In general, a blowtorch should be worn with a jalapeño. When it gets very hot and you have received inspiration from a sunflower, you may wear just a blowtorch with a parachute, or an amazing disease.
Scarlet fever must always be folded and inserted in a copy of the Koran.
Under no circumstances should the tinkle of your armpits interfere with the opulence of your convulsions.
To improve your conflagration, you may use metaphors to claw your way into heaven. For example, when you visit the underworld, you must never look back, but always look forward, chewing a stick of licorice and making sounds that rival that of really mean rodents.
Allow your shorebirds a respite equivalent to vapor.
You must never wear motorboats. They interfere with the snap of prepositions. Also see to it that your jewelry matches the steamy combustion of your ganglions.
A poet who wears a waterfall conveys palaver and a free disposition regarding punctuation.
Makeup can be an asset, but do not go heavy on the mascara. Highlight your personality with a few peccadillos and a sudden ejaculation.
The skin being our primary item of clothing, I recommend that you protect it with a crossbow and a bar of soap.
Never massage an area where you have applied your perspicacity, as this can destroy its mood.
Studies have shown that a stylish, immaculate haircut plunges the mind in bold contrast to a zipper.
Every little hair that grows on the body has a function. The eyebrows protect the eyes from sweat and the eyelashes keep out dust and little insects. Stray facial hairs, however, can give a look of impassioned gallantry in the face of utter colloquy.
Never wear anything that drips. Water, for instance, or milk. Remember: the entire universe is at your disposal, and comes in an infinite array of colors, including beige, saffron, and juggernaut green.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Five By Five
Clean needs start in destiny. Incongruous hats pushed into snow. Words blasted into convulsive yucca. Heaving crustaceans muscular as sound. Embryonic bubbles blown into upholstery.
Painting is unfettered by steel. Proximity trebles the spectral molasses. Tuna served on broken plates. Opposites beg for purgatorial fog. Apparitions knotted in gaslight moss.
Push-ups eat their own form. Brass pipes meditated by exigency. Write pretty so pistons burn. Bend the air into bananas. The puddle does its cartoons.
The water shivers with hypothesis. Greetings grow imponderable and sizzle. The lake is excused from enthusiasm. I will wrestle your gaze. I will give you iron.
The pines haunt everyone’s ambivalence. Black holds green in opals. The physiology of swans lengthens. Inflated legs energize the rebellion. What I mean is upside-down.
What I mean is growing. What I mean is beads. Totems fiddlesticks art and rectangles. Machines that pulse with description. Appeals to invention and radicality.
Quixotic coherence turning into palms. Pain and connectedness thickening thought. A sonnet will sometimes cry. Prose accommodates a frantic crimson. Secrets coiled on the floor.
Eyeballs hissing airplanes and froth. Romance bargains for more gold. Procession on an ocher path. Words earn an agreeable spring. Sweeten the biology of tongues.
This is becoming totally cochineal. Long and wide and Dionysian. Being is bells and viscera. A spilled glass of water. The shine on the water.
Rivers move lumber through books. Hungry eyes awaken the words. Hungry fingers awaken the skin. Forehead holding an orthochromatic allegory. The spine must shoulder wings.
Aerodrome bent to a theory. Age forgives its morning energy. Dancing is home to sugar. A studio is shrewdly studied. The strain is a symptom.
But the symptom is strained. A seashore sips the sand. Blisters and sweat indicate ships. Coordinates soliciting position and heed. Willingness and meat and spoons.
Space cracking under the sea. Stethoscope hanging from a neck. Periscope rising through the waves. Telescope floating masses of stars. Five senses commingled in holly.
The taxi overcomes its welcome. We are waiting for light. The sorcerer imitates a propeller. Do you see this wilderness? Winter makes it bristle with music.
The tinkling of little bells. Words carved out of air. The lucidity of tin mosquitoes. Height itching with sporadic width. A mouth under strange development.
You could say winter plaster. Or a mouth that opens. And patches itself with words. The thread is plainly red. The door is curiously slammed.
And then opened by harmonica. Does any of this caucus? Yes and no and maybe. I feel lift by lifting. A pi dribbling fresh circumference.
Algebra testifies to parenthetical solutions. Consider it riotous but numb. You cannot calculate a parakeet. The ruby is an opinion. Yet the horizon is clumsy.
Finally it is all words. Metaphors that anneal by speaking. Which is always so helter-skelter. Pack your suitcase with elation. Act seminal at the gate.
And here you are now. Where you always have been. Sublime and humming a tune. Feeling vital and pleasantly insoluble. A flower grown unofficially pectoral.
Painting is unfettered by steel. Proximity trebles the spectral molasses. Tuna served on broken plates. Opposites beg for purgatorial fog. Apparitions knotted in gaslight moss.
Push-ups eat their own form. Brass pipes meditated by exigency. Write pretty so pistons burn. Bend the air into bananas. The puddle does its cartoons.
The water shivers with hypothesis. Greetings grow imponderable and sizzle. The lake is excused from enthusiasm. I will wrestle your gaze. I will give you iron.
The pines haunt everyone’s ambivalence. Black holds green in opals. The physiology of swans lengthens. Inflated legs energize the rebellion. What I mean is upside-down.
What I mean is growing. What I mean is beads. Totems fiddlesticks art and rectangles. Machines that pulse with description. Appeals to invention and radicality.
Quixotic coherence turning into palms. Pain and connectedness thickening thought. A sonnet will sometimes cry. Prose accommodates a frantic crimson. Secrets coiled on the floor.
Eyeballs hissing airplanes and froth. Romance bargains for more gold. Procession on an ocher path. Words earn an agreeable spring. Sweeten the biology of tongues.
This is becoming totally cochineal. Long and wide and Dionysian. Being is bells and viscera. A spilled glass of water. The shine on the water.
Rivers move lumber through books. Hungry eyes awaken the words. Hungry fingers awaken the skin. Forehead holding an orthochromatic allegory. The spine must shoulder wings.
Aerodrome bent to a theory. Age forgives its morning energy. Dancing is home to sugar. A studio is shrewdly studied. The strain is a symptom.
But the symptom is strained. A seashore sips the sand. Blisters and sweat indicate ships. Coordinates soliciting position and heed. Willingness and meat and spoons.
Space cracking under the sea. Stethoscope hanging from a neck. Periscope rising through the waves. Telescope floating masses of stars. Five senses commingled in holly.
The taxi overcomes its welcome. We are waiting for light. The sorcerer imitates a propeller. Do you see this wilderness? Winter makes it bristle with music.
The tinkling of little bells. Words carved out of air. The lucidity of tin mosquitoes. Height itching with sporadic width. A mouth under strange development.
You could say winter plaster. Or a mouth that opens. And patches itself with words. The thread is plainly red. The door is curiously slammed.
And then opened by harmonica. Does any of this caucus? Yes and no and maybe. I feel lift by lifting. A pi dribbling fresh circumference.
