No Easy Answer

Where do you seek salvation? Church? Art? Literature? Pure speculative thought nibbling at the fragile contours of reason? A broom closet in a girl’s school? A bath house in San Francisco? A prose poem masquerading as a flapjack in a flashback? Today is the day our environment circulates in the grass like a deity of wind. And I face homeward, dressed in Thalassa up to my gills. If, on the atomic level, sugar turns out to be a sincere apology for the many contradictory features of dark matter, then I will expand my ignorance on the breath of heaven. I will take to bed and I will sail no more. I will remain there many years, watching movies and eating popcorn. I take sleeping very seriously. It’s indelicate to dream in an unmade bed. I agree. But this is not the way to suspend a poem in midair. What you need is a scaffold, and a fuck ton of pretense.

Literature is the junkyard of ideas. Where have I heard that before? Probably the boardroom of a multibillionaire tech mogul. I can see it now: a ghostly Cézanne melted into the upholstery of a Ford Escort.  This is what happens when art and commerce encounter one another on the Salvador Dali expressway, and it’s midnight, Captain Beefheart is on the radio, and the UFOs are everywhere. That’s when you want to get down with the vertical, and chummy with things that talk. I learned this from Max Jacob. I know. I’m name dropping. Shame on me. But I see there are emotions stirred by the charm of my tentacles, and nascent gold on the shine of your forehead. My other mode is a temperature. This is how I come to know certain things. Things that pertain to buttons. Tender buttons. Not difficult buttons. Easy buttons. Weird buttons. Terrifyingly sensitive buttons. Edgar Allan Poe buttons. Tarantula buttons. Dead buttons. This is not why I read Tolstoy. No. It isn’t. Whenever I dive into an emotion, I’m never sure what I’ll find. But I didn’t think it would happen like this. Robins in a laurel hedge. A universe in my hat.

Why is there such a compulsion to feel one’s wounds? What is the fascination? Pain can be fascinating. And exquisite. In the realm of pain, the miniscule is huge. Even a mild toothache can build to an intolerable crescendo. The worst I’ve had is a kidney stone. It took half the summer for it to pass. I can’t begin to describe the ever-present pain in my groin, its many shades and gradations. It had the magnitude of a symphony, say Beethoven’s 6^th, the Pastoral Symphony. Passing a kidney stone is very much like hosting Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in your groin. For three weeks. My advice: be careful with calcium carbonate. I think it’s time we start talking about Umwelt. Umwelt is a concept “that emphasizes that different organisms perceive the world differently based on their sensory organs and cognitive abilities, leading to distinct perceptual worlds. For example, a bee's Umwelt is dominated by ultraviolet and polarized light patterns, while a dog's Umwelt is strongly shaped by its sense of smell.” So, was Wittgenstein right? If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Hell. 30 years later, I still can’t understand French.

There are approximately 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fruit fly. But that’s just a number. God only knows what the actual quality of cognition a fruit fly is capable of. The ones in our neck of the woods all like Proust. Every time I open Proust there’s a fruit fly, circling Odette’s head or landing on Madam Verdurin’s madeleine. What the heart learns the cartilage spurns. And anyone gets fast with a ruffle will later regret the loss of a collar. When I first wrote my ode to a junco, the paper functioned as a vanity folded into an ear. I still remember my first barroom brawl. Just before seeing all my consciousness get swept under my face by a punch. What if life were purely quixotic? That we treasured our ideals. That we proudly upheld our principles. And tilted at windmills. Until arrested by the police. It’s hard to drive I-5 near the Columbia gorge because of all the windmills. They make your head spin. I sat in a restaurant booth a long time while the waitress waited. No, sir, you will not find posterity on the menu. Let me know when you’re decided. Decided? I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. I can’t find that on the menu either.

There’s no easy answer for the prevalence of strawberries in a three-dimensional bowl. It just happens. There were strawberries. And there was a bowl to put them in. It just made sense. As for the three-dimensional manifestation of the bowl, that is mostly surmise. Surmise on my part. It’s what I’m accustomed to. It’s how I see things. How I read things. I only visit the fourth dimension when opportunity knocks. And a door opens. Not a physical door. A metaphysical door. A door that doesn’t exist in the world of knobs and toasters. The door is a feeling. It’s that vague. That nebulous. That incorporeal. But I know it’s a door. It feels like a door. I can feel its hinges. I can feel its knob. But they’re not cold to the touch. They feel soft, like a woman’s breast. And open as anything I can think of with a lace mantilla and a hand forgiving as death.