A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Tarshish

A few years ago at a seafood restaurant on Seattle’s waterfront a friend asked if I knew anything about the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. Foolishly, I answered yes, and I did this for several reasons: I’ve been listening a lot to Terence McKenna’s talks on psychedelic drugs and I had a case of gastritis and wasn’t feeling well. I felt lethargic. Fact is, I knew nothing about Jonah and the Whale other than the dude getting swallowed and spending a significant amount of time in the whale’s belly. So I put my upset stomach and psychedelic lore together in a bowl of ignorance and said yes. I was ready to become a grouper and enucleate. Here’s my take: it’s a story about transformation and ego dissolution. I said this with woozy assurance, although there was nothing faintly Biblical or ichthyological about it. It was something I intuited and tossed out into the summer sun like a frozen salmon at Pike Place Market. My friend, who refrained from further comment, went on to make a movie based (partly) on his fascination with marine organisms called Fish Have No Psychiatrists: A Day With Andrei Codrescu.

I think of Codrescu as a sturgeon. Why a sturgeon? Codrescu (his name sounds like a species of fish) is from Romania, and 70% of Romanian aquaculture caviar destined for export came from wild sturgeons in 2019. The Roman poet Ovid called sturgeons “the noble fish” and Aristotle praised their medicinal values. Wild sturgeon is a rare delicacy, and can live in both salt and fresh water. Their solemnity is a ruse. They’re actually quite droll. They’ve been residents of Planet Earth for some 80 million years. Anything that old is bound to enjoy a wry and venerable perspective on life. How can you not? Just having fins is a cause for celebration. Fish may have no need of psychiatrists, but psychiatrists are fond of putting aquariums in their waiting rooms.

I couldn’t get Jonah off my mind. I continued to give that story a lot of thought. I felt swallowed by it. Once I solved the enigma, I could be vomited up. I could walk again the sunshine, a gleaming specimen of humility and generosity of spirit.

The Book of Jonah is surprisingly short. There’s very little detail, which makes the plot a little enigmatic. Basically, the story goes like this: God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and “cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.” But Jonah bails and makes his way to Joppa where he boards a ship headed to Tarshish. God puts a mighty tempest in the sea, “so that the ship was like to be broken.” All the sailors are freaking out and throwing wares overboard to lighten the ship. Jonah, however, goes below to take a nap. The shipmaster goes below and gives Jonah a shake and says hey, what the fuck dude? Any chance you can get in touch with your God and see about ending this storm before we all drown? Jonah rubs his eyes and goes on deck.

The crew, meanwhile, decides to cast lots to see which of them is the cause of the tempest. Which is a bit silly, since Jonah already told them he took passage on this ship to flee from the presence of the Lord. That’s a pretty big clue. Jonah asks them to toss him into the sea. I have to say, that’s a pretty selfless gesture. They don’t do it at first, and try rowing to land, but it’s futile. The sea is too rough. Jonah gets tossed overboard. Meanwhile, the “Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” So Jonah, thrashing in open water, gets swallowed by a great fish (ostensibly a whale), and “was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” As soon as Jonah promises to make good on his vow to God, the great fish vomits Jonah upon dry land.

Not many words are devoted to the ordeal of surviving three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, but the language is powerful in the graceful simplicity of its evocations. Jonah cries “out of the belly of hell,” the waters compassed him about “even to the soul,” the depths enveloped him, the weeds wrapped about his head, he “went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about [him] forever.” I’m not sure what is meant by weeds getting wrapped around his head, but it definitely sounds like something that might happen in the belly of a whale. Seaweed, maybe, somewhat freshly swallowed. Nor am I sure about “earth with her bars.” I doubt they’re roadhouses. The context would suggest some form of restraint, something stark and immutable. One thing the King James Bible is really good at doing is demonstrating how less is more.

It seems obvious that the time spent in the belly of the whale was purifying and transformative. My conception of a whale’s stomach involves hydrochloric acid and mucus and does not lend itself to allegory. I’m certain that’s not the kind of transformation the authors of Jonah and the Whale had in mind. The belly in the bible is expansive in its mythology, not its science. It bears many of the characteristics of what is called “the dark night of the soul” in Christian mysticism.

Anyone who’s suffered clinical depression will have a pretty good idea as to what the “dark night of the soul” is like. What’s like to be cut off from the world. What it’s like to be trapped. To be at the mercy of powerful, mystifying forces. To be surrounded by the crushing weight of a stubborn will that is not your own, but that is somehow a reflection of you, in the convoluted bowels of a monstrous misconception.

