Some Recent Events In The Language Zoo

Consciousness acts as an internal and subjective screen, which is blurred and distorted at times by the shadows of an imaginary cage. Routine, incuriosity, obedience, insecurity, lack of imagination are the chains that keep us in place. This isn't anything new. I think Rilke did a better job illustrating this with his panther, the animal turning in circles, over and over again, “the movement of its powerful and supple steps resembling a ritual dance around a center where a powerful will remains paralyzed.” I remember seeing a civet cat at the zoo behaving the same way. There were no bars. The animal was behind glass. There had been some effort to provide an environment of some assumed familiarity to the animal, vines, branches, woodchips, mulch, but this was no apparent interest to the cat, whose frantic pacing occurred close to the glass wall. The energy was so intensely frustrated, so deeply neurotic, it was painful to watch. I marvel at Rilke’s poem, which is in itself a panther, a muscularity of spirit trapped in a cage of words.

Words are acculturating things. I don’t know where they come from, how they first arrived, the sounds our simian ancestors made that somehow, weirdly, began to assume meaning, the power to convey images and associations. I’m bet it was fun. Everyone rolling in the dirt with laughter. I want to get back to that point. Like they did for a brief time in Zurich during Dada. Then, inevitably, as the words evolved and matured they assumed the stature of norms. They helped create laws. They became scripture, ceremonies, rituals, chants, religions and beliefs. Consciousness became structured. It became a house. But still, there was that tendency, that glorious penchant to drift, morph like clouds into reveries of pregnant irrelevance.

I’ve often thought what it would be like to think without words. Maybe it’s a circumstance somewhat akin to following Ikea instructions for assembling a desk or a coffee table. Skipping the verbal instructions and studying the pictures, the screws and parts. Or rock climbing. Figuring out where to put your feet and hands when you’re 500 feet above the ground on a rock wall. You’re probably not going to be mulling over a soliloquy from Hamlet or King Lear, or wooing granite with a feeling invocation of ivory vowels and effervescing prestidigitations of verbal acuity. They’ll be whirling in your mind as you plummet to the ground. 

In the spring of 1974, I took a class in James Joyce at San José State. It was mind-blowing, a game changer. Ulyssess rocked me silly into an intoxication with the English language that was still blazing among my neurons a year or so later when I got a job as a messenger-driver in a hospital in Seattle. It was a highly social job since I had a daily route in which I visited a number of offices during the day. I dated one of the women who worked in one of the offices. I took her to the Red Robin on Eastlake, which has now gone, replaced by an apartment complex. It was a casual restaurant that served hamburgers and fish and chips and also had a bar. At some point in our conversation, and rather unprompted by anything I’d been espousing at the table, she asked me if I intended to put people down by using such big words all the time. I was stunned. No, of course not, I said, as my chances of getting laid came flaming down like a Sopwith Camel from the sky over France in WWI. I really had no idea that people were reacting that way to my continuing intoxications with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I felt chagrined and embarrassed. The date was essentially just an ambush. I returned to work a much quieter, and sadder, man.

My dalliance with literature became a private affair. In some ways good, but in many ways bad. I’d wrongly assumed that the liberation I’d found in poetry ran parallel to other people’s experience. This is a big mistake in the United States. Polysyllabic words can get you punched in the face. I’ve been slammed into a Christmas tree, withered to the ground by looks of such hostility I felt more sympathy for the pained expression of the person I’d accidentally abused with a savagely eloquent expression. It’s important to remember: people hate their jobs. They don’t need a carnival sideshow of useless language complicating their day. There’s a reason people hate lawyers. They hate writers and poets even more.

And so I write. I feel safe to do so in a room with no one else around to feed me a fist sandwich. There are small tribes of people, à la the encampments in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, that love the written word so much they’ve memorized entire novels, whole volumes, caressing the words as they utter them in the isolate air. I still remember Bill Gate’s gloating prediction in the 1990s that computers would render books nearly extinct early in the 21^st century. I hoped he would be proven wrong, that bookstores and libraries would rally to the cause and fan the flames and make a supremely heroic effort to keep book culture alive, a vibrant alternative running parallel to the brain-rotting addictions of the internet and social media. This did not happen. By the end of the noughts, bookstores had become eviscerated. They often had more T-shirts and coffee mugs on display than books, or shelf-loads devoted to manga while a philosophy section might consist of 12 or 13 books. Libraires, meanwhile, have had their budgets so brutally slashed that their collections are as moldy and undernourished as a poorly maintained mushroom cellar.

What effect has this had on consciousness? I can’t speak for other people. I don’t know what it looks like in their heads. I only know what comes out of their mouths.

I do know that since Covid censorship has returned, eating away at free speech like a cancer. This has been compounded – exponentiated – by the genocide in Gaza. In England, I could be arrested for using the word genocide in public. And in my personal life, nothing ends a conversation faster, or induces more nervous, fidgety, frightened and confused looks, then the use of that terrible word. I’ve lost long-standing friendships. I feel every bit as muzzled and shamed as when I began asking questions about the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines.

Consciousness has been shrinking. Conversations have grown stilted. Small talk has long replaced the rare, now-and-again joy of sometimes finding a fellow word-juggler at a social gathering, or those wine-infused jousts and debates over a dinner table that would sometimes go long into the night and leave you feeling pleasantly jostled and shaken into new vistas, new perspectives, your mind dilated like a night-blooming moonflower.

