My Life As A Ghost

I learned to swim in Wisconsin. It was the 50s, and everything glittered under the rigid guise of a false prosperity. It’s a lot different now. Nothing glitters. The United States, grinning ear to ear like a Times Square con man, has walked away with everyone’s dream. And left us with a simulacrum. Freedom on a layaway plan extending endlessly into a nonexistent settlement. Eternity in a can. Why does deviancy so often feel like salvation? Is this wrong? Hallucinations aren’t dreams, they’re more like destinations. The 60s is a lonely place to be in 2026.  Regrets prowl the parameters, taunting us with scruples, blasting us with salutes. Have you ever tried bending a spoon with your mind? I tried it once, and it turned into a fork.  

Clouds are structural: the variables they elicit are round. Therefore, never count your mittens before they linger. If I crashed through a mirror, would I enter the domain of my other self? Or would I find myself looking back at myself with the same lost look? Splotches and blots always have something intriguing in their disarray. I’ve learned to respect the accidental. Anything inscrutable, yet obvious as a mouth. When I think of structure, I think of a pitcher and bowl on a North Dakota farm. I think of the silhouette, at sunset, of a deserted house. A sad image. One of the saddest. And I never got the real story. Where those people went.

I flourish most when I’m doing the least. The rest of the time, I diversify. I like the anonymity of the savannah. It’s where I can walk with cheetahs to the beginning of existence. This is the stepladder at its incidental best. I rise, and touch the ceiling with my brush, trailing the off-white chatter of cherubs. Such are my diversions. Here’s my idea of a paradigm: we build muscle together, we slather together. And by studying the subtleties of linen, I can warm my words in their hypothesis. 

The rattlesnake redefines wildness each time it coils and flickers its tongue. I remember when poetry mimicked the imposition of life with a clash of cymbals. And people politely listened, as they do now, but it’s different, and considerate, and nobody understands my hill. Outside the resistance, the harmonica is a romance. Inside, where it counts, the harmonica is sly, and cognac, and opens like an umbrella. Which is supposed to be bad luck. But I don’t think so. I love umbrellas, they’re like portable houses. And in defiance of rain, I learn to love the rain.

Feeling what I feel about aluminum, I have to ask: what has robbed us of our falsetto? What’s happened, indeed, to the entire chorus? Did you know the Supreme Court is across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library? I don’t know whether to think of that as a latent defect, or just plain ironic. I see a voyeur that sees me. Sometimes I spy on my own life. Just because your feathers are a little ruffled, it doesn’t mean you can’t fly. Today’s question was: what have you noticed recently? There’s light in the bedroom in late afternoon. The Cascades are eerily bald. And I’m a lot clumsier than normal. Maybe because I do everything now at the speed of sleep. And when I put down in writing everything that bounces around in my head, the feelings I get about cardboard get really French. I’ll say this: consciousness is never monotonous. It’s not the same as holding meat over a fire. It’s more like feeling haunted by the ghost of yourself.

 

The Struggle Inside

Iconostasis. What’s that? Windows to heaven. Icons in an orthodox church. Mirabilas.  Apocalypse. Metropolis. Hippopotamus. These, too. These produce images. And images have questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a ticket to paradise. Wherever that is. I think it’s one of those things that only exist in poetry. Meaning women in bodice skirts, white linen blouse, embroidered aprons, and black leather shoes doing the Hambo. James Joyce sipping oolong in Trieste. Epiretinal membrane, a thin, translucent layer of fibrous tissue or scar tissue that forms on the inner surface of the retina. Here’s looking at you, kid. Sometimes, I seem to be living in the past. There is some validity to this, if we may be permitted to include memory in our pataphysical toolkit. When desire goes unsatisfied yet maintains a sturdy intensity, it begins a mode of seduction. Which rarely, if ever, goes well. Not a good optic, as they say. It’s always the heated and awkward poems that end up back in the barn, transmitting elegies in long bellowing moos. The wilder ones jump the fence and take off for the prairie. And end up passed out on the floor at an open mike in Larame.

Translation is an art. Spin a pumpkin, get a fjord. That sounds corny, but I mean it. The very air has grown taut. There’s a poem in it. I just have to find it. I can smell it. It’s giving off an odor of popcorn mingled with Arthur Shchopenhauer. There has just a been trauma. Humanity has taken its mask off. It’s a total mess. What happened to the eyes? The expression looks so utterly sad with a tinge of narcissism. Its expression is flagrant, and yet timidly immaterial. The explanation is a reverie regarding a hiatus overlooking the anatomies of some modern specimens, specifically one with the teeth of a saw, and the other with a banana-shaped chest and a head like a forest of blurry animals. The texture is rough, like a bad joke at a Hungarian wedding. It takes a lot of motion to make any frame contemporary. And brother, this joint has gone nuts. Zombies on scooters. Academies of ache. Odysseys of ohm. Electrical resistance. Poetical nonexistence.

Sometimes the best solution is to plunge right ahead into the conjectural universe. I despise the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It shuts down conversations. It shuts down speculation. We live in a speculative universe. The narrative is old and beyond my comprehension. It burst out of nothingness, like a pair of old work boots tumbling out of a closet. A holy ghost in the pocket of a wool coat. Planets colliding with comets. Ideologies colliding with reality. There is nothing linear about it. It’s 100% nonsense. Nonlinear as a Moroccan goat in an argan tree. Human voices male and female singing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus in a Gothic cathedral. Everything is a sunset sandwich served on a platter of snow. Meaningful as a slap to the face. Silly as a translation of a reclining figure in a state of lassitude. And twice as redemptive.

What is at issue is what causes change. The struggle inside. The contest. With yourself. I’m always running a few steps ahead of my ego. The ego is an egg of remorse. The id is hid in a lid of Bonne Maman cherry jam. An officer of the law flickering inside a prostitute. No longer things, but what happens between things. Liberation is a libation of the spirit. But does it truly exist? Nothing exists with total autonomy. How could it? Only poetry can do that. Especially when it cracks its worrying eggshell head apart and supplies the world with its magic string and troubadours. What, at root, is the reality contemporary to us is hazy as the hazard we can’t see until it gets here. It’s always like that now, crazy and unpredictable. An ongoing dissociation of chilly euphemisms. The inviolate crust of a nitroglycerin thought. To each his natural own. It takes a lot of language to produce a raspberry. A real raspberry. With a justifiable handlebar and a nebular milieu. The deafening cheers as the wrestlers enter the ring. And the words are put in place. What we’re talking about. What we are after. And for which we are instrumental.

 

The Forever Dark Of Whatever It Is

One of the strangest characteristics of my life has been a tendency to do things that serve no purpose whatsoever. Poetry, for example. Poetry can’t provide fuel for the engines of transport and industry, make spackle to fill a crack or smooth a rough surface on drywall, mint money, power a boat, defend the innocent, prosecute the guilty, teach judo, manufacture socks, shine shoes, hold en electrical charge or resuscitate a heart. Poetry does nothing, and it does it really well. Its closest approximation toward a practical application is drugs, chiefly those of a psychedelic nature. It’s not really great at alleviating physical pain. It can be applied with some notable success in the area of mental and emotional pain. It shares a great deal with its far more successful cousin, music. Music excites the emotions. Poetry excites the intellect. Most people prefer to excite their emotions. Only a few give a shit about intellect. Why would they? What has intellect ever done? If you want to see what people think of intellect, bring up Spinoza at a union meeting or a drilling crew on the Texas plains. Why Spinoza? I don’t know. How about somebody more homegrown, like Thoreau. He made pencils. And grew beans. Suffice it to say, that when it comes to achieving nothing in the realm of the pragmatic, poetry is supreme. And this is useful in ways that elude the one-dimensional. The literal. The down-to-earth. The empiricists. The doers. The logicians. The rationalists. The realists. The skilled. The proficient. The competent. The well-adjusted. The masterful. The able. The accomplished.