Algebra testifies to parenthetical solutions. Consider it riotous but numb. You cannot calculate a parakeet. The ruby is an opinion. Yet the horizon is clumsy.
Finally it is all words. Metaphors that anneal by speaking. Which is always so helter-skelter. Pack your suitcase with elation. Act seminal at the gate.
And here you are now. Where you always have been. Sublime and humming a tune. Feeling vital and pleasantly insoluble. A flower grown unofficially pectoral.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Three Books
Either Way I'm Celebrating, Poetry & Comics by Sommer
Browning
Birds, LLC, 2011
The Source, Prose Poetry by Noah Eli Gordon
Futurepoem Books, 2011
Novel Pictorial Noise, Poetry and Prose Poetry by Noah Eli
Gordon
Harper Perennial, 2007
Last March Sommer Browning and Noah Eli Gordon visited Seattle to do a reading at Pilot Books on Capitol Hill. Pilot Books has, alas, since closed its doors, and so ends what had been a charming little space for poetry readings. I congratulate Pilot Book’s proprietor, Summer Robinson, for providing a relaxed, mercantile space for experimental writing in a world of growing illiteracy and harsh, capitalistic aggression, and wish her luck on her future endeavors.
After the reading, I purchased three books from Sommer (Sommer Sommer, not Summer Summer)and Noah at a generously discounted price. Sommer’s Either Way I’m Celebrating, and Noah’s The Source and Novel Pictorial Noise.
Browning is a cartoonist, and brings a cartoonist’s quirky sense of humor to her poetry. The work is frisky, spirited, and charmingly eccentric. It is also highly perceptive, smart, and imaginative. While humor is one of the more prominent elements of her work, it doesn’t lessen the impact of the words, which mingle drollery with trenchant perceptions of contemporary life. Much of the work reads like aperçus of present-day absurdities, concise packages of colorful provocation, flippant and poking, but never mean-spirited or crotchety. There is a strong current of verbal play moving through them, a keen sense of affable subversion, an evident awareness of the inherent instability of words and a willing sensibility alert and ready to exploit this feature to the hilt. Here, for example, is an untitled piece from the section titled “To The Housesitter,”
It’s the hour’s soundtrack.
Little train wheels
strain against their rails.
The preservation department
forgot to fall back.
The archivist subtracts a rebellious hour.
She wraps tissue paper around a man’s
ephemera. A habit keeps the chairs on the floor.
The archivist catalogs a blueberry for the library of beds:
½ inch diameter, blue, soft, sweet –
she accidentally
eats it.
There was a séance inside, and now her belly
is a ghost.
In the section titled “Vale Tudo,” which Browning reveals is a Portuguese phrase meaning “anything goes,” and is a Brazilian mixed-martial arts combat fighting style, Browning presents a diaristic series of small, informal pieces describing the idiosyncrasies of the motel/hotel milieu, a road trip of poetic fragmentation and semantic Jiu-Jitsu. A simple breakfast, the kind one eats when one is not quite awake and the disorientating effects of the road have mildly compromised one’s comfort zone, putting one’s perceptions a bit off-balance, is described in odd, metaphysical twists: “A plate of eggs, zigzags of bacon, and slices of toast. A Modern wrote about this in his noblest tractatus: breakfast must be analyzed on the basis of reason, not faith. Hush, the sugar’s shaking. Hush, her wrist clicks as she pours. Hush, that your heart was open as this cup.”
Gordon’s The Source has an immediate feeling of solemnity. The cover is a dark puce with the textured, imitation leather graininess of a bible. The work is divided into six parts and is a prose poem whose genesis is driven by (you guessed it) “The Source.” It reads fluently, very smoothly, in a manner very similar to John Ashbery’s Three Poems, or Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction Of Profiles, with a tone that is quite solemn on the surface, assuming, as it does, the language of philosophic inquiry, but with a very acute subversive current running underneath, so that the words, while referring constantly to the source they attempt to define, create a sensation of infinite flux, a feeling of words being liberated from the exigencies of semantic pertinence and set free to self-perpetuate a discursive, verbal adventure. The more “the source” is defined, the more it eludes definition.
A source is, of course, in its most literal sense, a spring. Gordon exploits this metaphor in a rich unraveling of chimerical digression. The words come bubbling from a propositional font or wellspring in the geology of the imagination, engorge from tributaries of philosophic immersion, percolate among a tangle of rhizomatic roots, and emerge, ceaselessly and serially, in emerald streams of evanescent inquiry. Inquiries of their origin and nature; inquiries of their character and essence.
The Source of The Source is defined as being a “touch sadomasochistic because it suffers a sense of its own belatedness, hates fussing with nature, and would like the world to be all weeds,” “a Roman shirt stitched from the scraps of various sources, keeping us warm,” “a representation of representations,” “If it can be seen as imperative and prescriptive, this deification of the Source knows but a single law -- itself!,” “In these circumstances, the Source confines itself to a string of paradoxes and takes refuge behind a barrage of high-sounding words,” “If anyone asks you what the Source is, send them to their own senses, because anything written can seem like straw,” “The Source’s stories or episodes are not simply added to each other, or juxtaposed with each other, but constitute a cumulative and organic development, one where customs and social arrangements, like a dog barking in the backyard, account for the phenomenon of consciousness.”
Aha! Consciousness! The Source, like consciousness, “makes a concept consisting of nothing but its distinguishing characteristics, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.” How do we know the world? We explain ourselves, and our situation in the world, by means of propositions. But propositions are doomed to communicate a new sense, however they may, with old words. Familiar, everyday words, words people exchange at the bus stop and drugstore counter, workspace and intimacy of home, but whose representations must be tweaked and twisted to articulate some phenomenon outside their usual representations. Tweaked by crazy people who delve into the mysteries of things, scribble their thoughts on paper, and call themselves poets. Sacred Technicians, Dharma Bums, Pscychodynamic Hockey Pucks and Cladogenetic Calliope Chimes.
Gordon reveals in the note at the back of The Source his process for putting the work together. He avers that between January of 2008 to September of 2009, he culled from page 26 of “nearly ten thousand books at the Denver Public Library,” bits of language which he fused together, occasionally altering some nouns to read “the Source,” and stitching together a verbal flux, a kind of perpetual motion machine, since works such as this never achieve their goal, nor ever pretend to an achieved, totalizing conclusion. There is never a Sum, but dim sum, the history of the world told and retold in verbal dumplings, mixtures of syllable and dough that are baked in the mind, and served on a sheet of paper. Or sent spiralling into the air of an auditorium or coffeehouse or lodging house "inhabited by bohemian writers and artists -- a royal antidote against all kinds of infection save creating some sort of shock of moral awareness." [The Source, page 76].
Gordon also reveals that he chose the number 26 because it corresponds to the number of letters in the English alphabet and represents the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that form the name of God.
“In relation to language, we are both makers and made,” observed Heraclitus. The source of our words is boundless because the driving force of our lives is boundless. Assertion alone cannot give sense to its thought because every proposition must already have a sense. What assertion asserts is the sense itself. It is circular. And because it is circular, the relation of structures is unending. Language is driven by a relation between properties that inhere in the words presenting them. Contradictions expand our perceptual and cognitive boundaries. Higher faculties of recognition than those based on logic are awakened.
