How To Build A Wordhouse

The wordhouse is made from seven pieces of pottery cut from a single language. The theme is made by combining two pieces of pandemonium and smoothing them out with a little breath and a little silver bell swung slowly back and forth. When placed together, the clauses in a sentence will make a dovetail and the beveled edges of a homily may be included by putting the bevel setting on a cognitive bias and then inflating it until it breaks and shards of nonsense come raining down. This will help distinguish your wordhouse from a word salad. Measure, mark, and cut a turnpike out of a pencil. If you use a pen properly you can make it do wonderful things. You can paint a sheet of paper with syllables. This is called writing. Writing is an important component of the wordhouse. For example, the front and back panels of a paragraph may be used for walls or liposuction. If you make two marks on the bottom of a journey you can be sure to arrive at a destination you hadn’t planned and a reservation you hadn’t made. At this juncture, you add all the parrots and participles you’ll need to create an acoustic environment. Once you discover that the center of things is hollow without a spirit level and an ontology you can proceed to the drill the wordhouse entrance. This will require distinguishing between “personal” identity and “self” identity, an idea well-established in the phenomenological literature – for example, in Husserl’s distinction between the “transcendental ego” and the person – but I will argue that the best wordhouses are made with untreated wordiness underwater with a clear plastic mask and a tube to breathe through. This is caused linguistic relativity & comes with a fork and a massage gun. When the wordhouse is done take a bow and watch the words fly out.  

 

The Jangle Of Badges

The jangle of badges, sashes and keys draped over the mirror of the big oak bureau in the bedroom when the drawer shuts. The drawers do not go in and out smoothly, always a bit sticky, not a fault of the oak, or carpentry, but the humidity of the northwest climate. Discovering the tonal differences (A major to B flat major) in “Strawberry Fields Forever” are due to splicing and highly sophisticated engineering fifty-four years later. It was originally in C major. Thanks to benign prostatic hyperplasia, my piss goes sideways, due to inadequate pressure. I’ve noticed the way the crows bring their wings in to pick up speed, then spread them out to land, their legs dangling down like landing gear. Learning how to whistle has weirdly become a feature of my life. I whistle to call Louise, the lame crow I feed with unsalted peanuts. She lives close by in our neighborhood. She’s usually there at the corner of Highland and Bigelow when I get there after a walk or run but if she’s not I’ll whistle to let her know I’m there. But I’ve never been very good at whistling. So now I’m trying to get better. And I wonder about the mechanics of it. What happens? What happens is the lips vibrate subtly and so does the air around the lips and inside the mouth and these vibrations cause the air molecules to vibrate and create compressions and depressions in the air, which in turn cause sound waves. A high-pitched sound. A whistle. I look at a world map showing color coded rates of coronavirus. Sweden and the U.S. are the darkest color. The worst. This is disturbing. And to think of the teenage kids I saw this afternoon playing basketball at the grade school playground. About 12 or 13 of them, and only one wearing a mask. This virus is going to be with us a long time. Why do the YouTube algorithms keep coughing up “Whiter Shade Of Pale”? They must think I’m an old hippie. The sad, melancholy hues running from gold to pink in the light of the sky, the random elongations and sketchy borders between air and vapor, clear light and dimmed light in the clouds above a copse of bare-limbed trees, the gentle roll of the hills and powdery, virgin snow in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, a watercolor my father painted in his retirement years living in a cottage by Lake Louise. The odd spectacle I made for two nearby women on the sidewalk jumping up and down, frantically patting my body, shaking out my jacket, after discovering ticks in my clothes while dining in a Chinese restaurant in the little town of Boissevain, Manitoba, Canada, in May, 1997. They must’ve gotten on my clothes when I walked down to relieve myself in an old grove of elm on my grandparent’s old farm. Which was totally gone. House, barn, chicken house, dairy shed, workshop, bunkhouse, even the old flagstones that led up to the house were so utterly gone, so totally vanished, that you couldn’t tell where’d they’d been. Even the foundations were gone. Nothing is wasted in North Dakota. Everything is put to use on the prairie. The sun doesn’t set without someone dusting it off and making sure it’s in good condition for the next day. 

 

Banana Republic

Surprising frustration at not being able to find the proper envelopes for mailing a book. I tried Bartell drugs; their shelves were empty. No envelopes whatever. Nobody bothers to restock the shelves. I tried Fed Ex. A few envelopes, but none the right size. The selection was sparse. I tried the CVS Pharmacy. They only had business envelopes. I tried the post office. It was crowded, this being a few days away from Christmas. A man, holding several packages, blocked the door. Inside, the line was long and people were jammed together. There was no social distancing, no monitoring of the number of people allowed into the lobby, no protocol whatever. And no envelopes on sale, as there used to be. Almost all the businesses and little restaurants on lower Queen Anne are boarded up and closed. It’s a scene of intense economic devastation. Very unsettling. And the tent cities keep growing, the mounds of garbage higher, the rats and vermin increasing. This is all the result of 40 years of neoliberal economics, beginning with Reagan. The government hardly counts for anything anymore, just a club for scoundrels and greedy mediocrities doing the bidding of their corporate donors. Disgusted, R and I drove to the business district on upper Queen Anne, which is doing a little better, but still struggling. There are far fewer people than usually crowd this district in December. I was able to get my two books sent at the Queen Anne Dispatch, a combination boutique and shipping service. They do a bang-up service. They’re efficient and courteous and they follow all the pandemic guidelines, marking the wooden floor with blue tape for social distancing and requiring customers and employees to wear masks. I walked away feeling a sense of relief that at least one small business is continuing to operate robustly and smoothly. I’ve never seen a society die before. Not this close. Not in a place where I actually lived. I never expected to see such a thing. It’s not unlike watching a human being or any other animal die. Limbs weaken and atrophy, sight dims, hearing goes, memory goes, cognition is disoriented, confused. Dying is a twilight of languishing abilities, an encroaching anemia, people going through motions with no real motivation, no elan, no resolve. But this analogy fails in light of the stupendous wealth that is being looted and funneled to the top tier of society, the obscenely wealthy, Bezos with a net worth of 182.2 billion, Zuckerberg with a net worth of 100.5 billion. Nancy Pelosi, who blocked the stimulus bill of 1.8 trillion, ostensibly so Trump would not be reelected, and which contained enhanced unemployment insurance and a second stimulus check, has an estimated net worth of 180 million. Income inequality is pharaonic. Unreal. I don’t recognize the country anymore. It has become a banana republic akin to Brazil. I remember a past not that distant in time when going out for dinner and a movie was a part of our routine. Streets and sidewalks were busy with commerce. The agora was thriving. Now it’s dead as the splintered plywood covering a store front. 

The Sparkle Of Candy

The sparkle of candy in a Parmigiano Reggiano jar. Snickers. Milky Way. Three Musketeers. Twix. The winter solstice approaches. Darkness comes early, daylight comes late. Sitting in the car, parked near Bartell drugs, upper deck of the parking lot, very cold day, reading Ponge, seeing how long I can go before turning on the heater, which means turning on the engine, in the minutes before R arrives and we go to the Mail Box on upper Queen Anne to mail copies of Mingled Yarn to friends. I wet my index finger in the laundry room sink to rub the small amount of lint from the dryer filter. I used to wet it a bit with my tongue but I don’t do that now that Covid is here. Every time I hear Jimi Hendrix play it sounds like the whole universe is coming out of his guitar. Resting my arm next to the Bluetooth radio on the filing cabinet so that I get better reception while trying to fall asleep to Antonín Dvorák’s Piano Quintet in A, Op.81, B.155. What is it to think? It is to fill the brain with uproar. The weight of the sun is impossible to calculate because weight is relative to local gravity, and since the sun is its own source of local gravity, it doesn’t sit on something else, and cannot be landed and sold at the local fish market. This is the ovum I meant when I said ovoid. The poem is the scrotum of the spoken. The sentence is the semen of the semantic. The staunch is the probe of the good. The cat’s claws penetrating my jeans as she tries to pull me out of my chair to give her some food. Some feeling has returned to the patch of skin on my right knee. I must’ve pinched a nerve while doing deep-knee bends with ten-pound weights. I don’t mind saying that I’m a little edgy these days. What’s wrong with edgy? I like edgy movies, edgy poetry, edgy art, and edgy ravines. Edgy: “meaning ‘tense and irritable’ is attested by 1837, perhaps from the notion of being on the edge, at the point of doing something irrational.” [Online Etymology Dictionary]. Or, simply, ‘edge.’ “O, who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus, or cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.” I love these lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II. It’s a precognitive criticism – albeit unintentional – of the simplistic message of the premise of cognitive behavioral therapy that changing one’s outlook or attitude about a situation will defuse it of irrationality and bring you into a state of well-being. Which is total bullshit. But if it does help people, who am I to criticize it? Words can paint reality. They can’t change reality. But if someone can alter their perception by altering the language they use to describe their experience of the world and the people in it, isn’t that a valid indication that some form of magic is occurring? Isn’t the interphase between language and reality as ambient and penetrating as air? “Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, and breath of life, I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me,” Gertrude tells Hamlet. Who gets up and drags Polonius out of the room. “This counselor is now most still, most secret, and most grave, who was in life a foolish prating knave.” So much for language. Worry, apprehension, rumination. What’s it all about? Nothing. 

