Singing Into Amber

Singing into amber during a metamorphosis may cause sudden rashes and outbursts of joy. Beauty becomes an immersive experience and shakes its suppositions out of the reach of children. It rattles astronomy until the universe shivers in its nudity. Death comes into contact with the maximum dosage of life and rains dextrose over most of Iowa. It’s an empty sophistication to organize the verdure of anything beyond the call of beauty. Therefore, explode. Arrange yourself in giant collisions. Button a birch with speculation. Feel yourself among the many competing theories of David Bowie. Take a long hot shower. Consider the lily. If a single atom can emit Chicago, why not exist in multiple states simultaneously, and order pizza?   

You ask what is the color of freedom. I’m next to demonstrating it crawling towards the bump under the bistro. It’s never what you think it is, is it? Grieve its loss among the elves accelerating this narrative by nerve and raw elation. We’re ephemera in the house of the rising sun. Sometimes it takes a stunning necklace to think about syntax in addition to quinine. If you have some participles to spare, reach inside yourself with a little inclemency and pull the hands. I’ll let you know when we reach the end of the universe. You’ll see a vacancy sign and a purgatory. You have the power to change the world. But the bed requires a quarter if you want it to vibrate. A great soothing light will announce its presence in your shed. Or head. When is the head a shed, and when is the head a utensil? When it’s on live TV, & when it’s a dense molecular cloud.

Gleefully, I stood on the sand crackling with hieroglyphics. My plan to play confusedly with the cream failed to divert the conversation. It only amplified the sound of the surf as it flowed into punctuations of sand. How can you trust what you cannot control? My body, in particular, was a problem for me: its inability to remain within itself, its subordination to the eccentric demands of needs. It wanted food, flesh, voluptuous amusements and volumes of De Materia Medica with golden spines and beautiful illustrations. How does one go about appeasing the cries and shouts of the body? Indeed, my body began to go off the rails. I couldn’t keep up with the mania of its appetites. I’m not against desire. I just want to corral it a little. Lasso it. Study it. And let it go.

I never doubted my existence. The problem lies elsewhere. We remain incapable of possessing our existence. That’s one problem. Mortality is another. Our lives are continually slipping away. It’s a pretty big problem. It’s much more appealing to forget the whole thing and ride against the wind. Spend an entire afternoon sipping absinthe at a Paris bistro. These are what are called fantasies, and create swirls of lovely improbability in the mind. The roar of the crowd as you reach a high soprano C. Old friends returned from the dead. It is by courtesy and sheer carnality that our quarrels with existence defer to the textures of the moment. And thereby hangs a sock.

 

Happy Accidents

We walked down to see a demonstration of Japanese calligraphy yesterday afternoon at the A/NT Gallery in the Seattle Center. We arrived early and had some time at our disposal to wander around and enjoy the artwork. My first feeling was one of total illiteracy.

I get greedy. I want to take in all the beauty, everything it has to offer. But here I was stymied. I was confronting a language I didn’t know and a discipline of which I knew very little, but felt profoundly fascinated by it. There was a time in my life when I developed a mania for writing haiku. I got pretty good at it, but felt strongly that if I wanted to continue in this artform I would need to learn Japanese. Haiku never looks completely right in the English alphabet. Our alphabet doesn’t have the same lively aspect as Japanese characters. It looks stark, pragmatic as a car battery. Japanese kanji resemble leaves and birds and the gaiety of cherry blossom. It does service in the realm of linguistic expression as well as in the realm of beauty.

It’s deeply frustrating to look at a piece of Japanese calligraphy and not be able to read what it says. Which is stupid. Because I’m missing a wonderful opportunity. Since I have no knowledge of Japanese, I have the opportunity to appreciate the discipline strictly as a visual art, not as an exhibition of signs that refer to something else. You’d think nothing could be easier. But it’s not. I find it strangely difficult to focus on these signs simply as gracefully rendered forms, lines and squiggles and splatters and dots, invigorated entities of black ink on white paper. I know they’re signs. I know they mean something. I know that hidden in their magic is a mountain, a frog, a water lily, or a dragon whose ancient eyes can see into you. The frustration is like staring at a safe that you know is filled with priceless jewels, but you don’t know the combination. It’s hard to stand there and admire the craftsmanship and quality of the safe. I want what’s inside. Or should I say on the other side, where the snow falls, the dragons fly, & stars twinkle in the void.

Fortunately, R brought her smartphone, which allowed her to access a QR code, which provided a translation. Here, for example, is a poem from one of the pieces:

Spent the night at a temple in the haze.
The moon illuminated the ship at night, the monk came back.
Clouds rising at dawn, it was like a dragon had appeared.

