My Amphibious Life

At this distance, one had the impression of a work of art rather than the sensation of water. What was missing was something wildly alive and indefinable, a root or a shoe. A gnarly, twisted root. A worn-out, whimsical, wildcat shoe. An ambience of bullfrogs. A climate of hammers and ice. Midnight trysts and flippant flautists. Something to set the water on fire and make it shoot up in force and elan and fall back down in a shivaree of misty splatter. This is hard to do in oil. It must be rendered quickly, but slowly, subtly, but fiercely, gingerly, but savagely. It must hold contradictions. It must impel metaphors. Bounce on bedsprings. Certain perceptual amenities subtly embedded in the paint can help the eyes find some perspective among the amorphous hues of a tentative but humid fulfillment, like the spray of a fountain getting your sleeves wet, or an argument in the hallway between a man and a gargoyle disputing the Heideggerian notion of Geworfenheit, and what it means to be thrown into this world, to abruptly find oneself alive to an existence whose meaning may be arbitrary, or imaginary, and the gargoyle seems to be winning.

What is wet? What is that feeling? I like it. I like being wet. In most instances. I don’t much like being wet when I’ve been running a long distance on a cold January day and my sweat gets my clothes wet from underneath, next to my skin, so that if I pause for a minute to wait for a traffic light to change or gaze across the water of Lake Union in the direction of Wallingford where there appears to be a kite wiggling around at Gasworks Park, and the awareness of the wet increases until it feels unmercifully cold and uncomfortable. My favorite wet is the wet of a hot shower, my cold skin getting pelted by drops streaming from a showerhead in a pleasing hiss. And that weird moment at 7:00 a.m. on a November morning in Kauai I got immersed in the Pacific Ocean and it was warm as bathwater. I wanted to stay there. Maybe swim some laps. But I felt a current pulling me under so I scampered out. It’s been a while since I put any trust in the ocean. I worry about sharks. Climate change is making it harder for sharks to find food. I don’t know how they do it, those surfers sitting out on the waves, calm and unbothered, legs dangling.

Or the Vikings. Riding for hours, days, weeks even in a longship, blisters on your hands from all the rowing, the wool and linen and reindeer hide wet from the slop of North Pacific waves, the sound of farts, hairy brutes hanging their butts over the side to take a dump, the stupid jokes, the monotony, the combined smell of brine and fish and sour milk. How is one to be expected to swing an ax at somebody and get splattered with all that blood? The life of a Viking is far less glamorous than it seemed in the beginning. Better to be a trader in spices and silks in Reykjavik. Chopping people up isn’t what it used to be. The thrill is gone. So much nicer to squeeze someone in affection. Not everyone. I don’t want to squeeze Gorm. I want to squeeze Yrsa. The board I’m sitting on is hard. I feel it tugging the oar. My back hurts. And my feet are cold.

I love swimming pools. Though it’s surprisingly easy to get bored in them, once you realize there’s little else to do but swim back and forth, or do a few dives, cannonballs, be a jerk and get everyone wet. I never did that. I was always well-behaved in pools. The most foolish thing I did happened one morning in August, 1965, age 18. I enjoyed diving to the bottom of the pool of my mother’s apartment complex and floating there, hung in suspension, just looking at my shadow on the blue concrete, arms undulating. I could hold my breath for an amazingly long time. It was a weekday, so nobody else around, everyone going to work. When I got out a man in a business suit looked at me, horrified. He was about to jump in after me. He thought I was drowning. I felt embarrassed. How weird that would’ve been had he jumped in & grabbed me. I probably would’ve freaked out. I didn’t know what to say. He was really upset. I thanked him for his concern. There’s no protocol for such things. I can still see him. Dripping. Uncertain how to feel. 

Delirium

Recently, reading an early essay by Virginia Woolf about street musicians, I gained some insight into a matter that has obsessed me for 58 years: why did Arthur Rimbaud stop writing poetry? Woolf's essay - entitled "Street Music" - extends far beyond the purviews of busking. It telescopes into a discussion of art in general. How powerful it is. How mysterious. How baffling. How audacious. “Street musicians are counted a nuisance,” she begins, “by the candid dwellers in most London squares.” Interesting, that she would begin by drawing attention to the tension that has always existed between artists and the society in which they abide. Why is this, and what has it to do with Arthur Rimbaud quitting poetry?

