Doing Nothing Nothing Doing: A Cri de Coeur

 We live in a time of unbridled lunacy. Thinking is at a climax of latent provocation.

Displaced cormorants dying on the Astoria bridge.

Rickety lies and lethal drones.

Ringside seaside genocide.

There’s a strange and vivid grace to the way a donkey approaches a goldmine. Such a humble creature, imposed with such a vulgar goal. There are currents not always readily apparent to the five conventional senses. But where there is fluidity, there is also grace. Movement is a liquid proposition. The river is its eddies, its contradictions, its idiosyncrasies, its rocks, its reeds, its splashy agitations and buoyant jollity. People float in whatever direction the pompoms punctuate its restitution. Hemp is a lamp of plumes, and is therefore ideal for dashboards and picnics.

I could go on like this all day, blossoming mutant flowers like a pigtail on fire.

And yet there remain enchantments. The surmounting ineffability of the sublime. The savage delicacies of complex systems, rainforests, coral reefs, ant colonies, snowflakes, interactions of water and air. The luxurious milieu of competing russets, schools of grunion off the California coast. The Percé Rock abutting heaven in the gulf of the Saint Lawarence. The bluish undertones of Zambia emeralds. Paracelsus Sylphs. Entities invisible to the empirical eye dilating the mind.

“In such cases, it tends to promote a magical causality—one that posits the necessary intervention of natural factors bearing no logical relation to the matter at hand—thereby disorienting and confounding our habits of thought, yet nonetheless possessing the power to subjugate our minds.” André Breton.

The world suddenly seems epic, volatile, its intimacies gone lunatic, explosive, its considerations freestanding implementations of mass and prickly textures. Nefarious actors geoengineering the sky with sulfur dioxide, aluminum oxide, diamond dust, black carbon. Manufacturing rain. The dark oily rain that fell on Tehran from blowing up oil refineries in Iran. The absurdly heavy rains of Guangdong. Of Maui and Oʻahu and parts of California. The sweet-smelling rain of late August and all its negative ions breaking molecules and chains of linear imposition apart, thereby liberating the engines of rebellion. The weight of utility as opposed to the airiness of fungibility. Explosions of joyful outmaneuvering. Deregulated demeanor. Wildness of innovation, joyful, sexual, uncanny, like Bo Diddley on Ed Sullivan, November, 1955.

And here we are at the edge of the world once again. We’ve been here before. Briefly. But this time it seems both unreal and all too real. It’s eerie business when reality slides off the rails.

There are, of course, signs. There are always signs during times like this. The air is stuffed with omens. Nothing ghostly, nothing cryptic. It’s all in-your-face stuff. Plain as the dopey smile on a garden gnome. Homeless tents everywhere. Deaths of despair. Endless war. Ridiculous rationales. Corruption ubiquitous as mold. Dry rot under the constitution. Rudesby dog walkers. Necromantic narcissist nonchalant knee-length cashmere cardigan Hollywood hypodermic puffy-cheeked Botox baby girls. Aged 60.

The exhaustions. The exhaustions of school. The exhaustions of oxygen. The exhaustions of exhaust. The exhaustions of drama required to argue with a healthcare robot. The exhaustions of pretending to fulfill a purpose, which fell off like a loose muffler ages ago.

The exhaustions of filling out survey after survey after survey.

The exhaustions of taxes. The exhaustions caused by malfeasance. The exhaustions of Googling Dr. Google for a plausible (and benign) explanation of one’s symptoms, but getting scary ones instead, and dropping your tired body on the bed, and dreaming you’re at a party in Villefranche-sur-Mer with the Rolling Stones in May, 1971, having fun until you discover your wallet and passport are missing and you don’t know the first thing about playing a guitar. The exhaustions of passwords. And glassblowing and glaucoma and the stress of family relations. The exhaustions of computers and the internet and trying to find a podcaster who doesn’t bore you with personal details before getting to the clickbait-bombshell-scandal of the day.

The exhaustions of toxic positivity. The exhaustions of downgrades and downsizing and draconian insurance policies.

The exhaustions of dirt after decades of cultivation, its microbial microbiomes destroyed by annual injections of anhydrous ammonia.