Gordon’s Novel Pictorial Noise is a “composition of noise” based solidly on the quintessential palpability of signs, and the proposition that “the world’s not weirder than we think, but weirder than we can think.” Structurally, it is interesting, in that it juxtaposes a single line, or short set of lines, on the left page, and a short prose poem on the right. The words to the left are bare fragments of minimalist audacity lacking enough syntactic cohesion to hang a meaning on. In brief, a kind of noise.
The prose poems on the right are rich displays of verbal acrobatics. Here the noise conveys an imagery abundant in cartilaginous elegance. Tissues hold. Sinews clench. The poetic membrane percolates an osmosis of thermal reverie.
“It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today,” observed Hart Crane, “a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction.” These words were written 86 years ago, and yet their pertinence to today’s world in the 21st century of toxic narcissism, sociopathic politicos, corporate greed, unchecked capitalist predation, Sarah Palin, WalMart, Wall Street, Walleyed Media Moguls, and polarized religions and cultures seem to have even greater resonance. Gordon’s prose poems are epistemological in flavor, but it is an epistemology in embryo, a polysemous blastocyst on the outskirts of meaning.
The idea of the picture, an image one might entertain in one’s mind, mind’s eye, as they say, is a large part of this project. The prose poem on page 35 chooses the photograph as its point of departure:
A photograph. A photograph admits. A photograph admits space. A photograph admits space around its subject. A photograph admits space around its subject’s a way to feel contained. I admit contentment with the Ajax bottle above the sink Alice Neel made from oils. I admit a train whistle, a dab of wisteria, a strip of duct tape’s upturned corner. Coincidental nonchalance or comic fortitude? I admit both, admitting this sort of disposition harbors dangerous potential. Cue the music and evening’s wash of unaccomplishment meant to make amends with whatever the day left undone does it. Now, I’m admitting a hue of a bluish green, adding color to the scene.
In the above piece, Gordon uses repetition to mimic the development of a photographic image in a tray of film emulsion, further elaborating the image with each repetition. The word ‘admit’ plays a key role, referring first to the admittance of light through a camera lens, then building on its associative meanings as a phenomenon of allowance and opening. An opening to the world. An allowance of whatever might be found in the world. This latter position is more difficult than it may seem. Delusion and denial are huge human addictions. Anyone who has experimented with hallucinogenic drugs knows that the world we normally experience through our five senses is subject to change. Senses may be dilated and discombobulated. Will the real reality please stand up?
As Wittgenstein pointed out, our sense of reality is heavily dependent on language. Propagandists all know how easy it is to manipulate people’s view of reality. Gordon’s achievement in Novel Pictorial Noise is to employ enough noise to rupture the static of mediated experience and playfully prod us to admit something new.
Browning
Birds, LLC, 2011
The Source, Prose Poetry by Noah Eli Gordon
Futurepoem Books, 2011
Novel Pictorial Noise, Poetry and Prose Poetry by Noah Eli
Gordon
Harper Perennial, 2007
Last March Sommer Browning and Noah Eli Gordon visited Seattle to do a reading at Pilot Books on Capitol Hill. Pilot Books has, alas, since closed its doors, and so ends what had been a charming little space for poetry readings. I congratulate Pilot Book’s proprietor, Summer Robinson, for providing a relaxed, mercantile space for experimental writing in a world of growing illiteracy and harsh, capitalistic aggression, and wish her luck on her future endeavors.
After the reading, I purchased three books from Sommer (Sommer Sommer, not Summer Summer)and Noah at a generously discounted price. Sommer’s Either Way I’m Celebrating, and Noah’s The Source and Novel Pictorial Noise.
Browning is a cartoonist, and brings a cartoonist’s quirky sense of humor to her poetry. The work is frisky, spirited, and charmingly eccentric. It is also highly perceptive, smart, and imaginative. While humor is one of the more prominent elements of her work, it doesn’t lessen the impact of the words, which mingle drollery with trenchant perceptions of contemporary life. Much of the work reads like aperçus of present-day absurdities, concise packages of colorful provocation, flippant and poking, but never mean-spirited or crotchety. There is a strong current of verbal play moving through them, a keen sense of affable subversion, an evident awareness of the inherent instability of words and a willing sensibility alert and ready to exploit this feature to the hilt. Here, for example, is an untitled piece from the section titled “To The Housesitter,”
It’s the hour’s soundtrack.
Little train wheels
strain against their rails.
The preservation department
forgot to fall back.
The archivist subtracts a rebellious hour.
She wraps tissue paper around a man’s
ephemera. A habit keeps the chairs on the floor.
The archivist catalogs a blueberry for the library of beds:
½ inch diameter, blue, soft, sweet –
she accidentally
eats it.
There was a séance inside, and now her belly
is a ghost.
In the section titled “Vale Tudo,” which Browning reveals is a Portuguese phrase meaning “anything goes,” and is a Brazilian mixed-martial arts combat fighting style, Browning presents a diaristic series of small, informal pieces describing the idiosyncrasies of the motel/hotel milieu, a road trip of poetic fragmentation and semantic Jiu-Jitsu. A simple breakfast, the kind one eats when one is not quite awake and the disorientating effects of the road have mildly compromised one’s comfort zone, putting one’s perceptions a bit off-balance, is described in odd, metaphysical twists: “A plate of eggs, zigzags of bacon, and slices of toast. A Modern wrote about this in his noblest tractatus: breakfast must be analyzed on the basis of reason, not faith. Hush, the sugar’s shaking. Hush, her wrist clicks as she pours. Hush, that your heart was open as this cup.”
Gordon’s The Source has an immediate feeling of solemnity. The cover is a dark puce with the textured, imitation leather graininess of a bible. The work is divided into six parts and is a prose poem whose genesis is driven by (you guessed it) “The Source.” It reads fluently, very smoothly, in a manner very similar to John Ashbery’s Three Poems, or Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction Of Profiles, with a tone that is quite solemn on the surface, assuming, as it does, the language of philosophic inquiry, but with a very acute subversive current running underneath, so that the words, while referring constantly to the source they attempt to define, create a sensation of infinite flux, a feeling of words being liberated from the exigencies of semantic pertinence and set free to self-perpetuate a discursive, verbal adventure. The more “the source” is defined, the more it eludes definition.
A source is, of course, in its most literal sense, a spring. Gordon exploits this metaphor in a rich unraveling of chimerical digression. The words come bubbling from a propositional font or wellspring in the geology of the imagination, engorge from tributaries of philosophic immersion, percolate among a tangle of rhizomatic roots, and emerge, ceaselessly and serially, in emerald streams of evanescent inquiry. Inquiries of their origin and nature; inquiries of their character and essence.
