How To Hang A Thing In Speech

Islands fascinate me. They are isolated worlds - not in the scientific sense, but the wildly nonspecific sense - from the rest of the planet. The rest of the planet is, of course, teeming with human beings, and the occasional misfit grumbling in his rags the same question over and over to a thousand wrong answers. Life is different on islands. The problems are less monumental. The sky solves everything. Awakens a carpenter's grammar and builds a glass vocabulary. For housing humanity. Everyone has their own preferences, ideas, and sense of time. So they become islands. Talking to strangers. Every argument in favor of hair dyes is a statement tinged with a million desires, and not a little anxiety. And every blow is worth at least one antenna. A shaky vision and a gothic redemption. Ibiza at night is a crazy place. Not so much Grimsey. Which is stark, and desolate, and surrounded by humpback whales. It’s Gothic. Mythic. And cold. It’s a place for philosophers. Old woman gazing at the gloom of thunder in a cube of Icelandic spar.

I sense, get the feel of the cage, with this work, this frigate ahead of me. With which I will make volleys of what is funny and strange. I will fold my life into a bomb and explode it in somebody’s porridge. Or mind. Not because the mind is a form of porridge, but because it has language at its disposal, and subjectivity. The mind cooked by English is a polyglot porridge. The recipe is apparent in every jaw. Every beard and spice rack. Caraway. Nutmeg. Thyme. Glass slides depicting arrays of stained protozoans. Which is crazy in a way. Bacteria are why the men around here wear ties. That, and a paycheck. The way water eats a continent shore by shore is precisely how everything human gets shattered by inconvenient realties. Pavement, rainy nights in San Francisco, ancient coins unearthed on the property of a former rock star, the subjunctive case clenched in the hand of an ugly preposition. It’s always good to have a graceful look above the neck, no matter what lumpy old bag you have in your hand. To those who don’t know you, you will appear suspicious, and silly. And to those who do know you, you will appear lost in mystical absorption. No matter. Subjectivity is prodigal, and fits in a single pronoun. Like an island.

I like a long thin faucet that curves upward in a kitchen sink. Arches. And lets the water down in a long thin column. And is mute in its dream of service like an elephant. Whose trunk sprays water over its head. And views the world with two sad eyes. It's an odd thing to sweep a floor while listening to Eric Satie. There’s a simplicity in the action that parallels the simplicity of the music. Which isn’t simple at all. The notes are sprinkled into the world like pearls from a broken necklace. It's a strange syncopation that awakens the nerves to the things they carry around. Emotions big as planetariums. James Dean with a grievance and a knife. It explains it. What we fight about. Let’s face it, a real antagonism at root. That old chestnut: what are we here for? Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong. But they keep getting up, starting the car, scraping frost from the window, and heading to work, whatever meaning happens to be sleeping in those syllables, they’re awake now, your eyes are mingled in these words, as are mine, looking for you.

Don’t be shy. You know who you are. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim once said all things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. Ok, gotcha. So what’s your poison? I’m a fiend for marshmallows. Cannabis gummies. And Ritz crackers.

TV is a poison. I grew up with it. I love TV. I have a great respect for propaganda, even though I know it’s toxic. It’s a guilty pleasure. A very, very guilty pleasure. Propaganda is the sweet syrup of confirmation bias that bloats the ego, appeases a troubled conscience with a wonderfully plausible alibi, and kills societies, rots them from inside out. How many cop shows show so-called conspiracy theorists as QAnon wackos with a maniacal hatred of rules, hair-trigger tempers, huge gun collections, garages full of survival gear, deep delusional passions, sooner or later caught up in the inevitable terrorist plot, à la Ted Kazinsky, and brought down by well-meaning detectives doing their heroic, self-sacrificing best to prevent us all from descending into the chaos of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. A good fiction has the capacity to charm. To make you believe in its virtues. However distorted. However delusional. The gaslighting is sweet.

He can't stand any image of himself, he suffers from being named. He believes that the perfection of a human relationship lies in this absence of image: abolishing adjectives between oneself, between one and the other; a relationship that uses adjectives is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

Wrote Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Raw, simple being. Undefined. Unconfined. Naked. Is this what is meant by absence of image? Because I’ve just used four adjectives to define the undefinable. And gotten nowhere. The first thing to come to mind are descriptions of near-death experiences, in which being, no longer contained by a body, diffuses into a boundless, nebulous energy of pure consciousness. Pure love. A pure ego-less state of pure energy. So that throwing a net of adjectives over it is like trying to capture a solar eclipse with a shoebox. You’ll capture none of the silence, this visit from the sublime, moon shadows rolling through prairie grass, and hole of night in the sky.

The central drive of everything is insemination. Pollinators and poets.

Propagation begins with a cerebral whirlwind. Inspiration. Something must inspire its creation. Mountains, forests, cranberries. We went hiking, inflated and cleaned. And this happened. A steady pulse haunted the totem. The faces looked ready to say something. We are the colors of contingency. Stop thinking! Just ask yourself if the work has allowed you to walk outside of yourself into an unknown world. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s about movement, emotion, holistic correspondence, and wild speculation. Conjecture is the way to the possible. The beehives that mouth their seeming chaos among the houses of genre. The biology of pink waddles around in brown. There are fires in black unleashed by alluring hues of gray. We’ll have things to do when green turns blue. But prose? You need space for that. Freer, more open language, and sudden curious sensations. The feeling that, after dying, the soul diffuses with a universal consciousness. There is, for example, tangible evidence that syllables discharge lightning and thunder, and will sometimes attain the status of a bold perfume, depending on the circumstances, and the magnitude of the impulse that keeps popping up in all these bubbles, smiling at the spectral autonomy that allowed these raptures, and how to hang a thing in speech.