Consciousness Is A Ghostly Occupation

Every journey happens afterwards, in the mind. Stay focused. Don’t stray too far from the path. Demands have fangs. Mirrors dance the air. I can hear a horde of words fight and howl in a paragraph. On the basis of this occurrence, it is possible to go beyond semantics and exhibit some chutzpah. I’ve never felt so close to earth as I do at this moment, orbiting earth on a Santa Cruz bicycle. I know it in my bones. The most perfect drink is a blue wind on a green day. One sip confirms this. Two sips condense it. Three sips cause a little discussion. Heidegger asks the question what is metaphysics. The answer is fish. Our neurons are stars. Our valleys are mud and chaos. I think that thoughtlessness is a thoughtful idea. To be a mollusk or a hornet is still to be a living entity, a word, a noun, a name, a squeak, a squawk, a squeeze, a squab. Nothingness is identical with Being. An unknown vigorous button is like a beatitude to me, a thing that only happens when the splash forgets the wave that brought it here. A dream of description is salt to my tongue. I look for the best way to get it done. I recommend a stroll. Bring some binoculars. Old men sing differently from young men. There’s a reason for that. But you’re not going to find it until your turn 80. At least. At last. Death on the back of a donkey, tattooed and sparkling.

The word for discretion got lost again. Nobody remembers what it looked like. What color was it? How big was it? Did it appear hard to pronounce? Crossing a new horizon is always makes a splash. Whispers in the nave are not uncommon. They’re quite noticeable. Friends stand around chewing the fat. The revolving display racks in the lobby creak. They serve a purpose. But no one remembers what it is. Somebody suggested peacocks. Someone else insisted that there can be embellishments to the Act of Love. Peacocks, for example. Peacocks can be supplemented with a variety of acolytes. Acolytes, like argyle, can be supplemented with speech. What did they come here for in the first place? What were they seeking? Did anyone look satisfied when they left? This is what life looks like to a burglar: one stolen moment after another. In a room of 100 people, there will be 99 conceptions of God and a shivering bivalve. I wonder, though, how many people feel something inside them that wants to be announced – defined, described, chatted up, promulgated – but there are no words for it. You want to mean something very precisely. As precisely as any language has ever permitted. Meaning that when meaning itself has been stripped bare due to semantic leaching, as say, the word ‘awesome,’ it is magnetized by the nearest iteration of it, which is to say the seminal event when a feeling acquired a sound, and a sound acquired a meaning. Something hot. Something soft. Something key. But something.

Acting parts is vital. I don’t know who I am. An internal investigation has been opened. I should have some results by the end of the month. Until then, let’s party. As I don’t have an identity, I’m free to do what I want. I don’t even know where to begin. Florida, maybe. Predicates come into play, and scenery and mashed potatoes. Life occurs in sizzling coefficients. Music can take you elsewhere. But you have to meet it half way. There’s a bookstore in Key West with a rug and a cockatoo. And shelves and shelves of books. This is why I like mahogany. It looks good almost anywhere. It’s clear the universe has other things on its mind than agates. What we’re dealing with here are words at the edge of reality. Adjectives like a skeleton broken into rain. I surround myself with beautiful blunders. Nobody gets hurt. But there is percussion. Ginger Baker in Nigeria in 1971. This is the logic of skin. Clods of dirt. Horticultural syntax. You know the feeling. The feeling that comes at night. And smashes a piece of wedding cake in your face. That’s it. That’s what I need. A violin concerto in D minor played by a refrigerator. The truth that we put into words does not extend to Las Vegas. Grammar is always so sad. It helps to frame it as laudanum. Consciousness is a ghostly occupation. Nobody really likes Platonic forms. They’re useless in a kitchen. Just give the word and I’ll paint some cherubs on the ceiling. I can see it in your eyes. The entire shit show. And whatever else we might find in the drawer.  

 

This Is Why I Hate Paywalls

Existence begins with a sigh, a goat, and a slide down a birth canal. I want the full meaning of this sentence to disassemble itself in a centrifuge. What can we do to make this moment incandescent? This is where the hammer becomes a couplet. Stupefaction by Wi-Fi. I like to think of it as a kitchen appliance that straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition. I enjoy every opportunity I get to wield a wrench. But sometimes I feel more like Malta. The call of an interior postulation puts my focus on hold, and I turn to the window for a ride across the Rubicon. I’ve made up my mind to go warm and temperate into the tropical regions of my southern hemisphere. Experience begins with a single inhalation. And ends with a fantasy. My fingers curled around an orange. My head wrapped around a novel perspective. How do you draw the light? How do you draw space? Just space. Nothing in it. No planets. No stars. No bus depots. No diners or donors or dinosaurs. Space. And many exciting minutes later Sandra Bullock. Reaching the sandy shore. And standing up. But that’s not space. That’s moo. Nothingness. Absence. Non-being. How do you draw that? What pencil do you use? What brush? What anarchy? What piano sonata? This is just silly. All the space is between the words. Not in the words. The slide in the park was put together with syllables. And a crescent wrench.

How does one manage to put so many words together without burdening them with the world’s tedium? I want to see the energy of life on paper. I want to see syllables and morphemes click as they collect the residue of combusting metaphors. Poetry is an incendiary problem with an explosive solution. Every now and then one gets a nice clean shot on the gun range. We live in an era nebulous as a rice ball. There are no parameters or parachutes. Capitalism is kaput. Competition has been replaced by authoritarian updates, unfulfilling fulfillment centers and sternly timed bathroom visits. Do you remember what it was like to feel your life unfold in candlelight and confession with the same quality of attention as a reader feels the articulations of a book tease the mind into thought? Writing gives us the opportunity to pour the northern lights over a crust of definition, and walk away grinning like Minnesota Fats after clearing the table with a single shot. It doesn’t always work out that way. It usually goes sideways. It’s why I get a kick out of punctuation. Is there still a place for poetry under the tutelage of techno-fascism? Sublime dead authors enlighten no one in library mausoleums. Books should be as wide-spread and available as water. You can use my swimming pool until I'm insoluble, & lost in butterflies.

Life is so much better when things are within reach. This is why I hate paywalls. Everything is siloed. Privatized. Automated. Society has been atomized into YouTube shorts. Who invented the zipper? I’ll bet there’s a video on YouTube to provide that information. Shared reflections can be erratic, depending on the host. Feelings aren’t always aluminum. And anything orthogonal can be abandoned for something folded and linen. Can you show me how you were born? I’ve forgotten much of it. Things continue to lie dormant within me. Trees. Hygrometers. Skies boiling with altocumulus. In the prominence of tidepools there are ample definitions for the weave of Michaux’s sumac. I want to see it do something extraordinary. Pour polar oil on a plaster mosquito. Sometimes I feel compelled to pin a question mark on a crab. There’s a melee every moment that staggers in the timeless presence of a Helsinki coconut. Here we have a group of carpenters swarming around a sonnet. I’m not always so openly scientific. Which is to say the carpenters are real. But the sonnet is not. The sonnet has been transformed into a bloodmobile.

Yesterday I bought a sound. A gown of sound. I’m a man of elder years and chrome elephants eavesdropping on marathons of pain. I consider clothing to be sparkles of perambulation on paper, parables of lavender and gray, like the sunsets of France. The sleeves of evening may be deployed in the libraries of the soul. These are the ghosts of pool sticks, the very things of which the world is made, including all the fractured ideals following a bloody revolution. Subtleties of this sonority shake the inhibitions from my horn. It’s a funny feeling. But I’ll get used to it. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mars. I crawled out of the world early in the game, when two tickets to a concert of frogs cost two bucks and a papal dispensation. I just come here for naps now, and a little vanishing point perspective. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. And then it occurred to me, isn’t the need to alter one’s perceptions the sine qua non of poetry? The Norse gods are deep in their mead, howling sagas at sawdust dolls. That was the original sound. Not the new sound. The new sound is from outer space, catching fire in a Belgian dictionary.

Dostoyevsky On A Pogo Stick

Have you ever noticed how easily wires get entangled? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these things? I do. It’s why I never get anything done. The day breaks and, further on, in the small port of Spinola, the fishermen are already bustling about on their small multicolored boats. It’s why I write poetry. You can map oblivion with propofol, or the unfiltered voice of summer rain, and still have difficulty netting certain ideas. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in The Ramones. But really. It’s so hard to convince people of anything. It’s a big problem. Especially if you have your heart set on becoming a self-help guru. I had a lifetime to do that. And look what happened. Nihilism. Nepotism. Cynicism. Emil Cioran. Is there a universal mind where one’s interior can thrive on the power of a waterfall and remain calm in the face of a plutocrat? I can’t answer that. Nobody can. I’m still stuck on these wires. Disentanglement. String Theory. Inflationary Universe Theory. The Theory of Everything. The components of life are courtesies of sunlight and dirt. You’re here as long as you’re here.

