From Proust To Porn In Less Than A Minute

Late summer, early September is when these tiny gnats begin to appear everywhere, especially in our apartment. Not in great numbers, thankfully, but occasionally one, only one, will appear and – like a sudden burst of notes in a Liszt piano piece – nag at your attention. Like the one just a minute ago who appeared as I was reading a passage in Proust that takes place in a brothel and my irruptive little buddy decided to land there. This by itself didn’t bug me so much; it was when the gnat began a conversation with the madam and requested a fresh young flame skimmer dragonfly. The madam smiled and returned with the brightest, twinkliest, prettiest and – if I may dare say so – sexiest insect I’d ever seen. She had a flame red body and wing veins black as obsidian. And that’s how it happened. How I went from Proust to porn in less than a minute.  

Genitalia come with all sorts of drapery. You can expect anything from a snowball vulgarity to a tube of fungus glue. We’re in science fiction now. Up to our antennae in pure astonishment. We’re just axles open to darkness, aren’t we? The bohemian stage suggests the hive is stirring with configurations. Like when we went to see Bob Dylan and found Bob Denver instead. I felt my chin fizz with newborn whiskers. I stood there and twirled a bright new baton. It’s how mass got massive. Densities formed badminton nets and drove the physicists nuts. You want to know what dark matter is? I’ll tell you what dark matter is: it’s dark. The kind of dark that matters. I want the sugar arms of twilight to melt into your tea. You sip. I sip. We get up and walk around. We whistle. We grow fins on our arms. We swim and swim and swim. And this, too, matters.

There should be people to welcome us into life. Like they do in hotels. Extend welcome courtesies. Give us a key and a map of the city. Here's what to expect. Here's what to avoid. But that isn’t life that’s a lie. The reality is way bigger. The reality is the shock of cold water when you enter a beautiful room. A swampy sweating bickering ensues. And the fall of a shoe.

Swann’s Way concludes with a broad spectrum of emotion, a bouillabaisse of conflicting feeling, everything ranging from saffron to crab, joy to betrayal, squid to fennel, remorse to resignation. And that’s the way it is in life, eternal dismay and confusion with fugitive hues of exquisite pleasure, a bizarre commingling of soupy incongruities, so that just sitting quietly can sometimes feel like you’re groping around in the dark feeling things, chairs, walls, light switches, anything familiar by which you can orient yourself. Swann feels the acute remorse of a backfiring epiphany, the realization that he’s suffered absurdly for a woman who did not please him or enjoy any real rapport, and with whom he felt a deep abiding love. He makes another discovery: the ability to view things from an objective distance, as if he were the writer of the story in which he’s trapped, so that he’s simultaneously in the thick of things, but also outside looking in.

Caravaggio’s musician comes to mind, the dreamy look of the lute player. He looks like he just got some bad news. But it’s probably a musical problem he’s trying to work out. Because music makes life endurable. Like Nietzsche said: without music life would be a mistake. It’s all about walking to the end of the world. The closer it gets, the more radical it gets. A colossal C minor.

 

Writing As A Form Of Blackberry Bramble

I was George Harrison once on TV and then I became anonymous for the sheer joy of it. This is a true story. I have a hundred complexions and a look. This is what I do in private I eat melon and go backward in time. I use subterfuge and lust to interrogate letter carriers. And then I sit back and sigh with a quiet desperation. Who am I without you by my side? Guilt lingers in the mind as if it were looking for a place to sit down. Everything here is true. My head is a barn. I sit down and milk words. Their meanings squirt into buckets. The wood smells of ulterior predicates. The light is fat as an adjective. And the words wag their instructions. This occurs at the end of a dream, as the world emerges, and the inundations are a shock to the understanding.

What do I think of Deadwood, South Dakota? I think it’s possible. Yes. Possible. Possible as a popsicle is possible. And drips. Deadwood drips. When it rains Deadwood drips. This includes roses and elms. Rhododendrons must be performed with plumes and pearls and all the incisions must be housebroken. I’ve been alive a long time and I still have no answers. But I do have dirt. 

We transplanted the hydrangea today. I shoveled around it, trying not to destroy too many roots. I was quite amazed at how long and thick and tough some of the roots were. K brought some pruning sheers and managed to sever one of the bigger ones. I rocked it back and forth to see how loose it was and if there were a way to work my hands under it and lift it out. K went and got a snow shovel and together we managed to get it out. The process felt like surgery. The plant needed to be transplanted because a crew were coming soon to jackhammer the walkway and remove a root from the sewer pipe. E and R dug a hole and filled it with compost and rich new dirt and water. We let the plant down slowly into its new home. Everything had felt so deliberate in making its transition the least traumatic. Like performing a coronary artery bypass grafting.