Eckhart Tolle reveals that he emerged from depression when he realized it was his ego that was suffering, not his being, his presence, what he calls his “I am-ness.” His depression lifted when he realized that he was not the unhappy story of his self, or the negativity of his thoughts.  Thoughts are not who you are. “No,” he says, “I am I. I am consciousness. I am presence.” My hunch about ego-dissolution proves apt.

“Impotence, blankness, solitude, are the epithets by which those immersed in this dark fire of purification describe their pains,” writes Evelyn Underhill in her book Mysticism. Writing of Madam Guyon, a French Christian advocating Quietism, at the time a heretical advocacy, who was imprisoned from 1695 to 1703 after publishing A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, “As her consciousness of God was gradually extinguished, a mental and moral chaos seems to have invaded Madame Guyon and accompanied the more spiritual miseries of her state.” She then quotes Madame Guyon’s own personal description: “So soon as I perceived the happiness of any state, or its beauty, or the necessity of a virtue, it seemed to me that I fell incessantly into the contrary vice: as if this perception, which though very rapid was always accompanied by love, were only given to me that I might experience its opposite.”

Underhill goes on to say “This world as well as the next seemed leagued against her. Loss of health and friendship, domestic vexations, increased and kept pace with her interior griefs. Self-control and power of attention were diminished. She seemed stupefied and important, unable to follow or understand even the services of the Church, incapable of all prayer and all good works; perpetually attracted by those world things which she had renounced, yet quickly wearied by them. The neat edifice of her first mystic life was in ruins, the state of consciousness which accompanied it was disintegrated, but nothing arose to take its place.”

It is in this infernal athanor that the transmutation of baser metals into gold occurs, a process more mystical than metallurgical which the alchemists termed Chrysopoeia. Gold represented the perfection of all matter on any level, including that of the mind, spirit, and soul; alternatively, prima materia, or first matter, required for the alchemical magnum opus and the creation of the philosopher’s stone, is the foundation of being, but not its catalyst. The spark of divinity that precipitates change and lifts us into higher states of being is a ligament to language, the churn of words in that ocean in our heads that lifts us out of the miasmic suck of emotional pain. The parallel with the The Book of Jonah and the transmutation of a preoccupied and tortured self into a new state of consciousness does not seem all that farfetched, or fishy. “Parallel with the mental oscillations, upheavals and readjustments,” writes Underhill, “through which an unstable psycho-physical type moves to new centres of consciousness, run the spiritual oscillations of a striving and ascending spiritual type.”

If the universe has meaning, you’re the one imagining it. Meaning is membranous. Sensations are permeations of larger energies connecting us to the universe. Schools of fish move in the blue currents of the ocean near the surface where light penetrates in nimble deviation, mercurial conversions of elegant spontaneity that are pure expressions of primal impulse. And joy, no doubt. Wild animal joy.

Our current age has fallen under the spell of technocratic solutions, a delusional, one-sided dance of pixels and graphs which narrow the spectrum of perceptual experience, and impose constraints of logic and linear algebra that obscure and disenchant the Wesen of being. Wesen, a German word, not only means essence, but also presence - an enduring of presence - meaning it is active, not static. You cannot market Wesen; it’s a matter of qualia, not quantity. It exists in the swells of the Pacific, the murmur and hiss of foam over sand. The silence in the void 35,000 feet down. We get glimpses of non-linear aesthetic experience in the undulations of a fin, or the relationship between the amount of fertilizer and the growth rate of a plant, the pollination of a garden, or the melodies of Mozart’s pet starling, which were converted to concertos.  

It has become increasingly difficult to access alternative modes of awareness, so aggressively has the scientific and technological juggernaut of the past decades dominated the human experience and zombified generations of people. But – given a little enthusiasm (from Greek enthousiazein, meaning to be inspired or possessed by a god) – it can be done. There are aids, innovative pulsations of art and poetry, adrenalin-inducing activities like rock climbing, cave diving, and wingsuit flying, the fathomless stillness of meditation, botanical arrays of psychedelic opportunity that help break habitual patterns and give the mind space to grow. “And when we do that,” Terence McKenna enthusiastically shared,

and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered realities that exist in nature, in society, in our lover, in ourselves, then you see the peacock’s tail, the coda di pavone, is a transcendental object at the end of time. An enormous, unspeakable something that beckons across the historical landscape, that casts an enormous shadow that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe. That we have always been in the grip of that iridescent, strange attractor. It has propelled our poetry, our art. Our best moments have always been when a tiny scintilla—another good alchemical word—a tiny spark of that alchemical completion burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception. 

