Why I Continue To Write Poetry In An Age Of Aliteracy

I can’t answer that. It’s not a decision, not a decisive action. Not the product of a long contemplative journey. When you’ve been writing poetry for as long as I have it’s the result of an existential urgency, the action of a working autonomic homeostatic nervous system, a function essential as breathing. You could call it an addiction, but it goes deeper than that. It’s as intrinsic to my being as my lungs or pulse or fingers.

I am, at the same time, aware of the situation. And it’s deeply sad. More than sad. It’s terrifying.

I just watched a short video, hosted by a YouTube channel called A Homeward Journey, of a young woman venting in her car after doing a 12-hour shift in an operating room, presumably as an anesthesiologist or circulating nurse, and in order to afford her rent and food and household bills, had to continue work as a Door Dash driver. After 12 hours of highly stressful work in a hospital operating room. This is clearly not someone who might have time to read a book. And she is far from alone. A substantial portion of the U.S. population is now denied any leisure time to spend with a book, or visit an art museum, or go see a play. This young woman, as so many others her age, have been denied the things that give life meaning, depth, and joy. Hers is a slavish existence with few affordable pleasures sandwiched between shifts. A Cro Magnon living in what is now the Dordogne in France 30,000 years ago had, I am certain, a far better quality of life.

Unless you’re among the elites, unless you’re a multi-billionaire, life in the U.S. is barbaric, exhausting, and void of hope for a better future. And yet I continue worry about selling books and getting reviews. The situation is more than ironic, it’s shameful.

I have flirted with the idea of setting up a podcast, but only very superficially. Figuring out how to set up a podcast and blather away like a Joe Rogan or Theo Von, which is where the audience is, including myself for a brief time, until Rogan's romance with tech giants like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel gave me qualms about his direction, and I migrated to other channels, such as Sabby Sabs, Glenn Greenwald and The Duran, is a daunting and costly enterprise. 

I joked once with my brother that I was practicing a trade far better suited to the 19th century than the 21^st century. Which I hate. I’m not a happy camper here; the 21st century is big on tech, drunk with surveillance, smitten with unregulated AI and short on rigorous intellectual debate. I should be hanging out with the surrealists in 1920s Paris. Not to mention James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. I stood, a few years ago, with longing and wistful pining by the gated entrance to 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein’s Paris address, nodding to a young Parisian woman as she arrived home with some groceries, feeling a bit foolish, and hoping she might invite my wife and I in for a peek at the grounds, maybe the interior of the building, or the very apartment where Gertrude hosted dinners with Picasso and Hemmingway and Ezra Pound, who broke a chair. She didn’t, alas.

I do know a number of people who, like myself, read books and write novels and poetry. But they’re not an audience; they’re competitors. It is nice, occasionally, to socialize with other writers, but I never get the feeling they’re as devastated and angry by what has happened to the world in the last several decades, maybe because they keep it to themselves. Many of them teach, which gives them, perhaps, a slightly rosier perspective. Every time I think of Bill Gates gloating over the disappearance of print media 20 years ago I seethe with resentment like a conquered warrior. There are many bookstores whose stock has been so eviscerated I believe they make more money selling T-shirts and coffee mugs to the tourists.

There are numerous books and articles citing the benefits of reading as opposed to the benefits of accessing entertaining videos on the Internet, and the consequent loss of attention span and inner reflection that comes with reading. Life for many people has shrunk from a multi-dimensional universe to a thin, tinny Metaverse of electronic jabber and social media emojis. I don’t feel the need to argue for the resurrection of literature. Who would read it? Yet here I am. Writing. Venting in binary digits. I’m as trapped by this machinery as anyone else. I do, however, manage to lead something of a dual existence, one foot in the 21^st century, and another in the imaginary library of a 19^th century manor in Sussex.

My fear is that as things worsen – and the pattern has been one of worsening conditions, particularly after the plandemic of Covid and its atomizing, desolating effects on society – and as AI assumes greater influence, nothing will remotely resemble what was once a rich intellectual life. I would include even its sillier moments, such as the William Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968, when a drunk Jack Kerouac surmised that the Vietnam war was fought so the Vietnamese could get possession of American jeeps. Kerouac had become a serious alcoholic by then, and would only be alive for another year, but his appearance a few years earlier on the Steve Allen show in November, 1959, was magnificent. He read the final passage from On The Road, beautifully, in full-throated command of the language, leaning into it with a love of the words, a bit nervous, but poised, and cool, with Allen accompanying him on the piano. It’s that image that helped launch me into the world as a writer, and for several decades I would proudly identify myself as such. These days, in case anyone asks, I don’t mention it at all. I just say I’m retired. On rare occasions, when I’m in conversation with someone over 60, I will mention I’m a writer, and enjoy a few minutes talking, as I once did with frequency in the 60s and 70s, about books and poetry and art and psychedelia. The afterglow is wonderful, especially if it lasts longer than a week. I feel a little more dignified sitting down at my desk to write, rather than the living specter of a former age.