Writing feels that way sometimes. Like transplanting a vague idea into the rich dark soil of language. The idea may seem vague but there is often a surprising quantity of roots attached. The idea was being nourished but hadn’t blossomed yet. So that when it’s enveloped in words it blossoms. Unless, of course, the writing fails to connect with the idea and so nourish it. For example, I have an idea that velocity and blood are involved and that the plumbing is crucial as is the process, which should be round like a goblet filled with Madeira, and ring like crystal. This wasn’t my original idea, but here it is, an idea the language coughed up when I was looking elsewhere, trying to spot my idea. Language is tricky that way. It will take your idea and inflate it into a python, or quadrangle. It all depends on the humidity, wind direction, and syntax.

When I was George Harrison I liked to play the ukulele. But then I lapsed into anonymity and let go of Mr. Harrison like a balloon. It takes a real George Harrison to be a real George Harrison. Who, incidentally, liked to garden. I don’t. What I like about the wilderness is that it takes care of itself. It finds balance and sticks with it. This is why I’ve chosen the wilderness for my education. Wilderness is a bodhisattva. Ferns? Bodhisattvas. Oaks? Definitely bodhisattvas. Blackberry bramble? Blackberry bramble is blackberry bramble only blackberry bramble can be blackberry bramble. This entanglement, this confusion, is brought to you by blackberry bramble. 

 

The Birthday Of The Moon

My eyes look backward into the encyclopedia of my head. It’s raining in Kauai. I feel ethical, like a jurisdiction of submarines. It’s a new way of feeling. There are no ceremonies or fists involved, no flags, no swords, no salutes. There is only a pool of stunningly clear water at the base of a statue and the geology of a loan set in a locket. Writing often feels like this, like a quorum, or an aquarium. This illustrates nothing, except the folklore of my anxieties. Picture a room full of bats and a man in a top hat juggling words on a long red tongue. There are no pirates in the placenta, but we do sometimes find pleading, cardboard perimeters and static. When the radar failed, we substituted rapture, and yo-yos. This is when the deer emerged from the forest. It was the afternoon of our evolution, when innocence isn’t so innocent and the air breathes freely. I don’t know what to say about the light, except that it smelled like spider lilies. Cause and effect aren’t as obvious as one might believe. Sometimes a door opens and a man walks out blazing with truth. Nobody knows what to say. What can you say? What can anybody say? The truth is a former sugar plantation. Just keep talking. Pretend not to notice. Those women are naked. That man removed his head. Rhinestones swing from a silver chest, and it’s the birthday of the moon.

Some Bitter Thing

Some bitter thing, some mean lean spleen, made me make a fist tonight. I owe nothing to science. I owe everything to science. The result is a soulful expansion of possibilities of feeling. The cat on my lap licking my forearm silly. Once I form an image in my head I sprinkle it with words. The keynote expresses contingency, but the setting calls for banisters. Physical weight is an admirable thing among rocks. It’s why I like to empty the dishwasher when everything is still warm. If you tell me something nice I’ll give you a bowl of rice. But if you tell me something mean I’ll give you a soggy saltine. Emotion becomes the sound of weirdness crystalized in words. The sputter of something nameless. I’ve got a feeling cupidity is just another muzzle. The way Nicolette Larson sways at the microphone says everything you need to know about the 70s.

These days, I feel utterly incompatible with the zeitgeist. It’s a relationship we find easiest to endure by ignoring one another. I eat my yogurt with strawberry jam and blueberries, read Marcel Proust in my underwear, and listen to the croaking of frogs on YouTube. The past is the only country where you can still tell stories: buffoons, saints, and motorcycle gangs. Whenever I write I try hiding the subject in false reassurances that I’m on the verge of saying something important, which I never do. Importance sucks the energy out of everything. I like coconuts. I’m temperamental. Coconuts are not. This is important. But really it’s not. It’s just miracles & milk.

I feel disheveled inside, like chlorophyl at midnight. People think I’m a tree but I’m not I’m not a tree I’m a rose. These are my thorns, these are my petals, and this is my tongue. I’m reaching across the universe to lick your cheek. Most guidebooks are monolingual and therefore acrid. What I need is a lump of coal and an ounce of slush. I’ve come a long way to say these things to you. I studied romantic poetry in Trieste. I learned to play the electric guitar in Memphis. And now I have nothing to say. My horse is everything. I named her chlorophyl and together, at night, we fly over the trees.

