Mallarmé's Crisis Of Verse

You have to bend your brain a little to read Mallarmé. It isn’t just that his language is difficult, his language is perverse, deviant, anomalous, weird. Reading it is not unlike the abrupt angular shifts one must make while white water river rafting, the alert attention one must pay to the capricious currents and rocks and eddies and surges and swirls in a mountain river. And not just his poetry, but his prose. Mallarmé’s prose is a startling mix of insightful exposition and syntactical chaos in which slivers and crags of reality tumble into consciousness with a surprising degree of veracity, a luminous fullness, moments when the mind is open to the quantum vagaries of phenomena in a universe of flux and convulsion. A poesis of fragments, odd juxtapositions, vagueness punctured by astonishing details, ricochets of polyphonous meaning.

Mallarmé’s language refuses definition, the cement of language. The tone is expository, but the language is volatile, erratic, feverish. The language itself is indicative of a crisis, the radical changes occurring in the language of verse. It’s a language of implication, folds and insignia. Intentions. Evocations. Potentials of meaning. Because nothing truly exists. Everything is words, and words are nothing. Not things, but effects. Opalescence, not bricks. Consciousness, not bone. “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest it, that is the dream,” said Mallarmé.

You don’t expect to see this in prose. The odd weight of a subject in a body of words with the dizzying velocity of quarks in a Hadron collider. Not only can you not step twice in the same river twice, you can’t read the same paragraph twice. The words will appear to have shifted, their function in the sentence more or less the same, but the scenery has oddly changed, the focus has diminished in one area and expanded in another. The theme remains, but the interactions have created a web no longer there, unless the dew brings it out, and the sun shines through it. It’s an unstable world, and Mallarmé knows what to do with it. Put it in you pipe and smoke it. It’s a hopeless case. The forms that result from light are comedians of mist. Mallarmé, wrote Mary Ann Caws, “is, above all, the advocate of (and in some strong sense, the hero of ) imagination.”

“Literature here,” writes Mallarmé, “is undergoing a fundamental, exquisite crisis.”

What is meant by ‘here’? ‘Here’ can mean France, Mallarmé’s study, or a point in time, the late 19^th century. Industry has kicked in hard. Commerce is fierce. The world of poetry, whose sacred values are foreign to the goals of industry and commerce, has been severed from the mainstream public. Its concerns are of little interest to a society consumed with consumerism. It is now free to explore other possibilities, an otherness that feels exciting, a little daunting, a little subversive.

Mallarmé wrote “Crisis in Verse” between 1886 and 1895, during which time the Eiffel Tower was built, France had expanded its railroad and telegraph lines, electrical power and telephones had been introduced, and iron and steel production benefited from the Bessemer process - removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron – although France lagged behind Britain and Belgium and experienced a sluggish economy due to a lack of resources and the residual effects of three major revolutions, the revolution of 1789 which brought down the monarchy, the July revolution of 1830, and the February revolution of 1848. French culture did not take readily to the industrialization burgeoning in Europe and the United States. Its literary culture had been dominated by Romanticism and authors such Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, père, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny.

On December 28^th, 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, launched the first commercial showing of a movie using a device called the Cinématographe, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.” The movie is available on YouTube and runs for approximately 46 seconds. The workforce is almost entirely women, all of them dressed in full length skirts with high collars and leg of mutton sleeves. This, too, would have an enormous impact on the kineticism of poetry as it was further developed by poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars at the beginning the 20^th century, though Mallarmé’s nonlinear shifts and dissonances should be credited with its initial impetus.

In 1875, Mallarmé moved to 89 Rue de Rome in the 17^th arrondissement. It’s one of Paris’s less expensive neighborhoods. The building is large and has the elegant charm of most of Paris’s apartment buildings. Today, at street level, is La Centrale du Casque, a motorcycle shop. 89 Rue de Rome is where – beginning in 1885 – Mallarmé hosted his Tuesday salons, a symposium of painters and poets including people like Oscar Wilde, Paul Valéry, André Gide, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Claude Monet and Édouard Manet. It was during this time that he became especially close to Manet and Monet, Manet doing an important portrait and Monet devoting a painting to “Gloire,” one of the prose poems included in Mallarmé’s Divagations, a collection of prose poems and bios of painters, musicians and writers he called “medallions.” As hermetic as Mallarmé’s poetry may be, he was extremely social, genial, witty, and welcoming.

Mallarmé retired from teaching in 1893 and went to live in his cottage at Valvins, a village on the Seine near Fontainebleau, accompanied by his wife Maria and daughter Geneviève.  This is where Mallarmé would complete Crise de vers, an essay he’d begun in 1886 encapsulating the changes that had diffused throughout poetry in latter decades of the 19^th century.

“Just now, in abandonment of gesture, with the lassitude that bad weather brings about, despairing one afternoon after another,” begins the first paragraph of Crise de vers, “I made fall again, without any curiosity yet it seems to him to have read everything here twenty years ago, the elongation of multi-colored pearls that coruscates in the rain, again, to the shimmering of the brochures in the library. Many a work, under the glass of the curtain, will align its own scintillation: I love in the consummate sky, against the window, to follow the flashes of storm.”

“I love in the consummate sky, against the glass, to follow the lights of the storm.” There it is, an open window on Mallarmé’s poesis. Can you feel the breeze? Can you smell the electricity? Can you feel the charge of negative ions? The air is turbulent, there’s a hurly-burly of sensation, a suddenness of impressions so quick they can only be registered in a spontaneity of abrupt, fragmented phrasing, evocations of brilliance in a non-linear framework. The world flashes into uncanny detail during a lightning strike. The effect is fleeting. When it strikes elsewhere, in different conditions, the scene will be very different.

