R comes in to tell me the astronauts stranded in the space station for 286 days splashed down near the Florida coast. And I wonder what that felt like to be trapped in space all that time and then touch down on earth and breathe fresh, atmospheric air again. Like that time I went to prison as part of a writer’s group that visited inmates and talked about writing and literature and a few hours later when we exited the prison how lushly detailed and sensuous the world seemed, as if I hadn’t been paying sufficient attention the whole time I’d been alive.
I used to get that feeling in my dad’s workshop when I
came home to visit from California. The smell of freshly sawn wood mingled with
the shine of chisels and the powwow of pipe clamps on the wall. Even radios
sound different in workshops; they sound like a voice healing the language with
diction, even though everything said is a lie or a fib or a gross distortion it
serves the energy of the language. Because it’s a calliope of nuclear syllables
and opens the gate to oxymorons. Sparkling inconsistencies. Haunting mascaraed
eyes. West Virginia garage sales.
We’re used to thinking about space as the setting in
which a number can precisely measure the distance between two points. A point
in space can be unequivocally characterized as a collection of three numbers (x, y, z)
on three axes. It can also be described as a large, roomy pavilion with lattice
walls admitting breezes from every quarter of the compass, or the flaming gold sunset
over the Columbia river gorge in August, 1988 when Bob Dylan sang “I Shall Be
Released,” or that moment in the summer of 1964 when my chute opened and I
dangled in the sky, marveling at the Skagit Valley, and the bird flying under
me.
The architecture of doubt excites our flapping. We nap
in the high vaulted ceilings of the Renaissance. Because we’re bats. And sound
the world with radar. I’m pinging off a bank of hills right now, feeling the
shape of the landscape, allowing my desires to become music, and echo their
elaborate schemes.
Clouds are machines for bringing rain to the earth. We
can do that, can’t we? Float. Drift. Clump. Piss on the ground.
I carved the electricity myself, using a jackknife and
a rock.
You may have noticed I now wear hearing aids and
suspenders. I’m at that age. Timelessness gets embryonic near the promenade.
But here it’s just a clock. And embodies a principle of tea.
My intentions tremble in sympathy. This is my seminal
ebony, the moment when they wake up the balcony, and we launch ourselves into anonymity,
breaking chaos into bits of inertia.
I only use overdrive if I’m captured by the moonlight
and have a hard time keeping my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. I
believe there’s a formula for this. Tools. Exercises. Operations. Procedures. Handsprings.
Somersaults. Cartwheels. Walking upside-down on a chair while singing the
national anthem. It always works best in the nude. I don’t know why. Some
things come alive via the magic of permeation. Being. And the trickle of
verisimilitude.
Space is an abstract
concept that describes the relationships between objects and the forces that
act upon them, and is the framework within which all physical phenomena occur,
acting as the "stage" upon which events in the universe unfold. In
other words, space is the three-dimensional expanse in which all matter exists.
Which is why it’s so easy to get lost in space. There’s so much furniture.
Getting lost is no easy
matter. I got lost once with some friends in a forest of eucalyptus near Santa
Cruz, California. I can’t remember how we managed to find our way out. Maybe we
didn’t. Maybe, in some sense, I’m still surrounded by eucalyptus, imaginary
eucalyptus, abstract emissions of sexual syntax which defy mahogany and ramble
along in a trajectory of hasty incisions in the fabric of space and time. I can
sometimes hear the murmur of stars in a canopy of canvas, bright maniacal
colors chained to a linguistic engine in a glimpse of delirium. It could also
be the lobby to a hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota. I can often identity a
location by the number of chandeliers or the clash between meanings in an
allegory of punching bags and sweat.
But please. Let’s not get
carried away. Language can only do so many things. It works by magic, we know
that, but its movements are similar to that of the Komodo dragon, which uses a
variety of libidinal adjectives to describe Cézanne, and can attain a speed of
thirty turtles an hour. One would be well served to use language carefully, and
with a view toward celerity and chiaroscuro.
Space is to language what language is to clouds. Participles participate in this clasp as it anchors. You can walk over there to greet a Cubist. There, in this context, references a staircase built to resemble the staircase of the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which spirals in 360 degree turns with no visible means of support, and looks like a DNA molecule made of spruce. If you happen to slide into the house of yourself as if by magic, you can always slide back out again if you use a bald excuse and a nearby shrub to use as a prop. Life is essentially theater. We’ve known that all the time, and yet I continually forget my lines, and stub my toe on the magazine stand. My biology does not allow for flying or hanging from the ceiling folded in my wings. I do have a certain position in bed that launches me into hypnopompic carnivals, and echolocation and songs. My more considered view requires a compass, because there is a curve to space, and cranberries and sewing kits. It helps to be experimental. Even better to be in touch.