That said, I would argue that phenomena that purportedly does nothing, does everything. It drills the air with spirals of inquiry and lets the sap of correspondence fill buckets of amber rhetoric. It conjugates the raw and incorporates the incorporeal in postulates of bone. It animates thought and stimulates the bees of the invisible to pollinate the mind. It finds beauty in squalor and music in appetite. It feeds on darkness and gives a habitation to the dead. It does this by doing nothing. Because without the weight of machinery, without the burden of intent, the spirit finds its joy. The cage opens. The panther stops its pacing, and plunges into the world.

Poetry, which revels in enigma, in the synergy of the indeterminate, in the energy of despair, thrusts us into the very heart of existence.

Put a symphony on the turntable and this will happen: restitution, illumination, and grace. Put a book on the turntable and this will happen: nothing. But put your eyes on a sentence and watch what happens: the words will carry your attention to the very end. The end of the sentence. If you lean forward a little, you’ll see where it was leading. A deep abyss. The air is warm and smells of sulfur. Breathe it in and you’ll have visions. The gods will communicate with you. You will write it down and try to get it published. When you’re feeling a little more sober. And a nice hot shower has restored your nerves to a glassy quiescence.

Choice takes initiative. Sometimes we call it prediction. Sometimes we call it weighing our pros and cons. Take a look around. The surrounding force, present on a plateau, requires no authority to breathe. It’s telling you something. It’s telling you to decide. The scales on which I base my work are highly sensitive. They’re capable of measuring masses as small as one yoctogram, which is equivalent to the mass of a single proton. These devices utilize undulating vibrations, where the tissues are flaccid and withered. A piece of time sits beside itself with brilliance. A kangaroo hops by. Turn your gaze toward what lies just above. The reel is real. I know what it looks like. It unwinds in images on a screen. People travel through a beam of light. They refine themselves beyond your reach. And the resilience we have highlighted in their favor pulls us out of ourselves. We walk into our future hoping the decisions we made are there to greet us, shabby, tattered, dirty, doesn’t matter, they were our decisions. We must honor them. Or ignore them. And buy a ticket to Rio.

I wonder who, today, maybe just minutes ago, stepped out of a bar and decided to become a poet. A hearty specimen of humanity like Gary Snyder, or an uncannily sensitive woman with eyes the color of sherry, standing in a garden of buttercups and heliotrope. Or were you born near an open-pit iron mine in Minnesota and became Bob Dylan. I can’t imagine being 18 at this moment and discovering Charles Baudelaire. Architect of my fairylands, I made – according to my will – under a tunnel of gems – a docile ocean drift. I heard a loud, percussive noise. And the sky dropped its shadows on the sad numb world. Decadence is a gift, and it comes in many forms. Hungry ghosts follow its earthy scent. What appealed to me was simple. The ability to find beauty in squalor is a terrible and wonderful power. There are pearls that allow our inner being to hold the sky like a bowl. Even when we’re standing in shit. Listening to the gossip of the stars. It’s a serious narcotic. There’s a science to it, and it’s maddeningly unscientific. There are no diplomas for what amounts to a trance. Just a push from behind. And a flair for parables.

Why should there be one time you have to be more happy, or miserable, than at any other. Sometimes it’s just a matter of standing around waiting for things to happen. Emotions shade in and out with nothing to anchor them. There is, supposedly, a guardian spirit watching over us. I stood once in a cave looking at Ice Age art and it felt fulgent and fundamental. I could feel the presence of something primal. The pull to commitment. And the dive into what that means. Whether something is real or conjectural is a failure to realize the relations between all givens. And so I crawled back out and got a sandwich and a glass of beer. Everything is personal. Even kelp. It doesn’t always need eyes. Just a repertoire, and a fireside. Reality is always a burden because it sets limits. There’s no limit to intimacy. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Follow a strand of thread Sumerian red. The next step down is critical. This is the forever dark of whatever it is makes the sun roll off the tip of your tongue, and plunge ahead into whatever conjectural universe fills the heart to overflowing with ermine and toadstools and stars.

 

Meatus Of Votive Syllables

I can’t remember all the faces, but I do remember the torments. Meatus of votive syllables. Line by Michel Deguy. That I remember. It’s so eminently chewable. Full of protein. Baroque as a vessel for burning incense. Tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis. I want to write a review of my favorite river. Mark Twain already covered the Mississippi. That leaves me with 187 major rivers globally. This will be long and ongoing project. It will be like a river. Maybe my favorite river. I’m leaving now I can already feel the tug of the current pulling me into another embankment. Another repercussion. Another ceremony. Another house. Another rising sun.

I’ve never been to Japan. It’s on my bucket list. So is Budapest. It’s in the title of one of my books. I feel irresponsible for using it in a book title since I’ve never been there. It seems fraudulent. So it’s on my list. Budapest. Which always makes me think of Buddha being pestered. Or Buddha himself being a pest. Imagine somebody being pestered by the Buddha. I think that may be the underlying reason I used it in a book title. So Budapest is on my bucket list. And so is Buddha. And building a time machine. I want to hear Rimbaud read The Drunken Boat on Rue Férou. I’ll bring Buddha along. If we’re lucky we’ll get pestered by Rimbaud. Why does denim look so cool when it’s torn? I’ve spent my entire life in denim. I’m wearing denim right now. Denim pants. Denim shirt. Denim eyeballs. Denim skin. Denim hair. Denim Buddha. Denim impertinence. Denim riddle. Denim nickel. Denim devotion. Denim motion. Denim emotion. Denim ocean. And when the tide ebbs I’m left naked. Staring at the stars.

I like socks. But I’d prefer not to talk about them just now. If you don’t mind, I’ll just drift along dreaming of walking barefoot on the sands of Carmel, July, 1965. Some guy on the beach playing a guitar. Iconic image. Ironic spinach. Laconic mnemonic. On another occasion, I started a revolution, based on evolution, endless postponements, and bold exaggerations. Solomon Burke drove me around town. Inglewood. He told me there’s a diamond in the mind. I said thank you, thank you for leading me to be something more than a frankfurter. Our lives change so gently we often don’t see the result until we’re 79, gazing out of the window of a hearse. Every time we cast off from the bank, I lose my balance a little. It’s only natural. It’s the frequent disassociations that cheer my interactions. Invisible strains of DNA ripple around our contact. Let me roll it to you. You should be feeling a current by now. It not, I have failed. Failed to enthrall you. Here: take this sentence and give it a home. Feed it poetry. Clap your hands. Spit and repeat. We’ll get there. We’ll get there alright. I’m not even writing this. It’s writing me.

Bo Diddley’s rhythm is a variation of the Afro-Cuban son clave. I lean toward anonymity. This is the rhythm of the broadloom. The painful yet strangely jubilant results of an uncompromising stance. À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Just writing this causes me to disappear. I sit here ripping thoughts out of the air. But I don’t want to think them. They’ve already been thought. Therefore, they stink. It’s not what I’ve been seeking. It’s not the shelter I was hoping for. Those vagaries of the mind that provide some inkling of elsewhere, the flickering lights and shadows of a foundry between the knee and ankle, the alluring mysteries of negligee, the salty brevity of ocean spray, the penultimate unfolding of the afternoon, the jolly self-deprecations of office blandishments. The asylum of words. The diesel of distraction. The intricate defense of filigree. The immoderacy of music. The haunting voice of Hope Sandoval. The final squeak of an unhinged door. The chuckling cluck of a cockatoo. A dodecasyllabic synopsis clicking across the floor.