“Artists of all kinds,” says Woolf, “have invariably been looked on with disfavor, especially by English people, not solely because of the eccentricities of the artistic temperament, but because we have trained ourselves to such perfection of civilization that expression of any kind has something indecent – certainly irreticent – about it. Few parents, we observe, are willing that their sons should become painters or poets or musicians, not only for worldly reasons, but because in their own hearts they consider that it is unmanly to give expression to the thoughts and emotions which the arts express and which it should be the endeavour of the good citizen to repress. Art in this way is certainly not encouraged; and it is probably easier for an artist than for a member of any other profession to descend to the pavement.”

Hence, the danger of such a choice. But also its allure. Art is a powerful drug. It plays on our perversities, and stokes our instincts. It goads relentlessly to go against the grain, particularly if that grain is oppressive and boring. Just as certain people have a greater craving for risky adventures and cheap thrills than others, certain people are more susceptible to the filigrees of risk. If the appetite for the extraordinary, for the anomalous and weird is powerful enough, it will seduce the most serious-minded. They’ll surrender financial security - or having a family - or just enjoying a serene and decent existence - to the captivating indecencies of art. There’s no rationale for it, and certainly no confetti. It’s an allure without a lure, a goal without a score. The excitement creating creates often leads to exaltations, the kind of inner richness that deludes us into thinking the squalor surrounding our worldly existence is a scintillating lobby in paradise.

There is, of course, much more to it than just that: art is a power. It has the ability to conjure the sublime and ornament our anguish with exquisite subtleties. It has the capacity to destroy oppressive narratives. It stirs the nerves. It beats the heart. “The artist,” says Woolf, “is not only looked upon with contempt but with a suspicion that has not a little fear in it. He is possessed by a spirit which the ordinary person cannot understand, but which is clearly very potent, and exercises so great a sway over him that when he hears its voice he must always rise and follow.”

Woolf was twenty-three when she wrote those words. I’m 77. I have nothing to add to what she said, or qualifiers or manifestos. It’s all true. I’ve been treated like a weirdo by most people. The normies. The stable. The well-adjusted. The financially comfortable. But this still doesn’t get to the heart of what made Rimbaud quit poetry.

Woolf raises music to the highest level of phenomena that is valued – often with reverence - despite being void of any pragmatic worth. Aesthetic phenomena whose contributions to brute survival are null, but whose qualities are essential to the health of the soul. “Certainly I should be inclined to ascribe some such divine origin to musicians at any rate,” Woolf further elaborates, “and it is probably some suspicion of this kind that drives us to persecute them as we do. For if the stringing together of words which nevertheless may convey some useful information to the mind, or the laying on of colours which may represent some tangible object, are employments which can be tolerated at best, how are we to regard the man who spends his time in making tunes? Is not his occupation the least respectable – the least useful and necessary – of the three? It is certain that you can carry away nothing that can be of service to you in your day’s work from listening to music; but a musician is not merely a useful creature, to many, I believe he is the most dangerous of the whole tribe of artists. He is the minister of the wildest of all the gods, who has not yet learnt to speak with human voice, or to convey to the mind the likeness of human things. It is because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself – a spirit that we would willingly stamp out and forget – that we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power.”

And there it is: the genie out of the bottle that terrified Rimbaud into quitting poetry for good, “because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself.”

Rimbaud wasn’t a musician, but the essence of what Woolf is elaborating here is a spirit, not a career choice. It’s no wonder that Rimbaud held such a fascination for the musicians of the 1960s; their spirits were remarkably similar. Take that photo of Bob Dylan, Michael McClure, Robbie Robertson and Allen Ginsberg taken by Dave Smith in the alleyway of City Lights Bookstore in December, 1965, at Allen Ginsberg's behest, and which was intended for the cover of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. The photograph, although not used for the Blonde on Blonde cover, testifies to the blending of the two cultures, literary and musical. Music and poetry had fused, and these guys were the epitome of that.

