You Never Can Tell

The Efferdent package is lined with silver. I rip the packet open, take out the lozenge, drop it in a jar of water, and wait for it to foam. My partial goes beside it. The partial was once a molar. A molar of greatness and dependability, with which I chewed things, and crushed graham crackers. If you meet me in Saint Louis, I’ll tell you about my life with Chuck Berry. Completely untrue. Completely made up. Such is the power of fiction. It disassembles the truth. Then reassembles it with words, which are like little gears in a watch, making the hands move. It rises above sea level and shadows the forests, ejecting hot magma bombs from the throat of the volcano, sending everyone fleeing from the barber shop, and reclaiming the dials on AM radio. You never can tell.

Some things are said which have no basis in policy. They just get said. I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not entirely sure what Kant meant when he said that thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. Was this a reference to parakeets, or more like a Ferris wheel in Pocatello, Idaho? Excerpts of my life may be a little too explicit for modest tastes. Therefore, I shall refrain from any rude displays of heartbreak, or heavy lifting in front of a mirror. You be my mirror. And I will be yours. You look good. Like I knew you would. This isn’t my first rodeo. I don’t consider it a rodeo at all. That’s not how I do things. I like to thump my chest and swing through the jungle. I feel alert in space. Like tuna. This is something else Kant said: space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality. But really, how constraining are they? If I poke around at night with a flashlight trying to see what the drapery does at night, I might just discover that the presentational immediacy of the entire experience is predicated on the resiliency of perception and the urge to wheel around in a Ferrari. The actions we take are only ugly to goldfish. I can’t speak for the tasseled wobbegong. It’s a different ontology. And accents the flicker of trouble.

And what of the mind? If we speak of time, we must speak of the mind. The mind wants fluidity, not consciousness in cubes of transparent grammar. Ice cubes, essentially, but with the wildness of mustangs. The hills are alive with the sound of credit cards. We all need an escape from substitution. The real is the edge on a fragment of bone. A single neck dripping with neckties. Singing is important to neurogenesis. It makes everything relevant until the electrons exhibit wave-like properties and our familiarity with everyday objects so fraught with vacancy that it assumes a new outlook, and morphs into footwork, as in boxing.  One might also consider spatial learning abilities, and mariposas and bells. The susurrus of surf is critical to our understanding of the universe. Convergence is a candy, like rice cakes. You should know that. But ok if you don’t. I’m not here to judge. My aim is simple. I just wanted to show you how I feel about landscapes.

We are fast approaching a world in which poetry and music will be outlawed. Maybe not formally outlawed, but considered verboten in polite society. Like family members who gather unsteadily at a thanksgiving table in which it is tacitly understood that no mention or reference be made to politics, religion, or art for the sake of peace. We’ve arrived in a world of censorship. Self-censorship, at least in public, is virtually automatic now. But why poetry and music? Poetry has posed as an implicit threat all along, because it explodes meaning. People cling to meaning like fragments of wood after a shipwreck, a storm at sea. Nobody wants to discover that what they thought was a dresser was a coffin. Or that a soft armchair arm turned out to be an actual arm. Language is messy. Poetry is a chimera, a hybrid animal hurling fire out of its mouth. A fire which burns down all the familiar structures and reveals the void out of which it sprang. The meaning of music is laid bare: it’s immediate. As immediate as the sounds it organizes. It stirs emotion. It encourages impulse. And spontaneity. And dancing and acrobatics and joy. Which can lead to madness. Ergo, it must be done away with. And everyone at the table can eat quietly.

What I seek is the sublime autonomy of music. You can’t have a navy without water, and you can’t have a showdown without a harmonica. Battleships look odd in the desert, like Cher in old age. No photograph is simply a product. It’s a piece of space, an orchard in a California valley circa 1952. Jack Kerouac emerging from a tent. Music makes this blue. The feeling is too nuanced for toothpaste. We need coffee. We need shadows and combs. Something for the parrots and something for the undulations on the wall. At the level of the visceral, the larynx is the mediating muscle. Things were once axiomatic. Quantum mechanics ruined everything. There was a time you could count on wire to transmit your thoughts. Now it’s a turmoil of quarks and quirks and you can’t count on anything to magnetize truth in a solenoid. Every good story has at least one table in it. It’s where people like to sit because it gives structure to conversation. And when the plates are cleared a little monkey will do a dance in the paragraph bowl. 

