How To Hang A Thing In Speech

Islands fascinate me. They are isolated worlds - not in the scientific sense, but the wildly nonspecific sense - from the rest of the planet. The rest of the planet is, of course, teeming with human beings, and the occasional misfit grumbling in his rags the same question over and over to a thousand wrong answers. Life is different on islands. The problems are less monumental. The sky solves everything. Awakens a carpenter's grammar and builds a glass vocabulary. For housing humanity. Everyone has their own preferences, ideas, and sense of time. So they become islands. Talking to strangers. Every argument in favor of hair dyes is a statement tinged with a million desires, and not a little anxiety. And every blow is worth at least one antenna. A shaky vision and a gothic redemption. Ibiza at night is a crazy place. Not so much Grimsey. Which is stark, and desolate, and surrounded by humpback whales. It’s Gothic. Mythic. And cold. It’s a place for philosophers. Old woman gazing at the gloom of thunder in a cube of Icelandic spar.

I sense, get the feel of the cage, with this work, this frigate ahead of me. With which I will make volleys of what is funny and strange. I will fold my life into a bomb and explode it in somebody’s porridge. Or mind. Not because the mind is a form of porridge, but because it has language at its disposal, and subjectivity. The mind cooked by English is a polyglot porridge. The recipe is apparent in every jaw. Every beard and spice rack. Caraway. Nutmeg. Thyme. Glass slides depicting arrays of stained protozoans. Which is crazy in a way. Bacteria are why the men around here wear ties. That, and a paycheck. The way water eats a continent shore by shore is precisely how everything human gets shattered by inconvenient realties. Pavement, rainy nights in San Francisco, ancient coins unearthed on the property of a former rock star, the subjunctive case clenched in the hand of an ugly preposition. It’s always good to have a graceful look above the neck, no matter what lumpy old bag you have in your hand. To those who don’t know you, you will appear suspicious, and silly. And to those who do know you, you will appear lost in mystical absorption. No matter. Subjectivity is prodigal, and fits in a single pronoun. Like an island.

I like a long thin faucet that curves upward in a kitchen sink. Arches. And lets the water down in a long thin column. And is mute in its dream of service like an elephant. Whose trunk sprays water over its head. And views the world with two sad eyes. It's an odd thing to sweep a floor while listening to Eric Satie. There’s a simplicity in the action that parallels the simplicity of the music. Which isn’t simple at all. The notes are sprinkled into the world like pearls from a broken necklace. It's a strange syncopation that awakens the nerves to the things they carry around. Emotions big as planetariums. James Dean with a grievance and a knife. It explains it. What we fight about. Let’s face it, a real antagonism at root. That old chestnut: what are we here for? Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong. But they keep getting up, starting the car, scraping frost from the window, and heading to work, whatever meaning happens to be sleeping in those syllables, they’re awake now, your eyes are mingled in these words, as are mine, looking for you.

Don’t be shy. You know who you are. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim once said all things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. Ok, gotcha. So what’s your poison? I’m a fiend for marshmallows. Cannabis gummies. And Ritz crackers.

TV is a poison. I grew up with it. I love TV. I have a great respect for propaganda, even though I know it’s toxic. It’s a guilty pleasure. A very, very guilty pleasure. Propaganda is the sweet syrup of confirmation bias that bloats the ego, appeases a troubled conscience with a wonderfully plausible alibi, and kills societies, rots them from inside out. How many cop shows show so-called conspiracy theorists as QAnon wackos with a maniacal hatred of rules, hair-trigger tempers, huge gun collections, garages full of survival gear, deep delusional passions, sooner or later caught up in the inevitable terrorist plot, à la Ted Kazinsky, and brought down by well-meaning detectives doing their heroic, self-sacrificing best to prevent us all from descending into the chaos of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. A good fiction has the capacity to charm. To make you believe in its virtues. However distorted. However delusional. The gaslighting is sweet.

He can't stand any image of himself, he suffers from being named. He believes that the perfection of a human relationship lies in this absence of image: abolishing adjectives between oneself, between one and the other; a relationship that uses adjectives is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

Wrote Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Raw, simple being. Undefined. Unconfined. Naked. Is this what is meant by absence of image? Because I’ve just used four adjectives to define the undefinable. And gotten nowhere. The first thing to come to mind are descriptions of near-death experiences, in which being, no longer contained by a body, diffuses into a boundless, nebulous energy of pure consciousness. Pure love. A pure ego-less state of pure energy. So that throwing a net of adjectives over it is like trying to capture a solar eclipse with a shoebox. You’ll capture none of the silence, this visit from the sublime, moon shadows rolling through prairie grass, and hole of night in the sky.

The central drive of everything is insemination. Pollinators and poets.

Propagation begins with a cerebral whirlwind. Inspiration. Something must inspire its creation. Mountains, forests, cranberries. We went hiking, inflated and cleaned. And this happened. A steady pulse haunted the totem. The faces looked ready to say something. We are the colors of contingency. Stop thinking! Just ask yourself if the work has allowed you to walk outside of yourself into an unknown world. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s about movement, emotion, holistic correspondence, and wild speculation. Conjecture is the way to the possible. The beehives that mouth their seeming chaos among the houses of genre. The biology of pink waddles around in brown. There are fires in black unleashed by alluring hues of gray. We’ll have things to do when green turns blue. But prose? You need space for that. Freer, more open language, and sudden curious sensations. The feeling that, after dying, the soul diffuses with a universal consciousness. There is, for example, tangible evidence that syllables discharge lightning and thunder, and will sometimes attain the status of a bold perfume, depending on the circumstances, and the magnitude of the impulse that keeps popping up in all these bubbles, smiling at the spectral autonomy that allowed these raptures, and how to hang a thing in speech.

