The Second Coming

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

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

Surely some new revelation is at hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Notes On A Lost Investment

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Helium Smile

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

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

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

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

Some Assembly Required

In the morning, after I brush my hair and brush my teeth, I take my partial out of a jar filled with Efferdent and water and stick it in place between two upper molars on the right side of my mouth. Then I put my hearing aids in and I’m complete. Ready to tackle the problems of existence with a modicum of dignity and a crude understanding of empirical reality. It’s a process of assembly in which I put the parts of myself together with syntax and bombast. Put one foot forward, and head into the mist.

Sometimes, I think this ache that develops over time is a true evaluation of life in one’s so-called twilight years, a yearning with no definition, no familiar chords. Just enough will to keep on keeping on and stow the fires and flutter one’s wings. Those of us fated to live in the stratosphere learn, over time, that it’s better to nod and smile in agreement than pontificate in the lumberyard. There’s more to the fingering of little facts than meets the eye. The useless quibbling that passes for conversation these days is better left to its own devices. It’s a drag on the energy. What you want is a button to press, a napkin next to your plate and a natural inclination with which to unravel in front of a fire.

Conveniences are good. I don’t like being inconvenienced. But they do happen. Annoyances, encumbrances, privations, delays. The tensions of air travel. You go to Paris. Your luggage goes to Bora Bora. What I advise is to cultivate a philosophy, a mode of perception that allows one to drift beyond the foam of surveillance and touch the contrasting parts of an animal’s body without flinching. Get close to things. Get intimate with the liniment. Take a hint from whatever can be picked up or thrown. Try a little tenderness. It’s what sustains us.

Pay attention to a woman’s mood when she gets out of the shower.

I’m pulling a word out of the air to give it a pulse and a beat and a perpendicular choreography. Around here, we cement the guidance of the local gods to soften it. There’s more to prose than being nervous about it. If the writing goes too fast, it’s an industry. If the mountains are near the house, it’s a force you can use. Remember: the ear is close to the mind. You don’t need a paddle to make a cup of coffee. Just a pot and a filter. Use patience. Stay loose. The mind dries things. Eat a hammer and sew something. Embellish the things you esteem with the grace they deserve. Let the colors on your nails clash with another like boomerangs in an accordion. Cut to the energy, once you’ve created a situation. It's good knowing my horses there, and a harness and saddle. You’ve got to be quick out here. Alert for signs. Quick to spit. Slow to comply.

“Perception should lead directly and immediately to another new perception.” – Charles Olson.

“Let the sense find the element.” – Robert Creeley

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation” – Terence McKenna.

“I feel stupid and contagious.” – Kurt Cobain

It’s in the sounds, and what they can grab. French dip sandwiches, the push of a good strong wind, headlights coming out of the night like Van Gogh’s stars. A middle-aged woman at the end of the bar bursting out in laughter. The peremptory gratification of a boiling fingernail. Art for Art’s Sake. A YouTube video of Jackie DeShannon singing “Over You” on Hollywood A Go Go. Ezra Pound staring out the window of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The graces of the Eastern Mind. The scrapes of the Western Mind. At 78 one should be on one’s way to more than mere conjecture. The world gets real. Gets real in ways I never expected. And ways in which I did expect it, for years, lying awake at night, searching for options. “And around the mind the image is the darkness it can find.” Wrote Creeley. There was a time when the hit songs were vital to one’s well-being and full of prophesy. I remind myself that there’s still a possibility in the word impossibility. Whatever words are capable of, the sum and substance of it will be revealed where the sounds break, and the weaving in and out, the warp and woof, reach out in different ways to sustain itself. What sleeping takes away the light of day restores. And there you have it. A two room jewel in brick, with a garden, heliotropes and hellebore. Guano on all the rocks. Swallows in the barn. A sideshow balanced on predicates. And kinetics all over the place, for the hell of it.

