River Cruises On The Danube

River cruises on the Danube have been disrupted due to drought. France is being devoured by fire. Homelessness is illegal in Indiana. What a beautiful deposition I could make. Dyspeptic assessments of the modern age. Indictments of society as hot and perverse as anything I witnessed in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. And on my laptop, too. Meanwhile, what are you doing until the Humvees pass? How about a picnic? Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. When the ground is damp, and alligators swim in the streets, it is suitable to get dry in a place of searing beauty. We can create a gaiety quite easily. By playing one word against another, the parameters expand into exhilarating idiosyncrasies. Honeycomb textures on Mars discovered by the Mars Rover robot. A tiger shark floating in formaldehyde. Worth millions. An unmade bed, complete with used condoms and empty vodka bottles, shortlisted for the Turner Prize and later sold for 2.5 million pounds. Robotic dogs with tech-CEO heads. And there it is: that telltale roar. The sky screaming as it gets sucked into the engine of a Super Hornet. Blue Angels. Loud and acrobatic in the sky above the city. High-performance climbs. Breathtaking dives. Coming in low. Thanks for the tinnitus, boys. Why does our culture have to be so militaristic? I would’ve made a terrible Viking. I can see my ancestors across the river, looking at me sadly and shaking their heads. Their helmeted heads. The story continues until the water stops boiling and the rice falls silent. Most people experience significant everyday life, but they express it in different ways. It’s everyone’s prerogative to be at least a little weird. What are you doing right now to fill the room with delight? I could soon be in the shadows, amusing myself with theories of gray, and sprinkling your arm with a river cruise.

 

The Birth Of Going Somewhere Else

I don't know about you, but I'm burning to get backstage and see what the whole thing was about. It had something. There was something there. And then it vanished. It was real. But the word ‘real’ diminishes its scope. Its exquisite pulsations. Whatever it was. It had something. Had something going. You can't say that about everything. The northern lights maybe. Orange Julius. But nothing that specific. It had no form, nothing palpable, nothing you could put in your mouth. Just hints. Clues. Intimations. Vague premonitions. Bad jokes that make you laugh inside. Unsettling intuitions. Curious moments of dissociation. It always feels like it’s on the verge of something. Something hair-raising. Something savage and cauterized. Something passionately devoted but tragically anachronistic. The air trembles with its presence. You’d think it was indestructible. And yet it’s subject to the caprices of time. The whims of the zeitgeist. The high cost of gas. A big-ticket cheap thrill. These things are vain. Though satisfying in many other regards, they have none of its mystery. And it already feels like it's crumbling, fading away like a really good song. It’s hard to hang on to this stuff. Because it’s immaterial. And it’ll never be the same. It’s getting harder and harder to find words for it. Most people are in a hurry to get from one job to another. They don’t have time for this kind of nonsense. Even though it’s vital. Indispensable. Critical. And although these edges crack with thunder, they serve a purpose. The scene across the street is too close for comfort. And I think that’s it. The birth of going somewhere else.

Getting there is another matter. Somewhere else might be a long distance. It can be far as your youth or intimate as nowhere at all. You’ll need transport. And transport has a long history. There’s more to it than yachts and private jets. Harleys are cool but they’re no good on this terrain. We need a long warm rapture. An ascendant descending. I’m doing what I can while waiting for a pair of little wings of mine to warm up and take me somewhere. Somewhere else. Something outside the usual parameters, the secure comforts of normalcy. Though that seems to be disappearing, too. There was a long intermission, a long darkness, during which the props got changed, and our seats were different, and what appeared to be a colossal chandelier above is now a web of creepy surveillance. The antidote is antiquated. I hesitate to even mention it. Someone might hear me. And turn away in mockery. Or horror. Nobody listens anyway, not when you’re this old and you don’t have a podcast or an invitation to appear on Joe Rogan. What I’m talking about isn’t digital. It acquires some attention. Jesus, I sound old. Look what age did to me. Too late to repair the damage. But sense enough to thrive on the energy of despair.