My Secret Pen Pal

What if I let it be known that I’ve been enjoying a heavy correspondence with Queen Elizabeth my entire life? We began the correspondence on the very day she was coronated. February 6^th, 1952. I was four years old and working as a bartender in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  “Dear John,” she wrote, “I’m so pleased to become queen of this this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars. I wore a beautiful dress of white satin embroidered with the symbols of England. I don’t know how many times my hand was kissed. It’s sopping wet. I’ll probably get the flu.” “I’m so happy for you,” I wrote back. “I broke up a fight today. Had a bottle of whiskey smashed over my head. I love you. I hate you. I do not know who you are.” “Dear John, what is it to be indifferent, neutral, I don’t understand indifference, is it heroin, what is it? Here it is 1955, and I’m already tired of being Queen of England. Most of the time I’m pumped, excited, I write, I discharge, I indicate and exhibit, it feels athletic to be engaged, involved, to point things out to the idiots in parliament. But why? It makes no difference. They don’t lesson. I’m just a lousy figurehead.” “Dear Liz, I know what you mean. I’m so tired of breaking up barroom fights. Who are we, really? Take our titles away and we’re just beings in quest of fulfillment and meaning. I’m fascinated, for example, by what is inside and what is outside. Where does the inside begin and where does the outside end?” “Dear John, I feel better today, I just knighted the Beatles. Do you like their music? They’re such silly little men.” “Dear Liz, how do you weigh the world? I use a little rumination, a broom, and a can of whipped cream. We got a new jukebox today. It’s got some Beatles songs on it. And it’s coin-operated. I think the Beatles are fine. But I prefer the Stones.” “Dear John, well I do, too. I prefer the Stones. But don’t tell anyone.” “Dear Liz, I hope we can meet one day. What’s Prince Philip like? Is he a good guy? Does he treat you right? Thank you for asking about my new study. I do most of my writing at an old oak desk. It has a flap that is pulled down for a writing surface. For a long time I had assumed the desk was a relic from the late 19^th century and a life on the prairie that had lately been the province of the Assiniboine and Chippewa and endless herds of buffalo but there is a large hollow space inside where a Philco radio was housed. Darkness and sympathy are interwoven with light and joy on the plains of Wyoming. If I think of thoughts as clouds that would imply that the mind is a sky. But what is that? And where? The sky itself has no location. The mind has no location. At what point can one say that one is in the sky? At what altitude? There are phenomena that cannot be described as crowbars or soap. Neuroscientists say that intelligence is really about dealing with uncertainty and infinite possibilities. The human brain has about 86 billion neurons and that each neuron can have tens of thousands of synapses, which puts potential connections and communications between neurons into the trillions.” “Dear John, Yes, I would have to agree. There are few certainties in life. Princess Di was just here. I’m actually quite fond of her, but she always acts as if I don’t. I don’t understand people anymore. It’s not easy wearing the crown of a former world power. But oh, that reminds me. I was so happy to receive the Tennessee whiskey you sent. It’s been a real life saver lately. Philip caught me doing my Janis Joplin impressions in front of a mirror. Very embarrassing.” “Dear Liz, you know you got it if it makes you feel good. I bought a drill today. I hung that picture of you sitting on the throne in that lovely pink dress. You look so dignified, so royal! But we know what you’ve been up to, you naughty minx! There’s always a chair for you here at the Acrobatic Mule.”

Hope Is A Ghost

Today, I would like to build a lotus of anarchy. It should be easy. But it won’t let me. I’ve tried everything, including analogies drawn from the savagery of expectation. The prepositions scrape against one another creating Buddhism. Here he comes again: the ghost of Bob Hope. Why Bob Hope? I was more of a Bill Hicks fan. And I love Maria Bamford. Who remains very much alive. This is where refined sensibilities step away quietly and stand on the porch and listen to the rain. Another steel beam is added to the lotus, which looks down and laughs. And no, it’s not a real lotus. Nor is it a UFO. It feels unaccountable, like TV. Life is an enigma. No one knows what it is, where it comes from, what to do with it. A bunch of syntax rolls toward the end of the sentence and explodes into pronouns. I hear someone singing. The smell of desire rolls over us like a handful of fingers making pizza deliveries. Which reminds me. I’d like to tour Sardinia one day. History creates so many unrealities we need candy to remind us of what’s truly important, what is substantial from what is fiction. The staircase hugs its shape, step by step. Who is that coming down to greet us? Is it Mr. Hope? Have you ever met someone so vaporous you could slide your hand through them? Life is hard enough without making things more difficult, and & yet it is certain crazy emergencies that surge up & down our spines will sometimes create a willingness to experience life. And sigh. Yesterday there was a fly in the window. I couldn’t hear a word it said. It was engrossed on getting out. Welcome. Welcome my friend to Planet Earth. Give a big kiss to Missouri. The idea that anything can happen is exhilarating. All the borders are imaginary and all the rivers are stories. We see Prince waiting for a prescription, riding a mountain bike in a Minneapolis parking lot. Let’s drop anchor right here. I want to see what’s really out there. Autumn gleefully does its thing, falling off of the trees and destroying any pretense to the meaning of summer, which has failed us once again. The train goes by. The poem picks up on it and glories in the clickety-clack of alliteration. Here it is: the lotus at last. It looks like a Bolshevik wearing a bolo tie. Nothing ever turns out the way we expect it. So go ahead. Make something up. Who’s going to know the difference?  Besides Bob.

Zombie Seaweed Sewing Kit

There is an energy in the head demanding kingdoms. Begin with that. Put a blot on a piece of paper and the mind will make something of it. The mind craves meaning. And sacks of blood. This is the embryo. Which is a dynamic of feathers and string. Who doesn’t like garlic? Conversation will often reveal the world. The essential thing is to develop a spine and walk. It is not the world but being in the world that pulls ourselves into ourselves. Write a sentence that feels like hypnopompic snow. A cow or donkey can be a sentence happening in a large red barn. Wheels, for instance, or an airplane passing overhead. Or the great slow water of life moving toward inexorable immersion in the ocean. Carve a pumpkin. Words like doing things. Beatles songs sung together at a picnic table. This could be you. For some people, this is a good adjective. But for others it’s just puzzling. It’s a good idea to keep some poetry around. There’s more to life than carbohydrates. Poetry is another dimension. Time may fold back on itself like a West African river. In other words, a dragon eating its own tail. This is where mathematics gets crunchy. It should be obvious to anyone that potato chips are coalitions of wine and informality. There are chemicals are involved in the perception of space. If you need a little quiet at the airport the bar isn’t too crowded. Get your laptop out. If you’re famous this might be more of a problem. You may have to use the rest room. In any case, remember: Bohemia is erratic and puzzling. If you want a good look at Bohemia, peer through this tangle of blackberry vines. Watch for the thorns, the unexpected traumas, the taste of shadows drooling into abstraction. If, at the outset of time and space, you said nothing at all, you would be correct. Thoughts weigh nothing. But be careful. Conjuration is a tricky game. It can lead to camels, zombies, and seaweed. Being is ineffable. Incalculable and incomprehensible. Thinking is the rhythm of being and its fires on the eve of great battles. The artist is not an army but seduces and captures pain with the precision of an insect, which will be used later to put these things within a specific context. The world is granite, the skin is soft, and Philippe Petit walks on a 26-foot-long cable 1,350 feet above the streets of lower Manhattan. I’m not going to say that life is hard. That’s too easy. Life is a heat. Energy and whistles, scabbards and magnetism. Meaning feeds the mind but not the gut. This is why angels are often equipped with sewing kits. My first instinct in all things is to buy a load of dirt at Home Depot. We need to be grounded. We need the sensation of keys. There are thousands of variables, asteroids and scents of incense. The narrative begins boiling. I know this feeling. It’s called Arizona. It attracts thieves and rebels. Spinoza saw God as nature itself. And why not? Glowing photophores on a squid are signals that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. We’re in Portugal. Drinking wine with Fernando Pessoa. Daydreaming doesn't lead to meat. But it will feed the walls of an inner realm. The darkness is alive radiant and lepidopterous it crawls around the eyes and gives them a big upgrade. Later, when we’ve gotten to know one another a little better, I will show you my favorite feeling, which is the weightlessness of nitrous oxide. Mania defines the moment. It gets all over everything. Why not put it in a novel?