 

The New Antipathy

The new antipathy was a clean hypothesis. It was an operation propelled by participle. It had nothing to do with broccoli. This was about luminosity. The tumble of photons about a sewing kit. It had the flavor of anger seasoned with a little disrespect. I could feel the heft of its implications in every word. Imagine two detectives backing away from a radioactive predicate. They move cautiously, so as not to disturb the circumstance of its combustion, this spondee of pickled helium. Poetry is the cesium of capitalism. We’ve known that all along. And yet the old paddle wheelers continued going up and down the rivers. And a pesky little particle intractable to grammatical analysis exploded into an eyeball. A pretty one, with an iris the color of exoneration. Each time I feel swelling in my ankles I know that I'm about to try and explain something that I don't fully understand myself. I don’t even know what it is yet. Whether it’s a substance, a proverb, or a feeling new to this form, a radical new manifestation of beauty as light as gravity and violent as a thermostat. Truth is, I just don’t understand anything anymore. Not even jock itch. My line of work never required an office. But it did require beams of light intermingling with one another like words in a tugboat. I had to do something, or the whole virtue of the thing, the principle, you might even call it an appliance, a dishwasher or iron, would evaporate in wire. This wouldn’t be the first time my intentions became overly ambitious and spread its lather leeward, in the direction of Steamboat Springs. Hesitations can hesitate for so long they become sensations, semaphores on a flightdeck. If you’re going to land, land now. It’s time our feet felt something other than mountains. I’ve been swinging back and forth on a trapeze all day, looking down at all that sawdust, all those rash decisions and warm embraces wrestled to the ground like escalators. I want to get down and walk the ground again, like a real narrative, with eggnog skulls and long secluded strolls along the coast of a thrashing indecision.

What I’d like right now is a bubbly metamorphosis. I feel ready for something. Not sure what. Something with wings. Something slithery and supple and preposterous. My hammer glows amidst the many mental calls to my gut. Much of life is like that. Shoegaze. Kabuki. A guitar can alter one's sense of being. You can stand on a stage in front of a million people and still feel upside down. Employment is the monotony that usurps our expansion. Experience is the barracuda that echoes our scope. Aching is the stir that institutes our reach. Instinct is the syntax that spangles our luxuries. Then there’s the really naïve hope that a postage stamp can carry the weight of my mind to a wet sweater in Lowell. Like the old days. When Emily Dickinson rode a Harley up and own the streets of Amherst. Now we have bandwidth. Minds tethered to security issues. I remember owning a baseball glove once, but that’s as far as I got to understanding Jung, and the vital importance of third base. Until I solve the problem of how to get the energy of a man – me – into narrative, this will have lost its relevance, and I’ll sit here as usual, taking in the Stones, reminiscing, scribbling, stirring some form of soup, entwining a frayed mythology, thinking hard about the future, the one I left behind in 1976, on the freeway to California.

Don't let yourself be carried away by superficial reactions to a dark thought. Explore it as you would an underworld. There are things there that can fulfil or kill a grammar with a single mushroom. The key property is movement. The convergence of hands on a sticky substance. A kneecap embodies the fulcrum of ingenuity among the strippers. It’s all so meridional. I think of Napolean strolling the shores of Saint Helena. Euclid drawing shapes on scrolls of papyrus. Morning in the throat of a paradox. Words born from a luminous consciousness. Tumbling down the spine of a paragraph. Stumbling around in a slippery metaphor. This glitter of drug nebula in my balcony headlights is entirely salsa. Winter is the perfect time for rides in competitive forklifts. I heat by generating incidents as toward happens. The warp finger is insoluble below the fullness of your antifreeze. Think of it as an ear eating a toccata sandwich. A conquest by sudden crease of the sugar pronouns. I dwell in the yell of a reach to think it. I have fenced off the personality house for everyone's safety. The time of nutmeg is here. There are signs in the men’s room. Life is preoccupation with itself. Get used to habits. Make use of them. Lift what you value into a Technicolor future. Pedal to the metal. Merge with oncoming traffic.

Now, here’s the kick. I write this stuff for no particular reason. I spill my brains without incident not because it makes me happy but because I’m against the restraints of seclusion. I can feel myself drifting out to sea a little more each day. The horizon is dripping with thought. Clouds veined with lightning. Things are beginning to seesaw. I like dealing with these things straight on, like Dostoyevski. Meditating on the universe with the look of bad intent is bound to create a disturbance. It makes people nervous. The Zoo was one of the bars that lets you know the instant you walk in nobody here is interested in your aspirations. All they want is your utter indifference. The guts are a poor source of moss. Nobody fondles their shield. They clench it. I am more fucked with the devious than the genial. The genial are everywhere they know is there because it’s there not because it’s whispered into the ear like a secret. We have no secrets. Secrets age in old age. They become strains of old melody. And die in the drafts at the airport.

Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle

Now I know what Walter Benjamin meant by aura. Sometimes an image will seem to have a soul, so powerfully affective is its halo-like quality, its uniqueness, its presence, its authenticity and unabashed display of beauty. Such was an image I viewed last Tuesday at Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery near Olympia, Washington. The image was titled Foggy Sunset and is a photograph. Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction eroded an artwork’s aura by its one-step removal from the immediacy and inimitable singularity of its moment in space and time. Reproduction is, by default, a degradation. To listen to a CD or streaming service of Miles Davis’s “So What” isn’t the same as hearing Davis perform live at the Village Vanguard. You’d have to be a bit old to make that claim, but so what? The point is a lesson in discernment. Nothing beats immediacy, the qualia of a particular moment. We live in a universe of improvisation. Spinning yo-yos and spilled sugar. Orb webs beaded with dew. These things are true. But isn’t it possible, as with this particular photograph, that the aura has in no way been harmed by a perceived detachment from its original setting, but generates, out of its own uniqueness, its language of light and shadow, its liminal and irreproducible position at the threshold of the divine, an aura redolent of an individual’s diffusion into that beauty, and its uncanny stillness?  The act of creation has its own immediacy. The camera registers the visible in a simple click of the shutter, but it’s the dilation of an enchanted mind that carries its visions and apparitions into the light. “To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy,” declared Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

The mood is serene, crepuscular. A bright sun crosses a narrow wooden bridge traversing a small narrow pedestrian bridge with two towering evergreens to the far left, a cluster of shrubs, dark and well-defined in the immediate foreground, a tree in the center receding, phantom-like, into the mist and off to the far right – muted as a parenthetical remark - the limbs of a tree just barely visible, so veined and delicate they could be the nervous system of a very pale ghost. Also faintly bordering on invisibility is a streetlamp and a street sign. Most of the scene is void, nothingness and mist. The world appears softened, hypnotized into an exquisitely serene Elysium so pure in its twilight vision the ugliest despair couldn’t crawl its way in, or eat a hole in the glamour. And there goes the sun, rolling homeward to night, and dawn in another part of the world.