 

Some Recent Events In The Language Zoo

Consciousness acts as an internal and subjective screen, which is blurred and distorted at times by the shadows of an imaginary cage. Routine, incuriosity, obedience, insecurity, lack of imagination are the chains that keep us in place. This isn't anything new. I think Rilke did a better job illustrating this with his panther, the animal turning in circles, over and over again, “the movement of its powerful and supple steps resembling a ritual dance around a center where a powerful will remains paralyzed.” I remember seeing a civet cat at the zoo behaving the same way. There were no bars. The animal was behind glass. There had been some effort to provide an environment of some assumed familiarity to the animal, vines, branches, woodchips, mulch, but this was of no apparent interest to the cat, whose frantic pacing occurred close to the glass wall. The energy was so intensely frustrated, so deeply neurotic, it was painful to watch. I marvel at Rilke’s poem, which is in itself a panther, a muscularity of spirit trapped in a cage of words.

Words are acculturating things. I don’t know where they come from, how they first arrived, the sounds our simian ancestors made that somehow, weirdly, began to assume meaning, the power to convey images and associations. I’m bet it was fun. Everyone rolling in the dirt with laughter. I want to get back to that point. Like they did for a brief time in Zurich during Dada. Then, inevitably, as the words evolved and matured they assumed the stature of norms. They helped create laws. They became scripture, ceremonies, rituals, chants, religions and beliefs. Consciousness became structured. It became a house. But still, there was that tendency, that glorious penchant to drift, morph like clouds into reveries of pregnant irrelevance.

I’ve often thought what it would be like to think without words. Maybe it’s a circumstance somewhat akin to following Ikea instructions for assembling a desk or a coffee table. Skipping the verbal instructions and studying the pictures, the screws and parts. Or rock climbing. Figuring out where to put your feet and hands when you’re 500 feet above the ground on a rock wall. You’re probably not going to be mulling over a soliloquy from Hamlet or King Lear, or wooing granite with a feeling invocation of ivory vowels and effervescing prestidigitations of verbal acuity. They’ll be whirling in your mind as you plummet to the ground. 

In the spring of 1974, I took a class in James Joyce at San José State. It was mind-blowing, a game changer. Ulyssess rocked me silly into an intoxication with the English language that was still blazing among my neurons a year or so later when I got a job as a messenger-driver in a hospital in Seattle. It was a highly social job since I had a daily route in which I visited a number of offices during the day. I dated one of the women who worked in one of the offices. I took her to the Red Robin on Eastlake, which has now gone, replaced by an apartment complex. It was a casual restaurant that served hamburgers and fish and chips and also had a bar. At some point in our conversation, and rather unprompted by anything I’d been espousing at the table, she asked me if I intended to put people down by using such big words all the time. I was stunned. No, of course not, I said, as my chances of getting laid came flaming down like a Sopwith Camel from the sky over France in WWI. I really had no idea that people were reacting that way to my continuing intoxications with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I felt chagrined and embarrassed. The date was essentially just an ambush. I returned to work a much quieter, and sadder, man.

My dalliance with literature became a private affair. In some ways good, but in many ways bad. I’d wrongly assumed that the liberation I’d found in poetry ran parallel to other people’s experience. This is a big mistake in the United States. Polysyllabic words can get you punched in the face. I’ve been slammed into a Christmas tree, withered to the ground by looks of such hostility I felt more sympathy for the pained expression of the person I’d accidentally abused with a savagely eloquent expression. It’s important to remember: people hate their jobs. They don’t need a carnival sideshow of useless language complicating their day. There’s a reason people hate lawyers. They hate writers and poets even more.

