The Untraceable Transference Between Suffering And Art

Michel Deguy writes of the untraceable transference between suffering and art. I think there’s something to be said for drifting. The feeling of it exhibits mint. The evident urgency in the shape of a mouth. This is my beginning it’s written in Cubism. I’m fluent in the art of getting behind things. And letting them swim in their polemics. I don’t know what kaolin is, exactly, but I can feel it sometimes, unfolding itself into a pizza. The placebo is gratuitous. This is my area of expertise. Is anyone here to watch my feeling wander? Is there somewhere where your hat will feel more salient? I can sometimes feel something crawling up my arm. I look, and find that it’s a beam of light, a tentacle of the afternoon sun awakening my tangibility. Everything has been so brash today. I believe it’s due to the monster in the garden, surfing the Adam and Eve birdbath.

The older I get, the more religious I get. It’s only natural. Sometimes nothing can be everything. I stand by my words, rolling a big metaphor into the oven. Similes go good with incense. But this isn't incense. This is flagrant thought. A page of testimony the words refuse to embrace. Life gets sloppy in old age. When words rebel, the best thing to do is to grab them like a bouquet and give them to a touch of aspersion. I will not block the ambush. Not if I’m flourishing, and sitting on a block of enlistment. This is how I sift through the strain of living and find a nugget of cotton. Emily sat down beside herself, and wept. With laughter. Nobody dreamed time travel would be so indigo. I interact with just enough ambiguity to make it constructive, and then I sit down to read a book on the topic of skin. Videos are ok. But I find books far more touching.

Everything seethes like a fugue on Rue Mouffetard, opening the ruby eye of a gypsy's kite. Meanwhile, here in the L'Hôtel du Vaurien the sideboard needs repairing. It is rumored that Rimbaud wrote a poem on it, and the letters burned into the wood, after the sheet of paper he was writing it on burst into flames. The poem is still readable, but it hurts to read it. Hurts in a good way. Is someone drifting toward this shoal? I feel a shadow emerge from the egg of a phantom barracuda. The temptation to collude with the absurdity of existence feels like a pulse in the wrist of a cynosure. Once it enters the bloodstream, it's hard to get away from it. You break down. You relent. You give yourself over to a force far greater than yourself. Which is called language. And is a serious abstraction, like track-and-field. Or leading a caravan over an Ethiopian desert.

There's a trick to determining whether something is real or not. You let it prowl around in your mind long enough to determine its weight and depth, and if it entices further thought with the hope of a definitive conclusion always dangling a little out of reach, it is most likely a piece of fiction. That said, fiction is frequently teeming with insights that bear the weight of ambiguity.  They will bedazzle a jury with the grayness of a fading morality. The truth nearly dies, verisimilitude bathes in uncertainty, and the judge is in a stupor. The law trembles with its own brushwork. And there it is, the framework of a negotiable reality. Hot air balloons drift over Albuquerque, and by evening we have a greenhouse with veins running through panels of bulging glass. Nitrogen stirs in the dirt and the fourth dimension drips with succulent euphorbia.

I never cheat at division. I divide things unevenly, this is true, but I do it with a nod toward the grammar of the situation, and touch the watermelon for luck. I’m wearing a green sweater. But I have plans to upholster my lips with a riotous hayrick in June. I’m all about sonnets these days, and garnishment and immaterial details. Do you understand the principle behind clapboard? Hint: it’s got nothing to do with clapping. Somebody told me I smell like lightning. There’s a reason for that. I still have a poem by Philip Lamantia cooking inside, teeming with innocence and airplanes. Innocence in a world this corrupt is a threat. It’s subversive. And deviant and hilly. Think of it: the Beatles playing at the Star Club on Grosse Freiheit in Hamburg, circa 1962. Or a war on war. Or a pilgrimage to the land of nonchalance. The noise of silence in a blatant spree of fuzz. A patch of snow with the blue of a neon sign glowing on it is anyone's guess. I thought that now might be a good time to bring it up. The question of romance. The heart of the situation. La raison d'être. Life. Meaning. Purpose. The lingering smell of sawdust after sawing a piece of grammar out of the air. And building a shamrock with a shank of syntax and a soft lament.