 

Dribs And Drabs

That zone of cool air by the kitchen window with the blinds down, the window panel open just a bit to prevent condensation from running down the glass and ruining the window sill. It’s a pleasant sensation, a reminder of the cold outside, the warmth inside. Warmth of the cat on my lap. The whump sound in the overhead vent above the stove whenever I heat a pot of water, the heat causing molecular expansion. It always startles me at first. I never expect it, even though I’ve heard it numerous times. The steam rising from the hot water I poured into the frying pan to loosen the carbonized matter on the sides from tonight’s dinner of chicken and stuffing. The steam rises into the air of the kitchen like an ephemeral guest. It disappears so quickly. It’s not even a guest. It’s not even a ghost. It’s just steam. My metaphors unravel. They don’t stick. I like the way the water fans out from the spoon when I rinse it. I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and wonder why Athena (our cat) is sitting on the floor staring at the wall. Then I realize it’s the night splint I’ve been using for Achilles tendinopathy. Perceptions are often unreliable. Which is why I really like the quote from yesterday’s episode of the Finnish crime drama on Netflix Bordertown: presumption prevents us from seeing the actuality of things. Amazement at the crow who – when I tossed a peanut his way – caught it in his beak. The sudden urge to sing Christmas carols while having a bowel movement. The difficulty of removing the twine left on the hook that attaches to the chain that attaches to the little cage in which R puts a cube of suet for the small birds to feed on. I poked at it with the sharp blade of a box cutter and it finally came off. Animals – squirrels or rats or racoons – gnaw through the twine until the little cage falls to the ground and they can work the little cage door open and run off with the suet. We have a harder time finding a good low branch to hang the cage from since the tree was trimmed last summer. Ideally, the branch should be low enough to reach without a ladder, or risking a nasty fall into the rockery below, but high enough so that the birds don’t feel threatened. I read that the Psyche asteroid, which is roughly the same length as Massachusetts, is mostly made of iron and nickel, and that it’s worth is estimated to be about $10,000 quadrillion. The three-way bulb in the bedroom lamp burned out, and since the overhead light provides inadequate light for reading, even with the lamp with its two bulbs to the right side of the bed by the Sangean Bluetooth radio, I put on a headlamp for reading, which is comprised of a flexible headband and a little white light. Every time I glance at my image in the closet mirror across the room from the end of the bed, it looks like a man (my face is obscured by the light) wearing a crown with a magical jewel.

 

 

The News From Hercules Road

Hey friend, what are you up to these days? Me, I’m hanging loose on the bed with a cat digging around for the month of August. August is where I float in my skull like an albatross of grace and beauty. I find minerals in Immanuel Kant. The morality of animals, the Palace of Westminster. And here I am sitting at the end of this sentence eating a tuna sandwich and scribbling words in the Dead Sea mud. When God was finished with the tigers, he made lambs, according to Mr. William Blake, who writes to us from Hercules Road, London, England. Mud likes to hang out in poetry because words like to stir up sediment. The sediment of sentiment is on the bottom. And a clear pool of singing women brings me some feelings in a paragraph. Am I sometimes obstinate? Yes. There are things I will not do. I will not put lipstick on a refrigerator. I have no theories of the organic and the inorganic. But I do have a bowl of molecules undergoing a sequence of reactions that results in pictographs and batteries. I affirm everything with saucepans. Why should it bother anyone if Galileo was being egocentric? He wasn’t. Galileo was being heliocentric. My feelings tell me that innocence is a pulse. How is the value of a feeling determined? I use a piano. I climb into the sky and get a hammer and build something. Let me show you some feelings. This one is blue and this one is walking around in my head twinkling with congeniality. I have to go now and look generously to the spirit within, even if it means dead people glimmer their way into our dimension like Christmas fairies checking in at a Motel Six. Breath and laughter are rubbed together to produce trout. This isn’t surprising. Everyone wants to pull things out of the air that aren’t natural. It leads to enchantment. We must defend what we love. Enthusiasms are rare. Imagination gives you everything. But capitalism  wants to take it all away. Do I speak irresponsibly? Very well. I like to go underwater and hear the world when it’s raining. And then pop back up in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Heaven isn’t a place. Heaven is the sky in my knee. The rest of my day is a letter postmarked from nowhere.

Internal Mechanisms

Whoever I thought I was, whoever I thought I’ve been all these years, proves more questionable with the passing years. The cells, molecules, atoms, proteins, enzymes that comprise me, this body, are me, but not me. Cells and molecules aren’t personal. This configuration of them is me, but I didn’t configure them. I had nothing to do with it. My father’s sperm, mother’s ovum, the whole idea of sperm and ovum, the whole idea of fingers and thumbs, legs and hands, hair and skull, eyes and nose and ears, aren’t my ideas, I wish they were, it’s fabulous, how all these things work, feet that keep me erect, allow me to run, walk, climb a tree, all this agility, suppleness, structure, all the evolution that led up to this, all the organisms it took to get here, the microbes in my gut, we’re all one happy family, a constellation of goo and sugars, amino acids, fatty acids, glycerol, lymphatic vessels, a symphony of globules and salts, bile pigments and bacteria. And this is me. Which isn’t me. I’m not doing any of it. It’s doing me. It’s being me. All this stuff. All this internal heat in the body comes from the earth. So what is the me in this equation? That sense of self I’ve been pushing around all these years, getting it out of bed to do things, eat, read, ingest, express itself in sounds, in words, the clothes I’ve chosen to wear, that’s me, the choices I’ve made, the choices I continue to make, with the help of chemical activity, the liver, which is the greatest source of internal heat in the body, which begins at breakfast, scrambled eggs, toast with jam. Stimulated peristaltic activity, essential amino acids, enter into the process and give this being, my being, the being that I’m being, energy and satisfaction, a smile because it tastes so good, and makes me warm. Makes me want to get up and write down what it’s doing to me. Making me do. Desire. The dynamic behind everything. Even in one’s so-called twilight years. The desire is there. To keep going. Keep talking. Keep writing. Keep on keeping on. Wear a cardigan. Guffaw. Pour another cup of coffee. Sit down and think. Fly the mind around like a helicopter. Emerge. Come forth. Discharge. Throw something out there. Anchor it on a word and make a web of words. Try to catch a pair of eyes. Another interested mind. Engaged with the same issues. Tissues. Spectacles and textures. Digits and stitches. Trying to get it figured out. Before it goes. While it goes. Being a person, these particular particles, this particularity temporarily holding a position in space, seeking transformation, another note in the performance, this sonata, this regatta, this impregnation of thought in a vertigo of uncertainty. This persistence, this groove scooped out of oblivion, chance, hazard, here now, here in this.

The Jungles Of The Skull

The first thing you do in a poem is to forget making sense. Life doesn’t make sense, why should a poem? The second thing to do in a poem is to forget you’re writing a poem. You’re not writing a poem. The poem is writing you. The third thing to do in a poem is to go swimming. Go swimming in language. Pick a language, any language, dive in and swim. If you feel wet and immediate you’re in a poem. If you feel tentative and impatient you’re in a doctor’s exam room waiting for a physical. And if you feel wobbly and unimportant you’re either on a bus or sitting on a barstool. In either case, if you’re patient, impatiently patient, patiently impatient, slimy and turbulent, nimble and insecure, dazzled and intertwined, eventually a poem will come into your head and sit down and wait for you to write it: feed it words, bring it into existence. Your job is done. You can take another swig of whiskey in good conscience and set sail another day for the shores of the iconoclastic, the jungles of the skull.

 

 

 

Buzz Kill

I’ve been in a foul mood all day owing to a disruption this morning. The intercom buzzer in our apartment went off at approximately 5:55 a.m. I thought it might be my alarm clock, which is almost as senile as I am. But the buzzer buzzed yet again. And again. I got up to investigate. R was already up. We were both perplexed, and a little afraid of what it might be. Was it a neighbor, someone in our building home from a party, perhaps a little drunk, just then realizing they were missing the key to the building? Or could it be some crazy fuck teeming with demons hoping to gain entry and rob or kill us? The mic on the intercom hasn’t worked in years. Not that it matters. It would be pointless to use it; a person could easily lie, declare an emergency, their car broken down or some other exaggerated tale of misfortune and great urgency, no smartphone, could they use our phone, etc., etc. I went to bed, worried about the intrusion, perplexed, running all sorts of scenarios through my mind, all of them a reminder of what a hellish world we’re now all occupying, a raging pandemic, a collapsing economy, failed institutions, rainforests burning down, the Arctic ice melting, methane bubbling up, a crumbling infrastructure, no ability to trust in anyone or anything any longer, a society that has completely unraveled. It’s a very dark feeling. A very insecure feeling. I squirted a dropper load of CBD/THC in my mouth and went back to bed. Next morning R went out to see if there were any sign or clue of who the person might have been. She discovered six sacks of groceries on our porch, an Amazon delivery. The food was for the people in the house next door. We were amazed at the stupidity of the driver, not just for mistaking two very different numbered addresses, but for buzzing our buzzer three times. Why three times? What was this person expecting? A tip? A funky, half-asleep assurance of acknowledgement and approbation? These guys usually just buzz once and take off. No need to sign for anything. It’s a common sight. Hundreds of deliveries are made every day. But at six in the morning? What the fuck was up with that? Were the people in the house next door having food security issues on a Saturday morning? The city is swarming with delivery trucks, most of them those deep blue Mercedes-Benz vans for Amazon’s Prime customers. I can’t wait for Amazon’s Prime Air delivery drones. What could go wrong? These imperious, unrelenting, technocratic assaults on the dignity of life and a fundamental sense of well-being are another sign as to how fucked up our world has become. Amazon emitted 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, roughly the same as Denmark. UPS put out 7.5 metric tons. Thanks in part to the pandemic, deliveries – a lot of them grocery items – is now the norm. The “new norm,” as people like to say. I hate that phrase. There’s nothing normal about it whatever. You can’t bullshit your way into a world of new norms and expect the collateral damage to remain safely under the rug. Language can’t alter reality. I wish it could. But here’s another so-called “new norm”: functional illiteracy in the United States is now 43 million. One in five Americans can’t name a single branch of government. Words are wonderful. I love words. But I’m getting increasingly tired of hearing them echo in a black hole of ignorance and brutish indifference.  

