Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle

Now I know what Walter Benjamin meant by aura. Sometimes an image will seem to have a soul, so powerfully affective is its halo-like quality, its uniqueness, its presence, its authenticity and unabashed display of beauty. Such was an image I viewed last Tuesday at Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery near Olympia, Washington. The image was titled Foggy Sunset and is a photograph. Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction eroded an artwork’s aura by its one-step removal from the immediacy and inimitable singularity of its moment in space and time. Reproduction is, by default, a degradation. To listen to a CD or streaming service of Miles Davis’s “So What” isn’t the same as hearing Davis perform live at the Village Vanguard. You’d have to be a bit old to make that claim, but so what? The point is a lesson in discernment. Nothing beats immediacy, the qualia of a particular moment. We live in a universe of improvisation. Spinning yo-yos and spilled sugar. Orb webs beaded with dew. These things are true. But isn’t it possible, as with this particular photograph, that the aura has in no way been harmed by a perceived detachment from its original setting, but generates, out of its own uniqueness, its language of light and shadow, its liminal and irreproducible position at the threshold of the divine, an aura redolent of an individual’s diffusion into that beauty, and its uncanny stillness?  The act of creation has its own immediacy. The camera registers the visible in a simple click of the shutter, but it’s the dilation of an enchanted mind that carries its visions and apparitions into the light. “To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy,” declared Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

The mood is serene, crepuscular. A bright sun crosses a narrow wooden bridge traversing a small narrow pedestrian bridge with two towering evergreens to the far left, a cluster of shrubs, dark and well-defined in the immediate foreground, a tree in the center receding, phantom-like, into the mist and off to the far right – muted as a parenthetical remark - the limbs of a tree just barely visible, so veined and delicate they could be the nervous system of a very pale ghost. Also faintly bordering on invisibility is a streetlamp and a street sign. Most of the scene is void, nothingness and mist. The world appears softened, hypnotized into an exquisitely serene Elysium so pure in its twilight vision the ugliest despair couldn’t crawl its way in, or eat a hole in the glamour. And there goes the sun, rolling homeward to night, and dawn in another part of the world.

The entire scene would repose in a serene uniformity of mist were it not for several more contrasting details that excite a deeper reading: in the far upper left is a sharp, steel-like, triangular section of what I’m guessing is the overhang of a roof. It’s aggressive, a Darth Vader-like thrust from the industrial world of commerce and finance into this nirvana of fog and ease of letting go. The triangular section – shaped somewhat like an arrowhead - is matched by a smaller version lower down. Together, they seem more like clumsy intrusions, awkward displacements, than a deliberate attack, or an aggressive, colonizing force. They’re just there. Twin architectural forms remindful of what everybody loves calling the real world (overcrowded freeways, healthcare snafus, broken pipes, hysterical outbursts, greasy combs, existential dilemmas, supervillain tech giants, drug gangs, military strikes, drones, arcades, helicopters, etc.), caught in a moment of harmless tranquility like two corporate moguls peeking into the ultramundane.

I became engrossed in a number of photographs – a very up close and personal view of a clematis in one photograph, and a rose in another, both highly sensual, intensely actual and detailed – and a large, open view of two American battleships off the coast of Vietnam, circa the late 60s or early 70s, in other words the Vietnam War, with a Vietnamese fisherwoman in the foreground wearing a broad-brimmed nón lá, or “leaf hat,” maneuvering a small boat with a long bamboo pole, poised with seeming unconcern. Her face is shadowed by the broad brim of her hat and completely hidden, so we do not know what she might be thinking, or if there were visible on her face any expression revealing her mood, or disposition. This makes the photograph a hallmark of wartime ambiguity. There are no explosions, nothing ripping the air apart with death and shrapnel. It’s simply a moment of calm in a universe of spectacular volatility.

In the middle of the gallery was a dugout canoe crafted by hand and using an array of tools such as an adz for rough shaping, chisels and gouges for fine details. The canoe is named Flicker, and was the first dugout canoe Red Eagle worked on, setting up shop in 2005 in the Tacoma Art Museum parking lot. Work was finished in the summer of 2008. Flicker was put in the water and paddled up to Cowitchen up on Vancouver Island. “Merrie was skippering,” Red Eagle relates, “and was not happy about taking so much water while traveling thru the San Juans, so we added the cover on the stern. We also thinned out the hull and used her on the journey to Suquamish where we gifted it to our lead carver, David Wilson (Lummi).  He used her on several journeys.  Recently, Flicker (Dave renamed her ‘The Gift’) had been sitting a lot at his house. When we asked to use her for the exhibit, he noted that he was getting ready to refurbish her and start using her to do some traditional style fishing.”

