Trampoline

A fall from grace can bounce you right back up if you’re on a trampoline. Think of this as a trampoline. We hurry to give it a standing ovation. Some very gallant people built this disorder. I offer you an extract of the wind’s scripture. Whatever correspondences appear will help form a giant beanstalk and lift us into the sky. Writing is a form of spatial copulation. Words appear after unzipping one’s inhibitions. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re all about. One cannot abolish time. But one can engorge with stigmata. Do what pathos prescribes. Grammar is nothing but fruit. Everything hangs in prepositions, or drifts over us like a tingling mist as we gaze upon the Statue of Liberty in the fog. A life in banking can do that to a person. Put you in a muddle of beeswax and unrealizable ambitions. Imagining the future is like trying to sail over the horizon. If you follow the brush, various surprises will dazzle you with unsolicited voyages, places that only exist in fugues and hillbilly operas. When you don’t know how to frame a situation the best you can hope for is a pencil and a piece of paper. Something happens out of the ordinary and scintillates in our neurons. Elephants trumpet the dawn. Followed by Paganini and Hilary Hahn.

This is indicative of trees. This ceaseless quivering. This unending search for canopies and branches, alternatives and wax. I have a trinket based on the parcel theory. It goes like this: if you receive a package in the mail missing any ontological grandeur or tangible existence, you should try opening it with your imagination. This is called unboxing reality and is a task undertaken by anyone who sits down to write a letter, or build an ark, or read all eleven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu. So many destinies have emerged from an ovulation, or a parcel left on the stoop by an extraterrestrial postal service. It will probably have stars all over it and strange symbols and maybe a little art. A scene in Vermont. A woman’s hairbrush strategically left by a pool of goldfish. Meanwhile a beautiful robot climbs out of the box and stares at you with deeply focused attention. It’s Miss AI. And you are now being surveilled.

I’m feeling shy now despite a morning filled with Kabuki. Kabuki does not give me confidence. Confidence comes from a different part of the psyche. In my case, it comes from age. Words furnish my hungry things. In an age of bombs and trumpets, I grow ravenous for Shakespeare. I hunger to hear passions eloquently expressed. Instead, we get two men dressed like toddlers playing video games. This is called progress. Even the shadows mourn for the waves of a more romantic time. Remember Duncan? Roots and Branches? “My yearning was of the ground. My yearning was of the seed. Hidden wherein, the workings of ecstatic form.” I remember yearning. People don’t use that word much anymore. It’s a romantic word. Too romantic for the tech sphere. I feel archetypal. The old man disdaining the present age. A junkyard romantic with a long green bench and a chrome hood ornament. Winged Mercury shining out like an oracle.

July afternoon dragging itself over the ground, pound by pound. How much does a photon weigh? A photon's rest mass is zero, but its energy and momentum are related to its lip gloss, giving it an effective mascara. What I need is a stove with the power of a thousand suns to cook a single strain of melancholy. Our melancholy. The one we’re feeling. You’re not feeling melancholic? Good. You may be excused. As for the rest of us, I find solace in strawberries, blueberries, chunks of pineapple and a big mound of whipped cream. This constitutes a mood. A humor is different than a mood. Humor is more like fluid, as in aqueous humor, the fluid normally present in the anterior chamber of the eye, between the cornea and the iris. And jokes. Those too. Mood is more modular, modal, and whatever conceivable escalator we may be going up at the moment, surprised to find some retail still functioning somewhere in the country. It’s an aggregate of things. Disappointment, rip tides, sparks, oceanic consciousness and a pair of sterling silver cufflinks. Most of this comes from the heart. But a little comes from Cartier.

History is alive. And there’s a lot of them. A lot of histories. Like tributaries to a river. The big river of history. Floating around a star. Einstein’s theory of relativity makes us more aware of this. We’re drawn to the open-ended, la forma aperta, open form, of perception in provisional motion. There are no plots in life. Plots are for best-sellers. In everyday life each minute is a collage of sensations and sounds and temperatures and sirens, a mosaic of arms and arteries and muscular exertions, melodies and sharks and Holiday Inns, French fries and megabytes and surf. Crows cawing, cars honking, sewing machines humming, ankles swelling, throttles opening.  Twist the cylinder of a kaleidoscope and all those little glass pieces form a new pattern. I speak with some authority because I’m old and iconoclastic and wear colorful shirts. I’ve learned to daub everything that flows through rivers of distress with licorice and robin egg blue. Colors are visitors from another dimension. They’re here to learn how to shape destinies and enhance the horizon with layers of accentuation. Horizons aren’t real. They’re conceptual. And ultramarine.

One is tempted to say that the more a poem is itself, the more it is independently controlled, shooting through a hole in our scheme and exploding into action. The moment it’s engaged it shoots out a stream of liquid fire, a brilliantly luminous aporia circulated throughout its vast elaborations. The power of it is exhilarating. It has zoom. It has panache. It has coordinates and upholstery. It’s a summer of French ochre doing trinkets and fairs. It’s a barroom fight. It’s two men in jail, strangers to one another, brooding. The cloth of allegory is spotted with its blood. Some people like to flirt with volume, some with philosophy, some with filigree. And that’s meaningful. Significant as a woman’s hands scattering ashes on the Alleghany. This is the interval known as sunyata. Mallarmé leading a prison escape. Existence is a creative liability. You’ll need a napkin. A skull full of diphthongs and the sparkle of consciousness dripping on a sheet of paper. Because music is pink. And desperate. And Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead.

So here I sit. Boiling. Infuriated. Bent out of shape. Hopping mad. Corybantic. This makes all my emotions happy. They like excitement. Is there a way out of this hotel? An exit to the back alley? What if I told you I hear Kentucky in Jackie De Shannon’s voice? There’s no analogy for this. And I don’t want one. I’m tired of trying to make sense of things that make no sense. I’m at the end of my life and I still don’t know what to make of this planet. Our species. Our species especially. Jesus. What a cock up. This is me, headed into the wilderness. The wilderness of language. This English of which I have learned something of how to speak it to the ghosts surrounding me. Anyone who has spent a night by a candle and a bottle of wine listening to the Beatles must also have an inkling of motorcycle repair. Everyone needs a meaning to tinker with. Try saying plum without using your lips. It’s an incendiary situation. All the details say so. Lou Welch wrapped in a bearskin coat, brooding. Marilyn Monroe. Bouncing on a trampoline.