How To Hang A Thing In Speech

Islands fascinate me. They are isolated worlds - not in the scientific sense, but the wildly nonspecific sense - from the rest of the planet. The rest of the planet is, of course, teeming with human beings, and the occasional misfit grumbling in his rags the same question over and over to a thousand wrong answers. Life is different on islands. The problems are less monumental. The sky solves everything. Awakens a carpenter's grammar and builds a glass vocabulary. For housing humanity. Everyone has their own preferences, ideas, and sense of time. So they become islands. Talking to strangers. Every argument in favor of hair dyes is a statement tinged with a million desires, and not a little anxiety. And every blow is worth at least one antenna. A shaky vision and a gothic redemption. Ibiza at night is a crazy place. Not so much Grimsey. Which is stark, and desolate, and surrounded by humpback whales. It’s Gothic. Mythic. And cold. It’s a place for philosophers. Old woman gazing at the gloom of thunder in a cube of Icelandic spar.

I sense, get the feel of the cage, with this work, this frigate ahead of me. With which I will make volleys of what is funny and strange. I will fold my life into a bomb and explode it in somebody’s porridge. Or mind. Not because the mind is a form of porridge, but because it has language at its disposal, and subjectivity. The mind cooked by English is a polyglot porridge. The recipe is apparent in every jaw. Every beard and spice rack. Caraway. Nutmeg. Thyme. Glass slides depicting arrays of stained protozoans. Which is crazy in a way. Bacteria are why the men around here wear ties. That, and a paycheck. The way water eats a continent shore by shore is precisely how everything human gets shattered by inconvenient realties. Pavement, rainy nights in San Francisco, ancient coins unearthed on the property of a former rock star, the subjunctive case clenched in the hand of an ugly preposition. It’s always good to have a graceful look above the neck, no matter what lumpy old bag you have in your hand. To those who don’t know you, you will appear suspicious, and silly. And to those who do know you, you will appear lost in mystical absorption. No matter. Subjectivity is prodigal, and fits in a single pronoun. Like an island.

I like a long thin faucet that curves upward in a kitchen sink. Arches. And lets the water down in a long thin column. And is mute in its dream of service like an elephant. Whose trunk sprays water over its head. And views the world with two sad eyes. It's an odd thing to sweep a floor while listening to Eric Satie. There’s a simplicity in the action that parallels the simplicity of the music. Which isn’t simple at all. The notes are sprinkled into the world like pearls from a broken necklace. It's a strange syncopation that awakens the nerves to the things they carry around. Emotions big as planetariums. James Dean with a grievance and a knife. It explains it. What we fight about. Let’s face it, a real antagonism at root. That old chestnut: what are we here for? Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong. But they keep getting up, starting the car, scraping frost from the window, and heading to work, whatever meaning happens to be sleeping in those syllables, they’re awake now, your eyes are mingled in these words, as are mine, looking for you.

Don’t be shy. You know who you are. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim once said all things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. Ok, gotcha. So what’s your poison? I’m a fiend for marshmallows. Cannabis gummies. And Ritz crackers.

TV is a poison. I grew up with it. I love TV. I have a great respect for propaganda, even though I know it’s toxic. It’s a guilty pleasure. A very, very guilty pleasure. Propaganda is the sweet syrup of confirmation bias that bloats the ego, appeases a troubled conscience with a wonderfully plausible alibi, and kills societies, rots them from inside out. How many cop shows show so-called conspiracy theorists as QAnon wackos with a maniacal hatred of rules, hair-trigger tempers, huge gun collections, garages full of survival gear, deep delusional passions, sooner or later caught up in the inevitable terrorist plot, à la Ted Kazinsky, and brought down by well-meaning detectives doing their heroic, self-sacrificing best to prevent us all from descending into the chaos of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. A good fiction has the capacity to charm. To make you believe in its virtues. However distorted. However delusional. The gaslighting is sweet.

He can't stand any image of himself, he suffers from being named. He believes that the perfection of a human relationship lies in this absence of image: abolishing adjectives between oneself, between one and the other; a relationship that uses adjectives is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

Wrote Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Raw, simple being. Undefined. Unconfined. Naked. Is this what is meant by absence of image? Because I’ve just used four adjectives to define the undefinable. And gotten nowhere. The first thing to come to mind are descriptions of near-death experiences, in which being, no longer contained by a body, diffuses into a boundless, nebulous energy of pure consciousness. Pure love. A pure ego-less state of pure energy. So that throwing a net of adjectives over it is like trying to capture a solar eclipse with a shoebox. You’ll capture none of the silence, this visit from the sublime, moon shadows rolling through prairie grass, and hole of night in the sky.

The central drive of everything is insemination. Pollinators and poets.

Propagation begins with a cerebral whirlwind. Inspiration. Something must inspire its creation. Mountains, forests, cranberries. We went hiking, inflated and cleaned. And this happened. A steady pulse haunted the totem. The faces looked ready to say something. We are the colors of contingency. Stop thinking! Just ask yourself if the work has allowed you to walk outside of yourself into an unknown world. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s about movement, emotion, holistic correspondence, and wild speculation. Conjecture is the way to the possible. The beehives that mouth their seeming chaos among the houses of genre. The biology of pink waddles around in brown. There are fires in black unleashed by alluring hues of gray. We’ll have things to do when green turns blue. But prose? You need space for that. Freer, more open language, and sudden curious sensations. The feeling that, after dying, the soul diffuses with a universal consciousness. There is, for example, tangible evidence that syllables discharge lightning and thunder, and will sometimes attain the status of a bold perfume, depending on the circumstances, and the magnitude of the impulse that keeps popping up in all these bubbles, smiling at the spectral autonomy that allowed these raptures, and how to hang a thing in speech.