“Whoever grants this function a place,” he states a few paragraphs later, “or the first, recognizes, there, the current fact: we are witnessing, as the end of a century, not as it was in the last, to upheavals; but, outside the public square, to a disquiet of the veil in the temple with significant folds and a little its tearing.”

“Disquiet of the veil in the temple” refers to the sacred art of poetry, and its goal of remediating the disenchantment of the industrial age and its soot covered buildings and obsession with material goods and the extraction of resources, which would achieve maximal climax with WWI. Military exports skyrocketed from $40 million in 1914 to over $2 billion in the final years of the war. The steel industry alone experienced a massive boom. This would certainly count as one of the upheavals to which Mallarmé was referring, though he would not live to see WWI.

A language under the control of tyrants, governments, cults, religions, academies, institutions, or corporate power is undermined by all the mutinous and mutational instincts already inherent in language. Censorship is useless. You can’t control a gas as atmospheric as air.

“The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to the words, by the collision of their mobilized inequality; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual torrent of fires on precious stones, replacing the perceptible breathing in the old lyrical breath or the enthusiastic personal direction of the sentence.”

“L’oeuvre pure.” Pure work. The work of the poet who dissolves into the language, surrenders to its spell. Invokes a divine energy more sacred and transcendent than the old rules of metric or the boundaries of taste fashioned by an elite close to the levers of power.

It’s what’s so wildly apparent in Mallarmé’s approach to language, his full immersion in it, and the electrifying consequences of this enthrallment. Getting these revelations into the hands of the reading public is another difficulty, particularly when one’s efforts result in an extremely difficult language, which will, no doubt, incur accusations of indulgence, of employing a hermetic style to disguise one’s failings as a poet or writer. I don’t have a solution for that. I do know that Frank James used to quote Shakespeare when he and his brother Jesse robbed trains. I believe the term for that is ‘captive audience.’ And probably a pissed off audience. So never mind. I don’t have a solution for getting people to toss their electronic garbage out and return to books. All I can do is point to the savage poets out on the savannah, and envy their freedom.

The academics have coaxed poetry back into the protection of the universities. This is where you will find awards and panels and erudite symposiums. It’s not a perfect solution, and it’s pricey, but there it is. Those of us outside collegiate walls pound away on our keyboards with the glee of quixotic myriapods, oblivious of the public, envious of musicians, and indulging freely in an orgasmic orphism of spectacular thermal winds. Columns of rising air, shared with eagles, circling over Idaho’s Craters of the Moon. Feeling pulse and radiate within the nerves of one’s spine a divine hand giving one the ultimate push, a kundalini awakening, the ravenous appetence to exist, and say things, and start things, and sing things into being. “The poet’s spell, if not to free, from a clenched fist of dust or reality without enclosing it, in the book, even as text, the volatile dispersion of the mind, which has nothing to do with anything beyond the musicality of everything.” “The volatile dispersion of the mind.” It’s all music. Rhythm and breath.

 

The Sweat Of The Throat Is Moral

The sweat of the throat is moral. I can imitate it. All it takes is a little lubricant. It’s how the Rue d'Orsel pushes its hands among my gardenias and comes up with sorghum. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to be ominous. I wasn’t built that way. My wisdom touches the concept and a jaunty seaman signals the big pop. It’s what goes on around here. Olives, mostly, and spars. I smell stealth. But there is none. Not at the moment. The air is a membrane. Honesty occupies it like eyebrows on a worm. Try my provender. Please. It would mean the world to me. The smell of molasses proves that the shadow of this sentence is a pale henna, and wants very much to believe in your ability to fill it with greenery. There is a resource that occurs on a cocoon now and then, and by that I mean the knife we ​​brandish with fear is a fundamental percept. Good things sometimes happen in the darkness. Legs inflate the exultation during cartilage. I whisper this worry as I would a glossy blubber. The eggnog I made extends the algebra of your smile. It’s what I wanted all along. A sphere with a twig on it, and an argument that jingles with bombast.

This is the push about research. The one I was leading up to. That I suggested. That I tailored beneath my antique bones. With reflection. With fallacy. With circles. And a hole we crushed on the cement.

I’m inviting you to do something. Something you may regret. Something that may alter your life forever. Something touristy. Something smacking of the paradox of pleasure. And twice as endearing. By God I mean it. The ache clapping in your impediment is really just a suspension. It can be ignored. Go home. Bake some snickerdoodles. We can talk about all this tomorrow morning over breakfast. Reticence with a little chiffon can be so enticing. But it’s how we communicate that matters. I use a toaster. A little reality. And a willowy sway in my nether parts.

Is it ok if take a little walk around in your head? That’s what all these words are for. They’re here to help me. Help me find some wicker and some dots to make a clean break from gravity. The world is too much with us. Every night I lie in bed gnawing on the past. It tastes like armadillo. Plug the aurora I entertain into this theology. Watch it foam into thought. There goes our pain propelled through a hose. I’m going to paint it with a bucket of words and call it prose. Thank you for joining me in this little expedition. I’ve never felt so naked, nor so indispensable.

Why so much Bob Dylan? He seems to be everywhere these days. I think it’s the algorithms. I know it’s the algorithms. The sticky goo of algorithms. So this 83 year old guy keeps showing up in fancy clothes and a shiny grand piano. His voice sounds raw, like a rusty old blade. Earlier today, when I began looking into life, and feeling its possibilities, I heard this man sing something really rhizomatic, and it made me feel fecund, things trapped inside come alive in me and echo their necessities, which caused me some effort to appease. What they say in Unstable is true: if you’re going to make some pom-pom dribble cake you’re going to make a little noise. In addition to entertainment, the splendor of our miscellany plummets until the dirt makes it busy. The paint sinks into deformation. The lumber reclines. My excuses for everything are so insoluble they’re pretty. I brush the putty until the effulgent flaps. And lift myself into paradise.

