Tillalala Chronicles

Robert Creeley Rides A Camel Across Egypt

2012-02-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

I live in a wilderness of pain. These very words exemplify the calypso. Sounds emerging from a spinning record. A 45. From a dusty garage. The air is folded into thunder. Four rocks by the window, like four bald heads. George Orwell swatting mosquitoes in the Irawaddy Delta. Poetry. Emeralds. Claws.

I am frequently amazed at the ingenuity with which cloth restaurant napkins are folded. Once I saw an albatross far out at sea. Then it was just cloth. And my soup arrived.

Where there is pain there is pleasure. The two are intertwined. Though it may not always seem that way.

Opacity engenders ice. It’s a good distraction. T.S. Eliot is sculpting an opinion from a slab of granite. I play the accordion with a Technicolor hope. I strain to put the wind in a jar. The idea of paradise makes life infinitely more palatable. Though it helps to believe it’s true.

Poetry broods in description. Excuse me. I have to sneeze.

What was I saying? The other day, just as I was curling my fingers under the handle of the car door, I saw a handful of poetry mutate into a war. The outcome was marvelous. It rained in Paris. The tanks rolled north. A woman gave birth to a metaphor. A metaphor gave birth to a woman. And a man named Funk sermonized on the terrors of liberty.

The fork multiplies the punctuation of eating. The spoon reflects an overhead fan as it spins and spins. The knife imitates consciousness, soliciting scale. The poem doesn’t know what to do. It idles in reverie. And resembles an ear.

I fold my day at the ocean and pack it in a suitcase. The head benefits from its position on the body. The cemetery murmurs of earth. The pumpkins glow. The hollows howl.

Hatred is more easily understood than love. The highest accomplishment in life is acceptance. Most people live in a zone of denial. Illusions offer refuge. Revelations are cruel.

I float around on a planet writing everything down. The moon twists the sky into a spoon. A stand of birch informs the air with correlations of black and white. I would like to buy a nice cool monotone to go with my shirt. What is the best way to present reality? Words ooze from the pen. Sentences form. Paragraphs grow into legs. They get up and walk away.

When I write about experiences I feel so many myriad sensations all competing for attention that it’s hard to focus on any one thing. I’m open to anything, even hay. Cinnamon and denim. Stepladders and constancy.

Robert Creeley rides a camel across Egypt. It is a story of thirst and cohesion. And under and over. And in back and in front of. Or up or down. Or in or in place of. Of this and this. Of all that is. And of all that isn’t.

I have the face of an old man. I stand amazed before the dawn. I never expected to be this old. I want to bake a tattoo into a loaf of narrative. I want to conjure a winter of dazzling crystal. I want to surge forward like a wave and crash on the shore of another world.

The cord fell behind the computer while I was on the phone with a woman in New Brunswick helping me to solve the problem with our modem. I couldn’t find it. It was hidden among the tangle of cords on the floor. She suggested I follow the cord from where it comes out of the wall. It worked. I found it. Such is life. A proverb behind every corner.

Sometimes I yearn for a taste of Mexico. Especially when it snows and truth dribbles from a spark of temerity. Jukebox songs make an astronomy of time. The past and present fuse. The future appears slippery. My desires are more luxurious than I can afford. I feel bronze. I feel red. I feel blue. The colors of my drugs match the colors of my life. Someone coughs in the next room. Fireworks squirt from my pen. The old brown road is constellated with puddles. The hills are alive with the sound of frogs. I get up and go to the bank and deposit a bicycle wheel and a handful of rain.

Do people like me? My Maori buckle, my calliope pants? My magpie hat, my pullulating shoes?

The medicine initiates a vague comprehension. The propeller is a miracle. The colors are so rich they startle you into attention. All you need is mouthwash.

The largest snowflake in the world fell from the sky of Montana on January 28th, 1887. It landed near Fort Keogh, and was 15 miles in diameter, and was shaped like a muscle cramp.

When I awoke this morning there was an angel sitting at the end of the bed who said “the skin is an organ.” I had no reason to disagree. I got up and made some coffee. I went to the bathroom to brush my hair. I could see the ghost of my youth swimming in the mirror. They say the geography of truth glimmers with craters of volcanic gold. I say the bomb of poetry explodes into paradise. I say codeine feels like God whispering soothing thoughts to your bones. I say the larynx corresponds to the stamen of a flower. And that syllables hang like petals from the stem of a thought.

Some days later Robert Creeley is sitting at the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train to Brussels. How far in the universe to get home, he wonders. What do you do when you’re still alone. What do you say when no one asks. What do you want you don’t take. When the train finally comes in, there’s nothing you’re leaving, nothing you can.

Veho Comitatus

2012-01-26T10:27:00.001-08:00

The surface of my right hand is constellated with tiny specks and lacerations, the remnants of play with my cat. He likes to bite. I know it’s wrong to encourage a cat to bite, but my hand is his favorite toy and the both of us often get carried away in rough-housing. The wounds heal quickly. Cells reproduce and patch the cuts by making new skin. I have nothing to do with it. I have no idea how my cells accomplish this, even though they’re my cells. Which makes me wonder: to what extent might I think of those cells as my cells? Is my own body truly my own body? I don’t know how my stomach digests food, transforms it to energy and muscle, or channels the proper vitamins to the proper glands. When it comes to my body, I feel like someone along for the ride. And when the ride ends, I end. I am, after all, no more nor less than my body. I do not believe in a soul that is separate from the body, but if this proves to be the case, no one will be more surprised than me to find it floating around when my body is gone. My body and its actions are a mystery to me, a factory where I have a high level position, and bear some responsibility for the burden I inhabit, but haven’t the faintest idea what the engineers and supply managers in their respective offices are doing. I feel like a CEO looking out from the top of my head, enjoying the benefits of my body’s labors and ingenious devices, but clueless as to how anything is done on the ground level. So who am I? Who are you? Who is anyone? Are we ghosts haunting our own skin? What makes an identity? What are its components? Right now my cat is sleeping, and dreaming. His limbs twitch and he makes little whimpering sounds. Who is this little guy? He doesn’t know either. He just likes to bite my hand. And eat. And sleep. And stare out the window.

Laughing Gas For Breakfast

2012-01-20T15:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning the office of my oral surgeon called and told me there had been a cancellation, would I like to come in early, at 10:50 a.m. My first reaction was an emphatic “are you frigging kidding me?” But that’s not what I said. I asked the receptionist how she had arrived at work. She said she had driven. Really? I was astounded. She said she lived at the bottom of Queen Anne hill and that the main arterials were slippery, but negotiable. I asked if she’d seen any buses. Yes, she had. The teapot began whistling. I excused myself, removed the pot from the burner, and returned. Yeah, ok, I said, I’ll give it a shot.

I gulped my coffee and put the rest in a thermos. There would be no time for my usual breakfast of cherry pie and slices of orange. I grabbed my coat, wool scarf, black fedora, backpack and a pair of strap-on ice grips. I sat on the steps in the hallway and worked at getting the ice grips on. Their framework is rubber. I was required to use a suprising amount of strength to stretch the grip over the toe of my left shoe, then extend it back to the heel where, after a sufficient amount of grunting and straining, I managed to secure it. I repeated the process with the other grip, stood up, and walked gingerly on my heels to the entry door so as not to damage the carpet or shale tile with the metal cleats on the toe of the grips.

The walk to the bottom of the hill went fine. There was more powder than ice. I like that sound of boots crunching into snow. I rarely get to hear that in Seattle. It’s a sound I more commonly associate with North Dakota and Minnesota.

There was an old woman sitting at the bus stop. She looked European, German or Russian, a colorful scarf tied around her head, worn Levi jacket, raggedy dress and a huge grocery sack stuffed with personal belongings at her side, from which she fished a Styrofoam cup of soup. She had a short, squat body and a gruff but gregarious manner. She told me she was going to her doctor. Me, too, I said. She revealed that she had taken some spills lately and hit her head. Her arms were partially paralyzed due to myalgia and so when she fell her arms were useless to catch her and she fell directly on her head. That sounded awful. I asked if she had suffered a concussion. She didn’t know. That’s why she wanted to see a doctor. She was able to get an appointment, which hadn’t been easy, since the doctor was closing early, on account of the snow. The snow was no deterrent for her. She had grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania near Lake Erie and was no stranger to snow. I tried to alleviate her anxiety over a possible head injury by telling her that she sounded lucid. That’s a stupid thing to say, she responded angrily. I told her that lucidity meant that she had not suffered a brain injury. If she had injured her brain, she would be slurring her words and feeling disoriented. This seemed to reassure her. I appeased her even further by going down and buying her a newspaper, an item she had complained of missing.

After a series of buses, several of which were heading back to the terminal, the 18 finally appeared. I got out my bus card, but the driver motioned me in, you pay as you leave. I found a seat and watched the world go by, white and crunchy and treacherous and cold. Everything had a sad, raw, refractory look of artless abandon. I was able to look up into the greenbelt on Queen Anne’s western slope, a greenbelt whose dense, summer foliage hides it from visual penetration, and looked for any paths that led to the top that I might be able to use in the future. I saw nothing. Just a tangle of black trunks and limbs, skeletal and foreboding.

A woman wearing an enormous fur hat got on the bus and reached to the coin deposit box to pay her fare. The driver told her, gruffly, that you pay when you leave. She moved gingerly down the aisle mouthing the words “I’m sorry.”

The bus turned left on Leary, which I had not expected. I got off at 20th NW and Leary and I swept my bus card through the slot on the coin box, but it made a funny electronic sound. The driver waved me off without further adieu, and I walked to the office, where I received a warm welcome. A pretty young woman in in gray hospital togs and hairnet ushered me into the room where my operation would take place, offered a place to hang up my coat and hat and backpack behind the door, then led me to the bathroom where she had me swish a blue, antibiotic mouthwash. I swished the minty liquid, spit it out, and returned to the room, where I was given a hair net, and invited to sit in the operating chair just as the doctor entered the room, an affable, athletic man in his 40s. The chair went way back and my head lowered to toward the floor. I gazed up the light fixtures, one of which had dimmed, a little ripple of light flickering in luminous play.

Then came the Novocaine, prick of a needle into my gum followed by immediate numbness. That’s when you know you have truly arrived at the office of a dentist, or oral surgeon. When your face goes numb, objects are inserted in your mouth, and speech is no longer possible, just grunts and squeaks and inarticulate murmurs.

When the words ‘nitrous oxide’ were uttered, my spirits lifted, and realized I had come to the right place at the right time. A rubber nasal breathing apparatus was fixed gently to my nose and I was asked to begin breathing deeply, a task which I performed with such unabashed eagerness, I was a little surprised that I didn’t suck the entire room into my lungs. In seconds, I began to feel tingly, light, and giddy. I liked this feeling. I craved hearing the Beatles. This was a perfect state in which to hear “Penny Lane” or “I Am The Walrus.” I felt like offering to pay not just for the day’s operation, but for the college education of anyone’s children. This, I felt sure, must be what Santa Claus feels. A giddiness of such unparalleled magnitude you want to fly a sleigh through the heavens with a team of reindeer bringing gifts to all of suffering humanity.

At first, there was some serious drilling. I felt like a block of wood on which someone was working into a birdhouse. My head vibrated. The vibrations conflicted with my giddiness, but no so much to put me out of it. This was followed by what the doctor warned me would be some tapping. I’d say it was more like unabashed hammering, but the task was performed swiftly, and with alacrity, and I did not feel any pain. Just minor irritation. I returned to studying the little flickering ribbon of light, which served as a delightful visual analogue to my lightheaded tingly silliness.

When the procedure ended, I heard the disappointing words “stop the nitrous.” It was like the end of an amusement park ride. The breathing apparatus was removed from my head and I arose from the dental chair back into the world of gravity, angst, Feodor Dostoevski, and uninsured medical bills. Our insurance does not cover this type of procedure, ostensibly because it is perceived as being cosmetic.

I paid my bill and exited the office. It seemed much colder, and it was still snowing. I walked to the corner of NW Market and 15th Street to find a bus stop, but it was merely for the 15, which was an express downtown. I trudged through slush and ice another half mile, until I found a bus stop for the 18, at the base of the Ballard Bridge. There was a couple, a man and a woman in late middle age, who seemed to be encamped under the bridge, and I had to wonder how they managed to endure such cold with no respite.

I enjoyed a conversation with a middle-aged man who had once worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and was now employed as a mechanical engineer at a local shipbuilding facility. We watched in bewildered fascination as trucks and leviathan four-by-fours gunned their engines and went planing up the ramp to Ballard Bridge, slush and ice squirting venomously out from the tread of their tires, all done, no doubt, in defiance of the weather gods, and hoped that this intense cold was an omen of an equally hot summer.

The 18 finally came and I swept my bus card through the slot on the coin box again. It made the same electronic bleeping. The driver said “I don’t know what that is” and invited me to go ahead and take a seat anyway. How could he not know what an Orca card is, I wondered. And then I realized. It wasn’t my Orca card. It was the Metro card from the Manhattan subway I had saved because it had a quote by Saint Augustine on it: Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.

Snow

2012-01-18T15:34:00.001-08:00

My arms feel weak. I’ve just been shoveling snow. Shoveling snow is a novelty. It reminds me of growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But this is Seattle snow. Seattle snow differs from Minneapolis snow in the way that the Taj Mahal differs from the Space Needle, or Istanbul differs from Fargo, North Dakota.

The snow in Minnesota is dry and powdery, like the dandruff of angels. The snow in Seattle is wet, like cement. Like the dandruff of Godzilla.

And Seattle has hills. Steep hills. Upon which the snow melts a little during the day, as temperatures rarely drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but then plunge to the lower 20s during the night. So the slush turns to ice. Which is treacherous and invisible.

Driving after a snowfall in Seattle is not impossible, but it is difficult. It is not uncommon to see a Metro bus, an articulated leviathan, immobile and abandoned in a ditch, or jutting out over a retaining wall overlooking I-5.

Everything takes on that enchanted, Doctor Zhivago look. Omar Shariff and Julie Christie in a mansion full of ice crystals. Otherworldly, romantic, but doomed. Ominous, sinister, weirdly baroque.

Luxuries such as walking are suddenly awkward, effortful enterprises, like speech therapy after a stroke. Until enough cars and people mash the snow into a hardpack of ice and slush, running assumes the heroic dimensions of space walking, or competing in the Iditerod with a team of feral cats.

I begin checking the temperature obsessively about once every 30 minutes. A rise in temperature by one or two degrees means the snow will beginning dripping from the shrubbery and falling in chunks from eaves and gutters. Means that the main arterials will be free of ice and easy of traction and the side streets will still by dicey in places, but negotiable if one drives with caution. A drop in temperature means another day trapped in ice. Means broken arms, broken legs, people unable to make it to work, additional stress for the people who can make it to work, and car accidents and canceled medical appointments.

Roberta lost one of her ice grips on her way to work this morning. Her store is sold out. She will have to walk home with one ice grip. I went to look for it on Roy and 5th Avenue North but didn’t find it.

I have an appointment tomorrow of oral surgery, a bone graft, in preparation for a tooth implant. The office didn’t call to cancel, so the onus is on me to find a way to get there tomorrow. I tried shoveling as much snow as I could from our car, regretting not buying chains. Sometimes if I can get the right start on our easement I can make it to the bottom without crashing into any trees or people. If the snow doesn’t melt by tomorrow afternoon, I will have to board one of Seattle’s many petri dishes. Roberta tells me the number 18 and 28 go to Ballard.

It’s 3:25 p.m. KOMO News says it’s 30 degrees with 92% humidity. They’re predicting a low of 36 degrees tonight, a high of 46 degrees tomorrow. If they’re right, which I hope they are, the world will be released from its jail of snow and ice, I can skip a ride on the petri dish and drive to my surgery in style, listening to Bob Dylan croon “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.”

The Wound Of Existence

2012-01-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

Doppelgänger, poetry by Brian Henry
Talisman House, 2011

Doppelgänger would be a good book to read when one is down with the flu and running a high temperature and the body is under assault and has a foreign feeling to it. The intensity is weirdly delicious and the feeling inside is strange. It is a feeling of shadows, of things lurking in us that aren’t exactly human. Monstrosities of our interior subterranean life. An inner life that we know is a dimension of our own being, but is also foreign, uncanny, phantasmal and dark.

I know this feeling. I have felt it most keenly on those occasions of misery when my bones ached and I was stuffed with antihistamine and codeine. I hate being sick, but there is, admittedly, a side to it that resembles the dance of hallucinogens in the blood stream. There is a poetry to it. An alluring blur of hectic umbra.

Not that I’m suggesting that Doppelgänger is a book suited to illness, or that one should run a high temperature to gain entry into its imaginary realm. The writing is strong and will induce that sensation without a viral invasion and a runny nose.

Doppelgänger is a German word meaning “double walker,” and refers to a supernatural double typically representing evil or misfortune. The word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, as if one were witnessing one’s own ghost, a portent of illness or danger or possibly even death arrayed in the ghostly raiment of dream.

The Doppelgänger is our shadow self and as such has connections with the underworld. In this circumstance, there is no afterlife. The “upper and lower worlds are the same,” observed James Hillman, “only the perspectives differ.” “There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother’s view sees it from above and through the light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades’ realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelgänger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.”

Doppelgänger, at a glance, could be taken to be a series of poems, or one long poem. Which it is. But it has an evident narrative structure and unfolds like a fable of mortal longing.

The central character is an old man who appears to have had a history of cardiac problems. In the first poem, his discomfiture during the night panics his wife and she takes him to the emergency room where it is discovered that he is ok, “Though his heart bleeds and bleeds / Unless his shadow self has left / And crept to where it waits / For an other’s actions / to draw it back.”

Henry’s lines are short, studied fragments of information, searching, probing, and fraught with anguish, yet curiously neutral in tone, a sort of plainsong tinged with an undercurrent of worldweary resignation. A cantus firmus for self and shadow self and a host of apparitions, the kind of nightly presences that might haunt an old man’s memory, including the road not taken.

“What is it that dwells / On the surface of the eye,” asks a poem a few pages in,

And moves with the eye

When it moves

Not a windbrought speck

Not a discernible scratch

Not a hair calcified and stuck

Not sleep or matter or gunk

The eye carries some thing

With it when it opens

And cannot distill its self

From what its surface allows

To intrude on the surface

The conscious self glances

To one side and sees its shadows

Until the eye draws down

On the image affixed

And no there was no one there

The attentive reader will discover what is almost an unheard thwack, thwack, thwack of a shuttle making the warp and woof on a loom. Line by line a gestalt forms, hazy around the edges, informed by darkness the same way a room will come to life when a candle is burning. We form something soft and reflective to hold ourselves, but then a sudden shudder thrills through our being and we realize we are sitting in a void. There is no actual floor beneath us, no actual walls to separate us from the universe. We discover before we are dead that we have an existence in that other realm before we die.

We do not know precisely who this old man is, but religion appears to have failed him. It is suggested that his religion of choice is of a Protestant, southern Baptist ilk. Jimmy Swaggert makes an appearance:

The old man is so tired

He nods through every meal

Like a suckfist sermon

Jimmy Swaggert sweating

All over a woman’s bosom

The old man wants a holy man

To draw the shadow out

And hurl it into a pit

Of fire there to burn

But no man is holy

The old man learns

His search gone cold

Barren sermon dissolve

Outside of some Native American and New Age practices, there is no shamanistic tradition to help us die and guide our spirits into the next dimension. Happily assuming, of course, that there is a further dimension after we slough off our mortal coil. Christianity is all starch and no meat. The lifeblood has been sucked out of it by years of vain, pietistic ceremony and stultifying dogma. Christ would have to return to put the zip back into it. But the Christian fundamentalists would either ignore or crucify him again for conflicting with their get-rich-quick and magical thinking schemes. And the pope would no doubt vilify him for consorting with thieves and whores.

“The invisible swells inside” proclaims the first line of the adjacent poem. There is richness in this line. I feel what Henry means. I feel it more strongly with each passing year. As the body ages, the spirit grows. The air is charmed with numina.

The word ‘swell,’ however, evokes more than growth. It also suggests pain and inflammation. What Nietzsche, in The Birth Of Tragedy, calls the “wound of existence”:

It’s an eternal phenomenon: the voracious will always find a way to keep its creatures alive and force them on to further living by an illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he’ll be able to cure the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductively beautiful veil of art fluttering before his eyes; yet another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost more powerful illusions which the will holds at all times. In general, these three stages of illusion are only for the nobly endowed natures, those who feel the weight and difficulty of existence with more profound reluctance and who need to be deceived out of this reluctance by these exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture emerges from these stimulants: depending on the proportions of the mixture we have a predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture - or if you’ll permit historical examples - there is either an Alexandrian or Hellenic or a Buddhist culture.

“Getting old,” Ted Enslin used to tell me, “is not for sissies.” The body becomes a burden. Health care, if it is affordable and available, is either a blessing or a curse. Doctors are intent on one thing and one thing only: keeping the patient alive. Death does not exist. There is no such thing as dying. Consequently, I have seen people suffer needlessly. As soon as modern western medicine recognizes death as a reality and a part of nature, and ceases prolonging a painful terminal illness with drugs and surgery, they can focus on ways to alleviate suffering when the inevitable time has come to let go of the body.

Henry has chosen a fascinating and compelling topic and approached it with a graceful simplicity. Even the space between the lines has a mute presence, the presence of absence, the song of the Doppelgänger, the shaman within. “Medicine fails words,” Henry proclaims. Illusions are fat with words. Belief, which some insist has the power to cure, ameliorates suffering for those who find in its words a more powerful medicine than what science offers. Practical medicine provides instruments and chemicals. Its words are throttled by frequent, accurate, controlled observation. Prayer and poetry, however cherished or scorned, extend beyond the pale of mortal life and overflow the lumpish ground of our heavy world with the shadows of elsewhere.

Liquor Of Flints

2012-01-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

Put your popcorn down the concertina and beans a gargantuan emotion is about to become gasoline and explode into talk conversation is inherently panoramic a parable of the sky in a stellar library gurgling loafs of idea rain in a jar armed with a powerful grip. A sorcerer will restore the kangaroos as a light explores the room with an oboe and a hoe it will deepen our sense of cosmology and sparkle among these lines as if envy were a seminal condition for silk and turned into an airplane not softly like a wheel but emphatic like a decision sometimes a bath will feel personal and include some semen and deepen our sense of cosmology and sometimes a wink to the mink will punctuate speech. I don’t know what I’d do without Cézanne lift a chisel and carve a wave breaking on the sand maybe or create an attitude in tin read adult magazines and watch the swallows under the bridge the pulley squeaks as I bring the laundry in and Jack London sits at his desk blossoming into an incentive. There are properties employed in poetry such as donkeys and postulation surreys are used for contrast if we choose to navigate the solar system we must also employ a horoscope and our favorite irritation. A knife tumbling through the air is always unpredictable because a parody is almond and our elbows are on the table. The imagery of birth is grotesque the natural thing to do is run away as hard as you can and find a wad of money in the snow rub the calliope and the genie will tell you where to find the nutmeg it’s up there high on the topmost shelf. We should smell boycotts and brushwork by spring which a jaunty elf reproduces by exhalation further away in time and space is a tornado just as it is beginning to acquire real power let’s go scrounge for another parable something implicit in linen the ink is bubbly with umbrellas and I can make out a coast baroque with rocks and aerial splendor a dancing bear carved in ivory on a palette of rain and a sonnet assembled with glue and intuition. The light has a peculiar hue and there are roots descending into the earth socks tumbling in a dryer that grandeur we find in ourselves during times of catastrophe agrees with that ever present glow of hope the thin gaze in a milk of paradise hints of Alaska and a group of lost astronauts passing through a door. Morality is hirsute with bears on the road of excess earth bursting out of itself shouting has a vertical dimension in climbing a stepladder we feel our inner wounds swelling into language the larynx damp with vowels the process is like a staircase a symptom of terminal baseball the space is spherical and wild and drooling like a hill. There is sunshine below a pretty smile even the gantry has an odor it smells like a tiger hugged by its reflection in a pool of unearthly water surrounded by lush Indian greenery. Ocher is not a good color for vanity I would recommend the orange in a fire leaping around a Russian doll. And let’s face it genitalia male or female is Byzantine and curious like a dream of oysters. Meanwhile a new paradigm is being assembled from sandstone and the origins of life the cows are titanic long and sweet like the antiphons of plainsong. We discover our truer natures in plays while it is a serious duty to hoist our deeper wounds into view using metaphors of blood squirting during surgery in a palace of ice. There is a climate of sexual linoleum and a rack of rifles as the afternoon approaches outwardly pious but inwardly golden in its sense of seclusion it’s a start not a conclusion consciousness under a hat chowder in a chipped bowl words swimming in a book there is no yardstick to measure piety only buffalo grazing by the river the contraption is linguistic by that I mean writing writing is not a club anyone can join one word to another word and discover the residual language of a foreign perspective the proverbial brass ring the green stepladder luxuries such as feet and pineapple fingers the sky is a soft hazy intuitive blue it’s time now to contact the mud get down and dirty feel the inscrutably sweet milieu of fantasy and calculus such as Leibnitz originally intended it fluxions of magic the exaltation of walking this path leads to Buddhism heave forward rippling toward the shore push yourself into hunger perceptions of depth brushes dipped in red apples and eggnog anticipate the sublime pain is often linked to pleasure and revolt newly minted on a tongue of gold consciousness sparkling in a syringe soft and squishy as grease it is a milieu of folds and convolutions it is more spoon than fork more fork than knife highways of red ants and distant buttes elevators going up elevators going down sticky fingers murmuring of sexual dreams the smell of freshly baked bread.

Baus House

2012-01-11T14:07:00.000-08:00

Scared Text, poetry by Eric Baus
The Center For Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2011

When Saussure developed his theory of the diacritical structure of language, that is to say the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, he might have imagined a linguistic universe such as that developed by Eric Baus in this collection of poetry. The word ‘fabulous’ comes to mind, not just as the enthusiastic adjective of praise and endorsement, but in its deeper sense as a sign of the inconceivable, the phenomenal, the marvelous, the mythic. A world of thought in which the face of the universe is a provocation of choice and exception, an immunity to the stultifying claims of the drably empirical.

Yet, what we have is not a sacred text, but a scared text. Which might also read ‘scarred.’

Scared, scarred, scoriated.

Nothing depends on a wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow is a sign, glazed with semanticism, beside the white chimeras.

In “Votive Scores,” for example, we have a vigorous play on dialectical offertories:

If eels lie vertically inside the statue or old bees coat its surface, a needle will point to the center of my hide. Owls murmured up a piece of green cloth. Hard ash topped me. The birds it entailed people the treetops, stripped me of my coos. Un-tuned doves flew elsewhere, worried their drones would shrink inside my ears. A second split occurred when its eyes bloomed red. Votive scores pushed open the view. Here, the street was both omen and throat. The swarming sky sparrowed until day withered, until the statue punched out of its skin. He was wearing his own arms. His house showed. Ants formed and he scorched their trails. Sing rendered. he trilled, Sing posed.

The central trope here, of course, is music. A score is music written down in such a way that the parts for different performers appear vertically above one another, i.e. “eels lie vertically inside the statue or old bees coat its surface” is a score embedded in the wax of the imagination. A votive offering is one or more objects deposited in a sacred place in order to gain favor with supernatural forces.

The sentence “Here, the street was both omen and throat” mingles the ideal with the real, the theoretical with the empirical. An omen is a phenomenon of the mind. A throat is a biological reality. A street leads to places. A throat, like a street, channels the air from our lungs to the larynx where it is vibrated into sound then led to the mouth where it is shaped into syllables.

Music is a perfect trope for this work because music is non-representative. It is what it is. It refers to nothing. The sound is all. The pattern is all. Harmony, rhythm, melody, and pitch. Conflict and resolution. Music is a sacred analogue of scared life.

The number of animals in this piece is interesting. Eels, bees, owls, birds, ants. Small animals. Two species, bees and ants, noted for their swarms. Owls for their nocturnal habits, wisdom, and omen of death. Eels are weird. Slippery. Though good eating. And sometimes charged with electricity. Taken as signs, these creatures recommend tonal analogues for sensory experience.

Sounds are much easier to produce, combine, perceive, and identify. This is why music appeals with such immediacy to our feelings and rock stars fill stadiums and even the most mediocre musicians are guaranteed an audience larger than that of our greatest poets. Words make us think. They might be signs with no actual connection to their referents, but they do engage the intellect, and most people would, quite naturally, not have to do with their intellect. Intellection is work.

Poets like Baus bring us to the frontier of language, that place where words as signs of arbitrary connection to the real are at their slipperiest. In “Owl Wool,” a short prose poem of three sentences, we find a density of assonance and alliteration burning in a conglomerate study of the relationship between words and music:

The sky fermented a cotton tarp. The baffled voiceover spread. Iris’s dove scored itself with scales while owl wool coated the cliffs.

I especially like the assonantal and semantic play on ‘scored’ and ‘scales.’ Scales can be appreciated both as musical signs for the melodic material of music and the thin, plate-like lamina on lizards and snakes. Also, the play on ‘owl’ and ‘wool’ followed by the alliteration of ‘coated’ and ‘cliffs.’

Baus likes brevity. There are few pieces of length in this collection. “A Delphi,” which begins “Minus tried to write his own bible It began, So what, saliva. So what, milk,” is one of the longer pieces, at six pages, and has a narrative tinge. It evokes, rather than tells, a story, switching back and forth from the third person to first person point of view. “I like lies,” it is tellingly stated, and “I like hills. They feel like hands.” The central character is Minus. One thinks of the Minos of Greek fable, and the numerical sign ‘minus,’ in which things are subtracted, taken away. There is an interesting parallel here, since Minos, the King of Crete who every year made King Aegeus pick seven men and seven women to enter Daedalus’s labyrinth to be eaten by the Minotaur, became a judge of the dead in Hades, and ‘minus’ as a numerical sign means to subtract, take away. Consequently, we have a Minus who begins a bible by mocking the very language used to write the bible, i.e. mocks the semantic gravity of saliva and milk.

The Delphi also bears significance within the above context since it was the most important oracle in the classical Greek world and a site for the worship of Apollo who took residence there after slaying the Python, the deity that previously inhabited that spot and protected the navel of the Earth.

I find it encouraging that this is a collection of prose poetry and won the Colorado prize for poetry. This strongly suggests the acceptance of the prose poem as a legitimate poetic form. Poetry, it would appear, is evolving into organisms with multiple limbs. It is allowed more breadth, it is less constricted by dusty Victorian ideas of metric structure. It is given the expansive breath of Olson’s projective verse and Whitman’s gymnastic reach. It is more profoundly physical. Its practitioners and architects have been eager to demonstrate the microcosmic possibilities of Joseph Cornell’s boxes. A place, like a house, in which strange furniture and the bricolage of experience pose fascinating problems to the agile mind.

The Smell Of The Mind When It's Floating On Words

2012-01-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

Breath imparts being, words served in earth, like a yak. Words are the ghosts of things hives full of honey symptoms of string causing music to happen. Poetry is forged in the furnace of the heart. It rides up and down on cables in allegorical space. Press the all the buttons to see what happens.

Rain happens. Sequoias happen. The world happens.

Horses are created by blowing into a trumpet. The radio comes alive and unfolds itself in shrubbery. Longing arrives in a harmonica. Morning arrives in a box of dishwasher soap congealed into lumps.

Heft is evident in seaweed. Divinity is evident in scripture. People stand in line waiting for a deity to arrive. I can feel a soup of vibrations emerge from a bell and move in my being like a womb of sound transforming into an idea.

There is difficulty getting the deity through customs. She transforms herself into a shawl and enters the country profligate and green.

To describe a circle is to describe a heaven under construction. Which later assumes the allure of a large pink hole.

It seems completely reasonable to go without a shirt while walking along the rails in the heat of a Mexican afternoon. The mind, accelerated by Dexedrine, follows the shimmer of heat above the splintered ties and crunch of gravel.

Monstrosity is a feature of poetry. Mutation is natural. Wave moves into wave. A gypsy woman squirts light from her eyes. It tastes of salt. I can feel myself turning into a flamingo. I grow wings and feel myself lifted by a light blue breath.

I study the air. I can see a filament of sound rubbing itself to get warm.

The distance is squeezed into a jar of time. I feel it sing in my veins like protein. I am a calliope I hang upside down in the water.

The coast is where whispers go to die.

The last time I was in San Francisco, thought John Lennon, I combined a noise with an image and a song emerged from my throat irritating the skin of my ears with its fuzzy vibrato as it translated three o’clock into a glittering stream of typewriter fire.

I can smell a mind when it is thinking. It smells like a cross between a Roman taxi and a root beer float.

All the door does is hang on its hinges clapping its hands.

Picasso sits down to immerse himself in pink. He drifts in reverie. He imagines himself swimming over the ribbed sand of Arizona with a mistletoe in his mouth and paints an eyeball lost in the cracks of suitcase as a woman falls through a bank statement and a piece of music is folded into a pond in the middle of a forest.

The air is quiet and cold. It begins to rain. There are peacocks in the parking lot and a man out walking his dog disappears around a corner. The hotel is reasonable. There is a chair and a desk and a curtain in the window. Cause and effect is a contingent feature. There may be cases where the effect precedes its cause, and an impenetrability of physical laws.

Sometimes it grows so quiet you can hear the smell of the mind as it floats on a mediation of gauze.

Moss

2012-01-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

There is a time in the afternoon in deep winter when, if the sun is out, the moss on the surface of the balustrade of Queen Anne boulevard goes into high definition and turns iridescent. It is green beyond belief. It looks like a thick carpet, but with a lumpy, irregular surface and little whiskery shoots bristling among the prominences.

Moss is ubiquitous in the northwest. It covers everything. Roofs, walls, trees, gables, gallstones, gargoyles, garages. Moss loves moisture. And there is plenty of moisture in the northwest. The northwest is to moisture what mecca is to Islam. What ovals are to eggs. What monuments are to wars. What shadows are to light. If moss were a form of credit, it would be the International Exchange of the global credit default swap swamp.

But moss is insistently, consistently moss. That’s what makes moss, moss. To compare moss to something else is to lose the mossness of moss.

I am charmed by moss. It is original and massive. It spreads like a superstition throughout all the balustrades and coffeehouse bricks of the dripping northwest.

It feels like an animal. If you brush your hand over its surface very softly, it feels remarkably like fur.

If you get lost in the woods, look for moss on one side of the tree. That will be the north side of the tree. North, where the sunlight is blocked. Moss likes shade. It feeds on dark things, like the necropolis of the Etruscans.

The moss growing on the balustrade of 7th Avenue West seems anomalous in its obvious appreciation of sunlight. Is it a species apart from the usual moss that carpets the shady nooks and recesses of the Pacific Northwest?

Yesterday, I had to stop by the balustrade to tie my shoelace. I was doing my usual afternoon run and was moist beneath my running clothes. I felt the cold immediately. I raised my leg and positioned my foot in the hole of the balustrade. A sharp winter breeze blew through the hole. I looked to the west where the sun was already beginning to set. The light was sharp. The moss stood out in high relief, attracting my attention to the spot where I had rested my gloves, black wool against a patch of green iridescence. It felt like an elegy. A sweet rag of holy fuzz marking the end of a day in early January.

Bones To Rattle The Storms Of The Spirit

2012-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

Human anatomy fascinates me. Fingers fascinate me. Hands fascinate me. Feet fascinate me. Intestines, heart, brain, blood vessels, muscle, nerves, bone, genitalia, membrane, phlegm, hormone, cartilage, shoulder, tongue, and skin fascinate me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. Except I don’t like touching other people. Unless, of course, I am in love with them.

Human anatomy is a marvel of ingenuity. Imagine you are an engineer in heaven and God comes up to you and says hey you know what I was thinking of making a creature that can walk and talk and make things, any ideas?

Legs and feet would not immediately come to mind. They do now, of course, because I already know what they are. I have them. I use them. I can’t figure out how two disproportionately small organs can support my entire body much less help move it about, but if I try to unimagine them, unthink them, imagine a situation before they ever existed, entered into time and history, I can’t do that. All I can do is marvel at the ingenuity of it all.

And hands. My god hands. Fingers. Thumbs. Grasping things. Feeling things. Picking things. Pinning things. Plucking guitar strings. Holding a pen and making words with it. Letters. Pulling doors open. Turning knobs. Fondling breasts. Cupping a book. Pounding nails. Tapping keys on a keyboard. Pinching and squeezing and manipulating things. Knots, buttons, dials. Coins, trapezes, talismans.

