Some Thoughts (Ten Years Later) On Bob Dylan Winning The Nobel Prize For Literature

It has been ten years since Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This decision made complete sense to me. I’m glad that he received this prestigious award. Forget the music: the scope and power of his lyrics are easily as thought provoking and imaginative and abundant in feeling as much of the literature produced over the several centuries the United States has existed as a democratic and cultural experiment. I’m not so sure the U.S. is still a democracy, or that a culture this heavily invested in technology and military power compares all that favorably with the art of the Italian renaissance or the misty glazes, delicate shapes and colorful porcelains of the Song and Ming Dynasties of China, but that’s a separate issue. The U.S. – despite its obsessive exaltations of practicality and profit - has produced some great art and has often been at the forefront of aesthetic developments – quantum leaps in the fields of literature an painting and especially music with the birth of jazz - and Bob Dylan stands unequivocally as one of our finest artists. That said, I’ve never really been all that comfortable with Dylan’s award, I’ve had a stubborn ambivalence nagging at my fullhearted appreciation, and this despite being a massive Dylan fan my entire life. There’s a reason for that reluctance, and it has to do with the cancerous rise of illiteracy and the demise of literary culture. Reading. Thinking. Books. Dylan’s Nobel Prize hit the literary world like a neutron bomb.

Dylan was able to introduce his audience to an unequivocal literary orientation, whether they were aware of it or not, via a powerful delivery mechanism called music. Give a poet a literary venue to perform their work and they’ll be lucky to get an audience of more than five or ten people, most of whom are friends and family. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, draws 68,000 to 72,000 attendees to one of her concerts. Bob Dylan himself, at age 85, still draws 2,000 to 6,000 people, preferring to play at smaller venues. The overall age at the poetry readings I’ve attended in the last few years has been somewhere between 60 and 70. Younger people don’t read. They scroll.

This has been a profoundly demoralizing problem for me. I’ve devoted my entire life to literature. There were a lot of famous poets around when I was 18 back in 1966: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. It wasn’t quite so embarrassing back then if a friend or relative let it slip at a family or social gathering that one fancied oneself a poet. It conjured images of Lord Byron and old Walt Whitman with his biblical beard and a butterfly perched on his index finger. It was embarrassing, but survivable. If someone mentions that I write poetry I cringe with red-faced horror and inwardly try to make myself invisible.

Some years ago, I wrote an essay about a book Dylan wrote that MacMillan published in 1971 called Tarantula, although it was written between 1964 and 1966, when Dylan was at his most avant-garde and surreal phase. I referred to Tarantula as my favorite Dylan album. And I meant it. I still mean it. I love that book. It gives me joy every time I dip into its pages. There’s music in it, but music of a different order than drums and electric guitars. If Dylan had received a Nobel Prize for Tarantula, I’d be ecstatic. The rest of the world would be scratching its collective head.

Tarantula is a crazy book. The language is mercurial, volatile, bursting with energy. It flirts comedically with chaos, à la the Marx Brothers, using William Burroughs' cut-up technique to make conventional language shiver and fragment in a carnivalesque escapade of improbable contrasts and conflicting ideas. Every time I read this book—and I've been reading this book for approximately 56 years—I feel like I'm growing new neurons, making connections and interrelationships that further expand the arena of my sensorium, obliterate the limits of my intellect, and provide me with fresh insights into what passes for cultural norms and the bogus narratives of a heavily supervised reality. It's an exhilarating experience, not dissimilar from the effects of cocaine or drugstore amphetamines, in particular those Benzedrine inhalers Kerouac used for writing On The Road.

Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan’s autobiography published by Simon and Schuster in 2004, is another of one my all-time favorite books. I’ve read it twice, the first time for content, the second time for style. Chronicles is written with a highly infectious and engaging manner. Dylan is famous for keeping his private life to himself, but Chronicles is amiable and intimate in ways that are surprisingly revealing, openly searching and insightful into Dylan’s creative evolution and later struggles in ways that may have been epiphanous to himself as he wrote it. Chronicles is a very open book. There’s a creative energy flowing through its sentences that keep its prose alive and young and prevent it from stiffening into a nursing home sciatica. The descriptions of times and places and cities and musical journeys are colorfully written, making a brocade of highly imaginative metaphors, vivid physical sensations and dynamic emotions. For example, here’s a description of some motorcycles he came across while working with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans on the album that would become Oh Mercy:

Lanois and his crew kept a bunch of vintage Harleys parked out back and in the courtyard of the studio. Mostly Panheads with Hydra-Glide front forks, chrome driving lamps, mostly solo seated, wide tires, tombstone taillights. I had to have one of these bikes. Mark Howard, one of Dan’s engineers and motorcycle enthusiast found me one – a ’66 Harley Police Special, out of Florida with a powder-coated frame, stainless steel spokes, black-powdered rim and hubs, everything original and it ran good.