 

The New Antipathy

The new antipathy was a clean hypothesis. It was an operation propelled by participle. It had nothing to do with broccoli. This was about luminosity. The tumble of photons about a sewing kit. It had the flavor of anger seasoned with a little disrespect. I could feel the heft of its implications in every word. Imagine two detectives backing away from a radioactive predicate. They move cautiously, so as not to disturb the circumstance of its combustion, this spondee of pickled helium. Poetry is the cesium of capitalism. We’ve known that all along. And yet the old paddle wheelers continued going up and down the rivers. And a pesky little particle intractable to grammatical analysis exploded into an eyeball. A pretty one, with an iris the color of exoneration. Each time I feel swelling in my ankles I know that I'm about to try and explain something that I don't fully understand myself. I don’t even know what it is yet. Whether it’s a substance, a proverb, or a feeling new to this form, a radical new manifestation of beauty as light as gravity and violent as a thermostat. Truth is, I just don’t understand anything anymore. Not even jock itch. My line of work never required an office. But it did require beams of light intermingling with one another like words in a tugboat. I had to do something, or the whole virtue of the thing, the principle, you might even call it an appliance, a dishwasher or iron, would evaporate in wire. This wouldn’t be the first time my intentions became overly ambitious and spread its lather leeward, in the direction of Steamboat Springs. Hesitations can hesitate for so long they become sensations, semaphores on a flightdeck. If you’re going to land, land now. It’s time our feet felt something other than mountains. I’ve been swinging back and forth on a trapeze all day, looking down at all that sawdust, all those rash decisions and warm embraces wrestled to the ground like escalators. I want to get down and walk the ground again, like a real narrative, with eggnog skulls and long secluded strolls along the coast of a thrashing indecision.

What I’d like right now is a bubbly metamorphosis. I feel ready for something. Not sure what. Something with wings. Something slithery and supple and preposterous. My hammer glows amidst the many mental calls to my gut. Much of life is like that. Shoegaze. Kabuki. A guitar can alter one's sense of being. You can stand on a stage in front of a million people and still feel upside down. Employment is the monotony that usurps our expansion. Experience is the barracuda that echoes our scope. Aching is the stir that institutes our reach. Instinct is the syntax that spangles our luxuries. Then there’s the really naïve hope that a postage stamp can carry the weight of my mind to a wet sweater in Lowell. Like the old days. When Emily Dickinson rode a Harley up and own the streets of Amherst. Now we have bandwidth. Minds tethered to security issues. I remember owning a baseball glove once, but that’s as far as I got to understanding Jung, and the vital importance of third base. Until I solve the problem of how to get the energy of a man – me – into narrative, this will have lost its relevance, and I’ll sit here as usual, taking in the Stones, reminiscing, scribbling, stirring some form of soup, entwining a frayed mythology, thinking hard about the future, the one I left behind in 1976, on the freeway to California.

Don't let yourself be carried away by superficial reactions to a dark thought. Explore it as you would an underworld. There are things there that can fulfil or kill a grammar with a single mushroom. The key property is movement. The convergence of hands on a sticky substance. A kneecap embodies the fulcrum of ingenuity among the strippers. It’s all so meridional. I think of Napolean strolling the shores of Saint Helena. Euclid drawing shapes on scrolls of papyrus. Morning in the throat of a paradox. Words born from a luminous consciousness. Tumbling down the spine of a paragraph. Stumbling around in a slippery metaphor. This glitter of drug nebula in my balcony headlights is entirely salsa. Winter is the perfect time for rides in competitive forklifts. I heat by generating incidents as toward happens. The warp finger is insoluble below the fullness of your antifreeze. Think of it as an ear eating a toccata sandwich. A conquest by sudden crease of the sugar pronouns. I dwell in the yell of a reach to think it. I have fenced off the personality house for everyone's safety. The time of nutmeg is here. There are signs in the men’s room. Life is preoccupation with itself. Get used to habits. Make use of them. Lift what you value into a Technicolor future. Pedal to the metal. Merge with oncoming traffic.

Now, here’s the kick. I write this stuff for no particular reason. I spill my brains without incident not because it makes me happy but because I’m against the restraints of seclusion. I can feel myself drifting out to sea a little more each day. The horizon is dripping with thought. Clouds veined with lightning. Things are beginning to seesaw. I like dealing with these things straight on, like Dostoyevski. Meditating on the universe with the look of bad intent is bound to create a disturbance. It makes people nervous. The Zoo was one of the bars that lets you know the instant you walk in nobody here is interested in your aspirations. All they want is your utter indifference. The guts are a poor source of moss. Nobody fondles their shield. They clench it. I am more fucked with the devious than the genial. The genial are everywhere they know is there because it’s there not because it’s whispered into the ear like a secret. We have no secrets. Secrets age in old age. They become strains of old melody. And die in the drafts at the airport.