And so I write. I feel safe to do so in a room with no one else around to feed me a fist sandwich. There are small tribes of people, à la the encampments in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, that love the written word so much they’ve memorized entire novels, whole volumes, caressing the words as they utter them in the isolate air. I still remember Bill Gate’s gloating prediction in the 1990s that computers would render books nearly extinct early in the 21^st century. I hoped he would be proven wrong, that bookstores and libraries would rally to the cause and fan the flames and make a supremely heroic effort to keep book culture alive, a vibrant alternative running parallel to the brain-rotting addictions of the internet and social media. This did not happen. By the end of the noughts, bookstores had become eviscerated. They often had more T-shirts and coffee mugs on display than books, or shelf-loads devoted to manga while a philosophy section might consist of 12 or 13 books. Libraires, meanwhile, have had their budgets so brutally slashed that their collections are as moldy and undernourished as a poorly maintained mushroom cellar.

What effect has this had on consciousness? I can’t speak for other people. I don’t know what it looks like in their heads. I only know what comes out of their mouths.

I do know that since Covid censorship has returned, eating away at free speech like a cancer. This has been compounded – exponentiated – by the genocide in Gaza. In England, I could be arrested for using the word genocide in public. And in my personal life, nothing ends a conversation faster, or induces more nervous, fidgety, frightened and confused looks, then the use of that terrible word. I’ve lost long-standing friendships. I feel every bit as muzzled and shamed as when I began asking questions about the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines.

Consciousness has been shrinking. Conversations have grown stilted. Small talk has long replaced the rare, now-and-again joy of sometimes finding a fellow word-juggler at a social gathering, or those wine-infused jousts and debates over a dinner table that would sometimes go long into the night and leave you feeling pleasantly jostled and shaken into new vistas, new perspectives, your mind dilated like a night-blooming moonflower.

There’s a part of me, thank God, that feels separate from the world. When it comes to language, and my own practice of language, I’m not in a zoo. I’m in a wilderness. I’m in a mode of exploration. Because it’s endless. Boundless. This is the luxury of privacy. Language is primarily a social medium. That’s what it’s for: to connect. To strengthen ties. Poets work in solitude. This makes them dangerous. Language endures their perversions, their sorcery, and in return gives them the genius and agility to unlock the cages and let the panther mind roam free in open air.

Byzantine Sizzle

 We drift inevitably towards the future, that estuary, that vague abyss of false fortunes and illusory skills known as Vegas, that chasm in the face of the imponderable, that chameleon of time, pissing discreetly behind the peacocks in the museum parking lot.

What a thing to say. What can I say?     

I just want to say how happy I am that you’re here, reading this sentence, perhaps not as I wrote it, but as I wished to write it, which is to say it wrote itself, it was in the process of writing itself when I noticed my fingers moving about on the keyboard, and if it’s not too late in life to figure out Dirac’s equation, and what’s the big deal about spinning electrons?

Wikipedia will tell you that the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. Relativistic wave equations predict the behavior of particles at high energies and velocities comparable to the speed of light. Particles are defined as small localized objects which can be described by several physical or chemical properties such as volume, density, or mass. They vary in size from subatomic particles like the electron to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like antifungal sprays for jock itch to rubber bands, crystals, ants, tiny robots, air inside a room, thistles, avocados, and hood ornaments.

An average adult human body is composed of seven octillion atoms. Sometimes you can feel them bouncing around like tennis balls in a clothes dryer. And sometimes they feel pleasantly and beautifully random, like Sonnets and Interludes for prepared piano, by John Cage.

In what way is it useful to predict the spin of electrons?

Spintronics: using electron spin states – up or down - for ultra-fast data storage and information processing. 

What a way to begin the morning.

These scientific terms always seem dry as biscotti. But there’s an accuracy there in which I find a healthy contrast to the surrounding malaise. An attempt to see wonder, disrobe a stunning mystery in the face of shock, murder, and paramilitary thugs.