I love the details of this. The writing itself takes on some of the panache of the Harley machinery and there’s a sense of immediacy and joy to the exhilaration these bikes are famous for. Considering Dylan’s fondness for machinery and raw, mechanical power (Dylan is a skilled welder; there was an exhibition of his welded iron gates at the Halcyon Gallery in London in November, 2013, titled Mood Swings) I’d love to get his take on Swiss artist Jean Tinguely who was known for creating complex, whimsical, and often chaotic moving sculptures out of scrap metal and found objects. There’s always been a goofy, contrarian spirit to many of Dylan’s songs – “Outlaw Blues,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream” to name a few – which makes it convenient for me to weld Dylan’s scrap iron ballads to Tinguely’s junkyard ballets.

The reason I took to poetry is largely due to Dylan’s influence. Hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” blast from a friend’s back speakers on a summer odyssey in 1965 going from junkyard to junkyard looking for car parts is largely what sparked that lifelong obsession, so Dylan’s Nobel Prize feels in some ways like a validation and in other ways like a corrosive acid poured on a dying media of print and literature. Dylan didn’t receive the Nobel Prize for his books, he received it for his music. This left me, and a thousand other struggling writers, out in the cold. It’s why my feelings about it are so conflicted, jumbled up like broken dreams in a rotating barrel of ambivalence. The hoopla has died down over the last ten years and the question rarely arises anymore, but if asked what I thought of Dylan’s Nobel Prize, I can’t give an honest answer. I simply don’t have one. As much as I love albums like Blonde and Blonde and Time Out of Mind and even his most recent one, Rough and Rowdy Ways, they won’t ever replace the shrinking inventories of bookstores, or the handful of veterans at poetry readings who haven’t got the memo yet. The war is over, and we lost. Charles Bukowski, bless his soul, is still quite popular on YouTube. So there’s that. But that spring day in Minneapolis on April 30^th, 1956, when T.S. Eliot drew 14,000 people to the Williams Arena (the basketball facility at the University of Minnesota) to give a lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism,” will not see its like in this era any time soon. Funny, too, when I think about it. 1956 was the first time I saw Elvis Presley perform. He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was 9. I went wild. Why oh why oh why I continually lament looking back on that moment, did not I follow his lead, and learn to play the fucking guitar?

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature over the last ten years have gone to actual writers: László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), Han Kang (South Korea), Jon Fosse (Norway), Annie Ernaux (France), Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/Britain),  Louise Glück (United States), Peter Handke (Austria), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Kazuo Ishiguro (Britain). I feel compelled to admit, quite shamefully, that with the exception of Louise Glück, I haven’t read any of their books. Clearly, I have a lot of catching up to do. I need to fill that rather large hole I left in my jeremiad. Books haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs just yet, albeit ChatGPT is a pretty damn big asteroid. And at age 78, soon to turn 79, maybe I should think about taking up the guitar, if anything just to learn that that’s not where my talent lies. And what am I thinking anyway: I’ve still got a mountain of books to read.

 

Can't You Hear My Egg Timer?

Why does my egg timer keep going off in the Stones’s “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” It’s an odd, insistent, inconsistent, jingly sound. I’m becoming like this. A cool pool that pulls on your eyes in a medicine cabinet. I have sometimes shredded a crucial anger, rather than put it to good use. Maybe that’s it. That’s why. Everything around me wants to explain itself. I don’t know why. I knew it as soon as light scattered over the bedspread that there were forces afoot, troubles dribbling calculus and calliopes responding with polymers. Meanwhile, the shapes and colors on the canvas are so unsettling the people have gathered, they’re reaping havoc, they’re doing the hully gully, they're singing an ancient new song, complimenting the propulsion, and squeezing the daylights out of every soufflé.

