What I'm Trying To Do

Though it may not be immediately apparent, these words have been carefully arranged on the shore of this sentence and are waiting for someone to pull them into their mind and set them afloat. This will have the effect of lightning in the sky, the one over there smiling and winking over the top of a mountain, and ruffling the world like a French impressionist. This will trigger a disorientation in some people, and epiphanies in others. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. Not in this frame of mind, however crooked it may seem to hang on the wall. The sunset looks funny. And now you know why. Next time I see you reading this paragraph, I’m going to follow you home like a dog. I’ll show you some magic tricks. Please don’t be upset. It'll be fun. But if you see me opening doors where there are no doors, it means that I will have connected with something larger than a magic trick. It will mean I’m here, hanging from the edge of your eyelid.

Riding the elevator of the Grand Hotel, Proust notices an open window of frosted glass that’s normally closed, and enjoys a view of the countryside from a novel perspective. This is like reading a difficult sentence repeatedly until it suddenly opens and you see at last what it’s been opaquely concealing. One day it’s a school of dolphins keeping pace with my understanding of intuition, and on another I might see an old man walking on the side of the road. Have you ever felt something urgent stirring in your caviar? It was probably this indistinct thought finding its way to the center of what I mean, which is glowing in the distance. I keep driving in that direction, but I never get there. And that’s what keeps me going, word by word, page by page.

What I’m trying to do is build an emotion I can live with, and talk about later. I like it when a guitar sounds like a wounded animal. But I can’t do that. Does money still exist? I can always start a podcast. Usually, if I want to show a feeling I take it out of my mouth and hang it in the air. But this often backfires. As soon as you dress an emotion in words it becomes a crisis. Shape manipulating the meaning of itself. You could say it’s all a semantic game in the end. One thing I’m sure of, I don’t want a gadget on my head. I crave the wilderness. The sparkle of irrational beauty. Be it nothing more than a migration of words moving toward a gleeful delinquency. 

I sometimes wonder if there are parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us. Artists struggle to extend our perceptions through heaving tongues of steel and vibrating fictions. There is a marbling in the mind, intermixtures of ooze and dock. And the way the waves move and the tides come and go and the universe continues its squawking of background radiation. I love this chair and its framework. But this time it’s different. A universe just fell out of my head. It rolled out the door and down the street. I apologize to the driver of a Tesla and bring it back. I carry it with my mind. I’m spilling it in words. The driver of the Tesla is calling her lawyer. It’s an imperfect universe. It’s not as perfect as a Tesla. Which is from another dimension entirely.

There are taut veins under the ochre. It accentuates the belt that old man is wearing. As you can see, it’s ringed with skulls. It’s me. Before I existed. I walked into life on a bet. It was a one-horse town. But I get by. I embody my own cruel tendencies. This is my arm. It matches the other one, which is just now reaching for a bow. The incentive of the violin isn’t music, the incentive of the violin is arbitrary and slippery, like the spirits that reside in mushrooms. This is how languages evolve. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream. You can’t take anything for granted. Colors surge. Shapes of air die softly and fall away. Their residue is called reverie. The kerosene of emotion blazes at the darkness and the night steps softly across the universe, dripping stars. We shiver in the cold and get ready for a new reality. 

 

The Waltzing Testicles Of Thoth

Is the energy running throughout the universe – which is the universe – primarily neutral, or is there an energy one could call benign? The answer is, in some way, yes. But how does a banjo sound in grunge music? The banjo is a happy sound. Grunge is a dark sound. I can already hear disagreements, and this is a sign that the ocean is unbalanced. For instance, have you ever stood in a bathroom listening to the Brandenburg Concertos? You can do that if you’re alive, and stand on your legs, and maneuver your eyes, and most importantly have a set of ears on your head. It all adds up to one thing: an ocean of consciousness which is shared with billions of other souls. This is the essence of music. Or is it more like spars on a ship, or ruffles on a shirt? This is no time for ruffles. This is a time of T-shirts and baggy pants. “Maybe,” by The Chantels, was my end of the rainbow. So yes, the energy is benign. A woman’s voice cutting through the chill of existence. 

