A Play Of Mind

I have nothing pinned to my forehead. It may seem that way, because the bump there is quite conspicuous. I don't know how it got there. But a few days later, I will see the beginning of a horn. A rhinoceros horn, to be precise. I had been warned that such a thing could happen. There was a lot of that going around. People were turning into rhinoceroses. There had even been a play about it. Warning people. You might become a rhinoceros. Symptoms included a morbid compulsion to agree with everything ratified by a central authority. It was worse than Covid. Masks were of little avail. They called it a pandemic. And then it became normal.

Me? I’m a poet. I’m equipped to do anything. Except make money. Or build a sauna. Or split the atom. Or serve caviar at a multibillionaire’s wedding. Calling oneself a poet is a very odd thing to do these days. I prefer to keep the whole thing quiet. It's like having something scandalous in your past, three years in San Quentin for armed robbery, or fraud, or years in rehab recovering from an embarrassing addiction. When, in fact, the addiction is poetry. And literature is dying. Ok. Enough of that. How about you? What’s going on in your circus? Please don’t say bitcoin. I apologize for the judgments. If I’m overly pellucid at times, it’s not you, it’s the billboards. They seem sad, and anachronistic. Like the Yellow Pages. I loved the Yellow Pages. No robots with whom to argue before you can talk to a human. I’m Ice Age. I’m not built for apps. In my day, you decompressed in a bar, or a tavern, and went home in a fog of philosophy and stupefaction. The seedier bars had a weird glamour. And the air held different omens. Potential was the color of propane, and it welded incongruities into airships for a rescue mission in the impending zombie apocalypse.   

I don’t know. I think I could build a sauna. Given the right tools. Some easy-to-read instructions. With beautiful, multi-colored illustrations. A warm room. With lots of space. And a big couch. A really seasoned davenport. With wine stains and loose change and popcorn under the cushions. Or rather, say, a workshop, like the one might dad always had. It was wherever we went, like he carried it in his back pocket, ban saw, table saw, pipe clamps, chisels, jig saw. It had different smells. Paint. Turpentine. Sawdust. The sawdust was ubiquitous. Given those circumstances I might be tempted to build a sauna. But do I need a sauna? Do I want a sauna? I don’t even know how it came up. What put sauna in my head? What puts anything in my head? Besides poetry. And propaganda. Poetry is the propaganda seeping into our lives from another dimension.

I like examples of things. If someone tells me there is a spoon that can bend the mind, I find it credible, and have no difficulty believing it. Anyone who has had a scoop of ice cream has felt a spoon bend their mind. But if someone tells me that objectivity is nothing but a play of the mind, I will ask for their credentials, and ask to see an example. If I’m told that 1 + 1 equals two, I will ask, where is the mind in all this? They may tell me that one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception. It’s the play of a mind that shows whether a mind is there at all. And I’ll answer ok, sure. What’s the next perception? Where is it? And if they hand me a ticket to purgatory, I will consider the possibility of being punked. And because the mind is sister to the brother of amusement park rides, I will go about things pell-mell. And right here, where the next sentence is to be born, I will find another perception. Right there, in those swift currents of syllables we call a brassiere. Nothing but frills and nonsense. Imagine a postage stamp that is pure thought. Pure thought with glue on the back. I think it is in this sense, this particular glimpse, this extraordinary percept, that we will find what we’re looking for. A play of mind. Right here. Where the work comes in, setting up chairs, making coffee, and mumbling lines from Hamlet. 

 

Nothing Has Ever Been So Write

Each jar has a consequence. I name a myriad of migrations. Signs of propane canoeing to the south. Ooze from the soil grows to maturity. Ooze from the soul teaches the dodo to fly. I steal Belgium with a net dizzyingly plural. It plunges me into knighthood. You can see it from a distance: the energy of a cow against a whole speed bump. Shout the moral stuff at kissing. It fills me with fury, and I salute the hem to aggressively subvert its reality.

The thicker the book the bigger the accommodations. It took a lot of punches to get the plot to combine my garden and throw my engagement to a forest. The wisemen tell me to practice isolation until the goldfish gong. Float the bleeding under its flavor. This gives the intrigue a certain helter-skelter, a kind of equilateral gravy. The next demonstration will only take a century. I invite you to hammer your sleep to a thrilling slide beyond meaning. I wonder if we are to dip our fingers in it. I pierce the source of the circle with a story. The gurgling is verifiable. And evergreen.

Welcome to my aluminum Mars. It’s meant to be hills. But comes up strawberry. This is just to say my fingers flow among spectral inflations. Nothing has ever been so write. We distance our engine by chewing a thermostat. It’s how everything is gallant. The mountain has our virtues in it. I feel insoluble, which makes me irresolute, and ache for a chisel. A cabbage stimulates my absence. But no faith should insult a dump. Therefore, I defer to totems, and the use of blossoming.

What color of skull do we intuitively infer? I believe the answer lies in a dollar of capable bacteria. If you fork my skin I stir with life. This should hold the whisper intact. What is metamorphism to a sandwich? My strength hunts an ugly eye. A rain we detonated teases intent. The stethoscope was just a highway to our exhilaration. Breakfast by all the honors I pinned to it. Van Morrison at 80. More and more this swamp is detectable by spectrum. Age is only advice. The rest of the story keeps elongating Cubism. I rub shadows out of the paint. It keeps me going.

The device is full of clarifications. You just keep pressing buttons. Sooner or later time twists around our camaraderie and makes it all a photograph. My belt buckle has a long neck and a mosquito. Language makes it lavender. None of this is going to change the world. I only wish someone had told me that roaring requires a lot of oxygen, especially when it's higher up in the planetarium. If I’m moving toward you I’m blue. If I’m moving away from you I’m clay. The rest of the universe is somewhere expanding into a book. It’ll look great on our coffee table.

The journey of the mind, in its drift towards liberation, finds flamingos bringing brocade into existence. Anyone reading this thermometer may float dizzyingly to the ceiling. You’ll find there’s a lot of resistance to this sort of thing among the other agencies. It’s a small concession. Like finding a lost leather belt under the aegis of a mahogany bureau. A bottle of absinthe in the closet. A diving board at the end of the bed. Endless icing next to the spin load. Like most things as yet unnamed, it hugs itself dry.

I didn’t just get here, no. I’ve been here a while. I know what it is to shave during a honk of anguish. There are ears that hem the head and effusions teeming with hymns. Prodigality houses the ghost of tolerance. Even the best of secrets sometimes percolates through our greetings. Osmosis isn’t just a town in Nebraska. It’s also a philosophy. A science simmering with oratorios. It rolled a tear down my cheek. I discovered locomotion and cocked my insularity. I write the medicine as a repair, the dish as tangential to a dumpling. Everything on the table is pretty much there to guide our embraces to a fruitful fulfillment. Death is explored by dream. As above, so below.

It's an odd perspective, taking one last drink of coffee, to see one’s face reflected at the bottom of a coffee mug.

I’m going to take a Krakatoa. Buy something topaz. I like torsion. It makes these planets revolve by a proposal of structure. The guy on the drums is a poet named Clark Coolidge. He taught me how to forget everything that wasn’t tied down. How to sip spirits when the incense barks. How a language has veins we should cherish in our nightgowns. The savage delicacy of nouns. That which fits wallows by attraction is sometimes also goats. Meanwhile, the clank of adjectives stiffens evocation. It diffuses into harmonies of appliance. The washing machine rocks on its legs like a poem. And when the bank opens, circumstance gets its wealth all over it.

 

Stepping Outside

I read a paragraph by Nietzsche and stumbled through the room, discombobulated by his ideas of sacrifice. What I'm doing now is not a sacrifice. It's an indulgence. Sacrifice washed over my generation like a rogue wave of oceanic ideology. It belonged in the past. More than that. It belonged in the movies. Beautiful women heaved into active volcanos. Hearts tossed down Aztec steps. Thousands of men running with bayoneted rifles into machine gun fire. What did this extreme behavior mean? Life on TV was safe and predictable. Life outside of TV was wild and unpredictable. Stepping outside was a sacrifice. Stepping outside of convention. Stepping outside of routine. Stepping outside of the law. There was also another word for it: eccentricity. Stepping outside the circle. Stepping outside circular thinking. Stepping outside bullshit. Psychedelia had a lot of tourists. They seemed genuine at the time. But when times got rough, they stepped back into the circle. They sacrificed eccentricity to financial security. And got jobs with generous salaries and health benefits. And sacrificed themselves to mutual funds. Mortgages. And golf.  