 

The Nob Hill Murder

A crow got quite angry with us today. He’s a member of the Nob Hill Gang. Or I guess you could call it the Nob Hill Murder. We began doing circles up and down Nob Hill Avenue North and 2^nd Avenue North. These are quieter streets, so we don’t have to dodge quite as many people, as we do on our usual route, which follows the crown of Queen Anne Hill, and there’s significantly less traffic, so that when we do encounter anyone on the sidewalk, we can run easily in the street. There’s a dense population of crows on Nob Hill. It may be the same murder that followed us down Bigelow last winter in such numbers it looked with we were being followed by a cloud of black wings. These crows are insatiable. We stop feeding them when our supply of peanuts runs low; we want to save some for the lame crow who comes out when I whistle on Highland Drive. When we stop tossing them peanuts, the crows become all the more persistent. They fly over our heads, coming close enough to feel the rush of their wings. One of them dropped a twig on R’s head. It might have been the same one we encountered later at the top of 2^nd Avenue North where it meets Galer. He flew down right in front of us and flapped his wings and chattered angrily at us. R relented and tossed him a peanut. He pounced on it, flew across the street and gobbled it up while his mates cawed raucously. The lame crow didn’t appear today. I think she gets discouraged by all the competition. She has to hobble around on one leg and is a little more vulnerable to attack, though she can be quite feisty. One of the homes we pass on Nob Hill is quite interesting, a lavishly decorated Victorian house with an elaborate Turkish turret upon which is inscribed in large black letters Quo Amplius Eo Amplius, which is Latin, and translates roughly as “Something more beyond plenty.” The interior is just as lavish, chock-a-block with antiques and curiosities from the Victorian era. I call it the Edward Gorey House, though it reminds me more of À rebours, a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysman published in 1884. The narrative centers on an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aristocrat and aesthete named Des Esseintes, and is mostly an agglomeration of Des Esseintes’s musings on art and religion accompanied by his exquisitely refined descriptions of hyperaesthetic sensory experiences. In his preface for the 1903 edition, Huysmans wrote that it had been his desire to depict a man “soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewelry, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.” The decadent tenor of the book was intended to fly in the face of bourgeois convention; hence the title, À rebours, which is French for “against the current.”

 

The Ever Elusive Tao Of The Here And Now

Ok Mr. Guru I’m ready now I’m ready to find now ready ready ready to be in the now soak in the now stretch my whole body out in the nowness of the now now is a noun but is it is now a noun now is a noun but it’s also an adverb a ripple a trill a paroxysm in time a sausage in a grill a nucleus with a shiny thesis the thesis of now which even now has already slipped away it slipped away as soon as I wrote the word now. I know the future isn’t real I get it it hasn’t happened yet whatever is going to happen isn’t real because it hasn’t occurred hasn’t commenced hasn’t emerged hasn’t cropped up broken apart materialized transpired perspired backfired retired inquired or gone haywire it’s just a thought an imagined event that may happen may not happen will most likely happen in a way I didn’t expect and so yes I get it there’s no reality there but isn’t it in some way apprehended doesn’t it have contours that can be reasonably predicted and doesn’t that make it at least a little real? And the past is even harder to overcome because there are things that happened things occurred concurred whispered in the dark yelled across a fence pounded on a door argued with passion argued with subtlety mistakes made awful things said terrible actions taken regrets made remorse stinging like iodine on a cut a constant ache in the brain a deep irreversible frustration how are these things not real they have real emotional depth and resonance the images aren’t hallucinated they may be distorted there is that no memory is without its distortions its magnifications its mistranslations but still it’s there swimming back and forth in the aquarium of the brain monstrous speculations climbing up and down the spine and spitting their black ugly ink in the accepting moistness and convolutions of the brain. Who wouldn’t love to ditch all that see it dissolve in a moment of enlightenment it’s not real none of it not like this fork on the counter this sock on the floor this blanket on the bed this song in my head this endless pursuit for forgiveness and peace. So where is it this wonderful sanctity this elusive now the power of now the ambience of now how would I know if I’m there ensconced squarely in the now the nonlinear now the juicy loosey-goosey now can I be immersed in it without knowing I’m immersed in it was it here long enough for me to know it was here or did it just pass by without a hint without a mind to fuel it bring it fully into existence toss an anchor out and keep it here keep it close and singing like a parakeet in a cage a cat on the lap a talismanic energy staving off death and loss and tragedy? Is it a matter of focus? This is silly. This is going nowhere. It’s not like looking for a rare butterfly. It’s like looking straight in the eye of time and seeing out the other side which just slid into the next moment which is happening now this very second unraveling in the aftermath of the first thing to come into your mind.

 

 

 

Tombs

R and I work out a new route for our run/walk. We’re fatigued from having to zigzag from sidewalk to sidewalk, dodge people constantly, many of them without masks, many of them in groups, blithely oblivious to the insidious, asymptomatic virus undermining world economies and crushing equilibrium. What used to be fun is now a stressful gauntlet. We plan a route that takes us up and down the quieter streets. My Achilles tendinopathy continues to dog my heel so I use the interval timer, five minutes running, five minutes walking, which I wear on my wrist like a watch with an elastic band. The digits have worn away, but I can still feel it vibrate when the five minutes is up. There are a lot of crows. They come swooping over our heads to get our attention and land a few feet ahead, awaiting their peanut. As we proceed down 2^rd Avenue North R digs into her bag of unsalted peanuts and finds the set of house keys we spent hours looking for just as we were about the go to bed nestled among the peanuts. We decide to keep our running and walking confined to a space of a few residential blocks, avoiding the more popular routes on McGraw and 7^th Avenue West, with its panoramic view of the Olympics. There is no snow on the Olympics, which is very strange. They’re normally capped in snow throughout the year. Now they look more like a range of mountains in Arizona, or New Mexico. The decision to confine ourselves to these quieter streets pays off; there are far fewer people to dodge, not as many cars traveling the streets. When we reach the corner of Highland and Bigelow I whistle and a few minutes later the lame crow appears with her two family members. I toss them some peanuts and we cross Bigelow to look at the big chunks of Chinese chestnut tree lying by the stump where they formed a trunk just a few hours ago. 24 trees are slated to come down on Bigelow, many of them dating back to the 1880s. They’ve all succumbed to disease and the stresses of climate change. You can see hollowed out areas in the center of the wooden slabs, evidence of disease. The Chinese chestnuts were once so numerous on Bigelow, their branches arched over the street, creating a tunnel. Most have already been replaced by oak and cherry trees. We shower and have dinner, Greek pasta. Afterward, we watch a documentary on Netflix about the discovery of mummified animals – including a lion cub – in the Saqqara necropolis about 20 miles south of Cairo. Some of the tombs date back to the First Dynasty, 4500 BC. The skeleton of a high-ranking priest named Wahtye who served under King Neferirkare Kakai during the Fifth Dynasty was found along with the skeletal remains of his family, his mother Meretmin, his wife Weretptha, his sons Seshemnefer, Kaiemakhnetier, Sebaib and a daughter named Seket. Tired from last night’s search for the house keys in our apartment, I keep drowsing off. I awake to see men crawling in and out of pits and shafts, dusting off artifacts, little statuettes, speculating on the scene unfolding before them, my eyes opening and closing as it seems I peer out of my own tomb, the plethora of ancient epiphanies and skeletal regrets winking like flashes of gold in the effulgent darkness, then sink back into voluptuous calm, “half in love with easeful death.” And I think of the silhouette of the clipper ship on a cornerstone of the retirement community on 4^th Avenue North. Why a ship? Maybe it’s a metaphor. The people in there are close to passing over, as they say, euphemistically. And isn’t a death a voyage?