 

Between Thorns And Pasta

Between thorns and pasta, it seems to me that one of them lies beyond life itself, so quantum is the consummation that visits the soul in the dead of night. Pasta is the buzz we get when the tomato sauce flashes its lights during dinner. This temporary visual blurring is a known side effect of translucence. Furthermore, the surgical procedure itself requires stirrups and poise, as lifting a body of noodles from their entanglement on the plate involves skills whose arithmetic balances presumption with bewilderment. Keep the mouth open and the mind on horseback. A story with a fork in the text caresses the membrane of the brain. This is what poetry is all about: reservoirs of irrepressible basil. Nothing great was ever achieved without basil. Turmeric is more about mental endurance and reaching for things in the back of the cupboard, those moments when a small ladder might come in handy, and step by step phrases designed to elevate our spirit bring us into contact with vegetable broth and cumin, epiphanies canned in tin. We’ve all had those moments when the universe is trying to tell us something, give us a little sage advice. Take time to visit a roadside philosophy. Dare to love God without a lawyer present.

You see, I’m afraid I think this is something that’s happened, something atypical of the way things struggle, when it’s really just denim and exclamation points, invectives hurled at oligarchs, penguins diving into the ocean, the dexterity of peeling an orange. It’s not like I’m trying to underestimate things. I find everything overwhelming. Particularly orchids. Orchids and monkeys. Swinging from vine to vine while filling the air with a bloodcurdling primordial yell. People sometimes ask if I would rather make a horseshoe ring sparks in a frontier stable, or weld the letters of the English alphabet together in configurations capable of speech. You know, like a gate creeping open as a pink elephant exits the lawn of a stately mansion, which is, in actuality, a long pink tongue, flapping up and down in a mouth hectic with verbal expression. I don't know why they ask me these things. I think maybe because they’re drunk. Or I’m drunk. Or that the whole scenario is an invention I've created to fill the time with wine and recitations.

I’m tired of these sophistries, these stabs in the darkness. We’re right there now, right at the commencement of Armageddon. So everyone wanders aimlessly or performs functions robotically, trying to create some motivating sense of purpose out of nothing, gobbling up the monologues of YouTube podcasters, sitting in their cars, weeping, or cursing, because even the myths are gone, there are just questions now, for what, for who, for whatever reason, for no reason, out of sheer momentum, just the blunt reactionary routines of applied physics. The people at the top, at the tippety-tippety top of the multibillionaire stratosphere, are prepared to go underground, and bowl, or sit on patio chairs waving their arms around as they exclaim what geniuses they are, while all the animals and Homo sapiens of earth lie dead and buried in radioactive dirt.

Existence offers us the chance to sew our muslin with the thread of sequence and patch our misfortunes with the breath of euphemism. Make ice cubes in the freezer, macaroons in our dreams. Decisions about what to do how to act what to say where to go when to get ready to be alive shoot bottles on fenceposts wear mohair feed the cat make the bed watch Hard Day’s Night for the umpteenth time hoping to recreate that period of time between 1964 and 1966 when the catastrophes of the future were still manageable but no one paid any attention. Making a lore of one’s existence is a mania. This condition, indeed, demonstrates what a crock any similarity might serve to wheel the cartilage of thought around in a makeshift comparison based on a fantasy of dimes and draft animals. I would urge, instead, the cultivation of thimbles. As if, quite obviously, one’s morning coffee held our conduct at bay, giving us time to collect ourselves, and spend our promptness on balance, rather than contact, until our skin felt the brush of fairies, and the household of language opened its doors to the fourth dimension, and the thrashing of postulation.

 

Hotel Burroughs

Am I trapped in history? Are we all trapped in history? What is meant by history? I can say to the people of the future: I was there when the bombs dropped. I was there when the president went mad. I was there when the sublime crawled into a ballistics calculator to die. I was there when people carried telephones everywhere and rode electrically powered scooters and lived in their cars and set up tents on sidewalks and foreshadowed their own demise. I was there when the sky split in half and Harpo Marx rode out on a bicycle smiling broadly and tooting his horn. I was there when technology became omnipresent and assumed control of everything and killed humanity with meticulous imprecision and rogue military drones with autonomous software shooting indiscriminate targets erased all the elation and skill of killing things. I was there when reality ceased to have any reality and the U.S. Constitution became a quaint antique with no relevance to the whims of billionaires. I was there for the last episode of Breaking Bad and the second season of Landman. I saw western civilization capsized in the Strait of Hormuz and Jim Kerry receive a Cesar award though sadly his fans did not think he was real. And here I am now nursing a macular hole in my left eye and wondering if it’s possible to escape history, defy fate, and live in an alternate reality based on Schrödinger’s wave equations and Balzacian syntax.

Anguish sometimes leads me to the gates of the present. The Power of Now. Concentrating on the precious and inimitable sanctity of a single raison I have inserted into my mouth with an attitude of reverence and awe for what Arundhati Roy calls The God of Small Things. But the present never feels solidly present. The raison is good, wrinkled little thing that it is, it’s a passing, ephemeral moment that leaves a ghostly residue of uncapturable life behind it. The present feels more absent than present. Maybe that’s the point. It’s the absence of the present that nourishes the sublimity and calm of the present moment. The reason the raisin is so delicious is the intense focus that went into recreating its own little power, as if its wrinkly little body contained the mystery of the Big Bang, and tasting it liberated a living shadow of its reality.

Now is now. I mean now. Now and again. And that’s the way the story goes. Goes on and on. And on and on. Sometimes when it seems people are exaggerating they’re really just extending themselves into space. It starts when the music becomes ecstatic. And eccentricity loses conscious awareness and gets real down and dirty. And Molly’s dress flies up and memory loses its memory and hangs like a mammary from the chest of a convict. It is characterized by heedless moisture and dirigibles producing a soft cranium light. Grammar snaps and spills itself in funny ornaments. This is how I splash upon my mood and make it luminous. This is how I pick up a stick of metaphysics and shake it like a staff of bells. It is my way of saying we need to stoke the furnace with dirt and turn it into a garden of fire. And cross the border at the frontier of your life.

50 years ago today I drove a truck with a pint of blood up Cherry Street to Harborview and worried about getting the clutch out in time before I rolled too far back and hit someone. It was a steep street and invited those kinds of concern. I worked for a hospital delivering things. And then I quit and went back to California where I thought I belonged. But I was wrong so I went back to the Northwest and its coffeehouses and gray skies and trolleybuses hooked up to wires and techies skulking around video arcades. If I look back far enough I find examples of myself littered around December, 1963, when I was rapidly metamorphosing into a hippy. I didn’t stop there I became a monster on the air guitar and played to stadiums full of imaginary denim. I learned to fly by the seat of my pants. And then I lost the seat of my pants and went for a swim in the Pacific. Things got real specific after that, and filigreed and crêpe, like a gypsy wedding. If I feel a surge at the beginning of a new pair of shoes I fill with cockatoos and gratitude. Because I know. I know what it’s like to turn the knob on the door of a long-lost friend, and find them gazing out the window. At nothing. At eggnog moons and sultry afternoons in Hyderabad. 

I am not the fog I pretend to be. Everyone tells me I need to take a trip to the limestone quarries of YouTube. It still rocks in 1958. Existence is a seme I lift with a shirt as the people roar and look artfully at themselves in paintings. I will do things in the circus that I won’t do at home. This should explain everything. My car has a carpentry overflowing with scarves for the long trip to roundabout during anesthesia. Once you learn to frame everything obliquely the looks you may get at work will be a little cracked open. The face gazing at you out of its shell may be a reflection of yourself. You can say what you want about swimming in a pool, but I like to take care of thinking with sharp downward blows to the embassy desk. The hotel concierge bears a disturbing resemblance to William S. Burroughs. He takes my cash and gives me a key to room 11. To be or not to be never ceases to amuse me. But I wasn’t expecting this. Robot prostitutes. Black diamond stingrays. A copy of Naked Lunch. A loaded .44. And a mint under the pillow.