Destiny is another odd concept. It belongs to a world of romance and grand gestures. It’s mythological. It traffics in deities and dragons. Great operas depend on it. I don’t think there’s been a time in my life when I felt I was fulfilling a destiny. The overall, prevailing feeling has been one of drift. Of drifting. Like Rimbaud going down the Meuse on his unmanageable barge. His delirium intensifying the closer the river takes him to the ocean, his life exploding into delirious skies and bottomless nights. Oceanic consciousness. Ineffable winds. So that returning home to the farm in Charleville is an option preempted by a lust for sensation. For turbulence and movement. But when he refuses his destiny as a visionary poet and chooses, instead, a destiny of caravans and guns in east Africa, his destiny turns lethal. This is destiny as a refusal. A refractory soul. Destiny suggests fate, a narrative written ahead of our existence and waiting for us to fulfill its goals. It smells of predestination, and can easily be mistaken for an alibi.

Mysticism is where it’s at. That’s always been a fascination. I’ve even, at times, been drawn to religion. You can’t help it when you enter one of those cathedrals in Europe, or the steaming rocks of a sweat lodge. I think the words of Philip Lamantia express it well: The marvelous unveils its face in front of me. It’s alluring, like the scene in Twelfth Night when Olivia lowers the veil of her face: item, two lips indifferent red; item, two gray eyes with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Revelation has a libidinal energy. It has a carnal aspect.

Lamantia describes it very differently. For him, it is an incorporeal rapture, a place of radiant bliss lights and color. It’s a place, but a placeless place, not a place in the conventional sense but a place at the table of the entire universe. There are sacred places. They don’t have fences or boundaries or appear on maps. It’s not a matter of real estate. It’s a matter of dimension. Light within darkness. Absorption in the Divine Presence. Union with the source of all being. A High Paradise that dwarfs the palatial with the floating architecture of a poet’s - Lamantia’s - words, a truth beauty wisdom loveliness heavenly bliss paradise. With a view of Samadhi, and free WiFi.

I can’t stay mystical for long. It’s a level of intensity hard to maintain. You need spiritual dumbbells. An open disposition. A willingness to ascend in smoke. Transport can be very taxing.  It’s the humor of all mortals to crave comfort, security, and wildlife. A place to rest. Maybe eat. Converse with a fellow human. Smell the incense. Dig the theatrics. Admire the ceremonies. The singing of the choirs. The luxury of invisible rewards. Is there a church of Dada? Is there a cathedral for gnats? Are there mosques for moss? Is there a roadside chapel for vagabonds and repentant bikers? An abbey in Cincinnati? A basilica for silica? A Holy See for Middle C? It's not often that the propeller propels the truth at a wall where it bursts into hallelujah. The Song to the Siren. Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei Deus. It’s hard getting a grip on the intangible. But you can express it in other dimensions, those placeless places that call out to us like a voice in a well. Cold misty nights in late October. A new moon behind a cloud mocking its own lucidity. 

Gertrude Stein Is Making Breakfast

Some things need emphasis. Mahler’s 5^th Symphony. The seashore. Any seashore. They’re all magic. We’re all on a divide between the sea and the land. Life and death. And all those islands in between. Swaying palms. They require no accentuation. The mood resides somewhere between gray and ruby. There’s a seamlessness to some moments that happen in taxis. The sudden, unexpected kiss. They wordless exchange between two gazes. A ghost from the past with a gem-encrusted grimoire on their lap. A circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Seamlessness is ceaseless. It can happen anywhere. And you won’t even know it. Because it’s seamless. Hammers are inherently emphatic. It's part of their structure. Even when they’re lying still they seem to be doing something. Reverie is different. It’s not a hammer at all. It’s more like a parade float. Or a silk shirt with tender buttons. It’s a version of living in which the bulbs are multicolored and Gertrude Stein is making breakfast.

The wiring unfolds the greenhouse with literal symmetry. This is a realm in which symmetry might also be metaphorical. But today it’s literal. And by that, I mean to damage some consonants among the distortions. Just to illustrate what a supposition can do to a pumpkin. The illuminations are boiling out of a jug of cacophonous phenomena. Even the adjectives thud when they hit the floor. That’s how volatile everything is in the laboratory today. You can’t say a word without emanating an eerie blue light. I've been waving semaphores all day in the kitchen window. I become irritatingly stiff among the circles. These attempts at communication have all been rendered flat by the simulacrum. Tonight at the Club Silencio the ghost of Buddy Holly will be singing “That’ll Be the Day.” I don’t know what any of it means. Which, of course, makes it all the more meaningful. Anyone who enjoys miniature golf as much as I do should probably fold themselves into a tumbleweed and roll away. We were happy because it is parliamentary to be happy, not because the shoot went berserk when Cher got on stage. I shattered myself eating spaghetti by virtue of a mouth gone rogue. It left quite a mess. Although the penmanship was remarkably good.

I forget how eyes work. I know light is involved. And roads and emergencies and blood. Passion tempered in fire. Early morning light crawling across a tidepool. The retina is explained by birds. The iris circles the dilation of a cave. Everything in the head is either a shadow or a fire. When thoughts burn down, they create a religion. Darkness laminates the sandstone arching over a bed of tarantulas. When I say eye I mean eye am eye who are U? Everything that enters through the eyes is upside down. Because the eye's lens is convex, it inverts the image; the top of anything hits the bottom of the retina, and light from the bottom of anything hits the top, sparking revolutions and marriage proposals. If you have a quandary reading bank drafts and legal documents, you should see a shaman. Those luminous blobs you see when the lids are closed are called phosphenes. And when the lids open details increase and seagulls hover the landfill. Sparkly women do somersaults on high wires and somewhere in Kansas the James Gang stop the train. Frank recites lines from Shakespeare while Jesse collects money and jewelry. Meanwhile, it's two o’clock, October 19^th, 2025, in Duluth, Minnesota. A calamity of opinions is erupting in everyone’s head as an ophthalmologist prepares to put a needle through Calliope’s left eye…

It’s not what a possibility can do when it’s impossible to do otherwise, it’s what a thermometer can do with an afternoon of churned bitumen. That’s it in a nutshell. The Big Enigma. The Grand Howdy Do. Natural Drift. Holy Moly. Oysters Rockefeller. Banzai Pipeline. I slammed the buttons on my shirt and it made me insoluble. After that, everything seemed like an opium dream. I slumped forward like a shopping bag as hallucinations played around with stones and shadows. My senses hemorrhaged Luxembourg. I voted for people I’d never heard of. Evangelists convulsed on the floor. I wore cotton in my sleep and denim in my dreams. I waxed my panic with shoe polish and the work was good. I felt alive and almond and aloe verra. I embellished my instincts with myths. Dragonflies dangled from my earlobes. Ladybugs flashed in my eyebrows. And man, what eyebrows. All tentacles and wires. It happens. Time. Death. Critical mass. The constant revolution of events in any random barrel. One day you’re studying for the bar. And the next, you’re in a pirogue on the Amazon, paddling toward a fulfillment center.

Some Notes On The Body Politic

The zipper on my running pants has gotten sticky. Must be rust. I haven’t worn them since early last spring. And it’s been an unusually humid summer. We’re well into October now, Halloween ghosts and witches and giant spiders everywhere on neighborhood lawns and houses celebrating the pageantry of death and the proximity of the supernatural. The air is crisp, and getting crisper. When I get up in the morning, I turn on the heat.

Change is in the air. There have been far fewer crows this fall. It's a bit spooky. There are normally hundreds of crows out by now. Why is this happening? Is this an omen? Is that magnitude 9 earthquake dormant in the Cascadia fault been agitating in ways apparent to wildlife?