My father was a designer, so I grew up with an appreciation for good design, and a particular fascination with the fusion of functionality and beauty. On display above Flicker was an array of paddles, and above them – hanging like scrolls – were drawings of the paddles, very precisely drawn, with numbered sections for aid in the carving process. Red Eagle picked one up and handed it to me: I was struck immediately by its sensuous shape and texture. It was wonderfully smooth and the curves were a pleasure to run my fingers over and around and under and across. I can only imagine the added pleasure of moving one of these paddles in the water and watching the swirls pass by in a sunlit glitter. “For the paddle blanks I used a grid form to make it easier to cut away the wood to make the paddle,” Red Eagle relates. “I started when I had heard about the Chief Leschi paddle that was at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. I knew the director from Udub and she agreed to show me and further allowed me to make a drawing and thus come up with the Grid Layout of the paddles. I have made several designs using this method. I used this methodology to teach the Udub students for carving their paddles.”

Red Eagle relates that he began his work in photography in the summer of 1976, when he was living in Sitka, Alaska. He used a Canon F-1 35mm camera loaded with Kodak Kodachrome ASA 25 film. One photograph in particular – a panoramic view of an intensely bright sun blazing through a thin, diaphanous mist over a range of mountains. The sun is moving over a range of mountains and shooting a streak of phenomenally bright light across the water; a few dark rocks accentuate the celestial power of the light, creating a dramatic contrast between the romantic splendor of the atmosphere and the silent dignity of earthbound objects. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson legendarily put high value on what he termed the “decisive moment,” a perfect, fleeting moment that reveal a deeper truth about life. I see that same principle here. Red Eagle’s photographs are éclats of sudden recognition, epiphanies of light that evoke occasions of sublimity and deep spiritual connection with forces external and supernal.

Other photographs, taken, I assume, at a much later date, are more human oriented, focused especially on the female form. One in particular perplexed me a little, it seemed so at odds with the serene intimacies of the other photographs. A beautiful woman with long black hair sits next to a tall accent table supporting a large Oriental vase with a bright white chrysanthemum in it. The woman appears to be in a state of crushing despair. Her head is bowed, and supported by her right hand, which is clutching her hair, and her pale left arm extends down, bends at the elbow as her forearm rests on the arm of her chair. Her upper torso is bare and a breast is partially revealed under her arm. The woman’s form is so gracefully curvaceous it feels like music, soft, sorrowful, and fascinating, a kind of stillness in movement. My wife and I both agreed that there was something Pre-Raphaelite about it; it evinced the kind of Gothic, aestheticized realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, artists like Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and John Everett Millais. I was surprised to discover the photograph was part of a project Red Eagle was working on in 1988 called American Kimono. Kimono, in Japanese, means something to wear, and there was something incontrovertibly bare and unadorned about this woman, not just physically, but emotionally. This was a woman open to view under a sheet of glass in a deeply private moment, an individual experiencing a level of emotional distress familiar to everyone, but doing so with a posture and gracefulness so remarkable it felt rude to look, and even more rude to walk away.

Another nude featured a young woman sitting in a lotus position on smooth floor, her arm reaching behind as she leans back in voluptuous ease, breasts exposed, a Japanese fan splayed by her side. She is wearing a shirt or robe, unbuttoned and loose as an afterthought.

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart,” remarked Henri Cartier Bresson. I can think of no simpler way to describe my immersion in Red Eagle’s photographs. They tend to coax one into a fuller state of being with their seductive intensity, their depth of caring about a world whose beauty is generously offered daily to anyone disposed to enter into that proposal. I’m glad we made the drive down to Olympia, and were treated to iced tea and the best cheesecake I’ve ever had at the Cascadia Grill on 4^th Avenue West, surrounded by hundreds of photographs, people, mostly, who’d come from Olympia: Dave Grohl, Judy Collins, Matt Groening, and many other less familiar faces. Time felt open and broad and generous, like a canoe on the Salish Sea.

Enjoy Your Problems

I have a wandering mind, active as a foundry, even on Saturdays, when there is no one there but Shunyata. They say a dullness of mind is seasoned with travel. If that's the case, then pack some extra underwear. Let’s put on a show. Inhibit nothing. Not even moisture. The humidity of passion. Which leaves a glaze of satisfaction and a rose by the window. Egos and eggs are similar contingencies. Eggs need a nest. Egos need a pageant. I’m trembling now with a giant palpability. It started when I noticed a shadow following me from behind. And when I turned around it walked in front of me. I was numbed by the sheer audacity of this manifest phantasm, this mockery of my Being and mitochondria. Emphasis is a form of testimony, butterflies in Fanny Brawne's bedroom. If you saw Bright Star, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Negative capability. Insidious secrets. Beaded bubbles winking at the brim of some brawny mint julep. Darkling I listen, and for many a time, I have been half in love with easeful death. The I is the eye of the cavern. The sole proprietor, as it were, of a body, replete with fingers and toes and a willingness to spring into action in the middle of Swan Lake, supple as a geistesblitz. Deep down, I’m a monster. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. It makes me irritable, especially when I’m chased by villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.

