The Universe In The Creak Of A Bedspring

Science doesn’t think. Said Heidegger. Science is rigorously empirical. It observes. It measures. It quantifies. It obscures Being with abstract numerical properties. Science is reductive, thought is rampant. Technology is fundamentally blind. Creativity sees the invisible beyond the visible. Science exalts objectivity. Poetry evinces Erfahrung, the feeling of coming into existence.

Science eschews the alchemy of metaphor for the accuracy of the caliper.

The mind (to paraphrase William James) sees in the universe an alluring enigma whose key is hidden in the form of a word or a name.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Science sees the mind as a kind of computer, an organ, an electrochemical Wurlitzer. A symbol-manipulation device, a network of neurons, or a probabilistic inference engine.

According to Heidegger (and, not unironically, the AI overview on Google) “technology significantly affects the mind by shaping our perception of the world, causing us to view everything as raw material for manipulation and control, essentially ‘enframing’ our understanding and limiting our ability to experience the world authentically; he argues that modern technology, with its focus on calculation and efficiency, can restrict our thinking to a purely instrumental way of viewing the world, potentially reducing our capacity for deeper contemplation and connection with nature and other beings.”

I’m sympathetic to these thoughts. I find them cogent and alert. I also find them romantically naïve.

Technology has helped make existence endurable. Not just endurable, fun. It’s exhilarating to feel the thrust and roar of the turbojets aboard a passenger jet lift from the ground and watch below as the city and its exasperating complications shrink into inconsequential miniatures. Take that initial downward dive on a roller coaster. Listen to Susan Tedeschi play an electric guitar.

Technology has given us refrigerators, vaccines, electric lights and heating, halls for symphonies, stadiums for sports, telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes and colonoscopies, calculus and codeine, welding, windmills and well-being, vineyards and violins, antennas and aqueducts and antibiotics, careful experimentation and observation, Robert Boyle’s indomitable matter of fact.

Technology has also destroyed what I most love. What I devoted to my life to. Writing. Literature. Poetry. Computer technology has had a powerfully corrosive effect on literary and critical thinking. It has also been a critical component of warheads and ballistic missiles.

Not to mention the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped daily on the citizens of Gaza. Men, women, and children. Babies.

Or the fire bombs dropped on Dresden in February, 1945.

Or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Or the daily release of 32,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan for the next thirty years.

Science doesn’t think. It blunders. It destroys. It brutalizes nature. It distances us from ourselves. It produces sidewalk zombies forever scrolling for little squirts of dopamine. It enables war and ecological disasters. Lethal viruses escape from its labs. Children die in lithium mines.

So I get it. I lean toward Heidegger. Everything but the Nazi affiliation.  

It’s a curious exercise to mix poetry and science. Lucretius did a fine job of it in De Rerum Natura. This testifies to the ultimate failure of categories to support a coherent argument. Because poetry and science – mathematics especially – have far more in common than they do irresolvable differences. Things blur. Life is lived in blends of plum and soft Tara gray.

Equations are poetry. There are equations that evince a marvelous aesthetic. And there are equations that reveal unexpected relationships between things, which is precisely what poetry does. Poetry is an arena of equation making.

For example, the Standard Model Lagrangian. It’s not much to look at. At first glance, it looks like an indecipherable mess. But it’s beautiful. Beautiful in its complexities and mathematical éclat. It describes the fundamental interactions of elementary particles within the Standard Model of particle physics, and does so with clarity and sparkle and a keenly displayed perceptibility of highly elusive abstractions. How is this different from a poem? The equation is customarily written as a sum of terms representing the kinetic energy of the particles, their interactions with the gauge bosons (a bosonic elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for elementary fermions) and the Higgs field interactions, which is responsible for converting energy to horses, frogs, and motorcycles. It’s a poem. It does what poetry does. It creates. It enchants. It accelerates particle beams smashes congruent chains and sprinkles the world with God particles.

I’m not trying to make converts here. I do tend to get evangelistic on matters of poetry and the verbal arts, but a lot of the time I’m trying hard to make sense of the many incongruities and contradictions that inhabit my brain. The wrongly assumed antagonism between science and art being one of them.

If there were an equation for that, it would look like this, what I call the Pierre Reverdy equation: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but only of the bringing together of two more or less distant realities. The more the relations of the two realities brought together are distant and fitting, the stronger the image – the more emotive power and poetic reality it will have.”

The ocean in a drop of water.

The universe in the creak of a bedspring.

