Aristotle's Kitchen

Books are repositories of boiling thought. Parachutes for rebellious angels. Sunglasses for the cynical. Telescopes for the oracular. Absinthe for the emotionally crippled. Things happen among words that are too weird to happen elsewhere. For example: prophecy. The curse of Cassandra. The warning nails itself into the past, where it is promptly ignored. Human beings have a very complicated history of crusades, war, oceanic consciousness and nutmeg. Did you know you can make a waterfall with a megaphone and a little urine? It’s true. Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, squirming to get out from under the eyelid. Bitumen feeds the gallantry of our highways and roads. The rearview mirror gives us a clear view of the past. Pomades consist of rostrum sweat and bits of singing. The splendor of rain. The glitter of consciousness in outer space. One can obtain medications from plants. No prescription necessary. Just jungle. An entire planet juggled in prose. Riotous drinking, strummed guitars, chronicled aspirations. Letters putting out buds of semantic fruit. Gauze. Cephalopods. The clatter of metaphysics in Aristotle’s kitchen. 

Don’t treat yourself like a prison warden. No, no, no. Treat yourself like a mad wizard atop a high bluff overlooking the ocean, invoking a storm with a rod and a battery of words gathered from the grimoire in your cave. Try to imagine yourself as Elwood P. Dowd. Or Harvey, his invisible a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall white rabbit. Converse with fabulous beings. Make friends with spirits. Press a stethoscope to the beating heart of night. Dream of a weekend with a Caribbean reef squid. Emotions aren’t like lingerie. They’re more like overalls. Let all the parts of you go berserk like laundry tumbling in a dryer. Turn resistance to resilience, then reverse it again, just to be sure the coffins remain below the sod and the moon mellows our intestinal biome with the languor of her phases. Despair is the daughter of hope. Hope is the bastard child of mitigation. Between these, we find intervals of rapport. Daylight in our laments. Moonlight in our bones.

Language breaks down when it’s employed to describe Paraguay or orbit tidepools. Words can’t do everything. It’s a magic limited to Jimmy Stewart’s role in Rear Window. His character, L.B. Jeffries, an adventurous photographer confined to his New York City apartment with a broken leg, allowed him to convey intense emotion. Infinity detonated in his eyes. The flash of bulbs. Immobility in the face of danger. The chaos of voices with different timbres and different needs reverberating in a building courtyard. When language breaks down the world breaks down. Details we hadn’t noticed before peep out. Thought on thought creates a dot of high density and temperature until it explodes into tennis shoes and rattles and intestinal biomes. In the same way glue is busy with adhesion, the croissant is a paradigm of the jaw. If we are to believe that the air inside a balloon is instinct with distillations of pink, then we must also concede that behavior is often the result of glia. You can drag a large vocabulary into the flowering vines of India, but you cannot make it engorge with blood and pump feathers out of its ass. To do this, you’ll need a press, at the very least. You’ll need a deep understanding of prepositions, and a map of Paraguay.

In the end, there is no end. Each end begins another beginning and each beginning slows before the next detour, the next exit, the next last chance, the next hothouse romance, the next smell of sawdust, the next play, the next crisis, the next fight in the ring, the next appliance, the next sweater. The weird motels of blue highways, the face on the back of a spoon, the incursion on your time, the escape into cinema, the push to go somewhere, always, until the journey itself becomes the destination. The engine clicks as it cools. Fresh rain. The sway of willows. Former truths turn out to be the biggest lies. And the biggest lies turn out to be fabulous entertainments. The saddest days are generally the most difficult to explain. The Victorians had beautiful salons in which to work these things out, eloquent speeches that shined like an English afternoon through frosted glass. The murmur of rain. The chatter of sparrows. The curve of a finger. Anything to draw the attention, and hold it long enough to get a point across. Which is most often pointless. The steam from an iron is more than apt to describe infinity as a collar. But that’s the iron. Everything looks wrinkled to an iron. It’s the things we’ve been busy neglecting that get us in the end. Bite us in the ass. Or flow over us like a solar wave in a Finnish sauna.