The entire scene would repose in a serene uniformity of mist were it not for several more contrasting details that excite a deeper reading: in the far upper left is a sharp, steel-like, triangular section of what I’m guessing is the overhang of a roof. It’s aggressive, a Darth Vader-like thrust from the industrial world of commerce and finance into this nirvana of fog and ease of letting go. The triangular section – shaped somewhat like an arrowhead - is matched by a smaller version lower down. Together, they seem more like clumsy intrusions, awkward displacements, than a deliberate attack, or an aggressive, colonizing force. They’re just there. Twin architectural forms remindful of what everybody loves calling the real world (overcrowded freeways, healthcare snafus, broken pipes, hysterical outbursts, greasy combs, existential dilemmas, supervillain tech giants, drug gangs, military strikes, drones, arcades, helicopters, etc.), caught in a moment of harmless tranquility like two corporate moguls peeking into the ultramundane.

I became engrossed in a number of photographs – a very up close and personal view of a clematis in one photograph, and a rose in another, both highly sensual, intensely actual and detailed – and a large, open view of two American battleships off the coast of Vietnam, circa the late 60s or early 70s, in other words the Vietnam War, with a Vietnamese fisherwoman in the foreground wearing a broad-brimmed nón lá, or “leaf hat,” maneuvering a small boat with a long bamboo pole, poised with seeming unconcern. Her face is shadowed by the broad brim of her hat and completely hidden, so we do not know what she might be thinking, or if there were visible on her face any expression revealing her mood, or disposition. This makes the photograph a hallmark of wartime ambiguity. There are no explosions, nothing ripping the air apart with death and shrapnel. It’s simply a moment of calm in a universe of spectacular volatility.

In the middle of the gallery was a dugout canoe crafted by hand and using an array of tools such as an adz for rough shaping, chisels and gouges for fine details. The canoe is named Flicker, and was the first dugout canoe Red Eagle worked on, setting up shop in 2005 in the Tacoma Art Museum parking lot. Work was finished in the summer of 2008. Flicker was put in the water and paddled up to Cowitchen up on Vancouver Island. “Merrie was skippering,” Red Eagle relates, “and was not happy about taking so much water while traveling thru the San Juans, so we added the cover on the stern. We also thinned out the hull and used her on the journey to Suquamish where we gifted it to our lead carver, David Wilson (Lummi).  He used her on several journeys.  Recently, Flicker (Dave renamed her ‘The Gift’) had been sitting a lot at his house. When we asked to use her for the exhibit, he noted that he was getting ready to refurbish her and start using her to do some traditional style fishing.”

My father was a designer, so I grew up with an appreciation for good design, and a particular fascination with the fusion of functionality and beauty. On display above Flicker was an array of paddles, and above them – hanging like scrolls – were drawings of the paddles, very precisely drawn, with numbered sections for aid in the carving process. Red Eagle picked one up and handed it to me: I was struck immediately by its sensuous shape and texture. It was wonderfully smooth and the curves were a pleasure to run my fingers over and around and under and across. I can only imagine the added pleasure of moving one of these paddles in the water and watching the swirls pass by in a sunlit glitter. “For the paddle blanks I used a grid form to make it easier to cut away the wood to make the paddle,” Red Eagle relates. “I started when I had heard about the Chief Leschi paddle that was at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. I knew the director from Udub and she agreed to show me and further allowed me to make a drawing and thus come up with the Grid Layout of the paddles. I have made several designs using this method. I used this methodology to teach the Udub students for carving their paddles.”

Red Eagle relates that he began his work in photography in the summer of 1976, when he was living in Sitka, Alaska. He used a Canon F-1 35mm camera loaded with Kodak Kodachrome ASA 25 film. One photograph in particular – a panoramic view of an intensely bright sun blazing through a thin, diaphanous mist over a range of mountains. The sun is moving over a range of mountains and shooting a streak of phenomenally bright light across the water; a few dark rocks accentuate the celestial power of the light, creating a dramatic contrast between the romantic splendor of the atmosphere and the silent dignity of earthbound objects. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson legendarily put high value on what he termed the “decisive moment,” a perfect, fleeting moment that reveal a deeper truth about life. I see that same principle here. Red Eagle’s photographs are éclats of sudden recognition, epiphanies of light that evoke occasions of sublimity and deep spiritual connection with forces external and supernal.

Other photographs, taken, I assume, at a much later date, are more human oriented, focused especially on the female form. One in particular perplexed me a little, it seemed so at odds with the serene intimacies of the other photographs. A beautiful woman with long black hair sits next to a tall accent table supporting a large Oriental vase with a bright white chrysanthemum in it. The woman appears to be in a state of crushing despair. Her head is bowed, and supported by her right hand, which is clutching her hair, and her pale left arm extends down, bends at the elbow as her forearm rests on the arm of her chair. Her upper torso is bare and a breast is partially revealed under her arm. The woman’s form is so gracefully curvaceous it feels like music, soft, sorrowful, and fascinating, a kind of stillness in movement. My wife and I both agreed that there was something Pre-Raphaelite about it; it evinced the kind of Gothic, aestheticized realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, artists like Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and John Everett Millais. I was surprised to discover the photograph was part of a project Red Eagle was working on in 1988 called American Kimono. Kimono, in Japanese, means something to wear, and there was something incontrovertibly bare and unadorned about this woman, not just physically, but emotionally. This was a woman open to view under a sheet of glass in a deeply private moment, an individual experiencing a level of emotional distress familiar to everyone, but doing so with a posture and gracefulness so remarkable it felt rude to look, and even more rude to walk away.

