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.