Combustion is only a part
of the story here. There was still to be read the old motto of the silver mine:
darkness is the nest in which the egg of oblivion holds the pulse of a poem.
Poets are miners. Their picks are words. They sweat like anybody else. And
could use a shower. And a more stable income. The rustling of an unknown
language issues from a shower curtain constellated with pink flamingos. By
implications, by folds, we move towards a field of expansibility. If we manage
to show intellectual flexibility, can the void surrounding us draw our
conversation toward it? The circumstances splashing our shore require our
leniency. We need a milieu for these symptoms of a disease we have yet to fully
understand. And that milieu is language. The smell of its lumber is delicious.
The banshee scream of the saw rips the air into words. Spirit levels. Planks of
grammar. Beveled edges. Swirls of grain. We can hammer it with our voices and assemble
a new perception of our predicament. The disease isn’t that complicated. Its
contagion thrives on subordination. All it needs is a little insubordination.
The disease will cure itself.
Everything constitutes a
thesis. Cognition is a charming device, and is somewhat like an expedition into
the unknown. You can evade a religion, but you can’t evade life. One day you
may be fooled by a single hair sprouting out from an eyebrow and think it’s a
sign of something eccentric, which, of course, is precisely the case. The
Gravitron works by centrifugal force, flattening your body against the wall
when the floor drops out. Eccentricity is slightly different. It requires a
place like San Francisco, and a point in time like 1966. What happens when you
bring together a group of kindred spirits, people who embrace life with joy and
openness, the result is a centrifugal thrust of intellectual acuity and long
conversations that spiral out into the California night. Crown molding high
baseboards and cheap rent. Hold infinity on the palm of your hand. Dilations that
elude the grip of the industrial war machine. Reflective ponds pondering the
mystery of Being.
Annealing a language to
make it less brittle and easier to shape is a good place to begin. You can
change the narrative any time you want. You’re not going to get a lot of
cooperation at first. You’re not going to be popular. There will be no stacks
of your books at the airport gift shop sandwiched like a towering éclat of
polished reliable prose between stacks of Kristin Hannah and Neil deGrasse
Tyson. Nobody likes a sentence that isn’t entirely sure of where it’s going.
Nobody likes a bumbling merry-andrew feeling around in the dark for a light
switch, grabbing at your unmentionables and tripping over quatrains. Reading is
a lost art. Which makes it especially dangerous. That’s why the powers that be
like to hide it with best-sellers. You can feel the tension in the editing
rooms. There are things you can’t say now. Things you can’t think. Not without
consequences. Not without rebuke. Not without losing a tenured position, or
losing an argument to ChatGPT.
Nothing at the gas
station is ever satisfying. But the odors are intense, and the memories can
overwhelm a so-so mood while the gasoline throbs through the hose. It always
feels so cool going in. And the numbers add up with dizzying worries. Whatever
is meant by fuzzy can gather into calico and clothe a demure desire to tango
with a wild perspicacity. Therefore, let me bless this formaldehyde with a
macabre burlesque and burn a hole in the fabric of our consciousness. Let a
little light come in. Engage our bones with some ocean brine. I used to be
against almost everything. Now I am against everything. In fact, I’m leaning on
it. I use it for support. And contrast. I believe in contradiction. And the
majesty of minimalism. I’m always on the alert for an escape route. And a map
of the unknown. Which is a discrepancy so flagrantly lost in its latitudes,
even the cormorants are confused.
Inconsistency is my very essence, claimed Boethius. The consistency of any inconsistency is a bellwether to the skies of March. Predictability is a cheap date but a cactus in bed. An unfettered language doesn’t predict; it coagulates. Behind each consonant, there is something like eyes staring back at us. Something wounded. Something coming alive in our imagination. It coheres according to a system different from the chilling ultramarine of a cold logic. Trees somewhere, glimpsed through a crack in the monotony of daily life, draw us into their world with their alluring outlines and eccentric incongruities. Anything we can derive from this quirk in consciousness is a blessing, a quick release from the domain of the sanctioned. The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun, as Yeats frames it. That’s what poets are for. They’ve got the keys to the door.
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