When Was The Last Time You Saw A Lucid Sweater?

An artist doesn’t need to directly express his thoughts in his work for it to reflect its quality, says Proust. It has even been said that the highest praise of God is in the negation of the atheist who finds creation perfect enough to do without a creator. All the little accidents by which we stumble toward the divine in its stunning incomprehensibility attest to all the preliminaries that we must go through in our daily crusade towards the creation of a new alibi. If everything holy were prefabricated nobody would ever want to live in a mobile home. It would be too unsettling. I'm more reflective when I’m unreflective & forget what I came here for. If things lack an innate, autonomous self-existence they do enjoy a picnic now & then, and a profligate interdependence on other causes & conditions, such as hunger, hardware, & that tarpaulin flapping in the rain.

The differences between ages, between class lines, between pollinators and insects, the particularities from voice to voice, melody to melody are all the more gripping because they become more marked, more legible as objects – glass and lumber and jewelry – and thereby more conceivable to the intelligence. Which is another idea I derived from Proust. How to face facts when their insinuations rise to the clarity of cutlery. Social nuances are particularly tricky. Especially on the Serengeti. At twilight. Lulled by the sound of crickets. Hard feelings soften to the sounds of a harmonica. And crickets. And katydids and cicadas. The end of the world. The beginning of the world. And nothing between but the wink of a star and the silence of the void.

The day the electricians came to give us our upgrade I put my headlamp on and grabbed a book to read. I chose Guide to Kultur by Ezra Pound. His sentences are direct and vigorously provocative, galvanizing as glacial milk. Pound's thrusts & lunges were the right fare for a day of chaos. But frustration soon arrived as soon as I began to encounter highly obscure phrases from Latin and Chinese and I couldn't look them up on the internet since the electricity was off. This wasn’t the moment for Pound. I went to the bookcase like a miner searching for ore. Alternating Current by Octavio Paz. That’ll do. Not what the words say, but what they say to one another.  

Beyond the doors of polite society are the mysteries. Eleusis. The allure of guns. The allure of contour. The allure. Of anything. Lucidity is the result of abuse. It’s too bright, too cruel to wear like a sweater. When was the last time you saw a lucid sweater? Exactly. It's either that or grow a lawn on my chin. I saw a man today crouched on the sidewalk in Belltown in July heat smoking crack. The area reeked of urine. The last time I got a stench like that up my nose was under Pont Neuf. We’re a funny bunch. Monks. Plumbers. Philosophers. Dentists. Cashiers. Simians to the core. Apes who crave the dust of Mars over the rocks of Earth. Or that diver we saw in the sound a few days ago, snorkeling, gazing at the bottom, where everything rests, or stirs the sediment.