Burroughs, you may remember, called language a virus. I take that with a grain of salt. I sprinkle it with walnuts, pecans, almonds and sunflower seeds. I sprinkle it with adjectives, allomorphs, diphthongs, and existential clauses. I circle it with a chain of illocutionary commitments. I pour a hypothetical mood over it. Give me a good word salad and I will give you a surge of conjuration. I will cause things to happen. I will seem unseemly when it seems seamless to seem so. I will comb my hair with a dictionary and cover my groin with an unbridled semiosis. There are leeches within words to cure our postponements. That which is perpendicular will be vertical and that which is hypnotic will be semiotic, like a kebob of poppies, and branch out eternally into an influenza of galaxies and explications. For it is in the nature of language to spread, and substitute one reality for another, which is the reality of words, and is imaginary and vague, and here to entertain us with tricks and illusions, and give us all a sick day to stay home and write sonnets.

I’m here, not only because I can keep going, but because I’m still trying to reach the horizon. Even though I know it lacks reality, it’s the lack of reality that draws me toward it. Some things are like that. They’re full of cork-lined walls and taunting fairies. Other things are less insistent on cereal and yearn for statuary. Their reality is a marmalade of equanimity and pataphysical limousines. Escalators rising to the occasion. Countermeasures artificially massaged by digital cherubs. Words don’t really alter reality they simply season it with lagniappe and sophistry. You can sprinkle a chain with salt but it’s still going to be a chain. Salt will not alter the semantics linking its parts together. The bonds between words are as strong as the will to stand in line for the one checker who appears to be available. Every narrative has its coupons. And every cathedral has its share of ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. I’ve come to the crossroads of authenticity and survival, says a man in a forest of himself. Something deep inside that recreates patterns. That sums things up pretty well. Because after a major commingling of trade secrets near the headwaters of the Amazon, you just want to lie back and absorb the chatter of the forest. Existence is a soft thing, enough to make distinctions between things, and find a good hotel.

Doing Nothing Nothing Doing: A Cri de Coeur

 We live in a time of unbridled lunacy. Thinking is at a climax of latent provocation.

Displaced cormorants dying on the Astoria bridge.

Rickety lies and lethal drones.

Ringside seaside genocide.

There’s a strange and vivid grace to the way a donkey approaches a goldmine. Such a humble creature, imposed with such a vulgar goal. There are currents not always readily apparent to the five conventional senses. But where there is fluidity, there is also grace. Movement is a liquid proposition. The river is its eddies, its contradictions, its idiosyncrasies, its rocks, its reeds, its splashy agitations and buoyant jollity. People float in whatever direction the pompoms punctuate its restitution. Hemp is a lamp of plumes, and is therefore ideal for dashboards and picnics.

I could go on like this all day, blossoming mutant flowers like a pigtail on fire.

And yet there remain enchantments. The surmounting ineffability of the sublime. The savage delicacies of complex systems, rainforests, coral reefs, ant colonies, snowflakes, interactions of water and air. The luxurious milieu of competing russets, schools of grunion off the California coast. The Percé Rock abutting heaven in the gulf of the Saint Lawarence. The bluish undertones of Zambia emeralds. Paracelsus Sylphs. Entities invisible to the empirical eye dilating the mind.

“In such cases, it tends to promote a magical causality—one that posits the necessary intervention of natural factors bearing no logical relation to the matter at hand—thereby disorienting and confounding our habits of thought, yet nonetheless possessing the power to subjugate our minds.” André Breton.

The world suddenly seems epic, volatile, its intimacies gone lunatic, explosive, its considerations freestanding implementations of mass and prickly textures. Nefarious actors geoengineering the sky with sulfur dioxide, aluminum oxide, diamond dust, black carbon. Manufacturing rain. The dark oily rain that fell on Tehran from blowing up oil refineries in Iran. The absurdly heavy rains of Guangdong. Of Maui and Oʻahu and parts of California. The sweet-smelling rain of late August and all its negative ions breaking molecules and chains of linear imposition apart, thereby liberating the engines of rebellion. The weight of utility as opposed to the airiness of fungibility. Explosions of joyful outmaneuvering. Deregulated demeanor. Wildness of innovation, joyful, sexual, uncanny, like Bo Diddley on Ed Sullivan, November, 1955.

And here we are at the edge of the world once again. We’ve been here before. Briefly. But this time it seems both unreal and all too real. It’s eerie business when reality slides off the rails.

There are, of course, signs. There are always signs during times like this. The air is stuffed with omens. Nothing ghostly, nothing cryptic. It’s all in-your-face stuff. Plain as the dopey smile on a garden gnome. Homeless tents everywhere. Deaths of despair. Endless war. Ridiculous rationales. Corruption ubiquitous as mold. Dry rot under the constitution. Rudesby dog walkers. Necromantic narcissist nonchalant knee-length cashmere cardigan Hollywood hypodermic puffy-cheeked Botox baby girls. Aged 60.

The exhaustions. The exhaustions of school. The exhaustions of oxygen. The exhaustions of exhaust. The exhaustions of drama required to argue with a healthcare robot. The exhaustions of pretending to fulfill a purpose, which fell off like a loose muffler ages ago.

The exhaustions of filling out survey after survey after survey.

The exhaustions of taxes. The exhaustions caused by malfeasance. The exhaustions of Googling Dr. Google for a plausible (and benign) explanation of one’s symptoms, but getting scary ones instead, and dropping your tired body on the bed, and dreaming you’re at a party in Villefranche-sur-Mer with the Rolling Stones in May, 1971, having fun until you discover your wallet and passport are missing and you don’t know the first thing about playing a guitar. The exhaustions of passwords. And glassblowing and glaucoma and the stress of family relations. The exhaustions of computers and the internet and trying to find a podcaster who doesn’t bore you with personal details before getting to the clickbait-bombshell-scandal of the day.

The exhaustions of toxic positivity. The exhaustions of downgrades and downsizing and draconian insurance policies.

The exhaustions of dirt after decades of cultivation, its microbial microbiomes destroyed by annual injections of anhydrous ammonia.

Borders closing. Borders opening. Borders crawling from church to church, synagogue to synagogue, mosque to mosque, shrine to shrine, temple to temple, chapel to chapel, looking for this guy they call God. Who, it is said, works in mysterious ways. Whatever that means. Maybe nothing. Borders will be borders. They like to have fun pretending to be something real, something actual, like a fish or a marshmallow. Reminds me of the story of the dog who got so used to the occasional shocks of an electrical fence that when the fence was removed the dog thought it was still there. There was nothing to see. But if you got too near, you got a shock. Or so he thought, poor dog. How could he know the fence was gone? He might’ve seen some unusual activity in the vicinity of the fence. But there was no way to interpret it. The dog had never been part of a work crew. Of course, if you felt unnecessarily hemmed in, as one often does under continuous surveillance, you could test it, test the fence, see if it’s there, that wicked current, see if they forgot to flip a switch and turn it on, it wouldn’t kill you to try, would it? Isn’t that worth a shock? Sometime, maybe. I have to get psyched. Some things are more easily assimilated by avoiding the demons of inquiry. The angelic isn’t always quite so angelic. Rimbaud’s Terrace of Princes, offering a view of the world from a completely open perspective.

Indefatigable prisms redefine the activities of ethereal technologies.

Jungle shamanism.

Ayahuasca eyebrows.

And hit a wall.

Of dumb indifference. Psychopathic apathy. And behind the wall an infantilized population, morbidly obese from toxic, artificial food. Sweeteners like aspartame. Preservatives like butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene. Eden dead as a plastic container of gas station jerky.

Dictators are, by nature, against nature. They’re unnatural. They’re monstrosities. And the planet is now in their hands. Their claws. Their tentacles. The drool of their mouths. Sadism in their smiles. The fleshy embrace of their rape.

W.H. Auden famously said poetry makes nothing happen. And therein lies its power. “It survives in the valley of its making.” Meaning its solutions are imaginary. Protozoan. Miscible. Atypical. Intrinsical. Elliptical. Pataphysical. The magnetic magnificence of the cypress leaning into its solicitations, the infinite whirl in the inspired keel of the particular. 