Life expands as one gets older. If I'm feeling incongruous, I get some pepper and a hawk and go experiment with the world. While filling a vague space in the room, I help a fire touch us in a loop of spirit. Did you know green can define a distance? I see a theme forming. Abalone, hogwash and bees. That electric feeling people get in a grove of hives. Experience folds the webs we make into monstrous abstractions. All you need is a pair of hands and a hint of Byzantine sizzle. This device may help until some despair gets here. Until then, discuss the liberation with a cemetery. Because it’s coming. It’s on the way. Ask yourself: what is consciousness doing? I think it's coming along now. I can see it slipping out. Sparkling on the paper like a predicate.

 

Pirandello Zombie Crossing

There, inscribed on the top rim of my desk, is the indecipherable scripture of my cat Toby, who liked to scratch there. The desk is old. It belonged to my paternal grandmother. If I remember correctly, she ordered it from a Sears catalogue, circa the 1920s. My grandmother kept a diary there, mentioning the major events on the farm that she and my grandfather managed for decades: births, deaths, storms, visitors, elections, celebrations, accidents, prizes, harvests. I’ve been in possession of the desk for 51 years, though I remember writing an essay about Joyce’s Ulyssess for a class at San José State in 1973 when I was visiting my parents in Seattle for Christmas. I hitchhiked part of the way. I got as far as Redding. My last ride was a middle-aged man driving an enormous station wagon. This was in Ukiah. There was a long line of hitch-hikers. I stood at the head of the line. After the man had stopped for me, and I got in, I assumed he was going to pick up a few more people. But he didn’t. And this worried me. I kept a close eye on the doorhandle the entire way to Arcata. He asked if I wanted some amphetamine. I said no, but thanked him. I like amphetamines, but I didn’t want to hitchhike at night. He was a nice guy. He took me to the bus station in Arcata, but it was closed. He dropped me off on Highway 299 to Redding. I spent the night in a sleeping bag a few feet from the road. In the morning I got a ride with a truckdriver carrying a big load of logs. He dropped me off on I-5, headed north. I walked across the Sacramento River into Redding. A load of teenage kids threw a beer can at me. I took that as an act of mischievous ill will against hippies. But years later I realized that beer can was full. They were giving me a beer. Unfortunately, I’d tossed it into the Sacramento.

53 years later I sit at the desk writing this sentence on a laptop. I very rarely write in longhand. I do a lot of French exercises. My wife and I subscribe to an online computer-assisted language learning company featuring interactive videos of various difficulty levels and genres called Yabla. Today I’m doing an exercise on La Forêt de Fontainebleau. When people speak clearly and pronounce each syllable of each word, I can understand what they're saying. But the French have a tendency to speak at breakneck speed, often without fully vocalizing vowels and consonants, or skipping over words entirely, in which case I have extreme difficulty in understanding what they're saying. It's really frustrating. The one I’m doing today isn’t too bad. Two elderly people taking care of the trails in La Forêt de Fontainebleau. Au mois de décembre (in the month of December) y aura des nèfles (there will be medlars) et y en a beaucoup ici (and there’s a lot of them here) en attendant (meanwhile) ce sont les châtaignes (it’s chestnuts) et la récolte est bonne (and the harvest is good).

R interrupts me to tell me that she discovered a robin that appeared to be dead. She wants me to come and look at it. It’s resting on the milkbox on the porch, wrapped in a plaid, fur-lined coat. Sadly, it was immediately apparent that the bird was dead. Its one visible eye was wide open. If it were dead, the eye would be partially covered by an eyelid. Nor was it breathing, or any sign of a heartbeat. There was no sign of attack. We guessed that the bird froze. The temperatures have been below freezing, which is unusual for February. R buried the bird in the park, and hung two birdfeeders from the branches of some nearby trees.

