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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Touch Of Blue

Is the collapse of the wave function a wicker chair made of ice cream? Consciousness is reverie. This includes Portugal and Spain. There are times I feel friendly and well-disposed, and times when I feel perplexed, stunned, stupefied, and dismayed. Consciousness is never what everyone wants it to be. During its ooze, I find there are spectacular waves that give it heat and Mozart, small but significant differences to unpack, and wear around the home. The universe is exquisite at night, and this is a carnival in my head. The freak show of private eyes and turnstiles scurries about pinching things. The world is palpable, and should be treated as exhilarations for which our biology erects monuments. Something is what it is when it sifts the air for a new decorum. Our language should have a strong affiliation for rivers. And catfish and reeds. In this respect Derrida, as well as philosophy itself, is forever haunted by its airplanes and jewelry.

It was in the solitude of an unsuitable career choice that I became sensitive to certain nuances of verbal expression. Objects turn in the mind like hot dogs in a 7-11 rotisserie. This is my life. It’s also a painting. A woman stands naked in a hotel on the French riviera holding a bath towel gazing at vase of dahlias in a meditative pose. It calms me to look at it. I coax sensations from its surface. And with a tempest of keystrokes, I conjure predicates to dance around me in sequins. And that’s when it hit me: I’m within walking distance of life.

being is everywhere

tent poles make it plausible

we see the sparkle of consciousness

leap back into my brain

when i get up in the morning

but what is it

that makes me think

i can change the world with poetry

when i can’t even tell a good joke

consciousness is exhausting

the average data center

uses 300,00 gallons of water per day

who can keep up with that

it truly is pointless

all of it

can this be taken to mean

that the universe

is just as confused as I am

i think it means nothing

can be solved with an app

i know what to do

i will get a ladder

and lean it against the moon

and climb into Fragonard 

I used to spend hours in a bookstore agonizing over what books I could afford and which I could realistically read within a lifetime. Sometimes I’d pull a book off the shelf and crawl into it wrapped in a bearskin coat. Have you noticed how salt is always in the background? I can tell you one thing. The dead don’t use words. They communicate by salt. Angels float by on Lake Mitigation. Each time I get a feeling I float further into the trees and discover it's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can crash through a window and leave the anxiety of death intact. Here’s what I don’t understand: horses. They’re so intuitive, like poetry. No one can build walls around it and call it a defense mechanism. Or a religion. Everyone needs a meaning attached like a tag on a mattress, which compromises the full weight of your being. Be careful about what you say. People are on edge. An honest feeling will get you into trouble. Can a universe be void of meaning if the waffles look good? I like the way those little square cavities fill with syrup. It just runs off pancakes. But waffles let it soak in. Like the meaning of something. I know it’s there. I can feel it. Everything quivers with something to say, and the there’s a touch of blue in the kitchen window blinds. It’s beautiful. Subtleties such as this are healing. It’s good medicine. Inane thing to say, I know, and I apologize. But there it is. Blue. Obstinately, beautifully blue.

The World Needs Poets

The world needs poets. It just doesn’t know it yet. The world needs poets to plant a rose in every secret garden. A tulip in every balloon, and a quorum in every quintet. All poetry is a form of insemination. But if it’s not, it might also be a fertilizer. Or a blitz. A fast intense campaign to restore croquet to the dunes of Mars. And what are poets for in a destitute time, asks Hölderlin’s elegy Bread and Wine. And I answer with biscotti. I know it’s not much, but my thoughts were bubbly when I thought of this, and my theories have been patched with exultation, rather than a tube of hubbub, which is sticky, and oozes forth with the grace and eloquence of all things elaborate and gooey. I have many theories. They’re ardent, like a harmonica, and hard to play. The court of opinion has been braced with a hope that it one day might do justice to itself, and cause all hell to break loose. And we all know what that means. It means the world needs poets.

To each of us something personal is granted. In my case, it’s personal. And by that I mean, really personal. So personal as to almost be impersonal. Like a pillowcase, or a snowshoe. When Heidegger uses the word draft, he means an evolving, or preparatory working out of a complex idea, rather than a final, dramatic crowbar. When I hear the word draft, I think of something to avoid at all costs. I also think of a big cold glass of bubbliness, as sunlight in a draft of beer. It is here, in this moment, right now, projecting itself into possibilities, the way air hardens into words, ingots of meaning, the way thoughts drift through the mind, haunting all the fauna and flora with memories of summer, and getting naked with a girl among the reeds on the banks of the Mississippi. Of course, not everything is a violin I can turn into dandruff. I still need skin and provocation. Every word should haunt the expectation of its being here, and then squeeze you hard with a naked and tender sincerity. This is what makes it circulate among the hammers, and cause mayhem to build a house, and live in happy squalor, inventing philosophies and hats.