Arms are a lot like tree branches except they move with much more suppleness. And don’t have leaves growing out of them. They culminate in fingers. Fingers give arms a life beyond the pedestrian function of holding a spoon or filing a bank statement. Fingers enlighten the arms and mind with the texture of a grapefruit or the telling physiognomy of a rock. If I were to go blind, I could use my fingers as eyes, touching the texture of the text of a book in braille. The meanings of the words would enter my fingers as bumps and travel through my nerves to my brain where they would form an image and out of that image I would find emotion and meaning.

Legs are both supports for the framework of my body and a source of locomotion. Insects have more than two legs. Centipedes can have anywhere from 20 to 300. I do not find that particularly enviable. More than two legs would be confusing. I like the rhythm of two. Two legs in motion. Walking. Or running. First one leg, then the other. Propelling me forward. Carrying me where I want to go.

Everything is contained in skin. I am contained in a sack of skin. I am a letter of organs in an envelope of skin addressed to no one in particular. It is stretched around my bones. Otherwise, I would be a sack of skin with a pair of eyes looking up. We need bones. Bones to drive a car. Bones to open doors. Bones to get dressed and draw and ride escalators and interact in dramas and make speeches and hear it. Bones to ferret the mystery of death. Bones to rattle the storms of the spirit.

Out In The Open

2012-01-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

I love the way bubbles float and drift in a room catching the light and sparkling and popping never to exist again. The hands of the clock jerk forward dragging time across a landscape of glass and cats and rumbling dishwasher afternoons. There are hooks for our clothes and pegs for our capes and hats. Symmetry both fascinates and repels me. I look for redemption wherever I can find it. I get up in the morning and drink coffee and listen to news from France and scribble my way into sweet oblivion. Life is an enigma. Insoluble. Animals seem to have a better grasp of it. Yet nothing alters perception like altering one’s consciousness with philosophy or enthusiasm for books.

Doorknobs darken over time into that color they call verdigris. You can find the word in the dictionary, burning and oceanic. I don’t like dressing up in a gaudy manner especially if I am dragging a heavy load of garbage to the bin in back of our apartment building. Hinduism has a certain appeal though my feelings about religion are erratic and vague. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a belief. I would rather leap from inquiry to inquiry in a novel from the late 19th century. A time when Cézanne would leave his cottage to go paint a mountain. His brush and eye and movements so powerfully focused on sensations of shape and space and color.

Beauty is so elusive but I’m bent on finding it and pushing and squeezing and wrestling it into words. That sounds pretentious I know but that’s art anyone who sets out to make art is making an assumption about their capacity to make something beautiful or so astoundingly ugly it becomes beautiful and that smells of pretense. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most, if not all, enterprises involve pretense. Sea coasts are beautiful by default. There is so much complexity complexity of shape complexity of color complexity of organic and inorganic complexity of debris washed ashore complexity of birds complexity of mollusks complexity of shells complexity of fins and mouths and gills and sand and reflections on the sand when the waves move in and crash and slide over the sand and recede leaving that special shine. The puzzle of waves alone is fascinating. Hypnotic. The way they move what is a wave it is neither an object nor pure energy. It is momentum made visible. The energy of a wave moving is water moving the wave itself does not exist in the manner that a mirror or pillow or handsaw exists. Blood is real. I remember that scene in Castaway the one movie with Tom Hanks that I truly enjoy in which Hanks unsuccessfully puts himself to sea and capsizes and wades back and cuts himself on the coral. Ribbons of blood swirl out from his leg trailing behind him and I immediately thought: sharks. But he made it back and tended his wound and went on to construct another more workable raft, using the plastic siding of a porta-potty for a sail. Brilliant.

Construction is a mode of culmination. One begins with nails and wood and a spirit level and blueprint and bags of cement and a hose with access to water and one digs a hole and fills it with cement and birds fly overhead and there is sometimes a little friction a little confusion but one way or another the job gets done. Later some men enter a lobby and fall into conversation. Conversation is another form of construction. The nerves are alert to someone’s words and then one makes one’s own words and the emission creates another emission and sometimes there is deceit and sometimes there is honesty and most often there is a little of both. And someone always exclaims oh my god that’s true.

A mongrel barks at a shadow. The organic is made of the inorganic. Insults mean very little. Greed drives too much human behavior. We endeavor to be kind. We endeavor to further human understanding. We scrounge for food and shelter. We carve images of people and animals out of wood and stone and air. That which we carve out of air we call words. Nothing is impenetrable. Except, perhaps, the universe itself considered in its entirety.

I am, improbably, a collar stud. I hate anything vague. Sometimes there is a parable with a dachshund in it. Sometimes something thick like a word slaps my lip. It indicates alphabetical tinfoil, a collosal black quatrain beginning a mind of umbilical wax.

An expectation ignites the urge to write. But an expectation of what I cannot say. It is an enigma.

I vividly remember the jar full of thinner and paint brushes in my father’s studio in North Dakota, a bouquet of slender wooden handles and a fragrance of sharp acrid thinner. His brushes were always ready to paint. He’d pull one out, wipe the bristles with a rag, dip it in paint, and make a smear that he worked into a shape, an identity. It would happen so fast that I wondered if it didn’t have an existence before he gave it an existence.

Hair comes out of my head thread by thread but I can’t hear it as it does that. I smack my face with warm water in the bathroom sink. I would describe it as warm and wet. How else?

The bone at the center of my chest is a sternum. The center at the sternum of my chest is a bone. The chest at the sternum of my bone is a center. A center is always wide and steady. A center is always a bone.

One must garnish one’s spinning with the science of accentuation. There is a sheen on my shoes that jugs the strain of walking. A thought churns in my head until becomes many different thoughts. I am glossing nothing but the autonomy of shoes. I am Parisian. My shoes are insoluble and surly. My shoes are burnished structures in the dust of elopement. My shoes are violins. My legs are Apache. My feet are airplanes.

Will it rain today I don’t know. I live in a city where the flavor of mud is arranged by water rounded into sideboards and given virtuosity by the sheer magnitude of its prodigality. The heart is slippery with its attentions. Water generates so many shapes. So many shapes. So many shapes.

A tiger burns out of my mouth whenever I am in England and I lift my knife to get a pat of butter on it and bring it back and see that it is teeming with cod. Soft gentle meat of cod. All things in motion. All things straining to mean something. Meaning is the meat of the imagination. Meaning gives muscle to the brain. Meaning is hard to find. Meaning exists in multiple form. There is meaning in entertainment and meaning in rapiers and meaning out in the open. Out in the open. The world is a pumpernickel basketball. The sun burns down on it and erratic forms go into meaning in soft gentle abstraction. Dog rose in twilight gold.

Why Poetry Is Slender And Blue

2012-01-01T09:19:00.000-08:00

I love being in motion. This is how we find precious metals. There are things in this world that elude our perception. One must adjust the seminal because it is effective and arrows thwack value to syntax as a form of sexual freight. Daub is just the weight of desire.

Parables help to discover that which is iridescent and beautiful. Mahogany and jellyfish. The monkeys of Madagascar. Nutmeg expands to include initiative and phantom trumpets of midnight jazz. Doctrines of silk encase the windows.

Hallucination acts as a mint to coin you. The sawdust has wings because the elevator insinuates desire. Bulbs demonstrate this with mania. Lucidity is the result of exzema and sticks. That the cocoon was baked in a pumpkin and hatched out of a face-lift means only that a doodle has fruit if the persuasion rouses flotsam and the creature in question is able to exist without the bias of preconceived ideas and feeds on the nectar of metaphor.

As for the farm, it was swallowed by a fish in the sky. All these words do is amble into morality. They do not bring the farm back. They can only allegorize the cathectic by filling in the cracks of each emotion with sand and lava. And this must occur when the number of heat particles hitting the sentence equal the number of heat particles leaving the sentence and are conducted into the brain by gleeful cells in teaberry reverie.

This is oblivion whispered in tin. My name is Percy Bysshe Shelley and I approve this message. The trapeze keeps swinging until it is pulled back by a man infatuated with gravity. This further induces the friction of interaction. For instance, there is an ocean talking to a cake on the other side of the casino which means that arms are whales of ancestral staircase.

Now roll the dice. This sexual sternum this consciousness washed with ideas of concord. This source of conifers. Conferences and shining. L’Estaque causes clarinets but it is not just trumpeted it is painted.

Think about that. Fierce feelings are there to join the paragraph in its infancy. This is how life becomes a secretion. Ink springs from the pen in a slide and generates Apollinaire. A flavor burning in the powder quickens the wrestlers into action.

Being balloons in dimes on the ceiling as a ball rolls into romance ravenous for virtue. This is its shadow widening into bleachers. Sometimes it is longer to stray from meaning than it is to embed some lines with gold. One way or another you hate to keep the tourists coming or the whole enterprise turns Mediterranean and oak. Plato plays badminton with Swinburne and convokes apparitions of flickering aggression that remind us all of the shuttlecock that is consequence and the fine solid particles of matter floating in interstellar space.

Chaos is expansive. Voices amplified by marble. Listening to one’s own emotions is everybody. Apples that voyage more iron than a spoon collect the pulse of the sun in boiling leaves. Cries of hirsute shorebird build into January or snicker into candy.

Peacocks explain the need for books behind the study. The pumpernickel falls into the sand and a sail spills wind into greyhounds. The lines around my eyes are protected by a copyright law, sings Mick Jagger. Should the map show fidelity to the ground yes certainly but it should also display grandeur. Time is nailed to space and there is a sea that describes this.
Many devices start by hope or turmoil. There is meaning in this and gurgling and parables. There is more lip than throat when a muscle sparkles. We are accentuated by constraint and atmosphere. It makes everything pink.

The scream dribbles out of a muscle and strays into ecstasy. There is such dripping soulfulness in the sound that we stand at the frontier of music. Sam and Dave sweating heavily in black pants and white shirts. The journey of life begins with soap and ends with kisses. The algebra of garments hanging from a peg creates a long blood and a bouncing knife.

The bugs are anomalies of the tide. The search for meaning begins with a convocation and strains to seclude Euclid’s eyeball in a summer resort. The neck is shrewdly designed to include a passage for coffee. Nouns smell of tea and barrel staves. This is why poetry is slender and blue and hammers its way through books in jaguars and brooks.

In Cranial Dark

2011-12-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

An Anatomy Of The Night, poem by Clayton Eshleman
BlazeVOX, 2011

When the Pre-Socratic poet-philosopher Parmenides sought the truth of reality, he visited Nyx in the halls of night. Nyx was the sensuous and beautiful goddess of night. She was born out of chaos and, after mating with Erebus, the deity of shadow and darkness, gave birth to a number of lesser deities, including Hypnos (sleep), Thanatos (death), and the Oneiroi (dreams).

This makes exquisite sense to me. It is at night the soul dilates. The boundaries imposed by daylight disappear. Jobs, appointments, routines, assemblies, judgments, everything that constitutes the structures of day and the everyday world dissolve into the abyssal glitter of night. Not only do we see it but feel it as well. Taste it in our wine. Feel it in our sleep. Try to escape it in bars and highways and motel trysts. Fill it with music. Appease it with drugs.

We are adrift at night. Untethered. It is the uncharted ocean of timeless space whose immeasurability terrifies and thrills the mind and whose fathoms hold the secret of our most primordial being. The mind is more receptive to the supernatural at night, more alert to the aberrations and anomalies of sense perception that are deadened by the static of day. “Imagination’s place might be the night sky of Renaissance astronomers or astrologers, or the geographical continents of explorers,” observed James Hillman. “It might also be the gigantic mythological construction of Dante’s worlds, the complex stoves and vessels of alchemist’s laboratories, the memory theater of Giulio Camillo, or the imagined past of Greek and Roman antiquity. Imagination must have space for differentiated unfolding. This immeasurable depth of soul or endless cavern of images, as August called it, or ‘black pit’ in Hegel’s words, must have a container. If we today would restore imagination to its fullest significance, we too need some sort of enormous room that can act as its ‘realistic’ vessel.”

The vessel, in this instance, is Eshleman’s book-length poem An Anatomy Of The Night, its “differentiated unfolding” the blastocoelic membranes of Eshleman’s nocturnal embryogenesis.

The opening poem is nineteen lines, erratically indented. It begins sensuously, voluptuously, with a broken taboo: “The sky is a bath incestuous.” Whitman is referenced in a feminine context: “Whitman arched by / his menstrual harp.” This is followed by some truly beautiful and dreamlike images: “vermilion moon scarves, surf resounding, / swim through our serpent-paneled spines,” “Earth / pink and quilted with tufts of violet grass.” The poet sees William Reich on the last night of his life, November 3, 1957, “recumbent on a prison cot.” The following image accesses Thanatos: “All is alive including the death carousel I load into the projector / of my awareness.” The inclusion of a slide projector - a device associated with 20th century technology and family entertainments - contrasts with the oneiric beauty of the preceding images and following three lines, blending - outside temporal order - ancient Greek and eastern cultures and capping it off with a macabre image embodying the gelatinous delirium of night: “Basho’s compote of cicada-absorbed rock / Aphrodite’s pudenda served on an orchid of clouds / Graze of the night’s hydra-mollusked tongue.”

The images are warm, macabre, sensuous, disturbing. Erotic and slithering and wet and bleeding. The feeling of night as a realm of otherworldly splendor is firmly established. References to Aphrodite and Basho and Whitman create a hive of visionaries brought together by the storied wax of mythopoesis. Basho and Whitman were both wanderers. Night is a time of wandering. It is neither a pilgrimage or a journey. There is no goal at night. No destination. There is only the stone and steam of strange landscapes, fondled organs, aggressive sirens, manhood in drag.

The reference to William Reich is significant. Reich, an Austrian-American psychiatrist, is recognized for his controversial ideas concerning psychoanalysis, breaking a taboo against touching the patient, but is perhaps best known for his theories concerning a primordial energy he termed “orgone.” “Orgone is blue in color,” he wrote, “visible to the naked eye, and responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality.” He built boxes called “orgone accumulators” in which people could sit and soak up healing orgone energies. The press called them “sex boxes” that caused uncontrollable erections.

Eshleman compares himself to an argiope in the second poem, a species of arachnid that is sometimes also called a “writing spider” because of the similarity of its web decoration to writing. He also alludes to himself as a “a shadow self in shaman sores.”

The constant metamorphosing from one identity to another, human, animal, insect, Serpente, is synonymous with the instability of night. It is a time of shadows and ooze and tricks of light. Filamentous lines of sticky complexity. The many allusions are intended to extend the reading of the poem to other sources. Eshleman is a generous poet. His images are macabre, bizarre, grotesque, volatile and changing, but they aren’t hermetic. The nebulous subtleties of the French symbolists are not much in evidence. Eshleman paints in broad strokes. His transformations read like a summons to the rattle of Druidic ceremonies amid ancient oak. He quotes from a letter by Antonin Artaud to Jean Paulhan written from the Rodez asylum: “To sleep is not to slumber, but to live on the side of the dream, and not like a sleeper giving off the compiled mucus of the dream, but like a fiend seeking itself, contrary to any consciousness of wakefulness, in that sort of terebrant immanence, in that space of unfathomable immanence where our unconscious is woven.”

There are many inclusions of expository prose included in the poem. Eshleman quotes large chunks of work by Géza Róheim, James Hillman, A. Alvarez, Herbert Kühn, Djuna Barnes and E.M. Cioran.

James Hillman, who passed away last October, was a psychologist with a very unique take on the Jungian archetype. He developed a polytheistic psychology that fused human psychology with the stratum and transcendence of myth. He theorized that the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage - or web - of fantasies. He was more focused on the idea of soul, or psyche. The word ‘soul’ is avoided in the precincts of postmodernist irony. But Eshleman stems from a long tradition of poet as shaman, as visionary, bringing poetry back to its more primordial, Dionysian energies. He is in sync with Hillman, who criticized modern psychology as being too reductive, materialistic, and literal. Hillman, like Eshleman, was alert to the speech of the soul, particularly in its manifestations as myth and metaphor.

Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology.

A. Alvarez is a British poet who has written a book about dreams called Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, And Dreams. Eshleman quotes generously from this book, but one statement I found particularly revealing reads “What you see is what you know, and what can be heard or felt or smelled but not seen is terrifying because it is formless. There are only two ways to make night tolerable: by lighting it artificially and by sleep which shuts down the senses.” I would a third, which is to imbibe alcohol and/or drugs. Carousal is a reliable technique for tricking night fright into frolic. Mercutio bouncing down Verona’s cobblestoned alleys delivering his Queen Mab speech.

Herbert Kühn was an eminent German scholar who, for a long time, was considered one of the best connoisseurs of Ice Age culture and its legacy in art. Eshleman himself has spent nearly a lifetime exploring and writing about the ice age caves in the Dordogne region of France. The quote Eshleman has included here focuses on a visit to the Niaux cave in the Ariège department of southern France in 1949, which Kühn believed to be one of the great religious centers for Ice Age people. Kühn describes his feelings about The Green Lake, “one of the most sinister things to be found in any of the subterranean grottoes…” “Black and deathly quiet the waters stretched before us. The absolute stillness by the lakeside is so uncanny that it soon becomes almost unbearable.” This is a wonderful description of not just a lake but of the otherworldly dimensions beyond the natural world, the bourne from which no traveler returns. Though, in this instance, the traveler does return, but with a feeling of those underground waters, “black, immobile, uncanny, awful,” still lurking in one’s marrow as one exits the cave and returns to daylight.

There are several deeply personal sections in Eshleman’s nocturnal anatomy. One is a deeply moving prose poem about his mother’s death. Eshleman’s mother occupied a “single railed bed”in room C 743 of Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. Eshleman’s description of this visit is astonishingly candid. But not sentimental. Not the least sentimental. The feeling is too intense, too honest, too stark, too loving to be sentimental. Everything seems suffused with death. “At one point,”” he writes, “I looked out of the window and watched in the darkness seven stories below a large heavy black woman slowly cross the parking lot - it’s all dead - that is the phrase that came to me, as if the nature of life - including the imagination that had opened to me when I was twenty-two - was that of death, as if that which lives and goes on is death. My mother was now a puppet, jerked by the cords of Death.”

This sentiment is echoed in section 25, which is a quote from Djuna Barne’s Nightwood. Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor utters “We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery.”

Section 26 begins with a quote by César Vallejo: “’It is clear,’ declared César Vallejo, noticing a black beetle giving head to a caiman virago, ‘why metaphysical life is so rich with pause.’”

Three lines end section 26: “In the neuron orgy / in cranial dark / to know thyself is to give a self to no.”

Eshleman’s pun on “no,” which night also be Japanese Noh, which derives from Japanese Nogaku, meaning skill, or mushin no shin, a Zen expression meaning “the mind without mind” and is also referred to as the state of “no-mindedness,” a mind not fixed or occupied by thought and thus open to everything.

An Anatomy of The Night is not the poem of an old man, certainly not in the way we have come to think of old people as rickety, doddering creatures in nursing homes sitting zombie-like in front of televisions, struggling to remember who the people are that come to visit them periodically, but it is the poem of a man late in life. Getting old does not mean getting old. You can get old without getting old. It depends on how actively engaged with life you are. I find it deeply encouraging that a man now in his late 70s can write such vigorous and generous poetry. The reflections in this poem are dark, but dark in that curious way the Sufis talk about, in which darkness becomes an illuminating force. I’m 64 myself. I can attest that a man still feels youthful feelings late in life, though those driving propulsions of one’s 20s have dissipated. One feels crepuscular. Feelings are still quick and quickened by what Breton called elsewhere. “Existence,” he said, “is elsewhere.” And yes it is. And that’s what I find in Eshleman’s work here. An ample feeling of elsewhere articulated in a “drop of psyche separated into streams, / each with a febrile image purpose, / ravenous image serpents all heading out hungry for extension…”

My Pythagorean Hat

2011-12-23T20:35:00.000-08:00

Have you seen my Pythagorean hat? Each time I reflect on the world, it crackles with lightning. Numbers taste of andouille, and the attitude of the willow turns red with planets.

I am following a spirit in denim through a mouth of stone. Shadows hold the secret of abandon. I sweat drops of horsepower. I use the dew of the moon for money. I wear fingerprints and alcoholic shoes. I am on a voyage of numbers. The number two is a watercolor. The number three is a surgeon lifting a strange shape from the internal organs of a mosquito. The number five is lost in the number four and the number four is five minus nine.

But then, you already knew that.

Here is something new: there is a fugue on the table. It was pushed through the stove of an artist where it baked into pure presence. The pure presence of music, which is the very embodiment of audacity, and depends on numbers, like a thrilling Irish summer, or a nebula of words giving birth to a library.

Language is more accurately described as a river than an ocean. I can feel its current moving me along in thought as a saga gallops through the art exhibit looking for Peter Green. Outside, the wind stirs up dead leaves, all dry and wrinkly like the parchment of a dead scribe. A metaphor blazes on a bed of creosote. A pumpkin combines cogency with circularity. Its pi tastes of crocodile, and its diameter gurgles the rivets of a far eastern bridge.

I have luxurious tastes. When sunlight hits the wall of the house next door, I can see the grooves in the shingles. A giant snake uncoils on a rock and slithers east. Spirits sing as they dissolve. Something wet and ductile tastes of perception. The energy of the day’s elegy is strong with the flavors of the earth. The scent of the dying. The scent of the freshly born. The smell of the stars in their baldness of will.

The smell of the taxi is visceral. A raw sienna winched from the fireworks of a pneumatic goatee. If watercolor causes virtuosity, then what is your opinion concerning pockets?

Take your clothes off. Now tell me, how does it feel?

Martin Scorsese plays a trumpet in the rain. Baudelaire does my hair. I feel propulsive and wet. Shadows bounce through my thirst. My mood is twisted into a hammerhead. My gloves are slow, but tolerant. The heart of this sentence weighs 15 tons. But it’s not done yet. There are more nouns to add, more verbs and adverbs. When it is finished, I will know the denominator of velvet. I will know the factor of sleep. I will know the formula for moonlight.

The climate of thought folds into a bicycle. The late new emotion crackles with broccoli. Arthur Rimbaud embraces the body of dawn. There are certain colors that penetrate my being and give me joy. One is the color of the pavement as it ripples through the sugar of apology. Another is the red smoke pouring out of André Derain’s tug on the Thames. And there is a certain blue that occurs in the midst of a vowel as the cowboys sit around a fire discussing Plato’s Republic.

Or is it the varnish of a guitar? I don’t know. As soon as the engine starts, the propeller turns, creating confusion in the water. Bubbles and foam. That sort of thing. Like when the rain is charged with pathos and you see Bessie Smith walking down the street.

Yes, you could say I’m wordy, but it is circumlocution that heals the sores of cynicism.

Look: there is a universe in this shoebox. It resembles the architecture of the heart. You can touch its wrinkles. Swirl its stars. It is a friendly milieu. Explicit as an apparition pinned to a blue wall. Or indigo stirring the rocks in the morning of a thermometer.

As for the color of my hat, it is the color of ferns in the forest embracing a deep solitude. A universe of numbers forged in a chord of irrational roots. The sun is coming out, and we see the strength of the earth as the stars recede into space, and an evergreen blazes with light.

The mathematics of splashing is hoarse with ecstasy, which is why cats are so fascinated by things falling to the floor.

If bingo equals being, then balloon equals odyssey, overriding a timeless moccasin as a kink in the escalator displays the elegance of combat. It follows that the Gaussian rationals from a number field which is two-dimensional as a vector space over Q will produce syrup, and that a morning painted with two brushes and a circle is apples. Therefore the square of a rational non-integer is always a worm, and the square root of an integer is always either another integer, or irrational structure, like a clitoris, or hat.

Penguin's Flightless Anthology

2011-12-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

I mean really.

The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry is such a travesty, why bother to say anything about it at all?

I call it the 2 by 4 effect: an event or phenomenon so incomprehensible, so utterly perplexing and inexplicable as to be mentally indigestible, that one feels as if some malefactor slammed the back of one’s head with a 2 by 4. I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, a president who, as a former constitutional law graduate from Harvard decimates our civil rights and flushes Habeas Corpus down the toilet, a blockbuster series of movies about teenage vampires in love, Bob Dylan doing an ad for Cadillac Escalade, the list is long. Long, long, long. How can anyone survive all these blows to the back of the head?

So, in view of what a hideous and psychotic landscape the United States has become, should it be that surprising that an anthology of American poetry would exclude, oh, I don’t know, Howl?

No Howl!!???? Not even a sampling from “Howl,” or one of the other poems in Howl, “A Supermarket In California,” “America,” or “Sunflower Sutra?” How can you frigging exclude “Howl” from an anthology purported to be representative of poetry in the 20th century? It is not possible to overstate the importance of that poem from the development of 20th poetry. I would argue that the anthemic power and reach of Diane DiPrima’s “Rant” is also of vital significance, and could easily have set the tone for the entire anthology. It might have substituted for the lack of "Howl," or any of Ginsberg's work. I'm sure there are others. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The question remains: why no Howl?

Penguin’s editor, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, argues that HarperCollin’s permission fee was prohibitively high in the case of Howl. If this is the case, then shame on HarperCollins.

Though it seems more than a little suspicious. How high did HarperCollins go? Is Penguin strapped for liquidity? Can it be that HarperCollins has their own anthology of 20th century American poetry in the works, and are trying to torpedo Penguin’s anthology? Are they planning to publish one in which all the poets Dove excluded will be included?

Dove’s exclusions are breathtaking: Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Niedecker. Basically, nothing at all from the Objectivist movement, except for William Carlos Williams. Dove has stated that she is averse to schools and isms as a guiding principle. But also missing are poets of great originality who do not fit into any niche or school or ism, poets such as Riding, Loy, Bronk, Blackburn, Eigner, Enslin, Dorn, Mac Low, Spicer, Plath, Rexroth, or Robin Blaser. Others conspicuous by absence include Schwerner, Lamantia, McClure, Whalen, Will Alexander, Corman, Guest, Schuyler, Padgett, Kaufman, Rothenberg, Kelly, Eshleman, Antin, Lansing, Hoover, Perelman, Armantrout, DuPlessis, Joans, Wieners, Tarn, Coolidge, Sobin, Sanders, Taggert, Bromige, Irby, Yau, Cortez, Chernoff, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Grahn, Kleinzahler, Waldman, Warsh, Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer.

Wait a minute. No Rexroth…??!! Let me go back and check.

Nope. No Rexroth. The poet, translator and essayist who is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and was once dubbed the “Father Of The Beats” by Time magazine, is not in an anthology of 20th century American poetry.

The mind boggles.

Was this another instance of a permission fee being too prohibitive?

I have a strong feeling that these names and many others are being bandied about even now with the same magnitude of incredulity, and with an equal amount of stunned speculation.

Helen Vendler has vigorously criticized the anthology, admonishing Dove’s bias toward multiculturalism as a guiding principle and being overly inclusive of poets of “little or no lasting value.”

Ouch.

Vendler further criticizes Dove’s bias toward accessibility: “Not to be ‘accessible’ is now to be chastised. Perhaps Dove’s two years as poet laureate helped foster the impression that poetry should be written in ‘plain American that cats and dogs can read’ (Moore, satirizing English views of America). But a poem can communicate while it is still imperfectly understood (said Coleridge), and Dove trusts her readers less than she might.”

Vendler criticizes Dove’s introductory essay as being breezy and shallow: “The simplest thing to say about Dove’s introduction is that she is writing in a genre not her own; she is a poet, not an essayist, and, uncomfortable in the essayist’s role, she strains for effects (alliteration the favorite) on the one hand and, on the other, falls into mere boilerplate.”

Dove counters these criticisms by saying that her representation of 175 poets is not overly indulgent, but that “when one considers the number of American poets (124) in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry—which includes other Anglophone poets as well—or the number of poets who have received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book or the National Book Critics’ Circle awards, 175 doesn’t seem an unreasonable number for a century’s worth of poetry—that is, if you are a mere mortal not satiated by a steady diet of ambrosia.”
Dove goes on to say that “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry is not meant to be an in-depth scholarly study of pick-your-ism; it is a gathering of poems its editor finds outstanding for a variety of reasons, and by no means all of them in adherence to my own aesthetic taste buds; my intent was to offer many of the best poems bound into books between 1900 and 2000 and to lend a helping hand to those readers wishing to strike out on their own beyond this selection.”

Dove’s most heated response is to Vendler’s criticism of Dove’s handling of the Black Arts Movement: “It is astounding to me how utterly Vendler misreads my critical assessment of the Black Arts Movement, construing my straightforward account of their defiant manifesto as endorsement of their tactics; she ignores a substantial critical paragraph in which I decry the fallout from the movement (‘Against such clamor and thunder, introspective black poets had little chance to assert themselves and were swept under the steamroller,’ I write in my introduction) and instead focuses on that handy whipping boy, Amiri Baraka, plucking passages from his historically seminal poem ‘Black Art’ in which he denigrated Jews, thereby slyly, even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies. Smear by association…sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth. (I could argue equal opportunity offensiveness by having printed Hart Crane’s ‘A liquid theme that floating niggers swell’—but perhaps that makes me racist as well.)”

I don’t know what to make of all this. My mental wheels are spinning. There is no traction. All I find is the immobility of total incomprehension.

Dove’s counters to Vendler’s criticisms are animated and sharp, but do not shed light on the many exclusions from the anthology that are conspicuous by their absence. I applaud her efforts to give pages to underrepresented voices and groups, but few of her choices within this parameter can be justified by the quality of writing. The anthology could have been a fabulous gallimaufry of disparate voices and human perspective such as Rothenberg’s Technicians Of The Sacred. Diversity is vital to poetry. I have sharp aesthetic differences with Vendler, and sharp differences with Dove, but there comes a point where the sheer quality of writing transcends its culture and dazzles the mind by the scorch of its imaginative force. These are the samples you need to find. It’s as if Dove went fishing in a very rich ocean but rather than bring back some scintillating samples of rare tropical fish she returned to port with the same old cod.

The issue of aesthetics is a prickly one. How does one overlook one’s preferences to locate a quality and strength of writing that goes beyond the walls of its garden and reaches and brings in a landscape of thrilling dimension? I think I just answered my own question. You’ll know it immediately. It will be there. Huge and wild and uncontainable. It will sing in your blood. Burn holes through your brain. Leave you trembling like a newborn wildebeest.

Dove argues repeatedly in her response to Vendler’s criticism that her primary concern was one of reaching beyond her own aesthetics to attain a truly representative sampling of poetic culture in 20th Century America. But this is precisely where I am most perplexed. If accessibility was a central criteria, which I read as a form of dumbing down, I can see now why poets such as Zukofsky or Eshleman or Blaser were excluded, not that their poetry is excessively difficult, but because their poetry is rigorous in its force and density. It requires a quality of attention our current Twittering generation is significantly lacking. Yet Dove did include many poets of notable sophistication: Ashbery, Palmer, Silliman, Rukeyser, Mackey, and Harryette Mullen.

I hope I’m utterly wrong about the current generation. The young poets I’ve met are all eager for experiment and intellectual rigor. They’re a very bright group of people who, despite the seductions of the Internet and Smartphones, have a love of books and language. I feel for them. I see them as a keen exception, ennobled by endeavoring at the far margins of American society where there are very few rewards or compensations, monetary or social. They do not have the social support that I enjoyed attaining adulthood in the late 60s. Poets were revered. The staid middle-class revered poets such as Frost and Sandburg for their wisdom. Frost recited poetry at Kennedy’s inauguration. Younger poets revered poets such as Snyder and McClure for their freedom and exuberance. As Larry Keenan’s photo of Dylan, McClure, Ginsberg and Robbie Robertson standing in back of the City Lights bookstore attests, there was nary a sliver of difference between a poet and a rock star. It was Dylan’s ferocious lyrics that brought me to poetry. Before that, I had it in mind to become a painter.

I worry to what extent this anthology will be taken seriously by schools and especially by young people with a flair for writing. They will find a lot of good poets in the anthology. But it seems an awful shame they won’t find those aforementioned names that were excluded.

Anthologies are curious repositories. They’re a lot like museums. They have that hushed quality of solemnity and canon. Whatever is in them on display bear the weight of historical importance. It is for that reason that I’ve always found anthologies appealing (I love museums), but also places where the very criteria for inclusion does something to the vitality of the items put on display. There is the acute sense that life is elsewhere. That the items in the museum - pots, butterflies, skeletons, scrimshaw, ancient flowers embedded in stone - have been long displaced from the worlds in which they once had a vital and authentic existence.

I remember when, somewhere between age 15 and 18, I had acquired a taste for literature, and what joy I had when I discovered Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, McClure and Corso. I admired the canonized poets, Frost and Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but with the exception of Dickinson and Whitman, they were just plain dull. Which is why, when I entered a bookstore or visited the house of a middle class family and spotted a “Best of” or “Anthology of” modern American poetry on the shelf, I took no interest in it. What I looked for was far outside the canon. I had a gut feeling that the poetry that really mattered and lit my nerves on fire was not going to be found in an anthology of contemporary poetry. How could it? What I was looking for was savage, raw, and wild. I was looking for words that would get me drunk. Get me high. Stir me up. Make feel more alive. And when I found that poet, he wasn’t even American. He was French. And his name was Arthur Rimbaud.

Aardvark Award

2011-12-17T09:30:00.000-08:00

Today I’ve won the Aardvark Award. I’m not sure what it is. Or what I won it for. I just have a feeling that I’ve done something spectacular. All I need to do is discover what it was I did.

Meanwhile, I just want my award. And here it is: a stuffed (you guessed it) aardvark. It is wrapped in gold foil, to give it that shiny, otherworldly, award look.

Perhaps it was my creation of the award that makes me the recipient of the award.

But isn’t that the way of all creative literary endeavors? Excluding the ones we have trouble with. The kind that keep us up at night. Banging our head against the wall. Notice I have suddenly moved into the third person singular. We are banging our head against the wall. Our one third person singular head.

You can do that in language. Bang one, two, three, four, however many heads you want against the proverbial wall.

Do you remember that scene in Raging Bull where Jake LaMotta bangs his head against the wall in his jail cell because he has suddenly realized what a total jerk he’s been? And what he’s had, and thrown away, because he can’t control his emotions? I saw that and I thought, immediately, holy shit, that’s me.

Give the man an Aardvark Award.

The Meeting Of Waters

2011-12-14T18:49:00.000-08:00

Kingdom Of Throat-Stuck Luck, poetry by George Kalamaras
Elixir Press, 2012

There is a place near Manaus, Brazil, where the Rio Negro meets the waters of the Amazon and the two colors of the two rivers remain distinct as they run side by side without mixing. The water of the Rio Negro is dark, almost black, and that of the Amazon is a sandy-colored beige. The phenomenon is due to the differences in temperature, speed, and water density. The waters do eventually blend and become indistinguishable, but for the few miles that they remain distinctly separate, the river presents a sight of singular simultaneity. This striking image, especially from the air, provides a strong visual analogue for the confluence of poetic influence apparent in George Kalamaras’s poetry.

Kalamaras is a remarkably eclectic poet and there are far more than two influences on his work, but there are two whose sources are as unlikely as they are geographically and culturally distant. This would be surrealism and eastern religion and philosophy.

Kalamaras has written extensively of Japanese surrealism, the work of Takiguchi Shuzo in particular, and is a practitioner of yoga meditation, a discipline not ordinarily associated with surrealism. Where these rivers blend we find a fusion of impulse, a debouch of fluid agreements: articulations of elsewhere, alterity, divergence, variance and otherness that are often as brilliantly opaque as they are inscrutably lucid. There are elements of Zen apparent in Japanese surrealism which reverberate in Kalamaras’s poems, or sutras, as he likes to call them, paratactic constructions that emphasize the irrationality of existence, the kaleidoscopic montage that is the fluctuating play of disparate stimuli that constitute each moment. Contrariety, eccentricity and contradiction urge discovery of our inner auroras and the fierce authenticity of life experienced as a spark in a cosmic fire.

The work gathered in this recent collection have a pleasant uniformity that suggests a heated composition within a single time frame. Whether that might be the actual case, I don’t know, but together the pieces have the savor of a symphonic ensemble.

“Bone Sutra,” the first poem of this collection, revels in osteopathic insomnia. The opening line - “Now we take up the study of bones” - is an adaptation of Patanjali’s first Yoga Sutra, “Now we come to the study of yoga.” Here is the poem in its entirety:

Now we take up the study of bones.
The copper-colored queen: wind through the cedars.

Perhaps one night I can’t sleep.
Or, perhaps you are convinced of the ritual naming of a dark gem.

There is severe ice cracking below each of the floating ribs.
Yet, his maybe, his how-come and what-not.