Squiggles Splashes Blobs

The abstract fascinates me. I can’t say why. Maybe it’s because it’s abstract. The attraction is in the realm of the abstract and is therefore indefinable. Intangible. Impalpable. Incorporeal. Like a mist on a swamp. Like the song of a siren echoing in a Norwegian fjord. The abstract morphs immediately into fable. Into wizards and gyroscopes. As soon as I start thinking about the abstract, I start fetching images for it, so that it becomes apparent and manageable. Which destroys it. It becomes a representation of something entirely different. It becomes a utility rather than an entity. The abstract has the fluid ellipsis of Platonic sublimation. Images aren’t repelled by the abstract, they’re attracted to the abstract. It’s just that in the realm of the abstract, they cease to be recognized as objects in the realm of the human. Human perception is navigable when things are specific. When things are no longer specific, no longer tied to a narrative, they become abstract. Geometric. Squares, circles, rhombohedrons. Squiggles, splashes, blobs.

I like to drift to the north of myself and float above the tundra in an igloo. This is precisely how I feel about abstraction. The energy is clear and brilliant like the stars, but if it gets too warm your house melts.

When I view a work of abstract art, I’m confused as to how to take in. Because I want to take it in. I’ve been drawn to certain paintings – many paintings in fact – by forces I don’t understand. An incomprehensible magnetism draws me to a representation that is a non-representation, a representation unrepresenting itself. The reality, its essence of being, is in shape and color. That’s it. Shape. And color. Altitude spread over a mountain like chowder. The eloquence of a green arm holding a black sun. The creak of floorboards. Sensations peeled back to reveal the juice of value. Predicaments of existential trace. I let myself go to this twist of reality to find a pulse of fervor in a streak of scarlet, and linger before the canvas dissolving on its spin. Each splatter, each blot, each smudge, each splurge a palpable echo of the void between our ribs.

Reality is just an artifice, writes Mallarmé, good for anchoring the average intellect among the mirages of a fact. One must sift experience for the charms of procrastination. Facts are simply the centipedes of certitude, a swarm of anatomies creating a mirage in the shimmering advance of the text, the rapid clatter of little slender ideas, each charged with its own special brand of facticity. Something is true because it has precipitous effects on people. It makes them happen to themselves, like jalapeños or dandruff. The idea that reality is one and many and in a state of perpetual flux comes to us from Heraclitus, who, it is said, may have brought about his own death by speaking in a confused manner to the doctors treating him. He had also covered himself in cow dung. What we apprehend is, in the end, mostly random. Reality is just an artifice.

The irony at the core of abstract painting is its seeming avoidance of reality, stripping itself of any narrative, a picnic in the woods, a winter sunrise in the country, lily pads in a still pond. It gives us reality: line, shape, color, texture, mass, volume, paint.

There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship. That amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line – to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass by drawing alone. Said Frank O’Hara.

You can’t look at abstract art without thinking: why am I here? How did I get talked into this? And why didn’t I wear my suspenders? This belt is useless. My pants keep falling down. My hair looks like shit today too. Like this painting. Is this truly what art looks like up close? Oh, stop being such a philistine. I was drawn here. I don’t get it. But I’m drawn to it. It’s visceral. Proprioceptive. Now there’s a word. Words have the funniest habit of popping into your mind for no reason. Like they’re some kind of elfin spermatozoa. The seeds of the impalpable. This painting isn’t a turnstile. You can’t enter it and pass through it to a subway that takes you to a specific destination. It’s all surface and fact and immediacy and sod. Take that painting by Wyeth. The one everybody understands. The woman sitting in the grass looking at a house in the distance, at the top of the slope. There’s a story there. Maybe a murder. Maybe she lost the use of her legs and she’s hoping someone in the house will come to her rescue. Maybe she’s lost. But what am I doing here? I’m looking at this painting and thinking about another painting. The abstract is insistent in a very weird way. It’s really not insisting on being looked at all. It seems fine just hanging on a wall. Even though it was created on some guy’s floor while the maniac danced around it in an exultation of paint. Color. Movement. That’s what I’m seeing. The residue of that guy’s exaltation. Which makes it insistent. That’s what I’m sensing. It’s that visceral sensation of some guy’s wild energy.

Pollock is the Nureyev of Action Painting. A Greenwich Village shaman of the 1950s. When I was a kid playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a flute and collecting eggs from the henhouse on a North Dakota farm and feeling their warmth and that beautiful ovalness that feels so good in your hand, right down to the bone and marrow and gladness of having a hand, this supple organ for feeling and holding things. With its bouquet of fingers, and silly importance of the thumb.

The heavy impasto of Shimmering Substance says it all: It’s a universe of color a tether untethered an éclat of internal lightning. A pleonasm steeped in naked transparency. Thoughts in pursuit of a stick. Pragmatism is just a subtle crack in the argument. There are better ways to feel the resonances of the dead. Our own kindnesses invite us to open our breath to the reality of ourselves. Or the hang of things. The scrotum is a domain of great decorum. Here are some ways to think about thinking: and by that I mean the activities of the mind, which are interacting with something it doesn’t recognize, but that flashes on and off in the Kansas night. I find paint uplifting. Sensuous. Libidinous. Pleasantly gooey. I could throw adjectives at it all day and it wouldn’t bring anything into easy understanding. The effrontery of it. That sound it makes when you stir it in a big can. One need only accept the sparkle of propagation to enjoy this moment.

