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.