I’m fairly open to things. But there are exceptions. Genocide. Technofeudalism. Global surveillance. Centralized digital banking. Neoliberal economics. Tax cuts for the rich. Things have gotten so sordid lately. There were incidents during last night’s bingo game I’d just as soon forget. What makes the vividness of the fourth of July so spectacular and simultaneously demoralizing isn’t the fireworks but the absence of anything truly independent. And who can’t be a little amused by Musk and Trump’s little breakup? If you must break the law, said Julius Caesar, do it to seize power. In all other cases don’t slam the door so hard. I’m trying hard to keep us both in focus. Bank robberies are exciting and cathartic. But when it comes to scandalous levels of extravagance, you can’t beat the pentagon. Bubbles do pop. Carry a widget wherever you go, and observe the law as you might a great judge of character. Leonardo de Vinci. Lao-tse. Marie Curie. Gypsy Rose Lee. Johnny Rotten. Dostoyevsky on a pogo stick.

Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It just happens. The day I was born I didn’t argue with anything. Or did I? Does crying count? Frustrations begin in the crib and mount with the evolution of our needs. I will apply words to reality whether they truly apply or not because words are more interesting when they detach from reality and flit about like hummingbirds in a cage of grammar. You can build an emotion of extravagant hues around a jewel of music. But can you make a tiger prowl through a sentence filled with entanglements of vine and orchid and yet remain untethered to anything proto-utilitarian or syntactically crystallized, as in the practice of doing dishes? Why would you? I’m a glutton for polysemy. My favorite shirt is a ceaseless provocation with four hundred buttons of flaming preternatural gold and eight sleeves for each tentacle. I live like Greogry Corso, still harboring that 5,000-year-old secret behind Jack and the Beanstalk. Gogmagog. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of a beatnik poet high on ayahuasca. 

There are infinite resources for the thickness of things, much of it rendered by the infinite resources embedded in the semantic thickness of words. My fingers squirt words all over the surface of a walnut desk. I didn’t invent this language, but I do go swimming in it occasionally. I wish people took better care of it. Which is a massively hypocritical thing to say, all things considered. I remember when correspondence meant something. You could see a mind drifting through itself, crackling like a power socket in a moon jelly exhibit. For example, that night Joan Rivers sat on my lap and told me a joke about my monkey. I got lost in Johnny’s eyes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: noodles improve the soul's lampshade. I’m far more comfortable when I’m insoluble. I can’t just amble around in iron. I must rub things together to get sparks. Our bodies are here to propagate, but our minds like to flourish in solitude. The human brain houses approximately 86 to 100 billion neurons. What kind of solitude is that? Mending things demonstrates a kind of tenacity, but I’m not here for tenacity. I’m here for the doughnuts, as always. It gives me release. The more bites you take, the bigger the hole. 

 

A Language Isn't Just Words

A language isn’t just words it’s a way of attaining elsewhere. It’s also a way to make the heart of a palomino pump its energy and burdens into a fiction. I like to write in the sky where the clouds are folded into fingers of crackling silk. Exempted from accuracy and truth, we abandon ourselves to lingerie and ceaseless correlations. The lights of Reno, the rhetoric of sage. Consonants tumbling into mountain rain. Morphic resonance, cogitatum, apodictic evidence, introspection, intentionality. A letter from Virginia Woolf. An intriguing set of vertebrae played like a xylophone. This is how perception, rendered in gray, makes concessions toward reality. Venice in the sfumato of a late afternoon. The phosphorous glow of Pacific waves cresting on Poipu Beach in Kauai in late evening quiet with a full moon framed in a ring of noctilucent clouds. I find the sea mysterious, sublime, and terrifying. I always wonder about what’s on the bottom. Metaphysics and coral. Metaphysical snow globes. Mermaid brothels unanswered howls. An embarrassment of riches, a space of humidity and glass for the opprobrium of cactus.

Where there are trees, there are leaves and branches. Things are weirdly encompassed yet infinite in the synaptic forests of the brain. Metaphysics snows on the ganglions. Righteous glia and neurons of the mangrove register the blue vastness at the surface of the Pacific where the curvature of the planet is revealed at the horizon line. This is how perceptions puzzle the strings of the violin with a bow of prose and a sternly monitored chin. I can’t explain why I said this. My cloud flashed. It’s an orgasmic muted in deep pleasure. I can generate a wavelength of love on any train in the country so long as it’s running on good rail and sketchy intentions. One day I shall pen a biography of fog in the luminous ink of the midnight sun. I’ll do it for kicks. I’ll lure it into being with the coals of a capable etiquette, the linguistic tinsel of subjunctive collisions and cognitive dissonances. They say its easiest to run where the sand is packed hard and I find that this is true. It’s not uncommon to make the discovery of the ego’s illusions at the beach. It’s a crunchy nugget of self-awareness, like inwardly cringing during an acceptance speech.

They say we know less about the ocean than we do the other planets and stars in the universe. The same could be said about consciousness, that ocean in our head. I’m not even sure why anyone imagines it’s in the head. Some of it might be outside the head. When consciousness becomes words it lights the chandeliers with a figure of speech. And this is called heat. This is how the search for consciousness can look stupid as hell on a sheet of paper and yet ignite your brain. Memories wrapped in glittering mirrors will yank you out of life and drag you into the steam of a dream. I know a fool when I see one. The mind juggles words like a court jester. Speech is a vulnerable undertaking. You can start out with the best of intentions and find yourself looking for a napkin after blurting a confession of fraud and irony. All these things are true and happened on a mountain. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. Let’s not kid ourselves. No intensity goes to waste. If the shoe fits, fine. You don’t have to wear it. I walk around in existence all day doing what I can to redeem the various predicates I’ve put into play. I order what looks good. I eat it. I look around. I thank the waitress. I get up. Grab my hat. Leave a tip. Head for the door. So no. There are still delicacies. Things to assess. Things to do. Things to say. Exits and entrances. Last night I listened to Fleetwood Mac. The early days. The Peter Green days. And then I began to drift away on a black horse of desire, and let it all happen in music.

 

Members Only

I belong to it. So do you, I believe. Life. Existence. Being. It’s a big circus with acrobatic Hamlets shooting out of Danish cannons. There are challenges, and there are amenities. There is also a passage, a trajectory of stage doors and wild vagaries of immodest equivocation. It’s the same path our ancestors traveled in their quest for eclairs. And yet, for some reason, whenever we go wandering there, this whirl of syllables appears, confounding everything in its wake and turning it into folklore. We live by pom poms, big emotions, skylark kazoos and evangelistic fanatical invention. The coinages are bluntly numismatic. But I’m buying nothing from our rotating hands. If things get anarchic, we’ll start the tractor and plant some vowels in the soil. We’ll grow hearty sonnets and stunningly beautiful elegies. Corn. Beets. Radishes. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Peppers. Beans. Cilantro. Conversational implicature and subjunctive kindling.

Today, I got a newsletter from infinity. It says drift, hungry and luminous, among our planets. My breath changes the course of a stream of words and it lifts a future tense into an engine of postponed meaning. Unity, a remembered effort, burned down last night. This left us with a steady mass of canvas and a cup of sugar. I’m not against gasoline. Logic is the refuge of the handshake. You’ll find it, at times, humming a charming song on a corner of the bench. Flap your explosions towards the dangling resilience. It’ll come in handy for the pancake parade.

Are the algorithms our buddies or more like border collies? I keep a gardenia stand under the planet. Applause is concentrated in the hands. Don't look for virtuosity in a cherry orchard. If the petal doesn’t match the description, form an opinion. Never let a compliment stand in the way of your vanity. We have tinsel for the toilet and history for the negligent. You can shine like a spatula in a merchant ship. But one day your monkey is going to beg the crowd for a branch, and hand you a hyperbole. Either grow up disembodied or escape yourself. I’m not here to cause trouble. It is, in fact, my most profound desire to lift you into abstraction. Old gets old by rattling its speedometer. Essence is a process, not a yacht. But it'll get us across the border. Cubism is rooted in my ganglia. It’s got a face like an outboard on a paradox. Everywhere you look you see people anxious to get out of here. It’s up there. Top shelf of the living room. Glued to an attitude.