Borders closing. Borders opening. Borders crawling from church to church, synagogue to synagogue, mosque to mosque, shrine to shrine, temple to temple, chapel to chapel, looking for this guy they call God. Who, it is said, works in mysterious ways. Whatever that means. Maybe nothing. Borders will be borders. They like to have fun pretending to be something real, something actual, like a fish or a marshmallow. Reminds me of the story of the dog who got so used to the occasional shocks of an electrical fence that when the fence was removed the dog thought it was still there. There was nothing to see. But if you got too near, you got a shock. Or so he thought, poor dog. How could he know the fence was gone? He might’ve seen some unusual activity in the vicinity of the fence. But there was no way to interpret it. The dog had never been part of a work crew. Of course, if you felt unnecessarily hemmed in, as one often does under continuous surveillance, you could test it, test the fence, see if it’s there, that wicked current, see if they forgot to flip a switch and turn it on, it wouldn’t kill you to try, would it? Isn’t that worth a shock? Sometime, maybe. I have to get psyched. Some things are more easily assimilated by avoiding the demons of inquiry. The angelic isn’t always quite so angelic. Rimbaud’s Terrace of Princes, offering a view of the world from a completely open perspective.

Indefatigable prisms redefine the activities of ethereal technologies.

Jungle shamanism.

Ayahuasca eyebrows.

And hit a wall.

Of dumb indifference. Psychopathic apathy. And behind the wall an infantilized population, morbidly obese from toxic, artificial food. Sweeteners like aspartame. Preservatives like butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene. Eden dead as a plastic container of gas station jerky.

Dictators are, by nature, against nature. They’re unnatural. They’re monstrosities. And the planet is now in their hands. Their claws. Their tentacles. The drool of their mouths. Sadism in their smiles. The fleshy embrace of their rape.

W.H. Auden famously said poetry makes nothing happen. And therein lies its power. “It survives in the valley of its making.” Meaning its solutions are imaginary. Protozoan. Miscible. Atypical. Intrinsical. Elliptical. Pataphysical. The magnetic magnificence of the cypress leaning into its solicitations, the infinite whirl in the inspired keel of the particular. 

The Art Of Being Null

This heat rising in the throat is a cargo of indignation. I don’t know what else to call it. Words are oscillations that travel through space transferring hair and stepladders. Equanimity is a rash by which a body can determine if it's fictitious or military and is often notorious for its long tongue and fuzzy dirigibles. These are basically lumps of sound by which a sculpture employs its grip on the surrounding air. Yesterday I saw a kangaroo push an intonation through the wall of a drugstore. What I saw was a jaded, pessimistic representation of crocuses canter across a tree stump. This made me feel clumsy. And human. More human than I felt chemically feasible, given the discharge of flak at my feet, and the various eruptions in my thumbnail.

Brutality may be used as a shield against disappointment, but I recommend canals as a superior means of infiltration. Sometimes a local citizen may provide a more personal perspective, and an increase in syrup at the breakfast table, completely incompatible with our goals but otherwise means to a higher purpose than is provided by the martinets on the university faculty. The ghouls are rules. Gaiety has its inclinations and may sometimes include justice, but is more apt to be jerky and disconnected, which is good for our nobler intentions, but bad for the calibrations.

It has been said that the poem explores the tense, often dangerous relationship between the human and the divine, emphasizing the poet's task to mediate between the two. The poet acts as a messenger or priest, crawling over the mountain tops to give birth to divine laws. Or the explorer arriving on the shore of a neglected sensation. One is one or the other in the one that goes to the other, and makes it all shiver, and whirl across a dune. This explains how dice and words get involved in drugs that affect the mind and surrounding foliage. And how combustion serves the engine as the engine serves the ebullience of cherries. There are still a few places where you can order a piroshki and a shot of vodka without drawing undue suspicion. What Mallarmé discovered is that one can also feed on cataclysms and survive the tedium of hell if is one sufficiently embalmed in mayonnaise. If you’re going to take the reins of a poem as it writes itself with the aid of your fingers, it behooves one to fret over vowels and rock hard on the rhythms. Carouse among Luddites. Farm semicolons. Magnetize ghosts. Unlock the precipice.

What does it mean to be null? I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean collateral. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but I’ve been around here long enough to know an omelet from a pancake. I know whenever there’s an abyss nearby. You can smell it. It smells of nothing. And that’s what makes it so deadpan. Every time a transgression makes the night tremble, I know there is a strange new color nearby. It only makes sense. If a quantum evening flowers in a book, the world seems more enticing, more disembodied. And I like that. I like being null. Comfortably numb. Not so much indifferent as preternaturally seasoned. Materially unencumbered. From which it follows that to be acquisitive is contrary to the spirit of nullity. And, in many ways, quite personal. Like the pottery scene in Ghost, in which Demi Moore is spinning a wet clay phallus and Swayze joins her as Unchained Melody plays in the background. Life is preoccupation with itself. Infectious names that slice the air into little adventures. That kind of thing. Things like corners. Where you can put a rocking chair. And enjoy the art of being null.