 

Here I Am Fumbling

Here I am fumbling among mental concepts of space. If we can’t bend reality, it’s up to us to do something other than submit to it. To give in to one's desire is to give in to the fear of what might happen if one assumed this "I," from which desire arises and pushes us. The walls are closing in. And moving back out. This means that the space is breathing. There are lapses in time that are out of my control. Space wraps itself around a world and breathes in its jasmine. Traveling requires filling the tank. The map is accurate. But the terrain is not. Energy sometimes disguises itself as mass. It does this to make us believe that life has a purpose and that our opinions matter. They don't. They shine a light in daylight, but don't light a thing at night when you need it.

The colors around here work hard. I'm not kidding let’s all cry out and call it a craze. Pink serves a beast of fire in a warehouse in Copenhagen. Red is the water talking to itself in a war. Black is the logic of the padlock. You need the eloquence of seaweed to open it. I can’t tell you how much I love the ceiling. I let my eyeballs do the walking, rather than my feet. It’s a bitter thing to be so opposite to the phenomenon we call a shadow. I envy the spiders that walk around up there. Pedestrians sip grenadine at the periphery. I don’t know what we’re looking for, or what we hope to find. The magnolia is not a stereotype. When it opens its mouth a universe spills out.

Sweet reason is a pin. A fish in a storm of flames. The tibia dwells in ignition.

We went out to look at the wildfire smoke. It was 7 p.m. and already dark as night. You could smell the smoke immediately. A dark haze filled the air. Capitol Hill was obscured by the haze. Lights twinkled on two buildings under construction downtown. There was something off-kilter about the lights, almost preternatural. They contributed to the irreality of it all. Sign of an empire in decay which – like the mycelium on a fallen log – can be quite beautiful. Odd paradox. The haunting beauty of smoke from the raging hell of all the fires consuming the world’s forests.

This was once a world of flowers. Roses and jasmine and heliotrope. Lilies and daisies and foxglove. You get the picture. Cocaine swallowed its weight in wealth and property. Hanging out was a study in circumspection. Circumference was a milk that only a breast could understand.

Today is the apotheosis of a species tormented by desire. Some have even worse torments: the hell of getting what you want. This is where all the answers to life rub up against chimeras of savage illusion. This is where a glass cat sits on a glass chair and the tea smells of burnt sugar and thought. This is where the fish think water is a mystery. Where floating works out in a cloud gym. Where mass clutches its pants. Where carrots wheel around in expandability. Where everything in a cave smacks of geometry equations and all the peacocks come with pedestrians hugging them. Where the luggage lugs itself and the vibrations are tinted with the texture of sloth. Where chrome is the story and iron is unironic. Where it happens. All of it. Even this.

 

 

A Crisis

A crisis is destroying the old patterns. Longitude and latitude are obsolete. The lattices are no longer arranged in Euclidean space. I’m not entirely about reform, but I don’t want to get too reckless. I don’t want any haar in my hair. Or flotsam. Keith Richards enters in an elegant frock coat. What’s he doing here? Where’s his guitar? Where’s your guitar, dude? Jesus, it’s happening all over again. Hear that? They’re bringing up the chains. Watch your step. This part of the dock is a bit rickety. The fire is out but the smell of soot persists. That smoke is caused by an excess of subjectivity. Don’t get too bogged down in details. Almost every sentence reads like a novel. Can you please hand me that mirror? You can find your fate in the dregs at the bottom of the cup. The heavy pounding of drums mean that a baby is being delivered. Otherwise, nothing much has changed. Seagulls, as always, circle the landfill. Look out now, I’m going to send this football spiraling. Check me when I get back. I need to see if my nose is still attached.

Because here is what is at stake: managing to find the words to reflect reality and to tell the truth without getting completely bogged down in it. Whether in writing, in philosophical practice or on the couch, what is seeing clearly, if not succeeding in giving form to what could not be articulated, in formulating the unnamable?

I hear the man upstairs chopping. He’s a chopper. This is a chapter of chopping. This is chopped. This is not. This is a not a knife. Now this, this is a knife: feel its edge sever the air.

Sometimes you need to tell the poem to get going, get out there and do something, save the world, inspire people, jail the billionaires, wobble some jelly, get drunk and sing like Bjork, or a cat, embalm time in a hymn to eternity, sprinkle commas on a distressed fly, let it pause, then fly away with a white goatee of aggression. Be the high green cheese of the century. Shoot lightning from the ass of desire. Be the bones of an eccentric book with an eccentric spine. Give Saturday a kick in the pants. Build a fire with the vertebrae of ancient tornadoes. But please. Get going.

