier of the park. I wonder if anyone else had seen it. It must’ve happened quickly.

The man had driven to that spot. He knew what he was doing. What he was about to do. To be or not to be. He’d chosen the latter. And to do it in this particular spot. With sky as intermediary.  

Funny thing is I’d just quoted Albert Camus in a letter to a friend. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.”

Later in the afternoon, after a dental appointment, I walked home. I decided to go through the park, mostly out of curiosity, a rather creepy rubbernecking darkened with a tinge of dread. There were things I didn’t want to see. But felt compelled, nevertheless, to walk through the park. Suicide is no longer considered a crime in most states. But it felt like a crime scene.

I saw nothing. The park was pristine, green and brown in the golden light of the sun. No blood. No bullet. The man was gone from this place, so utterly gone it was hard to conceive of years of struggle and pain, of whatever it was that led that man to this place, and to leave it so abruptly, following what must be assumed had been a lingering meditative moment on a bench in the morning sun. A pleasure weighed, perhaps, with the darker purpose the man harbored of coming there to do what he had chosen to do. To not to be. That was his answer. And he had acted on it with sureness and resolve. With forethought. With purpose. And no one else around. 

 

Man On The Runway

Pulse my spoon if the tumble outward is my reality. I’m watching our plugs writhe. Stink wear along the ingredients. I wander a timeless Baudelaire. I’m the formula for a stepladder I ski.

If a noun can make a flavor shout contact I would advise it. The embellished explanation must flourish in obscurity if it is to make a difference in sagging. I feel like groping the python. A cuticle is a cap of rain. I feel it in all the things I do. This constant fastening. This meditation.

It’s pretty to wallow and build my respect. Arms wear images if there’s a tattoo parlor nearby. Snap some begging amid the purple alerts. We make decorations so loud it makes the brocade sweat. I drill my wallet with a picture of money. There are ports considered by chin that I would gladly support, even if it takes all summer. Wet cement when I’m feeling busy with being alive.

Swerve out I say and bend to the light of my bulbs. Prowl a seashore. The emphasis should be on grandeur. A muse in the Louvre holds your Pythagorean window. You can learn things from fencing. Amalgamation is where the appeal begins to rattle.  The muscle of the heart makes this moccasin seem included. Therefore, I climb the staircase meditating on a dream I support.

A chisel believes the steel. Seashore cubes we crowd with assertion to make flower our clasp. I get it. Arrange a gross confession thickened with trickle. Lean in close. Let your nostrils take in the smell of creosote. I mean the concertina a willingness to play it but lack the skill to pull it off. What’s important is intent. We begin the migration while we pummel our talk with caviar.

My coffee is a limousine for the mind. We get tattooed in the rain. Me and my cup of coffee. There’s a twist in the story by which one can seduce the estuary and make it a swamp. Enkindle crystal. It makes the thermometer lower in expectation. But rise in urgency. A diagnosis of life is something I can live with. I see this sweeten a vertical ejection with surprising combustibility.

Pound a luminous edge if the dirt lingers. If I exhort overmuch, I will sift the dregs of my tea for a gentler mode of expression, and a glimpse of the future. Here emerges an angel of hinges. This is why the door creaks. There’s a spirit inside. As rails to the earth ambiguity rolls forward with purposeless purposefulness. Swimming among sharks isn’t a challenge it’s just plain stupid.

The hibachi urges heat. Mimicry urges death. The dissolution of the ego in a pudding of imitation leather. Hectic abandon we clench with our teeth. The assembled robin is a good robin albeit constrained by its surface to remain an emblem for the triumph of woodbine. I shall withdraw now and attend to my books. The aftereffects are as broad as the willingness to sparkle, or the readiness to endure the implications of this. I’m fine on the sidewalk, impersonal as a gym instructor. But out here I’m frantic, and orange. A man on the runway, waving semaphores. 