Once you see a reality, you can’t walk it back. The democratic morality is at it once again with a slogan, a few good adjectives, and a dead skunk. Sour sweet juices squeezed from a faulty cause and effect won’t quench the brushwork of a crazed calligrapher. This is an illiterate, anti-intellectual age, so I have to ask myself, why do I keep twisting my light into a corkscrew? What am I trying to open? What do I hope to achieve? Is this going to start a revolution? Why do I feel like Rip Van Winkle in a stolen Ferrari? By some apparent offkey anomaly, I manage to walk outside toward the emotions fossilized in the local real estate, and meander its many bones and mythologies. It was an ok empire while it lasted. And when it crashed we all felt strangely like a school of aberrations, pilgrims on a bender.

It's crucial to maintain the scenic beauty of one’s autonomy, not to tremble because of what harnesses you, but to deviate into sequins when the circumstances call for a hootenanny. There’s a lot of indigo beneath our words, but until everyone taps these consonants against the metal casing of their oscilloscope, it will remain in chaos. When science fails us, we must rely on swimming to find our inner Algeria. Our sugar is unofficially tough. But what about the clouds drifting around in life during a library? I have such books as I may mull to fill a universe with the lunatic grammar of its own absurdities, and the coolness of something with mint in it, or a pretty deferment. Absence is good because it restores the things that elephants like, such as space, and grass, and loose-fitting homogeneities. I’m all about underwear these days. I like the looseness of certain boxers, and a well-earned lassitude. I began, in old age, to rediscover the advantages, and some of the joy, in movement. And this new knowledge keeps much of our space outdoors, where it may touch the outer bounds of society, and the crack of morning in a dying conviction.

Logic is the cage in which we enshrine our cognitive jewelry. Dump logic, you’ve got something different. You’ve got dirt. There’s no limit to what a lyric can do spinning wildly around a marigold. I think consciousness is mostly paper. But that’s just me. I’m not here to preach, or sing, or rest my head on a table and drool. Talking is what each of us does while slowly chewing the air into tiny nuggets of sound. This, on the other hand, is a pale origami of folded air made reckless by a surplus of alibi. It isn’t propelled by incentive alone. Somewhere in the piano is a scenery cured by pulling on music with contrasting wires. We have to think differently of ourselves by folding our heritage into a conversation. I want you to think of this paragraph as your personal guide to a better delinquency, and so shake hands and part, believing in a better future, and the mutability of mousse.

When texture grabs an eggplant, it doesn’t mean umber, it means guzzle the moonlight. Seize the day. Sneeze the night. Suffer the fools. Squeeze the wind. Sizzle the fritters. Fritter the sizzlers. Nail the mail. Mail the nails. Walk backward into your childhood and bit by bit unlearn everything they pounded into your head. Color within the lines, salute the flag, work hard, obey your parents, trust the authorities and you will shine, because the U.S. is a stunning democracy and a prime example for other nations to the glorious achievements of a free society. This formula seems to work quite good for some people. Others seek elsewhere. The ancient ruins of Blonde on Blonde, Zen calligraphy, the prose and poetry of Charles Bukowski, miniature golf, moist umbrellas, the murmuration of starlings, or the improbable beauty of doorknobs. I sometimes find great solace in the ghostly ephemera of a garden hose. It is through solitude within the nothingness of pure being that the deployment of some inner sanctity builds its house under a waterfall, and forfeits the elegance of the harp for the eloquence of the ukulele.  

Who wins in the end? Our incongruities are often a triumph of hectic sensation. Public notices keep pouring in. Until I latch on, the feathers will not hold the sky in their hypothesis, because no one else does. Some days I can’t even watch Star Trek without some peculiarities obfuscating my gusto. Only on the basis of a total splatter can the variants of a new aesthetic be fully realized. Whatever a given aesthetics classifies as pleasing or painful carries an impulse to steal. If you drool your inattention within the device, and push it next to your denim, my candies will make more sense. I learned this one day in Brazil, substituting my foreignness with a sporadic behavior and framing each moment with bones. Every so often a new grammar exhilarates my fingers, and unravels a fresh commotion. Upheavals wander from sensation to sensation by a mechanism inside the teeming sand that is hard to identify without a fistful of nouns. But what nouns? This can only be answered by opening a dictionary, and crossing the river by feeling the stones. 

 

At Bottom

Ultimately, what I happily consume is an absence: a proposition that is by no means paradoxical, if one considers that Mallarmé made it the very principle of poetry: "I say: a flower! and... musically rises, the very idea and sweetness, the one absent from all bouquets."

