Who Are Our Eyes

Today, I want to talk about butter. At least, I thought I did. Everything changed as soon as you sat down to read this. I thought about butter and then I thought what about butter, what is there to say about butter? If it also involves inflating a chicken, I’m willing to talk about anything. Maybe I’ll just sit here and say nothing and let the words do their thing. Until our next disagreement regarding eccentricity - curse, or blessing - we must address the matter of balance, and what it is that remains in flux. Do Fascists like or dislike eccentricity? Some people choose to absent themselves from the frolic of our little exchange and spin wildly around the room spouting haikus at a homiletic yottabyte. It takes cotton to make a cloth, and chinquapin to fill a crepe. If you give a word an s it becomes a sword. What this means for oil production, I cannot say. There are people who prefer to sit in a corner saying nothing. That would be me. And the many ghosts at my side, gliding through the words as I write them down in a churning chromaticism, like the creation of butter, which is our background, and gives us something to talk about.

Who are our eyes when we aren’t there to see for ourselves? Writers. Musicians. Funambulists. Looking down. Way, way down. Backstage, everything is taking place in front of a harpsichord. The elements are poised to produce a drama that is plaster in form and Shakespeare underwater. This can go and open the door. I know it can. That’s why I’ve painted your knees with a deep hue of intent. Everything that happens here is destined to move in circles, to catch a glimpse of heaven, to hum something from the hymnal that is our voices in congress. Instead of being in the thick of things, I choose caution and the unknown. It’s a tragedy, then. Yes. Why, you ask? Write this down. Any kind of paper will do. The answer to anything depends on swarms of regret. The ink comes easy. The struggle is in the search. Whatever rises here may be heavy with self-importance. Just ignore it. There’s another bus coming. Distant and unthinking rays in apricot split the air in half. The sky falls out and rolls on the ground. You can say it happened here one night when your eyes weren’t there to see for themselves the whole charade get real, and insists on setting the whole train of thought in motion, gleaning as it goes.

There’s a tale unfolding amidst the frost. It has my breath in it. Whatever flesh there is to display, it sparkles as it hums along. I am not doing this to distance myself from form and structure. Far be it for me to suggest undulations in the upper melee help fantasticate. After understanding why our temperament tends to strike the mutable with a squeegee rather than a carbohydrate, I began to feel butterscotch, and a little aberrational. The moon - like a lozenge - crumbles nearby, not because it’s there to incite desire, a craze for the echolocations of elsewhere, but because the oboes serve the purpose of ornamenting the very existence we harness to our thought as it pulls the sentence forward into a timely and rather drowsy cavalcade of drunken words. I didn’t get dressed to squeeze your reticence into surrender. I’m here to engage your fluids in a game of nirvana. The first one to fall off the back of a hope wins a night in a lovely and magnificent despair under the protective guise of Scarlet Johanssen. Why else do thunderstorms crackle in algebra? It has little to do with hardware, and everything to do with enthusiasm.

 

Some Thoughts On Gestation

I’ve never really felt secure. Maybe when I was immersed in my mother’s amniotic fluid, doing whatever people do before they’re born, and somebody tells them what to do. When does consciousness start? AI Overview says consciousness is considered unlikely before 24 weeks. The neural pathways linking the sensory organs to the cerebral cortex—specifically the thalamocortical connections—are not yet established. Early brain activity at 6 weeks is primitive and unorganized. Furthermore, low oxygen levels and natural sedating chemicals in the womb (like adenosine and allopregnanolone) keep the fetus in a deep, sleep-like state. I’ve got some news for you: I’m 79 and still very much feeling primitive and unorganized. I have no memory of entering this world. No memory of the doctor whose forceps left shallow little impressions on my skull. No memory of the window. Was there a window? No memory of the nurses, if there were nurses. Did anyone think to offer me a shot of whiskey, or shake my hand in congratulation? Welcome to Planet Earth. No doubt, my mother was the focus of attention. My first memory was watching John Wayne wrestle a huge octopus on a movie screen. I would soon discover that John Wayne was considered the prototypical male. Rock steady, taciturn, stubborn. Unapologetic. Anti-intellectual. Tough as nails. Not for me. I drifted more toward Kerouac, drawn toward things on the other side of the mind, immense arcades of secret joy. Marcel Proust in bed, writing a universe of art. 

