The Ghosts Of Uncertainty

It's true what they say of vermilion, that the longer it can express the willingness to heave itself into "The Glass of Wine" by Johannes Vermeer, or “Lucca Madonna” by Jan van Eyck, the further will it extend into our lives scrounging for the vapors of tendency. For these are the perfumes of color, garden variety abstractions endeavoring aloud to solicit the attention of a greenhouse grandmother or the Air Force pilot bending to smell a rose before going on a dangerous mission. Sounds more like Norman Rockwell to me. Oh well. Here. Have some eggnog. It’s red because I’ve been talking about vermilion and all things red, all things burgundy and carmine and crimson effervescing in our emporium. Pinch my arm if I get carried away. Or let these words wander your mind, unprecedented and blue. The thin old vermilion on the wall is something more demanding of our attention because it has hurled itself outside the parameters of discrimination and become completely random, like a suitcase or a crumpled napkin. Vermilion may be observed in various ribbons, atriums, stadiums, excesses and gowns glazed with madder lake. Give me a wrinkled nail and I’ll give you a strum on the guitar. The blue one. The one that doesn’t exist. It’s basically just an idea trying to get its hands on some music. Excuse me while I take this moment to get dressed for some exercise. I’m standing next to a house, trying to sell it, and watering a rosebush. I like doing such things and creating sentences for them. Anything I do rarely gets past the stage of clashing cymbals together and waiting for the clarinets to blend with the strings. The book I always wanted to write is an aerodrome waiting to house the strange and unnatural. Things with wings. Membranes. Trumpets. Hairy spheres of timpani. Eyes like red eggnog. Airs of vermilion. The roots of oblivion, which are golden, and smell like Wisconsin. We shall endeavor together to find the meaning of this. It will be a lifetime adventure. Starring Bruce Willis, Etta James, Edgar Allen Poe, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg as the ghosts of uncertainty. There are times I ache to find the truth in things, while simultaneously ignoring it, even when it’s standing right in front of me. Which is most of the time. 

Baptism By Spot

Age six is an interesting age. It’s the age, here in the U.S. in the 1950s, that you entered the world. You got registered in a grade school and had a place to be every day at a specific time in a highly structured environment. It was every child’s introduction to the world of the institution. Some take to institutions well and naturally. Some fight against it all their lives. And others run so afoul of it they end up in prison. Which is the ultimate institution. Institutionality isn’t just a matter of norms and organizational rigor. It’s a force to contend with. It offers security, stability, and turtleneck sweaters. Desks, cubicles, and staplers. I have vivid memories of learning to read, and Dick and Jane and their dog Spot, which somewhat resembled my dog at the time, a cocker spaniel named Pepper. Reading, one could tell immediately by the amount of attention it was given, was a critical element of the institution. In later years, I discovered that language – and books – carried a great potential for staging subversive ideas. Writers like Jonathan Swift and Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing. Language that mocked, derided, or questioned institutional authority. And that was the magic carpet I rode on for many years. So it is exponentially strange to now find myself among a population who mock, deride, and disparage books and reading, print media in general. These are generally the people you now see walking in cities in a zombie-like trance staring at a mobile phone. They’re utterly brain-dead. The irony is that they’ve been far more subsumed by the dystopic technocracy in which most people are locked in, though a few remain locked out. The homeless encampments remind me a great deal of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, and the movie that came out in 1966, directed by François Truffaut. Not surprisingly, the same societies which have embraced all the latest technological advances, particularly the ones that lend themselves most efficiently to surveillance and control, are the ones least inclined to embrace the Socratic spirit, the intellectual agility derived from questioning everything. Vaccines, for example. Especially the ones forced on people with arbitrary mandates, however much the usual paths of science, such as experimental trials and empirical evidence, have been skipped with a view toward profit. Money is the new god. Though here I must question the validity of that statement: how new, and how divine? What is meant by ‘god’? On July 11, 1955, Congress passed H.R. 619, which mandated “In God We Trust” to be included on all U.S. currency, which is currently inflated and losing its value in a global economic environment that is souring on U.S. hegemony. I’m also reminded of how every school day began with a ritual: standing, with one’s hand over one’s heart, pledging allegiance to the American flag. For a lot of us, myself included, it wasn’t till I graduated from high school and entered another world – the world of brutish survival – that I began putting together what all this meant. And writing poetry. Exiting out to sea on Rimbaud’s drunken boat. Imagination is a much more valuable asset than money. I’m not talking about the commodified version that billionaires draw on to build spaceships. That isn’t imagination, that’s exploitation. Imagination is the opposite of that. It’s the realization that the real treasures aren’t beyond the horizon, teeming with cheap labor and resources. It’s the realization that the horizon itself is the treasure: an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. 