Sometimes I feel like 72 people scrupulously maintained by 93 lips. It’s a residual effect of choral singing for the Church of Holy Skillets. The costuming is by Arachne of Hollywood. Swimming swimwear for swimming or bringing singing to spinning in Stimmung by by Karlheinz Stockhausen. I like to create loopholes in legal briefs for certain ferocious or fabulous animals. Silly interdictions. Prohibitions against wearing cowboy boots without owning two cows. Double proxy marriage in Montana. Selling dyed ducks in quantities of less than six in Kentucky. Stimmung is an aid to my focus and reputation. Every time I pass a certain door the pocket of my cardigan sweater gets caught on the doorknob. I know there’s a reason for this, I can feel it in my bones, but there’s nothing I can do to guarantee its survival. When chaos is hungry for action chaos must be fed. Am I what I can do? What would life be like as an oboe? Enjoy your problems, counsels Shinryu Suzuki. The art should be in the way, not the content.

The luminous force under my arm is immaterial, and will not stand in a court of law. I can’t always tell what someone’s trying to do in their writing, mine especially. That odd moment with a pen in the hand, not even warm yet, still cold plastic and metal, waiting for something to come out of it, an answer fulfilling the quest of existence, which is a crisis, of sorts, is suddenly in motion, scribbling words into ensembles, outside the Poultry Building. It’s extroverted to defend products around depth. That is, stand up, take a swing, hit a ball, and make it all happen, able to absorb large amounts of raw experience. Holding still while a grizzly sniffs your body. Seeking the source of things. Of beauty. Of jurisprudence. The undulation of fins. Tents in a muddy lot. The epiphany of a hoofprint. And not for any other reason would I say this. And expect a mint.

I wonder how life feels as a jellyfish. They don’t have a brain. They react to stimuli, but they don’t think about it. Ostensibly. Consciousness is a funny thing. I mean, it evolved a mouth to say things, how crazy is that? So many organs. So many things to say. Some jellyfish species have specialized sensory organs called rhopalia (plural in Latin for club) which are located around the edge of their bell and contain eyes. This kind of thinking can distract you during a time of dissolution and stress. I often wish I lived closer to an airport. The interaction of people in airports is a never-ending fascination. The King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has the world's largest airport aquarium. You can sit and watch Goldsilk Seabream, Red Sea Spiny Basslet, Indian Threadfish, Persian Mullet, stingrays and sharks and sometimes your own thoughts undulating in fantasias of milky oblivion, artless and free.

I will enclose a copy of my mood to show you what happened. What happened when I was 12. What happened when I was 15. And so on. The whole damn show. The whole freaky mess. First time I got drunk. Last time I got drunk. First time I got drunk I couldn’t believe you could change a shitty mood so easily. So pleasantly. Last time I got drunk I couldn’t believe how hard it is to shake off a nagging sense of despair after trying to drown it countless times. Such things are expressed, at times, in front of microphones, before an audience of people, bewildered, flatulent, bored out of their skulls. It’s all too easy to make a theater out of your grudges. But it’s hard to gaze at the world without a brave expansion of one’s pituitary. Temptations will curl their tentacles around you every random moment. It’s about this time, or any time, really, the idea of travel, anywhere, gets to be an obsession of sorts, and rains down on you like a jungle. Interaction, like sugar and water, comes across as optimism on the radio. And the world is a ball of rock orbiting a ball of heat & light. Wood to cut. Break to bake. Milk to squirt. Things to say. 

 

Poetry Is An Egg With A Horse In It

I find it both reassuring and somewhat dubious that at 78 I still harbor affections and enthusiasms that I enjoyed in my rebellious 20s. I’d be in a sorry state of deep remorse were it otherwise. Chief among these early affiliations is French symbolism, followed quickly by Surrealism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, hypnopompic kabuki and the circumference of insanity. I had a special appetite for the work of Stephane Mallarmé, which was unabashedly difficult, and playful and sly and erotic and prodigiously self-propagating. My temperament matched Baudelaire’s antagonistic fillips to the inane and vacuous presumptions of bourgeois sanctimony. He had a genius for finding beauty in squalor and luxury in stark privation. He prepared me, at age 18, for the visionary deliriums of Rimbaud, whose defection from poetry for the louche commerce of guns and coffee in East Africa came as a big disappointment and an unending state of perplexity. Why? Why would anyone deny expression to the genius inhabiting them?

I believe the denial of the poet in Rimbaud for the pursuit of normalcy had lethal consequences. I believe it also accounts for Rimbaud’s evident dromomania. Even his brief flirtation with photography.

It wasn’t until I was much older that the lush orchestrations of Mallarmé’s poetry and prose poetry began to hold a certain fascination for me. He wasn’t as overtly exciting as Rimbaud’s psychedelic Illuminations, with their colorful imagery and robust deliriums, or Baudelaire’s dazzling sensuality, his silken orgies and gleaming boa constrictors and vague perfumes, but I find a deeply abiding intellectual stimulation in my Mallarméan immersions, a feeling of inner liberation, of unfathomable hungers and chance encounters. I’m drawn to the intense musicality of Mallarmé’s work, his subtle and tortured syntax, his fragmented phrasing and abrupt non-sequiturs, his ability to imbue the power of language with the vivid presence of the void.