Ask For Ginger

During my early days on the street, I learned a song about ginger. How it grew, how it flourished, how it assuaged osteoarthritis and eased digestive issues. There was a breadth of meaning in it that I could take for a walk. I could talk to the local spirits. I could think about condiments in a time of creosote. I could hesitate at crosswalks and impose my will on the rule of traffic lights. Deep within the Greenland ice sheet, sits an old man lost in thought. I feel in some way responsible for his being there, but reluctant to disturb the mise-en-scène with a superfluous objective. I’ve been told that there is more than one way to achieve sarcasm. One way involves a razor wit and a hellcat tongue, and the other just craves a little inducement, a convenient pretext. Look for a big blue door. Ask for Ginger. If you’re like most romantics, you’ll probably want a fascinating pain to go with your extremism. Find a cause. Veil your tactics with gauze. Be sweet and cajoling to Civil War reenactors. Turn an eye toward Luxembourg. I have 103 reasons to like concision. This is one of them. I found it on the bus. The entire circus of existence. Doing something to a car antenna. And bent down to tie my shoe to get a better look. It’s what romantics do when they’re old and ornery. Too edgy for yacht rock, too arthritic for nirvana. 

The candle teaches a finger the timbre of fire. My sense of abandonment prefers that we speak with sunlight in the dark. I’m not trying to be difficult I’m just trying to be exempt from summary. There will now be a play during oysters. We sparkle, I sparkle, they sparkle as one by one we eventually realize there's no point to it. And this makes it all timpani. We never know what they want do we but we know what we want that gets it done. Not everyone gets to have fun, even though I'm outside praying for the death of hope, which has been the most amusing thing I’ve done all day. Hope turns real solutions into bargain basement gimcrackery. I go about my business with a certain je ne sais quoi. There’s no need for density. We sometimes faint and when I grope around I feel the strangest things trying to establish intimacy with my skin. I like making myself available in ways that some might find strange. Posting things on social media is probably the strangest. They tell the story of what our clouds are like as they drift over the rugged terrain of our existence. I can never find the right metaphor. All the old bromides and platitudes are junkyard curiosities. I go down to the parlor. The realm of the imaginary versus the totalitarian beast. Emily Dickinson sitting in the dark while the winter pounds on her door.

In this kind of situation, where lyric poetry is often more about freestanding furniture, like envy, or telepathy, we save our grocery receipts, and learn to ride the clouds. The plump glow of truth walks a lonely path. An example is when a character in a play reveals their thoughts and innermost feelings, often when alone on stage, and begins to speak frankly and without censorship. You may have already seen a mime pretend to be trapped in an invisible box, using gestures to give the impression that she is pushing against the walls and a ceiling. This is called simulation, and is a way to achieve imperfection. In its free form, it spins like a mood for which the skating rink is a memory, as if water were a form of thought masquerading as blood, passing from one form or the other until it arrives in someone's antenna, humming like Billie Holiday.

Passions are awakened in the carefree joy of dance, and those who have seen such beautiful performances know exactly how much passion depends on the shape of an ankle, or the impressions of bare feet in the sand. Those enthralled by the steely grip of winter feel themselves huddled together, burying their faces behind a spread of fingers. Behind the tarpaulin, if a creaky old romance occurs, I will comb my furniture with a vacation. I am a beginning student of thorny things. This is my device. You are my blackberry. Together, we will make this fulfillment fulfill itself. Among nature and natural phenomena, the natural substance of things is evident, despite a manifest aura suggesting a clear foreshadowing of a fever dream about to unfold, something primal and desperate, something definite and vast, a mountain range or interstellar trajectory, a marble frog denying its inertia, and leaping into Norway. You can feel that tension in almost every sentence. It's a feature of language, a feature of the imaginary. The power to propose, to build a palace out of air, and hold it there just long enough to dazzle the logic of space. 

For The Sake Of Idiosyncrasy

Is what we create truly ours? And by that I mean, did Ed Sullivan get pissed when Bo Diddley sang Bo Diddley instead of Sixteen Tons as agreed upon? Yes, he did. But you have to understand that a divine energy was flowing through him and he had no choice but to defy the tight-lipped stoicism of TV for the sake of idiosyncrasy. Bo Diddley’s rebellion had the stamp of Promethean fire upon it. And a square guitar. Rock has evangelistic underpinnings. And when creative energies flow through the spirit the body moves, expresses itself in ecstatic rhythms, flagstones to the divine. The Gnostics believed that Human beings possess an inner divine spark of light or spirit, which is a portion of the true, transcendent God, trapped in the material body. The purpose of existence is to liberate this trapped divine energy from the corruptions of the material world and appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Or whatever venue seems appropriate at the time. Shindig, Hullabaloo, Where the Action Is. Today I think it’s more apt to be TikTok, or YouTube, or Madison Square Garden or the Showbox in Seattle. Busking in an underground transit system. Or communing privately in the forest, with a paintbrush and watercolors. Evergreens dancing as the wind moves through their branches, and ironweed and cat-claw. Gerunds are the sugar between negligee and dexterity. The weight of  the air on a G string. These are all sound indications of constrained energies breaking free. Jailhouse Rock. Warren Zevon. Werewolves of London. Richard Burbage, as Falstaff. Van Gogh’s insanely yellow sunflowers.