We worry the spirits when we talk in this vein. The melancholy soulfulness by which Lucinda Williams sings Magnolia is its equivalent in music. This adjusts how I dish the mud. Do I use words, the words of everyday life, or some other words, the words of a wedding cake ruminating on an abstraction, or David Lynch directing a miniseries? I can take an insult from nearly anyone but I cannot tolerate a too blatant eagerness to do nothing. I embody bedding. I always have a sleepy feeling. Please don’t spoil my day. I’m miles away. My homonyms heal the heels along the way. Tomorrow I’m bringing snow and evergreens to the site of a chronic remorse. The window is glazed with frost. I watch pathos stroll through a wilderness of improbable scruples. As soon as I get to the end of this sentence I’ll disappear. And reappear as a stimulus. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. A jacuzzi in the backyard. A divine destination. And a way to get there.

 

The Fossilization Of The Human Mind

I like the way The Firm opens. Everything is golden. Everything is excellent and prestigious and coming up roses. Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a top tier Harvard graduate in law pursued hy numerous law firms. He takes a job in Memphis that offers him a monster salary. Oliver Lambert (Hal Holbrook), chief of the law firm, shows him a lot of affection. Then there’s a rooftop luncheon overlooking Memphis and the Mississippi. And things start feeling weird to Jeane Tripplehorn, who plays Cruise’s wife. She learns from a brief conversation with one of the other wives that it’s not forbidden for the wife to have a job. And they encourage having children, because children promote stability. Things start escalating from there. Bar by bar by bar a cage forms around the couple. The big turning point comes [spoiler alert] when McDeere is sitting at a booth in a café trying to eat while studying for the bar exam. The fact he isn’t home and is having dinner in a café, surrounded by piles of books and notebooks, illustrates the pressure he’s been under and the strains beginning to appear in his marriage. FBI agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) and Thomas Richie (Paul Caldéron) come swaggering in and sit at a nearby table. They playfully drop some hints that gradually reveal that they know about McDeere and the law firm he works for, which is steeped in corruption. They firmly and persuasively convince him to meet with a higher official in Washington DC, by the Lincoln Memorial. Which he does. And he is told that if he cooperates with the FBI he won’t go to jail, but his career as a lawyer will be over. In the gathering of evidence, he will – by default – be breaking his oath of confidentiality. He and his wife will also need to go into a witness protection program, his dreams of pursuing a career in law utterly and irretrievably shattered.

The Firm is a dramatization of personal asphyxiation. The American Dream turned abject nightmare. Which is what has been happening in real life over the last several decades.

It's a terrible feeling. Dank, dreary, dungeon-like. Eerily similar, in fact, to a feeling I get related to our current political situation. Not just Trump, but one that’s been building over the last few decades, beginning with Reagan. The discovery that the country is steeped in so much corruption, so much aggressive surveillance, so much police state militarization, so much psychopathic greed and inhumane treatment of the poor and vulnerable, that escape seems impossible. It would take the genius of a Houdini to wrest free of the regimented lives people are now forced to inhabit like prisoners in a minimum-security Federal Prison Camp. Right now, the people who feel it most are poor, people with barely enough money in reserve to cover an emergency room visit. People blessed with higher incomes might not feel it at all yet, even when they see videos of thugs kidnapping people right off the street and deporting them to a CECOT prison in El Salvador.

The places that frighten me most right now are grocery stores, and Top Pot Doughnuts. The self-checkout aisles are trying to nudge us away from cash by reducing the number of stands that accept cash payment. Top Pot Doughnuts – at least the one in our neighborhood, which has recently closed – refused to accept cash altogether. I took offense to this. I stopped giving them my business. Boycotting them wasn’t easy. I love jelly doughnuts. Why is this? Not why do I love jelly doughnuts. I know why I love jelly doughnuts. They’re delicious. They’re palpable evidence that the universe is quintessentially benign. No. My question is more sociopolitical in nature. Why are certain businesses refusing cash? Is it because of Covid? Is it because of cooties? It makes no sense. It’s just paper. Though actually it’s not. It’s 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. But that’s not the point. The point is despotism. Rumblings in the media conjecture the end of cash and the launching of a social credit system. This maneuver would be final nail in the coffin of anything resembling free speech, or privacy or individual agency, and the institution of a totally totalitarian state of social control.

Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker and former public official who served as United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing during the presidency of H.W. Bush, warns that a digital concentration camp is posing a real threat in the behind-the-scenes machinations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “A complete re-engineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed,” she writes in her blog the Solari Report. “A digital control grid is an electronic network of telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation),” she writes, “compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and AI to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy – a system run by rules created by ‘experts.’”

This is what happened to the truckers in Canada when - in early 2022 - the truckers organized a protest known as the Freedom Convoy, initially against a vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers requiring them to be vaccinated before being allowed to cross the U.S.-Canada border, and Justin Trudeau responded by invoking the Emergencies Act and blocking access to their bank accounts.

The implications of this are terrifying. One could feasibly be debanked simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a protest against the official government narrative, and there you are, exiting a drugstore and exposing oneself to the biometric examination of a street camera, or – after enjoying a glass or two of wine after dinner – posting, on impulse, a provocative political statement or voicing a raw reaction on social media that might be interpreted as “hate speech.”

This would effectively end free speech altogether and have a chilling effect on public – and private – discourse. Imagine you’re a parent and you give your son or daughter a birthday party and one of their friends overhears an untoward statement between you and your partner that gets reported to their parents, then reported to the authorities, and the next morning at the grocery store you discover your bank account has been frozen. Or you buy a book on Amazon that goes contrary to the official government narrative. Or your produce a documentary about the atrocities of a foreign government that our government is friendly with, and making huge profits from the sale of weaponry. The documentary is quite successful and wins prestigious awards, at least in other countries. Like the César Award in France, for example. You’re suddenly rich. But you can’t access your money. You’ve been naughty. The government is calling you a terrorist, and your account is frozen.

Thought, creativity, spontaneity, vision, inspiration, expressivity, conjecture and conviction go down the drain. Life – or whatever is left of life – is conducted in an open-air prison in which every word is weighed carefully before being uttered. In which every purchase is carefully considered. In which you’re mandated to submit to a medical procedure despite the recommendations of your doctor or your own suspicions about the inherent dangers of a deviously conceived and poorly researched vaccine. So you refuse. And are debanked. Canceled. Ostracized. Quarantined on a compound in Greenland. And jabbed every six months.

Catherine Austin Fitts remains hopeful that the totalitarian juggernaut being assembled in the secluded corridors of the digitized cybersphere can be stopped. One immediate action to take is to boycott enterprises that forbid cash. Another is to get word out. There will be conveniences to a social credit system, such as paying for things effortlessly, with the blink of an eye or the touch of a finger, that will be used to lure the public into its net. Look how easily the public has been roped into doing the work of a cashier after the onerous chore of grocery shopping. Not to mention the atomization of the agora; for some elderly people, whose friends and family have all died or been estranged by some feud or grudge, a brief chat with a bank teller or grocery checker may be the only opportunity to exchange a few friendly words with someone. There was a checker at one of our local grocery stores who sang everything he rang up, like the people in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “How are you, I’m doing fine, bananas are on sale this week, and strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are $2.99 a pound.” Don’t let a self-check rob you of that. Or a centralized banking system control what you choose to eat.

The biggest enemy is apathy. A public that would prefer handing in an essay or article written by ChatGPT than endure the frustrations and work of writing something themselves. I won’t lie. Writing is hard. I’ve been doing it for years and only rarely does it come flowing out of me in sparkling rivulets of prose. It’s wonderful when that happens. I feel like a sorcerer. A wizard, like Shakespeare’s Prospero. It’s an intoxication. The struggles, too, are enrichening. It’s galvanizing to wrestle an inchoate idea into a vividness of being. Language is a wonderful but maddening medium. I agree with Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Language is muscular. Syntax and grammar and vocabulary and phrasing and juxtaposition are muscles. The more you use them the stronger they become. The reverse is also true; the less you exercise these elements the quicker they atrophy. The mind grows increasingly vacant. It seeks fodder in distraction, which is low in vitamin D and protein, and withers into the spongy decomposition of a bog. This isn’t just a danger for laying the foundations for a totalitarian social credit system, but the death of spirit, the fossilization of imagination.

