The Place Which Everyone Occupies

Cicero compares the earth to a vast theatre: Quemadmodum theatrum cum commune sit, recte tamen dici potest ejus esse eum locum quem quisque occuparit. “As the theater is common, yet it may rightly be said that it is the place which everyone occupies.” For years now – decades, really – I’ve been playing a man devoted to the arts, mainly poetry, who followed a different drummer, the beat of the beats, a fool, essentially, who pursued chimeras of alchemical glory.

Now I’m old and I don’t know where I am. The curtain is coming down. But I don’t hear applause. I hear Bang A Gong (Get It On) on YouTube. 96 Tears by ? and The Mysterians. Water running in the kitchen sink. Barely audible little electrical beats coming out of a desktop clock. Must be cogs, whatever mechanical delicacies mesh in unison. Big thumps and grind of scraping objects, cookware of some sort, emanating from the kitchen upstairs. The U.S. of A is a noisy place. A theater of jackhammers, cars, sirens, fireworks, garbage disposals, vacuums, backhoes, forklifts, nail guns, chainsaws, framing saws. And music. The noise is permanent. The music is occasional. All Along the Watchtower. Jimi Hendrix. Needles and Pins. Jackie de Shannon. What is the difference between music and noise music is a sound which produces a pleasing sensation while noise is an unwanted and unpleasant sound. But is music always pleasing? It’s the dissonances the make music interesting, give it its texture and edgy grin.

I didn’t audition for the part. I grew into it. I didn’t know my lines at first. I just stumbled over the few words that dropped from my brain into my mouth. When I discovered alcohol, I found this much easier to do. I blubbered. I howled. I spewed poetry for attention. This is the thing that puts us on stage. That craving for attention. And to play a role that gets us out of our skin and into the skin of someone else. Someone like you. Or that guy over there, sitting in a chair at the library, reading Confederacy of Dunces. Imagine picking someone at random and slipping into their body for a day. Saying things they’d never say. Doing things they’d never do. So that when they were themselves again everyone in their life would be asking a lot of questions.

I played a man who devoted himself to literature, novels and poetry and even some journalism. Then, toward the end of his life, he watches the death of literature. People no longer reading. Curiosity dead. Intellect dead. Imagination dead imagine. So that it’s sad, even, to hold a book in the hand, that solid thing dense with perspective and berth between piers, the bobbing and rolling of ideas on an ocean of words, on paper, in a book, with a title and a spine. What will become of Shakespeare? Gertrude Stein? Viriginia Woolf? Calixthe Beyala? Marcel Proust? Bei Dao? Yasunari Kawabata? Henrik Ibsen? James Joyce? Samuel Beckett? Edgar Allan Poe?

If this was a play in progress now would be a good place for a soliloquy. Fuck these zombie turds. I’m going to keep writing. Even if the thinking gets muzzy and convoluted does it matter? Once the idea of an audience is squelched the writing is liberated, but purposeless. The two go together. It’s an anomie that results in a lot of mongrel anomalies. Godzilla in a Noh play. Liberation is sexy and makes you giddy but there’s always that sinking feeling that what you’re doing is done for nothing, for the sake of what, the sake of nothing. I’ll say it again: the sake of nothing. When did a body of writing ever stop people from killing one another? Hint: it wasn’t the Bible. It wasn’t the Vedas. It wasn’t the Mahabharata. It wasn’t the Divine Comedy and it wasn’t Moby Dick. It wasn’t The Canterbury Tales and it wasn’t The Art of War.

Right around 1965 when the impulse to write first began producing its lovely array of symptoms – indolence, reverie, that constant mad paddling toward other shores – that photograph of Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Robbie Robertson and Michael McClure standing by the City Lights Bookstore caught my attention. These were the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Rock and beat poetry aligned in a marriage of melopeia and smokestack lightning. 

Wild Animal Joy

I get a letter from a fellow poet younger than me by a few decades, how many I’m not sure, but his exuberance and preference for rap rather than rock indicates at least several. I’m drifting into my late 70s now, unthinkable that’s happening, even though it’s been happening for over 60 years, and I’ve had time to adjust, but haven’t, every day gets a little weirder.

My young friend mentions John Muir in a discussion about class conflict and the obscenely rich befouling our planet with their yachts and wars and private jets.

John Muir, yes, a consciousness detached from worldly pursuits and devoted to the sanctities of the forest, à la Thoreau & Edward Abbey. People like Abbey, Muir and Thoreau are antidotes to the popularity of the prosperity gospel in the U.S., which dates back to the 17^th century New England Calvinists, and their twisted notions of material success, and fear of the forest, except – of course – as potential wealth to extract. Wilderness terrifies that mindset. They get a kick out of calling experimental writing “word salad.” Word salad being, in their minds, a put-down. But I love word salad. Especially with Roquefort and semantic rebellions in my lettuce.

Muir (the name doesn’t come up often) reminds me of my hippy-dippy days in California in the 60s. Bay Area. Muir was on everyone’s lips, and most everyone was familiar with the poetry scene, even teenage girls in well-heeled neighborhoods south of San Francisco like Cupertino and Saratoga. Poets had the status of rock stars. A few months ago, while culling through mountains of memorabilia, I came across a letter from a girlfriend, 15 at the time (I was 17) raving about Allen Ginsberg. Can you imagine an average 15 yr old today raving about Allen Ginsberg? What do they rave about? Taylor Swift? 

I never got around to reading John Muir. I order an ebook from the public library, My First Summer in the Sierra. It’s marvelous. Full of wild animal joy, to borrow a phrase from Muir. Muir's language is vibrant and alive, "mountan manuscripts," "icy cold, delicious, champagne water" of a mountain creek, or the glassy surface of a still pond mirroring Muir across the Yosemite of my imagination.

Muir’s prose is vigorous and highly detailed, constellated with botanical specimens and gorgeous descriptions of the wilderness that call Albert Bierstadt to mind, open vistas of pristine grandeur, a turbulence of paint reflecting the violence of creation itself. He describes Yosemite Creek in a plethora of botanical enthusiasm:

Calm, beautiful, and nearly silent, it [Yosemite Creek] glides with stately gestures, a dense growth of the slender two-leaved pine along its banks, and a fringe of willow, purple spirea, sedges, daisies, lilies, and columbines. Some of the sedges and willow boughs dip into the current, and just outside of the close ranks of trees there is a sunny float of washed gravelly sand which seems to have been deposited by some ancient flood. It is covered with millions of erethrea, eriogonum, and oxytheca, with with more flowers than leaves, forming an even growth, slightly dimpled and ruffled here and there by rosettes of Spraguea umbellate.

A single raindrop explodes into a cosmological garden of Edenic exuberance; he reads the terrain like a divine manuscript.

How interesting to trace the history of a single raindrop…Some, falling on meadows and bogs, creep silently out of sight to the grass roots, hiding softly as in a nest, slipping, oozing, hither, thither, seeking and finding their appointed work. Some, descending through the spires of the woods, sift spray through the shining needles, whispering peace and good cheer to each one of them.

He converts the wilderness of rock and fern to the wilderness of the word, the towering architecture of the forest to the spiraling associations among words.

His real purpose for being in the Sierra that summer (June through September of 1869) was to guide a flock of sheep through the meadows of the Sierra abounding in rich green grass. He notes an instance of phantasmagoric revelation: “This evening the show made by the circle of fire was very fine, bringing out the surrounding trees in most impressive relief, and making the thousands of sheep eyes glow like a glorious bed of diamonds.”

Muir – like Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman – offered a vision of the United States utterly untainted by the sordid extractions of mining and industry, the worship of technology and industry and the deathly obsessions with capital and property. To think of the Sierra as property, as private real estate, is an abomination. Muir’s writing was instrumental in getting Yosemite to be declared a federally administered park. Yosemite National Park became a reality in 1890.