We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters. There isn’t much to go on. Other than your nerves. I wish I better understood the decorum of legs. The way they move with such easy, natural rhythm could solve anybody’s argument. I do like Kline. And Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter. Prose is thought poetry is a gun in the glove box. These branches carry lovely blossoms. These branches of words, which are buds on the tongue of something magnificent, and wide open and denim. Ever open a bottle of something carbonated that overflowed and got your fingers sticky? We’re surrounded on all fronts by the impish sparkle of the arbitrary. Fruits, consequences, facts. Cesarean cookies dusted with penicillin. The science of masses, molecules and the ether. The oddness of standing naked in a stationary store looking for a stuffed monkey. Teary-eyed farewell bugs. Hot sonata ice. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. I don’t either. This always happens when I get around something abstract. The cod are visible below the waves. And the thunder reminds me of Ganesha. Whatever happened to Cameron Diaz?

Cy Twombly's marks inflate with the crackle of abstraction in the surrounding space. Rothko’s volumes are as lush as the light will allow. Is space the ultimate abstraction? Just space? Infinite quantities of space. Which isn’t a quantity. Or is it? Is space a quantity? Yes, it is, as it is a fundamental dimension that can be measured and is considered to be a vital framework for describing the physical world, similar to time and mass; meaning you can quantify the amount of space occupied by a walrus or a concertina through measurements like length, width, and height. Space isn’t empty. Space is full of particles, radiation and energy, which, according to William Blake, is eternal delight. You might also consider a trip to Thailand, or Bhutan, where penises are painted everywhere, in honor of Drukpa Kunley, a 15^th century Buddhist teacher. And if that doesn’t pan out you can always go fishing. Or visit a local face. Aren’t eyebrows wonderful?

Mathematics is fiercely abstract. That’s because numbers are elegant. It’s paradoxes bloom into beautiful theories. Einstein called math the poetry of logical ideas. But look at Einstein’s desk. Does anything look logical there? I suppose it does in some cockeyed way I’d never understand. Not without a spoon, a fork, and a pile of pancakes. A piece of chalk. And a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Socked by physics into a stupor of infinite volume. Or something like it. A truncated acute hyperbolic solid cut by a plane, like Gabriel’s Horn, which has finite space, but infinite surface area. I wonder what it sounds like. Conversations with strangers. Oysters slurped from the shell. Or maybe Miles Davis’s muted trumpet in So What. And that’s it. That attitude lurking in the abstract. I’m here. I exist. I have Being. But no bone. I exist in the mind. So what. 

Dumb Dark And Gray

Is there a recipe for chimera? They say the meat of the chimera is tender as hope and sweetened with the juice of illusion. It must first be pounded with a giant desperation, marinated in bitter rumination, then baked in a paragraph preheated with unobtainable desires. Later, after the table is set with great expectations, hungry emotions, & cutlery warm as tears, it’s time to serve the chimera. Some say it tastes like glory, others that it savors of desperate measures and fetishized asparagus. I followed a chimera to California one day. I tried to sneak up on it and surprise it, but as I approached, a giant reality pounced & ate it. Life is empty without at least one illusion. The illusion, for example, that life has meaning. Meaning is another tasty meat. It's best eaten raw, but if you put it in a poem, or a self-help book, which is its own special type of chimera, season it with prepositions and saleswomen. Make it convincing. Give it magnetism and crusades. Talk about it. Let people know where you’re coming from. Avalon. El Dorado. Cockaigne.

Glastonbury, near Pilton, where the Glastonbury Festival has featured T. Rex, Radiohead, Adele, Beyoncé and The Rolling Stones, was once known as the Isle of Avalon, where King Arthur was taken after the Battle of Camlann, in which his son Mordred stabbed him in the head with his sword. Keith Richards was but a young man when this happened. I can hear his chimera purring behind a Grammatico amp. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. I Heard It Through The Grapevine begins in the key of betrayal. We all come to discover the treachery of snow on a sidewalk, the barely visible, potentially lethal sheet of crystal known as black ice. I don't know if there's a parable here, or one on the way, but high inflationary dollars do have a certain flair, the wizardry of illusion. The boldness of drawing wealth from a future that may or may not exist haunts the corner of North Euphoria & West Ecstasy. Sausages are sold here, and pretzels and popcorn.

