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.