-                                       -  Roland Barthes

 

I like a prose that flows smoothly like a river. There are things you don't notice at first: patterns and agitations that subtly reveal themselves at the surface, boils, eddies, folds, ripples and whirlpools. Mesmerizing undulations. Intriguing fluctuations. If you read the river carefully, like Mark Twain when he was a riverboat pilot, you quickly realize that what appears on the surface – the text - is an important indication of the tremors and perturbations hidden in the depths. Language sublimates emotion. It turns abstract. It provides a critical distancing that permits a deeper intimacy with the thornier nuances of feeling. The drift of our mind touches on anything, on anyone it can quickly mull into a corner and revive, draw it to the surface and explore all those nuances and maddening incompletions that were never fully articulated in the jarring distractions of the moment when it first occurred, and tore you apart, unbuttoned your soul, or made you dilate into an actualization of existence never experienced this intensely, this exquisitely disconcerting. And while the wood crackling in a fire pit warms a universe of yearning and skin, the soul tugs on the pale azure of a cloudless sky whose fine, stratospheric air thins into the cold black void of outer space. I saw a sky like that once above an alkali desert in Nevada and it shook me to the marrow of my bone, and once during a solar eclipse in Yakima when everything went quiet and moon shadows moved in undulating waves over the wheatgrass I realized how thin and tenuous the division between existence and non-existence truly is. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever mood, whatever frame of mind, the void is there, glimmering in the spaces between the words, or thawing into the nothingness the words create.

I know the words are working when there’s nothing there to show for it. When everything said and done is kabuki and reality bursts into biology and form, the story you’ve been telling yourself to explain things comes out of a radio and unfurls its pullulations in shrieks and anguish. I get my strength there. I also get it from Kerouac and Proust. Wanda Coleman. Gertrude Stein. It’s painful to watch a language rot and disappear when a culture turns hostile to the vagaries of the mind. People have a tendency to blame the wrong things for their misery. I’ve done my share of bitching. Distorting. Exaggerating. And eventually stumbling over the truth. It feels good to do that. Vent. Ventilate. And underneath it all is sensed the unreality informing all these words and distinctions, the rarefied dimensions that stick to the mind like a magnet to a refrigerator.

The scorpion is our introduction to our hidden self. Like the night I was house-sitting in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 1974 and watching Elizabeth R starring Glenda Jackson, my bare feet on a wooden floor, when I heard a clickety clickety and looked down to see a scorpion scamper under the couch I was sitting on. It was startling, for sure, but I felt nothing transformative, nothing uncanny. If this was my hidden self’s cue to come out and disclose itself, my hidden self must not have been paying attention. Nothing happened. I think I was at a point in my life where my embarrassments and utterly irrational responses to a world I only half-understood were so thoroughly transparent it was pointless to care about what was private and what was public. I was just me, a man crying to carry the sun. People tend to hide their more authentic versions for a wide variety of reasons, but staying a member of one’s tribe is one of the biggest. Back in the legendary sixties I belonged to a tribe that relished disagreement. Now it’s just the opposite. Everybody’s got their scorpion. And I don’t mean tattoos. I mean those stinging comments one keeps to oneself. Small talk is the substitute for actual conversation. It’s like having a revolver in the glove compartment of your car. You know it’s there. You know what it’s capable of. But you don’t want to wave it around while firing it off randomly. Not if you’re cool, and guiltily relish a life of quiet desperation. Conversations are minefields. And because I’m conversational, I get blown up a lot. I stand there, exploding, while maintaining a smile.

So this, at bottom, is me. Nick Bottom, comedic weaver, and idiot extraordinaire. Making fustian out of total disorder. Trying to make sense of being able to enter a cathedral but not being able to chop down a wind. Don’t ignore the spirit of futility. It’s there for a reason. It’s there to remind you that the pursuit of money is non-refundable. Lavish the context in ambiguity if you plan to bathe your ideas in ink. The sun's wardrobe suggests summer, but it's archaic, and I prefer sequins. It’s when you hit bottom that you realize how high your ambitions went as you stood on the ground watching them burst apart in an apathetic sky. The earth feels good in a sweat lodge. Better than a witness stand. Or jail. The nothing I do is nothing. But this is corduroy, and meant for karaoke, not tweezers. I want a bolo tie with an eyeball and a horizon that gluts my aporia with a forever receding herd of excuses in my rear-view mirror. And I want it to be warm and welcoming when I get there, which is never, and overflowing with red hot vacancy signs.