 

It's Only Natural

Here at the edge of the abyss, the attention always wants something to mull. It’s only natural. There’s always something knocking to get in. Just yank the storm lever and it all rains down. What cannot be obtained must be imagined. The intellect is the type of wine you might find in a goatskin bag. It’s both raw and refined, like the mattress springs in a frontier bed near the border of Hypnagogia. The tongue shapes it as its energy flows forth in words. It’s warm on this side of things, where the words arrive in tonal aplomb, seeking connection with another organ of speech. I heard there was a diving board that hums like a mountain if you step on it just right. Gaze down. The shimmer of water is mesmerizing. It’s like repeating a difficult formula to yourself. If the sentence is too cold pour on the verbs. They’ll kick it into syntax, a grammar with the tint of a jewel. What resonances, what echoes, what beats, what harmonies in this empire. Ebony necklace with a swing subtle as a shiver of Saturday. Let’s get to work on what is between us, on what is separating us and what is joining us. What separates us join us. What joins us separates us. The best you can do in any situation is settle for an illusion of control. Remember, time passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head. Getting it all joined in synovial equilibrium can be distressing. It took a tale to boil a king. But it took a universe to grow fur on the limbs of the infinite. Language is the ocean surrounding and floating us. What is soft is also hard and what is hard is rarely heard. Granite feels even more solid in solitude. Unwilling to speak. It’s a giddy progression from the form given to that which does not have one. Who can escape the feeling that it’s all about to end? I prepared myself for a future very different than this one. The one where I caught a lobster before it hit the floor. The one in which the undercurrents are dark as a Paris sewer and the overtones are wrong. How does one frame an unthought in the coffin of a thought? We need the sun. I want to suck that nerve on the ceiling. It’s spooky trying to imagine the sound of Rimbaud’s voice. Harder yet to join all the events affecting one another in a network of sparkly exposition. Nudity is pertinent. But only in the context of flying. Every phenomenon has its own rhythm. Definition and description are two vastly different things. Especially if you walk around feeling birds in your blood. Layla is the sound of a man breaking apart. After which, removing my hearing aids is like taking insects out of my head. Things that are cuckoo might also be cozy. I feel elect when I’m standing on the surface of a lake. But you got me on my knees. I’m drowning in potential. I hang it and bang it and pound it with my stick.

Thinking Produces Heat In Our Heads

Thinking produces heat in our heads. Every configuration is particular, the way a bee brushes pollen toward its hind legs. A language can’t be a supermarket unless it kneels to expression. If you see me on Tuesday wearing a shawl of French baguettes, my blink to you means coffee. There are pleasures in the subtlest of things. I like to put the orange mango flavored carbonated water beverage next to my ear and twist the cap slowly so that I can hear it hiss. I like that hiss. It’s effervescent. Effervescence is rare these days. I promote a more radical empiricist methodology, something along the lines of Godzilla ripping through the fabric of time. This level of anxiety doesn’t need silhouettes swinging through a zone of punctuation. All this proves is phosphate. It has nothing to say about beatitude and the eloquence of stars in the Moroccan night. My childhood was spent in the Hall of the Mountain King. I’m like a man who can’t stop drumming. Experiences aren’t antiques. They’re biologies, they’re irreducible singularities, they’re the bells in bellicose and the long highway leading you to a town of smoky designs. There was the era of blue reverie and the era of used utility trailers. The time of harpsichords. The time of obvious flowing. As soon as you give yourself permission to say what you want you will blossom like a California poppy. The euphorbia at the corner of Taylor and Prospect look like little trumpets. This is coming to you by way of suggestion. If things aren’t entirely clear, the darkness is wrapped in a scarf Keith Richards gave me with all these skeleton things on it. Eventually, everything spills out on the streets of Baramati. And the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. May 4^th, 2024, airport security officers in Miami found a bag of snakes hidden in a passenger’s pants. If that doesn’t imply something broader than tribulation, then these words are cookies in the shape of stars. Think of it as the marriage of a cloud and a sigh in the Sagrada Familia. The sweet cream of meaning in a shell of sound. Frustration and regret in a basket of laundry. Speech is timid, always a little vague at first. How much does Hilary Hahn cost? I could use an excursion. Sometimes, when things are obscure, it’s good they’re obscure. I’m transmitting signals of hope and despair. It’s how I learned the difference between a chin and a chinchilla. TV always looks so welcoming in hotel rooms, and yet so out-of-place. That little black triangle sticking up from the pillow belongs to our cat, and is her ear. Language is the perfect instrument for arranging things. Pillows, yes. But also upheaval and dolphins. Angels or worms or angles or words. Doesn’t matter. It does. But doesn’t. And does. 