I’m a pessimist by nature, so I’m not as hopeful as Catherine Austin Fitts. But I have seen it happen. By ‘it,’ I mean revolution. An entire paradigm shift that seemingly happened overnight. The difference between 1962 and 1964 was gigantic. I’ve seen people who were once shy and retiring and bore all the trappings of what people once called responsible and mature, turn into Bohemian rebels flamboyant as Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and as outrageously Blakean and headstrong as Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. You never really know what people are capable of. What’s churning inside them. What’s aching for release.

The Firm was made some 32 years ago. The level of corruption wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Nor was the surveillance. It was pretty sophisticated, but it wasn’t as commonplace or sophisticated as social media monitoring or data mining or fitness trackers or drone surveillance. Movies once shaped public opinion. They were powerful influences. Now they’re as passé and sad as the Oscars. People don’t even go to the movies anymore. Or read books. They scroll. They gaze at pixels. They watch podcasts algorithmically tailored to meet their specific views of how the world is put together. It’s virtually impossible to find a consensus on anything. You would think that this must, then, be a very cosmopolitan time full of open-minded savants. But it’s not. It’s tribal. It’s electronic. It’s a dumbed-down cyclotron of overworked, overfed, overstimulated, supercharged zombies who have ceased paying attention to the wars and genocide and rising seas and temperatures and growing homeless populations and are still learning how to cope with the anguish burning a hole in their soul. The Great American Novel has imploded into Augmented Reality. Philosophy has been superseded by video games like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft and League of Legends. The last Tom Cruise movie I saw was Top Gun: Maverick. It was surprisingly good. Nobody looks cooler than Cruise in a Super Hornet.

Money has assumed many different forms over the millennia. Cattle, salt, feathers, hides, shells, coconuts, butter, whale teeth, cocoa seeds, tobacco leaves. Money is a form of language. Its current manifestation as digital currency – bitcoin, or cryptocurrency – underlies its true nature as a transactional abstraction – is as fascinating as it is potentially dangerous. People get caught in abstractions all the time. We call them ‘isms.’ Fascism. Captialism. Communism. Anarchism. One thing you don’t want is a systematized and centralized authority like the Wizard of Oz in control of how one chooses to live or chooses to believe. If you’re lucky, you might one day come upon a yellow brick road and a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow and a hollow tin man for companions, and through a combination of persistence and accident you might get a shot at entering the Palace of Oz and flipping the curtain back to reveal a quirky old man pulling the levers of power like a maniac high on ecstasy and ketamine. But really, it’s easier in the long run not to let things get to that point. Next time you go looking for a pastry, or a checker at the local grocery, insist on paying cash.

 

The True Cost Of Equivocation

The mind, following its usual course which advances by digressions, turning once in one direction, the next time in the opposite direction, finds itself – out of sheer exhaustion - adrift in an equatorial latitude, a boundless domain at zero degrees, and with nothing to confine it, revels in imaginary solutions and improbable novelties. Parallels spurt cognitive butter. Analogies percolate implications. Tropical anecdotes threaten the assumptions of civilization. Or what is assumed to be civilized. Or halfway sane. Or open to novel suppositories. Supernatural interventions. André Breton - bedazzled by euphorbia in the Canary Islands – checks his compass for loose change. Directions tend to collapse under the weight of the mountains. Goats on a wall of granite. Veins of silver, arteries of gold. Amber before the heft of prophecy transcendentally alters it to epitome. Is there an alchemist in the room? Why are legal documents always so hard to read? The language is so archaic you can hear it ferment. There should be a law against law. But if there are going to be laws the laws should make sense. And be consistent. Leave inconsistency to the mad. The chronically speculative. The roar of a minotaur echoing in a labyrinth. The maddening canter of multiple choice. The commitment to saying something provocative and weird. The final decision. The jubilant choice. I’ll throw caution to the wind, and pin my equivocation there, on the ass of an assertion, and say where there is sediment there is sentiment, and where there are roses, there are thorns, and where there is dirt, there is digging. The crunching of leaves, the breaking of twigs. Cracks in a fencepost. Frets on a neck.

Backyard Aporia

Stars and stripes are Willy DeVille when he was bubbly. He quickly learned to resolve the clairvoyance of clothing. Do all explorations begin like this? The frozen light of blue diamond dawns brings cactus and ironweed to mind. Old mines. Deep wells. Jesus fasting in the desert forty days and forty nights to be tempted by the devil. Nobody goes to Des Moines to be tempted by the devil. The devil doesn’t live there. The devil lives in Chicago. Or used to. I don’t where he lives. Probably lives like one of those multibillionaires with yachts the size of Guam. But I have to ask: when was luck ever an option? My soliloquies are all worn and floppy, the laces all squiggly, and all that is fair and rational well out of reach. It’s another typical day on Earth. Petula Clark singing Downtown in a subway. Willy DeVille in the Dordogne. The last time I felt this literal I was swinging from vine to vine at the San Diego Zoo. This gave suppleness and meaning to my metaphors, which I squandered on the weather. Silly me. And I had a dog named Talk who never talked. If I rang a little bell he’d get up on his hind legs and strut around imitating Liechtenstein. I will rise now and go to Innisfree. If you think pink is fun you should try applying vowels to the soft vaginal folds of a lingual franca. The implications speak for themselves.

My salt is crammed with elegies to Euclid's eyelid. There are alluring subtleties almost impossible to convey with mathematical thoughts that languish in the hallway closet. I’m not sure interior angles are what’s needed now. I want straw, and leisure, and girl scout cookies. Does this make me a barn? The middle name of profit is garbage. And it smells like hell. We are the arbiters of yellow. What we say and do is yellow. But what we think is often blue. I can’t account for that. The best way to protect a new meaning is to spend an entire afternoon doing nothing but gazing at the words lush, leafy, and by appointment only. Step two is to believe the spoon to be more sublime than napkins. Pull a rapier from its sheath. And slash a big fat Z into the back of a rococo armchair. Do it for the sake of rockabilly antimatter. For liberty and justice and dreams of swashbuckling gallantry. Like that day in Paris, July, 1789, when I first met retribution, and squirrelly urges and nostrils dilating with the scent of revolt, and how it might be used to express a library of fugitive sensations and the spirit of a golden improbability.

We find doors in graves. Places of allegory. And rock.

Without a third eye, everything in existence looks like a bathtub. Ideally, I’d like to do without a house or a car. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say what drugs to take, what shamans to look for? The vanishing point perspective is free to talk to people. About anything. Dogwood seeds in a city park. The whole point of poetry. Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. That’s it. That’s what I need. New insects. New vegetables. Whole new madrigals of deliciously wet pennies when a woman smiles. The ghost of her Cretaceous leaves rustling in the parlor of Emily Dickinson. Wild Bill Hickok creasing fillets of time into asymmetries of willow. It’s not really a question of linguistic grooves. It’s more like things stacked, one by one, on a plank of pine. This is how it is on Planet Earth in the 21^st century. The likelihood of abduction by aliens from space always leaves us with a trace of the burlesque. The butt of a joke suddenly awakens the Norse gods, and the water moves catlike to the shore, teeming with designation. I’ve seen consciousness squirm in the mind of a black mamba. But that’s just tomfoolery. Consciousness may be found at the edge of a river, or wild in a backyard aporia. One thing to look for: archetypes. And secondly, carbon dioxide. May the sky be merciful tonight. And float in space. With us on it. And all these words, which I planted here, to warm them into life, and meaning.

One Day I Stood Near A Small Door

One day I stood near a small door in the middle of nowhere. I knocked. And there stood Harpo, smiling like a glissando. He handed it to me, and I got a hibachi out of the trunk and sizzled it with a smoldering sonata. It smelled like stationary. This is a medley the musicians play with an innocent finesse. There are days when everything makes sense, cause and effect distill the murk of phenomena like the stillness in a small seaside bookstore, and expressions of one’s inner life pop up easy as toast. The books all have spines and pages and things to say about the world and human experience, each in a different way, so that a vast spectrum of possibility emerges and transforms them into reveries. I once saw a woman so entranced by a mark on the wall that she produced a volume of books on the errancy of modes. But isn’t this true of most fugues? The imperfections of the road function as declensions in a deep grammar of salty dry goods. Everything becomes a prediction, or a big hole in a raggedy old abstraction. You can find insight anywhere if you know where to look. But even that takes insight, and a nourishing sense of absurdity.