 

Signs

Bright, sunny but cold October afternoon. We’re going down 2^nd Avenue North being followed by a woman on a smartphone talking loudly at the top of her lungs. She’s walking fast. We can’t shake her. This isn’t uncommon. I encounter at least one to two people talking loudly on a smartphone, though sometimes in a conversation with a walking partner. The loudness is what gets me. Why so loud? It occurs to me that these people are so terrified of solitude that they feel the need to fill the space around them with the sound of their voice. They’re terrified of what’s inside them. What’s inside them is nothing. They’re hollow. If it weren’t for their remodeling projects and baby carriers and home security systems they’d have nothing whatever to talk about. At least this is my theory, take it or leave it. Down on 9^th Avenue West we spot an orb web with a spider at its center. We’re captivated by it. The web is on a median divider with a stop sign and a few shrubs. The spider has anchored one part of the web to a small flowering plant and the other end to the top of the stop sign. I wonder which end she began first. I would guess the stop sign; she waited for a breeze to blow her to the shrub. Then, when she established her two anchor points, she began her web. I imagine there’s a good amount of thinking involved. Planning, strategizing, scheming. The web is protected from the traffic while at the same time taking advantage of the open space to catch whatever stray bugs come flying through. We come to a section of road where a city crew had done some repair on a sewer or gas line and covered it with cement. There were a set of tracks in it. We looked at the tracks and tried putting together an identity based on the tread and shape and shoe size. The tread was light and tightly patterned. There weren’t running shoes. They were designed for casual walking. They were small, about a size 6. We guessed it must’ve been a teenager. The toes came to a point, so we surmised a feminine identity. A young teenage girl. Did she do it on purpose? Or was she lost in thought, listening to music on a headset, or gazing at a smartphone? Our narrative fell short. We needed a better tracker. We imagined an expert putting an entire identity together based simply on the tread imprinted in this cement. Which is, really when you come down to it, a form of reading. Signs in the dirt. Signs in the sand. Signs in cement. Nearer to home we travel down the little trail through Bhy Kracke park. R’s blue jay puts in an appearance. R tosses her a peanut, which she pounces on immediately and flies off to bury it somewhere. Everything is a sign of something, it seems. Though clouds, I think, are a different story. No intent, nothing deliberate, just the drift of vapor, serendipity of form, illiteracy of air, blowing nowhere in particular.

 

Sad Face

I’ve never seen such a sad face. Geronimo, circa the 1890s, wearing a thick greatcoat with broad lapels, wooden buttons, a medal of some sort pinned on the right side, a long black scarf flowing down from a tight knot below the neck. The word ‘sad’ falls far too short. There’s so much character and knowledge and mystery in his eyes, his mouth clenched, long gray hair parted in the middle and swept back. Hard to say what he’s feeling. I see desert in his eyes, and capture, and the millions of tricks for survival and escaping enemies. But that’s me reading things into his eyes. I do feel them penetrating me. Is that my imagination, or his vivid but phantasmal appearance in this photograph printed on a library bookmark? I’ve been using it to keep my place in Communicating Vessels by André Breton. This book - illustrating the interplay between reality and dream - seems like an appropriate place for this bookmark. 

        I’m closer to Geronimo’s world than the one I’m currently inhabiting. Geronimo died in 1909, a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I was born in 1947. We’re separated by only 38 years. I know with absolute certainty we could have a good meaningful conversation, and that would be an unlikely scenario with your average zombie adult in the 21st century. The information on the back of the bookmark says that Geronimo converted to Christianity. I find that hard to digest. Not that I’m against Christianity. Not in its original form, before its central message was distorted by the fundamentalists who are incapable of reading metaphor in the New Testament and can only think of it as a literal text. What is it that drew Geronimo to Christianity? What did the Chiricahua Apache believe? 

        “Two elements are thought common to most Apache medicine men (shaman) and their relationship to diyi’,” writes Charles River, author of The Apache and Comanche: The History and Legacy of the Southwest’s Most Famous Warrior Tribes. “As renowned Apache scholar Keith Basso explains, ‘the term diyi’ refers to one or all of a set of abstract and invisible forces which are said to derive from certain classes of animals, plants, minerals, meteorological phenomena, and mythological figures with the Apache universe. Any of the various powers may be acquired by man and, if properly handled, used for a variety of purposes.’ Thus, the primary responsibility and expectation of the village shaman is to effectuate and maintain a personal relationship with such forces.” 

        I wonder if Geronimo’s conversion to Christianity came about as a natural perception of Christ as the Geronimo of his time, a seditious energy in the Roman Empire as it extended into the deserts of the Middle East. There was that, but also the way kindness and mercy are put forward as central values.

        Toward the end of his life, Geronimo became a national celebrity. He was able to attend the St. Lewis World’s Fair in 1904. He was surrounded by guards wherever he went. He wrote about his experience at the fair. “One time the guards took me into a little house that had four windows. When we were seated the little house started to move along the ground. Then the guards called my attention to some curious things they had in their pockets. Finally they told me to look out, and when I did so I was scared, for our little house had gone high up in the air, and the people down in the Fair Grounds looked no larger than ants. The men laughed at me for being scared; then they gave me a glass to look through (I often had such glasses which I took from dead officers after battles in Mexico and elsewhere), and I could see rivers, lakes and mountains. But I had never been so high in the air, and I tried to look into the sky. There were no stars, and I could not look at the sun through this glass because the brightness hurt my eyes. Finally I put the glass down, and as they were all laughing at me, I, too, began to laugh. Then they said, ‘Get out!’ and when I looked we were on the street again. After we were safe on the land I watched many of these little houses going up and coming down, but I cannot understand how they travel. They are very curious little houses.” 

        Geronimo also rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.

        “According to Smithsonian,” writes Bess Lovejoy in her essay “When Theodore Roosevelt Refused Geronimo’s Plea,” “a member of the 1905 inaugural committee asked Roosevelt, ‘Why did you select Geronimo to march in your parade, Mr. President? He is the greatest single-handed murderer in American history.’ Roosevelt replied, “I wanted to give the people a good show.’”

        Geronimo’s plea was a simple one: he wanted he and his people to return to their native land. They and their cattle were dying in Oklahoma for lack of the proper means for survival. “Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough and is free,” he put forward to Roosevelt. Geronimo’s request was never granted.

Looney Tunes

Remember the logo at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons? Concentric orange-red rings with Porky Pig at the center stuttering “tha tha tha that’s all folks!” That was on the cover of the French philosophy magazine I get each month. In the place of Porky Pig, the Statue of Liberty. Below the closing statement “That’s all folks!” is the statement De La Fin De La Démocratie En Amerique  (The End of Democracy in America). Wow. A lot of us have been aware of the death of democracy – or at least some hollow, phantasmal semblance of it pushed and propagandized by the media and history textbooks – for at least the last 20 years – but to find this acknowledgement from an overseas European country is stunning. Downtown Seattle looks like a war zone. Tent cities, graffitied buildings, boarded up windows. I’m a crusty, cynical, misanthropic septuagenarian and I’m still shocked by the rapidity of our decline. Not to mention the deep sadness and tragedy of it all. The magnitude of suffering. Nancy Pelosi getting all huffy-puffy and red-faced and indignant because Wolf Blitzer, of all people, persisted in asking her why she was holding up the stimulus bill that had been offered when so many people are suffering. That segment had volumes to say about classicism in America. It wasn’t so long ago she sat in front of her $24,000 refrigerator bragging about all the ice cream she has. Good God. Meanwhile, Trump has wasted no time going around spreading coronavirus to his loyal fans. If you were to ask me for an image that best illustrates our predicament, I’d say The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.

 

Stephane Mallarmé Leading A Prison Escape

The mind tosses words like grenades, a bouquet of gold & beryllium. The murmur of an old squid in the middle of an audition. Stephane Mallarmé leading a prison escape. The splash of color on wrapping paper comes to our rescue, providing vivacity & spit. We gaze at one another like pilgrims, falcons on our shoulders, crabs walking toward us with kisses & resumés. There are seven shadows in a shark, one of them is an occipital lobe, & another has locations & meanings. The main thrust is a cup of tea teeming with Buddhism, bubbles winking in sunlight. Existence tastes stronger if it’s boiled in reflection. Sing the desert nomads in their kingly robes. 

        My position is separate from your frond. I have longitude but I’m clean out of socialism. Can you lend me a can of isometrics & an incessant straddle that I can use to mute the song of the shoulder blade? My right arm is indicative of the moon in whose light I plead for the spasms of the tenderloin. And you call this poetry? I’m not calling it anything, least of all a guitar. I know a hallucination when I see one. The majority of my noises are nocturnal. The rest is silence. Perfect as the feather of a chicken. Noble as the periphery of a stanza parked in the eye of a urethra. My transmissions are mere protons, but the midnight trilogy is the wink of a wildcat. 

        I sometimes wonder if I know what it is I’m saying. When am I saying something & when is language saying something? Everybody listen to me & return my ship. I’m your captain, though I’m feeling feasible these days, & quite palpable. It’s a vulnerable position, especially at my age. Am I a magician? I have a box of magic next to me. It’s a book called Take This Accordion & Squeeze It Hard. Can I sell you anything? Would you like a library? A study? An aviary? A glockenspiel? An odor? Can I sell you a perfume? This is a fragrance called Consider Me Holy And Buy Me A Home In Hollywood. It shoots out of the bottle in a spray of minivans. 

