I’m Just Here For The Music

One by one the words wander around like a drunken noise opening and closing for maintenance. It's difficult to throw the mind at a window and get nothing but glass. This is why we have shadows. Shadows are erratic, and words are shadows. Words are a way of undressing, as if, from head to toe, we were united by two different religions, and joined ourselves in warmth. The ideas that surge across the page, like the joints of fingers, show what distinguishes a temperament from a temperature, and how they might hang their fleece jackets on a song for the grammar surrounding them, and walk naked into oblivion.

These are hard times. Nothing is stable. But if words flow spontaneously from one idea to another until an equilibrium is reached, an abyss can dream of lava amid the sparks of the sacred and achieve full glory in a thermodynamic of impulse. A voluptuous heat will express itself in joules inside the body, and a framework of propagation will support whatever glass you choose to put in your window. I recommend tempered, with a hint of foreground, glazed with paradise.  

After a friend died, we sat a black table and reminisced, fueling our conversation with cognac and wine. Later we had cassoulet and clafoutis. A toast was made. And the spirits remained quiet. And the candles went out. And there was sudden laughter. And a ghostly image sitting in a corner of France, on a warm day in August, watching the seagulls, and the jolliness of the waves.

With or without a neuron, we find the frontier where our identities are hungry for an alliance with something larger than a tilted pony and grander than an airplane. A total lack of moderation or constraint can be a source of filigree and untangle our knots. This will require lampshades and parodies of erotica. The lives we lead when we’re sleeping are different than the lives we inhabit in our lyceums. Here is where a little sorcery can be serviceable. It is a candle of such bald vagueness that it seems like ants to an agate, and will blow our minds to the rampant winds, where the windmills creak and the houses are deserted and empty and the horses just chew their grass and ruminate. It’s always the intervals, the places between the cities that offer the most potential. But there is one drama in particular that prepares us for Brown Willy, Cornwall, and you can’t fit it in a word. It’s too indulgent. Too bloody dynamic. It successfully predicted the existence of antimatter, the intrinsic spin of desire, magnetic moments of pure idleness, and Cher on TV. I can’t say it’s what it isn’t when it isn’t what it isn’t. And all the meanings it expands. It just doesn’t work. And for that, I commend it. And recommend it. And feed it everything I have.

Which isn’t much, incidentally. But nothing is written in stone, besides lichen. Any circumstance, however impoverished, can be compensated by a generous spirit. It all comes down to perception. Take a watermark, those semi-transparent logos identifying ownership or copyrighted intellectual property. A watermark is a reverie of lines, be it fuchsia or an assortment of clouds, which are the silent songs of the air. You can choose to interpret as a thing of beauty or a pesky point of law with a decorous appearance. In this instance, it is clouds. It is drifting. It is that interval between paying strict attention to the details of this world and not paying attention at all, which is a blatant inaccuracy since our language must be bent a little to accommodate a circumstance of some vagueness, a phenomenon outside the empirical realm, in which the mind is as large as the sky and just as casual in its occupation of space.

From one end to the other of the blazing February sky was nothing but a desultory convoy of clouds. They moved like worms, satisfying their needs with a long slow undulation, while below, the infinite calm that inhabits the shores of paradise carried in its currents the ash of a long full day. This is how things become cathedrals. Details of crepuscular light ignited the trees while dynamos of fresh new sensation held me in thrall as I clawed at the threads of my old armchair. Themes of heavenly dispensation pulsed through my veins like cosmic gold. I’m a man of the world, a traveler, but I’ve never seen a backstage rain unleash itself with such force onto the stage of existence and inscribe its meaning in so many streams and mosses.

Our flair returns when I find my being is on our side of the predicament. Which is to say, it’s a matter of stellar importance, this overwhelming confusion, this parable of hunger. You can feel it coming. You can feel it squirm in your body like a like an emotion and struggle to put into words what is largely anathema to any language: the inability to say one simple thing about linoleum. So many experiences are made of ochre and dirt. While many other aspects of our passage through life reveal so many beautiful things, such as the phosphor of ancient bones in Colorado moonlight or summer oils shining on a young woman's skin, there are things that elude a simple assessment and require a deeper probe, a deeper application of our faculties.

Often thoughts, one after another, several at once, tumbling around like clothes in a dryer, have the curious effect of moving me as far away as possible from the granularity of brick into the hypnotic regions of prestidigitation. This comes from watching the washing machine too long.

Prestidigitation is a common side effect of writing. It involves quick, nimble finger movements to entertain or deceive an audience, and is a worldly inflation of one's power to inflict a maximal amount of change upon the things that make one sad.