So: what kind of suffering are we talking about here. It’s the kind of topic you sneak up on, approach slowly, with poise and grace, and whatever stealth you can bring to the table. And tea. Tea goes without saying. Tea is essential. Any talk of pain is to be mitigated by whatever means. The wonder of it is its audacity, sharp as the blade of a knife, strong as Danish butter. Art, I mean. The forms it takes in prehistory, in caves, and the forms it assumes on Tik Tok. You tell me: which is better? An Earl Gray flavored with bergamot, a smoky lapsang souchong, or a mug of sencha? It tea fails, we have opium, heroin, stethoscopes, online dating, charming rascals, heavenly imagery, ludicrous perceptions, terrible metaphors, silk parachutes, and Billie Holiday on tap. This is a place of voluptuous pleasures. This is where we address the issue of pain. And kick it down the street. A little sleep can help mollify a sting. But it won’t replace the exquisite pain of an unmanageable beauty.  

Anyone adrift must know what it's like to move toward a future of scorched ideals. It isn’t long before a sense of futility bends to the dynamic of the situation, which is clearly birds. Has anyone ever yelled at you to get out? That’s not what this is about, in case you were wondering. No, this is about argyle. It’s like arguing with a flute. You can’t fight it with a banjo. You’ll have to use an oboe. It’ll keep you on your toes. Try writing a poem of devotion. While racing down the streets of Pamplona with a bull in pursuit. If you’re so inclined, I give you Lorca: At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream, the wind watches watches, the wind watches the Moon. Why so many watches? Because in Spanish it’s mira, mira. El viento mira a la Luna. The marvelous isn’t shy. But it is rare. Therefore, we should hustle the raw fact of our feeling as if it were coins of fire, and spend it on ice cream.

 

My Life As A Ghost

I learned to swim in Wisconsin. It was the 50s, and everything glittered under the rigid guise of a false prosperity. It’s a lot different now. Nothing glitters. The United States, grinning ear to ear like a Times Square con man, has walked away with everyone’s dream. And left us with a simulacrum. Freedom on a layaway plan extending endlessly into a nonexistent settlement. Eternity in a can. Why does deviancy so often feel like salvation? Is this wrong? Hallucinations aren’t dreams, they’re more like destinations. The 60s is a lonely place to be in 2026.  Regrets prowl the parameters, taunting us with scruples, blasting us with salutes. Have you ever tried bending a spoon with your mind? I tried it once, and it turned into a fork.  

Clouds are structural: the variables they elicit are round. Therefore, never count your mittens before they linger. If I crashed through a mirror, would I enter the domain of my other self? Or would I find myself looking back at myself with the same lost look? Splotches and blots always have something intriguing in their disarray. I’ve learned to respect the accidental. Anything inscrutable, yet obvious as a mouth. When I think of structure, I think of a pitcher and bowl on a North Dakota farm. I think of the silhouette, at sunset, of a deserted house. A sad image. One of the saddest. And I never got the real story. Where those people went.

I flourish most when I’m doing the least. The rest of the time, I diversify. I like the anonymity of the savannah. It’s where I can walk with cheetahs to the beginning of existence. This is the stepladder at its incidental best. I rise, and touch the ceiling with my brush, trailing the off-white chatter of cherubs. Such are my diversions. Here’s my idea of a paradigm: we build muscle together, we slather together. And by studying the subtleties of linen, I can warm my words in their hypothesis. 

The rattlesnake redefines wildness each time it coils and flickers its tongue. I remember when poetry mimicked the imposition of life with a clash of cymbals. And people politely listened, as they do now, but it’s different, and considerate, and nobody understands my hill. Outside the resistance, the harmonica is a romance. Inside, where it counts, the harmonica is sly, and cognac, and opens like an umbrella. Which is supposed to be bad luck. But I don’t think so. I love umbrellas, they’re like portable houses. And in defiance of rain, I learn to love the rain.

