The Real Me

I read a book in the late 70s that completely altered my experience of myself. It startled my sense of identity so dramatically that I have wondered since if such a thing as a self or a personhood exists in the realm of nature. I believe it does, or I probably wouldn't be writing this, but in a mode far more fictive and imaginary than I’d previously imagined.

The book is called The Lives of a Cell, Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas, and has has been in my possession for 50 years. Thomas was an American physician and poet who became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He writes in a style that is both eminently accessible and highly engaging, scientific marvels seasoned with a gracious and dulcet touch. There’s a gentleness to the words, and a quiet lyricism, which makes them all the more an unlikely vehicle for mind-blowing epiphanies, but I would put it in a class with hallucinogenic substances such as peyote and psilocybin. It’s that transformative, that revelatory.

This is the paragraph that did it:

A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.

Who am I, then, the little homunculus in my brain gazing out at the world like Captain Kirk gazing at the screen on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, talking to a hostile alien emperor or Howard Stern or Buddha? The void. The voiceless void, which is the birthplace of us all. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness. Interesting thought. But is it me thinking this thought or the collectivity of cells that comprise the body I’m riding around in that is thinking this thought? In a word, yes. The human body contains around 50 to 100 trillion cells, and they have a lot to say: right now they’re busy writing these words, while simultaneously listening to “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, and feeling the warmth of a cat on my lap. A symposium of mitochondria, blood cells and osteocytes and myofibers and satellite cells and neurons creating my self-image, my self- esteem, my curations for the museum that is me, this carnival of neurochemicals, dopamine, GABA, histamine, serotonin and so on.

Most of cognition goes on in the brain, which is steeped in an electrical and chemical circus of neurons and glia. Neurons galore. Roughly 100 billion. These are the largest cells in the body and make up the nervous system. They’re busy little buggers. My nervous system is always busy. It always feels wonderful when it slows down and I can get a break from being myself. From everything, but mostly from me. Yours truly. This congregation of vapors and adipocytes and fibroblasts and fabrications and fingers and blisters and bone.  

It's weirdly reassuring to know I’m not a single entity but a multitude of entities. I feel less lonely. But when I am lonely, who is doing the loneliness? My cells are busy exchanging fluids between compartments and from place-to-place within the body, doing everything they can to keep me alive, keep me going, keep me erect, keep me vertical and dramaturgical.

I wonder if it’s possible, like some yoga master, to feel the cells teeming and vibrating the body, tingling in the mind like chimes. But when I say “in the mind,” what do I mean by mind? That energy in my head that busies itself like a rat in a hamster wheel creating narratives and fantasies and bouts with remorse?  Remorse doesn’t sound like something that a cell would bother with. So where does remorse come from? This is the trouble with empiricism. Its factual actualities make it literal and leaden. People in white lab coats peering into microscopes. Whose minds might be dancing crazily in their heads, witnessing mitochondria on a glass slide. Are cells familiar with inner and outer? They must be: they’re cells. What’s more inner and outer than a cell? The walls of these cells, however, don’t imprison: they emit signals into extracellular space.

Cell membranes are thin, flexible layers of lipids and proteins, with the fundamental structure being a phospholipid bilayer, amphipathic molecules made up of two fatty acid chains that are hydrophobic coupled with a phosphate-containing hydrophilic head group. A head group is an atom or group of atoms taking the place of another atom or group of atoms occupying a specific position in a molecule. Sounds like a typical worksite, people working together in a shared space, combining talents and skills to achieve a certain goal. I think of ants. I think of bees. I think of chorus lines and infantries and acting troupes. All this organizational effort to keep the cruise ship afloat, the cruise ship being me, with me (ostensibly) at the wheel.