        The prattle turns stagnant unless someone comes along with the right equipment & gets eccentric with the string. For example, the very presence of poles makes the nosegay plausible. The purring is unnatural, but nubile. The hummingbirds hover by me like the protons of a slippery piece of thought. No, I can’t forget this evening, or the look in your face as you were leaving. But I did forget the sorrow. I let it go. It grew wings & took to the sky, like all good compulsions longing for the vapor of nothingness. Years later, it all gets scattered in social media. It’s a technocratic world, but the underpinnings are noble, & live like worms in the jaws of the earth. 

        And sometimes I just sits. If it fits me. If it suits the time & place. If there’s a good chair to sit in. Or a floor. Preferably a carpeted floor. Although hardwood is de rigueur, there are other options. Hypotenuse steppes with right angle choices & lightning on the menu. The ball is fictitious. Let me roll it to you. It is my duty to inform you that eczema is not a condition it’s a teleology involving skates & Hollywood Bowl. The rupees are russet this time of year & the incentives are vicious. This pass will be good until the spurs come. If you stop acting like a horse people will stop treating you like an IOU. This isn’t flypaper. But the doughnuts are free for registered holes.

The Sound Of Rain

I love the sound of rain in summer and early fall when there’s still enough leaves on the trees to make the rain audible. There’s something really rich about that sound, fertile and quiescent. It’s soothing. Thuds and crashes from the kitchen above our bedroom put an end to the reign of the rain. I don earphones and watch the French news on my laptop, stories about Prince and the subterranean vault containing tons of his music in his palace in Minneapolis and the woman who has been curating it, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic, a man rising out of a deep crevasse where the earth has sunk due to the melting of the permafrost carrying the huge bone of a prehistoric rhinoceros, the exhaustion of nurses due to the coronavirus picking up speed again, a woman deeply moved when she meets the gendarme that saved her during the floods last week in the Alpes-Maritime department. Next day, 7:40 p.m. October 12^th, I conclude a bout of proofreading by watching Stevie Ray Vaughn perform “Texas Flood” live at the El Macombo, July 20^th, 1983. The El Macombo, turns out, is in Toronto, Ontario. This is the same place where the Stones put on a surprise show in 1977, the one where Margaret Trudeau (mother to current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) was observed partying with the stones, somewhat to the embarrassment of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She’s been a busy woman since then. In 2010 she authored Changing My Mind, a book about her personal experience with bipolar disorder, and in 2014 she visited Mali as an ambassador of WaterAid Canada. The French humanitarian Sophie Petronin arrived in Bomako, Mali, in a white flowing traditional dress after her release from Islamic extremists (strange word, ‘extremist’) last Friday, October 8^th, 2020. She’d been helping orphans and other children suffering from malnutrition in the northern city of Gao when she’d been abducted on Christmas Eve, 2016. I watch Gabor Maté give a talk for the Bioneers on YouTube. He talks about the importance of treating disease holistically, taking in all the factors impending on a life, nurturing a life, poisoning a life, inducing a life, indoctrinating a life, soothing a life, including a life, abusing a life, excluding a life, grooming a life, dooming a life, bejeweling diffusing ballooning approving a life. The water we drink, the food we eat, certainly, but also vibes, emotions, including the emotions of our mothers when we were in the womb, it goes that deep, that broad, that far. And how alienated we’ve become. Alienated from nature, alienated from ourselves, perverted by false values, the stresses of a materialistic, competitive culture. Instabilities and uncertainties pumping our systems and internal organs with stress hormones, cortisol and adrenalin. This is followed by Kurt Cobain’s heartrending, shattering version of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV’s unplugged series in 1993. “My girl, my girl, don't lie to me / Tell me where did you sleep last night / In the pines, in the pines / Where the sun don't ever shine / I would shiver the whole night through.”

Freedom From Freedom

I remember floating at the bottom of a swimming pool in the courtyard of an apartment building in San José, California, in the summer of 1965. I’ve always been able to hold my breath for long periods of time and it felt peaceful at the bottom of the pool. What I didn’t count on was how it might look to someone. When I surfaced, I encountered a man on his way to work who had been startled by seeing me on the bottom. He said he thought I might be drowning and almost jumped in to save me. The memory, like so many of my memories, remains brightly lucid and detailed, still charged with the emotion of the moment, and all the might have beens and should have beens and could have beens. All the alternatives that would’ve resulted in a very different present. The past is always pulling me back, engaging my attention, while simultaneously projecting scenarios in the future. This continual dissociation of the self can be experienced in the mode of lightness (I is another) or of responsibility (its engagement by the past and future). 

        “Sartre has a definition of consciousness as a perpetual decompression of the self: it is no longer what it was, it is not yet what it will be, therefore it has no substance, it is always in the rupture, the separation, the tearing away from the past and projecting it towards the future. The truth of consciousness is necessarily a becoming that advances by way of division, rewinding, spiraling, just like History. Such a truth poses the problem of solidarity with oneself: how can I still be myself while perpetually betraying myself? If I never stop projecting myself towards something other than myself, I only exist in relation to my projections. If I just say, ‘I am what I’ve done,’ it means that I’m already dead, a mummy to myself.” – François Noudelman, “Sartre pense à partir de ses contradictions” [my translation] 

        It’s easy to obsess about other actions one might’ve taken in the past; the alternatives are dizzying. And what would’ve been the right action – the unequivocally, unambiguously correct thing to do, to say – is unreachable. It no longer exists except as an ongoing narrative in one’s memory. The more you alter the narrative the more tortured you become. You can’t change it. You might be able to reinterpret it, but you can’t change it. It is both real and unreal. The emotional charge it carries is real. And unreal. It is both mutable and static. All you can do is look for amnesty. But the amnesty has to come from within. The chronicler must frame the chronicle differently, but the picture doesn’t change. There are no clouds in the museum. Only exhibits behind glass. Dioramas and straw. Cognitive maps in the hippocampus.

        “On the responsible side, you have to be accountable and supportive of your actions: you have done something or not, and you cannot say that this me was someone else. To try to solve this problem, Sartre finds a Hegelian solution, a movement of totalization - detotalization and re-totalization - where meanings are constantly reabsorbed, diverted and redirected by others and by History. The result is a sense which both depends on me and does not depend on me. It is the movement of History, of ideology, of otherness that I live, which means that I am not totally in control of the meaning of my actions.” – Ibid. 

        Are we mistranslating our own lives? What responsibilities embolden us and what responsibilities drag us down? Does art make us selfish? Do perforations token weakness or convenience? Wouldn’t it be nice to crawl into a parenthesis in the middle of our narrative and hibernate for an entire winter? Or go back in time? Drop out of the narrative and surrender to the inevitability of it all? Then return with a sack of drugs and a smile. 

        Everyone wants freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom from doubt, freedom from chores, freedom from tedium, freedom from ourselves, freedom from others, freedom from routine, freedom from guilt and remorse, freedom from commitment, freedom from pigment, freedom from bewitchment, freedom from infringement, impingement and the beaten path. What would it be like to enjoy a minute of freedom? Real, absolute, total freedom. Would that newly opened space leave us with more decisions to make? More possibility? Overwhelm us with possibility? I’ve heard some people talk about how exhilarating it is to be in the military because there nearly all your decisions are made for you by other people. And that is a sensation of total freedom. Is this why people are drawn to totalitarian regimes? To dictators? You don’t have to be yourself in a uniform. You don’t have to take responsibility for yourself. You give that responsibility to others. 

        "Therefore, freedom, Sartre's favorite word, is woven with responsibility and otherness. The truth of free conscience follows the tortuous paths of bad faith and inauthenticity. There are no moral values that would guarantee any of it a sincere uprightness. Value is only an external virtue. How, then, to escape the pretense, the lie to oneself? On the theoretical level, the rewinding of consciousness is a metamorphosis which conveys past commitments and reincarnates them in new projects, new bodies, new situations. Consistency is saved. On the other hand, on the existential level, it is a divided subject, fractured, which compartmentalizes and seeks solutions of continuity, as evidenced by the life and commitments of Sartre. And the connection between these two dimensions, moral and existential, arises from an endless debate with oneself and with others. As the closing line from No Exit says, ‘Well, let's continue.’” – Ibid.

Confessions Of A Rogue Cliché

It occurs to me a lot lately that I’ve become a cliché: an old man disoriented by a new world in which nothing makes sense. Customer services run by robot. References nobody gets. I met a young man once out walking & in a casual conversation referenced Jimmy Page. He didn’t know who Jimmy Page was. I said he played with Led Zeppelin. He hadn’t heard of Led Zeppelin. And so that world is gone. And we’re in a new one. I wouldn’t call it a brave new world. I’d call it a crisis. A catastrophe. A dystopia. But these are the words of an old man. They go nowhere. They get rendered in pixels in social media. For other old people. Who are likewise dazed & confused. 