The Faroe Islands Of Denmark

They say that embracing your emotions will elevate your craft. I would if I could. But how does one embrace a thing with no anatomy? The instructions weren’t clear. What was it we were supposed to be doing here? Was there ever a goal? It always feels like there’s some kind of goal, but I see nothing but sage and complacency. A stupefying weariness sometimes discovers us under the influence of Venus fondling various body parts and chasing away axioms of doom. I keep trying, keep failing. I can't get enough syntax to create a rhinoceros out of rice. I’ve tried boiling it, stirring it, squirting it, squatting on it, combing it, writing it that way, writing it this way, and I keep getting the Faroe Islands of Denmark. I’ve tried other islands, other nations, other tribes, other geographies, other cultures, other tongues, and everything results in the counterfeit foliage of a mad sorcery called language. Which is ubiquitous, like crickets. The implications reinforce it. It connects things. Assemble, squat in a sprawl of sunlight, you’ll see what I mean. And if you don’t, you don’t. There was no meaning. There was just the Faroe Islands of Denmark. And grebes and pipits and a large Viking sow sucking a litter of piglets.

Living In A Novel

I walked into a novel and sat down on a rock. The language was distressed and full of cyclones and swells. I could smell embalming fluid and folklore. Everywhere I went there were doorknobs, escalators, and clocks. Objects of all genre overflowing with prose. I stood at the end of a diving board and looked down. The water looked back at me with indifference. Was this a story by Albert Camus or Harpo Marx? Is it possible that I was the author and that what I perceived as clay was actually gas? What belongs to us to write? Everything happening in words is mostly bracelets, rattlesnakes and landscapes. Indifference is no longer an option. There are decisions to be made, infatuations to pursue, joyrides and appetites and regrets. Apathy has no place here. Only passion and its one central equation, which has to do with galvanization. It opens me up like a tunnel, a conduit to the other side of myself. I must go now. It’s time to feed the camels. I can rarely, if ever, tell where a story is going. Writing doesn’t give me a sense of control it gives me a sense of navigating chaos. Words engorge the mind with the puffery of waffles. The trick is to give them meaning. Or subtract meaning and festoon them with tinsel. This is how I discovered Christmas. I hid behind a couch wrapping morsels of affection with my sparkly hullabaloo. Chapter II begins with an erection and a tugboat. The sound of a foghorn. Hedonism is essential. I am my process. Even if it means living in a novel, turning pages.

I Feel So Ray Bradbury

I feel so Ray Bradbury. I’m 44 years in the future from when I last felt normal, when I could go to bed without feeling precarious and vulnerable and threatened and strange. The changes were incremental, until 1989, when I moved into an apartment on Belmont on Capitol Hill, Seattle’s most libertine neighborhood, and rents began going up almost every month, because of the meteoric rise of Microsoft, the burgeoning growth of Apple in Silicon Valley, and the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange with its ensuing frenzy. So here I am. Here we are. Smack dab in the belly of a dystopian behemoth fattening itself on extortionate medical bills, constant surveillance, treacherous technofeudalist jobs, undependable healthcare insurance and unfinished high-rise buildings infested with black mold. Houses too expensive to buy and raise a family. A population of zombie consumers hunched over devices as they trudge or scooter down sidewalks at 20 mph scrolling clickbait videos with the attention span of toddlers in a candy store.

Grunge cushioned the blow. Groups like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Earth. Screaming Trees. Alice in Chains. Malfunkshun. Gruntruck. Love Battery. It celebrated chaos. It reinvented rock. It spit on consumerism. Broke guitar strings with complicated chords and screams of primal being. But grunge didn’t last very long. It lasted longer than the whole hippy thing in the Bay Area, which lasted about a year. 1966 and the first half of 1967, to quote Peter Fonda in The Limey. The whole ‘live for today,’ ‘seize the day,’ ‘go where you want to go do what you want do,’ like handsome Jack Kerouac challenging capitalist rigor with bop spontaneity, his mind slung open to Buddhism and his spirit supple and bright with Benzedrine and alcohol, went down easy with a lot of us but after a while poverty proves less and less La Boheme and more and more Les Misérables with unpaid bills and partners walking out on you and friends distancing themselves and getting jobs with big corporate salaries with the ostensible goal of changing things from the inside, which was bullshit. The system changed them. They became insufferably smug golfers with Ralph Lauren sweaters Bahama tans and 401Ks engorged with the honey of dissimulation. 

I had faith in art. Art has natural appeal. It stimulates the senses and rocks the mind with eccentric ideas. It gives people a sense of urgency. A real sense of excitement. But the technofascists don't like art. And for good reason. All those paintings of food, oysters and apples and peaches and fish, make us hunger for experiences outside tame convention. Any appeal to sensuality unfastens the mind from the digital and sublimates it into the ethereal. Art is quirky. It resists control. It’s full of detours, oddities, fevers, a lust for the ineffable. The smell of patchouli on a hot day. Sweat rolling down the back. That feeling some people get when their fingers wrap around a pork rib rubbed with brown sugar and paprika. Subtle threats of instability. That knife, for example, in Chardin’s Le Buffet under the tureen of oysters, its handle sticking out while a dog looks upward at the feast. Or language when it gets slippery and gives birth to shameless introspection. Thoughts perplexing to logic. The flaming clay of a methane swamp. The backbone of resistance. Charles Laughton swinging on a four-ton bell. Named Gabriel.