Somehow, I managed to grow up rebellious, retiring, and absurdly mutable, traits frolicking in contradiction, sometimes canceling on another out, that’s life. I was never very belligerent. Getting old has changed that a bit. My social life keeps shrinking. Many friends have died. The chronic irritability of old age has accomplished the rest. Alan Watts seemed pretty cheery in his elder years. Was that a put-on? Was it fake? Was it all an act? Listening to him always puts me at ease. He seemed more hedonistic than ascetic. To my eyes, he’s a bit of a fraud, but that makes him all the more appealing. The best thing about Watts is that I never have to take him seriously. He ends every statement with laughter. If Mr. Watts says death is not the opposite of life, it’s the counterpart of birth, the other end of the same wave, I feel more than aquatic, I feel buoyant and green and flooded with growth and being. I feel Funky Tonk and many other heavy syncopated grooves. Miles Davis is another preferred guru. He said things like don’t play what's there, play what's not there. So I’m always looking, trying to see what’s not there, which is difficult, because it’s not there. I’m more apt to bump into it when I’m not looking. Here’s another MD nugget: Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. Whoever that turns out to be.

The most significant change for the better in my lifetime were the Beatles. When I was in 9th grade, the cool guys wore black leather motorcycle jackets and sported pompadours and ducktails. It was either that, or be a squeaky-clean jock, assuming one was graced with a tall athletic body, or a nerdy misfit, if one were predisposed to books and airplane glue, which was the category I nestled in. Norms prevailed in all the squishy niches and tributaries of the general river taking us all out to sea one day. Life felt tight as a compression sock. Step out of line, the man come and take you away. The Beatles did away with all that. All the norms got tossed out the proverbial window. Everything was funny and wild and exhilarating. Eccentricity was in, conformity was out. Life felt authentic and brilliantly contradictory. Status moldered. People denigrated money. Then they loved money. Egoless antimaterialism was king. People sought refuge in ashrams. Then money got imperative again and it all disappeared in a blush of disguised venality. How did that happen? How did everything go from Me and Bobby McGee to Material Girl? How did living authentically and large in dharma bum glee come to be so easily seduced, so easily appropriated? All that freewheeling joy became a 401(k). Disco revived chicanery. Cheesy mirror balls. Leisure suits. Junk bonds. And ChatGPT.

 

 

What Are You Doing Differently?

Like vapor, you take a stroll through a circus of thoughts, and just like that, there you are, a poet in the making. If it's a photogenic life, there will be many opportunities to water the begonias. But if it's the life of a vagabond, begonias won't matter as much as hope. We all belong to something. The vagabond belongs to the staccato pulses of a syncopated asceticism. Luxuries fall out of a book like scraps of prestidigitation, humming as they become meaningful. The thunder cracks the air open like an egg of lightning, and the path becomes evident as silverware on a nonexistent table of steaming backbeat. A cavern, through the fiber of a moment, forgets itself and thinks about twisting a diamond neck into fingers of light. Narratives are inherently sepulchral. A life in segments describes itself as a hood ornament and that’s all there is to it. Nobody gets lost by choice. It’s not that kind of universe. The architecture is more like music here, and religions toy with the concept of evil. Time is combed with nails, and all the clocks are coocoo.