We lived in insomniatic teacups.
We spent our loves loving a certain flea.

Some old man wears a gray left sock, seeks hints and cockroaches.
An altar of eels floats through each speck of dust.

Someone is drawing us drawing him or her with chalk.
The moment the milk arrives, all the children run, laughing.

Notable here is a keen structural character. Kalamaras favors couplets, which makes sense to me as an aesthetic choice as it is keenly suited to enhance the effects of paratactic collage. This is especially apparent in the fifth couplet, where we find mingled an old man and his sock, cockroaches, and an altar of eels floating through each speck of dust. Eel and dust are quintessentially opposed mediums - the wet and the dry, the slithery and the nebulous - but within the irrational milieu of the poem, seem strangely appropriate. They work in the same way that the adjective ‘insomniac’ enhances the image of the teacup.

Some of the pieces are quite macabre. In “The Beauty of Sadness,” Kalamaras presents a montage of iconography associated with the ominous and the dying. It is a blend of Thanatos and Eros, the erotic and reproductive with the ghostly and preternatural. It begins with a wonderfully striking image: “He entrusted the chemical dust of seahorses to the wound in his spine.” This transmits a sense of magic, of ritual healing that suits the tenor of the poem. “He displayed,” the poem continues,

… a complicated answer as if sharing mice bone with an owl.

The beauty of sadness is its celestial ascent.
We tremble with god envy yet insatiate our veins.

If a wing-flapping swan inhabited our sideboard, which of the
         dinner guests would weep?
How might I dance naked on the table without creating a scene,
         without sending my wife into protracted shame?

We arrive from the other world, expressing the unseen, yet lapsed
         with memory.
We torment our adults with knowing how to give, how to cry, how
         to ask for both eggs at once.

Why should we colonize the sea with male reproductive scope?
Shall we accept the groinal cricket, the seahorse as our method,
         and share the male egg with anyone who, when cut, will bleed?

Finally, the quiet of sincere inertia, of guests leaving early, one at
         a time, profusely praising the food.
After the spiritual coup, we weighed our body hair, we burned
         the epaulets, we asked the cadaver lamp to guide us home.

Notable is Kalamaras’s use of an adjective - insatiate - as a transitive verb. Why we envy the gods is implied, not stated, though it’s not hard to guess: power, freedom, omniscience, immortality. There are quite a few reasons to envy the gods. What prevents us is gluttony. Our inability to find satisfaction, fulfill our appetites. One associates ‘insatiate’ with grossness, obesity, substance abuse. The appearance of the swan in the next couplet suggests a more pre-Raphaelite setting, a bird emblematic of the sublime, of otherworldly grace and beauty. Which, in this instance, is intended for eating.

The line “We arrive from the other world, expressing the unseen, yet lapsed with memory,” is redolent with romantic and neo-Platonic associations. “We torment our adults” is an interesting phrase within this context. It implies that as we mature and adapt to the human condition we lose that vital understanding that was once cognate with our being.

The final couplet which culminates with the farewell of dinner guests ends with the remarkable image of the “cadaver lamp” to guide us home. Thanatos, the poet tell us, is the spirit which will guide us home. That other world from which we arrived.

Paradox is pivotal to the practice of both Zen and surrealism. Kalamaras blends these elements in much the same way as the Amazon blends its two major tributaries. But there is a third side to Kalamaras’s writing that I find interesting from the point of view of delirium. As phantasmagoric or strange as much of Kalamaras’s poetry tends to be, there is an accompanying feeling of equipoise. Of balance. This is apparent in his technique, his couplets and paratactic montage, but also in the general tone of his pieces. We are never quite sure who is talking, driving the narrative. The voice, or voices, have the appearance of disembodiment. Of being diffused through the words like wandering spirits. One feels systole and diastole, inhalation and exhalation, the quiet rhythms of the body.

I believe this has much to do with the reason he enjoys referring to his poems as sutras. Sutra, from the Sanskrit, literally means a thread or line that holds things together. The verbal root is ‘siv,’ meaning to sew. Here again, we find an image of balanced symmetry, a needle rising in and rising out as it embroiders or joins two pieces of fabric together.

Kalamaras’s images do not appear to arise from delirium, but from some other transcendent level of consciousness whose tendencies move toward calm rather than chaos. Wittgenstein comes to mind, since his philosophy of language as a body of signs with no logical connection to external reality, a notion drawn ultimately from Saussure, advances the notion of language as a chess game. Kalamaras likes switching parts of speech around like pieces on a chess board, as in the line “Might a commendable exchange parliament my hips?” This testifies less to a disordering of the senses than a deliberate philosophical application referencing Wittgenstein’s ideas concerning language and reality. “Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking,” remarks Wittgenstein, “but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.”

Kingdom Of Throat-Stuck Luck is divided into five parts. The last section is titled “The Make Possible.” It seems that this is the intent of Kalamaras throughout his work. To make possible the buzz of the real in the indicative and subjunctive be.

Timeless Advice

2011-12-11T14:26:00.000-08:00

There is an intriguing scene near the end of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek in which the elder Spock (Leonard Nimoy) gives counsel to the young Spock (Zachary Quinto).

Who wouldn’t relish that opportunity to travel back in time as the older, wiser you, and give counsel to the stupider, younger you?

Here I am in the winter of 1973, age 26, freshly graduated from college with a BA in English. I am at a crossroads. I am living in a small studio apartment in downtown San José with a galley kitchen smaller than what you might find aboard a 30 foot sailing craft, sharing a bathroom at the end of the hall with four other men, one of whom declares he was once a Texas Ranger, and another who likes walking around with a Remington carbine. I am tired of being poor. I have heard there is a glut of teachers, especially at the college level. This had once been my ambition, but now, I just want a job that pays reasonably well and doesn’t give me suicidal thoughts morning noon and night.

Get that master’s degree, I tell myself. There will be jobs. Don’t be discouraged. But get that degree. With no skills and nothing but a BA in English, you are virtually unemployable. Getting a master’s degree will save you from numerous menial, dead end jobs, that leave you feeling like a lump of fecal matter squeezed from the rectal orifice of the workaday world. And while it’s true that getting a master’s degree doesn’t quite conform with your ambitions of becoming the next Richard Brautigan, or Tom Robbins, the publishing world may not be so quick to grant your literary efforts so generously with a livable income and broad distribution for a public eager to spend their hard-earned dollars on your work. I’m not saying your writing isn’t good. Just that your expectations about publication and finding an audience or painfully naïve.

This is what parents are supposed to do, but nobody listens to their parents. Parents are parents. They come from a different time and adhere to a slightly different worldview.

So what makes me think I would listen to myself at age 64?

I am a very different person at age 64 then I was at age 26. I would imagine most people feel similarly, though maybe not. I would like to think that the 26 year old me would find something to respect and admire about the 64 year old me. The fact that we are the same person does not readily mean that we will have things to like about one another. The difference will be acute. The 26 year old me might well find the 64 year old me just as pedantic and tedious as Hamlet found Polonius.

The difference (apart from weight gain, wrinkles, and loss of hair) consists in wisdom, wisdom which is the fruit of experience. So it’s not really fair to call myself wiser, because it is experience that has made me wiser, and confers an unfair advantage over the person I was at age 26, who was still acutely concerned with romance, getting laid, and drinking immoderate amounts of alcohol. How do you reason with such a person? How do you tell such a person that life is sweeter and far more benevolent when you go to bed at, say, 10:00 o’clock and drink prudently, if at all, and by all means don’t worry and fret over getting laid, or finding a romantic partner, those things happen naturally, and unexpectedly, usually at times in your life when you’re happy living alone, and are passionate about other things than women, and getting laid. Because women are quick to sense those things about a young man. They tend to be leery of men who are needy, impatient, and basically just want to get laid. Men find it desirable to have sex with someone with whom they feel compatible, but that is generally an afterthought. Men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love. It’s a nasty little formula, and one that results in a lot of unhappiness, but there it is, it’s the gospel truth. So watch it. Buy a lot of dirty girly magazines. It will serve you better than all those drunken nights at the local meat market.

I see the 26 year old me nodding with polite agreement, but knowing, deep down, it will be impossible to adhere to this advice. At 26, testosterone is pouring out of one’s ears. One is chained to a maniac. Telephone poles look sexy.

At 64, one is down a few quarts in the testosterone department. Given a choice between a good novel or a freebie at a Texas brothel, the novel would win hands down. Moby Dick. So to speak.

Of course, knowing what happens in the future confers an absurdly obvious advantage when it comes to giving advice to someone. But would I have the heart to tell the 26 year old me that there will come a time when books are no longer appreciated by the masses? That text will be available on tiny electronic gadgets but that the art of reading will have virtually disappeared? That theocratic fanatics who denounce science and evolution and believe the world is 6,000 years old will run for president? That the United States will be a totalitarian police state in which 84 year old women are pepper sprayed for protesting against an obscenely wealthy and fraudulent class of oligarchs? That the middle class will be dying? That a substantial number of people who once owned homes and lived Leave It To Beaver lives are now living in tent cities? That although only a tiny minority continue to relish books and read poetry there will be an industry cranking out millions of poets competing for the limelight? That habeus corpus and posse comitatus will be quaint constitutional relics? That Bob Dylan will be doing commercials for the Cadillac Escalade? That Bob Dylan will be mistaken as a vagrant and picked up by a woman cop in New Jersey? That Bob Dylan will actually still be quite a compelling song writer and weirdly relevant?

That the world itself will be on the brink of destruction due to irreparable environmental degradation and climate change?

That Mount Saint Helens will erupt? That a tsunami will wipe out Indonesia? That a Penguin anthology of 20th century American poetry will not include the work of Allen Ginsberg? Will not have Howl in it? Will not have George Oppen or Louis Zukofsky or Michael McClure in it?

That would be cruel. I would not do such a thing to myself. Maybe the kindest advice I could give myself is to hang in there with the poetry thing. There is salvation in poetry. It is the sweetest religion going. It won't save you from a lot of pain, but it sure makes it more palatable, and interesting.

I might also hand my 26 year old self a suitcase full of winning lottery numbers from the future, and all the winning football, baseball, and basketball scores. A little financial independence never harmed the working of the muses. It would also be nice to finance a media empire that would not only rival but squash that of Rupert Murdoch's. Goodbye Fox. Goodbye Rush. Hello Howl. Hello Bernie Sanders.

The Storms Of Emily Dickinson

2011-12-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

I live in a palace of ice on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. The plumbing is ice and the counters are ice. The doors are ice and the windows are ice. The doorknobs are ice and the refrigerator is ice. The carrots are ice and the pork chops are ice. The rice is ice. The sweet potatoes are ice and smells and spices and books are ice.

I watch Bonanza reruns. And The Fugitive. Since the television is ice, the images are remarkably lucid. I can see the lines in David Janssen’s face, and Dan Blocker’s eyes are huge and generous and blue when he sits on his horse and smiles.

Richard Kimble, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Jack Kerouac, gets a job as a migrant field worker in southern California near the Salton Sea. A brush fire starts in the nearby hills. The field workers are enlisted to fight the fire. Kimble sees a fallen man in the smoke and runs down and drags him to safety. The foreman orders Kimble to drive the man back to camp where there is a nurse (played by the very sexy Beverly Garland) in the company truck. He orders Paco Alvarez, who has a pregnant wife in camp, to accompany him. Paco refuses to go. He tells Kimble privately that he and the other workers suspect that he is an undercover border cop and will send anyone without papers back to Mexico. Kimble convinces Paco that he is not a cop. In fact, he is on the opposite side of the law. Paco believes him, and they take off back to camp in the truck. I get up to increase the heat on the thermostat and my palace melts. The TV melts and the truck melts and Paco and Richard Kimble melt.

I fall from the moon and land on earth. It’s 4:30 p.m., December 9th. Roberta returns home from work. I’m shaving in the bathroom. I have lather on my face. She tells me she called. When? A few minutes ago. I must have been in the shower, I say. What happened? She spotted a small bird at the top of the hill by the corner of 5th Avenue North and Prospect, where that big hedge is. The bird was disoriented. I went to scoop him up with my hat, and he flew back into the hedge. I’m sure the bird will be ok. If he could fly, he couldn’t have been too youg. It’s strange, though. It seems awful late in the winter for birds to be hatching out of eggs.

We eat kielbasa and beans and watch Le Journal de France 2. David Cameron looks angry. Sarkozy and Merkel look happy. Cameron vows to veto the Eurozone deal. We watch the bonus CD for Paris, Je T’Aime and eat ice cream as the Coen brothers explain what they want Steve Buscemi to do in the Paris Metro. Roberta worries about the bird and I tell her I am sure that if the bird could fly back into the hedge he could not have been too young or disoriented. His chances for survival appear good. And what could she have done? If she had brought the bird home Toby would have eaten him.

Tomorrow is Emily Dickinson’s birthday. I wonder what to get her. And then I realize she is dead. And how ironic that is. So many of her poems were meditations on death. On dying. On stone. On Time and Sound and Bells and Spools. Sedulous of Multitudes, notwithstanding Despair, even Nature herself has forgot it is there. What? The dog, of course.

There are no poodles in Emily’s poetry. No collies. No spaniels. No beagles. No Dobermans or pugs. No boxers or whippets or Chihuahuas or golden retrievers. Emily appeared to be remarkably focused on pearls. Flags of Snow. Slow gold. Crooked hills. Everlasting Night.

Men of Ivory. Pizarro’s Ear Rings. Billows of Circumference. Long storms. The quiet nonchalance of death.

The storms of Emily Dickinson rage in the heart of a dachshund. The dachshund sends out rays of light. Tomorrow I will construct another palace. I will construct it of rupture and spring and call it Xanadu. It will have the glaze of a thousand revolts. I will grow more hair on my head. I will wear sonnets. I will create a cemetery for birds. I will place it in the Sea of Tranquility. Now, 64 years of age, I push the door of my life open and discover that I am really Emily Dickinson, and my breasts are made of ice, and small white words ripple among my ribs.

Movie Rant

2011-12-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

This has been a remarkably shitty year for movies. Usually, by early fall, some fairly decent movies have been released. The kids are back at school and now is the time for drama without boogers and robots. People exchanging actual dialogue. Facial expressions with nuance and subtlety. Except for a couple, such as 50/50 and Drive, the movies have been mind-numbingly awful. What is Al Pacino doing in the steaming pile of human fecal matter that is Adam Sandler’s Jack And Jill? I like going to the movies to get away from a world that is in the throes of imminent disaster. Catastrophic rot. I go to the movies for escape, yes, certainly, absolutely, but also for something a little extra, a trace of insight, a whisper of truth, a thoughtful exploration of the human soul, with maybe a sword fight or two and a dinosaur for good measure.

But it’s not just the movies Hollywood has been issuing like ground meat from an automatic stuffer. It’s the venues themselves. The audience. The management. The seats and screen and sound system.

A recent example: Roberta and I went to see The Descendants last Tuesday at the Guild 45th. We arrived early, and so went across the street to Starbucks to wait for the box office to open for the 2:30 matinee. While sipping my hot chocolate, I saw a man ascend a ladder to the roof of the Guild 45th, but thought nothing of it, assuming he was up there to clear away some leaves or check a minor leak.

At 2:00, we went to buy our tickets. We went into the theater and sat down. I could hear someone pounding on the roof, hammering, throwing heavy weights around. This continued into the previews. I went out to the lobby to complain. I asked the young woman who took our tickets if this guy on the roof was going to keep working through the movie. She followed me into the theater to check how loud it was. She heard the pounding instantly, and said she would go tell the manager. I figured the problem would be quickly solved.

But no. Movie began. The Descendants is not Savage Guns, Pearl Harbor, or Transformers. It’s a quiet movie, heavy on dialogue, pregnant pauses, facial close ups. I tried for an hour to get absorbed in the movie, but couldn’t. No one else seemed to mind. There were about 30 other people in the theatre. Finally, I gave up. I signaled to Roberta, and we left. We were refunded our money and given two free tickets.

But I can’t help wondering: what the fuck was the manager thinking in scheduling some guy to do roof construction during a movie? The mind boggles.

Could it be that people just don't give a shit about quality anymore? Or am I a whiny prima donna who expects far too much from the world?

I worry that the movies are dying. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, are willing to go through the bother of getting into a car and driving to a theater, finding a place to park, hoping the theater has a lobby in which to get out of the wet and cold, and they won’t be surrounded by nincompoops who spend the entire time texting.

When Roberta and I saw Stiegg Larson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last year, there was a young woman in front of me who took out her cell phone and began texting. The bright light from her little instrument was distracting. I found it difficult to keep my eyes focused on the screen. There was a luminous blur in my peripheral vision, and the light itself kept drawing my attention, away from the action and dialogue on the screen. I thought she just needed to check something urgent, then would put her little toy away, and get back to the movie. But she didn’t. After about ten minutes, I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I leaned forward and asked her to put it away. Which she did. I was glad of that. Her boyfriend was a bruiser. I didn’t want to mess with him.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve been bothered by people texting. It happens a lot. Why anyone would pay 10 bucks to see a movie, and then not see it, but text away on their little gadgets, is beyond my comprehension.

I see this behavior, and other forms of rudeness which have become much more prevalent, as signs of a dying culture. I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing the Romans went through, circa 400 AD, before the inevitable and final collapse into the Dark Ages.

Those displaced Romans and Christians still had a planet, though. We don’t. Our planet is swiftly becoming inhabitable. No water to drink, no air to breathe.

Meanwhile, until the atmosphere catches fire and angels descend blowing trumpets and God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney, I want to see movies. I want to see a movie in which God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney.

Or Obama. Anyone who is responsible for our demise. Or tells whopping lies to get his or her ass kissed. I’m not real big on the truth, frankly, I tend to prefer illusions, for obvious reasons, but I hate it when someone gets away with a deceit so colossal it would shame the devil.

In the Scorsese documentary about Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, Lebowitz remarks that a high level of connoisseurship is vital to the arts, and to culture in general, and that a significant population of connoisseurship was lost during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the mid to late 80s. Arts became more vulgar, everything had to be “broader, more blatant, more on the nose.”

I see that happening now. I don’t blame AIDS, I blame another epidemic: technological materialism. A mindset that is capable of referring to Steve Jobs as a visionary, or Bill Gates as a philanthropist. This is a society whose perceptions have been blunted by cheap entertainment and whose intellects have been bludgeoned by propaganda. I agree with Lebowitz: there needs to be more democracy in our politics, and less democracy in the arts.

My Beautiful Lassitude

2011-12-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a bearing which combines laceration
With amusement. As a keepsake it has been
Turned into a parable. A large Antarctic plug
Chafed with cellophane while humming
And percolating algebra. Sleep is more
Like an engraving than a conversation
With a wire and a pair of calipers. Knots
Are hectic with teak when they are shoveled
From the land. Nails jingle in a toolbox
And cellos turn to silver, their music dribbling
Guts and curry. When all is said the waterfront
Is nothing but mist and gloom and history
Dancing in a nightclub. Shall we dare
To soak ourselves in antifreeze? The candy
Is a nasty fire. And no, I am not opposed
To cyclones. I just don’t like fussing
With an old tube of glue. The thin logic
Of the tailgate is far more ecstatic. The map
Is a naked bud. A wedge of sound from the radio
Incites watermelon to arc into romance
With a nexus of hacksaws. The window
Is unassuming. The azaleas heave
Themselves into nirvana and we count
All the castles of the landfills until
The gasoline coughs. The laceration
Continues as a paragraph. The rest of us
Go to jail, which is just noodles after all
Is said and done. Noodles and bars and
Birds and armadas of wonderful poetry
That releases everyone into crickets.
The invertebrate drugs have a wall
In their scenery so be careful. There
Is just enough syntax available to make
Snacks and chew our memories into benediction.
In this realm we deposit our shoes in the bank
And withdraw into an obdurate obscurity
That is worthy of poets. Even the parakeets
Are delirious. Our shoulders are distilled
Into puddles. The scars form bundles of skin
That we can fold into slices of water.
This is how we have come to dawdle in mirrors.
There are more veins than wisps of aviation.
More shoulders than wainscoting. More suitcases
Than horizons of summer. Beautiful summer
Which I have folded into a shirt. My glands are opals
And the glue is an apparition, a flip of adhesion
Like an octopus tap-dancing on a jetty. A new
Anthology of poetry full of penguins and lassitude
Drifts under the boardwalk and yaws into blackberries.
The world is not a mechanical salad. No it is not. The world
Is a churning aluminum wallet stuffed with lips
Running amok among the credit cards and equations.
There are more than molecules in the house of olives.
There are verbs and hoes and watts that smell of life.
Life as it is lived in the drip of biography. Life as it is lived
In the cleavage of a yak at a nightclub in London. Yes
And a river long after it becomes a gate and lets us in
To better understand infinity, and get silly in the waterfall.

Ode To A Chair

2011-12-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

Is it wrong to love furniture
I love my chair
I think of it as my personal organizational assistant
With four legs two arms and a reasonably soft cushion
The arms are smooth and gently curved
With fluted columns in a duet of maple conviction
The front legs are also fluted and proudly vertical
While the back legs are more discursive
They descend to the floor in an obstinate curve
That argues the ontology of objects and persons
Consistent with the empirically established facts
Based on epistemic considerations
And causal interrelations of the chair’s constituent atoms
Manifesting themselves in a form I can sit on
And rest my body and lean back occasionally
To enlarge my prospects
I also love the couch
Because I love to recline
Consider a gas in a vessel with perfectly smooth and elastic walls
In an arbitrary initial state and let it evolve in the course of time
And you will get a couch
Bubbling out of a mossy hillside
In the middle of a football field
I believe the subjunctive mood is a form of furniture
For it supports the labor of the mind
Attempting to crawl out of reality
To find a commodious object
In which to launch its fanciful creations
For instance take this poem
Driving down Second Avenue
In a Lamborghini wearing nothing
But a refrigerator light
Would you say it was bald
Or more like a sandwich
Of words and lettuce
A wind blows through my work
If you want to call this work
I call it a public fountain
You can make anything on your lips
Travel out of your mouth and become a bloodmobile
I am trying very hard to be
Worthy of this chair
Even if I have to club it into submission
My love for this chair must be sweet destiny
For why else would I sit in it committing these words
To its shape and description
Its immortal being
Its four legs and two arms and cushion
Enthusiasm is the god within
My eyes walk out of my head to say this
Chair isn’t everything but it means a lot
Which is why the ode was born
To convey such thoughts and feelings
Even in a time of iPods and pixels
Pythagoras, it is said, lectured to his students
From behind a curtain so that they would concentrate
On what was said and not on it source
This was known as being “acousmatic”
This strategy applies equally
To expanding a chair into an evocation
Of perturbations and ribbons
The time is exquisite
At the frontier between perception and language
It is where the crocodile heaves its body onto the blacktop
And Scarlet Johannson takes off her clothes
The better to startle you
Into a recognition of yourself and your possibilities
Cézanne was on the verge of middle age
When he had the crucial revelation of his artist’s mission
He reversed the illusion of deep space
To achieve mass and volume first
Recording with a separate pat of paint
Each larger shift in direction
By which the surface of an object
Defined the shape of the volume
It enclosed and so a chair was born
To support the weight of the body
As it becomes available to itself
The chair has a more liberal
Breadth of a purpose than a feeling
But put a feeling in a chair
And that feeling will grow into a chair
Whose purpose is to lead the mind
To heights of understanding

Ted Enslin Letters

2011-11-28T11:04:00.000-08:00

I corresponded with the late Ted Enslin for something like 18 years, beginning sometime in 1993, or possibly 1994. I received his last letter on July 6th, 2011. I knew it would be his last. “Well,” he had written, “I think my condition is terminal. How long is a question. Personally I hope not very long. The past week was a stinker.”

Ted did not identify his illness or go into details about his limitations, though I had a pretty good idea, having been witness to my father’s death, mother’s death and that of my father- and mother-in-law. Ted’s evident acceptance of death was impressive, but not surprising. It was obvious from our years of correspondence that he was not only accustomed to reality but welcomed it. His poetry testifies to a no-nonsense worldview that exalted the world’s stony reverberations in a language of percussive penetration and solidity. His words were simple but carefully placed, pulsed, like the purity of notes in a composition by Eric Satie.

Ted loved music, Mahler especially. He had had a rigorous training in composition, and studied under French composer, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger. Poetry provided a means for musical expression in lexical form. He believed that the same principles apply to both music and poetry and that ideally they are one art. “I became increasingly aware of the fact,” Ted remarked in an interview with Robert J. Bertholf for Web Conjunctions,

that there was a great deal of material that I could not deal with in the usual ways. For instance, I wanted to write something antiphonal, I wanted to get that spatial sense of sound, and I was attracted—as many, many people have been—to the possibilities of a concert hall such as the nave of St. Mark's in Venice, where the so-called Antiphonal School arose. The Gabrielis and their great students (Monteverdi and Schütz in particular) is where that came from. Well, I thought, yeah, this is a great idea, the idea of an echo, but spatially moved out so that it would be apparent in the readings of such a piece. Could that be done? And I tried something which I called "Antiphony", I guess it must have been in about the middle '50s. And it didn't work. I didn't have the means to do it. I did do it, however, about 22 or 23 years later and it did work. I had it performed twice, once at Bowling Green in 1989. It is based on the consideration of a rock, geologic rock, and it comes back again and again in the series of echoing and returning sounds, and in a kind of percussive sense of rock, of something against which you can't push much of anything else.

Ted was a prompt letter writer. I would sometimes take as long as two months to answer a letter. But when I did, I would have a letter from Ted in less than a week.

Ted’s letters were all identical in size: the envelope was 6 ½ by 3 ½ inches and the letter itself was most ofen a small single sheet of paper, 5 ½ inches in width and 8 ½ inches in length. They were always typewritten. Ted used a manual typewriter. When I held one of his letters, my fingers could feel the little impressions the typewriter keys made on the back side of the paper. I don’t know where Ted managed to find ribbons. He lived in a rural part of Maine, less than a mile from the seashore. He was married to an artist named Alison Enslin, but was in all other respects a hermit. He had little use for society. We shared a contempt for American culture, its militaristic hardness and brutality, its cheerless pragmatism and inability to appreciate or value anything that didn’t involve money.

Ted was particularly contemptuous of doctors. “Of course, for me, doctors, and their inane ‘tests’ are unthinkable.” Fortunately, Ted was in remarkably good health for most of the years we wrote. He must have been pushing 70 when we began our correspondence, and he frequently mentioned swimming in the Atlantic. I often complained about the cholesterol lowering medication I had to take, and he would respond by letting me know that his cholesterol level was well below 200, which was probably the result of his love of seafood. He remarked in his last letter that he always had a fondness for big Dungeness crabs, and that he’d “eaten a good clam chowder a few days ago, and haddock yesterday.”

“I have always preferred fish, shellfish, etc. to meat,” he remarked in an earlier letter. “No moral preference. I simply like seafood more. I was that way as a child. Whenever I had the choice I invariably picked seafood. Something of a merman, perhaps.”

He did not like snow. He did not like winter. Maine winters especially. “Ah,” he remarked in a letter dated 1/11/11, “but I wish I could go to Belize as I used to. Not possible now for many reasons. To go alone is unthinkable in my physical condition.”

In May of 2011 it was still there. “Yes, 130 inches of snow, what I call our white filth, is a bit mind boggling, but we are used to anywhere between 70 and 80 inches a year.”

I would sometimes remark on the deplorable ignorance and decay of America’s public schools, and there, too, Ted had a lot of contempt. He referred to himself as an autodidact: “I have always been an autodidact, and started early. Standard schooling was an utter waste on me, and I rejected it. Actually some of it was harmful to me. Despite Horace Mann, and others, I often think that public schooling in this country should be abolished. Much money saved for better purposes. The best teaching is one on one, and I am sure many others have been injured by this usual crap.”

Ted’s letters were always a comfort to me. A kind of compass heading. He proved that one could live independently of society’s suffocating bureaucracies and soul-killing commerciality. He was outside the politics of the literary academies and conventions where everyone shows off their wares and jockeys for publication opportunities. He did not own a computer. He was his own man, all the way.

Whenever I went to collect the mail, I recognized Ted’s letters immediately by their modesty of size. I could tell immediately that they weren’t bills or requests for money. I liked that.

Ted’s pleasures were as modest as his letters. He liked smoking a pipe, reading, listening to music, and drinking a glass of whiskey per day. I sensed in his letters a profoundly New England character, a love of honesty and craft and reverence for nature, for economy and the deeply gratifying pleasure of a skill achieved by hard learning, be it carpentry, music, or fishing.

Ted had had a long history with New England. Ted’s great-grandmother was first cousin to Lydia Jackson, Emerson’s second wife, and William James second son, William “Billy” James, chose Ted as a model for a number of his paintings.

I once made inquiry about Ted’s view of the afterlife, of the supernatural, and Ted answered that “my interest in paranormal evidences comes through a number of instances in my own life, which can’t be explained in ‘normal’ ways. Of course all of the evidence is colored by the way in which people think at particular times. I don’t think of ghosts in white sheets, or accounts from some pie-in-the-sky paradise. Rather, I think that there is a residuum from experience and knowledge similar to archaeologist’s soils – carbon dating etc. All of us have a bit of that kind of sensing, though it is limited, and often stunted by ‘practical’ thinking. But there are other senses, and people like Aunt Nora have them in a developed degree. Ivan Tolstoy once told me that it is mathematically demonstrable that man’s knowledge has added to the weight of the earth. I think he was thinking in the right direction.”

I will miss Ted’s letters. I have become so accustomed to receiving them. They have been a part of my life. More than an adjunct; more like a tide. A coming and going of thoughts and convictions, opinions and images. Lives shared. Feelings contrasted and shaped according to the notes of one another’s words.

I never actually met Ted. Never even spoke to him on the telephone. Yet I feel I knew him deeply. I must have, because I feel his loss deeply.

The impulse to write him remains. I suppose in time that feeling will dissipate. And, like now, I will find myself writing about him, rather than to him. There is a world of difference between those two prepositions. On one side is life, and on the other, the complete unknown.

This Is The Farm Where Candles Boil

2011-11-25T09:42:00.000-08:00

Clumsiness is sweetened by rattling the wisecrack. Resilience was embryonic in the dream I had. The gantry forge was this parameter or inferno. The testimony propagated moon bubbles. A hirsute stepladder and bulbs that overflowed.

The wood in heartwood is longer than reticence. It is a fabric with the extent of sand. Tilted thoughts are smacked into life. Noumena swarm the book. The horizontal is sometimes gleefully housed in hardware.

This is because consciousness is stitched with rain. The blade extends grace. The stunning conclusion breaks out shouting. Nipples in salvation walk from Rome to Naples. The door’s ingredients are mirrored in the river.

Art is to experience what the oarlock is to oars. Audacity’s old hypothesis sleeps in admonition. Glasses become examples. The army moves into the opium map. Wet or adhesive the meaning of calypso dilates our tin.

A complex flower is hauled out of the garden. We serve ourselves speed and get the ceiling to sparkle. A development pumps itself into rope between the spars. Alarm whistles in steam for the coffee. Our feet pummel a pacific sidewalk.

This is the farm where candles boil. Where copperplate stirs perception. Where chiaroscuro slips through gravity’s veins and old puddles merit the play of a dachsund. Like pumps, the great octagonal truths coax our faiths to mingle and become a religion of thrills. The severity of our insults are actually sugar.

We heard that the tables are stern but flat and serviceable. Science’s phantom zippers seethe with divinity in them. During the paradigm, our truffles burst. The lost staircase spirits tumbled down the steps. The seashore climbed through the enfoldments of our clothes.

Sunlight materializes circumference. The newly built palace blazes with gold. A sparrow alights on the palette. Paper’s duty is not to the paddle but to the sonnet that replaces its letters with handsprings. Words are simulacrums until Euclid opens the door.

We step into our moccasins and the fierce new surge of being we feel is stunning. The hermitage pigments are done flapping. Expansion leaves a trail of discarded oysters. It dampens us in expanded dribble. The whole highway is fencing itself.

Demonstrate your tigers then think and interact later. The morning has no effective means to keep a secret. Fathom eyeballs are as pockets of change. Grains in suspension can rattle and multiply. Sweat grabs the skin and makes it gleam.

Goldfish arms unbend on the sandstone which burns. I had enough kisses to parody the harness. The swamp yells its examples in lines. The slide was brooding in moo drool. I put the emphasis on bounce but the hem was the first to plead its heterogeneity.

Heart salt is anything the hectic wrinkle binoculars. Jellyfish henna jarred in butane. Too blue to collect an irritation. Details unravel between your brushes. Explain the intestines. Why are incongruities always so developed that a mongrel hammer gladdens the hand of Thor and winter arrives in a harrow?

Consider parrots. Explore a sycophant. Papier collé looks chronological on muffins. It is a severity too old to pack. Fire fangs deepen the taxi.

This is a house for musk and cinnamon, not a bungalow for shouting. Wire and zippers meet certain ontological needs but we must anchor our personal sense of existence in a frame more personably oriented toward the light. Chiaroscuro branches into a texture. We sweeten our veins with adjectives. We are eager, like intellect, to swing our perspective into copper, and make it last until the chains are undone.

48 Reasons To Write Poetry In A Time Of Aliteracy

2011-11-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

Because words walk out of my hand like coins of fever
And the washer grumbles like a cargo plane taking off from Guam
Because lightning paints the wall with apocalypse
And staircases have implications
Because making a list of reasons for something that doesn’t require
         a reason is inexplicably convivial
Like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it
Or a catcher’s mitt turning infrared in a dream about pretzels
Because morning is a horse in Belgium
Because the dreams that clams dream are impelled by harmonica
And glass disturbs the rumors of the highway
Because whenever I make an incision in the air a charming
         sidewalk topples out of it
Because I live in the House of the Rising Sun
And the incident rate of odometer fraud is a nebula of alibis
Because there is no way to describe alpaca except with a bagpipe
         and a stepladder
Because vowels are hooked to consonants in a mathematics of
         sawdust and glue
That shine among ships and thicken into life at the exact moment
         there is music clasped to a lip from 10:00 o’clock to eternity
Because hot showers feel wonderful and T-shirts and shoes are
         marvels of sartorial conception
Because truth is slippery and cold and cognition suits the shape
         of the human skull
Like a string of sausages
In a marketplace in the highlands of Oaxaca
Because the sands of time are crucial to cooking
And consciousness is wet and goofy
Because an organ tugs music from a stone and drags it into
         beatitude
Because photosynthesis is an effective way to eat the sun
And rain converts to puddles on the ground
Because the formula for landscape is visibility plus trees equals
         the love of motion
And there are leaves scattered everywhere on the ground running
         the gamut from scarlet to gold
And comets and diplomats are displacements of electrical energy
And Hawaii is a backache
And lava chatters of heat
Because the sound of the alphabet flirts with immensity
And a pitcher of water imitates clouds
Because I feel powerfully alive each time sunset unveils the night
And curiously sad when I get out of bed
Because whenever an American male opens his mouth to speak I
         hear something dead inside
And whenever I hear an American woman open her mouth to
         speak I hear something frightened and dangerous
I hear incandescent capillaries sewn into a sonnet of blood
Because the Pacific ocean harvests a violin
And parables help us understand the sensations which arise from
         wheels
Because defecation is an enigma more puzzling than baseball
Because airports bananas and little white clocks
Because mahogany is a beautiful and imposing wood and the
         Skookumchuck has cut Centralia in half
Because joy is a mood but life is a feeling and true power comes in
         the form of a strawberry
Because death speaks the language of birth
Because if you thrust a jacket onto the couch it will remain there
Until somebody moves it
Because understanding dust is not the same as comprehending a
         complex emotion
Because echoes in a famished soul develop into libraries
And ankles are miracles of bone and cartilage
Because the little finger thinks it is cleverer than the thumb but is
         not and must be pitied
Because pink is in turmoil and clarinets are immune to drums
Because there is mustard on the accordion and thought is smeared
         into words and the firmament speaks to the mountain in the
         language of thunder and hair
Because jellyfish wash ashore and the hooves of the horses leave
         imprints in the sand that resemble the crescents of the moon
Because destiny is the eggnog of shock
And coffee is eloquent and black
Because Jeoffry my cat is not named Jeoffry at all but Toby and
         Toby is licking himself under the lamp even as I write the odor
         of beef stew fills the apartment and traffic lights would not be
         as effective if they were round like balloons
Because to Hegel the life process of the brain is the demiurgos of
         the real world and the real world is only the external,
         phenomenal form of the Idea translated into forms of thought
And muscle is predicated on bone
Because whenever the word ‘ground’ bends into the word ‘urethra’
         I feel that something wonderful and strange has happened and
         so desire to see it put into simulacrum of floating where I howl
         with laughter and men search for honey in magical Gabon

Mallarmé Packs His Suitcase

2011-11-18T14:47:00.000-08:00

Mallarmé packs his suitcase with flotsam and steam and the catechism of dice. There is no end to the horizon. Unlike the rain battering his window and hitting the ground in a chaos of spit and splatter. That will end, and become 200 frogs croaking in Monday drizzle.