Mallarmé encountered Rimbaud once, at a literary banquet in 1872 – “The Dinner of Naughty Goodfellows” - which was rendered in oil by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour and titled Coin de table (“Corner of the Table”) - and today is part of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s a scene of serenity and decorum – strangely out of character for Rimbaud, who sits gazing at his intimate friend, Paul Verlaine – and consists of five men seated at the table – Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d’Hervilly, Camille Pelletan – and three men standing, Pierre Elzéar, Émile Blémont, and Jean Aicard. In the foreground, a vase of camelias just off to the right balances Verlaine’s solemn gaze off to the far left. The camelias were put there to honor the absence of poet Albert Mérat, who refused to attend the banquet because Rimbaud had heckled him while reading his poetry. There’s no conversation going on at the table; none of the men are talking. Camile Pelletan, a politician, historian and journalist, looks questioningly at the painter, possibly out of intrigue, possibly out of affection. It’s an intriguing expression, and the only one who is looking out of the canvas. The others appear fully immersed in the sanctity of the occasion. I wonder how long they had to pose like this. Rimbaud looks almost angelic, and lost in a dream.

Mallarmé doesn’t mention why, in such close proximity, he didn’t bother to introduce himself to Rimbaud. He doesn’t describe the dinner at all. He quotes Verlaine’s description of Rimbaud, in Les Poètes Maudits: “He was tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an exiled angel, with disorderly brown hair and pale blue eyes that were disturbing.” The one thing he was struck by was Rimbaud’s hands. He thought they were enormous, and noticed they were “reddened with chilblains resulting from rapid changes of temperature, which might have indicated even more terrible jobs, since they belonged to a boy.” I suspect the chilblains were from sleeping in the cold. Mallarmé was struck by the contrast between the extremity of Rimbaud’s wildness and sleeping in the open and the uncanny innovations of his work, and remarks: “I later learned that they had signed some beautiful poems, unpublished; in any case his sardonic mouth, with its pouting and mocking expression, had never recited one.” Actually, though, he had: it’s said that he gave his first public reading of Le Bateau ivre at a bistro on Rue Férou, where today a giant mural of the poem has been inscribed on a high masonry wall. I’ve seen it. I passed it every morning I went running in Le Jardin du Luxembourg.

Mallarmé quotes five stanzas from Le Bateau ivre. Clearly, he was quite impressed with Rimbaud’s poetry. The impression he gives is how electrifying Rimbaud’s poetry was at the time. He dismissed the rumors, such as they existed at the time, concerning Rimbaud’s flippancies and ramblings and substance abuse, and remarks: “These are small, miscellaneous details, quite suited, in fact, to one who was violently ravaged by literature; the worst of all perturbations after his having spent many long, slow, studious hours on benches or in libraries, now master of a style that was perhaps premature but sure of itself, intense and exciting, spurring him to tackle unprecedented subjects – in search of ‘new sensations,’ he insisted, ‘not known,’ and he flattered himself that they could be found in the bazaar of illusions vulgarly known as big cities; in which the demon adolescent did discover, one evening, a grandiose vision, prolonged by drunkenness alone.”

Already, there is a sense of doom in these words. Something ominous, something uncanny, something demonic and cataclysmic. Rimbaud, this kid from a farm in the Ardennes who’d just participated in the Paris Commune - the revolutionary government that seized power in Paris, March 18^th, 1871, and controlled certain sectors of the city until May, 1871 - mesmerized the literary community in Paris and sent tremors of excitement through its corridors. This youth with chilblained hands possessed shamanic powers. I can easily imagine the exaltations he must’ve experienced when he composed his poetry, poetry that would shake the literary scene like a 9.1 quake on the Richter scale. The effect his poetry would have on his private life would be equally catastrophic. This is where, I believe, something went very, very wrong in Rimbaud’s psyche. The turbulent affair he would have with Verlaine, which led them to share a flat in London for a period of some months before exploding into what he termed “A Season in Hell,” and devoted a book to it. A Season in Hell begins: “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.” That sounds so sweet. And totally belies the nightmarish scenes that ensue: “I am slave to the infernal Bridegroom, the one who was the undoing of the foolish virgins. His really that very demon. He is not a ghost, he is not a phantom. But I who have lost all reason, who am damned and dead to the world…”