It helps, sometimes, to think of words as small, crawling, soft-bodied invertebrates with wills and agendas of their own, but which generously include our thoughts in their parade, indecorously shrouding reality with the intoxications produced by the power of effusion.

Accidents do, sometimes, occur. A bitter month or lever which has a pleated surface, usually striped, becomes languid when splashed with darkness. And sometimes a brilliant idea shines like a shooting star, deconstructing logic and prophesying UFOs.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, for example, where the words are bullets and the horses are wise.

At home, I am sometimes myself, sometimes a weird and distant tone, sometimes a bare minimum, sometimes a highly impractical objective, and sometimes a remote periphery on the outskirts of reality crazy about bears and confetti. Tonight, I arose from a crash of hydraulics and metal in an effort to find the molecular core of poetry. I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for delegates. I am looking for a narrative that I can fill with the dark energy of negotiation. I’m looking for a way out. I’m looking for a way in. There are rumors from other worlds, as always, but none with a highway to paradise. The truth lies in what we cannot do without and what we cannot impose on others; therefore, there is never enough balance to achieve a happy medium. That's why life is often so trying that you can't put it in a story without backing away and surprising yourself with a confession. But let’s not get too personal. I’m just here for the music. This isn’t a time for parables and lessons. It’s a time for resistance. And whatever feeds the soul.  

Somewhere Between The Goon Show And Proust

It’s fascinating to watch someone play the piano. Fascinating to watch the flutter of hands amid all the music stands. Everybody looks so calm. I’d be terrified of fucking up. Getting a cramp in my hand. Poking somebody in the eye with my violin bow.

The piano is a percussion instrument. It builds architectures of sound with little hammers. The top of my head flies off like the lid on a cookie jar. And I see things for the first time as they truly are, not as they appear to be. Literature is constructed a little differently. It's built with the murky teakettles of supposition. It’s a rebellion of empty chairs and frenetic combustibility. Its strategies focus on titillation, the fine hairs of the pubis as well as the heavy thuds of the glans. But its true fuel is a combination of gloom and spaghetti. An artist must trust her pain. There are empty bottles and torn pillows strewn all over the place. An arthritic magician lowers himself paragraph by paragraph into a novel held together by a frayed rope and a nylon consciousness. This is truly where it begins. The night Merry Clayton shoved the heavy glass door of Sunset Sound Recorders open and shouted rape and murder in her pajamas.

The doors are always open in Proust. But Françoise is petulant. Albertine will be dropping by around midnight. This is scandalous. But this is how it’s done. There has to be this shift in our understanding before the league of whistles breeds its vehement futility. And perhaps, while our mind goes wandering among all the new impediments, strange implications and wide-open dilemmas, our benevolence spreads by undulating waves a malleable tale of cracks and buttocks before the mountain begins to speak its language of stars.

Language is the house of Being. My advice is to grab a book and stay in your room. Things are getting dire at the home office. Everything is hectic with clothing. I shave in a mirror of pronouns. I need to look interesting and incomprehensible. At least as half as intriguing as Saturday. I walk across a consonant to open a vowel. Out comes a blaze of hawthorn. I begin to feel oblong. I do parlor tricks on a high wire. The hole in the knee of my jeans is expanding as rapidly as the country hollows from the inside out. If I move against the grammar that has been hammered into our expectations of life I come near to an understanding of our true predicament below the handstand of an extenuating circumstance. And this helps me understand oblivion. Not as a negation, but a prairie.

We garden adjectives in a field of adverbs. The self becomes a kind of throw rug. A personality is generally about what forces assemble us. The braid is insignificant. What counts is talk. You can heal things with language. You can instigate things with language. Take a long wide look at your incentives. Shadows rupture from a brief but startling emotion. Many noses are archaic, or arch youthfully in abstraction, only to become so later.  Pollock only dripped for 48 months. Huge canvases shoved around. Flopped on the floor. Thuds so loud I could actually feel them physically impact my ear drums. It made me breakable. Which is good. I like bending the rules. All my efforts were fat, poorly developed, and timid. But they resulted in a surge of nervous excitement and a heart-wrenching melody. This just goes to show that you can achieve wonders of pyrotechnic glory, but if you can't turn a mule into a butterfly, you haven't done anything extraordinary. Therefore, let the lamp happen inside its milk. Think of this as a bridge to elsewhere. Every time I see a horse, I fill with the shimmer of its being.

