Dinner At Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

Midnight. Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. We sit down to eat. It’s a big table. Solid oak. The milieu is an accessory for the sequins everyone is wearing. Overhead is a chandelier. Under our feet are planks of roughhewn prose. The debris of letters whose subtleties unveil a world released from the lie of being truth. This is a place of refuge. No prescribed choices. This helps explain some of my biases, which were carpentered in the Black Forest by a group of innovative elves. It's always beneficial to reflect on things. What is love: a lampshade, or a bowl of ambrosia salad? Mitochondria are essential to the functioning of biochemical reactions. We should show them as much hospitality as possible. Propulsion starts with engineering & ends with butterflies. After that, life becomes a biological rather than theological matter. And we all have ecstasy for dessert.

8:45 a.m., Sunday. I put my hearing aids in and the soundscape immediately comes into high definition. I hear the rustle of my pants, the metallic clacking of letters on a keyboard, and think about the developments in writing in mid-nineteenth century western culture, when the image of the writer assumed the character of a craftsperson, who (in the words of Roland Barthes), "shuts himself away in some legendary place, like a workman operating at home, and who roughs out, cuts, polishes, and sets his form exactly as a jeweler extracts art from his material, devoting to his work regular hours of solitary effort." But now, in the digitalized world, that exaltation of language as an exacting and venerable art has been superseded by a culture of conformity and shallow entertainment, and writing relegated to the gratuitous monasticism of Lindisfarne in the Middle Ages. The monks feared Viking invasion. The writer fears the erosion of value.

The chair creaks whenever I get up to do something, get a glass of water or feed the cat. The creaking audibly matches the strain in my legs with such accuracy that I often forget the creaking is coming from my chair and think it's coming from my legs. And sometimes I lean back and sip the solitude soaked in whatever scenery happens to be drifting around in my mind. Little details, like eluding a splinter or sealing a letter. Petting a cloud. The rustle of new wings moving by trial and error. The voice of an angel echoing in an aquarium. That weird smoky smell of candle wax. The excitement and anguish at the start of a revolt. How stellar it is to ship my freight and drive across Nevada on a Suzuki Intruder. Is that a detail or a dream? I think it’s the ignition of unburnt fuel in the exhaust system, or ceaselessly exploded clichés in a wilderness of words.

When I was young, I engorged with lyricism. Now that I’m old I engorge with oblivion. The universe becomes erotic. Because death is involved. And cataracts and arthritis. And moments of euphoria followed by despair followed by the ghosts of rock and roll past. Jackie De Shannon. Needles and Pins. Rosie Hamlin. Angel Baby. Merrilee Rush. Angel of the Morning. Which was written by Chip Taylor, who also did Wild Thing, Early Sunday Morning and Fuck All The Perfect People. I remember meeting Merrilee Rush. She was sitting on a stump in a woodsy yard somewhere near Burien, Washington. I was sitting on a stump, too. Feeling massively stumped. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. Don’t know why, lately, it has been popping into my mind. It’s one of those funny memories about something inconsequential that bubbles up for no reason, and yet holds a certain fascination, a certain mild excitement, and pops, sprinkling glitter on the void.

There’s an unparalleled resource beyond the obvious. I can sense it in Apollinaire. The trickle of interacting hymns. And great machinery. The night is a chamber of stars. My bed is the prairie. My radio is crickets. I feel Gothic. I feel melodic and imminent. Like hives. Like a pharmacy on the edge of town. Like a song about a woman who dropped her life into a microphone and created a sense of urgency in people’s lives. Darkness sees itself in our obscurity. This is where the story gets puzzling. The chameleon that walks on my nerves is thoroughly intuitive and trained in the martial arts, and yet it can never find a substance that can justify its choices. My life has been a lifelong conundrum. Is that such a bad thing? The dilemma of singularity can never by resolved by robots. It takes controversy, delirious mitochondria, and big mistakes. 

No better feeling than propofol diffusing into the bloodstream. Consciousness and all of its clatter and all of its clutter sublimating into a vapor of blithe inconsequence that is swept away by the breath of an angel. It’s on my mind constantly. This flirtation with death. With oblivion. With the void. It’s enticing. It’s beguiling. But I don’t want to feed it words. I just want let it exist as is. A vapor of blithe inconsequence. Nothingness is inherently unstable. It can’t exist without something. Nothing needs something to be nothing. It needs protozoans and hemoglobins and semicolons. Quarks popping in and out of existence. The crazy vagaries of dreams. Agates in the river Lot. Stars in a web of galaxies. And a staircase that leads nowhere.