 

The Page Turner

Her hands are swift and supple as swallows, bouncing off the keyboard in rapid-fire constellations of notes, because she's playing Bach's Concerto no.1 in D Minor, which is busy and prodigal and all over the place. She is Polina Olegovna Osetinskaya, a beautiful Russian pianist. She’s wearing a black gown with extravagant flounces and a long-sleeved top. Her features are exquisite. Seated next to her is a young woman, also dressed in black, who is there to turn the pages of the printed music, a task she performs so smoothly, and with such humble precision, that her presence has the solemnity of thought, a highly focused thought, a concentration of thought, like an abstract of focus in its purest form. The two faces are so different. The pianist’s face is luminous, like porcelain, whereas the page turner’s face is warm and full, like the air in a bakery on a winter morning. When she rises to turn the page, bringing into detail the black lace of her blouse, she turns the page with calm dexterity, & sits back down. How odd that must feel. Or maybe not. It’s hard to guess what people are feeling. The music is self-evident. It’s a torrent of notes, a mania, a zeal. The page turner is poised. Outwardly calm. I’d be terrified. Imagine getting up and you can’t get your finger on the paper, and it falls into the lap of Polina Olegonva Osetinskaya, and Bach’s composition is suddenly frozen, silent as ice. The embarrassment. The loss of a career. How does she do it? Manage that calm. It’s masterful. It amazes me how well some people adapt, evolve, nestle into roles of acute stress, and negotiate those critical moments in life, a rock climber’s fingers seeking a tiny, barely perceptible fissure, or a young woman rising to turn a page. On a stage. With a full auditorium. In a long black dress. Long silken hair flowing over her shoulders. I’m nervous for her. Which is silly. The concert is over. Everyone has gone home. The stage crew, the conductor, and the janitor have all gone home. The page turner is home in her home. I’m home in my home. Reading. Turning a page.

The Palette Of A Palate Is A Palaver

Time now to trudge our way to calm. We shall enhance our gardenia afterwards with an equator. Time is out loud both a grandeur and a serenade. Syntax handles whispers to precipitate a source. Independence is a cloud of mustard. We mind the attic above while wading in its insects.

Discuss a cram by wildcat. The fox is a wound in the hammer, a hanging cartilage we force to exist by building it. The feeling of the gym has an accordion calculus that a few struts give me contact. Wedge an innocence into my groin. My groan is to your merit. The hope we imitate is our palette. Think of it as an allegory entangled in the neurons of a bee sting. It’ll feel corollary.

Vertebrae. This reality is a burden. It’s our hammerhead by flipping a voice. One must treat images like birth. Plant willingness behind it to expand. Cog a need over a toss into turpentine. Here come the virgins. They paint a pretty treasure for the canvas and sell it for a song. 

Mine is an easy scenario. I expect little from hair except space. I spur a dusty anticipation. My threatening does this. It makes subtlety taste like exposition. It explodes into ghosts, which resemble words trying to hug a sensitive propulsion. My impulsions have led to not a few personal discoveries. I was told I was too miscellaneous. I can’t deny it. I really like fanfare.

Tendency has a name out there in the wild and this goldfish knows it. What friction combines Euclid with my oblong might also be an odor. I scrounged for an answer that wouldn’t clash with the rails. It’s a mood we clasp with what unfolds. What else is there? Nudity upset our migration. It continued to fester until I began wearing Baudelaire's play. If you’d like to hear the tale of our wallow follow me to the squashed prohibition where we yanked my moo into a throbbing goo.

A canoe falls in its shadow and awakes the forest mushrooms. A palette fretted to death has implications for the colors of autumn. Begin above the oasis which is piquant with my delight. The version we have chosen over all the others coyly embellishes our taproot. Our focus is there, asleep in the morning. It’s a funny habitat, not the kind of place you’d expect to find a sneaker floating in words. I shall sow the mud with azaleas and find some proper lighting for the oysters.

I’m trying. I really am. Trying to find a formula by which I may recreate the world in the image of a cockatoo. My consciousness would like that. Or at least I think it would. I never can tell. I can be quite resourceful when it comes to dangling candy in front of my mouth. When it’s raining in my mind the wash is ablaze with fatalism. There are just some things one should never take too seriously. Percolation, for example. Or the crackle of bacon. Taste itself, which is our first explanation for memory, and which extends the spirit past the scudding clouds, in blossoming moonlight, with angels on the radio and sagebrush in the beams of our headlights. 

