What I Did Tomorrow

I can’t remember what I did tomorrow. I remember I had plans. I remember caution and doughnuts. Looking for a candy dispenser aboard the Starship Enterprise. An appointment with Leonard “Bones” McCoy, who cured my tinnitus. And playing golf on Titan.

The illusion of the flow of time arises from our brains' cognitive processes, which constructs a narrative of "before" and "after" based on Marcel Proust, all 26 seasons of Southpark, and the dizzying whims of sundry prepositions.

Right now, I’m lifting dumbbells with Emily Brontë.

It’s 3:00 p.m. on Planet Earth.

I felt something seismic just now, which caused me to pause, and put my dumbbell down. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose myriad asymmetries are caressed by a thousand different winds and a thousand different situations, the many latitudes that may accommodate a lush plurality, and leave you standing in a taiga of infinite corollaries.

Never tease an ambiguity. They just get bigger. And more and more confusing. Until the gleam of a chisel on the workbench penetrates your eyes with its very specific function, consider yourself vulnerable to the vagaries of persuasion. And its cousin, propaganda.

What does the relativity of time say about the reality of time? There’s nothing fake about a clock, but its hinterlands are many. It can be a deer in the forests of the Turtle Mountains hanging above a TV in a salon with a player piano and a rack of hunting rifles. The tick of a cuckoo clock mocking the progression of time with the thrust of a bird. This is my way of contributing to the fluid immodesty of time in the cockpit of a fool. I remember the time I jumped from a plane and the cord of my chute lost a toggle and the eerie silence of the sky spoke to the inner, softer parts of my being and I had no control over my chute and a man on a one-way radio kept shouting turn left turn left turn left and I shouted I can’t I can’t I can’t and a small bird dashed by without a hello. Not everything in life has such clarity as the sudden impact of your body on a field of dirt. They tell you not to look at the ground but how can you not look at the ground. And bam, your knees are suddenly in your face. And the world feels new and wonderful again. You can pick up a rock and listen closely to the sound of the shape inside. It’s like that surprise when you have nothing to say until you start saying something and everything emerges like a wave swelling in the ocean and collapsing on the rocks and beach huge and chaotic, the foam rising to kiss the toes of sunbathers. We’d all like a buttery circumference to surround our pi. Which is just plain flaky. Differences are differentiated by outcasts. Sooner or later we all encounter it: proliferation. Plurality. A salacious kiln in a lump of magnesium. A quiet gray day in the Skagit Valley. Nothing broken. Nothing harsh. Nothing severe. Just the sweet sensation of being alive.

 

The Père Ubu Balloon

I just changed my T-shirt. My last one had Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son on the front. Today’s has Père Ubu picnicking on the grave of Thomas Paine. He’s also shouting things. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This statement is false. Less is more. The only constant is change. It’s a crazy world. A group's collective decision might easily go against the preferences of its members, and result in misgiving, skepticism, and mistrust. Logic is illogical. But fascism takes the cake. Eats it. Then shits on the public. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Which also makes no sense. If it’s a big club, there should be room for one and all. It is, in fact, a tiny club. There is very little that makes sense anymore. We must adjust our moral compass by the golden rule: those with the gold, make the rules. Physics is generally reliable. Some things do make sense. There’s a sequence, a concatenation of cause and effect. Fellatio inflates the jolly despot. He grows immense. He is smiling. It’s Thanksgiving. There’s a big parade on 77^th Street. And here he comes, high above the crowd, tethered to a float by a long, long rope: the Père Ubu Balloon.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to take the plunge. I’m going deep. I’m going to get to the bottom of things. Here’s two holes, one for each eye. Please excuse my fingers. I can neither explain nor entirely condone what they do, though my thumbs are in opposition. I want what Patchen wanted, and Creeley and Lamantia and the rest of the pack. I want a new beginning. Three Coke bottles and a poet are insufficient ambiguities. We need more to go on. The fear of death confoundeth me. I’m fighting hard for the convolutions and vagaries of prose. I’m leery of abstractions. Things like berserkers, psychoanalysis, and Boolean gazpacho. I have a voice, and I will use it if I must. I tend to lose envelopes. And I can’t remember the last time I bought stamps. This thought experiment shows that there is no universal mousse. What we initially took to be deterministic, locally interacting, and objectively defined realities, proved to be trains of thought bursting out in song. Imagine a rose petal gliding to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Watch as it slowly twirls, whirls, and wobbles in hypothetical space, riding undulations of air, just like a real sentence. It’s going to take a while, so sit back and enjoy yourself. Do what you gotta do.

