Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Marcel Proust had never been to a big-box store before. He was dazzled by the sheer size and scope of the store and the seeming impassivity of the shoppers. So many products, so many shelves, such strangely intriguing examples of the human condition. The people seemed dour, meditative, locked inside themselves where all their problems are kept private and where all their dreams are in hospice. But this mood of seeming passivity began yielding odd behaviors, things unnoticed before, as when one stands for a few minutes at some quiet, unassuming location and little by little begins noticing an array of beguiling phenomena, intriguing shapes and colors and interactions that were unnoticed before now taking prominence in one’s consciousness and dilating the mind until an entirely new universe blossoms out of a park or parking lot.  

Perception is an art, and takes practice. He saw a man pee on a display then take a ride on one of the kiddie rides. He saw another man grab an aluminum baseball bat from sporting goods and proceed to bash in all the TVs. The employees reacted calmly, having to deal with anomalous behavior throughout their day. It’s what human beings do when years of tension and taboo yield to irrational behaviors.

Marcel filled his basket with track suits and socks and a T-shirt with Willie Nelson on the front and thought about returning to Paris in the early 20^th century. The air was a little cleaner here than it was in sooty Paris, and better for his asthma, but he got fed up having to wear a mask all the time during Covid, and stay indoors as if under house arrest. That’s not what he came here for. He wanted to get away from all that head-splitting conflict over Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but there were even more divisive issues here, things that couldn’t even be talked about for fear of losing a job or friends and ending up totally isolated, a pariah whose sole contact with the world was YouTube and other streaming services. The 21^st century was a huge disappointment.

He'd had, of course, multiple destinations to choose from, including his native country, France. Mr. Wells imposed no restrictions on the use of his time machine. But he wanted to avoid all the riots and wars and countries overrun with militarized police in armored vehicles, especially Paris and the rage of the gilets jaunes, protesting the predations of the upper class just as they had in 1789 and again in 1848, that bloody uprising against the authoritarian crackdowns of the July Monarchy, inspiring Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. The whole world was seething with instability and conflict, all the chaos and war and terrain made uninhabitable by climate change. So he bought an RV and drove around the lonesome distances of the United States where the violence, for the time being, was a little less visible. It was mostly evident in tents everywhere, or people lying on the sidewalks and metro stations, hunched over in a Fentanyl coma.

He got back in the time machine, which he dubbed À la recherche du temps perdu, and set the dials for June, 1901, French Polynesia. He looked forward to meeting Monsieur Gauguin, the man who painted that marvelous work in oil, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? He slipped his Willie Nelson T-shirt over his head, pressed a small blue button, and felt the elasticity of time vibrate like a surge of country music, the mournful cries of a pedal steel guitar, and surf the quantum waves of an unfathomable universe to a place of native being.   

 

 

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.