Everything feels ominous these days. Precarious. The body politic has been morphing into increasingly authoritarian actions and behavior. The United States feels less and less like the United States and more and more like something foreign; it looks the same, a little more haggard, bridges collapsing, roads too raggedy to drive, but still recognizable, an IHOP still serving breakfast, people saying things you’re not supposed to say on podcasts. The shreds of democracy are still visible, but every day someone gets kidnapped or bombed. Laws broken. Ethics, principles, standards, honor, decency, have become so much flotsam on a putrescent sea of enlightenment debris. The zeitgeist is diseased. It hasn’t morphed into anything identifiable as yet, but pustules and sores encrust its body as it crawls upward from its cradle in hell. Laws that once carried weight and force mean nothing. They’re either gone, gangrenous with corruption, amputated, lying on the congressional floor, or linger in limbo, because no one bothers to enforce them. Or chooses, rather, to ignore their obligations to the constitution. What was once a strong national identity now lingers like a fairy tale confronting a mountain of blackmail and evil.

9:30 a.m. I grab The World Within the Word, Essays by William H. Gass, from the bookshelf to read over breakfast (a bowl of fruit topped with whipped cream and two slices of toast slathered with cherry jam), and open it to the chapter "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," which has been bookmarked with an index card.

There is writing on the card. My writing. “Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Insider Pentagon.” I have no idea what this is about. I’m guessing it’s from the Obama era. Something I was writing, or considering writing, 15 or 20 years ago.

There’s more: “John Murtha would not join the U.S. military today. The services are struggling with unanticipated personnel shortages due to a sharp decline in first-term enlistments and an exodus of experienced mid-level cover specialists.”

There’s also a quote, at the bottom of the card, by John Murtha: “Let me tell you, war is a nasty business. It sears the soul.”

I’m guessing this goes back even further than the Obama era, back to the Bush era. George W.

I was against the Iraq war. I’m guessing I was prepping to write something in protest. If I did, it’s long forgotten. What I remember is walking around Green Lake, holding a candle with hundreds of other souls, most of them elderly, protesting the coming war. It had been a warm, gentle evening. From a distance, it must’ve looked like a religious procession. It was mostly quiet, with virtually no police presence, and disappointingly unremarkable. Unlike the Battle of Seattle – the WTO protests in 1999, a mere four years in the past – the walk around Green Lake, a mostly meditative stroll while cupping the little candle flame with my free hand from the occasional stirring of air, felt impotent and futile. The only adversarial moment of any measure was a giant black Cadillac Escalade filled with frat boys hollering insults.

Twenty years later, the so-called left – shocked and repelled by the specter of Trump – had reappraised George W. as some kind of former statesmen, a benign, aw shucks downhome man of the people and overall good guy, painting his toes in his bathtub. The image of George W. slipping a piece of candy to Michelle Obama during the funeral of his father went a long way toward softening former attitudes of revulsion. His criticism of Trump also helped the democrats reevaluate those years of daily rebuke and mockery. He was one of us now, seemed to be the general feeling. And when Liz Cheney – daughter of the much maligned Vice President Dick Chenery – joined the democrats during Kalama Harris’s campaign for the presidency, she, too, was heartily embraced.

Obama had his share of war, too. He kept the war in Afghanistan going, increased the U.S. presence to 100,000 to combat the Taliban and disrupt al-Qaeda. And in March, 2011, Obama authorized U.S. participating in a NATO-led air campaign, which led to the overthrow and death of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Today, Libya remains mired in political paralysis and economic instability, marked by localized violence and a human trafficking nightmare for migrants attempting to reach Europe, where they are vulnerable to extreme abuses, including torture, forced labor, and extortion by smugglers and armed groups. None of this, however, threw shade on Obama’s continuing image of angelic rationality and intellect, a worthy recipient of the Noble Peace Prize.

“Books contained tenses like closets full of clothes,” writes Gass in his essay on Gertrude Stein, “but the present was the only place we were alive, and the present was like a painting, without before or after, spread to be sure, but not in time…The earth might be round but experience, in effect, was flat. Life might be long but living was as brief as each breath in breathing. Without a past, in the prolonged narrowness of any ‘now,’ wasn’t everything in a constant condition of commencement? Then, too, breathing is repeating – it is beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again and again.”

The paragraph clears the clutter of politics from my head. I return to my body, the actuality of living, of pineapple and grapes and strawberries and whipped cream. The crunch of toasted bread in my mouth, the sweetness of cherry jam seducing my tongue and palate into an aplomb of life affirming renewal.

The rest of the day evolves according to a set pattern of creative endeavors – practicing French on Yabla, watching a few podcasts, a few of them in French, while R attends to her horticultural chores outside, then – several hours later - going for a short, four-mile run – followed by dinner and watching another episode of True Detective, season 1, on our new flatscreen TV. After dinner, I retire to the bedroom to continue my reading of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

5:30 p.m. R returns from a short walk hoping to find Louise, the crippled crow we’ve been feeding for over a decade. She sometimes comes when we whistle, and hops around on her one good leg while pecking at a peanut. We haven’t seen her for a number of days now. The street where we are most apt to find her is lined with luxurious homes well into the millions. A woman emerged from one of the houses and yelled at R to stop feeding crows, the harshness of her voice galvanized with hostility. R is non-plussed. This is not the first time we’ve been yelled at by the neighbors for feeding crows, which they believe responsible for an uptick in rats. We’ve tried explaining to several of them that crows outcompete rats for resources, and are more apt to reduce the rat population, the source of which is the waterfront and granaries on Puget Sound, which are a mile or two distant. Our argument falls on deaf ears. The easier solution is to avoid that area from now on, if not stopping this pastime of feeding the neighborhood crows altogether.  

This weird hostility is puzzling. One would assume that people gifted with so much affluence, and thereby freed from the anguish the less fortunate suffer, fearing bankruptcy and homelessness from Godzilla-sized medical bills and stagnant wages in an inflationary economy, would be calm and charitable and tolerant. They’re not. They’re deeply unhappy. Whatever darkness is troubling their serenity is etched on their faces in broken capillaries and sunken eyes.

During an afternoon run the following day, we notice a silver 2024 Tesla Cybertruck parked in front of the mansion across the street from the irate crow hater. It looks military and futuristic, a solid structure of defiant, unapologetic hostility with clean, stern, no-nonsense lines and a heavily armored persona. I would not be surprised to see a turreted machine gun rise out of the roof. 

 

Evenfall

Evenfall. Good lord what a beautiful word. I can feel it fall through my body like a soothing whisper of morphine mixed with unconditional love. Evenfall. So gentle. So good. If I could swallow it I’d swallow a dozen. You can’t drink words. Except through the eyes. Or ears. The last several days have been stressful. Four days ago our TV of 30 years died. Matthew McConaughey was about to go toe to toe with a man 50 lbs. heavier than his scrawny Texas ass when the screen went black and an ugly staticky electronic noise came crackling out of it like the death rattle of a thousand peacocks. I looked for a pulse. There was none. We let it lay in state for a couple of days, then took it to a recycling service south of the city where industry and grim realities lurk together. Sad event. That TV was amazing. We bought it in the 90s but it was able to handle all the new technology, including streaming services. And man it was heavy. My back still hurts. It stood like a monument to stamina in our living room, a defiant treasure of former technology, when the jingle of dial-up Internet stimulated anticipation, and Grunge was King.

So we bought our first flat screen. Which reminds of that scene in Fahrenheit 451, when Guy’s wife Linda (Julie Christie) participates in an interactive TV play, gazing at a flatscreen TV on the wall as if it were a supernatural force drawing her out of her life and body. A TV zombie.

But also, once it slowly rolled into life after R’s ministrations guided by a tech support lady in India with a masterful command of English and a lot of patience (I’m useless in these situations, the one piece of technology I can handle with some confidence is lighting a candle, or operating my suspenders), it seduced us with its charms, and gave us the Rockford Files to watch during dinner. It takes little time for a TV to become a member of the family. Just imagine what a robot could do. Enveloped in advanced polymers, hydrogels for multi-functional sensing, self-healing e-skins, and living tissue grown on robotic frames. I doubt we could ever afford such a thing. And how creepy that is. To think of owning a sentient being, albeit manufactured, rather than delivered from a womb.

