A Braque Afternoon

Words carved out of air tickle the lucidity of mosquitoes during the revelation of pearl. Cylinders push the car. Space cures the gantries by duet. Limestone pipes heft the omen. Personification fantasizes a steam.

Brocaded proposals solicit tin zipper this. A Braque afternoon has energy. Anger stirs the train. Nimble dollops of brown put emotion in motion. Syllables house eyes.

Hirsute the may jar comb. Embody impulse wash the confusion with music. The sopranos jingle their processions behind the ink. Summer flows from the breath of spring. A box squeezed red until it rumors agitation.

This mutates into utility. Problems begin to stray into clarity. Moccasins enhance the talk of dinosaurs. We map the incense with bells and bamboo. Buffalo grab swimming and like it.

A cut in the car bleeds less than a carat. Oats are experience consonants are bowls. Humor description be an oval. Be a vague area in the Louvre yet serious as keys with a pungency of underworld Etruscans holding candles below the army of Philistines stirring our resilience. It ruminates Bach to a foot below me.

Excursion knots a despair when the swamp is privately painted. Languor has a spice that dazzles even the frogs. Touch personality with a decorated towel. The force of doctrine is rough on a puddle. Oblivion’s lobsters burst out of a pronoun pinching the salt of stenography.

Wave the river scrupulously. Drag the paradigm out of the blob with a gargantuan yank. Birch and glue the skin. There is more theorem than kerosene in the meaning knob. Semantic trousers sewn with a walking eye.

The gift of fiction explains the bones of the cuckoo. Injury is more flower than wound. Navigation does not alter the sphere. Perception earns the treasure of your sun. Those who collide eventually take to flipping.

Clapping begins with the ravenous hands of a bemused public attention, and ends with the bottle of a hushed voice. Let’s get our airplanes in order. Do nebulas in the flower parlor. Hum herds of meandering sound during a luminous cotton. Give hectic legs to a curious dance.

My chair is entirely metaphorical and upside down. If you find me sitting in it, you will find me upside down. Therefore is blossoming a suspension and suspension, however suspended, suspect in sustenance. The rascally gloves of time squirm in the fingers of bias. Erect a salon of wax then savor a vapor of wick and wicket.

Lure words to the brain absorption is hinged to mustard. Punish the tease of the fabric not the vividness of the skin. Montmartre bangs in its slants. Form heaves with simultaneity. Nothing succeeds like the coherence of wind.

On Being Naked

Fire engines and pigeons and rain, wrote Philip Whalen one day. Business as usual. But here is my question: where is the duct tape?

My wallet is falling apart. I’m reluctant to give things up, especially wallets. I get attached. I especially get attached to wallets. They become an appendage. They ride all day in my back pocket. For years. They are homes away from homes. My entire history and identity is contained in my wallet.

Driver’s license, credit cards, library cards, Sound Health & Wellness Trust, Seattle Art Museum, AAA, Elliott Bay Book Card, REI membership card, Amnesty International, Staples, a Metro Card from New York that I saved because of the quote on the back, from Confessions, by Saint Augustine: "Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you."

Brandon Downing, Sureshot Coffee, Seattle Wrote, Dark Coast Press, Metro Moggie Cat Sitting. This is my portrait. This is who I am. King County U.S.A. voter. South West Plumbing. Allstate Insurance. Tip Chart. Silver Platters. Gretchen Michels Hair Technician. Social Security. National Waffle Association.

The strangest thing about going naked outdoors, in the woods, at a beach, somebody’s house, is being without one’s wallet. One feels utterly disconnected from one’s social identity. Not having the proper identity can lead to trouble.

