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’s 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. 

 

The Newest Goo In Evolution

The mystery of consciousness is a crackling fire that repels darkness. Although, it’s generally in darkness, when I’m lying awake in bed, that consciousness feels most emphatic and real. It’s why I’ve always been drawn to language, either in literature, or in conversation. The marrow under the glitter of the world’s distractions enriches the scorch of the written word. Where the words clutter there is inflammation. Unresolved conflicts take a lot of words. A lot of words to plaster wounds. A lot of words to come up with illuminating narratives. I’ll gladly accept the illusory when it makes enough sense to stabilize my inner chaos until I can find a nugget of mineral truth. When consciousness is shared with the voices coming out of a radio it has a calming effect. Unless, of course, you fall asleep and wake up to hear one of the more nightmarish scenarios in Orwell’s 1984 dramatized by a troupe of British actors. The imagination is exceptionally susceptible when first waking up. You’re in a hypnopompic state. The division between the real and the unreal is vague and ephemeral. Luckily, a radio dial is easily changed. Or turned off. It’s often those crazy, unsolicited thoughts that pop out of nowhere that are hardest to avoid, or get rid of. I can see how Spicer was so fascinated by lines of poetry coming out of a radio à la Jean Marais sitting in a Rolls Royce hearing lines of resistance poetry coming out of the radio.

Robin Blaser called it “The Practice of the Outside,” an essay which appears in the 1980 Black Sparrow Press edition of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. “It is within language that the world speaks to us with a voice that is not our own,” Blaser writes. “This is I believe, a first and fundamental experience of dictation and correspondence – the dead speaking to us in language is only one level of the outside that ceaselessly invades our thought…Jack’s discipline of emptying himself in order to allow his language to receive an other than himself may be traced back to his tradition and sources, but he works there independently and fiercely…Here I could place him among his direct peers – Poe, Mallarmé, Artaud and Duchamp in their emphasis upon loss of meaning turning into necessity of meaning…This brings us to a ‘recommencement of perception’ that has barely begun, and within it, we re-enter a composition of the real.”

Beyond the parameter of conventional prose is a universe of counterintuitive laws and a mercurial intermingling, an impish reversal of roles and attitudes. Is it, for example, the writer who is the metaphor of the spider or the spider that of the writer? Monotony goes into a mailbox. There’s no easy answer in a Carrollian jungle of frumious bandersnatch and flamingo croquet. What happens when we remove the threat of control from the wild enticements rooted in language is a renaissance of psychotropical mind, an explosion of growth and pleasure vital to the irrationality of poetry and the health and diversity of the language itself. This is the kiss that set our hair on fire. We sexualize our nouns against concentrates of power and lose ourselves to lobster quadrilles and semantic play. The way in which language is experienced is seminal to psychic life. The mind is vulnerable. There are so many things that can fuck it up. Language has talismanic powers. If you seek them out, they’re there. Phylacteries. Fetishes. Abraxas. It's a complex siege against the pulleys and networks and puppetry of contemporary life.

If things get overly rational, I’ll drop a rattle in this sentence. Pick it up and shake it. It’s filled with the cruel jewels of misrule. Brightness, clarity, palpability. Johann Sebastian Bach. Claude Debussy. Counterpoint. The way things shine after a summer rain. The blaze of silver on all the rails. The insane beauty of it hurts the eyes. The deeply interiorized world of literature is exploded into full-spectrum light. The mind scintillates outside the bounds of habituated and programmed compatibility. Cassady strides down the rails, and the gleam of the locomotive verifies the battle between aesthetics and the blunt pragmatism that keeps the whole thing going.

More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. Said Walter J. Ong, author of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

Here’s something else he said: “Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.”

Can there be consciousness without language? Of course. Language is new. It’s the newest goo in evolution to get pummeled into the brain. However much I try, I can’t think without it. Maybe, for a brief time in meditation, I might experience an entire minute or two without a backdrop of language, the monkey mind swinging from vowel to vowel, consonant to consonant. I look at the cat and think, what’s it like in there? The eyes of the cat look directly into mine. I sense inquiry in them. Not much else. Interest. Absorption. Involvement. Engagement. Reverie. Reverie might be going a bit too far. I look at the cat. She looks at me. Her eyes are jewels of solitude. She turns her head, lifts her hind leg, and goes to work on cleaning her paw. Whatever is going on in her mind, it’s not entirely correspondent to mine, if only because I don’t bend my foot to my mouth and begin licking it, or purr when somebody rubs my belly, or hiss at the smug and fraudulent proposals of a multibillionaire on TV. Animals, I suspect, are blithely unaware of ownership, or the psychosis of Wall Street and its mania for bonds and blockchains and compound interest.

Dogs and cats do have instincts about people. Were it to take the form of language, we might not understand them. On the other hand, their perceptions might strike us as shockingly familiar. Uncle X is a lout who believes in nothing but his own ego. And his farts stink. But I do like the way he strokes my chin. Life among us felines is highly complex, as you might’ve guessed. We’re not like dogs. Dogs get happy about anything. We spend our leisure in deep oblivion. Window sills are ideal for soaking up the sunlight. Trust me. Be glad cats don’t talk. Owls are far more interesting. Cows are surprisingly brilliant. Worms are the words unsaid by the lonesome dirt. Spiders speak in filaments of protein. Octopi communicate by changing their shape and color. Text is texture. Chromatophores. Thought lights up on the skin. Paper thin. But eloquent.

Speculations are fun at first, but inevitably get circular and go nowhere, which is frustrating, and leaves one craving the hard realities of stone and oak and the heat of the stove. A silence in which consciousness rediscovers itself as a high-level awareness steeped in nothingness. Out pops a word. And another and another. And gets the ball rolling. 

 

The Séance Of Speech

I lift the insults and carry them to the fire. I feel the heat thickening around me. That glorious moment where, on the edge of the world, the mute existence of mud and pine complement the séance of speech. A creature of black signs on a sheet of white paper trembles in the light of our mutiny. Can you put something hot in it? Something life-giving and generous? A little focus, a little concentration. I find your demeanor a little rattan. A bit rickety. Maybe you could use a mimosa. The sun is just now spilling its gold in the water as it sinks below the horizon. I gave a bohemian finger to this painting, and swirled it around. Later, in our room, we'll sit beside the pipes as they hiss and steam and authorize a start to our conversation. The whole point of a conversation is a good laugh. This includes the ongoing dialogue in my head. Which is a different kind of circus. All the lions are ions. And all my regrets ride merry-go-rounds. 

Each word floats in amniotic peace as retinal nerves flash its opacity to the brain. The piano produces a rondo for this shape. It has a tremolo, and seems a little unsteady. Remember: the metamorphosis was a bas-relief before it walked the earth. I retired from the physiology of a robin. I had to. It was early summer, and I felt more like Iggy Pop than Igor Stravinsky. An incident is what happens before a propeller creates a wake. It’s the kind of song that makes you get a little goofy. A flickering line dances where a little gravity lingers. We may witness a paradigm shift before the next generation arrives. It may improbably happen with this call to the delegates. Our effervescence is sown in concentration. In a noisy kitchen in Nice. The bouillabaisse of the mind, the quiet simmer of contemplation. I include the meridional with the velvet and put an easel by the waterfall. I like this mahogany, it’s free of anything specific.