Let language be our tie. Rain, grass, birds on a wire. Please. Be my guest. Say something. I think it’s important that we exchange ideas, marbles, criticism, opinions, dowagers, divining rods and other items critical to the practice of bulldozing. Let us thrive on disagreements, the way we used to, before the shampoo turned lumpy and the borders closed. This we must do, and do, and do, otherwise we better go, say, into polite, barely endurable small talk, and become enemas to one another. I’m trying as hard as I can to produce the right secretions. The brutal truths we once industrialized have amounted to dimes in another dimension, idols to mint with your own head. We all wanted beauty so hard we became mathematical, and recklessly cryptic. That’s just not how things were meant to be. But who can beat life into form if the cause is bookended by pyromaniacs? Life is a tad chiaroscuro at the front of the vulva. Our first day is mostly one of endless confusion and crying. The best moments come in intervals, like those bittersweet melodic lines in Mahler’s Adagietto. In other words, touching at angles. Obliquity. It’s the best way forward, if you’re trying to find the right line, and avoid the self-checking bullshit. No one action is decisive. Kick out the rot, like they say, and let the mind swing clear of the junk.

I Took A Walk In My Mind

I took a walk in my mind, right to the end of Reverie Lane. Dreams sped by at the speed of dreams, which is actually quite slow if you’re using human perception, and not the perceptions of the dead, or the perceptions of birds, which are fast as thought, and propelled by words. Swallows are poets. Crows are prophets. And loons are librettists, and are clumsy on land.

Eagles have the sweep of prose, spiraling in columns of air.

The interior life is sounded by hammers, and opened by a sequence of keys on a keyboard. Black keys are semitones above the white keys, which are the basis of scales and melodies. The division between outside and inside is illusory. Reality is in the intervals. Privacy is a nice feeling, but so is touching the skin, which draws the attention outside, among blackberry vines and redwoods. The scent of the air, and infantries of clouds, conquering distances with calm.

For the sake of argument, let’s say there is no separate reality called tree. The label "tree" is a category – a mode of existence - invented by humans for ease of reference, rather than an inherent property of reality itself. It’s our mind’s interpretation of sensory data, dressed in leaves and inflectional stems. The noumenon of a truly active thing must be molded into some form of magic for it to be apprehended by the mind, and sudden and spectacular. Much like a mountain.

I agree, a mountain path is a duodenal angularity bordered by ferns. It illustrates its shadows with enormous persuasion. I’m the furthest example of myself that I can extend toward you. I smell the flavor of panic. You can reverse the loop in your backpack for a friendly clue above you. There’s really no need to display your knife. We’re among spirits, invisible beings clowning around in the puffballs. My mission here is simple: discover a convulsive beauty by flexing an unrolled frequency, a resonant piece of sheer scripture, a kind of spinal cord with edible leaves. The universe is a lenient start to things, a potent sense of adulthood on the edge of caraway seed. I’m leaning into it as we speak. Every cell in my body has begun to decipher this existence as a rudderless watercolor diffusing endlessness in all the places as yet untouched by endlessness, whose texture is smooth as free will and just as alluvial. There’s nowhere I can go without encountering the general ooze of biology, whose engine, sputtering invective, is aghast at the lines at the airport, and the ritual of removing shoes. Wherever there is consciousness, there is ceremony, and fear of the supernatural. It goes with the territory. Which is itself a procreation.

Is thought photogenic? I don’t believe so. I’ve never seen a picture of thought. But if I did, I would imagine it would like something like those extraterrestrials – Abbott and Costello – in the movie Arrival. Enormous octopian entities scribbling a swirly language on a glass wall. Everyone gawks, eyes bugging out of their heads, as if standing on the edge of a whole new way of perceiving and experiencing life. Which, of course, they are.