More and more language seems to me a kind of echolocation, not for the darkness bats inhabit, but the cognitive darkness humans inhabit. Even if the words are written down in quiet with no sound attached at all they rebound from hidden realities, or increase the insistence of things on our consciousness, radiant knots and luminous details. I don’t know what goes on neurologically, but having a medium like language between our experience of the world and our thoughts on the world can lead to some very strange distortions. They play the mind into a restless probing of what is real and what is simulacrum. Ping, ping, ping. Looking. Always looking. “As if there is a ‘god’ outside of / the inside of my skull.” And “the poem waits / for us to discover the larger mind at play.” Paul Nelson, The Day Song of Casa del Colibri. And it does have a point, however pointless it may seem, it will puncture the air and drop its candy like a burst pinata.

I've seen words mutate in meaning in very odd ways, but this one takes the cake: I looked up the French word 'valseuses,' meaning 'waltzers,' and was quite surprised to discover that it has acquired an alternate meaning, a variation in slang, which means 'balls,' as in 'testicles.' "Oh mes valseuses, elles vont craquer." "Oh my balls, they’re going to explode." "Il glace ses valseuses." "He's icing his balls." How do you go from waltz to testicles? Is it because they may be imagined to swing back and forth in a ball sack? The image of testicles waltzing to the sound of Richard Strauss is difficult to entertain. First I think of a China dragon drone show, then I think of the Secret Service finding cocaine in a cubby in the West Wing of the White House, and then I think of Ingenuity – the four pound NASA helicopter - phoning home from Mars, breaking a 63-day silence. Then I try to put these things together in a way that makes sense of life on planet Earth in the 21^st century, and what this has to do with the mutation of words, etymologically speaking. I’m looking for clues. Which – spelled ‘clew’ – once meant “a ball of thread or yarn.” The shift in meaning references the clew of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to use as a guide out of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology. The way out of the labyrinth is gathered from seemingly random phenomena, a semiosis of the anomalous. The vas deferens in the waltzing testicles of Thoth.  

In the same way that you cannot isolate a phrase of music from the rest of the composition because of its fluidity, no one can predict precisely what a word is going to do given the linguistic orchestration in which it has been played. This is how a universe behaves. Particles pop in and out of existence. Find a position, you lose velocity. Find velocity, you lose position. It’s all about probabilistic quantum fluctuations and semantic fluidity. The universe does what it does because it’s the universe. Language does what it does because it’s a wilderness. These things are intertwined. Each sentence is a primordial universe. What’s going on in your mind? Does it feel primordial & hot, or stable and stale and stippled and flat? Most of the time, I don’t even know what's going on in my mind until I ornament it with words. You know, like a mime.

 

Once When I Was Standing Next To A Potato Chip

Once when I was standing next to a potato chip, I rocked a puff of thought back in forth in a cradle of introspective glass. Nobody seemed to notice. It's like that sometimes when you get to thinking about things. You suddenly feel removed from the chatter of society. People seem to sense that. You’ve gone inside. You’re no longer there. Unless somebody rings the doorbell. I can't even remember what I was thinking. I'm going to guess it had something to do with the nerve it takes to describe the color red to a blind extraterrestrial. Another time I chiseled a spirit out of the air and wrestled it onto a sheet of paper. Words are often attracted to wine. But in this case two hundred penguins battled a rogue participle. This caused an almanac to happen. A man in a velvet robe told me how Chicago worked. Ezra Pound wrote it under some windows. There were implications attached to this, including parables and paddles. So we all went home by canoe. That’s when I discovered my sexual identity was chewable, and could relieve heartburn. They called it rottenness, foulness, sloughing of the sore. But I’m fine now. I’ll make you so proud of me. I’ll use magic. I’ll use surgery and perseverance. Gowns and sounds and vowels. The concentric noun is neither abstract nor deciduous. But it is cylindrical and epigrammatic. This is the heaven I fall through trying to get there. I assembled it with a poignant seamlessness. I always say that if you need to get something down, you’d better use a verb; nouns just sit around being things. I adapt to things by wondering about them. And then I thrust myself forward like a texture. I get a little religious around these things. For example, I have to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” in order to induce the flow of urine. Stars heal nothing. But they put on a good show. It is curious. The distances are too large to be measured with a conversation. The fact of it is impenetrable. You have to knock your head against it. Anyone who has looked deeply into the universe walks away charged with the voltage of location. Do you know where you are right now? You’re in a body of writing putting your life together with words and twine. You’re like an angel too good to be true. More than anyone in all of Venice. It’s all about the music. The mirrors, the indignations, the fire escapes. The day you find out what's going on inside yourself is the day silk will feel like intent. But you’ll go around in burlap, shaking hands with eyes.