I never thought life would be like this in old age. Mythical, weird, apocalyptic. Roman. As during the reign of Caligula. I’d envisioned more Emerson, more Whitman, more Thoreau. What was I thinking? Had I never read Camus? Had I never read Schopenhauer? I was lost in the forests of rumination where flowers of beautiful rhetoric are as diverse as cemeteries and authentic as genitalia. I try to keep my anomalies intact to protect myself from all the incongruities within anonymous Being. Then along came Larry David who inspired me to write an angry book about people who park their cars with a defiant and breathtaking insouciance. It suited a world in which inundations of spermatic ink could no longer support the hideous truth lying on top of me like a succubus. I was unnerved by the clatter of adjectives, the uncanny poise of the evergreens amid the Lynchian fury of Snoqualmie Falls. Speech is the common vapor emanating from the warmth of our blood. Attempts to block its passage result in delirium, fever, and gangrene. The myth of world which creates us and which we create is an unceasing runaway train. And stirrings of the secret life beneath the skin exhilarate to the lift of an airplane.  

 

The Abiogenesis Of Things

I need a knife to cut a loaf of bread and a key to open an old caress. I need a match to light a candle and a hammock in Polynesia to sift a cindery rumination. I need a book to open my mind and a broken heart to cast shadows in the street. A similar slow eye and a Dutch painting to walk out of a woman’s pearl. A reason for being and a reason for not being. A window, a door, and some extraordinary plumage. An excellent soft bed. A plate of steaming algebra. A bucket of sounds encountered by the shore. I have a chest of drawers for things such as this and Friday wheels and Tuesday glass and the soul of a knitter in the guise of a surgeon. I operate tomorrow on a lark of bitter alphabets. I do have a set of preferences when it comes to fabric softeners, though I remain neutral on the subject of chasms. I favor the leap of the chameleon to the monotony of refrigerators humming in chorus during the birth of ice. There are things that happen so easily that it takes years to understand them. Sooner or later you find yourself at the edge of a diving board preparing to jump into the void. And life feels raw. And life feels real.

Life, as we know it, requires cellular structure, metabolism, and a Barcalounger. A chemically unstable environment ignites its predicates. Gets it going, as it were. Walking. Strolling. Collecting things. Smelling things. Selling things. Malleable forms and good solid friends furnish our world with forks and jelly. Invention is three-fifths cough syrup and two-fifths quirk. The first time I saw a lazy Susan was at an IHOP. And the first time I journeyed through Proust I felt soulful and difficult. No one thought of saving a dream with a mass of words until the dream became reality and reality became a sweaty Monday in a friend’s attic with a typewriter and a bottle of Scotch. Did you know that there are fish in the insanely fathomless depths of the ocean that glow like a Venetian lantern? A broken hammer is still a hammer. Context and function are eccentric pods of mystical absorption. And this is where life truly begins, in the depths by hydrothermal vents & random associations.

An organism is a storm of fire, a point of novelty experiencing itself as a rose, an amoeba, or a Granny Smith. As a body of prose attempting to animate a creature with four legs and fur, or build a city of gowns and toothpicks. As a kiss. As a crawl. As a greeting on a stairway. As a poem of deep patterns recapitulating waffles and claws. If the bare bones of existence distress the mind, the planet soothes it with poplars and birds. Life is something larger than what is contained in the body. The energy that drives it is a shaggy diffusion of immeasurable vogue. There is a time for needles and a time for opinions. Now is the time for timpani. Kettledrums and vermicelli. Little linguistic tricks that work like polymers to expand the outward drift of things, the abilities of limbs and the blithe transactions of tentacles. Nerves. Veins. Sensory membranes. The procreational giddiness that causes the living to embrace the perversions of art. Strip utility of its power. Dress in the negligees of leisure. Bring a fabulous benevolence to the daily warehouse, and sit down and have your lunch on a picnic table, near an oak, or by a river.

An Early Evening In Late March

My considered harm is to be a compass. To greenhouse into mirrors makes the incident olfactory. It is better to sand the swell than sway in tergiversation. My ochre hustles the crust forward, where it might breathe, and become translucent. I write it through the jug. The tension generates us to poke, and to polish the bloom at the lip of its husk. It will always be muscle that herds the aerodrome geese. Elbows help me think. It comes easier when my head is supported by swans. I feel a slipping of the guts after a rain. I rise, and advance by instigation. Movement plays an invaluable role among the goldfish. Jane Austen sits at her desk designing a blowtorch. Tiny languages pelt the window. What to attract to my essential need is a frequent problem. If it isn’t Jane Austen, it must be something else. In order to generate sleep, we do push-ups. We do them on the ceiling. Our wings grow out of the calculations used to explore a feeling. Time and again the words build a mighty grammar. If you give me a baseball bat I will feel it inside this sentence. There are no speed limits within the fourth dimension. Just persuasion, and corollaries. 

Time itself feels suspended. It’s an early evening in late March. Soon to be April. There are repeated volleys of thunder, which hardens the muscle, and precipitates cheese. I do like ataraxia, but this isn’t the weather for that. We put yoga mats on the car windows in case it hails. One must assist that sunlight under the skin or lose it to progress. Even when times were vertical we brushed them with stunning bikinis to make them shine horizontally. Concentrating on the harmonica helps perforate the time. I like the expansion of the concertina more for the radical pleasure of its boil than the gleam of its civility. And as for storms, I love the sound of thunder. It’s the music of chaos. Crustaceans gaze at a champagne cork. Waves swell, crest, and crash on the shore. I’ve seen it all before. The first light of dawn crawling over the cabbage. The waitress coming to the table with a pot of coffee. The trickle beneath the bronze is sign of fever. Don’t let it confuse you. Just point to the item on the menu and say that’s it, that’s what I want. And if she answers that’s what everybody wants, smile, and shape your voice into a bouquet of snapdragon.

Undulations of any sort arouse my interest. If I swallow the sun when the scales break I can place some candy behind the horizon for entertainment. It’s all about waves. You should structure your door so it may open to a visceral thought. Everything is always so counterclockwise. If you pull hard enough the spirits will quack. I can feel it. Can you? The constant glimmer of details. Have you ever felt like you were standing in a room alone by a window reading a letter? If you can paint the sound of fire you can box a suede syncopation in a humble velocity. I’ve seen such things happen. Palominos crest a hill. Hummingbirds thunder in a courtyard. Howlin’ Wolf walk into Sun Records for the first time. The bohemian universe attacks a dilemma with pullulation and jokes. Notice what a nipple does during nerves. There are indentations on the furniture that brawl in the light when the curtains open. And there are moments when the present fills with the past so intensely they switch places and pluck romance out of the air. The surrounding dystopia retreats into the shadows. And Mary Shelley walks in.

 

Lost In Space

R comes in to tell me the astronauts stranded in the space station for 286 days splashed down near the Florida coast. And I wonder what that felt like to be trapped in space all that time and then touch down on earth and breathe fresh, atmospheric air again. Like that time I went to prison as part of a writer’s group that visited inmates and talked about writing and literature and a few hours later when we exited the prison how lushly detailed and sensuous the world seemed, as if I hadn’t been paying sufficient attention the whole time I’d been alive.

I used to get that feeling in my dad’s workshop when I came home to visit from California. The smell of freshly sawn wood mingled with the shine of chisels and the powwow of pipe clamps on the wall. Even radios sound different in workshops; they sound like a voice healing the language with diction, even though everything said is a lie or a fib or a gross distortion it serves the energy of the language. Because it’s a calliope of nuclear syllables and opens the gate to oxymorons. Sparkling inconsistencies. Haunting mascaraed eyes. West Virginia garage sales. 

We’re used to thinking about space as the setting in which a number can precisely measure the distance between two points. A point in space can be unequivocally characterized as a collection of three numbers (x, y, z) on three axes. It can also be described as a large, roomy pavilion with lattice walls admitting breezes from every quarter of the compass, or the flaming gold sunset over the Columbia river gorge in August, 1988 when Bob Dylan sang “I Shall Be Released,” or that moment in the summer of 1964 when my chute opened and I dangled in the sky, marveling at the Skagit Valley, and the bird flying under me.

The architecture of doubt excites our flapping. We nap in the high vaulted ceilings of the Renaissance. Because we’re bats. And sound the world with radar. I’m pinging off a bank of hills right now, feeling the shape of the landscape, allowing my desires to become music, and echo their elaborate schemes.

