The Outer Limits Of Things

I like the outer limits of things. The places where the limits are vague and the patterns are decoys. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This is the Zone, a dank, gloomy, industrial outpost in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the natural laws of physics are rendered bizarrely ineffectual. The goal is to find a legendary mystical room in which all desires are gratified. One begins to feel a wide gap between the empirical and the numinous. It’s a dilemma. Navigational equipment is useless. You have to go by intuition. This is difficult. It’s a question of subtleties. It’s a little like trying to choose among the many CDs in the glove compartment of a car. It’s never a rational decision. You’re reaching for something otherworldly in a grave of the mundane. Impulse is the only way out. You just grab what’s available and stick it in the slot and it gets sucked into the player on the dashboard and music comes streaming out of the speakers. If it’s Bob Dylan that’s ok, but if it’s Burt Bacharach forget it. A line has been crossed. No one is going to San José today. You’ve just been initiated to the divinity of the undecided. This is a resin without reason whose relish is a raison. The heat will come on in a second. Turn right at the next corner. Turn left at the next light. Or don’t. Google hasn’t mapped any of this. Nor could it.

The same way it takes more than a bag of almonds to create a tiger out of a wad of hypothesis, a beautiful autonomy hums within the genesis of thought until it assumes form in somebody’s alphabet and promotes the rhapsody of substance. That thunder you hear is a rose bursting out of a bud of punctuation. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m being chased or followed by something in a dream. What goes on in my head rarely, if ever, goes on outside my head. I suspect this is the situation for most people. If something going on in my head happens, also, to be going on outside my head, I make sure my gun is loaded. All truths are half-truths. Each minute of each day a Cecropia moth slips through the circuitry of a clock, and it leaves a shadow. The shadow, which assumes multiple forms, can carry a mountain of prose or a thought so light that no amount of gravity can hold it down. This is the birth of fiction. There are roots in the jungle that can remedy almost any disease, and if you toss a scarf or a handkerchief into a stream you can see it happen. Enigmatic meanings storm the walls of logic. Reason dwells in a granite hotel. Every fixation has a phantom presence. On Saturday we paint scorpions on our foreheads and on Sunday we divert our confusion with pieces of amber and volumes of ambiguity. Those of us who escape the prison of the ego find the providence of breath. Intoxicating fumes emerge from the abyss. When a boat appears in the mist of the river Styx you must pay the ferryman the coin that was deposited in your mouth before you began this journey, though he also accepts debit and credit cards, mobile payments and electronic bank transfers. He will not accept checks.

I need turpentine for a noun mist. And a diminishing pain in a trance of grapefruit. We should give our pleasure a month to get used to the easy darkness of the cathedral. I’m overflowing the hay of my necessity to create a tenable circumlocution. This is the place to do it. This is the place to sit down and eat a sundae. I call it Xenon. This is my summons to one and all to come and join me. Bring a dog. Bring a God. Bring a lapidarian. Bring an abstraction. Bring a truckload of abstractions. Especially blue ones. I’m stitching a tincture of universe. And it must be blue. Blue is the color of reality. If mass is a bath at the very beginning of flannel, then ink is a net of rain. It’s easy to affirm a reality. The hard part is convincing other people that your reality is the real reality, absolute reality, one-size-fits-all, the ultimate ululating ukulele reality, the one we all try so hard to adapt to, mistaking what is ordinary bedrock common sense with empyreal cloth.

I put the sponge in the whirlpool chamber for a reason. I need to prove how tomorrow’s parcel of time will be based on a theory of whalebone. I’m reminded of the night I discovered the ghost of a sparrow in a riverbed rock I split in half in with a mallet. It felt nimble to splash around in a swamp. I do not say this nonchalantly. Indecision claws at the gates of certainty. In youth, I aspired to be a dishwasher. But when I became an old man, I realized my true ambition, and became a semi-colon. Not many people use semi-colons anymore. They go for colons. And who wouldn’t. Colons means business. They’re not wishy-washy like semi-colons. I get it. But I still firmly believe that the semi-colon was destined for greatness in the world of punctuation; they provide habitat for a gently detached mimosa, and provide the sentence with a means to float.