        There’s an advantage to listening to music fifty or more years old. Many of the musicians are gone. They looked beautiful at the time, engorged with their own sense of beauty, polished & sent into the world in songs like “Walk Away Renee” & “Unchained Melody.” It’s a good lesson. I guess. The lesson being nothing lasts, grab it while you can, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. It’s a not a hard lesson to figure out, any child could do it, but it’s a hard lesson to achieve in a really meaningful way. It’s hard to swallow the fact of one’s non-existence when big emotions are coursing through your body, & most of the people from a particular time are gone. But the angst & urgency to live makes damn good music. “I am a passenger / And I ride, and I ride / I ride through the city's backsides / I see the stars come out of the sky / Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky / You know it looks so good tonight” 

        Gotta hand it to Iggy Pop, going out on the stage at the Sydney Opera House at age 72 with a bare torso revealing a modest paunch & a rugged Viking face of hardship & joy & smiling crags. He’s still on the lithe side, & muscular. My molecules are having fun today. And yes, I wanna be your dog. Pain increases the savor of life, gives it piquancy & range. So does sniffing butts. The main thrust is metamorphosis. One minute human, next minute poodle. Or a churlish chihuahua. Or a metaphor wandering around looking for something to do. “And now I'm ready to close my mind / And now I'm ready to feel your hand.” Roll over. Show my belly. Let my tongue hang out.

        Is the world saturated with music? Yes, & it’s also a persistent aspiration. Someone singing off key underground. Breath is a franchise for the propagation of sound. An old woman milking a cow. It’s all a music of slop & pail, mushrooms growing at the side of the road. Jupiter. Paganini. Prague. Music is organized sound. It floats the idea of metal, as if a walrus flopped forward deepening the sense of address that a forklift loaded with eggs might have of the future, which is feverishly unreal. So the mind ties knots of sound to hold the air together, which become feelings written in chalk on a blackboard, equations to make the unseen seen, & articulate steel. 

        Meanings shift with focus. Reality is never any one thing, it’s a multitude of overflowing telephones, pullulations & gnarly engagements. If you pluck a string a genie appears with a cryptic smile & a cigar. There are cherubs to remind us that the use of levers can liberate the elephants from their labor, if the elephants can be considered as living creatures & not just stewards of wisdom. Consider, if you will, the gallantry of Spain, or the nature of quarks & gluons, which are words, which are used to solve the problems of the intangible, & cell phone signals, which are everywhere, & justify the weight of a pawn with the tweezers of a king.

Day Of The Nail

 R left this morning to get some unsalted peanuts and a new scooper for our litter box at PetCo, then a flu shot and some groceries at Safeway. I returned to watching the Jimmy Dore Show on YouTube. She returned minutes later. Our left rear tire was flat. Again. This tire has been patched not quite a year ago. We called AAA and a truck arrived within a half hour. AAA is an amazing service. They always arrive in a timely fashion, even when they’re busy and the city is teeming with automotive mishaps, and get you back on the road in an embarrassingly short amount of time. AAA roadside assistance drivers are automotive wizards. The AAA driver changed the tire and discovered a big fat nail stuck in it. We speculated on where we might’ve driven over a nail in the road. The most likely culprit is a home remodeling project up the street, at the steep part of Bigelow where the road crests. It’s a bit dangerous there, the western sun in your eyes, people driving fast over the hill on the downside, people rocketing up. It’s amazing there aren’t more collisions there. This is where various workers, electricians, plumbers, glaziers and carpenters have been parking their trucks, half on the sidewalk, half off, creating yet more hazard. It’s also messy, bits of wood and glass and plaster strewn about. The nail might’ve fallen off of a truck. There are lots of remodeling projects and building construction in our neighborhood. Home expansion and remodeling has been going at fever pitch for the last few years. The intensity seems to increase with every catastrophe, the latest being Trump’s testing positive for Covid. We drove out to Carter Subaru on Aurora to get the tire patched. They’ve got a nice waiting room there. We found a desk with several stools and I got out my French edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, a New Directions English translation and a French dictionary. R brought Revenge of the Lawn, a collection of short stories by Richard Brautigan. It’s a nice waiting room, spacious, everyone wearing a mask. It was quiet as a library. Two women with a big white poodle sat together, the poodle's forelegs on one of the women’s lap as she caressed and petted him and he returned the affection with a big wet tongue. A middle-aged rather rugged looking man with a beard did paperwork at a small table. Another bearded man sat in an armchair reading a book. There was a TV on, but it was close captioned with the sound off. I wish they did this at the airport, where the TVs are ubiquitous. I wonder if we’ll go to the airport again. The pandemic feels endless. It keeps getting worse. And yet they’ve opened the fitness gyms. That’s insane. We prefer to exercise outside, where we’ve been able to work out a new running trail with fewer people to dodge. It was disappointing not to go for our usual run and feed the crows and scrub jays. It was a beautiful sunny day, uncharacteristically warm for early October. A warranty covered the tire repair, which helped take some of the sting out. We stopped at PetCo on the way back, got three big bags of unsalted peanuts and some canned cat food, and returned home. Hot dogs and three-bean salad for dinner, we watched people in the mountain villages of the Alpes-Maritime department in the south of France dig themselves out of the mud left when the rivers were engorged by three months of rain in ten hours, swelling over the banks and collapsing houses and tossing cars like dice. A man used a bow to shoot a rope across a river to use as a line to deliver food and other items to the villagers still trapped on the other shore.

 

 

Wilderness Of Pain

Where do you go looking for American mythology? It was easy to find in the 50s: John Wayne, tough individualism, taciturn straightforwardness, distrust of language, useless book-learnin’. Early 60s the Kennedys, Martin Luther King. Social unrest jiggled the mythology jar, up bubbled a weird utopian fervor for outer space, technology. The rationality of science. This was before corporate money began influencing what came out of the lab. Science was noble. Superstition was ugly & dangerous. But things got weird again. Weirder in a good way. The Beatles. Humor, eccentricity, imagination defeated the darker energies of misanthropy & militarism. The jocks in high school took a back seat. Jim Morrison appears, writhing, contorting on stage: lost in a Roman wilderness of pain / And all the children are insane. 

        In the U.S., success is gauged according to how much money one has. How big your home, how sleek and powerful your car, how attractive your wife, how handsome and alpha your husband. It’s a grotesque mythology, a psychology void of weightless transcendence. Everything is pragmatic. It’s a mythology of consumption. People taking selfies at Maccha Picchu. 

        Meaning isn’t easily packaged. Odysseys are involved. One doesn’t live one’s life so much as engineer it. Components are arranged to promote self-esteem. The idyllic place of consumption is a cruise ship. Everyone is untethered from the bleak anonymity of the landscape. Life is centered around alcohol, food and entertainment. Time is endless, like the ocean. But there are no white whales in these oceans. Just ice skating and surfing simulation. Classes in personal development. “The Story Of You,” a story-telling festival “where guests share their experiences and a video booth where stories can be uploaded to social media.” 

        What if any average day was like meeting Jack Kerouac on a bus? Would you be gregarious or coy? Would you feel the friction of commerce? Are these questions necessary? 

        The percentage of people who enjoy reading compared to the percentage of people who prefer playing video games is disturbing. But there’s no harm done if everything is protoplasm. We dwell in kettledrums. We wear ornaments in our ears & tattoos on our arms. Old men doing jigs in jukebox joints. And nobody has a secure job and nobody fully trusts anyone else. And every day is like meeting William S. Burroughs on a bus. A blue bus. Headed west. 

        Have you noticed how people look lately? Everyone looks lost. Answers are hard to come by. So is the truth. And reality. And other things that aren’t things but hyperrealities whose topographies are easier to navigate when they’re properly seen for what they are: simulations. Jokes. Substitutes. Illusions. Real things are incalculable and therefore codified. Domesticated into easily consumed pixels. Honor. Virtue. Quality. These are the things that seem to disappear first when an empire collapses. 

        “Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus,” writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic Monthly, “and despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered.”

        Hot August afternoon we go walking by an eggplant purple Scion sedan, the front panel just behind the front tire on the driver’s side riddled with bullet holes. He must’ve gone through a bad section of town, says R. We lead such freakish lives these days. When did human life begin to live so detached from nature? Nature isn’t external. Nature is everywhere. It’s another word for life. Where there’s life, there’s nature. And where nature is under assault, life is under assault. 