But art failed. Books failed. Conversation failed. Community failed. Everything failed.

They’re very sly, these venture capitalists, these vampiric elites, these propagandists and neocons. Here’s what they do: they turn art into politics. Writing into content. Drama into CGI. Healthcare into extortion. Actors into celebrities. Erotica into dick pics. Memes into psyops.

Oligarchs. Monarchs. Trademarks. Pockmarks. Tigersharks. Hierarchs. Patriarchs. Billionaires. Warfare. Malware. Spyware. Surveillance. Univalence. Interrogation. Castration. Privatization. Censorship. Pink slips. Internships. Container ships. Silicon chips. Proprietorship.

Illiteracy. Willful ignorance. Dumbing down. An infantilized public spoon-fed media pablum. People aren’t tricked by propaganda. They know the truth. It simmers below, in the unconscious, where it’s been shoved into darkness. Propaganda is there to muffle and soothe the naggings of the conscious mind, pull a blanket over the corpse of their critical faculty.

“Propaganda and torture are the direct means of bringing about disintegration; more destructive still are systematic degradation, identification with the cynical criminal, and forced complicity. The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success.” - The Rebel, by Albert Camus  

This is where Ray Bradbury comes in. Many of his stories and novels such as Fahrenheit 451 predicted with uncanny premonition what we have now. When I see homeless encampments, I’m reminded of the encampment in François Truffaut’s cinematic treatment of Fahrenheit 451 for the lovers of books who’d memorized treasured works of literature. There are differences: there is far more despair and trauma and Fentanyl addiction among the homeless than enlightened reverence for the works of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or James Baldwin or Shakespeare. But the extreme marginalization of these people is similar to the marginalized people in Bradbury’s story. It’s also important to point out that the book burning in Fahrenheit 451 was redundant: people had lost all interest in reading or enriching the mind; they’d been completely captured by the vapid distractions of television, illustrated by the scene in which a group of people are entranced in stupefied enthrallment to a flat screen TV on the wall. 

I fantasize about having a time machine coupled with the supreme advantage of living in an actual dystopia, writing down all that I see and experience in the 21^st century and returning to the 1950s to submit it to publishers. Noting down the daily horrors, the genocide in Gaza sponsored by a president barely cognizant of who or where he is and incapable of constructing a coherent sentence. The inauguration of a president circled by grinning billionaires. Surveillance in the U.S. and Europe so omnivorous that devices pick up conversations held in the privacy of one’s home, and if one posts a perspective on social media that runs contrary to the narratives espoused by the state you can be arrested or have your home invaded by a squad of police in the middle of the night. Acute loneliness caused by an atomization of the community that extends as far as the grocery stores where people check their own groceries at computerized self-serve stations and are denied even a short exchange with a fellow human being. A health-care industry so rapacious, so merciless in their denials of insurance for critical, life-saving treatments and surgeries that people are often bankrupted and end up homeless. A public so infantilized that they themselves insist on censorship and demand a controlled, carefully monitored public speech so asphyxiating that media intellects atrophy into leprous, shopworn clichés and stale memes. Articles written by PhDs that read more like high school essays than maturely crafted expositions that have been properly researched and fully articulated. Stores forced to close due to chronic shoplifting. Stores robbed by flash mobs. Street takeovers that resemble something in a Mad Max movie in which the police sit idly by while hooligans do donuts around the police cars in mocking arrogance. Exchanges of gunfire between rivaling pimps near suburban neighborhoods where prostitution is conducted in broad daylight on Highway 99, a long arterial of used car lots, derelict motels, box stores, massage parlors, and boarded up restaurants. A store manager on social media complains that he’s had to dial 911 with increasing frequency following a freakout or robbery and the police never show up. Not once. While, on the other hand, a small man ostensibly writing graffiti on the walls of the Gates foundation is summarily thrust to the ground and handcuffed by cops arriving in eight or nine vehicles within minutes of the perp’s detection.   

And then there was the time I passed a kidney stone and writhed on the backseat of our car in intense, excruciating pain while my wife drove 15 miles to an urgent care facility which closed at 4:00 p.m. We arrived at 3:50 p.m. and they refused to let us in: too close to closing time. 

Or the seven hours we spent in an emergency room and left without a diagnosis or pain medication. The kidney stones were discovered, at last, by an MRI some days later. I was told to drink lots of water to get rid of the stones. It worked. I could’ve saved myself several weeks of unrelenting pain in my groin just by drinking water fortified with a concentrate of lemon juice. 

So yeah. I don’t feel so much like Joyce or Hemmingway or Kerouac these days. Or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein. More like Ray Bradbury writing Something Wicked This Way Comes. Or Albert Camus writing The Myth of Sisyphus. Or Franz Kafka writing The Hunger Artist: 

“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children's special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other's hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground, sometimes giving a courteous nod, answering questions with a constrained smile, or perhaps stretching an arm through the bars so that one might feel how thin it was, and then again withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.”  

My Amphibious Life

At this distance, one had the impression of a work of art rather than the sensation of water. What was missing was something wildly alive and indefinable, a root or a shoe. A gnarly, twisted root. A worn-out, whimsical, wildcat shoe. An ambience of bullfrogs. A climate of hammers and ice. Midnight trysts and flippant flautists. Something to set the water on fire and make it shoot up in force and elan and fall back down in a shivaree of misty splatter. This is hard to do in oil. It must be rendered quickly, but slowly, subtly, but fiercely, gingerly, but savagely. It must hold contradictions. It must impel metaphors. Bounce on bedsprings. Certain perceptual amenities subtly embedded in the paint can help the eyes find some perspective among the amorphous hues of a tentative but humid fulfillment, like the spray of a fountain getting your sleeves wet, or an argument in the hallway between a man and a gargoyle disputing the Heideggerian notion of Geworfenheit, and what it means to be thrown into this world, to abruptly find oneself alive to an existence whose meaning may be arbitrary, or imaginary, and the gargoyle seems to be winning.

