When Was The Last Time You Saw A Lucid Sweater?

An artist doesn’t need to directly express his thoughts in his work for it to reflect its quality, says Proust. It has even been said that the highest praise of God is in the negation of the atheist who finds creation perfect enough to do without a creator. All the little accidents by which we stumble toward the divine in its stunning incomprehensibility attest to all the preliminaries that we must go through in our daily crusade towards the creation of a new alibi. If everything holy were prefabricated nobody would ever want to live in a mobile home. It would be too unsettling. I'm more reflective when I’m unreflective & forget what I came here for. If things lack an innate, autonomous self-existence they do enjoy a picnic now & then, and a profligate interdependence on other causes & conditions, such as hunger, hardware, & that tarpaulin flapping in the rain.

The differences between ages, between class lines, between pollinators and insects, the particularities from voice to voice, melody to melody are all the more gripping because they become more marked, more legible as objects – glass and lumber and jewelry – and thereby more conceivable to the intelligence. Which is another idea I derived from Proust. How to face facts when their insinuations rise to the clarity of cutlery. Social nuances are particularly tricky. Especially on the Serengeti. At twilight. Lulled by the sound of crickets. Hard feelings soften to the sounds of a harmonica. And crickets. And katydids and cicadas. The end of the world. The beginning of the world. And nothing between but the wink of a star and the silence of the void.

The day the electricians came to give us our upgrade I put my headlamp on and grabbed a book to read. I chose Guide to Kultur by Ezra Pound. His sentences are direct and vigorously provocative, galvanizing as glacial milk. Pound's thrusts & lunges were the right fare for a day of chaos. But frustration soon arrived as soon as I began to encounter highly obscure phrases from Latin and Chinese and I couldn't look them up on the internet since the electricity was off. This wasn’t the moment for Pound. I went to the bookcase like a miner searching for ore. Alternating Current by Octavio Paz. That’ll do. Not what the words say, but what they say to one another.  

Beyond the doors of polite society are the mysteries. Eleusis. The allure of guns. The allure of contour. The allure. Of anything. Lucidity is the result of abuse. It’s too bright, too cruel to wear like a sweater. When was the last time you saw a lucid sweater? Exactly. It's either that or grow a lawn on my chin. I saw a man today crouched on the sidewalk in Belltown in July heat smoking crack. The area reeked of urine. The last time I got a stench like that up my nose was under Pont Neuf. We’re a funny bunch. Monks. Plumbers. Philosophers. Dentists. Cashiers. Simians to the core. Apes who crave the dust of Mars over the rocks of Earth. Or that diver we saw in the sound a few days ago, snorkeling, gazing at the bottom, where everything rests, or stirs the sediment. 

The Combination Of Wind And Tea

 The combination of wind and tea can cause a corner of the world to collapse into waves. I can wear a breath and forget to button my paragraph. I can let everything hang out. I can wear a shirt of hornets to an insurance convention. But you don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t want anything to come between us. Including these words. None of which belong here. They belong elsewhere. That’s been their whole intent all along. To get out of here. And swim in infinity.

I'm interested in old records. Old propagators. Old men thundering invectives. Together we will triumph and stand our ground. Don't worry about the snow. The word is a parcel of sound responsible for nothing but its own coagulation. By that I mean context. Gestalt. Structure. Disposition. However a person might choose to emulate Screamin’ Jay Hawkins performing I Put A Spell On You. Or check into The Arcade Hotel in Memphis. The color of this equation is a hard black candy. Best eaten upside down. Like a bat. Suckling the juicy breast of a mushroom. Things like this are not for general consumption. But what is? Old records in old garages.

How much reality can words carry into the far future, how many ideas that have failed to survive or catch hold now might serve to hold a future civilization together, just as a melody can hold a musical vision together for several centuries? The idea that a handful of words can preserve an idea at all is pretty amazing. Language is a metaphysical embalming fluid. An idea is a fetus kept alive in an artificial womb. Gum and ash are two ideas linked by syntax that could one day serve as a bandage, or poultice. Who knows? Language is a very funny thing. A diving board made with jelly before logic had time enough to intervene in the madness of words and make solidity solid and fluidity flow where it is meant to flow remains attainable in another dimension. And this is called contention, a disagreement with what is established, and is a cause of exhilaration.

