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