What is wet? What is that feeling? I like it. I like being wet. In most instances. I don’t much like being wet when I’ve been running a long distance on a cold January day and my sweat gets my clothes wet from underneath, next to my skin, so that if I pause for a minute to wait for a traffic light to change or gaze across the water of Lake Union in the direction of Wallingford where there appears to be a kite wiggling around at Gasworks Park, and the awareness of the wet increases until it feels unmercifully cold and uncomfortable. My favorite wet is the wet of a hot shower, my cold skin getting pelted by drops streaming from a showerhead in a pleasing hiss. And that weird moment at 7:00 a.m. on a November morning in Kauai I got immersed in the Pacific Ocean and it was warm as bathwater. I wanted to stay there. Maybe swim some laps. But I felt a current pulling me under so I scampered out. It’s been a while since I put any trust in the ocean. I worry about sharks. Climate change is making it harder for sharks to find food. I don’t know how they do it, those surfers sitting out on the waves, calm and unbothered, legs dangling.

Or the Vikings. Riding for hours, days, weeks even in a longship, blisters on your hands from all the rowing, the wool and linen and reindeer hide wet from the slop of North Pacific waves, the sound of farts, hairy brutes hanging their butts over the side to take a dump, the stupid jokes, the monotony, the combined smell of brine and fish and sour milk. How is one to be expected to swing an ax at somebody and get splattered with all that blood? The life of a Viking is far less glamorous than it seemed in the beginning. Better to be a trader in spices and silks in Reykjavik. Chopping people up isn’t what it used to be. The thrill is gone. So much nicer to squeeze someone in affection. Not everyone. I don’t want to squeeze Gorm. I want to squeeze Yrsa. The board I’m sitting on is hard. I feel it tugging the oar. My back hurts. And my feet are cold.

I love swimming pools. Though it’s surprisingly easy to get bored in them, once you realize there’s little else to do but swim back and forth, or do a few dives, cannonballs, be a jerk and get everyone wet. I never did that. I was always well-behaved in pools. The most foolish thing I did happened one morning in August, 1965, age 18. I enjoyed diving to the bottom of the pool of my mother’s apartment complex and floating there, hung in suspension, just looking at my shadow on the blue concrete, arms undulating. I could hold my breath for an amazingly long time. It was a weekday, so nobody else around, everyone going to work. When I got out a man in a business suit looked at me, horrified. He was about to jump in after me. He thought I was drowning. I felt embarrassed. How weird that would’ve been had he jumped in & grabbed me. I probably would’ve freaked out. I didn’t know what to say. He was really upset. I thanked him for his concern. There’s no protocol for such things. I can still see him. Dripping. Uncertain how to feel. 

Delirium

Recently, reading an early essay by Virginia Woolf about street musicians, I gained some insight into a matter that has obsessed me for 58 years: why did Arthur Rimbaud stop writing poetry? Woolf's essay - entitled "Street Music" - extends far beyond the purviews of busking. It telescopes into a discussion of art in general. How powerful it is. How mysterious. How baffling. How audacious. “Street musicians are counted a nuisance,” she begins, “by the candid dwellers in most London squares.” Interesting, that she would begin by drawing attention to the tension that has always existed between artists and the society in which they abide. Why is this, and what has it to do with Arthur Rimbaud quitting poetry?

“Artists of all kinds,” says Woolf, “have invariably been looked on with disfavor, especially by English people, not solely because of the eccentricities of the artistic temperament, but because we have trained ourselves to such perfection of civilization that expression of any kind has something indecent – certainly irreticent – about it. Few parents, we observe, are willing that their sons should become painters or poets or musicians, not only for worldly reasons, but because in their own hearts they consider that it is unmanly to give expression to the thoughts and emotions which the arts express and which it should be the endeavour of the good citizen to repress. Art in this way is certainly not encouraged; and it is probably easier for an artist than for a member of any other profession to descend to the pavement.”

Hence, the danger of such a choice. But also its allure. Art is a powerful drug. It plays on our perversities, and stokes our instincts. It goads relentlessly to go against the grain, particularly if that grain is oppressive and boring. Just as certain people have a greater craving for risky adventures and cheap thrills than others, certain people are more susceptible to the filigrees of risk. If the appetite for the extraordinary, for the anomalous and weird is powerful enough, it will seduce the most serious-minded. They’ll surrender financial security - or having a family - or just enjoying a serene and decent existence - to the captivating indecencies of art. There’s no rationale for it, and certainly no confetti. It’s an allure without a lure, a goal without a score. The excitement creating creates often leads to exaltations, the kind of inner richness that deludes us into thinking the squalor surrounding our worldly existence is a scintillating lobby in paradise.

There is, of course, much more to it than just that: art is a power. It has the ability to conjure the sublime and ornament our anguish with exquisite subtleties. It has the capacity to destroy oppressive narratives. It stirs the nerves. It beats the heart. “The artist,” says Woolf, “is not only looked upon with contempt but with a suspicion that has not a little fear in it. He is possessed by a spirit which the ordinary person cannot understand, but which is clearly very potent, and exercises so great a sway over him that when he hears its voice he must always rise and follow.”