Where is he going? What will he do when he gets there? Will he find pleasure in water? Will he find sufficient rope to tie the sky to the earth?

It is 12:58 p.m. I am anchored in front of a computer. The snow slides gently and smoothly to the ground, softening and homogenizing form in a uniformity of white. Mallarmé exists in a different space and time. But we are linked. By poetry. And an ocean of blood flowing around a complexity of muscle and bone. Which is one and the same thing.

Laugh at necessity. But don’t laugh at pewter. Swimming is difficult in an empty pool. Pain sparkles in the shadows.

I am a monk in a realm of improbability. I prefer to wear denim most of the time. I like to experiment with words. Glazes and equations. Formulas and morals. Mass times bikini equals paprika. The square root of accordion is yellow fever. Pump means nervous multiplied by taste.

The window smells like an airplane. But the color of innocence blossoms in sugar and the fire vomits sparks.

Birch excites my words. Birch is a perspective. And a shaking and a deepening. A horse flies through a sonnet. Indigo lives in a violin. Frankenstein stumbles through the forest. His clothes are rags. His eyes are flames of hot bright mustard.

Everything meaningful exists outside of time. Identity is most acute when it has no identity. Once I was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now I am Thomas Hobbes. And the world is a leviathan.

What shall we call this world? This place without regiment, or horticulture. Let’s call it a pink balloon at the bottom of a rockery. A man pumping gas on a Saturday night in Nebraska. Three women sitting in wheelchairs in front of a Christian science church. Medallions of pork on a juniper plate. A woman in a yellow bathrobe, fingernails ablaze with pink.

The galaxy oozes visibility. Japan emerges from the fog. Water drips from the leaves, soaks into the ground, and rises back up in the form of sap.

I stop to gather healing elixirs in a garden of handsprings. Do you accept my nudity? My alphabet of needs and butterflies? Consciousness coils around a sound and becomes a word. A stirring of coal dust attacks the syntax of science. If cynicism doesn’t work, use force. If force doesn’t work, use poetry. Space holds the wind in a grove of willow. It waits for you. It is a gift from heaven. It is dangerous and strange and awakens the dead.

One of the reasons we cannot believe our senses is because the phenomenon defies any reasonable explanation. But it’s true. Snow is magic. It advances the truth of mutability. I see a haiku in your cheek. And a hunger in your eyes.

I made a strong cup of coffee this morning. Run as fast as you can if you see me coming. I am a peacock. I am a silhouette in the blinds of the window.

A man in a suit stands in the middle of a dirt road. It is Stephan Mallarmé. Holding a suitcase in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. It is 1:47 p.m. The moon is a teaspoon, an idiom of feeling. There is a pitchfork in a ditch, its prongs rusting. What is he doing? Where is he going? Does he know? Is he real?

Yes. Light is composed of waves. But no window ever got lonely by hammers, and no hassock grew a name out of antifreeze and rhetoric. It takes a nerve to pinch the temperature, and a roll of cellophane to crackle exemplification. When the bus comes, hide behind the pathos of tinfoil. Think thick thoughts of ginger. Scold reality. Surrender to the blues. Kiss the occasional peach and clap at each papaya. The world is doing what the world does, which is spin, and splash, and pivot into pantomime, weaving groceries out of words and highways out of wind.

More About Money

2011-11-16T22:03:00.000-08:00

Money isn’t hard to understand
People think money is wealth
But it isn’t it’s only paper
It’s less than paper it’s endeavor
Prospects and dreams convictions and schemes
It is airy nothing it isn’t even numbers
Numbers are for economists
Economists do not understand money
Politicians do not understand money
Investors and bankers do not understand money
If you want to know about money ask a poet
Poets understand money because they understand simple things
And money is simple it is so simple it is naked
Money is not astronomy money is paper
It is words like lipstick and fence
It is sloppy like feeling
Rain on a window
Money humors the intellect
With representations of time and labor
And skill and knowledge
None of which can be truly represented
Which makes money silly
Nothing in this universe has value
That can be quantified
And printed as money
Or the price of carrots or the price of guns
People kill for money how ridiculous
Is that it is less ridiculous
Than killing for religion or an idea
If somebody doesn’t like your method
Of worship or museums or weltanschauung
Tell them to go fuck themselves don’t kill them
Supply and demand is punctuation
It isn’t providence or pudding
Gross domestic product is just that
It’s gross and repellent
Because the main industry and product
Of the United States is death
Killing people directly with bombs
And bullets or more insidiously
With meaningless jobs
Why do politicians always say we need more jobs
I know how to bring more jobs
To people my policies will grow jobs
People don’t want jobs people want money
Because money is paper and folds neatly into a wallet
It isn’t even paper anymore it’s pixels
Algorithms dividends derivatives
Mutual funds collateral due diligence
What’s that it’s nothing
A poem has far greater value
Even a lousy poem
Why because a poem is based on interest
Genuine interest not the rate
At which banks charge borrowers
For the privilege of enslavement
That’s insane
Debt is insane
Unless you owe someone your life
Because they saved you from drowning
Or being eaten by a bear
A rhapsody is worth more than a Maserati any day
Medicine and education should be free
That’s a no brainer
Wealth depends on a healthy community
A community that charges exorbitant prices
For things that should be free
Is doomed to die a slow ugly death
The limbs grow gangrenous
And no one can support the corporate body
When it has scales and venom
And eats its young

Max Jacob’s Cuff Links

2011-11-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

This is my life, a ghost town on the verge of development. Flowers in a taxi. A headland emerging from the fog. Snow arrives in big white dollars. The water slaps its chaos against the sand. Wherever I look I see the spectral poetry of night, the prodigal poetry of day. It is a disease. Poetry is a disease. The strain of it leaves a stain of enthusiasm in my suede. Circles ripen in mutation. Duality is combustible. I can feel Montana in my shoulder. I can hear Roberta roll the compost bin up the easement.

Is there a glue for sticking daylight to an anchovy? I have carved an alphabet out of Martian air. I have preserved it in a jar. It wiggles around in abstractions of daily existence. The curious history of Max Jacob’s cufflinks serves to demonstrate the grandeur of detail in a simple piece of glass. Moonlight has broken the bottle that I hide inside.

Knock knock knock. I open the door and there stands General Grant. What are you doing here, I ask. He offers me some coffee. He comes inside. We talk about war and death and life and the weird smell of the basement. We are all Greek, he says. We are all involved in an epic struggle, when in fact we are but the puppets of capricious gods.

This is a delinquent logic, I tell him, but true. Years ago I married an asterisk in my search for the ablution of glue. I want things to cohere. I want things to stay together. But they never do.

There is an image in my heart. It is a soccer ball stuck under the tire of a green Volkswagen. I hope the owner of the car will see the ball before they start their car and squish it.

Look: I can do tricks with my wrinkles. One day you will be old too and have wrinkles like me. This is my favorite wrinkle. I pull the rain through the eye of a needle and the overhead fan dances on my spoon. A group of elves shave Elvis. An empty mug surrenders the voice of a skeleton. I hear the crackle and pop of someone opening a package they have just removed from the freezer. I reach around and scratch my back. I get up from my table. I put the sun in my pocket and the moon on my head. And I leave. I just go. I’m tired of waiting. Waiting for the wormwood of truth. Waiting for the purpose of everything to reveal itself.

Crows make such odd noises sometimes. I wonder what it means. Cats are meditations in repose. Things explain themselves by kerosene. By interrelation. By fork and formaldehyde.

Who is Nina Hagen? Do you hide yourself in wine? The romance of the lighthouse is finished. We all navigate differently now. We use satellites and pixels. We use time balls and chronometers. Wisdom and semen. Mucilage and dreams.

I like the feeling of water passing over my body. I like the feeling of air going in and out of my body. I like the feeling of music in my blood and the way candlelight permits certain intimacies. I like the way dawn imposes itself on the mountains and the way colors hold our attention until an image reaches our brain.

The exact cause of poetry is unknown. There is no reason for it to exist. There is no reason for anything to exist. The sun arrives and unpacks its light and the day begins. A new chapter crawls out of my head and sits down on a sheet of paper and attempts to mean something. Mean something so weighty that it stays there. Tugs like an act of will. But it never really does. All I see are Max Jacob’s cuff links. A sleeve and an arm and an old man leaning against a column staring off into space.

A Memory Of Ankles Boiled In Naked Rhetoric

2011-11-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

Winter kisses the rails with rain. Two men converse in the caboose. Inflections rise through their throats and emerge as instructions and tones. Equations of movement float ideas of space huge as thought and soft as the scrotum of dusk.

Does a fetus feel the emotions of its mother? It’s normal to want to live in a shell. The orchard is filling with infantry. The United States is a giant contradiction, and I have a blister on my soul.

That is why there is a meeting today in the bank vault. Destiny is crickets. Money is mere proverb. These very words are steeped in meaning. Yet mean nothing. Language is a map for the discovery of chalk. I will employ a little plaster to substantiate my theory. The letters are real. They percolate my feelings. There is more than a single umbilicus. The veins become an energy and the desolation cracks our lips. The ratio of pain to pleasure is getting a little dicey. Something needs to be done. Something large and axiomatic. Something glorious.

Jesus enters the bank carrying a Glock and a submachine gun. He means business. He’s had it. He’s not fooling around this time. Violence failed Picasso. But it won’t fail Jesus. How do I know? I’m shaking all over.

But that’s not really a part of this story. It belongs to a sweet white hour of snow whirling in the beams of headlights and a fast and slippery chase on the icy roads of Nebraska. A time before mirth and grease expressed our reverie in rags.

Fictions aren’t written to gain our trust, but resonate parallels within the gravel of our urges. Stories are crossties in the railroad of life. Creosote insures longevity, while a search for spiritual meaning often conflicts with a need to survive. Is there really any way to know if a car mechanic is being honest?

I once owned a typewriter that emanated the sweet and sour odors of sex. I used it to reach transcendence, the peaks and valleys of Shelly’s poetry, a verisimilitude of Christmas decorations overflowing from a box high on a shelf in the basement of a distinguished misanthrope. I celebrated Thanksgiving on the moon. Prayer and embroidery traveled through telegraph wire. We listened to the Beatles in a ’62 blue Bonneville sedan. Dolley Madison repaired a zipper on my jacket. We robbed 42 banks that year. Sipped fat oysters from their shells and packed our suitcases with books and moon jellies.

Have you ever thought about hands? Really thought about hands, gave them your full attention, held them in your mind and clasped them together like a marriage in a junkyard?

The thumb is a thesis of opposition. I gather shadows and grind them into bicycles. I read Spinoza. I yearn for the jewelry of enigma. Philosophy grows parallels between existence and postage stamps. I am naked granite. My first accomplishment of the day is to set my feet on the floor and try to remain erect. It’s important that I achieve some form of balance. Why? I own a flea circus, that’s why. We don’t mess around with dermatologists here. It’s all poetry. Frankenstein in a bathtub, singing French folk songs.

It is said that poetry is a mutation and will lead one day to strange maneuvers and peculiar phenomena such as shoes and airports. Amazement will come to you in the form of a wrinkle. Or maybe a waltz. Linen and bone blossoming in an ocean of sweet sensation.

I am awed by the alacrity of digestion. I once saw a drug swallow a window. It took three days to digest. We found it in a pile of lumber, glass shattered, nails trickling from a paper bag. The view was still in it. A bride stripped bare by her bachelors oozed nebulas of unmitigated milk. There was a motel in the background, and a highway so lonesome in its misdemeanors it advanced by hope and neon. It looked like Omaha. But I’m going to guess Honolulu. The night was too anxious to do anything but glitter and rattle its chains the way it always does when there is a full moon and a little beatitude gets wedged between the words like an eye.

Can an appetite gargle you to dust? Don’t eat a window. If you must eat something, eat an emotion, a memory of ankles boiled in naked rhetoric. The aftertaste will veer into benediction.

Yahoo Yaw

2011-11-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been into sailing. It has never had any appeal to me. But there is a nautical term that has a great attraction. The word is “yaw.” Yaw refers to a deviation from the course, usually for the purpose of gathering a greater amount of wind. This term strikes me as being very similar to the Japanese practice of ziuhitsu, which means “follow the brush.”

Writing, which bears many similarities to the practice of sailing, and navigation, requires deviation when the matter at hand grows stale, or a shiver of light on the horizon invites exploration. There is no shame in changing direction, particularly when the winds of inspiration open our eyes and ears to new possibilities. Fresh associations. Curious sensations.

If we remain stubborn and refuse a change of direction, we find ourselves in the doldrums. We languor in a calm, groggy with torpor, leaden with inertia.

It is said that when the winds disappear, the sea has no swells, and if there are no clouds or moonlight, but only stars reflected on the calm, mirror-like water, there is a sensation of floating in space.

There are times when it’s good to have a little calm. Some time to reflect. To make some repairs. But if we remain in this state we die. We exhaust our provisions. We grow mad for movement. Crazy for change. Hungry for some new development, even if it means a storm, or tidal wave. People often feel strangely euphoric during a catastrophe.

We need perturbation. A worry. An itch. A memory. A sudden discomfiting idea. Some new perception that shakes our model of the universe. Anything that can give us some propulsion.

Each effect has a cause. The cause of color is light. The cause of light is darkness. The cause of darkness is the absence of light. Absence is the cause of presence. Presence is the cause of absence. Circularity is the cause of circulation. Circulation is the cause of impressionism and pewter. Karakul handsprings rehearsed in a rickshaw. The savor of silver in a Kickapoo flute.

What made Mark Twain shave his head in Florence, Italy? I do not know. That is between Mark Twain and Mart Twain’s hair.

If I think of a thread, and add to that a thought of water, I may arrive at an image of hair. Hair is water pouring out of the head in the form of thread.

We converse with the dead in our dreams. William Shakespeare says hello. He hates the movie Anonymous. He wishes that everyone would stop arguing about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays and just enjoy the plays.

Travel is good for the soul. Even if you don’t go anywhere. You can always go somewhere. Some people go all the way to Paris, or Kuala Lumpur, without going anywhere at all. Travel isn’t about distance or speed or movement. It’s a matter of seeing things differently. And deviation. Tacking. Swinging about. Shifting accents. Opposition of planes and volumes. Cross-rhythms and a slight anticipation of the beat, with the unexpected placing of accents and with the shapes of melodic phrases.

There is a yaw in music and a yaw in writing that mobilizes contrast and creates a space that is vast and infinite. It ruminates on dimes and earns perception by detonating paradigms. The chair pleads for a metaphor and the sails propose to the wind.

Fahrenheit 451 Revisited

2011-10-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Bums on the outside, libraries on the inside.

That about sums it up. The phrase is from Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel Fahrenheit 451, in which an enlightened fireman turned fugitive flees a dystopic urban community and finds shelter and community in a hobo camp of bibliophiles and outlaw intellectuals where literature is preserved in people’s memories rather than actual books, which have been declared illegal, and are routinely burned by firemen whose task is to start rather than stop fires.

Like Jules Verne’s equally prophetic Paris In The Twentieth Century, Fahrenheit 451 describes an urban community that is devoted to technology and war and utterly disparages anything to do with art and literature. Critical thinking is vilified. Original thought is tantamount to blasphemy. Consumerism is broadly and vigorously encouraged. Distractions are plentiful. Conformity is mandatory. Ignorance is a social asset. Knowledge is an endangering liability. Utility and pragmatism are primary virtues. Idleness and reverie are anathematized.

Sound familiar? If the above sounds like the world in which we are now living, then you are more apt to be among the mocked and disenfranchised than the socially well-adjusted and affluent. A bum on the outside, a library on the inside.

Fahrenheit 451 was written in the late 40s and published in 1953, 58 years ago. More than half a century. I was 6 years old. How did Bradbury come to write this book? What put the seed of it in his mind? How did he, as did Jules Verne 90 years before Bradbury’s book was published, envision a future that proved to be so uncannily accurate?

Clearly, the values aggressively espoused from the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s had a great deal to do with it. Industrialization led to the creation of the factory, which mandated a robotic, routinized behavior and a reverence for technology. The factory system gave rise to the modern city and all of its noise and pollution. The arts continued to be taught in the universities and housed in museums and book publication was even more robust than it had been. But there was a tacit assumption that while artistic and intellectual values had some importance to a healthy society, they were inferior to the work of the scientist and engineer. This pattern grew increasingly lopsided until, 200 years later, technically savvy and highly aggressive entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became celebrated as visionaries. Jobs, upon his recent passing, was virtually deified. Had he been Catholic, rather than a self-professed Buddhist, it would not have surprised me to see him nominated for sainthood.

I reached adulthood in the 60s. I remember them vividly. I grew up in an upper middle class household. My father worked at Boeing as an aerospace engineer. All the households I visited had books. Television had replaced books and radio to become the chief medium of communication, but people still respected books and lauded writers such as Thoreau and Dickinson and Whitman and Emerson. Even the households that scraped by on modest incomes had books. It was inauspicious, but possible, to make a living as a writer. One could announce this as one's life ambition without embarrassment. It had credibility. Writers commanded a respect equal to doctors and lawyers. It was a viable and praiseworthy profession. The Beatles even had a song about it, "Paperback Writer." This pattern continued, albeit with gradual diminishment, until the 80s.

The zeitgeist changed radically circa 1980. Reagan became president. Greed was good. And here in Seattle, a little company called Microsoft began making the headlines.

Three decades later we have a world disquietingly similar to Fahrenheit 451. I try not to mention books at social gatherings because it would be tantamount to suddenly breaking into Chinese, or undoing my belt and letting my pants fall to the ground. An allusion to the written word to the unsuspecting at a wedding, birthday celebration or gathering of coworkers at the local bar is answered, unfailingly, with the deer caught in the headlights look. Glazed eyes, faces pale and numb with perplexity.

One would think that the computer would be the antidote. It looks like a TV and has a lot more fun stuff to look at than the stark little letters on the page of a book. But it’s not. In fact, the opposite seems to be happening. While the print media is now in its final death throes, newspapers thin as grocery flyers, book publishers wary of publishing anyone not a celebrity or whose prose is even a trifle oblique, independent bookstores eaten by merciless titans such as Barnes and Noble where the writerly, intellectually challenging author has the chances of a proverbial snowball in hell of selling enough copies to prevent all their books from being sent back to the publisher, the e-books and blogs and journals available online are not cultivating a new audience of readers. The medium does not encourage reading. It encourages a fickle, superficial, dilletantish skimming. “Who wants to reread Faulknerian sentences on a Kindle,” writes Chad Harbach, "or scroll back to pick up a missed plot point? Nobody, says the publisher. And the NYC novelist understands—she'd better understand, or else she'll have to move to Cleveland."

Ah yes, MFA programs. Life is weird. Perplexing and contradictory. Why, when books are dying, when literature is dying, are MFA programs doing such a good, profitable business? Damn good question. Which I can’t answer. I don’t get it.

I do know this, that the only audience any writer is going to have is going to be the graduate of an MFA program, or an inhabitant of Brooklyn riding the subway to Manhattan every other night to attend parties and meet literary agents and editors and publishers. The few publishers, that is, who actually read books. The bulk of the mainstream publishers have far more in common with the brokers at Goldman Sachs than a sophisticated man-about-town like Bennett Cerf.

An author’s dream audience is made up of people who love books and have the education and tastes and intelligence of a discerning aficionado but who are not themselves writers. Trust me. That ain’t gonna happen. The literary world is a hyper-competitive arena more vicious and treacherous than the court of Versailles in the 16th century. The audience is invariably made up of fellow writers and close family relatives who have been bribed, blackmailed, coerced and pleaded with to attend.

When I was in my 20s, my every other thought was how to get laid. Now that I’m 64, my every other thought is a question: why, oh why, did I ever want to become a writer? Why not, say, a lawyer? Lawyers operate with language. Had I become a trial lawyer, I would have been guaranteed an audience for my oratories. Oratories gleaned from Emerson and Montaigne and Shakespeare.

Or, at the very least, a journalist. That’s as pragmatic as writing gets. Just the facts, m’am. No embellishment. No literary flourish. Just hard-hitting prose à la Hemingway. But even that profession is dying. If a professed progressive like Ariana Huffington doesn’t pay her writers, nobody is. The precedent has been set. However prestigious it may be to get your article published at the Huffington Post, you cannot support yourself if you are not paid. No support, no journalism. Unless you can somehow support yourself as a hairdresser or court stenographer while moonlighting as a journalist. My advice there is: Dexedrine. Take lots of it. Wash it down with a few espressos. And try not to get too psychotic.

Here is another helpful tip: forget the MFA. Write cute, hip little tales about turds that don’t flush, or long, self-absorbed monologues about your exasperation with drug rehab. I guarantee you will get published. You will do more than that. You will ride to the top of the best seller list. You will be interviewed on NPR.

Why? Because when people read, when they do read, are most apt to read through the words to the content. The words are just there to convey information. Pictures. Do not, under any circumstances, frolic among the words or draw attention to the miracle that is language. Do not wander from your topic, meander into delicate, verbal brocade, or try your hand at sculpting solid lines of literary granite. That is the quickest way to literary doom. To joining the hobos in Bradbury’s sad refugee camps.

As Bradbury himself wrote in the Afterword to my copy of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches… For let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and once cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”

Full Rolling Boil

2011-10-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

There is a politics that does not intertwine with the skill of your life or mine. Wrinkles on a nipple signal the opening of an aperture. I nail my breath to an image of war. Gravity tumbles through space. Light convulses on the floor.

All politics is moral. Our brains float in a common dream.

It is exhausting to have to make certain decisions. Must it always be the lesser of two evils? Must it always be a matter of food or medicine? Politics or art? Kidney or education? Ghandi or Glock? Martin Luther King wisdom or Viking berserker rage?

I like watching astronauts swim through space. Cows intermingling with cows, nerves intermingling with nerves, words intermingling with words, stars intermingling with stars. It makes the universe appear more, I don’t know, sentient.

The house of autumn is built with the lumber of summer and the bricks of winter. The windows are ice. The doors are runes. The walls are hemispheres. The furniture is Etruscan. Some might call it a home. Some might call it a palace. I call it a paragraph.

Where are you? I mean, right now, this minute. I’m at home. The garbage truck is backing up the easement, beep, beep, beep, beep. There is nothing in this universe that is totally isolated.

Our house is covered with snow. Ganglions transmit the sensation of cinnamon to the enamel of the mind. Writing causes the world to become a calculus of words. Yet nothing is so calculated that it ceases to lose its mystery. I love my shoes. But I don’t completely understand them. It is more accurate to say that they understand me.

I’m a magician. England explodes into fireworks. The world slowly takes us deeper into winter.

Winter. Where the landscape is combed gently by the wind. And mongrel hounds howl at the moon. Winter has a way of highlighting form. The world carved in relief.

The necktie boasts of a structure based on meticulous method. Space dreams of paint and holds itself in a frame of gold.

Everything else is locomotion. I love taking a warm shower after a run in cold winter rain. It helps me to realize what a metamorphosis might achieve if it were set loose on a shoulder blade. Or bones in general. Including teeth. Are teeth a form of bone? Or are they apportionments of stone?

Pain visits a tooth, and endures. Pain must always be addressed. With respect.

What is the smell of a mirror? My clothes flirt with sculpture. My words boil with existence.

We sit in a lounge gazing out of our sad, interior frames. The seats are raw sienna. Cartilage buffers the actions of the bones. Bones are examples of passage. The philosophy of examples is an example of philosophy. Later, we gather under the branches of a swaying willow to discuss standards of rationality and under what circumstances it might be ok to forfeit one’s moral goodness in order to obtain a desirable object, say a really wicked tattoo or 18th century pepper mill.

I have often considered the glitter at the court of Versailles to be similar to the joys of huckleberry. I have some metaphysics in a little pink jar that just might answer to this sweet languor now imbuing my muscle.

Solitude is the ultimate balm. Solitude suits me like a finger fits a hand.

I am a tidepool in clothes. Chromosomes, metazoans, mitochondria, eukaryotes, ancestral cells linking and commingling in symbiosis. Which makes solitude questionable. Which makes me questionable.

It’s always good to hear from an old friend. There are places I remember where society felt good and less bewildering than it is now. I accept the wisdom of horses. They know what it is to run in a herd, yet maintain a certain distance between themselves.

See the hives? They’ve been placed closer to the shore. Though I’m not sure why. I asked an entomologist and he merely bowed reverently before a giant black beetle.

I’m a mammal. I have two arms and a glockenspiel. I can see that density happens to a pitcher, which assists the pitcher in holding water, and so making it of use, though if it also happens to command a certain beauty, who can say that beauty is a fundamental composition of the pitcher, or that beauty and density work together in a synergy of indomitable force?

And certainly not just for our benefit. The anecdote evolves a spout. Not because it has a lesson to teach, but because it is a fiction, and like all fictions, its truths must be filtered through a screen of cynicism and doubt.

Yesterday afternoon, just as the sun had slipped past its zenith, we rescued an angel in the rain. Suddenly, that biography of a doorknob I had begun, took a strange turn. Mick Jagger entered, and handed me a spine. I didn’t know what to make of it. He left without saying a word.

I know that music has a soothing effect, but when I listen to the songs in the pipes of our building, I worry. Worry that the plumbers will need to be called and leave us with another stupendous bill. Money is exciting if you have it but if you don’t have it it’s not exciting at all.

The solitude of winter shapes our perception of the cement. The sidewalks are more precarious. They have little, if any, aesthetic that appeals to our sexual being. I hold a frog in my hand. I feel its little life pulsing. It’s exciting to hold frogs. Exciting to fold waves of consciousness into paragraphs. Lovely paragraphs with sugar and sand and dreams on our tongues.

I wonder if I might be able to repair the broken rib in my umbrella, or whether it might be simpler to crawl into a shell and become a hermit.

The story approaches its own exile with a certain sang-froid. Grapes fortify our reunion. Do you know what it is that women want? I do not. The woman upstairs is a total mystery. I think her tongue is haunted by the fourth dimension. All of her words come out sounding like hammers and valves. Snow falls on the intestines as the hunters depart, and everyone gets a taste of the cosmos.

Nothingness is reflected in the insolubility of adjectives. The sky paints the air with rain. But who can say what color it is? Is it gray, or pearl? Gun metal, or ash?

One day, the English language gave birth to eternity. I saw meanings gather around a cataclysm and a man in Sweden leap over a speeding Lamborghini. If mustard disturbs the palate, it is because nature itself is oceanic in her operations, and occasionally speaks to our inner sea.

War divides the world into privilege and poverty. The monotony of Texas, the combustions of Pakistan. I stopped to tie my shoe and got bits of moss under my fingernail. An ambulance whizzed by howling, smelling of emergency. Dead leaves whirled up from the ground.

There is a story in each particular, a story in evolution, or a story forged in conflict.

The story of my life. The story of your life. Continues. In different directions. Down different streets. But interrelated. Preserved, like words, in a marmalade of sound.

Time In Excursion Done Into Stars

2011-10-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Cotton proposes a tidepool to holes. Paint abhors to put itself in sweat. It is so heavy to carve a swan out of trains. A spoon taps conquest in an icy problem. The duty turns walnut and drags that to a knife.

The fire fondles a log into embers. The butter behaves violently to halibut. Hallucination is instinctive because the mind pushes it to pump proverbs out of gargoyles. Mint from tendency smells minty. Splash as between highways as you escape yourself.

The jungle is imbued with searching. A nerve toward painted rain is plunged in paper. Library those blasts to smooth a thumb. Virtue requires concentration. Run a pitch more sandstone.

Fly refractory and reflect on it. Amplify forks during vertical iron. Murmur a flavor and crash through insults. Act with openness which imposes visibility. Trees in cuts are sometimes enigmatic.

Exploration includes a cure for talk. The walk remedies the crash of emotion. Your afternoon has tricky eyes. Pleasure is a treasure eggnog with oneself. It is a quicker glue than impulse.

Time in excursion done into stars. More winter will rattle a heartbreak and scatter it to parody. Drag a napkin with sparkling division. Diversions steeped in mineral mosaic. The you you want to modify is an unprecedented secret.

I know this because the design is glazed with invisible hiccups. Religious mosquitos lost in a railroad siding. A winch which attracts the sheen of mutation stimulates the constancy of blood. And so becomes a sawdust. Decision falling through a premonition.

Propane smells of presence. Give your thought an echo. A respectable propeller by Cézanne. Do you remember the early days of Cubism? Coherence or swamp tossed into prose each season modulates the sway of hair.

Throb or pound must come to ripped opinion. I cannot help a form to form itself unless the dips are buttoned in tenderness. The sky is pinned to a tiger. Hearing argues flotsam. Mallarmé in a rowboat.

Symptoms of dropsy touch in plush proximity dripping emotion. Being pours itself into cement and steel. The result is Manhattan. Analysis and eyeballs and coordinates and liniments and secretion. Everything that is phantasmal thickens into life.

Music clasped to a lip. Cynicism simmers in a round outdoors. As if transcendence was a concertina and the forehead imparted development between two Picassos. Thought may be attained by spar and sail. Pragmatic hunger turns of arm and a little turmoil.

Butter is gradual. Speed divides into savor. Green river at a monstrous picnic without algebra. Or bronze. Bouillon invites ripe watermelon and may later thunder photogenically.

Crack or unfettered gaze implications arched in marble from 10:00 o’clock on. Glass is done by delicacy and stars and shines in ships. The oak travels slowly through its injuries and demonstrates bark, a dachsund more stream than haunch. Consonants between kerosene earns perception the gift of friction and flips into heat. The forehead holds its own.

They Say Truth Lies There

2011-10-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

It’s 1:10 p.m. and someone coughed and a car started. Toby is finally sleeping after his tirade over the black cat from next door who walks by our ground-level window every day. I let Toby go into the hallway because sometimes that seems to appease him. Once he sees that the hallway is empty, he can imagine himself as the king of his realm, and all that he sees. But the ruse doesn’t work. He stands by the door and wants to be let outside. We never let him outside. If we did, he would panic and disappear under a bush or up a tree the first time a car went by.

And so I lift him up and open the door. I worry that he’ll jump from my arms so I try keep a firm grip. The black cat next door - a small female with a sweet and playful disposition - is just that moment scaling up the branch that leads to the above-ground patio of the house next door. I figure she’ll be alarmed when she catches view of Toby in my arms and scamper through the little cat door provided for her. But she doesn’t. She comes back down to our porch and looks up at me. She wants to meet Toby. Toby wants to meet her. It’s tempting to put Toby down and let them sniff one another, but I can’t take that chance. I bring Toby back in and put him down on the slate tile of the vestibule while I open the mailbox. It’s the usual disappointing crap. A brochure from Trader Joe’s featuring Halloween Joe Joe’s Scary Good Cookies, a bill from Birds & Blooms, thank you receipt from Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, and a brochure announcing the ACLU of Washington’s Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner.

Far away in the distance, to the east, over Snoqualmie Pass, awaits Roslyn. Roberta and I are going there November 3rd. I’ve been invited to do a reading for Oyez Roslyn.

The last time I was in Roslyn was 1993. I was with my father. He loved the TV show Northern Lights and Roslyn was the town featured in that series. We were doing a three-day road trip. We continued east to the Palouse country where the impeccable neatness of the German farms amazed me and the soft fine dirt, called loess, that comprises the gently rolling hills where a soft white wheat is grown.

Summer was so disappointing and brief this year. I hate winter. But it’s coming. Inevitable as death. Which is one of winter’s charms. Death. Things get so beautiful when they die. Leaves do. Maybe not people.

Which reminds me of the grisly description I came across last night concerning Shelley’s exhumed remains in Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections:

The soldiers gathered fuel whilst I erected the furnace, and then the men of the Health Office set to work, shoveling away the sand which covered the body, while we gathered round, watching anxiously. The first indication of their having found the body, was the appearance of the end of a black silk handkerchief - I grubbed this out with a stick, for we were not allowed to touch anything with our hands - then some shreds of linen we met with, and a boot with the bone of the leg and the foot in it. On the removal of a layer of brush-wood, all that now remained of my lost friend was exposed - a shapeless mass of bones and flesh. The limbs separated from the trunk on being touched.

“Is that a human body?” exclaimed Byron; “why it’s more like the carcase of a sheep, or any other animal, than a man: this is a satire on our pride and folly.”

What a horrific vision. It seems unthinkable that a man of such brilliance would end like this. But we all do.

Hence: Halloween. Let’s celebrate the dead. The beyond. Don masks. Costumes. Get silly. Play tricks.

I remember trick or treating at age 9 in Minneapolis. This would have been 1956. There was no discussion of serial killers or pedophiles. People could walk freely at night without worry. Kids could go door to door, unaccompanied by a parent. I wore a Frankenstein mask. It smelled of rubber, and I had a difficult time seeing through the slits that served as eyes. I loved that mask. It was my first rubber mask, and the details were exquisite. It looked just like Boris Karloff’s incarnation of the monster.

Odd, now, to remember that Frankenstein was the creation of Shelley’s wife Mary Shelley.

Odder yet to read Trelawny’s account of Percy Shelley learning to swim:

I was bathing one day in a deep pool in the Arno, and astonished the Poet by performing a series of aquatic gymnastics, which I had learnt from the natives of the South Seas. On my coming out, whilst dressing, Shelley said, mournfully: “Why can’t I swim, it seems so very easy?” I answered, “Because you think you can’t. If you determine, you will: take a header off this bank, and when you rise turn on your back, you will float like a duck; but you must reverse the arch in your spine, for it’s now bent the wrong way.”

He doffed his jacket and trowsers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in, and there he lay stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself. He would have been drowned if I had not instantly fished him out.

When he recovered his breath, he said: “I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.”

“What would Mrs. Shelley have said to me if I had gone back with your empty cage?”

“Don’t tell Mary - not a word!” he rejoined, and then continued, “It’s a great temptation; in another minute I might have been in another planet.”

“But as you always find the bottom,” I observed, “you might have sunk ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound.’”

“I am quite easy on that subject,” said the Bard. “Death is the veil, which those who live call life: they sleep, and it is lifted. Intelligence should be imperishable; the art of printing has made it so in this planet.”

Let Me Tell You A Story

2011-10-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a story. I can hear the gardeners blowing leaves. They carry engines with long tubes that blow air in a great rush and send the leaves whirling forward as they advance. Fairies dance in a ring as the gardeners approach, oblivious to the whirr of their engines. The fairies are blown into the air, but the gardeners continue their advance. They are serious men. Serious about gardening. Serious about making money. Serious about raising families. Serious about everything. They are serious. Serious men.

How’s that for a story? Here’s another: pain is intentional, pleasure is accidental. The end result is ice cream. Divorce, garlic, and butter. Fat sentences exulting in breasts. The incomparable feeling of skin brushing against the warmth of one’s clothes after the heat of summer and the first refreshing days of autumn.

Skin is a process involving little holes called pores. It’s touching. A touching instance of envelopment and fat.

This is a story about spoons. Spoons.

Spoons lie spoon to spoon in a kitchen drawer, sandwiched between knives and forks. There are two grooves for the spoons. There is a groove for teaspoons and a groove for tablespoons.

There is more drama concerning knives then there is surrounding spoons. One rarely hears of a spoon fight, or anyone murdered by a spoon. Spoons make poor instruments for killing people. They’re better for scooping up large dollops of ice cream or mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes slathered with butter. Ice cream under a glaze of blackberry or raspberry syrup.

The weather today is explicit. That’s code for gloomy and gray. Moisture on the verge of spilling out in the form of drizzle, possibly rain.

A phantom description feels soft and velvet. But a description of what? What is soft and velvet? Isn’t softness implicit in velvet? This is a story about velvet.

This is a story about plywood: a sheet of plywood covers a ditch freshly dug at the base of a large condominium building on Queen Ann Avenue North. Why was the ditch dug? Was there a problem with the plumbing? With leakage? Were the bones of a megathere discovered there? Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion.

We all know there is no conclusion. There is never a conclusion to anything. When one story ends, another story begins. Quite often, it is the same story. The same story assuming new proportions, new characters, new affronts and insults, mayhem and murder, banks and cattle. Horses grazing by the side of the road.

This is a story about horses grazing by the side of the road.

Horses grazing by the side of the road.