The Art Of Being Null

This heat rising in the throat is a cargo of indignation. I don’t know what else to call it. Words are oscillations that travel through space transferring hair and stepladders. Equanimity is a rash by which a body can determine if it's fictitious or military and is often notorious for its long tongue and fuzzy dirigibles. These are basically lumps of sound by which a sculpture employs its grip on the surrounding air. Yesterday I saw a kangaroo push an intonation through the wall of a drugstore. What I saw was a jaded, pessimistic representation of crocuses canter across a tree stump. This made me feel clumsy. And human. More human than I felt chemically feasible, given the discharge of flak at my feet, and the various eruptions in my thumbnail.

Brutality may be used as a shield against disappointment, but I recommend canals as a superior means of infiltration. Sometimes a local citizen may provide a more personal perspective, and an increase in syrup at the breakfast table, completely incompatible with our goals but otherwise means to a higher purpose than is provided by the martinets on the university faculty. The ghouls are rules. Gaiety has its inclinations and may sometimes include justice, but is more apt to be jerky and disconnected, which is good for our nobler intentions, but bad for the calibrations.

It has been said that the poem explores the tense, often dangerous relationship between the human and the divine, emphasizing the poet's task to mediate between the two. The poet acts as a messenger or priest, crawling over the mountain tops to give birth to divine laws. Or the explorer arriving on the shore of a neglected sensation. One is one or the other in the one that goes to the other, and makes it all shiver, and whirl across a dune. This explains how dice and words get involved in drugs that affect the mind and surrounding foliage. And how combustion serves the engine as the engine serves the ebullience of cherries. There are still a few places where you can order a piroshki and a shot of vodka without drawing undue suspicion. What Mallarmé discovered is that one can also feed on cataclysms and survive the tedium of hell if is one sufficiently embalmed in mayonnaise. If you’re going to take the reins of a poem as it writes itself with the aid of your fingers, it behooves one to fret over vowels and rock hard on the rhythms. Carouse among Luddites. Farm semicolons. Magnetize ghosts. Unlock the precipice.

What does it mean to be null? I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean collateral. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but I’ve been around here long enough to know an omelet from a pancake. I know whenever there’s an abyss nearby. You can smell it. It smells of nothing. And that’s what makes it so deadpan. Every time a transgression makes the night tremble, I know there is a strange new color nearby. It only makes sense. If a quantum evening flowers in a book, the world seems more enticing, more disembodied. And I like that. I like being null. Comfortably numb. Not so much indifferent as preternaturally seasoned. Materially unencumbered. From which it follows that to be acquisitive is contrary to the spirit of nullity. And, in many ways, quite personal. Like the pottery scene in Ghost, in which Demi Moore is spinning a wet clay phallus and Swayze joins her as Unchained Melody plays in the background. Life is preoccupation with itself. Infectious names that slice the air into little adventures. That kind of thing. Things like corners. Where you can put a rocking chair. And enjoy the art of being null.

Ask For Ginger

During my early days on the street, I learned a song about ginger. How it grew, how it flourished, how it assuaged osteoarthritis and eased digestive issues. There was a breadth of meaning in it that I could take for a walk. I could talk to the local spirits. I could think about condiments in a time of creosote. I could hesitate at crosswalks and impose my will on the rule of traffic lights. Deep within the Greenland ice sheet, sits an old man lost in thought. I feel in some way responsible for his being there, but reluctant to disturb the mise-en-scène with a superfluous objective. I’ve been told that there is more than one way to achieve sarcasm. One way involves a razor wit and a hellcat tongue, and the other just craves a little inducement, a convenient pretext. Look for a big blue door. Ask for Ginger. If you’re like most romantics, you’ll probably want a fascinating pain to go with your extremism. Find a cause. Veil your tactics with gauze. Be sweet and cajoling to Civil War reenactors. Turn an eye toward Luxembourg. I have 103 reasons to like concision. This is one of them. I found it on the bus. The entire circus of existence. Doing something to a car antenna. And bent down to tie my shoe to get a better look. It’s what romantics do when they’re old and ornery. Too edgy for yacht rock, too arthritic for nirvana. 

The candle teaches a finger the timbre of fire. My sense of abandonment prefers that we speak with sunlight in the dark. I’m not trying to be difficult I’m just trying to be exempt from summary. There will now be a play during oysters. We sparkle, I sparkle, they sparkle as one by one we eventually realize there's no point to it. And this makes it all timpani. We never know what they want do we but we know what we want that gets it done. Not everyone gets to have fun, even though I'm outside praying for the death of hope, which has been the most amusing thing I’ve done all day. Hope turns real solutions into bargain basement gimcrackery. I go about my business with a certain je ne sais quoi. There’s no need for density. We sometimes faint and when I grope around I feel the strangest things trying to establish intimacy with my skin. I like making myself available in ways that some might find strange. Posting things on social media is probably the strangest. They tell the story of what our clouds are like as they drift over the rugged terrain of our existence. I can never find the right metaphor. All the old bromides and platitudes are junkyard curiosities. I go down to the parlor. The realm of the imaginary versus the totalitarian beast. Emily Dickinson sitting in the dark while the winter pounds on her door.

In this kind of situation, where lyric poetry is often more about freestanding furniture, like envy, or telepathy, we save our grocery receipts, and learn to ride the clouds. The plump glow of truth walks a lonely path. An example is when a character in a play reveals their thoughts and innermost feelings, often when alone on stage, and begins to speak frankly and without censorship. You may have already seen a mime pretend to be trapped in an invisible box, using gestures to give the impression that she is pushing against the walls and a ceiling. This is called simulation, and is a way to achieve imperfection. In its free form, it spins like a mood for which the skating rink is a memory, as if water were a form of thought masquerading as blood, passing from one form or the other until it arrives in someone's antenna, humming like Billie Holiday.

Passions are awakened in the carefree joy of dance, and those who have seen such beautiful performances know exactly how much passion depends on the shape of an ankle, or the impressions of bare feet in the sand. Those enthralled by the steely grip of winter feel themselves huddled together, burying their faces behind a spread of fingers. Behind the tarpaulin, if a creaky old romance occurs, I will comb my furniture with a vacation. I am a beginning student of thorny things. This is my device. You are my blackberry. Together, we will make this fulfillment fulfill itself. Among nature and natural phenomena, the natural substance of things is evident, despite a manifest aura suggesting a clear foreshadowing of a fever dream about to unfold, something primal and desperate, something definite and vast, a mountain range or interstellar trajectory, a marble frog denying its inertia, and leaping into Norway. You can feel that tension in almost every sentence. It's a feature of language, a feature of the imaginary. The power to propose, to build a palace out of air, and hold it there just long enough to dazzle the logic of space. 