Stephane Mallarmé's prose poems define the indefinable with a nimble fracturing of banality. The tight grip of academic rhetoric. It's one thing to deliberately obfuscate a point for the appearance of sophistication and another to reorganize perception altogether.

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

Wrote Russell Jacoby.

Russell Jacoby famously coined the term "velvet prison" to describe the intellectual stagnation of academics who are insulated and complacent within the university system, leading to a situation where "the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged". He argued that this institutional comfort breeds an intellectual decline, making it difficult to think critically or challenge the status quo. 

States the AI Overview on Google.

In Book 20, Part Four of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe describes the phenomenon of Dämonisch (the daemonic) – which he attributed to the artistry of violinist Nicolas Paganini - as a "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher has explained.” Lorca referred to this in his essay “Theory and Function of the Duende,” where he describes the duende as a “power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist master say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means that it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.” It is not something anyone needs to go into debt for at a university. “No,” Lorca continues, “the dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendent of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock; a descendant also of Descartes’ melancholy daemon, small as a green almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing.”

My first taste of duende occurred one summer afternoon in August, 1965, two months after graduating from high school, in the backseat of a friend’s car, a speaker in back of my head, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” came blaring out, galvanizing me with its startling imagery. This prompted a search for poetry that had the same wildness as Dylan’s lyrics. A professor at San José City College revealed what I was looking for: “Le Bateau ivre,” “The Drunken Boat,” by Arthur Rimbaud. This adventure eventually led to the poetry of the beats, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso. Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism.

I aligned myself with the beats decades ago. I never liked hippies all that much. Most of the ones I met were shallow and pretentious and somewhat theatrical; many of them had enveloped themselves in the disarming gauze of a faux innocence to challenge the dreary, soul-killing controls of capitalism, or embedded themselves in fantastical Tolkienesque worlds weirdly superimposed over the bitter realities of the industrial world. Many of them named their children Rainbow and Moonbeam and danced like fairies in the moonlight. It’s rather sad, what happened. And it happened so quickly. When the spartan conditions of poverty inevitably soured to such an extent that the toxic predations of wealth suddenly started looking attractive, the most vigorous of these radicals were first in line for Reagan’s Good Morning America mode of unbridled consumerism. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker. Tom Hayden transitioned into mainstream politics. I remember a lot of friends and acquaintances suddenly working for corporations. They rationalized this move easily with the phrase, “we can change things from the inside.” And how did that work out? It’s little wonder Gen Z has so much contempt for boomers.

I admired the beats for their intellect, their candor, their sense of adventure, their embrace of Dada spontaneity, and their fearless and sometimes nihilistic, sometimes Dharmic embrace of ways and means contrary to the delusional pursuits of the American Dream highly unpopular in American culture, such as harboring an openly adversarial position toward conformism and the kind of soulless, bourgeois complacencies that have resulted in our current dystopic landscape.

Most of the beats are dead now. Gary Snyder, who was a central figure not only to beat culture but a strong advocate of wilderness preservation and ecological health and integrity, as well as a highly disciplined practitioner of Zen, is still alive, and still revered as a public figure, even in mainstream culture. As of this writing, he is 95.

Snyder wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. It’s titled “What You Should Know To Be A Poet,” and is short enough to include here:

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                        and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden–

& then love the human: wives     husbands     and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
                              hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger.     gambles.     and the edge of death.

I’m 99% on board with the recommendations of this poem. Everything. But one. The “work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted / and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion, hunder, rest.” That part is utterly foreign to my nature. I’ve had a lifetime of working long dry hours of dull work and hated it. Love it? Are you frigging kidding me? Every job I ever had never served as anything other than a source of money. End of the work shift, I felt like a turd squeezed out of the sphincter of commerce. It added nothing to my life but anguish, despair, and exhaustion. The nicest thing to ever happen to me was retirement and social security. I was finally – in old age – able to have time to create, reupholster my self-esteem, and do my writing. 

Bu the other stuff, about being a bad-ass passionate ecstatic shamanistic visionary fucking fun-loving philosopher with one foot in hedonism and the other foot in minstrelsy mischief and eccentric mystical phantasmagoric pursuits is terrific advice. Nor do I see any of that as a job recommendation.

Poetry was not an activity relegated to a quiet scholarly vocation, oak-paneled rooms, leaded windows in ivy-covered towers, awards, retreats, lectures, sabbaticals, academic panels and conferences, the polite society of the professoriate. That’s were poetry turns curdled and careful and stylishly chic. Poetry – the kind of poetry Snyder’s poem evokes - was the province of the desperado. The gambler at the edge of death. King Lear’s sad, forbearing clown. Ophelia’s lunatic rage against the abuses of fate. Hamlet’s scathing to be or not to be. Charles Bukowski’s inebriated smile.

I see the poet as a seasoned detective. The world is a crime scene. The human spirit has been murdered. There’s no lack of suspects. No accountability either, for the thousands upon thousands of zombies walking the streets, heads bowed, faces expressionless, voices corralled by fear and censorship.