Unfolding That Which Is Between Us

Unfolding that which is between us is like unfolding a Michigan grocery store. Unfolding Saturday like unfolding Nicolas Cage. But I don’t want to do that. Do you?

Good. It’s not even Saturday. It’s just the thought of it that makes me dance to another boxcar.

Things have been feeling rather sad, lately, gay and sad, like a rockabilly competition in Slovakia.

In your youth you’re a spirited mountain brook tumbling down the mountainside in a heedless spray. But in old age you’re a swamp. Things bubble up and glow blue in a nebula of haze and fireflies. The memories are often sweet, comforting oases of time in a world that made sense and everything was topsy-turvy but still had a solid foundation, a gold standard, a still functional constitution and bill of rights. You knew where you stood. Even when things got shaky with tear gas and bullhorns. Not like now. It’s like living in a world of methane hoping nobody lights a match. The value of the dollar erodes by the minute. There are multiple wars that are a constant suck on the treasury. Nothing goes to the streets and bridges. Nothing goes to the homeless.

The memories are important because they provide reference points. People read. They went to coffeehouses and sat at tables with the local weeklies and paperback novels and cappuccino meditations. They exhibited courtesies. They had a clear sense of right and wrong. They apologized.

Today was very pleasant and sunny, a mild day in mid-May. R and I went for a run by Lake Union. We were humming along just fine when a young man whizzed by on an e-skateboard within inches of me in the pedestrian lane. I could easily have been severely injured, if not killed. I yelled at him to get into the bicycle lane, and he causally raised his arm & flipped me off. I ran faster. I wanted to ring the asshole’s neck. R pointed out that he was a lot bigger than me, and considering my age, it would not go well for me. But when you’re filled with rage it’s amazing what you can do. It’s like having a superpower. The guy kept going and that was that. I calmed down. I could see myself slamming the guy in the stomach and going to jail. That gave me some relief. That asshole wasn’t worth jailtime. I think my flare up was due, in part, to a frustration. Earlier that morning, while having my coffee, I began reading an article titled “Our Humdrum Dystopia” in an online magazine. The article began by describing the number of electric bikes and monowheels and e-skateboards plaguing New York City, the incredible speeds at which people ride them, “indifferent to life, theirs and ours,” either for the sheer maniacal fun of it, or the need to maximize profit. Who knows why these A-holes take such chances. It’s like Mad Max. What’s going on? Is it the screens, the constant mindless scrolling? Is it the apotheosis of money as God to which all must sacrifice their principles and authenticity as human beings? I only got two paragraphs into the article and hit a paywall. A fee. We’ve already got enough fees. The other articles weren’t that interesting, so subscribing for that one article didn’t make sense. I let it go, but not without feeling frustrated. I wondered what direction the author was going to take it.

If one feels like mooing one should moo. But one should do it with a stride of compelling insouciance. I feel a parable coming on. Let us shine as we assemble and compare our cuts of the pie. The parabolic pie. The perpetual hole at the center of things pie. The pi of pie. And carpenters and hems. The pie of hems. The pie of hymns. The pie of you. The pie of us all.

I finally got to liking that Stones song from December, 1967, “2000 Light Years From Home.” It was one of the better songs on that infernal record, it just wasn’t in the Stone’s DNA to dally with the prettier and utopian side of psychedelia, even in satire. They never mocked the flower children. They seem humored by them. Their hearts were elsewhere. When they returned to their senses and did Beggars Banquet that sweet dream had evaporated. It had always seemed vapory. Too ethereal to get any traction in this old world. Many years would pass, whole decades, before I’d get a shot at hearing that weird space-age song again on YouTube. It starts with a bouquet of otherworldly tones, someone hammering a preternatural piano, followed by some sinister bass chords. Watts kicks in – bam! - & launches us into space. All you want to do is drift. Dissolve into stars & drift. And then it ends with a whoosh and a groan and a pounding drum and you’re back at the panel, spinning, reaching for a dial, & a map of the Dandelion Puffball Nebula.   