What I feared might happen to our society 30 years ago when computers entered mainstream culture, has happened. People aren’t as friendly as they once were. There are words – genocide, transgender, homelessness, surveillance, porn, Epstein, Covid, vaccines, pronouns, etc. – considered gauche to taboo. They can stop a conversation completely. People visibly stiffen. There is no chance, not the wispiest of possibilities, of enjoying a conversation of freely expressed ideas. I tend to be a very impulsive and spontaneous conversationalist, so I’ve had my share of faux pas. I’ve also lost some dear friends due to my feelings about Gaza.

I’m beginning to wonder if we still have a society. Electoral politics is a dead zone. Elections are rigged. Governments worldwide are steeped in corruption. It’s clear, when the billionaires gather at conferences like Davos, where the real power lies.

Every day I’m haunted by the final scenes of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, when Oskar Werner, as former fireman and book burner Guy Montag, is led around the encampment of book lovers and introduced to people who have not only memorized their favorite books, but have become them, embody them. It feels disturbingly familiar, as if it’s already become my new home. It’s a place I feel comfortable, even though it’s imaginary, it gives me a raft of sorts, something to cling to in a hurricane of dystopic disorder. I’m sure I’d fit right in. Trouble is, my memory sucks. I’d have to choose a very thin book to memorize. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents might be a good place to start. Or Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Tarantula, by Bob Dylan.

Ah yes, Bob Dylan. Who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2016. And why not? Tarantula is my favorite album.

 

My Battered Id

My battered id accompanies me wherever I go, sobbing uncontrollably as we plough through our day, denying our impulses for the greater good of society. And although I’m quite fond of reservoirs, I like to keep a sense of universality handy in case my individuality becomes an issue. It’s what we all agree on, isn’t it? The fragrance of panic. The modesty of denial. Lavender is a faith that serves as a thurible for mathematical exercises or for making wishes. Mathematics becomes a faith for those who dwell within it. There is, in all things, a quadratic equation running on merlot. One might sometimes perceive a molecular imbroglio. The atmosphere inside a parallelogram is grasping and muddy. Once, I had faith in mulberries. Now, all I think about are dirigibles. It sometimes happens that, moving through you with unlaced shoes, you feel yourself in opposition to the very essence of the wind. Why am I doing this? Who knows. Questions always sound so baritone, as if the universe were an opera, and a wheel on our grocery cart was broken. They say things happen for a reason. But sometimes they merely happen, and it’s up to us to provide a narrative, a framework with which to impose a law, and a panacea.

My body is not a hero. It has its flaws, its surprises, its limitations, its needs. There have been many instances in which it has been the source of considerable embarrassment. And while many of its shortcomings are exponentially exaggerated in old age, there have been instances in my youth, in those glorious new years of adulthood, that it encumbered my success as a human being with its ludicrous clamor. Like that final exam in linguistics when my digestive system filled the silent classroom with what can only be described as a primordial gurgling, an orchestral malaise that was as far removed from Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar as a two-carat diamond from a gas station hot dog. It has often seemed as if we lead two separate existences. And while, on the one hand, my body has been the source of numerous compensating pleasures, its continuous decline has, of late, been a sobering disclosure of life’s calamitous frailties, and engrossed the aloofness and vanities of the mind with the theatricality of its burdens.

It’s not easy to get enough leverage out of words to lift something unwieldy into place. Mortality, for example. Nobody wants to hear about mortality. The right hardware is needed, and enough subjectivity to withstand a molecular storm of semantic instability. If, in a glimpse of birth, sunlight shines forth from the ink, then that something shall be veins, and those veins will be full of blood, circulating like an expressway. We will see mortality as it churns with attitude. Anyone is never just anyone. Anonymity is a get out of jail free card. There are many here among us who have made peace with their chicanery. Something somewhere is always there ahead of us shaping its perceptions into such conceptual disport that it becomes edifying. What is it to walk through life free of all judgment? It is to dive into a pool to save a friend lying on the bottom. It is to shoot a film in Kodak Ektachrome. Or elude the bite of time with a song and a glass of wine at the end of a Sausalito dock. It’s a particular kind of ability, like churning out a manifesto in a single morning. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it high in the air in a book evincing free will. He who moves to the back of his life as he arrives at the station breathless and frantic to tell about it, is blessed with deputation. It takes a great passion for this kind of thing, and a special kind of indolence to truly appreciate its grandeur. Idleness must always precede work if the concoction is to transcend all idiom and become a truly delicious fetish.