There’s a part of me, thank God, that feels separate from the world. When it comes to language, and my own practice of language, I’m not in a zoo. I’m in a wilderness. I’m in a mode of exploration. Because it’s endless. Boundless. This is the luxury of privacy. Language is primarily a social medium. That’s what it’s for: to connect. To strengthen ties. Poets work in solitude. This makes them dangerous. Language endures their perversions, their sorcery, and in return gives them the genius and agility to unlock the cages and let the panther mind roam free in open air.

Byzantine Sizzle

 We drift inevitably towards the future, that estuary, that vague abyss of false fortunes and illusory skills known as Vegas, that chasm in the face of the imponderable, that chameleon of time, pissing discreetly behind the peacocks in the museum parking lot.

What a thing to say. What can I say?     

I just want to say how happy I am that you’re here, reading this sentence, perhaps not as I wrote it, but as I wished to write it, which is to say it wrote itself, it was in the process of writing itself when I noticed my fingers moving about on the keyboard, and if it’s not too late in life to figure out Dirac’s equation, and what’s the big deal about spinning electrons?

Wikipedia will tell you that the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. Relativistic wave equations predict the behavior of particles at high energies and velocities comparable to the speed of light. Particles are defined as small localized objects which can be described by several physical or chemical properties such as volume, density, or mass. They vary in size from subatomic particles like the electron to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like antifungal sprays for jock itch to rubber bands, crystals, ants, tiny robots, air inside a room, thistles, avocados, and hood ornaments.

An average adult human body is composed of seven octillion atoms. Sometimes you can feel them bouncing around like tennis balls in a clothes dryer. And sometimes they feel pleasantly and beautifully random, like Sonnets and Interludes for prepared piano, by John Cage.

In what way is it useful to predict the spin of electrons?

Spintronics: using electron spin states – up or down - for ultra-fast data storage and information processing. 

What a way to begin the morning.

These scientific terms always seem dry as biscotti. But there’s an accuracy there in which I find a healthy contrast to the surrounding malaise. An attempt to see wonder, disrobe a stunning mystery in the face of shock, murder, and paramilitary thugs.

Life expands as one gets older. If I'm feeling incongruous, I get some pepper and a hawk and go experiment with the world. While filling a vague space in the room, I help a fire touch us in a loop of spirit. Did you know green can define a distance? I see a theme forming. Abalone, hogwash and bees. That electric feeling people get in a grove of hives. Experience folds the webs we make into monstrous abstractions. All you need is a pair of hands and a hint of Byzantine sizzle. This device may help until some despair gets here. Until then, discuss the liberation with a cemetery. Because it’s coming. It’s on the way. Ask yourself: what is consciousness doing? I think it's coming along now. I can see it slipping out. Sparkling on the paper like a predicate.

 

Pirandello Zombie Crossing

There, inscribed on the top rim of my desk, is the indecipherable scripture of my cat Toby, who liked to scratch there. The desk is old. It belonged to my paternal grandmother. If I remember correctly, she ordered it from a Sears catalogue, circa the 1920s. My grandmother kept a diary there, mentioning the major events on the farm that she and my grandfather managed for decades: births, deaths, storms, visitors, elections, celebrations, accidents, prizes, harvests. I’ve been in possession of the desk for 51 years, though I remember writing an essay about Joyce’s Ulyssess for a class at San José State in 1973 when I was visiting my parents in Seattle for Christmas. I hitchhiked part of the way. I got as far as Redding. My last ride was a middle-aged man driving an enormous station wagon. This was in Ukiah. There was a long line of hitch-hikers. I stood at the head of the line. After the man had stopped for me, and I got in, I assumed he was going to pick up a few more people. But he didn’t. And this worried me. I kept a close eye on the doorhandle the entire way to Arcata. He asked if I wanted some amphetamine. I said no, but thanked him. I like amphetamines, but I didn’t want to hitchhike at night. He was a nice guy. He took me to the bus station in Arcata, but it was closed. He dropped me off on Highway 299 to Redding. I spent the night in a sleeping bag a few feet from the road. In the morning I got a ride with a truckdriver carrying a big load of logs. He dropped me off on I-5, headed north. I walked across the Sacramento River into Redding. A load of teenage kids threw a beer can at me. I took that as an act of mischievous ill will against hippies. But years later I realized that beer can was full. They were giving me a beer. Unfortunately, I’d tossed it into the Sacramento.

53 years later I sit at the desk writing this sentence on a laptop. I very rarely write in longhand. I do a lot of French exercises. My wife and I subscribe to an online computer-assisted language learning company featuring interactive videos of various difficulty levels and genres called Yabla. Today I’m doing an exercise on La Forêt de Fontainebleau. When people speak clearly and pronounce each syllable of each word, I can understand what they're saying. But the French have a tendency to speak at breakneck speed, often without fully vocalizing vowels and consonants, or skipping over words entirely, in which case I have extreme difficulty in understanding what they're saying. It's really frustrating. The one I’m doing today isn’t too bad. Two elderly people taking care of the trails in La Forêt de Fontainebleau. Au mois de décembre (in the month of December) y aura des nèfles (there will be medlars) et y en a beaucoup ici (and there’s a lot of them here) en attendant (meanwhile) ce sont les châtaignes (it’s chestnuts) et la récolte est bonne (and the harvest is good).

R interrupts me to tell me that she discovered a robin that appeared to be dead. She wants me to come and look at it. It’s resting on the milkbox on the porch, wrapped in a plaid, fur-lined coat. Sadly, it was immediately apparent that the bird was dead. Its one visible eye was wide open. If it were dead, the eye would be partially covered by an eyelid. Nor was it breathing, or any sign of a heartbeat. There was no sign of attack. We guessed that the bird froze. The temperatures have been below freezing, which is unusual for February. R buried the bird in the park, and hung two birdfeeders from the branches of some nearby trees.