The turbulence of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine – an excellent poet in his own right, and revered for the refinements of his musical qualities – was, no doubt, fused in Rimbaud’s mind with the demonic force of poetry. Demonic in the original Greek sense, a supernatural being or spirit. “His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my duty to society, to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me, me, the poor soul. The Demon! His is a demon, you know, he is not a man.” Is Rimbaud talking about Verlaine here, or the genie that led him to write such extraordinary poetry? A poetry of extremes whose alchemical energy would uncage the genius in anyone who became enamored of its powers, and assume a mystical presence in their world. And in some instances, penetrate even further into the moral fiber of someone’s being, percolate like an elixir through layers of western society’s Calvinistic principles and persistent inculcations and alienate them to the fruits of an industrialized society. “Life is the farce we all have to lead.”

Mallarmé makes a strong suggestion, which many others have corroborated, that Rimbaud’s dromomania and hikes over Europe and his voyage to Java with the Dutch navy and jumping ship and returning to the farm in the Ardennes long enough to say hello to his mother and get back on the road, to Germany, to Norway, to Cyprus, and eventually to Aden and the Hotel Universe, served as a substitute for the intellectual excitements of poetry. By December, 1880, Rimbaud would make his way to Harar, Ethiopia, as an employee of the export company Viannay, Bardey et Cie. He would organize caravans across the Danakil Desert, a highly risky and dangerous enterprise. One imagines the sounds of these operations, the muffled grown of camels snuffing and huffing as they lifted themselves into walkability for caravaning during the night to avoid the scathing rays of the sun. The crackle of a fire and the chatter of Somali, or Afar, or Amharic, or Tigrinya, or a blend of all of these, which prick Rimbaud’s ears, and which arouse old instincts, which he nervously contemplates, then pushes back down into the crevices of his soul. He has a load of 2,000 antique percussion rifles to get to King Menelik. He has no time for nonsense. And his leg hurts. And his soul hurts. And there’s a small stone pressing into his back.

 

Evocation Of Butterflies

One must learn to hem a streetcar with the lace of desire, treat diving in the Arctic with the deference of snow, fill your pockets with England and burst into song. Do these things with agility and the language will deliver a child. Let us hope it will be a kind and gentle child. Medicine is not an exact science. Nor is poetry. I love the shrimp jambalaya at the 5 Spot. But how do express this rapture with the grace it deserves? My giant organ generates imagery. It’s a Wurlitzer. I feel a rhythm within I can only describe as panoramic, especially when I’m surrounded by Renaissance oils. I love those occasions when it’s stimulating to say things for the enjoyment of saying things. It’s like when an explanation of pine resin summons ideas you never knew you had. The resulting purple dye will answer the give and take between words. I like to touch the rivets when erections happen, and scrape whatever wisdom I can from the clouds.

I’m not normally this thirsty. But tonight I’m nervous. I’m also shy around reality. It’s always so revelatory, so completely transformational. I feel like I’m in a movie. The surrounding greenery expands in the occurrence of fireworks, which is an effect of drama. Why does frustration always result in a slammed door? Drama, of course. We all need a winch of force so heavy that we steam when we lift our aspirations to the open invitation of the sky and challenge fortune with our chutzpah. Spring is here to pull the dimness out of our clumsy moisture. Fat glow I ponder to insist it get behind me. Murmur it before a jury of your own emissions. Pollinate a goldenrod, and flicker vivid hues. That’s me in the future, fastening my belt and getting a hammer from my toolbox to hang a picture on the wall: Evocation of Butterflies, by Odilon Redon.