A lot of people ask questions about Hegel’s dialectical method. It is a mechanical sewing machine from history known for its borders and gardens. I kiss its animatronic morality with the steam and participation it deserves. I hear the parables crackling about it. While not inherently harmful, prolonged holidays on an elevator can cause awkward implications or holes in one's logic. We want this, because everything that is needed at the moment when we do something else under the same conditions as the tropics will be comical, and we must consider another question. I can see what it does to the roots. The abstract has a beautiful black eyelash based purely on the caprice of any given moment. It's largely a flirtation with movement, despite the many imponderables uniting our bananas. And you know as well as I do that a dream of sand has many implications, ripples caused by wind and wave, the foam of the moment, and is a future with a junkyard in it. There is one fabrication for the ocean that sleeps in all of us, and that is who we are, who we were, who we aspire to be, who we will never be, and who we try hard not to be. Everything else is a shadow of some higher reality. I’m reaching for you out of this seclusion.  I'm heading towards a Saturday in another country. Would you like to come with me? You don’t have to pack. I carry a big house with me wherever I go because it's a source of beautiful friction.

This house is a demonstrable calculus of pins and bas-relief. It’s how I operate. I refine an unpopular opinion by sharing a saga of herding words in a dream of sand. The cricket's well-being is what makes my furrow so spoonful. So blackberry. So nearby. So faraway. So recumbent. So delicately embroidered. So strangely unembarrassed.

Elevators offer us a brief limbo between The Goon Show and Proust. I juggle plates and concepts. Breakfast is a beacon to the naked eye. This style of drilling was featured on the Spirit Express. I’m screaming this is my elevator but what good does it do? The sapphire that sleeps in a faith until it becomes a coconut wire is another knee on the quantum future of jellyfish. As the fluctuations of Earth inspire a prosody engorged with duende while a raw element in the melody grasps at a useful anguish, these changes take on a life of their own in Spain. This is the old saga beside the new cream. Don’t get a knot in your jodhpurs. Hold my jelly while I humor the jar it came in. They seem to know me personally about a winch. I think these words are too small to support a garbage truck. But they will support a memory. Who remembers The Lobsters from the glorious 60s? They were a little known band that played the clubs around Vegas. They had a hit song. Poker is a game based on drapery. But just let me get my claws on the Queen of Hearts and I’ll show you all the eerie feelings I can’t describe in words. It’s not an envy. Not a spin cycle. Not a bitter realization. Not a wad of money. Not a sad example. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s a spoon with an elaborate handle. It’s an old man playing a concertina. It’s a wedge of ice cream. It’s ha ha ha ha I told you so. And a drop of rain zigzagging down a window pane. In Zaragoza.

If Your Money Is So Plump Why Can't You Buy A Hoe?

 If your money is so plump why can’t you buy a hoe?

Nobody’s ever asked me that.

Umber embodies a certain maturity. The raw sienna has its own physiology. The colors I feel tonight are entwined in waves of pink and black. Extravagances move through my sleep eating perspectives and eyeballs. The whole idea of painting enriches the spirit. The smell of turpentine will begin to dog your heels. Every room in your house will have a view of the fence. This, I hope, will help us attain a deeper intimacy. Not the fence, per se, but the hole in the fence. The forms surrounding our afternoon. The stamina to play bingo at age 102. The bumps in the road. The considerations to consider. The hunger that keeps knocking on your door. Starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. The narrative that I keep trying to fend off in this paragraph. But it keeps coming. The one about starlings. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. I already said that. But I’ll say it again. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky.

all my poetry is misbehaved

it never does what I want it to do

i’m not asking much

all i ask is that it rid the world of fascism

and provide me with a few wildly extravagant nights

in Ibiza

or the rotating dining room

in Nero’s Golden House 68 AD

this is precisely what I mean

by the poem misbehaving

i said nothing about wealth and yet

the poem decided to be decadent and wealthy

it took me for a ride

i had no choice

because it will soon be a tree

in Redwood National Park

where I can’t arrest its development

i can only go along

and stub my toe

on a piece of conscience 

Was there ever a prettier song than Roy Orbison singing "Pretty Woman"? How would people react to it now? I don’t think it would go well. It wouldn’t be pretty. Next to that, in the story, the one I’m telling about pretty women, there's something that reeks of blatant impropriety. As soon as I identify its true nature, its full dimensions and temperature, I may notice that spring is missing and the worms are unhappy, and this will have a powerful effect on me. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. I will be your being, I will be your yesterday and today, I will bounce around your house with easy solutions.