Woolf was twenty-three when she wrote those words. I’m 77. I have nothing to add to what she said, or qualifiers or manifestos. It’s all true. I’ve been treated like a weirdo by most people. The normies. The stable. The well-adjusted. The financially comfortable. But this still doesn’t get to the heart of what made Rimbaud quit poetry.

Woolf raises music to the highest level of phenomena that is valued – often with reverence - despite being void of any pragmatic worth. Aesthetic phenomena whose contributions to brute survival are null, but whose qualities are essential to the health of the soul. “Certainly I should be inclined to ascribe some such divine origin to musicians at any rate,” Woolf further elaborates, “and it is probably some suspicion of this kind that drives us to persecute them as we do. For if the stringing together of words which nevertheless may convey some useful information to the mind, or the laying on of colours which may represent some tangible object, are employments which can be tolerated at best, how are we to regard the man who spends his time in making tunes? Is not his occupation the least respectable – the least useful and necessary – of the three? It is certain that you can carry away nothing that can be of service to you in your day’s work from listening to music; but a musician is not merely a useful creature, to many, I believe he is the most dangerous of the whole tribe of artists. He is the minister of the wildest of all the gods, who has not yet learnt to speak with human voice, or to convey to the mind the likeness of human things. It is because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself – a spirit that we would willingly stamp out and forget – that we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power.”

And there it is: the genie out of the bottle that terrified Rimbaud into quitting poetry for good, “because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself.”

Rimbaud wasn’t a musician, but the essence of what Woolf is elaborating here is a spirit, not a career choice. It’s no wonder that Rimbaud held such a fascination for the musicians of the 1960s; their spirits were remarkably similar. Take that photo of Bob Dylan, Michael McClure, Robbie Robertson and Allen Ginsberg taken by Dave Smith in the alleyway of City Lights Bookstore in December, 1965, at Allen Ginsberg's behest, and which was intended for the cover of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. The photograph, although not used for the Blonde on Blonde cover, testifies to the blending of the two cultures, literary and musical. Music and poetry had fused, and these guys were the epitome of that.

Mallarmé encountered Rimbaud once, at a literary banquet in 1872 – “The Dinner of Naughty Goodfellows” - which was rendered in oil by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour and titled Coin de table (“Corner of the Table”) - and today is part of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s a scene of serenity and decorum – strangely out of character for Rimbaud, who sits gazing at his intimate friend, Paul Verlaine – and consists of five men seated at the table – Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d’Hervilly, Camille Pelletan – and three men standing, Pierre Elzéar, Émile Blémont, and Jean Aicard. In the foreground, a vase of camelias just off to the right balances Verlaine’s solemn gaze off to the far left. The camelias were put there to honor the absence of poet Albert Mérat, who refused to attend the banquet because Rimbaud had heckled him while reading his poetry. There’s no conversation going on at the table; none of the men are talking. Camile Pelletan, a politician, historian and journalist, looks questioningly at the painter, possibly out of intrigue, possibly out of affection. It’s an intriguing expression, and the only one who is looking out of the canvas. The others appear fully immersed in the sanctity of the occasion. I wonder how long they had to pose like this. Rimbaud looks almost angelic, and lost in a dream.

Mallarmé doesn’t mention why, in such close proximity, he didn’t bother to introduce himself to Rimbaud. He doesn’t describe the dinner at all. He quotes Verlaine’s description of Rimbaud, in Les Poètes Maudits: “He was tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an exiled angel, with disorderly brown hair and pale blue eyes that were disturbing.” The one thing he was struck by was Rimbaud’s hands. He thought they were enormous, and noticed they were “reddened with chilblains resulting from rapid changes of temperature, which might have indicated even more terrible jobs, since they belonged to a boy.” I suspect the chilblains were from sleeping in the cold. Mallarmé was struck by the contrast between the extremity of Rimbaud’s wildness and sleeping in the open and the uncanny innovations of his work, and remarks: “I later learned that they had signed some beautiful poems, unpublished; in any case his sardonic mouth, with its pouting and mocking expression, had never recited one.” Actually, though, he had: it’s said that he gave his first public reading of Le Bateau ivre at a bistro on Rue Férou, where today a giant mural of the poem has been inscribed on a high masonry wall. I’ve seen it. I passed it every morning I went running in Le Jardin du Luxembourg.

Mallarmé quotes five stanzas from Le Bateau ivre. Clearly, he was quite impressed with Rimbaud’s poetry. The impression he gives is how electrifying Rimbaud’s poetry was at the time. He dismissed the rumors, such as they existed at the time, concerning Rimbaud’s flippancies and ramblings and substance abuse, and remarks: “These are small, miscellaneous details, quite suited, in fact, to one who was violently ravaged by literature; the worst of all perturbations after his having spent many long, slow, studious hours on benches or in libraries, now master of a style that was perhaps premature but sure of itself, intense and exciting, spurring him to tackle unprecedented subjects – in search of ‘new sensations,’ he insisted, ‘not known,’ and he flattered himself that they could be found in the bazaar of illusions vulgarly known as big cities; in which the demon adolescent did discover, one evening, a grandiose vision, prolonged by drunkenness alone.”