The Power Of Blue

I used to drink, but now I dunk. I used to go south, but now I go sideways. I used to go west, but now I go backwards in time, leaving a trail of pillow ticking. And a panoramic view of Fluxus. Which is a city in postulation somewhere north of Tewkesbury. My relationship to sound has always been like this. Wary of increments but always exploring new territory. I wish you could see my alfalfa. The other chords in the exposition are momentarily gongs. I have much nobler intentions than falling chronologically into mud and lubricious correspondence, but I’ve grown marginal over the years, like most of us, and sit back in the armchair dreaming of Persepolis, and all the fanfare surrounding movement, and rhythm, and evolved into Fred Astaire. There are wounds that embrace you from within like mechanical knots. Things that cannot be undone. They can be seduced into quiet submission occasionally, either with drugs and alcohol, or dancing like Mick Jagger in front of a crowd, jabbing at the air with your hands, strutting back and forth in a syncopation of odd wiggles and spins. So I guess that would be called dance, though most of the time I’m not up for it, it just seems silly. I lean into the dignity of age. But there’s no dignity in age. It’s an armchair with a rip and a spring poking into your back. And sometimes the knots come undone on their own, and there’s nothing at the end of the rope but you. I know, that sounds a little sinister, but hanging from a rope is not what I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of parable, moral truths packed in verse. Ivy on a castle wall. The fragrance of hemp in the fields of Donegal. There's a dimension of emotional convection that thickens into language and then expands into meaning. Lift it as a gross dusty problem. Or a pot of gold. Your call. But don’t drop it. It might come in handy later, as something to talk about over dinner in a fancy restaurant, musing on how good it feels that the traffic going by in no way pertains to you. All you need to do is keep tabs of the tab. A glass of Godspeed at Sushi Nakazawa is $16.00. A bottle of Hokkaido Saké is $175.00. This isn’t Sushi Nakazawa. But it could be. All it takes is a little tweaking, a little innovation, and a Schnitzel Sandwich. People will sometimes tell you that one day the pendulum will swing back and life will be an enterprise detached from commerce and soothed by random breezes under purple skies and fanciful structures. But it never seems to get there. What we have instead is this. A batch of words, a daub of blue, and a cry of adoration breaking the skin of the sky. For what? Everything. For who? Everyone. No one. The person looking out from inside you. And the power to ignore it. 