Another nude featured a young woman sitting in a lotus position on smooth floor, her arm reaching behind as she leans back in voluptuous ease, breasts exposed, a Japanese fan splayed by her side. She is wearing a shirt or robe, unbuttoned and loose as an afterthought.

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart,” remarked Henri Cartier Bresson. I can think of no simpler way to describe my immersion in Red Eagle’s photographs. They tend to coax one into a fuller state of being with their seductive intensity, their depth of caring about a world whose beauty is generously offered daily to anyone disposed to enter into that proposal. I’m glad we made the drive down to Olympia, and were treated to iced tea and the best cheesecake I’ve ever had at the Cascadia Grill on 4^th Avenue West, surrounded by hundreds of photographs, people, mostly, who’d come from Olympia: Dave Grohl, Judy Collins, Matt Groening, and many other less familiar faces. Time felt open and broad and generous, like a canoe on the Salish Sea.

Enjoy Your Problems

I have a wandering mind, active as a foundry, even on Saturdays, when there is no one there but Shunyata. They say a dullness of mind is seasoned with travel. If that's the case, then pack some extra underwear. Let’s put on a show. Inhibit nothing. Not even moisture. The humidity of passion. Which leaves a glaze of satisfaction and a rose by the window. Egos and eggs are similar contingencies. Eggs need a nest. Egos need a pageant. I’m trembling now with a giant palpability. It started when I noticed a shadow following me from behind. And when I turned around it walked in front of me. I was numbed by the sheer audacity of this manifest phantasm, this mockery of my Being and mitochondria. Emphasis is a form of testimony, butterflies in Fanny Brawne's bedroom. If you saw Bright Star, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Negative capability. Insidious secrets. Beaded bubbles winking at the brim of some brawny mint julep. Darkling I listen, and for many a time, I have been half in love with easeful death. The I is the eye of the cavern. The sole proprietor, as it were, of a body, replete with fingers and toes and a willingness to spring into action in the middle of Swan Lake, supple as a geistesblitz. Deep down, I’m a monster. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. It makes me irritable, especially when I’m chased by villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.

Sometimes I feel like 72 people scrupulously maintained by 93 lips. It’s a residual effect of choral singing for the Church of Holy Skillets. The costuming is by Arachne of Hollywood. Swimming swimwear for swimming or bringing singing to spinning in Stimmung by by Karlheinz Stockhausen. I like to create loopholes in legal briefs for certain ferocious or fabulous animals. Silly interdictions. Prohibitions against wearing cowboy boots without owning two cows. Double proxy marriage in Montana. Selling dyed ducks in quantities of less than six in Kentucky. Stimmung is an aid to my focus and reputation. Every time I pass a certain door the pocket of my cardigan sweater gets caught on the doorknob. I know there’s a reason for this, I can feel it in my bones, but there’s nothing I can do to guarantee its survival. When chaos is hungry for action chaos must be fed. Am I what I can do? What would life be like as an oboe? Enjoy your problems, counsels Shinryu Suzuki. The art should be in the way, not the content.

The luminous force under my arm is immaterial, and will not stand in a court of law. I can’t always tell what someone’s trying to do in their writing, mine especially. That odd moment with a pen in the hand, not even warm yet, still cold plastic and metal, waiting for something to come out of it, an answer fulfilling the quest of existence, which is a crisis, of sorts, is suddenly in motion, scribbling words into ensembles, outside the Poultry Building. It’s extroverted to defend products around depth. That is, stand up, take a swing, hit a ball, and make it all happen, able to absorb large amounts of raw experience. Holding still while a grizzly sniffs your body. Seeking the source of things. Of beauty. Of jurisprudence. The undulation of fins. Tents in a muddy lot. The epiphany of a hoofprint. And not for any other reason would I say this. And expect a mint.

I wonder how life feels as a jellyfish. They don’t have a brain. They react to stimuli, but they don’t think about it. Ostensibly. Consciousness is a funny thing. I mean, it evolved a mouth to say things, how crazy is that? So many organs. So many things to say. Some jellyfish species have specialized sensory organs called rhopalia (plural in Latin for club) which are located around the edge of their bell and contain eyes. This kind of thinking can distract you during a time of dissolution and stress. I often wish I lived closer to an airport. The interaction of people in airports is a never-ending fascination. The King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has the world's largest airport aquarium. You can sit and watch Goldsilk Seabream, Red Sea Spiny Basslet, Indian Threadfish, Persian Mullet, stingrays and sharks and sometimes your own thoughts undulating in fantasias of milky oblivion, artless and free.

I will enclose a copy of my mood to show you what happened. What happened when I was 12. What happened when I was 15. And so on. The whole damn show. The whole freaky mess. First time I got drunk. Last time I got drunk. First time I got drunk I couldn’t believe you could change a shitty mood so easily. So pleasantly. Last time I got drunk I couldn’t believe how hard it is to shake off a nagging sense of despair after trying to drown it countless times. Such things are expressed, at times, in front of microphones, before an audience of people, bewildered, flatulent, bored out of their skulls. It’s all too easy to make a theater out of your grudges. But it’s hard to gaze at the world without a brave expansion of one’s pituitary. Temptations will curl their tentacles around you every random moment. It’s about this time, or any time, really, the idea of travel, anywhere, gets to be an obsession of sorts, and rains down on you like a jungle. Interaction, like sugar and water, comes across as optimism on the radio. And the world is a ball of rock orbiting a ball of heat & light. Wood to cut. Break to bake. Milk to squirt. Things to say. 