I ran alone today. R went with a friend to attend the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival. When I got home, R — who had arrived a second or two ahead of me — told me she had a good time. I asked her how the lecture went. It was fascinating, she said. It was given by a professor of horticulture at Washington State University on the subject of soil science named Linda Chalker-Scott. R is enamored with dirt. Obsessed with it. Bewitched by its intricacies and contradictions. If a plant shows signs of disease, and a subsequent autopsy reveals significant root loss, or root damage, the first suspect in this sad scenario is dirt. Dirty dirt. Polluted dirt. Extremely compacted dirt. Dry dirt. Soaked dirt. Sticky dirt. Sandy dirt. Poorly structured dirt. Hydrophobic dirt. Really angry dirt. Lunatic dirt. Unhinged dirt. Imbalanced pH dirt. Anaerobic dirt. Claustrophobic dirt. Necrophobic dirt. Overly skeptical dirt. When dirt goes bad, R goes into emergency mode. It’s a situation that calls for an immediate search, a pilgrimage of nurseries in a quest for the Holy Grail of Dirt. Things to look for are chunks of dirt that are dark and crumbly and moist. There have been many disappointments. Dirt that looked good at the nursery and seemed like a good purchase but upon closer analysis betrayed a suspicious lack of merit. Dirt can be tricky. Dirt is the Pinot Noir of soils. It requires a good eye, a good sense of smell, and the eager curiosity of horticultural fingers. Because dirt, like wine, always feels good upon introduction. But further involvement can prove trying, and the consequences notoriously unpredictable.   

R asked me how my run went. I said fine. There were far fewer people than usual, probably because of the cold. I did see something intriguing. I saw a woman with long black hair walk down the steps of the Lake Union Building wearing a black jacket embroidered with the rib cage and spine of a human skeleton, rendered in a thick brilliant white fabric. She had just lit a cigarette and was probably on her way to her break. I wondered if she worked for a chiropractor. Maybe she was a chiropractor. Whatever she was she looked bad ass.

Tonight I’m looser than a hothouse twang. I feel as if I could decipher a dulcimer with a musical enema and a little judo. There are some things that should never be mentioned, which is itself unmentionable, and implies a tropical fever. But this isn’t one of them. This is a confession to the rain. This is a confession that splatters on the sidewalk. That things are disjointed and weird on planet Earth. It’s a tough place to adapt, much less adopt. Adaptation is for the prudent. What is called for is dissonance. Diffidence is a form of betrayal. It’s a syphilis of the conscience. It’s where you go when you’ve been fucked. But can’t talk about it, lest one be accused of being a necromancer, a megalomaniac, a horrendous narcissist and horrible poet, worse than Percy Dovetonsils, antimatter with halitosis, a mimesis of murk, a nemesis of creepy crawly Mississippi things, a semiotic abscissa, a blurt, a belch, a bubble of methane rising to the surface of a Danish bog. Conspiracy theorist. Pleurisy realist. Geometric irregularity. Hypercellular coiffeuse. Pirandello zombie crossing. And what is called for is unmentionable. Because it would alter reality. And show it for what it really is. And more importantly what it’s really not.

Earlier today, I heard a France Culture radio program about winter, specifically, human adaptation to winter. Gaston Bachelard was quoted with regards to the deep pleasure of sitting by a fire, either out on the open on a beach or forest glade or feeding on a few logs in a fireplace. Let’s say a stone, rather than brick, fireplace. I may be embellishing here a little. My apologies to Monsieur Bachelard. I’m paraphrasing badly. I’m paraphrasing so badly that I may be in danger of making everything up. Let’s just say, I got his point. It was hot, and crackled, and vomited sparks that whirled up the chimney in a wild delirium. "Contemplating a flame,” says Monsieur Bachelard, “perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers." I can testify to that. Add a big glass globe of brandy and you’ve got some terrific alchemy going on. You may nod into a leaden sleep, and awaken transmuted to gold. Of course, I don't have ready access to a fireplace, nor do I drink brandy. Anything I do in the alchemical realm is achieved with words, arranged randomly in a beautiful havoc. The heat is cerebral, and arises from crisis. The light is gold, and explodes out of wildness, and peculiarity. 

I’m Just Here For The Music

One by one the words wander around like a drunken noise opening and closing for maintenance. It's difficult to throw the mind at a window and get nothing but glass. This is why we have shadows. Shadows are erratic, and words are shadows. Words are a way of undressing, as if, from head to toe, we were united by two different religions, and joined ourselves in warmth. The ideas that surge across the page, like the joints of fingers, show what distinguishes a temperament from a temperature, and how they might hang their fleece jackets on a song for the grammar surrounding them, and walk naked into oblivion.

These are hard times. Nothing is stable. But if words flow spontaneously from one idea to another until an equilibrium is reached, an abyss can dream of lava amid the sparks of the sacred and achieve full glory in a thermodynamic of impulse. A voluptuous heat will express itself in joules inside the body, and a framework of propagation will support whatever glass you choose to put in your window. I recommend tempered, with a hint of foreground, glazed with paradise.  

After a friend died, we sat a black table and reminisced, fueling our conversation with cognac and wine. Later we had cassoulet and clafoutis. A toast was made. And the spirits remained quiet. And the candles went out. And there was sudden laughter. And a ghostly image sitting in a corner of France, on a warm day in August, watching the seagulls, and the jolliness of the waves.

