Buffalo Bill And The Giant Eyeball

Buffalo Bill rides out onto the prairie. What causes itching? he wonders. He is tired of scratching himself. He is wearing a lot of leather, softened by years of wear. It must be his long johns.

His saddle leather creaks and his legs are getting cramps. Old age, he thinks.

It is a lovely blonde day. The air is a parable of odors. Pawpaw. Sage. Wild prairie rose.

Divinations. Conjectures. The things a man thinks when a man is alone. And the air is palpable with premonition. Ghosts. Inner demons. The monstrosities of the soul.

Buffalo Bill carries a rifle, a Remington. It is beautiful. But it kills.

He is followed by wolves. The wolves are hungry. If Buffalo Bill manages to shoot one, or even two, the others will get to him. He hopes they don’t attack. But it’s inevitable they will.

The sun floats on a hill of wheatgrass. Buffalo Bill knows that if he spurs his horse and speeds up the wolves will give chase. Movement excites them. He rides at a measured pace and tries to remain calm.

His heart beats faster. His horse snorts, smelling death.

The wolves give chase.

He spurs his horse. They take off at a gallop. He turns round and fires a shot. A wolf yelps and hits the ground.

Moments later, the pack stops, turns, slinks away. He is puzzled. Something other than a single dead wolf has spooked the pack. And then he sees it.

Edward Swanborough, engineer and balloonist, reconnoitering for the Union Pacific, is lost. His balloon has a giant eyeball painted on it. He shouts to the man on the ground: where am I?

Buffalo Bill cannot hear him. He merely stares at the eyeball, and studies how he might relate this mystery to his friends.

Moist Tender Lies Of Quivering Truth

Today I am making a stew. A mélange. A mixture. A medium of solutions.

All solutions are hollow. Which is to say hole. If all solutions are hollow, and all hollows are holes, are the holes hollow, or full of solution?

If a male barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves, does the male barber shave himself? Because if he shaves himself, he does not shave himself. So that eventually a beard comes into existence. A beard that does not exist. Because if the beard were to truly exist, it could not be a beard. It would have to be something else. It would have to be sagebrush. It would have to be flagrant. It would have to be a chocolate tree, or ecumenical wraparound.

If a woman (let’s say Sigourney Weaver) travels back in space, and time, and kills her great-great-great-great-grandmother, who she mistakes for an alien, a slimy tentacled alien with a long probing tongue, and warts and bad manners, is she actually killing herself? The alien in herself? But how can she kill a self that never existed? And if she never existed, she could not have killed her ancestor. Which would insure her existence. So that she may continue to star in movies like You Again. And travel back in time where she will encounter the alien that is her great-great-great-great-grandmother. And cease to exist. In order to exist.

A stew is a stew is a stew. Soups simmer. Bacon sizzles. Stews stew. If the stew moos, or barks, or cries out in the middle of the night, is it still a stew? Or a misplaced surgical scar?

It is a stew. Carrots, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, sausages, and seasoning. All bubbling, blending, mingling their essences, as words do. Pulpy, slushy, piquant.

Stewing is suitable for meat that has a tendency to be a bit tough. Stewing makes it tender. Stewing slowly brings out the juices. Moistens gelatinous connective tissue. Which makes it the ideal medium for cooking a paradox. More or less. Probably less. Because less is more. More or less.

This stew is a genuine mendacity. A complete lie. I do this for arbitrary reasons. I cannot tell the truth but by lying. When I say I am lying, I am telling the truth. It cannot be otherwise. I am far too honest not to lie. The truth is always false. The false is always true.

What is actual is stew. Onions. Carrots. Dry vermouth. Moist tender lies of quivering truth.