Clouds are machines for bringing rain to the earth. We can do that, can’t we? Float. Drift. Clump. Piss on the ground.

I carved the electricity myself, using a jackknife and a rock.

You may have noticed I now wear hearing aids and suspenders. I’m at that age. Timelessness gets embryonic near the promenade. But here it’s just a clock. And embodies a principle of tea.

My intentions tremble in sympathy. This is my seminal ebony, the moment when they wake up the balcony, and we launch ourselves into anonymity, breaking chaos into bits of inertia.

I only use overdrive if I’m captured by the moonlight and have a hard time keeping my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. I believe there’s a formula for this. Tools. Exercises. Operations. Procedures. Handsprings. Somersaults. Cartwheels. Walking upside-down on a chair while singing the national anthem. It always works best in the nude. I don’t know why. Some things come alive via the magic of permeation. Being. And the trickle of verisimilitude.

Space is an abstract concept that describes the relationships between objects and the forces that act upon them, and is the framework within which all physical phenomena occur, acting as the "stage" upon which events in the universe unfold. In other words, space is the three-dimensional expanse in which all matter exists. Which is why it’s so easy to get lost in space. There’s so much furniture.

Getting lost is no easy matter. I got lost once with some friends in a forest of eucalyptus near Santa Cruz, California. I can’t remember how we managed to find our way out. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe, in some sense, I’m still surrounded by eucalyptus, imaginary eucalyptus, abstract emissions of sexual syntax which defy mahogany and ramble along in a trajectory of hasty incisions in the fabric of space and time. I can sometimes hear the murmur of stars in a canopy of canvas, bright maniacal colors chained to a linguistic engine in a glimpse of delirium. It could also be the lobby to a hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota. I can often identity a location by the number of chandeliers or the clash between meanings in an allegory of punching bags and sweat.

But please. Let’s not get carried away. Language can only do so many things. It works by magic, we know that, but its movements are similar to that of the Komodo dragon, which uses a variety of libidinal adjectives to describe Cézanne, and can attain a speed of thirty turtles an hour. One would be well served to use language carefully, and with a view toward celerity and chiaroscuro.

Space is to language what language is to clouds. Participles participate in this clasp as it anchors. You can walk over there to greet a Cubist. There, in this context, references a staircase built to resemble the staircase of the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which spirals in 360 degree turns with no visible means of support, and looks like a DNA molecule made of spruce. If you happen to slide into the house of yourself as if by magic, you can always slide back out again if you use a bald excuse and a nearby shrub to use as a prop. Life is essentially theater. We’ve known that all the time, and yet I continually forget my lines, and stub my toe on the magazine stand. My biology does not allow for flying or hanging from the ceiling folded in my wings. I do have a certain position in bed that launches me into hypnopompic carnivals, and echolocation and songs. My more considered view requires a compass, because there is a curve to space, and cranberries and sewing kits. It helps to be experimental. Even better to be in touch. 

 

I Live In The Real World Now

Prowling the depths is my failure, not yours. You're too hard on yourself. You should read Henry Miller. He makes poverty look like brandy. The ability to make yourself at home anywhere is a huge criterion. It all depends on how much one is willing to tolerate the wallpaper. I painted a scratch of it against a squiggle of wind and the tangible became emphatic. Musical, even, like love-in-the-mist. Sensations can be rampant, even in old age. Sometimes overwhelming. My left knee yearns for the feel of ermine. But the rest of my body is devoted to rain. I like the feel of it on bare skin. The saunas of Finland are a good place to start spanking yourself with a bundle of birch twigs. It stimulates blood circulation and releases a fresh birch aroma. My slap was meant to awaken your inner subversive. Again. I can’t stress this too much. Read Henry Miller.

Or Anselm Hollo. Now there’s a poet who knows how to bend an intentionality into things that are unintended, but wonderful, like hallucinations, or the northern lights. He knows how to sit and listen to someone while their eyes glitter. He knows how to turn on the lights in order to make it dark outside. He can address his friends while sleeping. He has all the markings of a poet. You can see them through two layers of glass at the far end of the restaurant, where he sits eating lasagna and whose head is a glob of light.

I live in the real world now, which is disenchanted and drab. I’m not staying here long. Just long enough to get a paycheck. As soon as I’m off work I enter another dimension. I enter the non-work dimension. Which is a streaming service brought to me by spiritual frequencies.

On the way home, I see a crow land on a high wire between a gibbous moon and a jet approaching Sea-Tac. I think it might be a sign. If I were a prophet I might be able to interpret it. Utter that one little word ‘if,’ and you raise the hypothetical into actionable being. How much does Schubert Sonata by Mark Di Suvero weigh? My car keys feel like extrusions of gray light. We all have an infinite pocket we visit with our fingers from time to time. I envision Joseph Cornell at a garage sale. He finds a snow globe containing a thyroid gland. My thesis swallows it and it oozes triiodothyronine. I can’t stop tragedies from happening, nobody can, but something has to be done about American history. It’s time to start my hiatus. There’s a chair over there and I may just sit in it. After I finish sanding the mind of a cranberry. And doing the dishes and taking out the garbage and gazing at the spectacle before me a ten-foot-tall clarinet summoning the angels with a sonata in e minor. I’m branching out. I’m putting down roots. I’m running to the indicative to stop the breakage of stems. I’m knitting a speckle with a Heckel bassoon.

The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and hot chocolate. One million earths could fit inside the sun. But try to put that in the overhead compartment. If we put consciousness in a box the result is often imprecise. Consciousness has a tendency to raise the dead. It can get a little edgy. It’s why I like to permit things. It gives me the illusion of control. I authorize the tin man to dance like Fred Astaire. And he does, bringing forth pandemonium negative space and winter. Everybody has to jump over an abyss at some point. I play Blueberry Hill on a peach harmonica. And a minute later I get a call from Mick Jagger. He will give a million dollars to never play the peach harmonica again. But I can’t help it. I can’t hold out. It’s got to be done. It’s got to be said. Life is weird among the dead. Sing the dead. All the way from Saturn. Which smells of amaretto.

It’s time to go home now. This is where the pedal meets the metal. Everything hurts like a gospel. King Kong breaks his chains and leaps from the stage. It was meant to be. Tear up Montmartre do what tear up time tear up space rip it up rip it all up. The poem never finds the right angry vapors to make the air feel stupid. And the clouds are mostly picnic areas and spoons. I fooled you world. I’m still listening to the Doors. Weird scenes in the gold mine. I wish I’d written that. Before AI gobbles it up. And spits it out in a university classroom. I’m lost. Lost in space. You can find it through wandering. Liberation. Salvation. Absolution. And then lose it again. And go looking for it again. In a different place. And a different time. And a different body. And a different set of circumstances. The light sweetens at the end, regardless of the tune. 

Running

I love running. I love the exhilaration of running, the elevation of mood, the euphoric charge of unfettered movement. Any time I find myself caught up in stressful speculations or dreary ruminations, running pulls me out of the muck and sets me back on solid ground. It takes my mind off the nonsense and puts me back in my body, where I belong. Sometimes it takes a mile, sometimes two, but gradually the mind-numbing miasmas of brooding and worry dissipate, and the invigorating immediacies of wind and cloud and sunlight and frost get my full attention. The space between my ears gains clarity. Relentless gloom turns rowdy.