Wassily Kandinsky turned to abstraction to bring reality to paint. People had begun mistaking pictures for paint, paint for pictures. Kandinsky incandesced into color. Geometric and biomorphic forms, curious entities with strong suggestions of intracellular life but without the domesticating definitions of easy identifiability. The mind is provoked into celestial organicism. Bold colors in a realm of endless metamorphosis. Luminous walls across a blue river. Radiant yellows, robust greens, squiggles of black sinuous as music. What feels like a flicker of red is an immersion in the abstract, the canvas strumming a herd of deities. It’s an aesthetic of heat, a fire in the logic of blue. The flutter of rebellion in a splodge of atomic tangerine. Or just plain heat.

Is there a fool in the dictionary? Yes, there is: one who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding. One who acts unwisely in a given occasion: I was a fool to subscribe to The Elegant Gaffe. Formerly, a member of a royal or noble household who entertained the court with jests and mimicry. The act of being foolish, such as making inversions invite the irrational into a whorl of living temperature. The ability, if not the compulsion, to turn the world upside down. To scoff at money, then do everything you can to get it. Devote yourself to a library of world literature as the world grows increasingly illiterate. And expect to get paid for it. Celebrate the use of lazy tongs at a word salad bar on a late-night poetry show called Dumb Dark and Gray. Make demands. Don’t let the academic system degrade it into being a mere specialization. Wear a funny hat. Put everything beyond the reach of logic. You’re there. Now honk your horn.

 

 

Time For You To Leave Now William Blake

I think it’s finally here, that feeling of irrelevance that’s been seeping into the darker corners of my denial for at least a decade. My relation to the world has altered. The pier is empty. The ship has sailed. Captain Ahab isn’t hunting for a white whale in a world of towering, oceanic prose. He’s obsessively doomscrolling a mobile phone next to a closed bookstore which is now a Starbucks. The good news is that I’m old. Being old is surprisingly salutary; it feels appropriate, like old boots on a wet day in December. There’s a side to obsolescence not unlike adolescence. Irrelevance is to old age what an Amish horse and buggy is to a Tesla sedan with all-wheel drive. It’s based. It’s genuine. It’s contrary, it’s refractory, and agreeably anachronistic. When defiance of the norms leads to social and cultural irrelevance, old age is the salt that enhances its flavor.

I’m not alone. Language itself has become irrelevant. More and more people can’t read. They may be functionally literate, but reading for subtleties of meaning, for nuance, for evocative insinuations or glorious insights into the realm of human consciousness counts for very little. Don’t believe me? Go listen to a podcast. Go on TikTok. Listen to an influencer. But before doing so, remove any guns or potent pharmaceuticals from your office or home. Why else have things such as ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ or ‘fake news’ become such a threat that liberals – once the bastion of free speech – are now calling for censorship? Language has become a wild beast, a bull bristling with banderillas and blood running down the sides in a bullfight ring.

People of a given age who rage over these issues are generally called curmudgeons – a favorite word among gaslighters – and reminded of their irrelevance. We’re in a new world now. Post a protest about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and – if you happen to be a resident of England – you may have your house raided, as did author and anti-Zionist Asa Winstanely, who argued the salient but unpopular point that it’s wrong to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and that the conflation of these terms is used by the state to stifle dissent. This contradicts my statements about the irrelevance of language; apparently, there remain situations in which the written word still unsettles some people with a bit too much relevance. I may be confronting an important paradox here: language continues to have relevance depending on context, the intolerance and infantile hypersensitivity of a heavily propagandized public, and the power of billionaires who own and control the social media platforms to censor speech contrary to the official narrative.

Thankfully, I’m not a journalist, but a harmless poet, composing verbal amusement parks with the relevance of a funhouse in a weapons manufacturing plant.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned. In 1994, the prestigious publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. The trajectory of Birkerts’ life was quite similar to mine: enamored of the enchantments of the written word, he spent his early adult years living in very humble circumstances while dedicating himself to the pursuits of a nascent author, supporting himself with jobs clerking in bookstores. And also like me, and being of a similar age, he has had to witness the slow, painful erosion of a literary culture thousands of years old. Various literary cultures, I might add. The apocalypse of the printed word has been global. “There is no question,” Birkerts writes, “but the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language on every societal level.”

The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of “plainspeak.” Syntactic masonry is already a dying art. Neil Postman and others have already suggested what losses have been incurred by the advent of telegraphy and television – how the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple “vision thing” and myriad other “things.” Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person’s energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse…Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

This was written 30 years ago. Fast forward to 2024, and the detritus of the plague are visible everywhere, at least to the like-minded bibliophiles who have retreated into the sanctity of their libraries.

I’ve noticed that some authors, such as former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote his own plea to the preservation of print media accompanied with all the dire consequences its demise would have on society, in a book published in 2009 titled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, now writes a column on Substack which is accompanied by a podcast, The Chris Hedges Report Podcast, covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society. Were it not linked with a podcast, for which his accompanying text is essentially a transcript, I’m guessing his audience would not be as large. Which is a shame, because Hedges is a beautiful writer; the lucidity and gracefulness of his sentences were a special joy despite their oftentimes disturbing contents.