If autumn is to bump into wonder, one must step out of one's dwelling and grab a rope and pull. And pull hard. Whatever lurks in the darkness will begin to assume form and definition. Pain, on contact, will glow in the gables. Money is a disease. Side effects include hallucination, merciless predation and cutthroat monopolies. Sex is a reasonable form of recreation, and remains our most fervent hope for the future. Any future. Despite appearances, we maintain strong ties with our mythologies. The universe above the reach of our arms sparkles in our beer. There’s a feeling of slammed doors being reopened, forgotten revolutions reenacted by rodeo clowns. Chokeholds pop the spectral liquidities inflating our debt. Leaves plummet to the ground with the lacy arabesques of a thousand abstractions. Clearly, the drift of ideas has not yet been abandoned. People eat and do backflips, swirling their glow sticks in anticipation of that last possibility unique to oneself, which is the possibility of authentic existence, which occurs when the spirit is jarred, jolted awake, enlightened by the ineluctability of its demise. How it is that things are things at all passes unnoticed in the arc of a frog, and plops in the water. Supple legs thrust back and the frog is propelled forward. Aspens sway. And the frog grows still. A word: grenouille in French, 蛙 in Japanese,afloat on the page like a leaf on a pond glazed with moonlight.

Depth Is Orange At The Punishment Dump

This exhibition shines what our harmonica twirls. I rattle a bone if I'm alone. The energy carries this beside a bomb. I call it reflecting myself openly. I generate books I attract italic iron. We bend this pleasure into puddle pegs. Sashay with blood where the flames stand. I will inform you of the baroque. But the time must be circular algebra. Before I tailored blobs I squashed gargoyles. In the end, I blossomed like denim.

The scratchier feathers generate a gentle greenery. Your calculus clanks loudly in your spit. I like to carry my clapboards gingerly. Little Richard did it like it mattered. We scatter gold over this old air. I'm reckless and French and hirsute too. I have many facets to my library. My seminal war my enduring staircase butter. A journey in space starts my altitude. And a press crackles through its animal control. I find this garishness sliced by concern.

My bird has consciousness from termites. Making inquiry into space is a hope. Send the bank my freshly engorged interest. I have creamy thoughts about this milk. The hypothesis of participles clatters like jujubes. And the sky is a lavender treasure. My abhorrence moves against snatching a volleyball. Now is not the time to gape. I shall stand here naked as Picasso. It’s a process involving many different zippers.

Grab pleasure before the jump into gravity. I mull emotive so yank my sob. There will be circumstance there and sidewalks. Hectic talk is unpredictable cartwheels the consciousness. Box our unity before we weather physiology. Explode the duty think among its hats. Crackle my creosote until I get lyrical. Endeavor with mass behind you and twist.  We defend our sloppy deviations with meringue. We swear to Cézanne the hammer has will. Your wrinkles are autumn flowers in bas-relief. 

Over there a mood tosses in humor. My impact on coffee has been marigold. Elsewhere, the little I have done sputters. Can it be that translation is spectral? Depth is orange at the punishment dump. All the little neurons create thunderous fictions. The human brain is a pumpkin. Solace supposes a big bang swaying inside. Change the eyes as indicated under the description. The elegies we stroll as fathoms are dreams. We chatter amidst thrilling struggles of impatience.

I experience words by squeezing their vividness. Their texture leaves a demonstrable protuberance behind. We paddle a paper canoe and whirl. Letters crackle as I blast a harmonica. Distorted beings gave the imagery clumsy phenomena. I celebrate each pulse with an octopus. I grow a phonograph and dance exultantly. Shake a flower with my unshakeable hunger. The exploration has been miming its milieu. I seem to be pissing rainbows everywhere. I fold my southern wallet and mutiny. 

An obscurity has been plunged in controversy. A pyramidal universe most definitely has attitude. But who can decide what branch to prune? I have faith in thunder springing forth. I hear the far sound of pamphlets. The quarks dream among themselves as skylarks. And breezes carry the scent of exigency. How many times must I prove polyhedral? I prefer to plant my flags upside-down. Bees often exhibit an erratic morality. It’s nothing we could ever not be. 

