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.