There was a shadow of the trees in the middle of the river.
I heard the sound of the temple bell.

 

The demonstration began with a quiz. A spritely, charismatic woman dressed all in black and speaking only Japanese began drawing rudimentary kanji on white sheets of paper. She held the first one up and asked – with the help of a translator - if anyone in the crowd might want to guess what it was. R thought it might be an island. The woman seemed amused. But it wasn't an island. It was an eye. Another simple drawing consisted of a line with a small indeterminate shape above suspended in space. I thought it might be a horizon line with an asteroid floating above. Asteroid seemed a bit farfetched so I remained mute. The correct answer was 'above.' It wasn't a depiction of things, asteroid or flying saucer. It was a depiction of spatial relation, a preposition. The woman turned the paper upside down. We all said "now it's below."

During this activity, a 12- or 13-year-old girl sitting to the woman’s immediate right steadily ground an ink-stick on a small slab or ink stone which also contained a shallow pool of water. The woman thanked the young girl, and emphasized the importance of using alertness and vigor to rub the ink stick on the ink stone as the ink liquefies. A vigorous immersion in the process will enhance the quality of the ink while the action of grinding helps settle the mind and prepare a suitable degree of focus for the creative moment. She then demonstrated a wrong way to do it, which she expressed by lowering her head and leaning slackly on the table while slowly and indifferently moving the ink stick in languorous circles. It was quite comical.

The quiz segued into the main demonstration. A man in his sixties, completely bald and wearing a dark robe and smiling jubilantly entered the space and began making some elementary shapes. He invited a young man standing nearby to try some of the shapes – tiny circles around a small oval – which the young man obliged, somewhat timidly, to do. The old man gleefully smiled, dipped his brush, and began another composition, making vigorous, graceful movements with the brush, modulating its pressure and angle while ink trailed behind in differing shades of black, some thick and assertive and others diaphanous and wispy, like veils of calligraphic inflection.

The old man reached to his side and pulled out a book full of kanji. He remarked on the blocklike form of the characters. They were rigid, and lacked expression. None of the characters showed anger, or hunger, or delight, or volatility. Calligraphy offered a way to awaken their expressive nature.

With the help of some assistants, the old man spread a large sheet of white paper on the floor and asked everyone to step in closer. I moved in closer and got down on my knees so I wouldn't be blocking anyone's view. It felt good to get a little rest from standing. The man got out his set of brushes and with a few brisk, spontaneous strokes and dabs created a branch constellated with blossom. The branch looked like a real branch. It had the same squiggly irregularities and quirky certainty of a branch reaching into space for dollops of sunshine. It was more than a work of representation, it was the spirit of creativity itself. This was a discipline that seemed to call for spontaneity and a shrewd appreciation of imperfection, a welcoming spirit toward happy accidents. He accompanied his drawing with a poem that celebrated the beauty of the mountains surrounding the city, the pleasures of travel tinctured with a yearning for home, which he did his best to describe, given the awkwardness of two languages, and using a tongue instead of a brush. 

 

Schopenhauer's Flute

Afferent nerves can make a dark winter next to a flower of prose, as controversies do. George Eliot comes to mind, and mints and licorice. The mood can feel driven by propellers, as an idea of ​​life assumes contradictory status through its stings and caresses. Efferent nerves act like manifestos. That is to say, they initiate action. Which is how I came to be here. I walked part of the way. I cheated the rest of the way. I flipped a hammer and reversed the direction of time. Everything expanded. My mouth roared with space hunger. And when I arrived, I realized the destination had been entirely false. There was never a destination. Just a rip current. And a raft.

I woke up dizzy in a state of disarray and defrosted my attitude against logic. There’s a flowery storm inside a plow and I aim to bring it to light. I want everybody to see what a straw looks like caught in the light of a Kansas sun. It’s the daily awning among the citizens of a luxuriant plumage. A scorpion with the neurons of a meanwhile. Everything beyond matter could be fiction or conceptual. The birth of an apricot next to a whisper scratched into the wall. I see the darkness speaking to me in bed. I see it chain itself to a thrift store. I swell myself for a fat heat against the depths of a woman’s heart. Is this how I plan to go through life? I guess. I’ve been doing it for over 70 years. Which means it’s either a huge mistake or a big wad of happenstance.  

I can feel the real. It’s soft, because it’s real. It’s smelly, because it’s brimstone. It’s intimidating, because it’s laminated. It’s constantly clenched. It’s indiscriminate as water and twice as wet. It defends itself with hail. It enlarges just below the waist. It has three eyes, four compartments, eight arms, and a freely adjustable free will. It is not redundant. But it is abundant. It has a harbor and a grammatical case of Bolivian leather. It conceals itself with conservatism. It reveals itself with citrus. The wheels of its progress make a noise almost erratic as Gaelic. But not as gríosghoradh. What makes it real is primarily how it sounds when it’s amusing our opinion of it.

Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, played the flute.

As an anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and of what is possible, poetry murmurs its irritations in sanguine usurpation, grasping at content then dropping it on the heads of the unsuspecting. You’ll need to run some cartilage for clapping your hands among all these drifters, these flaneurs of implication. Knuckles, mostly, and signs of rheumatism. Suspension has more value than greed both as an element in composition but also as a flautist from Vienna. Objects in art and objects in reality are entirely illusory. The conception of pulchritude is nugatory. It is therefore deviating into inquiry. I can’t wait for the dilatory. Or wary. I must proceed apace. I must give empirical reality its due. Even if it means structure, or taking the trash down. If I look up at the sky I’ll see a semblance of freedom. And when I look down, I see grounds for assertion.

Beauty merging with poetry which, in being "of nothing and nowhere," is in Reverdy's eyes "the manifestation of the irrepressible need for freedom that is in man." It is this certainty that Ossip Mandelstam went so far as to pay with his life, recalling: "What distinguishes poetry from mechanical speech is that poetry wakes us up, shakes us right in the middle of the word. "

I could multiply the examples of this desperate quest for what is priceless. In fact, few people settle for giving up the desire to make it their own in the sparkle of an eternal present. That the emergence of beauty accompanying it with its unpredictable horizons has never ceased to worry all the powers, this is precisely what they want to take away from us, including even the memory of it.

To what extent will we continue to remain indifferent to it? To what extent will we agree to contribute to it, even if it is through inattention? Until when will we agree to ignore that this is the establishment of a new type of enslavement if not corruption?

-        Annie Le Brun, What Is Priceless (my translation)

Being of nothing and nowhere is precisely what I had in mind when I sat down to breakfast this morning. The sparkle of an eternal present, like the lady said. There are fish crashing into the wave behind you. There are those who will call it painting. And those who sense exhilaration before necessity becomes a problem. That irrepressible need for freedom, for example. It may require some struggle. A regime rich in protein. But there it is: dolphins racing alongside the hull, and the chrome of the wheel blinking in the Sicilian sun. Which will assume an entirely different form a minute or two from now. Something deep and soulful, like a cello. Or shrill and exquisite, like Schopenhauer’s flute.

 

 

Have You Noticed

Have you noticed, the harder people find it to face reality, to acknowledge the truth of things, the more they resort to censorship and propaganda to maintain the self-deluding servicability of an obfuscating narrative? Infantile, yes, and cowardly and shameful. But can you blame them? Things are not looking good. There used to be just enough civility, just enough warmth, just enough honesty to live in the world with a sense of decency and benign liberality. The raw truth has fangs. It’s terrifying. Horrifying to discover the world has no meaning, that you live in a society that is just barely a society, cities unwalkable due to maniacs on e-scooters and e-bikes whizzing past people crouched smoking fentanyl or walking determinedly indifferent to the surrounding dystopic squalor while dodging mounds of human poop and laboring hard to convince themselves we live in a moral universe. A media that glorifies empty suits seeking positions of power and wealth and demonizes people of principle who protest the manifest evils afflicting the world’s populations. That calls a genocide a conflict. That calls a heavily militarized totalitarian oligarchy a democracy. That calls journalists who reveal the truth terrorists. And arrests them. And muzzles them. And claps its hands with delight. 

Before syntax, we used jukebox buttons. We punctuated time with hit songs. Most everything was assumed to be genuine. But there are methods for finding out the undercurrents of the banquet hall. Analysis is held together by paper clip, if it is explicit in meaning. If not, then paint the light next to a light bulb. See if it doesn’t turn bovine. I’m serious. The fire lasts longer when we read. This is because of syntax. It holds everything together. Otherwise things go crazy. There’s meaning all over everything. Ideas crash into each other like protons. The book perceives it is being written even when someone is reading it. And this is a cause of wakefulness.

Meditate to apprehend all that is empty. Or so they say. I say thrash the current beneath the wave to catch a fish. Read things carefully. Read like a catheter. Penetrate. Sew acceptance in the heat. Use the thread behind the eyes. The needle of the mind. Thread it with thought. Plus bursting around awkwardly attracts laughter. And for intestinal peculiarities, we have the highway. Emerson’s cutlery touched on the slice between heaven and so-called necessities. It happens when our nature is galvanized towards the fiber to be folded. It’s easier than you think to climb the planets against the void after dreaming. It takes a minute of old rails to explain a train. But once this is realized, the path to satori trails us until it trips over itself, and gets lost in the rain.