The Source of The Source is defined as being a “touch sadomasochistic because it suffers a sense of its own belatedness, hates fussing with nature, and would like the world to be all weeds,” “a Roman shirt stitched from the scraps of various sources, keeping us warm,” “a representation of representations,” “If it can be seen as imperative and prescriptive, this deification of the Source knows but a single law -- itself!,” “In these circumstances, the Source confines itself to a string of paradoxes and takes refuge behind a barrage of high-sounding words,” “If anyone asks you what the Source is, send them to their own senses, because anything written can seem like straw,” “The Source’s stories or episodes are not simply added to each other, or juxtaposed with each other, but constitute a cumulative and organic development, one where customs and social arrangements, like a dog barking in the backyard, account for the phenomenon of consciousness.”
Aha! Consciousness! The Source, like consciousness, “makes a concept consisting of nothing but its distinguishing characteristics, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.” How do we know the world? We explain ourselves, and our situation in the world, by means of propositions. But propositions are doomed to communicate a new sense, however they may, with old words. Familiar, everyday words, words people exchange at the bus stop and drugstore counter, workspace and intimacy of home, but whose representations must be tweaked and twisted to articulate some phenomenon outside their usual representations. Tweaked by crazy people who delve into the mysteries of things, scribble their thoughts on paper, and call themselves poets. Sacred Technicians, Dharma Bums, Pscychodynamic Hockey Pucks and Cladogenetic Calliope Chimes.
Gordon reveals in the note at the back of The Source his process for putting the work together. He avers that between January of 2008 to September of 2009, he culled from page 26 of “nearly ten thousand books at the Denver Public Library,” bits of language which he fused together, occasionally altering some nouns to read “the Source,” and stitching together a verbal flux, a kind of perpetual motion machine, since works such as this never achieve their goal, nor ever pretend to an achieved, totalizing conclusion. There is never a Sum, but dim sum, the history of the world told and retold in verbal dumplings, mixtures of syllable and dough that are baked in the mind, and served on a sheet of paper. Or sent spiralling into the air of an auditorium or coffeehouse or lodging house "inhabited by bohemian writers and artists -- a royal antidote against all kinds of infection save creating some sort of shock of moral awareness." [The Source, page 76].
Gordon also reveals that he chose the number 26 because it corresponds to the number of letters in the English alphabet and represents the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that form the name of God.
“In relation to language, we are both makers and made,” observed Heraclitus. The source of our words is boundless because the driving force of our lives is boundless. Assertion alone cannot give sense to its thought because every proposition must already have a sense. What assertion asserts is the sense itself. It is circular. And because it is circular, the relation of structures is unending. Language is driven by a relation between properties that inhere in the words presenting them. Contradictions expand our perceptual and cognitive boundaries. Higher faculties of recognition than those based on logic are awakened.
Gordon’s Novel Pictorial Noise is a “composition of noise” based solidly on the quintessential palpability of signs, and the proposition that “the world’s not weirder than we think, but weirder than we can think.” Structurally, it is interesting, in that it juxtaposes a single line, or short set of lines, on the left page, and a short prose poem on the right. The words to the left are bare fragments of minimalist audacity lacking enough syntactic cohesion to hang a meaning on. In brief, a kind of noise.
The prose poems on the right are rich displays of verbal acrobatics. Here the noise conveys an imagery abundant in cartilaginous elegance. Tissues hold. Sinews clench. The poetic membrane percolates an osmosis of thermal reverie.
“It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today,” observed Hart Crane, “a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction.” These words were written 86 years ago, and yet their pertinence to today’s world in the 21st century of toxic narcissism, sociopathic politicos, corporate greed, unchecked capitalist predation, Sarah Palin, WalMart, Wall Street, Walleyed Media Moguls, and polarized religions and cultures seem to have even greater resonance. Gordon’s prose poems are epistemological in flavor, but it is an epistemology in embryo, a polysemous blastocyst on the outskirts of meaning.
The idea of the picture, an image one might entertain in one’s mind, mind’s eye, as they say, is a large part of this project. The prose poem on page 35 chooses the photograph as its point of departure:
A photograph. A photograph admits. A photograph admits space. A photograph admits space around its subject. A photograph admits space around its subject’s a way to feel contained. I admit contentment with the Ajax bottle above the sink Alice Neel made from oils. I admit a train whistle, a dab of wisteria, a strip of duct tape’s upturned corner. Coincidental nonchalance or comic fortitude? I admit both, admitting this sort of disposition harbors dangerous potential. Cue the music and evening’s wash of unaccomplishment meant to make amends with whatever the day left undone does it. Now, I’m admitting a hue of a bluish green, adding color to the scene.
In the above piece, Gordon uses repetition to mimic the development of a photographic image in a tray of film emulsion, further elaborating the image with each repetition. The word ‘admit’ plays a key role, referring first to the admittance of light through a camera lens, then building on its associative meanings as a phenomenon of allowance and opening. An opening to the world. An allowance of whatever might be found in the world. This latter position is more difficult than it may seem. Delusion and denial are huge human addictions. Anyone who has experimented with hallucinogenic drugs knows that the world we normally experience through our five senses is subject to change. Senses may be dilated and discombobulated. Will the real reality please stand up?