 

People Who Take To Writing

Life in the 20^th century was all about dials. Radio dials, TV dials, speaker dials, watch dials, clock dials, ovens and washing machines, oscilloscopes and telescopes, there was even a soap called Dial. Dials are easy and unequivocal. It feels good to turn a dial. The control is straightforward. Uncomplicated. Life in the 21^st century is all about touchscreens. It’s slightly less convenient, a little more tentative. Icons and symbols get accidentally touched and things go haywire. Everything suddenly turns complicated. Maddening. It’s harder to control things. There’s always a function for help, but the help arrives in a language that is indecipherable. One’s day gets lost going down one rabbit hole after another. Again: maddening. One feels a loss of control. A creeping obsolescence undermines one’s sense of ease and confidence. One’s sense of relevance.

One wonders: is this due to an erosion in communication skills? A deluded idea that anything in computer technology is inherently superior to analog technology? I think it’s both. Erosions in communication have been massive. The delusions of high-tech border on psychosis. Tech giants that believe they’re gods. That hunger for immortality and transhumanism. That want to rid themselves of their humanity and become androids gifted with superpowers. No wonder life in the 21^st century feels like living in a comic book. Life is continually under attack by supervillains.

Poetry is a lost art. Reading is a lost art. The few, such as myself, that persist in its impoverished domain dream wistfully of a place like the encampment of book lovers at the end of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, which was based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, who despised modern poetry. One wonders what he meant by modern poetry. Ezra Pound? Marianne Moore? T.S. Eliot? Gertrude Stein?

I watch a video hosted by a female, thirty-something literary agent on the topic of her clients being worried about AI written novels taking over the market. It’s hard to sit through the video because the host uses that infantile up-speak for getting her message across. That is, however, the way people in that age group talk now. They don’t sound like Gore Vidal or Malcolm Ex. They don’t sound like Susan Sontag or Doris Lessing or Alice Walker. They sound like they’re kindergartner teachers addressing a class of five-year-olds. I did, however, like her overall message. Concentrate on the quality of the writing. I can’t argue with that. She also encourages writing high quality, prestige writing; difficult and challenging writing, and cites some figures that convincingly argue that there is a market for this kind of writing. It’s in the area of marketing where she disappoints my demand for integrity in writing. Marketing is for marketers, not for authors. Marketing is a special expertise that has little to do with the kind of intense concentration and mental juggling an author must do to create a language that engages the mind and inspires creativity in the reader. Like any selling, there’s a skill and a demeaning aspect to manipulating emotion and generating a superficial excitement based on ludicrous notions of popularity and personality, concepts that are anathema to the creative writer. A lot of publishers have shifted that onerous task onto the authors, which is utterly absurd. People who take to writing often do so because they don’t connect artfully with the public. They’re authentic people intensely uncomfortable with playing roles, especially performances gauged to influence. I find the current trend of influencers on social media to be yet another sign of moral decay.

This also betrays how unrealistic I am. If I’m going to be honest about generating an audience for my writing, I have to concede that figuring out ways to publicize my work is going to bear some importance. If you’re going to raise horses, you have to learn to shovel shit. I just don’t like it.

My wife came home from a local nursery with a hibiscus today. It has bright red flowers and she's completely in love with it. I know the feeling. I get that way whenever I encounter a beautifully crafted paragraph. But that’s too limiting. It isn’t just the craftsmanship of the phrasing and grammar, the way words flow together in an undulating field of meaning, like the green hills of England, or the dazzle of fishing lures mounted above a hamburger grill. That was in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, by Lake Metigoshe, and comprised all the reasons anyone would ever need for the use of an outboard. These are structural qualities, things that turn the mind like a driveshaft. It’s when a body of words scuds across a crowded dance floor without tripping anybody that piques the upper registers of the mind. The words conjure the hully gully, and the ruminations it inspires sparkle like a mirror ball at a Cincinnati rave. It’s never just craftsmanship. Quirks of grammar. Bon mots. It’s when the letters bristle on a wolf, and thrash at the air, that it nears its goal. But it’s when the entire scene vanishes and turns to nothing that it sparks into life, and bites the sun. Writers that can do that amaze me. There are powers in language, and the writers that find them have eyes like Emily Dickinson.

Word processing is an unassuming stool. I say this because the satisfaction of the boomerang arrives with the dyspepsia of the straggler purged by the morning winds of a general tumefaction. From the point of view of common sense, the anvil doesn’t have feelings. But from the point of view of iron, the anvil is livid with syntax. This is because language is held together by moonlight. A sense of interiority alters beside the cardboard, but the arousal of a violin from a cup of tea amazes both the potential for mayhem and the sympathy of strings. This is because language runs on prestidigitation. We often exclaim the very tools that crash the savor of themselves. And this causes a great alternative to hurl itself at our necessities. The nouns with these shapes get them from fencing predicates. The others ride a caboose to the blast sight, and assume the form of clay.