What didn’t become a park is the fullness of being an immersion in the wilderness can induce. You can’t market the sublime. It’s not for sale. Not up for private ownership. Fewer and fewer people seem to understand that vital connection. We’re all accustomed to a culture that elevates the quantifiable over the immeasurable, the incalculable, the indefinable. Most seem quite well-adapted to it. A suite of luxury apartments for zombie consumers is worth more than a park or wilderness. How do you get that juggernaut to turn around after 700 hundred years of plundering resources? Fortunately, the wilderness is a lot slipperier than people think. It’s not always where you expect it to be. Sometimes it’s just a moment of reverie. Although I hear employers may begin implanting chips in the brain to more rigorously manage those moments stolen from corporate profit. I don’t see that working. You can’t suppress a wilderness. It’s not always a matter of trees and ski resorts. It’s a matter of listening. The mountains are a calling. And their language is in the phosphor of your bones and the ecstasies of your breath.

 

Blue Pompom

What wealth of vision there is in a blue pompom. If we went below to talk about an elephant, would there be a problem? Our sense organs filter the outer world as it permeates our being, but they can be persuaded to relax their governance. That’s how I met your mother, when she was dancing with Fred Astaire. Do you remember the day President De Gaulle held you on his shoulders and declared that the Bordeaux government was illegitimate and that he was the true representative of France? You laughed so hard you peed on him, thus altering forever the course of our planet. There are some things in life so hard to accept that it becomes a crisis. A very sweet and crumbly crisis, but powerful enough to pulverize the sternum. They happen every day, these gestures of appeasement, these desperate gymnastics for things we can’t control, things we can’t pull back into language, the place they began, before they turned wild, and ornery, and created all this paraphernalia, this nest in the badlands, where we brood our young in reverie.

Despair is a science. The search for stupefaction grants it a reprieve until one’s wings grow back. To understand these things we must leave the circle of appearances and enter the parallelogram of shadows. We must iron our shirts. We must learn the Monster Mash. I like throwing balls at walls. It helps me feel abstract. These northern seas are freezing. But the horizons are wide. And golden. When the horn is blown we jump to our oars and make things happen. What is poetry for if not to revise the blundering truth? A few of us have returned to paganism for that very reason. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us. And so we row faster and faster and make discoveries of ourselves in the slop of the waves. Our despairs become phosphor, our words become salt.

We dream of singing in the spring. We spring into singing dreaming of spring. The rear admiral is straining his reason. The excitement mounts as we sail into the mystic. Those faint markings of Cy Twombly thicken in the mind with complexion. I remember the marks made by mail hampers on a certain wall in the old bakery building that was repurposed into a mailing service. It said Cy Twombly, although Cy Twombly had nothing to do with it. A parable has been concocted to restore Makauwahi Cave. For even though all knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. Some things arise from opium. Percepts of the world are structured by time and space. Though I’ve seen enough preludes to know an extract from a tesseract. Many things serve the world description. Gerunds, and the warm attachment of bonds, twirl in perfumes. Would you like a wolf spider? It’s a way of introducing oneself to imagery.

I entrust my musty introversion to the algebra of the moment. Each minute is equipped with the best compulsions money can buy. What is the skull but a sphere of shadows? We walk in exuberance craving the original world at the end of my finger. I think you know what this means. Property is theft. We strike suddenly when we feel arabesque. But this isn’t the time for that.  Look into this viewfinder, tell me if this doesn’t stimulate your sense of trigonometry: Cézanne staring at a tennis net, fascinated by the shadows it makes. We live in a rainbow of chaos. One adapts by watercolor. Engorge yourself with variation, & fissionable isotopes. Read poetry. Refine your escape into nothingness. Things are as they are, or aren’t. I feel increasingly tangible, as if I lived in a house of language, and the windows were open and the fridge was crammed with beer, & so became a biting commentary on the status quo. For which language was not intended. As if I knew. I’m just another fish in the ocean who has never seen water.

Rain and rain and more rain represents what the beginning might have begun when it began to begin. It’s the closest thing I have to a tattoo. Except for Groucho Marx teasing a flamenco dancer. My God water is wonderful when you’re thirsty. Every day I spent in Kauai I gazed into infinity. It broke my brain into a million gazebos. I can see infinity but I can’t think infinity. Infinity is thoroughly unthinkable. And so I turn to the Bee Gees and their illustrious career. I know my frame of mind. You ain’t got to be so blind. Words are residue. This sweetens the proposition. Experience without thermodynamics is bloodcurdling, but thermodynamics without experience is mere introspective popcorn. So here I am, reaching out for a house in the rain.

 

The Logic Of Illogicality

I have a vision of life, and try to find equivalents for it in coin-operated machines, which often leave me feeling coconut. Even the hills are monologues whose wooded temples cry out for Apollinaire. The fights and conversations beyond the museum are a play about religion. I always keep a pattern handy in case of chaos. I occupy a zone of impartial ups and downs. By nothingness I mean the thing that nothing is. Everything that is not a thing becomes a thing by the quintessence of its qualia, its atoms & molecules, hardware & context. I drilled a parable in the waiting room. Several of the watercolors weren’t bad. I felt jolted into some new reality. My ascension began at 5 a.m. when I was delivering newspapers and saw my feet leave the ground. And as I approached the stratosphere, I could hear it: the chatter of meat arriving in heaven.

I learned to appreciate logic when the world broke apart. But I was so unfamiliar with its use that I'm not sure it was logic I was employing but something else that looked like logic, a legal loophole, perhaps, or a carefully calculated verisimilitude. Or maybe it was simply wishful thinking. We’re all delusional now. We’re doomed to spend our remaining years in a carnival funhouse. Knock a noise into astonishment and the outcome will be gravy. This is how impressionism began. Paint tubes and attitude. Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. Said Benjamin Franklin. Who invented the Franklin stove, urinary catheter, glass harmonica and bifocals. I found him stumbling around in a prose poem once. He’d tripped over a metonym and landed on a metaphor. I helped him up and he thanked me. What are you up to, I asked. I’m looking for some logic, but this appears to be the wrong address. It’s the right address, I said, but the wrong altitude. Welcome to Laputa. 

Logic is inadequate to tackle the problems of existence. Logic cannot explain a suicide or a coincidence. What logic can do is bring consistency to one’s thinking. But consistency does little to help thinking to think it’s thinking when it’s thinking in knots and columbines, like a physicist on a mountain meadow in the Swiss Alps trying to make sense of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Consistency is a dead end. It only exacerbates the quiver of the quixotic. It’s a lot like Kinbane Castle in Northern Ireland. It sits on a raggedy old rock confronting the batterings of the North Atlantic simply because this is where it happens to be, empty of people, empty of service, empty of purpose. But a defense, nevertheless. A defense against oblivion. A defense against utility. A defense against utopia. Every defense needs a defense. Defending the defenseless against the undefendable can be a questionable employment of time & resource, but a noble one.

Logic is at its most logical when it’s illogical. The logic of this is tablespoons. Think about the curvature and backdrop. The context and shoes. Is there a cowboy singing and playing guitar on a horse? If so, then the heliotrope is worth the strain, and the banana split is worth the calories.  There is, curiously, a fertile inconsistency to our opinions concerning X-rays. They’re a miracle of electromagnetic radiation, but all they reveal are bones. The logic of this is based on an understanding of French impressionism. One must wrestle the symptom to find the apparition. Every disease has a signature handle. Rheumatism, tourism, fauvism. I’ve been diagnosed with incurable logorrhea. I feel like an evergreen. All my needles are turning red, and when the wind shifts, I feel as if I could touch the pallor of calamity. But my sap is amber, & there’s logic in it.

The Holiness Of Holes

Did you know that if you wear green on St. Patrick’s Day Krispy Kreme will give you a free doughnut?

I wonder what happens to unsold doughnuts. Do their bodies disintegrate leaving behind a hole? Where do holes go when things fall apart? They cluster together in holy places. There are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire alone.