Bruise yourself among the experiments that life presents us and do it for the sake of sublimation. For the confusion of a contusion. For the pleasures of ooze and purviews. For the crackle of wisdom. The sound of cattle feeding on hay. Bone black artful bulwarks. Wildcat revelations. Flexed muscles. Searchlights steeped in ambiguity. Displays against delays beyond the apparitions of justice. The sound of moonlight dropping on a cemetery. Rock and roll angels sputtering ganglia in a suitcase. Personification of the impersonal with a can of paint and a glowworm jar equipped with bugs. Hive balls shiny with gloss varnish. Tangential and friendly kinetic energy driving a poignant locomotive toward a mournful spectacle of stationary birthday cards on a rickety rotating greeting card display stand, which is virtue itself in a gown of chatter.

 

The Possibility Of Seeing A Bear

There are some things in life for which you need a certain temperament. Imagine a rock star. The constant touring. The endless flow of fandom and autograph requests. Who could put up with that? I can see the temptation of drugs. Roadhouse anonymity and handstands on bar rails. Or how about the life of a well-known author? The gray heads. The drafts. The echoes. And the sadness of people trying to hold onto something as it ebbs into oblivion. I think I’d enjoy the life of a man in his twilight years reflecting on the past. The past is not always sympathetic. It has an insistence on revealing things. But it’s free. Free of tender parables wrapped in pretty gold foil. Free of Steven Spielberg. Free of George Lucas. Free of Judd Apatow. Family entertainment. Lies. Deceits. Denials. Narratives that look inspiring and eternal on the screen but diminish as soon as you leave the theater and enter the cold air and complexities and irrationalities of life. That hunger goes unsatisfied. You need a Hamlet or Joker or Dennis Hopper to get those across.  

My disappointment, age 8, at seeing Mt. Rushmore, four solemn faces, chiseled out of granite by Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln, each head about 18 feet high, grotesquely magnified into deification. I would’ve preferred Superman, Elvis Presley, Calamity Jane or Howdy Doody. Behind the stone heads is a chamber called the Hall of Records. Which doesn’t exist. At least not the way Borglum intended. He wanted to create a large room, 80 by 100 feet, drilled into the north wall behind the faces that would hold documents and artifacts. The chamber was to be reached by an 800-foot granite stairway. A smaller version was completed in August, 1998, by his son Lincoln. I loved the surrounding area. The smell of sage and pine. The possibility of seeing a bear. The faces seemed anticlimactic. Maybe because I was 8. Solemnity was boring. All four faces looked ponderous and dull. In real life I’m sure they were a hoot. Washington operated the largest whiskey distillery of his time. Lincoln had goats, a cat named Tabby, and a dog that he rescued from the Wabash River. He was assassinated the same day he signed legislation to establish the secret service. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific writer and a grad college dropout. Jefferson fought Barbary pirates. But as granite, they looked dull as a statute.  

In the end, it’s all about stimulation. Peak experience. Feeling the intensity of things. The density of granite isn’t due to stubbornness or the number of atoms packed together but the appeal it has to certain painters, and the fact that a chunk of granite is mostly space, and is therefore a dream.

Some people crave excitement. Loud excitements. Lewd excitements. Quiet excitements. An adrenalin rush. An opium-induced visit to paradise in the back room of a coffee merchant in Marseille. That second before you jump from the railing of a bridge and bounce back up on a bungee cord. My excitement the first time I opened The New American Poetry and discovered poetry as exciting as deep-sea diving and real as meat hung on a hook. I continue to marvel at how that’s accomplished, how a few words, rightly placed, or wrongly placed, can generate such a fabulous gadgetry of the mind, the intermeshing of intellectual gears, neurons exuding the gift of elasticity, a linguistic web catching the buzz of idea in a sticky silk, gnat in a panic of syntax. 