Art moves line by line. Note by note. This is why Mahler’s adagietto moves so slowly. Then picks up speed. Urgency. Phenomena like this often occur during a trance. Music is to trance what alpine is to high winds. Actual to the point of putting a fat feather in a skinny hat. It's a cheese that can only be swallowed when its weight is understood to smoke the century like a chandu of opium. Which is a roundabout way of saying cowlick. We try not to get too fancy around here. Language is meant to be translucent. Some things languish in obscurity. And some things achieve a good standing. Art shatters quickly. The market can’t always keep up. A tale of music should include at least one speedboat to get us there quickly. It doesn’t have to be real. It just needs to float. And leave a good wake behind it.

I pool as a gravy unfolding its syntax on a ramification. Tin roof during space with a rain on it scattered my titration. And somehow it came together and formed a narration, a puddle of lightning with a saloon in it and people playing cards. It’s not hard to make a poem chirp like a mockingbird. We do it in our prosody zone. This is a place conducive to gasoline. It’s a conceit I learned from Gregory Corso. Fuel, ignition, the high-octane rush of language. Or was it Duchamp’s love gasoline? Fluid for a mechanical allegory. I can’t remember. It’s funny. Some memories are weird as ears. Others are confusing as lines to see a shitty movie. We live in a city where things are a little hard to grasp. Sooner or later you’re going to come face to face with a QR code. Or a Cyclops going 80 mph on an ebike. Very little makes sense to me in a city with eleven billionaires, more dogs than children, a subterranean ghost town, a museum of bad art, the highest rate of UFO sightings per capita, nightly gun battles on Aurora, and a troll under the Fremont bridge. And to think this was the birthplace of grunge. And Jimi Hendrix. And pickleball.

Let me start again. I’m on the wrong track here. I can’t keep everything filtered out of my language. So why try? Why not just let it hang out like bedsheets on a clothesline? Let’s move even further away from meaning: here in this neck of the woods a work is a riotous amalgamation beyond our control, a broken sprocket after a faulty conception of sawdust. Anyone can loop into a batch of someone if the drool of being has anything in it resembling hair. Earth tones east of Cle Elum help disencumber summer from the damp of early June. Umber has roots in Ice Age cave art. Its grammar has a glamour that is handily subterranean. And yet there are things about it that verge on frailty. Few of us inhabit caves these days. I shall pursue this ignis fatuus another time. Do you mind if I open a new line of credit? I ponder a breathy vowel as a parody of pig iron but feel the foundry of its origin may be tethered to an ocellated turkey. Later, I’ll sort through a few of my mistakes to see if I can redeem anything. That’s how strong my love is. I get ideated and go beyond the snow to see how big the world can get when it’s not real property. This is my silhouette in letters, and what your eyes can see is an open field. We must rely on our dexterity to pull us through, and find our inner ukulele.    

A Button For Bangkok

I’m here to drink life, he shouted, and ordered another bottle with a memorable afternoon agitating its hues. We understand what's there, the paradise of the perplexed, the sunbeam born in a large oval bowl of contrary feelings. Yes. Yes. That's it, my heart digging into the sky with a spade of art. The squabble that’s been aging for over twenty years like a slice of demented cheese. Overturned. Flipped. The warm feeling that costs nothing but buzzes all night like a beehive. I can taste the sky in every carrot, every plunge into Buddhism, every cathedral full of songs, every little distinction breaking its barriers and getting controversial. I believe that nothing is truly nothing, and did so when the sidewalk aggrandized its cracks and idiosyncrasies, and the only one to take notice was a Yorkshire Terrier named Isidore Ducasse. I believe in zig, I believe in zag, I believe in zigzags, chin sags and dishrags. I believe the best location for viewing the stars is a strip mall with her ingots in a bra. This is why. Why I honor the mending stick that sensitizes the cracked musk of Mongolia. Why I sit here listening to a dying language talk to the body of work between my hands. I believe every tattoo loves the skin it’s on. That the fates like to tease people. That irony is their favorite prod. And billionaires are their biggest joke. That nobody gets. We’re all still waiting for the punchline.

