How Funny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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