 

In The Key Of Swallow

We have a constant time designing a goal, and jokes, like this one, with a warranty attached to it. Your spark is the pounce that chisels it. Snake what manufactured it what squashed it with bloom. Brightness is the stuff to insure you have the key to your bed. I saw it happen with my own ears. Hothouse tailored my cry to study my ample pleasure. And then a pause cogged the flashlight after a buffalo walked into my eye. It happened to be a Thursday and the exceptions were as beautiful as they were Euclidean. I know a cube from a polyhedron. It’s an occurrence going all toward anybody that I happen to be an eggplant. And no, the sprint wasn’t about the disruption of plowing, the intent was to qualify death as a corollary to work.

As pathos veers somewhere spectral we groan through our consonants until liberation imbues our nerves. This is called expenditure, and is a form of linen. We name things in order to calcify things. It’s funny how much trust we have in our mother tongue. Me, I don’t trust the word ‘utopia.’ I know a dystopia when I see one. But you can’t see a utopia when everything is operating according to plan. This is called sedation, and is a form of cyberspace. If it ever rises, let this evolving passion singing in its own brightness decide what to leave out, or include, or daringly espouse. Editing begins at home. And ends at a dead end overlooking a valley of stars.

Everyone at rip me softly is also rallying to develop these experiences. Beyond all reason at navigate toys, I am your muscle beside an emerging tube of bubbly. A little talking here indicates an anomaly of the tongue incidental to the movement of bone propelled by a strong emotion twinkling inside me. My previous conversation lies in tatters about the galaxy beneath our bed. I rub against the scratchy sentiment our binoculars evade and take it inside to give it a circumference and a waterfront. What plug, you might well inquire, might stop a catastrophe during the upheaval of an athletic universe suitably dressed in quantum foam slapped together in a bathtub? What I can tell you is that it’s not a plug. It’s a dolphin amazed by its own movement. The gods look down, happy to see its carousals please the tourists. I don’t know why I said that. Consciousness sloshes around in the head when the fireworks sob. I guess that’s why.

Advise me with a kiss, and I will reward you with a fiddle. I saw an idea stirring among these words as interacting dimensions twisting occurrences on the radio, and was at a loss as to its provenance and bark. Therefore, I did nothing. What can one do, given our specific predicament, our unique requirements, and our imperfect understanding of apical bud dominance in Viking strongholds? I will give garments and hymns to this narrative after sleeping against a sparkle of paradise. And when and if that door ever opens, I will humor the time with rubber. My palace embeds a pain acquired from everything and created by none. I sit among its glories by means of a lingering nostalgia manufactured out of tinfoil. We all know what’s happened, by are too frightened to say it. My anybody glows in the sphagnum moss spread throughout this paludarium, and squirts. We get by either by farming our instincts for better counsel, or deepening our hindsight. Either way, the stern has its wake, the house has its windows, and the swallow has its sorcery.

 

Pearls And Flywheels

Are we going to be remembered? And who do I mean by we? I like it when people ask what kind of animal I’d like to be. Because I’m already an animal. I’ve got eight legs, a public address system, and a mustache like Groucho Marx. Therefore, I’m qualified to raise worms. On a worm ranch. In Wormely, Hertfordshire, Sussex. That’s correct. I’m a rootin-tootin-wormboy and this is a wide-open prairie. At least until I fill it with words. And give an address on a public address system. Because I’m an animal. It’s what animals do. We stick together and sing songs and ring bells. We pick out cards for birthdays and Christmas. We lift boxes and squirt DNA at sadly pummeled walls. We forgive our faux pas with silence and rumination. We offer our hands when a hand is necessary and the theater is full of applause. We ponder swamps with inquietude and philosophy. We go down rivers in inflatable narrations. We gird our loins and walk into the fog of city council meetings and parliamentary debates. We shine a light into the dark. We write books. We make movies. We wipe the splatter of soap from our mirrors. And wonder who belongs to the face looking back at us from the other side. The other side of what? The other side of ourselves. Which is a stew of whoever. And smells like teen spirit. And lavender and percussion and wine. And Keith Richards at 48.