I once found a ball of tangled wires in an old trunk. It meant little at that moment, but in the fullness of time it evolved into a recollection, which also meant nothing, but did so in such a captivating manner that I devoted a typhoon to it, and pitched it to Warner Brothers. I do this constantly. Point to things and offer them as souvenirs when the party is over. I don’t want to see people go home empty. Physiology functions much like an oak tree, murmuring unintelligible philosophies in a lakeside breeze. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to interpret the meaning of gravity among the hectic cracks of city pavement. Alice Coltrane once said the purpose of art is to awaken the dormant mysteries within our souls. Well ok then. Let’s get to it. Make something come out of the dark and gape. All the enigmas of existence rise from their benches in the square and do the slow dance of secrecy and the cool blue dance of the lost.

Jazz never had a strong appeal for me until late in life. That makes sense to me. Jazz walks out of the night like a wild energy pierced with feeling. It doesn’t know where to go so it goes everywhere. It achieves this by way of legerdemain. Legerdemain is from the French. It means lightness of hand. Brushed cymbals. Eighth notes in irregular groupings. Juicy horns. I run a thumb over the lip of a saxophone. A circular figure demands to be pushed into supposition. What fascinates me is the hole. A hole is the one thing that disappears the deeper you dig it. I’m the first to admit that geometry is not my forte. But I do know the difference between a raspberry tart and a rhombohedron. I like being elliptical, too, from time to time. Sliding adaptations past the moo of things has always felt natural to me. Spontaneity is a gift. It should never be squandered on surveys. The answer to everything is jazz, so they say. Better get it in your soul.

It truly is pointless. Any of it. All of it. But so what. It never stopped Jackie De Shannon. Or James Brown. Or Elvis. Or Francis Ponge, who went around noticing things, and investing them with language, which turned it all into propositions. Blackboards. Goats. Dinner plates. Tables. We inhabit a world of objects. The world itself is an object. A hyperobject. But an object. A thing. A thinginess. A whatness, in the eyes of Aldous Huxley. For whom everything was a door. A brave new world. Or a ghost rising up from a swamp. I love it when people say money is no object. Because objects are international. The total reality is the world. Like the night I saw Neal Cassady at the Barn in Scotts Valley. One name stands for one thing, and another for another thing, and they are connected together. And so the whole, like a living picture, presents the atomic fact. Because money is no object. It’s digital now, and corresponds to nothing in reality.  

 

The Smell Of Memory

The most peculiar smell I’ve experienced in life is the smell of the screen door on my parent’s house in Minneapolis when I was a kid and it was summer and raining outside, that combination of odors, the metal of the screen combined with the smell of summer rain. I don’t know how to describe it. It swirled in my brain without a name. Turpentine is easy to describe. Its fumes are powerful, penetrating, dangerous like bulldozers and tanks and Virginia Woolf’s birthday. Things to be taken seriously. And not with a grain of salt. I know the taste of salt. Who doesn’t? It’s fundamental. It’s stimulating. It’s parenthetical. It’s diplomatic. It’s salt. Screen doors are a midwestern phenomenon. Because of the mosquitos. Flippers and fisticuffs. The stuff of summer. When the blood runs hot. And odors hang low with the threat of tornado.

My dad was a painter. He liked watercolor. I don’t know why. Acrylics and oil seem easier. Watercolor is hard to master. I may have asked. If I did, I can’t remember his answer. And now he’s gone. But he left me with the smooth unearthly snow of the Turtle Mountains. A ghostly band of cirrostratus and a copse of quaking aspen.

It’s amazing what paint can do. It can unfurl a salmon salvation in champagne pink. It can explode subject matter to smithereens of risk. Shave the night with a razor of gold. Color deepens the mythology of circumstance. Paul Gaugin in Polynesia. Wassily Kandinsky in the Alps, just south of Munich, where the road from Salzburg meets the Isar River, and the sycamores turn neon green in late afternoon. The intensity of the light produced by a failing sun turns a drab Bavarian studio into a palatial chorus of tangerine and imperial red. Huge canvas. Sable brush. Broad swaths of color and refractory forms. The clash of pigments. The hues of seclusion. Black whacked with a sliver of blue. Metamorphosis. Tremors of semantic confusion. Gunshot wound. Medical indelicacies lead a circus of glaze up and down a leg of pale copper. If this proves anything, it proves the difficulty of milking nirvana from a headlight. If nerves are thoughts do worms have thoughts? Neurology on the molecular level is pretty mind-blowing. Ants on a wall near Alamogordo following a nuclear blast can draw their own conclusion. What can one make of this world? A cup of tea. A tuft of cowslips. The potent charm of an empty room.

The best smell of all earthy and unearthly things is dirt. Rich black dirt. Full of worms and microbes. The smell of memory is the smell of dirt. Hard to get it out of your mind. Because you don’t want it out of your mind. You want what everyone wants: a dirty mind. A mind of dirt is a fertile mind in fertile dirt. The French word for word is mot. The French word for a compact clump of dirt is motte. Very similar words. Suggesting what? Suggesting that a word – say the word suggest – suggests dirt. With everything in it, and on it, and under it, and around it. A big clump of dirt. Full of fungi and grubs. Histories and arthropods. Nouns and nematodes. Roots and nutrients. It takes an exceptionally dirty mind to farm a single sentence. Plant it with seeds and semiotics. The semen of thought. The ovaries of ovation. Sous les toits de paris by Henry Miller. Fertilizers like Fanny Fern, Flaubert, and Philip José Farmer. Bone meal. Bat guano. Trials. Testaments. 45 minutes in a quiet corner with Anaïs Nin and a nimble imagination.

This Place Is New To Me

This place is new to me. This former country. It had a structure. Which I internalized. Fairness in all things. The freedom to say anything you want. Put out there. Now I feel the need to retreat. Pull back. Make myself invisible. That language I took so much delight in is now a potential danger. It’s a hazard for people who blurt things out on impulse. Don’t edit things. Like those occasions when I was younger of being invited to eat at some friend’s house and feeling crazy urges to shout fuck at the table. For no reason. Just that crazy internal mischief that goes on in some people. Imp of the Perverse. It started at the airports. This fear of impulse. Loss of control. It became a place where you don’t joke. They went from being shrines of travel to corridors of fear. If you don’t put forward documents of identity on demand you can wind up in detention hell. It’s that kind of place now. The wild energy of rock concerts is long dissipated. The corporate pop kings and queens of today are autotuned and unthreatening as milk. Although the milk isn’t in great shape these days either. Milk can be contaminated by microorganisms, things like salmonella, E. coli, and listeria. Pesticides. Herbicides. Antibiotics. Aflatoxins. And then there’s plastic. The world produces around 400 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. It gets trapped in various parts of the human body. The average person ingests around 5 grams per week. It’s everywhere. Even the brains of deceased individuals. Who are free of this mess.

But don’t get me wrong. There remain uplifting things. Basic things. Octaves. Cork. Shiny objects and ice cubes and dreams and dog-eared books in used bookstores in towns where you’d never imagine a bookstore to be. No day has gone by without something surprising in it.

How the hell did the Wurlitzer pipe organ of the California Theater in Dunsmuir make its way to Skagway, Alaska? I sense a potential David Lynch movie here. I see a Gaudi cathedral rise from a dream of feathery perspective. And a pterodactyl clutching a volume of Les Miserables wing its way north across the English Channel. I normally avoid adjectives, but this one barged in with a structurally defective temper and a nickel plated .38 with pearl grips and a cratered euphoria. It was the biggest adjective I’d ever seen, and yet it had a certain modesty about it, a kind of curtsy, if you will, to the gods of grammar. I painted glimpses of it to power our predicates. I like to float my milk symbolically. It helps, sometimes, to approach things from a fresh new angle. Use a little charcoal gray to enhance the feeling of a plucked bow. Ok, I’m going to turn into a poet now and write something eager and hot. And let it hang from my mouth like a Wurlitzer.

Ever have that nagging feeling that you need to be somewhere, but you don’t know where? By the time you’re there you’ll already be there. Because it was there all along, sleeping in your clock.

