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.