My Battered Id

My battered id accompanies me wherever I go, sobbing uncontrollably as we plough through our day, denying our impulses for the greater good of society. And although I’m quite fond of reservoirs, I like to keep a sense of universality handy in case my individuality becomes an issue. It’s what we all agree on, isn’t it? The fragrance of panic. The modesty of denial. Lavender is a faith that serves as a thurible for mathematical exercises or for making wishes. Mathematics becomes a faith for those who dwell within it. There is, in all things, a quadratic equation running on merlot. One might sometimes perceive a molecular imbroglio. The atmosphere inside a parallelogram is grasping and muddy. Once, I had faith in mulberries. Now, all I think about are dirigibles. It sometimes happens that, moving through you with unlaced shoes, you feel yourself in opposition to the very essence of the wind. Why am I doing this? Who knows. Questions always sound so baritone, as if the universe were an opera, and a wheel on our grocery cart was broken. They say things happen for a reason. But sometimes they merely happen, and it’s up to us to provide a narrative, a framework with which to impose a law, and a panacea.

My body is not a hero. It has its flaws, its surprises, its limitations, its needs. There have been many instances in which it has been the source of considerable embarrassment. And while many of its shortcomings are exponentially exaggerated in old age, there have been instances in my youth, in those glorious new years of adulthood, that it encumbered my success as a human being with its ludicrous clamor. Like that final exam in linguistics when my digestive system filled the silent classroom with what can only be described as a primordial gurgling, an orchestral malaise that was as far removed from Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar as a two-carat diamond from a gas station hot dog. It has often seemed as if we lead two separate existences. And while, on the one hand, my body has been the source of numerous compensating pleasures, its continuous decline has, of late, been a sobering disclosure of life’s calamitous frailties, and engrossed the aloofness and vanities of the mind with the theatricality of its burdens.

It’s not easy to get enough leverage out of words to lift something unwieldy into place. Mortality, for example. Nobody wants to hear about mortality. The right hardware is needed, and enough subjectivity to withstand a molecular storm of semantic instability. If, in a glimpse of birth, sunlight shines forth from the ink, then that something shall be veins, and those veins will be full of blood, circulating like an expressway. We will see mortality as it churns with attitude. Anyone is never just anyone. Anonymity is a get out of jail free card. There are many here among us who have made peace with their chicanery. Something somewhere is always there ahead of us shaping its perceptions into such conceptual disport that it becomes edifying. What is it to walk through life free of all judgment? It is to dive into a pool to save a friend lying on the bottom. It is to shoot a film in Kodak Ektachrome. Or elude the bite of time with a song and a glass of wine at the end of a Sausalito dock. It’s a particular kind of ability, like churning out a manifesto in a single morning. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it high in the air in a book evincing free will. He who moves to the back of his life as he arrives at the station breathless and frantic to tell about it, is blessed with deputation. It takes a great passion for this kind of thing, and a special kind of indolence to truly appreciate its grandeur. Idleness must always precede work if the concoction is to transcend all idiom and become a truly delicious fetish.

Description is always tricky. It requires an understanding that carves out a space for itself amidst a clamor of words. Otherwise, it sinks like a dead monk in a Danish peat bog. I get religious around electricity. I suggest you step back. Way back. All the way to prehistoric Omsk. What I’m about to describe here may not actually be breathing. Not because it’s dead, but because it’s indescribable. A fat old man stands by the window drinking sack. It’s snowing, and men are going to war. Scenes such as this never end happily. But they do entail a good deal of convolution. The path to narrative dereliction is paved with knickknacks. Therefore, before pulling the trigger, stir the poplars with a few indecisions. Look carefully at your shoes. Are they laced to your satisfaction? Have your nerves been fed tornados of dowager and garlic? Have you seen the orchids of Borneo, or the beautiful cloth napkins of Singapore? Enthusiasm grows into ultimatums if you don’t mellow it with a little equilibrium. Either you find what you're looking for in a language, or you secrete your life out on the periphery, surrounded by candles and facts.