What are you doing differently, dear rags of thought, as slowly in your search for quintessence the heating we feel in our minds is beginning its overflow into speech? As humanity continues its descent into chaos, ideas glow like bumps in the brushwork of drunken calligraphers. Within the peremptorily mutable, we find - by virtue of meringue – a new form of writing better suited to the illiteracy of the age. Sweet being worthy of boiling, shall we get busy at our spices and try soliciting the slash and hullabaloo of the wind? I see a face in the window at midnight. I believe it’s the ghost of George Carlin. It’s one of those nights when the wolves are silent and the moon howls. Sometimes you can tell when a language is attempting to storm the Bastille and when it’s just resting on the page like a watermark. It’s a lot like putting on a shirt right after it’s been pulled out of the dryer. The distress or pleasure of the sensation will largely depend on any number of variables, everything from weather to sex to a plunge into Sanskrit. Yesterday these words were about deepening one’s experience of life, and already today they’re beginning to depart, and seek a new Eden with which to abolish, garden, and mend the world.

Writing is like folding clothes, except that the volcanos are active, and clothes haven’t been invented yet. The carpenter’s knee is outside, although the position of either knee remains to be seen, since the narrative made a sharp turn to the north and we all felt keenly the immediate ease of going in another direction. Many things begin with a coffee grinder and end with an appliance. This is not one of them. What we have here is a knitter with a collection of roots. There is the smell of rich black dirt in the air, and a clear potential for taffeta. Emily Dickinson sitting at a small desk, about the size of a nightstand. It’s not really a desk at all. It’s a table. But we’re not here to quibble. We take what the words give us. We see a new art begin to tell a story, using black like a font and blue as a means of escape. We call it the art of black and blue. It has a soft side and a tendency to gorge itself with words, as if were the ticking of the pillow and not the endorphins of sleep that cause most of our buffalo to erupt in soap. Writing isn’t a career it’s a calling. That is why the panacea dispenses with itself, and suggests instead an understanding based on drinking. Getting shitfaced. Because the Enlightenment is over, and nothing makes better sense than art, which needs us, and offers such sumptuous alternatives to algorithms and data structures. Things like twigs, and bacchanalia.

The Daffodil Pill

Only months otherwise moiré. These edges are a real pain to inflate. All I can say is: feel around under that little bell tower. To propulse oneself is to propose oneself. It is to experience a hike, ready, up to, and furthermore.  A sinister music calls this hard, nebulous diamond, a panacea. An emissary will be present to search the grounds when necessary. You may now send me all your money. You will be reimbursed tomorrow by twelve pancakes and a Mardi Gras. Here’s an egg unless ready while waiting for the overflow. Stand behind that white line. When the gun fires, run as hard as you can toward that big brick wall over there. Break through to the other side. It’s always good to lend yourself to a prodigal roadside attraction based on an understanding of how one conducts oneself in a jellyfish. I’m working on a design suited to the temperature of the water. Doing this is excessive while waiting for it to become metaphorically worn-out. I’m not ready for that. I’m bursting out with that breath you sent. It’s full of metaphors. Moiré. And vertigo.

Since blooming is almost ruby ​​although it’s splashing, let me greet you on the outside of this periphery and welcome you to the puzzle that is stretched nylon. Think of it as an underlying craft, raw and geometric. Or you can go beyond all the natural airwaves and find an allegory transcending thought. Learn to sew. Pick a thread. Choose a deadwood. Provide a library for the palm, and a punctuation for the fire escape. Jump into your fingers and collide with something poignant. Either scrap metal or a scientific drawer. The trickiest decisions are chestnuts. So, plow or hornet, search until you groan, and carry a fire alarm. Use your eyes to adore the chaos of your existence. Every day is a fable. Here is Bob Dylan warning everyone to open a gate. He looks worn. We could all use a vacation. Sometimes, that's all there is to it. Vacate. Depart. Dissolve. Sometimes the best solution is a solution. Wishing wells are for fools. The wise use cash. Learn to imply things. Inflate your vespa with semiotics. Oil your bananas hard, against the ribbon, where it smokes.