The Highly Subjective Objectivity Of Objects

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. This includes Moscow, angels, and God. Particularly when you’re driving across state lines with a shipment of tabasco sauce. Here’s what Wittgenstein has to say about objects: objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs. It’s a circumstance of great latitude, and tremendous responsibility. The door, the window, the ironing board and the car across the street all testify to the rigors of being an object. It is the object of the object to be an object. The matter with matter isn’t just glitter, but garlic. Consciousness flows through both matter and space, and in some way allows reality to exist so that perceptions can authorize steel and codify the circus. Infinity, meanwhile, slides through Indonesia and goes bald as a crab. The entire universe has to be hosed down with history. This wrinkles the planets that are there to be admired. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space. A speck in a visual field need not be red, it can also be France, and turn subversive at the drop of a hat. I was there when it happened: when Dada was born in a delicatessen, and Tristan Tzara sliced a logic in half with the subtlety of hypnosis. All the lobsters were set free, and each symptom was licensed to carry Friday forward and make it available for fondling and aberration.

Every proposition must have a sense. Assertion cannot give it a sense, for what it asserts is the sense itself. And the same holds true of destiny. It’s hard to make any sense at all of things without a compelling narrative. My instincts indicate grease. How its very syllables could warp the sputter if something came loose and the sentence rolled forward on its odium, its fangs bright with torque. I can’t deny that the ground is a riddle. The garden savors of dirt. Yet the roses deliver bags of road to the money of the nose. I’m clean now, and the way ahead is free of elevators. I feel awed before this easel. Even my chair feels stupid. Perception goes wide-eyed with gestation. Everything around me seems a little bent tonight, and warm. I feel like I may be walking into something monumental. Each snap of my fingers is seminal to the general percussion. Each stitch has that compelling engorgement we call romance. If you follow the thread you will find it gallant in proposal and diffuse in conversation. The way a crow argues its placement in time and space reveals a crack in the general entelechy, a potential realization given the tone of the summons and the aerodynamics of the analysis. I feel better now. And peculiar.

Some objects are tricky. Others are swampy. Clay is eminently malleable, but slippery. As for kimchi, it has great benefits, but its spicy, and makes my stomach burn. Objects do this: they make promises they can’t keep, just like humans. Disappointment is educating. However, I do find many of the lessons to be confusing and contradictory. Anyone who has come home with an Ikea bed or bookcase knows this. What you envision might not be exactly what ends up happening. If the truth requires assembly, maybe it’s not the truth. Maybe it’s a diorama containing a riotous night at the Cedar Tavern in 1956. Maybe it’s a chance encounter at 3:00 a.m. by Red Grooms. Maybe it’s deception so lovely in its conception as to create a sense of circumspection. A sense of iconography in a state of abbozzo. And a sad but wistful acceptance of soy sauce. All I know is what I have words for, and sister, they can exist in multiple states. They can create a new wave. We can surf our way to Mars. We can balance ourselves gracefully as the chaos that exists in all organic beings thrusts us into the turbulence of Teahupo'o. Or Malibu. Or Oceanus Borealis. This is the interval known as sunyata. And is a luminous halo. 

 

Converting Feelings Into Murky Aquarium Glass

It’s a funny thing when you think about it, converting feelings into words. I suspect it’s much easier for musicians to do that. Just make the right sounds. Don’t saddle anything with meaning. Meaning makes everything squishy. Like murky aquarium glass.

To be once in the world, one must never be again. To be fully in the world is to be welcomed from exile, all the false expectations of life. Alive, we need purpose. Un raison d’être. A reason to exist. This need for purpose in a world – in a universe – where purpose is continually stymied by death, the natural processes of growth and decay – is to assume the status of a guest. To accept the impermanence of one’s life is reason enough to live it to its fullest potential.

Submission is death. To submit to authority or constraint is to renounce one's own freedom, individuality and will. Death is not necessarily physical, but rather a death of the soul or spirit. It is the end of intellectual life, creativity, dignity, and autonomy. Submission, however nobly packaged, or embellished and beautified by desperation, can lead to a loss of moral values, disengagement, and a form of torpor that resembles a death of the spirit.

The problem with now is that it doesn’t last. The problem with now is that it curtsies to oblivion. The problem with now is nothing you can prepare for. The problem with now gets repetitive. The problem with now is on the outer edge of ruin. The problem with now humiliates all the formulas. The power of now is a pablum disguised as a postponement. The power of now is over before it commits a single sin. The power of the problem of now is a problem caused by annoyance, unseemly behavior, and immaculate conception. Now is now but now it’s gone. And this is a problem.