bubbles of potato soup

cannot say what they mean

without bursting

into epiphanies

of sunyata

not to mentionVan Gogh’s potato eaters

i can smell the earth

in its many disclosures

there’s more to a potato

than geniality there are also pom poms

cheerleaders for existence

at the forty-yard line

in the big game of life

which is a metaphor

so stupid I’m tempted to leave it here

until somebody comes along

to kick it into ambiguity 

Adjusting to life in the 21^st century is an odyssey of contradictions. Heidegger’s hammer pounding digital nails. Reality is twelve elves on a bone. Existence explains the stove. But I’ll never understand money. Can you hear it? That clanking of vowels and syllables. I was carried here by a language. Introspection does backflips, like Dylan’s Tarantula. It’s only natural to expect a more open country where you can sit on a hill and feel your intellect dangle from your ganglions like another dimension at the edge of absence. Control is illusory. These words will never be what I want them to be: devices for exerting pressure on demonic impulses. Democracy failed us. But maybe our art will keep our language alive during a time of censorship. At night the metaphors come out and lick my face. They leave scraps of cryptocurrency that only has value in the mind. You can’t write a utopia in a vacuum. But why would you? When something is intangible, it can’t be captured by time, or coopted by a corporate marketing strategy. It’s pure noumena, an aura of expectation.  Chaos is but a shout away, too wild for a haircut, too apodictic for a leash. There are limits. You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. But sometimes something breaks. A chunk of wall falls down. And possibilities sprout feathers.

It started as a one-to-one proposal, before it had time to evolve into something more than a bucket of tears. Things that happen in secret inevitably become problematical. That’s why living rooms were invented, and school dances and sepals, some might suggest steeples, others will quietly nod ascent to hamburgers and comets. Me, I’m always on the look for UFOs. What kind of poetry are they writing on the other side of the Milky Way? It was always there, always a brutal reminder of everything that agitated us, excited us, drove us, defined us, and it had to be kept alive before it deteriorated into private equity and deposit slips. Ungodly towers of glass and steel. The banalities of wealth that can only be relieved by sadistic proposals and anonymous tips. Clandestine leverages. Although the annoyance of poverty is generally considered to be a reliable indication of genius and diehard fervent German romanticism, disproportionately large anatomical organs do in some instances apply, depending on context and the temperature of the operating theater. Mathematics are hilariously distorted, and the basilica cradles a superpower. I think we all know what it means to listen to Frank Sinatra during a thunderstorm, but the intense pleasure of terza rima in Dante is brighter than all the lava from Mount Etna, and so is Portofino.

it’s 1030 a.m., a Thursday in February

i’m looking at my intestines

on a computer screen

sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean

that’s me alright

knots of anguish

loosened into oblivion

divine propofol

i’m a big fan of Baudelaire

and this is why

i believe the 21^st century

is a bust and I want my money back

i’m walking out of here

on a carpet of nitrous oxide

and in the future

shall arrange my speech accordingly

what does that mean

it means a lot of things

mainly words

of hemp & irony

like that moment in a hotel

we see a rainbow

trout leap

out of a suitcase 

I think it’s time we start talking about Umwelt. Otherwise, everything in life is everywhere. Scattered. Haggard. Battered. Nothingness is not nothing, because music is perfectly clear about these things. Arpeggios kill depth. Go for a nice long note of Mahler. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. He’s in the kitchen preparing a salad. This makes all my emotions happy. The dilemma of daring to go to the marsh by moonlight means something has to happen. It’s a matter of emphasis, not comprehension. If something is incomprehensible it just means it’s obliging our refusal to believe what we see. You can shape a sound with a tuba, but try it sometime with a freshly scrubbed mosquito. Am I overlooking something? The windy splatter of rain on a window. The way water running in a kitchen sink sounds when you’re alone in a house. That sense of regions, zones, zones is a better word, for that which feels simultaneously far and near, and is open to those who can feel it unfold and cue the membrane lining the eye. Who can define what a wilderness is? The French don’t even have a word for it. The crunching of leaves, the breaking of twigs, the sound of its breath. The croaking of frogs. And if you do all this in your head it’s difficult to describe. But if I spin around twice the sugar of it ripples through my nerves. And there’s nothing I can say that will stop what’s coming. It has no reality. Until it gets here.

the hammer is defined by its use

but the nails are chickenpox

and the house is full

of the effusive gestures

of otherworldly beings

how easy it is

to slip away

and listen to the Beach Boys

in a different reality

than this one

don’t worry baby

everything will turn out alright  

 