It’s hard to see, especially during the day. You know. The small one is all fields and shadows. But the big one is totally Toledo. Each window is a washing machine. Each door is its own skin. Give a salute to everything that running dares to inspire. I finally had to admit that Patti Smith could sing. The mayor gave me a donkey. But the janitor gave me an entire history. You will find it where the shadows are frozen and your birth is metal. It’s dazzling in a gerund. I struggle with chrome every day. I want to make a paper god for the arena. Can you keep a secret? I can’t either. I’m just some office lipstick without a plum. I can pull it until its apricot, but that won’t solve the rodeo. I've been rosily chapped ever since setting the chalk on fire. Ultimately, it all comes down to pills. The blue one ends the story. You wake up in bed and believe whatever they want you to believe. The red one offers the unvarnished truth. The black one means adopting a deep, fatalistic, and nihilistic worldview. The lavender one is for listening to Miles Davis. The burnt sienna one is raw with horseplay. The white ones are religious. You can play with reality all day like this if you use the right words. Use the wrong words, and no one will like you. You’ll be accused of all sorts of things. Misspelling. Misdirection. Wantonness. Cognizance. Hypostasis. Self-consciousness. You name it. I recommend the daffodil pill. It has a kite.

We were wrong. The last hours of the dinosaurs were worse than we thought. But let’s leave that for another day. Think, instead, of the Kelvin Wave, a warm-water surge that travels beneath the ocean surface rather than crashing on a beach. It’s the ultimate poem, a metaphor traveling stealthily through the unconscious and emerging in the mind not as a pressure but a treasure of transformative beauty. It's a feeling that becomes a tone, a moment that can be described as the appearance of cracks in an old wall, and which arouses an endless chain of molecular Beehoven. On sees time in knots, or anything else, whatever happens in the middle of words. This could be anything that drifts through a reverie like the perfumes of Honduras. It inspires the splendid mechanism of constellations in a planetarium of the mind to fold space into bizarre shapes, little sea friends whose tickles are a blessing, and whose forms awaken various uses when the idioms we choose to serve break the mailbox, and stumble forward into the realms of humankind, batting at habitudes.

In Mozart’s A Little Night Music, the sensation of mass is sublimated in the string section. It’s enough just to put up with futility in our day-to-day survival. It’s a leap into the void to think that the slower the rock the easier it becomes to build a new altitude. The same framework applies to the spine. Everyone loves a mimosa. But who gives a damn about a mustard seed in a time of endless wandering? For the time being, simply having the genitals to walk around with is quite enough to appease one’s inner turmoil. It's the rolling motions, the sound of scrapbooks opening and closing, because the ocean is right there, and it makes you want everything to sparkle with fine particles and big ideas. When was the last time you listened closely to the conversations of drunks in a cocktail lounge? No language was ever destined to collapse into obscurity. That is why the machinery of the poem played out yesterday in someone's mouth, and gave birth to Chet Baker.

There Are Places I Remember

When we visit a place, we don't leave it behind. Depending on the extent of our experience with it, we bring a significant part of it back home with us. Not just photographs and memories, but the spirit of the place, the subtleties of the air, the intricacies of its architecture, the flavors of its food and language. It brings about a shift in consciousness. It alters our overall perspective, our Weltanschauung. I have felt this most acutely in visiting Paris, France. In a visit of a mere five days that occurred eleven years ago, I still feel it. I feel the depth of certain emotions I experience when, for example, on a foggy late afternoon in August, I saw the four Evangelists from the Book of Ezekiel at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was sublime. It was enchanting. It awakened depths of feeling in me that were new to my being. It was similar to the effect certain key poems have had on my existence. The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” I had a friend that used to recite those lines at key moments and it always put me in a good mood. The grace and musicality of those first two lines followed immediately by the grotesque image of a patient etherized upon a table always cracks me up. It evokes the inherent majesty of life then punctures it with the ghastly reality of its horrific mortality. It awakens something both impish and noble, something ungainly and provoking in that strange art called poetry, which is a creaking carousel in a drugstore full of postcards published in The Twilight Zone. There are geographies of the soul, metaphysical frontiers that shield the enchantments of the sublime from the mediocrity of the mundane. The French have a word for it: le dépaysement. Being transported out of the familiar into the unfamiliar. I’ve got another word for it: odometer. My face is an odometer. Look hard enough & you’ll all the miles I’ve traveled. Rambled. Ambled. Gallivanted. Wandered. All while sitting in my chair.