Books

I’m lying on the bed, tired and achy, the cat on my lap. I moved a lot of books today. Big heavy boxes. In the cold and dim light of our storage facility, a big building two or three miles to the west, by the Brown Bear Car Wash. It’s a huge bin. Every time the corrugated aluminum door goes clattering up, I’m overwhelmed by the mountain of boxes and miscellaneous odds and ends forgotten over time, wine rack and clarinet and chess table. Framed prints of my father’s aerospace illustrations, landing modules and orbital satellite for harvesting the sun. But boxes, mainly. Big ones. All full of books. Books I’ve bought over the years. I wonder how many of them I’ve actually read. It’s too cold at the storage facility to sort through them. There are no amenities there, just the overhead lights, which are timed. R had to walk around a little to get them to come on again. They have sensors that detect body movement. Once I get the boxes home, I can take my time making hard decisions on which to keep, which to sell. I need to get rid of most of them. The storage facility is too expensive. It’s an agonizing process. Even though I’m now 75 and the likelihood of ever having enough time to read these books is nil, it’s hard parting with them. They all represent a certain phase of my life, shifting tastes, abrupt pursuits, great enlightenments, comforts in my despair, evolutions of intellect, my dalliances with Middle English, my flirtations with physics, my discovery of Dada, poetry in old journals when print media was still a primary feature of our culture, along with critical thinking. A few of the books belong to R. Her tastes run so closely parallel to mine that we often can’t tell which books belong to who. Some were a gift from her father. Occasionally, an old notebook will surface. I found one today with poetry I’d written in 1973. It wasn’t half bad. Even a photo album. Photos of me with my brother and dad circa the mid-80s, both gone now. I managed to get five boxes filled and ready to take to the used book store. What they don’t buy I’ll take to Goodwill. And if Goodwill won’t take them, I don’t know. I will sit with them. Feel the weight of them. And sigh.

Looking Out From The Shore

Broom spirits swept the diving board clean. Potato soup fulfills the goals of the stomach and makes it a festival. Go pearls, go snow. Sequels whistle my art. I’m the hotel jewel man. The dwarf does nothing fast. His very absence fulminates in melody like an idea. Slothful ingots of cocoa belie the noodle barometer. It’s a cracked elfin bronze, like my sister’s hat.

My eyes trigger the refrigerator, which whirs into action, creating a cold like that of the arctic, but less strident, and more like the jellied veritas of congelation, or marmalade. A daily disaster of butter chews through the confusion and grasps the helm of appetite. A cricket climbs up to my hip and chirps like a second pelvis. Later, after gorging on a chocolate doughnut the size of Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun, I stood in a field of algebra palpating a polynomial. Eventually, it sneezed, and made a new library. A Martian emissary arrived on the horizon with a truckload of percussion, and we all floated in hindsight, believing the past to be a form of Gothic realism, from which we harvested lyrics for our songs and mosses for our podiatry.   

Hunger personifies the gondolier whose short nimble wings carry us into the domain of the invisible. Battle ears are the nutmeg of analysis. Buy a bingo lobster and enjoy the outdoors. The Sparkle Club was its own happy setting, harked the fierce cactus with a lisp and a desert frown. And so I sat down and amended my adjustments to the world with a loud cockatoo obtained from cocaine and an incendiary dimple I let fall in a pile of innocence. Do not attempt this at home. You will only confuse the neighbors.

I believe a shrill cry will cause the gates of Hades to creak open and hairdos to rumble with the kind of benign neglect we saw in the middle of the last century, when everyone was trying out new modalities of thought, and crashing into religions. That was then. This is now. Scraps of morning tinkle in our conversation. Masturbating euphemisms scratch at everyone’s door, yearning for sanctuary, and a nice warm bed. A thin melee of unbalanced perspective savors of provocation. The hibiscus dares state itself as a hazy wild noise, and we sink into the field wanting a few more napkins to daub the mustard from the sun.