As Wittgenstein pointed out, our sense of reality is heavily dependent on language. Propagandists all know how easy it is to manipulate people’s view of reality. Gordon’s achievement in Novel Pictorial Noise is to employ enough noise to rupture the static of mediated experience and playfully prod us to admit something new.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Giving The Finger To The Invisible Hand
Happy Birthday Adam Smith Inventor of the Invisible Hand
Of the market I wouldn’t know an Invisible Hand if it was reaching
Up my ass there is no supply and demand
In poetry no invisible hands all the hands are real and so
Are the fingers and thumbs
The Dainty Thumb of the Poetry Market
Commingles with the Fingers of Controversy
Which expand into Cyclones Of Perfect Dereliction
And wash over the body like a tide
Of guitar strings vibrating with Keith Richards’s
Open G Tuning you get my drift
Don’t you I mean there is no selfishness in the world
As selfish as poetry which wants everyone’s
Full unabated attention and is never invisible
But naked yes totally naked
Poetry wants you to take your clothes off
And make love to a squeaky toy
The door is open go ahead walk outside
If you see an Invisible Hand run before it grabs hold of you and
eats
Your head off although since the Invisible Hand is, you know,
invisible
It is more likely you will feel the effect
Of the invisible hand as someone on Wall Street
Taking away your Medicare or Social Security
This is what Invisible Hands do they rob they steal they pilfer they
filch
Take the elevator to the top floor
Of any building and look down at all the cars and people
What Invisible Hand is causing these things to happen
Are we puppets no we are not puppets there is no Invisible Hand
In Obama’s pocket just your money
And Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and Hilary
Clinton enjoying the many wonderful things they have bought
with our money
Premised on the fable of an Invisible Hand which Adam
Smith never really intended what he meant was any individual
action
That has unintended consequences particularly those that arise
Serendipitously and that leave in their wake little ripples
Of benevolence washing the arid shores of our existence
Which is silly I know but not as silly
As the presumed consequences of poetry which is an Invisible
Finger
Raised to the Rats of Wall Street
As if Wall Street
Gave a Flying Fuck
Of the market I wouldn’t know an Invisible Hand if it was reaching
Up my ass there is no supply and demand
In poetry no invisible hands all the hands are real and so
Are the fingers and thumbs
The Dainty Thumb of the Poetry Market
Commingles with the Fingers of Controversy
Which expand into Cyclones Of Perfect Dereliction
And wash over the body like a tide
Of guitar strings vibrating with Keith Richards’s
Open G Tuning you get my drift
Don’t you I mean there is no selfishness in the world
As selfish as poetry which wants everyone’s
Full unabated attention and is never invisible
But naked yes totally naked
Poetry wants you to take your clothes off
And make love to a squeaky toy
The door is open go ahead walk outside
If you see an Invisible Hand run before it grabs hold of you and
eats
Your head off although since the Invisible Hand is, you know,
invisible
It is more likely you will feel the effect
Of the invisible hand as someone on Wall Street
Taking away your Medicare or Social Security
This is what Invisible Hands do they rob they steal they pilfer they
filch
Take the elevator to the top floor
Of any building and look down at all the cars and people
What Invisible Hand is causing these things to happen
Are we puppets no we are not puppets there is no Invisible Hand
In Obama’s pocket just your money
And Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and Hilary
Clinton enjoying the many wonderful things they have bought
with our money
Premised on the fable of an Invisible Hand which Adam
Smith never really intended what he meant was any individual
action
That has unintended consequences particularly those that arise
Serendipitously and that leave in their wake little ripples
Of benevolence washing the arid shores of our existence
Which is silly I know but not as silly
As the presumed consequences of poetry which is an Invisible
Finger
Raised to the Rats of Wall Street
As if Wall Street
Gave a Flying Fuck
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Four By Four
Silk which development coppers. The air is dimes. Studio remembered under mirrors. The antique gun perseveres.
Images pepper the antenna. My quixotic nails bend. Palette dipped in burns. I fiddle a feeling.
Hectic oysters built it. Indigo tastes of vespers. Pretzels crawl in absence. I jingle their positions.
It eludes all index. And explains your sleeve. Construction irritates a button. Jauntily thick between cherries.
Rain evokes a throat. The fire cut inside. You glow and ache. The stew is written.
Thought seeds morning ecstasies. Parabolas on a highway. Insults squirt a stream. Drag calliopes to paper.
Which carries audacious despair. And residual insights unlock. Deliverance unfolds the ermine. Just a rattlesnake voyage.
In fractious rain debris. Broken freight and hickory. Luminous heaven pushes faith. Greenery imposes constant sensation.
Metaphors crack the coordinates. History dreams the empire. We rattle incandescent colors. Formulas obscure the summer.
Butterflies knock their talk. Lyrical ooze embedded within. The monster draws grace. The office occasions rhetoric.
All the forges roar. Eyebrows harnessed to heaven. Halibut sliced in mushrooms. Daylight crashed our eyes.
Handstands tickled in orange. Phantoms experience your music. They dance on antiques. And a bistro’s bread.
One could leaven gesture. Another leaven their straw. This line gets operating. And a spectrum explodes.
You could say altitude. I know your cemetery. It has three necromancers. And a dark orchard.
Each crow elbows salvation. When does day toughen? When it bends mirrors. And birds thrash linen.
Emotion patched with bones. As if pleasure moistened. Or perception filled Spinoza. Consider a vague orthogonal.
Or a growling stomach. The truth wears radar. It is heard raw. Like meat or philodendrons.
My intent is birds. And mirrors and raspberries. Simply to say dissonance. Hop and sow enigma.
Have you considered sticks? They make me crackle. Like orchids gargle tornados. I endorse those billows.
The bounce of sculpture. The bounce of meat. The bounce of beauty. The bounce of feet.
Quixotic by tangible fluff. Flux and whispering fire. The glow of coal. The pink of willow.
Daylight stabbed by description. Fruit that wheezes charcoal. Caravaggio shrewdly churning tissue. Soliciting thin Italian contingency.
Serious hammers of myth. The power of corollary. The wash of spouts. An exercise in crying.
A war during France. The bark of dogs. The fireworks of idea. Iron accentuated by guns.
Ascension achieved by hymn. Hearts in crisp emotion. The blast of trumpets. The riddle of drums.
Paradise haunts the mouth. Someone paints the trees. Words reach from pain. Pleasure arrives in birds.
Images pepper the antenna. My quixotic nails bend. Palette dipped in burns. I fiddle a feeling.
Hectic oysters built it. Indigo tastes of vespers. Pretzels crawl in absence. I jingle their positions.
It eludes all index. And explains your sleeve. Construction irritates a button. Jauntily thick between cherries.
Rain evokes a throat. The fire cut inside. You glow and ache. The stew is written.
Thought seeds morning ecstasies. Parabolas on a highway. Insults squirt a stream. Drag calliopes to paper.
Which carries audacious despair. And residual insights unlock. Deliverance unfolds the ermine. Just a rattlesnake voyage.
In fractious rain debris. Broken freight and hickory. Luminous heaven pushes faith. Greenery imposes constant sensation.
Metaphors crack the coordinates. History dreams the empire. We rattle incandescent colors. Formulas obscure the summer.
Butterflies knock their talk. Lyrical ooze embedded within. The monster draws grace. The office occasions rhetoric.
All the forges roar. Eyebrows harnessed to heaven. Halibut sliced in mushrooms. Daylight crashed our eyes.
Handstands tickled in orange. Phantoms experience your music. They dance on antiques. And a bistro’s bread.
One could leaven gesture. Another leaven their straw. This line gets operating. And a spectrum explodes.
You could say altitude. I know your cemetery. It has three necromancers. And a dark orchard.
Each crow elbows salvation. When does day toughen? When it bends mirrors. And birds thrash linen.
Emotion patched with bones. As if pleasure moistened. Or perception filled Spinoza. Consider a vague orthogonal.
Or a growling stomach. The truth wears radar. It is heard raw. Like meat or philodendrons.
My intent is birds. And mirrors and raspberries. Simply to say dissonance. Hop and sow enigma.
Have you considered sticks? They make me crackle. Like orchids gargle tornados. I endorse those billows.
The bounce of sculpture. The bounce of meat. The bounce of beauty. The bounce of feet.
Quixotic by tangible fluff. Flux and whispering fire. The glow of coal. The pink of willow.
Daylight stabbed by description. Fruit that wheezes charcoal. Caravaggio shrewdly churning tissue. Soliciting thin Italian contingency.
Serious hammers of myth. The power of corollary. The wash of spouts. An exercise in crying.
A war during France. The bark of dogs. The fireworks of idea. Iron accentuated by guns.
Ascension achieved by hymn. Hearts in crisp emotion. The blast of trumpets. The riddle of drums.