I started running when I was 45. It was a complete surprise. I’d never been athletic. Not in grade school. Not in high school. Not on planet Earth. I spent my adolescence lounging and lollygagging whenever I could, reading books like Brave New World and Dharma Bums and Tropic of Cancer and getting high on rock and whiskey when time and luck and opportunity triangulated on the weekends. It was a long adolescence. I only recently felt its last little tremor quietly vanish in a bubbly, wistful poof. Age 45, middle age, was a renaissance. In 1986, after my second divorce, I went into a clinical depression. With the help of some meds and therapy I became quite friendly with Bacchus once again. Alcoholism is a darn sight better than depression, but its fatiguing, and saps your life energy. I have to hand it to Charles Bukowski. That guy had stamina. I quit drinking in 1990 and began attending AA meetings. I loved the AA meetings. I discovered how much I like to talk. Conversation is the next best thing to sex. And combined with sex, it is most certainly at the top of the hit parade.

Two years later, in 1992, I quit smoking. And that’s when the running began. I started out doing a couple of miles, then increased my distance to about six miles. I had a beautiful run that went from the crowded, narrow streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill district up a gentle slope to the broad lawns and stately, 1890 ambiance of Volunteer Park down to the narrow road winding its way through the heavily wooded serenity of Interlaken, cross 23^rd street, segue into the arboretum, and loop around to home again. I was doing this at 5:00 in the morning, so it was quite serene, with no traffic, just me and the raccoons.

And now I’m 77. Still running, though the running has begun to feel a little more critical, a little more urgent, and a little more strenuous. I’ve learned how to avoid overuse injuries, which put frustrating holes in my running routine. I’ve always got a bit of runner’s knee – also known as patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) - is a chronic pain in and around the kneecap. I had it so bad once following a half-marathon that I was limping like Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys. Unfortunately, nobody younger than 70 will get that allusion. But maybe you can find it on YouTube. Crotchety Walter Brennan as Grandpa Amos McCloy grinning and limping into the TV screen. That was me limping down Mercer Street at the finish of the half-marathon. Crotchety old me dreaming of one day catching up to Mick Jagger.

The stubbornest overuse injury was peroneal tendonitis, an inflammation of the peroneal tendons, which run along the outside of the ankle and help stabilize the foot. I took eight weeks off from running and iced and massaged the afflicted area at the edge of my foot, but it persisted. I made an appointment with a podiatrist who X-rayed my foot and turned it from side to side and emphasized the importance of running shoes, and taking time off. I told him I’d been in the habit of running every day of the week. He suggested I start with a running schedule of two days on and one day off. Later, I can try running three days, two days off, or three days on, one day off. See how it goes. The important thing is to give your body time to recover. Damaged muscle tissue needs to be repaired. The cells need to disassemble old or damaged cell parts and use whatever is salvageable to create new cells. It’s called cellular recycling. There’s also mitosis, the generation of cells that are genetically identical to one another. He returned to the subject of running shoes and recommended two brands, which he scribbled on the back of a prescription form, which made it an official prescription, which I handed to the clerk at the shoe store, who went in the back and brought a pair of elegant ghosts (Ghost is a shoe brand) and invited me to try them on and do a little jog outside to get a feel of them. They felt fine, lighter and thinner than my regular shoes, which have good support, but don’t distribute weight properly. I’m not an expert on the engineering of the human foot – a subject that fascinates me – and neither am I a good judge of shoe engineering. But whatever the dynamic is, my new high end running shoes, my Ghosts, had a decidedly salubrious effect. My foot was feeling better within a week. I liked the new schedule, too. On my day off I began a dumbbell routine. I enjoy lifting dumbbells. I feel an affinity to them. The brand name is Ethos. Ethos dumbbells.

But it’s still running I love best. Outdoors with open sky and crows and robins and hummingbirds and sparrows and the geese down by Lake Union expands the mind. Mind and sky seem like the same thing. The same energy. The same mists and mountains of air.

Every time I commit to going for a run, I make it a point of pride to never change my mind and go back. There’s a joy in being a little Spartan. Intemperate weather can be invigorating. I’ve been hailed upon and snowed upon and poured upon. Today was different. It was cold—about 43 degrees—and pouring rain. March rain. That rain that’s been spurred by winter and whipped by the wind. It’s a mean rain. Inconsiderate. Downright sassy. Penetrates the skin. Kisses the bones.

A few weeks earlier, R - my wife - had been ravaged by an intense respiratory virus. She coughed nonstop for over a week. Watching her slowly get better was a great relief. We’re both getting on in years. I was afraid of contracting the same illness, which could be fatal. A few months previous to R’s illness, in late August, after passing a kidney stone, I caught a respiratory virus that sent my temperature soaring to 104 degrees. R stripped the covers and blankets off the bed and covered my naked body with towels soaked in icy water. This got my temperature down to a 101-degrees. It took at least two weeks to recover from that bug.

Running strengthens the immune system. But there’s a limit to that, and that limit becomes increasingly apparent with age. It’s a situation I liken to that moment late at night when a bar closes and the bartender turns the lights on and off, which shatters that pleasant state of Dionysian insouciance with the leaden inevitability of closing time. Always a bummer. Mortality sucks. Mortality is another kind of bar. No booze. No bartender. But the flus and broken bones and rashes and dimmed vision and diminished hearing of senescence are the lights of the bar turning on and off. It’s closing time. The problem is, I’m not ready to leave yet. Deep down, there’s a twinkling little light, a stirring, an agitation, a rebellious quickening of nerve. And there it is. My adolescence again.

R and I generally run together. We’ve been running together for 30 years. Lately, she’s had to take a break. On December 26^th, as we were running down the sidewalk running parallel to Mercer, she got distracted by some crows, tripped, and felt flat on her face, breaking a molar, scraping her chin and inflaming her facial muscles. She needed a dentist, tout de suite. Our normal dentist did not provide an emergency service. He suggested we go to the emergency room. But emergency rooms don’t have dentists. We called another dentist and got a message suggesting an emergency dentist in downtown Seattle. We called and were able to get in that same day. Several hours later, after some screaming, the dentist managed to get the molar out in five pieces, which he later showed me, describing how difficult it had been to remove. The good news was that she hadn’t broken any bones or injured any joints. The bad news was the number of weeks it took for the inflammation to go down. She took several months off from running and has started again running with me again. Somewhat gingerly at first, of course.

Sunday, March 16th. We go for a run. The air is crisp and invigorating. R is doing well. She's able to keep up with me, which makes me glad. Very glad. We've been enduring a lot of anxiety lately, due to the savage cuts that the president has been making on federal programs like Medicaid, and Medicare, and now even Social Security. We feel very precarious. Nothing in the public domain feels remotely under our control or influence. The country doesn't feel stable. A rug has been pulled out from under our feet. Running isn’t a panacea, but it does help you keep on your feet during times of unrest and volatility. It’s one of the few things over which we have choice and agency. And – unlike skiing or parasailing - it’s relatively inexpensive. The shoes can get a little pricey, but apart from that, all you need is the will, the time, and a pair of feet.

Wild And Weird And Hungry

This is trembling. This is climbing into you. A sentence. A thought. Purple damask by enkindling it with your eyes. Bright light in a drugstore. Grace crashes into a bundle of comic books. Cosmopolitan. Vanity Fair. Maire Claire. What a fashion is exhibited next to the tailor. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Naked iron percussion. Snow.

Let us now exceed the sniff of amazement and rise into ponderation. Charming behind stilts, the dynamic parody of shoes plunges into trigonometry. Animatron Ezra Pound shuffles forward. He offers to shake your hand. If you raise an embryonic comma, this will secure a pause in a sentence as yet unwritten. Words are compelling. They demand utterance, and writing, and megaphones. A magisterial bearing. A savage devotion. A deepening sense of fungus. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Jokes told in a hurry. I’m nailing my boil down as an impatient example of something I haven’t thought of yet. I’m waiting for the words to get here. Compliments wing the fiddle. It’s all about husbandry. And cabbage. The words are here now. Pulsing like a tortilla.