Another writer, an Australian woman named Caitlin Johnstone, also began accompanying her columns with a video in which the text is read by her co-writer, Tom Foley. Anticipating, I’m sure, the aversion people now have to the arduous task of reading. Read, for example, her recent article “The West Only Has Pretend Heroes Like Spider-Man And SpongeBob.” Here is an excerpt: “There are no real heroes with popular support in the western empire, because everything that’s truly heroic gets stomped down here, and everything that gets amplified to popularity is either vapid distraction or directly facilitates the interests of the evil empire.”

I envy people who have the finances and patience to set up a microphone and what else technology needed to put out a podcast. They’re hugely popular, an indication, perhaps, of a return to an oral culture not that dissimilar from our distant ancestors munching down hard on mastodon meat while listening to one of their clan members deliver the narrative of killing the tusked, hairy monster with their spears and unflinching courage. Joe Rogan – a hugely popular podcaster and UFC color commentator – not to mention a massively built man highly skilled in the martial arts – would dovetail into that role perfectly. His interviews can go as long as three hours without becoming tedious. He is an absorbed listener and adept conversationalist. Nevertheless, art, aesthetics, philosophy and/or literature rarely, if ever, come under discussion.

At age 77, it is somewhat befitting that a man in my predicament would try to find some meaningful traction despite the haunting fact of my irrelevance. The once highly popular blog provided a convenient substitute for the disappearance of print media, particularly in that it bypassed the accustomed gatekeepers and editors and gave one the freedom to write whatever and however you wanted, has been on the wane. There are now platforms such as Medium and Substack which appear to have captured the blog audience. All these mediums, however, are read on a computer screen, oftentimes a small mobile phone screen. Not an ideal situation.

Another victim of our electronic age is letters. I used to love writing letters. Still do. Provided I can occasionally find someone to participate in the exchange of verbal flurries and details pertaining to one’s personal life. There is no reason an email cannot carry that burden, but most people evince a stubborn reluctance to let their language spread its wings there. Don’t know why. It’s so frigging easy. Could it be the ever-haunting specter of surveillance? The letter sealed in an envelope was a private, sacrosanct world. Compare, for example, the warmth and verbal panache of Keats’ letters to the abrupt bullets of a typical email and you will witness an erosion of an art akin to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, or the ice sheets of Greenland.

I’m often amazed to attend literary events. They’ve begun having a distinct Fahrenheit 451 vibe about them, people still devoted to the literary arts and doing what they can to preserve them. But the high and noble ambition of making a living by writing the Great American Novel, of producing an On The Road or The Handmaid’s Tale or Catcher in the Rye or Slaughter-House Five, seems as antiquated and obsolete as a prospector leading a mule burdened with camping equipment into the Nevada desert in search of gold.

Why should it bother me? I’m retired – not so much from a literary career but from the menial shit jobs I worked to make a living (what a remarkably odd and stupid phrase that is, make a living) which were the bane of my existence. I hated every job I ever had. But who doesn’t. It’s rare to find someone who makes money doing what they love to do. I have nothing but a huge bonfire of envy for that person, and a spark of admiration flying up into the dark cold night.

I watched a video recently about the 15 signs of intelligence, one of which was change, the eager embrace of the new rather than the stubborn reluctance to adapt. I couldn’t disagree more. Which, I guess, makes me a really stupid person. But most of the changes I’ve witnessed since the beginning of the 2000s have been unmitigated disasters. All the sidewalk zombies I see every day gazing mindlessly at a handheld device testify to an obliteration of intellect akin to the bubonic plague. Or the dreary tedium of people checking their own groceries without even a murmur of aggrieved humiliation at being put to work by the very store to whom they're giving their money is another sad spectacle of fallen humanity. Fuck change. If you can’t step in the same river twice, and the water is too polluted for swimming, go for a walk instead. But watch out for the nincompoops doing 60 mph down the sidewalk on a monowheel.

There is, I must admit, a euphoric side to irrelevance. It means being detached. Unchained. Not necessarily unengaged, not apathetic, not aloof, but off to the side, viewing the pageantry of human absurdity from the margins, like one of God’s spies, a neutral observer enlightened by dissociation and the wisdom of mortality, a bit like one of the angels in Wings of Desire. The knowledge that you’re temporary, ephemeral as a dragonfly when it comes down to it, is weirdly exhilarating. At least in the abstract, where nothing weighs nothing, and all the data banks nestled in row upon row upon row of floor-standing server racks count for nothing in the stillness of a crystal. Sunyata, the Hindu term for ultimate truth or reality, flashes semantically over a field of obsidian in the veined wings of a dragonfly. Irrelevance is an amulet beaded with words.

