The Age Of Raisin

I have a craving for raisins. I have no reason to crave a raisin and yet I crave a raisin. The craving of a raisin craves a reason for having a raisin. I raise the craving to the sprawl of possibility. The possibility is everywhere possible except when it’s impossible and then the impossible becomes possible and this possibility is the impossible undoing of impossibility. Impossibility is possible because possibility becomes an impossibility when impossibility becomes possible. The reasoning is circular, like a raisin. A dark wrinkled raisin. Each little raisin looks like the scrotum of a tiny elf. But a mound of raisins, a bunch of raisins, an agglomeration of raisins, is a meditation of matter, an imbroglio of the particular.  

The need for sunlight is the reason why grapes are grown in the San Joaquin Valley. Sunlight pounds the valley like a hammer of radiant force. The grapes dry and their skin wrinkles into dark little kisses of light.

Reason pounds the irrational brain into tiny wrinkled raisins of scrotal scripture.

I love raisins. I like to scoop them up with a spoon and put them in my mouth. I put all my metaphors aside and appreciate them for what they are until they’re swallowed and the metaphors come rushing back into my head and I have to do something about them.

The metaphors, that is. Not the raisins. The raisins have their own raisin d’être.

I have a reason to love raisins and the reason is reasonable and topaz. I don’t know why it’s topaz. I just like the word topaz. My reason for topaz is exonerating and vinyl. You can see where this is going.

A pair of pears glares among the dappled apples. Shinto potatoes tiptoe amid a dumb show of grapes agape in the landscape. Helen’s melons gel in Helena. The swans in Ceylon feed on the lawn in the bygone chiffon of dawn. Hemmed in lemons persimmons summon the calmness of a psalmist in the juice of abuse. And the squash is awash with the slosh of the posh in the moonlight of our midnight appetite.

Clearly, the world is a place of things. Tables, chairs, pulleys, guitars, trees, rocks, hats, plugs, rugs, drugs and bugs. Heliotrope and fruit. Grapes and apes and drapes and crêpes. Figs and twigs and Buddha’s hand.

I’m not separate from the world. Nobody is. When the world dies we die. Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you said Whitman, who had a lot of atoms.

Heidegger referred to the mind as a “cabinet of consciousness” as a false premise. There’s no separation between the mind and the world.

Think about that. Pop a raisin in your mouth and chew it into the universe that is you. And ask yourself: is what is in me and about me and around me one and the same? Yes and no. The body is host to the soul which is nowhere without the body and everywhere when the body goes.  

What surrounds me, what surrounds you, is Umwelt.

That’s what I’m putting out there today, right now. These are ideas. Just ideas. Perceptions hammered into words and vertices. Refreshments on the counter. Spring rain at the window. The blades of a fan. The sheen on the coffee table. The pain in my shoulder. The warmth in my hand. The pleasing reasoning in the taste of a raisin.