It all makes so much sense. When I’m hungry, it’s not me creating the sensation of hunger. Nor is it me creating all the right digestive juices to extract protein and vitamins from the food I’ve chosen to eat. I didn’t invent my fingers. I didn’t invent my eyes. Or knees or mouth or feet. When I first entered this world there were people to take care of me, and growth hormones to help me evolve into a semi-autonomous being. Had the entire process been up to me I wouldn’t have made it. Nobody would. Cells do it all. We’re just along for the ride.

When I breathe, I’m not really doing the breathing; something is breathing me. And when – some years ago in my carefree and libidinous past – I’d be consumed with the urge to get intimate with another constellation of cells, it wasn’t me – that phantasmal homunculus in my skull who thinks he’s Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s fifth - but a libidinal confluence of hormones – testosterone in particular - that made me dance like a puppet whose strings were manipulated by a propagative goddess named Aphrodite.

Or so I’d like to believe. It’s tempting and easy to blame those crazy behaviors on instinct, as if I’d been some primordial swamp creature like Shakespeare’s Caliban. But that would be a distortion. I did draw on a store of cortical resources that took the form of foresight and planning, scheming, plotting, coining witticisms and putting on a show. But a truck can’t move without diesel, and I had plenty of diesel in the form of gonadocorticoids and gonadal steroids to power my rig down the highway. Oftentimes, my expeditions were buffoonish and mad, but sometimes Cupid’s arrow hit its mark, and choruses of angels ascended to the heavens in song.

It's what cells do. They interrelate. They seek reciprocity. Give and take. Networking. Bonding. Forming connections. For the last 30 years I’ve been married to a woman of marvelous affinities, for which I give thanks; thanks to the orchestra of cells that provided the juice, the oomph, the elan vital, the instincts and intuitions necessary to commingle so wonderfully with another constellation of cells. What a communion of cells doesn’t explain is the uniqueness of such a rapport. At what point does the immaterial enter? The sublime. The transcendent. Are there neurochemicals for romance? In her essay “The Neuroendocrinology of Love,” Krishna G. Seshadri writes:

Love may be defined as an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. It appears that lust, attachment and attraction appear to be distinct but intertwined processes in the brain each mediated by its own neurotransmitters and circuits. These circuits feed on and reinforce each other. Sexual craving is mediated by testosterone and oestrogen and has the amygdala as an important centre. Attraction is mediated by hormones of stress and reward including dopamine, norepinephrine cortisol and the serotinergic system and has the nucleus accumbens in the ventral tegmental area as key mediators.

This description disappoints because it’s so reductive. Love is bigger than hormones. This is where my epiphany bursts like a puffball mushroom, words adrift like spores in a forest understory. Cellular biology is only a part of the puzzle. There’s also a thing called hylozoism, the idea that all matter is living. Or pantheism, the idea that everything is God. It’s a boundless space where nothing is quantifiable or subject to systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, or the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. In musical terms, it’s the intervals in a symphonic structure that give it life, the silences between the notes that create the music. It’s a breeze carrying and dispersing seeds. It’s a phenomenon of consciousness, where the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity dissolves. As Leibnitz said, evolution is involution. Sounds and silences. The neural interface between a cell and a soul.  

The Biographer's Distress

The biographer’s distress was nothing less than dazzling. 200 pages in, he’d discovered something electrifying about his subject, something that called into question the entire premise, the entire scaffolding by which he framed his subject in a golden dream of aspirations fulfilled, ambitions reached, and tragedies transcended. This one thing, this one maddening discovery, something he should’ve picked up along the way but didn’t, altered the entire thematic scheme. People are never any one single thing, people are networks, interrelational tessellations of imbricated realities. But if you’re going to do a biography, it’s helpful to have an overarching theme. People like a coherent personality, even though the actuality proves otherwise. People are different people depending upon who they’re around. Context is everything.

Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was a swashbuckling poet of the late Victorian period writing and behaving in the manner of the aesthetes, the art-for-art’s sake crowd and their super-subtle sensibilities seasoned with hashish and absinthe. Birdwhistle’s biographer was an elderly man of the 21^st century named Abbott Aloysius Grady the Third who taught contemporary lit at Ragsdill University, a southern institution of learning and excellence. His biography of Birdwhistle took in the whole art scene and decadence of 1890s London, all of it liberally peppered with the luminaries of the time, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater and Lucas Malet, the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, a Victorian novelist.

What Grady had discovered about Birdwhistle put him in a tizzy. Birdwhistle’s true name was Olivia Berrycloth, and Olivia was a woman. Grady’s biography up to that point had described a Byronic libertine with a feverish appetite for women and sensual pleasures. The feverish appetite part was true, but it hadn’t been the hunger of a male, but a female. Grady in no way found this objectionable, it simply nullified the previous 200 pages and all the work put into research and organizing and verifying details. This revelation of Birdwhistle’s true identity would require some changes, to say the least. Grady had been careful to insert in his biography that most of the stories surrounding Birdwhistle’s erotic odysseys were anecdotal and quite possibly apocryphal, so as to avoid any accusations of slander or pornography.

Would he? Have to change anything? Did it make a difference if Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was a woman named Olivia Berrycloth? He could, except for all the name changes. That would be tedious, but not as tedious as rewriting 200 pages. He’d been somewhat prudent in handling the details of Berrycloth’s intimacies because the liaisons were not much more than breezy escapades, outrageous sexual encounters with no real basis in anything, except, perhaps the erotic black ink drawings of Aubrey Beardsley with their disproportionately protuberant organs, and gleefully hedonistic gymnastics. One thing was true: Olivia’s enactment of a swashbuckling Victorian Casanova named Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle had been rendered with exquisite panache. Her sexuality reversed, she was able to expand her repertoire of lustful exchanges exponentially. Great artistry, indeed.

He owed it to her. He, Abott Aloysius Grady the Third. A new biography. The right biography. Her biography. The biography of a woman who surrounded herself with the finest minds of her age, the most dissident, the most promiscuous and daring. Swinburne, Max Beerbohm, Lafcadio Hearn, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Wits dry as a Petit Chablis. The headstrong scholars of midnight deliriums. For Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was not just invention, but a visitor from another dimension, and a determined woman's guise for unorthodox pleasures. This, the new biography, would map the exploits of a woman who’d maneuvered the rigid mores of late Victorian England without ending up in Reading Gaol, like her dear friend Oscar. With whom she’d shared cigars, and brandy, and tall tales of midnight romps. And who lived to be 102. Grady could barely call it a biography. It was more of a dual-ography, the biography of two people in one body. And now he, Abott Aloysius Grady, made three.

Mark Twain once said that biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written. Nor the woman. Especially when she’s occupied in being someone else. A man with a penchant for women. With a mind boiling over with wit. With an Edwardian waistcoat and a libertine’s smile. Where is the reality of this being? What turns them from a hypothesis into an unchained swain of flesh and blood? From a stream of spermatozoa into a hive of busy thought? We sit and polish the spring on a sewing machine, and that, for the moment is who we are. Said Olivia Berrycloth sewing a new reality through the mouth of Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle. 

 