Life ends quickly. Or so it seems. Because it doesn't really. If I take out my telescope and peer into the past, I see swearing and laughter. I see peonies, anemones and hydrangeas in fluted glass. I hear a woman biting into a crust of bread in Marseille. I see clouds out of the window of a passenger jet. I see a man come out of the sound in SCUBA gear. I see people at conferences. I see people turning into rhinoceroses. I see nipples and harpsichords. I see liquids and rocks and old dirt roads. I see people whistling and hugging one another. I see a ball get thrown. I hear cheering. And wonder what it’s like to be a billionaire. It’s inconceivable. Not just the money. The many things I can’t even think of. The disasters caused by letting my desires go wild. And the impoverishment of spirit. For which I do not have words. But I do have the receipts.

i believe that feeling can be expanded

to include honesty

which is far more entertaining

than chemistry

as it spills itself

all over the 21^st century

reality is mostly ice

but some of it comes packaged

as new underwear

i’m going to take a deep breath now

and inflate myself with 900 lbs. of nitrous oxide

and arrange my speech accordingly

on the shores of Miami

you should never think of yourself as old

an angel told me that

everything is a naked mind

climbing the high temples of Angkor Wat

and pops like a bubble

at the top

where all the monkeys are chattering

about the poem that came to town

wearing nothing but a universe

and the words it came in 

If I ever call you a conspiracy theorist, it’s not an insult. It’s a compliment. Nobody should be shamed for having suspicions. For critical thinking. For introspection. For circumspection. For insurrection. Logic isn’t always such a bad thing. I don’t like to see it intrude on poetry. It has no place in poetry. But I do like to see it shatter arguments. Facts used to be quite handy. If you got them right. And you could remember them in a heated moment of arrogance and condescension. But now we’re in the dark ages and facts count for very little. Money decides everything. Money gets everything wrong. But they keep printing it. And devaluing it. And exchanging it for gold. And favors. And persuasion. And this is a fact. Based on nothing. Just fiat. Trust. And debt.

Meanwhile, while we’re all still learning about how to inhabit this planet, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

We need art. More art then ever before. Any art. You can make art out of anything. Softeners, ocean swells, sanitary napkins, gyrating drowsy dividends, implausible presumptions, the ovaries of the hellebore, apparitions ripped apart by logic, postpartum starling histories, Led Zeppelin souvenirs, feathery wet dreams, beautiful resentments, football pottery, grievous effigies of ice sculpture, anything with pale narrow leaves. You name it. It’s yours. It’ll follow you around. And wonder what you’re doing. And that’s art. That’s what it does. It counterfeits rocks. And wears argyle socks. Dictates flippancy. Parachutes into your darkness and shines like duende.

I’ve got a feeling deep inside. Think I’ll call it luggage. And hope it gets lost in Bora Bora.

It’s time to start the Renaissance. These dark times are a drag. I don’t know what to think of humanity. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know what I don’t know. And that’s a good thing.

The most thought-provoking thing is that we are still not thinking, said Martin Heidegger. What do you think? I think I’m thinking but maybe I’m not maybe I’m really just dreaming I’m thinking.

As soon as things get metaphysical, let’s get an Uber and ride around Paris all night.

My song is a gingerbread cartoon on an axle of crazy wheels.

they say the west and the east will never meet

that’s not true they met one night

on the outskirts of Perpignan

dogs kept them awake all night

so they went south

then they went north

then they went southwest

then they went northeast

then they got lost

in details and created a brave new world

of rags and exasperation

and this is how the search for consciousness

can look blank as hell

on a sheet of paper

it takes stamina

to strangle a remorse

but who cares

if all the metaphors smell of romance

and finally bloom

in the light of the sun

Think of a poem as a clamor or a hug or a hip and often it will hold you hard and during the growing distance that is in its power it will glow in you like the speech of the peacock king. There's always a way to do things with iron, but I recommend a cup of coffee, eggs benedict, and a table with a good view of the highway. You can’t remove a windshield without a little effort. But why would you want to do that anyway? A gerund is born through cabbage one day on the fields of suggestion. It doesn’t happen by paint. It happens by assembling a gluttony and eating Thursday until the world turns gregarious so you can start there. I’ll get dressed and join you. Heidegger’s hammer is a famous philosophical everyday activity. So we'll need lots of nails and tales and forests. Sometimes you just get the urge to build something. It’s instinctive. Like running behind a chair when an elf jumps into your soup extolling the virtues of spontaneity. Sometimes you just know what to avoid, what to seek, what to extol, and what to say when someone asks you what you do for a living. Tell them you feel concentric. And roll away.

 

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 Technicians 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.