The Grail Of The Ineffable

Crisp January morning pulling into a Denny’s parking lot, Terence McKenna encounters hyper-dimensional pirates. He thrashes about crazily and yells “I’ve got it, I’ve got it now, if you know what is in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Now get these damn pirates off of me, I want breakfast!” I switched the engine off. Why can't I put time in reverse Terence, and back it up like a car? Why can't it be more willowy, more like a musical? I have friends long since passed I want to see again. I’m not at home here in the 21^st century. It’ll be 25 years old tomorrow. Watch out for centuries in their adolescence. The world goes mad. Atoms are always moving. Nothing is static. Not even a mug of hot chocolate is static. Rub a heavy claw and find the world translated into pearls. The world speaks lucre. The bottles flaunt their liquor. The walls are swarming with ant women. What is this place? This ain’t no Denny’s. As soon as there is heat, the physicists tell us, the future is different from the past. I see a woman running full blast into the fog on an oceanside beach. She forgot something in the last century. She can’t say what it is. But it smelled like the rain in Monterey and the frogs croaked at night.

I’m in Mick Jagger country. The future is precarious and undetermined, whereas the past is semiformal and reddish brown like the carp in the Mississippi and the present is simply me sitting here ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. A storm is threatening my very life today. If I don't get some shelter, oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away. This is how the gravitational field behaves when it heats up, although the mechanics of it is still an unsolvable problem. Physicists enjoy such enigmas. Their equations are gardens of exotic abstraction, wavefunctions, angular momentum and probability currents. Flowers of computation. But the poets seem worried. They always seem worried. They’re always pursuing the unobtainable. The qualities of things. Vanishing virtues. Hidden voices. Things beyond the grasp of capital. The grail of the ineffable. What all these words seem to be doing is interacting with a myriad of variables. Isn’t that what they’re here for? Not just undercutting remarks and insults, but the awakening of speech in the musk of our infatuation? War, children, it's just a shot away. It's just a shot away.

Anyone who has attended a poetry reading knows that the orbit of our propinquity is a perfect ellipse. It obscures the confusion. Not to mention the furniture. Which I always manage to bump into when I’m about to say something brilliant. And end up tangled in consonants. What are the characteristics of a failed society? It’s a dumb question. The obvious is better left unstated. Every time I read Proust, the current of words under my eyes describes the quantum events that comprise the world are themselves the source of time. Huh. Why didn’t I see that? What do you call the obvious when it’s no longer obvious? This is the place where the hammer meets its nail, and the singer meets the song. I might find you one day on the other side of my exhortation. That’s ok. There are shawls and other amenities in the attic long forgotten. Galaxies of wool. Bob Dylan on YouTube. Nirvana on grocery store playlists. And me. Riding on an asteroid.

Let’s face it. I need to get back to the place where I understood the airports and laws. And didn’t have to take my shoes off. Or raise my hands like an outlaw. It takes a long genetic thread to cement relations between a pragmatist and a phantom limb. And it takes a mutiny just to get a grievance heard. I consider raspberry to be a consummate swerve from granite. Who wouldn’t? Realism slaps a grapefruit with a dumbbell rag and reminds us our balloon went bankrupt. The astronomy of this is insatiable when it's trumpeted with a pustule. Didn’t anyone see this marriage coming, this sultry wedlock of AI and Musak? Rattle this composition the next time you see something itching to get scratched and I’ll come running with all my might and fingers.

I Hung A Blue Towel On A Rack In The Bathroom

I hung a blue towel on a rack in the bathroom. Such a dark blue I thought it was going to hop off the towel and beat up the wall. A dark, obsessive blue. I’m reminded of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain Cézanne so obsessively painted, which is located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southern France, between Aix-en-Provence and Pourrières, and is a famous deposit of dinosaur eggs, chiefly titanosaurs. The mountain was formed through a geological process called "folding" where tectonic plates collided, causing the earth's crust to buckle and uplift, creating the mountain's distinctive ridge structure; this occurred over millions of years, with the rock primarily composed of limestone and dolomite from the Cretaceous period. Cézanne died of pneumonia which he got from painting Mont Sainte-Victoire in the rain. He passed out in the field and was taken home by the driver of a laundry cart. He died a few days later. Still painting. Painting obsessively. A dark, obsessive blue. He said blue gives other colors their vibrations, and creates a sense of space. According to Rilke, Cézanne used at least sixteen shades of blue, a barely blue, a waxy blue, a listening blue, a blue dove-gray, a wet dark blue, a juicy blue, a light cloudy blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a densely quilted blue, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue, a self-contained blue and a completely supportless blue. 