Wanna Get Away Day

A Möbius sonnet in a quantum armchair attracts photons. it’s not uncommon to find me snorkeling on the ceiling on Wanna Get Away Day. My revolt insisted on moving toward willpower. I knew this day would come. But I didn’t expect it to be so down-to-earth. The smell of clay runs toward the abstract unless it can be treated with cabbage. I have often found this to be the case. The first time I saluted a flag I felt grabbed by something. That's when I knew that one day I would have to fight a strategic adversary within. A bald eagle or a gnome embalmed in honey. Meanwhile I get by on selling cashews at the flea market. My face is cracked and withered and so invites a degree of trust. Life is a pilgrimage, that’s for sure. The trail is instinct with dispossession. Primitive ferns and lizards. The abyss glows with lava. And is there to remind me what a joke a lot of these streaming services are. A lot of motels don’t even put the big screen TVs where you can watch them from your bed. Nobody watches them. They look at their phones instead. Travel boosts my appreciation of divine guidance. My hearing thickens at the horizon. Maturity has charms that youth never had. At age sixteen I crashed into a wall that I later discovered is a phenomenon called reality. People in heated arguments are fond of invoking that word. I puzzle over it, pummel my fists into it like a punchbag. As I got older, I began to see it sag like the breasts of an old woman running an automotive shop in Lubbock. The word itself convulsed on the page like a furry accordion doing a mazurka. Men shivering in doorways. Memories aglow in the dark. That first day in Chicago when Bo Diddley opened the door to Chess Records. That sense of the beyond that never goes away, and generates such a lovely sense of anarchy. It’s a fiery little word, tough like Barcelona leather, and built like a Möbius sonnet.

The Meaning Of Hair

I sometimes get asked what the meaning of hair is. It's a gleam of luxuriant orchids folded into words. I saw this once in a Jim Jarmusch movie. None of the ones that have been made but the one that had never been made. It starred Charles Bronson and Gina Lollobrigida. It was called The Spur Below The Cowboy Exalts His Corpus. It was about the practice of phenomenology at a biker’s rally. For example, the premise of chains, and how that might be perceived as a symbol for intentionality. I’ve seen stranger things. There's a spectrum of abalone that leans against the rain as it vanishes into the afternoon. But what really gets my attention are forklifts. I love to watch them in operation. The stellar conditions in the sanguinity of elbows is a slightly more common phenomenon. I see it a lot in bars. Somebody gets off a creaky stool and walks over to the jukebox and drops a quarter and punches a couple of buttons. Minute later you’re hearing Needles and Pins. Rain pelts the window. You see your old face in the mirror. The one you had before you got old. And made movies in your mind while seeding the fields with flax and barley.

Bela Lugosi's Refrigerator

What if you gazed at an object so hard it sprouted blue blames? What if the object were a fork? Or a female breast? Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore, they cannot be donkeys. Donkeys carry things on their back. Pickaxes and propositions. Roughly speaking: objects are inscrutable. Mute. Completely mute. Except for microphones. Coffee machines and blenders. The hiss of irons, the chatter of jackhammers. Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs, and are analogous to tutti frutti. Propositions can only represent the whole reality if they’re plugged into a source of energy, a 50-watt generator or Bela Lugosi’s refrigerator. It all gets rhythmical in the end. And we all become bits of information on an enormous grid. A phenomenon called social media. Where the medium is the message and the message is infinitely diffuse, the microwave radiation from the Big Bang and a wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom.

Hippopotamus Pearls

It’s quite easy to imagine William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, thinking. But it’s not so easy to imagine Philippe Petit balanced on a cable 1,000 feet above the bottom of the Grand Canyon reading Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Or is it? I change my mind. It’s easy. It’s easy to change your mind. Let me restate that. It’s easy to change my mind. Not your mind. Another person’s mind is a secret so deep that it only appears in glimpses, in flashes of wit, in passionate declarations, in shouts and sighs. But mostly in words. Hippopotamus pearls and a village of levers. Are minds even singular? Are they unique? Or are they singularly similar? What makes a mind unique? I’ve got a mind like a parasail in a dome of mollusks. Bulging and pregnant. But when I hit the ground the little homunculus I’m imagining as me in the dome of my mind vanishes because ultimately it just wasn’t that interesting. The scene shifts. Everything feels like a highway, even in my own head. Maybe it was all those years of hitchhiking. This is where you learn philosophy. This is where you learn about human nature. The Hyperion storm of the universe. All those spirals and spheres and nebulae in the cosmos. And here on earth the caprices of wind and undulations of wheat. But most of all patience. Hitchhiking is where you learn patience. And trust. Not a full, unconditional trust. That would be stupid. What you want is a Farmer’s Almanac, a qualified trust. A refined trust. A calculated trust. In bridges. In Newtonian mechanics. In toes and planetariums. In doctors and car mechanics because you have to. You have no choice. Unlike politicians, in whom trust is a joke. A toothy grin. And a mouth full of platitudes. Everybody likes platitudes. They’re designed to excite you to do something you’re probably never going to do. But it’s nice to dream, isn’t it? Hence, William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, turning. Turning where? Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