My eyes occupy two holes in a somewhat spherical skull, two holes in my nose, two holes in my ears, a hole in my rear, and a hole beneath my nose which only appears when it opens and words come streaming out in a spectral wavelength of ultraviolet frequencies.  

The biggest hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Kola Peninsula of Russia, near the border with Norway. It descends seven miles deep in the earth’s crust.

The word ‘hole’ appears 26 times in 253 speeches within 39 works of Shakespeare.

As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney,

as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib’s

rush for Tom’s forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove

Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his

hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen

to a wrangling knave, as the nun’s lip to the

friar’s mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin.

 

-          All’s Well That Ends Well, Act II, scene 2. Clown.

 

Nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth. Whoa. What’s that about? What’s a nun’s lip doing on a friar’s mouth?

We originate from holes. Take a long sweet look at Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It is the holiest of holes.

Some physicists speculate that what we perceive as cosmic inflation – some sort of field that provides an energy inherent to space itself – an energy so robust and powerful it causes the universe to inflate, refusing to dilute even as the expansion of space continues – marks the creation of our universe from an ultramassive black hole.

I often fantasize walking into a wormhole and reentering the year 1966. The year Blonde on Blonde came out, and Aftermath and Sunshine Superman and Sounds of Silence and Fresh Cream and the Moods of Marvin Gaye. A hamburger, on average, cost 15 cents, and a two-bedroom house went for about $21,400.

The rock group Hole, with lead vocalist Courtney Love, disbanded in 2002. The hole itself, the idea hole, the many perforations and performances of holes, holes as a group, holes upon holes upon holes, echoing with tender invitations to be entered, to be filled, to be fulfilled, to be nucleated and nudged into interplay, is hunkered in a hollow somewhere, forlorn as a lover on a dock scanning the horizon for a ship, hollow as the hoop of hope on a chimney on a hill, fueled by nothingness and fire, crackling and alone. 

A Trinket Of The Mind

You can say bliss is yellow. You can call to the root of the baobab during a storm on the plains of Zimbabwe. You can write a paragraph that flames like a mushroom in a forest of words. But to create a fact with a luxurious sting you must drink the flight of the hummingbird.

An iron knowledge helps establish a meaningful wind in the life of a hippopotamus. And yet the ink that dreams of being a nail will sometimes be confused with a swamp.

This is a book of radar in a ginger terrain. Here, scratch the snowball card. This will prove that money is hurt by nicknames.

I mixed a nightcap with a nightclub and found a hibiscus in my shame.

What beautiful foam this water makes. The intake is a dagger. It’s like a mouth one blurs with quintessence.

Is this getting anywhere yet?

Eggs drink buttons. It’s how chaos moves through a sentence. I rattle my birth at a little aroma. It gives me a sense of scarlet identity. Out on the prairie time has mellowed our noises. Our pearls of rain mimic the bustle of sage.

I see enough reason for an alpine shadow that I hurry to sell it to the moon. It's a beautiful night. The stars are scattered like ingots of golden vertigo. Somewhere near Cutbank an elephant smells raspberries in the sweet prairie air. Memories of Botswana warm her mind.

The state of being is to be considered as an ebony ambiguity becoming correlative to all things through a trinket of the mind. How might an ambiguity be lipstick if it already has a diameter? The reason is simple. Because percussion has a gnome in it. And his name is Kolbein Butter Penis.

Blink against the wall showing off the spoke of the wheel. Step forward. Take a breath. Jump to me now suggesting darkness. Together we will move forward through the sentence allowing the rain to belong to the waves. And in the end cause beautiful things to happen to our bodies.    

 

What Makes Rock Rock?

What makes rock rock? Or should I say what made rock rock? Rock is dead. I think. I don’t know anymore. Intricacies abound in the daily phantasmagoria. Everything that constitutes life comes into focus. Ginger Baker in a frenzy of sticks and rhythm. There are days I can feel all the cells in my body subtly vibrating with cosmic cymbals. This is generally an indication that I’m pregnant with something fine and elegant, an embryonic opera swirling in a turbulence of light and darkness or elephants grazing together in the savannah of my private musings. The brain is a womb of musings, unending elaborations of Sein und Zeit. The labor went hard but the delivery was a success: a 9 lb. sonnet howling with magma and crystallizations of raw perplexity.

I’ve love to write about rock but I know very little about music, and having never played it, I don’t have a visceral sense of what’s going on. Writing about music is a difficult project if you know little about the construction of music. Of course, everyone, even the deaf, know something about music. It’s rhythmic, it creates vibrations, and it’s lively as a nest full of cuckoos. Unless it’s not. Unless it’s soft and reflective like still water in moonlight. A frog on a rock like a note on a sonata. The steady languorous rhythms of an albatross in flight, à la Peter Green.

Beethoven, who was nearly deaf, used a pencil in his mouth to catch the vibrations of the piano. He could tell by the vibrations the sound as it emanated from the string and permeated the wood.

Here’s what I do know: rock changed everything in my life. I remember the very afternoon it grabbed my soul and yanked it out of the dingy adolescent cell it was crouching in and let it loose as a Blakean angel. The song was “House of the Rising Sun,” sung by Eric Burdon. It had everything in it: New Orleans, a life of decadence and ruin seeking redemption in a desperate howl of epiphany and pain. It’s an intense song. It was the intensity of this song that grabbed me and shook me and made me turn into Arthur Rimbaud. Who doesn’t mythologize their past when they hear this kind of music? It’s different with a piece of music like Mahler’s Adagietto. This is what you listen to when you’re old and at the brink of something sublime. Mountain summit looking down. Lights changing and oscillating in movements across the long grass of the valley.

What makes rock rock is a strong backbeat, usually in 4/4 rhythm. It’s an emphasized offbeat. Unconventional, unusual. It hooks you with its off-kilter bravura. Going against the grain of what is expected. A sly contrariness leading you into a spirited confrontation with propriety. Propriety has its place. It helps people exchange ideas without killing one another. But it’s confining. It can be deadening. This is why rock and roll upset the world so much circa the early 50s, beginning with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, and culminating with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” in 1955.

The most vigorously idiosyncratic drumming appears in the Beatle’s “Come Together.” Ringo was left-handed, and so the drumming is shaped naturally around that idiosyncratic style. I’ve watched several videos of drummers demonstrating the complexity of drumming propelling this zany song, and it left me feeling dizzy with its rhythmic intricacies.

The electric guitar is essential. Or is it? There’s no guitar in the Beatle’s “Eleanor Rigby,” or Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” That said, the electric guitar is pretty important. Bo Diddley wouldn't sound Diddley without Diddley’s Jupiter Thunderbird. It wouldn’t have a spine. It wouldn’t have Bo. It wouldn’t have Diddley. That diamond ring won’t shine. No mojo. No cocoa. No cat black bone.

Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is mainly an E minor pentatonic with a bit of Dorian. The guitar work is lush and classical, serving a wistful melody with a heavy flavor of what the Portuguese call saudade. It opens with an acoustic guitar and builds into a powerful crescendo of fury and spiritual dilation. I think it’s much more moving than Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” I prefer Zeppelin’s more obscure numbers, like “Boogie with Stu.” The goofy Tolkienesque lyrics don’t really synchronize that well with the edginess and bite of an electric guitar.

And then there’s the most iconic beginning to a rock song in the Stone’s “Satisfaction,” the fuzz tone distortion produced by the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone seemed perfect for a song about the eternal dissatisfactions of consumer culture.

I don’t know where rock is today. I’m almost 77. I don’t go to clubs. My auditory system couldn’t take it. I’ve experienced heavy hearing loss and as early as 1966 acquired a lifelong case of tinnitus. Most of my listening is done with a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Sometimes I keep my hearing aids on, and sometimes I remove them. They tend to distort music. They have minimal effect on most of the rock I listen to, but completely destroy the more delicate sounds of classical music.