 

Poetry Is An Egg With A Horse In It

I find it both reassuring and somewhat dubious that at 78 I still harbor affections and enthusiasms that I enjoyed in my rebellious 20s. I’d be in a sorry state of deep remorse were it otherwise. Chief among these early affiliations is French symbolism, followed quickly by Surrealism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, hypnopompic kabuki and the circumference of insanity. I had a special appetite for the work of Stephane Mallarmé, which was unabashedly difficult, and playful and sly and erotic and prodigiously self-propagating. My temperament matched Baudelaire’s antagonistic fillips to the inane and vacuous presumptions of bourgeois sanctimony. He had a genius for finding beauty in squalor and luxury in stark privation. He prepared me, at age 18, for the visionary deliriums of Rimbaud, whose defection from poetry for the louche commerce of guns and coffee in East Africa came as a big disappointment and an unending state of perplexity. Why? Why would anyone deny expression to the genius inhabiting them?

I believe the denial of the poet in Rimbaud for the pursuit of normalcy had lethal consequences. I believe it also accounts for Rimbaud’s evident dromomania. Even his brief flirtation with photography.

It wasn’t until I was much older that the lush orchestrations of Mallarmé’s poetry and prose poetry began to hold a certain fascination for me. He wasn’t as overtly exciting as Rimbaud’s psychedelic Illuminations, with their colorful imagery and robust deliriums, or Baudelaire’s dazzling sensuality, his silken orgies and gleaming boa constrictors and vague perfumes, but I find a deeply abiding intellectual stimulation in my Mallarméan immersions, a feeling of inner liberation, of unfathomable hungers and chance encounters. I’m drawn to the intense musicality of Mallarmé’s work, his subtle and tortured syntax, his fragmented phrasing and abrupt non-sequiturs, his ability to imbue the power of language with the vivid presence of the void.

Stephane Mallarmé's prose poems define the indefinable with a nimble fracturing of banality. The tight grip of academic rhetoric. It's one thing to deliberately obfuscate a point for the appearance of sophistication and another to reorganize perception altogether.

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

Wrote Russell Jacoby.

Russell Jacoby famously coined the term "velvet prison" to describe the intellectual stagnation of academics who are insulated and complacent within the university system, leading to a situation where "the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged". He argued that this institutional comfort breeds an intellectual decline, making it difficult to think critically or challenge the status quo. 

States the AI Overview on Google.

In Book 20, Part Four of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe describes the phenomenon of Dämonisch (the daemonic) – which he attributed to the artistry of violinist Nicolas Paganini - as a "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher has explained.” Lorca referred to this in his essay “Theory and Function of the Duende,” where he describes the duende as a “power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist master say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means that it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.” It is not something anyone needs to go into debt for at a university. “No,” Lorca continues, “the dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendent of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock; a descendant also of Descartes’ melancholy daemon, small as a green almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing.”

My first taste of duende occurred one summer afternoon in August, 1965, two months after graduating from high school, in the backseat of a friend’s car, a speaker in back of my head, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” came blaring out, galvanizing me with its startling imagery. This prompted a search for poetry that had the same wildness as Dylan’s lyrics. A professor at San José City College revealed what I was looking for: “Le Bateau ivre,” “The Drunken Boat,” by Arthur Rimbaud. This adventure eventually led to the poetry of the beats, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso. Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism.

I aligned myself with the beats decades ago. I never liked hippies all that much. Most of the ones I met were shallow and pretentious and somewhat theatrical; many of them had enveloped themselves in the disarming gauze of a faux innocence to challenge the dreary, soul-killing controls of capitalism, or embedded themselves in fantastical Tolkienesque worlds weirdly superimposed over the bitter realities of the industrial world. Many of them named their children Rainbow and Moonbeam and danced like fairies in the moonlight. It’s rather sad, what happened. And it happened so quickly. When the spartan conditions of poverty inevitably soured to such an extent that the toxic predations of wealth suddenly started looking attractive, the most vigorous of these radicals were first in line for Reagan’s Good Morning America mode of unbridled consumerism. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker. Tom Hayden transitioned into mainstream politics. I remember a lot of friends and acquaintances suddenly working for corporations. They rationalized this move easily with the phrase, “we can change things from the inside.” And how did that work out? It’s little wonder Gen Z has so much contempt for boomers.

I admired the beats for their intellect, their candor, their sense of adventure, their embrace of Dada spontaneity, and their fearless and sometimes nihilistic, sometimes Dharmic embrace of ways and means contrary to the delusional pursuits of the American Dream highly unpopular in American culture, such as harboring an openly adversarial position toward conformism and the kind of soulless, bourgeois complacencies that have resulted in our current dystopic landscape.

Most of the beats are dead now. Gary Snyder, who was a central figure not only to beat culture but a strong advocate of wilderness preservation and ecological health and integrity, as well as a highly disciplined practitioner of Zen, is still alive, and still revered as a public figure, even in mainstream culture. As of this writing, he is 95.

Snyder wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. It’s titled “What You Should Know To Be A Poet,” and is short enough to include here:

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                        and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden–

& then love the human: wives     husbands     and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
                              hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger.     gambles.     and the edge of death.

I’m 99% on board with the recommendations of this poem. Everything. But one. The “work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted / and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion, hunder, rest.” That part is utterly foreign to my nature. I’ve had a lifetime of working long dry hours of dull work and hated it. Love it? Are you frigging kidding me? Every job I ever had never served as anything other than a source of money. End of the work shift, I felt like a turd squeezed out of the sphincter of commerce. It added nothing to my life but anguish, despair, and exhaustion. The nicest thing to ever happen to me was retirement and social security. I was finally – in old age – able to have time to create, reupholster my self-esteem, and do my writing. 