Music is patterned sound. So they say. It’s a negotiable medium, like the headwaters of the subjective, the place where bone and spirit meet. Music can take you elsewhere. But you have to meet it half way. You can beat a drum, blow on a horn, or use a purposeful self-assertion in ways that are disproportionate to the starkness of the décor, and create new worlds, new patterns. Language produces and reproduces itself, and is a form of music, since it whirls around in the ears like wind through Louisiana cypress, and brings things into the light of understanding. Do emotions have shapes? Of course they do. I see the architecture of time as a sky full of starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. Mozart had a starling he bought in Vienna after hearing it whistle a variation of a theme he had composed just weeks earlier. The bird altered the theme by singing a G sharp instead of a G natural, which delighted Mozart. Grace is exhilarating. And when there is grace in music, and grace in language, the spirit rises to the occasion. We step away quietly from the necrosis of politics, and stand on the porch, and listen to the rain.

We are the bees of the invisible. Declared Rilke. “We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up on the great golden beehive of the Invisible.” It’s intangible there where the glow extends beyond itself and becomes a portrait of time. If I steer my forehead west, there’s a hinge for the door and a knob to make it visible. This is how most languages get started: they evolve an array of predicates to buzz around pollinating the shit out of the world. I see this as an anticipation of asparagus. And push it aside. It’s the orchid of vowels that acts like a language. And the ballad that pilots it across the mind. It's always a little awkward when a man adopts a mode of gallantry towards a naked woman. But if it hangs in the Louvre it seems a little more box office. The bright lights of Times Square punctuate the night with American products gone crazy. Don’t let the mania fool you. There is often a subtle control that gets to you before they turn the lights off. Once you realize that the brightest places are the darkest of places, the age will pass through an unprecedented process involving blood and pumpernickel and arrive by pulley to clarify the meaning of itself. Heaven appears for one solid second over the peaks of the Cascades. And then we see the granite face of Mount Si towering over the Twin Peaks Café. Snoqualmie Falls raging over the edge of the abyss. And hope for a mystery that never ends. 

The Day The Stars Went Out

Was the United States ever truly here? It vanished so quickly. The constitution, free speech, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, due process, the fourth amendment safeguarding our privacy and the sanctity of our homes, gone. Gone in a flash. Like it never existed.

Or do I delude myself? Are there things I’m not seeing because of my personal bias? Is life in the U.S. as catastrophic as it seems, or am I exaggerating events out of an innate tendency to catastrophize? No. I am not. These are realities. Facts. Concrete evidence. Videos. Savageries impossible to hide, however much deceit and propaganda get thrown at it. You can argue about policies that further enrich the rich and impoverish a population already struggling to survive under the harsh austerities of neo-liberal economics, but you cannot exaggerate or obfuscate a murder. And there have been at least two. Committed with the merciless slick of Minnesota ice.

It is so easy to delude oneself. I do it consciously. I do it unconsciously. I do it in my sleep and I do it standing arms akimbo in daylight, with a cape flowing behind me. One of the more unexpected benefits of feeling powerless, is counteracting it by developing superpowers. One of my superpowers is inconsistency. Another is contradiction. Oh my god do I love contradiction. I love anything that spurs a quiet moment of domestic monotony into a hippodrome of competing theories and flaming enigmas. I enjoy quantum incongruities like Schrodinger’s cat. And a tight-fitting blue suit, red boots, and a long red cape. I do lift dumbbells. So I’m on my way. Give me time. Tell me something and I’ll contradict it. I’ll twist it into a muscle. I’ll make it physical. I’ll build it into something counterclockwise and strange and animate it with electric motors and old rubber belts and industrial scrap à la Jean Tinguely’s noisy, self-destructive sculptures.  

I believe illusions are necessary because the human condition is stark and unforgiving, but when illusions start dominating the agora and replacing reality with the kind of simulacra described by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, life starts resembling the hellishly fake worlds of The Truman Show and The Matrix. It’s fun to watch sci fi movies like Alien and Fahrenheit 451 and tv series like Black Mirror that allegorize dystopic and technological threats with highly destructive agendas. It’s always a relief to leave a nightmare behind with the popcorn and credits rolling on the screen and step back out into the world where life continues as normal. But now we’ve reached a point where the events outside the theaters and streaming services on our flat screen tvs are even more threatening and dark, and most certainly no longer normal. The alien eating the crew of the USCSS Nostromo is a slimy analogue to the unchecked greed devouring what is left of the former United States. And I often feel surrounded by the same eerily bland temperaments of the vegetabalized population in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sidewalk zombies riveted to lithium hungry smartphones.