 

Voyage To Land Of The Dots

Experiments select what they graze on, which is the problem. A thermometer a grandeur and a museum. The coaxial split has style. Encouragement to illuminate the wall more and more. The copper plate makes the bird drift through the air.

I’m juggling with the timelessness that accelerates inside an oak. There was a stilling cap of wind I wore that made life feel prismatic, like a sky. You can curve a song by singing what it wants to do. The elevator boils next. I see a seam that we make and ride it into our structure.

Thermometers need architecture. They just do. It seems to me that the hypothesis has some whiffs to it, but could use a little more allegory. I sigh, flap around the room, and land on an armchair, irritated that such monstrosities as this must seek expression in writing. We bounce down the street singing operas. My intestines growl. I soothe them with a little milk of magnesia, and am glad. I live among potatoes and elephants. The comfort of hallucinations is a resource.

Monumental hive we vein with power. My plow jokes of carrots before it caresses the soil. Our summoning abounds in flavor but brings no plucking to our epilogue. There is a pathos in bread I do not find in crackers. I spot your cocoon interior. I could hear it leak from the Charles Bridge.

Our evocation got serious when the escalator fired up again. Communion is a gush embellished by running. I dab the mushroom in confusion. The galaxy next to the scribbles is a flower. This should be flashing. I didn't say it had to be a tomato. Or convincing. It’s respectable to compose a simulacrum whose odor can weigh as much as a clarinet. Anything less is simply an outline.

Anybody can be a pogonophile. But it takes a mustache to be a skinflint. The plumbing of it all rattles the muscles of a lightbulb and leaves us moaning like a lampshade. I find a friction between insinuation and mutton. Even so it makes me happy to take you down to the river to see these things for yourself, the bathing women, the euphoria, the outcasts in their fine regalia. Morality is obsolete. We all go a little crazy at times. It’s the pogonophiles who suffer.

An author greets me at the entrance to the Land of Dots. We enter trough a colon: a transparent 3-sided object separating colors into theories and underworld Monstera Deliciosa dances its distillates all over our faces. Every two minutes a new religion emerges from the rear of the sentence and produces a goddess of tinfoil and vapor. The very ground trembles with Panpsychism, especially as it appears in the panels of the Sunday comics, a forklift running amok in a warehouse of Ben Day Dots and circus supplies. We exit into the blinding light of a fresh new job loading semicolons onto the back of a pickup, and a lively Bohemian polka.  

 

Quantum Scrap

I hugged a rhododendron and tried to listen. It made me gamble and I won a garden. Consider trying to enamel along. This might be a way to knock the moose into life. The biggest emphasis I could find related to water. Harm turns a generation into subtlety. It’s hard to approach them without a cookie. Fidget a denim they harden. Tear the parabola into a scream.

Cézanne made depth become a rain. It moved me to structure this percolation according to what I propose, which is water. The smell of truffles are there to taste in a lifetime, and make the wheels spin in perpetual arrival. A washing mist is not geographical. It's metaphysics. The eyes are clearly visible beams of attention. A light call for the biography of death. And a cap and a knife.

I rap my breath to muddle everyone's ears. The syntax of the stomach has vines but the law is vague when it comes to vapor. I don't know why the heat it is so splendid. What I do know is the spit of its insistence. Ebony is ecstasy for the bandaged plumber. Who knows why. Life is full of quantum scrap. The fabric I write on is smooth as a runway. Please help me find the rest of this sentence. The entire sauce is at stake in the kitchen. If you find it, give it a piece of your mind.  

Superb cringe of the Thumb King. Think of it as a movie, or a punch to the solar plexus. Art is like that. Our panic is the arm of a long pigment. A freshly varnished violin can make us shiver. I feel a hectic seduction in the strings. The picture yawned its appearance into me, turning me anatomical with a sifted and parenthetical science. This is the flower that did it. I wanted to make it sweat. So I raised it up with my tongue and said it. There’s a brocade for all of our contusions.