Steve Buscemi was punched – hard – by someone, for no apparent reason, while he was walking in New York City. There was no evidence it was personal. People have begun punching people. Arbitrarily. Why? Because they’re mad at our species, at homo sapiens, for fucking up so badly? For being such selfish bags of bone and sewage? I don’t know. I’m spit balling.

I loved Buscemi in Ghost Town. A sad sack with a keen sense of the sublime, especially when it came to the blues.

I hear water running through the pipes. R watering her flowers, fuchsia and dahlia and hellebore. Sweet alyssum, which the bees like, and a rose, from Texas. She has a tough time watering. The soil is hydrophobic. She waters strategically, trying to create conditions in which the water can penetrate and percolate through the dirt. Water as rhetoric, persuasion by saturation.

And it continues. It’s what things do. The things that exist. The things that don’t exist continue, too. But only as ideas. Whispers. Ghostly presences. The darkness of closets. And the clothes that hang in them, awaiting a body to fill out the contours, and bring them into the world.

The Endless Rapport Among Things

That night in the summer of 1968 I thought they’d come at last to save us, a perfect H formation a thousand feet or so over Puget Sound, nine bright dots, motionless in the night sky except for the twinkling. We’d been sitting in a bar where a blues band was playing as one by one people left their tables and went outside. I was really enjoying the music and didn’t want to go anywhere but my curiosity got the better of me and I went outside to see what everyone had gone to see and there they were, the H formation of little twinkly dots. Were they going to land? It was like waiting expectantly for a bus in the cold. I ran down to a small café to get to a pay phone. I had really long hair and was wearing a frock coat and a frilly Regency style shirt and black Beatle boots and jeans and called my dad and shouted into the phone to go outside. There are little twinkly lights hanging over Puget Sound in an H formation. Everyone stole a shy nervous look at me. My dad, an aerospace engineer, seemed less than enthralled. I went back to see if the dots had moved. Nope. Excitement yielded to drab reality. Probably a hoax. I returned to the blues.

We’re not just alive. We’re life. Life itself. So this fascination with extraterrestrials is a fascination with life and the multiple forms it can take. The whole idea of finding another form of life quickens the nerves. The monotony of human anatomy hungers for the stupefying phenomena of some new life form. Work is an inspiration to some people. For others it’s a deadening poison, an unnatural imposition. One thing everyone has in common is a hunger for anything different, especially if it’s weirdly different, like an igloo in the middle of Death Valley. Being can be wearying, like a manifesto on a paper towel. It’s something you hold onto for as long as you can, without entirely knowing why, or being fully invested in the irony of it. Some problems are never meant to be solved. The answers are too convulsive. Life prefers a nice clean sheet to a slab of marble. But when it comes to tentacles, there’s a familiar fascination, the pull of mystery. Tentacles are tantamount to theory. Is all life based on carbon? Or is some silicon-based? Those suction cups are so alien on the side of the glass. The eyes full of wonders. 

When I learned that a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table, I put all my clocks on the floor. I find I can get a lot more done in the day now that the day has been extended by a few more hours. I haven’t done the calculations yet, but the world feels a whole lot different than it did before. It feels like there’s something in suspension. Maybe it’s time, time in suspension. It’s still moving, but much more slowly. It used to go fast as swallows. Now it hangs in the air like a D minor slowly unfolding an intrigue. I feel drawn, as always, to some future goal, even though I know there’s no goal, because if there was a goal I’d feel it. Goals monopolize a being. When there’s no goal, there’s no reason for a clock at all. Unless you like to keep track of the minutes dripping out of space like whole notes. A rhinoceros can stand under a tree for hours without making a sound. And it is this, rather than the speed of a Bugatti Chiron, that matters most about time. The stillness in the air. The endless rapport among things.