Hour Of The Bonfire

Did you ever have an entire dialogue stewing in your head all day and you couldn’t stop it? They say it’s advisable to suck venom from a wound but I don’t think language works that way. It’s not that kind of venom. It’s too abstract. And the scenery isn’t right. Everything is so new now it already feels aphoristic. I’ve never been the piano player in a band before. That’s ok. When the world becomes impossible the best thing to do is bake bread. I learned to swim in Wisconsin. But I didn’t get the full impact until I jumped into ancient mythology. Anyone my age would be able to show you a list of things they once believed that turned out to be nonsense. No need to go into it. It annoys people. It’s easy to be yourself when you’re not around. Think of it as a walk in the forest. The flapping of its wings creates a big lightning. And becomes paper again.

My job is an open secret. I have things to say. I agree, the sidewalk does seem to grimace with prolongation. People look at me like a light bulb filled with blinking ants. I feel the balm of nothingness and fondly reminisce the smells of an old hotel in Memphis. For I am the chitchat bird and this is my story. One night when I was cleaning the barn a molecular storm churned in my muscle and I saw the electric unicorn neon sparkle. And nothing else mattered. This is snowball art not Parcheesi. I found a smaller bit and succeeded at making a hole. I found a universe on the other side of a coconut palm. This isn’t surrealism this is contingency pure and simple. Infinity takes a long time to get here. The letters heat up and I dream on paper I’m twisted like a parachute. I congratulate the toad in a cloud of sprockets and turn to face the sun.

I tried to find a practical use for my pessimism. I should be more optimistic. Were it not for ruining my pessimism. It’s the Hour of the Bonfire. If these words are present to you the past is right behind. It’s where I get all my pessimism. The sound of a drummer brushing a snare drum is like lingerie falling to the floor. How can you not love that? I had to get out of Dodge quick. There was a noise on the ground. It was time to shift gears. Move forward. Put the past in my rearview mirror. I had fun sitting down at a table unfolding my woes. But that was then. This is now. I stand before you a naked oaf. It’s something of a luxury to be dissociated from yourself. Nothing to prove. Just a slice of doorknob pie and a way to punch the unsayable into the sayable.

I once heard it said that deception has eleven elevators and ten combustible gags. I’m paraphrasing. The important thing is to proceed with prudence, and knit. You never know who you’re going to offend. Funny how words come in and out of the language. Take awesome, for example. Awesome is an awesome example of semantic leaching. And it’s a shaky fact that nicknames create chameleons. Glass only pretends to be transparent. I think what it’s really doing is lifting us into the sublime. Listen: I can hear the fish whisper. A piece of fleece in the hand feels amazing. But watch it. It’s so easy to trigger people these days. All I need is a microphone & a frequency. I will rise like Godzilla at a Zillow rally. I have a plan based on spit.

I said goodbye to California just before San José became Silicon Valley, and headed north. I believe spangles have a future. I hope so. I’m completely lost around the auxiliary mode. All those surfaces, lines & angles make a beautiful setting, but I feel awkward around octagons. That said, I’m fascinated by Renaissance plumbing. Go figure. Something there is about a thick white tablecloth that induces good manners. Put a woman’s scarf on it though and things change. Everything turns immoderate and saying anything feels like smuggling a provocative thought across the border of decorum into the realm of anything goes. Which it does. Nobody can control a language. Tell that to the censors. Once you prune a tree you’re forever pruning a tree.