With or without a neuron, we find the frontier where our identities are hungry for an alliance with something larger than a tilted pony and grander than an airplane. A total lack of moderation or constraint can be a source of filigree and untangle our knots. This will require lampshades and parodies of erotica. The lives we lead when we’re sleeping are different than the lives we inhabit in our lyceums. Here is where a little sorcery can be serviceable. It is a candle of such bald vagueness that it seems like ants to an agate, and will blow our minds to the rampant winds, where the windmills creak and the houses are deserted and empty and the horses just chew their grass and ruminate. It’s always the intervals, the places between the cities that offer the most potential. But there is one drama in particular that prepares us for Brown Willy, Cornwall, and you can’t fit it in a word. It’s too indulgent. Too bloody dynamic. It successfully predicted the existence of antimatter, the intrinsic spin of desire, magnetic moments of pure idleness, and Cher on TV. I can’t say it’s what it isn’t when it isn’t what it isn’t. And all the meanings it expands. It just doesn’t work. And for that, I commend it. And recommend it. And feed it everything I have.

Which isn’t much, incidentally. But nothing is written in stone, besides lichen. Any circumstance, however impoverished, can be compensated by a generous spirit. It all comes down to perception. Take a watermark, those semi-transparent logos identifying ownership or copyrighted intellectual property. A watermark is a reverie of lines, be it fuchsia or an assortment of clouds, which are the silent songs of the air. You can choose to interpret as a thing of beauty or a pesky point of law with a decorous appearance. In this instance, it is clouds. It is drifting. It is that interval between paying strict attention to the details of this world and not paying attention at all, which is a blatant inaccuracy since our language must be bent a little to accommodate a circumstance of some vagueness, a phenomenon outside the empirical realm, in which the mind is as large as the sky and just as casual in its occupation of space.

From one end to the other of the blazing February sky was nothing but a desultory convoy of clouds. They moved like worms, satisfying their needs with a long slow undulation, while below, the infinite calm that inhabits the shores of paradise carried in its currents the ash of a long full day. This is how things become cathedrals. Details of crepuscular light ignited the trees while dynamos of fresh new sensation held me in thrall as I clawed at the threads of my old armchair. Themes of heavenly dispensation pulsed through my veins like cosmic gold. I’m a man of the world, a traveler, but I’ve never seen a backstage rain unleash itself with such force onto the stage of existence and inscribe its meaning in so many streams and mosses.

Our flair returns when I find my being is on our side of the predicament. Which is to say, it’s a matter of stellar importance, this overwhelming confusion, this parable of hunger. You can feel it coming. You can feel it squirm in your body like a like an emotion and struggle to put into words what is largely anathema to any language: the inability to say one simple thing about linoleum. So many experiences are made of ochre and dirt. While many other aspects of our passage through life reveal so many beautiful things, such as the phosphor of ancient bones in Colorado moonlight or summer oils shining on a young woman's skin, there are things that elude a simple assessment and require a deeper probe, a deeper application of our faculties.

Often thoughts, one after another, several at once, tumbling around like clothes in a dryer, have the curious effect of moving me as far away as possible from the granularity of brick into the hypnotic regions of prestidigitation. This comes from watching the washing machine too long.

Prestidigitation is a common side effect of writing. It involves quick, nimble finger movements to entertain or deceive an audience, and is a worldly inflation of one's power to inflict a maximal amount of change upon the things that make one sad.

It helps, sometimes, to think of words as small, crawling, soft-bodied invertebrates with wills and agendas of their own, but which generously include our thoughts in their parade, indecorously shrouding reality with the intoxications produced by the power of effusion.

Accidents do, sometimes, occur. A bitter month or lever which has a pleated surface, usually striped, becomes languid when splashed with darkness. And sometimes a brilliant idea shines like a shooting star, deconstructing logic and prophesying UFOs.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, for example, where the words are bullets and the horses are wise.

At home, I am sometimes myself, sometimes a weird and distant tone, sometimes a bare minimum, sometimes a highly impractical objective, and sometimes a remote periphery on the outskirts of reality crazy about bears and confetti. Tonight, I arose from a crash of hydraulics and metal in an effort to find the molecular core of poetry. I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for delegates. I am looking for a narrative that I can fill with the dark energy of negotiation. I’m looking for a way out. I’m looking for a way in. There are rumors from other worlds, as always, but none with a highway to paradise. The truth lies in what we cannot do without and what we cannot impose on others; therefore, there is never enough balance to achieve a happy medium. That's why life is often so trying that you can't put it in a story without backing away and surprising yourself with a confession. But let’s not get too personal. I’m just here for the music. This isn’t a time for parables and lessons. It’s a time for resistance. And whatever feeds the soul.  

Somewhere Between The Goon Show And Proust

It’s fascinating to watch someone play the piano. Fascinating to watch the flutter of hands amid all the music stands. Everybody looks so calm. I’d be terrified of fucking up. Getting a cramp in my hand. Poking somebody in the eye with my violin bow.

The piano is a percussion instrument. It builds architectures of sound with little hammers. The top of my head flies off like the lid on a cookie jar. And I see things for the first time as they truly are, not as they appear to be. Literature is constructed a little differently. It's built with the murky teakettles of supposition. It’s a rebellion of empty chairs and frenetic combustibility. Its strategies focus on titillation, the fine hairs of the pubis as well as the heavy thuds of the glans. But its true fuel is a combination of gloom and spaghetti. An artist must trust her pain. There are empty bottles and torn pillows strewn all over the place. An arthritic magician lowers himself paragraph by paragraph into a novel held together by a frayed rope and a nylon consciousness. This is truly where it begins. The night Merry Clayton shoved the heavy glass door of Sunset Sound Recorders open and shouted rape and murder in her pajamas.