The Art Of Jumping Off Cliffs

 

People often talk about seeing a ghost but what about feeling a ghost two seconds later two windows break in a live demonstration the hardest and sweetest of labors is to arouse curiosity hop hop hop what’s a muscle what’s the mud disturbing the genres between figuration and abstraction without affiliating any creed have you ever felt a ghostly emotion an idea needs hormonal control and a means of protecting the developing embryo the configuration of vectors in the cloud is very important for determining the chemical properties of chicken vindaloo

I look to height to bear the consequences of the wild guilt is a hidden cultural imperative I feel friendly whenever I float images of life rendered in an empiricist impulse à la Nicolas de Staël if you complain about the welcome you should travel by invitation Niki de Saint Phalle’s insistence on exuberance and bold use of color did not endear her to everyone in a minimalist age I drool lightly and throw it away there’s some kind of trouble in Cajun French you can hear it in the bayou just before sunrise Stella Adler said she didn’t teach Brando acting I showed him the door and he kicked it down

I’ve got an attitude consisting of many parts fleeing the prospect of death designing drapes for an off-off-Broadway performance of Fall of the House of Usher ice skating at Wollman Rink you name it all I want is as much as I can handle and maybe more I hope to alter my attitude by indulging in pretenses and the futile pleasures of existence the bagpipe is played by squeezing the bag to blow air into the chanter drones and regulators people writes Pascal having been unable to cure death decided to make themselves happy and just not think about it

Some people like to write with opacity it makes everything seem more significant because it’s less defined the audiologist has a strange relationship with his hair structure is all about description guilt is the emotional equivalent of jail I can expand this room with the glitter of my suitcase the river feeds a despair quiet as a plunge into the depths the wizard’s breath reeks of Gruyere ladies and gentlemen the roadhouse is proud to welcome Lissie

The individual is an infinite void that only infinity could fill said Pascal the universe gifts the line a tiger and it moves stealthily through the syllables we had to admit that Rod Stewart’s model train was completely tenable we could ride it as far as our imaginations let us before reason came down the aisle asking for tickets

The probe indicates that the sentence is deepened by triangles historical crises drop on us repeatedly as information dumps I blew into the keys the next thought concerning thought thought thought a question about its own ponytail what is thought thought is warm and quick this pairing is intentional I sit and gaze at pictures of Deadwood just before the dawn I awake and find you gone I can’t help it if I cry the conductivity of bronze answers by getting dressed in a sentence a limb of words irrational as women’s lingerie we pick the bumps my tickles bring up our sensations are a heavy metaphysics to give to the folds of the vagina

Sometimes when I can’t think of a word it’ll bob up later like something alive and agitated at the end of a fishing line that’s been dangling in the water for an hour I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair combing this cloud of electrons while the banana woman overtakes the charisma of velvet far from here there’s a light that never goes out it’s either a 60-watt collarbone or the complementary association of logically incompatible terms it always happens like this you see someone you think you know on the way out of the restaurant the chrome is cold who was that person I swear I’ve seen them somewhere before we’re in the Black Hills near the border of an alternate reality another state in another dimension far away from home it may be WWWIII has already begun calling it a good day for peace Biden signed into law the 95 billion war aid measure

The smell of turpentine in a workshop used to be a pleasure for me it meant something creative was about to happen however you define creativity a feeling a phenomenon a stick of words jingled like bells in an oyster house or exploded out of the back end of a cruet during an argument at a stagecoach station in Nevada near the California border we have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down said Kurt Vonnegut I think it emerges from catastrophe like mosquito larvae in a nearby pond headlights entangled in grass there are signs that indicate something potentially explosive is about to explode it’s what explosions do they explode and something comes out of it something along the lines of Tom Waits leaping around in the fog bug-eyed and khaki

I’m surrounded by phantoms I dissolve in a dotted vortex brocade the subconscious there are times when reading Mallarmé seems like a quiet side street filled with phantom lobsters holding syllables in their claws rhythmically clicking to Ravel’s Bolero the silk below language is our sacrament I was standing in the middle of Shakespeare’s Hamlet when I heard a howl it gave me the Honky Tonk Blues I looked to put some speech in my mouth that would reflect my current circumstance with nougats nouns and mongrel analogies running around in crazy patterns voluminous plumes wacko machinations biting at stray consonants in a splash of street I remember my father running a table saw in his workshop while I was reading Kenneth Koch in the room next door and it didn’t bother me it made the words alive I don’t know how that happened maybe the smell of wood

The focus on singing broke what we thought was glass but proved to be a form of emotional awakening for which the equation was not yet in standard form but might be expressed simply as a quick oscillation of actions if lama equals reunion then disillusion equals the toss of a crate on a loading dock in Suffolk