It gives me a peaceful feeling whenever I revisit in my mind’s eye that image of Johnny Depp in Dead Man lying still in a canoe, mortally wounded, as he drifts into the ocean. It all began by applying for a job as an accountant in the western frontier and morphing – mostly by one crazy happenstance after another - into a surprisingly lethal gunfighter. He has a memorable encounter with a frontier Iggy Pop, and an infamous bounty hunter and murderous cannibal named Cole Wilson played by Lance Henriksen. Most of these events occur while under the tutelage of a member of the Cayuga Tribe named Nobody, archly played by Gary Farmer, who – under the impression that Depp is English poet William Blake – befriends the accountant-cum-gunfighter as he penetrates deeper into the American west, feeding him quotes of Blakean wisdom until his final and fatal gunfight. Nobody leans over the carefully prepared canoe to tell Depp “Time for you to leave now William Blake, time for you to go back to where you came from.” “You mean Cleveland,” the dying Depp mutters. “Back to the place where all the spirits come from,” answers Nobody, “and where all the spirits return. This world will no longer concern you.” Nobody gives the canoe a shove and Depp floats outward toward the gray horizon to that place of ultimate irrelevance, of free-floating creative energy where particles pop in and out of existence in a sparkle of divine fluctuation. “The authors,” said William Blake, “are in eternity.” 

 

 

Manifesto Of Surrealism Centennial

One hundred years ago this month André Breton first published his Manifesto of Surrealism. Someone needed to explain why there were buffalo riding the subway. Why childhood arches over our lives with its unobtainable trinkets and drowns in the slavish timidity of adulthood.

The manifesto begins: “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.”

This is a powerful statement, one that resounds with the pangs of Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure who was punished for revealing many of the secrets of the gods. His punishment consisted of standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, always just a little out of reach, and to make matters worse whenever he went to take a drink, the water receded. This is, in many ways, a metaphor for the human condition. Man, Breton continues, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been let to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts…

I find it fascinating that a book that delves so profoundly into the mysteries of human consciousness aligns its agitations with the hard realities of existence, the yearning for what is unobtainable, the yearning for what is ill-defined and maddeningly Orphic, the yearning for beauty, for the marvelous. “This is because,” Breton writes, “he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.”

We now inhabit a technocratic dystopia of disembodied sidewalk zombies hopelessly riveted to handheld gadgets, electronic screens dominated by a commercial holocaust of satisfactions that are incapable of satisfying, but whose true achievement is the death of critical thinking, assaults on the imagination and a diminished capacity for idle speculation. Salvation is critical. We live in a panopticon of technocratic surveillance, the death of solitude, oligarchic rapacity, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

Breton’s manifestation appeared at a time of counterfeit splendors, cars and airplanes, the fruits of technology, exultations of empirical totality and industrial giants encoding human experience with false goals and alluring seductions. Breton masterfully and ingeniously borrows the language of science (he had practiced psychiatry during WWI, which is where he discovered the liberating force of free association, the free flow of speech, by way of Sigmund Freud, for whom he had enormous respect) in order to reenchant the world.

“Today is the crisis in consciousness.” Mina Loy, 1914.

In science, truth is that which gives us the maximum sum of our tastes, but its coherence with respect to previous truth as well as with respect to the new fact remains the most imperative requirement.

Said William James on the subject of pragmatism. Pragmatism has little to do with surrealism, which makes it the perfect candidate for the demon of analogy. The less two things have to do with another the more they attract, the more they broaden the scope of what is possible. There is a magnetism in things that draws us to an overflow of sensation, vast magnetic fields of fragrant affiliation, mountains of rocky correlation, diaphanous waves of Being, silky convulsions of voluptuous interaction, of illuminating frictions, of opposing charges creating sparks of revelatory heat, dilations of plasmatic space, the opening of an astronomy of dreams.

Surrealism isn’t a theory, it’s a discovery. The French have a word – dépaysement – which means to disorient, to be disorientated, quite generally by finding oneself in another country, another territory or zone, à la Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In this case, the region, the territory, the zone is surrealism, not just as an aesthetic, a treatment of paint or language, but a philosophy, an approach to life that claws at reality for a more vivid reading of the sidewalk, a deeper understanding of the metaphysics of light, or the thousand and more miracles in the intricacies of milk; the beauty of the semicolon, the splendor of feathers, the genius of orchids, the fleshy aerial roots of Vanilla planifolia or tart suggestions of paradise in a pint of ale.

Surrealism, Dr. Breton warns us, “does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like.” A driver license test, for example, or a conference on the emergence of narrative in the cinema in which some modicum of sobriety might be recommended. Not all situations in life are amenable to the impulses of surrealism and the impish whimsies of the notorious Id, which Edgar Allan Poe termed “the imp of the perverse.” He refers to it (somewhat jokingly I hope) as a disorder, and something to be concealed temporarily so that we may pursue a career or social life.

