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.