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.