Already, there is a sense of doom in these words. Something ominous, something uncanny, something demonic and cataclysmic. Rimbaud, this kid from a farm in the Ardennes who’d just participated in the Paris Commune - the revolutionary government that seized power in Paris, March 18^th, 1871, and controlled certain sectors of the city until May, 1871 - mesmerized the literary community in Paris and sent tremors of excitement through its corridors. This youth with chilblained hands possessed shamanic powers. I can easily imagine the exaltations he must’ve experienced when he composed his poetry, poetry that would shake the literary scene like a 9.1 quake on the Richter scale. The effect his poetry would have on his private life would be equally catastrophic. This is where, I believe, something went very, very wrong in Rimbaud’s psyche. The turbulent affair he would have with Verlaine, which led them to share a flat in London for a period of some months before exploding into what he termed “A Season in Hell,” and devoted a book to it. A Season in Hell begins: “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.” That sounds so sweet. And totally belies the nightmarish scenes that ensue: “I am slave to the infernal Bridegroom, the one who was the undoing of the foolish virgins. His really that very demon. He is not a ghost, he is not a phantom. But I who have lost all reason, who am damned and dead to the world…”

The turbulence of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine – an excellent poet in his own right, and revered for the refinements of his musical qualities – was, no doubt, fused in Rimbaud’s mind with the demonic force of poetry. Demonic in the original Greek sense, a supernatural being or spirit. “His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my duty to society, to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me, me, the poor soul. The Demon! His is a demon, you know, he is not a man.” Is Rimbaud talking about Verlaine here, or the genie that led him to write such extraordinary poetry? A poetry of extremes whose alchemical energy would uncage the genius in anyone who became enamored of its powers, and assume a mystical presence in their world. And in some instances, penetrate even further into the moral fiber of someone’s being, percolate like an elixir through layers of western society’s Calvinistic principles and persistent inculcations and alienate them to the fruits of an industrialized society. “Life is the farce we all have to lead.”

Mallarmé makes a strong suggestion, which many others have corroborated, that Rimbaud’s dromomania and hikes over Europe and his voyage to Java with the Dutch navy and jumping ship and returning to the farm in the Ardennes long enough to say hello to his mother and get back on the road, to Germany, to Norway, to Cyprus, and eventually to Aden and the Hotel Universe, served as a substitute for the intellectual excitements of poetry. By December, 1880, Rimbaud would make his way to Harar, Ethiopia, as an employee of the export company Viannay, Bardey et Cie. He would organize caravans across the Danakil Desert, a highly risky and dangerous enterprise. One imagines the sounds of these operations, the muffled grown of camels snuffing and huffing as they lifted themselves into walkability for caravaning during the night to avoid the scathing rays of the sun. The crackle of a fire and the chatter of Somali, or Afar, or Amharic, or Tigrinya, or a blend of all of these, which prick Rimbaud’s ears, and which arouse old instincts, which he nervously contemplates, then pushes back down into the crevices of his soul. He has a load of 2,000 antique percussion rifles to get to King Menelik. He has no time for nonsense. And his leg hurts. And his soul hurts. And there’s a small stone pressing into his back.

 

Evocation Of Butterflies

One must learn to hem a streetcar with the lace of desire, treat diving in the Arctic with the deference of snow, fill your pockets with England and burst into song. Do these things with agility and the language will deliver a child. Let us hope it will be a kind and gentle child. Medicine is not an exact science. Nor is poetry. I love the shrimp jambalaya at the 5 Spot. But how do express this rapture with the grace it deserves? My giant organ generates imagery. It’s a Wurlitzer. I feel a rhythm within I can only describe as panoramic, especially when I’m surrounded by Renaissance oils. I love those occasions when it’s stimulating to say things for the enjoyment of saying things. It’s like when an explanation of pine resin summons ideas you never knew you had. The resulting purple dye will answer the give and take between words. I like to touch the rivets when erections happen, and scrape whatever wisdom I can from the clouds.

I’m not normally this thirsty. But tonight I’m nervous. I’m also shy around reality. It’s always so revelatory, so completely transformational. I feel like I’m in a movie. The surrounding greenery expands in the occurrence of fireworks, which is an effect of drama. Why does frustration always result in a slammed door? Drama, of course. We all need a winch of force so heavy that we steam when we lift our aspirations to the open invitation of the sky and challenge fortune with our chutzpah. Spring is here to pull the dimness out of our clumsy moisture. Fat glow I ponder to insist it get behind me. Murmur it before a jury of your own emissions. Pollinate a goldenrod, and flicker vivid hues. That’s me in the future, fastening my belt and getting a hammer from my toolbox to hang a picture on the wall: Evocation of Butterflies, by Odilon Redon.

Bruise yourself among the experiments that life presents us and do it for the sake of sublimation. For the confusion of a contusion. For the pleasures of ooze and purviews. For the crackle of wisdom. The sound of cattle feeding on hay. Bone black artful bulwarks. Wildcat revelations. Flexed muscles. Searchlights steeped in ambiguity. Displays against delays beyond the apparitions of justice. The sound of moonlight dropping on a cemetery. Rock and roll angels sputtering ganglia in a suitcase. Personification of the impersonal with a can of paint and a glowworm jar equipped with bugs. Hive balls shiny with gloss varnish. Tangential and friendly kinetic energy driving a poignant locomotive toward a mournful spectacle of stationary birthday cards on a rickety rotating greeting card display stand, which is virtue itself in a gown of chatter.

 

The Possibility Of Seeing A Bear

There are some things in life for which you need a certain temperament. Imagine a rock star. The constant touring. The endless flow of fandom and autograph requests. Who could put up with that? I can see the temptation of drugs. Roadhouse anonymity and handstands on bar rails. Or how about the life of a well-known author? The gray heads. The drafts. The echoes. And the sadness of people trying to hold onto something as it ebbs into oblivion. I think I’d enjoy the life of a man in his twilight years reflecting on the past. The past is not always sympathetic. It has an insistence on revealing things. But it’s free. Free of tender parables wrapped in pretty gold foil. Free of Steven Spielberg. Free of George Lucas. Free of Judd Apatow. Family entertainment. Lies. Deceits. Denials. Narratives that look inspiring and eternal on the screen but diminish as soon as you leave the theater and enter the cold air and complexities and irrationalities of life. That hunger goes unsatisfied. You need a Hamlet or Joker or Dennis Hopper to get those across.  