That said, going a single day without music is unthinkable. I agree with Nietzsche: “without music, life would be a mistake.” 

Improprieties Of Property

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his chapter on “Property Considered as a Natural Right,” refers to a “frenzy of possession.” Marvelous phrase, which perfectly captures United Stares culture. 90% of time, energy and innovation in the United States is devoted to the acquisition of things. Possessing things. Which involves money, and predation and borrowing and loaning and trickery and thievery and skilled labor and unskilled labor and misery and tedium and sometimes – if you’re lucky – having a blast performing on a stage, which is more a matter of being possessed than possession.

The other 1% of time is spent in waiting rooms, dressing rooms, bus depots and airports, scrolling up and down a screen on a mobile phone, gossiping, talking, adjusting a seatbelt, reading a map, hanging out in bars hoping to get lucky, reading menus and laboring to keep a conversation going without veering into politics or religion, which can be quite dangerous in these times of hypersensitivity and paranoia.

Why do people in our society crave ownership so much?

The legal definition of property in the United States is “anything (items or attributes/tangible or intangible) that can be owned by a person or entity. Property is the most complete right to something; the owner can possess, use, transfer or dispose of it.”

That doesn’t sound very exciting, at least on the surface. The complete right to something excites libidinal thoughts and – in many instances I’m sure – assholes exercising this principle in abusive and exploitative ways. But maybe that’s just me and my cynical mind. A right to something can also mean right to a bed and shelter, right to food, right to speak one’s mind, in which case language is the item in question, nobody owns a language. At least I hope not. Right to travel freely, right to plant vegetables and flowers and till the earth and fertilize it however one chooses, right to keep a collection of postage stamps in a locked drawer, right to take certain drugs and medications, right to an attorney, right to medical attention, right to modes of transport, especially private forms of travel, in which one can drink whatever one wants and gaze out a window and not have to think a single thought. Right to a thought means what, exactly? You have a right to think whatever one wants. And sell it to the highest bidder.

Intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect and imagination; the best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. It does seem odd that something with no physical existence, no boundaries or weight, no density or texture, no smell or color can be considered property in any conception of property however stretched or inflated it may be. If I imagine a speech balloon propelled by a glass propeller proving the existence of God does that become a property? Can I sell it to a baseball enterprise? Will it buy me a house in Malibu? Can I auction it off at Sotheby’s?

I think God would have some say in the matter. Is the idea of God a form of property? Clearly, nobody can possess God. Of course, if anyone did, they’d have one hell of a bodyguard.

“The whole strength of the State is at the service of each citizen,” Proudhon wrote. “The obligation that binds them together is absolute. How different with property! Worshipped by all, it is acknowledged by none: laws, morals, customs, public and private conscience, all plot its death and ruin.”

Property is anti-social. The items most illustrative of this phenomenon are books. I remember doing a lot of visiting in my 20s, and everybody had books, everybody loved books and everybody read books, and bought books and talked about books and wrote recommendations about books. Almost every time a friend would visit, they would scour my library and pull out a book with excitement and ask to borrow the book. It felt wrong to say no. Books are communal. There’s some inherent quality books possess that makes them immune to the poisons of possession. This is certainly not be the case with online magazines and other similar entities that ask for a fee. Nobody possesses words, but if the words are arranged a certain way, arranged to convey knowledge in the clearest way possible or arranged for aesthetic purposes, to create a certain feeling or sensation or cause the mind to dilate and disburden itself of harmful ideologies and conceptions, then it has value as something to possess. Possession, however, is not the right word. The right word is access. You may be asked for a fee in order to gain access to the pixels holding the content in place. This is not anti-social, exactly, but it does impose burdensome conditions on someone’s time and financial resources.

Morality comes into play during times of extreme inequities between shelter and resources. The city I live in – Seattle – is extremely expensive. The minimal amount required to buy an average house in Seattle is an annual income of $200,000 dollars. I thought this was ludicrous when I first read it. I thought the only people who make $200,000 a year were Hollywood actors, corporate lawyers and gifted neurologists and heart surgeons. Turns out quite a few trades and professions pay that amount. But it’s still far from average. Most people are struggling to make rent and put food on the table. And a lot of people have fallen into the most inhumane circumstance of all, which is homelessness. The most conspicuous aspect of morality here is its complete absence.

Proudhon famously said that “property is theft.” The hoarding of wealth keeps it out of circulation. And wealth buys power, particularly the capacity to insure legislation favorable to the acquisition of more wealth and more power, while removing goods and services from the public, and further impoverishing those whose assets keep shrinking. “Behind every great fortune,” said Balzac, “is a great crime.”

Ok, but what about someone like Taylor Swift or Paul McCartney, musicians who made ginormous fortunes writing songs and making music? There was nothing criminal in their actions. You can’t arbitrarily demonize the rich and expect to maintain a solid grip on the morality of money. Which is why I say thank God for cognitive dissonance. The dissonance of being rich. And the propensity of property to become private. One man’s privacy is another man’s deprivation. And who isn’t galvanized by dreams of plenty, luxuries and exhilarating freedoms? Is there a balance to this picture, or anything like a center that serves to make it coherent?

Wealth and poverty are polar extremes, but not polar opposites. A young man in good health in a one-bedroom apartment is wealthier than a billionaire with pancreatic cancer. That’s your center. Life itself. Life is nobody’s property. I don’t own my body. I am my body. And my body owns me.

 

A Mood Comes Up From Behind

I’m not as autonomous as I like to think. A mood comes up from behind and gives me a push. I punch around in the air looking for a mood or something I can fight. Most of my feelings are figments of something I’ve imagined. I hear the tinkle of glasses. The fizz of champagne. I have an attitude after me now. It catches me during an idle moment when my attention is drawn to a nude in a Finnish sauna. The attitude twists my arm. I’m compelled now to perform wonders, however banal they seem to the unelected. If it's snowing I roar the parallels. The analogous. The comparable. And assorted maps. I’m going to Deadwood. I hear they’ve got eggnog. And gold and loose women. There are fortunes to consider when an absence sublimates steam. Experience is a contraption like a spoon. You stick it in your mouth, give it a lick and wipe it clean.

My castle is a palette of detonating rain. I see things as they exist not as how they might exist. Language alters nothing. But it reveals everything. Makes things real. Weirdly real. Really real. Surreal. Real as snow. The crisp kind that crunches underfoot alerting the wolf packs to your presence. Two weeks later I was on a mission to Mars. This is how things happen when words take control. Nuances and wharves. Middle-aged people getting sloppy drunk on a cruise ship while passing over unimaginable depths and bioluminescent fish. Does any of this sound familiar? Welcome aboard, my friend. Let me tell you something. I grew up believing in acne. Later, when I became a man, I abandoned bobsledding for shuffleboard. I love the ocean. Love the rolling of waves. It’s why I agreed to a round of golf with the pope. I love the interactions of letters. And on some nights I can hear the metaphors stirring among the banalities of this world.

I may be at liberty to say anything I want, but I will need a pound of grammar to begin. Let’s begin at the toolshed. There is a footprint, there is a shovel oozing darkness. Everything falls into place when a windshield intercedes with reality. All I get on the radio is static. I have a problem with invocations. They’re so solemn and inexact. You never know what you’re going to get. It might be a goulash of renegade abstractions, and it might be a Wichita sarsaparilla. Try not to sneer. It’s impolite to mouth emotions so insincerely. Never be ashamed of your nothingness. It’s the unspeakable that allows a cow to stand in our room expecting to be milked. Life is funny that way. I like Corot since I live in art like a pastel. It’s more than a fashion, it’s more like a foundry. The paradigm is red hot. We come riding out furiously on our ponies. I have cuticles to explore.