So come on, take my hand, walk with me. Kinesis emboldens temptation. Let’s hurry. I’m feeling chromatic and I want an éclair. It’s one thing to be in love with technique and another to be infatuated with varnish. Nothing is ever truly extracurricular, but if it is, so much the merrier. Everyone imagines the bartender is some form of therapist. This might be. When you start to see people in terms of decibels, and you can’t really function, people can surprise you with their parables. Quantum equations have otherworldly meanings. Kung Pao Chicken, for example. Or life on an island. I need to gain a better understanding of shade. I feel like there’s something there but I can’t see it. Even the prepositions hang loose. That kind of sentence. That kind of day. 

 

Loop Morph

The sentence evolves into coherence as a herd of lips moving over the page with the dexterity of fingers picking up words along the way. Everything that exclaims the fertility of mass is eager to consummate a semblance of grammatical outboard that can push us forward toward the opposite shore. Which is exactly what a subject is. What a subject is subject to. Either a fly rod or a strong wind blowing over your casting shoulder. The density of mass which shines out of a stein is proof enough of Innsbruk. But language is more like thaw, the romantic thermodynamics of a mutual couch. It requires a warm hand and a hard outer layer of wilderness. If you’re like me you’ve probably already spent a lot of time googling solutions for the human condition. It’s like casting a line into a void of uncertainty hoping something bites and dreading the moment it does. Knowledge is always a little disturbing and slippery, like a fimbriated moray. Language comes from the other side of where I started. It slid through the unconscious like a penguin and emerged as a full-blown human. The names of the dead stream from the mouths of the living assuming a ghostly but vigorous existence. The constitutional crisis is now become a tenuity. More like a referee than a referendum. A man with a black bowtie trying to separate two sweaty grammars, even though everyone knows it’s fake. It’s hardcore theatre. We once had a body of laws but when the laws became a body the appetites profited from the situation and nominated themselves relentless. They ate the entire country. And then ordered a bowl of Venezuela for dessert. Proposal is more than a dispersal of words. It’s a form of carnation, a state of being with an added personal touch. You might think of it as something slid forward on the counter for a fuller appreciation of its many hues and facets. It’s not exactly as if I were trying to induce a hysterical reaction to something fairly mundane, but I would like to expand my options a little. I wasn’t sure it would happen like this. But it did. It stood first as a significance, filling itself with stone mullions and tracery. The imagination does this. It decants, allowing its fragrance to envelop you in voluptuous impracticalities. There are many challenges that I pass on to my predecessor, but burdening the past with my irrelevance isn’t one of them. I’m much more interested in zoetropes than proctoscopes. The big door closed on the riotous outer world and a light beamed through the rose window unhesitatingly defining itself as an ontological phenomenon in its own right. 

 

There's A New Sound Now To Figure Out

There’s a new sound now to figure out. It’s a hard crisp slightly metallic sound, a thud with force and purpose. It’s the two panels on our new living room window shutting. They have handles, and slide easily within their grooves. I’m not used to it yet. They haven’t been opened much in the past several months. But now it’s May and the air is getting warmer and it feels good to air the apartment out. Keep them open until the interior smells like spring. The noise has an image: panels shutting on a late afternoon in May. Crisp as an equation. Resonant as a gong.

What’s it like being a musician these days? It’s a question I put to Google. Google came back with a list of answers written by musicians, who all pretty much said the same thing: if you love making music, make music. As far as supporting yourself, it’s really hard. They advise crowdfunding, live shows, and streaming services. Pretty glib response. And rather dreary, except for the live shows. AI has already begun undermining the market. Making a ton of money, but destroying the romance of creativity, and the quest for something real, something genuine, something pure and new and exhilarating. Imagine a medieval laboratory in a chamber illumined by a liquid boiling in the alembic of an alchemist’s quest for the philosopher’s stone. I think that’s a much better vision. Although it’s not music. It’s an image of artistry as a pursuit for the divine. Which is a little pretentious. Hard to picture the Ramones on a quest for the divine. Buy why should that be? As soon as I make one statement, another bangs into it from behind, and I have to start all over again, trying to make a coherent hat out of a brim of nonsense. Not a surprise. Much of the time is spent in idle speculation. And sometimes I just want to be sedated.