The Second Coming

Maybe it's because I did jury duty once and I feel I could have done a better job if I had a better understanding of the law and how lawyers operate. Maybe it’s because I like courtroom dramas. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a certain, inexplicable fascination with outlaws, bank robbers and wise guys, con men and gunslingers. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassiday and The Sundance Kid. Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone. Maybe it’s because there are so many stupid laws. Maybe it’s because the current administration flaunts constitutional laws – which are anything but stupid - with the flagrant disdain and mockery of the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" Maybe it’s because for the past few months a federal paramilitary force has been attacking, kidnapping, and murdering its own citizens without the slightest restraint or concern for breaking constitutional laws. Maybe because our current president has been flouting international and constitutional laws with a breathtaking cavalier indifference, has kidnaped the president Venezuela and put him in one of our jails, killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a religious leader with the equivalent prominence of the Pope - without any congressional or judicial restraint, and has attacked Iran without any plausible cause or a clearly stated objective, an attack that has so far killed at least 3,332 Iranian citizens. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen the law so utterly disregarded, or felt so anguished and vulnerable without its protection. The value of life is keyed to the preservation and respect for the law. Without the law to protect each individual, one’s life feels as valued as an armadillo on a Texas highway with an eighteen-wheel rig barreling straight toward your scaly little ass at 90 mph.

And so I wonder. Has Yeats’s “rough beast” been awakened? Is the apocalyptic monster slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? Because there can be no doubt: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some new revelation is at hand.

Recently, I watched a French TV show which airs weekly called La Grand Librairie hosted by Augustin Trapenard, whose primary focus is to excite interest in books and literature. Authors are invited to come on the show and talk about their books, all of which are related to the topic at hand. The topic of the show I watched was Pour quoi est-ce qu'on est fasciné par le mal? (Why Are We Fascinated by Evil?). Of the five guests, the one that provoked the most fascination – and distress – was an attractive, 54-year-old woman named Constance Debré, who was elegantly dressed in a pinstriped blazer and pants with a black shirt and a buzz-cut that reminded me of Sinead O’Connor’s strategy for downplaying her femininity and beauty. Debré – who, for many years had been a criminal defense lawyer before leaving the profession to become an author, was there to talk about her recent novel Protocoles, a work of autofiction described as “a stark and clinical account exploring the detailed procedures of capital executions in the United States,” in which Debré “analyzes the ritual of the death penalty, contrasting administrative rigor with the chaotic and violent reality of the execution.”

Debré’s true focus is on exploring our relationship to law and its approach to evil. How does the law protect its citizens without exercising too much restraint? How does the law manage to protect our freedoms while protecting us from the abuses of psychopaths and sharks, from the abuses of propaganda and misinformation? What does the law have to say about the nature of evil, its motivations and sources? What is evil? Is everyone capable of doing evil? Is there anything like a true state of innocence? Is silence in the face of genocide a form of complicity in evil, or may it be pardoned as an act of self-preservation? Is it criminal to voice an opposition to a perceived injustice in public? Is vengeance evil? Is revenge evil? Is killing someone in a fit of rage evil, or may it be justifiably deemed a temporary insanity? Are people inherently good, possessing a natural compassion and innocence that is often corrupted by the influence of society and conceptions of private property as Rousseau argued, or are people inherently self-interested, competitive, and fearful, driven by a desire for power and survival, as Thomas Hobbes argued?

What did Bob Dylan mean when he wrote “to live outside the law you must be honest?”

What did Hanna Arendt mean when she said “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil?”

What did Albert Einsten mean when he said “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

Or Edmund Burke, anticipating Einstein: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Or Mahatma Ghandi: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

Humanity’s one true weapon against evil is law. But – as Dylan implies – is the law always honest? Justice (to quote the AI Overview on Google) “is depicted as blind (often wearing a blindfold) to symbolize impartiality, objectivity, and fairness in the legal system. This suggests that justice should be administered without fear, favor, prejudice, or regard for a person's identity, wealth, or social status. It ensures decisions are based solely on evidence and law.”

Then there’s the golden rule: those with the gold, make the rules.

And then there’s literature. The old and new testaments of the Bible. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The Firm, by John Grisham. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. The Verdict, by Barry Read. Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Native Son, by Richard Wright. The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. Snow Falling On Cedars, by David Guterson.  The Code of Hammurabi, proclaimed and enacted by Hammurabi,  the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, who ruled from approximately 1792 to 1750 B.C.

