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.