Snippets

 I turn the car around, head west up the easement, can’t see for the sunlight, pull the visor down, doesn’t help, I’m blinded by the light. I find the Hotel Recamier on a bookmark in Proper Name by Bernadette Mayer, Un Hôtel Chic À Saint-Germain de Prés. I remember passing the wall mural of “Le bateau d’ivre” early in the morning to go for a run in Le Jardin de Luxembourg. Paganini’s violin bow going all over the musical spectrum on YouTube, coming to me through noise-cancelling earphones, drowning out the noises from the kitchen above. Tuxedo cat sleeping on a blanket of fluffy blue sheep on a white background, curled, white nose on white paws. Those squiggles on Oreo cookies, a text for the tongue until it crumbles followed by a surge of sweetness in the white frosting. Sinking feeling when I overhear one of the internet cable workers announce to his colleagues “I discovered something.” Not what you want to hear after several days of service disruption, confusion, misinformation, chaos & noise. Another reminder of the precipitous drop in competence in late capitalist society. Story on the French news about men in Senegal devoted to saving the sea turtle, a group of men pulling a huge sea turtle into their shallow draft wooden boat, one of them stroking the turtle’s head as the creature is examined for wounds & ill health. One of the men dives in after it’s been released, legs & flippers agitating in clear water. A female acupuncturist in Phoenix, Arizona has signed up for a trial test for a Covid-19 vaccine. How do I know this? I check Google News every day for reports on a vaccine. R tells me two more Seattle businesses went under, Bamboo Garden Vegetarian Cuisine & the College Inn in the University District, where I used to eat dinner after work at Mailing Services every day after my divorce. I keep thinking about Rod Stewart’s model train layout & the extreme attention to detail. Even the pavements look used. Magritte’s The Human Condition – an oil painting of an oil painting on an easel in front of a window that is itself a painting of the scene from a window – is reflected back at me on the bedroom closet mirror, with the name Magritte at the bottom in big black letters spelled backwards.

 

Coin Stars

The cost of a ferry ride between Seattle & Bainbridge Island: $9.05 for an adult, 19-64. The cost of a ferry ride across the Mersey: £4.90. The cost of a ferry across Lake Michigan: $50 for car and driver. The cost of a flight to Mars: less than $500,000, says Elon Musk. The cost of a boat ride across the River Styx: one obolus. See Charon, ferryman of Hades. Bring a change of clothing.

An obolus is roughly one-sixth of a drachma. I’m not sure where either coin may be found. Maybe Charon takes credit cards. Though money borrowed from a future that doesn’t exist is problematic.

The oldest coin in the world is a 1/6 stater coin and is more than 2,700 years old. It’s on view at the British Museum, & is made of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold & silver. It was discovered in Ephesus, an ancient Hellenic city near present day Selçuk in Izmir Province, Turkey. The coin is hand-struck with the image of a lion on one side. The lion has an odd bump on its forehead known as a “nose wart.”

I usually go around with a bunch of change in my pocket. I’m often too lazy, or in too much of a hurry, to work out the exact amount of money when I’m making a purchase. I hand over the appropriate amount of paper currency & stuff the change into my pocket. When the bulge grows embarrassingly big, I put all the change into a ceramic jar, & then at some point in the future we take it to a Coinstar to have it converted into cash.

Money in the United States is weird. It bears no relationship to reality whatever. It’s impossible to put a true value on anything, particularly in a world so obsessed with quantifying everything, while remaining stubbornly oblivious to anything intangible, like quality.

Example: Wall Street has been going like gangbusters while the rest of the country is enduring catastrophic economic losses due to the Covid virus. The disconnect is breathtaking. Speculators live in a world of irreality, attempting to profit from stocks, bonds, commodity futures, real estate & fine art. Arbitrageurs trade fungible instruments in markets of extreme volatility. It’s a world of pure mathematics; nothing has any real existence. Goldman Sachs employs particle physicists from places like CERN to work on highly complex financial instruments.