Cézanne cured art of its tendency to judge. It became fruit. Apples and oranges and odors and skulls. Each line became more thoughtful and expressive. A swamp like a shaggy face soaked with laughter. If there exists a catalogue swollen and bulging with waltzing generalities, it doesn’t take long to figure out what it wants to free itself from. How else describe a color? Or a floral chintz on a creamy white background? What you want is a beard wild as tropical foliage. What you need to consider are the grooves that fit the tongue. The social element is injected into art by an act of sabotage and doesn’t really need to be there. If you find yourself in a simulacrum, you need to get out. The verities are there, in the eyes of Madame Cézanne.

We live in a time in which the police are within and the laws are without justice. This is why I cling so hard to whatever remains of the creative spirit. This is the determinable meaning of the meaningless. If you find someone stung by abandonment, insist on compassion. That someone might by you. Flap among yourselves with enough saga to dive deeper into existence. Art wants to undo all the damage of the time. So yeah, man, you should definitely take that propeller and put it on a metaphor or something. There’s nothing to prove but God, and that ignites with doubt. All else is simply different, which comes with differentiation, and combinations of wind and tea.  

The Glitter Of Incongruity

I wrote to a friend who has a broad familiarity with the Chinese language the meaning of a name that was written on the bow of a tanker that was docked at the Pier 86 Grain Terminal. The name was Fu Rong Feng. My friend replied that it could be translated as "'Wind of the Camellia,'" which may be a reference to Chengdu, the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan, which is also a major financial hub and home to many international companies. Chengdu doesn't have an ocean port, but it's called the "City of Camellias."

I spend a lot of time at the Seattle waterfront. It's a good place to go running. It's very open, which is more than a matter of space, it's a bodily sensation. I can feel it inside. It gives me a bit more elan. Seattle is a claustrophobic city. The streets are narrow and confusing, houses and buildings are mushed together, and everywhere you go it’s crowded, teeming with people, many of whom are speeding by on e-scooters and monowheels. Move slightly to the side to avoid hitting a pedestrian, or a pile of shit, and you risk getting fatally slammed by a sociopathic techie on an e-scooter, or something worse. Paris did a smart thing by banning e-scooters. But then it did a massively stupid thing and hosted the summer Olympics.

9:24 p.m., July Fourth. I hate this holiday. I hate the noise, and what it does to the birds. Not to mention pets. All to celebrate what is essentially a farce: a country whose constitution and bill of rights have been so grievously denatured that there’s not much else there except a blue-eyed comatose president staring into space at a podium. I grab my headphones and laptop and prepare for the assault. To the far right of my computer screen is a list of searches trending on Google, one of which is the Hawk Tuah girl, whose appearance on somebody’s video went viral on TikTok. Curious, I look it up, which isn’t easy, as it’s hard to find a podcaster organized and coherent enough to explain this phenomenon, which is a young girl in Nashville who – while walking down the street – is asked by a man with a microphone what’s a move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time and the young woman – smiling broadly and amiably – replied you’ve got to give him a Hawk Tua and spit on that thing. She delivers this information with charming gusto and a fetching country accent. The thing being, no doubt, a man’s boner. Prep work for a blowjob. So. What can I say? It went viral. Happy Birthday, America, you had a good run.

We’ve lost our myths. We’ve lost our way. But there’s one last narrative to blast into dandelions.

It's a story that comes from plums bursting open. Call it strength by cocoa. It's a conception advanced by poker when the lawn is ready to come into being. Groom it like a Renaissance chicken. Laziness is for creating your own conception of genius. You can't treat sadness with a bandage. You’ll need a cookbook and a kitchen. Architectural splendors. Playful insurrections. And a chrome swan floating in your breath. Are you the same person today that you were yesterday? One of these days you’re going to come walking through that door and quietly panic. You’re in for a shock. All my U-turns are teeming with sequels. If you plan to enjoy the glitter of incongruity in a woman's purse, silence is seminal. And it doesn’t hurt to be spectacular. 