Bu the other stuff, about being a bad-ass passionate ecstatic shamanistic visionary fucking fun-loving philosopher with one foot in hedonism and the other foot in minstrelsy mischief and eccentric mystical phantasmagoric pursuits is terrific advice. Nor do I see any of that as a job recommendation.

Poetry was not an activity relegated to a quiet scholarly vocation, oak-paneled rooms, leaded windows in ivy-covered towers, awards, retreats, lectures, sabbaticals, academic panels and conferences, the polite society of the professoriate. That’s were poetry turns curdled and careful and stylishly chic. Poetry – the kind of poetry Snyder’s poem evokes - was the province of the desperado. The gambler at the edge of death. King Lear’s sad, forbearing clown. Ophelia’s lunatic rage against the abuses of fate. Hamlet’s scathing to be or not to be. Charles Bukowski’s inebriated smile.

I see the poet as a seasoned detective. The world is a crime scene. The human spirit has been murdered. There’s no lack of suspects. No accountability either, for the thousands upon thousands of zombies walking the streets, heads bowed, faces expressionless, voices corralled by fear and censorship.

Marianne Moore once defined poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But a moment ago R shared a definition of poetry she saw on Facebook today, written by a fourth grader: “poetry is an egg with a horse in it.”

That’s brilliant. I can’t top that. All I can do is keep it warm, and wait for something to hatch.

 

It Can Kill A Man

It can kill a man. Said Wallace Stevens. That’s what misery does. Ergo, you should buy some insurance. This is how poets make a living. And it’s not too miserable. I’m available on most days of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, which are relegated to sleeping, and leisure, and gratifying my appetites. On Monday I am like a man in the body of a violent beast. I keep a thesaurus in the bottom drawer of my desk in case I need to describe something elegant and queenly, a balloon rising to the ceiling of somebody’s wedding, Elizabeth Taylor on one side, Richard Burton on the other. This is their planet, their world, now in ascendancy, and rich and limitless, but also a little taut with risk, like a bank robbery, or a Mardi Gras float moving in the direction of things as yet unknown. This is the skin of the poem. The bones are angular, and shaped toward their function, which is ejaculatory. You know. Like opening a book, and finding a wad of cash. The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

As an adult, you learn to avoid certain things. Invisible things. Subtleties. Like the embarrassed side glance in a crowded room when you tell someone you’re a poet. You have a badge. And enough poetic license to start a family. But nobody takes you seriously. Don’t worry. It’s all just a matter of orientation, disorientation, and blunt polytrauma. Each minute something new scurries across the ocean floor. Just holding a guitar is cool. There are surges, occasionally, of windows. Popcorn is a mood waiting to come to life. When there are waves, you learn to swim, and when there are swans you let the boat drift. It’s as simple as that. The oars are all yours.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. It’s not like that speck on the screen you wipe off with a soft cloth that turns out to be a period, or more accurately, a fistful of pixels clenched in a dot, otherwise known as a period, which stops sentences from growing into a lot of weeping blubber, bookmakers subject to changing moods, sacrifices, slumps, illiteracy, the full panorama of someone’s life unfolding, catching fire, and attracting UFOS. Though I think you can make a case for it. Statutes related to the metaphysics of calico, criminal code, criminal procedure, real property and conveyances, luxuries, like reading, having the time to read, and the lips of a distant cobweb. Here in Washington State there are laws against harassing bigfoot, sleeping in someone’s outhouse, pretending your parents are wealthy, whaling on Sunday or buying a mattress, lick lollipops in cars, use X-rays for shoe fittings, disguises for teachers, abandon a refrigerator, and (if you live in Everett) display a hypnotized person in a store window. How many laws have you broken? I’m not going to say, for fear it may implicate me in the bismuth of a jellyfish. I’m boiling up something this minute, in fact. Definitions. Secrets. Collisions. Big gray blocks stepping on absence. And a huge spatula. Straight from eye to paper.

I begin to feel ultramarine when I travel. And geographical. Spreading out on a bed honors the muscles. The best way to travel is to scatter abroad above the earth's atmosphere, that place where the sky ends and prophecy begins. It’s a trip, baby. There are trillions and trillions of stars and nebulae and a sigh bursting out of a pack of allegories. Birthdays counted in light years. I’m not appreciably different at 79 then I was at 18. I like those movies where a troubled boxer takes his ire out on a punchbag. The strange elegance of a boxer suspended in a photograph. Contrasting things makes them tremble. The potato has an immediacy only a Bach could appreciate in a potato concerto, fingers prowling the keys for a look at the sublime, and finding sea salt and rosemary. There’s always the element of surprise. Counterpoint and fugue. Mood dynamics and tempo. Tornados and strange loops. If the potatoes are going into the oven, so should the bacon. You don’t want stand there by the sink looking like Lady Macbeth. Think of something like wage satisfaction.  The mysteries of the Dirac equation. As soon as I found myself dogpaddling in a paragraph, I looked down to see the bottom, and discovered objects I didn’t understand. I would have to dive deeper. Buy a shovel. Buy some land. And plant some potatoes.

I didn’t discover how important it is to have a purpose until I didn’t have any. And yet something is there to push me, get me to roll out of bed, brush my teeth, brush my hair, feed the cat and sit down at a desk with a book. I think of Matthew McConaughey. That speech he has in True Detective. “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect separated from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion that having a self. This secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling. Programmed, with total assurance, that we’re each somebody. When, in fact, everybody’s nobody.” A normal person would so this as a slur of words with a pompous attitude toward the miracle of masturbation. I became difficult to categorize. Was I a mammal, or a crustacean? The antennae on the top of my head confuses people. Why is it always in motion, people ask. The vibrations of other stars produce eerie songs that I like to convert to words. There’s an eschatological dimension to it that I find difficult to put into palatable and wholesome dishes. This is why I was once so attracted to bars. The quieter the better.