Horses. Grazing. By the side. Of the. Road.

I have a photo of Paris in my wallet. Would you like to see it? That’s me, standing under the Eiffel Tower, and that’s Nikolas Sarkozy with his arm around me, and Carla Bruni giving me a peck on the cheek.

Aren’t words wonderful? You can say anything. Create anything.

Language is best explained as a form of hallucination.

One day, there was a synonym loose in the library. It was overburdening a lot of sentences. Someone needed to do something. A trap was set. A large fat noun was placed inside. The synonym came sniffing around, eager to mean something similar, similar to the noun placed inside the trap, or pitfall, or snare, but in a slightly different way. A door slammed down behind the synonym and there it was, pulsing, breathing heavily, evincing a strange geometry and making a strange, rubbery noise.

I strain to gather my absurdities into a blueprint. The world is a balloon complicated by cuticles and despair. There are epics. Legends. Stories of great adventure. And they all lead to something vast and incommunicable. A baby’s sock lying on the sidewalk. A flag incubated in the warm blood of revolution. Cezanne’s vivacious hands. A flash of lightning illumining the chambers and shelves of the library moments after the clock sounds midnight, and the sentences crawl forth looking for nourishment and minds, eyes to bring them to life.

The Curious History Of The Margarita

2011-10-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

I love the way the waiter at La Palma says Margarita. The r’s roll off his tongue with all the opulent musicality that is the Spanish tongue.

I would love to order one, but I no longer drink. The waiter seems disappointed when I order a root beer instead.

According to Wikipedia, the most plausible of all stories concerning the birth of the Margarita relates that the Margarita was invented in October, 1941, by bartender Don Carlos Orozco at Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada, Mexico. Don Carlos was eager to impress the daughter of a German ambassador who lived with her husband Roy Parodi near Ensenada in Rancho Hamilton. I assume this lady was fond of tequila. Don Carlos concocted a mixture of equal parts tequila, orange liqueur, and lime, and served it over ice in a glass rimmed with salt. She liked it. Don Carlos paid tribute by naming his new elixir after her.

Rimming the glass with salt was a touch of genius.

Though I must say Margarita does not sound German. So although it is a plausible story, with tenable details and an entirely credible romantic gesture at its core, one must entertain a little doubt as to its authenticity.

Margarita means daisy in Spanish.

Another story has it that a bartender at the Rancho La Gloria Hotel near Tijuana named Carlos Herrera, who went by the nickname Danny, concocted the drink for a Ziegfeld dancer named Marjorie King.

So the history of the Margarita is forever doomed to speculation.

Speculation, as a mental activity, mental beverage let us say, has a salty taste, the clarity of tequila, and the limitless range of the Mexican sky.

The Margarita is a welcome addition to our green and living world. It is cool to the touch, reckless in its effects, and brilliant in a patch of sunlight.

One might sit by oneself in a dark, cool cocktail lounge, drifting into reverie, into the disparate worlds of existence that surround us in vinyl and silk. Here comes the man with a thousand hearts, and there goes a woman into the outside world, where the blue begins, and the skin of the sky brushes the tops of the mountains, hemorrhaging stars as it crawls to the western horizon.

Every day there is a new way to be satisfied. The wind is a vague emotion. But a delight to the senses. Particular in the way it means what it means. I love anything built of wood and stone. But the wind is a Margarita of invisible caprice. Visible only the salt of its voice. Sudden as skin. It is what is pushing in the poem. Words cupped in the imaginary space of a glass. Slice of lemon on the brim of a liquid.

The kind of weird liquid you have to sip to believe.

What Matters Is Round

2011-10-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

How do you do my name is Luigi and I am the Duke of Abruzzi. I love bubbles, strawberries, and sheets drying in the wind and sunlight. Hobbies include bank robbery, kidnapping, and extortion.

As you can see, the streets are barricaded, and the police are confused.

What can I say?

I grew up in Minneapolis. I am a true poet. I grow obscure when I feel like it and ride the green dragons of Mandalay.

I feel old. I have begun to see my life as a play in the shape of a boat propeller.

In Act One, I bare my fangs, lightning illumines the library, and the sea crashes against the rocks. I wrap myself in a cape and glide from room to room howling plump and personal sentences.

In Act Two, I saw an opulent emotion in half. This is how I discover the magic of bubbles.

There is a blaze of art in the room. Do you see it? Even the map has a pulse. Figures move around on a screen and a mound of photogenic sugar acquits all adjectives of their burdensome role in the sentence.

But what sentence? We are all serving a sentence. Even this sentence is serving a sentence. But what can be done?

People die in the canyons all the time. We do what we can to warn them, but there are always those who go headlong into the wilderness with nothing but a song and a flashlight.

Necessity makes a necessity of necessity.

Hope is a curious medicine, healing and enfeebling simultaneously.

Did I mention the Rolling Stones played at our wedding?

Did I mention that I was married?

I married a balloonist from Barcelona. We honeymooned in Honolulu.

Where is she now? That’s my last Duchess on the wall, over there, by the begonias. She’s the one with the hairdo that looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a Moab garage.

I know all the sorrows of the jukebox.

Sometimes I feel like I am walking on a highwire, and sometimes I drive to California in a silver Dodge sedan, only to discover that I have not left the couch, but am lost in a cloud of smoke, a bowl of opium at my side.

Absence does not have a structure. If it did, it would not be absence, it would be a hat, or an elevator.

Do you hear? There is a song in the ink. A pool of words bubbling in the center of the page.

I saw this happen once on Ron Silliman’s blog. A pair of slugs mated, dangling from a branch on a strand of mucus, their genitals entwined.

Life is an endless struggle and death is a long sweet rest. But let’s not fuss over little things. What matters is ultramarine. What matters are spoons and forks.

Alphabets and clams.

I wonder if the wash is done. You’ll have to excuse me. I see a revolving door and somebody has to push it. Round and round and round and round.

Thank god for walls. Thank god for breasts and sentences and syllables and sound.

And round and round and round and round.

Margaret Gridley Pancake Society

2011-10-08T15:32:00.000-07:00

hey David,

I can't leave a comment at your blog. Can't leave a comment at my blog. Neither Google Account or Anonymous work. Some kind of glitch in the Google blogworks I haven't the foggiest how to fix.

Anyway

Thank you for the terrific follow up to Margaret Gridley.

Rave on, Margaret, rave on.

P.S.

Thanks for posting that video of me reading my bank robbery poem. That was from Summer Robinson's Pilot Books bookstore, which she ran for a couple of years in a tiny upstairs space in a funky pedestrian mall at 219 Broadway on Capitol Hill. One of the most comfortable chairs I have ever sat in. Though you didn't sit in it so much as surrender your body to it. I could have sat there forever. What makes a chair get so comfortable? Upholstery, certainly, but other more preternatural variables must be at play. This should be up for discussion at the next Margaret Gridley Pancake Society Meeting. Edgar Allan Poe's Philosophy of Furniture may provide some clues.

What's The Matter With Margaret Gridley?

2011-10-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

What’s the matter with Margaret Gridley? Margaret Gridley is logical.

- Philip Whalen

What’s the matter with Margaret Gridley? Margaret Gridley is human. What does it mean to be human?

It is human to want blankets for sleep. It is human to want to sleep. It is human to get dressed in the morning and go look for a job. It is human to look in a mirror and wonder if one is attractive. It is human to find mobility in feet. It is human to walk. Even better to drive a car. A car with a wheels of ivory and an engine of gold. Tires of Brazilian rubber. Ornaments of Rumanian chrome. A dashboard with the numinous promise of electroluminescent polymers and a finely calibrated instrument cluster.

Margaret Gridley loves her instrument cluster. Who wouldn’t? It escalates the sugar of vision.

Margaret Gridley is companionable and occasionally amatory.

Margaret Gridley is equitable and witty.

But enough about Margaret Gridley. I want to talk about neckties. Who wears them, and why.

I prefer the bolo. It slips on easily. No knot necessary. And there is a shine in the movement.

Like that of the soul. As it slides up and down the braids of heaven.

The Navajo believed the soul to be part of a divine being called the Holy Wind. The Holy Wind suffused the universe, giving life, thought, speech and the power of movement to all living things. Their sandpaintings are full of symbolically expressed motion: whirling snakes, rotating logs, streaming head feathers, whirling rainbows and feathered travel hoops: magical means of travel.

Easy to see why Pollock was so enamored of Navajo sandpainting.

When language was born, the sea strained to come out of the mouths of people in the form of words. Words as waves that floated boats of meaning.

Illogic can't be taught, though it can be taut. - Michael Schein.

Taut as a surfboard. Tart as a tart. Torn as a tear. Tender as a fender.

I cannot keep my subject still. It wants to wander. Forever wander. Meander.

The question of form is inextricably mingled with expression.

From Latin ex, out, plus Latin pressare, to press. To press out.

Expression is a pressing out. Form is the form that form assumes in being pressed into existence. Paint on a canvas, words on a page.

Pigment is squeezed from a tube. Words are squeezed by lung into the chamber of the mouth where they are shaped on the palate and extruded into the outer air. Air mingling with air. Sound mingling with sound. Form mingling with form.

Japanese zuihitsu: following the impulses of the brush. Starting at one place, ending up at another. Like life.

The effort, generally, to get to the energies, and not end up with dead tripe.

No one can put their finger on it. It’s partly empirical, in the sense of air, and sound, and clarinet, but mostly, essentially, diaphanous emission, the trembling of gauze in a quiet African room.

Rivers I've Known

2011-10-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

You gotta love the names of Washington’s rivers: Yakima, Snoqualmie, Sauk, Cedar, Tolt, Wenatchee, Columbia, Snake, Satsop, Chehalis, Nisqually, Duwamish, Cowlitz, Touchet, Tucannon, Cow, Crab, Skookumchuk, Humptulips, Palouse, Skagit, Skykomish, Quinault, Methow, Nooksack, Okanogan.

The Snoqualmie squirts out of the ground high in the Cascades in three separate places then all three forks join near North Bend, the little mountain community where David Lynch set Twin Peaks and all of its weirdness and murder and strange mountain beauty.

The Sauk pops up somewhere in the Glacial Peak Wilderness and forms its main stem at Bedal, flows northwest past Darrington (lots of tarheels and blue grass music in Darrington), then north to join the Skagit at Rockport.

I white water rafted down the Wenatchee in April, 1985, by invitation with a friend training to be a guide. Which meant I got to go for free, and it being April, I also got to freeze. Even though I was wearing a so-called wet suit. I found out that wet suits do not keep you dry. They’re just supposed to keep you warm. It didn’t keep me warm, though it may have kept me from freezing. I danced around in a parking lot trying to get the suit off. I got in the car, turned the ignition on, and when the engine got hot enough to put some real heat out, heat has never felt so good. I slowly recovered the mobility of my limbs as I began to thaw. I put my hands over the heating vent and moved my fingers back and forth. Suppleness is underrated.

The Duwamish gets most of the abuse of Washington’s rivers. It empties into Puget Sound near downtown Seattle, by Harbor Island, where a lot of ships get painted. Boeing has some plants on its banks as well. When I worked at plant no 2 in the summer of 1967 I used to take my sack lunch out onto the concrete dock by the river’s edge and stare at the water moving by and wonder how many different chemicals were in it and what might happen if you were to drink some of it or eat a fish or a clam from its water. Poor old Duwamish. Poor Puget Sound.

I’ve never seen the Humptulips, which is over in the Olympic Peninsula, flowing through the rainforests, which receive around 220 inches of rain annually. The Humptulips has gone by a variety of names, including Hum-tu-lups, Humptolups, Humtutup, and Um-ta-lah. Humtutup sounds like the name of an Egyptian pharaoh, but all these names emanate from the Chehalis tribe, and either means “hard to pole,” or “chilly region.” The Humptulips empties into Grays Harbor, where the town of Hoquiam is located. Kurt Cobain was from Hoquiam, and I have two close friends living there, Dan & Tammy, who own a bookstore there, Jackson Street Books, in downtown Hoqiam on 7th Street. Hi Dan, Hi Tammy.

The Cedar River is where Seattle gets its drinking water. It emanates in the Cedar River watershed, a gazillion little rivulets and brooks and streams convening at some point to turn into a river, a wide flowing being of stunningly pure water. Roberta and I went to the Renton Public Library once to kill some time before a wedding. We were both formally dressed and got some curious looks from people who must have thought we got all dressed up to visit the library, as if visiting the library were a formal occasion for us. Well, why not?

On the way into the library, we crossed a bridge, which was lined with people, all gazing into the river as it slid over a bed of rocks shiny and clear as glass. We went to the edge and looked down and saw hundreds of salmon all seeming motionless as their bodies swayed ever so slightly as the current moved over and around their bodies, all heads pointed east, in the direction of the Cascades.

The Columbia is the biggest and most famous river. Woody Guthrie’s song, “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” celebrated the 11 hydroelectric dams which harnessed its water for crops and electricity and was commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration. The song became famous because one, it’s a really great song, and two, it was an anthem about the American public works projects arising out of the New Deal in the Great Depression.

Hear that, Obama? Probably not.

The Final Frontier

2011-10-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

Language is the final frontier. Baudelaire inflates a balloon. I light a stick of incense. Together we prepare for the voyage. The voyage into language. The voyage into alibi and balm.

Pain is exotic. The more that you live, the more memories you will have. Perspicacity is propelled by despair. Truth attacks a pumpkin. Yet the pumpkin survives. The pumpkin is a lie. It is, in fact, a cucumber.

Letters build on a justification for stucco. This is why I like wearing mud and the mane of the Palomino. I find it touching that people choose to celebrate certain occasions. Yesterday, I saw a woman mowing the sidewalk. I celebrated by rubbing a lantern until a genie appeared. He granted me three wishes, one of which involved Grace Kelly and Joseph Cornell’s garage.

The weather today is vast and blue. The drugs I have taken confer prodigies of stick and paper. Why would anyone feel separate from the world? This world of pleasure, this world of pain. This world of sandwiches and bandages and rain.

My bones are ornamented with muscle. The house collides with fog. The fog feels like a phantom description of itself, soft and velvet and young. My muscles move my bones. I wear an elevator for a hat and a forest for a shirt. I get around, let me tell you. My father shoves cars at me. The Mediterranean spins on my thumb.

Skin is a process involving little holes called pores. You can use this skin to touch things, and keep your internal organs from falling out. Night rises into the sky and peppers the earth with stars. A ballerina spins in the air.

I know all the sorrows of the jukebox. I know how coal affronts the cold, and garlic and leather advertise the railroad, which is punctuated with cocaine and whiskey.

An angel perches on a crane at a construction site and sews rivers together with moonlight.

The physiology of ducks pardons the tyranny of water.

What we think of as ghosts is the emotional residue the dead have left behind. This is why airports are so exciting, and velvet and sawdust commit beauty on the floor of a barbershop.

If these words were steeped in thunder, I could tell you about my area code. But that will have to wait. This morning I took some codeine and listened to Mark Twain talk about working in a Nevada silver mine. I know I have a tendency to hallucinate, but isn’t language a hallucination?

I love the feeling of ivory. Dead leaves scattered on the ground. Sinking my fingers into the plastic tightly wrapping the box of Gatorade bottles until it suddenly breaks and I feel my fingers curl around the neck of a bottle and pull it out. It is a highly satisfactory maneuver.

And strawberries. Strawberries have a presence that is downright uncanny.

Do you smell something burning? Autumn insinuates itself into summer. It happens like this every year. Hawaii hangs on the wall and fairies dance in a ring. Infinity strolls scrupulously across the lake and we see ripples of some invisible power headed this way.

Growth Of A Poet's Mind

2011-09-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Clearview/Lie, memoir by Ted Greenwald
United Artists Books, 2011

Ted Greenwald does not live in a subordinate clause. His life, as they say, is an open book. Clearview/Lie is palpable evidence of that. His writing speed is in sync with his mind speed. There is nothing subordinate about it. The writing is ascendant in its handling of a set of problems inherent in autobiography.

There is the problem of time. Chronology is an illusion, a mental organization. It is natural to give time a line, a timeline, as it were, but this would be false. Time does not go in a line. I was invited once during an Indian sweatlodge ceremony to think of time as a broad landscape extending to the horizon; those people and buildings in the far distance are people that no longer exist in our time, but still have an existence. They are not outside of time. Nothing is outside of time. History is continuous. What Gertrude Stein aptly phrased a “continuous present.”

Augustine wrestled with problem of temporal order in his autobiography, what may have been the first written autobiography, and developed an interesting theory. In book 11, Augustine writes: “It is now, however, perfectly clear that neither the future nor the past are in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there are three times - past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say: ‘There are three times - a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.’ For these three do exist in the mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time of things past is memory; the present time of things present is sight; the present time of things future is expectation.”

Then there is the problem of self. How does one stand back, zoom out like on a Google map, to get a bigger picture of one's personal geography?

“I hate the self,” writes Blaise Pascal, “because it is injust in wanting to make itself the center of everything. Briefly, the self has two characteristics. It is injust in that it makes itself the center of everything. It is pernicious to others in that it wants to subjugate them, for every self is the enemy and would like to be the tyrant over all others.”

This is putting it pretty harshly. I prefer Whitman’s notion: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And What I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Greenwald disburdens himself of these problems with a simple solution: the fragment. He has strategically gone outside time and the tyrannical or celebratory self by fragmenting his history in small blocks of prose. Roland Barthes, who used a similar technique for his Roland Barthes By Roland Barthes, writes: “Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures… The fragment (like the haiku) is torin: it implies an immediate delight: it is a fantasy of discourse, a gaping of desire. In the form of a thought-sentence, the germ of a fragment comes to you anywhere: in the café, on the train, talking to a friend (it arises laterally to what he says or what I say): then you take out your notebook, to jot down not a ‘thought’ but something like a strike, what would once have been called a ‘turn.’”

That’s it, then. That’s what makes Greenwald’s autobiographical prose poem such a pleasure to read: it is full of turns. It is not bogged down in a linear narrative. Each fragment is a vivid aperçu gleaned from memory. A limpid pool or lens through which we gaze telescopically into Greenwald’s boyhood in Queens, New York, in the vicinity of the Clearview Expressway. We see snippets of basement, piano lessons, Paris, movies, books, family, Sky King, Howdy Doody, at least one louche uncle and Wilhelm Reich and the orgone box. Life as it was lived by a teenager growing to manhood in Queens in the 50s and 60s. Growth of a poet’s mind.

The recollections are remarkably vivid because they’re charged with the kind of details that would be overlooked in a more conventional autobiography. “The sense of being a controlling center of consciousness or a unified source of causal efficacy is an effect of language,” writes Louis A. Sass, “one that, paradoxically enough, can only be experienced if one lets oneself be taken over by this pre-existing, transcendent transpersonal system.” Greenwald loses himself in language, but more like a dolphin than a log bobbing downstream. The trick is to write as far into the accidents as one can before collapsing into statement. “Insouciance,” writes Alice Notley, “is a freeing quality that can open poetry to truth.”

It is Greenwald’s eccentric, slightly off-balance language I find so alluring. Sentences are densely constructed though leavened with a curiously offhand style, as if spontaneously created, which they may very well have been. Phrases are delightfully idiosyncratic and halting at times, spurting forward spasmodically, reflecting the mind’s convulsive operations in fresh new words as mental images pop and dive in one’s consciousness.

Peculiarities of phrasing charm the attention and thicken Greenwald's aperçus with a discreet adhesiveness. In jazz, this quality of dissonance is called syncopation, the deliberate upsetting of the normal accent. Instead of falling on what is supposed to be the strong beat of the measure, the accent is shifted to an off-beat. Sometimes these syncopated prose rhythms are hurried, blunt, and telegraphic, as in this paragraph: "School, school yard hang out with friends, listen to radio stories, dinner, homework, bed. It's a week night and school's tomorrow. Halloween. Christmas, pea shooters, yo yos. Then, it's summer."

Or, as in this paragrah, there is a more irregular, chromatic texturing, as if the words were like the sharps, flats, and accidentals in a musical composition: "To augment piano lessons I'm taking going nowhere fast. The bios make sound interestng and set me on the way to being Beethoven, love his work. The lessons go nowhere, but I buy some music paper and compose a short song (in fountain pen)."

Accidentals are alterations of pitch, sharped or flatted notes that diverge from the prevailing key and might also serve to exemplify Greenwald's chromatic ingress into the terraced dynamics of memory.

It is no accident that Mnemosyne is the goddess of poetry, the mother of the nine muses by Zeus. Memory is, after all, an odd phenomenon, and when we fish in its waters for remembrances of a previous time - sensations, feelings, discoveries, epiphanies, disappointments, romances - we don’t always get fish. Sometimes we get an odd creature like a squid or an octopus. Or parakeet:

I have a pet (it’s probably the family pet), a parakeet from Woolworth’s named Admiral. We leave the cage open, he’d fly out and hang out up on the curtain rods, eventually would light on the edge of a glass of water in front of me, dips a beak in for a drink.

He lets me hold him, bites me lightly with his beak. Periodically, for no apparent reason, he freaks out, flies around weirdly, jumps around the cage. One morning wake up and he’s lying still on the bottom of the cage, the inside of his throat visible, he got caught between the bars and the perch. He died.

Greenwald is fond of ending blocks of reminiscence with the word ‘anyway.’ The word takes on a variety of value, sometimes dismissive, sometimes a relaxed dissipation of energy after a concentrated effort, sometimes a ball tossed to resume a story, bounce down the page to the next paragraph, flight of steps, hallway or block.

Humor abounds. Greenwald’s early life is informed largely by the movies. From which he learns some things gleaned from the silver screen, practiced in real life, produce dubious results. As, per instance, his take on Broken Arrow:

One Saturday afternoon, come home after seeing Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow. He plays Cochise trying to work things out in the Old West, with James Stewart and, lurking Debra Paget, opposed to the idea of compromise by Geronimo, played by Jay Silverheels (the real-life Tonto).

Anyway

After eating I guess buffalo meat sitting around the campfire Ira Gossel, from Brooklyn, who is Cochise finishes eating with his hands and uses his biceps as a napkin, wiping off the fat rubbing it into his arms, opines how it wards off the chill.

That night for dinner we have chicken. I pick up a piece, munch away from my hand, finish, put down the bone, proceed to rub the grease from my fingers into my arms, dignified with a thousand mile stare. My parents, everyone at the table, don’t all talk at once, what the hell are you doing. Just rubbing the fat in, I say, it’s good to ward off the chill.

Go wash. Don’t do that again.

The next Broken Arrow I see (for the name of the earlier one) is John Woo’s with JohnTravolta. Wonderful, two A-Bombs go missing. Someone says the only reason for John Woo to have two, you know, for shit sure, and he does, he’s going to blow one up. It’s great!

Hello

2011-09-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

Hello in the midst of kettledrums and silliness. Hello hello hello.

Hello to the sun. Hello to the window. Hello to the stove on which the coffee pot stays heated.

Hello to the dictionary and TV and refrigerator. Which hums its hellos back to me. And keeps my cheesecake nice and chilled.

Grape juice too. Hello grape juice.

Hello shoes. Hello shirt. Hello pants.

Hello throat you feel a little sore today. I hope I didn’t walk away with a bug from Paul’s birthday party. I guess I’ll find out later but there is codeine in case the microbes get serious and put me on the couch.

Hello bacteria. Hello Dolly.

Hello hello hello.

I say hello and you say goodbye. Hello hello. Hello hello.

Hello universe. Hello probability. Hello improbability. Probability is no more improbable than improbability. And thusly my fingers skip along the computer keyboard saying silly things.

Which is the essence of poetry. Silliness. As if you didn’t know.

Capital Stain

2011-09-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

I felt something moist beneath my foot this morning. Under my heel, to be specific. It took a while to register. I wasn’t fully awake. I turned on the hall light next to the bathroom. I looked at the floor. There was a small brown stain in the shape of New Zealand. Toby must have coughed something up. I reached under the kitchen sink for a bottle of stain remover, aimed the nozzle at the stain, and squeezed the trigger. A fine spray came out. It made a sound that was one part whisper, one part hiss, and one part gurgle. I rubbed the stain with a paper towel. It came up easily.

Morning is a delicate time. I emerge into consciousness slowly. If it happens too fast, I’ll be in a shitty mood all day. If it happens gently, calmly, quietly, there is a change the day may flow forward as gracefully as a Yankee clipper.

Dolphins leaping at its side.

I dollop out some food for Toby, pour some coffee, and sit down in front of the computer. I google the New York Times. The state of Georgia executed Tory Davis. I find this deeply sad. They quite possibly executed an innocent man. Seven witnesses recanted their testimony. There was significant doubt that Davis had murdered Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail. Davis insisted on his innocence right up to the last moment before he was executed with lethal injection. Amnesty International, Jimmy Carter, Al Sharpton, and even the Pope pled for clemency and a stay of execution. Carter wrote “executing Troy Davis without a real examination of potentially exonerating evidence risks taking the life of an innocent man and would be a grave miscarriage of justice.”

The news is a stain, but this stain can’t be removed. It is a stain on humanity. A foul discoloring of the soul.

The Ghost Of An Adjective

2011-09-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

The ghost of an adjective chews a noun into supple ambiguity. My skin eats the sun. A man wandering the streets of San José in search of an apartment sits on a curb to read William Carlos Williams. A giant crocodile is found in the Philippines. Some men try to make the creature vomit so that a man can find his brother.

We are all searching. Fire feeds on straw. Straw feeds on dirt. 40 years later, the corn still grows, the fire still burns. It has become a nebulous form sparkling in the fog. Some call it the hammer of justice. Some call it a monster. Some call it syntax, others an allegory in search of a theme.

Words cry continually for the nourishment of eyes. Curious eyes. Interested eyes. Absorbed and brooding and searching eyes.

My cuticles gleam pink. The universe fizzes like a root beer. Robins in a state of confusion. The gleam of the limousine compensates for the drabness of the garage. One thing balances another. There is deliverance in a guitar, and breath to fill a song. Coffee answers the need for hardware. The wind confers the scent of clover. Even the rungs in the refrigerator shelving ring when I shut the refrigerator door, thus proving that there are common essences naturally apt to be present in and predicated of many similar individuals.

For example, people are rarely the people that we think they are. The alchemist searches for gold in the chaos of existence and discovers that words create their own safari, their own savannah, their own sense of freedom. I love the scene in the movie where King Kong breaks loose of his chains and sends the audience fleeing into the streets.

The mind is a climate. We live in a language of paint and light. This is how oblivion was born. This is how nothingness becomes somethingness. Rungs in a refrigerator. A spoon. A fork. A thousand regrets.

One day in October I discover the true meaning of doughnuts. That a doughnut has a hole, and in that hole is a world, and that a doughnut without a hole has red jelly inside, and a thick skin of powdered sugar, and the less we just stare at the doughnut, and the more we seize hold of it and eat it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and that the involvement has a distinctive phenomenological signature, until the doughnut is gone, and we debate within ourselves whether to have another, so that a great moral is shaped, and a corresponding transformation in the mode of one's being.

Did you know that winter is written in the wind? That space dangles from a string?

And twirls. Ever so slightly. Twirls.

I hear a helicopter. I can feel the pulse of a painting. Spectral ponies on a hill in Wyoming. The sky exploding into orange and gold. Cheyenne tepees in a valley of white dogwood and weeping cherry.

The dishwasher is noisy. But it works. It gets the plates and silverware clean. The telephone rings. It’s Roberta. She wonders if she should get a box of oranges at Costco. I tell her that’s a lot of oranges to invest in. I ask her to pick one up and weigh it. If it’s heavy, that means it’s got a lot of moisture in it. She tells me it’s not that heavy. We decide to pass on the oranges.

What is light? It is a landscape spreading into flax. Opium eyes opium thumbs. Photons and scones. A bell hanging from an easel. An alphabet glowing in a riot of color.

Here comes Moses with a Geiger counter. We welcome him with mirrors. I tell him there is a cat sleeping in my dictionary. He tells me this is natural. The Sun King sneezes. Gesundheit, says Moses.

Life is often difficult. One requires so many things. Food. Shelter. Lingerie.

As for me, I enjoy sunlight, friendly dogs, and cleavage. The accordion is not a problem. But there is no remedy for poetry. I’m afraid not. My advice is to buy a motorcycle and visit Australia. Do push-ups. Awaken the words that are sleeping in a book. Show them around your head. Stir them. Churn them. Tumble them in thought.

I sometimes read Finnegans Wake in the bathtub. I am forging a new conscience for our race. There will be scones for everyone. Darkness illumined by a contagion of chandeliers.

I’ve been behind bars at least once in my life. This is where one learns how to sew clouds to the sky. How to visit a slice of toast with cinnamon. Imagine tidepools stirring with life. Note how the silhouettes on the wall mimic the beginning of time.

Time is a monstrosity. But so is space. Together, they make silverware shine in the sunlight, marriage and divorce, sticky fingers and rubber. The butter does handsprings. Words squirt from a bad headache. A man dives in the Rhone searching for Caesar. He finds Caesar in the muck at the bottom and brings him head with the aid of a crane and a highly skilled crane operator.

Structure wanders through the poem looking for invisible entities to flesh out into meaning. An elf sits down to breakfast and notices how the whole thing turns delicate and strange, three arms holding three margaritas in a gesture of farewell.

Did I mention the pliers? They, too, have their importance in the scheme of things. Evergreen. Turquoise. The kimono the sky wears in late summer, early autumn. Somewhere between appearance and reality there is a wealth of entanglement. The enfoldment of lips. Brass doorknobs in an old Norwegian house. Silent operas of dripping fish. Soft fur on a kitten’s belly.

The ghost of an adjective goes around dressed in the lost scarves of an ancient rhetoric. Reading becomes honey. A soft translucence, like twilight. A fetus of thought turning syntax in jelly.

The Dream Of Language

2011-09-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

The Spiritual Life Of Replicants, poetry by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Talisman House, 2011

“Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration,” observed the 17th century British scholar and critic Richard Bentley. “Some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.”

Mallarmé describes the same essence with opalescent felicity: “Words rise up and in ecstasy; many a facet reveals its infinite rarity and is precious to the mind. For our mind is the center of this hesitancy and oscillation; it sees the words not in their usual order, but in projection (like the walls of a cave), so long as that mobility which is their principle lives on, that part of speech which is not spoken.”

Poet Murat Nemet-Nejat uses the Turkish word Eda, meaning mien, or carriage, to describe this principle of mobility and oscillation as a quality unique to a certain species of poetry in which what is written, and how it is written, cannot be separated from the dream or desire animating the work. “Eda,” he writes, “is a poetics of Sufism embodied in the structure of the Turkish language. This linguistic quality -- thought not as statements, but thought as a linguistic tissue -- is achieved in Turkish primarily through its syntax: Turkish is an agglutinative language, that is to say, declensions occur inside the words as suffixes. Words need not be attached to either end of prepositions to spell out relationships, as in English. This quality gives Turkish total syntactical flexibility.”

The poetry in The Spiritual Life Of Replicants is not written in Turkish, but English. The reason, I believe, that Murat Nemet-Nejat makes these distinctions in the essay at the book of the book titled “A Few Thoughts On Fragments,” is to underscore how one linguistic behavior might inform another linguistic behavior. Eda is not a quantifiable phenomenon like temperature or steel, or even an identifiable style such as Japanese haiku or Elizabethan sonnets; it is an immaterial, ontological essence similar to the 12 century Islamic philosopher Suhrawardi’s Light of Lights, the divine light animating all existence, or the invisible force of Shelley’s “Hymn To Intellectual Beauty,” “the awful Shadow of some unseen Power,” consecrating human thought with its multiple hues and rapturous spells.

“If one considers The Spiritual Life an attempt to translate the flexibility of Eda, the spiritual universe of Sufism into English,” Nemet-Nejat writes, “one sees the antagonist the poet must encounter: the nearly absolute inflexibility of English syntax. English turns into a prison within which Eda must move and, more importantly, from which it must escape. The spectacle-ization of the poem in The Spiritual Life, fragments becoming basic poetic units, is the path to achieve that goal.”

The most striking feature I noticed when I first opened this book was the huge amount of empty space on the pages of much of the work. Some of the fragments, such as the three lines on page 39, aggregate in a compact image at the top, left-hand side of the page:

the yellow of the carpet
lurks in the yellow of my eye.

and waits.

The static tension of this piece charges the image of the carpet with divine significance. Why yellow? Yellow is, of course, a bright color, the color of the sun, lemons, crocus flower, yellow pages of the phone book and their allure of service and appliance, but is also unsettling. Its brightness is aggressive, unrelenting. It is associated with spirituality and enlightenment, but also cowardice and unrequited love. It is arguably the color with the most contradictions associated with it, and so makes an appealing ingredient in a poem mirroring two separate realities of uncertain relation: the object of the carpet and the consciousness of the poet.

The stillness of imagery in these three lines is deceiving. The final two words, “and waits,” give it an ominous, somewhat menacing tinge. And below it is the lush whiteness of the page. Space is of primary importance. It confers authority upon the line, makes a spectacle of the word-aggregation, multiplies possible directions and combinations, unites or destroys the union of opposites, makes the written work appear less utilitarian and hence more artistic, and makes the inert, immovably fixed print more dynamic. In some ways, space appears to be the subject of the text, not just something to be viewed, but stands as the most definite or stable element on the surface of the page. Space has body, existence, being. It has a presence that is both literal and psychological. It stands as an entity of final and unanswerable nullity: the void surrounding, imbuing, and articulating all things. In the case of the poem, it determines where the image stops, begins, and argues its course. It delays or disrupts the development or movement. It increases attention to the material fact of words. It dramatizes the Non-being of Being.

The poem on the following page is even smaller: it consists of three lines, four words. This tiny constellation occupies the far, upper left corner of the page, and is so modest in its appearance it reminds me of those strands of webs one encounters when reaching into an unused, forgotten corner for an errant movie ticket or ping pong ball. The object in this instance, however, is not a web, but a dart:

A dart’s
instantaneous
license.

The use of the word ‘license’ at the end is exquisite. The sharp bright piece of metal that constitutes the dart’s essence is an immediate license - warrant, privilege, latitude - to fly and impale its target on the wall. I feel a sleekness in that word, and allowance and function. The very function of a dart is explicit, immediate in its shape, density, point. When one has thrown a dart one might also know what it means to make a point, hit the target, literal target in a basement rec room or noisy bar, and figurative target, the points we struggle to make in argument and discourse, which might also occur in a basement rec room or noisy bar.

A few of the poems and the title of the collection reference Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, which was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick titled Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. The central plot of the movie concerned a line of genetically engineered organic robots called replicants created to perform dangerous or menial work on off-planet colonies. Their use on planet Earth was prohibited. A world-weary expert on replicants named Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is persuaded to track down a particularly brutal and cunning group of replicants hiding out in a rainy, dystopic Los Angeles.

One of the things I liked best about this movie were the ingenious tests used to identify a replicant masquerading as a human. It was assumed that robots would not have the same emotional response to certain situations as humans, and so the questions were designed to elicit a bizarre and revealing reaction. The replicants are made with a four-year failsafe life span to prevent them from developing emotions. Needless to say, the strategy doesn’t work. I am always deeply moved at the end of the movie (spoiler warning: skip to the next paragraph this if you have not seen the movie), when Rutger Hauer, the lead replicant named Batty, is dying after a titanic battle with Ford, stands against the dark with rain running down his face, and says: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

Blade Runner raised serious questions about consciousness, machinery, and emotion. Not to mention death and mortality. In the poem “Limbo,” Nemet-Nejat writes “The soul, the mechanical eye we are born with, stealing the body to tell its dream. Then it dies, its specific mode of existence, and it continues its wanderings to find another host. That’s why the classical thinkers knew the ghosts of the dead wandered in the nether land -- not searching for god, but yearning for another body.”

The dilemma of soul and body has been with us a long time. I have tried imagining a state of existence in which I was pure essence, pure energy, with no fingers or thumbs or legs or eyes. No ears to hear sounds. Not skin to feel textures. No bones and muscles to feel the gentle push and pull of gravity. It is this dilemma that goes to the heart of this collection, and reveals itself most tellingly in the word ‘replicant.’

Language is the ultimate replicant. It is the living tissue in which the soul finds another body, and begins to dream.

Metaphysical Dashboard Cackle

2011-09-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Let me make myself very clear. This is not just another argument with Pythagorean doors. The world isn’t numbers. The world is a blister on the dream of a filmstrip.

The imagery of fiction is squeezed from a gray exclamation point. If it has the pathos of olives and the clasp of a trunk, it will open its lid to subtleties of menstruation.