I’m sure there are many others, all wrestling with the dilemmas of good and evil. The darker turmoil of the human unconscious. Loki, the Norse trickster god who creates chaos. Ravana, the ten-headed Hindu demon king of Lanka, symbolizing ego and lust. Apophis, the ancient Egyptian serpent deity who represents chaos and attempts to devour the sun god Ra every night. Lamashtu, the female Mesopotamian demon notorious for her malevolence toward pregnant women, mothers and children. Beelzebub, a.k.a. Lord of the Flies, originally a Philistine god from Ekron, located in the Judean lowlands of Israel, often considered another name for Satan, and associated with the deadly sin of gluttony in Christian demonology, a disgusting, bloated,  humanoid entity with flashing eyes, bat-like membranous wings and webbed, duck-like feet, who embodies pride and envy, and is notorious for inciting war, lust, and idolatry.

The law approaches evil one way. Literature approaches evil another way. The law attempts to be objective. Surgical, precise, leaving no room for doubt. Whereas literature goes for salvation, aberration, contrast, paradox, messy incongruities, and drama. Law calls for evidence. Literature calls for theater. Bloody battles and witch’s cauldrons. Dragons and fog. Fjords echoing with the groans and laughter of Norse warrior gods. Cities of sin and corruption buried in volcanic ash. God’s wrath. Faustian bargains. Scapegoats and sacrifices. Human hearts tumbling down Aztec temples. Genocides. Massacres. Annihilation. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden. Auschwitz.

During Debré’s opening remarks, she made one highly provocative statement that I’m still pondering, still trying to unravel and understand more deeply. She said “La loi rend toute littérature obsolète,” (“The law renders all literature obsolete”). 

The law operates according to a strict code of facts. There’s no room for nuance and metaphor, no accommodating stage for eloquent justifications, verbal acrobatics incarnating our existential and moral dilemmas à la Hamlet and King Lear, or moving, probing, piercing explorations of what makes people do the things they do, including rape and murder, à la Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy. The law is as sharply and coldly defined as a surgical instrument. Literature is designed to provoke thought. The law is designed to punish, and to act as a preventative measure. Literature illumines. The law casts shadows.

Elsewhere – on a YouTube channel called Maison de la Poésie, Scène littéraire  -  I listened to Debré read an opening passage from Protocoles describing, in graphic detail, the grisly details of a public execution. It was profoundly disturbing. I was also struck by the clinical explicitness of her description. Her attention to accuracy and the minutiae of this grisly procedure can’t really be described as a description; it was too clinical for that, too precise, too literal, too clear-cut to be called a description. The ghastliness of what occurred was even more dreadful in the raw, fact-based, unadorned sterility of its operation.

I was all the more struck by her statement at the end of La Grand Librairie. Each emission of La Grand Librairie ends with a two or three-minute statement of eloquence and power titled Droit dans les yeux, in English “right in the eyes.” Debré’s Droit dans les yeux may be accessed on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. It’s in French, but I translated it into English:

There isn't the world on one side and literature on the other. There isn't reality on one side and fiction on the other. Reality without books, and this shattered, refracted, illegible matter. This succession of strange, mechanical, confused events. A machine that always seems to be one step ahead, that cancels us out, swallows us, separates us from one another. Keeps us bewildered in a feeling of absurdity, solitude, and madness. Books, for their part, are not the stories, the little stories they tell. Books are not this enclosed space, closed in on itself, on the sentences and what they seem to say. A possibility of escape, a way out of reality. To the question of what reality compels us to do, what its senseless mechanics demand as an answer. And they are not a shelter for the thick-skinned, made of their sentences alone, a place to forget reality and what we do within it. There is no escape, no way out of the world, no refuge. That's more or less what books tell us. They don't offer solutions; they wrench us from the idea that existence is a contradiction to be resolved, an enigma to be cracked. They place us before our destiny, our shared destiny, all of us who are alive, neither entirely separate nor entirely together, but simultaneously. Books are our only chance to become aware of this: that we are not beings without cause or purpose, absurd and lost in the chaos of the world, but rather figures of something greater than ourselves, something called humanity.

I found her statement surprising and impactful for several reasons. I was astonished by the power of her eloquence, especially considering how clinical and sterile her description of an execution had been, but also her attitude toward literature. I could more easily understand why she had exchanged her profession as a criminal defense lawyer for the purviews of literature. Literature isn’t, as a lot of people assume, particularly those who surrender to the infantilizing charms of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, or Tolkien’s Hobbit adventures, a place of refuge, an escape from the rigors of existence. But she doesn’t make it out to be a dark, nihilistic habitation of impotence and futility either. Elsewhere in her appearance on La Grand Libraire, she cited authors like Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka. She lauds its grasp on the reality of our situation, its unflinching gaze at destiny. On the other hand, and this is where my thoughts about literature differ, I can’t remember a single book that didn’t in some way try to unravel the mystery of existence, or offer a solution for ameliorating its inevitable losses and tragedies, find humor and redemption in the lushness of its mysteries. This would, of course, include Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Kafka especially. I have to wonder what she would make of Rimbaud’s mysterious flip flop, his strange reversal from visionary poet to caravaneer and import/export clerk. Rimbaud’s correspondence in his later years bear the same stark, barren grasp of existence, his letters to his mother and sister full of burdensome grievances, with maybe a small glint of humor now and then.