“There is every reason to believe,” André continues, “that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do” (aha, I think to myself, no wonder I’m so drawn to this odd manifestation of the literary arts), “like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts. It also is, if you like, an artificial paradise, and the taste one has for it derives from Baudelaire’s criticism for the same reason as the others. Thus the analysis of the mysterious effects and special pleasures it can produce – in many respects Surrealism occurs as a new vice which does not necessarily seem to be restricted to the happy few; like hashish, it has the ability to satisfy all manner of tastes – such an analysis has to be included in the present study.”

It's helpful to remember that in 1924 the public and literary worlds hadn’t completely severed; an artistic movement was often anticipated to have observable effects on society, and sometimes it did. The din of machinery paused and angels shook their hair over our roofs. Poetry’s wildly erratic alphabet beaded on the windows. Or, at the very least, it consorted with the zeitgeist. Today’s bleak tendencies are less accommodating. The tide has ebbed, revealing the suck of the estuary. The literary scenes in the U.S. and England, if not the rest of Europe, could comfortably inhabit a tiny island in the ocean of your choice. Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. Energy, however, cannot be created or destroyed. There persist qualia that resist the juggernauts of commodity. Surrealism, like a mycorrhizal fungi, persists in the forest understory. People make one of two comments when interviewed after a catastrophe, either “it was like a movie,” or “it was surreal.”

Poetry, Breton declares, “bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure…The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in.” This is, of course, the inflammatory Breton sounding very manifesto-ish. But wait. There’s more: “Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything. May you only take the trouble to practice poetry. Is it not incumbent upon us, who are already living off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for further inquiry?”

It’s a fair question. Despite the madness, the folly, the fights, the extravagances, the prodigious gravitations, the prodigal éclats of unabashed absurdity, the self-imposed poverty, the cold and flickering candles of the attic, or the chaos and inebriations of the loft, the race to get to heaven before they close the door, the panic to patch a leaking sanity, the uncommon bouts with reality, those blows to the ego, those marvelous procrastinations in which fallow fields grew fertile, alchemical sublimations of massa confusa performed in delicate solitudes, purification in albedo, voices crying on a table, soon there won’t be anything but snow on the sea, despite this, despite these strange, beautiful, alienating gifts, is the urgency justified? Is the effort worth the wounds and injuries? What is meant by ‘incumbent.’ How is anything this seemingly immaterial in any way incumbent? What is my responsibility as a poet? Responsibility and poetry seem like very odd bedfellows. But I see his point. The intensity is obvious, a little more subtle, perhaps, are the efforts to contain it, to give it a grounded and cogent prose.

“Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense,” Breton writes in the final paragraph of the manifesto. “This world is only very relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating.” Lovely, the way he refers to surrealist practice as “this world.” A world that runs parallel and invisibly aside the world of commerce, daunting high-rises full of brokers and bankers and lawyers and fish. Beautiful aquariums in the palaces of capital and finance. Is this reality? It is for many.

They used to be everywhere in the 60s: people. Flesh and blood people. Readers. Dreamers. People who read Rimbaud and Mallarmé, McClure and Kerouac, Lamantia and Dianne di Prima. Gwendolyn Brooks and Joanne Kyger. Richard Brautigan. Bob Kaufman. Gertrude Stein. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, by Richard Farina. The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie. Their names bring it back to me, make it palpable again, make it immediate. It’s a trick of the mind. A sacred fever. “The earth,” muses Breton, “draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.”

I know that feeling. I both love it and respect it. Whenever I’m given to a troubling urgency, whenever I surrender to impulses of otherworldly hue, I’m there. I’m here. I’m nowhere. “It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

Thank you, Monsieur Breton, for the many rebellions and that page by page house insanely glazed in the wide open sky. For earthlight and soluble fish. For surrealism and mesmerism and horsehair massage gloves and a door to the universe and the chandeliers in the lobby of the Hotel Elsewhere. Who needs money when your pockets are full of typhoons?

 

Words Arranged As Thoughts Leaping Into The Air

 

This is all about the steady flow of perceptions the scrotum is a place of great decorum a neon fox flashing on and off in the Kansas night the walls are soft and the voice will not echo the cod are visible below the waves I will address the crowd from the balcony

If I shift my legs I can alter my perception of gravity I find warmth uplifting I turn the wheel with the gross willingness of the stalwart prose is thought poetry is vocabulary see if there’s a gun in the glove box is that prose or poetry maybe it’s neither maybe it’s both maybe it’s a kettledrum words are such beautiful comedians it was obvious the paragraph was sick and needed some vocal cords ever open a pop bottle that overflowed and got your fingers sticky those branches carry beautiful blossoms every time I get engrossed in Cézanne I grow pagan

There’s a sign up ahead I want to shoot we hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters I would like you to have my opinion of humankind it’s mostly conversations with strangers lines and angles and volumes and planes the thunderous spatula of convalescence a friend who goes to the store for a six-pack and returns with an ocean