Truth is, I’ve always liked TV. I’ve never seen it as a threat. Partly because, age 8, I sat next to a girl named Cathy in third grade, with whom I had a fanciful 3^rd grade crush, and fed her pictures of horses that I’d drawn myself, with the help of my father, a professional illustrator, how could I miss? It was my first yearning, and though I had only a dim understanding of that attraction, and no way of articulating my feelings, it was still a genuine yearning. So when, circa 1955, I saw Lawrence Olivier on TV one afternoon calling out for his love – Cathy! Cathy! - on the forlorn English heath, it got to me. This was the 1939 production of Wuthering Heights directed by William Wyler. The mood of unrequited passion played out on the desolate terrain of the Yorkshire moors appealed to a nascent romanticism. Though actually it wasn’t Yorkshire at all, the movie was filmed in southern California, somewhere near Thousand Oaks. My 8-year-old brain drank in the emotion of the film and rather than get me hooked on TV, it sparked an interest in books. It might’ve set me up for binge watching and booze-infused all-nighters in my sardonic Sturm und Drang adulthood (and sometimes did, thanks to cable, MTV and HBO and the rest) but instead I was drawn to the excesses of the literary life. What Virginia Woolf described as a “luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” I have Emily Brönte to thank for that. And Merle Oberon.

The literary life, in 2025, feels antiquated. I feel anachronistic. And not a little irrelevant. To keep on creating works of literary merit is a futile endeavor, but if the madness of its pursuit is rooted deeply enough, it ceases to matter whether it will result in awards and respectability. It’s like going on a long pilgrimage and mapping existence with arpeggios and enzymes. There are foreign worlds with which to engage. And not a few of them offer circumstances as yet to be catalogued in the human nervous system. Writing is more than words. It’s a way of life.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years: collisions of ice and water in the atmosphere generate immense electrical charges. This results in lightning and thunder. The same principle applies to writing. Words collide with words, creating smells, libraries, indicatives, and swans and lobsters.

Repairing machinery takes a great deal of patience and concentration.

If you treat people openly and honestly and let a little of your empathy show, the reaction is always 100% unpredictable.

Addictions are easy to acquire, and a son of a bitch to get rid of.

Music offers solace. Sometimes redemption. Sometimes inspiration. But always heat and yearning and a quickened pulse.

That funny jingle of the tambourine in The Band’s rendition of “Tears of Rage,” featuring Richard Manuel’s heartbreaking falsetto run the spectrum from acceptance to the weird enchantments of despair in the exquisite pain of being alive. Which means, ultimately, being vulnerable. Being open. Open to circumstance. Open to spontaneity. To apathy and indifference. To ecstasy and rebellion. The whole damn gamut of human emotion.

Evenfall tonight arrived at 6:30 pm. Today was the first day since June that felt like autumn. The air felt cold, even though, truth be told, the temperature is mild. 57℉. The skin isn’t used to it, so it feels colder than it actually is. It was a gray day. Gray everywhere. Gunmetal gray. Slate gray. Charcoal. Pewter. Gainsboro. Gray is the overall disposition of this Cimmerian realm. The northwest is perpetually gray. People acquire its moods. They keep to themselves. They seem well-adapted to monotony. Monotony is easier than a full despair riddled with parking tickets and unpaid bills. Downtown Seattle always looks bleak this time of day. It’s a wistful scene of high-rise towers and the naked beams of partially built skyscrapers beaded with lights. Clouds drift overhead like a herd of pregnant ghosts. They’re headed east, over the Cascades. They’re moving unusually fast. A brisk wind must be pushing them. But there’s no apparent wind where I’m standing. Nor can I see the sun. I’m on a steep hill. I can’t see anything to the west except an e-scooter on the crest and a telephone pole teetering east. I’m guessing a big truck backed into it. The air is full of disasters this fall. Crises upon crises. And none of it gray. Gray feels like a luxury. Who can afford to wallow in its nuances except philosophers? Evenfall belongs to another time. People on a heath in the sfumato of time, and the even interlacing of quiet voices.

 

The Mandalay Of The Mind

Whenever I get tangled in a body of verbal apparatus, I try bringing it around the back way. I try to make it tangible. I fill it with cactus and buckskin. The way is long and hard and fraught with parables. It’s an ecology of locomotion. And that’s what makes it so obtrusive. The long steady rhythm of walking forward tough, rough, and full of conjecture. Let me put it another way: which shoes do I use? My blue suede shoes, those big black clumpy boots I bought at an Army Surplus store in Seattle’s Belltown 35 years ago, or my running shoes, which are engineered air mesh and comfort my feet like a consulting firm on Park Avenue. Going barefoot is out of the question. The road ahead is as endless as it was beginningless. It’s not even a real road. It’s a metaphor paved with words. I can hear the splatter of rain whenever I unfold a map of human consciousness. I drive a blue Maserati. They’re known for their sensitivity of response. Metaphors are slippery. Traction is difficult to maintain. Focus is crucial. It’s easy to get carried away with words. I once woke up in a luxury hotel in Reykjavik with Balzac on one side and Emily Dickinson on the other. I excused myself, got dressed, and caught a flight to Bora Bora.

There are, of course, places you can’t find on a map. They’re not real places, at least not in the conventional sense. They’re more like the clatter of pots and pans and calamitous shouts in a busy hotel kitchen. The idea of place is a tad misplaced. A point in space can also be an evolution, an ever-unwinding transformation that teeters on the spectral and wallows in skulls. That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once, remarked Hamlet, Act 5, scene 1. You see my drift. There’s no place like a grave, and the grave is no place at all. It’s a hole in the sweet steamy earth that brought us all into this life. A whisper, a phosphor. Wish that I were, at this moment, pushing out for some warm, tropical place like Mandalay. The Mandalay of the mind, as it were, with streams tumbling down steep rocky cliffs and waterfalls where maidens bathe and the adrenalin inside a long dive into mystical absorption boils in a whirl of letters.

How odd, that notion of Hamlet’s, that a skull might circumvent God. Which is like breathing a universe into a basketball. Just enough to dribble. Kids and goats and everyone clapping hands and singing. It’s like a color on the tongue, this philodendron. It smells of invention. And growls like a sedition. Throw in a basement, and you’ve got Jerry Lewis on American Bandstand. Little Richard, unhinged. It’s the whole point. Just this little stimulus to the palate, and things get lickety-splickety. And people call this work? I call it propane. A long blue flame in the gentle fall of evening. Dollars to doughnuts, as they say. And how the new work is done, how it happens, how it grows and spreads its wings and scares the shit out of you, because it’s alive now and the only way to bring it into captivity is to lure it into the halls of meaning with words and sweet perfumes. It’s thicker than anything, this dimension, and opaque. We’re outdoors now, we’re by the sea. There’s water and light and afflatus by the mile. I’m spitting it into the future. And it spits back at me in the wind. Meaning, the future is a scam. A scum. A loop in the noise. Punches, convulsions, woodcuts. The plot fostered from a mood. The practice adept at revolt.

People speak Burmese in Mandalay, and is the country’s lingua franca. It makes me dream of the labial walls of origin, the life of the party, the pivot upon which everything turns. That pained, yearning, armor-piercing voice of Richard Manuel singing “Tears of Rage.” Finding the root, in head and self, that takes time. My family got a little worried when they saw me drift into nineteenth century Paris. I was lured there by cornucopias of literary glory. And the absinthe, of course. And the Tartelette sablée aux fruits rouges at the Bouillon Racine. Some of which proved real, and some of which lingered as echoes and vague shapes, things I might come across in a book, that lively decadence of the desolate, hedonistic, though fraught with despair. Similar, say, to the spirit of ukiyo-e, of Japan’s Edo period, Pictures of the Floating World. Death in life. Joy in despair. The shuttlecock of contradictions that give nuance its piquancy. The sorcery of such things are the very impetus of glorious impieties, and give art its savage instincts. Things you can make with your fingers and head. Anything to keep living, keep going. Puncture holes in the enveloping simulacrum. Sit back and dream as it deflates, causing a riot among the seagulls. I mean, there’s little satisfaction in committing oneself to answer what needs no answer. It’s a noble pursuit, the holy grail of beatnik pilgrims, if there ever was such a thing. There’s a seductive wistfulness to such things. If one sails out far enough, it’s there, melting into the void.   

 

Somewhere In Phoenix

I fostered a taproot and it smashed into Cubism. It's my way of saying the moon is an umbrella and it takes a discriminating eye to see what a brush with string might bring to the stringless in a world of pulleys. No pallet is against itself in the realm of dots. Sensory details are important tools for lingering in bed on a Sunday morning. Speed paints a distance differently than a voluptuous inertia. I always think to myself, we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we? Is that what you think? I think the combinations we float require a lot of soap. I can feel it. That old tension. The pull of heaven. Two thousand light years from the nearest MacDonalds. A phonograph next to him, an artist's thumb presses a blob of cobalt blue into a blob of Tuscan red. And a feeling seizes hold of my baggage. Packing has long been one of my more reliable talents. There’s a trick to it. The truth is never naked. It’s an inner journey I experience through a pack of lies.