You can’t help to keep on caring with a cat on your lap. The easiest way to convert feelings into words is to become motionless a moment and sell clothes to the tourists. Invest your opinions with some pejoratives. Make witty remarks at the back of the bus. Become a novice. A novice of anything. Find a set of words that best describes your current direction. Are you feeling north but going south? Are you heading west but stuck in a doll factory? Describe a rose to a blind person. Write a letter to Emma Bovary. Walk nude through a quatrain of tender buttons.

So what do I do? I write. What else can one do? Given the capacity to put words together. Create a lovely liquid thing that squirts words like a bivalve and bivouacs on your forehead. Something like a pancake. Or a form of combustion. Pistons pumping up and down in a frenzy of verbal incontinence. What you want is compression, your own rhythms, tell everybody what’s happened and don’t spare the details, and through all this, with all the deadwood around, and punch bowls and popcorn, it is the use they make of us, these words, your words, my words, our words, because, bless us, we have to eat, and swap stories, and galvanize the timid.

Inexperience makes it impossible to get an exact grip on the history of perforation at this juncture. But reading this morning in the Möbius Gazette that it takes a lot of butterflies to inspirit the many maneuvers necessary to serve a good apfelstrudel I think I’ll stick with extrasensory rubber. Think of prose for a minute. What can prose do? It’s like fighting snakes and hailstones to pour your blood out on the page, punch by punch, participle by participle. Prose is primarily a social instrument. The scholar lives in the imperial city, does her work, and, once a month, tells the children what she has found out. That about sums it up. The job of making sense for a body of people that no longer read is just plain pullulation. It’s a short cut to the other side of despair, which is a peculiar euphoria, the world turned inside out, and the damned rigidities weeded out. Once you lift anchor and get going it’s like breaking eggs over a cast iron pan. The very house shivers with the luxuries of a good oratorio. Form is never more than an extension of Utah. You’ll find the cirrus is really just sport when you get to the far reaches of the stratosphere. And the gardens full of delphinium.

The formalities of the bookstore are no longer our concern. One’s inner agitations, turmoil, anxieties, angst, unease, unresolved crises, all that shit, I can put down as subjective as I can make it. And that will make some noise in the academic heads, a feverish molestation of the instincts, whose symptoms include reckless parody, what the good doctor calls the necessity of destruction. Echoes of the young Rimbaud, before he and a caravan of camels and men dragged a wagon load of Remingtons over the Somali desert. The former French poet who stopped writing poetry and made photographs of himself looking exotic and weary. Life has a way of resurrecting itself. There are remedies held in place by stupefaction. Here’s some conjecture: what if consciousness were a property inherent in matter itself, so that it had tread, and pattern, and could be folded into a basilica, or nailed to the breath with a small hammer? Its dance among syllables is an obvious hospitality, and pertinent to the ant, or centaur. What lives, enjoys particularity. You can see it in the eyes of these creatures: particularity. Particularity as far as the eye can see.  Nothing exists but doesn’t have some particularity. Bookstores in particular. The smell of knowledge. The creak of the floorboards. And anarchy in the eyes of the readers. 

 

Stating The Obvious

The canary in the coal mine assumes many forms these days. The rate of glacial melt is accelerating globally due to rising temperatures from human-caused climate change, with glaciers losing mass at a rate of approximately 273 billion tons per year between 2000 and 2023, or an 18% higher rate than previously thought. Rivers are drying up. Trees are stressed. Eggs are expensive. People are being kidnapped off the streets by ICE agents cracking windshields and intimidating pedestrians. There have been 502 mass shootings in the U.S. as of the end of August, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Over 10,000 homes lost to wildfire in the Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, situated on a hilltop directly above the Palisades Highlands, was empty, due to a tear, ostensibly, in its rubber cover. Flint, Michigan and Jackson Mississippi are still without drinkable water. Everything is penury fire and fever. Brain-eating amoeba present in the Lake of the Ozarks. Plastic nanoparticles in the human brain increased by 50% between 2016 and 2024. Godzilla wears a Stetson. Père Ubu is president. I don’t like being a bummer. But here I am. Stating the obvious.

This is it, societal collapse, Armageddon, whatever one chooses to call it. I call it done. Kaput. Tits up. I call it genocide. I call it apartheid. I call it immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Pregnant Ukrainian woman fighting Russia in a muddy ditch. The world – and by world I mean the human universe – is hopelessly fractured. Raped. Abused. Torn asunder by technofascist police-state corporate greed. Unobtainable healthcare. Unobtainable housing. Unobtainable food.