Description is always tricky. It requires an understanding that carves out a space for itself amidst a clamor of words. Otherwise, it sinks like a dead monk in a Danish peat bog. I get religious around electricity. I suggest you step back. Way back. All the way to prehistoric Omsk. What I’m about to describe here may not actually be breathing. Not because it’s dead, but because it’s indescribable. A fat old man stands by the window drinking sack. It’s snowing, and men are going to war. Scenes such as this never end happily. But they do entail a good deal of convolution. The path to narrative dereliction is paved with knickknacks. Therefore, before pulling the trigger, stir the poplars with a few indecisions. Look carefully at your shoes. Are they laced to your satisfaction? Have your nerves been fed tornados of dowager and garlic? Have you seen the orchids of Borneo, or the beautiful cloth napkins of Singapore? Enthusiasm grows into ultimatums if you don’t mellow it with a little equilibrium. Either you find what you're looking for in a language, or you secrete your life out on the periphery, surrounded by candles and facts. 

 

 

On The Outskirts Of Pahrump

This is for anyone puzzled by mirrors, anyone hanging around a glass engine in a pataphysical garage, anyone in a library curled up in a corner where a powerful inner light propels a dazzling exploration of the printed word. Anyone who has felt like a stranger in a strange world, or eaten oysters or slept all day. Picked apples. Bonded with an octopus. Wandered through a busy restaurant kitchen—lost and confused—frantically searching for a bathroom. Or a place to hide from the truth. But don’t get wayward. To embellish upon what is already there is to boil the broccoli too hard. What you want are eyebrows that offer maximum possibilities. A thick long beard and a rubbery disposition. Sometimes, you’ve got to throw life a bone, just in case it takes a cinematic turn. There are tools for repairing fate. You might call fate the engine of the plot, moving everything forward. Some might say closer to the edge. Others might say further from the past. Faraway or near the thunder, you're the reason bones need cartilage. Flexibility is a gift. Trees survive the storm because they can bend. And funeral pyres make really good page turners.

I owe our trembling to that taste you get when you've been left behind. If a feeling erupts, I could be anybody. Over there, on the other side of grumbling, everything is in abundance. It’s just the way things are around here. Heavy, raw, and overflowing. Pool improvements are evident through ingots of light. The sign keeps flashing, but the letters are dim and glow with a sad acknowledgement of mystical absorption. The noumenal comes for its visit each night. You can hear the gerunds sucking and scratching for sustenance. Swimming climbing croaking criticizing pursuing clucking clutching moonshining eating sleeping laughing crying and fucking around. As you can see, a sensual neck possesses many contours. But that’s just Rita Hayworth, sticking her head out of the tent. She’s starring in a movie I’m filming this very instant. If you look hard enough, you can see a camera whispering its attention to the forest. The house of language is alive tonight with the sounds of the Chantels. It’s all about maybe. Peut-être. Quizás. Vielleicht. Malia paha. Maybe grammar is the architecture of a grand silhouette. Something reflected from the other side through the gauze of an imaginary geography. Perhaps someone who has it can do this if they have it to do it with. And then go off and order a drink at the bar across the street. The one with the dim blue light and the letters in the window glowing hot mama red.

This time last year I fished a 92-year-old man out of the blackberries on a steep incline, reassembled his power chair and pushed him home. This year I await eye surgery. A week of piety with my head bowed to allow a gas bubble to mend a macular hole. We’re all experiencing it. This sense of something impending. Of course, something is always impending. It’s written into our DNA. The dread of something catastrophic. The premonition of Mammon laughing grotesquely and loudly at a banquet of fools in a moment of triumph. The emergence of something primal and corybantic that encapsulates everything monstrous about this moment in history. Godzilla rises from the depths of Eliott Bay, lifts a cruise ship from Pier 91 and bites into it like a Baby Ruth candy bar as vacationers in thongs and loud Hawaiian shirts plummet to their deaths in the harsh cold waters of Puget Sound. The image is gauche, absurdly violent, and for that I apologize.  Comparisons are always a little silly. If I compare my nail clippers to a pair of scissors the fusion of the two is a pair of calipers figure-skating in a Tweety Bird cartoon. Is this what a 60-year immersion in Keats has led me to? O for a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim. We shall discourse, and drink, and walking beyond these words, lie down among some ferns, and dream.  