Until it became an incessant babbling of swans, the sailing here was circular, and full of decorations. It stands to reason. Consciousness is my favorite bistro. I anticipate the meaning of an entire generation to walk through that door any minute and sit down in the next sentence. But no go. Didn’t happen. I often expect too much of words. They can only do so much. It would mean a great deal if a twig were plucked and carved into a waterfall. I think it would prove something. What, I don’t know. I wish Samuel Beckett were still alive. Ponder this device, if you will, and see if it means anything. A communion, a book of hymns, or a particle accelerator with a ring of superconducting magnets. The wound is large that panics my quarks into beatitude. There are those who turn to drawing as a way to forget the pain. Others turn to knitting. The resilience that it cultivates through its practices is fragile, but persistent. It’s my chief prerogative to dilate when nothing else is happening. The rest of these words are for floating in space.

I squeeze a predicate with a rhythm and a velocity lets loose. The movement is fluid in contrast to the surrounding frenzy. I write my diagnosis with a cactus needle. Human evolution has gone awry. What were you hoping to hear? That a sigh in the folds of a dress cradles fire? There are so many sequins hidden under the stage costumes I can’t always be sure what constitutes a genuine excitement and what makes a good homily. The specific context surrounding our interactions was translatable as a box of candy. I knew it was a friendly message because it was pinned to my glucose. Anyone who fathoms the calamity that lies concealed in the absurd guilelessness and blind confidence of technocratic solutions suffers from an anxiety that is past all comparisons. Because we know all too precisely what it takes to build an understanding based on warm water and a thrilling, irresistible rationale, accompanied by a perfectly good conscience. That is why the spoon rebels against the scoundrel. And the tines of a fork are helpless in a bowl of soup.

Somewhere in Phoenix is a Spiritus-Sancti: the Holy Grail of houseplants. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve been hearing a lot of strange things lately. Spiritus-Sancti is a rare philodendron. And it’s a rare daisy that can tie the sun in a knot and cough up Houdini. I borrowed Bob Dylan for the weekend. He’s 84 and spry as a bowl of Rice Krispies. There’s no reason that our former passions and aspirations should fade from resonance. The hills are alive with the sound of hives. Bells in the mountains, buckles in everyone’s belt. Credulity often comes packaged in doubt. Might I persuade you that when my propagation twangs my G string trembles? If you’re alive you should wear your age like a discipline. And if you find yourself for something you’re automatically against something. Therefore, let’s be rebels together. Or at least roommates who agree on one thing and one thing only: the house is on fire. Gray days such as these are perfect for unintentional situations. If you’re old enough to remember Lulu’s rendition of “Shout,” you’re old enough to remember what it was once like to enter a bookstore as if it were the Louvre, or drop a needle onto Blonde and Blonde, and find it full of shotgun deviations instead of bytes and algorithms. I feel it, too. Metamorphism is for the dissatisfied, the dreamers and malcontents. Madame Bovary frantically doomscrolling on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. And admiring the display that is sunset on Flatbush during the Mermaid Parade.

Skiing The Enigmas

There are no examples, no rules, no precedents, no staplers, no staples, no standards, no civics, no emulsions, no bullets, no bombs, no knots to undo. No secrets to uncover, no horses to saddle. Just you. And a blank screen. This is what it looks like:

So you see. The enigma is entirely in your mind.

They mystery that is you. The mystery that is me. The mystery that is everywhere. The mystery that is for old men a deeply occupying conundrum. And is like a winter in Alaska.

I move swiftly in a city. I walk with determination. To linger in a city is to invite obtrusion, suspicion, ridicule, and mayhem. The country is different. You can walk a long way on a dirt road on the plains and think the world is a place of tranquil interactions, occasional violence, and moments of overpowering stimulation.

You can look out, across the plains, at the mountains.

The mountains are poems. Written by volcanos.

Shooting flames into the sky. Vomiting lava. And the intestinal tribulations of the underworld.

When a container takes the shape of the contained, the contained is deliberate as a passport. The intent of the contained is to become uncontained. Now then. What the fuck is up with contentment? Where did contentment go? The dictator has sent his armies out among the people, and the people have become uncontained.

Contentment has gone the way of the dodo. And clubfoot Lord Byron slashing his way through life.

But hey: you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Tommy the Turtle.

Tommy the Turtle is the world's largest snowmobile-riding turtle. Sitting on his snowmobile in Bottineau, North Dakota, at the base of the Turtle Mountains, he is over 26 feet tall, and radiates the joys of winter.

Life, I think, is a gaudy chemistry of lipids, proteins, compatibility, oxymorons, and stubborn resilience. Existence is resistance. This is true. But without resilience, phenomenon dies.

It’s the sound of a word around a thing that gives it a shell and a shine, a cognitive arthropod at the bottom of a deep blue significance. The imaginary. The real. And the glitter of absurdity.

All things being equal, it’s strategically advantageous to make a few digressions, make room for the unexpected, loosen up the sound and method, take a chance on the abyss, and let things happen the way they do at a gas station. Dropped wrenches. Interruptions. Streams of invective. The smell of combustion. The hum of a pump. A man in a black leather jacket looking for a map to existence.

Tell me how these things sound to you: capillary oratorio hammerhead hamburger. If they sound hollow, nonsensical, piquant, and a bit gamy, it's clear that to anticipate action within is birds in a Wyoming morning. When words are clustered so firmly together that they seem to deepen into eerie shades of aberration, piston-popping hippo conduits of henna chiffon, they solicit one’s attention in a sly and sparkling hypothesis of conks and exonerations, aluminum coughs, Parisian parasols, an entire universe sloshing around in a wide black tray of imaginary solutions.

Ok. What’s next?

What I Did Tomorrow

I can’t remember what I did tomorrow. I remember I had plans. I remember caution and doughnuts. Looking for a candy dispenser aboard the Starship Enterprise. An appointment with Leonard “Bones” McCoy, who cured my tinnitus. And playing golf on Titan.

The illusion of the flow of time arises from our brains' cognitive processes, which constructs a narrative of "before" and "after" based on Marcel Proust, all 26 seasons of Southpark, and the dizzying whims of sundry prepositions.

Right now, I’m lifting dumbbells with Emily Brontë.

It’s 3:00 p.m. on Planet Earth.

I felt something seismic just now, which caused me to pause, and put my dumbbell down. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose myriad asymmetries are caressed by a thousand different winds and a thousand different situations, the many latitudes that may accommodate a lush plurality, and leave you standing in a taiga of infinite corollaries.

Never tease an ambiguity. They just get bigger. And more and more confusing. Until the gleam of a chisel on the workbench penetrates your eyes with its very specific function, consider yourself vulnerable to the vagaries of persuasion. And its cousin, propaganda.

What does the relativity of time say about the reality of time? There’s nothing fake about a clock, but its hinterlands are many. It can be a deer in the forests of the Turtle Mountains hanging above a TV in a salon with a player piano and a rack of hunting rifles. The tick of a cuckoo clock mocking the progression of time with the thrust of a bird. This is my way of contributing to the fluid immodesty of time in the cockpit of a fool. I remember the time I jumped from a plane and the cord of my chute lost a toggle and the eerie silence of the sky spoke to the inner, softer parts of my being and I had no control over my chute and a man on a one-way radio kept shouting turn left turn left turn left and I shouted I can’t I can’t I can’t and a small bird dashed by without a hello. Not everything in life has such clarity as the sudden impact of your body on a field of dirt. They tell you not to look at the ground but how can you not look at the ground. And bam, your knees are suddenly in your face. And the world feels new and wonderful again. You can pick up a rock and listen closely to the sound of the shape inside. It’s like that surprise when you have nothing to say until you start saying something and everything emerges like a wave swelling in the ocean and collapsing on the rocks and beach huge and chaotic, the foam rising to kiss the toes of sunbathers. We’d all like a buttery circumference to surround our pi. Which is just plain flaky. Differences are differentiated by outcasts. Sooner or later we all encounter it: proliferation. Plurality. A salacious kiln in a lump of magnesium. A quiet gray day in the Skagit Valley. Nothing broken. Nothing harsh. Nothing severe. Just the sweet sensation of being alive.