Opposites I flirt with growl their logic, and they become a song. What kind of whisper builds life with an indentation? Have you ever been stabbed by a woman’s eyes? All my responses to life have been like this lately. Nothingness bruises my syncopation with my own biology. Think of it as a nipple haunted by your own initiative. Hope hears the quixotic but not the chronology. Some men look like they could fix a sink. Others don’t. Heave this hammer against the milieu: if it hits a nail, the calliope will expand your clutch. Former inabilities will become billboards. Past associations will become banquets. Life provides us with a construction to carry. Some have wheels. Some have cuticles. See which gets there quicker. The bike with the pounding pistons, or the sad horns riding over the chatter.

My dismissal of orthogonal control forms the landscape. That little acreage I call my own here. This place of planting. This place of seeding. This place of revolt and metaphor. Various tumultuous symptoms indicate the presence of bias. I try hard to maintain some objectivity, the success of which largely depends on fiction, the kind of things one tells oneself when principles are at stake, and the pursuit of adventure unfurls in sumptuous Technicolor. William Burroughs sitting on a Kansas yard in a lawn chair. Hands clasped together. Musing. There was never a better time for resetting the clock and refining one’s sense of inertia. Redefining. Better way to put it. Circulate thought with exultation. Everybody loves a tidepool. Grasp something offshore and misty when the world grows hard and emphatic. Bring it home. Hose it down. Give it a name. Set it down gently on the landscape and watch it take off, wild and weird and hungry. 

 

A Sad Development: The Erosion Of Free Speech During A Time Of Crisis

Does it make sense to write poetry when the world has grown this delirious? When people are being arrested for protesting a genocide?

The erosion of free speech has been brutal. There’s now a big hole in the language and all sorts of demons are rushing out. Demons of fear. Demons of greed. Demons of isolation. Demons of secrecy and sectarian taboos. Demons of arbitrary destruction. Demons of oil. Blood diamond demons in luxury hotels. Demons of grime and Mammon. Demons of fraud. Demons of genocidal denial. Demons of linguistic sepsis. Organ failure. System failure. Heart failure.

It's a sad development. And we were warned. We were warned by books and movies. We were warned by the philosophers and scientists of the age.

They told us that war is stupid and vile and a racket for the rich. They told us that it takes courage to live and courage to die. That life and death are one and the same and that everything appears and disappears. That change is constant. That everything is in flux. That emperors come and emperors go. That it is better to hide ignorance, but difficult to do this over wine.

They told us the universe began as an extremely dense and hot point that rapidly expanded outwards, creating the universe we observe today, the roosters crowing at dawn on Kauai, the cry of seagulls over the waves of Puget Sound, the bulbous head of a harbor seal gazing at the stream of people on the walkway, the alignment of Mercury, Venus, and Mars in early March, viewed from the sidewalk in front of the 5 Spot Café, the James Webb Space Telescope finding a black hole in the galaxy CEERS 1019, which formed only 570 million years after the Big Bang, and is unusual because it's relatively small, weighing only 9 million times the mass of the sun. Ancient galaxies, supermassive black holes, and nebulae. Globular clusters. Stellar Streams. And life on earth with fields of lavender in Provence and old barns in Wyoming, bull sharks off the coast of Zambezi and spurts of afternoon rain on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. TV. YouTube videos. Nina Simone. Billie Holiday. Carl Sagan hosting Cosmos. All manifestations of the universe. The death of a warrior. The birth of a star.

We’re aware of the universe surrounding us. We’re aware of the universe within us. We’re aware that each of us is an issuance of the universe. Ergo, we’re the universe self-aware of itself as a universe. The universe studying the universe. Which is a stunning implication. Consciousness is an inherent property of the universe. Consciousness is me typing these words and consciousness is the sun squeezing hydrogen atoms to make heat and light. Consciousness is to speech what speech is to the heat and light of the mind, boundless within a sphere of bone.  

Quantum entanglement, where particles can be linked across vast distances, could explain how consciousness might be interconnected throughout the universe. Some scientists conjecture that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s seemingly infinite ability to find relationships between things, between ideas and concepts, between waves and wind and the distant chatter of background radiation, the residue of the Big Bang.

We are, emphatically, interconnected. Every tribe, nation, country, clan, progeny, dynasty, scion, house, society, lineage, language: interconnected. Every time someone kills someone part of that someone dies with their victim.

Language parallels the evolution of species, sudden spurts of linguistic speciation rather than steady accumulations of change, thus proving Kerouac’s bop prosody and the inherent capacity of words to leap into longer and wider trajectories, dilations of thought that follow the dilations of the universe, and lead to invention and engrossing amusements, the non-linear, quantum leap of the mind unfettered by dogma, by doctrine, by state propaganda. There’s a natural exhilaration in conversation that reveals the pulse at the core of things. The giddy pleasure of allowing one’s speculations to manifest and reveal themselves in a free flow of speech is itself wildly evidenced in the eruptions and expansions of the universe, of gravitational waves undulating with the fabric of spacetime as they propagate outwards, creating suns and planets and asteroids and moons.

So how does it happen that a language shuts down? That certain words be excluded from speech? That opposing narratives can get people detained at airports, or arrested and thrown into prison? You can’t stop a universe from being a universe. And you can’t stop the truth from being the truth by forbidding certain speech. The powerful are always fearful of losing their power. They maintain power by controlling narratives. Surrounding themselves with mythologies that conform with nothing in reality, but chain the mind and tongue to a false empire maintained by force. The universe goes on expanding. The universe doesn’t stop being a universe. It’s out there. And it’s in here. Here in these words. And the breath that gives them meaning and motion.

Welcome To My Daydream

I try to make my clothing as evocative as possible. It’s because the sunlight has an elsewhere in it. And nowhere else to go. Nothing jams a zipper like rust. In the old days, when the blackberries appeared on the vine, and a simple forelock could sustain a veranda, we did the mashed potato. This was before the furrows held water. I know differently now. I can nullify our assumptions with a piccolo. Go push a desk. I mouth hawks during chivalry. Sound is to glass what gas is to quandary. Another offspring due to femininity. Most of my feelings are auburn, and being somewhat of an expert on daydreaming, this isn’t the first wall I’ve walked into. What wall, one might well ask. There is no wall. And to that I say welcome, welcome to my daydream.

The depth it takes to hold a spoon is watery. It wanders through me like a sentence. I push, I accept, we adapt. The sentence readjusts. It becomes a celebration. The surrounding greenery signals its doctrine of chlorophyll. The pitcher in the middle fills with detail. Gorgeous from every angle, my thermostat is torn between absurdism and quantum entanglement. The room is never too hot or cold it’s always fissionable. The algebra there is always in upheaval. Picasso’s teasing asserts a giddy acceleration. It was the summer I climbed below gravity to find some curriculum. Wet with fascination, a chronology jaywalks across a wasteland in search of a worry. Paradise reflects the grass this thunders. We send all the cocoons we groom to Nineveh.

I scribble an impiety in grease next to the shop of improbable shapes. A woman comes out and tells me that faith is the fog of a long disquiet. I engorge with equilibrium. I tell her I’m waiting for a religion to materialize. This is the hunger walking around in me seeking solidarity. I skim a staircase during onions. And suddenly, out of nowhere, an olive appears. Clearly, garnishment sends its radar out to map our intentions. Everything hinges on accelerants. The next step I take will determine the course of my ascent. Either I shoot right up, or the sheen of my sweat will pack a mighty railroad. I'll know what to do when the time comes. I adjust my anonymity. I feel lucky. The epilogue remains speechless.