Paradise haunts the mouth. Someone paints the trees. Words reach from pain. Pleasure arrives in birds.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Three Things That Truly Matter
Assuming the universe is infinite, would it be considered to be an open or a closed system? If the universe is infinite, it is not isolated from anything and is, therefore, an open system. But couldn’t you also assume that, since there is no effect on it from an outside environment, it must be closed? So which is it? If there is neither space nor time outside of the universe, what could it be isolated from? Perhaps it is strictly a question of mass. If the universe has enough mass its rate of expansion will decrease and it will then fold back on itself.
I do know this: I love water. If I want to go for a swim, I undo my belt, drop my pants, and dive right in.
A lake is a closed system. A river is a moving system. The ocean is a large funny hat.
I like to throw dreams in the air in the form of words. Words are little engines of haphazard maneuver. Adjectives are humors. Nouns are allegories, little puddles of brazen infinity. Verbs are locomotives, pistons of sound running on diesel and heat.
Light stimulates the growth of books and cuticles.
Muscles carry the weight of our being. The skin wrinkles. Time folds into morning. Morning folds into maple syrup. The rungs of the ladder redeem the indignity of purpose from the stains of sequence. If you must personify the light, use an affidavit. Don’t just drag an irritation. Send it to the Ambassador of Sand and Clouds.
Everything is ignorant of its own emptiness. Anger can sometimes bring a new perspective to the rank autumnal explosions of semantic dancing. Anger can also sometimes lack perspective. One must decide if the wash is worth doing, or can wait another day. In the alchemy of morning, the thumb is an abstraction and the bathroom is a naked assumption.
Your pickles burst with history. Your hands hold a kimono. We are desperate. A soft, percussive feeling shines behind your words. Enough is enough, you say. I agree. The moose was useless. There was greater subtlety in the stand of birch without this animal. A spring bubbles forth. Everything trembles with life. Even the piano gives birth.
The moose, uninvited, sits down and plays a sonata. I do not recognize the composer. Christmas ornaments hang from his antlers. His eyes shine with divine madness.
Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.
Take honey, for example. How sticky, gooey, transparent, sweet. Even the thought of honey diffuses in the mind, shining and coincidental. Words gather like nerves in infinite speculation, spread like honey on a piece of bread, easing into themselves as they ooze toward enlightenment.
It is a participation in turnstiles that hunger for symbolism. I once followed a man to the subway and saw his shadow break into a thousand red animals. One of them pantomimed probability theory. Another folded a napkin into a replica of Paraguay.
There is a way the light shines on the surface of a river and all the ripples and waves and stirrings on the surface indicate the character and singularities of the current.
One cannot help but think of blood and the circulation of blood. Are thoughts made of blood, or something else, storms, tornados, dumplings, or a combination of blood and storms and tornados and dumplings? I mean, what is it? This ability to choose a pair of running shoes, or a dog or a car? Is this ability only an illusion? Are we guided by something we do not clearly understand?
If each of us is a conglomeration of cells, is it the cells who do the choosing? Are we archipelagos of bacteria operating under the illusion of freedom of choice?
Right now I want some coffee. That’s simple enough. And why isn’t the vet calling back?
It’s nice to have objectives, particularly during a bingo game. But really, when it comes down to it, it is just three things that truly matter: eating, sleeping, and curtains.
I do know this: I love water. If I want to go for a swim, I undo my belt, drop my pants, and dive right in.
A lake is a closed system. A river is a moving system. The ocean is a large funny hat.
I like to throw dreams in the air in the form of words. Words are little engines of haphazard maneuver. Adjectives are humors. Nouns are allegories, little puddles of brazen infinity. Verbs are locomotives, pistons of sound running on diesel and heat.
Light stimulates the growth of books and cuticles.
Muscles carry the weight of our being. The skin wrinkles. Time folds into morning. Morning folds into maple syrup. The rungs of the ladder redeem the indignity of purpose from the stains of sequence. If you must personify the light, use an affidavit. Don’t just drag an irritation. Send it to the Ambassador of Sand and Clouds.
Everything is ignorant of its own emptiness. Anger can sometimes bring a new perspective to the rank autumnal explosions of semantic dancing. Anger can also sometimes lack perspective. One must decide if the wash is worth doing, or can wait another day. In the alchemy of morning, the thumb is an abstraction and the bathroom is a naked assumption.
Your pickles burst with history. Your hands hold a kimono. We are desperate. A soft, percussive feeling shines behind your words. Enough is enough, you say. I agree. The moose was useless. There was greater subtlety in the stand of birch without this animal. A spring bubbles forth. Everything trembles with life. Even the piano gives birth.
The moose, uninvited, sits down and plays a sonata. I do not recognize the composer. Christmas ornaments hang from his antlers. His eyes shine with divine madness.
Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.
Take honey, for example. How sticky, gooey, transparent, sweet. Even the thought of honey diffuses in the mind, shining and coincidental. Words gather like nerves in infinite speculation, spread like honey on a piece of bread, easing into themselves as they ooze toward enlightenment.
It is a participation in turnstiles that hunger for symbolism. I once followed a man to the subway and saw his shadow break into a thousand red animals. One of them pantomimed probability theory. Another folded a napkin into a replica of Paraguay.
There is a way the light shines on the surface of a river and all the ripples and waves and stirrings on the surface indicate the character and singularities of the current.
One cannot help but think of blood and the circulation of blood. Are thoughts made of blood, or something else, storms, tornados, dumplings, or a combination of blood and storms and tornados and dumplings? I mean, what is it? This ability to choose a pair of running shoes, or a dog or a car? Is this ability only an illusion? Are we guided by something we do not clearly understand?
If each of us is a conglomeration of cells, is it the cells who do the choosing? Are we archipelagos of bacteria operating under the illusion of freedom of choice?
Right now I want some coffee. That’s simple enough. And why isn’t the vet calling back?
It’s nice to have objectives, particularly during a bingo game. But really, when it comes down to it, it is just three things that truly matter: eating, sleeping, and curtains.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Some Songs
It’s Wednesday, June 1st. I can hear someone tossing their laundry into the dryer. It’s a funny sound, air in a hollow drum of metal reverberating with the thrust of clothes, click of zippers and buttons, slam of the dryer door, setting of the dial, then a long monotonous hum, a gentle, steady drone of neutral diffusion. This is the “Song of the Dryer.”
Our cat is on a feeding frenzy. I worry that he might have worms. We look for little rice-like pellets in his favorite places to sleep, the pillow under the study lamp and the end of the bed, but can find nothing. Something seems to be bugging him. It would be helpful if cats could talk. He sits by his bowl until we put food in it. If I scoop out a generous dollop of cat food, he sucks it up in seconds, and is back again a few minutes later, and will sit by his bowl until one of us breaks down and gives him a little more. This is “The Ballad Of The Cat.” Poignant, compelling, utterly silent.
May was not a kind month. The refrigerator required repair, water got trapped in the door of our car, Toby - who is an indoor cat - got a bad case of fleas, and I came down with the flu. On top of which, the weather was awful. Cold, wet, gloomy. May may as well have been November. Except November is generally nicer than this.