Feeling what I feel about aluminum, I have to ask: what has robbed us of our falsetto? What’s happened, indeed, to the entire chorus? Did you know the Supreme Court is across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library? I don’t know whether to think of that as a latent defect, or just plain ironic. I see a voyeur that sees me. Sometimes I spy on my own life. Just because your feathers are a little ruffled, it doesn’t mean you can’t fly. Today’s question was: what have you noticed recently? There’s light in the bedroom in late afternoon. The Cascades are eerily bald. And I’m a lot clumsier than normal. Maybe because I do everything now at the speed of sleep. And when I put down in writing everything that bounces around in my head, the feelings I get about cardboard get really French. I’ll say this: consciousness is never monotonous. It’s not the same as holding meat over a fire. It’s more like feeling haunted by the ghost of yourself.

 

The Struggle Inside

Iconostasis. What’s that? Windows to heaven. Icons in an orthodox church. Mirabilas.  Apocalypse. Metropolis. Hippopotamus. These, too. These produce images. And images have questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a ticket to paradise. Wherever that is. I think it’s one of those things that only exist in poetry. Meaning women in bodice skirts, white linen blouse, embroidered aprons, and black leather shoes doing the Hambo. James Joyce sipping oolong in Trieste. Epiretinal membrane, a thin, translucent layer of fibrous tissue or scar tissue that forms on the inner surface of the retina. Here’s looking at you, kid. Sometimes, I seem to be living in the past. There is some validity to this, if we may be permitted to include memory in our pataphysical toolkit. When desire goes unsatisfied yet maintains a sturdy intensity, it begins a mode of seduction. Which rarely, if ever, goes well. Not a good optic, as they say. It’s always the heated and awkward poems that end up back in the barn, transmitting elegies in long bellowing moos. The wilder ones jump the fence and take off for the prairie. And end up passed out on the floor at an open mike in Larame.

Translation is an art. Spin a pumpkin, get a fjord. That sounds corny, but I mean it. The very air has grown taut. There’s a poem in it. I just have to find it. I can smell it. It’s giving off an odor of popcorn mingled with Arthur Shchopenhauer. There has just a been trauma. Humanity has taken its mask off. It’s a total mess. What happened to the eyes? The expression looks so utterly sad with a tinge of narcissism. Its expression is flagrant, and yet timidly immaterial. The explanation is a reverie regarding a hiatus overlooking the anatomies of some modern specimens, specifically one with the teeth of a saw, and the other with a banana-shaped chest and a head like a forest of blurry animals. The texture is rough, like a bad joke at a Hungarian wedding. It takes a lot of motion to make any frame contemporary. And brother, this joint has gone nuts. Zombies on scooters. Academies of ache. Odysseys of ohm. Electrical resistance. Poetical nonexistence.

Sometimes the best solution is to plunge right ahead into the conjectural universe. I despise the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It shuts down conversations. It shuts down speculation. We live in a speculative universe. The narrative is old and beyond my comprehension. It burst out of nothingness, like a pair of old work boots tumbling out of a closet. A holy ghost in the pocket of a wool coat. Planets colliding with comets. Ideologies colliding with reality. There is nothing linear about it. It’s 100% nonsense. Nonlinear as a Moroccan goat in an argan tree. Human voices male and female singing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus in a Gothic cathedral. Everything is a sunset sandwich served on a platter of snow. Meaningful as a slap to the face. Silly as a translation of a reclining figure in a state of lassitude. And twice as redemptive.

