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.