The water in the car door event drove me nuts. I heard it sloshing for over a month and thought it was a bottle of water trapped under one of the car seats. I searched everywhere. No bottle. Nothing. I was teetering on the verge of some serious frustration. Then Roberta noticed the sloshing when she was opening the door. “It’s in the door,” she said. “You’re kidding?” I answered, incredulous. She wiggled the door. The sloshing was unmistakable. This was the “Song Of The Car Door Sloshing.”
She took the car in to Hobb’s Garage on Garfield. The drainage hole in the door got plugged. Same damn thing happened to the refrigerator. Only the drainage hole was nowhere to be found. It was behind a panel. It required special tools, special skills. We had to call in a repairman.
It was the flu that got me really depressed. This is common. For one thing, I took antibiotics, which not only kill the offending bacteria, but the bacteria (microflora) that normally live in one’s intestines, functioning almost like another organ. The resident gut microflora positively control the intestinal epithelial cell differentiation and proliferation through the production of short-chain fatty acids. They also mediate other metabolic effects such as the syntheses of vitamins like biotin and folate, as well as absorption of ions including magnesium, calcium and iron. Iron is needed for producing red blood cells, the lack of which results in brittle hair, anemia, a craving for licorice, and naked despair.
Whenever I get a little depressed I like to watch YouTube videos. The opening scene of Adventures In Babysitting is a favorite. I love to watch Elizabeth Shue dance around her bedroom while the Crystals sing “And Then He Kissed Me.” The energy is glorious. Sexy and goofy and bursting with elation. She uses the bedpost for a microphone and makes a wedding veil out of the window curtain. How could anyone not fall in love with this woman?
I also really like Nolwenn Leroy’s version of the traditional Breton song “La jument du Michao.” The people in the video remind me of the people I used to hang out with the in late 60s. The kid with the slouch hat and long hair could be the young Arthur Rimbaud.
I marvel at the new song Robert Plant and his Band of Joy put out, “Monkey,” which is actually the creation of a rock group from Duluth, Minnesota named Low, and members Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker, and Zahary Micheletti. Plant sings “Monkey” with Patty Griffin, a pretty singer and song-writer considerably younger than him. It’s weird to see Plant looking so old, crags in his face, sags in his jowls, but his hair still long and blonde and curly, he could be Druid priest, or King Lear’s wise and aging fool.
“Monkey” is a weird song. The lyrics are highly evocative, but extremely elliptical, like Neil Young’s “Down By The River.” With the help of the music, the song communicates on a very deep, intuitive level, and even though I don’t know what is meant by the phrase “the monkey dies tonight,” it sounds prophetic and eery, like something from a David Lynch movie.
It’s often a good thing to have a song splashing around in your head when thoughts turn ugly and somber or thinking just gets onerous and tedious and you want to empty your head of it all. Listen to the Beatles. That effervescence has turned classic like Mozart. Not Mahler, Mozart. Most definitely Mozart. The Beatles always had that spritely Mozart sound never that somber Mahler pathos with its fevered unrest or the grandness of Beethoven’s towering dramas. Even a relatively ominous number like “A Day In The Life” has moments of quirky humor.
Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” is a moving portrait of one’s waning years. The mood is bittersweet and reflective. I can listen to that over and over. It’s a good song to hear when you get old and crepuscular. Unfortunately, I can’t find any decent video for it. They’re either plastered with ads, really bad covers someone had the moxie to post on YouTube, or terrible amateur recordings made during a performance using what must have been a cell phone. The sound is awful and the image of Dylan’s now aging figure trussed up in glitzy cowboy clothes à la Hank Williams and a Texas Swing band goes in and out of clarity.
I also really like this new young lady from England, Adele, whose “Rolling In The Deep” is large and powerful and whose cover of Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” is performed with stunning sincerity. I usually don’t go for a video dramatization of someone’s song, but the video that goes with “Rolling In The Deep,” with that odd figure in the eighteenth century costume of an elegant aristocrat with a wig and cane dancing in all that flour or cocaine or heroin or whatever it is, is pretty damned interesting. So are all those glasses of water, the water trembling with the drum beats. Very cool. Here again, though, no way around the ads.
Music cures nothing, but it can help with a few of life’s more indelicate circumstances. Delusions of grandeur. Bad cough. Aching muscles. Worn book jackets. Hospital bills. Strange cities with complicated intersections and slow traffic lights. Corrupt politicians. Lying deceitful sociopathic presidents.
What’s your favorite sensation? If I had to pick just one I couldn’t do it. Getting into bed is high on the list. So are eating and sitting in the shade on a really hot day. Getting silly with a bowl of jello. Hot water hitting my skin after a long run in the rain and sleet on a cold winter day. Feeling cat fur or the soft muzzle of a cow. Walking barefoot and drinking from a garden hose. Squirting lather out of a can of shaving cream. Squeezing paint from a tube. Riding a horse in ocean surf. Hearing the roar of jet engines and that first feeling of lift as the wheels leave the ground. Carrying something heavy like a piece of furniture or sack of cat litter a long way and then putting it down. Quitting a job and walking into the sunlight. Finding something I lost. Ambiguity (sometimes). The flavor of almost any food except broccoli or liver. Opening a present. Weird colors like violet and infrared. A room that is illumined by a single large candle. Meditation. The smell of rain. Walking on a path on the side of a mountain. Pulling a shirt off when it’s hot. Being excused from an onerous task because someone else has offered to do it. Or it is already done. Or there is nothing to do. Not even think. Or make sense of the world.
Anybody can describe logic. But can you describe cotton?
Don’t knock reason. I think reason is great. The sleep of reason produces monsters. But music is not a product of reason. It operates best without reason. In that respect it is very similar to poetry.
Poetry and songs have a lot in common. Both use words. Both strive to charge the mind and emotion. Both employ alliteration and assonance and rhyme. Both are steeped in reverie and wish fulfillment and dream. But they’re two different species. Same phylum, same family, but different species. Like insects. Ants, aphids, lacwings, pill bugs, locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, millepedes, earwigs, gnats, moths, scarabs, houseflies, tarantulas, wasps, yellow jackets, spiders, mosquitos, weevils, wood ticks, beetles, hornets, termites, cicadas, butterflies.
Which is the song, which is the poem? Is the ant a poem and the cicada a song? Is a spider really a novel? Is a wood tick a ballad? Is a hornet a sonnet?
Many insects are hairy. But many are not. Ladybugs, for instance, are shiny red little pellets of insect joy. Dragonflies are magnificent. Dragonflies are fugues of lucid buzz.
Our cat is on a feeding frenzy. I worry that he might have worms. We look for little rice-like pellets in his favorite places to sleep, the pillow under the study lamp and the end of the bed, but can find nothing. Something seems to be bugging him. It would be helpful if cats could talk. He sits by his bowl until we put food in it. If I scoop out a generous dollop of cat food, he sucks it up in seconds, and is back again a few minutes later, and will sit by his bowl until one of us breaks down and gives him a little more. This is “The Ballad Of The Cat.” Poignant, compelling, utterly silent.
