The Song In The Head

I can trigger a quintessential absence if I there’s enough propane available to weld a hindsight to a premonition. I could also use a paper pillow and a parkway nonchalance. There must be something I can do. I have motorcycles in my breath. Achievement hangs about me like a dead crow. I could do almost anything that might require a little acting on the side. And with a little more chutzpah, I could disassemble a theological pain. But for that I would need a golden magnet and the liquid scarf of a brooding scorpion. The thumb is pungent when the sublime is yawning. The garage is the right place for a midnight tryst. But if the vertigo is emphatic enough to sprawl out in shadows, there must also be long postulations to mitigate against the ensuing ambiguity. Or encourage it. I’m not trying to be vague or self-indulgent. Time results from pulling things into existence, then sewing them into embellishments of meaning. The metaphors parade through town stimulating romance. It’s all I can do to hold back the skin of indication.

Oh sure, the Lady Gaga joker movie might turn out to be the very thing we need to turn things around. Cryptocurrency contains enough bold and beautiful spoilers to make any wedding a pleasant distraction from a hair loss lawsuit. But you might want to stop playing with your balls, however discreetly. When John Donne was ordained in 1615 at the age of forty-three, his earlier tendencies were not forgotten. There is nothing more metaphysical than a Cadillac. It has to do with the vapors of dawn and the beauty of robbing an East Texas bank. I’ll let this totem stand. The Corot is for coherence. The moon is too big to garden. But it’s a good way to spend the afternoon. You might think I’m a cowboy or something, but I’m not. I’m only the residue of a hypothetical willingness to climb into the haggard voice of a rocking chair & chop the daylight into chunks of folklore. Whatever you’ve done in the past, you can leave it here. I’ll figure out something to do with it. Meanwhile, check out Edith Sitwell. She wrote a great book about Bath.  

Poets enchant the world. That’s their job. It’s what they do. Because reality doesn’t dry up with platitudes. Au contraire. You know that feeling that comes from the rhythms of Bo Diddley? It’s like that. Meet the metaphors. The band is good tonight. Even Keats got up to dance. Life is a satori of rags & chemistry. But don’t let that fool you. Everything I’ve said so far is teeming with éclairs. Adjusting to life in the 21^st century requires a lot of pastry. Good pastry. Italian bomboloni, Peruvian picarones, Austrian krapfen. The mind is separate from the world. Otherwise, why would I press my stethoscope against the night? It’s adorably plump, and I can hear its pulsars throbbing like a heartbeat. Does age really matter? I wash my face with the tears of the moon. But my nails are done by sea lions. And rocks. So what do you say? Let’s sail into the mystic with dolphins at our side and diphthongs hanging from our lips. Nothing smells worse than a geothermal burp. Do that. Jiggle your gardenias. Beat time. Do handstands in Kenya. The enthusiasm alone will make a man of you. Women get it. It should be a worldwide thing. Art that drags itself across the floor like hot red buckets of Martian soup. And explodes into paradise. 

The Music Of The Unknown

The smell of gold pours a lambent odor on the periphery of a flower. This is the music of the unknown. It bends to hear the skin of a calendar. Prehistory is foggy this year. The lights are softly dimmed and the effect is an option. You can either face reality or do whatever reality is writing down in your inner Mick Jagger. And then make a song out of that. Maybe that’s all we need, a little red rooster and a desolation striking the air with surprising force. You don’t expect that from paint. And when language tries to substitute paint for reality, the effect can be a Spanish bus station, and an old woman in a black shawl selling rolls of toilet paper to people on their way to the rest room. It makes you take another look at credit. Is life worth the investment? As a general characteristic, it’s cynicism that keeps me going. Keeps me talking. And when I encounter old friends, I enjoy the sensations of delirium groping around in my soul for something to say. The language of earth is invoked to open the dirt and let the elves come staggering out in a state of extreme intoxication. This is the narrative I originally greased with the seaweed of shipwrecks. I mean, you know, the mushrooms of the human chest. I no longer have ambitions. I have socks. I’m going to walk through a tunnel now, and when I come out the other side, I will hand you the beginning of stars. The gold in the apple of nothingness.

You Never Can Tell

The Efferdent package is lined with silver. I rip the packet open, take out the lozenge, drop it in a jar of water, and wait for it to foam. My partial goes beside it. The partial was once a molar. A molar of greatness and dependability, with which I chewed things, and crushed graham crackers. If you meet me in Saint Louis, I’ll tell you about my life with Chuck Berry. Completely untrue. Completely made up. Such is the power of fiction. It disassembles the truth. Then reassembles it with words, which are like little gears in a watch, making the hands move. It rises above sea level and shadows the forests, ejecting hot magma bombs from the throat of the volcano, sending everyone fleeing from the barber shop, and reclaiming the dials on AM radio. You never can tell.