I can carry an experience to its fullest expression as an allegory. I can wrestle a parameter, or shoe a groundhog with sparkly C-clamps. But I cannot burn a kiss with bagpipes.

Always Cézanne. Cézanne is the palette where we find the right colors for osteopathic conjecture.

Sail the cause with its only hoe. The bruise is a mark that murmurs the same.

Twig everything the finger hawk may jerk. Respectable complex sandstone hats have the advantage here. Why? Because the ripple moves through vermilion buying warrant along the way. If you can twine a brain stem, you can flex a lung. Life is a parody of death.

Astronomy pressed its energy toward a galaxy of sloth.

The tiger is the same as Cubism.

You know this is true because its chatter has turned its back to desire.

A sticky barking sternum. You are your blast. Your atmosphere. Your rubbing alcohol. The soothed yellow sparrow that dipped its music in hell.

The jaw fondles the sonnet it initiates. The blaze is perceived as such. It comes as no surprise that abstractions are faster with chrome than chitchat.

Hit the sphere if you want your wash to come out pepper.

Arabesques predicated on the alarm system are now going crazy. I have an intuitive sense that hockey is a slippier game than we thought. Absence by staircase, elegance by shoal.

I agree. The lobster is ocher, not gawky, or gay. It is simply a lobster. Unrivalled in the tattoo department. Better than a snake. Pineapple snow or a flaming orthogonal limousine.

I wanted to say something about potter’s clay. But the sentence was too thick to write. It swarmed with cloth like a spark of insect milk.

Your physical clay is the science in your climb. So much reflection in your eyes that your vision treads asteroids of hurling fire. Deepens in pools of Beowulf green.

Everything culminates in blood. The oysters dispel the spoons, but the suspension thickens in indentation. Until finally it all makes sense. The world is a redeye on the emerald of a dashboard.

Solace In Adjectives

2011-09-03T14:20:00.001-07:00

The world is divided into facts: floods, seasons, diseases. Clouds, bluebells, harmonicas.

Perforations aren’t what they used to be. I used to be able to tear off a section of paper towel in one shot. Now I have to saw it in half.

Have you ever tried to drive a car while prophesying?

I love travel. I am sympathetic to anything in motion. Especially if it is moving away from me. Or if I am moving away from it. I’m not saying I’m an unregenerate misanthrope. All I’m saying is that if you swing from a trapeze 50 feet above the ground, you should be able to trust the person that is going to catch you.

Propositions resemble arrows. The fingernail clippers are in the bathroom in the drawer to the far right. That’s one arrow. Here is another arrow. There is a Geiger counter on the dashboard ticking wildly as we approach Fukushima. And Obama wants to build more of these things. Are you kidding me?

Some people do not know how to follow arrows. Even if that arrow happens to be a wolf baring his fangs in the Yukon. Or hot water squirting out from the valve when it gets turned open.

I marvel at the way cameras assert themselves. A face behind every camera. Clumsy particles of light walk around inside the camera and become an image. A birthday. Variegations of green in an avocado. A man ruminating on a shoe.

If you let the world in, you have to let it back out. Choose a color, rub your arm. That will do the trick. If not, write a mentally indigestible letter and mail it to the president of a clumsy particle.

A meaning is anchored in words. It may be heavy as a truck tire, particularly in its relation to the world. To the road. The proverbial highway. Where things happen. A man and his violin waiting for a bus. Swallows. Bing cherries. A woman riding a lawnmower off Highway 17 near Moses Lake.

I lived in California for ten years. Believe me, that’s where things happen. Big things. Like boiling water for tea. Daubing paint on a canvas. Manicuring your cuticles. Examining the sternum of an Egyptian mummy. Who happened by one day to ask: why does water glisten so brightly? There are times when the division between the organic and non-organic ceases to exist. Dry yourself by the fire and mull it over. The division among things is blurry. The border is sparkling. It could be demonstrated in tin, or a paragraph riding on my tongue.

What holds atoms together? A grain of salt and a pinch of thought. A smile adhering to a simile. Like a fetus. Of smoky quartz. Or the creak of an old oak desk as the pen pressed down to form a string of words. Which will one day change the world. Because it is a fetus. Of corn silk. Which will one day evolve. Into Wild Bill Hickok sitting at a table in a saloon holding a hand of cards.

The origin of language was hectic and hairy and teeming with adjectives. You should have seen it. You wouldn’t have believed it. There were spider webs in all the windows corresponding to a definite wavelength of light. Ominous cows. Preposterous frogs. The Beatles on YouTube.

As butterflies probe for a pollen, I feel an expectation growing in me. What does it feel like to punch somebody? Somebody assembled in 1868. By Emily Dickinson.

The poem is a contraption, a flirtation with death. Nipples, glaciers, gloves. Poke the anemone and watch it close. You can find sensitivity in the most unlikely places. It is pure sorcery. My hands are numb as my spaceship approaches Neptune. Last night I saw my face floating in waves as I was pulled inexorably toward the sun. I had a hell of a time removing the two bottom screws of the license plate. And then the elevator doors slid shut and the predicate sleeping in the breast pocket of my shirt awoke and set the universe on fire.

The U.S. government is run by thugs. This is why I dislike doing laundry on Saturday. Said a man in a man town near Williston. Over the thin clatter of silverware. All kinds of things get discussed out on the prairie. And when there are no women around, a man thinks of women. In this sense logic is different from biology, since it is more general, but it is also similar to biology in that it is a science that aims to capture a certain body of truths. This way of looking at logic is often associated with the refrigerator. There is a shout from a bank of sand, and the little bulb inside is crying like the soft eye of the antelope in a blaze of snow.

Rumination is always coffee on the dark side of the moon. But this isn’t why France is so poorly represented in the annals of rock. And even though it is conceivable to shave with a license plate, a herd of elk on a bar of soap is not resolved in the analysis. It will continue to smell like Wisconsin (I love Wisconsin) but solve nothing about the government.

What can you learn from growing old? Open a window. Let the air in. Hear the birds. Throw a rock at the neighbors.

There is a certain solace in adjectives. Thick, thin, noble, iconoclastic. Plucky, jumpy, mutinous, adamantine.

The cat swims through his fur. A silver light trickles down the wall of the cave illustrating the differentiation of matter into galaxies and stars. Blades and birds and words and worms.

The idea of wealth blazes with red hot veins tangential to consciousness. If you shake a bottle filled with earthquakes, it will erupt into imagery faster than a sofa humming along a string of Christmas bulbs.

The word ‘extent’ is rough as the skin of an elephant, solar flares exploding into space. Mallarmé’s swan glides by like a root beer in a bingo parlor. Why is life so hard? I am ravenous for an answer. I will attend a meeting at City Lights with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

My ancestry is bashful. I don’t blame them. They were Vikings. Raping and pillaging. Shame on them.

There are far better things to do in life than rape and pillage. What, for instance, can you learn from growing old? Open a window. Strike a note on a piano. If the sound is blue, so are you.

Wrinkles elaborate the face with the flavor of understanding. Let us say thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses. What can you say about Utah? Utah is insoluble.

Abstractions of tin ornament the head of an airplane. It is the head of Dwight D. Eisenhower. His nose is a propeller. His chin is a ramp. His eyes are cockpit. It is clear we are not concerned here with hockey but the expression of plums.

Flip a coin. Jingle a bell. The ripeness is all. I have a friend who lives in Santa Cruz. There is a large stone chimney in his house and a sonnet dancing on his lip.

There is little you can do about space except fill it. Space is profligate by nature. Time is a map of space bleeding crystals and cities. Yes, life is hard. But there is a great deal of solace in adjectives.

Think of them as fish flip flopping in a net.

Fauve elegies on a collar stud. A vapor in nature, breath in a caboose. Cubist pipes in a Cubist house. Oddities of willow written on an old oak desk. Mushrooms in Portugal.

A mood is a mode of mustard, but a canvas flooded with color cries out for revelation. Gulp it down. Faith obviates the mystery of rags, and raspberries enhance the surface of a cake.

The Right Place At The Right Time

2011-09-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

It Happened In Monterey: classic photographs by Elaine Mayes.
Britannia Press, 2002

Nico of the Velvet Underground looks amused. Her hair is long and blonde. Her lips, full and sensuous, are on the verge of a smile. Her eyes, artfully darkened with eye liner, express a calm, affable elation. Her cheekbones are prominent. Her presence is unmistakable. I feel I am about to have an enjoyable conversation with her. And I would, if she weren’t a photograph.

Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, leans into the back of a folding chair, his feet resting on two chairs in the row ahead of him, revealing silk, gray stockings. He wears a broad brimmed fedora and a heavy coat lined with black fur. His hair is shaggy, and he sports a neatly trimmed beard. A necklace of beads hangs from his neck in a long, pendulous loop on his sweater. His gaze is directed to someone or something on what must be a stage. Two people sit next to him, a man with short, well-groomed hair and sunglasses, and a woman with long dark hair whose head is resting on the man’s shoulder. A pretty young woman with a charming overbite and long, thick wavy hair, a pair of sunglasses resting on top of her head, a short striped skirt revealing a pair of shapely legs, looks bemusedly in the same direction, her hands clasped lightly and resting on her lap, the tips of her fingers holding a daisy, a roll of paper pointing upward from her other hand. Since there are quite a few empty folding chairs, one imagines a rehearsal in progress, a musical group getting their equipment set up.

A woman wearing a black wool sweater, seated a row or two behind Andrew Loog Oldham, looks off to the side, her attention distracted by something else.

Eric Burdon, his eyes closed, his mouth open, stands before a microphone in a bluish light. He wears a scarf and a striped wool shawl with tassels. His facial expression is beatific. He could almost be a figure in a medieval religious painting.

These are some of the photographs included in a book called It Happened In Monterey, by photographer Elaine Mayes. The photographs, which were done on assignment in three day’s time, chronicle a time and a place but mostly an aura, a confluence of energies and musical genius that happened in one of the world’s most beautiful settings, the town of Monterey, California, where John Steinbeck staged Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row and East of Eden.

The Monterey Pop Festival of June, 1967, was an extraordinary event. It was the first full manifestation of a feeling that began several years earlier, circa 1964, with the so-called British Invasion and a sudden elevation of consciousness helped, in large measure, by the introduction of LSD and growing popularity of marijuana. Alcohol was frowned upon in those early, halcyon days of mind exploration and spiritual expansion. Drugs of choice were all hallucinogens: LSD, psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, nitrous oxide, fly agaric mushroom, even Morning Glory seeds. Alcohol was rightfully perceived as a depressant whose effects diminished rather than expanded the mind. It was associated with the people in mainstream society who supported the war in Vietnam. Obnoxious cowboy truckers whose bumper stickers read “Love It Or Leave It” and whose bruised, bullied wives worked in sullen resignation washing dishes on cracked linoleum floors. Bitter, bridge-playing spinsters with snippy poodles, pink sunglasses, and cyanide personalities. Cynical, hardcore military men chewing tobacco by the backyard barbecue.

The sixties was neither a political movement, cultural movement, religious movement, or hedonistic celebration of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was a social and cultural dynamic whose engine was fueled by all these things. The sixties cannot be analyzed, broken down into components. The sum was quite definitely larger than the sum of its parts. It was quintessentially a feeling. A feeling of rapture and change, excitement and romance, joy and rebellion.

The sixties have been so trivialized it is impossible to utter that phrase without automatically reducing it to lava lamps, long shaggy hair, sappy naiveté and colorful clothes. That was not the sixties. The sixties were incendiary, joyful, and monumentally open. The 70s, which ushered in Disco and Studio 54 and cocaine, consumerism and celebrity culture, were its polar opposite: exclusionary, aggressive, competitive. How the coin got flipped so suddenly, I’ll never know.

The joke “if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there” is funny, but not true. Quite the contrary. My memories of the sixties are extremely vivid, the most vivid I have in my 64 years on this planet, and I was quite definitely there. I lived in the Bay Area just south of San Francisco throughout most the 60s and the early 70s. I took a small hiatus home to Seattle in 1966 due to a bad acid trip, and was working at Boeing’s Plant No. 2 on the Duwamish in June of 1967, so I missed the Monterey Pop Festival. I quit that same month, but didn’t make it back to the Bay Area in time for the festival. This would remain an ongoing frustration, since all my friends could not stop talking about how wonderful the music had been at the festival.

Two huge artists emerged from the Monterey Pop Festival: Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Elaine took Hendrix’s picture as he wandered with a female friend by a flower stand before she knew who he was. He had not yet appeared on stage, and was new to quite a few people. There is a shot of Janis Joplin standing in the audience, although the audience itself is not visible. The focus is on Janis and her look of delight as she watches an act on the stage, and a young man with black hair and a black coat next to her, lowering his head as he readies to light a cigarette. He is virtually invisible, save for a little sheen on his hair, the white stick of the cigarette angling down from his mouth, a glimpse of his shirt, and a large button on his coat. Janis looks so wonderfully casual you wish you could hug her. It is unimaginable that she has been dead for 40 years.

There is a beautifully expressive shot of Laura Nyro. I had a close friend who loved her singing and song writing, but she was not a hit at the festival. According to the commentary provided by Michelle Phillips, “Laura Nyro was devastated after her performance. She was sure she had bombed. I took her aside, and we drove around Monterey for a while, and I tried to make her feel better.”

Elaine’s photo shows Nyro looking profoundly sad, the microphone barely visible in the darkness of the stage next to her long, black hair. Her hand rests on her upper chest. Her eyes are partially closed in a deep, pensive moment. Her shoulder is bare, smooth and vulnerable.

It could be Nyro’s music was a tad too nuanced and urbane for this crowd. People in the sixties liked their music forceful, jubilant, and intense. The lyrics were of a very high quality, and the musicianship was prodigious. These were very smart people. But there was a strong, anti-intellectual side to the sixties which I did not like, a forced naiveté that exalted a false, childhood innocence that was one part Jean Jacques Rousseau and one part Mr. Rogers. In that respect, the sixties were not too unlike the current Zeitgeist. The preferred literature - if people took out time from getting stoned to read a book - were titles of inane fantasy such as Tolkien’s hobbit series, or science fiction thrillers like Dune. Richard Brautigan was hugely popular, Trout Fishing In America especially, which revealed a nicer, more benevolent side to sixties anti-intellectualism, a receptive appetite for drollery, for anything quirky and bizarre, particularly if was expressed in language that was deceptively simple in structure and tone. Brautigan was far outside academia and its pompous, over-complicated literature. The hippie ethos sought simplicity and innocence in all things. Brautigan managed to command extremely high sales without ever becoming remotely commercial, and for a time enjoyed the fame of a rock star.

I never understood the connection with the beats and the hippies, Kerouac especially. Kerouac was edgy and often full of despair. He was a fairly easy read in terms of phrasing and vocabulary, but the prose expresses an intensity and gritty, working-class veneration for male toughness and goofy bravado that was beautifully expressed in figures such as Neal Cassady, James Dean and Marlon Brando. There is no false grab for innocence in Kerouac’s hectic, Benzedrine-driven prose. With the arguable exception of The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s writing is not utopian. Compassion is emphasized and there are numerous allusions to Buddhist philosophy, but states of malaise and tragedy are just as common, and appreciated for their inherent nobility. The bop spontaneity Kerouac espoused was meant to liberate everything trapped in the human psyche, be it monstrous or screwball or disdainful or full of compassion. Beat could mean beatitude, or beaten down. Juju beads on cold knees. Bleak coffee tired hope. Sunlight smashed through forbidden window panes. Kerouac would have felt awkward at the Monterey Pop Festival. Bodhisattva toasting ants with a bottle of Ripple.

I can see some of the frustrations Elaine experienced with lighting working in such chaos and with such little time available to take in all the variables in the environment. But there is often a plus side to certain liabilities, chance elements that injure a perfect picture, but allow for something more natural and revealing to occur. This is certainly the case with a shot of Brian Jones as his attention is held by something occurring on stage, though all that is visible is Brian’s head and part of a blurry figure next to him. The blondness of his hair and paleness of his face fuse in an ethereal gaze. The light is a bit washed, which heightens the ethereality, the ghostly quality of the photograph. He appears to be flooded with soft, yellowish light. He could easily be one of England’s romantic poets, another Keats or Shelley, a spirit visiting from the realm where the authors, as Blake put it, live in eternity.

“It helps to realize that the frame is not a natural thing at all,” observes photography teacher Philip Perkis, “it is an imposition on vision. The paradox, of course, is that the frame is a very important contributor to content in a photograph. What is included, what is left out, and what is cut can be, and frequently is, the central meaning in a photograph.”

Throughout It Happened In Monterey, you can feel the “it” happening, whether it is in the frame or outside the frame. The eyes of the musicians and audience are often directed elsewhere. This is the joy and meaning of any festival: its thousand distractions. The uniqueness of this festival is clearly outside the frame. That’s what made it so special. It was one of a kind. Terra incognita. By the time Woodstock rolled around, the media had framed the sixties’ movement so thoroughly, it was already as saturated with cliché as a tie-dyed t-shirt.

There is no imagery or vocabulary to describe what occurred between 1965 and 1967. It helps considerably that I lived in this area during this time, which gives me a leg up, but it will always elude analysis. This makes it impossible to put down in words an event whose chief qualities were utterly intangible. What might someone who came of age during the Reagan years when non-commercial values had become virtually extinct and everything became concentrated on profit and commerciality see in this book? Someone for whom the swaggering belligerence of rap with its materialistic obsessions have become the norm, or the glitzy, in-your-face, semi-pornographic theatrics of Madonna and Lady Gaga, or the brassy, corporate polish of Beyoncé?

They would see a policeman stringing orchids on his motorcycle antenna.

People gathered together in shared communion but gazing in different directions.

Musicians in various states of rapture, joy, meditation, or radiant consummation just as a brilliant, unexpected note has been reached and sent echoing out among the audience.

A melding of cultures, ethnicities, modes. Ravi Shankar. Otis Redding. Jerry Garcia.

Paul Butterfield, his eyes squeezed shut as he opens his mouth in front of the mike, his hair parted down the middle, his double-breasted jacket buttoned, he could be a crooner from the roaring twenties.

David Crosby smiling under a thick fur hat as a woman with long brown hair gives him a hug.

Jimi Hendrix bent over his guitar in a frilly shirt looking as if he has just discovered the source of the universe.

Joyeux Anniversaire Guillaume Apollinaire

2011-08-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Moi aussi, je suis fatigué de ce vieux monde
Vaisselle cassée pluie persistente
Le guerre partout cadavres dans les rues de Bagdad
Hélicoptère raids au Pakistan
Je veux construire une fusée et voler vers Mars
Où je vais construire la ville du future
Basé des plans que j’ai trouvé dans Les Illuminations de Rimbaud

Les religions ici dans ces états désunis de Merry Caw
Sont gonflés psychotique courroucé et sanglante
La plus grande religion est l’argent
Tout le monde vénèrent l’argent
Méme l’argent vénère l’argent

Mais voici l’ironie l’argent perd sa valeur
Il est basé sur rien
Comme la poésie
Mais la poésie n’a jamais eu aucune valeur
Sauf pour l’imagination
Malheureusement on ne peut pas vendre d’imagination
Ou le prêt ou le louer ou le quantifier ou le mettre dans une
         banque
L’imagination doit être partagée elle est sans limite comme l’air
Et va à rebours du capitalisme
Qui se nourrit de la dette et de la déprédation
Et se rend malade et se meurt
Le capitalisme s’effondre mais la poésie proliférer il est partout

Il y a de la poésie dans mon café il y a de la poésie dans mes
         chaussures
Poésie dans la syntaxe poésie dans la peinture
Le temps est la poésie de l’espace
Et l’espace est la poésie de l’escrime
On pourrait supposer que la poésie est une perturbation
         de langage
Mais il est en réalité une biologie

Des pâmoisons et des explosions
C’est la fin d’août il y a du soleil sur les fougères
C’est de 73 degrés Fahrenheit avec 65% d’humidité
Warren Buffet a annoncé qu’il va investir 5 milliards de dollars
         dans la Bank of America
Et NATO ne peut pas trouver Muammar el-Qaddafi
Neil Young joue “Cowgirl In The Sand” dans YouTube
Et j’ai fini le reste de mon café
Songeant si la supposition de Malebranche
Que les idées sont “êtres representatifs”
Distinct de la perception est vrai je ne pense pas qu’ils soient
Bien que je crois que le langage est largement hallucination
Puisque les mots ne sont que les signes de choses
Et pas les choses ells-mêmes
Ainsi, il sera très facile de construire ma fusée
Et construire ma ville de l’avenir sur Mars

Je dois agir rapidement la planète Terre se meurt
Il y a des tatous dans Missouri
Et des zones mortes dans le golfe de mexique
La glace arctique fond
Et les sécheresses ont décimé la Russie, l’Australie, et la Somalie
Chacun d’entre nous vous nous manquez Guillaume
Lorsque j’appuie sur le bouton de ma fusée
Je pense à toi
Et tes fétiches d’Océanie et de Guinée

Adieu Adieu

Soleil cou coupé

The Blue Stream At The Edge Of Thought

2011-08-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

I like the way an orange feels in my hand when I bring it out of the crisper, cold and round and porous. It feels good to curl your fingers around an object, a tool, a breast, a doorknob. It is a better way to understand the universe than to merely think about it. The weight of things, their texture and shape, their density and temperature, express a great deal.

I rarely wear a tie. But when I do, the way the fabric slides through my fingers is a nice sensation.

The feeling of hot water splashing against the skin in the shower after running a few miles in cold, rainy weather is a remarkably good feeling.

It seems sadly ironic that the things that cause the most hate and violence in the world aren’t things at all. Religion, ideology, belief. Things without weight, texture, form, odor, temperature, density, velocity, or flavor. They aren’t even a gas. How can this be?

How can a belief about the origin of the universe or a prescribed form of behavior according to the narratives surrounding the origin of the universe cause so much havoc and death?

It is a little easier to understand the conflicts that arise out of political ideology. Ideas about conduct are imposed on you and have a direct consequence on the quality of your life. But it’s important to realize that the philosophies surrounding the construction of laws are abstractions. Conceptions. Theories. Mental erections with no actual foundation. Nothing solid holding them up. They’re less than air. Not even atoms. Mere electro-chemical impulses in the brain.

Then where do a sense of right andwrong come from, and are they fabrications, inventions of thought, or do they have a reality of some sort, however intangible or diaphanous? Is compassion innate? Is joy innate? Is the impulse to destroy innate? Do animals have compassion, or a sense of guilt? I believe that some animals have compassion, but that no animals experience guilt. But this is just thought, an opinion I have, which is based on little evidence. If I were attacked by a lion on the African savannah, I might not be so disposed toward believing animals, lions especially, have real compassion. Or is hunger the ultimate driving force in all situations?

How do words refer to sensations, asked Ludwig Wittgenstein. Can we imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences -- his feelings, moods, and the rest -- for his private use? -- Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?

I can’t see why not. Though a word is only a sign, a symbol. How might I communicate my inner life with symbols? That automatically creates a filtration. The language is a medium, like a skin, or tissue, in which sensations lose much of their purity.

My inner life and outer life are interrelated, the same way it is for everyone, all sentient beings. But the emotion I experience while producing a poem is hard to share with anyone who isn’t enamored of poetry. Most people are not. And what is that emotion? It is similar to the high produced by inhaling cocaine. It is a state of extreme sharpness, sensual acuity, and euphoria.

If I could communicate that sensation fully and accurately I would certainly sell a lot more books. So clearly, something is not working. Is it the fault of the poem, or the fault of language in general? Does the same sensation, or emotion, come out differently in French or Japanese than it does in English?

In what sense, Wittgenstein further asks, are my sensations private? That’s an excellent question. We have names in the English language for quite a range of emotion: love, hate, anguish, fear, anxiety, depression, euphoria, perturbation, exhilaration, irritation, exasperation, impatience, self-confidence, shame, embarrassment, joy, jubilation, enchantment.

And what of the word ‘soul’? It is “a kind of floater in the language,” says Robin Blaser. “They have said the word means breath, but that is the meaning borrowed from spiritus, an inhalation and exhalation of the world.”

It is “the inseparable freedom of a primal ambiguity, this convulsive beauty insisted upon by Lautréamont.”

Ponder, if you will, the secret, inseparable blackness of milk.

The feeling of light through a window in mid-August, warm, voluptuously warm, and golden. Shadow of a leaf trembling on the surface of a round, skull-shaped rock. Imagine the dreams inside that rock. The silence inside that rock. The cold, dark heart of the universe inside that rock.

The blue stream at the edge of thought, writes Blaser.

I wish I had ordered a root beer to go with my tea and water last night at Uptown China. The food was highly seasoned, salty. I love that food. But it makes me thirsty. Thirst is universal. No animal goes without thirst. So that we then know precisely what is meant when we say that we thirst for knowledge. As if knowledge were the cold hard water of a spring, a glistening under fern fronds where the water trickles from the ground, collects, and moves where gravity tugs it.

In those places on earth where it is still possible to stand in quiet and watch as the day darkens and the first few stars appear, it is not at all accidental to wonder how the planet manages to float around a single star day after day and not lose its course, drift, of a sudden, deeper into space. Or, at least, try to imagine what existed before the universe came into being. Before space and time and root beer and antelope came into being. How could so much appear out of total nothingness?

It is obvious that we all need a can opener. And love and affection.

Here is a definition of language: absence suddenly melding with presence.

And vice-versa, so that the presence of anything equally implies the absence of which it is composed. Which is a paradox, like Solomon’s knot.

In Service To Poetry's Furious Scribble

2011-08-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

The following is an exchange between yours truly and poet Mickey O’Connor on Facebook expressing our bewilderment over America’s docility in view of her population’s daily rape by an oligarchical elite and betrayal by President Obama. The energy of our writing grew weirdly joyful and reminiscent of a time in the past not that distantly removed from our current conundrum. You might call it the pre-9/11 world, before the schism between the population and government had not grown so extreme, and the American dream had not fossilized into potholes, prisons, and the fern fronds formerly recognized as American currency. At any rate, it seemed worth saving, if only on a blog slightly less ephemeral than Facebook.

**********************************************************

didn't anybody take LSD didn't anybody stay awake for three straight days reading & writing & painting, didn't anybody else hitchhike from Boston to San Francisco in the dead of winter so headed south to Florida across Texas to California five days one nickel in their pocket ? Is everybody SOUND ASLEEP ???????????????????????

didn't anyone stay up all night on Dexedrine & Jack Daniels talking to angels & Blake & writing the Poem of the Future didn't anyone ride a Greyhound to New Jersey with a suitcase full of dreams didn't anyone sell sheet music to Magus for a hot dog?

didn't anybody swallow hashish walk all night Boston streets subways chant ' holy holy holy ' sleep at dawn in back pew St. Anthony's church til rousted by janitor? didn't anybody hear the voice from a closet see the words written across the sky spend hours typing transcribing ? didn't anybody dream a red tennis ball & bounce it along to a hillbilly song?

didn't anyone get naked swing from a rope into glacial milk didn't anyone thread a needle with hawsers of rimbaud rope & squeeze a camel into heaven didn't anyone meet Apollinaire on the Montmartre streets at dawn & say nothing because the air was pure & the belly was full of wine didn't anyone vote in america ink bubbles of fragile quixotic hope & get the proverbial rug pulled out didn't anyone grow wheat in Kansas sharpen a knife in Wichita polish old shoes in Milwaukee paint a porch in Pocatello hear Bartok in bar talk Buddhas in fuchsias toss greasy fries to shrieking gulls on Seattle's sad ruffian waterfront of goofy scrimshaw?

didn't anybody drive Eugene to San Francisco Los Angeles to Portland hiway coast road old car girlfriend marijuana radio sex back seat Santa Barbara sea shore park at dawn ? didn't anybody a cloud in trousers declaim poetry on street corner at the top of my voice as the secret mind whispers ? didn't anybody become addicted to amphetamine in service to poetry's furious scribble shiver in a chair cure themselves four years kundalini yoga hatha yogas' due diligence ? didn't anybody late nite table piled high with books study sweet Emily D. concision Rimbaud expansion Gregory Corso wild humor William Carlos Williams & a clear eye?

didn't anybody walk winter storm two feet snow in two hours stranded miles from home hitchhike a ride on old time milk truck open door on side wire cartons filled white milk bottles in back with beautiful long haired girl Denver years ago ?

didn't anyone lose themselves in Eine kleine Nachtmusik ride the green dragon of nerve delirium through the gates of dogma didn't anyone eat oatmeal in a Humboldt County hotel room cook on a hotplate measure redwood considerations with an imaginary yardstick & a blue guitar didn't anyone rent a trailer from an old Italian man obsessed with potatoes and listen to the Doors behind a Mexican restaurant among supernatural enchiladas & angelic cows?

The Penchants Of Peach

2011-08-14T13:09:00.001-07:00

I like crowds gatherings swarms I can’t say why maybe it’s the profusion I’m in love with profusion a surge of words for example words in a swarm of description words floating tumbling spilling through the mind as if the mind were a huge arena an empty space in the skull and light entering through the eyes was without substance or meaning until the energy of the light its photons activated nerves traveled in electrical impulse congealed commingled coagulated assumed the weight and form of meaning something red something shiny something viscous something urgent and moving like blood the way blood will appear on the skin after a thin barely perceptible cut and will bead and smear and eventually coagulate forming one day a scab.

It is sweet to carry an umbrella I must go public with this I will use antennas sticks goldfish apples sparklers myriad currents morning in the mountains mirrors and camels.

Nothing escapes necessity except the necessity to escape.

The world is a place of migration constant pursuit dusty banging cars meat bumped into action moving dunes cracked hands anarchic winds. You never know when it might rain but the desert is always encroaching. The hunger for freedom persists like a glowing metaphor the biography of time a palace in the clouds waves crashing on the shore blobs of meaning splayed on the sand gelatinous transparent lustrous.

Kerosene is a proposal a puff of breath on a feather.

The restaurant was closed. It had its own atmosphere. Clusters of hyacinth scintillating brocades a parable of green stirring as a summer in Seattle.

Glue speaks to the point of adherence, and adheres. The farm is an abstraction. Only the lonely recognize it as a place of pragmatic heresy. Fatalism is an oversimplification, like carving a bank robbery out of a Texas drawl.

Lust in a caress demonstrates the soul of the apricot a handkerchief inflated into a bird perched high and defiant on a finger of stone gargling the literature of the heart.

Description grows eyes. I feel purple. I want to linger here. Electricity is amazing. Have you ever played bingo during a lightning storm? Each muscle fulfills the motivation of bone.

Thought is a form of exploration. Thought renders life more agreeable, although some adjustments may be necessary, a little water tossed into the air a transcendental hat a palomino on a surfboard instants before it swells into a theory whose circumference sprawls over the terrain like sunlight.

This flowing this silver this business of writing is like finding mounds of cocaine on a Peruvian mirror I am awed by the alchemy of words odors that reflect the discourse of the forest upside down and Fauve the private sensations of genitalia the feeling of romance waxed like a console in the hall of mirrors at Versailles then pushed into morality or joined into sticky halves of DNA hippopotamus or slug the song of a mockingbird the hectic antithesis of insects.

The ground shakes the details of the horizon the phenomenon is delicate arms akimbo. I feel old but malleable. Can a lobster fly? Of course it can. It is like an anthology of poetry: another form of willingness.

Cotton is entirely mental but it can be worn with an air of moody approval or immersed in suds until it fades into broad-minded images of granite. Heady abstractions. Eyes floating in a bowl of milk.

Distance evokes the sky, which is indispensable for a diagnosis of turmoil.

Evocation rides the dragons of discourse. The sky bends into a worried look. The logic of glue implies contingency. Propositions are complex entities bound together in a certain way. There is syntax, which is a species of glue, and semantic properties, harnessed together by declension and chain to form new, complex relations. Milwaukee. Mania. Sedimentation. Stars in a puddle, oarlocks and collar studs, a giant crystalline lobster tap-dancing on a treadmill.

A constellation of drums excites a conception of art based on the weather. And when we arrive in Limoges, the thunder dissolves into punctuation. A river curves into the color ocher. The MGM lion runs down the aisle of the theater with an intestine in its mouth.

If you wrinkle a sheet of tinfoil in your hands a certain way you will discover a passion for politics, undress, and do fifty-two push-ups.

A skull unearthed in Denmark adorns the dashboard of a red Mustang convertible. We have all made this voyage at one time or another. We have all watched as the rain moved over the crest of a mountain in a veil of ephemeral agitation and felt the first few drops on our skin as we hurried to clear the picnic-table and make it back to the car before the heavens opened and the rain came down in torrents.

All the world requires an epilogue, a perfume or equation that expresses our essence, our endeavor to find rebirth in stone and quietude.

Deliverance comes in vermilion, gallant and stirring.

The sunlight surrenders its strawberries. The night secretes its definitions of pain. Larynx and eyeball bloom in the sun. A huge black snake weaves its way through a sentence, following an apparition of meaning, some possibility of warmth, references to worlds and times that map our relation to the universe and bring some materiality to the gauze of our understanding.

I see it all in a painting. In a still life by Cézanne. Undercurrents of sexual fury in a bowl of fruit. The sheen of initiation. The shine of expiation. The wobble of wood. The penchants of peach.

Finally, we turn to algebraic approaches. The ability to disengage oneself from a concrete situation. A combat, for instance, or riot. It isn’t adequate to say that speech equals thought. It just isn’t.

What one can say is this: a man speaks as a lightbulb becomes incandescent, that is, without any idea of why.

Feeling inclines toward feeling and detours are genial when the yearning is soft.

Because The Sky Is Crying

2011-08-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Rivers start as threads
Of water in the mountains
Tumbling down in inexpressible purity
To become tea or coffee
Words are the residue
Of a long incubation
Let’s talk about God
Fireworks in all the colors of the spectrum
The poet chisels the air
With the roar of a wildcat in an antique store
Pain is sometimes a diversion
Or a simple drink of water
I struggle every day against the embarrassment
Of the pump on my grandparent’s farm
Eyeballs and olives and other beautiful spheres
Balance it out
With the taste of rain
The rivers of China
Are radical as ants
Even the lobster has a purpose
On a spectral farm with spectral cows
Drink the sky
Hoist a sentence on your tongue
A word emerging from the tip of a pen
A broken beer bottle in the street
A poem written in 1971
Teleological as the color yellow
Tendencies of deep affection bubble at the surface
Of a dime on the coffee table
An abalone gliding in a mountainous wave
Is the eye in the wind
Of a soul in a storm
Dissonance is indispensable
Observes Marcel Proust in a rowboat
I hold in my hand a fire
Forged in the pathos
Of cause and effect
Because the sky is crying
And poetry is a suitcase
Full of soothing walls
And a voice hanging in the air
Here for instance is a pair of pants
With belt buckle in the form of a swan
The curtain rises on a pair of lovers
And Erica Jong in an airplane
Jotting everything down
Fondling the vapor
Of the human breast
In a motel room in Omaha
All the rivers are nerves
Of light flaming into space

The Smell Of Rain Aboard A Train

2011-08-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

Pain is sometimes a diversion, like a simple glass of water, or the smell of rain aboard a train. The dreams of the lobster are the property of the lobster, whereas the rivers of China are spectacular with the physiology of the fugue. Nothing is static. Everything moves. Each story has its paths, each washing machine its cycles. Pleasure and pain are one and the same. I know you don’t believe me, but believe me, extend this cognition into something soft and permeable, so that it may be better understood as a tongue. A muscle. The raw volume of a skinny inquiry doing cartwheels on a strawberry.

Or rainfall in North Dakota. There is a power in bread called life. Climb through the tangle of thought in your head and tell me why the sky is leaning against the ground in August. It takes a lot of sweat and wood to build a fire, but sheer bravery to combine pineapple with bacon.

I live in Seattle, as you may already have guessed. Here is a map of the Rio Tinto Zinc Mines, and here is a strand of Pythagorean string dripping words. You will find a pair of fingernail clippers in the drawer to the right under the bathroom mirror beneath a beige comb. The Sumerians scratched their alphabet into clay. But you can do better. You have a pen. You can tease the surface of a sheet of paper into revealing interactions of cause and effect.

The sky is crying. But not because I love hamburgers. Not that, no. But because it is harnessed to a paragraph where it is bullied into performing the function of an image. An image of air. Of heaven. Of clouds and stars. Everything that a sky does, including totems in the fog.

Here, for instance, is Shakespeare dipping a quill into a bottle of ink. The texture of his words have been baked in a philodendron, moistened with a rag, and pushed into unthinkable abstractions, a storm at sea, the redemption of trees, witches on a moor, oak and iron and hope, an old harmonica with the sheen of infinity. Fold it into a sparrow and give it to a sorrowful Elizabethan.