A steady rain absolves eternity of its endless somersault. It’s the cruelest joke that ever existed. Except the one about the pope, the donkey, and the Hollywood pimp. I’ve got to cut this out and get a decent job. Glitter invocation into my intentions. I must convince myself to tear the canvas off and reveal eternity for what it is. It’s more than a bus stop. It’s more like a pot of air for the consonants of our tenuity. It takes a long time to learn how to backslide into reflection. There are languages to learn, and soliloquys and songs. Everything is thin there due to the altitude. I see insects quickly disperse among the bottles. And mountains as far as the eye can see. A woman breaks out of the ice and offers me immortality. No thanks, I say. I like being temporary. She hurls the sky at me. I drift through downtown Omaha. Next time I’m calling an Uber.  

Dinner At Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

Midnight. Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. We sit down to eat. It’s a big table. Solid oak. The milieu is an accessory for the sequins everyone is wearing. Overhead is a chandelier. Under our feet are planks of roughhewn prose. The debris of letters whose subtleties unveil a world released from the lie of being truth. This is a place of refuge. No prescribed choices. This helps explain some of my biases, which were carpentered in the Black Forest by a group of innovative elves. It's always beneficial to reflect on things. What is love: a lampshade, or a bowl of ambrosia salad? Mitochondria are essential to the functioning of biochemical reactions. We should show them as much hospitality as possible. Propulsion starts with engineering & ends with butterflies. After that, life becomes a biological rather than theological matter. And we all have ecstasy for dessert.

8:45 a.m., Sunday. I put my hearing aids in and the soundscape immediately comes into high definition. I hear the rustle of my pants, the metallic clacking of letters on a keyboard, and think about the developments in writing in mid-nineteenth century western culture, when the image of the writer assumed the character of a craftsperson, who (in the words of Roland Barthes), "shuts himself away in some legendary place, like a workman operating at home, and who roughs out, cuts, polishes, and sets his form exactly as a jeweler extracts art from his material, devoting to his work regular hours of solitary effort." But now, in the digitalized world, that exaltation of language as an exacting and venerable art has been superseded by a culture of conformity and shallow entertainment, and writing relegated to the gratuitous monasticism of Lindisfarne in the Middle Ages. The monks feared Viking invasion. The writer fears the erosion of value.

The chair creaks whenever I get up to do something, get a glass of water or feed the cat. The creaking audibly matches the strain in my legs with such accuracy that I often forget the creaking is coming from my chair and think it's coming from my legs. And sometimes I lean back and sip the solitude soaked in whatever scenery happens to be drifting around in my mind. Little details, like eluding a splinter or sealing a letter. Petting a cloud. The rustle of new wings moving by trial and error. The voice of an angel echoing in an aquarium. That weird smoky smell of candle wax. The excitement and anguish at the start of a revolt. How stellar it is to ship my freight and drive across Nevada on a Suzuki Intruder. Is that a detail or a dream? I think it’s the ignition of unburnt fuel in the exhaust system, or ceaselessly exploded clichés in a wilderness of words.

When I was young, I engorged with lyricism. Now that I’m old I engorge with oblivion. The universe becomes erotic. Because death is involved. And cataracts and arthritis. And moments of euphoria followed by despair followed by the ghosts of rock and roll past. Jackie De Shannon. Needles and Pins. Rosie Hamlin. Angel Baby. Merrilee Rush. Angel of the Morning. Which was written by Chip Taylor, who also did Wild Thing, Early Sunday Morning and Fuck All The Perfect People. I remember meeting Merrilee Rush. She was sitting on a stump in a woodsy yard somewhere near Burien, Washington. I was sitting on a stump, too. Feeling massively stumped. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. Don’t know why, lately, it has been popping into my mind. It’s one of those funny memories about something inconsequential that bubbles up for no reason, and yet holds a certain fascination, a certain mild excitement, and pops, sprinkling glitter on the void.

There’s an unparalleled resource beyond the obvious. I can sense it in Apollinaire. The trickle of interacting hymns. And great machinery. The night is a chamber of stars. My bed is the prairie. My radio is crickets. I feel Gothic. I feel melodic and imminent. Like hives. Like a pharmacy on the edge of town. Like a song about a woman who dropped her life into a microphone and created a sense of urgency in people’s lives. Darkness sees itself in our obscurity. This is where the story gets puzzling. The chameleon that walks on my nerves is thoroughly intuitive and trained in the martial arts, and yet it can never find a substance that can justify its choices. My life has been a lifelong conundrum. Is that such a bad thing? The dilemma of singularity can never by resolved by robots. It takes controversy, delirious mitochondria, and big mistakes. 

No better feeling than propofol diffusing into the bloodstream. Consciousness and all of its clatter and all of its clutter sublimating into a vapor of blithe inconsequence that is swept away by the breath of an angel. It’s on my mind constantly. This flirtation with death. With oblivion. With the void. It’s enticing. It’s beguiling. But I don’t want to feed it words. I just want let it exist as is. A vapor of blithe inconsequence. Nothingness is inherently unstable. It can’t exist without something. Nothing needs something to be nothing. It needs protozoans and hemoglobins and semicolons. Quarks popping in and out of existence. The crazy vagaries of dreams. Agates in the river Lot. Stars in a web of galaxies. And a staircase that leads nowhere. 

 

A Western Groove

I see a western groove tune itself in a pair of overalls and wonder if our cosmetics could have some fun together. Think of the wealth such union may bring, not to mention the propagation of various shampoos. Maybe next time. You look like you’re in a hurry. I’ll shave now, and attend to my hygiene. You may not see me tomorrow. I like wandering. They say the sea is good for that. But today, I'm at the yellow theater watching a nuance get guttural with a slattern. It's a complicated play, more like an undulation than an adumbration. But with a touch of Beckett. Slopping around in a gallon of amusement. So easy to imagine. So hard to perform in a bucket.  

Do you feel punctilious? I don't. Not at all. I'm not even necessary. Nor am I good at poker. The introversion is just a disguise. I made it up so that I could dance with a skeleton on the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m home now, sighing, weeping, laughing maniacally. I feel so unfettered at times I have to sit down and look at a Rembrandt. The browns and russets bring me back to earth. Luxuries like this are never innocent. But it’s not friendly to deny things. Better to accept what’s there. Especially despair. Writing is an accompaniment to despair, a vain extravagance, like Charles Olson wearing a helmet of porcupine fish skin to a wedding. It is often lauded as a transformative energy. I think of it as the rupture of expectation by the rapture of predication.  

I get lyrical around sand. I can feel it. The sand between my toes. The fervent waves breaking against the rocks. The city lights to the south are tantalizing. We move with disproportionate fluidity towards whatever destiny offers. Our arrival is met with hullaballoo, firecrackers and madness. A turbulent universe emboldens everyone on the sidewalk. They dance with abandonment and frenzy. This is our chance. We can do it. We hold the power. To change the mind. Detonate conceptions that control nothing, but thunder it like hell. The art of the parable makes me a little shaggy and nervous at the wheel. I'm old now. All the decisions have been made. But so long as there are subtleties of voice, we can deepen our understanding of sand.

I like the sound of fanning paper money in my hand. Is this because it’s lost so much value due to inflation that now it’s really mostly paper? Was my perception occluded by the commercial power of the dollar when the dollar still held market value, or did it engorge with the pulse of poetry, whose value is incalculable, because it’s phantasmal, and variegated, and backed by abstraction? Matter matters when it matters. It's very funny to make declarations of things. The house of language has a fast current running through it today. Let’s get lawless and boil our hope in deutsche marks. The heart holds life. I just let it sit there for a day or two until it marinates fully in Rembrandt. And then I take it down from the hearth and release it into the wild.