As for evil, I see it as a form of madness, a satanic rebellion against the natural order of things. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I’ve never been hostile toward religion either. There’s a scene in True Detective, Season one, episode 3 with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson that I find highly relatable. They visit an evangelist revival meeting in a tent somewhere in rural Texas, looking for information on a suspect. McConaughey, as the dour, world-weary, cynical Detective Cohle, utters disparagingly to his partner Marty, played with embattled, conflicted intensity by Woody Harrelson, “What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?...I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales, folks putting what few bucks they do have into little, wicker baskets being passed around. I think it's safe to say that nobody here is gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.” Marty, who staunchly adheres, believes in, and champions the value of religion, responds in stern opposition: “can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?”

I’m with Marty on that one. Religion is one of the few things that keep people from destroying one another. The one reason anyone aspires to be honest, aspires to be caring and compassionate, aspires to do good work, aspires to be faithful, aspires to do the right thing. The obvious irony, as McConaughey’s nihilistic Cohle would gleefully point out, is that religion is also the central reason that people do destroy one another. And thereby, saith the bard, hangs a tale. 

Some Notes On A Lost Investment

In eternity, time has nowhere to go. Wherever it goes, it’s already there. So it becomes relative. In French, la future proche has a place to be right away. It arrives in a golden coach pulled by a team of big oil CEOs. Most of the oil in the ground comes from algae and plankton that lived in ancient oceans and swamps millions of years ago. And so here we are. Pumping it into Silverados and Ram pickups. F-47s and Sikorsky Seahawks. Those of us on the fringe have elsewhere to be. The eyes dilate for the foliage of poetry. Fronds of Wanda Coleman. Radicles of Ashbery. Bulbs of Beckett. Canopies of Keats. Deciduous Dickinson. Panicles of Poe.

It is not until one becomes old that time truly reveals its wilder idiosyncrasies. After precedes before but only when the moon is waxing crescent and the door to the hermitage is left open. The time for decisions is fallible. The time for scissors is ribbons. The time for rectitude is recyclable. The time to die is phantom ovations in a theater of words. The time for youth is drowsy. The time for time is not nearly enough. The time for quick is slower than a secretion. The time to find the ultimate truth of things is as elusive as the objects swimming in a cataract. The struggle to explain evil gets harder. And when there’s more evil in the end than in the beginning you begin to wonder where the fuck it all went wrong. You can call it entropy. And leave it in the basement. It’s a good scapegoat. Specify, specify, always specify. Talk and sleep. Time was, time is. Avoid holes. Let go of the plot at some convenient place, where it will stand as a sign.

I once invested in an upright piano whose octaves never seemed to agree. The sound was dissonant and rouge, with a slag of distortion. I can still hear it, reverberating like an old barn full of hungry cattle. It distinguished itself by occupying a zone outside of time and space. It had its own unique lexicon, like a thought that never defines itself but haunts the outer limits of one’s private reflections. I thought it might have a promising future as an instrument of musical pathology. Sadly, it was roundly rejected. The public did not like it. Musicians did not like it. It was a thing of poetry, doomed to failure, yet retaining a certain charm, a haunting je ne sais quoi. I don’t regret the money I lost on this adventure. The investment had more to do with the ephemeral charms of music more than the mechanics of the piano. A rhapsode, sewn with loss.

Things happen. I don’t know why they happen the way they happen, but they happen. Stories are written. Dreams occur. That beautiful passage in Proust where he and Albertine are lying in sand, feet toward the ocean, and its breathing becomes a voluptuous reconciliation, the perpetual surf receding in a hiss of sudsy withdrawal and crashing back in a crescendo of chaos and foam, a systole and diastole of murmuring intervals soothing a tortuous cycle of endless ambivalences, injudicious actions, nagging anxieties, louche betrayals and passionate midnight trysts which the ocean’s rhythmic assurances rock and lull into a lush and undulating prose.

