People Who Take To Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

In The Key Of Swallow

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

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

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

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

 

Pearls And Flywheels

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

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

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

 

That Feeling Of Being Drawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

An Awkward Moment At The Good Place

Last Sunday the high reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. R and I decided to go for a run on the pedestrian trail of the newly renovated Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Park. You can’t really tell the difference between the two parks, but while Myrtle Edwards is maintained by the City of Seattle and Centennial Park is maintained by the Port of Seattle. As soon as we stepped outside, felt the heat. It impacted the skin with an almost physical feeling. Heat like this is rare in Seattle. Normally the summer air is balmy, not hot, warm enough to get by with a T-shirt, but you might want to keep a shirt or a cardigan nearby if you plan on dining on someone’s backyard patio.

We crossed the Seattle fairgrounds and exited on Sue Bird Court North. A line of cars with the FIFA logo were parked at the curb and were pulling away in a synchronized and orderly fashion. One of the cars had its windows down and the driver hollered to Roberta if she wanted some water. She went over to the car and the driver handed her two bottles of water, free. I left home with a bottle of water holstered at my hip, but the extra two would no doubt get consumed rather quickly.

We felt the air cool noticeably as we approached Puget Sound, but the heat was still quite evident. I didn’t see any seagulls, which is quite unusual. The only birds we saw were the bird deterrents – hawklike scarecrows on high flexible poles that wobble around – planted in all the areas where lawns had been seeded with new grass.

Eliott Bay Connections, the contractor who renovated the two parks for a payment of 56 million dollars, did a good job. It was much more attractive and had a lot more amenities and the landscaping had been done with an eye toward a thriving ecology native to the region. This included native plants such as tufted hair grass, holly-leaved mahonia, snowberry and evergreen huckleberry, pollinator meadows and 12,000 trees, including twisted pine, red alder, Sitka spruce, black cottonwood and the Patmore ash. There are multiple sites equipped with wooden benches for viewing a sunset or a misty ultramarine morning with sparkly waves and a few whitecaps.

A significant new addition is the cedar-clad public amenities pavilion, baptized haʔłali (pronounced hah-THLAH-Lee), a Lushootseed word meaning “The Good Place.” It included a little Scandinavian café, equipped with outdoor benches and picnic tables, some public bathrooms, a spot where joggers and bicyclists can replenish their water bottles, and a couple of drinking fountains.

Unfortunately, the bathrooms are gender free. Meaning men and women and anyone in-between are free to share the facilities. I’m entirely uncomfortable with this assignation. I miss the convenience of urinals and the ability to swing in and out of a men’s room without having to touch anything. Other than myself, of course. I’m also intensely uncomfortable relieving my body of its waste within easy whispering distance of a completely strange woman. I feel embarrassed around men much less women. The stalls are all quite private and have lockable doors, but a panel wall won’t stop the various sounds emerging from one’s evacuations.

I went to hang my holster with the bottle of water on a hook attached to the inner door and the bottle fell out and hit the floor. Shit, I said. What now? It’s important to know that I’m OCD. I have contamination fears. A water bottle dropped on a bathroom floor is catastrophic.

Normally, in any public rest room, I freeze. No matter how badly I have to go, if I’m lacking privacy and feeling uncomfortable, my body will freeze. My bladder will shut tight as a high-resistance bolt on a railroad bridge. I have to turn therapist and coax my bladder into releasing its pressure-building fluid. Compounding my problem is an over-sized prostate. The medical term - Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – which refers to a non-cancerous (benign) increase in the number of cells in the prostate gland, which surrounds and squeezes – blocks - the urethra.

