Soloing

But really, what is it about climbing rock walls at dizzying heights that so excites the mind? Is it the imminence of death? Death is always imminent. I think it's the extreme immediacy of it all. The extreme focus. The extreme tactility of fingertips working their way into tiny fissures, the extreme sensations of temperature and tension and weight. There’s no room for rumination. Only the deep awareness of every movement. This isn’t the paradigm I was born into. I’m terrified of heights. But I get it. The feeling of being alive becomes so intense the personality of a single hair is a monad of hammers and vowels. Limits assume illimitable acknowledgement, the churning of clouds in the luminous distance doing what rivers do when no one is looking. I like to watch logic melt into lunacy. The holiness of closet doors opening to the ghostly clatter of clothes. Confirmations of excess in the pain of the lower back. Distortion is crucial to priests. There are loopholes nobody can see but wizards. They know the ropes, those guys. Do wizards still exist? Witches exist, God love them, and so do wizards. I saw one just the other day walking down the sidewalk with a python wrapped around a tattooed torso, eating a peach. It was an odd day, curiously moody, with a touch of innovation. Everything felt so phenomenal my being dilated and reached for a corollary. Nothing needs forgiveness like a simulacrum. Are eyebrows seismographs or goldfish? Seismographs, obviously. They go up when they feel a tremor of alarm. Though some are clearly some form of Arthropoda. The beetle brow is a tirade of hair. Whenever I sit beside myself I do so with a secret incentive, which is one of modesty, and sheer therapy. There’s a wildcat on my lap and a searchlight in my mind. The sensations thrilling through my veins are evidence of a nimble underworld just now unearthed by a bumpy salvation. A jeep ride through the seven canyons of Kenya will lengthen one’s phallic understanding of pillars and arcs. If you whisper these thoughts to the hummingbird there will be rain in the morning and upheaval in the empire. And so I asked R during our run on Westlake today what she thought the phrase “life is tiiiiit” written in red letters on the white ice machine beside the mini-mart meant. She didn’t know either. Why five i’s? I is the largest one letter word in existence. The injuries testify to the daily shit show. Conversing with one’s wounds will sometimes produce a grimace. There’s a kind of eloquence in pain that goes vertical if you squeeze it with a little truth. One finds relief from the chicanery & superficialities of the internet in the objectivity of hardware. It’s a different world than the one was born in. In that world, Philip Lamantia opened a legendary reading at a space in San Francisco while I played Daniel Boone in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Years later we would marvel at the reliquaries of Clara and Saint Francis Assisi, and the day would be divinely auspicious, its colors awakened by sunlight.