We can relax now, and watch the mime try to escape from an invisible subjectivity. I can accept the presence of mosquitos if they sparkle like possibility. That’s my thermostat on the wall. It's time someone saw what my next move is about. Imagery is crucial to the exemption of squash. I laugh at the endless highway of remorse. I’ve got Nevada sage in my headlights and asphalt for a muse. We’re on our way, boy. Uncle Sam had a good run. Established some principles, made some good movies, then burned the whole thing down. It’s left me feeling estranged, abstract and intuitive. I have a nerve showing what a little propulsion can do. The lights of Pahrump are coming up. The marvelous never yields to analysis. It goes beyond summary to present a somber knot of abiogenesis. The interrelationships we find in-late-stage capitalism are all the more exquisite for their enduring obsolescence, and their persistent indeterminacy. Each disavowal. Every little cautionary tale. These lopsided confessions. These boots. These reflections. Those stars above the hills. That beautiful flashing neon vacancy sign on the outskirts of Pahrump.

  

Borderline Poetry

Borderline poetry demands a leap. Said Deguy. Sweeter still, he added, is the vantage point of the mind from which one’s wandering is beheld. Amen to that. And what is a borderline poem? I see it as a form too loose and scruffy to be recognizable as a poem, just hints here and there that it means something other than where to invest your time and attention. Something discursive, but quick as a fox. Something fractured but monumentally seminal. A mongrel chlorophyl. A savage inclination. A disconnected milieu. A pilgrimage. An amorphous, embryonic prophecy incubating in the backroom of a louche grammar. Or perhaps something else altogether. Something awkward and raw but with a peculiar elegance bouncing up and down in a kind of prologue. Something with a clear chuckle of dexterity. Fingers busy on piston valves. The pleasures of a threshold. The annoyances of dirty dishes. The pitfalls of miniature golf. The quiet in a music studio seconds before the first note. A pregnant pause. A mind with 300 claws. The birth of a fresh new gestalt. An eye in a bucket of shivered perception, looking from side to side.

Borderline poetry is rude and unschooled. Dim, unnecessarily divergent, and marginal as a lunar commissary for lunatic extraterrestrials. It doesn’t require a license. Poetic license is an encumbering oxymoron. It’s an ox and it’s for morons. The freedom to do anything is paralyzing. You need constraints. Constraints are liberating. Like music. The first time I got in a poem I was listening to Ike and Tina Turner in a beach house near Three Tree Point near Burien, Washington. I just graduated from high school and the future had never felt so huge. So daunting. So dispiriting. So astounding. The music at that moment in time was phenomenal. And most of the people playing it looked like romantics from England’s Regency period. It made quite a good soundtrack for the aberrations of an impulsive youth with subversive tendencies. I’ve been trying to recapture that moment ever since. But it requires brisk salt air, the giddiness of youth, and an inferno to dip your quill in. Ike and Tina Turner were just the tip of the iceberg. It was when I discovered Charles Baudelaire that the door to another dimension opened.

Les fleurs du mal was the first borderline poetry I discovered. It was irreverent and sensual and contrary to the conventional morality of its time, which was recognizably obsessed with wealth and power and industry - just as in the U.S. of the mid-60s and Vietnam - and managing a conformable and passive public. Baudelaire had the heart of a warrior. He was not conformable. Baudelaire was marginalized and scandalized just as any other rebellious spirit, Shelley in England and Hölderlin in Germany. The most rebellious and romantic of the U.S. poets emerged in the 40s and were highly prominent and influential in the 60s, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka and Michael McClure. There were also Anne Waldman who – with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado - Ted Joans, Joanne Kyger and Philip Lamantia, who was close in spirit and style to the French surrealists, and whose omnivorous appetite for the exotic and otherworldly found sustenance in Native American spirituality and Catholicism, and whose poetry rumbled and hissed with the ores of the marvelous. Gary Snyder, who was an odd hybrid between a Zen priest and a frontiersman, remains to this day, at age 96, a wise ambassador of ecopoetics. Gregory Corso was perhaps the most determinedly averse to the suffocating routines and compromises of institutionalized careerism. He lived well outside the walls of polite society, pursuing the life of a vagabond and often relying on the support of other writers and admirers to survive.