I know what it is. The source of the problem. If you want to call this a problem. I let things happen. I encourage things to happen. And the outcome is rubber, as always, and a little bit custard, and vanilla extract. I crawled through a hole in the eye of a newborn and saw the future of orthodontics. This made me understand the need for pepper, but where was the salt, where was the empathy for paper, and the people that make paper, and the trees and streams that bring paper into being? It was all turning around in the mind, exciting as the biology of retail. 

I opened the door to the kitchen, and there were onions on the table and soap. I’ve always been eager to generalize from actual experience. The potato chips are worth exploring, yes, but what is better, the ears or the tongue? Flexibility punishes bronze. It was a muslin Monday and the canopy of my bed trembled with onanistic conviction. The cat ate quenelle by the candle. A bullish feeling of streaks brought me to the brink of oblivion. The view was ageless. And that includes seaweed. 

The Outer Limits Of Things

I like the outer limits of things. The places where the limits are vague and the patterns are decoys. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This is the Zone, a dank, gloomy, industrial outpost in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the natural laws of physics are rendered bizarrely ineffectual. The goal is to find a legendary mystical room in which all desires are gratified. One begins to feel a wide gap between the empirical and the numinous. It’s a dilemma. Navigational equipment is useless. You have to go by intuition. This is difficult. It’s a question of subtleties. It’s a little like trying to choose among the many CDs in the glove compartment of a car. It’s never a rational decision. You’re reaching for something otherworldly in a grave of the mundane. Impulse is the only way out. You just grab what’s available and stick it in the slot and it gets sucked into the player on the dashboard and music comes streaming out of the speakers. If it’s Bob Dylan that’s ok, but if it’s Burt Bacharach forget it. A line has been crossed. No one is going to San José today. You’ve just been initiated to the divinity of the undecided. This is a resin without reason whose relish is a raison. The heat will come on in a second. Turn right at the next corner. Turn left at the next light. Or don’t. Google hasn’t mapped any of this. Nor could it.

The same way it takes more than a bag of almonds to create a tiger out of a wad of hypothesis, a beautiful autonomy hums within the genesis of thought until it assumes form in somebody’s alphabet and promotes the rhapsody of substance. That thunder you hear is a rose bursting out of a bud of punctuation. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m being chased or followed by something in a dream. What goes on in my head rarely, if ever, goes on outside my head. I suspect this is the situation for most people. If something going on in my head happens, also, to be going on outside my head, I make sure my gun is loaded. All truths are half-truths. Each minute of each day a Cecropia moth slips through the circuitry of a clock, and it leaves a shadow. The shadow, which assumes multiple forms, can carry a mountain of prose or a thought so light that no amount of gravity can hold it down. This is the birth of fiction. There are roots in the jungle that can remedy almost any disease, and if you toss a scarf or a handkerchief into a stream you can see it happen. Enigmatic meanings storm the walls of logic. Reason dwells in a granite hotel. Every fixation has a phantom presence. On Saturday we paint scorpions on our foreheads and on Sunday we divert our confusion with pieces of amber and volumes of ambiguity. Those of us who escape the prison of the ego find the providence of breath. Intoxicating fumes emerge from the abyss. When a boat appears in the mist of the river Styx you must pay the ferryman the coin that was deposited in your mouth before you began this journey, though he also accepts debit and credit cards, mobile payments and electronic bank transfers. He will not accept checks.

I need turpentine for a noun mist. And a diminishing pain in a trance of grapefruit. We should give our pleasure a month to get used to the easy darkness of the cathedral. I’m overflowing the hay of my necessity to create a tenable circumlocution. This is the place to do it. This is the place to sit down and eat a sundae. I call it Xenon. This is my summons to one and all to come and join me. Bring a dog. Bring a God. Bring a lapidarian. Bring an abstraction. Bring a truckload of abstractions. Especially blue ones. I’m stitching a tincture of universe. And it must be blue. Blue is the color of reality. If mass is a bath at the very beginning of flannel, then ink is a net of rain. It’s easy to affirm a reality. The hard part is convincing other people that your reality is the real reality, absolute reality, one-size-fits-all, the ultimate ululating ukulele reality, the one we all try so hard to adapt to, mistaking what is ordinary bedrock common sense with empyreal cloth.

