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.