And yet I did. I let it go. That problem solved, I emerged from my stall to tell my wife (after my initial shock of finding her in a men’s room, which was no longer a men’s room, but an everyone’s room) that I dropped the water bottle on the floor and wasn’t sure how to handle this problem. “I just mopped the floor,” shouted the attendant, a Hispanic middle-aged woman in a yellow vest seated by the wall. “Thank you,” I shouted back, “that’s good to hear.” The next thing I said seemed to burst out of me of its own volition. “I hate these gender-free bathrooms,” I said. She looked surprised, of course. “Imagine,” I said, hoping to ease the tension I’d just created, “you’re on a very special date.” R, who was just then taking the precaution of washing the water bottle at the sink, gave me an amused look. She knew what was coming. “And you and your very special date have just eaten a dinner of spicy seafood, which, some minutes later, is raising hell in your digestive systems. And now here you are in adjacent bathroom stalls, producing a veritable symphony of profoundly embarrassing and disgusting primordial noises, great borborygmic gurgles and burbles of serious biological waste. Will you even have the courage to face your date after this?” The attendant, being someone with a good sense of humor, laughed heartily at this. “My wife and I,” I threw in for good measure, “have been married 31 years. She’s heard every possible noise my body can make.” And she laughed all the harder.

 

 

So What

Here’s a drink for anyone dropping the needle on Miles. So What. I call it a coconut éclair. I pour in a boomerang of failure, sprinkle it with a trivial faux pas and add a pinch of destination. It excites the nerves and corkscrews the drudgery of pantomime. Here’s my bio: I’ve got three arms, five legs, twelve hundred prescriptions, thirteen faucets, a gruff exterior, a presumptuous magnetism, a small rebellion in my left eye, a keen sense of weightlessness and an array of exotic genitalia. My first name gave up on me and got a job with a suffix in Sussex who coughs up nearsighted reindeer whenever it ovulates. I enjoy writing letters to little towns in Florida. I like hopping around on a pogo stick when the weather gets fidgety and licking postage stamps whenever I’m feeling beige. Drink up, my friend. Tomorrow may be too late to mop our brows with regret. I see a cherub who sees what we already know, which is conveniently reversable, and upholstered with a foamy commiseration. I want you to feel tactical. Look east and you’ll see a surge of duration. Look west and you’ll see a garage dying in its own didacticism. Look north and you’ll see freakish display of eczema. Look south and you’ll see yours truly, fishing for goodwill in a pool of disavowal. This is a perplexing point for some, but for others a simple doxology of larks in a sultry Alabama quatrain.

Forbidden Things

Truth was for my parents primordial and spiritually dangerous. The Gnosis, like Eden and the Original Creation Itself, had once been perfect and complete – a simple sentence – “good” as Genesis testifies. But Gnosis, Eden and Creation, the very Word, had been lost in a Fall from Grace that we know as knowledge. The sentence, no longer simple, grows apprehensive of a duplicity. It covers what it is about to say. It rationalizes. It qualifies itself. Noah becomes drunk and bewildered from the fruit of that vine and threatens to say forbidden things.

-                 -       Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth

 

The spirits surrounding us are anomalies of the space-time continuum and are, consequently, highly insidious. They get into everything, especially my breath, and stream into being as words. They hunger for attention. They glide around everyone's nervous system causing garlic and flowers. I hear some of them now, buzzing around my head like French hotels. You'd think they'd have better things to do. They’re exhausting. I want to be rid of them. I want to be more like our cat, and sit and stare at nothing, at the air, at whatever subtleties ornament the invisible realms. Yet these fairies and flashes of lightning, while evoking a certain poetic feeling, also stir in me a desire to lead a new life, something more allegorical, more abstract and ethereal, and their contradictory nature makes that break easier for me.

Proust was fascinated by the names of places. They appealed strongly to his imagination. So that, when he encountered the actual, place he felt disappointment. The reality never matched the power of his imagination. And this is what language does. This is the fever of language. The mood sometimes goes against the season in which one is having fun, and is called an emotional dissonance. It sometimes spills out of the mouth, looking a little opaque, until it gets some traction, and finds its parallels in the local uncertainties. Intensities of pitch and tempo mount the walls of our prison and drop like bliss on the dry hot ground. Some few years ago, enchantments came easy. What happened? Deep in the caverns of the afterlife, Thoth weighs the hearts of the dead against the feather of truth. It wasn’t language that failed us. It was indifference. And all the dead predicates of a lost synecdoche.