Marianne Moore once defined poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But a moment ago R shared a definition of poetry she saw on Facebook today, written by a fourth grader: “poetry is an egg with a horse in it.”

That’s brilliant. I can’t top that. All I can do is keep it warm, and wait for something to hatch.

 

It Can Kill A Man

It can kill a man. Said Wallace Stevens. That’s what misery does. Ergo, you should buy some insurance. This is how poets make a living. And it’s not too miserable. I’m available on most days of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, which are relegated to sleeping, and leisure, and gratifying my appetites. On Monday I am like a man in the body of a violent beast. I keep a thesaurus in the bottom drawer of my desk in case I need to describe something elegant and queenly, a balloon rising to the ceiling of somebody’s wedding, Elizabeth Taylor on one side, Richard Burton on the other. This is their planet, their world, now in ascendancy, and rich and limitless, but also a little taut with risk, like a bank robbery, or a Mardi Gras float moving in the direction of things as yet unknown. This is the skin of the poem. The bones are angular, and shaped toward their function, which is ejaculatory. You know. Like opening a book, and finding a wad of cash. The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

As an adult, you learn to avoid certain things. Invisible things. Subtleties. Like the embarrassed side glance in a crowded room when you tell someone you’re a poet. You have a badge. And enough poetic license to start a family. But nobody takes you seriously. Don’t worry. It’s all just a matter of orientation, disorientation, and blunt polytrauma. Each minute something new scurries across the ocean floor. Just holding a guitar is cool. There are surges, occasionally, of windows. Popcorn is a mood waiting to come to life. When there are waves, you learn to swim, and when there are swans you let the boat drift. It’s as simple as that. The oars are all yours.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. It’s not like that speck on the screen you wipe off with a soft cloth that turns out to be a period, or more accurately, a fistful of pixels clenched in a dot, otherwise known as a period, which stops sentences from growing into a lot of weeping blubber, bookmakers subject to changing moods, sacrifices, slumps, illiteracy, the full panorama of someone’s life unfolding, catching fire, and attracting UFOS. Though I think you can make a case for it. Statutes related to the metaphysics of calico, criminal code, criminal procedure, real property and conveyances, luxuries, like reading, having the time to read, and the lips of a distant cobweb. Here in Washington State there are laws against harassing bigfoot, sleeping in someone’s outhouse, pretending your parents are wealthy, whaling on Sunday or buying a mattress, lick lollipops in cars, use X-rays for shoe fittings, disguises for teachers, abandon a refrigerator, and (if you live in Everett) display a hypnotized person in a store window. How many laws have you broken? I’m not going to say, for fear it may implicate me in the bismuth of a jellyfish. I’m boiling up something this minute, in fact. Definitions. Secrets. Collisions. Big gray blocks stepping on absence. And a huge spatula. Straight from eye to paper.

I begin to feel ultramarine when I travel. And geographical. Spreading out on a bed honors the muscles. The best way to travel is to scatter abroad above the earth's atmosphere, that place where the sky ends and prophecy begins. It’s a trip, baby. There are trillions and trillions of stars and nebulae and a sigh bursting out of a pack of allegories. Birthdays counted in light years. I’m not appreciably different at 79 then I was at 18. I like those movies where a troubled boxer takes his ire out on a punchbag. The strange elegance of a boxer suspended in a photograph. Contrasting things makes them tremble. The potato has an immediacy only a Bach could appreciate in a potato concerto, fingers prowling the keys for a look at the sublime, and finding sea salt and rosemary. There’s always the element of surprise. Counterpoint and fugue. Mood dynamics and tempo. Tornados and strange loops. If the potatoes are going into the oven, so should the bacon. You don’t want stand there by the sink looking like Lady Macbeth. Think of something like wage satisfaction.  The mysteries of the Dirac equation. As soon as I found myself dogpaddling in a paragraph, I looked down to see the bottom, and discovered objects I didn’t understand. I would have to dive deeper. Buy a shovel. Buy some land. And plant some potatoes.

I didn’t discover how important it is to have a purpose until I didn’t have any. And yet something is there to push me, get me to roll out of bed, brush my teeth, brush my hair, feed the cat and sit down at a desk with a book. I think of Matthew McConaughey. That speech he has in True Detective. “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect separated from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion that having a self. This secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling. Programmed, with total assurance, that we’re each somebody. When, in fact, everybody’s nobody.” A normal person would so this as a slur of words with a pompous attitude toward the miracle of masturbation. I became difficult to categorize. Was I a mammal, or a crustacean? The antennae on the top of my head confuses people. Why is it always in motion, people ask. The vibrations of other stars produce eerie songs that I like to convert to words. There’s an eschatological dimension to it that I find difficult to put into palatable and wholesome dishes. This is why I was once so attracted to bars. The quieter the better.