Blue is a newcomer. You won’t see blue among the earthy hues of Ice Age art. Blue is hard to produce. By the time blue appeared on the scene, people didn’t know what to do with it. It symbolized nothing, not even the beyond, which appears so natural to a modern eye. It’s first rapport was with textiles. Linen. Wool. Silk. Cotton. Everybody loved red. Blue was foreign. A muted indigo blue dye was first produced from woad, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Egyptians made blue by heating a mixture of limestone, sand, copper, and alkali to a high temperature. They used blue in tomb paintings, on wood, papyrus, and canvas, and to make faience beads, inlays, and pots. Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed, wrote William Gass in Being Blue. It is the dark inside of sentences. The cardigan I got for Xmas is a dark navy blue, like the towel in the bathroom. I remember a night in Kansas when I was about 3 years old being struck by a blue in a neon sign. I can’t remember what it said. I couldn’t read. But it was a near a railroad, and made me feel blue.

Do colors truly exist? Yes. Colors are wavelengths that occur in our eyes and nerves. But what I think of blue and you think of blue might not be the same hue. This is where qualia come in. And Vermeer and veneer and cafeteria booths upholstered in burgundy vinyl. Without qualia, nobody would think of lighting a candle and playing the Beatles. Nobody would build a city like Paris, or host the Olympic Games there, unless they’re a complete idiot. I find qualia galore in tired old bistros like the ones in Lisbon where Ferdinand Pessoa hung out. Every city has one. Especially Seattle in the heyday of its grunge culture. The techies had no use for them and they disappeared. I look for qualia among the crows. And among the trees and what the bark can tell me as it talks to my hands. The smell of dirt can vary from field to field, as does the taste of coffee, and cognac, and Kandinsky. The creak of floorboards in used bookstores and the smell of thought. 

Think of blue long enough and it does begin to feel like consciousness. And space. Space and consciousness are both blue and it’s hard to separate the two, like the horizon line I stared at for hours from a vantage point in Kauai far out on the Pacific, where it was apparent the line was imaginary, and indistinct from the blue of the sky. And as the day began to blend with night the blue darkened into a spectral hue of transformation, definitions of day turning eternal and black.

The moon was full and intense in a halo of cloud haze. The crashing waves were phosphorous.

Would you like anything? A glass of water? You’ve come this far. We see the sparkle of consciousness stream from the balcony and join the moon in a penumbral coolness. Shakespeare walks toward us, holding a skull full of paint. 

The Pillars of Creation, a small part of the Eagle Nebula made of cold hydrogen gas and dust, are purple, blue, and teal, along with greens and reds.

Miranda, Uranus’s closest and seventh moon, is a carnival of disparate features. It looks cobbled together. It’s a Frankenstein of collision and deformation. The monster was an alien being of miscellaneous parts. The life within that animated its tortured existence was a nucleus of blastoderms. Embryonic tissue gone haywire. Imagine a life pulled in different directions. Conflicts of instinct and conformity. Conflicts of impulse and inhibition. So that behavior is an uncoordinated mess. Villagers in pursuit with torches and pitchforks. All of it reaching a crescendo of flames as a castle burns down. What could be plainer? Civilization sucks. Freud identified three measures for adapting to the difficulties of life in a social environment: powerful deflections, such as shifting blame on other people; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make people insensible to it. This is the misery Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote Caliban into existence. Who threatened Miranda with his bestial desires. And wreaked havoc with his grumbling. This is the spirit that drives our speech. Especially when its encountering something new. Like a blind violinist. And a goblet of wine.