A sentence dreams like a plum branch reaching for the green-sauce sky. It creates a fin like a magnificent cathedral. It combs itself with my bones. The arena of its schemes projects an almanac of fire. So we think of sperm as the fluid of propagation and the semantic nest as the divine warmth of meaning. We don’t have to shoulder all of it at once. We may inhabit a capital structure of Gideon chrome that supports a monumental sugar bear broom, and believe it to be a marvel of Gnostic syntax. Nowhere is it stated that a prayer is equivalent to a bucket of nitroglycerin. And yet it sometimes makes sense to mount a creditable foreground against the ominous grays of a dispassionate plot. A sudden explosion will awaken the mind to its investment in a Ferris wheel. Remember that scene in Rumble Fish when The Motorcycle Boy takes Cassandra to the fairgrounds? I don’t. Not really. My memory’s pretty vague. But somehow it’s important to me. Look. See this? This is a bulb without a corresponding narrative. It illumines the room. That’s it. Which makes it a simple sentence. Like a broken woman on a Ferris Wheel.

In the Yoruba religion of West Africa, priests and practitioners perform incantations alongside herbal remedies that are believed to catalyze healing, offer protection, alter situations, or influence the elements. Incantations invoking the palm frond solicit the rustle of its leaves as they’re animated by wind to obtain swift answers to problems. The rustle of its leaves is seen as the voice of ancestors and Orisha, the deity of iron and clearing paths. I see in Diane di Prima’s Rant a similar invocation of power, an appeal to the human imagination to resist the onslaughts of conformity and predatory aspects of industry and science, “a multidimensional chess which is divination and strategy: the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” We invoke the oversoul. The power of the void. Interconnection. Flux. The revolution of everyday life. The influence of the immaterial, which is the caress of stars, and the triumph of being.

We see the insanity of our time in the demons of profit. Commerce. Marketing. Branding. The savage gluttony of data centers imposed on rural communities with the brutal of authoritarianism of a barnyard gavage. College professors living in cars. Populations bombed with random indifference. Rampant inflation expressing the rot and corruption conspicuous in the feeding frenzies of the obscenely rich.

It’s a marvelous sight: the Olympic mountains at 2:00 in the afternoon on a warm day in mid-June. I love mountains. When I was kid in my grandfather’s study I used to stare at the Rockies with admiration and wonder. I grew up in Minnesota, where everything is flat, or a quiet undulation of hills. The mountains were full of drama. High dizzying rocks of granite and sparkly schist. My uncle had a cabin up there whose rain barrel held a dark cold water that froze my hand with its shocking cold when I plunged it in. It felt preternatural, like a charm, like the domain of a woodland spirit. I remember that afternoon in Boulder in the summer of 1995 when Allen Ginsberg, who’d been ill, felt well enough to give a talk and a tent went up on the Naropa canvas impromptu. R and I and her friend sat toward the back where David Bromige got divebombed repeatedly by a dragonfly. “They ARE dragons,” he exclaimed. It was sunny when Allen began delivering a fluid and fascinating talk which segued toward Blake’s notion of sweet science. Minutes later a sudden storm of thunder and lightning blew in and bashed against the nearby Rockies. I worried that a bolt of lightning was going to hit an electric cable powering the microphone Allen was using and turn him into a ball of St. Elmo’s fire. Didn’t happen, of course. When we returned to Seattle and picked up the mail I flipped through the latest New Yorker and found a cartoon of Allen Ginsberg holding a fountain pen skyward where it connected with a bolt of lightning.

Inspiration never comes easy. It can’t be forced. You can’t use a crowbar to pry it loose from the grip of the empirical, the drab dreary expectations of the 21^st century dystopia we’re all trapped in. The exhaustions of work and worry. That sense of enchantment poets rely on to do their work has been under siege for quite some time by a fetishized and heavily commodified omnipresence of electronic gadgetry dulling and smothering the inner life of the human spirit. It takes special strategies, all of it uniquely suited to the whims and vagaries of each individual. I generally find it in the work of other poets, or listening to a foreign language. We do what is forbidden: we expend our energy on things that do not lend themselves to branding and commodification. To that which lies well outside the purview of free market Wall Street psychosis. There’s release in that. The giddy intoxication of an impish idleness. The mutiny of doing what is unnecessary. Of what is disastrously unpragmatic. Of whatever needs the raw spontaneity of an unbridled articulation. And is eccentric as the contrary squeak of bedspring revolt.