Art elevates our autumn to the status of a chimney despite the actual palette, which is bedrock. I see in it a detail of stars and stripes. I get a rise out of art. If we discuss it this summer, I will give it a push. If its components chew mint, then we are the minions of thyme. Here it is. I found it. Charles Olson’s proprioception. It was in the closet the whole time, hanging there like a small evergreen government. I must say I really like denim. Something about it shouts Wyoming. Monument Valley. The prairies in both the Dakotas. If denim is a problem it excuses whatever makes this world so busy. Busy with sugar. Busy with bananas. And empire and trumpets. Many romantic ideas were based on the banana. Some call this an enigma, others a conundrum, and still others a dirigible. I call it a trombone. We now have a diagnosis over rubbing what the exhibition engendered, which was nothing less than ink. I have a photosynthetic tattoo.

One night as I gazed at the sky I thought I saw Wisconsin and spurred my horse. I like to take long gallops in the open air. I look for subtleties of balance and interplay. One day I stopped to pick a fight with a hesitation. I found a language and folded it into a flower. Meaning is a device made of wire and snow. It's a dart that pins my war to the wall. I find it hard to be spontaneous socially. But you have to be. If you want to interact with life, you’ve got be willing to take a punch to the groin, and a grudge to the dance. Nipple sticks are everywhere. A nipple stick is a form of rosary. Lightning is a nipple stick. It comes with a warranty and a pair of earrings and fits nicely in a tool belt. But no. I don’t know why there’s something instead of nothing, and that if a thing isn’t forbidden by the jaws of quantum gherkins, it’s guaranteed to happen. If this little emulsion of awe can soothe your ecstasies you can glue pieces of me to the axle. I’ll understand.

Here’s an idea: make an analogy out of wire and paper mâché, then compare it to a jigsaw. The pointlessness is exhilarating. It may or may not manage to capture fully our sense of what things are, or if that was even the intent. It exceeds the limits of understanding. I don’t know what it’s trying to comfort, what it’s trying to convey. We’re in the country of the silly, where consciousness thrives without a subject, and the drawers are plump with gadgets. A good word or two might gratify a usurpation but it can never take the place of ointment. When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else. What does that tell you about existence and being? It tells me that a pot should have enough soil in it to support the plant, and control is illusory. 

 

My Skinny Lily

R tells me that what I want is daylight. This is in reference to a light bulb. I’d prefer a daylight bulb, a bulb designed to replicate the tone of light emitted from the sun, so they can reach up to 6,500 Kelvins, and are usually a crisp and invigorating light source, in which chestnuts sparkle like crime and waves of quicksilver lucidity diffuse space with uncanny delicacy. This will be for my new lamp, which I ordered from Home Depot, and assembled on the living room floor, like building a flower, an extremely skinny lily, with a small white cone bending down in happy splendor.

I watch a YouTube video on light. It’s in French, so that I can feel fancy when I’m trying to shed light on light. Light consists of electromagnetic waves characterized by their level of energy and intensity. It travels by wavelength. It doesn't oppose anything. It imbues. It penetrates. It goes around. It bends. It's too light for nothing. Nothing is bitter. Nothing is everything. Light can't butter anything so insistently dark that it can’t spit skin at a vacant fetish.

Picture a stream of wavelengths beating into a lush mud slide. This will tell you all you need to know about our planet. The rest is kept in a vault in the Vatican. It walks around like a sequel of bones in a cathedral panegyric. All religions are the same, so your coupon is good at all mosques and synagogues. Tell them a swamp sent you. And that it smelled of waffles.

A consonant rubs my mouth to find a vowel. That’s not where I keep my vowels. You’ve come to the wrong place, my dear. Keep on going until the kangaroo finds justice in a cemetery. No one has told this story before. Because it hasn't happened yet. No one has a memory of things that haven't happened yet, except Mr. Super Future, who lives next door to himself in a warm reminiscence. That zone we call our hodgepodge hinges on a plurality blessed with pyramids and papyrus. But if it worries you, just don’t give a damn, and everything falls into place. The sun rises to the east, the moon is in Scorpio, and the skulking incendiary of a dying culture is ugly as the end of a road on the coast of reality. The sexton is dead and the wind is slamming the door.  

We decide daylight might be wrong. We need a globe. Something globular. Daylight is bright. Too bright. Maybe what I need is a globe. Or a republic. The norm is gone. We live in a new zone now. I have whirlpools in my shoes and jewelry in my noodle. I feel frenzied as a hive of wasps at Easter. I must take it upon myself to be my flesh. To do what flesh wants. Because it keeps my bones hidden from view. And makes the world feel quizzical. The irony of life is that the older you get the more intensely you live. Bleeding hearts grow best in full sun. If you follow this sentence to the end you’ll find that it has no point. But did you notice the fish were noble and expressed themselves by wandering through the water in quest of nothing of interest to us?

 

We Were Walking South On 6th Avenue North

We were walking south on 6th Avenue North when we saw a cyclist crossing Mercer get hit by a large delivery van. It was shocking. The cyclist appeared to be a man in his sixties. I was sure he would continue to lie still in the street, unconscious, possibly dead. Instead, he got up with an uncanny suddenness, straddled his bike - which didn't appear to be damaged and was still operable - and rode off with such vigor and force of will that you'd think he was fleeing a bank robbery. I'm pretty sure what he was fleeing was a giant hospital and ambulance bill and an exhausting, nightmarish engagement with a merciless and predatory medical billing system. The driver, meanwhile, a young black man, sat frozen in his seat. I felt really bad for him. He seemed to be in a state of shock. I used to drive a van myself, and dark rainy nights in a crowded city always held the prospect of disaster.

10:32 a.m., Sunday. R is transplanting her ferns in heavy February rain. The window people are coming tomorrow to install our new windows. They'll be stomping around in the area where the ferns and moss have been thriving. She's leaving one because the roots are deep. She's going to put a bucket over it, and hope that the workers have enough sense to avoid it.

Our apartment is in chaos. I seek refuge in Proust. Who, at present, is enjoying a champagne breakfast with his friend Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup’s mistress, an actress and prostitute, in a private room with angled mirrors all around. I mistranslate a passage to mean that he is smiling at the champagne and the champagne is smiling at him. I messed up the indirect pronoun. He’s smiling at himself in a mirror, because he looks disheveled and ridiculous, which is his image in the mirror smiling back. I prefer the mistranslation. I remember that feeling. The glee of something inside creating a new language, a foreign disposition. I can see why spirits are called spirits. Nobody calls alcohol spirits anymore. It’s a shame. And yet another mistranslation. Not that it matters. It’s just that old craving, to feel something other than myself in myself. Something more like Emerson’s oversoul. Which has a fruity taste and a touch of sweetness.

February 14^th, a cold and gray Valentine’s Day, the window installation crew (I don’t think they’re called glaziers anymore, at least no around here uses that term) arrived in two big vans, one of which parked in back of the building. They looked like a heavy metal garage band, but with gigantic toolbelts instead of guitars. I was greatly relieved to see they arrived on time. They went to work immediately on the window in our bedroom, a narrow window with a lovely view of a concrete window well. I worried about those guys getting in there and maneuvering around. It was extremely noisy. I tried reading an article on Proudhon and the concept of property in my French philosophy magazine. The concentration kept my mind off the noise and a little less ill at ease with all these guys stomping around. We put Athena (our cat) in the bathroom with her food bowls and litterbox. She didn’t like it. She scratched furiously at the door. After they finished with the bedroom, they moved their operations to the other side of the building to work on the living room window. This allowed us to take refuge in the bedroom, where I watched a video on the origin of the universe.

I always feel ill at ease around people with skills. Practical skills. None of my skills are practical. Most of my skills are obstinately unmanageable and inconsequential. Hopelessly quixotic, an embarrassment for a man my age. I used to marvel at my uselessness. It was thrilling to feel detached, a romantic in ocean mist. Now I feel queered by it, sabotaged, adrift, askew. I discovered new wants in my elder years. The confidence of a skill. The more skills the better. Even if it’s just juggling skulls in the Court of Death. Defended by a lawyer whose skills reside in the obscurities and chicanery of the law. Which would make me fall in love with language again. And what a beautiful whore it is, Mae West cracking blue jokes on the stand. Judge with raised eyebrows. Jury pretending to look detached and wise. But stifling laughter. That’s language all over. Radiant energies in which linen is flipped and beds are made. In which skills are learned. Carpentry, plumbing, welding, active listening, attention to detail, fucking around.