900 Pieces Of Daylight

What does it mean to be rich? The wherewithal to transform gross experience, primary matter, into a golden inutility and assorted heresies against the gods of profit. This is crucial to any understanding of life. If you throw your personality at a mirror, it’ll come back to haunt you as Tom Waits. That’s him at the end of the bar. Staring at you. Like a mirror. We are all vessels of a reality we can’t understand. Let obscurity fold it into a compelling and serious attempt at exhumation. Cloud what counsels through thunder. It helps to light up the sidewalk. And then, you know, it’s whatever it seems. Grab a bowl while the anchovies are still tractable. Enhance your argument with backflips. You can’t get in without going out, or assemble a bridesmaid with toothpicks. It’s why I prefer microscopes. In an incongruous public setting, we commit ourselves. And why not. It’s a beautiful day, and the resurrection is on the verge of bas-relief. 

Most of my experiences with plaster have been refreshingly inconsequential. I got conked on the head once by a rogue sentence. It was speeding across the page in a rage of majuscules. There are nights when the mist comes up early from the river and knocks on the door. It’s a bit like that. This constant fever. I’ll say this. It cured my myopia. I’m tired of making judgments. I prefer to gamble. Twinkle like a napkin. Thank God I’m still strong enough to lift an old TV. But just barely. When you reach a certain stage of development you will be required to play games. I found refuge in left field. The ball rarely came out there. And I was so lost in thought it was more apt to bounce off my head than get thrown to the appropriate glove. You do get wise in old age. Unfortunately, that’s when you need it least. The nouns are just stand-ins. Substitutes. The music is in the pillow. In the rain. Because the intent was serious. And that’s where it ended up.

I have written feathers of red. I have walked with the dead. My aerodrome has a smell that curves in the light like autumn. Who are you, green sweater? What are you, banished flower? I’m going to perform a series of backflips until I go on TV in my old moccasins. This object in my hands squirts vowels. I use it to shape oblivion. And this is gallant. A sweet hinge of glory. From the farm. That old shack in a grove of hobnail goblins. I'm going to throw it and crack it and sneer at it and jerk it around until I can lift it. Brilliance takes time. My French is calling me back. It wants an answer. Deep dive into stucco. We ride such phenomena by our actions. Sprinkle them with alms and yams. Make everything small. Pick it up. One by one. And caress it. 

I see a crimson lake with eyes in the snow. I see a lobster scorched by eagerness. You do know I make a lot of shit up. But I didn’t make this up. It arrived by apothecary. I’m braced to the nines. I'm fit to go on talking and will use my thumb and forefinger if I must. I specialize in recreating the feel of Picasso's Parisian steam forge. It’s a very expensive process requiring the phantom weight of buried light bulbs multiplied by a factor of spring. Meaning folds into stories so the monsters can shine. I see a bustling studio flaring in an airport flower. I see a pair of eyes following the words in this sentence. In the distance, a twitching muscle of mist clutches a glorious sunset, a garage explodes, Dr. Williams advises a patient to carve out a life for themselves, a filet of prose glows with a reckless infrared sand, and a crocodile eating the end of this sentence until nothing exists except you and me and a jar of pandemonium. I think it’s time we quit playing games and got serious about our audition. You play me. I’ll play you. And together we will reproduce a loop of unwritten worms jacked up on 900 pieces of daylight.  

 

The Morning News

I stood in a room of parachutes, falling through a hole in one of my better moods. A naked blue maneuvered the sky. I handed all my subtleties over to a deviation of faculties, hoping for a parallel to confetti. I was called the detective of thwack. I solved cases of missing content. Tonight was a doozey. I arrived palpable and scratched with literal basilicas. There’s a tacit understanding that snobbism is just a shorthand for xenophobia. The oaths we perturb with our dance are not the ones we try to appease with our history. Those are dealt with later, and are still under development at Warner Brothers. You can probably hear the sound of cylinders thrumming up and down. This is called an enharmonic shift and is just another metaphor used as an impetus for virility and wit. I sure wish I had some. I had a wound once took eighteen stitches just to renew this life. Doctors are serious people. And yet most diseases are absurd.

We miss our former glory. The present is tempting, but the future is coming at us from all sides. I got a tattoo that says "playing against the bombs.” It’s surrounded by a utopia. Don’t kid yourself. Utopias are dangerous. Utopias are dystopias minus the candor. Ever see a glooby mop? That’s how I used to shake the dissociation of self out of myself, and go silly providing myself with turgid winks and ocarinas. Subjectivity describes a person’s grip on what is acting on them. Objectivity is what hovers over our blood at night, bald, autonomous, and tactless. It is through an indispensable fold in the space-time continuum that we can enact our cause with marionettes, à la Raymond Roussel. Everything in it leans on action, and smears the walls with its endless implications. Language is all about substitution, the morning news in the breath of a rose. One thing leads to another, and is therefore angular and bristling with ersatz propellers.

But enough: you are there reading this, and I write things down as they come, so for the moment, things hang, madcap and parasitical. I see a wedge of prospect brimming with desire. Fuck the slush. Pull it out of your complexities, which is what they’re for, putting a treadle on the grindstone and building a milking stand for the goat. It's not always the tumble that develops one's bedside manner but the bubbles goaded into galaxies with a single breath. As soon as I set the dish soap bottle down they pop right out of it. I can hear Shakespeare in the background, talking late with the lead actor of Hamlet. He sounds like a detective. Determined and circumspect. Existence is a scrambled business, one minute all twinkly and appliqué, the next minute cannons and howling banshees. It’s a good art gives in when things aren’t solid in the head. Control can get in the way of sweetmeat. Uneducate yourself first. From there it’s not really what’s in the hand, but the tone that makes things squeeze the hell out of existence.