My disappointment, age 8, at seeing Mt. Rushmore, four solemn faces, chiseled out of granite by Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln, each head about 18 feet high, grotesquely magnified into deification. I would’ve preferred Superman, Elvis Presley, Calamity Jane or Howdy Doody. Behind the stone heads is a chamber called the Hall of Records. Which doesn’t exist. At least not the way Borglum intended. He wanted to create a large room, 80 by 100 feet, drilled into the north wall behind the faces that would hold documents and artifacts. The chamber was to be reached by an 800-foot granite stairway. A smaller version was completed in August, 1998, by his son Lincoln. I loved the surrounding area. The smell of sage and pine. The possibility of seeing a bear. The faces seemed anticlimactic. Maybe because I was 8. Solemnity was boring. All four faces looked ponderous and dull. In real life I’m sure they were a hoot. Washington operated the largest whiskey distillery of his time. Lincoln had goats, a cat named Tabby, and a dog that he rescued from the Wabash River. He was assassinated the same day he signed legislation to establish the secret service. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific writer and a grad college dropout. Jefferson fought Barbary pirates. But as granite, they looked dull as a statute.  

In the end, it’s all about stimulation. Peak experience. Feeling the intensity of things. The density of granite isn’t due to stubbornness or the number of atoms packed together but the appeal it has to certain painters, and the fact that a chunk of granite is mostly space, and is therefore a dream.

Some people crave excitement. Loud excitements. Lewd excitements. Quiet excitements. An adrenalin rush. An opium-induced visit to paradise in the back room of a coffee merchant in Marseille. That second before you jump from the railing of a bridge and bounce back up on a bungee cord. My excitement the first time I opened The New American Poetry and discovered poetry as exciting as deep-sea diving and real as meat hung on a hook. I continue to marvel at how that’s accomplished, how a few words, rightly placed, or wrongly placed, can generate such a fabulous gadgetry of the mind, the intermeshing of intellectual gears, neurons exuding the gift of elasticity, a linguistic web catching the buzz of idea in a sticky silk, gnat in a panic of syntax. 

The Grail Of The Ineffable

Crisp January morning pulling into a Denny’s parking lot, Terence McKenna encounters hyper-dimensional pirates. He thrashes about crazily and yells “I’ve got it, I’ve got it now, if you know what is in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Now get these damn pirates off of me, I want breakfast!” I switched the engine off. Why can't I put time in reverse Terence, and back it up like a car? Why can't it be more willowy, more like a musical? I have friends long since passed I want to see again. I’m not at home here in the 21^st century. It’ll be 25 years old tomorrow. Watch out for centuries in their adolescence. The world goes mad. Atoms are always moving. Nothing is static. Not even a mug of hot chocolate is static. Rub a heavy claw and find the world translated into pearls. The world speaks lucre. The bottles flaunt their liquor. The walls are swarming with ant women. What is this place? This ain’t no Denny’s. As soon as there is heat, the physicists tell us, the future is different from the past. I see a woman running full blast into the fog on an oceanside beach. She forgot something in the last century. She can’t say what it is. But it smelled like the rain in Monterey and the frogs croaked at night.

I’m in Mick Jagger country. The future is precarious and undetermined, whereas the past is semiformal and reddish brown like the carp in the Mississippi and the present is simply me sitting here ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. A storm is threatening my very life today. If I don't get some shelter, oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away. This is how the gravitational field behaves when it heats up, although the mechanics of it is still an unsolvable problem. Physicists enjoy such enigmas. Their equations are gardens of exotic abstraction, wavefunctions, angular momentum and probability currents. Flowers of computation. But the poets seem worried. They always seem worried. They’re always pursuing the unobtainable. The qualities of things. Vanishing virtues. Hidden voices. Things beyond the grasp of capital. The grail of the ineffable. What all these words seem to be doing is interacting with a myriad of variables. Isn’t that what they’re here for? Not just undercutting remarks and insults, but the awakening of speech in the musk of our infatuation? War, children, it's just a shot away. It's just a shot away.

Anyone who has attended a poetry reading knows that the orbit of our propinquity is a perfect ellipse. It obscures the confusion. Not to mention the furniture. Which I always manage to bump into when I’m about to say something brilliant. And end up tangled in consonants. What are the characteristics of a failed society? It’s a dumb question. The obvious is better left unstated. Every time I read Proust, the current of words under my eyes describes the quantum events that comprise the world are themselves the source of time. Huh. Why didn’t I see that? What do you call the obvious when it’s no longer obvious? This is the place where the hammer meets its nail, and the singer meets the song. I might find you one day on the other side of my exhortation. That’s ok. There are shawls and other amenities in the attic long forgotten. Galaxies of wool. Bob Dylan on YouTube. Nirvana on grocery store playlists. And me. Riding on an asteroid.

Let’s face it. I need to get back to the place where I understood the airports and laws. And didn’t have to take my shoes off. Or raise my hands like an outlaw. It takes a long genetic thread to cement relations between a pragmatist and a phantom limb. And it takes a mutiny just to get a grievance heard. I consider raspberry to be a consummate swerve from granite. Who wouldn’t? Realism slaps a grapefruit with a dumbbell rag and reminds us our balloon went bankrupt. The astronomy of this is insatiable when it's trumpeted with a pustule. Didn’t anyone see this marriage coming, this sultry wedlock of AI and Musak? Rattle this composition the next time you see something itching to get scratched and I’ll come running with all my might and fingers.