In eternity, time has nowhere to go. Wherever it goes, it’s already there. So it becomes relative. In French, la future proche has a place to be right away. It arrives in a golden coach pulled by a team of big oil CEOs. Most of the oil in the ground comes from algae and plankton that lived in ancient oceans and swamps millions of years ago. And so here we are. Pumping it into Silverados and Ram pickups. F-47s and Sikorsky Seahawks. Those of us on the fringe have elsewhere to be. The eyes dilate for the foliage of poetry. Fronds of Wanda Coleman. Radicles of Ashbery. Bulbs of Beckett. Canopies of Keats. Deciduous Dickinson. Panicles of Poe.
It is not until one becomes old that time truly
reveals its wilder idiosyncrasies. After precedes before but only when the moon
is waxing crescent and the door to the hermitage is left open. The time for
decisions is fallible. The time for scissors is ribbons. The time for rectitude
is recyclable. The time to die is phantom ovations in a theater of words. The
time for youth is drowsy. The time for time is not nearly enough. The time for
quick is slower than a secretion. The time to find the ultimate truth of things
is as elusive as the objects swimming in a cataract. The struggle to explain
evil gets harder. And when there’s more evil in the end than in the beginning
you begin to wonder where the fuck it all went wrong. You can call it entropy.
And leave it in the basement. It’s a good scapegoat. Specify, specify, always
specify. Talk and sleep. Time was, time is. Avoid holes. Let go of the plot at
some convenient place, where it will stand as a sign.
I once invested in an upright piano whose octaves
never seemed to agree. The sound was dissonant and rouge, with a slag of
distortion. I can still hear it, reverberating like an old barn full of hungry
cattle. It distinguished itself by occupying a zone outside of time and space.
It had its own unique lexicon, like a thought that never defines itself but
haunts the outer limits of one’s private reflections. I thought it might have a
promising future as an instrument of musical pathology. Sadly, it was roundly
rejected. The public did not like it. Musicians did not like it. It was a thing
of poetry, doomed to failure, yet retaining a certain charm, a haunting je
ne sais quoi. I don’t regret the money I lost on this adventure. The
investment had more to do with the ephemeral charms of music more than the
mechanics of the piano. A rhapsode, sewn with loss.
Things happen. I don’t know why they happen the way
they happen, but they happen. Stories are written. Dreams occur. That beautiful
passage in Proust where he and Albertine are lying in sand, feet toward the ocean,
and its breathing becomes a voluptuous reconciliation, the perpetual surf receding
in a hiss of sudsy withdrawal and crashing back in a crescendo of chaos and
foam, a systole and diastole of murmuring intervals soothing a tortuous cycle of
endless ambivalences, injudicious actions, nagging anxieties, louche betrayals
and passionate midnight trysts which the ocean’s rhythmic assurances rock and
lull into a lush and undulating prose.
Who knows? Maybe the best way to achieve elsewhere is
to go on an imaginary journey. The insanity of the current regime can be an
asset. It invites opposition, a creative response with restorative power. If
our existence as a species is hanging by a proverbial thread, fuck the elites
and their Caribbean retreats. There are places that can’t be reached by coercion
and money. Not that they’re too spiritual or refined or celestial or immaterial
for the gross vulgarities and predatory instincts of the rich. These are qualities
obtainable through even the most fraudulent pieties. Realms of blue flame have
a power unique to the sacrifices and rigors of privation. They have a reality
powered by duende, which is aligned with the imaginary, the capacity for
enchantment. Contrary energies. Carboniferous outgrowths. Bizarre mythologies.
Castles made of planetarium lint. I am, of course, making this up as I go
along. That’s the entire point. Welcome aboard. Follow the signs. Note the fill
of uncanny enthusiasms. Turn left at the next diversion. The cranium inspired
by organs. Freewheeling deities and amiable cephalopods.
Our entry into the carpenter's workshop is preceded by
rain. We smell olives and sawdust. Everything becomes waves by the grace of
heat. There is a reassuring sense of agency. The ineptitude of genius rescued
by music. Construction demonstrates the tactility of facts. The intervention of
chaos is necessary to disregard the handkerchief lying on the armchair. Pipes
creak and twist creating memory. Something huge and amorphous blurs the air.
Existence cracks open like sugar. And when the void supersedes our immersion,
we can celebrate its unveiling with irrelevant stimuli. We can bend reality. We
can reveal the void and fill it with pickles and brine. We can inherit whole
kingdoms of russet. We can escalate cats. We can bubble with emphasis. We can
boil with criteria. We can aim at the fog and excite its incongruities with a
ricochet of words. And ride home in a barrel of lopsided wine.
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