The doors are always open in Proust. But Françoise is petulant. Albertine will be dropping by around midnight. This is scandalous. But this is how it’s done. There has to be this shift in our understanding before the league of whistles breeds its vehement futility. And perhaps, while our mind goes wandering among all the new impediments, strange implications and wide-open dilemmas, our benevolence spreads by undulating waves a malleable tale of cracks and buttocks before the mountain begins to speak its language of stars.

Language is the house of Being. My advice is to grab a book and stay in your room. Things are getting dire at the home office. Everything is hectic with clothing. I shave in a mirror of pronouns. I need to look interesting and incomprehensible. At least as half as intriguing as Saturday. I walk across a consonant to open a vowel. Out comes a blaze of hawthorn. I begin to feel oblong. I do parlor tricks on a high wire. The hole in the knee of my jeans is expanding as rapidly as the country hollows from the inside out. If I move against the grammar that has been hammered into our expectations of life I come near to an understanding of our true predicament below the handstand of an extenuating circumstance. And this helps me understand oblivion. Not as a negation, but a prairie.

We garden adjectives in a field of adverbs. The self becomes a kind of throw rug. A personality is generally about what forces assemble us. The braid is insignificant. What counts is talk. You can heal things with language. You can instigate things with language. Take a long wide look at your incentives. Shadows rupture from a brief but startling emotion. Many noses are archaic, or arch youthfully in abstraction, only to become so later.  Pollock only dripped for 48 months. Huge canvases shoved around. Flopped on the floor. Thuds so loud I could actually feel them physically impact my ear drums. It made me breakable. Which is good. I like bending the rules. All my efforts were fat, poorly developed, and timid. But they resulted in a surge of nervous excitement and a heart-wrenching melody. This just goes to show that you can achieve wonders of pyrotechnic glory, but if you can't turn a mule into a butterfly, you haven't done anything extraordinary. Therefore, let the lamp happen inside its milk. Think of this as a bridge to elsewhere. Every time I see a horse, I fill with the shimmer of its being.

A lot of people ask questions about Hegel’s dialectical method. It is a mechanical sewing machine from history known for its borders and gardens. I kiss its animatronic morality with the steam and participation it deserves. I hear the parables crackling about it. While not inherently harmful, prolonged holidays on an elevator can cause awkward implications or holes in one's logic. We want this, because everything that is needed at the moment when we do something else under the same conditions as the tropics will be comical, and we must consider another question. I can see what it does to the roots. The abstract has a beautiful black eyelash based purely on the caprice of any given moment. It's largely a flirtation with movement, despite the many imponderables uniting our bananas. And you know as well as I do that a dream of sand has many implications, ripples caused by wind and wave, the foam of the moment, and is a future with a junkyard in it. There is one fabrication for the ocean that sleeps in all of us, and that is who we are, who we were, who we aspire to be, who we will never be, and who we try hard not to be. Everything else is a shadow of some higher reality. I’m reaching for you out of this seclusion.  I'm heading towards a Saturday in another country. Would you like to come with me? You don’t have to pack. I carry a big house with me wherever I go because it's a source of beautiful friction.

This house is a demonstrable calculus of pins and bas-relief. It’s how I operate. I refine an unpopular opinion by sharing a saga of herding words in a dream of sand. The cricket's well-being is what makes my furrow so spoonful. So blackberry. So nearby. So faraway. So recumbent. So delicately embroidered. So strangely unembarrassed.

Elevators offer us a brief limbo between The Goon Show and Proust. I juggle plates and concepts. Breakfast is a beacon to the naked eye. This style of drilling was featured on the Spirit Express. I’m screaming this is my elevator but what good does it do? The sapphire that sleeps in a faith until it becomes a coconut wire is another knee on the quantum future of jellyfish. As the fluctuations of Earth inspire a prosody engorged with duende while a raw element in the melody grasps at a useful anguish, these changes take on a life of their own in Spain. This is the old saga beside the new cream. Don’t get a knot in your jodhpurs. Hold my jelly while I humor the jar it came in. They seem to know me personally about a winch. I think these words are too small to support a garbage truck. But they will support a memory. Who remembers The Lobsters from the glorious 60s? They were a little known band that played the clubs around Vegas. They had a hit song. Poker is a game based on drapery. But just let me get my claws on the Queen of Hearts and I’ll show you all the eerie feelings I can’t describe in words. It’s not an envy. Not a spin cycle. Not a bitter realization. Not a wad of money. Not a sad example. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s a spoon with an elaborate handle. It’s an old man playing a concertina. It’s a wedge of ice cream. It’s ha ha ha ha I told you so. And a drop of rain zigzagging down a window pane. In Zaragoza.

If Your Money Is So Plump Why Can't You Buy A Hoe?

 If your money is so plump why can’t you buy a hoe?

Nobody’s ever asked me that.