Wall Street has been exemplary in helping to turn the United States into a Hades of bankruptcy, corruption, extortion & fraud. Things that once had real value – honor, honesty, accountability – are non-existent. Vanished like steam. The kettle is everything; the power that made the water boil means nothing. It’s a world of extreme nihilism. Nothing transcendent has real value.

But what about art? Art is a viable investment. This may be the one exception. But how a work of art finds its value – it’s financial, not its intrinsic aesthetic value – is recognizability. As soon as an artist becomes a celebrity, the art has value for the investors. It’s not a sophisticated world. It’s a world of vulgarity and deep ignorance concerning the real value of art.

Salvator Mundi, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting Christ holding a sphere of crystal in his left hand & making the sign of the cross with his right hand, was auctioned at Christie’s on November 15^th, 2017, for $450.3 million. The crystal sphere represents the sphere of the heavens, “the court of the Great god, the habitacle of the elect, and of the ceolestiall angelles,” according to 16^th century mathematician and astronomer Thomas Digges. “This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling our sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect.”

The orb in Christ’s hand is mesmerizing. The glass is pure. There’s no distortion. There are three white dots inside, which may represent the constellation Leo, and the palm of Christ’s hand, obscured by a multitude of bubbles. Some believe the orb may represent the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, the substance capable of concerting base metals to gold. The lack of distortion caused a degree of contention over the authenticity of the painting, since it was uncharacteristic of Da Vinci to eclipse scientific reality. But if you look closely, and use a little imagination, you can see the interior of the ball doesn’t conform to material reality; it’s the entire boundlessness of the universe. He isn’t holding a glass ball. He’s holding eternity. Which is light as a feather, and worth nothing whatever on the stock exchange.

The Politics Of The Fairy Tale

What is the hardest lesson that life has to teach? I mean, apart from the obvious, which is death. Getting across that parking lot at Disneyland? Maybe the first is that life isn't a teacher. Life is life. The central goal of life seems to be to reproduce. That's neither romantic nor fulfilling. Maybe for others. Not for me. One man’s mission is another man’s sedition. Nowhere is it said that one must accumulate wealth. Worship wealth. Weaponize wealth. Kill for wealth. The sun just does what it wants. It explodes. Now that's a way to live. Continually explode. Exuding light and heat and polarized sunglasses. Feelings complete the picture with birds & pretzels.

Because that’s what feelings do. They tenderize the hard thick gristle of blunt reality. Whatever that reality happens to be. There’s no single reality. Realities are socially constructed. And filtered by the senses. More than filtered. Shaped. It all comes down to the body. This thing I walk around in. This thing of bone and skin that I seem to be looking out of, through these eyes.

Or smelling. Or touching. Or hearing. Or squeezing. Or sucking. Or walking around in a daze. Dazzled. Frazzled. Baffled.

That weird tendency to talk about my body as if it were separate from me, a fragile & cumbersome bag of water held together by bones whose injuries & illnesses prevent me from doing what I want to do, which, at present, is run. Achilles tendinopathy. So I get mad at it. As if I could do better without it. Which would be weirder yet. No legs, no arms, no eyes, no ears, no fingers, no nose. Just energy. Like Ariel in The Tempest. Instead of Caliban shoveling potato chips into my mouth. A plague upon the tyrant that I serve! But which is more of a tyrant: the mind, or the body? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? Asked Whitman.

Love is anhedral. Wrote Tom Raworth. In a short asymmetrical poem. Titled: “Sky Tails Putschist.” Adjective: (of a crystal) having no plane faces. Nobody has a plain face when they experience love. The face becomes eccentric. Under the influence. Head down. On a barroom table. In Moscow. Idaho. Where the wind is elastic. And the fences are rectangular. And the moon is spherical. And the sky is unpunctuated & so goes on & on into space until there’s no sky there’s just space. Which is voluminous. And infinite. And planet Earth is supported by a turtle.

There’s always a mess in message.