Confessions Of A Self-Ordained Monk

I used to describe myself as an urban Thoreau. The cheap studios and one-bedroom apartments I lived in were my cabin by Walden Pond. It was a Walden Pond of the imagination: a sanctuary of books and unbridled reflections unsullied by the noxious ambitions of money and power. I lived austerely, but comfortably. I did not choose austerity because I enjoyed asceticism. I didn’t. I don’t. The truth is, I lean toward the sybaritic. I lived that way because I had a passionate need to write. And the best way to solve the problem of eating and shelter while consuming hours bent over a desk writing prose and poetry with no commercial value was to work part time.

Since then, the urban Thoreau analogy has withered. Life has become more drastic. What little community still endured to support the intellectual life in mainstream contemporary culture is now so thinly marginalized as to be no more than a ghost, a stratospheric wraith of dissipating cirrus. Hardly a contrail. Even the dinosaurs left footprints. The legacies of Emerson and Dickinson and Thoreau have nothing whatever of value for the Hilary Clintons, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. These people all crave power. Even their philanthropy smacks of power. The 70s, despite disco, were still imbued with the jubilant idealism of the 60s. The 60s now seem as historically distant as sepia tinted daguerreotypes of Civil War officers posing in front of their tents. So do the 70s. Today’s pestilent Zeitgeist begins in 1980. With Ronald Reagan.

The real Walden Pond still exists, thanks, largely, to Don Henley of the Eagles, who initiated the WaldenWoods Project to prevent the area around Walden Pond from being developed.

It was my imaginary Walden Pond that dried up.

In today’s world of capitalist predation, ignorance, illiteracy, and endless war, I think of myself as a monk. It is pertinent that the word monk, which comes from the Greek word monachos, means “single, solitary.” My solitude, however, is of a particular kind. We have all heard that expression about solitude in a crowd. That’s what I’m talking about. Solitude in a crowd.

Married, and living in a one-bedroom condo, collecting social security until the Republicans take it away, my quality of life has improved markedly. I never go hungry. I eat quite well, in fact. My wife is a terrific cook. My newly found status in monkhood has nothing to do with food, or shelter, or piety. It has everything to do with an audience. That is to say, the non-existence of an audience. There is something quintessentially monkish about devotion to an art for which there is no audience.

I feel a profound sense of fraternity with those robed, tonsured old men tending vineyards and making illuminated manuscripts in the drafty hermitages of the Dark Ages. Marriage dilutes the analogy, but my sense of affiliation with that group has more to do with intellectual isolation than celibacy. It also has a lot to do with the Dark Ages.

This sense of isolation pertains chiefly to the domain of poetry, and a very eccentric poetry, at that, though sometimes the writing (my writing), the writing that dribbles and oozes from my hand in sentences and subtleties designed to engage the eyes of a refined, non-existent reader, erupts into a shrill, opinionated rant, as now. Isn’t this really what the blog was invented for? To provoke? To engage? To jostle the sensibilities of people whose opinions differ sharply for yours? Or are in sync, but with critical shades of difference? Differences whose urgency, whose significance, whose interestedness, require a comment. That’s the beauty of the blog: comments. Readers who are so engaged, they chime in with writing of their own.

It’s a fabulous community, but unless your name is Ariana Huffington, or Julie Powell, you are not going to get paid for it, and it may take years before you attract a readership. The kind of readership that translates into a movie deal, like Julie and Julia.

Don’t knock anonymity. It may not be the kind of social currency that garners an audience, but think of the freedom. The broad, exhilarating margin you have to imagine, and write about, anything.

And what better place to find anonymity than a blog. If a writer, poet, or investigative journalist (another profession well on its way to extinction) lacks the cachet of a big mainstream publisher, the gloss of a magazine like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s to fit one’s writing into their Elysian of the gatekeeper blessed, one needn’t perform fellatio, literal or metaphorical, in order to score publication. You’re on your own, bub.

I suspect the few people who consist of my “pageviews” are people who Googled their way here by accident. I doubt that they linger here. Why would they? Who reads other people’s poetry? Definitely not other poets. They’re far too occupied with writing their own work and finding a venue to publish it. Why should they be bothered by reading anyone else’s poetry?