May was not a kind month. The refrigerator required repair, water got trapped in the door of our car, Toby - who is an indoor cat - got a bad case of fleas, and I came down with the flu. On top of which, the weather was awful. Cold, wet, gloomy. May may as well have been November. Except November is generally nicer than this.
The water in the car door event drove me nuts. I heard it sloshing for over a month and thought it was a bottle of water trapped under one of the car seats. I searched everywhere. No bottle. Nothing. I was teetering on the verge of some serious frustration. Then Roberta noticed the sloshing when she was opening the door. “It’s in the door,” she said. “You’re kidding?” I answered, incredulous. She wiggled the door. The sloshing was unmistakable. This was the “Song Of The Car Door Sloshing.”
She took the car in to Hobb’s Garage on Garfield. The drainage hole in the door got plugged. Same damn thing happened to the refrigerator. Only the drainage hole was nowhere to be found. It was behind a panel. It required special tools, special skills. We had to call in a repairman.
It was the flu that got me really depressed. This is common. For one thing, I took antibiotics, which not only kill the offending bacteria, but the bacteria (microflora) that normally live in one’s intestines, functioning almost like another organ. The resident gut microflora positively control the intestinal epithelial cell differentiation and proliferation through the production of short-chain fatty acids. They also mediate other metabolic effects such as the syntheses of vitamins like biotin and folate, as well as absorption of ions including magnesium, calcium and iron. Iron is needed for producing red blood cells, the lack of which results in brittle hair, anemia, a craving for licorice, and naked despair.
Whenever I get a little depressed I like to watch YouTube videos. The opening scene of Adventures In Babysitting is a favorite. I love to watch Elizabeth Shue dance around her bedroom while the Crystals sing “And Then He Kissed Me.” The energy is glorious. Sexy and goofy and bursting with elation. She uses the bedpost for a microphone and makes a wedding veil out of the window curtain. How could anyone not fall in love with this woman?
I also really like Nolwenn Leroy’s version of the traditional Breton song “La jument du Michao.” The people in the video remind me of the people I used to hang out with the in late 60s. The kid with the slouch hat and long hair could be the young Arthur Rimbaud.
I marvel at the new song Robert Plant and his Band of Joy put out, “Monkey,” which is actually the creation of a rock group from Duluth, Minnesota named Low, and members Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker, and Zahary Micheletti. Plant sings “Monkey” with Patty Griffin, a pretty singer and song-writer considerably younger than him. It’s weird to see Plant looking so old, crags in his face, sags in his jowls, but his hair still long and blonde and curly, he could be Druid priest, or King Lear’s wise and aging fool.
“Monkey” is a weird song. The lyrics are highly evocative, but extremely elliptical, like Neil Young’s “Down By The River.” With the help of the music, the song communicates on a very deep, intuitive level, and even though I don’t know what is meant by the phrase “the monkey dies tonight,” it sounds prophetic and eery, like something from a David Lynch movie.
It’s often a good thing to have a song splashing around in your head when thoughts turn ugly and somber or thinking just gets onerous and tedious and you want to empty your head of it all. Listen to the Beatles. That effervescence has turned classic like Mozart. Not Mahler, Mozart. Most definitely Mozart. The Beatles always had that spritely Mozart sound never that somber Mahler pathos with its fevered unrest or the grandness of Beethoven’s towering dramas. Even a relatively ominous number like “A Day In The Life” has moments of quirky humor.
Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” is a moving portrait of one’s waning years. The mood is bittersweet and reflective. I can listen to that over and over. It’s a good song to hear when you get old and crepuscular. Unfortunately, I can’t find any decent video for it. They’re either plastered with ads, really bad covers someone had the moxie to post on YouTube, or terrible amateur recordings made during a performance using what must have been a cell phone. The sound is awful and the image of Dylan’s now aging figure trussed up in glitzy cowboy clothes à la Hank Williams and a Texas Swing band goes in and out of clarity.
I also really like this new young lady from England, Adele, whose “Rolling In The Deep” is large and powerful and whose cover of Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” is performed with stunning sincerity. I usually don’t go for a video dramatization of someone’s song, but the video that goes with “Rolling In The Deep,” with that odd figure in the eighteenth century costume of an elegant aristocrat with a wig and cane dancing in all that flour or cocaine or heroin or whatever it is, is pretty damned interesting. So are all those glasses of water, the water trembling with the drum beats. Very cool. Here again, though, no way around the ads.
Music cures nothing, but it can help with a few of life’s more indelicate circumstances. Delusions of grandeur. Bad cough. Aching muscles. Worn book jackets. Hospital bills. Strange cities with complicated intersections and slow traffic lights. Corrupt politicians. Lying deceitful sociopathic presidents.
What’s your favorite sensation? If I had to pick just one I couldn’t do it. Getting into bed is high on the list. So are eating and sitting in the shade on a really hot day. Getting silly with a bowl of jello. Hot water hitting my skin after a long run in the rain and sleet on a cold winter day. Feeling cat fur or the soft muzzle of a cow. Walking barefoot and drinking from a garden hose. Squirting lather out of a can of shaving cream. Squeezing paint from a tube. Riding a horse in ocean surf. Hearing the roar of jet engines and that first feeling of lift as the wheels leave the ground. Carrying something heavy like a piece of furniture or sack of cat litter a long way and then putting it down. Quitting a job and walking into the sunlight. Finding something I lost. Ambiguity (sometimes). The flavor of almost any food except broccoli or liver. Opening a present. Weird colors like violet and infrared. A room that is illumined by a single large candle. Meditation. The smell of rain. Walking on a path on the side of a mountain. Pulling a shirt off when it’s hot. Being excused from an onerous task because someone else has offered to do it. Or it is already done. Or there is nothing to do. Not even think. Or make sense of the world.
Anybody can describe logic. But can you describe cotton?
Don’t knock reason. I think reason is great. The sleep of reason produces monsters. But music is not a product of reason. It operates best without reason. In that respect it is very similar to poetry.
Poetry and songs have a lot in common. Both use words. Both strive to charge the mind and emotion. Both employ alliteration and assonance and rhyme. Both are steeped in reverie and wish fulfillment and dream. But they’re two different species. Same phylum, same family, but different species. Like insects. Ants, aphids, lacwings, pill bugs, locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, millepedes, earwigs, gnats, moths, scarabs, houseflies, tarantulas, wasps, yellow jackets, spiders, mosquitos, weevils, wood ticks, beetles, hornets, termites, cicadas, butterflies.
Which is the song, which is the poem? Is the ant a poem and the cicada a song? Is a spider really a novel? Is a wood tick a ballad? Is a hornet a sonnet?
Many insects are hairy. But many are not. Ladybugs, for instance, are shiny red little pellets of insect joy. Dragonflies are magnificent. Dragonflies are fugues of lucid buzz.
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