What is at issue is what causes change. The struggle inside. The contest. With yourself. I’m always running a few steps ahead of my ego. The ego is an egg of remorse. The id is hid in a lid of Bonne Maman cherry jam. An officer of the law flickering inside a prostitute. No longer things, but what happens between things. Liberation is a libation of the spirit. But does it truly exist? Nothing exists with total autonomy. How could it? Only poetry can do that. Especially when it cracks its worrying eggshell head apart and supplies the world with its magic string and troubadours. What, at root, is the reality contemporary to us is hazy as the hazard we can’t see until it gets here. It’s always like that now, crazy and unpredictable. An ongoing dissociation of chilly euphemisms. The inviolate crust of a nitroglycerin thought. To each his natural own. It takes a lot of language to produce a raspberry. A real raspberry. With a justifiable handlebar and a nebular milieu. The deafening cheers as the wrestlers enter the ring. And the words are put in place. What we’re talking about. What we are after. And for which we are instrumental.

 

The Forever Dark Of Whatever It Is

One of the strangest characteristics of my life has been a tendency to do things that serve no purpose whatsoever. Poetry, for example. Poetry can’t provide fuel for the engines of transport and industry, make spackle to fill a crack or smooth a rough surface on drywall, mint money, power a boat, defend the innocent, prosecute the guilty, teach judo, manufacture socks, shine shoes, hold en electrical charge or resuscitate a heart. Poetry does nothing, and it does it really well. Its closest approximation toward a practical application is drugs, chiefly those of a psychedelic nature. It’s not really great at alleviating physical pain. It can be applied with some notable success in the area of mental and emotional pain. It shares a great deal with its far more successful cousin, music. Music excites the emotions. Poetry excites the intellect. Most people prefer to excite their emotions. Only a few give a shit about intellect. Why would they? What has intellect ever done? If you want to see what people think of intellect, bring up Spinoza at a union meeting or a drilling crew on the Texas plains. Why Spinoza? I don’t know. How about somebody more homegrown, like Thoreau. He made pencils. And grew beans. Suffice it to say, that when it comes to achieving nothing in the realm of the pragmatic, poetry is supreme. And this is useful in ways that elude the one-dimensional. The literal. The down-to-earth. The empiricists. The doers. The logicians. The rationalists. The realists. The skilled. The proficient. The competent. The well-adjusted. The masterful. The able. The accomplished.

That said, I would argue that phenomena that purportedly does nothing, does everything. It drills the air with spirals of inquiry and lets the sap of correspondence fill buckets of amber rhetoric. It conjugates the raw and incorporates the incorporeal in postulates of bone. It animates thought and stimulates the bees of the invisible to pollinate the mind. It finds beauty in squalor and music in appetite. It feeds on darkness and gives a habitation to the dead. It does this by doing nothing. Because without the weight of machinery, without the burden of intent, the spirit finds its joy. The cage opens. The panther stops its pacing, and plunges into the world.

Poetry, which revels in enigma, in the synergy of the indeterminate, in the energy of despair, thrusts us into the very heart of existence.

Put a symphony on the turntable and this will happen: restitution, illumination, and grace. Put a book on the turntable and this will happen: nothing. But put your eyes on a sentence and watch what happens: the words will carry your attention to the very end. The end of the sentence. If you lean forward a little, you’ll see where it was leading. A deep abyss. The air is warm and smells of sulfur. Breathe it in and you’ll have visions. The gods will communicate with you. You will write it down and try to get it published. When you’re feeling a little more sober. And a nice hot shower has restored your nerves to a glassy quiescence.

Choice takes initiative. Sometimes we call it prediction. Sometimes we call it weighing our pros and cons. Take a look around. The surrounding force, present on a plateau, requires no authority to breathe. It’s telling you something. It’s telling you to decide. The scales on which I base my work are highly sensitive. They’re capable of measuring masses as small as one yoctogram, which is equivalent to the mass of a single proton. These devices utilize undulating vibrations, where the tissues are flaccid and withered. A piece of time sits beside itself with brilliance. A kangaroo hops by. Turn your gaze toward what lies just above. The reel is real. I know what it looks like. It unwinds in images on a screen. People travel through a beam of light. They refine themselves beyond your reach. And the resilience we have highlighted in their favor pulls us out of ourselves. We walk into our future hoping the decisions we made are there to greet us, shabby, tattered, dirty, doesn’t matter, they were our decisions. We must honor them. Or ignore them. And buy a ticket to Rio.

