Quantum Scrap

I hugged a rhododendron and tried to listen. It made me gamble and I won a garden. Consider trying to enamel along. This might be a way to knock the moose into life. The biggest emphasis I could find related to water. Harm turns a generation into subtlety. It’s hard to approach them without a cookie. Fidget a denim they harden. Tear the parabola into a scream.

Cézanne made depth become a rain. It moved me to structure this percolation according to what I propose, which is water. The smell of truffles are there to taste in a lifetime, and make the wheels spin in perpetual arrival. A washing mist is not geographical. It's metaphysics. The eyes are clearly visible beams of attention. A light call for the biography of death. And a cap and a knife.

I rap my breath to muddle everyone's ears. The syntax of the stomach has vines but the law is vague when it comes to vapor. I don't know why the heat it is so splendid. What I do know is the spit of its insistence. Ebony is ecstasy for the bandaged plumber. Who knows why. Life is full of quantum scrap. The fabric I write on is smooth as a runway. Please help me find the rest of this sentence. The entire sauce is at stake in the kitchen. If you find it, give it a piece of your mind.  

Superb cringe of the Thumb King. Think of it as a movie, or a punch to the solar plexus. Art is like that. Our panic is the arm of a long pigment. A freshly varnished violin can make us shiver. I feel a hectic seduction in the strings. The picture yawned its appearance into me, turning me anatomical with a sifted and parenthetical science. This is the flower that did it. I wanted to make it sweat. So I raised it up with my tongue and said it. There’s a brocade for all of our contusions.

The example a plaster makes on a wall when it beats a corner to abolish itself and suddenly becomes a window with a dead fly on the sill and a small crack in the upper corner is sometimes the very thing that promotes an irreducible fascination with the saxophone. I think it’s what Cézanne meant when he painted those delicious apples and oranges. He’s got them arranged artistically but they still look like something you can hold in your hand and bring to your mouth and eat. Life can be so tipsy, just like a canoe. Isn’t hard to stumble and land in some muddy lagoon? I modified my problem by cutting it in Costa Rica. There's a taproot to my prominence, if you know what I mean. The horizon struts across the carpet with a pronoun. These are the stars that I protect by the airfield that I made. We solicit what we drum and then escape it.

And so we carried gallons of water to the park to water the surviving rhododendrons. This is a true story if you choose to believe what these words are doing. Though it’s not a matter of belief. Or words. It’s a matter of virtue. And what’s virtue? Virtue is everything. Rain. It’s mostly rain. Depth is what we hope to find in even the most banal conversations, even if it’s just body language, and somebody’s hand on your butt. This kind of verbal nudging is a trick and you shouldn’t trust it. Like the man said, the truest poetry is the most feigning. The sound of robins on a spring morning is a bright and cheerful melody, but really, it’s mostly about worms. Finding them and eating them. Like words. And then I hear rain. And spirits at the border of our shoes.

  

Pictures Of The Floating World

Recently, on a muggy Sunday morning, R and I went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Capitol Hill to see the featured exhibit Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec. This consisted of 90 Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings from SAM’s Japanese collection alongside private loans of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The idea was to genially highlight the perceived parallel between the bawdy energy of Montmartre in the Belle Epoch and the “floating world” of Ukiyo-e. The “floating world” refers – in part - to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period (1603 to 1867). There was a pronounced flavor in both art worlds of an unfettered eroticism and contagious joyfulness which the art reflected with great skill and a genial lack of pretense. In neither instance was there anything remotely doctrinaire about these social dynamics, but there was an understanding that something was afoot, a strong appetite for living openly and freely, unhampered by the weight of an imposed moral code. It wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t decadent. It was a generosity of spirit steeped in an atmosphere of uninhibited glee, and a whiff of dissent.

Asai Ryōi, a Japanese samurai and writer of the early Edo Period, described Ukiyo in these terms: “living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river...this is what we call Ukiyo.”

It's rather odd reading these words during this age, fraught with so much social division and day-to-day uncertainty, WWIII an imminent possibility, an obscenely wealthy minority of elites living in gated communities, sailing catastrophically depleted oceans of heat-stressed plankton and bleached coral in luxurious yachts while millions live in poverty, homeless tents a ubiquitous sight in nearly all the cities of the western world, but especially conspicuous in the United States.

So, Ukiyo in the U.S. is a bit harder to attain than it was when I was a youth in the late 60s, living in the Bay Area and a frequent visitor to the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.

That said, it’s not dead. I have a solid grip on the soft warm buoyancy of Ukiyo. There’s still a good quantity of it diffused among the neurons of an aging brain. I know lust when I see it. I still know what sensuality feels like. I can still occasionally sublimate it out of the soup of cortisol sloshing around in these old bones.

Brothels are another matter. I’ve never been to one. Never had the urge. Or the money. I get a sense from the ZZ Top song “La Grange” that a lot of fun can be had in a brothel. I imagine it’s not just a matter of getting off sexually. The numerous prostitutes found along Aurora Avenue here in Seattle puzzle me – hard to get a handle on the erotic dynamics there – but I can wrap my head around the ambiance of a brothel. There’s not a few of them in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, written a few years after Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was busy with his prints and posters. La Goulue kicking her heels at the Moulin Rouge. Jane Avril lifting a sexy silky sleek black leg at Jardin de Paris while a hand grips the fingerboard of a cello that looks ostentatiously like a massive hard-on.