 

The Père Ubu Balloon

I just changed my T-shirt. My last one had Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son on the front. Today’s has Père Ubu picnicking on the grave of Thomas Paine. He’s also shouting things. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This statement is false. Less is more. The only constant is change. It’s a crazy world. A group's collective decision might easily go against the preferences of its members, and result in misgiving, skepticism, and mistrust. Logic is illogical. But fascism takes the cake. Eats it. Then shits on the public. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Which also makes no sense. If it’s a big club, there should be room for one and all. It is, in fact, a tiny club. There is very little that makes sense anymore. We must adjust our moral compass by the golden rule: those with the gold, make the rules. Physics is generally reliable. Some things do make sense. There’s a sequence, a concatenation of cause and effect. Fellatio inflates the jolly despot. He grows immense. He is smiling. It’s Thanksgiving. There’s a big parade on 77^th Street. And here he comes, high above the crowd, tethered to a float by a long, long rope: the Père Ubu Balloon.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to take the plunge. I’m going deep. I’m going to get to the bottom of things. Here’s two holes, one for each eye. Please excuse my fingers. I can neither explain nor entirely condone what they do, though my thumbs are in opposition. I want what Patchen wanted, and Creeley and Lamantia and the rest of the pack. I want a new beginning. Three Coke bottles and a poet are insufficient ambiguities. We need more to go on. The fear of death confoundeth me. I’m fighting hard for the convolutions and vagaries of prose. I’m leery of abstractions. Things like berserkers, psychoanalysis, and Boolean gazpacho. I have a voice, and I will use it if I must. I tend to lose envelopes. And I can’t remember the last time I bought stamps. This thought experiment shows that there is no universal mousse. What we initially took to be deterministic, locally interacting, and objectively defined realities, proved to be trains of thought bursting out in song. Imagine a rose petal gliding to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Watch as it slowly twirls, whirls, and wobbles in hypothetical space, riding undulations of air, just like a real sentence. It’s going to take a while, so sit back and enjoy yourself. Do what you gotta do.

Let language be our tie. Rain, grass, birds on a wire. Please. Be my guest. Say something. I think it’s important that we exchange ideas, marbles, criticism, opinions, dowagers, divining rods and other items critical to the practice of bulldozing. Let us thrive on disagreements, the way we used to, before the shampoo turned lumpy and the borders closed. This we must do, and do, and do, otherwise we better go, say, into polite, barely endurable small talk, and become enemas to one another. I’m trying as hard as I can to produce the right secretions. The brutal truths we once industrialized have amounted to dimes in another dimension, idols to mint with your own head. We all wanted beauty so hard we became mathematical, and recklessly cryptic. That’s just not how things were meant to be. But who can beat life into form if the cause is bookended by pyromaniacs? Life is a tad chiaroscuro at the front of the vulva. Our first day is mostly one of endless confusion and crying. The best moments come in intervals, like those bittersweet melodic lines in Mahler’s Adagietto. In other words, touching at angles. Obliquity. It’s the best way forward, if you’re trying to find the right line, and avoid the self-checking bullshit. No one action is decisive. Kick out the rot, like they say, and let the mind swing clear of the junk.

I Took A Walk In My Mind

I took a walk in my mind, right to the end of Reverie Lane. Dreams sped by at the speed of dreams, which is actually quite slow if you’re using human perception, and not the perceptions of the dead, or the perceptions of birds, which are fast as thought, and propelled by words. Swallows are poets. Crows are prophets. And loons are librettists, and are clumsy on land.

Eagles have the sweep of prose, spiraling in columns of air.

The interior life is sounded by hammers, and opened by a sequence of keys on a keyboard. Black keys are semitones above the white keys, which are the basis of scales and melodies. The division between outside and inside is illusory. Reality is in the intervals. Privacy is a nice feeling, but so is touching the skin, which draws the attention outside, among blackberry vines and redwoods. The scent of the air, and infantries of clouds, conquering distances with calm.

For the sake of argument, let’s say there is no separate reality called tree. The label "tree" is a category – a mode of existence - invented by humans for ease of reference, rather than an inherent property of reality itself. It’s our mind’s interpretation of sensory data, dressed in leaves and inflectional stems. The noumenon of a truly active thing must be molded into some form of magic for it to be apprehended by the mind, and sudden and spectacular. Much like a mountain.

I agree, a mountain path is a duodenal angularity bordered by ferns. It illustrates its shadows with enormous persuasion. I’m the furthest example of myself that I can extend toward you. I smell the flavor of panic. You can reverse the loop in your backpack for a friendly clue above you. There’s really no need to display your knife. We’re among spirits, invisible beings clowning around in the puffballs. My mission here is simple: discover a convulsive beauty by flexing an unrolled frequency, a resonant piece of sheer scripture, a kind of spinal cord with edible leaves. The universe is a lenient start to things, a potent sense of adulthood on the edge of caraway seed. I’m leaning into it as we speak. Every cell in my body has begun to decipher this existence as a rudderless watercolor diffusing endlessness in all the places as yet untouched by endlessness, whose texture is smooth as free will and just as alluvial. There’s nowhere I can go without encountering the general ooze of biology, whose engine, sputtering invective, is aghast at the lines at the airport, and the ritual of removing shoes. Wherever there is consciousness, there is ceremony, and fear of the supernatural. It goes with the territory. Which is itself a procreation.

Is thought photogenic? I don’t believe so. I’ve never seen a picture of thought. But if I did, I would imagine it would like something like those extraterrestrials – Abbott and Costello – in the movie Arrival. Enormous octopian entities scribbling a swirly language on a glass wall. Everyone gawks, eyes bugging out of their heads, as if standing on the edge of a whole new way of perceiving and experiencing life. Which, of course, they are.

If autumn is to bump into wonder, one must step out of one's dwelling and grab a rope and pull. And pull hard. Whatever lurks in the darkness will begin to assume form and definition. Pain, on contact, will glow in the gables. Money is a disease. Side effects include hallucination, merciless predation and cutthroat monopolies. Sex is a reasonable form of recreation, and remains our most fervent hope for the future. Any future. Despite appearances, we maintain strong ties with our mythologies. The universe above the reach of our arms sparkles in our beer. There’s a feeling of slammed doors being reopened, forgotten revolutions reenacted by rodeo clowns. Chokeholds pop the spectral liquidities inflating our debt. Leaves plummet to the ground with the lacy arabesques of a thousand abstractions. Clearly, the drift of ideas has not yet been abandoned. People eat and do backflips, swirling their glow sticks in anticipation of that last possibility unique to oneself, which is the possibility of authentic existence, which occurs when the spirit is jarred, jolted awake, enlightened by the ineluctability of its demise. How it is that things are things at all passes unnoticed in the arc of a frog, and plops in the water. Supple legs thrust back and the frog is propelled forward. Aspens sway. And the frog grows still. A word: grenouille in French, 蛙 in Japanese,afloat on the page like a leaf on a pond glazed with moonlight.

Depth Is Orange At The Punishment Dump

This exhibition shines what our harmonica twirls. I rattle a bone if I'm alone. The energy carries this beside a bomb. I call it reflecting myself openly. I generate books I attract italic iron. We bend this pleasure into puddle pegs. Sashay with blood where the flames stand. I will inform you of the baroque. But the time must be circular algebra. Before I tailored blobs I squashed gargoyles. In the end, I blossomed like denim.

The scratchier feathers generate a gentle greenery. Your calculus clanks loudly in your spit. I like to carry my clapboards gingerly. Little Richard did it like it mattered. We scatter gold over this old air. I'm reckless and French and hirsute too. I have many facets to my library. My seminal war my enduring staircase butter. A journey in space starts my altitude. And a press crackles through its animal control. I find this garishness sliced by concern.

My bird has consciousness from termites. Making inquiry into space is a hope. Send the bank my freshly engorged interest. I have creamy thoughts about this milk. The hypothesis of participles clatters like jujubes. And the sky is a lavender treasure. My abhorrence moves against snatching a volleyball. Now is not the time to gape. I shall stand here naked as Picasso. It’s a process involving many different zippers.