Writing always feels clumsy at the outset. I find myself grabbing at words and finding entanglements and knots, semantic squeaks and faulty headlights. I fold it to get a shape like La Place de la Bastille, then sit back and comb my hair. I start to wonder what the hell am I doing? The more lucid things get the more obscure they become. I make a net of words, toss it into the void, then tug it in to see what kind of catch I’ve got, which invariably turns out to be something too calcareous to grow into zithers. In other words, words like to play tricks. They excel at creating illusions of reality, but fail hilariously in trying capture it. Is it possible that words, which are essentially hallucinatory, aren’t really designed to mimic reality, but invariably end by creating their own reality? To quote Emerson: “words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.” But do they always? Impoverish it, that is. Because the contours and consonants of any single moment are encrusted with a million other moments, and that is most certainly a sign of wealth. Each word is like a suitcase in which eternity has been folded into meaning like a cashmere sweater. It’s a never-ending pilgrimage, a shattering music with the heart of a chameleon. It’s awkward like a charging rhinoceros: faster than you think, and unstoppable. Unless, of course, you’re Hemingway. He always barges in at the wrong moment. It’s why I continually lose my place, and spend hours turning the pages, trying to find that moment, the one I haven’t yet written, which is gripping a fencepost in Wyoming as a bend in the road reveals the sudden splendor of haiku.

I remember a night in eastern Montana, nestled out on the prairie in a sleeping bag, looking up at the universe, the gazillions of stars moving across the sky. I couldn’t sleep so I spent well over an hour just staring at them, the stars, the constellations, the meteors and planets and eerie obscurities, eternity itself putting on a show for the benefit of anyone interested, and was enthralled to see those stars move, which, of course, was the planet moving, Planet Earth, my one and only home in the universe, enjoying its sensations, breathing its sweet air and wrestling with its propositions, its bristly grass and dinosaur bones buried deep in sedimentary layers of sandstone and siltstone and bentonite clay. The erosion over years revealing the skull and jaws and spine of a Tyrannosaurus rex, or the solid bony neck frill of a triceratops. It was a night in which I felt on a visceral level the immensities of space and time and how it all mingled in some of the tiniest of things, the petals of a blue-eyed Mary or the bright yellow flowers of a prairie thermopsis. The barnyard smells and musty woodiness of old-timey saloons, the scent of lavender in farmhouse kitchens. People often say that staring up at the grandness and infinite splendors of a clear night sky makes them feel small. It doesn’t make me feel small. It makes me feel huge. Not in a Trumpian megalomaniacal way, but in a mystical connected-to-everything way. In a how utterly strange it is to be alive way. To be in a body which functions without my slightest input, but does it with cellular interaction, & the wonders of DNA. I’m just happy to be along for the ride.

 