This solitude that we propel through life sparkles like a universe. Because it is a universe. Solitude is a universe of cubicles. It oxidizes quietly like rust. People used to call life a rat race. I don’t know what they call it now. But it’s still a rat race. Even though everything has changed. Almost all the theaters are gone. The malls and parking lots are empty. When I was a kid the world was biblical and huge and full of heroic pathos. The first time I saw Charlton Heston he was splitting the Red Sea. The first time I saw James Dean he was in a knife fight at the Griffon Planetarium. Paul Newman destroyed parking meters. Debra Winger had a pigeon stuck to her head. I remember a time when all the exit signs were blue. And all the movies were good. And all the lobbies were grand. The traffic is a bitch. Always has been. But there are modes of transport so brilliant they percolate with the subjunctive mood. I’m going to take a deep breath now and inflate myself with 900 pounds of nitrous oxide and float back into the sky. There’s a space between emotions that propaganda can’t reach. This is the interval known as sunyata. It’s intuitive. Like jumping out of a plane. I want to parachute through my life until my boots hit the sod. And lift myself and square myself and look around. Breathe the air. Smell the dirt. Bow to the local flora. Wave to the local fauna. Knee-deep in the language that brought me here.

Life. It needs an organ. A big sound. A grand sound. Oak pipes. Poplar windchests. A sound as big as the clash of gods on the open seas. Lightning on the edge of town. Funeral procession in the Dolomites. The organ implements the solemn resonances of ceremony. It’s hard to do an elegy on a ukulele. You need an organ. You need lungs. You need a kidney. You need a heart.

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor gives a lot of latitude for personal expression. It’s a generous piece of music. Toccata is derived from Italian toccare, which means to touch. It takes a lot of dexterity to play this piece. It’s got a lot of arpeggios that run up and down the keyboard.

There are infinite resources in the thickness of things. The semantic thickness of carefully chosen words. The fountain of Jupiter in Dodona. Elephants on the savannah. That cosmic density always pulsing on the threshold of reception. Sun emerging over the summits of the Cascades.

Nothing else matters. Metallica. So close, no matter how far / Couldn't be much more from the heart / Forever trusting who we are / And nothing else matters 

 

Ponge On The Seine

I remember standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris about ten years ago, in early January, and gazing at the Seine, fascinated by the churning and swirling and roiling and boiling of its muddy waters. I’d never seen the Seine like this. This Seine was insane. This version was more like the Seine of 1910 that flooded Paris, rising eight meters above its normal level swallowing the entire city, including the sacristy and presbytery of Notre Dame, the basements of the Louvre and the Palais de Justice. The Seine I saw in 2015 wasn’t rising to flood level, but was a far cry different than the placid, easygoing Seine I was used to seeing. Water, in all its forms, is fascinating. But rivers, in particular, hold a profound fascination for me.

When I was ten, my father built a house high on a bank of the Mississippi River in Fridley, a suburb of Minneapolis. I spent many hours watching the river. I looked for tree branches and other detritus floating on its surface, listened to the crack and thunder of ice floes breaking up in early spring, squatted to gaze at the carp sunning themselves in the shallows near the shore in the languid days of summer. Rivers are always changing. The swirls and twirls and spirals and eddies on its surface are liquid enigmas, subtle indications of what lies beneath. Mark Twain said it's like reading a book. And it is. The turbulence at the surface is an intimation of anomalies in the current due to the shifting formations of sand and clay on the bottom. It isn't prose. It's poetry. These subtle revelations of the mischief below is an ongoing saga, a language of oblique impressions and agitated scripture.

Francis Ponge, the 20^th century French poet famous for his unique collection of prose poems, most of which centered solely on objects, swallows and flowers and seasons and dinner plates, wrote a prose poem embodying the Seine. It begins with a perplexing riddle: “A thousand times since I tried to give free rein to my mind about the Seine, a thousand times, you have noticed, dear reader, I have encountered obstacles on my way, hastily erected by my own mind to block its path.” One of Ponge’s characteristic methods is to shape his language in such a way that it adopts the attributes and properties of the object he is describing. In this case, he expresses the most salient characteristic of a river: it flows. Flowing is also a characteristic of writing, at least when inspiration is driving the words forward, and the current of this wonderful absorption continues unabated, occasionally overlapping the banks and attracting footnotes.

Writing flows. At least, it flows until it encounters an obstacle, like a dam, or a drought, or a rerouting. A sudden bend in meaning. Thunder. Rain. The landlord knocking at the door. The focus breaks. The flow goes elsewhere. Trapped by a distracting video on YouTube. Or just plain fatigue. The heat is intense. The thrust trickles to a thread. The mind exhausts its ideas, or - as Ponge suggests - the obstacles are hastily erected by my mind itself. The mind - in its fervor to explore every possible eventuality - encounters obstacles that it imposes on itself. Why? Why does the mind do that? I don’t know. I’m watching Lucinda Williams sing Magnolia.

This technique of pairing one thing – a phenomenon or object with the of human consciousness – functions as a generative device, a strategy for exploring the potentialities and capabilities of language while simultaneously providing a focused and unique perspective on the phenomena of planet Earth.

"A thousand times,” he continues, “it seemed to me that my mind itself was running along the edge to outpace its own tide, to oppose it with folds of land, dikes, or dams... frightened perhaps to see it rushing to what it believed to be its doom." Note how skillfully he manipulates his words and ideas to mimic the many whims of a great expanse of moving water, and at the same time allude to the many oddities and entanglements of human consciousness. Reading into the current of the river the same impetus that drives his mind to explore external phenomena an equal fear of revealing the darker truths of mortal existence, he doesn’t anthropomorphize the river so much as invest it with his own tendencies, to draw from the river a parallel that has little to do with applied physics and far more to do with metaphysics. He isn’t blocked by fixating on a rational description; he’s stymied by the abrupt appearance of unintended consequences. Everyone, I’m sure, is familiar with the rather destabilizing tendency of experiencing invasive thoughts, thoughts that in no way relate in any rational way with whatever it may have been you were thinking. Rather than suppress this tendency, Ponge does what he can to profit from it, go with it, see where it takes you. With Ponge, there is always something a little subversive seasoning his rhetoric, a mischievous desire to undermine his own framing with the craziest analogy he can find. “Objects, landscapes, events, people around give me a great deal of pleasure on the other hand,” Ponge writes in his diaristic My Creative Method, an ars poetica written in Algeria from December 12, 1947, to February 9, 1948, “they convince me. By the very fact they don’t need to. Their presence, their obvious solidity, their thickness, their three dimensions, their palpability, indubitability, their existence of which I am far more certain than of my own, their: ‘that’s not something you invent (but discover)’ side, their: ‘it’s beautiful because I couldn’t have invented it, I would have been quite incapable of inventing it’ side, all that is my sole reason to exist, my pretext, so to speak; and the variety of things is in reality what makes me what I am. That’s what I want to say: their variety makes me, gives me permission to exist in silence even. As the place around which they exist. But in relation to a single one of them, in relation to each one of them in particular, if I consider only one of them, I disappear: it annihilates me. And, if it is only my pretext, my raison d’être, if it is therefore necessary that I exist from it, that it will only be - it can only be - by a certain creation of my own with it as subject.”

Still waters run deep, so they say, and this is deep. But still it is not. It’s rife with paradox, swarming with heterogeneity. Without interrelation, nothing exists. The world of things finds their essence in willow, the willowy suppleness of a mind in a thrall of excitement to the churning of a hungry consciousness. The hunger, say, of the Seine to reach the ocean.

“Each time,” he elaborates further in La Seine, “after having recognized the obstacle, I almost immediately found the slope that allowed me to get around it. And no doubt I was not so fixed on my plan nor on the point of the coast that I would cut through to throw myself into the Ocean, that certain obstacles could not have deviated my course, but what does it matter, since I definitely found my passage, and knew how to dig a bed that now hardly has any hesitations or variations.”

I hesitate to provide my own interpretation of this, as I’m sure there are many. But anyone who has plunged ahead with a difficult artistic project has certainly felt the combined feelings of frustration and euphoria that accompany these endeavors. That vague but teasing scintillation in the mind of an understanding or perception that eludes articulation, but which – maybe in the middle of the night as one’s mind wanders – flows – like a river – that surmise or abstraction that so teasingly eluded definition, is arrayed all at once in the jewelry of words and metaphors. I’m frequently amazed at the things that bubble up from the unconscious. Strange thoughts, bizarre ideas, sudden insights, hilarious conceptions that shift from one thing to another depending on the silt and season and depth and effluence of that river in my head.

Ponge, not surprisingly, feels the same way. "What does it matter,” Ponge exults, “since given the obstacles that were put in my way, I still found the shortest path.”