Planet earth will survive. But much of it, the part we live in, the forests and deserts and mountains we inhabit, is disappearing. The daily erosions are sobering, like the death of a star. Impermanence has always been a part of life. It’s a universal, existential process, natural as a woman’s pregnancy or the pop of a champagne cork. Magpies on a barbed wire fence. Dead coyote in a ditch. Burst of a meteor burning through earth’s atmosphere. It’s the unreality of the reality that gets you. Yanks a curtain open on the debris from last night’s party.

And yet, the sublime persists. Transcendence, compassion, beauty. People capable of personal sacrifice and with a deep sentiment of the common good persist. As of this writing, a flotilla of ships has set sail from Barcelona to the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid and activists on board. They are doing what world governments have refused to do: relieve suffering. Err on the side of life.

Whatever life is, whatever brought it into being, whatever force or energy or divine power, whatever random coming together of chemicals and molecules invested the existence of matter with the baffling phenomena of consciousness, with self-awareness, is eternal. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet,” wrote Emerson. “This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title…The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even in the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”

Had I written this, I would’ve chosen a different word than ‘infancy.’ I know what Emerson means: he is referring to a state of pure consciousness, non-judgmental consciousness, a state of awareness in which everything is new, marvelous, amazing, astonishing, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, always enchanting, beguiling, spellbinding.

The world abounds in subtlety. The reddish hues of krill. The shifting hues of a glass octopus. Sunlight traversing a mug of beer. Robins singing near the kitchen window. Draft of cool air. Tires skidding on steep Highland Drive after a spring rain. Shrill inquiry of a blue jay. Despite all the tons of concrete and steel employed on this globe to house enterprise and luxury suites in mid-town Manhattan and the pristine streets of Singapore, infinite subtleties remain.

What are subtleties? Duchamp called it inframince: the subtle, barely perceptible, or immeasurable differences between interacting phenomena. It’s not a clearly defined concept, but a nebular aura, such as the lingering warmth on a chair after a person has stood up. It highlights the transient and in-between states, like the presence of a bright object – Venus, the morning star  – and a pale moon that remains in the morning sky after sunrise. Inframince emphasizes the nuances of perception and the invisible qualities that enrich and enhance the sensations of living in this world, this plane, this dimension. Whatever the nervous system of the human organism is capable of absorbing, assimilating, apprehending. Nuance, undertone, trace - inframince - require a great deal of awareness and sensitivity to detect, an eccentric disposition. Eccentric: meaning outside the circle. Outside mainstream narrative. Outside indoctrination. And they’re important. Critical to the survival of the human spirit during a time of aggressive, moral inversion and unbridled materialism.

The myth of living is strangely persistent. “Even in this day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly recognized,” wrote poet Laura Riding, “we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time devoting pious ceremonies to the aesthetic vitality of the Myth, from a haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art of living.”

She makes modern life sound tedious, deluded and inauthentic, but what she’s really getting at is the anarchic energy at the core of the poetic urge. “Poetry,” she says, “is essentially not of the Myth. It is all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense of duty…Whatever language it uses it makes up as it goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to start all over again…In the art of not living one is ephemerally permanent but permanently ephemeral.”

Kant called it a purposeful purposelessness. Poetry doesn’t help anyone survive. It doesn’t grow food. It doesn’t make heat and light, crackle and spark in a fireplace, warming the legs and feet. It doesn’t fix things, build things, or make the bells ring at the New York Stock Exchange. What it does do is surge through the bloodstream like a wild energy, demanding focus and traction.  

This is what one tells oneself when the urge to create something coaxes and needles you into finding its expression, and the indulgence, although deeply pleasurable in the moment, will not feed a starving infant. Creativity is an odd phenomenon. There’s a madness to it. It exists outside the rational. It’s quintessentially selfish. Shakespeare’s Richard III enjoys a disturbing flamboyance. Those devoted to it are also willing to make great sacrifice. It can be alienating. It can empty a bank account in no time, just like an addiction to cocaine, or fentanyl, or negative capability. It must perplex the hell out of the private equity firms. That is, if they pay any attention to it at all. Which I strongly doubt. The only profit to be had from poetry, is the dilation of the soul.

I worry about the steady erosion of world literature. Daily reading for pleasure in the U.S. has declined by over 40% in the last 20 years, dropping from approximately 28% of the population in 2004 to 16% in 2023. This represents a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year. 

