Planet Earth. December, 2024. A wide-eyed iron deity excites the skin. Helicopters crowd the sky. I sense something erotic in the air. I jump up the stairs just to touch your olives. Our boxing throbs upside-down. My big slap is in the flower.
Going into a cold room, turning the heat on and
waiting for the heat to build then completely envelop you is one of the great
pleasures in life. It’s quite similar to waiting for a drug to take effect,
alcohol or cannabis, ecstasy or psilocybin. Feelings and perceptions change
subtly, gradually, like when you're traveling by car or train and the landscape
changes as you go from region to region, some hilly and densely forested, some
mountainous and rocky, some flat and desolate, some smelling of sage, some written
into the soil by tractors and ploughs. It is a form of inner metamorphosis, a
discovery, as in adolescence, of feeling differently, seeing differently,
delighting in novel complexities, feeling the metal of trumpets in a pool of
violins.
The drug of life embroiders a sanguine hope. That there’s
autonomy behind the thunder, elevation behind the bone. That red is red that
green is green that brown is brown that oranges are orange and that pattern that
is endemic to the history of plaid is the catalyst that awakens the enlivening actualities of black.
The paint stick accelerates the swirl of paint.
Picasso’s muffin glows and crackles with abstraction. Is this because of words?
The wood creaks as a character walks on stage. This is the language of wood.
Fishnet stockings stiletto heels. The sink belongs in the kitchen. You can put
it there if you use the right predicate. The wrong predicate will put it in a work
of art. And make it do things improper to the use of predicates. As if anything
were foreign or anomalous to a predicate. I assure you it is not. Is is a
transitive verb. An ingot of red. Which is a poplar in the foreground. This is
a sample of Fauve painting rendered in oil and thiamine with a thick brush of religion
hanging from a sunbeam. Predicates are predicated on something, even if it’s
just a forge. Backstage you'll see frost in the eyes of a mosquito, and the
machinery of how it all happens. These aren’t predicates, these are more than
predicates, these are stories. The stories are created to lift themselves into
paradise, where the predicates are calm and graze on nouns.
Yellow is the color of joy. It’s also the color of
caution. Of intellect. Of Anxiety. Of clarity. Of excess. Of sunlight. And crows
and corn and a man painting crows in a field of yellow.
What drives the poem is reverie. The weight our
sabotage. The light of our eyes. The ruby has left us in darkness. But we
have other minerals to pursue. The knowledge of which exceeds one's own
cognition. There will be light to the east. While the west awaits our immodest
assumptions.
It’s easy to speak to the dead, but hard to speak to
the dying. You might as well be bowling. You feel so ineffective. Words tend to
fade in the soft light of a hospital room. Nothing can reverse time or
circumstance. Words lack the power to effect certain things. Like prolonging
life. Power yields nothing without a fight. And what power do words have, when
you’re up against fate? Destiny. Whatever you want to call it. There are words
available for such things. Just don’t expect magic. Expect the unexpected. Life
is full of surgery. And surrender and meatballs.
Words are turkeys. Gobbledygook. But they make spectacular fodder for fairy tales. Think of me as a frog awaiting your kiss. The onion of whatever moment bristles with kites. We are all in a state of becoming. At least, that’s what I hear. That was me just a moment ago. And now I’m me again, until now, still in a state of becoming, which is unbecoming, because I’m still here, becoming foreign, becoming luggage, becoming maps and the leisure to study maps, becoming reflective, becoming omnivorous and spongelike, lingering in obfuscation, trying not to try to be somebody else, and try it without trying, and ending up on the dance floor, masquerading as Fred Astaire. But still me. Fantasizing. Driving a bus of Baptist schoolteachers to Puerto Vallarta. Not as Fred Astaire. Not as Richard Burton. But me: a young man in the dark chasing iguanas into the ocean I painted on the wall. And walking through a hole and coming out the other side somewhere in Finland, where the fun is, and the streets of Helsinki, and the fiery wet of a sauna.
3 comments:
lovely reference to one of my favorite john huston movies, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. burton was electric as the defrocked minister. & like the message of the movie, that everyone is the same in their own freaky ways! but then, i always self-identified as the elderly poet jonathan coffin who writes one more poem before dying!
Glad you caught that. I love that movie. There's so much in it. I was especially moved by jonathan coffin's quiet defiance against the noisy superficilaties of the world, its petty obsessions amid so much beauty, and the immense dignity Cyril Delevanti brought to the role, and Deborah Kerr's indomitable care for the aging man. I, too, self-identified with the man, even though, at the time, I was in my early 20s when I first saw it, I was well aware of living in a culture that praised the pragmatic at the expense of more transcendant experience. That scene, for instance, when Burton stops the bus on a bridge to look down at the harmonious play and serenity of the women doing the wash in a river, and his passengers full of irritation and impatience and utter blindness to the spectacle.
beautifully phrased, john! i believed you just tapped the same vein tennessee williams mined. i too was in my very early 20s when i discovered this movie. i was both on a richard burton & john huston jag. & this movie adaptation is a brilliant encapsule of williams' ethos & aesthetic. that scene with burton is sublime!
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