For The Sake Of Idiosyncrasy

Is what we create truly ours? And by that I mean, did Ed Sullivan get pissed when Bo Diddley sang Bo Diddley instead of Sixteen Tons as agreed upon? Yes, he did. But you have to understand that a divine energy was flowing through him and he had no choice but to defy the tight-lipped stoicism of TV for the sake of idiosyncrasy. Bo Diddley’s rebellion had the stamp of Promethean fire upon it. And a square guitar. Rock has evangelistic underpinnings. And when creative energies flow through the spirit the body moves, expresses itself in ecstatic rhythms, flagstones to the divine. The Gnostics believed that Human beings possess an inner divine spark of light or spirit, which is a portion of the true, transcendent God, trapped in the material body. The purpose of existence is to liberate this trapped divine energy from the corruptions of the material world and appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Or whatever venue seems appropriate at the time. Shindig, Hullabaloo, Where the Action Is. Today I think it’s more apt to be TikTok, or YouTube, or Madison Square Garden or the Showbox in Seattle. Busking in an underground transit system. Or communing privately in the forest, with a paintbrush and watercolors. Evergreens dancing as the wind moves through their branches, and ironweed and cat-claw. Gerunds are the sugar between negligee and dexterity. The weight of  the air on a G string. These are all sound indications of constrained energies breaking free. Jailhouse Rock. Warren Zevon. Werewolves of London. Richard Burbage, as Falstaff. Van Gogh’s insanely yellow sunflowers.

bubbles of potato soup

cannot say what they mean

without bursting

into epiphanies

of sunyata

not to mentionVan Gogh’s potato eaters

i can smell the earth

in its many disclosures

there’s more to a potato

than geniality there are also pom poms

cheerleaders for existence

at the forty-yard line

in the big game of life

which is a metaphor

so stupid I’m tempted to leave it here

until somebody comes along

to kick it into ambiguity 

Adjusting to life in the 21^st century is an odyssey of contradictions. Heidegger’s hammer pounding digital nails. Reality is twelve elves on a bone. Existence explains the stove. But I’ll never understand money. Can you hear it? That clanking of vowels and syllables. I was carried here by a language. Introspection does backflips, like Dylan’s Tarantula. It’s only natural to expect a more open country where you can sit on a hill and feel your intellect dangle from your ganglions like another dimension at the edge of absence. Control is illusory. These words will never be what I want them to be: devices for exerting pressure on demonic impulses. Democracy failed us. But maybe our art will keep our language alive during a time of censorship. At night the metaphors come out and lick my face. They leave scraps of cryptocurrency that only has value in the mind. You can’t write a utopia in a vacuum. But why would you? When something is intangible, it can’t be captured by time, or coopted by a corporate marketing strategy. It’s pure noumena, an aura of expectation.  Chaos is but a shout away, too wild for a haircut, too apodictic for a leash. There are limits. You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. But sometimes something breaks. A chunk of wall falls down. And possibilities sprout feathers.

It started as a one-to-one proposal, before it had time to evolve into something more than a bucket of tears. Things that happen in secret inevitably become problematical. That’s why living rooms were invented, and school dances and sepals, some might suggest steeples, others will quietly nod ascent to hamburgers and comets. Me, I’m always on the look for UFOs. What kind of poetry are they writing on the other side of the Milky Way? It was always there, always a brutal reminder of everything that agitated us, excited us, drove us, defined us, and it had to be kept alive before it deteriorated into private equity and deposit slips. Ungodly towers of glass and steel. The banalities of wealth that can only be relieved by sadistic proposals and anonymous tips. Clandestine leverages. Although the annoyance of poverty is generally considered to be a reliable indication of genius and diehard fervent German romanticism, disproportionately large anatomical organs do in some instances apply, depending on context and the temperature of the operating theater. Mathematics are hilariously distorted, and the basilica cradles a superpower. I think we all know what it means to listen to Frank Sinatra during a thunderstorm, but the intense pleasure of terza rima in Dante is brighter than all the lava from Mount Etna, and so is Portofino.

it’s 1030 a.m., a Thursday in February

i’m looking at my intestines

on a computer screen

sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean

that’s me alright

knots of anguish

loosened into oblivion

divine propofol

i’m a big fan of Baudelaire

and this is why

i believe the 21^st century

is a bust and I want my money back

i’m walking out of here

on a carpet of nitrous oxide

and in the future

shall arrange my speech accordingly

what does that mean

it means a lot of things

mainly words

of hemp & irony

like that moment in a hotel

we see a rainbow

trout leap

out of a suitcase 

I think it’s time we start talking about Umwelt. Otherwise, everything in life is everywhere. Scattered. Haggard. Battered. Nothingness is not nothing, because music is perfectly clear about these things. Arpeggios kill depth. Go for a nice long note of Mahler. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. He’s in the kitchen preparing a salad. This makes all my emotions happy. The dilemma of daring to go to the marsh by moonlight means something has to happen. It’s a matter of emphasis, not comprehension. If something is incomprehensible it just means it’s obliging our refusal to believe what we see. You can shape a sound with a tuba, but try it sometime with a freshly scrubbed mosquito. Am I overlooking something? The windy splatter of rain on a window. The way water running in a kitchen sink sounds when you’re alone in a house. That sense of regions, zones, zones is a better word, for that which feels simultaneously far and near, and is open to those who can feel it unfold and cue the membrane lining the eye. Who can define what a wilderness is? The French don’t even have a word for it. The crunching of leaves, the breaking of twigs, the sound of its breath. The croaking of frogs. And if you do all this in your head it’s difficult to describe. But if I spin around twice the sugar of it ripples through my nerves. And there’s nothing I can say that will stop what’s coming. It has no reality. Until it gets here.

the hammer is defined by its use

but the nails are chickenpox

and the house is full

of the effusive gestures

of otherworldly beings

how easy it is

to slip away

and listen to the Beach Boys

in a different reality

than this one

don’t worry baby

everything will turn out alright  

 

The Second Coming

Maybe it's because I did jury duty once and I feel I could have done a better job if I had a better understanding of the law and how lawyers operate. Maybe it’s because I like courtroom dramas. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a certain, inexplicable fascination with outlaws, bank robbers and wise guys, con men and gunslingers. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassiday and The Sundance Kid. Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone. Maybe it’s because there are so many stupid laws. Maybe it’s because the current administration flaunts constitutional laws – which are anything but stupid - with the flagrant disdain and mockery of the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" Maybe it’s because for the past few months a federal paramilitary force has been attacking, kidnapping, and murdering its own citizens without the slightest restraint or concern for breaking constitutional laws. Maybe because our current president has been flouting international and constitutional laws with a breathtaking cavalier indifference, has kidnaped the president Venezuela and put him in one of our jails, killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a religious leader with the equivalent prominence of the Pope - without any congressional or judicial restraint, and has attacked Iran without any plausible cause or a clearly stated objective, an attack that has so far killed at least 3,332 Iranian citizens. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen the law so utterly disregarded, or felt so anguished and vulnerable without its protection. The value of life is keyed to the preservation and respect for the law. Without the law to protect each individual, one’s life feels as valued as an armadillo on a Texas highway with an eighteen-wheel rig barreling straight toward your scaly little ass at 90 mph.

And so I wonder. Has Yeats’s “rough beast” been awakened? Is the apocalyptic monster slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? Because there can be no doubt: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some new revelation is at hand.

Recently, I watched a French TV show which airs weekly called La Grand Librairie hosted by Augustin Trapenard, whose primary focus is to excite interest in books and literature. Authors are invited to come on the show and talk about their books, all of which are related to the topic at hand. The topic of the show I watched was Pour quoi est-ce qu'on est fasciné par le mal? (Why Are We Fascinated by Evil?). Of the five guests, the one that provoked the most fascination – and distress – was an attractive, 54-year-old woman named Constance Debré, who was elegantly dressed in a pinstriped blazer and pants with a black shirt and a buzz-cut that reminded me of Sinead O’Connor’s strategy for downplaying her femininity and beauty. Debré – who, for many years had been a criminal defense lawyer before leaving the profession to become an author, was there to talk about her recent novel Protocoles, a work of autofiction described as “a stark and clinical account exploring the detailed procedures of capital executions in the United States,” in which Debré “analyzes the ritual of the death penalty, contrasting administrative rigor with the chaotic and violent reality of the execution.”

Debré’s true focus is on exploring our relationship to law and its approach to evil. How does the law protect its citizens without exercising too much restraint? How does the law manage to protect our freedoms while protecting us from the abuses of psychopaths and sharks, from the abuses of propaganda and misinformation? What does the law have to say about the nature of evil, its motivations and sources? What is evil? Is everyone capable of doing evil? Is there anything like a true state of innocence? Is silence in the face of genocide a form of complicity in evil, or may it be pardoned as an act of self-preservation? Is it criminal to voice an opposition to a perceived injustice in public? Is vengeance evil? Is revenge evil? Is killing someone in a fit of rage evil, or may it be justifiably deemed a temporary insanity? Are people inherently good, possessing a natural compassion and innocence that is often corrupted by the influence of society and conceptions of private property as Rousseau argued, or are people inherently self-interested, competitive, and fearful, driven by a desire for power and survival, as Thomas Hobbes argued?