Many of the Japanese woodblock prints were done by Kitagawa Utamaro, considered one of the greatest artists of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) movement; he is known especially for his portraits of female beauties, and whose sensuous artistry and vivid colors were a huge influence on the French impressionists. One of the prints – A High-Ranking Yujo With A Client – drew my attention. I found it enigmatic. This was an intimate scene of a man with a yujo, a female prostitute. What puzzled me was the lack of sexuality. If it was implicit in the various shapes and colors, the postures of the two people, the overall ambiance created by the intimacy of mood, it eluded me. There are several bare feet, belonging to the man I’m guessing, based on their positions. Other than that, the two people are heavily dressed in multiple layers of silk or cotton kimono. This is how people might dress in a freezing room during a brutal winter, but there’s no sign whatever that the room is cold. They seem completely comfortable, completely at ease with one another. Maybe they’ve had sex and are now just hanging out, enjoying one another’s company.

The man is lying on his stomach and the woman is sitting on his back. The man appears to be saying something and the woman is leaning forward a little, her head resting on her hand. I can’t tell if she’s bored, or listening with rapt attention, absorbed in the man’s talking. The man is holding a long slender implement – I’m guessing it’s a pen with a tiny nib – which is slanted upward, in the direction of the woman’s face. The nib is near the man’s mouth, which is tiny. Both mouths are tiny. The man’s looks like a tiny red butterfly and the woman’s is a tiny red dot. I like to imagine the man has just written a haiku in beautiful calligraphy on the floor and is describing his feelings and aesthetic goals, and that the woman finds this engrossing.

The man is a paying customer and the woman is rendering a service, but there’s absolutely no sense of that in the print. She’s definitely not in a hurry to get this guy on his way and prepare for another customer. They look more like a married couple.

The hairdos of these two people are astonishing. Thick black hair impeccably groomed. Slender sticks crisscross busily in the woman’s hair. Clothing and background wall are teeming with contrasting geometric patterns and strong, sweeping, graceful lines.

Perhaps what this is is an erotica of the intellect. The voluptuousness of thought in a moment of unhurried quiet and respect. Precisely the opposite of what you find in the outer world today, in which the simple act of walking exposes one to the perils of escooters and ebikes and outbreaks of road rage, especially in Seattle’s south of Lake Union district and the glass and steel towers housing the offices of Google and Amazon and Facebook. The energy here is invisible. Except when it isn’t. And people walk by riveted to the devices in their hands, void of expression. Incommunicable as tantalum, taciturn as nickel.

 

Searching

Music always seems to be searching for something, even when it just seems to be wandering around in space, or entertaining grocery shoppers. I saw a symphony once disguised as a cluster of ferns in a forest of words and said to myself it takes a lot to make a sound extend itself across the desolations of modern life. You need a lot of geometry and towels. D minor on a Fender Stratocaster, squeaky bedsprings, ionized arias, and jingly implications. How many drugs does the body manufacture? Enough to function. How many drugs does an individual require to commune with the universe? Depends. Sometimes the moment calls for Duende. Sometimes Baton Rouge. Life can be rigid as a stripper pole. But given the right music, it can bend.

Music might be defined as “a vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” It might also be a man preparing to eat a hot dog, wheezes of air squeezed out of a bottle of relish, or that deep audible breath Marianne Faithful takes before launching into “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” There’s the music of audition, which is a persistent anticipation mingled with anxiety and the propellers of ambition, and the music of Stephane Mallarmé leaning against the wall of a garage churning with wind & Paganini. Summer rain. Gunfire in a sugar refinery. An old woman milking a cow. 

I love that cocktail lounge jazz which sounds defeated, but defeated in a good way, resigned, that sweet feeling of relief that envelops you when the realization finally unfolds revealing all the formidable obstacles and impossible feats you’d have to perform to conquer whatever evil, whatever depravity, whatever arrogance, whatever stupidity, whatever asshole held all the cards. It’s really not a defeat at all, it’s more of a triumph. The triumph doesn’t feel like triumph, not until a spirit takes you out of yourself and puts you somewhere else. It’s a form of transcendence with a hint of hedonism. The quiet, unvoiced rebellions learned and refined in adolescence that blossom in the adult mind like a golden abdication. It feels cathartic, like all the birds and barking dogs going silent during a solar eclipse and watching moon shadows roll over the earth. 

Music is personal, sympathetic as a home. Gustave Mahler’s Adagietto. Absolutely sublime. Eileen, by Keith Richards, performed on stage. He plays the guitar with such joy, such confidence, such easy skill and impish insouciance, that he can’t remain still, he’s all over the stage, kicking a leg as if in a mock alley fight, pulling out chords with limber panache. 

Etta James. Live at Montreux, 1975. Look out, she says. And launches into I’d Rather Go Blind with a full spectrum of feeling, so broad, so full, so intense it rips a new reality out of a world of stupefying indifference, and coaxes it into being with a husky female fire. Somebody in the crowd shouts something witty and smart and she responds, “you should be up here.” 

Leaving, by Chet Baker. It begins with a cello, segues to a trumpet and ends with a long slow purgation. And because this is YouTube, his face fills the screen: craggy, beaten, sad, but undefeated, there’s heaven in his eyes, and the quiet dignity of pain.