Will the public discern true beauty from the digitally counterfeit? Let’s hope so. Does freshly poured concrete dry in the rain? Yes, but not well. It’s weakened by the rain. The coolest thing to be in the 60s was a rock musician, or a writer. What is the coolest thing to be now? A billionaire? A game developer? A mobile app developer? An Ethical Hacker? An InfoSec analyst? A cockroach? A dung beetle? An AI sex robot?

I’ve got a satchel of prose and a ticket to Rye. Why Rye? Why not Minot? No particular reason. I gave up on particular reasons a particular time ago. I’m not particular now. I’m completely lenticular. And occasionally perpendicular. I’m at my best when I’m horizontal. And on a train to Kauai. By way of the locomotive I just plucked from the air. It’s made of ice, and rice, and extracurricular devices, such as a Dental Nitrous Oxide System purchased at Na Huhu Lani in Kauai. It doesn’t ride on rails it rides on dolphins and mermaids, and is fueled by Bo Diddley.   

I’m getting better at it. Not sure what. But I feel I’m getting better at it. Better at whatever it is I’m getting better at. How could I not? Do anything long enough and it becomes a meditation on an acoustic guitar, a trance by the fireplace, a horseback ride up a switchback in Bryce Canyon, or landing a rocket ship on the icy surface of Pluto, which I defiantly continue to think of as a planet, maybe my favorite planet, other than earth, which is melting and burning down, but it’s resilient, it’s been through all that before, and thanks to a lot of cyanobacteria we now have Zen gardens and green tea. The feelings grow distant with time, broader, more universal. The perceptions slip into various modes of expansion and malleability, depending on one’s capacity for sitting still for a really long time, and willingness to let things dilate and recede into mist.

I often wonder who uses those desks at hotels and motels. I imagine the mobile phone has obliterated that form of writing. Missing someone, being somewhere else, seeing something new and wanting to put it into words. It’s easy to picture someone circa the 20s or 30s doing that just before going to the opera or a walk down the shoulder of the highway to the closest roadhouse café. Or the 50s. There sits Kerouac in a Los Gatos attic hammering out the details of existence in a mode of creative transport fueled by whiskey and Benzedrine. Or the 60s. There I am at the Arcata Hotel in 1968 laboring to figure out how all those poets in New American Poetry created such lively poetry. It was a verbal paradise. By the 70s the whole idea of belle lettres was sadly obsolete. The sensibility did not comport well with Disco. And by 2024 bookstores once engorged with a gazillion titles had become stuffed with tchotchkes, T-shirts and coffee mugs.  

Favorite hotel is the Hotel Récamier in the 6e arrondissement of Paris, by the Church of Saint-Sulpice, where Baudelaire was baptized, and around the corner on rue Ferou are all 100 lines of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre. Life felt so different there. Richer, headier, more stimulating all around due to a beautiful Baroque architecture with its flourishing colonnades and classical tablature and bartizans and bay windows and chimeras rather than the brutalist architecture of the U.S. and its aggressively drab Philip Johnson office buildings. I enjoyed awakening in bed and turning my head in the direction of the window to see the wall of the cathedral where Baudelaire had been baptized and feeling a familial connection, as if Baudelaire had been my grandparent.

I’m also partial to the Hotel Sorrento in Seattle, where I got married. And Free Spirit Spheres in Vancouver, British Columbia, which are pods hanging from trees. And the Time Out Of Mind on Mars, which overlooks Elysium Planitia, and features a stunning vista of absolutely nothing.