I don't know which is worse, a stomach ache or a headache. You can ride out a stomach ache. As soon as the food that caused the stomach ache is digested, the stomach will generally return to a state of relative tranquility. Headaches are more unpredictable. The brain is digesting something - a bad idea, a tough morsel of cognitive dissonance, a bitter sauce of disillusionment, the dregs of an old argument - and struggling to deconstruct it into a more palatable form. Brains are more difficult to appease than stomachs. You can try wine. Predicates are good. They go with anything. Parables. Bonfires. Resentments. Balloons in the rain. The politics of the fairy tale. 

A Life Of Its Own

I confess, I’m not a modern man, nor an ulna in the waist of a garbage collector. Nor do I have the unreasoning sluice of the urethra at a rock concert. These things are called phenomena, & are impregnations of the subjunctive when it arises in frequencies too thin to take seriously, & yet powerful enough to bring our senses into the arena of existence, & split light into colors. The bazooka, for example, is ruled to have a symmetry like no other in the empire. If you combine a lap with gospel you get a terrier. And this matters. Because the syllables are entitled to hydrogen.

This is what words do: they prove imprecision by implication. And imply tricks. Pulling rabbits out of hats. Pulling hats out of rabbits. Then leaving stage in a huff. Which is a form of puff, or puffin, or muffin, or twinkle or something. How is your pension? What’s going on with the unions these days? The proper equation for the angular momentum of trailing vortices went by a minute ago followed by three angry Irish women.

Does everyone have a cave in them, place of visions, light flickering on the walls of the brain, which are begrimed with the soot & ocher of ancient chimeras? You never know what kind of animal you’re going to find behind someone’s eyes. Or is it all just balloons? Like the ones in comics. Dialogue going on in a cloud above the head. Imagine the plays that could be written based on somebody’s inner dialogue. Don’t panic if the immaterial materializes. Celebrate the fact of your existence. The drapery redeems the view. Go. Embrace your shadow.

The painting has a life of its own, said Jackson Pollock. And so it does. There it goes now, strolling through the gallery with a big cigar in her mouth, for she it is who walks in majesty like a tuber, a potato at home in dirt, but mnemonic as a knuckle, & twice as twill. Even twilight isn’t this unhinged. Victory goes to the willful. But willfulness goes to the melodious. Who are standing outside in the rain, singing “Good Vibrations.” The fact of the painting, said Turner, is in its impact. Does it brew in pungency like a dusty ocher or does it grant sensation a soulful awakening in Ravenstone? I think it’s a cow. Staring at a prescription for fentanyl.

We are then treated to footage of tanks & men marching in the street of some foreign city. Does any of this make sense to a cow? Prior to arriving in Melbourne, we all gave one another a hug & a kiss, then sat back down in our seats & buckled ourselves in for a night of turbulence & recrimination. It’s dark inside your head, you know? What lights it up is interplay, surgery & randomness. The best places are always postcards.

Seattle is the largest & most-populated city in my tent. The city is located between Puget Sound & my will to bear discomfort. It has scenic surroundings – mostly mountains – water bodies - & glitzy displays of largesse. Mostly bullshit futuristic architecture but with the charm of a robot doing a funny tap dance on Jeff Bezos’s balls, a.k.a “The Amazon Spheres.” Seattle has numerous attractions, even in its outskirts, where you’ll find cave dwellers mingling with dinosaurs & fire breathers making change with their minds. It’s a corporate filet mignon with a side order of tax haven fries. Grinning sociopaths stroll past forlorn tent cities smartphone in hand big grins all around save for Crazy Jane, nibbling a soggy cheese sandwich in a door entry. “For Love has pitched his tent in a place of excrement.”

San José was no picnic either. All those freeways, all those chronic conditions & friendly staffs waiting to hand you an application at the desk. It can seem pretty soulless some nights. A lot of twinkling lights, but nobody really home, if you know what I mean.

Most of the time lately, my mind is on the old west. Can’t say why. The more in the direction of the 21^st century I travel, the closer do I feel to the 19^th century. Not so much Paris, as I would hope to be, but the mountains & prairies of the American west.

