Tristan Tzara's Special Relativity

And so, one day when reality brushed against the sumptuous improbabilities that lie all too inconveniently within reach, the moment one broke free from its coordinates and shook the world out of its trance, we lingered in the barn unfolding our thoughts. I gave a talk on diagnosis as a form of jaywalking, and ways in which to assemble reality with semantic grass. I like the way nouns flow through a feeling making it enigmatic. I’m not sure feelings were intended to have a language. If you heap too many words on a feeling it collapses under the weight and becomes a denouement. Once the plot has been unraveled, we have to invent new problems. And if you throw an emotion into the ocean, it washes ashore thousands of miles into the future where it eventually decays into a tv series. There are too many ifs in life. I can’t keep track. If this happens, that happens, and if that happens, this happens. Would you believe me if I were to tell you I was the original Sam Eliot? I drift through life with the confidence of a mustache.

And one day I sifted through my perceptions and found an elk. It was 1975 and I enlisted in a basement where I could play bas-relief with a human heart. I learned how to cry out like a wolf when the moon was full, and paint heaven with my defiance. If everyone’s a swan, the violin is wisdom, and the pegs are a concern. Remember: Idaho produces roughly 14 billion tons of potatoes per year. This is why, in deep meditation, potatoes are so abundantly palpable. I’ve seen a chair animate the space around it with brilliance, yet it inspired nothing in me but anguish. My look of denim and cotton isn’t entirely by accident. The drainage to my narrative really speeds everything up, and we need to gather the hose at the end of the day and coil it around a retort. Something tighter than invective. Something fragrant, like thought, or corn tortillas.

Tristan Tzara's special relativity states that the speed of language is eucharistic for everyone, while time and space are relative to the amenities linking them to a gypsy festival south of Arles. Nothing surprises me anymore, except earrings. They get bigger and weirder all the time. I think of water, and the fluidity of the incandescent mode through which I walk. I stroll along the waterfront and bend my reflections into confessions. I listen to the pleading whispers of being that emanate from all things in a goldfish bowl. I wonder if the fish are aware of their limitations. And if so, what do they conclude? What philosophies do they weave? What do they make of the many faces in the waiting room that gaze indifferently at the floor? A fuzzy probability cloud snaps into earrings. In physics, this is called the Wave Function Collapse. It means we’re living in a simulation.

Nothing inside a camera sinks into despair. The images are in gestation. As soon as the light hits the silver halide crystals floating in the developer tray, the images assume form and character. Billy the Kid plays croquet by a schoolhouse. A man stands in front of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, obstructing their progress. My father gives me a hug in front of a North Dakota bakery. Planet Earth, its bottom half hidden in darkness, floats above the moon’s scarred and cratered surface. A man jumps over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, his reflection in the water. Arthur Rimbaud looks sulkily into the eyes of Étienne Carjat, who, in a fit of temper, he will strike with a cane. Some years later, in Ethiopia, Rimbaud will try his own hand at photography. In one, a Harar artisan in a raggedy robe sits at the base of a stone column with a blanket spread before him, selling earthen jugs and plates and bowls. And in another Rimbaud himself, starkly dressed in a white tunic and trousers, stands stiffly in front of a banana tree, his hair cut short in a military style, his arms folded across his chest. He looks stern and determined, gaunt as a Sufi ascetic. He will send the images home. And ask for books on engineering, urban hydraulics and agriculture, mining and naval architecture, The Perfect Locksmith and the Gunsmith’s Guide. 

The main attraction, long and honeycombed, propelled the shy little narrative forward in the deep green volume. Inevitably, things went sideways almost immediately and turned into pyramid schemes. In other words, poetry. Metaphors elusive as sand. Endless as dunes. Fragrant as the alleys of Paris. If I happen to see a concertina I fill with elation and squish it together with my arms, producing a waltz. The world still active in my mind hasn’t existed for 60 years. It’s mostly echoes now, and the soft vocals and bright instrumentation of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. Discovery is a place of red emotion. If my hunger finds passage, if it perceives the allure of a lunar lucidity, it makes a weird little noise. Some people call them spirits. Some people all them sprites. I call them puff balls. And widen my language to include Thursday.