This much I know: I need to learn how to transform data into actionable insights. Otherwise, what’s the whole point of the mackerel? Let the mind exceed its ideas of scale and trigonometry to stimulate one’s improvisations. I shall continue my painting drop by drop until it perceives a loophole, allowing me to walk into a different performance. Meanwhile I’m going to stop all the candles until my adulthood arrives. There’s a cactus that awakens the climate. We won't need a wide-eyed vein antenna. But we will need a thought to dangle over the abyss of our flatulence. I will get some clay for my insistence on yardarms and spars. Something needs to be done. Every pulse adheres to a specific muscle. We pound our blood with foreboding. There’s a curve in our proposal that is silly with grouse. How much longer need I point to the sky? Don't bang a fingernail to spite the cat. It all works out in the end. 

Pixies In Pixels Garlic In Garamond

The olive tree is a stump to the river. I’m straining to understand the situation. There’s an abstraction beyond the construction of the eyes that fulminates like a landscape measured in quarks. It has those deep blues you find in the Proto-Renaissance of Italian art, those earthy tones of burnt Sienna and Venetian red, pigments like Terra Rosa and gold leaf halos. We come now to a hiatus in our amble, a massive furrow of fallow life, teeming with worms. The shovels lying around the grounds display a certain sagacity, a knowledge like grilled eggplant, and a drizzle of good olive oil. Perhaps this will help explain the reason I've chosen this moment to structure an apology for you, and why it's taking so long to get to the end of this sentence, which was originally intended to be a tiny wrinkle in the fabric of space and time, and has grown into this kingdom of garlic, in which aesthetic considerations trump economics, thereby causing butter.

I consider butter to be among some of my richest experiences on planet Earth. Everything tastes better with butter. And by everything I mean russet and rural and ruthlessly gurgled. Something like a sun. And a fence. And a day in the country, hunting cranberries. I think it’s high time we got to know one another. You’ve been coyly glancing aside at something peripheral all afternoon, something in the field of our vision that I haven’t written down yet. What is it? I’m not a mind reader. Unless, of course, the mind has rendered itself in an alphabet, a body of words streaming forth in the air, or flowing in stillness upon the paper of a page. Bobbing up and down. Or floating in a milieu of digital code. Fonts. Helvetica or Roboto. Pixels in a screen. Penguins on a shelf. Proteins in a proton. Polygamy in a porthole. Pixies in the meadow. Pixies in the forest. Pixies in the bathroom. Pixies on stage. Doing “Where Is My Mind?”

There’s a drama near us blinking plays. I think what's needed now is a boat propeller, something to move us forward in time. I’d like to get a closer look at the trellis in your blouse. If you could step forward and bow down a minute, the surrounding environment will make better sense, and things may evolve in different directions, mahogany in the rain, say, or a blue sweater abandoned by a river, and hanging from a branch of Amazonian cedar. I’m not the bombard I once thought I was. Just another rare species of clown with a brain in one hand and a cantaloupe in the other. Do people still carry notebooks? I do. But I’m weird. Always have been. Always will be. I'd rather be at the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end. That’s not a preference, that’s a commitment. My sense of belonging demands a casserole, at least. I want to hear that oven door opening. And all the way from the shores of Lake Geneva, and the Origin of the World, by Gustave Courbet, who knew a good brush when he saw one, and painted with the delicacy of a guest. 

The Gift Of Speech

I love this time of year. Winter loosens its grip and the air begins to warm. Everything hovers on a threshold of blossoming. Scientists caress their abstractions. Our inner gold aches and murmurs. It takes a sensitive pair of hands to fondle a conversation. The jokes are good and the punchlines accentuate our exultation. Reveries engulf the lyceum. We hear the lucidity of scruples warm the logic of soap. We hear things from very far away, tauntingly indefinable yet vaguely familiar. The sound of thunder on the surface of Venus is deliciously eerie. What does the other side of my life sound like? The rustle of a gown in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Madness in its apogee. Frank Zappa talking to Joan Rivers on the Tonight Show, 1986. Please don’t mock my children’s names. I urge a new rebellion against generalization. All else may be considered details.

The future? It's still too distant to know for sure. Is it an Oort cloud, or a contusion? The life I started 77 years ago is still hugely influenced by music. That doesn’t sound entirely convincing. Would it be more accurate to say that the life that started me 77 years ago was largely induced by hunger? Which never gets satisfied. Not completely. Some do better than others. You can see it in their apathy. We don’t have fur like other animals, or instincts or fangs. What we have is largely myrtle and folklore. Skin is quite sensitive and requires wool and gyration. It’s a defining moment. Everyone has their own cherished opinion regarding paddling a kayak. But one thing is universally accepted as true: music is a large thick bowl of consciousness. It's like sipping wine with your ears instead of your mouth. Melodies bend everything towards life, like Nina Simone, while a variety of rhythms shape our convulsions, like André Breton. The tongue fire has a pleasant taste. It wraps itself around our needs and gives us the gift of speech.

There is a hummingbird in the park that I have become very fond of. We communicate by telepathic confetti. It has 88 tentacles and a head the size of the Hagia Sophia. Maybe it’s not a hummingbird. Maybe it’s a mosque. Or a mosaic. Or a tiny pterodactyl reading Le Monde. The definition of things requires a compelling narrative, a wonderful inscrutability and a good imagination. I agree that what a conceptual idea of religion may alter may not be the final float in the enigma parade. We make gasoline as well as suture veins. There’s nothing one can’t do with a roll of string and a bag of parables. The first thing I look for when I come to town is a good barbershop. That’s where people get their news. Or scroll their phones. Looking for news. Ancestry and beach resorts. Or just sit around bleeding quietly to themselves.

Was there ever a Twilight Zone episode in which the main character discovers that everything they say has the power to produce actual physical results? Let’s call our friend X. So if X says to Z “take a hike,” Z goes on a hike. Or if X says to Y, “go stick your head up your ass,” Y attempts to insert his/her head up their ass. X has issues, it would seem. But say X proclaims “I wish neoliberal capitalism would die and a social democracy would take its place.” The next morning all the podcasts are chattering about the White House frantically restoring all the government agencies recently eviscerated (thoroughly reformed, of course, and fully staffed with highly efficient, deeply empathetic, altruistic experts and happy, competent workers) and subtracted a considerable amount of money from the Pentagon budget to give back to the population to help with inflation and infrastructure. And yes – oh yes! – free healthcare and college education for everyone. And no more homelessness, or war, or genocide. And so, engorged with power, X goes on a wild drunken spree. And in abject drunkenness and an irrepressible appetite for self-sabotage X starts sermonizing about how totally absurd everything is and stupid and meaningless and that’s when Rod Serling appears and smokes this sentence until it’s completely gone. 

 

Prelude And Fugue

More and more when I’m typing on a keyboard I feel like I’m playing a piano. The laptop has keys. A piano has keys. The parallel is compelling. I like to picture myself as a shy Victorian man hammering out whirlwinds of lush music on a baby grand. Concertos. Nocturnes. Arpeggios. Glissandos. Arpeggios. Adagios. Allegros. A salon full of people sporting ostrich feathers and top hats. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let your ego go wild. Even in a fascist dystopia. Though the proposition is somewhat ludicrous. And sad. I don’t want to get too carried away here. There was a time one could live somewhat askew to the reality of things, a little aslant and out of the picture. Now you’ve got to be alert. The old ways are gone. The new ways are just getting started. New ways to resist. And insist. Like the beginning of Monk’s Crepuscule with Nellie, tender and woozy, with its percussive ascension and off-balance shadows. Waitress with a tray of espresso. Sad candles in the dimness of a bistro. Sartre writing madly.

Outside is dimly heard the broken music of the street. Cars, trucks, people, pigeons, crows, jackhammers, industry, attitudes, attorneys, perturbations, accelerations, shops, molecules, abstractions, riddles, quarrels, accents, appointments, aspersions, asphalt, sirens, emergencies, currents, helicopters, jets.

The music of the spheres is the music of proportion, the movement of celestial bodies. It’s not an audible music, but a music of the soul. It pervades everything.

Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.