I found Gregory Corso’s stance the most appealing; he did more than write poetry, he lived it. His life was poetic. His bearing in the world was the stuff of romance and poetry. Institutions such as universities compel a certain conformity to certain standards, in exchange for which many advantages are conferred, such as a salary, which secures stability, and status. This, however, also compels one to live in a cage whose bars are invisible but whose proscriptions are real. Even those with tenure can find themselves without a job if they openly express political concerns contrary to the stated positions of the university in whose employ they enjoy their privileges. Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg College – a liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania – became one of the first tenured professors dismissed after posting content on social media critical of Zionism. Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor at San José State University, is reported as the first tenured faculty member fired from a US public university in connection to pro-Palestinian campus protests. And in the novel Stoner by John Williams, the protagonist – William Stoner, a stoical and highly motivated teacher passionate about literature - is punished in subtle but damaging ways because he refuses to pass an incompetent student. While a work of fiction, I don’t for a minute believe these things don’t happen with alarming frequency.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘borderline’ as a: being in an intermediate position or state; not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite, i.e. a borderline state between waking and sleeping, or b: not quite up to, typical of, or as severe as what is usual, standard, or expected, i.e. borderline intelligence, borderline hypertension, or c: characterized by psychological instability in several areas (such as interpersonal relations, behavior, and identity) but only with brief or no psychotic episodes.

I’m drawn to intermediate states. Gray zones. Crepuscular fugues. Calamity and prologue. The mystical and the physical. Bardo – the liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Barzakh in Islaam, the phase between a person’s death and their resurrection. The mesophase in physics in which matter is intermediate between a solid and a liquid, such as block copolymers, materials that can self-assemble into complex mesophases like lamellar (plates, scales, layers that are flat and thin) or hexagonal structures. Archaeopteryx, a raven-sized carnivore featuring a blend of reptilian, dinosaurian, and bird-like traits, such as feathered wings paired with teeth, claws, and a long bony tail, represents an intermediate state between dinosaurs and birds.

My favorite intermediate states are related to human consciousness: hypnopompia and hypnogogia. Hypnopompia is the state of consciousness between sleeping and coming awake and is characterized by a dreamy euphoria in which hallucinatory phenomena freely associate with very little, if any, intervening rationale. Hypnogogia is the same, but occurs as one falls asleep. I frequently enjoy hypnopompic states – it’s a fabulous way to emerge into the world – and have no memory of ever enjoying the same state as I fall asleep. I just fall asleep, quite often with BBC 4 Extra in the background, The Goon Show or Desert Island Discs Revisited.

Reading frequently constitutes an intermediate state between being alert and fully attentive and being elsewhere, floaty, delicate, dreamy and abstract. The effect is exponentiated if I happen to be reading poetry. And if the poetry happens to be borderline poetry, I sublimate into a quivering ethereality of accumulated cumulus and towering, stratospheric speculations, often with negatively charged particles creating a massive electric field that discharges as lightning.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is in many ways borderline. Each poem reads like a lightning-fast, epiphanic burst of insight, each word quivering like a blob of mercury on a flat surface.

Rimbaud’s Illuminations are emphatically borderline. They exist somewhere between chasms of azure and wells of fire.  He alone has keys to this savage side show.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger: borderline. The gunslinger shoots metaphysical bullets.

Bob Kaufman’s Blue O’Clock: seven shaking angels revealing our pain.

Borderline poetry is difficult to market. People like to know what it is they’re investing in. They want assurances. Nobody likes feeling insecure. This is especially true of award panels. This insures that anything borderline remains in the wilderness.

We live in a world of taxonomies. Definitions. Categories. Divisions. Ranks. Class. Grade. Grouping. But it’s a false world. It’s a world based on counterfeit assumptions. Authenticity scares the shit out of the rich. It gives them a thrill. Just watch their eyes as they sit at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. I like Oscar Wilde’s brilliant phrase: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The borderline poem, situated at the threshold between a solid, unidimensional signification and a volatile polysemy, resists absorption and materializes a boisterous autonomy. The subjective element is nevertheless maintained as a potential liposuction. Something must be left for the consumer. The greater the effort to participate in the realization of the work and its structural dynamic, the greater the need to lubricate its gears with greasy contingencies. Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics comes to mind, as does disproportion, pink stationary, heavy lifting and vodka. Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the author mediates objectivity with a cue stick and lets calculus do the rest. One becomes conscious of own’s own nullity and compensates for it with a foreignness that pokes at things with a long thin feeling. What such an aesthetics does when it finally gets off the ground no one can really say. The privilege of the artist is to see with the work’s own eyes. One might call it a clairvoyance. And is a borderline.