Who are these people I see out walking or whizzing by on monowheels or escooters who so ignore your physical presence you begin to wonder if you’re not a ghost? The pods have opened.

Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism thrives on a dumbed-down or atomized population, specifically through the erosion of critical thinking, loneliness born from an imposed isolation similar to the one mandated by the Covid pandemic, and the replacement of truth with consistent, fabricated narratives. She noted that such regimes replace expertise with loyal sycophants and groveling mediocrities and find it much easier to exploit a society that has lost the ability to distinguish fact from fiction than a society with an appetite for inquiry and intellects nimble enough to appreciate the inherent complexities of human behavior and its many contradictions.

Dictators dislike contradiction. That’s because they’re constantly teetering, having come unmoored from the moral universe and having no understanding of the fickleness of existence. Stop respecting existence and you risk existence losing respect for you. You live in fear. Constant insecurity. Because you lead a life of lies. I know how exhilarating that must be, to acquire that ability to lie, distort, create fictions that suit your image, that flatter your beautiful hair, and your winning smile as the paramilitary force you’ve devised bashes in doors and kidnaps people. The power is intoxicating. But it must be constantly fed, like any drug. And that requires lying. The truth won’t do. The truth is bitter and pregnant with nuance. The truth is aligned with liberty and justice, those two old worn-out words, weak with Orwellian legerdemain and semantic leaching. But they do mean things. They mean having the freedom to air your opinions without fear of arrest or banishment. And not having to conceal or compromise your beliefs to keep a job or a friendship alive.

The late Michael Parenti once said you don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day. The further from the peg you go, the tighter the leash around your neck. When people move too far from the peg they get called conspiracy theorists, cynics, curmudgeons, and just plain nuts. I’ve been feeling that leash tighten these last few years. Beginning with Covid. And showing proof of vaccination to a maître d’ so that I might have entry into a restaurant. Growing suspicions. Growing mistrust. Which has cost me some friends. And who knows what else.

I was born in Minneapolis. I lived there until I was twelve. The last house our family occupied in Minneapolis was on the banks of the Mississippi. In the summer I’d go down and gaze at the carp lounging in the sand close to shore. Or that turtle that used to get up on a rock in a shallow part of the river and stay there all day, looking north. Why north? I remember coming home from school one April afternoon and hearing the loud crash and thunder of the ice breaking up. That’s what you fear all winter long. The treacherous, unforgiving ice. Like that time I was ten and skating on a lake at night and two guys got in a big fight and were lying on the ice blood splattered everywhere, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, who were trying to stop it. The prevalence of blood was no doubt due to the blades of their ice skates. It was horrifying. I was unused to seeing violence outside of television dramas and news shows and my feelings about it were intense. Ice can also be beautiful. But I prefer it in a glass of iced tea. Not in people’s eyes.

Some things still feel normal. We still have electricity and running water. The mail gets delivered. The streets are full of cars. The traffic lights are still functioning. People are still trading in the stock exchange. I can watch Lucinda Williams or Glenn Greenwald on YouTube. This afternoon I took a shower. And ate a meat loaf sandwich and watched Landman on Paramount Plus. But I can’t help feel something is missing. And something in its place has been added. I can’t quite define it yet. But it’s not a ticking bomb anymore. It’s been detonated. And its explosion has left a crater the size of the liberty bell right where my heart used to be.

Mouth Shadows

Often afterwards but on the infundibulum while or mostly however some to be still yours for trust with swells or with bouillon but afterwards it will be extravehicular. No doubt it varies for each person depending on what they have and among whom they are. Everything in this sense, which is an infundibulum in relation to them, is far too much of this, and in its current state, far too much of it does not relate to anything other than intermittent lucidity, which is sometimes also a form of drapery. A lesser-known name for the matrix of one within the other is, for us, the source of the rituals. Just as indeed the contiguity is the same for the knees and for their gelatin, but equally resilient for the airplane tickets and the modes for the stalactites it is much the same turbulence as for the foliage. It can be done with kisses, through one person, by another, and through yet another, and we do it through these means, creating an erotica of disproportion. Stealing it is annoying, but only if it's in one place or in another. It is in this way that the hornet is able to use its sting to explain the reason why it drinks.  It is a swamp that grammar gives us, in which to sew words together that on paper resemble a sunset coming into being in the sense of music. We don't know much about what the role is like or how to do it quickly; it's about getting involved and making it your own. This life. This hurly burly. This twister. This infundibulum.