Extraordinary Contingencies

I like the way sugar embarrasses itself. Or the way a spoonful of novel explodes in the mouth, scattering pages of intimacy and intrigue. The surrounding room enters itself slowly, hesitantly, feeling around for volume, shared perceptions and antimacassars. We call it a parlor, because that’s where we talk, those of us who choose to talk, who walk the tightwire between decency and alterity, exploring facets of the human experience in sly confessions, and random guffaws. I wash each noun with 8 purple roses & a bar of encumbrance, as if a religion folded itself into a harmonica and spat blasphemies into the void. I go elsewhere & listen to the clouds in my knees. They make a sound like charity, until I get up, and they shriek like a kettle on a Coleman stove. When I return to speech, I find a wild idea on my sleeve combing itself with a wherewithal.  

Extraordinary contingencies pile up in a municipality, causing crispness, fights and woodwinds. I can’t say yes to everything, but I can say no to duplication. I believe in signs. The Feinschmecker’s fetching daughter, or the Costco flushable wipes settlement. In any case, vicissitude. You know what I mean. One day the fall of a dictator, the next the rise of a shiny new utopia propped up by seven virgins and Victor Mature, reprising his role as Samson. Does it matter whether this universe was created by a goliath frog or evolved spontaneously out of a container of Roquefort cheese? What matters to me is mostly conductive. For example, the practice of putting salt in one’s shoes fosters a sense of cleanliness and well-being. But if the community pool has been dyed red, you should spend all your money on generalities & grab the next bus. This is the way to salvation, & what it looks like through the window of a Greyhound.

Just think: you can let things swarm around you if you let yourself be lazy, amorphous like a gas. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. It’s a gas, gas, gas. It's why we enjoy playing with neon and making signs out of it. Sorrow, on the other hand, is a sorcery of the heart and should be advertised as such. Picture young Werther watering a rose with the blood of a chimera. The work before you is essentially a basement grammar I found on the bottom of a song. It was done in overflow of myself hard against the desk where being takes the form of hydrocarbon and seaweed. A big tube of blue. I went outside and the world was completely illegible. There were curious experiences for everyone. How to interpret a look, or the body itself, what it wants, what it invites you to do.

Mourn the accident, but not the exercise. Accidents teach us heraldry. And kindling. We all know everything at first, and then nothing, and then inflammation, pain and fever. I can only expound on what I don’t know. I have a difficult time asking what's going on in a Franz Kafka lyric. Franz Kafka is a rock group from Prague. We shared volumes in a round of terror. It happened shortly after jumping from a plane. I like to caress space with dissimilar attitudes. Hurry out of the pupil of a gaze if you’re ever in Amsterdam looking for thrills. Never settle for anything counterfeit, like the Fourth of July, which explodes on a hill and rains down in goofy Supreme Court decisions. You should celebrate your cause with singing. And then jump into life. 

Sweet Spot

5:55 p.m. It’s June, 60℉ and cloudy. I’ve just been reading Proust, who – on a wintry Parisian night in late fall thick with fog – has just negotiated the revolving door of a crowded restaurant. He is treated rudely and given a seat by the door reserved for Jews, where he gets a cold draft each time someone enters or exits. I’m reminded of all my misadventures with revolving doors. I can never get myself in sync with the rhythm of the door. Instead of trying for a graceful entry, I just leap in and exit as soon as the door is exposed to the interior. I haven’t had to do that in a long time because so many department stores and shops closed after the pandemic. The commerce of the world seems to be happening in higher places now, places out of reach financially, morally, and militarily. Like that movie Elysium, with Matt Damon, who gets fried in a radiation chamber, becomes a cyborg and leads a rebellion against the elites in outer space.