They say Wyatt Earp carried a ten-inch Colt. And spent the winter of 1872 living in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois.

Earp met Doc Holliday in Texas while on a trek to capture a gang of bank robbers led by Dave Rudabaugh. Bat Masterson, who didn’t care for Holliday, said “Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man…. Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, pointing out that this was why Doc was quick to go for his gun when threatened.”

And it’s often so hot inside the old west the pictures all have that sepia tint & the faces all look somber, as if to look anything else would be a sin of some sort, a lynx prowling the margins of a poker game about to turn explosive. The lynx is a device. But the joker is wild. We can hear an owl hoot inside the menu of a sound floating by, there’s a special on scallops. A man in the corner is playing Bach suites on a cello. The gunslinger is due any minute. We all look anxiously east for the stage to come tumbling down the side of the mountain. Most of all Socrates, who believes the truth is a Colt .45, & keeps everyone busy with an endless stream of questions.

Bump Flop

Maturity needs roots. Bitumen. Stimulus calliope. Indigo pleasure. Meanings. Incongruous sails. Collected implications. This propels a bump flop. Jaw. I cream a fat shaggy chronicle.

Age of mockingbirds. I ruminate on the paper birds we saw. Donkeys. Let this provoke a massive spoon to vein. The friendly swans of string. Wrinkles. Descriptions squashed by construction. Our secrets are octagonal and orange and fasten sand. Scream. Clang consideration. Travel by walking a representation.

Remedied feather. Stitch. Moody grapefruit that a box contains by sweaty propulsion. Triangles. Violent blasts. Eager bulbs. Hungry proverb unraveled in blood. Flirtations. Writing biology.

Glue worry. Refined by raspberry. Rain. I fold it to lucidity. Athleticism. This generates an expansive sense of pink wash. Oasis. Suitcase full of quixotic progress rooted in wax. Proposals poked. Tears pinned to a demand.

Dimension. Riotous indispensable plunge. Robin army. Garlic. Implicit thinking. Letters tug a begging green force. Concentric parabola. Sidewalk fang amazing raw landscape. Malleability. Mutating oblong. Wisdom crashing through a bag.

This causes journeys. And expansion.

Feathers that were the itch of science. As if a sentence opened. And spread itself into reality like a hawk.

Whoosh

It’s 3:24 p.m., Tuesday afternoon. Just showered after a short three mile run around the crown of Queen Anne hill. The apartment smells richly of peanut butter. R is making a peanut butter cake. The clouds were remarkable when we left, cirrocumulus & some other wispy formation of cirrus with an odd color, not white as usual, but pinkish, otherworldly. I wonder if that’s due to the added amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which was at 407.4 parts per million in 2018.

I asked R what word she would invent if we didn’t have a word for wind. Whoosh, she said. As in whoosh-mill. It’s a whooshy day. The whoosh is from the east. Gone With The Whoosh. “Blowin in the Whoosh.” “Candle in the Whoosh.” “Any way the whoosh blows.”

We eat potato chips, ham sandwiches, peanut butter cake & watch Season 3 Episode 3 of Lilyhammer (the one where the Lithuanian woman accidentally gets shot in the head with a flare gun) & try to find the Norwegian folk music theme that begins each show. It appears to have been composed by Steven Van Zandt.

I eat a passion fruit flavored marijuana gummie & listen to Yo Yo Ma play a Bach cello suite & read Le Temps retrouvé by Marcel Proust.

The cat sleeps on a blanket ornamented with sheep. Big fluffy sheep. Fluffy like clouds.

I begin feeling sharp little pains in my stomach & worry that the ham sandwich will affect me like the roast beef French dip sandwiches that caused me to explode with diarrhea. It’s difficult finding food to put into this old body that doesn’t mess with the metabolic machinery. Everything is old & fragile & cantankerous. Cells seem to do their work more sluggishly. I feel more & more like a constellation of organs & organelles. How does a coherent identity emerge from all this? When did the first eukaryotes appear? 2.7 billion years ago. I’m a colony of mitochondria. With a brain. And a tongue. And a curious need to write things down.