Who knows? Maybe the best way to achieve elsewhere is to go on an imaginary journey. The insanity of the current regime can be an asset. It invites opposition, a creative response with restorative power. If our existence as a species is hanging by a proverbial thread, fuck the elites and their Caribbean retreats. There are places that can’t be reached by coercion and money. Not that they’re too spiritual or refined or celestial or immaterial for the gross vulgarities and predatory instincts of the rich. These are qualities obtainable through even the most fraudulent pieties. Realms of blue flame have a power unique to the sacrifices and rigors of privation. They have a reality powered by duende, which is aligned with the imaginary, the capacity for enchantment. Contrary energies. Carboniferous outgrowths. Bizarre mythologies. Castles made of planetarium lint. I am, of course, making this up as I go along. That’s the entire point. Welcome aboard. Follow the signs. Note the fill of uncanny enthusiasms. Turn left at the next diversion. The cranium inspired by organs. Freewheeling deities and amiable cephalopods.  

Our entry into the carpenter's workshop is preceded by rain. We smell olives and sawdust. Everything becomes waves by the grace of heat. There is a reassuring sense of agency. The ineptitude of genius rescued by music. Construction demonstrates the tactility of facts. The intervention of chaos is necessary to disregard the handkerchief lying on the armchair. Pipes creak and twist creating memory. Something huge and amorphous blurs the air. Existence cracks open like sugar. And when the void supersedes our immersion, we can celebrate its unveiling with irrelevant stimuli. We can bend reality. We can reveal the void and fill it with pickles and brine. We can inherit whole kingdoms of russet. We can escalate cats. We can bubble with emphasis. We can boil with criteria. We can aim at the fog and excite its incongruities with a ricochet of words. And ride home in a barrel of lopsided wine.

 

Helium Smile

Sometimes when it seems you have nothing you have this moment, this lovely perusal, this luxurious absorption detached in obscurity. It's a form of spaghetti to be this inquisitive. The carpet insists that a cat be up there on a desk and I understand this it has a certain pungency, an easy pulse to comb with a checkered tongue. I’ve got things in my pocket and a book with bitter flames describing the plight of humanity. I am near it all in a kind of trance. Our constant hula is one among many contingencies. To the east is an armchair beyond our most keen imagining, and to the west lies the spoor of a hot tiara. Beyond what our needs radiate, there is a regatta during sunset, the air twisting in golden arenas. It’s just a matter of singing. 

I'm unanimous in space. I resuscitate prongs. Disorder cooks my rapture. Complexity effaces everything I gratify with puppets. I get my kicks whenever and wherever I can. I'm an early pilgrim on a rusty fiasco. Trademarks oboe my mold. The cork is illiterate but the bottle is calm. Wild horses peddle the sideshow into ubiquity. We all want a look on the other side of death. It’s a kind of obligation to kiss your ass goodbye. And why not? The nomenclature surrounding anything neon gets my juices going. Let me be clear: it is in the nature of logic to defeat the squeak of combustion. I’ve always wanted to be a counterpart to its tumultuous happenstance. If I must, I shall subsist in a glamour of my own undoing, running a comb across all the indications, intermingling my fiber with the dromedary stars.

What you see here is more than a mood, it’s a disposition based on qualia, the sizzle of a roadside grill where the menus have been carpentered by a keen understanding of food coupled with a flair for exotic phenomena at the fringes of perception. I often feel as if a chance to rub shoulders with plums has been squandered on apples. And despite the clear advantage of an awning, I can't explain sauerkraut. I find it easier to explain the Dirac equation than chili powder. I am at one with the universe but hopelessly confused when it comes to genderless bathrooms. Marcel said something the other day which unraveled one enigma and then raised another. He said things that have a definite, concrete value like commercial success or acquiring a practical skill are less alluring than phantom enticements. Things without status. Things without prestige or stature. And so it comes to this. It arouses a hunger I can’t explain. And it’s never on the menu.

Royalty requires trumpets. Not the sweetly muted trumpet of Miles, but the blaring instruments of empire. Poetry has a royal heart but a healthy distrust of empire. It’s an aristocracy of spirit. Cowboy coffee. Milieus of lapidary fire. Those whose hearts have been pierced with poetry launch themselves into the boundless space of an authentic existence. Tiny holes or corkscrews for privileging spit over punctuation. The croak of a radish morning is a thesis of dirt. And so the unsung provocations of a fatigued defiance schleps through the shallows of a long imperial limbo looking for an exit. Splish splash the labial jab of nothingness causes all pandemonium to break loose into trance. Iridescent irises dilate with the shine of sunyata. I want to disband the football team and walk into presumption like a science based on crying. Disavow the novel of today for the novel of tomorrow. Which will be written by cats. On steroids and meth. This will enhance my rapport with sockets and become a glamour of tingling expectations. The voltage of metaphor powering alchemical blenders. Interstellar oysters in dynasties of coral. The peevish etiquette of traffic lights sobbing legacies of mechanical duality. The carnival world bursting into polyneuronal innervation. Extraocular muscles tactile eyes. Groundbreaking gypsum genitalia grammar. Hydrogen halo. Helium smile.