I put the sponge in the whirlpool chamber for a reason. I need to prove how tomorrow’s parcel of time will be based on a theory of whalebone. I’m reminded of the night I discovered the ghost of a sparrow in a riverbed rock I split in half in with a mallet. It felt nimble to splash around in a swamp. I do not say this nonchalantly. Indecision claws at the gates of certainty. In youth, I aspired to be a dishwasher. But when I became an old man, I realized my true ambition, and became a semi-colon. Not many people use semi-colons anymore. They go for colons. And who wouldn’t. Colons means business. They’re not wishy-washy like semi-colons. I get it. But I still firmly believe that the semi-colon was destined for greatness in the world of punctuation; they provide habitat for a gently detached mimosa, and provide the sentence with a means to float. 

 

Letters Are Skeletons

I made a map in the sand of the island of my dreams. It hovered at the edge of absence. And smoked and trembled and quaked until it was swept away. Just like Ricky Nelson singing “Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart.” I’m floating an armchair into my mind so that I can readjust to the gravity of the situation. When you get to be my age you spend so much time in the past that the present seems like glass & the future is 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock. There was a time I slid down the hall in my socks crying out for the gods. Now everything is echoes. And feathers and mollusks and splatter and rhubarb. Wi-Fi bombast blood and bombs. Androids drones and homelessness. Wall Street corruption and sycophantic swordfish dinners. It used to be candles & wine. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that? I’ve got mosquitoes on my terrycloth sneakers. I’ve got a black magic helmet and a suitcase packed with voodoo. I’m ready to go. 

I’m immersed in pink noise. Ten hours of it, to be exact. It’s a sound therapy program for people who suffer tinnitus to get a little relief, available on YouTube. The sound masks the ringing in one’s head. It sounds like being on a passenger jet. I’m lying on a bed but it feels as if I could lean over and see clouds beneath. I find myself getting a little euphoric. The noise provides a perspective from which I can think about my experience of tinnitus more objectively. I think of the sound of background radiation and how it helped astrophysicists form their Big Bang theory. Background radiation has a pulsing buzzing sound that morphs into a monotonous sputter. It appears the entire universe has tinnitus. But in this instance the tinnitus is a pink noise that drowns my tinnitus in an ocean of sound. Why bother to travel anywhere to go look at a waterfall if you couldn’t hear the thunder of it? Tinnitus is the sound that accompanies consciousness in the same way the sound of a waterfall is the sound of its volume affirming itself in space.

You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. Though the fewer words you use the more effectively does reality bend to your will. Not knowing what reality is to begin with is a big help. Visits to the junkyard in search of a carburetor opened an avenue of thought and discovery I hadn’t anticipated. Cars don’t use carburetors anymore, they use fuel injectors, and it’s a downright shame. Carburetors are less expensive and have jets that push the gas into the combustion chambers. Fuel injection requires a lot of fiddling because of electrical components and return lines to the fuel tank, and only delivers about 10 horsepower at peak. This is a reality I’d like to bend into a CT4 Cadillac with a 2.7L Turbocharged engine, premium alloy wheels, HD color touch-display and heated seats with lumbar massage. Or I could just buy it. If I had money. Which I don’t. I could steal it. But I’m too old for jail. Like I say. You can only bend reality so far. Bend it too hard and it’ll break. You’ll find yourself standing on the shoulder of some highway, thumb out, your hair blowing in the wind as a fragment of reality speeds by.