Grab pleasure before the jump into gravity. I mull emotive so yank my sob. There will be circumstance there and sidewalks. Hectic talk is unpredictable cartwheels the consciousness. Box our unity before we weather physiology. Explode the duty think among its hats. Crackle my creosote until I get lyrical. Endeavor with mass behind you and twist.  We defend our sloppy deviations with meringue. We swear to Cézanne the hammer has will. Your wrinkles are autumn flowers in bas-relief. 

Over there a mood tosses in humor. My impact on coffee has been marigold. Elsewhere, the little I have done sputters. Can it be that translation is spectral? Depth is orange at the punishment dump. All the little neurons create thunderous fictions. The human brain is a pumpkin. Solace supposes a big bang swaying inside. Change the eyes as indicated under the description. The elegies we stroll as fathoms are dreams. We chatter amidst thrilling struggles of impatience.

I experience words by squeezing their vividness. Their texture leaves a demonstrable protuberance behind. We paddle a paper canoe and whirl. Letters crackle as I blast a harmonica. Distorted beings gave the imagery clumsy phenomena. I celebrate each pulse with an octopus. I grow a phonograph and dance exultantly. Shake a flower with my unshakeable hunger. The exploration has been miming its milieu. I seem to be pissing rainbows everywhere. I fold my southern wallet and mutiny. 

An obscurity has been plunged in controversy. A pyramidal universe most definitely has attitude. But who can decide what branch to prune? I have faith in thunder springing forth. I hear the far sound of pamphlets. The quarks dream among themselves as skylarks. And breezes carry the scent of exigency. How many times must I prove polyhedral? I prefer to plant my flags upside-down. Bees often exhibit an erratic morality. It’s nothing we could ever not be. 

The Highly Subjective Objectivity Of Objects

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. This includes Moscow, angels, and God. Particularly when you’re driving across state lines with a shipment of tabasco sauce. Here’s what Wittgenstein has to say about objects: objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs. It’s a circumstance of great latitude, and tremendous responsibility. The door, the window, the ironing board and the car across the street all testify to the rigors of being an object. It is the object of the object to be an object. The matter with matter isn’t just glitter, but garlic. Consciousness flows through both matter and space, and in some way allows reality to exist so that perceptions can authorize steel and codify the circus. Infinity, meanwhile, slides through Indonesia and goes bald as a crab. The entire universe has to be hosed down with history. This wrinkles the planets that are there to be admired. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space. A speck in a visual field need not be red, it can also be France, and turn subversive at the drop of a hat. I was there when it happened: when Dada was born in a delicatessen, and Tristan Tzara sliced a logic in half with the subtlety of hypnosis. All the lobsters were set free, and each symptom was licensed to carry Friday forward and make it available for fondling and aberration.

Every proposition must have a sense. Assertion cannot give it a sense, for what it asserts is the sense itself. And the same holds true of destiny. It’s hard to make any sense at all of things without a compelling narrative. My instincts indicate grease. How its very syllables could warp the sputter if something came loose and the sentence rolled forward on its odium, its fangs bright with torque. I can’t deny that the ground is a riddle. The garden savors of dirt. Yet the roses deliver bags of road to the money of the nose. I’m clean now, and the way ahead is free of elevators. I feel awed before this easel. Even my chair feels stupid. Perception goes wide-eyed with gestation. Everything around me seems a little bent tonight, and warm. I feel like I may be walking into something monumental. Each snap of my fingers is seminal to the general percussion. Each stitch has that compelling engorgement we call romance. If you follow the thread you will find it gallant in proposal and diffuse in conversation. The way a crow argues its placement in time and space reveals a crack in the general entelechy, a potential realization given the tone of the summons and the aerodynamics of the analysis. I feel better now. And peculiar.

Some objects are tricky. Others are swampy. Clay is eminently malleable, but slippery. As for kimchi, it has great benefits, but its spicy, and makes my stomach burn. Objects do this: they make promises they can’t keep, just like humans. Disappointment is educating. However, I do find many of the lessons to be confusing and contradictory. Anyone who has come home with an Ikea bed or bookcase knows this. What you envision might not be exactly what ends up happening. If the truth requires assembly, maybe it’s not the truth. Maybe it’s a diorama containing a riotous night at the Cedar Tavern in 1956. Maybe it’s a chance encounter at 3:00 a.m. by Red Grooms. Maybe it’s deception so lovely in its conception as to create a sense of circumspection. A sense of iconography in a state of abbozzo. And a sad but wistful acceptance of soy sauce. All I know is what I have words for, and sister, they can exist in multiple states. They can create a new wave. We can surf our way to Mars. We can balance ourselves gracefully as the chaos that exists in all organic beings thrusts us into the turbulence of Teahupo'o. Or Malibu. Or Oceanus Borealis. This is the interval known as sunyata. And is a luminous halo. 

 

Converting Feelings Into Murky Aquarium Glass

It’s a funny thing when you think about it, converting feelings into words. I suspect it’s much easier for musicians to do that. Just make the right sounds. Don’t saddle anything with meaning. Meaning makes everything squishy. Like murky aquarium glass.

To be once in the world, one must never be again. To be fully in the world is to be welcomed from exile, all the false expectations of life. Alive, we need purpose. Un raison d’être. A reason to exist. This need for purpose in a world – in a universe – where purpose is continually stymied by death, the natural processes of growth and decay – is to assume the status of a guest. To accept the impermanence of one’s life is reason enough to live it to its fullest potential.

Submission is death. To submit to authority or constraint is to renounce one's own freedom, individuality and will. Death is not necessarily physical, but rather a death of the soul or spirit. It is the end of intellectual life, creativity, dignity, and autonomy. Submission, however nobly packaged, or embellished and beautified by desperation, can lead to a loss of moral values, disengagement, and a form of torpor that resembles a death of the spirit.

The problem with now is that it doesn’t last. The problem with now is that it curtsies to oblivion. The problem with now is nothing you can prepare for. The problem with now gets repetitive. The problem with now is on the outer edge of ruin. The problem with now humiliates all the formulas. The power of now is a pablum disguised as a postponement. The power of now is over before it commits a single sin. The power of the problem of now is a problem caused by annoyance, unseemly behavior, and immaculate conception. Now is now but now it’s gone. And this is a problem.

You can’t help to keep on caring with a cat on your lap. The easiest way to convert feelings into words is to become motionless a moment and sell clothes to the tourists. Invest your opinions with some pejoratives. Make witty remarks at the back of the bus. Become a novice. A novice of anything. Find a set of words that best describes your current direction. Are you feeling north but going south? Are you heading west but stuck in a doll factory? Describe a rose to a blind person. Write a letter to Emma Bovary. Walk nude through a quatrain of tender buttons.

So what do I do? I write. What else can one do? Given the capacity to put words together. Create a lovely liquid thing that squirts words like a bivalve and bivouacs on your forehead. Something like a pancake. Or a form of combustion. Pistons pumping up and down in a frenzy of verbal incontinence. What you want is compression, your own rhythms, tell everybody what’s happened and don’t spare the details, and through all this, with all the deadwood around, and punch bowls and popcorn, it is the use they make of us, these words, your words, my words, our words, because, bless us, we have to eat, and swap stories, and galvanize the timid.

Inexperience makes it impossible to get an exact grip on the history of perforation at this juncture. But reading this morning in the Möbius Gazette that it takes a lot of butterflies to inspirit the many maneuvers necessary to serve a good apfelstrudel I think I’ll stick with extrasensory rubber. Think of prose for a minute. What can prose do? It’s like fighting snakes and hailstones to pour your blood out on the page, punch by punch, participle by participle. Prose is primarily a social instrument. The scholar lives in the imperial city, does her work, and, once a month, tells the children what she has found out. That about sums it up. The job of making sense for a body of people that no longer read is just plain pullulation. It’s a short cut to the other side of despair, which is a peculiar euphoria, the world turned inside out, and the damned rigidities weeded out. Once you lift anchor and get going it’s like breaking eggs over a cast iron pan. The very house shivers with the luxuries of a good oratorio. Form is never more than an extension of Utah. You’ll find the cirrus is really just sport when you get to the far reaches of the stratosphere. And the gardens full of delphinium.

