Forbidden Things

Truth was for my parents primordial and spiritually dangerous. The Gnosis, like Eden and the Original Creation Itself, had once been perfect and complete – a simple sentence – “good” as Genesis testifies. But Gnosis, Eden and Creation, the very Word, had been lost in a Fall from Grace that we know as knowledge. The sentence, no longer simple, grows apprehensive of a duplicity. It covers what it is about to say. It rationalizes. It qualifies itself. Noah becomes drunk and bewildered from the fruit of that vine and threatens to say forbidden things.

-                 -       Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth

 

The spirits surrounding us are anomalies of the space-time continuum and are, consequently, highly insidious. They get into everything, especially my breath, and stream into being as words. They hunger for attention. They glide around everyone's nervous system causing garlic and flowers. I hear some of them now, buzzing around my head like French hotels. You'd think they'd have better things to do. They’re exhausting. I want to be rid of them. I want to be more like our cat, and sit and stare at nothing, at the air, at whatever subtleties ornament the invisible realms. Yet these fairies and flashes of lightning, while evoking a certain poetic feeling, also stir in me a desire to lead a new life, something more allegorical, more abstract and ethereal, and their contradictory nature makes that break easier for me.

Proust was fascinated by the names of places. They appealed strongly to his imagination. So that, when he encountered the actual, place he felt disappointment. The reality never matched the power of his imagination. And this is what language does. This is the fever of language. The mood sometimes goes against the season in which one is having fun, and is called an emotional dissonance. It sometimes spills out of the mouth, looking a little opaque, until it gets some traction, and finds its parallels in the local uncertainties. Intensities of pitch and tempo mount the walls of our prison and drop like bliss on the dry hot ground. Some few years ago, enchantments came easy. What happened? Deep in the caverns of the afterlife, Thoth weighs the hearts of the dead against the feather of truth. It wasn’t language that failed us. It was indifference. And all the dead predicates of a lost synecdoche.

A sentence dreams like a plum branch reaching for the green-sauce sky. It creates a fin like a magnificent cathedral. It combs itself with my bones. The arena of its schemes projects an almanac of fire. So we think of sperm as the fluid of propagation and the semantic nest as the divine warmth of meaning. We don’t have to shoulder all of it at once. We may inhabit a capital structure of Gideon chrome that supports a monumental sugar bear broom, and believe it to be a marvel of Gnostic syntax. Nowhere is it stated that a prayer is equivalent to a bucket of nitroglycerin. And yet it sometimes makes sense to mount a creditable foreground against the ominous grays of a dispassionate plot. A sudden explosion will awaken the mind to its investment in a Ferris wheel. Remember that scene in Rumble Fish when The Motorcycle Boy takes Cassandra to the fairgrounds? I don’t. Not really. My memory’s pretty vague. But somehow it’s important to me. Look. See this? This is a bulb without a corresponding narrative. It illumines the room. That’s it. Which makes it a simple sentence. Like a broken woman on a Ferris Wheel.

In the Yoruba religion of West Africa, priests and practitioners perform incantations alongside herbal remedies that are believed to catalyze healing, offer protection, alter situations, or influence the elements. Incantations invoking the palm frond solicit the rustle of its leaves as they’re animated by wind to obtain swift answers to problems. The rustle of its leaves is seen as the voice of ancestors and Orisha, the deity of iron and clearing paths. I see in Diane di Prima’s Rant a similar invocation of power, an appeal to the human imagination to resist the onslaughts of conformity and predatory aspects of industry and science, “a multidimensional chess which is divination and strategy: the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” We invoke the oversoul. The power of the void. Interconnection. Flux. The revolution of everyday life. The influence of the immaterial, which is the caress of stars, and the triumph of being.

We see the insanity of our time in the demons of profit. Commerce. Marketing. Branding. The savage gluttony of data centers imposed on rural communities with the brutal of authoritarianism of a barnyard gavage. College professors living in cars. Populations bombed with random indifference. Rampant inflation expressing the rot and corruption conspicuous in the feeding frenzies of the obscenely rich.

It’s a marvelous sight: the Olympic mountains at 2:00 in the afternoon on a warm day in mid-June. I love mountains. When I was kid in my grandfather’s study I used to stare at the Rockies with admiration and wonder. I grew up in Minnesota, where everything is flat, or a quiet undulation of hills. The mountains were full of drama. High dizzying rocks of granite and sparkly schist. My uncle had a cabin up there whose rain barrel held a dark cold water that froze my hand with its shocking cold when I plunged it in. It felt preternatural, like a charm, like the domain of a woodland spirit. I remember that afternoon in Boulder in the summer of 1995 when Allen Ginsberg, who’d been ill, felt well enough to give a talk and a tent went up on the Naropa canvas impromptu. R and I and her friend sat toward the back where David Bromige got divebombed repeatedly by a dragonfly. “They ARE dragons,” he exclaimed. It was sunny when Allen began delivering a fluid and fascinating talk which segued toward Blake’s notion of sweet science. Minutes later a sudden storm of thunder and lightning blew in and bashed against the nearby Rockies. I worried that a bolt of lightning was going to hit an electric cable powering the microphone Allen was using and turn him into a ball of St. Elmo’s fire. Didn’t happen, of course. When we returned to Seattle and picked up the mail I flipped through the latest New Yorker and found a cartoon of Allen Ginsberg holding a fountain pen skyward where it connected with a bolt of lightning.

Inspiration never comes easy. It can’t be forced. You can’t use a crowbar to pry it loose from the grip of the empirical, the drab dreary expectations of the 21^st century dystopia we’re all trapped in. The exhaustions of work and worry. That sense of enchantment poets rely on to do their work has been under siege for quite some time by a fetishized and heavily commodified omnipresence of electronic gadgetry dulling and smothering the inner life of the human spirit. It takes special strategies, all of it uniquely suited to the whims and vagaries of each individual. I generally find it in the work of other poets, or listening to a foreign language. We do what is forbidden: we expend our energy on things that do not lend themselves to branding and commodification. To that which lies well outside the purview of free market Wall Street psychosis. There’s release in that. The giddy intoxication of an impish idleness. The mutiny of doing what is unnecessary. Of what is disastrously unpragmatic. Of whatever needs the raw spontaneity of an unbridled articulation. And is eccentric as the contrary squeak of bedspring revolt.