Some things are said which have no basis in policy. They just get said. I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not entirely sure what Kant meant when he said that thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. Was this a reference to parakeets, or more like a Ferris wheel in Pocatello, Idaho? Excerpts of my life may be a little too explicit for modest tastes. Therefore, I shall refrain from any rude displays of heartbreak, or heavy lifting in front of a mirror. You be my mirror. And I will be yours. You look good. Like I knew you would. This isn’t my first rodeo. I don’t consider it a rodeo at all. That’s not how I do things. I like to thump my chest and swing through the jungle. I feel alert in space. Like tuna. This is something else Kant said: space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality. But really, how constraining are they? If I poke around at night with a flashlight trying to see what the drapery does at night, I might just discover that the presentational immediacy of the entire experience is predicated on the resiliency of perception and the urge to wheel around in a Ferrari. The actions we take are only ugly to goldfish. I can’t speak for the tasseled wobbegong. It’s a different ontology. And accents the flicker of trouble.

And what of the mind? If we speak of time, we must speak of the mind. The mind wants fluidity, not consciousness in cubes of transparent grammar. Ice cubes, essentially, but with the wildness of mustangs. The hills are alive with the sound of credit cards. We all need an escape from substitution. The real is the edge on a fragment of bone. A single neck dripping with neckties. Singing is important to neurogenesis. It makes everything relevant until the electrons exhibit wave-like properties and our familiarity with everyday objects so fraught with vacancy that it assumes a new outlook, and morphs into footwork, as in boxing.  One might also consider spatial learning abilities, and mariposas and bells. The susurrus of surf is critical to our understanding of the universe. Convergence is a candy, like rice cakes. You should know that. But ok if you don’t. I’m not here to judge. My aim is simple. I just wanted to show you how I feel about landscapes.

We are fast approaching a world in which poetry and music will be outlawed. Maybe not formally outlawed, but considered verboten in polite society. Like family members who gather unsteadily at a thanksgiving table in which it is tacitly understood that no mention or reference be made to politics, religion, or art for the sake of peace. We’ve arrived in a world of censorship. Self-censorship, at least in public, is virtually automatic now. But why poetry and music? Poetry has posed as an implicit threat all along, because it explodes meaning. People cling to meaning like fragments of wood after a shipwreck, a storm at sea. Nobody wants to discover that what they thought was a dresser was a coffin. Or that a soft armchair arm turned out to be an actual arm. Language is messy. Poetry is a chimera, a hybrid animal hurling fire out of its mouth. A fire which burns down all the familiar structures and reveals the void out of which it sprang. The meaning of music is laid bare: it’s immediate. As immediate as the sounds it organizes. It stirs emotion. It encourages impulse. And spontaneity. And dancing and acrobatics and joy. Which can lead to madness. Ergo, it must be done away with. And everyone at the table can eat quietly.

What I seek is the sublime autonomy of music. You can’t have a navy without water, and you can’t have a showdown without a harmonica. Battleships look odd in the desert, like Cher in old age. No photograph is simply a product. It’s a piece of space, an orchard in a California valley circa 1952. Jack Kerouac emerging from a tent. Music makes this blue. The feeling is too nuanced for toothpaste. We need coffee. We need shadows and combs. Something for the parrots and something for the undulations on the wall. At the level of the visceral, the larynx is the mediating muscle. Things were once axiomatic. Quantum mechanics ruined everything. There was a time you could count on wire to transmit your thoughts. Now it’s a turmoil of quarks and quirks and you can’t count on anything to magnetize truth in a solenoid. Every good story has at least one table in it. It’s where people like to sit because it gives structure to conversation. And when the plates are cleared a little monkey will do a dance in the paragraph bowl. 

Books

I’m lying on the bed, tired and achy, the cat on my lap. I moved a lot of books today. Big heavy boxes. In the cold and dim light of our storage facility, a big building two or three miles to the west, by the Brown Bear Car Wash. It’s a huge bin. Every time the corrugated aluminum door goes clattering up, I’m overwhelmed by the mountain of boxes and miscellaneous odds and ends forgotten over time, wine rack and clarinet and chess table. Framed prints of my father’s aerospace illustrations, landing modules and orbital satellite for harvesting the sun. But boxes, mainly. Big ones. All full of books. Books I’ve bought over the years. I wonder how many of them I’ve actually read. It’s too cold at the storage facility to sort through them. There are no amenities there, just the overhead lights, which are timed. R had to walk around a little to get them to come on again. They have sensors that detect body movement. Once I get the boxes home, I can take my time making hard decisions on which to keep, which to sell. I need to get rid of most of them. The storage facility is too expensive. It’s an agonizing process. Even though I’m now 75 and the likelihood of ever having enough time to read these books is nil, it’s hard parting with them. They all represent a certain phase of my life, shifting tastes, abrupt pursuits, great enlightenments, comforts in my despair, evolutions of intellect, my dalliances with Middle English, my flirtations with physics, my discovery of Dada, poetry in old journals when print media was still a primary feature of our culture, along with critical thinking. A few of the books belong to R. Her tastes run so closely parallel to mine that we often can’t tell which books belong to who. Some were a gift from her father. Occasionally, an old notebook will surface. I found one today with poetry I’d written in 1973. It wasn’t half bad. Even a photo album. Photos of me with my brother and dad circa the mid-80s, both gone now. I managed to get five boxes filled and ready to take to the used book store. What they don’t buy I’ll take to Goodwill. And if Goodwill won’t take them, I don’t know. I will sit with them. Feel the weight of them. And sigh.