900 Pieces Of Daylight

What does it mean to be rich? The wherewithal to transform gross experience, primary matter, into a golden inutility and assorted heresies against the gods of profit. This is crucial to any understanding of life. If you throw your personality at a mirror, it’ll come back to haunt you as Tom Waits. That’s him at the end of the bar. Staring at you. Like a mirror. We are all vessels of a reality we can’t understand. Let obscurity fold it into a compelling and serious attempt at exhumation. Cloud what counsels through thunder. It helps to light up the sidewalk. And then, you know, it’s whatever it seems. Grab a bowl while the anchovies are still tractable. Enhance your argument with backflips. You can’t get in without going out, or assemble a bridesmaid with toothpicks. It’s why I prefer microscopes. In an incongruous public setting, we commit ourselves. And why not. It’s a beautiful day, and the resurrection is on the verge of bas-relief. 

Most of my experiences with plaster have been refreshingly inconsequential. I got conked on the head once by a rogue sentence. It was speeding across the page in a rage of majuscules. There are nights when the mist comes up early from the river and knocks on the door. It’s a bit like that. This constant fever. I’ll say this. It cured my myopia. I’m tired of making judgments. I prefer to gamble. Twinkle like a napkin. Thank God I’m still strong enough to lift an old TV. But just barely. When you reach a certain stage of development you will be required to play games. I found refuge in left field. The ball rarely came out there. And I was so lost in thought it was more apt to bounce off my head than get thrown to the appropriate glove. You do get wise in old age. Unfortunately, that’s when you need it least. The nouns are just stand-ins. Substitutes. The music is in the pillow. In the rain. Because the intent was serious. And that’s where it ended up.

I have written feathers of red. I have walked with the dead. My aerodrome has a smell that curves in the light like autumn. Who are you, green sweater? What are you, banished flower? I’m going to perform a series of backflips until I go on TV in my old moccasins. This object in my hands squirts vowels. I use it to shape oblivion. And this is gallant. A sweet hinge of glory. From the farm. That old shack in a grove of hobnail goblins. I'm going to throw it and crack it and sneer at it and jerk it around until I can lift it. Brilliance takes time. My French is calling me back. It wants an answer. Deep dive into stucco. We ride such phenomena by our actions. Sprinkle them with alms and yams. Make everything small. Pick it up. One by one. And caress it. 

I see a crimson lake with eyes in the snow. I see a lobster scorched by eagerness. You do know I make a lot of shit up. But I didn’t make this up. It arrived by apothecary. I’m braced to the nines. I'm fit to go on talking and will use my thumb and forefinger if I must. I specialize in recreating the feel of Picasso's Parisian steam forge. It’s a very expensive process requiring the phantom weight of buried light bulbs multiplied by a factor of spring. Meaning folds into stories so the monsters can shine. I see a bustling studio flaring in an airport flower. I see a pair of eyes following the words in this sentence. In the distance, a twitching muscle of mist clutches a glorious sunset, a garage explodes, Dr. Williams advises a patient to carve out a life for themselves, a filet of prose glows with a reckless infrared sand, and a crocodile eating the end of this sentence until nothing exists except you and me and a jar of pandemonium. I think it’s time we quit playing games and got serious about our audition. You play me. I’ll play you. And together we will reproduce a loop of unwritten worms jacked up on 900 pieces of daylight.  

 

The Morning News

I stood in a room of parachutes, falling through a hole in one of my better moods. A naked blue maneuvered the sky. I handed all my subtleties over to a deviation of faculties, hoping for a parallel to confetti. I was called the detective of thwack. I solved cases of missing content. Tonight was a doozey. I arrived palpable and scratched with literal basilicas. There’s a tacit understanding that snobbism is just a shorthand for xenophobia. The oaths we perturb with our dance are not the ones we try to appease with our history. Those are dealt with later, and are still under development at Warner Brothers. You can probably hear the sound of cylinders thrumming up and down. This is called an enharmonic shift and is just another metaphor used as an impetus for virility and wit. I sure wish I had some. I had a wound once took eighteen stitches just to renew this life. Doctors are serious people. And yet most diseases are absurd.

We miss our former glory. The present is tempting, but the future is coming at us from all sides. I got a tattoo that says "playing against the bombs.” It’s surrounded by a utopia. Don’t kid yourself. Utopias are dangerous. Utopias are dystopias minus the candor. Ever see a glooby mop? That’s how I used to shake the dissociation of self out of myself, and go silly providing myself with turgid winks and ocarinas. Subjectivity describes a person’s grip on what is acting on them. Objectivity is what hovers over our blood at night, bald, autonomous, and tactless. It is through an indispensable fold in the space-time continuum that we can enact our cause with marionettes, à la Raymond Roussel. Everything in it leans on action, and smears the walls with its endless implications. Language is all about substitution, the morning news in the breath of a rose. One thing leads to another, and is therefore angular and bristling with ersatz propellers.