The crew finished, but there was a problem: the big living room window wasn’t fitting right. The measurement was off. Which would make this the second time the measurement was off. We were told that they would have manufacture yet another new window. This filled us with anguish, frustration, and dread. We’d had enough of stress. Next day, thank God, we were informed that there might be a way to get the window to fit. They could get to it the next day.

Next day, the window was removed and some material was shaved off the inner aluminum lining on our window frame and the window was re-installed. But now there was a problem with the left window panel; it had a small crack in the left bottom corner and would not slide freely as intended. You had to tug hard on it to get it to open. Unacceptable. A new panel would have to be manufactured. This would take another two weeks, if not more. This meant R had to wait to replant her ferns and moss for an indefinite period of time. We were pissed, frustrated, tired, crabby, and demoralized. But compared with miseries elsewhere, it must seem small, if not ridiculous. We’ve got electricity and running water and each other. Streaming services. Sitcoms. Rattles and raspberries. Bo Diddley. B.B. King. Ella Fitzgerald. Hot dogs and baked beans.

Disasters come in all sizes. I reserve the bigger ones for another day when they may be talked about more freely. Not like now in which one word, one passionately exclaimed declaration deposited in a social media site can end a friendship of 50 or 60 years. One recklessly expressed opinion about the truth of things can turn you into an overnight pariah. Many doors are closed now, and many windows broken or closed or boarded over. And sometimes a man on a bicycle gets hit by a van, gets up, straddles the bike and bicycles speedily to a place of calm, and refuge. 

I Feel So Abstract At Times

I feel so abstract, at times, I can swallow a piece of cake and think of nothing but the bolero. It’s as if the glitter of creativity held the exasperation in all of us as a form of invitation. But to what? The swans I stuff with animation. The lake rippling with my breath. The tiny theatre I present to the world in the form of conjecture. The cast is diverse, and if my harness is soaked in oasis pins, I will spout the truth of collision, and get gaudy around the hibachi. Discourse is produced by the creation of an alibi, a serrated rod placed in the tarpaulin and pulled violently to ignite. For example, everyone laughs when Warren Buffet tells a joke at lunch. But what does it mean to understand something? Walk under an eyeball if you want to see something shaggy. Some call it an eyebrow, others an evolution. I call it a guffaw. There is a dimension of adjectives in which the heart beats against the churchyard, and a hypothetical summit stuns the structure of existence. The table locomotive chugs with infinite fury. But it must be balloons that write the smell that I beat on a fruit. Why otherwise would I maneuver the points I’m making? I’m sending a kiss to your junkyard by freight. This will prove that our brilliance shines like soot and that we mean what we do. There are small objects that I pepper with words if I feel haunted by a language. It's this kind of thing that gets me through the day. The greenery resists a myriad frizz and this makes me phonemic, if not bubbly. If there’s anything else I can do to make you feel technical, please let me know and I’ll bake us a tarte tatin. It’s like they say: brush a jingle push a wedding.

 

To No One In Particular

Oil fountains from the heart of the earth and powers a civilization of trucks and roadside cafés, long daydreamy journeys on four lane highways, polyester hoodies, air mattresses, antifreeze, cold cream, crayons, lubricants, pajamas, vinyl flooring, shampoo, putty and panty hose. Consider this the place of emboldened radar. The ping, ping, ping of mysterious forms. Mass heating up in a fist of energy. The dark blood of ancient life forms serving a culture of industry, dominance and power. F-16s dropping “smart” bombs on Mesopotamia. King Kong atop the Empire State building swatting at Curtis Helldivers.  

In this process of being primarily concerned with things, that ever increasing production, that ever increasing consumption, we ourselves transform ourselves into things without knowing it. We lose our individuality, in spite of the fact we talk a lot about it. We follow leaders who don’t lead. We believe that we are acting on our own impulses, and convictions and opinions, when actually we are manipulated by a whole industry, by slogans, and yet nobody has any true aim. We are alienated from ourselves, certainly we don’t feel intensely. All we are after is to not be different, and we are frightened to death to be just two feet away from the hurt. – Erich Fromm

Debussy’s Deux Arabesques glide into my head, tinny and slightly distorted, due to my hearing aids. I’m listening to music on a noise-canceling headset. I do better with rock and roll. This is because the nuances of classical music are destroyed by the electronics in my hearing aid. This is the same for jazz, which is really just a further evolved version of classical music. Near bedtime, I remove my hearing aids so I that can enjoy more subtle musical expressions. I wait a bit for some tinkly ripples of piano notes to finish rippling (it’s really hypnotic) and move over to Lissie doing the Wild Wild West scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. I love it when she rises to that really long note that swings the vistas to the west wide open and all that excitement that was once there in the form of towering pines and grizzly bears before MacDonalds and Walmart and the glitz and glam of Hollywood got there. That’s my take. Lissie seems to be implying something a little different. More like Kierkegaard. The dizzying effect of freedom, of vast possibilities, the boundlessness of one’s own existence, an existential paradox of choice, a teleological suspension of the ethical that leads to the Hollywood Freeway, and a new reality. 

Or, in Lissie’s case, Iowa.

I didn’t become the mayor of myself as I’d hoped. I just got old and turned my head into a museum of regrets. Big and little dioramas of angry words and slammed doors, the wrong words at the wrong time, shaggy philosophies based on primal instincts, cocaine philosophies based on semantic lunacy, footlight mosaics and strange encounters in hotel lobbies.

What a paradox is the art of handling things by signs which are external and foreign to them, and whose very correspondence with them is completely arbitrary. Each thing must be accompanied by a ghost to which the sign is attached, another ghost. The combined signs combine the ghosts - and a special machine allows ghosts to be passed back to things - and to impose on them, on things, the same fate that the easy ghosts endured in the zone of the bizarre where they are slaves to the signs. – Paul Valéry, Notebooks

This is a perfectly handsome calico dress. It’s completely imaginary and sewn together with words. I left it here for some reason which I have long since forgotten. But now that it’s here, I might as well leave it here. Here is such a pretty word. Why waste it on a calico dress?

For a moment, I imagined a Place Pigalle existence, bistros, magicians, pickpockets, flame throwers, sex shows, adult theatres, black silk stockings, ostrich plumes, painters in furious discourse at outdoor cafés, rooftop beehives, joyful windmills reaching out to the sky, a chair walking down the street on the back of a man, rugged old boots and insanely virile sunflowers, and then it became words written on a laptop screen, emitting strange noises and lurching forward down the Boulevard de Clichy looking for the rest of this paragraph.

I have fun translating things, chairs, faucets, sacrifices, Thursday afternoons. Things change depending on the language in which they find their expression. A rose by any other name is still a rose, but human perceptions are fluid, and today’s troika may be tomorrow’s barouche. It’s all about qualia. “Midnight Rider” sung by the Allman Brothers or “Midnight Rider” sung by Tom Waits. The difference is subtle, but significant. Doom and defiance in one, gravelly idiosyncrasy in the other. With bits of each other overlapping. It’s not a strong contrast. Just enough to make a difference. A significant difference. Like a hand reaching out of the dark. You won’t know whose it is. But the grip and texture of the skin will inform you of its character.  Poet or politician. Psychopath or raconteur. Ectoplasmic phantom or insurance actuary. Pronoun or prayer. You’ll know. Just don’t get pulled in. Qualia can be tricky. It doesn’t have spheres or horizons or anything remotely geometric. It’s wisps, hues, skeins of silk and the blast of the sun on a Phoenix patio in late July. Burning feet. Ice tea. A tart recognition of being in the open, far from anything central, wonderfully alone, and mouthing a new word to no one in particular.