Umber embodies a certain maturity. The raw sienna has its own physiology. The colors I feel tonight are entwined in waves of pink and black. Extravagances move through my sleep eating perspectives and eyeballs. The whole idea of painting enriches the spirit. The smell of turpentine will begin to dog your heels. Every room in your house will have a view of the fence. This, I hope, will help us attain a deeper intimacy. Not the fence, per se, but the hole in the fence. The forms surrounding our afternoon. The stamina to play bingo at age 102. The bumps in the road. The considerations to consider. The hunger that keeps knocking on your door. Starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. The narrative that I keep trying to fend off in this paragraph. But it keeps coming. The one about starlings. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. I already said that. But I’ll say it again. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky.

all my poetry is misbehaved

it never does what I want it to do

i’m not asking much

all i ask is that it rid the world of fascism

and provide me with a few wildly extravagant nights

in Ibiza

or the rotating dining room

in Nero’s Golden House 68 AD

this is precisely what I mean

by the poem misbehaving

i said nothing about wealth and yet

the poem decided to be decadent and wealthy

it took me for a ride

i had no choice

because it will soon be a tree

in Redwood National Park

where I can’t arrest its development

i can only go along

and stub my toe

on a piece of conscience 

Was there ever a prettier song than Roy Orbison singing "Pretty Woman"? How would people react to it now? I don’t think it would go well. It wouldn’t be pretty. Next to that, in the story, the one I’m telling about pretty women, there's something that reeks of blatant impropriety. As soon as I identify its true nature, its full dimensions and temperature, I may notice that spring is missing and the worms are unhappy, and this will have a powerful effect on me. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. I will be your being, I will be your yesterday and today, I will bounce around your house with easy solutions.

Life ends quickly. Or so it seems. Because it doesn't really. If I take out my telescope and peer into the past, I see swearing and laughter. I see peonies, anemones and hydrangeas in fluted glass. I hear a woman biting into a crust of bread in Marseille. I see clouds out of the window of a passenger jet. I see a man come out of the sound in SCUBA gear. I see people at conferences. I see people turning into rhinoceroses. I see nipples and harpsichords. I see liquids and rocks and old dirt roads. I see people whistling and hugging one another. I see a ball get thrown. I hear cheering. And wonder what it’s like to be a billionaire. It’s inconceivable. Not just the money. The many things I can’t even think of. The disasters caused by letting my desires go wild. And the impoverishment of spirit. For which I do not have words. But I do have the receipts.

i believe that feeling can be expanded

to include honesty

which is far more entertaining

than chemistry

as it spills itself

all over the 21^st century

reality is mostly ice

but some of it comes packaged

as new underwear

i’m going to take a deep breath now

and inflate myself with 900 lbs. of nitrous oxide

and arrange my speech accordingly

on the shores of Miami

you should never think of yourself as old

an angel told me that

everything is a naked mind

climbing the high temples of Angkor Wat

and pops like a bubble

at the top

where all the monkeys are chattering

about the poem that came to town

wearing nothing but a universe

and the words it came in 

If I ever call you a conspiracy theorist, it’s not an insult. It’s a compliment. Nobody should be shamed for having suspicions. For critical thinking. For introspection. For circumspection. For insurrection. Logic isn’t always such a bad thing. I don’t like to see it intrude on poetry. It has no place in poetry. But I do like to see it shatter arguments. Facts used to be quite handy. If you got them right. And you could remember them in a heated moment of arrogance and condescension. But now we’re in the dark ages and facts count for very little. Money decides everything. Money gets everything wrong. But they keep printing it. And devaluing it. And exchanging it for gold. And favors. And persuasion. And this is a fact. Based on nothing. Just fiat. Trust. And debt.

Meanwhile, while we’re all still learning about how to inhabit this planet, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

We need art. More art then ever before. Any art. You can make art out of anything. Softeners, ocean swells, sanitary napkins, gyrating drowsy dividends, implausible presumptions, the ovaries of the hellebore, apparitions ripped apart by logic, postpartum starling histories, Led Zeppelin souvenirs, feathery wet dreams, beautiful resentments, football pottery, grievous effigies of ice sculpture, anything with pale narrow leaves. You name it. It’s yours. It’ll follow you around. And wonder what you’re doing. And that’s art. That’s what it does. It counterfeits rocks. And wears argyle socks. Dictates flippancy. Parachutes into your darkness and shines like duende.

I’ve got a feeling deep inside. Think I’ll call it luggage. And hope it gets lost in Bora Bora.

It’s time to start the Renaissance. These dark times are a drag. I don’t know what to think of humanity. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know what I don’t know. And that’s a good thing.

The most thought-provoking thing is that we are still not thinking, said Martin Heidegger. What do you think? I think I’m thinking but maybe I’m not maybe I’m really just dreaming I’m thinking.

As soon as things get metaphysical, let’s get an Uber and ride around Paris all night.

My song is a gingerbread cartoon on an axle of crazy wheels.

they say the west and the east will never meet

that’s not true they met one night

on the outskirts of Perpignan

dogs kept them awake all night

so they went south

then they went north

then they went southwest

then they went northeast

then they got lost

in details and created a brave new world

of rags and exasperation

and this is how the search for consciousness

can look blank as hell

on a sheet of paper

it takes stamina

to strangle a remorse

but who cares

if all the metaphors smell of romance

and finally bloom

in the light of the sun

Think of a poem as a clamor or a hug or a hip and often it will hold you hard and during the growing distance that is in its power it will glow in you like the speech of the peacock king. There's always a way to do things with iron, but I recommend a cup of coffee, eggs benedict, and a table with a good view of the highway. You can’t remove a windshield without a little effort. But why would you want to do that anyway? A gerund is born through cabbage one day on the fields of suggestion. It doesn’t happen by paint. It happens by assembling a gluttony and eating Thursday until the world turns gregarious so you can start there. I’ll get dressed and join you. Heidegger’s hammer is a famous philosophical everyday activity. So we'll need lots of nails and tales and forests. Sometimes you just get the urge to build something. It’s instinctive. Like running behind a chair when an elf jumps into your soup extolling the virtues of spontaneity. Sometimes you just know what to avoid, what to seek, what to extol, and what to say when someone asks you what you do for a living. Tell them you feel concentric. And roll away.

