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.