The world needs poets. It just doesn’t know it yet. The world needs poets to plant a rose in every secret garden. A tulip in every balloon, and a quorum in every quintet. All poetry is a form of insemination. But if it’s not, it might also be a fertilizer. Or a blitz. A fast intense campaign to restore croquet to the dunes of Mars. And what are poets for in a destitute time, asks Hölderlin’s elegy Bread and Wine. And I answer with biscotti. I know it’s not much, but my thoughts were bubbly when I thought of this, and my theories have been patched with exultation, rather than a tube of hubbub, which is sticky, and oozes forth with the grace and eloquence of all things elaborate and gooey. I have many theories. They’re ardent, like a harmonica, and hard to play. The court of opinion has been braced with a hope that it one day might do justice to itself, and cause all hell to break loose. And we all know what that means. It means the world needs poets.
To each of us something personal is granted. In my
case, it’s personal. And by that I mean, really personal. So personal as to
almost be impersonal. Like a pillowcase, or a snowshoe. When Heidegger uses the
word draft, he means an evolving, or preparatory working out of a complex idea,
rather than a final, dramatic crowbar. When I hear the word draft, I think of
something to avoid at all costs. I also think of a big cold glass of
bubbliness, as sunlight in a draft of beer. It is here, in this moment, right now,
projecting itself into possibilities, the way air hardens into words, ingots of
meaning, the way thoughts drift through the mind, haunting all the fauna and
flora with memories of summer, and getting naked with a girl among the reeds on
the banks of the Mississippi. Of course, not everything is a violin I can turn
into dandruff. I still need skin and provocation. Every word should haunt the
expectation of its being here, and then squeeze you hard with a naked and
tender sincerity. This is what makes it circulate among the hammers, and cause
mayhem to build a house, and live in happy squalor, inventing philosophies and
hats.
Music is patterned sound.
So they say. It’s a negotiable medium, like the headwaters of the subjective,
the place where bone and spirit meet. Music can take you elsewhere. But you
have to meet it half way. You can beat a drum, blow on a horn, or use a purposeful
self-assertion in ways that are disproportionate to the starkness of the décor,
and create new worlds, new patterns. Language produces and reproduces itself,
and is a form of music, since it whirls around in the ears like wind through
Louisiana cypress, and brings things into the light of understanding. Do
emotions have shapes? Of course they do. I see the architecture of time as a
sky full of starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. Mozart had
a starling he bought in Vienna after hearing it whistle a variation of a theme
he had composed just weeks earlier. The bird altered the theme by singing a G
sharp instead of a G natural, which delighted Mozart. Grace is exhilarating.
And when there is grace in music, and grace in language, the spirit rises to
the occasion. We step away quietly from the necrosis of politics, and stand on
the porch, and listen to the rain.
We are the bees of the invisible. Declared Rilke. “We
ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up on the great golden
beehive of the Invisible.” It’s intangible there where the glow extends beyond
itself and becomes a portrait of time. If I steer my forehead west, there’s a
hinge for the door and a knob to make it visible. This is how most languages
get started: they evolve an array of predicates to buzz around pollinating the
shit out of the world. I see this as an anticipation of asparagus. And push it
aside. It’s the orchid of vowels that acts like a language. And the ballad that
pilots it across the mind. It's always a little awkward when a man adopts a mode
of gallantry towards a naked woman. But if it hangs in the Louvre it seems a
little more box office. The bright lights of Times Square punctuate the night
with American products gone crazy. Don’t let the mania fool you. There is often
a subtle control that gets to you before they turn the lights off. Once you
realize that the brightest places are the darkest of places, the age will pass through
an unprecedented process involving blood and pumpernickel and arrive by pulley
to clarify the meaning of itself. Heaven appears for one solid second over the
peaks of the Cascades. And then we see the granite face of Mount Si towering
over the Twin Peaks Café. Snoqualmie Falls raging over the edge of the abyss.
And hope for a mystery that never ends.