The theater is the best place to demonstrate percussion. These are my slow night theories. I'm fresh from the soul cave. When I do my fast night theories I wear a thousand scarves and a homesick sponge. Can a dry poplar stray far from the sleet on a windy night? Not at all. The poplar needs the sleet as much as the sleet needs the poplar. Distance may be achieved in other ways. Trains, planes, and electrolytes. Needs are often served in the guise of hazard. A punch to the gut, a brawl in the alley, a perforated peptic ulcer. It’s all part of life. I find comfort in philosophy. It makes me feel cadenced and gyroscopic, like a foghorn, & gives me enough words to make a paragraph feel comfortable. Then why am I anticipating a visit from my temper? I’ve got water, food, a wife and a warm room, a slithering inkling of better possibilities awaiting us all at the gates of sequence, and a helicopter that is so perfectly derelict in explanation I weep. Some nights I just don’t feel like using capital letters for anything. And that’s ok. What irks me are leaky pipes. This winter has been particularly bad. But enough about me. What about you? What are you wearing? Am I some sort of pervert? Quite frankly, yes. But a really good one. I mean, who writes poetry in the Age of Wi-Fi? Techies rule the world, not poets. If poets ruled the world we’d have libraries everywhere and traffic lights using haikus instead of color signals. Jack Spicer would’ve survived the Beatles. Lou Welch would’ve survived the seventies. Emily Dickinson would’ve lived to be 108. And Adrian Rich would’ve been much much richer. Don’t you give up, baby, don’t you cry, don’t you give up till I reach the other side. Dick and Dee Dee. 1961. My first concert. And then I became Fredrich Nietzsche & grew a pet mustache to keep me warm and inquisitive on cold lonely nights at the edge of the known universe. Which was the parking lot at Dicks. And sometimes the wharfs in downtown Seattle smelling of sea slop and mollusks. And sometimes a bookstore open at midnight, fragrant with thought and fabrication.

Letters are skeletons. The flesh is in the imagination. If I try to slip an actual chicken into the word for chicken, there are difficulties. Needles awaken in my skin and I sprout feathers. I become a chicken. I peck and scratch at the ground. I lay an egg. I incubate an egg. The egg hatches & another language emerges. And it becomes a chicken. Soon the world is overrun with chickens, like in Kauai, which is teeming with wild chickens. This is the story of language. According to the International Society for the Understanding and Proper Feeding of Chickens. One day a chicken laid an egg and out of that egg a universe emerged, dressed in lottery tickets and pyramids, and began making sounds that mirrored the world in ways that made it appear distorted, and cotton, and imbued with aspirations toward truth and understanding. This was the world’s first chicken. But if this was the world’s first chicken, where did the egg come from? How did the egg precede the chicken? It was probably caused by heating an allegory, which caused a flame of semantic yolk to flicker within the heart of an ovoid, and become an omelet.

The Social Life

I don't like disliking anyone. My first instinct upon meeting anyone is to find common ground. It's just an instinct. It’s not a realistic plan. Common ground is boring. So I lean in close and tell the person that they have lit a fire in my soul. This doesn’t always produce happy results. The person looks stunned and doesn’t know how to respond. But it’s a start. And neither of us have made mention of the weather. Conversation is important. It’s how the language revives itself. It’s an art requiring a minimum of two people. Conversations with myself go in circles. And I always know what I’m going to say in advance. Most people are shy and averse to conversation. Starting a conversation is like cracking a safe. Once you find the right combination the door opens. Sometimes the safe is empty. But sometimes you find rapport. Things flow. Words fly. Points are made. Ideas are floated. Delicacies disentangled. Opinions weighed. Insights expanded.

The opposite thing happens when I dislike someone. Meetings tend to be accidental. And awkward. The silence must be filled. This is what weather is for. The vagaries of weather are a convenient resource. Who thought it would rain this hard today. Isn’t the snow beautiful but treacherous. It’s cold but sunny. Isn’t the sun wonderful? You do know I hate your guts, right?

Why do I like some people and dislike others? I like warmth and spontaneity. A good sense of humor. A capacity for pessimism and wit. I like a cynical wit. People obsessed with always being positive are upsetting. They make me contract. Pull my head back into my shell. Why is this? I don’t trust positive people. It’s usually contrived. It’s not authentic. It’s a put on. It’s what society expects. The more toxic the society, the more it demands its citizens display a positive outlook. The pursuit of happiness becomes a tyranny. It’s easy to smile with a knife behind your back. Nobody has ever just been honest and said “I don’t like you.” How would I respond to that? I have no idea. It wouldn’t feel good. But there would be a funny relief. The weight of pretense removed like a cumbersome armor. I’d feel lighter. And more than a little excited. It’s exciting when someone I dislike dislikes me. I feel I’m doing a good job being myself. Representing whatever it is I’m in the business of representing. Whatever set of values. But if someone I like dislikes me, this is an unhappy situation, and one I don’t know how to negotiate. It's happened a few times. There’s really not much you can do. Extortion won’t work. Blackmail is out of the question. Sycophancy is off-putting. You just accept it. And talk about the weather.