I ran alone today. R went with a friend to attend the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival. When I got home, R — who had arrived a second or two ahead of me — told me she had a good time. I asked her how the lecture went. It was fascinating, she said. It was given by a professor of horticulture at Washington State University on the subject of soil science named Linda Chalker-Scott. R is enamored with dirt. Obsessed with it. Bewitched by its intricacies and contradictions. If a plant shows signs of disease, and a subsequent autopsy reveals significant root loss, or root damage, the first suspect in this sad scenario is dirt. Dirty dirt. Polluted dirt. Extremely compacted dirt. Dry dirt. Soaked dirt. Sticky dirt. Sandy dirt. Poorly structured dirt. Hydrophobic dirt. Really angry dirt. Lunatic dirt. Unhinged dirt. Imbalanced pH dirt. Anaerobic dirt. Claustrophobic dirt. Necrophobic dirt. Overly skeptical dirt. When dirt goes bad, R goes into emergency mode. It’s a situation that calls for an immediate search, a pilgrimage of nurseries in a quest for the Holy Grail of Dirt. Things to look for are chunks of dirt that are dark and crumbly and moist. There have been many disappointments. Dirt that looked good at the nursery and seemed like a good purchase but upon closer analysis betrayed a suspicious lack of merit. Dirt can be tricky. Dirt is the Pinot Noir of soils. It requires a good eye, a good sense of smell, and the eager curiosity of horticultural fingers. Because dirt, like wine, always feels good upon introduction. But further involvement can prove trying, and the consequences notoriously unpredictable.   

R asked me how my run went. I said fine. There were far fewer people than usual, probably because of the cold. I did see something intriguing. I saw a woman with long black hair walk down the steps of the Lake Union Building wearing a black jacket embroidered with the rib cage and spine of a human skeleton, rendered in a thick brilliant white fabric. She had just lit a cigarette and was probably on her way to her break. I wondered if she worked for a chiropractor. Maybe she was a chiropractor. Whatever she was she looked bad ass.

Tonight I’m looser than a hothouse twang. I feel as if I could decipher a dulcimer with a musical enema and a little judo. There are some things that should never be mentioned, which is itself unmentionable, and implies a tropical fever. But this isn’t one of them. This is a confession to the rain. This is a confession that splatters on the sidewalk. That things are disjointed and weird on planet Earth. It’s a tough place to adapt, much less adopt. Adaptation is for the prudent. What is called for is dissonance. Diffidence is a form of betrayal. It’s a syphilis of the conscience. It’s where you go when you’ve been fucked. But can’t talk about it, lest one be accused of being a necromancer, a megalomaniac, a horrendous narcissist and horrible poet, worse than Percy Dovetonsils, antimatter with halitosis, a mimesis of murk, a nemesis of creepy crawly Mississippi things, a semiotic abscissa, a blurt, a belch, a bubble of methane rising to the surface of a Danish bog. Conspiracy theorist. Pleurisy realist. Geometric irregularity. Hypercellular coiffeuse. Pirandello zombie crossing. And what is called for is unmentionable. Because it would alter reality. And show it for what it really is. And more importantly what it’s really not.

Earlier today, I heard a France Culture radio program about winter, specifically, human adaptation to winter. Gaston Bachelard was quoted with regards to the deep pleasure of sitting by a fire, either out on the open on a beach or forest glade or feeding on a few logs in a fireplace. Let’s say a stone, rather than brick, fireplace. I may be embellishing here a little. My apologies to Monsieur Bachelard. I’m paraphrasing badly. I’m paraphrasing so badly that I may be in danger of making everything up. Let’s just say, I got his point. It was hot, and crackled, and vomited sparks that whirled up the chimney in a wild delirium. "Contemplating a flame,” says Monsieur Bachelard, “perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers." I can testify to that. Add a big glass globe of brandy and you’ve got some terrific alchemy going on. You may nod into a leaden sleep, and awaken transmuted to gold. Of course, I don't have ready access to a fireplace, nor do I drink brandy. Anything I do in the alchemical realm is achieved with words, arranged randomly in a beautiful havoc. The heat is cerebral, and arises from crisis. The light is gold, and explodes out of wildness, and peculiarity.