I like it when abstractions come to the aid of an injured well-being healing requires a little coconut rub and a languorous organ more and more I feel that percussion is our staircase to sensation I have a really old brain it came with the body it was a package deal the faucet radiates kindness like a cherub pissing shiny equations geometry fills the wheel with spokes and rolls toward the crickets the cow looks into the darkness where there is a movement of aliens its moo permeates a blue glow and reveals a great deal about how metaphysical systems operate in the void one thing is sure Deadwood is still a town wild at heart and shines a light on the murmuring pines it’s early May but I can see my breath 

 

 

Words Are The Clay With Which We Sculpt Our Day

 

Words are the clay with which we sculpt our day it’s the virtue of writing which undoes abstract categories and brings back incarnation flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom the exercise of sensitivity is work but it’s work that gives value to our existence you can buy a flame-throwing robot dog for under $10,000 dollars or imitate a glow this pretzel must be eaten

I like staying in hotels motels too especially the ones surrounded by desolation histamine is a chemical created in the body that is released by white blood cells into the bloodstream when the immune system is defending against a potential allergen I will secure my equipment as I rise in my balloon at least half of my life has taken place in books

I found myself in a junkyard allegory gassing a ’55 Buick with a rearview mirror framed in pearls the movement of the sentence is accomplished by alternate contractions of the syntax the harnessed mind opens an umbrella the volume is determined by using adverbs and everything feels sweetly unemployable I feel like an octopus in an underwater maze I wear glasses I realize it now I see in the ancient bones of the Badlands my brain is hungry for roses

Ears and eardrums are not a prerequisite to detect sound frequency the words of the song persuade the pitch to assume a greater load it’s possible to change your everyday consciousness so that you feel yourself as something the universe is doing chuckled Alan Watts the temperature on Pluto is -387℉ singing helps me piss in this way the attention functions allow for more efficient processing of myriad auditory inputs from various streams show called The Behavior what the fuck is that

I remember one night in Sedona when Max Ernst rode into town on a gigantic Sonoran desert toad and ordered a gin and tonic at Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Saloon it seemed natural to go up and clap hands and have us some talk and some laughs and get to know one another but when I extended my hand everything flipped Max Ernst was the gigantic Sonoran desert toad and the man riding on his back was a lowland homunculus named Popcorn

I write like this whenever I’m feeling chewed up and non-specific small courtesies are as obsolete as antimacassars steel strings metal flutes valves on trumpets I adapted my strumming so that it made people jump up and down I imagined one day I would have the opportunity to play a set of cloud chamber bowls with the Rolling Stones the world’s heaviest emotion is optimism what’s your favorite drink mine is popped manacle the world’s lightest emotion is self-satisfaction limousine crickets the six quark flavors can be grouped in three pairs up and down charm and strange and top and bottom

Our panic is painted with pepper spray the sip is its own experience when the upstairs neighbor is gone the silence is so heavenly that I don’t want to limit it to my ears but take it in with my skin arteries veins capillaries and lymphatics this isn’t surrealism this is milkweed the proteins in solution in the blood have many important functions if nothing matters everything matters the metaphor must be pliable it must not be uniform or unvarying it might resemble ibis it might resemble rebellion bacteria fungi and archaea that are referred to as extremophiles hibachi caboose bones or just plain pewter

My flower includes a willow something Gertrude Stein might say above a landfill frequented by exposure democracy is deader than a roadkill opossum

I’m surrounded by phantoms if a flash of light stiffens on the raspberry the bet is stable soon the Thunder will be playing in a new billion dollar arena I get attached easily when the world is good feliz Dia dos namoradas Happy Valentine’s Day in Portuguese my mouth probes the language so that it activates a gate or a door a Boeing plane makes an emergency landing in New York after the exit slide fell off or should I say slid off Gleðilegan Valentínusardag Happy Valentine’s Day in Icelandic there’s a muscle over what medicine calls a clench it moves by waves of alternating contraction and relaxation

I like to splash around in a river when existence feels pleasant the esophagus is a tube ten inches long different images can awaken new emotions within us an aircraft in straight and level flight is acted upon by four forces lift gravity thrust and drag we are made of this image factory and called to create meaning like Pollock moving around a canvas on the floor dripping paint with artful consideration in his dancelike movements of creating a controlled accident it gets me through the day