 

The Energy Of Despair: Ecopoetics In The Work Of Michel Deguy

The best way to combat fascism is to expand one's vocabulary. I agree with Wittgenstein: The limits of my language are the limits of my world. I have never understood the tendency in the American mindset to reduce a given situation or experience to its most basic terms. I suspect it has something to do with the insanely disproportionate obsession with profit and survival at the expense of consciousness and thought. The current anti-intellectual trend among right-wing populists and the Woke left reflects this, and is, in large measure, what has led to this current flare-up of fascism. It’s always been there. Poetry, especially its wilder manifestations in poets like Emily Dickinson, Clark Coolidge and Gertrude Stein, exists as a highly effective antidote. It’s a strong intoxicant with the paradoxical effect of counteracting the inherent toxins of capitalism. To intoxicate means to induce a toxin; poetry is an anti-toxin toxin. It would be a mistake to cite Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” in one’s resumé. Unless, of course, you were applying for a job as wilderness guide in the annals of surrealism or Finnegans Wake.

In some of the more intellectual quarters poetry occupies a status similar to the mindfulness movement and meditation retreats which cater to the wealthier sector of the western demographic. It excludes working class populations saddled with long working hours and little – if any – leisure for developing one’s more spiritual appetites.

According to Heidegger, we’re all homeless. We’re thrown into this world – into existence – with little understanding of what we’re doing here. In his Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger describes our dilemma as a fundamental ontological struggle between authentic existence and falling into a trance-like state of inauthentic debasement, of social superficialities and soul-deadening routines. Authentic existence requires an awakened acceptance of our mortality, of taking ownership of our life and choosing to cultivate and pursue our own possibilities rather than conform to the everydayness of the herd mentality. An ethos quite similar to this was prominent in the 60s. Not surprisingly, the 60s was also a time of tremendous creativity. Some reports indicate that Heidegger was sympathetic to the movements during the 60s, though it would be a mistake to assume any substantial linkage. That said, the break from societal conventions was quite dramatic, and lingered in a decidedly more diluted form throughout the 70s. There was a dramatic pivot toward consumerism in the 80s during the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberal economics; the 60s became trivialized as a time of frivolity and little else, its psychedelic pathfinders such as Alan Watts and Timothy Leary mocked in sitcoms like Taxi in characters like the drug-addled Jim Ignatowski, played by Christopher Lloyd.

The situation is far worse now. The zeitgeist has completely and resolutely gone in the direction of market-driven profiteering and grueling work schedules with very little margin left for spiritual development, except among the very wealthy, tech oligarchs and corporate overlords of the financial industry and asset management sector. They favor high end spiritual retreats such as Ananda in the Himalayas and Golden Door in California, a highly exclusive, $10,000-per-week, Japanese-inspired spa beloved by CEOs and celebrities.

To inhabit the world poetically has become a spa cliché, remarked the late French poet Michel Deguy in a podcast interview about the practice of poetry and – more specifically -  Friedrich Holderlin’s exhortation to inhabit the world poetically. Deguy cautions that the full meaning of this words has been cheapened by marketing ploys designed to lure bobo money into the coffers of the wellness industry and corporate training centers. Commercialization has tarnished its initial luster. It now sounds like a glib bromide coopted by the bourgeoisie. Our ecological situation is far more grave. Capitalism, along with its evil bride colonialism, has so polluted, exploited, vulgarized and subjugated the world that the sublimity once sought by the romantics has been trashed beyond recognition, crushed by the juggernaut of consumerism and pissed on by tech giants. Intervention is crucial, and it must be an intervention of the poetic spirit, a transcendent imaginative force immune to the seductions of capitalism, and powerful enough to blow a hole in the cybersphere.

The average data center uses 300,00 gallons of water per day, with larger facilities potentially using between 1 million and 5 million gallons daily for cooling purposes. The mountains of plastic and electronic waste contaminating the shores of poorer countries – the former Edens of earthly paradise - with decomposing plastics and harmful chemicals are symptoms of the decrepitude of every virtue that inspires a quality of life higher than the unmanageable obesity of the rich. 

Ergo, Deguy’s ecopoetics has been spawned by a world in crisis and provides an antidote that has more to do with the way we inhabit our lives, inhabit our histories, and inhabit the planet, than the bogus alternatives enriching the coffers of the green movement.

I’m not a champion of the oil industry, but nor am I a champion of windmills, each of which requires an estimated 260–300 tonnes of steel, which requires significant mining, production, and transportation energy. Maintenance involves regular servicing, and in some cases, the use of gear oil and, for some, diesel engines to assist in operation. Windmills last approximately 20 to 30 years, meaning they’re in constant production, burning diesel in transportation and using electricity to manufacture steel, fiberglass, resins, aluminum and copper.

I wish had a dollar for every cable leading to an electric car I’ve nearly tripped over while out running. Are electric cars better for the planet than cars using gasoline? I don’t know. You be the judge. Global lithium production reached roughly 100,000 to 180,000 metric tons recently.

As a poet, I feel that any diatribe or prescription or screed I contribute to the global debate surrounding our planetary crisis will be as effective as throwing paint on the Mona Lisa. To be fair, anything I wrote – however futile its mission – would not be as imbecilic. But the deep feeling of impotence is real. People don’t read much of anything in this current social malaise, much less poetry. And yet here I am, writing out of a sense of crisis. Why? It’s all I’ve got.