But enough: you are there reading this, and I write things down as they come, so for the moment, things hang, madcap and parasitical. I see a wedge of prospect brimming with desire. Fuck the slush. Pull it out of your complexities, which is what they’re for, putting a treadle on the grindstone and building a milking stand for the goat. It's not always the tumble that develops one's bedside manner but the bubbles goaded into galaxies with a single breath. As soon as I set the dish soap bottle down they pop right out of it. I can hear Shakespeare in the background, talking late with the lead actor of Hamlet. He sounds like a detective. Determined and circumspect. Existence is a scrambled business, one minute all twinkly and appliqué, the next minute cannons and howling banshees. It’s a good art gives in when things aren’t solid in the head. Control can get in the way of sweetmeat. Uneducate yourself first. From there it’s not really what’s in the hand, but the tone that makes things squeeze the hell out of existence.

What I’m kicking around is this notion: a cry, a scent of Cézanne, can say so much about a spine and its many intricacies. What makes you stand. What makes you get up in the morning. What gives you meaning and purpose. Your hat, for example. Organized education is a duck. It just waddles around from panel to podium, from podium to panel, and that’s straight crazy, is it not? Personally, for me it’s all about blackboards. I love blackboards. The sound of chalk. Diagrammed sentences. Quantum equations. Powerfully solid if useless abstractions. Mesopotamian art in cylinder seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library. What happens to us from all the other things going on, in other words. It kills me. That such things are made of it, that a simple wince can deepen into a gun, and shoot a pillow’s feathers into the air, making an image.

I started out in life naked and I’m 100% naked at all times under my clothes. I’m old now, though, so I’m careful when I remove them. Darkness is a friend to the stigmata we bear. That day in Perpignan we boarded our train at two in the afternoon had nothing to do with it. It’s like I’m old King Shit again ruling over a realm of everlasting magenta. Luxury is for the idle rich. It’s inseparable from the will to exclude. Or put it this way: the will to cohere is seminal to the play of ligaments holding the bones together. Erotica, as a consequence, invites talking over the fence. That something is broken is quite obvious. What’s not so obvious is the necessity to hold tight to whatever mast you can find, and not get swept over the gunnels. Under it all, working invisibly, electromagnetic forces, the old patterns give space its grit. A fountain, from four blocks away, can look like ice. And sometimes is ice. Like that fountain froze in the courtyard of the old high school turned into condominiums. Fountains and waterfalls. How does a waterfall freeze? It’s like some kind of warning, mad bride of the ineffable, gorgeous in her gown of ice.

     

When The Images Dream

A confusion club attracts kiwis. Allow me to introduce Molly Ringworm. She sings soulful ballads from the fireworks door. I spit words for the flower. The one in the pot, by the carpal tunnel syndrome. We're in office mode if we dance. I’m learning the electric boogaloo. It tells the story of our mocking spirit. The impulse joke. I grew it from a concertina and a handful of coordinates. There was a sense of impending mutation. Perplexity at our incense rush. It’s best to infiltrate a fall by exalting it. Just before you hit the floor. Talk fast. But meaningfully. Like you were wrestling with something. A sudden revelation. Or an express escalator laughing all the way down to the lingerie department. Because we encumber ourselves in the volumes of life, and such things deserve a special kind of attention. A bas-relief of choice heats my stove, and the house gargles a piano. When the images dream I feel like an airplane. The world floats in my blisters. The abstractions carry plump green thoughts. And the carp enjoy the sun in shallow water. What does it all mean? It’s not even a question anymore. It’s an argument.

I wonder how many people wonder, on a daily basis, WTF am I doing here?

It’s good to sprawl out near the singing fold. I want the door to be fractious, it's a participle, not a ripple. The discipline begins with a charming process involving recruitments, odors, and engaging perversions. Civilization is embarrassed. The bulbous aberrations are jaunty tonight. What romance! What luxuries! Yet all is not perfect. There are problems, debts, and rampant prolixity. Planets orbit the mismanagement of your inner conflict. I see wormwood in your gallantry. Why must everything in life be so corduroy? My rose believes everything I pour on it. A powerful voice can twist an entire paragraph into believing it’s Victor Hugo. But it takes a real idiot to chew the air into a turnip. Yachts don’t make me jealous. Houses do. I like to hum majuscules when I tear buzzwords apart. I’m trying to get at the shape of things. Amazing ovals. Trapezoids. Spheres. Nonagons. Prisms. Kisses. Bedsheet salons. The bulge of time in an inflatable daydream. Demand diamonds. Follow your instincts when they come to a boil.

If you look inside the novice bird, you’ll see all the offers are from the beyond. There’s even a coupon for withdrawal. It’s a retreat conducted by a whisper of yearning. Things seem to be happening backwards. The time is out of joint. Sculpt an exculpation, excite the dusty grace of forgiveness. It pays to develop an argument. It’s hard to convince anyone of anything these days. And yet everyone’s so gullible. Illusions feed my romance with milk. I turn the page and slide down a snapdragon. I know this zone. It’s an airport under pressure from a drop in trust. A good slap will defuse the situation. Accepting a stick across a loving embrace signals a U-turn. A cardboard joke sashays out of the elevator. Everything stems from a zipper what a crock. The word balloon on stilts is a better stopgap than a suitcase when it comes to cartoon technology. A chronically thick vertigo might be a symptom of technicolor. You should go see a cinema.