Very few people read anymore to begin with. Unless, perhaps, the text is dished up in some spectacularly lush and high tech fashion, like Kindle, iPad, Smartphones, and Laptops. But even then I find it hard to believe that anyone consumes more than a paragraph before they begin rubbing their eyes and gazing out of the window. Or - who knows? - resting their eyes on the spines of a shelf-load of books put on display in a coffee house somewhere, relics from a bygone era when people took time to craft a well-written sentence.

And so my thoughts turn toward the fall of the Roman Empire, circa 411 or so, when that population took a turn for the worse and sought entertainment by feeding Christians to lions. Not a good time for monks. Let’s fast forward to, say, 800 A.D. Christians are doing a little better.

Am I a Christian? No. Not really. I attended a Unitarian Church when I was fifteen. My parents made me attend. When they relinquished me to my own volition, I ceased going. My feelings about religion remain relatively neutral. I am not an atheist. I find it hard to believe that there is a large, robustly muscled man in the sky with a long flowing beard who was responsible for putting this universe together (and if He is responsible for Infinity, how do you finish that? How do you begin a phenomenon that has no beginning? And what sort of being makes a platypus, or mosquito?), but I also find it hard to believe that we (all living creatures) are here merely to reproduce. That is a tautology, not a reason to exist. To go through all the hardship of living (finding a job, filling out tax forms, driving a car, finding a clean rest room in public, etc.), and the misery of dying, all for no reason other than joining your DNA with someone else and producing another sorry creature to go through the same shit is stark indeed. No comfort there. I may not believe in an afterlife, but I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of it.

But yes, I write, don’t know why, it’s a compulsion, a need. Got to do it. Putting words down on paper, or tapping them into pixels on a computer screen, is an eternal fascination.

Gertrude Stein said “I write for myself and strangers.” I feel that way. But I would amend that, a little, to say “I write for myself and myself.” I indulge in unabashed, intellectual masturbation. And I heartily recommend it. It’s good for the soul. Nobody gets pregnant, nobody gets jilted, and no books get sent back to the publisher from Barnes and Noble, or languish on the shelves of an independent bookstore teetering on bankruptcy.

It’s comforting to think of those monks in the dark ages bent over a desk making those beautiful illuminations. Beautiful calligraphy. Radiant artwork. Fabulous flora. Fabulous fauna. Saints and angels and a loving (though sometimes wrathful) benevolent God. For who? Hardly anyone was literate. It was a time quite similar to ours. The majority of people given to superstition, delusions, illiteracy. The times were brutal. People were brutish. Rape, pillage, plunder, oppression were daily occurrences. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I have searched the internet trying to find writers who wrote during the Dark Ages. How did they cope with illiteracy? Imbecility? Infantile beliefs?

I wish I knew. I haven’t had much luck. Why would I? They don’t call it the Dark Ages the Dark Ages for nothing. If anyone bitched about their time, and wrote it down, the chances are they were driven out of their village, or burned at the stake.

No doubt they kept to themselves. That’s the smart thing to do. Whatever they wrote, they wrote for the joy of writing. Sometimes the best applause is your own silent satisfaction.

Ontology 101 Part Seven

What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object?

They’re rioting in Cairo. But this is Nebraska. A giant eyeball floats over the prairie. Sunlight dazzles the terrain. Arapahoe and Pawnee. Wounds and feathers. Perpetual change. This is, after all, a prairie. The prairie cannot be reduced to an essence. The prairie murmurs the breath of angels. Odors are proposals. There is hunger in the wind. Wolves and abandoned farmhouses. The sky floats on purpletop. A flower yells back at the sun.

Do you own a hibachi? A sawmill in Alabama? Fill yourself with the world.

If I dangle a piece of space, gravity squeezes it together into a glockenspiel, and flowers pop out of my mouth.