“Thus, the thickness of things is opposed only by a demand of the mind, which every day makes words more costly and their need more urgent,” wrote Francis Ponge in 1933 in a proeme titled Témoignage, meaning testimony. 

“No matter. The resulting activity is the only one in which all the qualities of this prodigious construction, the person, from which everything has been called into question and which seems to have so much difficulty in frankly accepting its existence, are brought into play.”

Piano notes are so clean, so pure, that it would seem a travesty to compare them to words, which are inherently messy, and whose roots dangle like raw pink tentacles hoisted out of the dirt, their connections to the rhizomatic underworld temporarily severed. A cluster of notes in a melodic line are self-contained and unrestrained. The patterns are impromptu. Words require networks. Earth. Microbes. Fungi. They have histories. Resonances. Laminations. Stratum. And are forever jealous of music.

Music is supremely good at creating a sense of anticipation. There are many compositions in which the music seems to be building toward something, epiphany or high. There’s a delicious sensation in a heightened tension. Anticipation of an abstract reward can lead to dopamine release in the striatum. By avoiding the tonic, the listener subconsciously wants to hear it, and so it creates a very powerful sense of musical energy. The anticipation of something marvelous. Something mathematical and jeweled and metal and wood. Something maned and grammatical like 73 jumping horses and two chariots going round and round a center pole on a circular platform at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Robin Guthrie, Carousel, released August 28, 2009.  “A sonic palette with a personality all its own,” quipped music critic Joshua Klein.

Certain questions are raised. How does one go from the inorganic to the organic? How does a brew of chemicals become a milieu of tubes and testicles? How does a fireball become an eyeball? How does a rosewood become an oboe? How does a word become a worm? How does a worm become a word? How does a gourd become a chord? How do atoms become spasms? How do feuds become fugues? How does pilin become Dylan? How does Bach become rock?

If you listen closely, the beauty of the joke is obvious. Turpentine had nothing to do with it. It all began with a contagion of laughter. A set of allegorical equations languishing in a pile of engine blocks and coefficient levers. The remarkable cathedrals and soap bubbles extending from Mr. Potato Head’s combustible locution. As if nothing mattered but ping-pong. Or the furniture of unmanageable outfields. Each pebble is a fascinating world. Especially the ones encrusted with adjectives. There’s no need for concern. All life is messy. Evolution cries out for underwear. Even the cheese has something to say. It's hard to disagree with a world this incoherent. You might try walking in the sand. Before the color orange became a muscle, the disorder was all about feathers. And now it’s all about trains. My railroad nerves and everything they unlock.

 

Have You Ever Stumbled Over A Hyperobject?

Have you ever stumbled over a hyperobject? A black hole? The colossal California drought? Capitalism? A tectonic plate? How about language? French, Spanish, Mandarin, Hungarian, Somali, Tahitian, Hawaiian, Hindi, Igbo? Did you stub your toe? Did you bring it home as a funky collector’s item? Put it in a glass case? Stuff it into a box? Find a place for it in the garage?

Language meets all the identifying features of a hyperobject. The hyperobject (a term coined by environmentalist Timothy Morton) is an object that is so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity. Examples of this are the internet, evolution, charismatic facts, eco-socialism, elite emissions, relativity, habitat nostalgia, sites of significance, the biosphere, all plastic ever manufactured, Styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. Hyperobjects have temporal undulation. They ripple through time in ever widening circles, encompassing all within their circumference, combining and incorporating other phenomena.

Language does this. All languages do this. They invite immersion. They modulate moods. They ignite relations. I never feel outside language, I feel like I’m inside a language. In my case, English. I feel that I’m inside English. It’s so much a part of my being.

For example, that gut-wrenching scene in Hamlet, Act III, scene 4, after Hamlet has forced his mother rather violently to look inside herself and won her over to his argument, though not entirely, so that she feels divided, heavily conflicted, and assuages his demands with this painfully uttered parcel of speech: “Be thou assured, if words be made of breath / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou hast said to me.”

Our relationship with our mother tongue is as intimate as the blood circulating our veins.

I’ve been studying French for over two decades now but I still feel outside it. The day I feel inside French is the day it becomes so natural to speak it it will feel like an additional appendage, a new arm with a new hand, un nouveau bras avec une nouvelle main. My emotions will flow expressively form my mouth in new sounds, new phonemes, new hues and tumultuous outbursts.

There’s a strange volatility running through all languages, an irrepressible instability inherent in any vast, boundless, illimitable entity. Weather, for example, which is essentially the behavior of a gas, observable in terms of temperature, precipitation, clouds and wind and lightning and thunder. Air is a chief component of language, and there are storms in language, the thunder of great speeches, simooms of gripping narrative, chinooks of impassioned confabulation, flashes of lightning we call poetry.

“A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry,” writes Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

All potions, all drams and elixirs, all medicines, all tonics, all brews and libations have side effects. That’s what makes them so much fun. Side effects are usually thought of as adverse, but some side effects, such as intoxication – elation, euphoria, intemperance, giddiness – are often enlightening and inspirational. Sometimes the nearest one can get to the truth of any situation is by distorting one’s perception. A really good lie will often lead straight to the truth. Language can also have profound effects on neurology. Bilingualism can lead to increased gray matter density in areas of the brain involved in language processing, and increased white matter integrity, which connects different brain regions. Language learning boosts brain plasticity and the brain’s ability to code new information. It strengthens neural connections and the ability to profit from counterintuitive information. Particularly, that of poetry. Its fantastic irrationality. Its open abuse of logic. Its uncanny resemblance to fingernails. Its word-by-word assembly of neurons in an act of passionate ganglia.

Poetry is one of the more potent side effects of language, a phenomenon loved by many, a supercilious indulgence and effrontery to human dignity hated by most. Poetry is a potent distillation of all the inherent capacity language has for elevating one’s awareness, one’s diversions and playfulness. A lot of people are happy just to get through the day as quickly and profitably as possible, and to accomplish this via self-restraint and taciturnity and maintaining a tight focus on empirical and commercial concerns. But there’s also a substantial group enthralled with the grandeur of the spoken word, the free-form flow of rhapsodic enchantment, the manic impulses of incantation, the stunning blast of an inspired phrase, or the distillations of a haiku.

The haiku is to a hyperobject what a hyperobject is to a pond: a kerplunk valued in ripples. It brings everything full circle, out of the abstract and back into the real. Or the surreal. The wonderful feeling of a cold knob on a hot day. The breeze that preceded a sneeze. The electric smell of the air on the prairie prior to a storm. A wall of purple so deep and weird it bruises the eyes. The distant sound of a tractor. The hog in the pen. The cog in the wheel. The sting in the needle. The alloy in the steel. The persistent, exquisite pain of an existence baked into a book. The words we meant to say that came out different, that got to the point faster than we did, and left us with an infinite number of ways to figure out why, and what got us to this point, and the many detours along the way.

The Volatile Dispersion Of The Mind

Space is curved, which is a cause of motels. Not everybody gets a room at the Hotel Destiny. The one downtown, with the wonderful lobby and magnificent chandelier depicting 3,000 fluttering crystal butterflies. We’re not going somewhere special anyway. Not the Seychelles. Not this week. This is the big time. This is where the elasticity of time gets stretched into an afternoon at Giverny, France. The mouth is funny when it moves around the face making words come out. But pay attention. We’re facing a new bend in the river. Hang on tight. And paddle hard. People often ask where I got my accent. I got it from forging metaphors. Which is called forgery. And is punishable by French. This is why I wear so many hats. And have so many participles in my pants. I’ve got a cow on my buckle and a calamity in my swerve. Everyone endures their own evolution. We should jingle the unfolding of ourselves as we're taking in water and bailing like crazy as our friends surround us wondering what the hell this is all about. 

