And I Looked Inside

I went backstage to look for a water intake. Hamlet was about to engage in some dialogue with a gravedigger. Ophelia whispered in my ear: I find redemption in apricot. Aren’t you supposed to be dead? I’m an idea, she answered. I’m the figment of romance in everyone’s head. Which is why it’s always drowning. The world is crawling with concepts. You need a good hammer and a big bag of nails to keep it all down. Magic abounds. Most people don’t see it. But please. Listen closely to the sounds of eggnog. It’s so hydraulic, so blissfully unhurried. The humor of our situation embarrasses the concertina. You can fill a glass to the brim, but the first sip is going to cost you some dignity. The earth is full of subtleties. France, for example. And sometimes ancient coins, Ice Age cave paintings, and the black diamonds of the Perigord. A song can agitate the flames in the hollow sockets of a human skull, but it takes an agate to locate Laputa.

It takes a large sail to create a canopy for the ashes of an explosive theory. Nobody is used to it anymore. Sensation. Unpredictability. The false division between the organic and inorganic radicalized me. I see things differently. Plants, the diabolic magnetism of power, the newly awakened garrulity of granite, hollow generalities, hydrocarbon molecules, complexions, fireworks, radiators, citadels, radiology, carousels, swashbucklers, Irish rock groups. I see an old hammer with a splintery handle has been scrapped in the arena of our mutual jurisprudence. Judgement has become a thing of the past. It was bound to happen. Reality can only take so much abuse. I’m tired of pretending to be a sewing machine. I’m looking for some real action. The glory of the pomegranate is still just a dream in the eyes of most bowlers, not because the lanes are empty, the shoes woefully unrented, but because Neptune has a more active atmosphere than anything our current malaise can produce, and the experience of what is present in the ever-elusive and ruminant present signifies the true, unmediated experience of things themselves. California Lilac. Agave. Sage and Manzanita. San Diego. Rosie and the Originals. Angel Baby.

Some people have a knack for floating through life. It's easy to be detached when you’ve got nothing to hide. But who’s got nothing to hide? What saint? What senator? What priest? What human resources manager? Teeth make a feeble portcullis when the tongue gets loose. Innocence and guilt are intertwined. A breeze blew through an orchard and whispered I approve of you, and so a therapist is born. Language is dangerous these days. Certain words can get you arrested. And some words can liberate you. It’s hard to tell the difference. Meanings alter with the spin of the propaganda machine. No sane person ever becomes a poet. The hours spent sowing roses fill with thorns. The terrain is largely uncultivated in the realm of the half-truth. Even the seeds are unpredictable. The biggest plant in the field is a paradox, a complete and utter contradiction whose branches extend outward with blatant displays of sanguine glossolalia. The certain is very often the least certain. This is what makes certainty so maddeningly opinionated. But who doesn’t love a good hypothesis? Our senses learn only late, said Nietzsche, and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. It’s better to be taught by perception than to teach perception what to perceive. It deepens the cave, but kills the light.

In 1962, some young French teenage boys were asked how they envisioned the year 2000. It was featured in one of those video panels that pop up on YouTube. It didn’t play long. Everything was a glimpse. A peek at a fairly predictable future, based on the technology and norms of 1962. I was 15. What I remember most vividly was the Cuban missile crisis. I remember sitting at a picnic table during recess at a high school on the outskirts of Denver. The sun was out. And even though we all knew we could die at any minute, the entire world gone in a flash of heat and blast waves, we couldn’t stop laughing. Had somebody told a joke? I can’t remember. But the euphoria of the moment was glorious. The French kids described a future in 2000 as luxurious, full of labor-saving technology, a bright and shiny place where all the shortcomings of the 20^th century – its wars and poverty and civil unrest - were resolved in the enlightenment dreamscape of 2000. That’s what I thought, too, age 15. And then I read Brave New World. And 1984. And It Can’t Happen Here. Which, of course, it can. And did. And does. And somehow keeps going.

The door was open so I walked right in. To my right, Robert Desnos muttered odd phrases in his sleep. I wrote everything down, published it, and won a Pulitzer. And on my left, Guillaume Apollinaire knitted a gray firmament, a hypothesis so big in its sentiment it puckered with attitude. The crackle of meaning attends an ecstasy behind the brocade, he said. As trees to a pathos so antlers to a dripping forest. I nodded in agreement, though I understood nothing. Ironing is lonely, he sighed, but irony is lonelier. I stood silent. It seemed like the kind of phrase that should be left alone to drift in the air. I looked out the window. The sky was a naked blue. Hypothesis is an umber among the ashes of calculation, I muttered, gazing at Apollinaire as he cast his net over the waters of reverie. He looked tired. Every poem is a hopeless dilemma, he said, but if you look under the hood, you’ll see the entire escapade turn pale with negative space. And then what, I asked. Enjoy it before it turns to smoke, he said. Does the void have a face, I asked. Yes, he answered. Consciousness is oceanic. Therefore, the planetarium is a mess. As well as it should be, no? Imagine a peach with a sugary throat singing Strangers in the Night. We see a pretty eye in the key of black and a beast with horns emerge from the depths of the cave. Lessons are given. Conversations resumed. The light tuns soft. The mood turns aquamarine. Everyone comes to a single realization, only to see it engorge with ink, and become meaningful.

Upper paleolithic imagery rarely employed innocence. There was no sin. Therefore, no innocence. Which is why I elevate chrome to the highest distinction of my perception. It’s so shiny. It makes me think combustion is the metaphor of our age. Pistons thumping up and down. Axles turning. Wheels turning. Galaxies turning. We navigate by stars and heliotrope. It’s how we achieve the dizziness of language and keep pushing it until it reaches some kind of climax. So many words. So much grammar. What do we do with all this? Create things. Objects. Ideas. Monkey ballast with Pataphysical binoculars. Resurrection cue card kiwi radio. A crowd with unprecedented reticence moving around in a dilemma. We run the violin through its strings and find it preoccupied with music. It was to be expected, I suppose. It’s a violin, not a skeleton. The power of visibility rises in the attic up to the rafters, and turns invisible. It’s how things propagate. The sternum connects the first seven ribs via cartilage. The rest is a matter of proportion, crushed shells and black humor. If you keep tugging on the sleeves of night, eventually a hand will emerge and write a symphony of pigments bursting into stars. And if you really insist on existing in multiple states, go for it. Move to Spokane. Produce a musical.

Let me give you my opinion: the human body is total genius. The dexterity of fingers. The sensitivity of skin. The frolic of hair. The mobility of legs. The endurance of feet. The fantastic array of noses. The goofy bumptiousness of male genitalia. The wonderful subtleties of female genitalia. The infinite constellations of the brain. The mind is a fist of willingness which unfolds like a daylily into forests of reverie. It expands like an ageing sun with the fermentations of age and the lubricants of experience. There are things I learned in my youth that I’ve forgotten in my dotage. And what is dotage? Dotage is the postage of time. I knew, when I was young, that I was young, and that I would one day be old, and forget things, and invent things, and trip over things, and argue with ghosts. We all like to challenge the notion of objective reality. Some of us do it with words. Some of us do it with dice. Some of us don’t do anything. The happy ones. Who play video games. The very act of measurement creates the flavor and character of a thing. It’s not a correct world. Or an incorrect world. It’s a world of phobias, and pilgrimages, and mirrors and invocations. I’m particularly fond of good titles, and good creameries, and bread and aliens. Anything weird. Basically. Like a one-word sentence. Or an anchor settling into the muck of Venus. Which is unscientific. But phenomenal. Like a tambourine, rattling the ghosts away.