What I’m kicking around is this notion: a cry, a scent of Cézanne, can say so much about a spine and its many intricacies. What makes you stand. What makes you get up in the morning. What gives you meaning and purpose. Your hat, for example. Organized education is a duck. It just waddles around from panel to podium, from podium to panel, and that’s straight crazy, is it not? Personally, for me it’s all about blackboards. I love blackboards. The sound of chalk. Diagrammed sentences. Quantum equations. Powerfully solid if useless abstractions. Mesopotamian art in cylinder seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library. What happens to us from all the other things going on, in other words. It kills me. That such things are made of it, that a simple wince can deepen into a gun, and shoot a pillow’s feathers into the air, making an image.

I started out in life naked and I’m 100% naked at all times under my clothes. I’m old now, though, so I’m careful when I remove them. Darkness is a friend to the stigmata we bear. That day in Perpignan we boarded our train at two in the afternoon had nothing to do with it. It’s like I’m old King Shit again ruling over a realm of everlasting magenta. Luxury is for the idle rich. It’s inseparable from the will to exclude. Or put it this way: the will to cohere is seminal to the play of ligaments holding the bones together. Erotica, as a consequence, invites talking over the fence. That something is broken is quite obvious. What’s not so obvious is the necessity to hold tight to whatever mast you can find, and not get swept over the gunnels. Under it all, working invisibly, electromagnetic forces, the old patterns give space its grit. A fountain, from four blocks away, can look like ice. And sometimes is ice. Like that fountain froze in the courtyard of the old high school turned into condominiums. Fountains and waterfalls. How does a waterfall freeze? It’s like some kind of warning, mad bride of the ineffable, gorgeous in her gown of ice.

     

When The Images Dream

A confusion club attracts kiwis. Allow me to introduce Molly Ringworm. She sings soulful ballads from the fireworks door. I spit words for the flower. The one in the pot, by the carpal tunnel syndrome. We're in office mode if we dance. I’m learning the electric boogaloo. It tells the story of our mocking spirit. The impulse joke. I grew it from a concertina and a handful of coordinates. There was a sense of impending mutation. Perplexity at our incense rush. It’s best to infiltrate a fall by exalting it. Just before you hit the floor. Talk fast. But meaningfully. Like you were wrestling with something. A sudden revelation. Or an express escalator laughing all the way down to the lingerie department. Because we encumber ourselves in the volumes of life, and such things deserve a special kind of attention. A bas-relief of choice heats my stove, and the house gargles a piano. When the images dream I feel like an airplane. The world floats in my blisters. The abstractions carry plump green thoughts. And the carp enjoy the sun in shallow water. What does it all mean? It’s not even a question anymore. It’s an argument.

I wonder how many people wonder, on a daily basis, WTF am I doing here?

It’s good to sprawl out near the singing fold. I want the door to be fractious, it's a participle, not a ripple. The discipline begins with a charming process involving recruitments, odors, and engaging perversions. Civilization is embarrassed. The bulbous aberrations are jaunty tonight. What romance! What luxuries! Yet all is not perfect. There are problems, debts, and rampant prolixity. Planets orbit the mismanagement of your inner conflict. I see wormwood in your gallantry. Why must everything in life be so corduroy? My rose believes everything I pour on it. A powerful voice can twist an entire paragraph into believing it’s Victor Hugo. But it takes a real idiot to chew the air into a turnip. Yachts don’t make me jealous. Houses do. I like to hum majuscules when I tear buzzwords apart. I’m trying to get at the shape of things. Amazing ovals. Trapezoids. Spheres. Nonagons. Prisms. Kisses. Bedsheet salons. The bulge of time in an inflatable daydream. Demand diamonds. Follow your instincts when they come to a boil.

If you look inside the novice bird, you’ll see all the offers are from the beyond. There’s even a coupon for withdrawal. It’s a retreat conducted by a whisper of yearning. Things seem to be happening backwards. The time is out of joint. Sculpt an exculpation, excite the dusty grace of forgiveness. It pays to develop an argument. It’s hard to convince anyone of anything these days. And yet everyone’s so gullible. Illusions feed my romance with milk. I turn the page and slide down a snapdragon. I know this zone. It’s an airport under pressure from a drop in trust. A good slap will defuse the situation. Accepting a stick across a loving embrace signals a U-turn. A cardboard joke sashays out of the elevator. Everything stems from a zipper what a crock. The word balloon on stilts is a better stopgap than a suitcase when it comes to cartoon technology. A chronically thick vertigo might be a symptom of technicolor. You should go see a cinema.

If I have time to sit beside a perception a reason for doing so will eventually present itself. I put this down straight. Actions in the past have a way of insisting on their backslide. My personal astronomy became an emotional whirlwind after rumors were spread. The slightest laziness on the part of the writer will be discerned among the litter, the empty beer cans, the wide-eyed look of the ballerina hiding behind the couch, Jerry Lee Lewis rocking out on a flat screen TV. The many pitfalls of representing a scrambled circumstance with all the right notes and nuance. The sky glossing over all its proposals with a layer of feathery cirrus. The mystery of the Mary Celeste. The poignancy of any random waterfront. Cry of gulls. Shifting of perspective. I saw Elvis in a French fry. It had tiny lips and a thunderous pompadour. What slow entertainments I do in the autumn is a testament to my capacity for constructing a stately lassitude, upholstering it with butterflies and gargoyles, and launching it from a 19^th century rolltop in Giggleswick.  

Is this what the fall of Rome felt like? I think it was more like the weight we pretend to carry when gravity fails. When the old laws fail and the new laws are waiting to be written. The past is a condition of the present. It’s not the kind of thing you want to balance on the end of your tongue. You don’t do anything 50 years ago. Even though you can feel it waiting. The first time I saw Paris. The last time I saw sorcery. What haunts me, what’s chained to my leg. The veins. The bread on the table. We slosh back and forth in ecstasy smelling of dirt and bark. 

 

A Play Of Mind

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

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

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

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

 

Nothing Has Ever Been So Write

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Stepping Outside

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

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

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

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

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

Gertrude Stein Is Making Breakfast

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

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

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

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

Some Notes On The Body Politic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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