One Day I Stood Near A Small Door

One day I stood near a small door in the middle of nowhere. I knocked. And there stood Harpo, smiling like a glissando. He handed it to me, and I got a hibachi out of the trunk and sizzled it with a smoldering sonata. It smelled like stationary. This is a medley the musicians play with an innocent finesse. There are days when everything makes sense, cause and effect distill the murk of phenomena like the stillness in a small seaside bookstore, and expressions of one’s inner life pop up easy as toast. The books all have spines and pages and things to say about the world and human experience, each in a different way, so that a vast spectrum of possibility emerges and transforms them into reveries. I once saw a woman so entranced by a mark on the wall that she produced a volume of books on the errancy of modes. But isn’t this true of most fugues? The imperfections of the road function as declensions in a deep grammar of salty dry goods. Everything becomes a prediction, or a big hole in a raggedy old abstraction. You can find insight anywhere if you know where to look. But even that takes insight, and a nourishing sense of absurdity.

I once found a ball of tangled wires in an old trunk. It meant little at that moment, but in the fullness of time it evolved into a recollection, which also meant nothing, but did so in such a captivating manner that I devoted a typhoon to it, and pitched it to Warner Brothers. I do this constantly. Point to things and offer them as souvenirs when the party is over. I don’t want to see people go home empty. Physiology functions much like an oak tree, murmuring unintelligible philosophies in a lakeside breeze. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to interpret the meaning of gravity among the hectic cracks of city pavement. Alice Coltrane once said the purpose of art is to awaken the dormant mysteries within our souls. Well ok then. Let’s get to it. Make something come out of the dark and gape. All the enigmas of existence rise from their benches in the square and do the slow dance of secrecy and the cool blue dance of the lost.

Jazz never had a strong appeal for me until late in life. That makes sense to me. Jazz walks out of the night like a wild energy pierced with feeling. It doesn’t know where to go so it goes everywhere. It achieves this by way of legerdemain. Legerdemain is from the French. It means lightness of hand. Brushed cymbals. Eighth notes in irregular groupings. Juicy horns. I run a thumb over the lip of a saxophone. A circular figure demands to be pushed into supposition. What fascinates me is the hole. A hole is the one thing that disappears the deeper you dig it. I’m the first to admit that geometry is not my forte. But I do know the difference between a raspberry tart and a rhombohedron. I like being elliptical, too, from time to time. Sliding adaptations past the moo of things has always felt natural to me. Spontaneity is a gift. It should never be squandered on surveys. The answer to everything is jazz, so they say. Better get it in your soul.

It truly is pointless. Any of it. All of it. But so what. It never stopped Jackie De Shannon. Or James Brown. Or Elvis. Or Francis Ponge, who went around noticing things, and investing them with language, which turned it all into propositions. Blackboards. Goats. Dinner plates. Tables. We inhabit a world of objects. The world itself is an object. A hyperobject. But an object. A thing. A thinginess. A whatness, in the eyes of Aldous Huxley. For whom everything was a door. A brave new world. Or a ghost rising up from a swamp. I love it when people say money is no object. Because objects are international. The total reality is the world. Like the night I saw Neal Cassady at the Barn in Scotts Valley. One name stands for one thing, and another for another thing, and they are connected together. And so the whole, like a living picture, presents the atomic fact. Because money is no object. It’s digital now, and corresponds to nothing in reality.