Goodbye Shakespeare. Goodbye Dante. Goodbye Keats and Shelley and Gwendolyn Brooks. Goodbye Viriginia Woolf. Goodbye Gertrude Stein. Goodbye Ginsburg. Goodbye Kerouac.

R noticed a young dawn redwood dying from lack of water. She began toting empty cat litter jugs filled with water to water the young dawn redwood. Some of the leaves had turned brown from drought stress, but after several waters some of the leaves reverted to green. There was still life in the tree. Dawn redwoods are deciduous. Their feathery, bright green leaves turn a coppery-red or russet-brown in autumn before dropping. People sometimes wrongly assume the tree is dead when it loses its leaves. R called the park department and requested that they give the tree a wrap-around slow-release watering bag, as is the norm with young, newly planted trees. The park department came and chopped the tree down. No explanation.

A similar scenario happened to five lush rhododendrons in the park next door, growing over a bank of blackberry vines. Every spring they produced a profuse agglomeration of bloom. It was a joy to round the corner on the switchback trail and confront this assembly of robust, Rabelaisian color. The rhododendrons were watered automatically by an underground sprinkler system. When the system stopped working, the park department took it out, rather than try to repair or replace it. We began watering them ourselves, using empty cat litter jugs to carry the water. The park department chopped two down. R continues to water the remaining three. One is doing ok and two are struggling, but still alive. Summer drought is now a seasonal phenomenon, coupled with the scent of wildfire. R has no further plans to call the park department.

We’re on our own now, to quote Young’s “Ohio.” That was 54 years ago. I lived by Coyote Creek in downtown San José, a wooded ravine filled with coastal scrub and an upturned grocery cart. Fed a family of raccoons dog food. Studied Creeley and Olson by a big glass wall. Noticed a constellation of eyes watching me. Bandit eyes. Tiny hands on a pane of glass. Looking in.

 

Especially When I'm Swimming

First, I make a chain of associations by eating jelly into existence. Then, if the weather is clumsy, I describe things as tantalizing or contrite, depending on the situation, and with an eye toward shape and juxtaposition. Scale is important, and so is cryptography. Whenever a history overflows it must be sprinkled with sage or it becomes clothing. Do you hear the siren? It’s a sign of respect. It means there’s danger in the air, and that’s when things become stellar, and vigorous and radical. Hundreds of crows swirl and mingle in the air. It's time to do something birch, and bivouac in a prayer, as a fever welcomes the after-effects of a derby. Anyone who can twist beauty into flesh deserves a ruby. The body must retain its idea of cadence or lose it in bandages. Needles are good for administering pain medication to the dying, checking the air pressure in a tire, or measuring the electrical power of a copula. It is at precisely this point that I start the lasagna and arrange a slide through a forest of diamonds. I'm trying to make things easy and glorious, like holding a cashmere shawl and feeling its indiscretion with your fingers.

It would be nice to be at the ocean. It would be nice to feel the blunt true honesty of existence, the immensity of it all, the rawness of it all, the hiss of water rising in sheets of effervescing foam over the sand, the delicacy of the night air sliding over your skin, infinite sensations alive in a single moment. The immensity excuses every crazy thought that crawls around in my brain. The infinite isn’t picky. Eternity isn’t pious. These things have a science, and a benediction. There’s nothing crazier than a universe with things popping in and out of it. This has a name. It’s called absurdity, and there’s nothing funnier than absurdity. There’s absurdity in death, absurdity in pain, absurdity in desolation, absurdity in despair, absurdity in certainty, absurdity in courtesy, absurdity in circuitry, and absurdity in rhyme. Thinking of the ocean isn’t quite the same as being at the ocean, it never is, thoughts are never the same as loops, as actual rings, brass rings on a merry-go-round, bronze rings on a granite slab. You can’t think yourself warm by imagining a fire when you’re mountain-climbing in a blizzard. And this is what’s so remarkable about the ocean. My thoughts cease thinking and let the whole universe into my breath.