Beyond the Renaissance there are the notebook fingers that heal the fissures within the general enigma that constitutes my being. Anyone’s enigma, really. It’s all one big lūʻau. Beyond the hay mounds drifting through the daydream harvesting its pearls within my chronically irritated convolutions is the glory of the west. Some of my thoughts get a little beyond themselves and get mired in quantum bogs of endless rumination. There’s so much I don’t understand. Things like light and gravity. Space and spice and irreconcilable differences among friends. How are space and time the same thing? How much chlorine are you supposed to put in a swimming pool? What if you don’t have a swimming pool? If you don’t have a swimming pool one will be appointed to you by the court of space and time. This is a court in the fifth dimension which rules with a relativistic code based on the speed of light. According to spacetime theory Act III of King Lear is about to begin at the Whitehall Palace on Boxing Day 1606 as a Tyrannosaurus Rex bends down to sip from a spring in the late Cretaceous and a weary old man in a black fedora walks into a Denver bar in the late fall of 1984 and orders a primordial fireball. This is a concoction of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky mixed with citrus and bitter-sweet liqueurs, sometimes with a pinch of sage, and served on fire to represent the hot, dense, plasma-filled beginning of the universe. The Big Bang. Or whatever it was pulsing in the ovum of a pregnant nothingness.

A splash of gasoline will get you to Lubbock. A splash of whiskey will get you to talk. I am not the first time I was ever this palpable. The closer you get to death the more you feel alive. That’s why old people are the youngest people around. Right when you least expect it you might get another chance. But that’s just life being cruel. We've all seen this before, and yet we continue to let the situation escalate. The equinox was there before I smelled the gumbo. Confusion distorts our words. They form rumors of heresy. I stormed out of the room and went for a nice long walk. Autumn leaves stiffen in a fire. I smell wilderness, and mint. I stir chemicals in my mind. I throw the indigo into an ablution of apples and detours. Mouth shadows flow out with the breath. A paradigmatic powder gets sneezed on the diagram. The distance is still developing. We won’t know where we are until we’re there. This is how space works. It milks what it leaves behind. And sprinkles the future with perfect participles. It’s been really great to talk to you tomorrow. I know you can’t see me. I’m down here. Scratching a match on the wall. And lighting another candle. 

 

It's Risky When You Start

One might also say it’s whiskey when you start, risky when you continue.

Either way, you’ve got a conundrum to unravel, a web to spin, a dilemma to solve, a world to engage, a world to examine cautiously, and anonymously, and a world of words at your fingertips ready to probe the world of dirt and rainbows with a variety of radar, sonar, ultrasonic sensors, scatterometers, dynamometers, dictionaries, libraries, moonberries, apiaries, corollaries, emissaries, dignitaries, dispensaries, limitless intuitions and echolocation.

It's risky when you start with a form of water and use a spoon to describe your anguish. It's often possible even to go so far as to do it with some relish. For one thing it won't be this attenuated, it will be suitable for diffusion and make a nice necklace when the words are all strung together. It's risky when you start accumulating them and using installment payments against a backdrop of rising over-indebtedness to obtain certain satisfactions that only a ghostly belladonna can know. Life is a continual alarm going off and that’s what makes Emily Dickinson such an interesting investigation for me. Her poems are like glass slides smeared with bewildering thread. They’re gnarly, like Bacardi, and give off bubbles. Today’s population, as you can see, has become quite enamored of sequins and other sparkly things. They are turning to these for things for timeless enjoyment, like the guy that already has enough tattoos to drive a Grave Digger across the state line into Arkansas on a Saturday night. I have everything I need for the plasma that is the handshake with oblivion, and plenty of cologne for the one that needs a haircut instead of a liniment. I’ll say one thing and you can say something different and together we’ll make a literature get up and do something feathery and weird and you can rely on that. What you do otherwise is none of my business. 

Because of the fact that the virtue with the highest aspiration is one of a dozen in a wilderness of pain and often used for homecomings, weddings and golf tournaments it will include various rums and other spirits, for no virtue however so mojito, can weigh as much as squalor. Isn’t there a pop song with the refrain one way or another I’m going to get ya? Blondie, right? Released in 1979, the year that I learned to juggle, and discovered Duchamp, and drank Glenfiddich. But enough about me. What about you? What are you up to these days? I like walking. And eating blueberries while reading a book. There are things I’ve learned. A leg will help in propping up a nice cuddling by random selection and to mix and pop into quantum equations like chalk and glow from end to end before continuing to oblige whatever it is that gives you a beard and a place to go. I recommend the seashore. Say Copacabana. Because life is a bonfire on the night's archaic neck and from which its music hums in and out like systole and diastole and is acquired through a wardrobe of flowery frills and velocities, the same way it is with a man and a woman to love one another and surpass its ecstasies with a load of toads on them like Terence McKenna.