There's a place where one can manipulate one's symptoms near our most primitive instinct. This has led to a situation in which we glaze our despair with the shine of metaphor. I have, for this reason, decided to bark at the traffic. Over the winter, I think about phenomena that can ignite a light in the mind. The first thing I notice is pretty. The second thing I notice is ugly. The third thing I notice is gambling on the ambiguity of beauty, the electric-blue body and crimson head of the Malayan Coral Snake. Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The eerie bioluminescence of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. The secret heart of poetry, which can destroy a life while giving it its ultimate meaning. Which is a filet of cardboard jerked east by the spasmodic gusts of rain sweeping the Times Square Billboard. Which is an alligator unzipping its throat and out pops the flower missing from every bouquet. Which smells of swamps and semen. And is the source of all sorcery and the forgeries of the divine.  

There’s a stain of geography on the globe. If you stare at it a long time it becomes a country populated by jugglers and vagabonds. There are many active volcanos and picnics and rash, chaotic assemblies. That’s the arctic on top and calculus on the bottom. The land of a thousand infatuations. A here and now that runs contrary to Monday. I feel warm towards someone in the hope their shoes may one day engulf them in foam. It’s how I sharpen my instincts on the roots of a western red cedar. My obscurity feeds on the galaxies surrounding our Abbagenesis. Did you know that there are twelve million swimming pools on Proxima b? It gives me a reason to employ a semicolon in a contextual gallimaufry. But I’m not in the mood just now. I’ve got a bunch of crazy ideas built out of wire, immoderate articulations and aromatic philosophies to put on display for nobody in particular. Life is a big mosaic but sometimes the landlord wants his son back and a cop below in the street is talking to you through a megaphone. Irony glitters everywhere. When things go wrong there’s usually something right that made it available in the first place. It’s how we like it here. Ribbons of contrary air shaking a patch of devil’s walking stick, a volume of Emily Dickinson on my lap and 70 degrees in the shade.

I think it’s time that I faced reality. I have a face for the quick, a face for the many cycles of life, and a face for gazing out of coffeehouse windows on rainy days. But I don’t have a face for reality. I’ve got a face for daydreaming, which has been the bane of supervisors and a frequent cause for dismissal, a face that sometimes looks back at me from the bathroom mirror and bears a disturbing similarity to the face of my father, long deceased, which gives his likeness an added jolt, and a face which is really more of a mask that I find convenient for socializing and playing poker in the Ozarks. There are 32 to 33 individual muscles in the human face, depending on how they’re counted, the temperature and humidity of a given circumstance, the weight of the emotion being lifted into expression, and the level of transparency with which one feels comfortable. I like the faces painted by Francis Bacon. I find their distortions to be apt reflections of the world’s current realities, the various contortions of logic and daily complications with which the human experiment must now cope. The face is theatrical. It’s a device. It’s something to hide behind. And for those who refuse to face reality, there’s Botox. And for those who do, there’s Clint Eastwood. Which is Hollywood’s way of saying stand tall, smoke a cigar, and squint. It’s not reality. But it is entertaining. And then there’s Renée Jean Falconetti, who played Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s 1928 version. The intensity is jaw-dropping. Antonin Artaud – as sympathetic bailiff and interrogator Jean Massieu - speaks to her on the stake, about to be burned alive. “Tell me, how can you still believe that you were sent by God?” “His ways are not our ways.” And you can see the shock of anguish and passion subtly manifesting the power of the sublime in her fatigued mortal eyes.