One need only accept the sparkle of propagation fruits consequences facts the anomalous propagation of radar might be overly urbane why is pragmatism something that people settle for useless questions and metaphysical abstractions what we really want is the raw heat of the moment

The library felt palmy today and reciprocal I oiled my destination with romance I once felt clockwise about an elf that I created with my legs it’s not always easy to predict what a gas is going to do the perpendicularity of your vomit is odd the new idea is then adopted by a family of verbs what a hawk in a greenhouse sounds like is gut-wrenching coming out of a harmonica I would give a thousand horizons for a pearl of such beauty

Whatever happened to Cameran Diaz teary-eyed farewell bugs ever notice the words ‘write’ and ‘writhe’ are distinguished only by an ‘h’ and are semantically similar should one appreciate to its fullest the labor of bringing something new into the world words arranged as iridescent feathers thoughts leaping into the air like dogs catching sticks Cesarean cookies dusted with penicillin a prompt dereliction stimulating unkempt comparisons I feel heavy holding everything better to wander nude in a stationary store than stifle on a Greyhound tickling people creates interesting deformities

Here are some ways to think about thinking never marry an opinion to breathe is to interact with the air in the unlimited leisure of the wilderness discussion had been worn threadbare we returned to the theory of the breaststroke just to get us through the night nothing warms the legs like denim the all-enveloping air invites us to open our breath to the reality of ourselves oysters prior to a rebellion the hour coughs monkeys and the market scales are studded with consideration I have an array of chattering coupons and by that I mean the table upon which rests a thunderbolt of sonata ice

I’ve never seen the night look so black firm chewy candy and North American deer parade through my mind I can get by once I see the lettuce sparkle in the morning sun I do back dives in my sleep it feels stunning to leap blindly into space thinking generally occurs when you’re not looking sometimes it thunders in syllogisms molecules and ether the swans are exceptionally preternatural this year which proves the existence of pretzels pragmatism is a subtle crack in the argument with spin variables the actual universe is wide open any idea that will carry us from one part of our experience to any other part is like spiraling through space in dilations of beautiful rhetoric and reminds me of Amarillo 

 

 

 

To Be Relished In Private

 

There’s no substitute for muskmelon at least not until we got stuck in the rain and discovered God in the straw how much does the taste of liberty weigh if you hear me moan it’s because I’m having a dream of cherries what can I give you besides a pleonasm in naked transparency aren’t eyebrows wonderful will we ever discover ourselves happy on a beet farm dear Mr. Fantasy play us a tune something to make us all happy I’ll light a candle & put it in the window I find reality has been turned upside down at the bottom of the pool

When is that damned Safeway going to open I will put my thoughts in a fever and see if I can produce an inkling of understanding I’m feeling something I don’t know what it is what I’m feeling which is often a cause of hair and to be relished in private the North American Pine Squid isn’t real nor did I make it up my sense of proportion is bad I once tried to cross a notebook with a barracuda thereby broadening my capacity for love

Marcel Proust was my roommate in college I lay awake pestering him with questions how does one accept the absurdity of life he said there’s a special cookie that fills the mind with splendor flavorful interactions pink umbrellas a subconscious recognition that we do not understand ourselves we must talk through it sweat through our T-shirts the mouth searches for words philosophical fat intentions connectivity oysters owls bogus excuses curtain rods silverware and drums I like you I trust you let’s shake hands and settle the deal over dinner thought is the enemy of flow the beginner’s mind art yields nothing but accidents beautiful things pantyhose lingerie the smells of Cairo in the 1980s sapphires ignition coils breasts and quantum equations Hilary Hahn playing J.S. Bach Concerto No. 1 in A minor the world goes to rags in the evening if you agree to walk my poodle I’ll give you an arena with good acoustics and fill it with a regatta

I won’t deny it there are pebbles in the mailbox echoes in a bee helicopters with great amenities things you wouldn’t expect like tiny sea polyps and varsity jalapenos the arteries of the rose filled with the blood of lovers which is why the chemical system of our cells often produce puzzling consonants crumbling paradigms basal cognition isn’t philosophical fluff which is why worms don’t have necks poetry supports nothing but teeth cyborgs jam at the local bar music never ends it continues over the horizon even our carpet has currents running in it it’s amazing how obstinate some people can be roaring about cybernetic toys the great cholesterol scam the taste of success which is oftentimes bitter there’s a pill under development that may reduce tinnitus others insist the wind lives in a cave by the sea I don’t know what to make of any of this

As for kidney stones the pain was so bad I was sweating bullets why do I keep bringing it up my memory keeps retrieving the sticks I throw my legs are levers and comrades evening mists caress the dying of the sun there’s a fire in the room a bright reflection the garden has a stranger standing in it a woman in black scribbling madly in a small book