 

What Happens When You Open A Book Of Incongruous Dimensions

 

No trifle is but a trifle but has just as much bearing as a massive outdoor knife lying on the ground under a swaying punching bag and that is my mystification that a thing can be so blunt and immediate and yet so enigmatic God is not what consciousness knows God is what consciousness is before it knows anything at all the natural sphere of what Heidegger termed unshieldedness is the invisible and interior of consciousness slopping around in my head all day I feel a stirring in my inertia I need an antenna to hear your shirt the fabric is so glittery and full of conviction the gold toilet stolen from Blenheim palace has probably been melted down into ingots and rings it makes you wonder what are poets for sometimes everything is nothing but mist kitchen knives bitter regrets I’m in awe of whatever autonomy life affords there are no absolute structures in the cosmos a poem starts out as a story and ends with a spirit of anything goes 

Everything is what it is by relation with another the world that surrounds us is diversified and teeming with life after striking down the demons of capitalism I went to work on a parable about a violin concerto that I chewed with my eyes the devils of analysis sip at the troughs of science most of the time I’m an engine of glass an imbroglio of inalienable curls what I’m doing now can only be described as a form of scrap metal the sky is everyone’s titular destination the lightning has the smell of raw leather not unlike the upholstery in a Nevada brothel celebrating the extraordinary is an effrontery to the blasphemies of wealth that prostitutes everyone and puts our own life out of reach

I solve my problems by walking around in circles until I find a place that has not yet split into subject and object and when that is accomplished I feel oval and shiny and shaped by internal forces I feel lighter I feel inventive and wonderfully subversive contrary as a puncture and easy as a forefinger in Edinburgh pointing at a UFO

Special relativity rests almost entirely on the fact that the laws of physics exist independently of the particular form of those laws it’s the grammar of phenomena in which physics is written the grievances of old age challenge my nerves to sip the wine of dissolution while my craving for music drives the urge to pound the air with my tongue it’s a funny feeling to feel oneself slipping away it’s simultaneously sad and euphoric according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle virtual particles pop in and out of existence ad infinitum the quantum foam of space is a bubbling cauldron of vulvas and bells

10:41 a.m. my stream of thought is briefly interrupted by the thud of footsteps the city crew hasn’t begun the work on the road as yet which is why we had to move our car from our parking lot which will be blocked for an indefinite amount of time we’ve already grown somewhat accustomed to the pandemic of incompetence negligence ignorance hypersensitivity victimhood orgies today’s trending searches on Google brain eating amoeba national parks cloudfare layoffs noaa forecasts northern lights visible across northern united states the northern lights are mentioned in Ezekial in the Old Testament “I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north–an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light” Pentagon begins release of UFO files mom mistakes alligators fighting on her porch for home intruders in Ave Maria, Florida

I remember one summer years ago standing knee-deep in ice cold water near the spray and thunder of Snoqualmie Falls you can’t go there now they’ve blocked it off the park department restricts everyone to a boardwalk you have to crane your neck and study it at an angle as recent as the 90s people could jump from a rock and swim close enough to get a face full of spray this has been the history of the United States it started with barbed wire and quickly escalated to parking tickets and criminalizing poverty I’m fascinated by islands remote places too small to become an empire too warm and pretty to reprove the poor too rocky to become a golf course too cracked and fissured to become a resort

In the end, I opened book of incongruous dimensions like a door and felt meaningful toward anyone I touched it was called Desperado and read like a tarantella of rotating blades the protagonist wore Technicolor cufflinks and had a shadow as long as a Pythagorean tetractys there was an overall sense of dread combined with a soupcon of grenadine settling on the bottom of each page it was based on The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran but with obvious infusions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance most of it took place in my head since I was reading it while the plot simmered quietly somewhere behind a paragraph and miners panned for gold in the local creek which was fed by an imagination we all share in the quantum field where the emptiness of interstellar space is a buzzing, energetic sea of potentiality I love it I love it all the void the vacuum the improbability of it all shattering common patterns and leaving new ones behind what more could anyone ask there are rivers there are boons and congruities cairns cables habits haiku idioms igloos lamas quantum fluctuations we need nothing ask for nothing nothingness is such a grand propeller my medication can wear it with oysters in the firmament among all the poems singing at its inauguration 

