The Mandalay Of The Mind

Whenever I get tangled in a body of verbal apparatus, I try bringing it around the back way. I try to make it tangible. I fill it with cactus and buckskin. The way is long and hard and fraught with parables. It’s an ecology of locomotion. And that’s what makes it so obtrusive. The long steady rhythm of walking forward tough, rough, and full of conjecture. Let me put it another way: which shoes do I use? My blue suede shoes, those big black clumpy boots I bought at an Army Surplus store in Seattle’s Belltown 35 years ago, or my running shoes, which are engineered air mesh and comfort my feet like a consulting firm on Park Avenue. Going barefoot is out of the question. The road ahead is as endless as it was beginningless. It’s not even a real road. It’s a metaphor paved with words. I can hear the splatter of rain whenever I unfold a map of human consciousness. I drive a blue Maserati. They’re known for their sensitivity of response. Metaphors are slippery. Traction is difficult to maintain. Focus is crucial. It’s easy to get carried away with words. I once woke up in a luxury hotel in Reykjavik with Balzac on one side and Emily Dickinson on the other. I excused myself, got dressed, and caught a flight to Bora Bora.

There are, of course, places you can’t find on a map. They’re not real places, at least not in the conventional sense. They’re more like the clatter of pots and pans and calamitous shouts in a busy hotel kitchen. The idea of place is a tad misplaced. A point in space can also be an evolution, an ever-unwinding transformation that teeters on the spectral and wallows in skulls. That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once, remarked Hamlet, Act 5, scene 1. You see my drift. There’s no place like a grave, and the grave is no place at all. It’s a hole in the sweet steamy earth that brought us all into this life. A whisper, a phosphor. Wish that I were, at this moment, pushing out for some warm, tropical place like Mandalay. The Mandalay of the mind, as it were, with streams tumbling down steep rocky cliffs and waterfalls where maidens bathe and the adrenalin inside a long dive into mystical absorption boils in a whirl of letters.

How odd, that notion of Hamlet’s, that a skull might circumvent God. Which is like breathing a universe into a basketball. Just enough to dribble. Kids and goats and everyone clapping hands and singing. It’s like a color on the tongue, this philodendron. It smells of invention. And growls like a sedition. Throw in a basement, and you’ve got Jerry Lewis on American Bandstand. Little Richard, unhinged. It’s the whole point. Just this little stimulus to the palate, and things get lickety-splickety. And people call this work? I call it propane. A long blue flame in the gentle fall of evening. Dollars to doughnuts, as they say. And how the new work is done, how it happens, how it grows and spreads its wings and scares the shit out of you, because it’s alive now and the only way to bring it into captivity is to lure it into the halls of meaning with words and sweet perfumes. It’s thicker than anything, this dimension, and opaque. We’re outdoors now, we’re by the sea. There’s water and light and afflatus by the mile. I’m spitting it into the future. And it spits back at me in the wind. Meaning, the future is a scam. A scum. A loop in the noise. Punches, convulsions, woodcuts. The plot fostered from a mood. The practice adept at revolt.

People speak Burmese in Mandalay, and is the country’s lingua franca. It makes me dream of the labial walls of origin, the life of the party, the pivot upon which everything turns. That pained, yearning, armor-piercing voice of Richard Manuel singing “Tears of Rage.” Finding the root, in head and self, that takes time. My family got a little worried when they saw me drift into nineteenth century Paris. I was lured there by cornucopias of literary glory. And the absinthe, of course. And the Tartelette sablée aux fruits rouges at the Bouillon Racine. Some of which proved real, and some of which lingered as echoes and vague shapes, things I might come across in a book, that lively decadence of the desolate, hedonistic, though fraught with despair. Similar, say, to the spirit of ukiyo-e, of Japan’s Edo period, Pictures of the Floating World. Death in life. Joy in despair. The shuttlecock of contradictions that give nuance its piquancy. The sorcery of such things are the very impetus of glorious impieties, and give art its savage instincts. Things you can make with your fingers and head. Anything to keep living, keep going. Puncture holes in the enveloping simulacrum. Sit back and dream as it deflates, causing a riot among the seagulls. I mean, there’s little satisfaction in committing oneself to answer what needs no answer. It’s a noble pursuit, the holy grail of beatnik pilgrims, if there ever was such a thing. There’s a seductive wistfulness to such things. If one sails out far enough, it’s there, melting into the void.