How To Keep Art Alive During A Time Of Mammon

Without a single bruise, the little veil in the air helps me remember what I did. A paragraph that, in my opinion, seemed to have been written in a convoluted way, promised transparency. It's remarkable, in fact, how the radiant darkness of books helps pave the way for thought to find its own moment, its own reason for existing. Behind every vision there is a world beside it, sparkling with indecisiveness. One can hear the sand make its silent appeal to the rocks embedded in its mute sonority and welcome a fin to swim around in the punctuation bowl. This is not how most novels engage the reader. This happened before to a solitary man in Norway who wrote a book about how language defines the boundaries of our world. There is often a carpenter inside each of us, waiting for the opportunity to wield a hammer. Operate a backhoe. Build a bildungsroman of wind and snow and storms of impossible romance. Below a sky-piercing mountain, a neon light illuminates my shin, flesh against the side of a granite wall. Details shift and change. An inarticulate force must be named. And then we move on.

How to keep art alive during a time of Mamman? Art began in a cave. It has always been subterranean, a louche energy running contrary to tribal conventions. I placed this thought at the crest of one of my waves and watched what happened when the whole thing swelled into words and splashed against the curtains. It came raining down as entrails, which revealed otherworldly secrets. Haruspicy. Even as a thinker, one is still an animal. And since language is inherently hallucinatory, the source of its chimera is a sorcery of potent legacy, the calamity of existence. This is what has led us all along to take this path. Aromas of smoke using from the mouth of a cave, the meat of the real in the grip of a rapturous art. The art of the hunt. The art of the erotic. The art of myriad necessities. The art of swerves and deviations. The art of lament. The art of extravagant praise. The art of lighting a juniper wick in animal fat and painting a sleek red horse.

The emergence of consciousness allows me to discover something I didn't understand before. Which is a mind in yellow, however green and theatrical it may appear. If you build me a stage, I’ll light you a candle. We will celebrate our inglenook. My copy of Hölderlin will provide raw material for the ceremony. The ceremony of understanding. The ceremony of curling barrel staves. Being isn’t a thing but a process. It's time to begin the mutations. I abandon all groping. I prepare, as always, for ambiguity. A nearby dream grows a load of funny punctuation. If I hang England in my mind it tends to steam like an old locomotive and take thoughts around in circles. This is not the hypothesis we mapped on the page. Not at all. It’s a biography of time. When it turns infrared, it will spray itself all over the ceiling. And if it falls, we’ll put it in a basket and sing. The bubbles will amplify our pathos. The rain will offer an escape route. And the moon will awaken feelings of candor.

My mouth heals the writing on the desk. All those predicates and vowels. All those rolls and backflips. Letters that get up and walk around. I can feel it. I just know it. I’m on the fringe of something blithe and mechanical. My shirt endures the improvisations of the clouds. That has to mean something. You never know when something is about to crack its shell and come flying out in a riot of color. Sometimes a beautiful temptation drops out of the steam, and I have to go somewhere vast and entertaining to think about it. Today, I stand here gazing at the rebellion. I hold a piece of wind in my fist. I glue it to the sky with a jar of syntax. I get my sewing kit out and create simulations of control. I create a beard of slender aluminum for the priestess of guessing, and I begin to guess. Who is she? Aretha? The embroidery is laughing at a sandwich. I know it’s not Cher. Though it is dear to think so. Art will sometimes provide an ablution for this. But if it doesn’t, that’s ok. I like drawing provocative parallels between things. It can get messy and over-complicated. But who’s worried about any of these decisions? I like butter even better.

I stand among geographical details with our daughter feeling. The bologna is parallel to a blob of arms and legs. Here, we will sprinkle cinnamon on it and see if it produces a pupa. I’m in the mood for something soft. I flop on the bed with olive drift. I'm expanding my fluids to produce a romance. Look out. This a pigment about to make some letters lift it into meaning. My oboe is the architecture by which your ability to roll through the enthusiasm of this is alive and eclectic. Think of something multidimensional. The façades of Gothic cathedrals, say, or Polynesian polytopes. I have sometimes noticed that when it rains some of it comes burbling out of the mouths of gargoyles. I have employed it to represent the helter-skelter nature of things. But who needs symbols these days. The spoon holds a jingle of broken summer. Slurp it down, baby. I will combat the baldness of harmony with the caprice of the harmonica, and play it on a clarinet.

It is this continual adjustment to context where the details get lost. Nocturnes, for example. Or Gymnopédie. Anything with a pump and a whistle. A roll in the hay or a dance with a rattler. Most of life is entertaining. It’s the intervals where things get a little dicey. Like pulling into a town with no vacancies. This can be annoying and probably not very entertaining. But even this can change. It’s all about getting used to things. AI, for example. The long slow sigh of the toilet tank filling. Or the disturbing spectacle of Mathew McConaughey floating in a fifth-dimension tesseract, trying to send the quantum data from a black hole's singularity to his daughter by manipulating gravity in her childhood bedroom across different moments in time. Like it or not, we’re subject to our civilization’s ways of thinking. Incantation is decantation. And while it's a rather vague thing I’m alluding to here, the poetry is the thing, the fact of it, its unique angle, its inner gaze, its vision clear as the stars of a summer night. Or Mathew McConaughy. Now he’s in a dinghy, rowing like hell to get to the end of a sentence. I put him there. It’s my movie now. And it’s got nothing to do with singularities. It has everything to do with singularities.

The wind blew in when the door opened, and with a quick turn, shifted, and blew down the hall where a couple sat on a couch, waiting, backs to the fire, the shadows of them on the wall, against it, big black shapes there which because they were talking, they didn’t see. That’s where I come in. Smiling like a coordinate and holding a balloon. You can resemble an assembly but you can’t nail death to a boxing glove. And why would you? Part of the problem is centered here, bending over like a hypothesis. Theories are always accommodating. If they weren’t, there’d be nothing here but the smell of her perfume. Go ahead. Shout. I know you want to. Any rational and articulate entity should be given an approximation, at the very least. It’s a very fat urge that one day turns crustacean and grasps the fact of its existence with pure stimulation. And clamors over the rocks in a rage of overconfidence, considering the size of the wave, and the weight of the air. A sequence which can be followed isn’t a sequence, it’s an infinite attempt to claw the air, and pull something out that wasn’t there a moment before, when the wind was from the north.