I wonder who, today, maybe just minutes ago, stepped out of a bar and decided to become a poet. A hearty specimen of humanity like Gary Snyder, or an uncannily sensitive woman with eyes the color of sherry, standing in a garden of buttercups and heliotrope. Or were you born near an open-pit iron mine in Minnesota and became Bob Dylan. I can’t imagine being 18 at this moment and discovering Charles Baudelaire. Architect of my fairylands, I made – according to my will – under a tunnel of gems – a docile ocean drift. I heard a loud, percussive noise. And the sky dropped its shadows on the sad numb world. Decadence is a gift, and it comes in many forms. Hungry ghosts follow its earthy scent. What appealed to me was simple. The ability to find beauty in squalor is a terrible and wonderful power. There are pearls that allow our inner being to hold the sky like a bowl. Even when we’re standing in shit. Listening to the gossip of the stars. It’s a serious narcotic. There’s a science to it, and it’s maddeningly unscientific. There are no diplomas for what amounts to a trance. Just a push from behind. And a flair for parables.

Why should there be one time you have to be more happy, or miserable, than at any other. Sometimes it’s just a matter of standing around waiting for things to happen. Emotions shade in and out with nothing to anchor them. There is, supposedly, a guardian spirit watching over us. I stood once in a cave looking at Ice Age art and it felt fulgent and fundamental. I could feel the presence of something primal. The pull to commitment. And the dive into what that means. Whether something is real or conjectural is a failure to realize the relations between all givens. And so I crawled back out and got a sandwich and a glass of beer. Everything is personal. Even kelp. It doesn’t always need eyes. Just a repertoire, and a fireside. Reality is always a burden because it sets limits. There’s no limit to intimacy. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Follow a strand of thread Sumerian red. The next step down is critical. This is the forever dark of whatever it is makes the sun roll off the tip of your tongue, and plunge ahead into whatever conjectural universe fills the heart to overflowing with ermine and toadstools and stars.

 

Meatus Of Votive Syllables

I can’t remember all the faces, but I do remember the torments. Meatus of votive syllables. Line by Michel Deguy. That I remember. It’s so eminently chewable. Full of protein. Baroque as a vessel for burning incense. Tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis. I want to write a review of my favorite river. Mark Twain already covered the Mississippi. That leaves me with 187 major rivers globally. This will be long and ongoing project. It will be like a river. Maybe my favorite river. I’m leaving now I can already feel the tug of the current pulling me into another embankment. Another repercussion. Another ceremony. Another house. Another rising sun.

I’ve never been to Japan. It’s on my bucket list. So is Budapest. It’s in the title of one of my books. I feel irresponsible for using it in a book title since I’ve never been there. It seems fraudulent. So it’s on my list. Budapest. Which always makes me think of Buddha being pestered. Or Buddha himself being a pest. Imagine somebody being pestered by the Buddha. I think that may be the underlying reason I used it in a book title. So Budapest is on my bucket list. And so is Buddha. And building a time machine. I want to hear Rimbaud read The Drunken Boat on Rue Férou. I’ll bring Buddha along. If we’re lucky we’ll get pestered by Rimbaud. Why does denim look so cool when it’s torn? I’ve spent my entire life in denim. I’m wearing denim right now. Denim pants. Denim shirt. Denim eyeballs. Denim skin. Denim hair. Denim Buddha. Denim impertinence. Denim riddle. Denim nickel. Denim devotion. Denim motion. Denim emotion. Denim ocean. And when the tide ebbs I’m left naked. Staring at the stars.