 

 

The United States Of Delirium

Slap it. Slap it silly. I insist. The garter can take a beating. Rub a springy wire on a stiff brocade. The landscape means this beauty has clothes. There is tension in saying things contrary to the quake of enrichment despite the damage caused by the jumps of those people within their own absence. Look how coppery that willow is in the light of our passage. The bacteria have my full attention. Wherever you go there you are. How many times have you heard that before? Probably in one of those places you ended up one night in a fugue state, like most of us. Not knowing whose place this is, what country you’re in, what city that is on the other side of the window, and what is this wet thing in my hand? The public has a deep resonance like a fountain. They go repeating the actions of the former day for which they’re rewarded with the skins of animals and paper and metal representing the value of things such as they exist in a state of complete abstraction. When I was in the movies, our words were violent for which there were reasons and halibut congenial in the depths of a long filibuster. The world is experienced in the imagination before it becomes an intrusion and fighting one’s way through entanglements of butcher paper becomes a society. Every day a truth is coughed up and presented to the public as a substitute for mahogany. How often does a belief become its own uncertainty? The blood coagulates as the recruits spread over the countryside. There’s a logic to the corkscrew that twists into the mind like a hot Parisian summer. The cork pops out with a quick riddle and a novel duration. I know. We’re in the United States of Delirium. As soon as somebody – anybody - enters the story, the paragraph jumps into a mug of shaving cream and all the words in the sentence arrange themselves into a towel. A scorpion hangs from the neck of an outlaw. It could be a gentle night if the ocean’s nerves weren’t so elongated and phosphorescent. Instead, what we have is a needle thinking its way in and out of the fabric of life and bringing it together in a zigzag stitch. On the other side of this sentence is a frozen heart melting in a pool of correspondence. And embellishing the front is a tempest of emboldening scarlet. There’s a door at the end of the hall. As soon you open the door, duck your head as a predicate flies overhead. We're in the Mesozoic now, dependent on engineering and knees. North of my chin is an epigraph whose mission is to rid London of organized crime. That’s when I can sit down and start negotiating with the past. What did that mean, what does this mean, and so on, until the present moment steps in and inserts itself in a sentence so I can see what’s happening. Everything else is writing itself into being with a soldering iron and a Renaissance, up there around the corner, where the future is.

The First Time I Heard Satisfaction

It's hard to find satisfaction in this world. It’s a huge and wonderful thing when a need is met. Be it food, water, shelter, warmth when it's cold, a cooling breeze when it's hot, some needs are easier to negotiate than others. Love and friendship are the hardest to obtain. And maintain.

And there are yearnings that are nameless, that can’t be defined, not entirely, and drive you nuts. Because you can’t describe it. It exceeds the reach of language. It’s a mystery whose odysseys assume mythic proportions. People scale mountains looking for it. Take powerful hallucinogens. Go on long pilgrimages. Prey to saints and gods and spirits and coy apparitions. Fast. Meditate. Maneuver their way to power. Take risks. Write novels. Thunder over the country on Harleys.

Most everything on TV is a lie. It’s a kingdom of seductive illusions. The Stones – quite possibly the most prominent hedonists of the last few riotous decades - made a song about it. “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” held the number one spot for four weeks in July & August of 1965.

You have to love the irony of Keith Richards being the author of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and the one providing the most - if not all - the obstructions in its making. He had the fewest satisfactions, as it were, in keeping with the plaint of the title. The opening riff came to him in a dream. He insisted on horns for those five famous opening notes. And he worried about some songs he’d unconsciously borrowed from, namely Martha and the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run” and Chuck Berry’s “30 Days” with the line “can’t get no satisfaction from the judge,” and was hesitant to release it for that reason. Fortunately, he got voted down by the others.

The first time I heard Satisfaction I was in a Lamborghini with Kim Novak heading east out of Nice on Autoroute A8 with a view of the Alps to the north and the glitter of the Mediterranean below. Kim wore a blue silk scarf and I had just had a cast removed from my right arm. I fell from a table while attempting flamenco under the influence of a little too much Quemada while Kim was filming a movie based on my novel The Savage Vagina, directed by John Huston, and co-starring Robert Mitchum and Yves Montand. It was a heady romance poured straight from a jug of bottled lightning, the breeziest of flings, but oh we had fun.

Which is a lie. Albeit a satisfying one.

Governments lie to their people all the time. Which everyone finds satisfying. If they knew the truth they’d go mad. Run riot in the streets. Create cults. Worship bonfires of burning men in the Nevada desert. Revolt. Languish, crushed and demoralized, in tropical opium dens.

On the level of pagan celebrations, the signified is always overshadowed by the play of signifiers.

I wonder what the 60s looks like to someone born in 2001 or 2002. Probably how 1860 looks to me, in my imagination, of civil war soldiers looking tired in front of open fires or Emily Dickinson wandering a garden or Herman Melville scaling a mast or Walt Whitman helping the wounded write home. And in the fields of the Ardennes in northern France Arthur Rimbaud dreams of hopping onto a river barge and drifting out to sea, into the furious lashing of the tides. 

Reality Lights Up With Writing

Believe me. I know what I’m doing. I’m taking shots in the dark. The bullets are words. They go rat-a-tat-tat. They go bonga bonga bonga. They go bananas. They sit and do nothing. Like batteries. They must be inserted into the mind. The mind draws their energy and they go wild. They go myriad and sing like a choir. They stall in the air and go still and stalwart. I'm irritated by an unprecedented heat parallel. The strain of Monday. Monstrosity regret pulled towards a fireworks display. Unhindered, our glasses prove nothing. Sculpt and fill the walls by opening yourself. We bend radically, and the disturbances increase our treasure. The strain fits our example and my sip. When needs impose on me, I zoom in on life. What weight of goldfish causes your valiant stars to imitate a dusty old town by Rembrandt? Oblivion rips my deepening awareness that a steadiness needs for fabrication but a listening needs for guiding a chisel. Soften the taxi with a little dextrose. Grab a bottle. Empty it. A fork shines a light above the sneer. Whenever I awaken above a distress there’s a lever, a can of paint, and a lingering sense of tinsel. A succubus sits on a tire in a swamp. It would light the sky if I threw a grenade. But I'm not here to cloud the issue. There is so much we need to understand. Everything. Except eating. know how to eat. I do it all the time. My favorite dish is word salad. Reality lights up with writing. The cutlery is warm. Ecstasies excite the quantum beauty card. The glass is so pure everyone wants to jump into it and drink it all down. But there’s nothing in it. The glass is empty. Until the imagination fills it with something. Orange juice. Tequila. Drambuie. Anisette. Sambuca. Words do nothing until fins appear and darkness and the abyss. To satiate the unbalanced man we can make another mess. But what will this accomplish? A bushy vertebral hill, a black on white belying a soft underlying gray, and a larger understanding of ivy. Throw the clay at what perception arouses. The sphere box has a crack in our room. Never waste a wild resilience. It gives life to a horn and pulse to a precipice. I seriously worry about what is gentle for a cat. If you play Bach I will extrude a knee exactly like this consonant, and swing it back and forth. Last night in Massachusetts a new awareness overtook my consciousness and turned it into Seekonk. This is why the Higgs boson is important. I went fly fishing in the Harvard business department and caught a rare puffer fish in the tide pool area. It felt hot like a chimera. How do we know that mass is energy? Because things come out of the mist and the pain is exquisite. Nobody wants to be embodied in anybody. It's not about the swamp and its eccentricities it's about creating a big round love and letting it walk around. We can discuss this later, after the drinks arrive. It’s enough that I have a home in your mind. Please don’t kick me out. This is why we write books. Those of us still writing books. We write to put chaos in a cage of letters. Though some insist they write to raise chaos. And ride it to the ends of the earth.