Tristan Tzara's Special Relativity

And so, one day when reality brushed against the sumptuous improbabilities that lie all too inconveniently within reach, the moment one broke free from its coordinates and shook the world out of its trance, we lingered in the barn unfolding our thoughts. I gave a talk on diagnosis as a form of jaywalking, and ways in which to assemble reality with semantic grass. I like the way nouns flow through a feeling making it enigmatic. I’m not sure feelings were intended to have a language. If you heap too many words on a feeling it collapses under the weight and becomes a denouement. Once the plot has been unraveled, we have to invent new problems. And if you throw an emotion into the ocean, it washes ashore thousands of miles into the future where it eventually decays into a tv series. There are too many ifs in life. I can’t keep track. If this happens, that happens, and if that happens, this happens. Would you believe me if I were to tell you I was the original Sam Eliot? I drift through life with the confidence of a mustache.

And one day I sifted through my perceptions and found an elk. It was 1975 and I enlisted in a basement where I could play bas-relief with a human heart. I learned how to cry out like a wolf when the moon was full, and paint heaven with my defiance. If everyone’s a swan, the violin is wisdom, and the pegs are a concern. Remember: Idaho produces roughly 14 billion tons of potatoes per year. This is why, in deep meditation, potatoes are so abundantly palpable. I’ve seen a chair animate the space around it with brilliance, yet it inspired nothing in me but anguish. My look of denim and cotton isn’t entirely by accident. The drainage to my narrative really speeds everything up, and we need to gather the hose at the end of the day and coil it around a retort. Something tighter than invective. Something fragrant, like thought, or corn tortillas.

Tristan Tzara's special relativity states that the speed of language is eucharistic for everyone, while time and space are relative to the amenities linking them to a gypsy festival south of Arles. Nothing surprises me anymore, except earrings. They get bigger and weirder all the time. I think of water, and the fluidity of the incandescent mode through which I walk. I stroll along the waterfront and bend my reflections into confessions. I listen to the pleading whispers of being that emanate from all things in a goldfish bowl. I wonder if the fish are aware of their limitations. And if so, what do they conclude? What philosophies do they weave? What do they make of the many faces in the waiting room that gaze indifferently at the floor? A fuzzy probability cloud snaps into earrings. In physics, this is called the Wave Function Collapse. It means we’re living in a simulation.

Nothing inside a camera sinks into despair. The images are in gestation. As soon as the light hits the silver halide crystals floating in the developer tray, the images assume form and character. Billy the Kid plays croquet by a schoolhouse. A man stands in front of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, obstructing their progress. My father gives me a hug in front of a North Dakota bakery. Planet Earth, its bottom half hidden in darkness, floats above the moon’s scarred and cratered surface. A man jumps over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, his reflection in the water. Arthur Rimbaud looks sulkily into the eyes of Étienne Carjat, who, in a fit of temper, he will strike with a cane. Some years later, in Ethiopia, Rimbaud will try his own hand at photography. In one, a Harar artisan in a raggedy robe sits at the base of a stone column with a blanket spread before him, selling earthen jugs and plates and bowls. And in another Rimbaud himself, starkly dressed in a white tunic and trousers, stands stiffly in front of a banana tree, his hair cut short in a military style, his arms folded across his chest. He looks stern and determined, gaunt as a Sufi ascetic. He will send the images home. And ask for books on engineering, urban hydraulics and agriculture, mining and naval architecture, The Perfect Locksmith and the Gunsmith’s Guide. 

The main attraction, long and honeycombed, propelled the shy little narrative forward in the deep green volume. Inevitably, things went sideways almost immediately and turned into pyramid schemes. In other words, poetry. Metaphors elusive as sand. Endless as dunes. Fragrant as the alleys of Paris. If I happen to see a concertina I fill with elation and squish it together with my arms, producing a waltz. The world still active in my mind hasn’t existed for 60 years. It’s mostly echoes now, and the soft vocals and bright instrumentation of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. Discovery is a place of red emotion. If my hunger finds passage, if it perceives the allure of a lunar lucidity, it makes a weird little noise. Some people call them spirits. Some people all them sprites. I call them puff balls. And widen my language to include Thursday. 