I like socks. But I’d prefer not to talk about them just now. If you don’t mind, I’ll just drift along dreaming of walking barefoot on the sands of Carmel, July, 1965. Some guy on the beach playing a guitar. Iconic image. Ironic spinach. Laconic mnemonic. On another occasion, I started a revolution, based on evolution, endless postponements, and bold exaggerations. Solomon Burke drove me around town. Inglewood. He told me there’s a diamond in the mind. I said thank you, thank you for leading me to be something more than a frankfurter. Our lives change so gently we often don’t see the result until we’re 79, gazing out of the window of a hearse. Every time we cast off from the bank, I lose my balance a little. It’s only natural. It’s the frequent disassociations that cheer my interactions. Invisible strains of DNA ripple around our contact. Let me roll it to you. You should be feeling a current by now. It not, I have failed. Failed to enthrall you. Here: take this sentence and give it a home. Feed it poetry. Clap your hands. Spit and repeat. We’ll get there. We’ll get there alright. I’m not even writing this. It’s writing me.

Bo Diddley’s rhythm is a variation of the Afro-Cuban son clave. I lean toward anonymity. This is the rhythm of the broadloom. The painful yet strangely jubilant results of an uncompromising stance. À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Just writing this causes me to disappear. I sit here ripping thoughts out of the air. But I don’t want to think them. They’ve already been thought. Therefore, they stink. It’s not what I’ve been seeking. It’s not the shelter I was hoping for. Those vagaries of the mind that provide some inkling of elsewhere, the flickering lights and shadows of a foundry between the knee and ankle, the alluring mysteries of negligee, the salty brevity of ocean spray, the penultimate unfolding of the afternoon, the jolly self-deprecations of office blandishments. The asylum of words. The diesel of distraction. The intricate defense of filigree. The immoderacy of music. The haunting voice of Hope Sandoval. The final squeak of an unhinged door. The chuckling cluck of a cockatoo. A dodecasyllabic synopsis clicking across the floor.

 

Between Thorns And Pasta

Between thorns and pasta, it seems to me that one of them lies beyond life itself, so quantum is the consummation that visits the soul in the dead of night. Pasta is the buzz we get when the tomato sauce flashes its lights during dinner. This temporary visual blurring is a known side effect of translucence. Furthermore, the surgical procedure itself requires stirrups and poise, as lifting a body of noodles from their entanglement on the plate involves skills whose arithmetic balances presumption with bewilderment. Keep the mouth open and the mind on horseback. A story with a fork in the text caresses the membrane of the brain. This is what poetry is all about: reservoirs of irrepressible basil. Nothing great was ever achieved without basil. Turmeric is more about mental endurance and reaching for things in the back of the cupboard, those moments when a small ladder might come in handy, and step by step phrases designed to elevate our spirit bring us into contact with vegetable broth and cumin, epiphanies canned in tin. We’ve all had those moments when the universe is trying to tell us something, give us a little sage advice. Take time to visit a roadside philosophy. Dare to love God without a lawyer present.

You see, I’m afraid I think this is something that’s happened, something atypical of the way things struggle, when it’s really just denim and exclamation points, invectives hurled at oligarchs, penguins diving into the ocean, the dexterity of peeling an orange. It’s not like I’m trying to underestimate things. I find everything overwhelming. Particularly orchids. Orchids and monkeys. Swinging from vine to vine while filling the air with a bloodcurdling primordial yell. People sometimes ask if I would rather make a horseshoe ring sparks in a frontier stable, or weld the letters of the English alphabet together in configurations capable of speech. You know, like a gate creeping open as a pink elephant exits the lawn of a stately mansion, which is, in actuality, a long pink tongue, flapping up and down in a mouth hectic with verbal expression. I don't know why they ask me these things. I think maybe because they’re drunk. Or I’m drunk. Or that the whole scenario is an invention I've created to fill the time with wine and recitations.