I love nature because it’s careless with pomegranate and rolls around in the grass and spreads itself everywhere and for a brief time walked around in the skin of humans feeling the air and smelling the strain of the delirious and unhinged. Yes, we’re in the midst of a crisis. A crisis of understanding. A crisis of value. A crisis of biodiversity, of diversion, the backwash of honest laughter and sunsets at the Café Canvas. And this will turn out to be us in conversation. We were here for a brief time. Metaphors hung like Finland from the reality of one’s skin. There were images in the street for our songs. And one time I took hold of a big fat sentence and pulled it out of my mouth. That’s it, I said. I’m done. Can one be well in a dying world? Don’t know. But you you can love it all with eyes and bones until it’s all just a tibia in the leg of a crippled universe. 

  

I'm A Maniac

I’m a maniac for various raisins. They come in a red pack. And it all makes sense in a frugal kind of way, like piracy, or Tupperware. I’m not known for my misconduct as much as my neglect. But this is all a disguise. I’m meant for higher, nobler topics, the fruits of philosophy and the sympathies of the cello. What are these if not potential lapels? As for pockets, I can never have enough pockets. I carry so much stuff around I’ve begun thinking of myself as a marsupial. It’s all going to happen at the hop. At the hop hop hop. We’re going to rock rock rock. Juxtaposition is the key to proximity. It’s not my favorite island, but I like the consonants, and the openness of the vowels, and the way they sway between whys and wherefores, bringing coolness to the vinyl and timbre for the comparisons, of which there are many, both similar & dissimilar like all simulacrums. Even the shiftless occasionally shift. It’s all in the dice, & tinkling little bells.

My One Objective

I have but one objective, which is to succeed at anticipating what will happen when I take my shirt off. Yesterday, I saw Bob Dylan and John Lennon in a limousine, drunk. I took my shirt off and got very little reaction. A chuckle from Bob, a sneer from John. People see different things when I remove my shirt. For some, it’s a chorus of puppets on the lipstick horizon near Tahiti. They’re probably referring to my tattoo. But it’s a tattoo of a steam shovel in the grip of a strong emotion. Human perception is such a strange phenomenon. Performance artist Laurie Anderson saw lewd gonads in a pod of abstraction. Can you hear them? The bells outside are loud and jangly and full of trying. Trying to reach the ears of God. Trying to heal the world with the redemption of sound, vibrations from a bowl of metal swinging back and forth while a maniacal hunchback jumps from bell to bell, madly in love with life, with love, with the rivers of blood circulating in his body. I think I’ll pause now and have a sandwich. The universe is an organ donor. I want to be in good shape so that I may share my organs with the universe as the universe shares its organs with us. And this is why my one objective throughout life has been to remove my shirt. Language is the phantom limb of a lost cognition. Each button is a word, each word a button. And here I stand, a torso rising like a dark wall of art, snug in the realm of the nominal. 

Do's And Don'ts

 Don’t turn your back on the ocean. It will toss up a big unexpected wave and shove you to shore or carry you out, out to sea, where you must tread water until a boat or helicopter comes to fetch you.

Do be kind. Be kind to yourself and others.

Don’t be rude. Being rude is just plain stupid. Don’t be stupid. Be stupefied. Stupefaction trumps stupidity. Stupidity is lost among the folds of a sweater. Sitting on the edge of a bed. Surrounded by a universe. And a green suitcase boiling with grasshoppers.

Do magic if illusions fascinate you. Pull rabbits out of hats. Fish words out of your mouth. Long ones. Short ones. Put them in sequence. They will lift the veil over reality and show you the world as it truly is, and which it never is, but if you put enough words together, you’ll have the illusion of discovery, a kettle of fish, an inducement to violence, and a harmonica and sleep.

Do what you want. Do what you need to do. But don’t be harsh. Don’t be cruel. Be cotton. Be emphatic. Be a speed bump and shine. Be prodigal in rumination and alarming in private. Go slow when it is proper to go slow and fast when it is relevant to go fast. Rush the yellow if the traffic is light but don’t linger too long in reflection while waiting for the light to turn green. Pay attention. Wear a badge. Play a guitar. Be dopey. Be soapy. Avoid rhyme. It hurts the design. What design. There’s no design.

Be true to yourself. Know yourself. Forget yourself. Absorption is its own reward. Seclusion is for secret loves. Secretion is for hormones. Be hormonal. Be abnormal. Be a platypus. Plug yourself into a platitude. Go for a bromide if the truth hurts. Assuage your guilt with curios.

Sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can’t. The right thing to do. The right moment to do it. What to do if I don’t do it. What to do if I do it and I want to keep it going. What to do if I can’t do it. What to do if it does me better than I do it. What to do if the doing undoes the undid and a tall man walks forward out of the graveyard and there are bolts in his head and a look of abject disdain in his eyes which are black as obsidian.

The best thing to do when you don’t know what to do is to do nothing.

Be a cloak to the wise. Be a cry in the wilderness. Be analytical. Diacritical. Levitical.

To be or not to be.

Be.

Aghast. Not a ghost.