Granting ideas by grammatical resilience is the essence of what I do. There’s nothing approximate about it. It’s the whole tamale. Think of these words as hanging behind the oak I have created to grow beside me shooting out branches and leaves. Under the orchard, there are screams on the circumference of a wobbly expression, most of it roots and dirt. Here is where things get messy. Make the paraphernalia fall towards the sink by the very smell of it. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. And you must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss, but a stalactite is unintentionally disgraceful. Don’t blame the makeup, blame the minerals. This kind of dripping from above reveals the dialect of the depositions to be correspondent to our singing.  

On the way home from a short run along the Seattle waterfront we stopped on the old Seattle World’s Fair grounds to watch a magician. He was surrounded by a group of people. He was quite good. He had an engaging patter that held everyone’s attention and his tricks were skillfully rendered. He folded the six of clubs into a tiny square and made it disappear. He revealed all the places the card had bounced and ricocheted: off a tree over there, a bench over there, the wall of the nearby Seattle Armory and pointed to a man in the crowd and said it ended up in his pocket. The man went to look and the magician joked it didn’t stay there it flew off. It was a funny joke but I couldn’t help think how cool that would’ve been if the six of clubs had been in that man’s pocket. The magician began explaining another trick he was going to do and pulled a lemon from a small black bag someone in the crowd had tossed to him and began retching and opened his mouth and out slid a butterknife, with which he sliced the lemon, and out came the six of clubs.

The conjecture of absentia by absinthe proposes a table upon which to dilate into a sphere and rise to the ceiling. This is not how most things begin, but this is how this begins. Two lines that intersect are called parallel. Two lines that form a nerve in the morning spill life into congruent faces. If the world is a domain of nouns and adjectives, then why does the probability of a chance event depend on description? Shouldn’t it be a matter of perspective, of finding the crucial undergarments? Things in geometry have boundaries and angles. Things in language have aviaries and clowns. Once in space, parts of the situation will seem to undulate, like coitus in orbit around a tattoo. It’s at this point that we discover the true meaning of sweet spot, and give it all we’ve got. Meanwhile, on earth, the sepia bride TikTok drama continues, and anxiety and ice. So let’s stay up here, where consciousness flows, and words chatter in naked spontaneity. 

The Enema Of Art

Every mental excitement giving an exceptional value, a superior quality to the concerns which are attached to it, there is no taste however spicey which doesn’t compose around itself a society which it unites and where the consideration of others is the one virtue everyone seeks in life. Consider the Hell’s Angels, if you will, or The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Everything turns pink and sage and deviates from the normal subterfuge, all the conventions and lies designed to keep feelings at bay. Not all feelings. The wrong feelings. Which are the right feelings. The right feelings are wrong. The wrong feelings are right. And between the two is the unsettling quaintness of motel art, how it denudes the world, and leaves you feeling naked. All those sailboats & sunsets & grotesque abstractions. The smell of clean sheets and carpet fiber obscured by the steam of an insanely hot shower. Ikebana, and the exhilaration of elsewhere.

Breakfast acts as an offering, a preparation for the assaults and shootouts and temptations of the day. I tend to see life as a western. I start out like Henry Fonda and end up as Stan Laurel in a Stetson. I don’t care where it goes, really. I’m going to find a hole in the wall and crawl inside and die. Sang the Marshal Tucker Band one day in a hot July in an office building in downtown San José. I was a factotum then. I’m a factotum now. Sometimes I get what’s coming to me but most of the time I have to make shit up. So many friends are gone I have to wonder where everyone goes when the curtain comes down. And what needs to be said when the curtain goes up. Like that day in San Francisco where the sunlight didn’t seem to fit anybody’s mood and I went on a long walk and told my life to wait outside while I went into a restaurant for some Buddha Jumps Over The Wall and a stranger warned me I was wandering into the Tenderloin.

