Is what we create truly ours? And by that I mean, did Ed Sullivan get pissed when Bo Diddley sang Bo Diddley instead of Sixteen Tons as agreed upon? Yes, he did. But you have to understand that a divine energy was flowing through him and he had no choice but to defy the tight-lipped stoicism of TV for the sake of idiosyncrasy. Bo Diddley’s rebellion had the stamp of Promethean fire upon it. And a square guitar. Rock has evangelistic underpinnings. And when creative energies flow through the spirit the body moves, expresses itself in ecstatic rhythms, flagstones to the divine. The Gnostics believed that Human beings possess an inner divine spark of light or spirit, which is a portion of the true, transcendent God, trapped in the material body. The purpose of existence is to liberate this trapped divine energy from the corruptions of the material world and appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Or whatever venue seems appropriate at the time. Shindig, Hullabaloo, Where the Action Is. Today I think it’s more apt to be TikTok, or YouTube, or Madison Square Garden or the Showbox in Seattle. Busking in an underground transit system. Or communing privately in the forest, with a paintbrush and watercolors. Evergreens dancing as the wind moves through their branches, and ironweed and cat-claw. Gerunds are the sugar between negligee and dexterity. The weight of the air on a G string. These are all sound indications of constrained energies breaking free. Jailhouse Rock. Warren Zevon. Werewolves of London. Richard Burbage, as Falstaff. Van Gogh’s insanely yellow sunflowers.
Adjusting to life in the 21st century is an
odyssey of contradictions. Heidegger’s hammer pounding digital nails. Reality
is twelve elves on a bone. Existence explains the stove. But I’ll never
understand money. Can you hear it? That clanking of vowels and syllables. I was
carried here by a language. Introspection does backflips, like Dylan’s
Tarantula. It’s only natural to expect a more open country where you can sit on
a hill and feel your intellect dangle from your ganglions like another
dimension at the edge of absence. Control is illusory. These words will never
be what I want them to be: devices for exerting pressure on demonic impulses.
Democracy failed us. But maybe our art will keep our language alive during a
time of censorship. At night the metaphors come out and lick my face. They
leave scraps of cryptocurrency that only has value in the mind. You can’t write
a utopia in a vacuum. But why would you? When something is intangible, it can’t
be captured by time, or coopted by a corporate marketing strategy. It’s pure
noumena, an aura of expectation. Chaos
is but a shout away, too wild for a haircut, too apodictic for a leash. There
are limits. You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do
it. But sometimes something breaks. A chunk of wall falls down. And
possibilities sprout feathers.
It started as a one-to-one proposal, before it had
time to evolve into something more than a bucket of tears. Things that happen
in secret inevitably become problematical. That’s why living rooms were
invented, and school dances and sepals, some might suggest steeples, others
will quietly nod ascent to hamburgers and comets. Me, I’m always on the look
for UFOs. What kind of poetry are they writing on the other side of the Milky
Way? It was always there, always a brutal reminder of everything that agitated
us, excited us, drove us, defined us, and it had to be kept alive before it
deteriorated into private equity and deposit slips. Ungodly towers of glass and
steel. The banalities of wealth that can only be relieved by sadistic proposals
and anonymous tips. Clandestine leverages. Although the annoyance of poverty is
generally considered to be a reliable indication of genius and diehard fervent
German romanticism, disproportionately large anatomical organs do in some
instances apply, depending on context and the temperature of the operating
theater. Mathematics are hilariously distorted, and the basilica cradles a
superpower. I think we all know what it means to listen to Frank Sinatra during
a thunderstorm, but the intense pleasure of terza rima in Dante is brighter
than all the lava from Mount Etna, and so is Portofino.
I think it’s time we
start talking about Umwelt. Otherwise, everything in life is everywhere.
Scattered. Haggard. Battered. Nothingness is not nothing, because music is
perfectly clear about these things. Arpeggios kill depth. Go for a nice long
note of Mahler. Percy Bysshe Shelley
isn’t dead. He’s in the kitchen preparing a salad. This
makes all my emotions happy. The dilemma of daring to go to the marsh by
moonlight means something has to happen. It’s a matter of emphasis, not
comprehension. If something is incomprehensible it just means it’s obliging our
refusal to believe what we see. You can shape a sound with a tuba, but try it
sometime with a freshly scrubbed mosquito. Am I overlooking something? The
windy splatter of rain on a window. The way water running in a kitchen sink
sounds when you’re alone in a house. That sense of regions, zones, zones is a
better word, for that which feels simultaneously far and near, and is open to
those who can feel it unfold and cue the membrane lining the eye. Who can define
what a wilderness is? The French don’t even have a word for it. The crunching
of leaves, the breaking of twigs, the sound of its breath. The croaking of
frogs. And if you do all this in your head it’s difficult to describe. But if I
spin around twice the sugar of it ripples through my nerves. And there’s
nothing I can say that will stop what’s coming. It has no reality. Until it
gets here.
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