That Feeling Of Being Drawn

I often find myself drawn toward something I don’t understand, be it a novel, a scuffle in the street, or the way a woman carries herself in the rain. I'm a glutton for mystery. The greater the mystery, the greater the appetite. The vagaries of time, the history of the harpsichord, the excitement people find in sports, to name a few. The answer to the greatest mystery of all will be waiting for me at the end of my life. A not insubstantial number of my family and friends have already discovered it. None of them, as yet, have chosen to share it with me. That might be part of the answer right there. Could be there’s nothing on the other side except the silence of the void. Those little particles that keep popping in and out of existence aren’t people. They’re momentary fluctuations, mathematical constructs that pop up during interactions with a zero-point state, not physical entities. Their shimmer is the shimmer of uncertainty. The momentum of interaction. The generative force of collision. The hard sugar of regret. The buzz of a gin fizz. La Dolce Vita.  Mulholland Drive. These are qualia. They’re not things. They’re what gives mystery its tingle. And life a reason to keep living. Things are for the vulgar. Qualia are for poets, early morning mist, midnight trysts, and private dicks.

Like most people, I’m a man of many modes. My morning mode is hygienic, conducted gingerly, and slow. My early afternoon mode is volatile, demonstrative, and cinematic. In fantasy mode, my various predications pack a punch. I can reach across the border that separates the marsh from the coconut grove. What this means for the health of my garret cannot be assessed by mere extravagance. There must also be conviction. I have to believe that there are holes in time and that space is essentially a mailbox for the letters of remembrance and the shoes of expedition. What my instincts tell me is charmingly hypnotic. And sometimes I can feel the authority of the reader hover over my words like a hummingbird seeking a pollen I can only provide by inducing a sociable incandescence. This requires drugs and a capacitance based on trespassing. Therefore, I write for myself and toolbars. I need to forget what I’m doing here in the first place. Go somewhere legendary for its lack of credibility. Deep beneath the dance floor, there is a swirl of criticisms I need to overlook. And then arise in a ball of fire spitting epithets into the wind. 

Objects dangling from a doorknob. Sacks. Seemingly empty. Not unlike the sack between a man’s legs, at age 92. The fingers curl nicely around the knob, either to pull the door open, or close it gently to drown a sound. Exhaustion finds comfort in this room. A bed, a Korean radio, and a woman standing, naked, in a hotel room in Nice, holding a bath towel while staring at a vase of flowers, painted by Matisse in 1921. The colors are muted so that they harmonize and make the warmth of the room apparent to the skin as well as to the eyes. Dejection has no place here, and is rejected by a projected ease, and the feeling of a room with the door closed and the window obscured by sunlight. That's what I'm pushing for. A universal given, and letting the sky walk in. It all unfolds when it dreams itself into a privacy this vast.

Where - or what - do we come from? Mud? Lightning? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur? A passing comet? A one-night stand with a throbbing pulsar? A beefcake God touching an outstretched index finger? Abiogenesis, hypogenesis, pathogenesis? Divine spark? Hot cosmic mama? A roadside gift shop operated by a hearty woman named Rugby Smith? The sparkle of a starlit lake and a pair of horny toads coupling on a warm Mesozoic night? Spittle of a musician in a microphone in a parallel universe where grunge guitarists emerge from a polyphonic bitterness to become something like the Manananggal of Philippine legend, a self-segmenting vampire creature capable of separating its torso and sprouting bat-like wings to hunt, go for a spin, or play “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on a black Stratocaster? I don’t know. Goop. My money’s on goop. Blue goop. Red goop. Green goop. Something high up and plum-colored reposing on a cloud.

I think we come from language. Our species, that is, our particular adaptation, which doesn’t seem to be adapting well, not adapting well at all, no sir. We’re in trouble. So how is it, being this dumb, we come from language? Does the mouth have an aptitude far above that of the brain in its shell of bone? Language flows through us like water. Like air. Like fairy breath. Like an alternating current. Think of a still life. Not a still water. Not a mint condition dime. Not a parable. Not a TV. Not a smartphone. A still life. Cat on a ray knife blade under a tablecloth the handle sticking out. The flow is imaginary, and yet real. Those occasions in which the imaginary and the actual are hybrid dynamics, are a pure caring, a blessing. A breakthrough. What do we call things with no mass or substance of any kind? Ideas, thoughts, feelings. Light and heat and sound waves. Mackerel, glassware, a loaf of bread and lemons on a table with a white cloth by Anne Vallayer-Coster, court painter to Marie Antoinette. Until, you know, things went sideways, and things got weird and bloody. In other words, language. The language of revolution. The language of romance. The language of puppets and moisture and Angora goats. They’re all the same. And yet quite different. Did I say that or did language say that? I can’t help it, sang Roy Orbison. I can't help it if I cry. I remember that you said goodbye. It's too bad that all these things, can only happen in dreams.

If the dreamer has at least one ear, the song will be neon and the window will diet on girlfriends. We happen so fast to ourselves that the flannel is brushing against our beards. Space feels eventual. Time feels bronze. The knot feels knotted and the driftwood feels inconclusive. This may be the first time we’ve been like this, visceral and raw and textually instinctive. Because the story keeps collapsing, and the theme at the heart of the thing is now an active pulse in the surgeon’s hands. We’re on automatic drive now. Anything can happen. The sentence may grow a judiciary and collapse under the weight of its corruption, or twirl its blades and rise from the page like a controversy ablaze with speculation. There’s a chair at your embassy awaiting your empathy. Grab it while you can. The world is on fire. Time to make sure our shoelaces are tied and there’s enough gas in the tank to get us to the next garage. Google can’t help us. We’ll need the ancient tools of tolerance, and the silliness and the willingness of trying to keep it altogether by keeping it all apart. 

And so it is I stand within my senses, looking outward, looking inward, intending nectar. Row, row, row your boat, life is but a dream. I always liked that song. I can imagine Mallarmé rowing in a flat-bottomed boat on the lily pond at Giverny “with a clean, sweeping, drowsy motion,” or Rilke somewhere on the Rhine, “I think, drifting past, I heard some frightening words.” There’s the sense of an unknown sadness upon the water, a feeling of transformation, a green fluidity, a river boat with a spine-shaped keel, and a shadow falling upon the hip of a water nymph. Drifting on a lake is different than drifting on a river. Lakes are static. Rivers are in constant movement. We go where the river goes. My attention follows the movement of the sentence as it drifts into uncharted waters, tributaries making it wider and deeper, and adding to its jewelry the haze of confusion. The craze for a new grammar is just now becoming kaleidoscopical. We feel it in our nerves, and give it our best guarantee that the folklore surrounding these imputations are each a codicil of cunning and elasticity, because if we don’t where are we? I have no idea, but I'm on my way there now for a few words I can squeeze into accidents.