The example a plaster makes on a wall when it beats a corner to abolish itself and suddenly becomes a window with a dead fly on the sill and a small crack in the upper corner is sometimes the very thing that promotes an irreducible fascination with the saxophone. I think it’s what Cézanne meant when he painted those delicious apples and oranges. He’s got them arranged artistically but they still look like something you can hold in your hand and bring to your mouth and eat. Life can be so tipsy, just like a canoe. Isn’t hard to stumble and land in some muddy lagoon? I modified my problem by cutting it in Costa Rica. There's a taproot to my prominence, if you know what I mean. The horizon struts across the carpet with a pronoun. These are the stars that I protect by the airfield that I made. We solicit what we drum and then escape it.

And so we carried gallons of water to the park to water the surviving rhododendrons. This is a true story if you choose to believe what these words are doing. Though it’s not a matter of belief. Or words. It’s a matter of virtue. And what’s virtue? Virtue is everything. Rain. It’s mostly rain. Depth is what we hope to find in even the most banal conversations, even if it’s just body language, and somebody’s hand on your butt. This kind of verbal nudging is a trick and you shouldn’t trust it. Like the man said, the truest poetry is the most feigning. The sound of robins on a spring morning is a bright and cheerful melody, but really, it’s mostly about worms. Finding them and eating them. Like words. And then I hear rain. And spirits at the border of our shoes.

  

Pictures Of The Floating World

Recently, on a muggy Sunday morning, R and I went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Capitol Hill to see the featured exhibit Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec. This consisted of 90 Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings from SAM’s Japanese collection alongside private loans of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The idea was to genially highlight the perceived parallel between the bawdy energy of Montmartre in the Belle Epoch and the “floating world” of Ukiyo-e. The “floating world” refers – in part - to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period (1603 to 1867). There was a pronounced flavor in both art worlds of an unfettered eroticism and contagious joyfulness which the art reflected with great skill and a genial lack of pretense. In neither instance was there anything remotely doctrinaire about these social dynamics, but there was an understanding that something was afoot, a strong appetite for living openly and freely, unhampered by the weight of an imposed moral code. It wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t decadent. It was a generosity of spirit steeped in an atmosphere of uninhibited glee, and a whiff of dissent.

Asai Ryōi, a Japanese samurai and writer of the early Edo Period, described Ukiyo in these terms: “living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river...this is what we call Ukiyo.”

It's rather odd reading these words during this age, fraught with so much social division and day-to-day uncertainty, WWIII an imminent possibility, an obscenely wealthy minority of elites living in gated communities, sailing catastrophically depleted oceans of heat-stressed plankton and bleached coral in luxurious yachts while millions live in poverty, homeless tents a ubiquitous sight in nearly all the cities of the western world, but especially conspicuous in the United States.

So, Ukiyo in the U.S. is a bit harder to attain than it was when I was a youth in the late 60s, living in the Bay Area and a frequent visitor to the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.

That said, it’s not dead. I have a solid grip on the soft warm buoyancy of Ukiyo. There’s still a good quantity of it diffused among the neurons of an aging brain. I know lust when I see it. I still know what sensuality feels like. I can still occasionally sublimate it out of the soup of cortisol sloshing around in these old bones.

Brothels are another matter. I’ve never been to one. Never had the urge. Or the money. I get a sense from the ZZ Top song “La Grange” that a lot of fun can be had in a brothel. I imagine it’s not just a matter of getting off sexually. The numerous prostitutes found along Aurora Avenue here in Seattle puzzle me – hard to get a handle on the erotic dynamics there – but I can wrap my head around the ambiance of a brothel. There’s not a few of them in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, written a few years after Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was busy with his prints and posters. La Goulue kicking her heels at the Moulin Rouge. Jane Avril lifting a sexy silky sleek black leg at Jardin de Paris while a hand grips the fingerboard of a cello that looks ostentatiously like a massive hard-on.