I’m tired of these sophistries, these stabs in the darkness. We’re right there now, right at the commencement of Armageddon. So everyone wanders aimlessly or performs functions robotically, trying to create some motivating sense of purpose out of nothing, gobbling up the monologues of YouTube podcasters, sitting in their cars, weeping, or cursing, because even the myths are gone, there are just questions now, for what, for who, for whatever reason, for no reason, out of sheer momentum, just the blunt reactionary routines of applied physics. The people at the top, at the tippety-tippety top of the multibillionaire stratosphere, are prepared to go underground, and bowl, or sit on patio chairs waving their arms around as they exclaim what geniuses they are, while all the animals and Homo sapiens of earth lie dead and buried in radioactive dirt.

Existence offers us the chance to sew our muslin with the thread of sequence and patch our misfortunes with the breath of euphemism. Make ice cubes in the freezer, macaroons in our dreams. Decisions about what to do how to act what to say where to go when to get ready to be alive shoot bottles on fenceposts wear mohair feed the cat make the bed watch Hard Day’s Night for the umpteenth time hoping to recreate that period of time between 1964 and 1966 when the catastrophes of the future were still manageable but no one paid any attention. Making a lore of one’s existence is a mania. This condition, indeed, demonstrates what a crock any similarity might serve to wheel the cartilage of thought around in a makeshift comparison based on a fantasy of dimes and draft animals. I would urge, instead, the cultivation of thimbles. As if, quite obviously, one’s morning coffee held our conduct at bay, giving us time to collect ourselves, and spend our promptness on balance, rather than contact, until our skin felt the brush of fairies, and the household of language opened its doors to the fourth dimension, and the thrashing of postulation.

 

Hotel Burroughs

Am I trapped in history? Are we all trapped in history? What is meant by history? I can say to the people of the future: I was there when the bombs dropped. I was there when the president went mad. I was there when the sublime crawled into a ballistics calculator to die. I was there when people carried telephones everywhere and rode electrically powered scooters and lived in their cars and set up tents on sidewalks and foreshadowed their own demise. I was there when the sky split in half and Harpo Marx rode out on a bicycle smiling broadly and tooting his horn. I was there when technology became omnipresent and assumed control of everything and killed humanity with meticulous imprecision and rogue military drones with autonomous software shooting indiscriminate targets erased all the elation and skill of killing things. I was there when reality ceased to have any reality and the U.S. Constitution became a quaint antique with no relevance to the whims of billionaires. I was there for the last episode of Breaking Bad and the second season of Landman. I saw western civilization capsized in the Strait of Hormuz and Jim Kerry receive a Cesar award though sadly his fans did not think he was real. And here I am now nursing a macular hole in my left eye and wondering if it’s possible to escape history, defy fate, and live in an alternate reality based on Schrödinger’s wave equations and Balzacian syntax.

Anguish sometimes leads me to the gates of the present. The Power of Now. Concentrating on the precious and inimitable sanctity of a single raison I have inserted into my mouth with an attitude of reverence and awe for what Arundhati Roy calls The God of Small Things. But the present never feels solidly present. The raison is good, wrinkled little thing that it is, it’s a passing, ephemeral moment that leaves a ghostly residue of uncapturable life behind it. The present feels more absent than present. Maybe that’s the point. It’s the absence of the present that nourishes the sublimity and calm of the present moment. The reason the raisin is so delicious is the intense focus that went into recreating its own little power, as if its wrinkly little body contained the mystery of the Big Bang, and tasting it liberated a living shadow of its reality.

Now is now. I mean now. Now and again. And that’s the way the story goes. Goes on and on. And on and on. Sometimes when it seems people are exaggerating they’re really just extending themselves into space. It starts when the music becomes ecstatic. And eccentricity loses conscious awareness and gets real down and dirty. And Molly’s dress flies up and memory loses its memory and hangs like a mammary from the chest of a convict. It is characterized by heedless moisture and dirigibles producing a soft cranium light. Grammar snaps and spills itself in funny ornaments. This is how I splash upon my mood and make it luminous. This is how I pick up a stick of metaphysics and shake it like a staff of bells. It is my way of saying we need to stoke the furnace with dirt and turn it into a garden of fire. And cross the border at the frontier of your life.