Writers, said Anthony Burgess on a TV talk show, are people who can’t do anything else. I find that relatable. Debatable, yes, but also inflatable. I can inflate this distinction into an inflatable dinghy. Don’t ask me to fix the flush valve on a toilet. Wait on tables. Install an electrical panel. Manage livestock. Sell hot dogs at a sports event. Don’t. Can’t do it. Here’s what I can do: put words together. It’s not really the kind of skill you learn in a high school workshop. It’s not like working on cars. Though it is, a bit, when you think about it. William Carlos Wiliams referred to poetry as a small (or large) machine made of words. I find that relatable, as well. And lacrimal and affable because why the hell not. It’s not a bad life. Not if there’s a literate public around with a few extra bucks to buy a book and a few extra minutes to read it. We don’t have that luxury now. I’m more like a horticulturist of rare tropical flowers. I press a word into the soil of my brain and wait for it crack open and blossom into a caterwaul, or a lopsided mechanical discharge of smoke and mirrors and a chorus of sexy predicates creating grammar.

I generally trade in things I can't actually own, which makes everything vague and Mallarméan. It’s not a strategy calculated to draw a big audience. It's more like what happens when things splatter while roasting a heartache a bit too close to the window. The idea isn't to love it; the idea is to create pearls and flywheels through observation. To ensure everything works smoothly by the time the jewelry is finished. If my calculations are correct, the cat should be wagging her tail by now. It’s always promising when something alive happens in a sentence. The lights go on, the radio murmurs something cool and sad in the background, and a certain faint pulse begins to make the syllables wiggle into place and start blinking on and off. If I’m ever visited by an apparition imbued with depth, I mark the occasion with a blue ribbon tied to a bone at the end of the sentence. The image helps me find a radio station tattooed to my forehead like a jar of mustard, and if it enables me to see stars I know there is a redemption among my pleasures. This is how writing enables itself now. It bends the air into clothing, which is revealed in dance and exhilaration. There’s a universe in my sock that nobody has seen, and if sheer necessity unites this discrepancy in a net of syllables, the mind shoves it about until it becomes an anatomy of skin and defiance, and the results are witnessed as quail.    

 

That Feeling Of Being Drawn

I often find myself drawn toward something I don’t understand, be it a novel, a scuffle in the street, or the way a woman carries herself in the rain. I'm a glutton for mystery. The greater the mystery, the greater the appetite. The vagaries of time, the history of the harpsichord, the excitement people find in sports, to name a few. The answer to the greatest mystery of all will be waiting for me at the end of my life. A not insubstantial number of my family and friends have already discovered it. None of them, as yet, have chosen to share it with me. That might be part of the answer right there. Could be there’s nothing on the other side except the silence of the void. Those little particles that keep popping in and out of existence aren’t people. They’re momentary fluctuations, mathematical constructs that pop up during interactions with a zero-point state, not physical entities. Their shimmer is the shimmer of uncertainty. The momentum of interaction. The generative force of collision. The hard sugar of regret. The buzz of a gin fizz. La Dolce Vita.  Mulholland Drive. These are qualia. They’re not things. They’re what gives mystery its tingle. And life a reason to keep living. Things are for the vulgar. Qualia are for poets, early morning mist, midnight trysts, and private dicks.

Like most people, I’m a man of many modes. My morning mode is hygienic, conducted gingerly, and slow. My early afternoon mode is volatile, demonstrative, and cinematic. In fantasy mode, my various predications pack a punch. I can reach across the border that separates the marsh from the coconut grove. What this means for the health of my garret cannot be assessed by mere extravagance. There must also be conviction. I have to believe that there are holes in time and that space is essentially a mailbox for the letters of remembrance and the shoes of expedition. What my instincts tell me is charmingly hypnotic. And sometimes I can feel the authority of the reader hover over my words like a hummingbird seeking a pollen I can only provide by inducing a sociable incandescence. This requires drugs and a capacitance based on trespassing. Therefore, I write for myself and toolbars. I need to forget what I’m doing here in the first place. Go somewhere legendary for its lack of credibility. Deep beneath the dance floor, there is a swirl of criticisms I need to overlook. And then arise in a ball of fire spitting epithets into the wind. 

Objects dangling from a doorknob. Sacks. Seemingly empty. Not unlike the sack between a man’s legs, at age 92. The fingers curl nicely around the knob, either to pull the door open, or close it gently to drown a sound. Exhaustion finds comfort in this room. A bed, a Korean radio, and a woman standing, naked, in a hotel room in Nice, holding a bath towel while staring at a vase of flowers, painted by Matisse in 1921. The colors are muted so that they harmonize and make the warmth of the room apparent to the skin as well as to the eyes. Dejection has no place here, and is rejected by a projected ease, and the feeling of a room with the door closed and the window obscured by sunlight. That's what I'm pushing for. A universal given, and letting the sky walk in. It all unfolds when it dreams itself into a privacy this vast.