We can drift from pruning to percolation, I've seen it happen, a certain accentuation in a used car lot sells a 2016 Silverado, or a writer for an Amazon Prime series gets arrested for too many unpaid parking tickets and the ensuing events provide a provocative twist to a plot hung up in development. Art imitates life, but the reverse is also true: the example of Marcel Duchamp can inspire a person full of piss and vinegar to start a new line of urinals, or gather enough dust to create an orgasmic cloud of insatiable volatility, and feed it Los Angeles. Or the singular performance of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, which was based on you-know-who, and here we are again, humming “We’ll Meet Again.” And since I lack the power to prevent a nuclear war, I must resort to unguents, and offer my opposition to tedium, which is the enema of art.

Travel is one of life’s happy necessities. No two voyages are alike. There are journeys that involve flight and drawbridges and hotel reservations, and journeys whose drowsy miles take us to places we’ve never contemplated visiting before. One thing all journeys have in common is counterpoint, interwoven fates & lush contradictions. It’s hard getting a lay of the land without a hypersensitive divining rod or a digital astral plane theodolite, but if you plan on feeding yourself some of the local resources, I recommend picking blackberries. Eat something that calms the mind. Take note of the surroundings. We’re all passengers here, ghostly embodiments of ourselves passing through the terrain of the living, where it rains, and is intermittently beautiful.   

The Real Me

I read a book in the late 70s that completely altered my experience of myself. It startled my sense of identity so dramatically that I have wondered since if such a thing as a self or a personhood exists in the realm of nature. I believe it does, or I probably wouldn't be writing this, but in a mode far more fictive and imaginary than I’d previously imagined.

The book is called The Lives of a Cell, Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas, and has has been in my possession for 50 years. Thomas was an American physician and poet who became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He writes in a style that is both eminently accessible and highly engaging, scientific marvels seasoned with a gracious and dulcet touch. There’s a gentleness to the words, and a quiet lyricism, which makes them all the more an unlikely vehicle for mind-blowing epiphanies, but I would put it in a class with hallucinogenic substances such as peyote and psilocybin. It’s that transformative, that revelatory.

This is the paragraph that did it:

A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.

Who am I, then, the little homunculus in my brain gazing out at the world like Captain Kirk gazing at the screen on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, talking to a hostile alien emperor or Howard Stern or Buddha? The void. The voiceless void, which is the birthplace of us all. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness. Interesting thought. But is it me thinking this thought or the collectivity of cells that comprise the body I’m riding around in that is thinking this thought? In a word, yes. The human body contains around 50 to 100 trillion cells, and they have a lot to say: right now they’re busy writing these words, while simultaneously listening to “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, and feeling the warmth of a cat on my lap. A symposium of mitochondria, blood cells and osteocytes and myofibers and satellite cells and neurons creating my self-image, my self- esteem, my curations for the museum that is me, this carnival of neurochemicals, dopamine, GABA, histamine, serotonin and so on.

Most of cognition goes on in the brain, which is steeped in an electrical and chemical circus of neurons and glia. Neurons galore. Roughly 100 billion. These are the largest cells in the body and make up the nervous system. They’re busy little buggers. My nervous system is always busy. It always feels wonderful when it slows down and I can get a break from being myself. From everything, but mostly from me. Yours truly. This congregation of vapors and adipocytes and fibroblasts and fabrications and fingers and blisters and bone.  

It's weirdly reassuring to know I’m not a single entity but a multitude of entities. I feel less lonely. But when I am lonely, who is doing the loneliness? My cells are busy exchanging fluids between compartments and from place-to-place within the body, doing everything they can to keep me alive, keep me going, keep me erect, keep me vertical and dramaturgical.

I wonder if it’s possible, like some yoga master, to feel the cells teeming and vibrating the body, tingling in the mind like chimes. But when I say “in the mind,” what do I mean by mind? That energy in my head that busies itself like a rat in a hamster wheel creating narratives and fantasies and bouts with remorse?  Remorse doesn’t sound like something that a cell would bother with. So where does remorse come from? This is the trouble with empiricism. Its factual actualities make it literal and leaden. People in white lab coats peering into microscopes. Whose minds might be dancing crazily in their heads, witnessing mitochondria on a glass slide. Are cells familiar with inner and outer? They must be: they’re cells. What’s more inner and outer than a cell? The walls of these cells, however, don’t imprison: they emit signals into extracellular space.