How is the Milky Way a way? In what way is the Milky Way a way? Because the band of light stretching across the night sky resembles the appearance of spilled milk, which is reflected in the name’s origin from the Latin “via lactea,” meaning “milky way.” Where there’s a will there’s a way, because will is milky and when it’s spilled on the table destiny gets wet and the children scream and the cat runs to another room. The first planet Galileo saw was Venus. Galileo saw that Venus exhibits phases like the moon, which could only be explained by milk. Which reminds me of barns. And the ancient practice of milking a cow. And The Barn in Scotts Valley, California, in the summer of 1966, the Merry Prankster bus parked outside, Ken Kesey and Neil Cassady talking, in jeans and T-shirts, at the entryway, people upstairs dancing to a rock band, everyone flickering in blue light like an old movie. That was a way but it wasn’t a milky way. It was more like discovering Venus, in the mythological sense, riding in on a half shell, like Botticelli painted her, a naked beauty with a graceful modesty and a disarming artlessness. 

Let's Talk About Language

Let's talk about language. I hear a crow in the distance. And a dancer in a shimmer of black sequined silk shaking a tambourine. It reminds me of the day I first proposed marriage to nature. It was consummated with a wide-eyed enthusiasm. Believe me when I say that what I’m feeling inside doesn’t always correspond to what is outside. Thus, the birth of words. Which are endless. Infinity reflecting infinity in infinitely recurring images. If a description doesn’t fit its own description, try using a different set of words. Sometimes all it takes is a lotus, a bone, and a good hand lotion. Language is neither an instrument of precision or prediction. It’s a construct, like a small village. Today is a special day and everyone is running to the park. I marvel at the diversity of eyes. What detours, what misunderstandings, what convoluted trajectories, all to end up saying what one says. Existence is multifarious. This can be a problem if you’re brilliant. Mallarmé by a window, having breakfast, spoon in a grapefruit, contemplating Rimbaud.

Naiveté can be dangerous. Everyone remarked at how sexy the assassin was. That should tell you something. It’s an important clue. If it isn’t clear to you yet it soon will be, in the future, where the past goes on vacation and the present is unopened privately in a hotel room, button by button, Pacific breezes blowing in on a fairy tale, a knife on the floor and a multicolored moth on the ceiling. Meanwhile, certain expenses are carried over to another financial year. It’s how we get by. We live in a fiction. Which seems to be changing. Quite drastically, in fact. Language can’t help itself. It keeps trying to explain the universe. Listen. Listen up close. The first place you come to at the edge of the universe is Cheyenne, Wyoming. Maybe this isn’t what you were expecting. But hey. Sometimes what is most needed is a U-turn and a good woman at your side.

If language were perfect, people would cease to think. But now that I’ve brought it up, let’s get down to some milking. Gently grasp the teat between your thumb and forefinger near the top, squeezing downward to express the milk. That tingling you feel is just the night air. Microbes. Organelles. Mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell, converting juniper berries to thought, dynamite and communion. They call it thinking when it raises welts. These welts can appear anywhere on the body and may vary in size and shape. Don’t let it get in the way of your fun. Do what you want, go where you want to go. I would consider it imprudent to use a penis as a hammer. Don’t do that. There are other forms of entertainment far less taxing. Those tiny veins indicate something big is coming. Raise your arms to heaven and repeat after me: the birth of light takes place in darkness. Words are defined by other words. Click. Clack. Just like pool.

People have concerns. Shark attacks have been on the rise. There are drones over New Jersey. Chaos reigns on a Caribbean cruise ship. The wild west is still quite wild. You can smell it.  Desolation and sage. Creosote and oil. James Dean in Giant. Now come the elements. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The slap of the sea. The slap of indifference, which hurts the worst. Beauty persists, but it appears in strange, unexpected ways. That’s always been its modus operandi. A little threatening, a little edgy. Beauty is never innocent. Music often makes me feel like I'm busting out of my inhibitions. And I often do. The consequences can be a real problem. I find it increasingly difficult to describe things. The sunflower makes a splendid tattoo. But it’s hard to describe. It’s irrational. An irrational flower. And when the winter air is so cold it crackles in your voice I stop talking and listen. I hear the plumage of infinity rustling among the evergreen.