Spain. The Costa Brava. May, 1972, there were nightclubs in Lloret de Mar that didn't open until three a.m. Franco was still in power. And Franco ran a fascist regime. The Policia Armada carried a sidearm called the Star S Pistol. Whenever I saw them coming late at night, I always checked my pockets to make sure I had my passport. Of course, I went about it very discreetly. They were nicknamed los grises because their uniforms were grey. And also, I suspect, because they occupied a very grey zone in the political spectrum. It felt very Hemmingway. The frontier between the human mind and external reality is a curious zone. It’s odd how a seeming normalcy can exist within a regime of oppression and fear. Take a peach. I love everything about them. The fuzz, the sweet, savory juice, and the heft of their heavenly consistency. They’re far more erotic than an apple. Prettier than a prune. More lenient than a lemon. Way nicer than fascism. You can relax with a peach. And try to forget what happened in Minneapolis January 7^th, 2026.

Boxing during a full moon is glorious. But dancing during a new moon is just plain lunacy. Of all the activities available to us during our brief tour of life, there's one I never completely understood: golf. But I’ll come clean: I never played it. Perhaps if I gave it a shot, the mystery of its apparent monotony would ignite something within, a long-buried need to hit a tiny ball into a tiny distant hole. There are a lot of things I've never done. I've never ridden in a hot air balloon. I've never sat at a conference table discussing complex geopolitical problems with the fate of the world in my hands and a line of coke up my nose. I never dated Brigitte Bardot. I never stood at a gaming table in Monaco gazing discreetly at everything with a knowing gaze, the way Sean Connery did it. Not so much the other dudes. They never mastered it. I will never know what it’s like to give birth. I could never hang Christmas lights on a radio tower. I am good at a few things. Jujitsu isn’t one of them. I am good at spying. You just make yourself anonymous, keep a low profile, and notice things. Little things. Like lipstick on the rim of a shot glass. Morning light on a breakfast table. Orange peels. Champagne glasses. Crumbs. Sugar cubes. Coffee. Body bent forward. Head on the table. Overhead fan spinning round on the back of a tablespoon.

We must try to describe our world such as it is, in this current moment, and from this point onward keep talking, keep writing, keep filming, keep venting our grievances, until we reach the full pitch of life’s reality, which is never going to be but one thing, but a vital conduit to other dimensions, other ports of call where the drinks are cheap and the postulates all burble like rain. In doing so, it is understood that, in case it hasn't yet been possible to ask certain indelicate questions, we must assume a hypothetical chromaticism and push forward like a textbook preface drunk on passion, presumption, and panoply. Ask yourself: why do I bother to protrude when so many others before me have entered the ring with such miscreant bluster? What do I bring to the table, besides bad jokes and Byronic baloney? All of this is rapidly escalating toward a storm in a teacup, which is precisely what happens when a wind baffles a restaurant awning.

 

Little Cloud Sky And The Cataract

Last Sunday, while waiting for a friend to arrive in the spacious lobby of the Seattle Art Museum, I amused myself with the cataract in my left eye. With my right eye closed, I could look at people and focus my cataract on any random individual within range of my vision. Their heads would shrink and distort like a portrait by Francis Bacon. I found this to be an amusing activity for an arty farty Sunday. It was the penultimate day for viewing the Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibit. Play with my cataract was interrupted by two toddlers running up and down on a metal grate under the windows, making a terrible racket. They were creating their own art. Unfortunately, they were moving too fast to give them the Francis Bacon cataract treatment. Instead, I turned my gaze towards the puffy, cloud-like shapes hanging from the ceiling, each one identical to the other with two black dots for eyes and a tiny little upturned crescent for a smile. The exhibit is titled Little Cloud Sky, and was created by the Los Angeles-based art duo FriendsWithYou (Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III). These cartoonish confections of jubilant cumulus weren’t entirely random, not like real clouds, they were neatly arranged into rows, regimented like a military parade and elicited a response somewhere between euphoria and alarm, giddy buoyancy and a bald, high-definition vapidity. I subjected one of them to the transformative mischief of my cataract. The result was unsatisfying. The little cloud collapsed into a Styrofoam packing peanut, not the fierce dragon of provocation I hoped my cataract would awaken by distortion. I’m always misjudging things, including my own experience of them. I like it when things get punchy. I like it when things punch back. Rather than recede, and ghost me. Or walk around in circles wondering what the hell happened.