Elevator Safari

9:14 p.m. January 1^st, 2023. Anana Kaye sings Dylan’s Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) on a YouTube video. Her voice is fresh and smooth, like an Orange Julius. Or the dawn air over Athens. The song is complex. It’s like an allegory of the old west. A man appears to be in thrall to a man – or spirit – named Señor, who is taking him somewhere. The man wonders where they’re going, dropping riddles and incongruities along the way, and does so in what seems like a drugged or hypnotic spell. That’s the song’s allure, its hypnotic power, and capture of the weirdly wild old west.

The word ‘safari’ used to ignite a lot of excitement in me as a kid. It meant cool shows on TV, Tarzan shouting, thumping his chest, swinging from vine to vine, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceros’s and big gorillas drilling holes into your soul. Those deep-set eyes made them seem so wise. The natives – the inhabitants of these fascinating regions - were treated abominably by the European colonialists, who were there to extract resources, which confused me, why were the original inhabitants being treated so shabbily? What had they done? I was intrigued with these people. As a kid, you don’t realize that what you’re seeing is most often through the lens of European and North American cultural biases. And yet, your instincts tell you something is off.

The man who inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write his novel about a man raised by apes in the African wilderness was William Charles Mildin, the 14^th Earl of Streatham. “I was only 11 when, in a boyish fit of anger and pique, I ran away from home and obtained a berth as cabin boy aboard the four-masted sailing vessel, Antilla, bound for African ports-of-call and the Cape of Good Hope,” writes Lord Mildin, who left behind 1,550 handwritten pages of memoirs.

Lord Mildin writes that the apes he fell in with and that accepted him into their group gave him nuts, grubs, and roots. He was starving, so he ate the castoffs, which made him sick. “I was terribly ill afterwards,” he writes, “and the apes appeared to understand this. Once ancient female hunched her way over to me and cradled me in her arms.”

He “gathered branches to make a crude treehouse.” He repaid the care and kindnesses his newfound ape family gave him (I’m guessing these apes were chimpanzees) by making fire and stealing weapons from a native settlement. “I found new and easy ways to root under logs for grubs and dig for roots with a sharp-tipped stick.” He also talks about dressing their wounds with cool moss or wet mud.

Lord Mildin eventually returned home to England where he reclaimed his fortune and title. He died in 1919.

‘Safari’ comes from the Arab word ‘safar,’ meaning journey, or migration.

A story on Le Journal de France 2 vingt heures – a French news show – runs a story on an enterprising young man who started a safari company in South Africa. He gets up early to take some tourists out in a large jeep-like vehicle. They park near a watering hole where a group of elephants are bathing and having fun. Their eyes fill with wonderment.

There are 150,000 muscles in the trunk of an elephant.

A photographer named John Lund has taken a series of photos of an elephant in an elevator, one of which was taken at the airport in Buenos Aires. Why? He doesn’t say.

You never know what to expect when you press an elevator button. You hear the whine and rumble of gears and two panels whoosh open and there you are, facing a street hoodlum from 18^th century Paris. You hesitate getting on. But there’s nothing to fear. The hoodlum is slowly spinning, as if in a trance. Not as if. He is in a trance. But it’s ok. Let it go. You don’t have to get on. Here comes another one. The panels open and there stands a hologram of The Rolling Stones as they appeared in 1965. Scruffy, insolent, and happy. This will be a fun elevator ride. But as soon as you get on and the panels close the elevator begins going down. You wanted to go up. You must not have been paying attention. The elevator arrives at its destination, July 12^th, 1962. London’s Marquee Club. This isn’t he button you pushed. Your appointment was on the 20^th floor. But what the hell. You decide to get off. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And 61 years to find another elevator.