 

Process And Tung Tree

I see any proposition advanced in the glaze of a heated moment as a pinch of prodigal air. Because if you encounter an orchard in the middle of a fog, you need a way to talk to it. A lute, or a mantra. We must build an algebra of fingers based on the temperature of the sun. And if there’s a bandage on someone’s knee, we can determine the general attitude of the hotel staff. It is a matter of vital importance to peel it, examine it, and light it up. Which reminds me: the Chilean fire tree by the Methodist church on West Garfield is beginning to bloom. Intensity in a tree is a wonderful thing to behold. Strength is a noble quality, though it is sometimes gnarled and tough with contradictions. Sometimes, indeed—in response to some word that burst forth from God—there would come, in a harsh tone, an insolent retort that shocked everyone. This is why animals avoid the language arts. Those who indulge in its arsenal of elixirs and incantations are called poets, and the lives they lead are wildly impractical, and nastier than antifreeze.

The meaning of this is still in process. I don’t know why this is happening. I’ll have to wait for the meaning of this to help explain why anything is being written. Until then, let’s keep kneading the dough and heating the oven with trepidation. It was my original intent to undermine capitalism and replace it with buffalo. Get naked, and return to our Edenic state. Explore new perceptions, the spiral part of the inner ear, and the history of dice. Wait a minute. I think I heard a door open. I think it’s here now. The meaning. The meaning I’m writing this. It had something to do with transport, both in a literal and a transcendent sense, and why I’m here posing such questions. If I can find the answer to that then I’ll know what this is about. But I’ve already forgotten what it was that brought me here. I know. Imagine The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. That’s what brought me here, 78 years ago. And I’ve been trying to get back ever since.

I hate to say it, but I think I’m headed in the wrong direction. I see lights ahead, and delicacies and buccaneers. I see Eros in the gold camps and Kavijihvagravasini at all the open mikes. Kavigihvagravasini. Pronounced kah-vee-jih-vuh-gruh-vaa-see-nee. A Hindi word meaning “one who dwells on the tongue of poets.” And that would be Goddess Saraswati. Once again, I have to ask myself, how did I end up here? Mensuration and poetry are falling in love. That would be one reason. Another has to do with capacitance, the ability to store electrical energy, and feed it to an appendage of hungry words. There is sometimes a protuberance from a bone for the attachment of character, which is a distinctive combination of traits, or velvetleaf blueberries. And this gestalt needs constant feeding, or it turns highly unstable and desires food it cannot eat, which makes the appetite stronger and the resistance weaker. And ends up in a bar in downtown Milwaukee gobbling up cashews and listening to the ghost of T.S. Eliot read The Wasteland.

Milwaukee is derived from Algonquin and means gathering place by the waters. The present is composed of the past and is therefore Lethe, doing its utmost to forget while simultaneously lathering it with jojoba and coconut. The effort to forget is the best way to insure that the past has a foundation. Forgetting requires oblivion, not photo albums. In this paper, I urge a scent to grab itself and rise to the ceiling like incense. Because you can talk to odor. It has ears, and smells like dragon’s blood. Come forward, and sing. We celebrate your elegance. We who haunt every word. We who seek solace in stopgaps. In stout nomenclatures and hydrogen jukebox snow. Little Richard. Lucille. The gentle equivocation of a gracious credibility. Independence elevates us, even when the elegies turn dark, and surrounds our raft with eddies of perfect cleavage.

We stitch a puddle, then take a whirlwind tour of the algebra of the situation. You know: the shape of the sandwich, the bristles of the scrub brush, the insects crawling up your back. I’ve been here all day trying to mingle with the locals without drawing too much attention to myself. It’s hard to do if you’re the one putting words together, and making them spin around in people’s minds. The wind sculpted sandstone of places like Utah fascinates me. It represents a level of creative energy that inhabits the zone of the uncontrollable. It’s what I’m after. What I want in my bag of tricks. A gasoline I dry with a phantom towel as I try to manage my escape from control. Let’s hang around and see if any joy comes to visit us. I can feel it in the wind: cold palms and icy fingers. We’re nearing the end now. We’re getting closer. We’ll be getting an answer soon. Will it be the triumph of evil? Will it be the winter of grace? Will the sky crack open revealing all of eternity? I think it’ll be whatever the universe coughs up. They say the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning beginning again. And again and again. I’m not here to argue. Or prophesy. I just had to get it out. Everything. Except my tattoo of mystic wind.