It's really funny when an empire collapses. And by funny I don’t mean ha ha ha I mean weird. It’s a weird feeling. There are no navigational devices for sailing this feeling anywhere where it might make better sense. When the usual signposts and markers come down and people walk into you as if you were a ghost the resulting dismay and confusion aren’t helpful. An artful nod to the biodiverse rainforests of Indonesia might be in order. Or a transition to bitcoin. There are no maps for this place. No exchange rates. Currencies become sensations, spheres of luminosity rising out of decay. Nothing is true, everything is permitted, said Nietzsche. Don’t let it defeat you. Walk speedily, and with deliberation. Volume wallows in volume because the universe is essentially a single living entity. A murmuration of starlings. A lump of dirt teeming with words.    

The volatile dispersion of the mind, which has nothing to do with anything other than the musicality of all things (Stéphane Mallarmé), incandesces under the charms of polysemy, attains the unattainable by semiotic horseplay and semantic legerdemain, squeezes the universe in and out like an accordion, hurls knives of conviction at carnival balloons, rings melodies out of empty whisky bottles, sings like an angel and plays the piano like a fiend. Our mission is clear. The paradox must achieve its theoretical destiny and flare into a full irresolution. There exists, below us, an orgasmic fairyland. Stands of heartwood. Garlicky Druids. Whirling dervishes. Pornographic priestess. Unimaginable pleasures. Hell and heaven depends on one's point of view. One person's heaven is another person's hell and one person's hell is another person's derailment. Control is illusion. Illusion is control. We're all churning inside with something. It's time to release the kraken. For the sounds of the kraken are stunningly and shockingly sweet. They give us chills, like a pantomine in leather. The melodies carry spoons and the tempo is a big bowl of caviar. I think if things continue much longer in this vein we might see something move. An eerie glow vanish into the night, accompanied by a sharp e minor on a lip of syntax. 

How Funny

How funny that Whitman's and Dickinson's approach to the poetic line are polar opposites. It’s a weird symmetry: at one end expansiveness and at the other end Emily Dickinson touching the universe. Whitman is large, monumentally large, he speaks with the authority of the cosmos, he sees vistas, he embraces the sky, he sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots, his rhythms have the thunder of incantation, the electric clarity of lightning, the convergence of rivers, the taciturn sitting on barstools are obdurate kings of independence. Everything is food and air for the spirit of liberty, rejecting none, accepting all. His lines are long and sprawling and dispersive pageants of democratic ebullience. Emily’s lines are quick and elusive, ecstatic éclats of airy cargo, a slash of blue, a wave of gold. Silent dramas of midnight frost. Riddles. Little clocks. Balms and nectars. I love them both. They invigorate me in different ways. One expansive, one taut as the skin of a drum. Both engorged with lungs.

How funny to be alive and not know why. No manual. No instructions. No swag bag. But here you are inhabiting a sack of skin and bone. You learn a language. The language inseminates you with the values and ornaments of the people among whom you live. You assume the attitudes and locutions of the figures you admire and this becomes an identity which is essentially fiction but helpful in the long run should you decide to become a beachcomber or media pundit. You get so used to being you that being me is a laughable proposition. I’m already me so you don’t have to be me. You be you. We’ve all been given roles. There’s no script. You just make things up as you go along. Try not to bump into the furniture. If you find a rapport with someone you’re lucky. You’ve struck gold. When frequencies blend you get a clearer idea of what this is all about. Where the play is headed. What to emote. What to say. What to read. What to convey.

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual – namely to You. Said Walt Whitman.

Make me a picture of the sun, so I can hang it in my room, and make believe I’m warm. Said Emily Dickinson.

How funny to grow up in a culture and think this is important, this is important, this is important and this is important and devote your life to something that to you on a deep personal level is important and then many years later as the culture disintegrates you painfully realize that what you thought was so important has no importance at all to what remains of the culture. It may well be still important to you but it’s not the same. Not the same at all. And what remains of the culture may be a stabilizing element like the availability of food or electricity or running water and a flushing toilet which lighten the burden of the body but don’t do a lot for the spirit.

It's funny how money assures one safe passage through life, particularly in a culture so fiercely devoted to it, to its management, its production, its intoxicating power. It doesn't matter how you got it, whether you embezzled it from a shady business or designed a vaccine, people admire you, envy you, cook you elegant meals, clean your toilets, make your bed, give you honors and awards. Whereas the poor are frowned upon, considered to be a nuisance, dumb and lazy and addled with drugs. What a scam! It’s what happens when the pious morph into criminals. Remember Tartuffe? Or W.C. Fields? “A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money. When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I’m old I know that it is.” But here’s what happens: inflation. The money dilutes. It’s like pouring a glass of water into a glass of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac. There’s more cognac, but significantly less value.

When I entered adulthood Henry David Thoreau was considered to be a great man. Today it’s Bill Gates. It’s hard to talk about money without getting preachy. Funny how that works. Funny how anything works. Because it’s all in flux. It’s all dark energy and dark matter. We’re all propelled by some force we don’t understand into doing things we don’t understand. It’s crazy. The dream of life deepens with every precipice and windshield wiper blade. Distance persuades us there is more ahead than we left behind. It’s what fuels the story. Nothing is ever over. It just keeps going. The road becomes a long unending destination. Infinity infringes on the margins, and smells of sage and lavender. Things fall into place. The novel gets larger as we read it. Pages get added to our biography. And so here we are, at the end of a sentence, dangling from a branch of prose, which is a form of entanglement, and worms and ideas. Asteroids. Hemorrhoids. Steroids. Words creating DNA. And mud and coffee and a mouth boiling with money.

  

You Can Never Step Into The Same Sentence Twice

Signal languor I'm braced for a cocktail. I want a long sophisticated paintable bronze in a tall glass of July. Let me lie here a while. Spring our communion against the mosquitoes. Put your eyes in a healing darkness. Use a big box.

There's an eyeball among my fingers. It needs a soft light.

I crawl along soaked in chopsticks. I correspond to the clouds above my literature.

Who uses that word anymore? People like to say literal. Literally a lot. When a perception strikes us, we complain about it. We give it time to evolve. We plant philodendrons. Some of which go public. Others languish in analogy. Some narrative possibilities follow us until our clothing turns so abstract nothing can interpret our intentions, least of all ourselves, and the narratives die alone, surrounded by Mauri warriors, and a chintz kilowatt.

Consciousness arrives gargling my tinsel. I’m hurrying as fast as I can to make sense of the treasure I see before me. You. Sitting in a chair. Reading Proust. 

Can you hear it? A granite stomach rises to the surface of an essay, digesting a moose.

The split between fantasy and reality is not entirely absolute. There have been some contradictions, notably that between wisdom and vertigo, and steam and stigmata.

Meanwhile, the sun’s magnetic fields twist and stretch as it rotates, creating plasma storms and scorched bananas, wide-eyed engorgement embellished with aerospace, atmospheric jungles and antique bravado, the spirit of poetry, which is studied in private with a bag of fries and a milkshake, and culminates in gulls.

The age of gravitation and how it behaves among these abstractions will make our ceremony argyle, if not hyacinth. Area is such a hungry significance. You have to fill it with something. It might as well be chili. The mind has its suppositions. If you hose them down, they’ll crumble right down to the waxy core, creating undulation, and is a form of undercurrent, a moist layer of category, which also applies to strawberries. Unofficially, it's the same with fire.

You can never step into the same sentence twice. It’s already journeying toward another adherence, another cohesion, another lost continent. It’s difficult to write things that make a detonation evolve the tea I’m pouring. I can’t get it out of my mind. A sticky sticker is a sticky idea. But a chattering weather is cheddar. Thus, as it snowed on our way home, we opened umbrellas and walked in silence, enjoying the crispness of the air, and the simplicity of its expression in dovetails, when even a painting can fail this reality, and scour it for your attention.