“And what are poets for in a destitute time,” asks Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine.” Hölderlin held a very high position in Heidegger’s philosophy. In his essay “What Are Poets For,” Heidegger provides some answers. We need poets because they resist the technologies of war and exploitation with the technologies of transcendence, the Technicians of the Sacred, to borrow the title of Jerome Rothenberg’s foundational anthology of multicultural poetry. Poets, such as they inhabit the hyper-technological, profit-driven dystopia of the modern world, resist the banalities of the marketplace with a strong sense of duende, a Promethean rebellion against the banalities of the bureaucrat, what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. Suffice it to say, this is not an easy path. The cost of living is extremely high, and poetry does not pay well, to say the least. Most poets that I know make a living teaching at universities, which also lend a great deal of support in publications and conferences. Outside academia, it’s another story. Without the institutional visibility of universities, and lack of grants and awards, it’s extremely difficult to grow an audience for one’s work. Which also means very little influence, thereby negating the kind of role Heidegger describes for the poet. It’s a problem. A very big problem.

It’s a slightly different story in France. I was amazed at the number of bookstores in Paris when my wife and I visited in 2013 and 2015. I was also astonished at how many different titles and subjects were offered covering an extremely broad spectrum of ideas and interests.

My wife and I met poet Michel Deguy for coffee one morning in the square of Saint-Sulpice in Paris’s 6^th arrondissement. We sat outside at one of the tables in front of the Café de la Mairie. It was a beautiful, sunny August morning. Michel arrived on a bicycle, smoking a cigarette. He seemed quite cheerful. I waited while he finished his cigarette. When he was done, he tossed it on the ground and said ‘salut,’ with a mischievous grin. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was having me on. ‘Salut,’ which can mean either hello or goodbye, depending on the context, had a far deeper meaning, which I didn’t discover until some years later, while reading an essay by Jacques Derrida focusing on a poem by Michel Deguy called “Apparition of the Name.” Derrida’s essay, titled “How to Name,” explores the bivocality of Salut, which he sees as signifying a salutation and a salvation, an act of maintaining the other as "intact" and inviolable in the present, even as that act is "contaminated" by the inevitable reality of finitude and departure. Which, in this particular situation, we did. We left the poor cigarette to its fate, wisps of smoke fading into non-existence, and found a table outside on the ground near the café.

In an essay devoted to explicating Michel Deguy’s philosophy concerning ecopoetics and the different ways in which it manifests in his poetry - Pensée écopoétique de Michel Deguy - Julia Holter writes: “The poem, for its part, does not define, but it makes us see, crystallizing 'its thought' in an instant. Proceeding metonymically, it shows the ‘whole’ through the particular, the example ‘rises to the paradigm,’ while infinitely extending its enigma. For the poet, this ‘paradigmatic’ vision is a way of life, a mode of dwelling. With ecology, which means the study of oikos, the study of the dwelling place, poetic dwelling acquires a new urgency in Deguy's work, its most radical vector.”

Deguy’s The End of the World (La fin dans la monde), a prose poem in five parts published in 2009, is a work of profound poetic and philosophical reflection, what Deguy calls “philopoetry.” “Neither lamentation nor preaching,” writes Gisèle Berkman in an essay titled “Giving Voice to Infinity” (Donner parole à l'infini), “The End in the World is above all a meditation on the intertwining of finitude and infinity that constitutes our condition, or, if you prefer, that composes our existential structure. The central theme here would be Pascal's famous statement: ‘Man infinitely surpasses man,’ reinterpreted, in a Heideggerian mode, as that which represents the very torsion of Dasein, or the existential weaving of the infinite and the finite. Deguy leads us to consider infinity at the heart of finitude, the distension or internal disjunction of a finitude as if transfixed by infinity. Analysis with an end, analysis without end.” 

The End of the World, Berkman continues, “implicitly confronts the triple Kantian question: what can I know? what should I do? what may I hope for? And that the ‘ongoing mutation’ constitutes a paradigm. What can I know? Nothing other than what the intelligence of the overall process offers me, always to be meditated upon, analyzed, and understood. What should I do? What am I permitted to hope for? Here, the two Kantian questions are intertwined, forming a program of critical resistance, a truly po-ethical one. For it is no longer a matter of hoping, the poet and thinker reiterates, but rather, by relinquishing hope, of implementing the salutary awareness of what has been lost, reviving the active sense of loss in the very places where it occurred. Not ‘to mourn’ (a refrain with which Deguy soberly settles accounts) but to reinscribe what has been lost: ‘To be in mourning so as to never be done with it; neither with it, nor with what it reveals in its tone.’ (Let us mention in passing: The End in the World is also, even if not solely, a book of mourning, reinscribing the names of living, indelible loss, and a book working to metabolize mourning, to actively perpetuate it—the energy of despair.”

Our modern apparatus, or Gestell, Heidegger’s term for the essence of modern technology, has had a sterilizing effect on the human imagination. Deguy sees it as an ongoing mutation carrying us further away from the Logos, the Greek term meaning word, reason, or principle, and which is fundamental to philosophy and theology. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, it refers to persuasion through logic and data, and in Christianity, specifically John’s Gospel, it signifies Jesus Christ as the divine Word made flesh.

So if one asks, what are poets for, this may serve as a partial answer. The poet – fueled by the energy of despair – is an antidote to the juggernaut of computer technology and surveillance eroding our deeper connections to the planet we inhabit with such grotesque negligence, such uncaring ignorance. Of course, you can’t force people against their will to sit in a room listening to a poet’s verbal acrobatics do everything it can to liberate the mind from the technologically conceived panopticon in trajectories of verbal panache. But you can keep trying, you can keep putting it out there. It is this unwavering faith in the logos that presents a path of lucid resistance, the love of thought expressed in poetry, the universe in a swarm of words.