What did Bob Dylan mean when he wrote “to live outside the law you must be honest?”

What did Hanna Arendt mean when she said “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil?”

What did Albert Einsten mean when he said “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

Or Edmund Burke, anticipating Einstein: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Or Mahatma Ghandi: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

Humanity’s one true weapon against evil is law. But – as Dylan implies – is the law always honest? Justice (to quote the AI Overview on Google) “is depicted as blind (often wearing a blindfold) to symbolize impartiality, objectivity, and fairness in the legal system. This suggests that justice should be administered without fear, favor, prejudice, or regard for a person's identity, wealth, or social status. It ensures decisions are based solely on evidence and law.”

Then there’s the golden rule: those with the gold, make the rules.

And then there’s literature. The old and new testaments of the Bible. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The Firm, by John Grisham. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. The Verdict, by Barry Read. Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Native Son, by Richard Wright. The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. Snow Falling On Cedars, by David Guterson.  The Code of Hammurabi, proclaimed and enacted by Hammurabi,  the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, who ruled from approximately 1792 to 1750 B.C.

I’m sure there are many others, all wrestling with the dilemmas of good and evil. The darker turmoil of the human unconscious. Loki, the Norse trickster god who creates chaos. Ravana, the ten-headed Hindu demon king of Lanka, symbolizing ego and lust. Apophis, the ancient Egyptian serpent deity who represents chaos and attempts to devour the sun god Ra every night. Lamashtu, the female Mesopotamian demon notorious for her malevolence toward pregnant women, mothers and children. Beelzebub, a.k.a. Lord of the Flies, originally a Philistine god from Ekron, located in the Judean lowlands of Israel, often considered another name for Satan, and associated with the deadly sin of gluttony in Christian demonology, a disgusting, bloated,  humanoid entity with flashing eyes, bat-like membranous wings and webbed, duck-like feet, who embodies pride and envy, and is notorious for inciting war, lust, and idolatry.

The law approaches evil one way. Literature approaches evil another way. The law attempts to be objective. Surgical, precise, leaving no room for doubt. Whereas literature goes for salvation, aberration, contrast, paradox, messy incongruities, and drama. Law calls for evidence. Literature calls for theater. Bloody battles and witch’s cauldrons. Dragons and fog. Fjords echoing with the groans and laughter of Norse warrior gods. Cities of sin and corruption buried in volcanic ash. God’s wrath. Faustian bargains. Scapegoats and sacrifices. Human hearts tumbling down Aztec temples. Genocides. Massacres. Annihilation. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden. Auschwitz.

During Debré’s opening remarks, she made one highly provocative statement that I’m still pondering, still trying to unravel and understand more deeply. She said “La loi rend toute littérature obsolète,” (“The law renders all literature obsolete”). 

The law operates according to a strict code of facts. There’s no room for nuance and metaphor, no accommodating stage for eloquent justifications, verbal acrobatics incarnating our existential and moral dilemmas à la Hamlet and King Lear, or moving, probing, piercing explorations of what makes people do the things they do, including rape and murder, à la Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy. The law is as sharply and coldly defined as a surgical instrument. Literature is designed to provoke thought. The law is designed to punish, and to act as a preventative measure. Literature illumines. The law casts shadows.

Elsewhere – on a YouTube channel called Maison de la Poésie, Scène littéraire  -  I listened to Debré read an opening passage from Protocoles describing, in graphic detail, the grisly details of a public execution. It was profoundly disturbing. I was also struck by the clinical explicitness of her description. Her attention to accuracy and the minutiae of this grisly procedure can’t really be described as a description; it was too clinical for that, too precise, too literal, too clear-cut to be called a description. The ghastliness of what occurred was even more dreadful in the raw, fact-based, unadorned sterility of its operation.

I was all the more struck by her statement at the end of La Grand Librairie. Each emission of La Grand Librairie ends with a two or three-minute statement of eloquence and power titled Droit dans les yeux, in English “right in the eyes.” Debré’s Droit dans les yeux may be accessed on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. It’s in French, but I translated it into English:

There isn't the world on one side and literature on the other. There isn't reality on one side and fiction on the other. Reality without books, and this shattered, refracted, illegible matter. This succession of strange, mechanical, confused events. A machine that always seems to be one step ahead, that cancels us out, swallows us, separates us from one another. Keeps us bewildered in a feeling of absurdity, solitude, and madness. Books, for their part, are not the stories, the little stories they tell. Books are not this enclosed space, closed in on itself, on the sentences and what they seem to say. A possibility of escape, a way out of reality. To the question of what reality compels us to do, what its senseless mechanics demand as an answer. And they are not a shelter for the thick-skinned, made of their sentences alone, a place to forget reality and what we do within it. There is no escape, no way out of the world, no refuge. That's more or less what books tell us. They don't offer solutions; they wrench us from the idea that existence is a contradiction to be resolved, an enigma to be cracked. They place us before our destiny, our shared destiny, all of us who are alive, neither entirely separate nor entirely together, but simultaneously. Books are our only chance to become aware of this: that we are not beings without cause or purpose, absurd and lost in the chaos of the world, but rather figures of something greater than ourselves, something called humanity.

I found her statement surprising and impactful for several reasons. I was astonished by the power of her eloquence, especially considering how clinical and sterile her description of an execution had been, but also her attitude toward literature. I could more easily understand why she had exchanged her profession as a criminal defense lawyer for the purviews of literature. Literature isn’t, as a lot of people assume, particularly those who surrender to the infantilizing charms of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, or Tolkien’s Hobbit adventures, a place of refuge, an escape from the rigors of existence. But she doesn’t make it out to be a dark, nihilistic habitation of impotence and futility either. Elsewhere in her appearance on La Grand Libraire, she cited authors like Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka. She lauds its grasp on the reality of our situation, its unflinching gaze at destiny. On the other hand, and this is where my thoughts about literature differ, I can’t remember a single book that didn’t in some way try to unravel the mystery of existence, or offer a solution for ameliorating its inevitable losses and tragedies, find humor and redemption in the lushness of its mysteries. This would, of course, include Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Kafka especially. I have to wonder what she would make of Rimbaud’s mysterious flip flop, his strange reversal from visionary poet to caravaneer and import/export clerk. Rimbaud’s correspondence in his later years bear the same stark, barren grasp of existence, his letters to his mother and sister full of burdensome grievances, with maybe a small glint of humor now and then.

As for evil, I see it as a form of madness, a satanic rebellion against the natural order of things. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I’ve never been hostile toward religion either. There’s a scene in True Detective, Season one, episode 3 with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson that I find highly relatable. They visit an evangelist revival meeting in a tent somewhere in rural Texas, looking for information on a suspect. McConaughey, as the dour, world-weary, cynical Detective Cohle, utters disparagingly to his partner Marty, played with embattled, conflicted intensity by Woody Harrelson, “What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?...I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales, folks putting what few bucks they do have into little, wicker baskets being passed around. I think it's safe to say that nobody here is gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.” Marty, who staunchly adheres, believes in, and champions the value of religion, responds in stern opposition: “can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?”

I’m with Marty on that one. Religion is one of the few things that keep people from destroying one another. The one reason anyone aspires to be honest, aspires to be caring and compassionate, aspires to do good work, aspires to be faithful, aspires to do the right thing. The obvious irony, as McConaughey’s nihilistic Cohle would gleefully point out, is that religion is also the central reason that people do destroy one another. And thereby, saith the bard, hangs a tale. 

