Backyard Aporia

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

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

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

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

One Day I Stood Near A Small Door

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

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

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

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

 

The Smell Of Memory

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

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

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

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

This Place Is New To Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ponge On The Seine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By The Forge Of Process

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

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

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

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

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

The Art Of Letter Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Cape Cod Baby Godzilla

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Méret Oppenheim Teacup Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

An Eye On Tuesday

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

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

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

 

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.