The Possibility Of Seeing A Bear

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

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

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

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

The Grail Of The Ineffable

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

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

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

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