Where - or what - do we come from? Mud? Lightning? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur? A passing comet? A one-night stand with a throbbing pulsar? A beefcake God touching an outstretched index finger? Abiogenesis, hypogenesis, pathogenesis? Divine spark? Hot cosmic mama? A roadside gift shop operated by a hearty woman named Rugby Smith? The sparkle of a starlit lake and a pair of horny toads coupling on a warm Mesozoic night? Spittle of a musician in a microphone in a parallel universe where grunge guitarists emerge from a polyphonic bitterness to become something like the Manananggal of Philippine legend, a self-segmenting vampire creature capable of separating its torso and sprouting bat-like wings to hunt, go for a spin, or play “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on a black Stratocaster? I don’t know. Goop. My money’s on goop. Blue goop. Red goop. Green goop. Something high up and plum-colored reposing on a cloud.

I think we come from language. Our species, that is, our particular adaptation, which doesn’t seem to be adapting well, not adapting well at all, no sir. We’re in trouble. So how is it, being this dumb, we come from language? Does the mouth have an aptitude far above that of the brain in its shell of bone? Language flows through us like water. Like air. Like fairy breath. Like an alternating current. Think of a still life. Not a still water. Not a mint condition dime. Not a parable. Not a TV. Not a smartphone. A still life. Cat on a ray knife blade under a tablecloth the handle sticking out. The flow is imaginary, and yet real. Those occasions in which the imaginary and the actual are hybrid dynamics, are a pure caring, a blessing. A breakthrough. What do we call things with no mass or substance of any kind? Ideas, thoughts, feelings. Light and heat and sound waves. Mackerel, glassware, a loaf of bread and lemons on a table with a white cloth by Anne Vallayer-Coster, court painter to Marie Antoinette. Until, you know, things went sideways, and things got weird and bloody. In other words, language. The language of revolution. The language of romance. The language of puppets and moisture and Angora goats. They’re all the same. And yet quite different. Did I say that or did language say that? Nothing destines a language to be the instrument of precision, nor the playground of fools. There are words that anchor the mind and words that launch the mind. I go for words that allow for wide margins and hairpin turns. But that’s just me. It’s not my language. I don’t own any of it. It’s free as a lark. This is not my writing this is the writing's writing. All I remember is cats. Some department store mannequins. And a radio playing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

If the dreamer has at least one ear, the song will be neon and the window will diet on girlfriends. We happen so fast to ourselves that the flannel is brushing against our beards. Space feels eventual. Time feels bronze. The knot feels knotted and the driftwood feels inconclusive. This may be the first time we’ve been like this, visceral and raw and textually instinctive. Because the story keeps collapsing, and the theme at the heart of the thing is now an active pulse in the surgeon’s hands. We’re on automatic drive now. Anything can happen. The sentence may grow a judiciary and collapse under the weight of its corruption, or twirl its blades and rise from the page like a controversy ablaze with speculation. There’s a chair at your embassy awaiting your empathy. Grab it while you can. The world is on fire. Time to make sure our shoelaces are tied and there’s enough gas in the tank to get us to the next garage. Google can’t help us. We’ll need the ancient tools of tolerance, and the silliness and the willingness of trying to keep it altogether by keeping it all apart. 

And so it is I stand within my senses, looking outward, looking inward, intending nectar. Row, row, row your boat, life is but a dream. I always liked that song. I can imagine Mallarmé rowing in a flat-bottomed boat on the lily pond at Giverny “with a clean, sweeping, drowsy motion,” or Rilke somewhere on the Rhine, “I think, drifting past, I heard some frightening words.” There’s the sense of an unknown sadness upon the water, a feeling of transformation, a green fluidity, a river boat with a spine-shaped keel, and a shadow falling upon the hip of a water nymph. Drifting on a lake is different than drifting on a river. Lakes are static. Rivers are in constant movement. We go where the river goes. My attention follows the movement of the sentence as it drifts into uncharted waters, tributaries making it wider and deeper, and adding to its jewelry the haze of confusion. The craze for a new grammar is just now becoming kaleidoscopical. We feel it in our nerves, and give it our best guarantee that the folklore surrounding these imputations are each a codicil of cunning and elasticity, because if we don’t where are we? I have no idea, but I'm on my way there now for a few words I can squeeze into accidents.