How much does existence weigh? This will largely depend on the fulcrum of your generosity. If I believe my nose has an opinion about the smell of morning, the meanings and the seriousness of things here grow exponentially, and this will include the humidity of farce. Don’t Worry Baby, sang the Beach Boys, so many years ago they seem freeze-dried in beauty. A beauty, shall we say, of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular feeling. The time was 1965, the place was Cupertino, and the feeling was an awakening of passion that felt completely new and wonderful to my being. A fullness of being it felt awkward to contain. It’s always so gratifying to discover someone else who shares your opinions, especially when they emerge from the scribbles and jungles of the unconscious. We strive to be rational. Most of us do, I think. There are those other needs, however, that don’t get properly acknowledged in a culture such as ours, where the emphasis in the universities is on STEM, the gods of technology and the money to be made in real estate and war. The humanities have been kicked to the curb. Which is also where a lot of the homeless now find themselves. Others dream larger. Others dream of one day finding a button for Bangkok on the eighth floor of a Supreme Being. Others look for otherness in a world of lusterless and colorless dualities. Good, bad. Up, down. Open, close. Democrat, Republican. Right wing, left wing. Love, hate. And so on. And so on is where I live. Not the so-so. I’m not a so-so person, not generally. What I am mainly is someone who gets on an elevator and if I ever see a button for Bangkok, I’m pressing it. And when the doors open, I’m getting off. And if I find myself in Budapest, I’ll find a café and order a chimney cake. And so on.

The gravity of a certain house hides someone beyond the distance to Saturn, who neither cracks their theories with granite nor writes the poetry of navigation with textbook cachet. It is because we have plugs that electricity can exist in a constant state of franchise. I use it to brush my teeth, dry my hair, and illumine the face in the mirror looking back at me with worry and supposition. I garden the cartilage of language with the power of bone. Anybody familiar with a philodendron can regret an afternoon rain spent on clothing a circumstance with habit. You know how it goes: thought unravels a fist of earth and discovers propagation. This starts everything dancing in a mania of dancing girl ginger. A groan by tumble is everything it precedes, and ends with a filigree motif. It’s how I met your mother and taught her the ways of our people. We grew our curls against the admonitions of the ambivalent and nobody scattered what seeds we had to implicate the grace of nothingness. And this is how hypnosis was invented, and the loveliness of paint became a mutable stimulus against the tendencies of form. 

Everything is diesel when it comes to maintaining a train of thought. Its fluidity is semiformal, which makes it ideal for drinking, proselytizing, and the glamour of doing nothing. I have often considered a poem built on nothing but antediluvian grammar to spring from its autonomy within the sentence to become a tumult of flickering eczema. And by everything, I mean anything. Anything and everything except jaundice, Mongolian grapefruit, and purgatory. These respond better to eucalyptus oil. Dry shaving on steel from any buffet will enhance the hibachi oysters. All these moods make me frown at what I acknowledge by omission. What more can I do to fortify the milk against the its chastity of its flavor? The chrome whistle demanded the innocent markings of the lotus no one ruminates in a taxi. And so we added antifreeze to its rhetoric and wept with joy by the go-go fountain.

I am so my own fog that a galaxy can frame it in buckles. This will now be my experience of you. I have an arrival in my elevator that is here for the benefit of your bloodstream. I say this out of respect for the hermitage convulsing in the ground of our reflection. That one day I felt your ensemble near me I almost spurred my endeavor to greater and greater intrigues, and came close to spitting guitars at a seeming indecision. Instead, I considered us as a gift, and held your eyes in my palette. I trembled as I dipped my brush in the goo of your sexual splendor. There are luxuries in getting here before I excel at eggnog. One of which is really just a rattlesnake shake away from being utterly inappropriate. I never fret over the thickening of a word in the wilderness of my mouth. Language isn’t just another appliance, a way to focus our calculus on parallels of salvation, but a perturbance crucial to our vertigo and a place like Bangkok to broaden our labials.  

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.