Things like abiogenesis, arabinose, erythrose, fructose, galactose. Autocatalysis. Polysaccharides. Agar agar.

Enzymes. Peripheral proteins. Morphogenesis.

Research suggests eukaryotes developed as a result of one primitive cell – called a prokaryote, like a bacterium – absorbing another, two billion years ago. (Mitochondria and chloroplasts are descendants of independent prokaryotes that entered symbiotic relationships with larger cells.) A little later, along came you. And here you are. Reading this. This spasm, this thesis of life, this hot little sentence, which is evolving, it’s growing, look at it now, look what it’s doing, it’s trying to lift something into the air, an idea, a thought, a little action, something like a eukaryote doing the mashed potato in a poodle skirt, or a carload of teenagers headed to Houston.

Chaos is a tear in the fabric of form. But that’s not really what it is. Chaos is a misnomer. Within the evident volatility of elaborate chaotic systems there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, feedback loops, repetition, fractals, & islands of predictability.

Someone has glued my castanets together. Oh well. We’ll have to do without them. Are you still with me? Yes? Welcome to Ibiza. Over there you’ll find a jamboree, & see this? It’s a unique arrangement of lights on the head of a turtle. We need this for philosophical reasons, which will be explained later, when the woman on stage is done singing, & the yachts begin jockeying for position behind a starting buoy. I do wish I had my castanets in working order. I could sing to you, & dance for you, & tell you all about waterfalls of Cova de Can Marca, which are in a cave, & except for the myriad sounds of the sea, everything is stuck together like castanets.

It can take a long time to work one’s way out of a faulty system of habitual thought. Intuition helps us transcend the limits of thought & culturally derived biases.

There’s a tiger following me. But I don’t feel like I’m being hunted. Maybe I should be. But I just don’t feel it. And how do I know there’s a tiger following me? Can I see the tiger? I cannot see the tiger. But I know the tiger is there. And the tiger has intent. And motion. And stealth. And two bright fiery eyes. Could it be that I’m the tiger? Is a tiger awakening in me? No. I don’t think I’m a tiger. I think I’m Joan Baez. I think I’m Wyatt Earp. I’m Wyatt Earp singing like Joan Baez. I’m Joan Baez putting Wichita to rest with her beautiful voice. I walk into the saloon. And there she is: the tiger. Coming toward me. Eyes like fiery opals. Claws like pure cocaine.

Heaven is a confusing place. First of all, is it a place, or is it a state of mind? Can the same thing be said of hell? “The mind is its own place,” said Milton, “and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” I question these polarities. I distrust polarities. On the other hand, I tend to get lost easily. I have trouble understanding my own preferences. My own backyard.

Have you ever had to read a book to explain yourself to yourself? What was the book? Did you walk away feeling that you understood yourself a little better? Did you walk away feeling like having a self is a little silly, in the same way that having a receptionist doesn’t automatically make you a dentist? Have you ever awakened in the morning to discover that you’re the true heir to the kingdom of Bulgaria? Did you ever find yourself singing “Blue Velvet” in the shower & find teenagers lined up at your bathroom eager to get an autograph? Was it a problem keeping the towel in place? Were you able to write ok with a trembling hand & a head full of confusion?

I feel theoretical today, & particular. Beads drool from the séance in my knee, as the sunlight walks around in a pickle. I can’t understand the arroyo when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. Is it possible that the universe may be sung by a limb of rhinestone? My arms are on loan from the New York Public Library. This is a lie. The fact is, I grew them out of a cereal box. Then I attached them with a welding torch, using my feet, which I had assembled from junkyard epithets & a little blue hammer I found sleeping in a cello one night in Budapest. Give my leers a chance to retort. If I’m taciturn it’s only because the complications of life have ground me down to a mutiny, & I must rummage through the immaterial until I find a way out of here. 