The formalities of the bookstore are no longer our concern. One’s inner agitations, turmoil, anxieties, angst, unease, unresolved crises, all that shit, I can put down as subjective as I can make it. And that will make some noise in the academic heads, a feverish molestation of the instincts, whose symptoms include reckless parody, what the good doctor calls the necessity of destruction. Echoes of the young Rimbaud, before he and a caravan of camels and men dragged a wagon load of Remingtons over the Somali desert. The former French poet who stopped writing poetry and made photographs of himself looking exotic and weary. Life has a way of resurrecting itself. There are remedies held in place by stupefaction. Here’s some conjecture: what if consciousness were a property inherent in matter itself, so that it had tread, and pattern, and could be folded into a basilica, or nailed to the breath with a small hammer? Its dance among syllables is an obvious hospitality, and pertinent to the ant, or centaur. What lives, enjoys particularity. You can see it in the eyes of these creatures: particularity. Particularity as far as the eye can see.  Nothing exists but doesn’t have some particularity. Bookstores in particular. The smell of knowledge. The creak of the floorboards. And anarchy in the eyes of the readers. 

 

Stating The Obvious

The canary in the coal mine assumes many forms these days. The rate of glacial melt is accelerating globally due to rising temperatures from human-caused climate change, with glaciers losing mass at a rate of approximately 273 billion tons per year between 2000 and 2023, or an 18% higher rate than previously thought. Rivers are drying up. Trees are stressed. Eggs are expensive. People are being kidnapped off the streets by ICE agents cracking windshields and intimidating pedestrians. There have been 502 mass shootings in the U.S. as of the end of August, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Over 10,000 homes lost to wildfire in the Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, situated on a hilltop directly above the Palisades Highlands, was empty, due to a tear, ostensibly, in its rubber cover. Flint, Michigan and Jackson Mississippi are still without drinkable water. Everything is penury fire and fever. Brain-eating amoeba present in the Lake of the Ozarks. Plastic nanoparticles in the human brain increased by 50% between 2016 and 2024. Godzilla wears a Stetson. Père Ubu is president. I don’t like being a bummer. But here I am. Stating the obvious.

This is it, societal collapse, Armageddon, whatever one chooses to call it. I call it done. Kaput. Tits up. I call it genocide. I call it apartheid. I call it immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Pregnant Ukrainian woman fighting Russia in a muddy ditch. The world – and by world I mean the human universe – is hopelessly fractured. Raped. Abused. Torn asunder by technofascist police-state corporate greed. Unobtainable healthcare. Unobtainable housing. Unobtainable food.

Planet earth will survive. But much of it, the part we live in, the forests and deserts and mountains we inhabit, is disappearing. The daily erosions are sobering, like the death of a star. Impermanence has always been a part of life. It’s a universal, existential process, natural as a woman’s pregnancy or the pop of a champagne cork. Magpies on a barbed wire fence. Dead coyote in a ditch. Burst of a meteor burning through earth’s atmosphere. It’s the unreality of the reality that gets you. Yanks a curtain open on the debris from last night’s party.

And yet, the sublime persists. Transcendence, compassion, beauty. People capable of personal sacrifice and with a deep sentiment of the common good persist. As of this writing, a flotilla of ships has set sail from Barcelona to the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid and activists on board. They are doing what world governments have refused to do: relieve suffering. Err on the side of life.

Whatever life is, whatever brought it into being, whatever force or energy or divine power, whatever random coming together of chemicals and molecules invested the existence of matter with the baffling phenomena of consciousness, with self-awareness, is eternal. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet,” wrote Emerson. “This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title…The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even in the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”

Had I written this, I would’ve chosen a different word than ‘infancy.’ I know what Emerson means: he is referring to a state of pure consciousness, non-judgmental consciousness, a state of awareness in which everything is new, marvelous, amazing, astonishing, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, always enchanting, beguiling, spellbinding.

The world abounds in subtlety. The reddish hues of krill. The shifting hues of a glass octopus. Sunlight traversing a mug of beer. Robins singing near the kitchen window. Draft of cool air. Tires skidding on steep Highland Drive after a spring rain. Shrill inquiry of a blue jay. Despite all the tons of concrete and steel employed on this globe to house enterprise and luxury suites in mid-town Manhattan and the pristine streets of Singapore, infinite subtleties remain.

What are subtleties? Duchamp called it inframince: the subtle, barely perceptible, or immeasurable differences between interacting phenomena. It’s not a clearly defined concept, but a nebular aura, such as the lingering warmth on a chair after a person has stood up. It highlights the transient and in-between states, like the presence of a bright object – Venus, the morning star  – and a pale moon that remains in the morning sky after sunrise. Inframince emphasizes the nuances of perception and the invisible qualities that enrich and enhance the sensations of living in this world, this plane, this dimension. Whatever the nervous system of the human organism is capable of absorbing, assimilating, apprehending. Nuance, undertone, trace - inframince - require a great deal of awareness and sensitivity to detect, an eccentric disposition. Eccentric: meaning outside the circle. Outside mainstream narrative. Outside indoctrination. And they’re important. Critical to the survival of the human spirit during a time of aggressive, moral inversion and unbridled materialism.

The myth of living is strangely persistent. “Even in this day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly recognized,” wrote poet Laura Riding, “we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time devoting pious ceremonies to the aesthetic vitality of the Myth, from a haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art of living.”

She makes modern life sound tedious, deluded and inauthentic, but what she’s really getting at is the anarchic energy at the core of the poetic urge. “Poetry,” she says, “is essentially not of the Myth. It is all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense of duty…Whatever language it uses it makes up as it goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to start all over again…In the art of not living one is ephemerally permanent but permanently ephemeral.”

Kant called it a purposeful purposelessness. Poetry doesn’t help anyone survive. It doesn’t grow food. It doesn’t make heat and light, crackle and spark in a fireplace, warming the legs and feet. It doesn’t fix things, build things, or make the bells ring at the New York Stock Exchange. What it does do is surge through the bloodstream like a wild energy, demanding focus and traction.  

This is what one tells oneself when the urge to create something coaxes and needles you into finding its expression, and the indulgence, although deeply pleasurable in the moment, will not feed a starving infant. Creativity is an odd phenomenon. There’s a madness to it. It exists outside the rational. It’s quintessentially selfish. Shakespeare’s Richard III enjoys a disturbing flamboyance. Those devoted to it are also willing to make great sacrifice. It can be alienating. It can empty a bank account in no time, just like an addiction to cocaine, or fentanyl, or negative capability. It must perplex the hell out of the private equity firms. That is, if they pay any attention to it at all. Which I strongly doubt. The only profit to be had from poetry, is the dilation of the soul.

I worry about the steady erosion of world literature. Daily reading for pleasure in the U.S. has declined by over 40% in the last 20 years, dropping from approximately 28% of the population in 2004 to 16% in 2023. This represents a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year. 

Goodbye Shakespeare. Goodbye Dante. Goodbye Keats and Shelley and Gwendolyn Brooks. Goodbye Viriginia Woolf. Goodbye Gertrude Stein. Goodbye Ginsburg. Goodbye Kerouac.

R noticed a young dawn redwood dying from lack of water. She began toting empty cat litter jugs filled with water to water the young dawn redwood. Some of the leaves had turned brown from drought stress, but after several waters some of the leaves reverted to green. There was still life in the tree. Dawn redwoods are deciduous. Their feathery, bright green leaves turn a coppery-red or russet-brown in autumn before dropping. People sometimes wrongly assume the tree is dead when it loses its leaves. R called the park department and requested that they give the tree a wrap-around slow-release watering bag, as is the norm with young, newly planted trees. The park department came and chopped the tree down. No explanation.

A similar scenario happened to five lush rhododendrons in the park next door, growing over a bank of blackberry vines. Every spring they produced a profuse agglomeration of bloom. It was a joy to round the corner on the switchback trail and confront this assembly of robust, Rabelaisian color. The rhododendrons were watered automatically by an underground sprinkler system. When the system stopped working, the park department took it out, rather than try to repair or replace it. We began watering them ourselves, using empty cat litter jugs to carry the water. The park department chopped two down. R continues to water the remaining three. One is doing ok and two are struggling, but still alive. Summer drought is now a seasonal phenomenon, coupled with the scent of wildfire. R has no further plans to call the park department.

We’re on our own now, to quote Young’s “Ohio.” That was 54 years ago. I lived by Coyote Creek in downtown San José, a wooded ravine filled with coastal scrub and an upturned grocery cart. Fed a family of raccoons dog food. Studied Creeley and Olson by a big glass wall. Noticed a constellation of eyes watching me. Bandit eyes. Tiny hands on a pane of glass. Looking in.