All I Need

How might one translate a sour taciturnity into a sweet and artless eloquence? If one is to go where the current is swift, one must be prepared to exhort blueberries. The wax of the beehive was created to help the senses find their queen. The world must be pollinated. I would not know how else to put this. Our planet is a pearl in a shell of emptiness. It emboldens me to say that. The very presence of its absence is absinthe to my frayed and troubled journey. I don’t remember that time before language, but it would have been the last time I could see things without the machinery of grammar. Language changes things. It’s virtually impossible to fully and accurately translate an emotion. I feel a paragraph coming in which I may sit among the clouds as if the sky were an armchair and the planet were an amusing toy. I call it a paragraph. You are, of course, free to call it something else. This isn’t my first rodeo. Nearly all my proposals require a great sum of money. If you cage a tiger in words, the tiger will learn to speak. Its language, however, will not be designed to create categories. It will sow the air with fire. The savagery of its metaphors will rip the sky into a million bright crystals and envelop the cathedrals in fog.

There is nothing more charged with mystical longing than ocean mist. The everyday is not without its own peculiar charms, but the vastness of the ocean can overawe a warehouse forklift fueled with the implacable energy of the desperate. The correspondences between a raft and a zipper must be relished in small infrared arias if they are to be appreciated at all. Perceptions aren’t mechanical. They’re the carpenters of our saga. They have the fluidity of angels and the nakedness of orchids. There are those who are drawn by things obscure and elusive and those who are drawn by pencils and chalk. I was never invited to be on the Bob Newhart show, but I can imagine myself talking with Carol all day. There was something about that space I found strangely beguiling. The camaraderie of work in a public space, the minor embarrassments, the wobbly scaffolding that is small talk. Life is a wilderness, serviced by elevators and great religions. That’s where the mist comes in, adrift in the sparkle of consciousness.

Of course, none of this matters. Who’s going to be around to read or make art or design things when the neocons finally get their way and the planet is blown to smithereens? And if they don’t do it, AI will make sure goals are achieved according to a strict, binary logic. Robots. Androids. Cyborgs. Waltzing in ancient discos. It’s transparently placatory to pretend to find a positive spin to put on a civilization spinning crazily out of control. Or try to appease my disaffection with the human species. Weltschmerz wasn’t built in a day. Nobody at Home Depot has expertise in this matter either. God knows I’ve tried. Everybody arrives at their own conclusion in their own way and in their own dinghy. Just make sure the seams are properly caulked and the thwarts are fitted with care. If you’re dreaming of building a spaceship, forget the billionaires. Wealth makes people arrogant and stupid. Who needs a spaceship when we have Cinnabon, Emile Cioran and cinema? Buy a Cessna. I really dug the way that Steve Carel movie ended. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. I thought it was sadly underrated. Steve Carel carrying Keira Knightley to his father’s plane while the Hollies sang all I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you. As cornball as that scene was, I enjoyed, unreservedly, the lead up to the impact of the asteroid. The final moment. The peaceful acceptance. The last caresses. The big boom. The flash of light.