Cell membranes are thin, flexible layers of lipids and proteins, with the fundamental structure being a phospholipid bilayer, amphipathic molecules made up of two fatty acid chains that are hydrophobic coupled with a phosphate-containing hydrophilic head group. A head group is an atom or group of atoms taking the place of another atom or group of atoms occupying a specific position in a molecule. Sounds like a typical worksite, people working together in a shared space, combining talents and skills to achieve a certain goal. I think of ants. I think of bees. I think of chorus lines and infantries and acting troupes. All this organizational effort to keep the cruise ship afloat, the cruise ship being me, with me (ostensibly) at the wheel.

It all makes so much sense. When I’m hungry, it’s not me creating the sensation of hunger. Nor is it me creating all the right digestive juices to extract protein and vitamins from the food I’ve chosen to eat. I didn’t invent my fingers. I didn’t invent my eyes. Or knees or mouth or feet. When I first entered this world there were people to take care of me, and growth hormones to help me evolve into a semi-autonomous being. Had the entire process been up to me I wouldn’t have made it. Nobody would. Cells do it all. We’re just along for the ride.

When I breathe, I’m not really doing the breathing; something is breathing me. And when – some years ago in my carefree and libidinous past – I’d be consumed with the urge to get intimate with another constellation of cells, it wasn’t me – that phantasmal homunculus in my skull who thinks he’s Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s fifth - but a libidinal confluence of hormones – testosterone in particular - that made me dance like a puppet whose strings were manipulated by a propagative goddess named Aphrodite.

Or so I’d like to believe. It’s tempting and easy to blame those crazy behaviors on instinct, as if I’d been some primordial swamp creature like Shakespeare’s Caliban. But that would be a distortion. I did draw on a store of cortical resources that took the form of foresight and planning, scheming, plotting, coining witticisms and putting on a show. But a truck can’t move without diesel, and I had plenty of diesel in the form of gonadocorticoids and gonadal steroids to power my rig down the highway. Oftentimes, my expeditions were buffoonish and mad, but sometimes Cupid’s arrow hit its mark, and choruses of angels ascended to the heavens in song.

It's what cells do. They interrelate. They seek reciprocity. Give and take. Networking. Bonding. Forming connections. For the last 30 years I’ve been married to a woman of marvelous affinities, for which I give thanks; thanks to the orchestra of cells that provided the juice, the oomph, the elan vital, the instincts and intuitions necessary to commingle so wonderfully with another constellation of cells. What a communion of cells doesn’t explain is the uniqueness of such a rapport. At what point does the immaterial enter? The sublime. The transcendent. Are there neurochemicals for romance? In her essay “The Neuroendocrinology of Love,” Krishna G. Seshadri writes:

Love may be defined as an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. It appears that lust, attachment and attraction appear to be distinct but intertwined processes in the brain each mediated by its own neurotransmitters and circuits. These circuits feed on and reinforce each other. Sexual craving is mediated by testosterone and oestrogen and has the amygdala as an important centre. Attraction is mediated by hormones of stress and reward including dopamine, norepinephrine cortisol and the serotinergic system and has the nucleus accumbens in the ventral tegmental area as key mediators.

This description disappoints because it’s so reductive. Love is bigger than hormones. This is where my epiphany bursts like a puffball mushroom, words adrift like spores in a forest understory. Cellular biology is only a part of the puzzle. There’s also a thing called hylozoism, the idea that all matter is living. Or pantheism, the idea that everything is God. It’s a boundless space where nothing is quantifiable or subject to systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, or the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. In musical terms, it’s the intervals in a symphonic structure that give it life, the silences between the notes that create the music. It’s a breeze carrying and dispersing seeds. It’s a phenomenon of consciousness, where the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity dissolves. As Leibnitz said, evolution is involution. Sounds and silences. The neural interface between a cell and a soul.