“What does it matter if the sun and the air prevail upon me for tribute, since my resource is infinite…and that I have had the satisfaction of attracting to me, and of draining throughout my course a thousand adhesions, a thousand tributaries and desires and adventitious intentions...

…what does it matter, since they have given up trying to contain me, since they only think about stepping over me...

…I see clearly now since I chose this book and that despite its author I took my course there, I see clearly that I cannot dry up...

…what does it matter, since far from throwing myself into another desire, into another river, I throw myself directly into the Ocean...

…what does it matter, since I now interpret my entire region, and that not only will one no longer do without me on the maps, but only one line will be inscribed there, it will be me.”

…but here begins another book, where the meaning and pretension of this one are lost.”

Odd, isn’t it, to see the external become internal? One can never be quite sure where one thing leaves off and another begins. Everything overlaps. The external overlaps the internal as the internal overlaps the external. The world doesn’t stop at your skin. It registers on the eyes and ears. It flows in the veins. It mints its coins in the forgeries of the mind. It collides with opposing forces as ideas collide with the quantum legerdemain of the universe.

So what’s up with his next book effacing the existence of this book, this present contemplation of the Seine? He uses the word ‘pretension.’ This confession of inadequacy is there to serve a higher impulse than a perceived inefficacy. When the Seine enters the ocean, it ceases being the Seine. It diffuses and fuses with the water of the ocean. The Seine ceases being the Seine and is lost to the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of this new medium. The ocean. Which was there all along. When it was clouds. When it was reeds. When it was flowing. When it was dividing into green and gray at the Square du Vert-Galant, which is the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. When it reached Le Havre, and ran its water, its currents and idiosyncrasies, its anomalies and candy and verbiage and larynx into the calm cold rhetoric of the English Channel, it wasn’t lost, it was transformed. That’s the name of the game. Flux. As Heraclitus put it, no one steps in the same river twice. And that’s what flux is all about. Impulse. Impetus. Implication.

“And I know very well that I am neither the Amazon, nor the Nile, nor Love,” writes Ponge. “But I also know very well that I speak in the name of all liquid, and therefore whoever conceived me can conceive everything.” 

By The Forge Of Process

It’s not the product, it’s the process. It’s the main ingredient of future becomings. It’s an intoxication with the pith of potential. The reward is in ripping a hole in the fabric of the known world and stepping out into lunar dust. It’s a moment of great euphoria, and the hum of the peculiar is emphatic. It’s weird. It’s soft. It’s wet. It’s rich in nectar. It’s got scales and wings and eighty-two-thousand cataclysmic incongruities flowing freely in a jar of curtsies. It’s terrifying and green and magnificent and actual. Because it’s a metaphor and has nothing in common with the embroideries of the orthodox. It has the texture of immediate experience, and smells of musk and violence and latitude. It trickles insistent craving, that zest for existence that propels an octopus across the sea floor, or explodes into flight like a flock of turmoil.

It’s in the creation of something that the excitements and frustrations of trying to bring something new into the world—something for which there is no plan or map or formula—that the essence of the creative act is found. The product, even if it’s a glorious success, is nothing by comparison. It’s always a disappointment. Even when it’s not disappointing. It’s disappointing. And you’ve got to move on to something else immediately. No cocaine was ever this exciting, or demanding. The need to create is a powerful compulsion. It causes embarrassments and disruptions. It leads to insane wealth or catastrophic poverty. It’s intense. It’s extreme. It’s potent as a jukebox in Kalamazoo, tragic as a rodeo clown, and kinky as a kakapo.

“At times I fancied I knew how to draw, at times I saw that I knew nothing. During the third winter I even realized that I probably would never learn to paint. I thought of sculpture and started engraving. I have always been on good terms only with music,” wrote Paul Klee in his diary. I know that frustration. I’ve lived with it since I was in my late teens. It never goes away. There’s no medication for it, other than running as hard as you can and taking a leap over the wall.

Can AI feel frustration? Does AI have feeling, as yet? Will it one day have feeling? Will its feelings be the feelings of humans or the feelings of some entirely different synthetic consciousness, feelings so unspeakably different that the nothing in the human mind can begin to approximate their heft and color, their range and settings, their durations and volatility?

Processes are interconnected and constantly changing. Each creative act is a universe incarnating itself. As soon as you step into a language you can feel the cool heavenly gases of starry nebulae swirling around your ankles. You’re weightless now because you’re creating something. You’re creating something as you read these words. Your response to these words is a creative act. And you’re probably going to come up with things to say that are far more marvelous than these endeavors to break reality into morsels of savory enigma and are going to make me feel jealous. Jealousy isn’t very creative. I would avoid it. Jealousy is good at intrigues and plots. But leave that up to the Big-League writers with big stacks of books at all the major airports. What’s going on here is an imposition of pattern on experience. My experience and your experience may have some things in common, will almost certainly have some things in common, syllables, for example, and belly dancers and ice cream, but what they don’t have in common is the one fugitive ingredient that fuels the endless appetite of creativity. And it isn’t on the menu.

The Art Of Letter Writing

“Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman - I forget his name - who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in by saying that the art of letter writing is dead? The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter writing.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s letter to John Lehmann, a young man working as an apprentice for the Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Woolf and her husband, Leonard. The implication in this anecdote is tied to investment: is there any real merit in making a fuss over something as trivial as letter writing? Is it worth the bother to adorn such a humble medium with eloquence and music? Isn’t it tedious for the recipient of a letter to be forced to wade through someone’s lofty elaborations and taxing elocutions? Sometimes all we want is a simple answer, a clear, unembellished body of information regarding health, travel, moving, plans, aspirations, disappointments, dilemmas, relations, etc. Today’s emails are blunt; it’s rare to find a well-crafted letter elaborating a shared circumstance.

“There is some truth in that remark, I think,” Woolf goes on to say, offering a balanced view of the situation, such as it existed in Britain in the 1930s. “Naturally, when a letter cost half a crown to send it had to prove itself a document of some importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity. But your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It cost only three halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme.”

I’m not sure why the letter would have to be burnt, but ok. I get it. The medium is cheap. Why keep them? I’m the wrong person to ask. I have drawers loaded with letters. Boxes in storage stuffed with letters, many of which go back to the 1960s.

The idea that convenience and affordability would impact epistolary culture is a curious, somewhat wobbly supposition. But it’s true. The convenience of the medium argues against the amount of effort one may wish to put into it. Technology devalues the aesthetics. On the other hand, the informality of the medium invites a broader, more playful range of expression, the kind one used to find in the letters of John Keats, for example. People have varying approaches and attitudes toward language; for a few it’s joyful invitation to exercise some creative muscle, but for most people it’s a hassle, a cumbersome and somewhat worrisome task with a strong potential for embarrassment, misunderstanding and personal exposure.

I miss letters. Especially when they come in the mail and the words have been put down on actual paper. Typed or written, doesn’t matter. Ted Enslin’s letters were always typed. On a manual typewriter, too, which made it even better. When I held the letter, I could feel the indentation of the letters on the back of the paper, which felt good to my fingers. The texture itself served as a text.

Letters are striking. Like a peacock in frost. Emails are more tidy; they invite a more telegraphic approach to sharing and dispensing information.  Occasionally, someone will take the time to construct a beautifully worded email. This has value. It’s an antidote against the deadening impositions of modern life. Feelings are complex. Their inherent confusions and ambiguities are a welcome challenge for those with a fascination for language, and an empowering pleasure to fight the sterility of modern life with the infinite possibilities languages offer. Words are always a potential source for sorcery and conjuration. There’s power in it. But for many others who understandably prefer to remain guarded about their internal life, verbal expression is a thorny terrain. And there is never a perfect correspondence between one’s feelings and perceptions and the medium of language, which is extramundane, disembodied, disconnected from the empirical realm and its boorish disenchantments. It’s easy to get carried away, easy to entangle one’s more instinctual life with the mercurial allurements of language.

Culture used to be a lot more literary than it is now. People have lost the appetite for reading. Scrolling has replaced the architecture of thought. It’s a self-perpetuating dilemma: the less people feel the urge to express themselves, and the less they feel free to exercise their verbal acumen, the faster it deteriorates. Wittgenstein’s statement that the limits of his language reflect the limits of his world is true. The world we live in now is a dystopic, open-air prison engineered and operated by reptilian oligarchs. AI and its robotic potentate loom over our future.