No prison can imprison the mind. The mind is a pigment that is easy to smear into a sweet conflagration of arms and legs in motion around a lotus. Infinity is real. Saturday is an illusion. The pickle is an appliance. Violins and bugs implicit as a web. And yes, these are only words, but they cry out for utterance, stamp and envelope.

Dear Bob Dylan why are you always juggling piles of laundry in the hallway? Can’t you see that the smell of spice has imbued the room with dragons and indigo? That a Wall Street Bankster is playing a fiddle next to a window? That the world is throbbing upside down? That if a balloon of thought excites the globe of the head it must result in a sonnet? How many roads must a man walk down before he becomes a seagull snatching a French fry from the lips of fate?

Life is green and lifts itself into a fist of anger. Coffee dances among the nerves. My thumb is out I am hitchhiking in my sleep. Here is a sentence lathered with the absence of stolen money. Here is the sensation of a cherry bursting in the mouth, and here is a fury of rain pelting the surface of a river. Enhance your behavior with sweat. Put some quarters in a jukebox and toss that old bleeding heart into a song of woe. I am all shook up with no place to go.

Except Texas. Willie Nelson driving a jeep ignites a mockingbird and ruminates on a bag of nails. There is a balloon of thought over his head and he realizes that he is in a cartoon called life.

Life is funny and strange. We all know that. There is no reason for it. For life. For struggle. For birth and death. Pin the cocoon to a human tear and it will one day emerge as a butterfly, eloquent and chronological, a mask of indigo on a face of rust.

Time imitates the movement of stars, but life is forged in the furnace of a wound.

The hole in the wind, said the poet, is where the intoxication of trees find their symbol of grace. It is where the appeal of gauze is in its sympathy. And where folds of cloth flap for no reason. Red buttons on a white shirt. A vague emotion resisting description. A spectral cow. A cripple’s brace.

Money is the engine of war. You can’t wear it. You can only exchange it. Its value is gained in honor, and lost in dishonor. It’s very simple. Simpler than you can imagine. Soap furthers the glide of the hand on the skin, while Joseph Priestly describes the air to a skull on a painter’s table.

The Tao Of Water

2011-08-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

Clouds are water. Odd to think a substance can change so radically from one thing to another. Liquid, solid, gas. Water.

Montaigne writes about inconstancy among humans as if it were pervasive as rain. But I’m not sure I agree. He writes: “Nothing is harder for me than to believe in men’s consistency, nothing easier than to believe in their inconsistency.”

This has not been my experience, except in the case of politicians, such as Obama, who say one thing to get elected, and do another once elected. But this is duplicity, not inconsistency. Most of the people I have known over a long period of time have been very consistent. My view of them may have altered, but they have remained very much the same.

“Our ordinary practice,” observes Montaigne, “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstances carries us. We think of what we want only at the moment we want it, and we change like that animal which takes the color of the place you set it on. What we have just now planned, we presently change, and presently again we retrace our steps: nothing but oscillation and inconsistency: ‘Like puppets we are moved by outside things.’ Horace.”

This was true when I drank alcohol. There were mornings far too numerous to number upon which I awoke with the pounding headache and sharp anguish of a hangover, after swearing to myself for the umpteenth time I would never drink so immoderately again. But once I made it to AA, and quit drinking, and eventually smoking, I was left with a course that was pretty steady.

I’ve led a pretty Spartan life, largely self-imposed as the result of pursuing a chimera called poetry. Maybe that’s why my behavior has been so spectacularly consistent. I haven’t had the financial means to indulge my desires. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. And read. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved writing. I’ve done what I could to support myself with menial jobs that provided just enough money to procure shelter, food, and a few creature comforts.

Which isn’t to say I’ve been free of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy has been a pretty useful cover for working around people I could not stand. It has been a tool of survival. I don’t have any reservations in that regard. No one can hold down a job without pretending to like people you otherwise loath. Particularly managers and supervisors.

What troubles me now isn’t a chaos of contradictory actions left in my wake, but the inheritance of the decisions I made when I was in my 20s. Despite the mythology of opportunity engraved in the stone of the great American swindle, there are few opportunities available to those below a certain income. And those opportunities are becoming fewer as the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. The career path you have chosen after leaving high school, if not before, will remain your career path for the rest of your life.

I decided very early in life to become a writer. This was at a time when it was still somewhat possible to make a career out of writing. Not journalism, necessarily, which used to be a pretty good opportunity for up and coming writers, but creative writing: novels and short stories and poetry. Writers such as Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Joan Didion, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates demonstrated that it could be done.

I recognized by the time I was 18 that, unless I hit the jackpot à la Brautigan or Kerouac, I would never be financially well off. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. But then, I was only 18, it was 1966, and Bob Dylan made the open road look sexy and cool. “How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / like a rolling stone.”

The biggest change I saw in people came between 1970 and 1980. People who, in their 20s, had been full of passion and creativity and joyfully embraced a life of simple, inexpensive pleasures, became obsessed with careers in their 30s. They became dull, lifeless zombies. It was sad.

For someone who prides themselves on their creativity, it is embarrassing to admit to being so consistent, particularly when it comes to one’s principles. I wish I could say I have changed my mind more often. But I haven’t. I have always despised war, the military, the ludicrous posturing of male aggression, a vulgar, craven materialism that seems so much a peculiarly American trait, willful ignorance, bullying, intellectual squalor, Babbitry, and sentimentality.

The one area where I have felt the most out of control, the most regret for past actions and stupid, mean things that I have said, is anger. Rants. Dry drunks. Occasions upon which I am grateful there wasn’t a recording device around.

I’ve never hit anyone, killed anyone, or cheated anyone. Never stole, never told a lie that hurt anyone. This is depressing. I’m starting to feel like a little goody two-shoes.

The closest I have come to betraying my principles, is when, in a moment of weakness, circa 1973, when I was in my mid-twenties, I applied for a job at Lockheed. My application was not taken seriously. No one called for an interview. I can’t even remember what I applied for. I probably left that part blank. I just wanted a job that paid enough money to allow me to rent a decent apartment and feed myself.

Life must have been very different in Montaigne’s time. It is highly probable that I simply haven’t been tested. Life was rougher in his day. My life has never been so hard that I’ve been tempted to steal or kill. I’ve had it pretty good as far as that’s concerned.

“No one makes a definite plan of his life,” says Montaigne. “Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.”

What if you become the sea itself? One day salt and waves, the next day vapor splayed out against the sky. One day ice. The next day bubbling and boiling.

But always water. “The best man is like water,” says Lao-tzu. “Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it so near Tao.”

Reality Is A Cobra In A Magician's Bag

2011-08-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

I like crowded restaurants where plates and silverware clatter and different conversations go on simultaneously at all the tables, voices meshing and sewing and interweaving. Looms of sound and image. Keep your sleeves off the table there’s bound to be goop or syrup. Waiters and waitresses are all busy. It is a marvel how they remember what plate goes to which person. The patience is monumental. Flavors search for you as you search for flavors.

I turn to answer the glass, the structure of things. The light that separates night from day, day from night, and the light in between. The twilight light. Half light. Light of reminiscence. Reflection. Moisture. Coiled hose, still dripping. The strange silence amid the tangle of plants.

Orchids tremble in the smell of dirt. The greenhouse humidity brings tears of sweat to the skin of men with the sea in their eyes.

The words drink themselves drunk, until there is history. Buffalo graze on South Dakota hills. The morning has a girth and heft, it has been hammered together in a valley of sweating gods. The day is bronze. Our effort, as artists, is to make the invisible visible. Piebald, slalom, and facet. Robin Blaser bends over the steering wheel, thinking of the miracles of Mary in Egypt.

What do you call the craft of the poet? How does a poet barter for food? What form of work is it to build a house of words? For what flowers? What African birds? What new Picasso knocks at the door of the new? What stream of words turn to limestone and grow hungry for heft? Sometimes the river finds itself in a kitchen sink. There is power in walking. There is a wilderness in words. You can go anywhere. Reality is a cobra in a magician’s bag.

Linger there in the trees and listen to the birds. Robins, sparrows, jays. Bobolinks, flickers, cedar waxwings. The cliffs are vertiginous. Nothing represents anything. Each thing is solidly its own thing. Unique. Rough. Smooth. Edged. Round. We are in the realm of the immediate. A woman gazes out of the window. Someone across the street is sawing and hammering. The city is the human grasp. Property is the blade of exclusion. There is a large, interior war in everyone. The battle for autonomy. Freedom from the needs of the body and its insane desires.

Summer warms the wood of the boardwalk. Abstractions kill the clouds. The clouds kill abstractions. No ideas but in things. No prawns but on prongs. Everything is in flux. Powerful flux. Even flux is in flux. Flux would make a good name for a laundry detergent. Churn of water and clothes and suds. The noise of machines. The punch of the real. Designs hammered into leather. Thesis flies when the tongue wags. Have you ever seen a tongue wag? No, but I have seen a thesis fly. Flutter in words and hover over a sheet of paper like an hallucination of animals. Animals that appear hungry. Hungry for expression. Hungry for meat. The expression of meat in hooves and legs and muscle and blood.

Images on a cavern wall. A sacred subterranean world of stalagmites and stalactites and dripping limestone columns and places were the skulls and bones of Leviathan mammals repose in the soft cool dust of eternity.

Paradigms of stone, beautiful asymmetries, curves, voluptuous lines adjusting with mastery and grace to the incongruities of stone, horses stampeding Paleolithic plains. The air is charged. Dragonflies hum over lava beds. Obsidian bubbles. Bare feet. Fires in pools of water. There is no point. Nothing with a point. The mind is a ship sailing insoluble water. Waves are ovations, water applauding the infinite horizon. There is a railroad underwater. We can hear it gurgle.

My words are contrary to the world. My words run wild among olives, participles tart and luminous. The sun is a bomb of continuous explosion. Explosions of gold that drool warmth among the bones. That lick the skin until it is dark. Nerval dreams in a forest where the trees eat the light and birds in their parliaments chatter until the sun drops.

Poke the fire. The flames curl around the wood. Flames from the words squeezed until the juice of meaning dribbles on paper. All shook up. Please don’t step on my blue suede shoes. The effervescent hair of the trees in the emerging wind is a mark of ablution. Sandstone indicates the passage of spirit.

Capitalism is dying. The dollar is losing its value. People are buying gold like crazy. The flow of money has stopped. The market is black and gangrenous. I wear whatever is tangible. These are tangible years. These are empirical years. Time itself has become obsolete. Talk is nimble in the bars where dissolution grows ripe and the faces are wooden and women cover their bodies in tattoos. An alligator rides a woman’s bicep. The sheen of the bar reveals the grain of mahogany. A brook ripples through a man’s mind.

Let’s all yell French ocher! French ocher! French ocher! at the dump. Morality is a thing of the past. The halcyon past. It’s been ripped to shreds. It’s worthless. It’s taking up room. Valuable room. Box it. Put it in the attic. Build a birdhouse. Make it out of clay. Shoot the rain. Shoot it with a machine gun. .50 caliber Browning. With butterfly bullets and the brain of a moose.

If you’re looking for coherence you should visit the ocean. There is wisdom in the ocean. The wisdom of salt. The wisdom of depth. The wisdom of wave and wind and trough and crest. Essence and flight and hymn and marrow. Push and pull. Scurry and lark. Watch those waves swell, grow higher, crest, and curl, and crash into the sand. The way the water murmurs and whispers as it moves up the sand, then pulls back, revealing bubbles, little holes and places where the sand puckers, reflects the clouds until it dries.

The sky is butter at sunset. The blue of the sky darkens into vermilion and solferino. Star by star glimmers into incident scintillation. The water comes in again, slaps itself down, and says listen, listen to this eagerness, this eagerness to engulf. To seduce. To bring you into my depths, where it is dark and silent at the bottom. Where walls of rock glide with the smoothness of breath into an abyss of lambent apparitions. Where Neptune sits on a coral throne, and the light turns blue as the language of drifting souls. Where quarts of eye and spine move in the lassitude of reverie. Where idioms of being fold into light. And the ink of eternity trembles on the verge of language.

The Summer Of My Awakening

2011-07-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

Beyond this universe of countless worlds and stars I find many more, wrote Philip Whalen in July, 1965. Beyond this temporary imagination I call myself and mine there are countless others. Far away, all by their lonesome.

Where was I in July, 1965? Who was I, in July, 1965?

I was a 17 year old high school graduate who was clueless about the future. I had no particular ambition, other than some vague sense of becoming an artist, probably a painter. I was not a big reader at the time, nor had any intellectual inclinations outside of a fondness for Shakespeare. I was adrift, inchoate, with nebulous longings and opaque intuitions.

I was living at my father’s house in Seattle. I had one other brother, and two stepbrothers, who were also living there. My stepbrother Mike, who had been one year ahead of me in high school, had graduated the year before and was working at one of the manufacturing plants at Boeing. He seemed to belong to another world. A notorious bon vivant and lady’s man in high school, he became silent and distant and carried a large black toolbox. My brother was four years younger me, still just a kid. The other stepbrother was the youngest, a quiet, obedient little fellow who would one day become a Republican, supervise a department at Boeing, and drive a Leviathan four-by-four.

I had to fill my summer with something other than loafing. My father was a man who believed strongly in the character-building value of work. He did not take kindly to malingerers, particularly when the malingering had the appearance of habit and earnest intent. I was now officially out of school. Lacking a fuller, more defined goal, a means to an income and independent way of life that did not smack too heavily of tedium and cramped, spirit-killing routine, I decided to postpone my entry into the world of commerce and industry at least another month or two. I decided to go visit my mother in San José, California, who was married to a car salesman named Carl, an affable, balding, middle-aged man with a nice sense of humor.

My mother was living in a two-bedroom apartment with a swimming pool in the central courtyard of the building. She worked as a secretary. I was pretty much on my own during the day. I spent a lot of time by the pool, lying on an adjustable chaise lounge listening to a transistor radio. Hits that summer included “You Were On My Mind,” by We Five, “Help!,” “Ticket To Ride,” and “Yesterday,” all by the Beatles, “Unchained Melody,” by the Righteous Brothers, “Just A Little,” by the Beau Brummels, “California Girls,” by the Beach Boys, “Come See About Me,” by the Supremes, and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stones.

I liked being underwater a lot. I could stay underwater for an amazingly long time. I enjoyed hovering on the bottom like a manatee. I surfaced once just as a man in a business suit was preparing to dive in to save me. He thought I had drowned. He was quite relieved to find that I hadn’t. I was relieved that I surfaced in time to prevent him from jumping into the pool in his suit.

My mother got fed up with me lollygagging around. She and Carl drove to a nearby Car Wash and waited in the car while I went to inquire about a job. I felt very awkward. I had never asked anyone for a job before. I definitely didn’t want one. I preferred swimming and TV. But I recognized the fact that I would be turning 18 in a few weeks and that the luxurious irresponsibleness of childhood was about to go away for good. I hoped the manager of the car wash would recognize instantly that washing cars would be a ludicrous pursuit and a terrible incongruity for a shy and surly 17 year old fresh out of high school and urge me to seek employment elsewhere. He didn’t. Much to my amazement, he hired me. I started the next day.

I lasted four days. Four days of rubbing cars with a rag. That’s all I did. It seemed incomprehensible that rubbing cars with rags was any kind of a way to make money. I worked with a man who appeared to be in his late 20s. One day, a car appeared and some men got out and arrested the man. Handcuffed him and led him away. I never found out what this was about. No one stopped working. We all just kept rubbing cars with our rags as the man was led away. In some marvelously intuitive way, I realized that the captivity of this man being led to the car was not much different than the captivity of wiping cars with rags for eight hours in exchange for money.

My mother was not the least bit pleased when I told her I had quit my job at the car wash. She persuaded me to make a visit to the navy recruitment office at a nearby shopping center. I did it to please her. There was no way on earth I was going to join any branch of the military. The navy seemed far more benign than the army, just in case I fell prey to the lure of life in the military and an immediate solution to my employment problem, but four years rather than two gave me serious pause. I told the man I would give the offer serious thought. He gave me some pamphlets, which I threw away as soon as we got back to the apartment.

I was aware that when I turned 18 I would have to register with the draft, and that there was a war going on in Vietnam, but I did not think of it as a war, it seemed to be more of an occupation. Everyone was told that Vietnam was being invaded by communists and that U.S. intervention was required to keep the Vietnamese safe from communism. If Vietnam fell, the rest of the world was in dire jeopardy. It was all a bunch of bs as far I was concerned. Growing up, adults perplexed me with their fear of communism. They talked about it as if it were a disease like polio or tuberculosis. I never understood it. It was simply a political system. How could a political system hurt anyone? It made no sense.

I knew instinctively that I was not cut out for the military. It would be a disaster. Means would have to be found to avoid it, but that particular summer, it was still a distant reality. In fact, it seemed more than that: it seemed to be a total irreality. There hadn’t been that much protest to it yet, but I sensed something immoral about it, something nefarious and completely wrongheaded, and wanted nothing to do with it.

I also met a young woman named Jill that summer. She was 15, a couple of years younger than me, and was a member of the Santa Clara Swim Club. She was smart, pretty, and athletic, in many ways the quintessential California girl. Unwittingly, she became something of a guru to me. She was much more aware of current trends, and this was an age in which fashion was more than a superficiality, but a whole new way of perceiving and thinking and being in the world. She was aware of figures like Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.

Jill had a passion for the British rock groups just coming into fashion. Except for the Beatles, I hadn’t seen what any of them looked like. I was a bit startled the first time I saw the Rolling Stones. I was familiar with some of their early hits, such as “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly classic, and I had imagined them as being very cool in the manner of Steve McQueen, or James Dean, detached but masculine, tough but vulnerable. Well-groomed and slick like Ed Byrnes’s “Kookie” on the TV show 77 Sunset Strip.

This was patently not the case. Their hair was not only incredibly long, but shaggy, their expressions strangely, unashamedly effeminate. Not sissy effeminate; effeminate in a challenging, surly, rebellious way. It was the effeminacy of libertine outlaws, romantic rakehells, audacious sybarites.

I was confused. I didn’t know what to make of these Rolling Stones, whether to mock them, or emulate them. They were so contrary to the image of the American male embodied by Elvis and Yul Brynner and John Wayne. There was nothing about them to suggest stoicism and taciturnity. They looked neither combative, nor aggressive, nor hard or emotionally sterile. They looked wild and subversive, more like the tough, motorcycle jacketed rockers of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent than the modish, somewhat genteel look of the Beatles, but without the usual male hubris. There was an evident sensitivity there they made no effort to hide or contain. They resembled the romantic poets whose portraits adorned the walls of an English literature class I had taken in high school, Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, with a large dollop of James Dean’s male vulnerability and intensity mixed in for good measure. I sensed in this new look and music a path opening up, a fresh new potential for creating a life of poetry and creativity. When I returned to Seattle that August I felt that something in me had changed, but what, or how, I couldn’t say. The standards for what constituted the good life seemed less credible, and quite possibly harmful. I had been offered a new possibility.

Possibilities. There was more than one world.

And then it happened. I was riding with a couple of pals in a ’55 Plymouth sedan, on our way to a junkyard to buy a used automobile part. I heard “Like A Rolling Stone” blare from the backspeakers, “how does it feel / to be without a home / like a complete unknown / like a rolling stone,” and that was it. I felt like I exploded all at once into the person I was somehow meant to be.

Driven To Drive

2011-07-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

A central fact of my existence has been defined by driving. Stepping on a pedal, feeding gas to a set of pistons, moving through space and time in a shell of glass and steel, hands on a steering wheel, eyes forward, occasionally checking the rear view mirror, changing lanes, passing other cars, going places in what amounts to a stupor most of the time, devoting just enough attention to the vagaries of the external world to prevent collision and death.

My first car was a blue Ford ’55 station wagon. The paint had worn and the outer shell had a somewhat mottled, calico look, that I very much enjoyed. It looked funky and strangely welcoming. I can’t remember what became of that car. I was 18, fresh out of high school, my highest ambition in life was to become perpetually drunk, party, chase girls, and welcome whatever life and adventure happened to plop on my adolescent plate. I remember taking a trip to the ocean with a group of friends, four men and four women, caravanning in two cars. Since I had a station wagon, my car was loaded with cases of beer. We went to Oceanshores, a little resort town on the Washington coast with a long broad sandy beach, built a bonfire, swilled beer, got drunk, laughed and frolicked until it was time to return home. One of the cars returned without a member, a tall, affable, though highly volatile young man from North Dakota, who had chosen to wear a wet suit and flippers, got into an argument with the members of the other car, insisted on stopping and getting out, and hitchhiked back to Seattle in his wet suit and flippers.

I went a long stretch without owning a car, or driving, in my late teens and early 20s. I moved to San José, California, and lived very simply while attending San José City College. This was 1966 and the Zeitgeist was very much on my side. It was considered cool to be poor, avoid commodities, cars and houses in particular, and commune intimately with the planet. Much better to walk barefoot and feel the grass and asphalt beneath one’s feet than the rubber and plasticity and linoleum and tile of a world grown severely Cartesian and detached from the natural world. It was high virtue to shun the world of commerce and industry, vigorously protest the war in Vietnam which was an immoral, sinister extension of capitalist predation, tune in, drop out, and absorb the wisdom of the east. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Taoism. The Beatles incorporated the sitar into rock ‘n roll and incense burned and hair grew long and clothing got colorful and zany. It was a good time. The Volkswagen bus was hugely popular. It was low key, funky, and easy to work on.

I got married in 1970 and we bought a Volvo. I don’t remember much about it, except that one morning it wouldn’t start, which put me into a towering rage, and made me late for school. San José did not have a viable public transit system. I waited an hour for a bus to come, which never did come. The marriage didn’t work out, and a few years later, I found myself back in Seattle.

From 1975 to 1978 or so I drove a four-door Dodge Dart. This was a good car, reliable and easy to drive, but at the time I did not really want or need a car. The Dart had belonged to my stepmother. My parents insisted that I take it. I told them I did not make enough money to properly take care of it. I can’t remember what made me finally give in to their insistence, but the results were sad. Unable to maintain it, or buy insurance, the car eventually decayed into immobility. For a time, I played a game with the meter maid. It was parked on a city street. The apartment building in which I lived did not have a garage or driveway. In Seattle, you can keep a car parked on the street for a maximum of three days. On the fourth day, I checked the tires. There was a chalk mark on the rear right tire. I removed it with a rag. This continued for about a week. The meter maid decided to get tricky and left a tire mark on the left side, on the side opposite from the curb. But I got it. This went on until I sold the car, which wasn’t even running. I think I sold it for $50 dollars. The people that bought it were extremely happy. To this day I wonder why. What is it about a ’65 Dodge Dart that made them so happy? Their happiness made my dereliction seem all the worse.

My next car was a Toyota two-door sedan and appeared during my second unfortunate marriage. I have few memories of it. I do remember waking up one morning to discover that some malefactor had systematically gone down 19th Street on Capitol Hill and shot out the windows of each car, ours included. We had to pay to have the windows replaced. After our divorce, I resorted once again to Seattle’s public transit system, and rode the 43, 14, and 7 to and fro from the University District, a ride of about 10 minutes, enough to read a paragraph or two, or gaze out the window dreamily on way to work, or even more dreamily on my way home from work.

The car my wife and I now own is a red ’94 Subaru which continues to run quite well (knock on wood) although a few mufflers have rusted through and fallen off. This is because our drives tend to be very short, little errands we run to Costco and the grocery store, so that condensation builds without being fully evaporated. The furthest we have driven the car was Denver, Colorado, in 1995. We went to visit a friend of my wife’s who was attending Naropa, in Boulder. I remember how the brake linings smoked and burned on our way down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, on Interstate 70.

Roberta and I dream of one day not owning a car at all. No more expenses paid for oil changes and check-ups, car insurance, gasoline. During the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we did not have the heart to drive at all. We stopped driving. It wasn’t a protest staged to effect change, because such a minor alteration of our behavior would be futile as far as bringing the nefarious oil industry to its knees. We just sickened each time we got behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. It felt like slapping mother earth full in the face. I bought some gear at REI, a little backpack and carrier for my wallet, and incorporated errands into my daily run. It felt good. When the ultimate mode of transport becomes your own body, you feel in harmony with the air, the birds, the trees, and everything else sweet and good on the surface of his old spinning planet.

A Braque Afternoon

2011-07-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Words carved out of air tickle the lucidity of mosquitoes during the revelation of pearl. Cylinders push the car. Space cures the gantries by duet. Limestone pipes heft the omen. Personification fantasizes a steam.

Brocaded proposals solicit tin zipper this. A Braque afternoon has energy. Anger stirs the train. Nimble dollops of brown put emotion in motion. Syllables house eyes.

Hirsute the may jar comb. Embody impulse wash the confusion with music. The sopranos jingle their processions behind the ink. Summer flows from the breath of spring. A box squeezed red until it rumors agitation.

This mutates into utility. Problems begin to stray into clarity. Moccasins enhance the talk of dinosaurs. We map the incense with bells and bamboo. Buffalo grab swimming and like it.

A cut in the car bleeds less than a carat. Oats are experience consonants are bowls. Humor description be an oval. Be a vague area in the Louvre yet serious as keys with a pungency of underworld Etruscans holding candles below the army of Philistines stirring our resilience. It ruminates Bach to a foot below me.

Excursion knots a despair when the swamp is privately painted. Languor has a spice that dazzles even the frogs. Touch personality with a decorated towel. The force of doctrine is rough on a puddle. Oblivion’s lobsters burst out of a pronoun pinching the salt of stenography.

Wave the river scrupulously. Drag the paradigm out of the blob with a gargantuan yank. Birch and glue the skin. There is more theorem than kerosene in the meaning knob. Semantic trousers sewn with a walking eye.

The gift of fiction explains the bones of the cuckoo. Injury is more flower than wound. Navigation does not alter the sphere. Perception earns the treasure of your sun. Those who collide eventually take to flipping.

Clapping begins with the ravenous hands of a bemused public attention, and ends with the bottle of a hushed voice. Let’s get our airplanes in order. Do nebulas in the flower parlor. Hum herds of meandering sound during a luminous cotton. Give hectic legs to a curious dance.

My chair is entirely metaphorical and upside down. If you find me sitting in it, you will find me upside down. Therefore is blossoming a suspension and suspension, however suspended, suspect in sustenance. The rascally gloves of time squirm in the fingers of bias. Erect a salon of wax then savor a vapor of wick and wicket.

Lure words to the brain absorption is hinged to mustard. Punish the tease of the fabric not the vividness of the skin. Montmartre bangs in its slants. Form heaves with simultaneity. Nothing succeeds like the coherence of wind.

On Being Naked

2011-07-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Fire engines and pigeons and rain, wrote Philip Whalen one day. Business as usual. But here is my question: where is the duct tape?

My wallet is falling apart. I’m reluctant to give things up, especially wallets. I get attached. I especially get attached to wallets. They become an appendage. They ride all day in my back pocket. For years. They are homes away from homes. My entire history and identity is contained in my wallet.

Driver’s license, credit cards, library cards, Sound Health & Wellness Trust, Seattle Art Museum, AAA, Elliott Bay Book Card, REI membership card, Amnesty International, Staples, a Metro Card from New York that I saved because of the quote on the back, from Confessions, by Saint Augustine: "Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you."

Brandon Downing, Sureshot Coffee, Seattle Wrote, Dark Coast Press, Metro Moggie Cat Sitting. This is my portrait. This is who I am. King County U.S.A. voter. South West Plumbing. Allstate Insurance. Tip Chart. Silver Platters. Gretchen Michels Hair Technician. Social Security. National Waffle Association.

The strangest thing about going naked outdoors, in the woods, at a beach, somebody’s house, is being without one’s wallet. One feels utterly disconnected from one’s social identity. Not having the proper identity can lead to trouble.

Back in the 80s I moved to a different apartment and neglected to get my address changed on my driver’s license. The entry door was shoddily made, a hollow core door that had warped, having a western exposure. You had to push on it several times to make sure it was closed all the way. I was pushing on it one summer afternoon as I was leaving for work and a woman cop spun into the driveway, got out, and asked what I was doing. I told her I was checking to see the door was locked. She asked to see my I.D. I handed her my driver’s license. The address didn’t match. I tried to convince here I actually lived there. She was on the verge of arresting me. Happily, the next door neighbor came out and identified me. Satisfied that I was not a robber, the lady cop cautioned me to get my address changed on my driver’s license, and went on her way.

The duct tape was in the bottom cupboard, on the bottom shelf behind the clothes iron. I wrapped a small piece around the part of my wallet where the leather had split and its engorged contents were spilling out.

A man in Helsinki affirms that the people there do not rely on language as a key to one’s social identity as they do in France, England, and the United States. I disagree. I believe this was true about the United States some thirty or forty years ago, when using big words would identify one as an educated and cultured member of the upper class, despite the actuality of your income. Now it’s all about money. There is no longer any pretense to culture and education. Retail managers have at best a primitive use of the language and frequently misspell and misuse letters in their memos and signs and it does not bother them in the least. One finds typos and poor grammatical construction in newspapers and magazines with disquieting frequency. Nobody seems to mind. Nobody seems to care about language anymore. People no longer pride themselves on their education and command of language. It’s all about money. Look at Sarah Palin.

Age imposes an identity on you. Youth, middle age, old age. When you get old and complain about things you get called a curmudgeon. Your observations are discredited. You say negative things not because your observations are acute or your life experience has empowered your capacity for perception and thought but because you’re old and crabby. Old people crab about things all the time. They have back problems. Arthritis. Envy. Jealousy of the young.

It’s hard to tell people that the planet is dying without being called a curmudgeon. Or wallowing in pessimism porn. Nobody wants to hear that the planet is dying.

And who would? I don’t like to hear that the planet is dying, that by 2050 all marine life in the oceans will be extinct. But that’s what the scientists have been saying. It’s got nothing to do with my age.

Michael McClure writes: WITHIN I FELT REVOLT AND RIPPED MYSELF FROM MYSELF. / I FEEL REVOLT AND RIP MYSELF, til my / eyes spread and my nostrils burn, become the infant / of myself’s desires.

What an astonishing statement. The violence of revolt against the staleness of being comfortable in a single, unchanging identity, a creature of habit, a being cloistered in smug delusions, unable to live fully and broadly, incapable of making a sustained deferment of opinion and judgment, of hatching out of a shell of habit and outlook and exposing the tenderness of one’s authentic being to the actualities and unfiltered sensations of experience. What we desire and what we get are at odds with each other, wrote John Dewey in “Art As Experience.”

One can be naked and yet fully clothed, or fully clothed and naked. Nakedness is a state of mind.

Nakedness is also being fully exposed, without any clothes. Animals are never naked. Or people covered head to toe with tattoos.

We all wear masks. You have to. You cannot hold down a job without presenting a false front to the people you truly despise. Hypocrisy is always a pejorative term. Perhaps it should not be.

Skin is the frontier between our bodies and the external world. But skin is not concrete. It’s an organ in which the outer world is constantly permeating. There is no real division there. We are intimately involved with the world. There is continuous merging. Our experience with the world is like a conversation. There are pauses, inflections, interchange, yet each speaker retains their identity even as they merge their ideas and thoughts with the ideas and thoughts of their partner. Some reach a conclusion and are clothed. Some never reach a conclusion and are eternally, radically naked. There is often a consummation, but no conclusion. No buttons buttoned. No laces tied. No shirt tucked in.

In the morning, when I put my clothes on, there is a weight that is not simply the weight of my clothes, my jeans, the jingle of change in my pocket, the final clasping of my belt has the feel of armor. A psychological armor. Assuming a role. Getting into costume. One almost wishes there were lines already prepared for utterance. A story. A conflict of which one knew its dimensions, the size of its circumference, its pitfalls and mines, its weak points and strong points. But there are no lines. Costume, sure. Lines, never. You do that yourself. Compose yourself as you go along. Try to get it right.

At night, when I take my clothes off, I usually start with my pants, let them drop, wrestle my legs out, then unbutton my shirt, toss it on the couch. It feels great. I love that feeling. Love being rid of all that appurtenance. And then there is the final undressing, which is letting go of consciousness, and going to sleep, and sliding into oblivion.

The night is itself an undressing. The world takes off its sky and exposes itself to the stars. Then morning comes with a fresh set of circumstances and errands. Vestments of the new day. Rain on the hydrangeas. Delicious warmth of mid July. Fire engine siren. Car honk. Rise and fall of a cat breathing slowly on a pillow. Smell and taste of coffee. Doors slammed. Ladders raised. Ambitions pursued.

The ultimate wig and chemise is desire. Those are the boots we walk in. Desire. Black, shiny desire. Yearning. Hunger. Revenge.

Some wear uniforms. Some go with cotton and rayon. Some with silk and denim. But it all comes down to finding warmth and protection among the thorns of daily existence. Perception, says McClure, is a shape of the darkness seeing itself.

The softness of human skin is shocking in its vulnerability. Which is why sociopaths seem reptilian. And strippers appear Circean, turning men to pigs.

Desire is clothing. Nakedness is that place beyond death where the dawn sleeps and protons glimmer in and out of emptiness.

Even the president of the United States, sang Mr. Dylan, must sometimes have to stand naked.

Reflections On The Fourth

2011-07-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

I hate the Fourth. But I love fireworks.

Unless you have a place of refuge, a cabin in the woods, an isolated vacation rental near Moclips, or reservations at the Hotel Sube in Saint Tropez, you cannot escape the Fourth. Its noise and imbecility are ubiquitous.

Cretins of all stripe and color are given carte blanche on the Fourth to blow their fingers off, destroy property, and commit general mayhem. This is their day. Their day to plumb the depths of imbecility and blacken the name of prudence with acts of raw insanity.

The use of fireworks is banned in Seattle. The regulation is heartily, meticulously, and emphatically unenforced. I have not seen a single cop fine or arrest anyone for discharging fireworks. Ever.

When I say I love fireworks, I’m not referring to the crap sold outside city limits, M80s, bottle rockets, cherry bombs, and sparklers, I’m referring to the big stuff: aerial shells fired out of mortars buried in sand on a floating platform, usually a barge. The kind that squiggle hundreds of feet in the air like an incendiary spermatozoa and explode into chrysanthemums and showers of crackling rain. The shows are carefully orchestrated and timed. They rarely go on for more than a half hour. Unlike the neighborhood cretins who keep everyone awake until 2:00 in the morning.

Seattle used to have two big fireworks displays, one on Puget Sound, the other on Lake Union. Now we have just the one, provided that enough sponsors step forward to finance it. This year’s display was sponsored primarily by Microsoft and Starbucks.

Roberta and I headed down to Lake Union at about 9:00 p.m. Lake Union is a small lake sandwiched between Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east and are joined by the Lake Washington Ship Canal. There is very little open shoreline on Lake Union, which is densely populated with marinas, restaurants, businesses, and houseboat neighborhoods.

We found a spot near Signature Yachts, a viewpoint blocked by a high railing. A few other people were lingering there, mostly young couples with their kids. I pondered the possibility of climbing up and sitting on the railing, but it was too high to make that a feasible enterprise. It would be a precarious perch. I gazed at the water below, which was shallow enough to reveal a huge pipe. If I did manage to get my butt ensconced on the top rail, and happened to fall, that’s what I would hit. Not to mention getting soaked. This summer has been the coolest I have known in Seattle. Highs have barely reached 70. Getting soaked was not an idle prospect to be trifled with.

I folded my arms on the railing and rested my head on my arms.
There were three enormous yachts floating in the distance. Each was as large as a three-story building. I pointed to them and told Roberta that’s where our Social Security and Medicare were going. I indulged in a brief fantasy of aiming a bazooka at each and watching as they exploded into splinters and flames.

There was a huge crowd at Gasworks Park on the other side of the lake. We could hear music. I thought at first that there was a live band playing, but as soon as I heard the distinctive chords of Jimi Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner," it became obvious the music was taped. Almost all of the songs that were played dated from the 60s and 70s. It occurred to me that that music is now 40 to 45 years old. If, say, in 1968 they had played music that old we would have been listening to “Doin’ The Raccoon” and “When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.”