If I have time to sit beside a perception a reason for doing so will eventually present itself. I put this down straight. Actions in the past have a way of insisting on their backslide. My personal astronomy became an emotional whirlwind after rumors were spread. The slightest laziness on the part of the writer will be discerned among the litter, the empty beer cans, the wide-eyed look of the ballerina hiding behind the couch, Jerry Lee Lewis rocking out on a flat screen TV. The many pitfalls of representing a scrambled circumstance with all the right notes and nuance. The sky glossing over all its proposals with a layer of feathery cirrus. The mystery of the Mary Celeste. The poignancy of any random waterfront. Cry of gulls. Shifting of perspective. I saw Elvis in a French fry. It had tiny lips and a thunderous pompadour. What slow entertainments I do in the autumn is a testament to my capacity for constructing a stately lassitude, upholstering it with butterflies and gargoyles, and launching it from a 19^th century rolltop in Giggleswick.  

Is this what the fall of Rome felt like? I think it was more like the weight we pretend to carry when gravity fails. When the old laws fail and the new laws are waiting to be written. The past is a condition of the present. It’s not the kind of thing you want to balance on the end of your tongue. You don’t do anything 50 years ago. Even though you can feel it waiting. The first time I saw Paris. The last time I saw sorcery. What haunts me, what’s chained to my leg. The veins. The bread on the table. We slosh back and forth in ecstasy smelling of dirt and bark. 

 

A Play Of Mind

I have nothing pinned to my forehead. It may seem that way, because the bump there is quite conspicuous. I don't know how it got there. But a few days later, I will see the beginning of a horn. A rhinoceros horn, to be precise. I had been warned that such a thing could happen. There was a lot of that going around. People were turning into rhinoceroses. There had even been a play about it. Warning people. You might become a rhinoceros. Symptoms included a morbid compulsion to agree with everything ratified by a central authority. It was worse than Covid. Masks were of little avail. They called it a pandemic. And then it became normal.

Me? I’m a poet. I’m equipped to do anything. Except make money. Or build a sauna. Or split the atom. Or serve caviar at a multibillionaire’s wedding. Calling oneself a poet is a very odd thing to do these days. I prefer to keep the whole thing quiet. It's like having something scandalous in your past, three years in San Quentin for armed robbery, or fraud, or years in rehab recovering from an embarrassing addiction. When, in fact, the addiction is poetry. And literature is dying. Ok. Enough of that. How about you? What’s going on in your circus? Please don’t say bitcoin. I apologize for the judgments. If I’m overly pellucid at times, it’s not you, it’s the billboards. They seem sad, and anachronistic. Like the Yellow Pages. I loved the Yellow Pages. No robots with whom to argue before you can talk to a human. I’m Ice Age. I’m not built for apps. In my day, you decompressed in a bar, or a tavern, and went home in a fog of philosophy and stupefaction. The seedier bars had a weird glamour. And the air held different omens. Potential was the color of propane, and it welded incongruities into airships for a rescue mission in the impending zombie apocalypse.   

I don’t know. I think I could build a sauna. Given the right tools. Some easy-to-read instructions. With beautiful, multi-colored illustrations. A warm room. With lots of space. And a big couch. A really seasoned davenport. With wine stains and loose change and popcorn under the cushions. Or rather, say, a workshop, like the one might dad always had. It was wherever we went, like he carried it in his back pocket, ban saw, table saw, pipe clamps, chisels, jig saw. It had different smells. Paint. Turpentine. Sawdust. The sawdust was ubiquitous. Given those circumstances I might be tempted to build a sauna. But do I need a sauna? Do I want a sauna? I don’t even know how it came up. What put sauna in my head? What puts anything in my head? Besides poetry. And propaganda. Poetry is the propaganda seeping into our lives from another dimension.

I like examples of things. If someone tells me there is a spoon that can bend the mind, I find it credible, and have no difficulty believing it. Anyone who has had a scoop of ice cream has felt a spoon bend their mind. But if someone tells me that objectivity is nothing but a play of the mind, I will ask for their credentials, and ask to see an example. If I’m told that 1 + 1 equals two, I will ask, where is the mind in all this? They may tell me that one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception. It’s the play of a mind that shows whether a mind is there at all. And I’ll answer ok, sure. What’s the next perception? Where is it? And if they hand me a ticket to purgatory, I will consider the possibility of being punked. And because the mind is sister to the brother of amusement park rides, I will go about things pell-mell. And right here, where the next sentence is to be born, I will find another perception. Right there, in those swift currents of syllables we call a brassiere. Nothing but frills and nonsense. Imagine a postage stamp that is pure thought. Pure thought with glue on the back. I think it is in this sense, this particular glimpse, this extraordinary percept, that we will find what we’re looking for. A play of mind. Right here. Where the work comes in, setting up chairs, making coffee, and mumbling lines from Hamlet.