I like to be friendly. It suits my disposition. I think I was born with it. Maybe not. I don’t know. Being open and friendly was the general order of things not long ago. People are frightened now. Or apathetic. Or both. And maybe I’m not as friendly as I think I am. Perceptions get sloppy in old age. Boundaries collapse. Shapes become insistent. Definitions get feathers. Metals confuse the issue. Goads get discussions doing. Discussions get goads going. Duties are abandoned. Values alter. Altars alter. Things get silly. Rain especially. Rain is just plain silly. Try clutching the air and squeezing rain out of it. Learn to merge with traffic. This is a difficult skill. It requires a superb sense of timing, a lot of grit, and Jerry Lee Lewis. It helps to be kinetic. No suitcase should have to beg for a chair. A good slap of warm water from the faucet is good for the face. Distortions often bring clarity. The stars in the night sky no longer exist. You’re looking at a light that’s taken billions of years to reach your eyes. Ghosts are everywhere in life. A lot of people become ghosts before they’re dead. Or know they’re dead. Like that scene in Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis sees Anna drop his wedding ring and notices that he’s not wearing one. I believe it’s called dissociation. Feeling like you’re dead when you’re not dead is not a good way to be dead. It means you’re alive. You only stop feeling dead when you’re dead. That said, when it comes to death, all bets are off. My mind isn’t a telescope. It’s more like a load of wash. What I imagine and what I experience are unauthorized and palpable, especially when I’m swimming.

 

Imagine A Butter Knife Divided Into Many Rooms

Imagine a butter knife divided into many rooms. People with books in their hands go from wall to wall, turning over pages, reading the names of places, the secret, unstated yearnings of old age, whitecaps on Chesapeake Bay, thin streaks of snow whipping over a North Dakota highway, Viking blood on ancient manuscripts, pockets of clear parallel in a 60-watt bulb, and the sticky remembrances of spiritual abstractions. Milwaukee, Beau Brummel, Shakespeare, Rossetti. Absorbing situations: lady in white, sucking poetry through a straw, pointing at a UFO landing on Wizard Island. Goats in shadow flecked with brilliant yellow sunlight. A figure in blue pushing a hive of rabid bees into a momentary symbolism. Two hundred clergymen caught in a net meditating on a bet. In each book is a lifetime imprisoned in words, a lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes, and joys. Sweetmeats spread on a table of slumbering umber. Airplanes shining in a labium. Anything the kingdom of words can handle may strain the understanding but answer to the needs of the intellect, which is to choose a slippery maneuver, and glide out of jail. 

Each work of art is a wall shattered by a whim, a Danish bookcase blooming in a mimosa. Politics sullies it. Nothing kills art faster and with greater efficiency and thoroughness than politics. Art museums, nourished by affluent gala dollars, love replacing art with cutting edge, boutique activism. It’s so much more manageable. This is me being political. This is me with a megaphone. This is me hurling metaphors at a four-blade, twin-engine, medium-lift military utility helicopter manufactured by greed. And this is me as a complicated cosmetic finishing off a warm face with a touch of soubriquet. Imagine painting a sadness with a palette of silverware and an acre of dirt. Ants agitating on a mound. Palm fronds trembling like fingers on a piano. Ancient turtle protruding a head. Swirls and dabs of a paint brush. A man wildly gesticulating at crows in a corn field. An attempt to make yellow hotter produces a green tint and unleashes both the hormonal and eccentric impulses. A devotion to art is indulgent, irresponsible, and utterly absurd. Therefore, it is holy and charmingly unmanageable. Even in discord, and brushed aside with superficial words and explanations, it shakes the universe with a totally dead silence.

This spark of inner life I’m inserting into the void floats an empire of dreams. The spark is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. But it’s there, lubricating a psychonaut. An incursion of urges big as planets and twice as volcanic fill the veins of this sentence with the blood of phonemes. It may be beneficial to us both if I try to maintain some semblance of decorum and wade nakedly into the universe with a coconut, as a gesture of goodwill, and deflate the nightmare of materialism until it glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. Things are getting serious now, and petulant and vain. Pain generates paint. No structure is too old to get seminal through elations and choreography. Words, which seem at first to puddle into trinkets, pulsate with their own semantic fever, and quake spasmodically with salty morsels of artistic bilimbi. Every sidewalk has its curves and idiosyncrasies, and for that I feel glad, and maroon and geographic. I know I will one day walk to the end of a sentence and see nothing but libraries. You know it. I know it. It’s all going to explode one day. Meanwhile, this is me, standing on a knoll, tapping my chin with my index finger, wondering what to do with the ashes of the past.