50 years ago today I drove a truck with a pint of blood up Cherry Street to Harborview and worried about getting the clutch out in time before I rolled too far back and hit someone. It was a steep street and invited those kinds of concern. I worked for a hospital delivering things. And then I quit and went back to California where I thought I belonged. But I was wrong so I went back to the Northwest and its coffeehouses and gray skies and trolleybuses hooked up to wires and techies skulking around video arcades. If I look back far enough I find examples of myself littered around December, 1963, when I was rapidly metamorphosing into a hippy. I didn’t stop there I became a monster on the air guitar and played to stadiums full of imaginary denim. I learned to fly by the seat of my pants. And then I lost the seat of my pants and went for a swim in the Pacific. Things got real specific after that, and filigreed and crêpe, like a gypsy wedding. If I feel a surge at the beginning of a new pair of shoes I fill with cockatoos and gratitude. Because I know. I know what it’s like to turn the knob on the door of a long-lost friend, and find them gazing out the window. At nothing. At eggnog moons and sultry afternoons in Hyderabad. 

I am not the fog I pretend to be. Everyone tells me I need to take a trip to the limestone quarries of YouTube. It still rocks in 1958. Existence is a seme I lift with a shirt as the people roar and look artfully at themselves in paintings. I will do things in the circus that I won’t do at home. This should explain everything. My car has a carpentry overflowing with scarves for the long trip to roundabout during anesthesia. Once you learn to frame everything obliquely the looks you may get at work will be a little cracked open. The face gazing at you out of its shell may be a reflection of yourself. You can say what you want about swimming in a pool, but I like to take care of thinking with sharp downward blows to the embassy desk. The hotel concierge bears a disturbing resemblance to William S. Burroughs. He takes my cash and gives me a key to room 11. To be or not to be never ceases to amuse me. But I wasn’t expecting this. Robot prostitutes. Black diamond stingrays. A copy of Naked Lunch. A loaded .44. And a mint under the pillow.

Burroughs, you may remember, called language a virus. I take that with a grain of salt. I sprinkle it with walnuts, pecans, almonds and sunflower seeds. I sprinkle it with adjectives, allomorphs, diphthongs, and existential clauses. I circle it with a chain of illocutionary commitments. I pour a hypothetical mood over it. Give me a good word salad and I will give you a surge of conjuration. I will cause things to happen. I will seem unseemly when it seems seamless to seem so. I will comb my hair with a dictionary and cover my groin with an unbridled semiosis. There are leeches within words to cure our postponements. That which is perpendicular will be vertical and that which is hypnotic will be semiotic, like a kebob of poppies, and branch out eternally into an influenza of galaxies and explications. For it is in the nature of language to spread, and substitute one reality for another, which is the reality of words, and is imaginary and vague, and here to entertain us with tricks and illusions, and give us all a sick day to stay home and write sonnets.

I’m here, not only because I can keep going, but because I’m still trying to reach the horizon. Even though I know it lacks reality, it’s the lack of reality that draws me toward it. Some things are like that. They’re full of cork-lined walls and taunting fairies. Other things are less insistent on cereal and yearn for statuary. Their reality is a marmalade of equanimity and pataphysical limousines. Escalators rising to the occasion. Countermeasures artificially massaged by digital cherubs. Words don’t really alter reality they simply season it with lagniappe and sophistry. You can sprinkle a chain with salt but it’s still going to be a chain. Salt will not alter the semantics linking its parts together. The bonds between words are as strong as the will to stand in line for the one checker who appears to be available. Every narrative has its coupons. And every cathedral has its share of ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. I’ve come to the crossroads of authenticity and survival, says a man in a forest of himself. Something deep inside that recreates patterns. That sums things up pretty well. Because after a major commingling of trade secrets near the headwaters of the Amazon, you just want to lie back and absorb the chatter of the forest. Existence is a soft thing, enough to make distinctions between things, and find a good hotel.