Some Notes On A Lost Investment

In eternity, time has nowhere to go. Wherever it goes, it’s already there. So it becomes relative. In French, la future proche has a place to be right away. It arrives in a golden coach pulled by a team of big oil CEOs. Most of the oil in the ground comes from algae and plankton that lived in ancient oceans and swamps millions of years ago. And so here we are. Pumping it into Silverados and Ram pickups. F-47s and Sikorsky Seahawks. Those of us on the fringe have elsewhere to be. The eyes dilate for the foliage of poetry. Fronds of Wanda Coleman. Radicles of Ashbery. Bulbs of Beckett. Canopies of Keats. Deciduous Dickinson. Panicles of Poe.

It is not until one becomes old that time truly reveals its wilder idiosyncrasies. After precedes before but only when the moon is waxing crescent and the door to the hermitage is left open. The time for decisions is fallible. The time for scissors is ribbons. The time for rectitude is recyclable. The time to die is phantom ovations in a theater of words. The time for youth is drowsy. The time for time is not nearly enough. The time for quick is slower than a secretion. The time to find the ultimate truth of things is as elusive as the objects swimming in a cataract. The struggle to explain evil gets harder. And when there’s more evil in the end than in the beginning you begin to wonder where the fuck it all went wrong. You can call it entropy. And leave it in the basement. It’s a good scapegoat. Specify, specify, always specify. Talk and sleep. Time was, time is. Avoid holes. Let go of the plot at some convenient place, where it will stand as a sign.

I once invested in an upright piano whose octaves never seemed to agree. The sound was dissonant and rouge, with a slag of distortion. I can still hear it, reverberating like an old barn full of hungry cattle. It distinguished itself by occupying a zone outside of time and space. It had its own unique lexicon, like a thought that never defines itself but haunts the outer limits of one’s private reflections. I thought it might have a promising future as an instrument of musical pathology. Sadly, it was roundly rejected. The public did not like it. Musicians did not like it. It was a thing of poetry, doomed to failure, yet retaining a certain charm, a haunting je ne sais quoi. I don’t regret the money I lost on this adventure. The investment had more to do with the ephemeral charms of music more than the mechanics of the piano. A rhapsode, sewn with loss.

Things happen. I don’t know why they happen the way they happen, but they happen. Stories are written. Dreams occur. That beautiful passage in Proust where he and Albertine are lying in sand, feet toward the ocean, and its breathing becomes a voluptuous reconciliation, the perpetual surf receding in a hiss of sudsy withdrawal and crashing back in a crescendo of chaos and foam, a systole and diastole of murmuring intervals soothing a tortuous cycle of endless ambivalences, injudicious actions, nagging anxieties, louche betrayals and passionate midnight trysts which the ocean’s rhythmic assurances rock and lull into a lush and undulating prose.

Who knows? Maybe the best way to achieve elsewhere is to go on an imaginary journey. The insanity of the current regime can be an asset. It invites opposition, a creative response with restorative power. If our existence as a species is hanging by a proverbial thread, fuck the elites and their Caribbean retreats. There are places that can’t be reached by coercion and money. Not that they’re too spiritual or refined or celestial or immaterial for the gross vulgarities and predatory instincts of the rich. These are qualities obtainable through even the most fraudulent pieties. Realms of blue flame have a power unique to the sacrifices and rigors of privation. They have a reality powered by duende, which is aligned with the imaginary, the capacity for enchantment. Contrary energies. Carboniferous outgrowths. Bizarre mythologies. Castles made of planetarium lint. I am, of course, making this up as I go along. That’s the entire point. Welcome aboard. Follow the signs. Note the fill of uncanny enthusiasms. Turn left at the next diversion. The cranium inspired by organs. Freewheeling deities and amiable cephalopods.  

Our entry into the carpenter's workshop is preceded by rain. We smell olives and sawdust. Everything becomes waves by the grace of heat. There is a reassuring sense of agency. The ineptitude of genius rescued by music. Construction demonstrates the tactility of facts. The intervention of chaos is necessary to disregard the handkerchief lying on the armchair. Pipes creak and twist creating memory. Something huge and amorphous blurs the air. Existence cracks open like sugar. And when the void supersedes our immersion, we can celebrate its unveiling with irrelevant stimuli. We can bend reality. We can reveal the void and fill it with pickles and brine. We can inherit whole kingdoms of russet. We can escalate cats. We can bubble with emphasis. We can boil with criteria. We can aim at the fog and excite its incongruities with a ricochet of words. And ride home in a barrel of lopsided wine.

 

Helium Smile

Sometimes when it seems you have nothing you have this moment, this lovely perusal, this luxurious absorption detached in obscurity. It's a form of spaghetti to be this inquisitive. The carpet insists that a cat be up there on a desk and I understand this it has a certain pungency, an easy pulse to comb with a checkered tongue. I’ve got things in my pocket and a book with bitter flames describing the plight of humanity. I am near it all in a kind of trance. Our constant hula is one among many contingencies. To the east is an armchair beyond our most keen imagining, and to the west lies the spoor of a hot tiara. Beyond what our needs radiate, there is a regatta during sunset, the air twisting in golden arenas. It’s just a matter of singing. 

I'm unanimous in space. I resuscitate prongs. Disorder cooks my rapture. Complexity effaces everything I gratify with puppets. I get my kicks whenever and wherever I can. I'm an early pilgrim on a rusty fiasco. Trademarks oboe my mold. The cork is illiterate but the bottle is calm. Wild horses peddle the sideshow into ubiquity. We all want a look on the other side of death. It’s a kind of obligation to kiss your ass goodbye. And why not? The nomenclature surrounding anything neon gets my juices going. Let me be clear: it is in the nature of logic to defeat the squeak of combustion. I’ve always wanted to be a counterpart to its tumultuous happenstance. If I must, I shall subsist in a glamour of my own undoing, running a comb across all the indications, intermingling my fiber with the dromedary stars.

What you see here is more than a mood, it’s a disposition based on qualia, the sizzle of a roadside grill where the menus have been carpentered by a keen understanding of food coupled with a flair for exotic phenomena at the fringes of perception. I often feel as if a chance to rub shoulders with plums has been squandered on apples. And despite the clear advantage of an awning, I can't explain sauerkraut. I find it easier to explain the Dirac equation than chili powder. I am at one with the universe but hopelessly confused when it comes to genderless bathrooms. Marcel said something the other day which unraveled one enigma and then raised another. He said things that have a definite, concrete value like commercial success or acquiring a practical skill are less alluring than phantom enticements. Things without status. Things without prestige or stature. And so it comes to this. It arouses a hunger I can’t explain. And it’s never on the menu.

Royalty requires trumpets. Not the sweetly muted trumpet of Miles, but the blaring instruments of empire. Poetry has a royal heart but a healthy distrust of empire. It’s an aristocracy of spirit. Cowboy coffee. Milieus of lapidary fire. Those whose hearts have been pierced with poetry launch themselves into the boundless space of an authentic existence. Tiny holes or corkscrews for privileging spit over punctuation. The croak of a radish morning is a thesis of dirt. And so the unsung provocations of a fatigued defiance schleps through the shallows of a long imperial limbo looking for an exit. Splish splash the labial jab of nothingness causes all pandemonium to break loose into trance. Iridescent irises dilate with the shine of sunyata. I want to disband the football team and walk into presumption like a science based on crying. Disavow the novel of today for the novel of tomorrow. Which will be written by cats. On steroids and meth. This will enhance my rapport with sockets and become a glamour of tingling expectations. The voltage of metaphor powering alchemical blenders. Interstellar oysters in dynasties of coral. The peevish etiquette of traffic lights sobbing legacies of mechanical duality. The carnival world bursting into polyneuronal innervation. Extraocular muscles tactile eyes. Groundbreaking gypsum genitalia grammar. Hydrogen halo. Helium smile.