Sometimes a little propane goes a long way. You can push a thought through the loophole of a sentence, but a puddle of light forms on the wall, and the sky turns black.

Other things exemplify soup. The rants of a cynical wizard. Drugs on a hardwood floor.

If you can fill a paragraph with descriptions of raw sienna, you will be greeted by soft bare arms, golden women on a silver boat. And everything warm and gentle will counsel your heart.

Essence is insoluble. Life is insoluble. Life is an essence.

It is viscous and smooth. A formula for making hand lotion.

It is rough and convulsive. A Brahma bull chafing under a saddle.

Each thing has a presence. A thin yellow sun on a winter horizon. Everything implicit in blue. Everything revelatory in green. Onions. Ghosts. The art of translation. The heart of a lobster. The transcendence of eggs. Amber mounted on a copper ring. Clay and wood and chains and nails.

I have decided to shave. You can pull a language out of a thirst, but you cannot pull a thirst out of a fish. Sometimes you just have to accept the sawhorse as a demonstration of support. And the razor as a supplement of hygiene.

There is a dimension that eludes science. You can, for instance, bend a flashlight beam around a corner. But you can only do this on special holidays, or by further developing the autonomy of sleep, so that it resembles Portugal, and pulses with parables.

I have conducted experiments on language and discovered hysteria and ice cream. Brush your hair. Life is changeable. Write everything down. If a set of adjectives clash in a painting by Georges Braque, I ask you to consider the light and its full spectrum of colors. We express ourselves with napkins. There are bones buried beneath this sentence.

Try to find a little innocence. There are paths that lead deep into the forest. One is not required to be religious, but it helps to cultivate a sense of reverence. The process is blue, with nuances of red and white and green. There are almonds in the snow, and kumquat and milk. Boiling art. Auguries of spruce.

Marie Laurencin hides under the table, giving birth to strange ideas. Circles and waterfalls. Glens and neurons.

Sound waves create eyes in the air. What is visible is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A mouth moving on a canvas. Density, volume, weight. Color, design, texture.

Some things that are present to the mind do not have palpable form. Yet there is something essential about them. Intuition, premonition, perspicacity. A blowtorch made of thought. And blue flame. And metaphor and art.

A face falls out of a mirror, bitter and full of juice. Do not look at it, even as it tries to talk. Merely go on combing your hair. Listen to the sounds of the concertina someone is playing in the street. Assemble a sentence. Applaud vigorously when Polly Peachum finishes her song.

Since, therefore, of the things that are predicated some signify what a thing is, or quiddity, and others quality, and others quantity, and others relation, and others action or passion, and some the place where, and others the time when, to each of these the being of essence signifies the same thing. A shining incontrovertible whatness. A glowing. An aura. A saw blade gleaming in Alabama sunlight. The smell of sage. A Pawnee brave riding a roan stallion out onto the prairie.

Wrinkles tell stories. Realism is elementary. I remember the gunrack in my grandparent’s farmhouse in North Dakota. The beauty of those rifles made you want to fire them. Load them. Shoot them. Fill yourself with the world. Hit the wall if you must. Contradictions can sometimes be more than you can bear.

It is a delicate situation. Colors persist after the sun goes down. There are a dizzying number of stars. Diesel locomotives. The scream of a butterfly. The ghost of Jim Morrison.

And Buffalo Bill. And Sitting Bull. And Aristotle.

What is emotion? Describe gravity. Describe a jellyfish washed ashore. The gleam of the sand. The sound of the waves as they curl, tumble, hit the sand. Crash into rocks. How many adjectives do you need? There is a stepladder in the closet. Form is a form of definition. Apollinaire walks by eating a sandwich. Cubism, he says. I’d call it Cubism.

I call it the noise of a café in the afternoon. Heat, attitude, clouds. A sack of potatoes. A plane taking off at noon. Divinations. Conjectures. Black feathers. Salvation Army desk.

A giant eyeball floating over the prairie.