I can’t remember a time when I felt anything like a patriotic emotion. I remember a time when I felt lucky to have been born in a country that offered such a high quality of life, free and open access to education, colleges where the tuition was so low as to be non-existent to nominal, public schools that encouraged students to think, where learning anything by rote was discouraged as the activity of a crass and vulgar mind, doctors that made house calls and charged a very modest fee, books published for the quality of writing and originality of idea rather than sensationalism or fame, free clinics, free parking, water fountains galore, roads and highways where hitting anything like a pothole or bump only occurred in the most remote and dismal of places, apartments and houses where the rent was so cheap you could get by on a part time job while pursuing a more creative occupation such as painting or writing and have plenty of money left over for food and bills and eating out occasionally, or a lot. Where the idea of a bridge collapsing was as remote as a volcano erupting in midtown Manhattan. Where a single parent doing even a menial job as a janitor or parking attendant could afford a house and raise a family while the other parent stayed home to watch the kids and maintain a clean and orderly house.

That country is long gone. It feels so utterly remote now as to constitute a once mythical utopia, the lost continent of Atlantis or the golden city of El Dorado.

I feel a great admiration for the people who fought against the British in the late 1700s. They put their lives on the line for a cause and the misery of a great injustice. They refused to be exploited. I wish it were that way now. The United States is once again under attack. But this time it is under attack by a tiny cabal of über-rich oligarchs. The enemy is insidious. Treacherous. When the President publicly states that he is considering cuts to vital programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, one realizes that one is no longer represented by the people holding power, but threatened. Under attack.

Thoughts of patriotism do not enter my mind on the Fourth. No more than a belief in Santa Claus fuels my enjoyment of Christmas. I just like the fireworks. Those immense explosions. The burst of colors and lights followed seconds later by a loud report. Thud. Bang. Boom. It’s exhilarating. Like watching the universe burst into life out of the void. Out of nothingness.

The United States, as a political entity, fills me with shame and revulsion. It murders, pillages, oppresses and tortures using national security as the flimsiest of excuses for such flagrant immorality. But the United States as a culture in which people such as Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau and Janis Joplin and Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and Billy Holiday and Mark Twain and Martin Luther King have been shaped is something else. It’s like a subterranean United States. It’s not the United States that is seen on television or babbled about on right wing radio shows. That United States is monstrous. Despicable and evil. The other United States, the one in which people find means to resist and lead lives of joyful energy and creativity, that one I can live in. That one doesn’t give me a bad conscience, or fill me with fear and loathing. That one isn’t called The United States. It doesn’t have a high falutin’ title. It’s the weird old America of Wild Bill Hickok and Sitting Bull. Vikings roasting a goat. Arapaho naming a mountain peak. Choctaw inventing verbs for sewing and talking and riding a horse to the moon.

Soft Warm Smooth And Conscious

2011-07-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

Is a line I stole from the poem Priapic Hymn
By Philip Whalen who apparently took the time
To celebrate slippery dong and balls all over
The appeal of this line if it is not apparent already
Is the lovely way it sums up the feeling of being
Alive and human a mammal with hair and legs
Testicles toenails fingernails opposable thumbs
Eyes ears nose a torso a cock a pair of shoulders
With a head on top thinking thoughts about consciousness
It’s my favorite topic my biggest fascination
My hypothesis concerning consciousness is this
As soon as nerves evolved a feeling of being alive blossomed
Out of what I’m not sure a glop of protein
That grew into stalks and eyeballs
And needed to eat to say alive and so went looking
For something to eat which requires a small degree
Of planning and strategy an organism is largely urged
To interact with the environment out of a desire to eat
Or procreate the whole thing is baffling what’s the purpose of it all
Where does it lead the planet is dying there are too many humans
         on it
You cannot say human intelligence developed so as to maintain
         balance
That clearly is not the case the planet is dying
From too many wars too much oil dug up and burned into the air
Radioactivity ignorance greed cruelty madness veins squirting
         blood
Bones protruded cadavers everywhere in the street
Rock stars riding in limousines dictators eating pretzels figure
         skaters
Twirling on Helsinki ice all aglitter all awhirl and why not it’s
         pretty
We all begin as an embryo a multicellular glop of neurons and glial
         cells
Which later turn into a dentist or dictator depending on a
         confluence
Of circumstances called destiny when the mouth develops a
         thought
Of raw sienna the need for expression is partially redeemed
In the movements of a brush on the surface of a canvas
Or a series of words written down on a sheet of paper or pumped
Into sound in the form of speech which is another form of
         gestation
The syllable is an embryo the sentence is a fetus a paragraph is a
         giraffe
Or elephant or ape or homo sapiens male or female Elton John or
         Lady Gaga

Words Words Words

2011-07-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

I have a head full of words. They’re easy to extract. I can either extrude them through my mouth, à la aluminum tubes or beryllium blocks, shaping them with my tongue and lips and filling them with air and sound, or write them down on paper, or a computer screen. But as soon as I launch one batch, another set of words appears, demanding expression. They seem to self-propagate.

I can’t get away from them. It’s part of being a human being and living within a certain culture. One that shares words. One that makes sounds that have meaning for one another.

And then one day I got drunk and starting tossing out words whether they made sense or not. I had a lot of fun doing that. I soon learned that the very process of tossing words out willy-nilly produces a state of intoxication. Handy, if you like being delirious, not so handy if you need to find employment.

Today I want to avoid anything unpleasant. Making an appointment to have a new molar installed, or doing the laundry. I often have an urge to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling.

Eyeballs are created out of muscle, jelly, blood vessels and nerves. Light waves stream through the jelly activating nerve impulses that carry the shapes and colors to the brain where they are identified according to patterns learned while growing up. Today those light waves consist of just about everything. Lamps, cat, stove, plants, sunlight, cars, rocks, towels, tomatoes, onions, jars, drawers, computer keyboard, computer screen, glasses, soap, coffee grinder, thermos. Words. More and more words. Fucking A.

And then there is the matter of ears. This morning I awoke to the sound of the washing machine. Though I didn’t know it was the washing machine. It sounded more like a cement truck whining away as it spewed wet cement into a cavity. It was a large, intrusive humming and whirring sound that later developed into a rumbling. The building shook. Someone was doing laundry early this morning. It must have been an emergency. Whoever it was must have needed some clean clothes pronto. The machine was set on heavy. What were they thinking of wearing? A double breasted cement suit? An earthquake? Tornado tennis shoes and a hurricane tie?

I was trying to listen to Hal Sparks on the radio. He’s filling in for Stephanie Miller and The Mooks. He’s a terrible radio host. He does not have a pleasant voice and his speech mannerisms are annoying. He inserts um between all of his words. This morning he was going on and on about how gays should be able to marry. Of course they should be able to marry. What a boring subject. Why does this need to be debated. Christians called in and said they objected. When gay people marry it destroys the institution of marriage. I don’t follow this logic. Sometimes people use words in a manner intended to convince you of something but the process gets so muddled it goes backwards. It reverses. Instead of sounding rational it sounds insane.

All marriage is is a promise to stay with someone for as long as possible. Until death do us part they say. So it’s pretty serious. That’s a heavy commitment. Because if you stay around anyone long enough, no matter how much you like them, it’s a guarantee they’re going to drive you crazy at some point. But that’s all marriage is. That simple promise. And whether you fulfill that promise is a lot of work. It’s not just words. Some things are just words. But marriage is not just words. It’s punching a wall instead of a person. Or staying by somebody’s bed when they’re sick. Possibly dying. It makes no difference whatever whether you have the same genitalia or not. Genitalia are only marginally involved. Either for having kids, or having a good time. But that’s not marriage. You can share the pleasures of genitalia without being married. People do it all the time.

So who wants to hear a bunch of crazy ass Christians denouncing gay marriage on the radio? Hal Sparks does. It makes him look cool and smart to argue with these people.

You never see words stuck in a beard like food. That’s because words are just sound and air. Hallucinations, really. Because they represent something or someone not present. If I say there is a giant parrot eating the Eiffel Tower it may or may not be true. I could even say it in French. Il y a un perroquet géant mangeant La Tour Eiffel. But that does not make it any truer. It may be true and it may not be true. You would have to go to France to find out. Or turn on the TV and see if anyone is reporting it.

There was a time when people used words like jewelry to show off their education. Big words like ‘distensible’ or ‘ithyphallic.’ But now that it has become cool to be ignorant and illiterate you don’t find that to be the case quite so much anymore. The American empire is crumbling and so is its language. Ironic, when you consider the fact that this is occurring during a time when people have access to so much information and so many tools for communication. But that’s why they invented twitter. So people could remain stupid while communicating with one another.

Stupidity has its charms, no doubt about it. But on balance, it is richer to be curious and expand your knowledge of things.

Because if you ever find yourself in prison, I guarantee that if you know enough words, you can always get out. Consciousness itself can be a prison. Ignorance is a prison. Language is the key to open the doors of that prison. Words words words said Hamlet with ironic contempt. You can never get rid of them and sometimes they tire your brain but most often they’re your ticket out of this world.

Breaking And Entering

2011-07-03T10:02:00.000-07:00

Last night I broke into the Louvre. I was home, reading a magazine, when I suddenly felt an acute hunger for art. Do you know what it is to crave something? Of course you do. But this was different. This was beyond craving. There is no word for what I felt. My blood was electric. I was driven. I felt like a tiger trapped in the furious oils of Delacroix.

I am not a young man. I know what desire is. I have been driven by it a thousand times to say stupid things and do stupid things and finish an evening’s revelry with the sting of remorse and the angst of dissolution. Multiply this by a hundred, by a thousand, and you will begin to get a glimmer of what drove me to break into the Louvre.

I discovered that breaking into the Louvre is easy. But there are alarms everywhere. Duh. It wasn't long before the police arrived.

They looked everywhere. But they did not know where to look. Police are unaccustomed with phenomena such as this. It is not in their training. And yet I was there. I was there the whole time.

You could see me in the Mona Lisa's smile. In the soft cerulean sky of Odilon Redon's Le Char d'Apollon. In the lush green trees of Titian's The Pastoral Concert. In the wings and golden halos of Giotto's Lamentation. In the candle flame and shadows of George de La Tour's Saint Joseph The Carpenter.

I'm the man in the tophat holding the rifle in Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People.

I'm the fur and jewels in Rembrandt's portrait of Henrickje Stoffels with a Velvet Beret. I'm the tenderness with which he painted her. The bristles of the brush. The texture of the paint. The moment itself forever eluding the vicissitudes of time.

I'm The Buffoon With A Lute, Pandemonium, and Boy With A Club Foot. I am the frill in Titian's Man With The Glove, the heavy black robe in Erasmus of Rotterdam. In Louis Le Nain's Peasant Family, I am a spoon and a ladle and a cat on the floor. I am a beard and a wrinkle. I am the dirt and the folds of old, dingy clothing. I am the table. The chairs. The darkness, the weariness, the quiet dignity and resignation.

I am the boy playing the flute in the middle of the painting. The flute is so thin you can barely see it, barely see that amid this misery is a boy playing a flute. It is a wonder. This kid playing a flute among these sad, bitter people. No one appears to be listening. The old man at the table under his big floppy hat appears to have lost all hope. He takes what is given. He assumes nothing. His feet rest solidly on the ground.

When it was agreed that no one was in the museum and that something accidental, bad wiring or a mouse, must have tripped the alarm the police left the museum and it all turned quiet again. I dripped from the ceiling in beads of light and made my way home in the soft Paris night. Someone shouted: look! A tiger! And someone else, no, no it is just a boy with a club foot. And someone else, no, it is neither a boy nor a tiger, it is a fierce woman in a green dress crossing a barrier of debris and wounded men clutching a rifle and a flag. The top of her dress is undone and her magnificent breasts show us the voluptuous promise of the future. Follow that woman's breasts! She is leading the way to wholeness and liberty. And one old man opened his eyes in wonder and said, mon Dieu, c'est le Char d'Apollon! The Louvre has escaped!

Making Sense Of Sense

2011-07-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

How many senses do I possess? Are there more than five? Is there a sense I haven’t discovered yet? Is poetry a sense, or simply a literary form? That is to say, is language an antenna, or a ganglionic mass of syntax and nerves?

If I had another sense, wouldn’t I simply sense it? I don’t think about touch, I touch. Don’t think about hearing. I hear. Don’t think about seeing. I see. Don’t think about tasting. I taste. If Ismell a rose I smell a rose. I don’t think about smelling a rose. I don’t think, smell a rose, then smell a rose. I simply smell a rose. None of these things are cerebral. They just occur. Happen.

But what if a sense were so subtle, I didn’t know I was sensing it, even though I was sensing it. Sensing the sense. Without sensing the sense. Because it’s too thin, too delicate, too ethereal.

But that doesn’t make any sense. How would I not know I was sensing something? Something not touch, or sound, or sight, or taste, or smell? Something ineffable. Something beyond the scope of language. Something I felt but could not say what I was feeling. Or that I could not affirm that what I sensed corresponded with something in the outside world. In the same way that something wet and sweet on my tongue is translated into a cherry, or an unpleasant quality on the skin is interpreted as cold, or something liquid and black and bitter to the taste can be identified as coffee.

Charles Olson did mention something about a proprioceptive sense. This is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body. The cavity of the body in which the organs are slung. Lungs, stomach, kidneys, intestines. All that gooey gooshy slimy convolution. Blood moving and moving through the veins, pumped by a muscle, the heart. The body of us as object which spontaneously or of its own order produces experiences of depth. A position, as being seated in front of a computer, a movie screen, cockpit of an airplane, or dentist’s office, someone, man, young woman, is bending over, concentrating heavily on our open mouth. They have latex gloves on their hands, and the radio is so low it can barely be heard. There are mountains on the ceiling. And a bright fluorescent light, for which the dentist has kindly provided sunglasses.

It gets to be a story. The senses combine to bring us the world, and it is delivered all at once, which makes it hard to organize in a paragraph. Poetry is more adept at this sort of thing.

Consciousness as ego, followed by judgment. Judgment has, of late, acquired a negative flavor. People often say: don’t judge me. Or, it’s so nice to be around friends who don’t judge you. That’s stupid. These aren’t friends, these are morons. I’m friends with people because they have judged me. They have judged me worthy to be a friend. And so there is friendship.

But’s matter for another discussion.

So let me ask you: do you have passions beyond your understanding? Beyond your control? Beyond the bounds of polite society? If civilization were to disappear tomorrow, would you miss it?

I would miss running water, electricity, and cellophane, but not much else. I imagine myself sometimes as living in harmony with the world, with nature, as a Laplander, a Sioux, a Choctaw, a Mongol shepherd or Celtic farmer circa 800 B.C. I could deal with that. No salt for my meat and vegetables, no place to shit except outside, behind a bush, but that’s no big deal. I would do that in exchange for a planet. Because the planet cannot sustain the kind of technology we have imposed on it for transport, houses, TV, computers and energy. The oceans are dying, the bees are dying, the planet itself is dying. I wonder if there will be enough protein left to begin another species. But how will they survive the radioactivity?

Certainly none of this makes sense.

And how do we know what is sensed is real? I have had my share of hallucinations. Hallucinations are fairly easy to identify. They’re like cartoons, all full of color and goofiness. Monsters, angels, phenomena not commonly found in the external world. But what of delusions? Beliefs that turn out to be false? Is there a surefire way to discriminate between what is real and what is not? If there is, I haven’t found it.

Let’s say you believe in God and one day a tornado comes along and blows your house away and kills your pets and spouse and children. Or leaves your pets and spouse and children safe and sound. But your house is gone. And you have no insurance or place to live, except the high school gymnasium, where the Red Cross has provided some blankets and a cot. Do you thank the same God who made the tornado for selecting you, out of all those other people, for saving your life? Or do you get pissed like Job, and say what the fuck, I was pious and prayed and went to church, and this is how you repay me? Destroy my house? My job? My friends and family?

Spinoza cautions us about language: Again, since words are a part of the imagination --- that is, since we form many conceptions in accordance with confused arrangements of words in the memory, dependent on particular bodily conditions, --- there is no doubt that words may, equally with the imagination, be the cause of many and great errors, unless we keep strictly on our guard. Moreover, words are formed according to popular fancy and intelligence, and are, therefore, signs of things as existing in the imagination, not as existing in the understanding. This is evident from the fact that to all such things as exist only in the understanding, not in the imagination, negative names are often given, such as incorporeal, infinite, &c. So, also, many conceptions really affirmative are expressed negatively, and vice versa, such as uncreate, independent, infinite, immortal, &c., inasmuch as their contraries are much more easily imagined, and, therefore, occurred first to men, and usurped positive names. Many things we affirm and deny, because the nature of words allows us to do so, though the nature of things does not. While we remain unaware of this fact, we may easily mistake falsehood for truth.

It’s so easy to slip up, and assume that an idea has weight, and substance, when, in fact, it is less substantial than a palace of vapor floating over Düsseldorf.

I believe, right now, this minute, that what I am sensing is summer, moderate warmth, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and the lingering taste of coffee, and fingers on a keyboard, dancing, making these signs, pixels, words, and if I want a boat, I will make a boat, write boat, and a boat exists, at least in my imagination, though in actuality, there is a boat in my future, assuming the future is real, which it is not, it is always a fiction, a ball of myriad possibilities, rolling toward the void. Where there is life and potential. And assurances and oceans. Floating a boat of the future on a suffusion of words.

Warm-Blooded Dreams

2011-06-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

Symposium on the Body’s Left Side, poetry by George Kalamaras
Shivastan Publishing, 2011

Imagine the warmth of a single life, a column of smoke, great crane migrations over the Ural mountains or the perfume of a Civet cat imprinted on handmade, Nepalese lokta paper in Kathmandu, Nepal, and you have a virtual approximation of the chapbook that is Kalamaras’s Symposium on the Body’s Left Side.

Kalamaras is a profoundly physical writer. Constant reference is made to physical sensation: breathing, smelling, touching, hearing, bleeding, healing, gnawing, seeping, tumbling, eating. His imagery abounds in sensual, erotic play: “… say my name sadly as you might the erotic texture of plankton,” “Would you kiss me even if I was not composed of starlight,” “I’ve spent so much time desiring women, I’m tired of my feet,” “I’d drag my paramecium self over the eyelid of certain women I’d one day hope to love.” The eroticism is mingled with celestial longing, with a craving for wisdom, the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of moss, and willow-root, and the heart pumping out blood in its cage of bone. There are numerous references to yogic lore and eastern religion, but the work itself remains true to the puckish instincts of poetry, which thrives on a playful contrariness, a subversive energy calling out constantly to the actualities of life.

It’s as if Kalamaras channeled Bo Diddley and the Buddha simultaneously. At the core of this work is a fabulous disparity, the fundamental paradox of all life: mortality. The inherent ephemerality of all living things. Curiously, this is the crisis that fuels all great art: the awareness that we are always in flux, and that with each ripening there comes a dissipation, fuels a mania for living as passionately and intensely as possible. “Then a sense of perspective frees me also,” observed Robert Duncan, “that I am indeed to die, as you are to die, makes life all mine to live.” The fuller resonance of this means that nothing circumscribes “the flowering of being into its particular forms.”

Symposium on the Body’s Left Side is part of an ongoing work called Bone Sutras.

In Hinduism, a sutra is a form of literary composition based on short, aphoristic statements. The texts were intended to be memorized by students, and so concision was a valued element in their composition.

Kalamaras makes a slightly different use of them; he combines riddles, koans, puzzles and occasional surrealist flourishes. He avoids strict linearity and logic in the service of a higher, more transcendent form of cognition. What Hart Crane described in a letter to Harriet Monroe as an “apparent illogic,” an inflection of language, that “operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish a claim to another logic, quite independent of the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed.”

Here, for example, is “Saluting the Bruise,” in which the poet remarks, through a series of puckish contradictions, on what Nietzsche referred to as the “eternal wound of existence.”

As if my heart was the canticle of the Milky Way, I am exact in my
         stance.
Yes, I’ve said it before. I am in the business of regressing evermore
         forward.

Chess? You require a blue and green board to combat your black
         and red regret?
I’ve skillfully hidden the black and blue, and now my strategy might
         slip?

How distinct from one another are we, really?
I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you
         speak through me in absolute threes.

As if my heart. As if my canticle. As if my Milky Way where the
         healing might begin.
I might be exact as an epaulet, confiscating the shoulder, even, of
         every civilian who dares salute the bruise.

This breath wherein the world goes on dying.
This breath wherein the world forever goes.

People tend to have strong feelings about the use of the second person as a literary strategy. Some people hate it. I like it. I like the ambiguity of it: the writer could be referring to the reader (or listener), to a hidden, mysterious identity, to oneself, which gives it an argumentative tinge, or to all of the above, simultaneously.

The line “I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you speak through me in absolute threes,” speaks to the circumstance of a rite, a ceremony of magic, a shamanistic journey. The combination of mirror and ants is effective; the one an object of reflection, the other a teeming, as of words, picking up pieces of nourishment from the world, and then descending into the ground, into a deeper realm where these articles are digested.

Kalamaras brings with this chapbook a beautifully crafted inclusion in his Bone Sutras series, which in itself offers something unusual to contemporary poets and writers: a sense of the sacred, certainly, but one which is delivered in words that have the juiciness of plums, the tart vivacity of wild chicory, and the spicy warmth of Ethiopian red pepper.

Two By Four

2011-06-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

Gallant finger. Nascent oak.

Rain agrees with myth. Visceral rips of rhetoric. Circulated comb invisible fruit. Morning in a taxi.

Intuitive blood. Iron being.

Cloth is living testament. Ravenous oval fireside spoon. Thin oddities mongrel truths. Circus where secrets sparkle.

Holy perspective. Esophageal hose.

Hilly conception in accentuation. Coffee under perpetual construction. Firmament dragging placental perception. Loads of jaunty angels.

Black hills. Startling beige.

Soap excels at tickling. Lobster juggling its scruples. Sunlight flopped on smelt. Romance of jingled adults.

Bistro palette. Splattered sweat.

Red house spitting knives. Language humors a syntax. Burning howling growling grammar. Focussed convocation of ears.

Spectral depth. Storied attitude.

Revelatory highway barked emotion. Staunch taste of outdoors. The sky gets bottled. Fly this into prophecy.

Boiling point. Exhilarating stars.

A spirit strains meaning. Because consonants thunder vowels. And syllables twang infinity. Phantoms pump the tongue.

And hypothesize. Stir tattoos.

Kerosene urges sputtering plausibility. Silver locomotives of art. Sanguine banks of fire. Emotions big as morning.

Restless azure. Eloquent eyes.

The story gets loud. Cemetery held by metaphor. Gloss on Mediterranean shells. Laughter gets algebra unbuttoned.

Ghostly forms. Indigo spirits.

Hammer in a canoe. Tall maples fluttered leaves. Galaxies of clinging pain. Water denies its flimflam.

Because tin. Because erratic.

Formula shouting its chrome. Resilience cocoons stratospheric poetry. Poke this into absorption. The metamorphosis of silk.

Teeming bighorn. Amorous sparrows.

Do anything you want. Be rubber be rubbed. Rubbed rubber ruddy rubble. Rumble in russet rumination.

Swallow circumference. Sip mind.

Hallucinations amaze the air. The lake is lonely. The lake is mosquitoes. The lake is wrinkled.

Fat glitter. Frantic waves.

A man named Tie. A woman named Hypothesis. A boy named Murmur. A girl named Green.

Experience spinning. Shrewdly dangling.

I feel your skin. Your eyes your arms. Your feelings your tumult. Your seething your screaming.

Your anonymity. Your weariness.

Glue eludes its garrulity. Alligators pound the ooze. We listen for France. We hear the sky.

Epidermal cries. Romantic immersion.

The sandstone library twinkles. The books occupy themselves. Poetry sweetens the corner. Paragraphs affirm our alibis.

Sounds

2011-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Clicking of the burner on the stove.

Toby scratching his chin.

Ticking of the red clock behind the TV.

Steady grumble of an airplane, chop chop chop chop chop of a helicopter.

Toby eating: smack, smack, smack, smack.

Hush of water through the pipes going into the washing machine in the laundry room as S comes out to check on his wash. Hushed metal and wood sound of door closing.

Muted, metallic sound of my keys hitting the carpet on the hallway steps as I drop them and prepare to put my running shoes on.

I go for a run. A thirty-something woman walking a black poodle suddenly bursts out yeah! yeah! yeah! as I pass. I see her adjust a gadget hooked to her ear. Bluetooth.

Thud, thud, thud, thud of a heavyset, middle-aged man wearing a sweaty t-shirt that says Texas State.

Spirited exchange of robins in the vicinity of Galer Street and 8th Avenue West.

Dog barking in Bhy Kracke park.

Washing machine in its spin cycle sounds like a helicopter landing in the building hallway. Big rattle and rumble. Fury and force. As if it were about to burst apart like a self-destructing Jean Tinguely sculpture.

K running the power wash, hosing the parking lot and sidewalk, the hiss and splash of water accompanied by the rapid-fire, angry murmur of the pressurizer.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of rock ‘n roll drums coming from the CD player in the upstairs apartment.

My pen and glass case hitting the solid wood surface of the coffee table as I undress for bed.

Cat toy in the shape of a fish that makes a gurgly-burbly sound, like water bubbling in a cartoon aquarium.

Goofy, evacuative sounds of the plastic barbecue sauce bottle as Roberta squeezes out sauce for our beans and muffin cowboy dinner.

My heel burbles. I feel a lump under my foot. I am standing on Toby’s toy.

The owner of the house next door, a solidly built, muscular man in his early to mid-60s with white, short-cropped hair and the look of a seasoned warrior, runs some sort of power tool that makes an extremely abrasive sound, an electrical whir followed by a spinning blade grinding stone, or metal.

Sound of a small paring knife slicing through an orange, muted thunk, thunk, thunk as each piece drops to the wooden bread board.

Out running, I hear busy little scratchy sounds and see a dozen or so squirrels flow down the trunk of a tree. It looks like a squirrel waterfall.

Warm, mellow June evening: the distant hush of a jet fades into the sky.

Two From Burning Deck

2011-06-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume, poetry by David Lespiau, translation by Keith Waldrop
Burning Deck, 2010

engulf - enkindle, poetry by Anja Utler, translation by Kurt Beals
Burning Deck, 2010

Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume, may be the only book of poetry to indicate the method of its production in the title. This suggests a kind of baldness, an open declaration of strategy, and poetic philosophy. It is like entering a building before it is fully constructed, so that the beams, anchor bolts, and butt joints are exposed. There is the smell of freshly sawn wood and plaster. Voices echo. Buckets and stepladders punctuate the space.

Four Cut-ups has four sections. The poems are untitled. Vocabulary and imagery suggest shared source material for each section, which are titled “Alan, Benjy, Billy…,” “The reproduction of the seascape is unsigned,” “Iris & Bang-Utot,” and “Sucre in French is not sugar in English.”

“The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years,” observes William Burroughs in The Third Mind, “And used by the moving and still camera.”

In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passerby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents… writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit -- all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point -- had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4… one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page.

“thought sugars” begins the poem on page 18 of the first section.

thought sugars
the storm / not
water, cognitive
discomfiture of
the bait in place
and position of
fact, after all o-
range is orage save
for n letters in a fine
rain of blue silk
- the gentle rain
its contour

orage, in French, means storm. The poem’s disjunctive structure is an analogue for the chaos of a storm. There is an acute feeling of velocity and turbulence tearing at the poem’s structure, as if the force within were almost too great for the poem’s containment. Disjunction both arouses and defies coherence. The poem’s subject is identical to its structure. Syntax rattles like a can of nuts and bolts. The action of the poem is under high compression. It could explode at any minute.

The poem on page 25, in the second section, presents a calmer climate. The subject is the seashore.

twice at the surface
of the sea and its waves
the representation
of water’s color
is bad. Shot of calm
sea. Slices. Fish
The other noises, voices
across the room
start up again. Lemon, housefly
glass egg raring
to reproduce
verisimilitude

This is a meta-poem whose subject is the nature of representation itself, summed up nicely in the last pretty word, verisimilitude. It’s modesty of size and minimalist bareness belie a richness of information. “Twice at the surface” alludes to Heraclitus and his famous axiom about never being able to step into the same river twice. “Water’s color” refers both to the actual color of the water, but also the rather tame watercolors we often find adorning the walls of motel rooms. “Slices” refers both to slices of fish and the poem’s method of production. Two simple words, lemon and housefly, generate an entire milieu: a room in which someone is squeezing, or just squeezed, a lemon, which has drawn a housefly. We see the room clearly, like a painting by Jean Baptiste Chardin, or Fairfield Porter. It’s a calm scene, which is duplicated in a glass egg, a piece of egg-shaped glasswork, perhaps, reflecting the objects in the room, and so producing a verisimilitude, a world doubled by reflection.

I was startled the first time I opened Utler’s engulf -- enkindle. The work is so elemental. Utler’s poems are highly similar to Lespiau’s, they are small, fragmented, disjunctive, with no apparent subjectivity, though she makes no open declaration of her method of construction. She is a trifle less minimalistic, giving us a bit more description, a few more adjectives, and there is a peculiarly romantic flavor. Romantic in the sense Schiller intended it: underlying beauty is the sublime, which is a force of terrific power, too great for our mortal senses, and contends against reason while leading us to a higher, moral sense of the universe. Here, I am in danger of reading too much into Utler’s poetry, or misinterpreting it altogether, but this I do know: it is full of turbulence. The lines halt and burst and fracture because of the tremendous energy underlying its production.

In the margin to the immediate left of the poem on page 16, are two words: encounter: escape. These serve, like a chapter heading, to suggest the circumstance of the poem.

but feel only: stagger, well, murmur -- a murmuring
stream, so it’s called - not to know, just
to: plunge down towards finally
to: trickle to drip start to spill over
pinechoked till: deep in the lowland
- the gullet, it’s called - as if: sluiced
from the: spit- to the streambed - run-
off - exuded, poured out into
pitching flowing, meandering veins
fray - towards: waterstop - jugal dam,
gurgle and sticks stutters catches: on snares of
hornwort, toothed, flooding the: clearcut mouth

One can feel the poet in a state of considerable excitement struggling to put this scene in words that have the same immediacy and rawness with which the senses apprehend it. The sublime is apparent in shreds, stumbling, in images coming so fast the poet cannot get them down on paper fast enough. One feels the water on one’s skin, the sparkle of it, the turbulence, the ferocity of water cascading down a mountainside.

German would seem to be the perfect language for this rough, woodland ecstasy. I wish I knew German. I have heard enough German to be familiar with its sounds, and German sounds like earth and water in play and contention with one another. Elemental.

“sibyl - poem in eight syllables,” (Utler prefers lower case letters in all instances), has a vatic intensity. It is both violent and sensual. It begins with an epigraph, on the opposing page, by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Sibyl in cinders, Sibyl: a trunk. / The birds incinerate, but God has come.”

The word ‘sibyl’ comes (via Latin) from the Greek word ‘sibylla,’ meaning prophetess.

Syllable, in German, is Silbe, which sounds more like ‘sibyl.’

The poem is divided into eight small stanzas. Here is the seventh, penultimate stanza:

sibyl here: head swims, she: breaks in the swirling heat: whispers,
she whirs: sump, slough slick thighs the: reed belt she wets she en-
girds herself tongues gurgles - adder - she slips off and: sisses

The sibilants here, which I am guessing are in the original German, suggests both the hiss of a fire burning through moist wood, and the sound and movement of a snake. In this instance, an adder, which is deadly. One is reminded that beauty in nature is never without a threat of some sort, at least to our mortality. There is no sense of evil, but of forces too great for human consciousness. This is the sense that Kant and Schiller wrestled with. Human reason, on the one hand, and the higher, transcendental sublime of the external world.

This is a marvelous language, and one that I have not seen before. Gerard Manly Hopkins comes to mind. Sound and sense are so fused, so incorporate, as to produce a language that convulses with elemental intensity.

Personal Poem #2

2011-06-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

It is 1:13 p.m. Friday afternoon in Seattle
Queen Anne hill to be more exact
I’m in the living room sitting here
in front of the computer typing this
which will one day be in all the literary textbooks
like an ode by John Keats
I will be famous and make appearances on Oprah
except that Oprah’s show ended
so this would have to be a fantasy Oprah
similar in kind to the fantasy of having a poem displayed
on the glossy pages of a literary textbook
for young students with literary inclinations
who all dream of having an enduring work
displayed on the glowing screen of an iPod
this is stupid
I just put earplugs in my ears
because Lewis is next door making a lot of racket
with his power tools and rake and leaf blower
he looks like a Vietnam vet at war with grass and dead leaves
wandering back and forth with grim determination
a gas-powered machine on his back
he will never be famous like John Keats
if he carries on like this
he should just sit down and lean and loaf observing a spear
of summer grass
which would be a lot quieter
at 10:00 this morning I ate a slice of cherry cheesecake
and watched a documentary about life on Saint Hélène
a tiny island in the south Atlantic
after breakfast I began plunging into books
Imagine the task of mounting 10 Saint Pauls
without the convenience of Staircases
John Keats wrote to his brother Tom
August 3rd, 1818, on climbing Ben Nevis
the highest mountain in Great Britain
the whole immense head of the Mountain
is composed of large loose stones
chasms 1500 feet in depth
turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it
We tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style
Sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear
sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up
and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds

Gasoline

2011-06-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

We live in a world of gasoline. Everything depends on gasoline. Food, childbirth, furniture, jewelry, appointments, vacations, wars, exhibits, construction, exploration, diplomacy, clothing, cologne, haircuts and rock concerts. Gasoline.

The food on your table travels an average of 1,500 miles to get there. There is even a term for it: Food Miles.

The word in French is ‘essence.’ I prefer essence. There is philosophy in the word ‘essence,’ and fumes. Fumes of power. Fumes of thought. In one manner or another, there is essence in everything.

One fuels cars. The other is a problem without a solution, but fuel for endless discussion.

The word ‘gasoline’ reeks of chemicals, sinister refineries in Texas and Alabama, eyes burning with hydrocarbons, lungs straining for clean air.

I’m nervous around gasoline. You can smell fire in it. The perfume of death. The fumes are potent. They penetrate the olfactories, permeate them with the latent crackle of violence and revolution. The roar of explosion. The smell of anarchy. Molotov cocktails. Window panes blown out of a store.

I will postpone a trip to the gas station as long as possible. Sometimes (in fact, all too often) until the needle is on empty. I know it’s risky, but in some ways it is strangely pleasurable. I am daring fate, risking the loss of power in the midst of traffic. It’s weirdly exciting, but also stupid. One of these days I am going to pay for that peccadillo. I mean, what’s the big deal?

I hate self-service gas stations. It is one of the reasons I enjoy driving in Oregon, where self-service is illegal. You are guaranteed that someone will come out and pump gas for you.

The place we usually go to get our gas now is a mini-mart called the Plaid Pantry at the bottom of the hill at the intersection of Valley and Taylor Streets. There are four pumps. Quite often, all pumps will be in use. If there is still, say, a quarter tank left in the car, I’ll go back at another time. But if the needle is on empty, it means waiting.

I have often wondered about the disappearance of gas stations. There used to be one on every corner. Now, there is only one within a radius of 5 miles, and that’s within a city. It seems paradoxical. The more cars there appear to be on the road, the fewer gas stations there are to provide them with gas.

Of course, no gas stations at all should be the norm. No cars. A modest fleet of trucks, buses, and trains should be all that we need for transportation and the delivery of goods. But this is Utopia. The actuality is far different, and more intractable. The world teeters on apocalypse. Conferences convened to solve the problem of climate change end in abject failure.

The use of petroleum is nothing less than insane. Pumping oil out of the ground, or the floor of the ocean, destroys the ecology and is just plain ugly. But the real menace is the carbon that it produces. 350 parts per million of CO2 is as high as carbon emissions in the atmosphere can go without destabilizing the climate. Atmospheric CO2 reached 390 ppm in 2010. The results have been catastrophic. Between April 25 and 28 of this year, over 300 confirmed tornadoes culminated in 317 fatalities. 41 people were killed in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Hospitals filled to capacity. People with broken bones were told not to go to them. In Birmingham, a tornado produced by the same supercell, was so huge that television reporters could not zoom their cameras out far enough to get the entire funnel into the frame.

In May of 2010, while BP’s underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico was hemorrhaging millions of gallons of oil per day, Roberta and I stopped driving as much as we could. We are aware that this little modification in our driving habits won’t change a damn thing, but driving just doesn’t feel right. It’s like trying to drink again after a few visits to AA. The spirit sickens behind the wheel. One turns the ignition key feeling an acute sense of toxic decadence.

I bought some gear at REI so that I could run small errands, pick up books at the library or medicine at the Safeway pharmacy, while I was out running. Seattle’s public transit system is decrepit and dirty, but we live close enough to downtown to either walk or grab a short ride on one of the buses to get to an exhibit at the art museum or restaurant or movie. A short ride on the bus is tolerable, although the best option is the monorail. It only goes a mile, but it’s a blast. One has the sensation of flying through the city on a magic carpet.