Theraphosidae

Language is a living organism. It’s a siphonophore, a colony of organisms called phonemes or morphemes, merged together in a tentacled mass called a sentence. The sentence is a process by which a cell divides its cytoplasm to produce two daughter cells, & these daughters evolve very differently from one another, & this becomes a novel. Sometimes writing can look like a mood - translucent enactments of intellective inquiry & exploration - & sometimes it just hangs in the air until someone responds to it, adding meaning, & further complexity. And this is called confabulation. Here we enter the province of prophets & poets. Hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the mind, protected from the abrasions of everyday life, sustaining the molecules needed.

Insert these words one by one until the sentence comes to the end, which is approaching, I can feel it, I can almost see it, the master sergeant is saluting his men goodnight, paramedics are resuscitating a Polynesian astronaut, the oven is ovulating an omelet, English royalty are social distancing themselves as ever, I think that observation is unfair and a little stupid, but it’s already there, let it stand, at least until the end of the sentence, which is there ahead, I can see it, the protagonist is waiting for us patiently at the dock, evergreens adorn the surrounding hills, but there are none here, not in this sentence, just a hand reaching down to help us up, out of this sentence, just bobbing in the water.

What I’m thinking is a play pen for lumps of lathery music. The river is so quiet. Nevertheless, the nibbles are significant. Small mechanisms make the words intensify. They become what they represent. Which is to say, void. Nothingness. Introspection will get you nowhere. But it will get you everywhere. Everywhere there is everywhere there is also nowhere. Nowhere is everywhere. It’s the oink in ointment & the end at the beginning of the word anger. Anger is mere monotony. I mean, after a while. It’s wearying. And redundant. So it surrenders. And becomes a tarantula. 

Martian Sunset

Have you ever noticed that if you play a guitar just right you can cut the air into little sections and set them on fire? And then there's all that energy in the brain, you know? It's like a furnace, an athanor, a Slow Henry, as the alchemists called it. Everybody's got one. Or not. Some people seem to get by fine without it. You know who you are. Standing over there by the church holding the bible. So adorable.

No amount of logic can explain a clam. But I can tell you the mind dilates under the influence of certain phenomena. A crinkly old dollar. Zen mosquitos on a hairy arm. Speaking of which, there’s an unseen power that creeps from flower to flower like moonbeams on the loose. It wandered out of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley & appears to be lost. As for me, I like the little bulbs at the top rim of the mirror in the bathroom. This is where I get my face going. And think about how weird the world keeps getting. And what to do next. And wondering how it all began.

There are some feelings you can shake, get rid of like a pestering bug, or wasp, ruining the picnic. Some feelings can be sculpted into better feelings, smoother feelings, big feelings surrounded by columns. Some feelings can be coaxed into mutation. This is when the blues turn gray or the grayness turns blue and the fog lifts and there’s a mountain looming over you, indifferent, craggy, sublime. The other feelings go berserk & explode into airy pinkish blooms. These get written down, or sung, or inserted into a circular piece of DNA & become contagious. 

I keep forgetting that that bright silvery sound that violins make is caused by the friction of the bow - hair from the tails of horses - on the strings, which are catgut, nylon & steel. But the main thing is friction. Friction that makes olives of sound sweat in the air. The blood of the poignant impinge on the guitar. There's a sound for everything, even thirst. Thirst is the sound of a pharmacy at night. It occurs quietly in the mouth, like cotton. At first, it's unpleasant. Then it becomes a craving. Then, if it's still not satisfied, it becomes a movie. The world is a vast hallucination. Water makes it real.

And so I got into a mode of watching the Martian sunset. A lot. Once a day, at least. I would also enjoy a Martian sunrise, but Curiosity, so far as I know, has not filmed a sunrise on Mars. The sunset will do, for now. I do wish I were standing there on the Martian desert watching it. But it's easy to mistake this visual dessert on YouTube as anything like Earth. That solitude might be overwhelming. And there is still that nagging dependence on technology. There are always these details tumbling out of the rational part of the brain. That sudden deflation when the mind is pulled back into the body. Mars pops like a balloon and I'm back on earth, listening to Méa Culpa Jazz sing "The Wind Will Carry Us Away."