I wonder, since the once treasured virtue of free speech is being destroyed, and language has become a precarious, slippery medium that can lead to possible indictment, as what has happened to journalists like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst, arrested for simply for doing their job as journalists and getting the reality of an event transmitted as fully and honestly as possible, if the art of letter writing will return. There’s a bit more privacy in a letter written on paper and inserted into a sealed envelope. The algorithms can’t get to it.

Are tattoos a form of letter writing? I think they are. They seem that way. I assume the tattooed don’t mind being stared at. They’re like walking totems. Spirits and symbols all over their bodies. Aching to communicate. Provoke. Stimulate. What’s that skull about? An attitude toward death? And how about that butterfly, or that dragon, or that dagger, or that physics equation, or haiku, or frog plopping into a pond on your back? Tattoos, like letters, are moments of impulse inscribed in the sting of ink.

Someone will occasionally send me a letter, but it’s more like a novelty, or a kind of joke. A nougat of nostalgia.

The letters I both wrote and received in the 60s were full of joy, discovery, confession, jubilations and fabulous new encounters. Now the waters are poisoned by the toxins of censorship.

“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too, and your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through, don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue.” Even Bob Dylan’s songs sounded like letters.

I always feel like I’m coming dangerously close to sounding like Andy Rooney. Fuck it. Since nobody reads who cares? Language, like a wild animal, does everything on impulse. Censorship has a lot in common with Rilke’s panther. A caged animal paces back and forth. It can do no harm. I just wouldn’t want to be the person whose job it is to feed it.

 

Cape Cod Baby Godzilla

What, exactly, is a Cape Cod house? I love this question. It has nothing, and everything, to do with anguish. The anguish of the moment, which is byzantine, and drunk with architecture. 

The Cape Cod house has a rectangular shape, steep roof, central chimney, and symmetrical design. Perfect for white night meditations, inexplicable ruptures within one’s personal realm, and a searching and extrasensory grammar.

The world is so incredible. Certain indecisions have to be expanded by colloquy, or collusion. Either one. Makes no difference. If our words have an impact on the surrounding totems, we stand back and watch as the animals squirm and gnash and fulminate into life. No one can hear us through the sound of the surf. We find our way by touch and intuition, as our ancestors did, in the forests of Saskatchewan and West Siberia. 

Sometimes there are signs. Signs can be important. Neon, digital, or LED. They can be hard to decipher, but full of convulsive beauty, syntactically ungovernable, but full of ingenious angles. They generally indicate the presence of Gaelic, or Lampong, or a nearby popcorn popper. Letters dance amid the new growths in the garden, legibly illegible, and daubed with sunlight. If, during our banter, my macaque gropes around for an offering of affection while I’m struggling to make myself coherent, pay it no mind. He won’t bite. It’s all just a poem anyway. This life. This cauldron. This wisteria of syllables. This aviary of vowels. This purposefully prurient purposelessness. Once you accept the premise that in a universe without any conclusive moral underpinning or reassuring consistency, anything can, and will, happen quite often, even if it means closing the garage early and going home. There comes a time when you just have to sit down somewhere quiet and ponder things. And we call this form of reflection salutary, because it leads to boisterous discussion, and Spinoza and quetzals and soothing moisturization.

I asked AI: is there any mention of Cape Cod architecture in the poetry of Wallace Stevens? And the answer was no. Apparently not. Although it did go on to say that Stevens' use of imagery and symbolism can evoke a sense of place and feeling that might resonate with the landscape of Cape Cod.

The highest concentration of Cape Cod architecture is in Massachusetts. This is the result of oysters, and Charles Olson, who I read as a youth in a backyard in downtown San José. Later in life, when I had come to appreciate how cacophonous my emotional life had turned out to be, despite my many attempts at kung fu and taekwondo, I could say, with the utmost proprioception, that if I should ever come to inhabit a Cape Cod house, I will certify my pretentions with soft cloth napkins and quietly murmured phonemes, and assume the proportions of a giant mailman. I will bring letters to people’s houses. And oysters and roosters and bombast. Beautiful beautiful bombast. Cradled in my arms like a Cape Cod baby Godzilla.                                  

 

The Méret Oppenheim Teacup Solution

My wrinkles arrange the beak by which I speak. I lean forward. I lean backward. I light an energy to glide into cockeyed.

The clatter beneath our prayers has the sound of oarlocks in a bayou. If you allow the embryonic a place in this denim, we’ll find ourselves an intriguing intestine to describe. It will grow into pigs.

Biology is a symptom of grace. The prodigal makes it flourish. This linen moans with acceptance. I can feel it in the sparkle of your eyes. This junkyard of words and expressions. This long tall sally. This plump verification of wax. We draw up experiments there drop by drop. The local pharmacies pay us with locomotives.

Have you ever tried putting a diesel locomotive in a coin operated parking meter? Good luck finding a parking meter. They use apps now.

We use our locomotives as one might a Méret Oppenheim teacup: that is to say, sometimes a great notion deserves something better than a dying security. It needs trees and sweet morning air. A good roll in the hay. And a Méret Oppenheim teacup.

Meanwhile, my plan is to treat the bacteria with respect until a disease gets here. It may be a while. Wings smear our bohemia with pushing and pulling. The nation has lost its bearings. Only a disease like fandango can cure us of horizontality. What’s the trick to burning mushrooms, anyway? All I require for now is a donkey, a compass, and a Lucinda Williams album. Look over there and watch as I bend my journey to the caress of her music.

Assume an aroma and strut around. I welcome the mint on my tongue. A language vessel can sigh for rattan, but it takes a supreme court decision to establish oligarchy. They squeeze the medicine and clash with its precepts. Can anyone say they were surprised? You can peer through a submersible window to see the luminous monsters swimming by in hourglass cotillions. But will it bring you heat and credibility? Will it corner your demons in rum? Soon after my languish vanished, I saw it shattered on the ceiling. And that’s when I knew. I knew everything. Everything there is to know about drumsticks. And Malibu. And the perverse craving I have for lilacs.

Once again. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re contemplating a career, consider Méret Oppenheim’s teacup. Her fur teacup. Sip your ambitions and struggle against the tide. I won’t stop you. I don’t even know you. Growl yourself into denim so I can see you better. Surely as sleep approaches morning, the sun will scatter its temptations all over spring. We’ll know better then. Better what to do. And what not to do. And put it in a constitution. And send it to El Salvador. 

 

An Eye On Tuesday

An eye on Tuesday is a flowery forge a greenery for my laughter an evening that drags itself towards hope. An eye on Wednesday welcomes hummingbird mucus welcomes sauerkraut on a bone china dinner plate welcomes almost anything a scarf and a plow a ray of sunlight full of showers a despair that walks on legs of vibrant color. Acrobatic plum splash a shivering tarpaulin a spring that affirms the capharnaüm of cravings in a single axle.     

Oh my God could this be it today is a parable of wasps a pomegranate of sunlight. It creates a very singular weight an espadrille on a carpet a sky streaming down through the canopy of a tropical forest. Almond and chocolate in a cherry cupboard. There is often a weight to the circumstances of things, the gestalt, the forms, the shapes, the shovel in the back of the cathedral, the mist that feels the adjacency of mass like a ball hurled into heaven. I’m often inspired by movement. And music. I’d like to open a wound and play the harpsichord. I hear a faraway sound that’s soft and colorful like the song of a paper bird. I’m finally convinced. West Frisian has the taste of plums. And yet the voice will echo in a cave in which a deity is suddenly awakened and think it only natural to call an attorney. We must assume some accountability for our actions. Even a scrap iron apricot has its ecstasies. And every wrong note invokes a coyote.

I really enjoy a good casserole and from time to time a walk down a quiet street. Salvation is often slow to arrive. What to do in the meantime can be a delicate matter. The sponge that shapes its life around absorption is weighed down by whatever it absorbs. The sponge must be squeezed to express this. The first time I felt squeezed I was 15. I took the Amtrack to Minot, North Dakota and joined a circus. It was a metaphysical circus called Actus Essendi. I learned to juggle sparklers while riding bareback on Archelon, a giant sea turtle. At age 208, Archelon retired. I headed east and scored a big role on Broadway as a lout who spends all day on the couch watching the Oblomov Ballet on an analog TV. My performance was based on a log I saw in the forest. It had fallen without making a sound, until I heard it, in the misty pluperfect, next to a Walgreen’s. Memories refract on the pavement at night, and this, too, makes a sound, somewhat like butter spreading on a slice of bread. And then the horns blast everything into marmalade.