At Bottom

Ultimately, what I happily consume is an absence: a proposition that is by no means paradoxical, if one considers that Mallarmé made it the very principle of poetry: "I say: a flower! and... musically rises, the very idea and sweetness, the one absent from all bouquets."

-                                       -  Roland Barthes

 

I like a prose that flows smoothly like a river. There are things you don't notice at first: patterns and agitations that subtly reveal themselves at the surface, boils, eddies, folds, ripples and whirlpools. Mesmerizing undulations. Intriguing fluctuations. If you read the river carefully, like Mark Twain when he was a riverboat captain, you quickly realize that what appears on the surface – the text - is an important indication of the tremors and perturbations hidden in the depths. Language sublimates emotion. It turns abstract. It provides a critical distancing that permits a deeper intimacy with the thornier nuances of feeling. The drift of our mind touches on anything, on anyone it can quickly mull into a corner and revive, draw it to the surface and explore all those nuances and maddening incompletions that were never fully articulated in the jarring distractions of the moment when it first occurred, and tore you apart, unbuttoned your soul, or made you dilate into an actualization of existence never experienced this intensely, this exquisitely disconcerting. And while the wood crackling in a fire pit warms a universe of yearning and skin, the soul tugs on the pale azure of a cloudless sky whose fine, stratospheric air thins into the cold black void of outer space. I saw a sky like that once above an alkali desert in Nevada and it shook me to the marrow of my bone, and once during a solar eclipse in Yakima when everything went quiet and moon shadows moved in undulating waves over the wheatgrass I realized how thin and tenuous the division between existence and non-existence truly is. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever mood, whatever frame of mind, the void is there, glimmering in the spaces between the words, or thawing into the nothingness the words create.

I know the words are working when there’s nothing there to show for it. When everything said and done is kabuki and reality bursts into biology and form, the story you’ve been telling yourself to explain things comes out of a radio and unfurls its pullulations in shrieks and anguish. I get my strength there. I also get it from Kerouac and Proust. Wanda Coleman. Gertrude Stein. It’s painful to watch a language rot and disappear when a culture turns hostile to the vagaries of the mind. People have a tendency to blame the wrong things for their misery. I’ve done my share of bitching. Distorting. Exaggerating. And eventually stumbling over the truth. It feels good to do that. Vent. Ventilate. And underneath it all is sensed the unreality informing all these words and distinctions, the rarefied dimensions that stick to the mind like a magnet to a refrigerator.

The scorpion is our introduction to our hidden self. Like the night I was house-sitting in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 1974 and watching Elizabeth R starring Glenda Jackson, my bare feet on a wooden floor, when I heard a clickety clickety and looked down to see a scorpion scamper under the couch I was sitting on. It was startling, for sure, but I felt nothing transformative, nothing uncanny. If this was my hidden self’s cue to come out and disclose itself, my hidden self must not have been paying attention. Nothing happened. I think I was at a point in my life where my embarrassments and utterly irrational responses to a world I only half-understood were so utterly transparent it was pointless to care about what was private and what was public. I was just me, a man crying to carry the sun. People tend to hide their more authentic versions for a wide variety of reasons, but staying a member of one’s tribe is one of the biggest. Back in the legendary sixties I belonged to a tribe that relished disagreement. Now it’s just the opposite. Everybody’s got their scorpion. And I don’t mean tattoos. I mean those stinging comments one keeps to oneself. Small talk is the substitute for actual conversation. It’s like having a revolver in the glove compartment of your car. You know it’s there. You know what it’s capable of. But you don’t want to wave it around while firing it off randomly. Not if you’re cool, and guiltily relish a life of quiet desperation. Conversations are minefields. And because I’m conversational, I get blown up a lot. I stand there, exploding, while maintaining a smile.

So this, at bottom, is me. Nick Bottom, comedic weaver, and idiot extraordinaire. Making fustian out of total disorder. Trying to make sense of being able to enter a cathedral but not being able to chop down a wind. Don’t ignore the spirit of futility. It’s there for a reason. It’s there to remind you that the pursuit of money is non-refundable. Lavish the context in ambiguity if you plan to bathe your ideas in ink. The sun's wardrobe suggests summer, but it's archaic, and I prefer sequins. It’s when you hit bottom that you realize how high your ambitions went as you stood on the ground watching them burst apart in an apathetic sky. The earth feels good in a sweat lodge. Better than a witness stand. Or jail. The nothing I do is nothing. But this is corduroy, and meant for karaoke, not tweezers. I want a bolo tie with an eyeball and a horizon that gluts my aporia with a forever receding herd of excuses in my rear-view mirror. And I want it to be warm and welcoming when I get there, which is never, and overflowing with red hot vacancy signs.