That Moment Before Writing

That moment before writing, butterflies in the stomach, like going on a date. The idea is close, yet the reality is so distant, it swishes back and forth like a wind brushing over the peripheral headwaters of a bizarre idea. And it’s slightly sexual, for reasons I don’t understand. Not at my age. The Age of Blurry Night Vision. The Age of Hazy Concepts and Coy Perversions. The Age of the Ages which is ageless as Be Bop A Lulu. A lot of the time I imagine writing down everything happening in the world on a daily basis. I use the word ‘everything’ somewhat loosely. The ambition is not quite so collegiate. It will not be a taxidermy of catalogued phenomena. It will be less methodical, more like pretty women on a Mardi Gras float. A sparkly decorum. A sanguine evening in Louisiana, somewhere on the outskirts of Lake Charles. A world whose moods are as volatile as the overall pitch and tumble of the voyage. The enlightenment is over. Things aren’t as rational as they once were. I want it to reflect the manipulation of needs by vested interests, people chained to an imaginary matrix of social controls. A landscape of data centers, rampant corruption, and Kafkaesque bureaucracies. This technocratic panorama of luxury and slavery and everything feeding this zeitgeist of genocidal madness. To find oneself in a moment of distress is to decide whether one wants to engage completely with life, or hold back a little, and write it down as quickly as you can. Writing happens in the intervals between events. It’s a place of redemption, an oasis of stillness amid the hurly-burly. Life is at peril on Planet Earth. Forests in flame. Rivers going dry. Wars everywhere. Who needs to put guardrails on a juggernaut of AI when the president threatening to annihilate Iran assures us his superintelligence will be adequate protection? Who imagined things would ever get his crazy? Here’s my idea: I write everything down, get it printed out, build a time machine, return to the year 1956, and submit it as an adventure in science fiction. It gets rejected. The letter from the editor reads thank you. We found the ideas and events in your story to be far too dystopic for our readers. How could so much evil exist within such a tightly framed time span? The billionaires you describe read like over-the-top comic book supervillains, too megalomaniacal and corrupt to be taken seriously. And all these societies that have succumbed to zombiedom are just too much for the average reader to invest their time in seriously. People walking down sidewalks staring vacantly at social media in a small telephone seems a little too convenient a trope for the levels of apathy you describe. It boggles the imagination to think a people would surrender so easily to such massive abuse. Your vision smacks of too much Philip K. Dick. We wish you the best in future writing projects, and would welcome a less horrific manuscript.    

The Solace Of Any Given Moment

We stir ourselves beside the strings while the movement establishes the home key. The time is ripe for syncopation. The fairy music is expanded. Everything sways. It’s all about leaps, and pirouettes, and ricochets. The kick of a resplendent chimera. What is suitable for the ceiling is electric for the soul. Water flowing through a paragraph in a carpentry of breath. Thinking in language coalesces forms and shapes peculiar to itself, a magnificent, swooping loop of a life. Things get idiomatic. Phantasmal, like Scheherazade, or a squall of nerves. Consciousness graces us with its presence as I try to wrestle my refractory life down on paper and give it light. My dream about denim pulls us there, dripping with nails.

Most gazes infringe on our privacy; those that don’t, are the ones behind our eyes. Purpose is neither wax nor impermeable. If I can figure out how to decontrol this language, I shall drink to the fruitfulness of its being. The solace of any given moment is its biggest thought, and I find that extrajudicial, if not semitropical.

Redemption scatters its reflections, before skidding around on my arm. Bohemia has its own biology, its own resonances, perceptions and scales. There are phenomena I sometimes steal for my circus, and hang from the ocean swells, finally conceding to the muscularity of thread. The spirit generates its own insistence, its own way of doing Cincinnati, and for that I am wireless, and happy.

Cubes are to Cubism what boats are to glitter.

Cause is to effect what pliers are to buckwheat.

It’s a way to explain oneself to the rotation of rubber.

It is somewhat erratic to feel aquatic. Though it isn’t required in order to play the glockenspiel.

Enthusiasm burdens the concertina with a strangely inappropriate music. And this is a cause of interior secretions, the happy adrenalin of an anticipated pleasure, the shape of a new dollar dressed in salsa. Gravity, meanwhile, gives us the communion we need to achieve a fresh new circumference.

Dada has a date with a clarinet as the letters of a foreign alphabet may conceive of various tactile charms in a linguistic context, and so dilate the parameter of our perception, that life’s inherent pungency scintillates in the sun’s shadow, divulging a vehemence that is new to music. Accidentals intensify the leaves of a passionate logic, as the seven tones of a chromatic invention create such contrasting folds as may prove to be latitudes of a fresh new hope. We’ll make their heads turn every place we go. Hamlet stands in the doorway rattling his analogies, proving nothing, but illustrating everything. We cannot stop death. We cannot stop war. What we can do is sublimate chaos by boiling our weltschmerz in a bouillabaisse of zany miscellany, and everything bad and everything good, everything noble and everything vile, rise to its level and boil, leaving nothing behind but the bombast.