Many of the Japanese woodblock prints were done by Kitagawa Utamaro, considered one of the greatest artists of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) movement; he is known especially for his portraits of female beauties, and whose sensuous artistry and vivid colors were a huge influence on the French impressionists. One of the prints – A High-Ranking Yujo With A Client – drew my attention. I found it enigmatic. This was an intimate scene of a man with a yujo, a female prostitute. What puzzled me was the lack of sexuality. If it was implicit in the various shapes and colors, the postures of the two people, the overall ambiance created by the intimacy of mood, it eluded me. There are several bare feet, belonging to the man I’m guessing, based on their positions. Other than that, the two people are heavily dressed in multiple layers of silk or cotton kimono. This is how people might dress in a freezing room during a brutal winter, but there’s no sign whatever that the room is cold. They seem completely comfortable, completely at ease with one another. Maybe they’ve had sex and are now just hanging out, enjoying one another’s company.

The man is lying on his stomach and the woman is sitting on his back. The man appears to be saying something and the woman is leaning forward a little, her head resting on her hand. I can’t tell if she’s bored, or listening with rapt attention, absorbed in the man’s talking. The man is holding a long slender implement – I’m guessing it’s a pen with a tiny nib – which is slanted upward, in the direction of the woman’s face. The nib is near the man’s mouth, which is tiny. Both mouths are tiny. The man’s looks like a tiny red butterfly and the woman’s is a tiny red dot. I like to imagine the man has just written a haiku in beautiful calligraphy on the floor and is describing his feelings and aesthetic goals, and that the woman finds this engrossing.

The man is a paying customer and the woman is rendering a service, but there’s absolutely no sense of that in the print. She’s definitely not in a hurry to get this guy on his way and prepare for another customer. They look more like a married couple.

The hairdos of these two people are astonishing. Thick black hair impeccably groomed. Slender sticks crisscross busily in the woman’s hair. Clothing and background wall are teeming with contrasting geometric patterns and strong, sweeping, graceful lines.

Perhaps what this is is an erotica of the intellect. The voluptuousness of thought in a moment of unhurried quiet and respect. Precisely the opposite of what you find in the outer world today, in which the simple act of walking exposes one to the perils of escooters and ebikes and outbreaks of road rage, especially in Seattle’s south of Lake Union district and the glass and steel towers housing the offices of Google and Amazon and Facebook. The energy here is invisible. Except when it isn’t. And people walk by riveted to the devices in their hands, void of expression. Incommunicable as tantalum, taciturn as nickel.

 

Searching

Music always seems to be searching for something, even when it just seems to be wandering around in space, or entertaining grocery shoppers. I saw a symphony once disguised as a cluster of ferns in a forest of words and said to myself it takes a lot to make a sound extend itself across the desolations of modern life. You need a lot of geometry and towels. D minor on a Fender Stratocaster, squeaky bedsprings, ionized arias, and jingly implications. How many drugs does the body manufacture? Enough to function. How many drugs does an individual require to commune with the universe? Depends. Sometimes the moment calls for Duende. Sometimes Baton Rouge. Life can be rigid as a stripper pole. But given the right music, it can bend.

Music might be defined as “a vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” It might also be a man preparing to eat a hot dog, wheezes of air squeezed out of a bottle of relish, or that deep audible breath Marianne Faithful takes before launching into “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” There’s the music of audition, which is a persistent anticipation mingled with anxiety and the propellers of ambition, and the music of Stephane Mallarmé leaning against the wall of a garage churning with wind & Paganini. Summer rain. Gunfire in a sugar refinery. An old woman milking a cow. 

I love that cocktail lounge jazz which sounds defeated, but defeated in a good way, resigned, that sweet feeling of relief that envelops you when the realization finally unfolds revealing all the formidable obstacles and impossible feats you’d have to perform to conquer whatever evil, whatever depravity, whatever arrogance, whatever stupidity, whatever asshole held all the cards. It’s really not a defeat at all, it’s more of a triumph. The triumph doesn’t feel like triumph, not until a spirit takes you out of yourself and puts you somewhere else. It’s a form of transcendence with a hint of hedonism. The quiet, unvoiced rebellions learned and refined in adolescence that blossom in the adult mind like a golden abdication. It feels cathartic, like all the birds and barking dogs going silent during a solar eclipse and watching moon shadows roll over the earth. 