Piano Moon

Despite the many trepidations ahead of us, our beginnings were auspicious. We thrilled to the music of the piano moon and eased our way into cognition, convulsing with joy. All our spasms are religious in nature. Life is insoluble, but we do have means at our disposal by which to unravel the great mysteries of existence. Squeaks, hisses, the friction of moved furniture which may be sublimated into music, the tenuity of its strands maneuvered into webs of cosmic understanding. We feed the streets with bitumen, traffic lights, and parades. Call the studio. I’m ready to ride the escalator. You’ll recognize me by my clothes. I wear a monster gardenia and a beehive for a hat. Each day we test the prepositions of the English language for soundness and appetition. Up and down are no longer the polar opposites they once were. They are now in a state of exquisite convergence, recreating perceptual experiences which we chronicle in our journals. Last night I discovered a lost and disoriented dining room staff in the spectra of Aldebaran. This is an eyeball I wrapped in tinfoil. You can see lines of a pain rising there, at the center, where the world has become a sphere clutching gems of water. The fingerboard gives us potatoes. It does this by making sounds exempt from dry-cleaning. I write by swimming through a language, ablaze with philodendrons. I cut some ocher out for a cat I found in clay. I’d hoped that spreading myself out like this might lead to a glimpse of truth, or O’ahu. When a few of our more industrious members began scheming for ways to produce commercial wealth, we worried that this was a sure sign of disease, possibly fatal, and an antipyretic to the fevers of poetry. The diagnosis was pinned to a dream. Imaging and laboratory tests confirmed our suspicions. We trembled under the weight of is implications. The disease was plunged in a barrel of wasp piss, and the symptoms flew out like collateral. It became obvious that life was not only polysemous in nature, but that the vocal cords, which are attached to the cartilages, are to the human speech organs what the two vibrating reeds are to an oboe or the strings of a violin, which make it non-specific, and prone to hypnosis. I don’t know how to prove the existence of consciousness. I just throw words at it hoping something will stick. What we all hope to induce is trance. I’ve never wanted to treat sound like a magic carpet. The fugue was never about avoidance. It was always a search, a quest for an ontologically transparent activity, like a man sanding a block of wood. 

The Emotion Of Joining A Divided People

The emotion of joining a divided people was from the beginning 100% bilateral. During the autonomy, I literally worried about greeting you. What could we say that hadn’t already been said? The blaze engulfing my prevarications awakened my sense of detachment. The waiter stood by my table, a hair’s breadth from my list of beautiful objects. I didn’t mention Leibniz because his monad was protoplasmic, and it needed to crawl into a deep cave and sleep the pain away. I jumped through the window and landed in the street. This happened before I was born, when I was in history, and learning the art of unconsciousness. Before growing, we apply the lotus, and it creates a sense of mutability. The man next to me growled at his tattoo. What an original, I thought. In opposite corners are piles of personality, each one with a Christian thought and a bow to Frobenius. The plumb line is red. A crowd stands in front of my naked scribbles, captivated and under duress. I wrote it with a dagger. If my chowder warms up masterfully, I will have birch for breakfast and play my clarinet. We are all symptoms of a much greater geography. I ran by the window with a bone. It caused quite a stir. As you can see, I tend to go in and out of science, gradually comprehending why Dante Alighieri spent so much time in the laundromat, blurring his soup with images of hell. Obscurity has become a protective carapace. But I can still hear Marianne Faithful. I’m not letting go of all that disassociation in the face of public stupidity. I carried my arrogance deeper into life than was good for me. It was a silly encumbrance, like the air surrounding Chet Baker. This is the mood into which I walk into you. Into your life. No one else wants me around. I talk too much. Do you have anything in the refrigerator? You can take almost any shape and vary it to infinity. Anyone dealing in oil is superficial. I can assure you of that. The poor are eaten by extortion, mold, and usury. The rich swim in warm oceans from the deck of their yacht. And are never eaten by sharks. Don’t worry about me. I can find salvation in a loaf of bread. Every shillelagh and recess have an influence on me. Always benign. Always titanic. It’s a big universe. Dexterity is a useful skill, but by no means a reunion. Lock fingers with an angel and you’ll find yourself loose on the streets of Reno in no time. You can be forced out of any position, but no one can take your place in the uprising. Rebellion is personal. Everybody goes about it their own way. I surrounded myself with a lot of books. I also kept a toolkit handy. At first, everything was wine and romance. And then it got musical. Mahler opened a space in me that I’m still filling. I need to do just the opposite. I need to flow out, and submit myself to the divine. It’s dorsal, and full of anguish, and ecstasy, and long legato strokes.