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.