Music is personal, sympathetic as a home. Gustave Mahler’s Adagietto. Absolutely sublime. Eileen, by Keith Richards, performed on stage. He plays the guitar with such joy, such confidence, such easy skill and impish insouciance, that he can’t remain still, he’s all over the stage, kicking a leg as if in a mock alley fight, pulling out chords with limber panache. 

Etta James. Live at Montreux, 1975. Look out, she says. And launches into I’d Rather Go Blind with a full spectrum of feeling, so broad, so full, so intense it rips a new reality out of a world of stupefying indifference, and coaxes it into being with a husky female fire. Somebody in the crowd shouts something witty and smart and she responds, “you should be up here.” 

Leaving, by Chet Baker. It begins with a cello, segues to a trumpet and ends with a long slow purgation. And because this is YouTube, his face fills the screen: craggy, beaten, sad, but undefeated, there’s heaven in his eyes, and the quiet dignity of pain. 

What I'm Trying To Do

Though it may not be immediately apparent, these words have been carefully arranged on the shore of this sentence and are waiting for someone to pull them into their mind and set them afloat. This will have the effect of lightning in the sky, the one over there smiling and winking over the top of a mountain, and ruffling the world like a French impressionist. This will trigger a disorientation in some people, and epiphanies in others. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. Not in this frame of mind, however crooked it may seem to hang on the wall. The sunset looks funny. And now you know why. Next time I see you reading this paragraph, I’m going to follow you home like a dog. I’ll show you some magic tricks. Please don’t be upset. It'll be fun. But if you see me opening doors where there are no doors, it means that I will have connected with something larger than a magic trick. It will mean I’m here, hanging from the edge of your eyelid.

Riding the elevator of the Grand Hotel, Proust notices an open window of frosted glass that’s normally closed, and enjoys a view of the countryside from a novel perspective. This is like reading a difficult sentence repeatedly until it suddenly opens and you see at last what it’s been opaquely concealing. One day it’s a school of dolphins keeping pace with my understanding of intuition, and on another I might see an old man walking on the side of the road. Have you ever felt something urgent stirring in your caviar? It was probably this indistinct thought finding its way to the center of what I mean, which is glowing in the distance. I keep driving in that direction, but I never get there. And that’s what keeps me going, word by word, page by page.

What I’m trying to do is build an emotion I can live with, and talk about later. I like it when a guitar sounds like a wounded animal. But I can’t do that. Does money still exist? I can always start a podcast. Usually, if I want to show a feeling I take it out of my mouth and hang it in the air. But this often backfires. As soon as you dress an emotion in words it becomes a crisis. Shape manipulating the meaning of itself. You could say it’s all a semantic game in the end. One thing I’m sure of, I don’t want a gadget on my head. I crave the wilderness. The sparkle of irrational beauty. Be it nothing more than a migration of words moving toward a gleeful delinquency. 

I sometimes wonder if there are parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us. Artists struggle to extend our perceptions through heaving tongues of steel and vibrating fictions. There is a marbling in the mind, intermixtures of ooze and dock. And the way the waves move and the tides come and go and the universe continues its squawking of background radiation. I love this chair and its framework. But this time it’s different. A universe just fell out of my head. It rolled out the door and down the street. I apologize to the driver of a Tesla and bring it back. I carry it with my mind. I’m spilling it in words. The driver of the Tesla is calling her lawyer. It’s an imperfect universe. It’s not as perfect as a Tesla. Which is from another dimension entirely.

There are taut veins under the ochre. It accentuates the belt that old man is wearing. As you can see, it’s ringed with skulls. It’s me. Before I existed. I walked into life on a bet. It was a one-horse town. But I get by. I embody my own cruel tendencies. This is my arm. It matches the other one, which is just now reaching for a bow. The incentive of the violin isn’t music, the incentive of the violin is arbitrary and slippery, like the spirits that reside in mushrooms. This is how languages evolve. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream. You can’t take anything for granted. Colors surge. Shapes of air die softly and fall away. Their residue is called reverie. The kerosene of emotion blazes at the darkness and the night steps softly across the universe, dripping stars. We shiver in the cold and get ready for a new reality.