        “As Michel Foucault explains in his lecture of February 7, 1979, there is a latent conflict between society and capitalism. This conflict stems from the ‘irrational rationality’ of capitalism. Capitalist reason reveals its irrationality, among other things, in the field of public health: in a model where only the search for profit counts, health is seen as a cost that must be reduced. But this isn’t rational, because the poor health of its workers cannot guarantee a strong economy. Knowing that capitalist logic can destroy society if it attacks education, health, care for the elderly or undermines the environment, the role of the state is to ensure a balance of power.” – Teresa Pullano, “Bienvenue dans l’Europe d’après”

        Late stage capitalism is a juggernaut crushing everything in its path of any genuine value while exalting wealth and property and exulting in its ceaseless propaganda. High-end jeans with fake mud on them. Sterling silver Tiffany and Co ping pong paddles. Moschino dry-cleaning bag dress. Think rich to get rich. Bullshit packaged in luxurious smiles. Rags to riches. Rugged individualism. Fake it till you make it. “Everything is worshiped and nothing has value,” to quote Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) from La La Land. 

        “The artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine.” 

        That day in Paris some few years ago (and yet what now feels like an epoch ago, due to the pandemic) while walking down the rue Bonaparte I spotted a window display of letters by luminaries such as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust & Francis Poulenc. There’s an elegance in the written word that has disappeared from the digital age, which has decimated print media & resulted in a society of zombies. The pens are graceful, the dark ink alluring. The paper must be high quality: it’s still white. It’s such a pleasure to be reminded of a time when language & writing were synonymous with thought, visions transferred from absinthe to ink, ink to infinity. 

       Writing has taken a backseat to the podcast, tweet and YouTube bullhorn. Everyone is big on oral communication networks now. What writing does is allow talking a space to find its revolt. Writing isn’t talking. Writing is redemption. It’s where we redeem our confusion for the wisdom of silence.

Spark Muffin

Clean hair stabs the plywood. Guzzles wealth. Eyes gaze at umber. Development. Ovation. Find France without brooms. Steer murder invite asking. Starry arms drive. Complete the ultramarine consonant cake. Start contrasting pyramids with exhumation. Anthology regrets tumble in restless phenomena. Thickly. Draw a palomino. Wrestle and skulk. Concepts include a boiling cello. Spark muffin. Exhortation necessarily chills despite drums. Spangles the tube farm. Ponder the force of personality. Does it hawk or does it crackle? Rocks cure the greeting. Walk the dachshund Corot road. Polish this attraction in magic. Twist bacteria. Press on hunger. Let the collar stud flap its monsters.

        Rattle Cubism and wander a time. Fulminate. Raw stratosphere. Anarchic ecstatic rain. Imagine a language that yields balloons. Buffalo Bill mushrooms nutmeg and art. Send a respectable glow. Become a slogan. Prophecy needs reflection. Operated iron. Incidents roar amplification by pleading. Wild indicative steel. We shout a ruffled metamorphosis. Writing can be a mimicry. But when it’s not it’s infinite. Our reach has appetite. The mouth spits its buckles and the tears come. Solace jiggles its cream. Wilderness threatens the chronology. History apprehends its detonation. And so begins a beautiful dereliction.

        Steal excuses. Excuses are landscapes. Sand. The trumpeted army swelled into history. And this stepped into stilts. The prospects ached. Fondle autumn it will crawl into upheaval. Green paradox harked by blossom. Wheels drool a sparkling velocity. A lobster’s cracked intentions burn into sound. Pounds of heaven. Whales. Bubbly reality chopped into dreams. Give me more. Collect these words and make them display herself. Marry it in tin. Teeming with behavior. For it impels reading. My plays mutate into loons. And the zippers come undone. Easels caressed by circle. We give them angels. And they surface in tools.

        Beaten copper. Fold the smell into hope. Or despair. One will bring wonder and one will bring crying. Eat the boiling elegy. Snap it into place. Place is where the area spreads into ribs. Trickle about the ponder cogs. My favorite instinct is about to turn vermilion. The cemetery offers union. But who wants union? Sweeten the sneeze with celery. Wear earrings and juggle vowels. The consonants will follow in tilted ensembles. Explain spoons. Greed exaggerates computers. We saw it coming. And it came. And it’s still here. Tension mirrors and sticks of light.

Stowaways Alleyways And Castaways

A green locust has been hitching a ride on our Subaru these past few days. We first noticed him as we were getting ready to drive to Ballard. He was crawling around on the windshield. He crawled to the bottom and disappeared in the narrow space between the metal of the hood and the glass of the windshield. He reappeared when we returned. Crawled out of his hiding place and went for another promenade on the windshield. I noticed him today as I was backing into our parking space in back of our building. The sunlight revealed the glistening strands of an orb web over the rearview mirror and when I glanced to the right I saw the locust on the surface of the other rear view mirror. I wonder why he – or she – is so attached to our car. It’s not unusual to find spiders living in the hollow cup-shaped mounts of the rearview mirrors, especially this time of year, late September, early October. The air has been spectacular, clear and fresh with a very slight chill imbuing an otherwise unseasonably warm temperature.  A neighbor tells me more smoke is on its way from California, the wildfires now raging in the Napa Valley. I hope not. The last smoke lasted a full week and appears to have decimated the population of songbirds. I haven’t seen any chickadees, sparrows, robins, starlings, pine siskins, goldfinches, flickers or red-breasted sapsuckers since the smoke cleared. Just the usual scrub jays and crows. Corvids are hearty birds. I remember the family of crows on Bigelow that flew down late in the afternoon on one of the worst smoke days – the sun a vague yellowish blob in a sky of sooty grey – gliding down to the grass after I tossed some peanuts on a neighbor’s lawn. It’s a nice spot under a giant chestnut that’s probably over a hundred years old and is slated to come down soon. It’s been struggling with some sort of disease the last several years, some of the branches are already dead. It’ll be sad to see it gone. We got a pizza after picking up prescription at Safeway and ate it while watching The Mystery Of Henri Pick with Fabrice Luchini and Camille Cottin about a library on the coast of Brittany consisting entirely of rejected manuscripts – The Library of Refused Books – inspired by a Richard Brautigan story. A young female publishing executive discovers the manuscript of a book called The Last Hours Of A Love Story ostensibly written by the owner of a pizza parlor in the same small town; the novel is published and becomes a huge hit. The plot thickens when the host of a TV book show – Fabrice Luchini – refuses to believe the book was written by the owner of the pizza parlor and becomes so obsessed with finding the truth he loses his wife and his job and goes to Brittany to vindicate himself. It was a lighthearted movie with a lot of commentary on the publishing industry and book culture in France. It was inspiring to see houses and apartments chock-a-block with books. It was like watching an alternative reality, a place where serendipitous treasures reside in the quiet splendor of the outcast and castaway.

 

 

Francis Ponge's Fruit Crate

I dropped off my failed implant at the orthodontist’s. It was basically a crown attached to a screw. You could screw it into a wall and have a molar emerging from a wall. You could frame it with incisors. Or lips. I wanted to donate the failed implant to a lab that studies them and ostensibly searches for clues as to how they might’ve failed. The orthodontist’s office was closed for lunch so R and I parked and sat in the car and waited. It was a raining a little. Our windows fogged up. When the orthodontist’s office reopened I dropped the implant off with the receptionist and asked to use the bathroom. Sure thing, she said. I grabbed the bathroom key, which is attached to a toothbrush. On the way home we stopped at Safeway to get my medication. Antidepressants. Four of them. My doctor won’t give me a full prescription until I see him for my routine physical. I’ve been reluctant to go because the clinic is within the hospital complex and I worry about Covid. You pass by an emergency room to get to the other clinics, which are accessed by a bank of elevators in the adjacent lobby. It doesn’t feel safe, although clinicians stationed in the lobby are taking everyone’s temperature and asking pertinent questions about their health before they allow them access to the clinics. I phoned earlier in the week to request at least an extension to my current prescription. The receptionist said she would pass the information on. But the pharmacy did not have my medication. The doctor hadn’t called. R called the doctor’s office again and asked the receptionist to relay the message that I needed the medication. Somebody dropped the ball. I still don’t know if it’s there. We came home and had dinner and watched two episodes of Cobra Kai. The I went to the bedroom to read. I heard the banshee scream of a power saw. One of the members of our building is still sawing wood. He’s been sawing wood for three months now. He has a power saw set up on the porch a few feet away from our bedroom window. We don’t know what he’s sawing the wood for. We can’t imagine anything within the space of even a three-bedroom apartment that would require that much wood. Thank God for ear plugs. Could it be he’s building an arc on top of the building? The Greenland ice sheet is melting. It won’t be long before all the world’s seas begin to rise. If I see our neighbor collecting animals – bears, elk, rhinoceroses, elephants, fruit flies, peacock spiders, coatimundi, storks, axolotl, mole rats, pangolin, Tasmanian Devil, cassowaries, alligators, kinkajous, vampire bats – we might lean more confidently toward the ark scenario. The animals will need a shelter. I think he’s gone through several forests. Also in the news today, more than 7 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the U.S. The U.S. is now the hardest-hit country in the world for both cases and deaths. But is “hardest-hit” the right modifier? It’s bad here because so many chose to ignore it. People have lost faith in their institutions. And I think about the fragility of Francis Ponge’s fruit crate: best not to weigh too heavily on its fate.