Back in the 80s I moved to a different apartment and neglected to get my address changed on my driver’s license. The entry door was shoddily made, a hollow core door that had warped, having a western exposure. You had to push on it several times to make sure it was closed all the way. I was pushing on it one summer afternoon as I was leaving for work and a woman cop spun into the driveway, got out, and asked what I was doing. I told her I was checking to see the door was locked. She asked to see my I.D. I handed her my driver’s license. The address didn’t match. I tried to convince here I actually lived there. She was on the verge of arresting me. Happily, the next door neighbor came out and identified me. Satisfied that I was not a robber, the lady cop cautioned me to get my address changed on my driver’s license, and went on her way.

The duct tape was in the bottom cupboard, on the bottom shelf behind the clothes iron. I wrapped a small piece around the part of my wallet where the leather had split and its engorged contents were spilling out.

A man in Helsinki affirms that the people there do not rely on language as a key to one’s social identity as they do in France, England, and the United States. I disagree. I believe this was true about the United States some thirty or forty years ago, when using big words would identify one as an educated and cultured member of the upper class, despite the actuality of your income. Now it’s all about money. There is no longer any pretense to culture and education. Retail managers have at best a primitive use of the language and frequently misspell and misuse letters in their memos and signs and it does not bother them in the least. One finds typos and poor grammatical construction in newspapers and magazines with disquieting frequency. Nobody seems to mind. Nobody seems to care about language anymore. People no longer pride themselves on their education and command of language. It’s all about money. Look at Sarah Palin.

Age imposes an identity on you. Youth, middle age, old age. When you get old and complain about things you get called a curmudgeon. Your observations are discredited. You say negative things not because your observations are acute or your life experience has empowered your capacity for perception and thought but because you’re old and crabby. Old people crab about things all the time. They have back problems. Arthritis. Envy. Jealousy of the young.

It’s hard to tell people that the planet is dying without being called a curmudgeon. Or wallowing in pessimism porn. Nobody wants to hear that the planet is dying.

And who would? I don’t like to hear that the planet is dying, that by 2050 all marine life in the oceans will be extinct. But that’s what the scientists have been saying. It’s got nothing to do with my age.

Michael McClure writes: WITHIN I FELT REVOLT AND RIPPED MYSELF FROM MYSELF. / I FEEL REVOLT AND RIP MYSELF, til my / eyes spread and my nostrils burn, become the infant / of myself’s desires.

What an astonishing statement. The violence of revolt against the staleness of being comfortable in a single, unchanging identity, a creature of habit, a being cloistered in smug delusions, unable to live fully and broadly, incapable of making a sustained deferment of opinion and judgment, of hatching out of a shell of habit and outlook and exposing the tenderness of one’s authentic being to the actualities and unfiltered sensations of experience. What we desire and what we get are at odds with each other, wrote John Dewey in “Art As Experience.”

One can be naked and yet fully clothed, or fully clothed and naked. Nakedness is a state of mind.

Nakedness is also being fully exposed, without any clothes. Animals are never naked. Or people covered head to toe with tattoos.

We all wear masks. You have to. You cannot hold down a job without presenting a false front to the people you truly despise. Hypocrisy is always a pejorative term. Perhaps it should not be.

Skin is the frontier between our bodies and the external world. But skin is not concrete. It’s an organ in which the outer world is constantly permeating. There is no real division there. We are intimately involved with the world. There is continuous merging. Our experience with the world is like a conversation. There are pauses, inflections, interchange, yet each speaker retains their identity even as they merge their ideas and thoughts with the ideas and thoughts of their partner. Some reach a conclusion and are clothed. Some never reach a conclusion and are eternally, radically naked. There is often a consummation, but no conclusion. No buttons buttoned. No laces tied. No shirt tucked in.

In the morning, when I put my clothes on, there is a weight that is not simply the weight of my clothes, my jeans, the jingle of change in my pocket, the final clasping of my belt has the feel of armor. A psychological armor. Assuming a role. Getting into costume. One almost wishes there were lines already prepared for utterance. A story. A conflict of which one knew its dimensions, the size of its circumference, its pitfalls and mines, its weak points and strong points. But there are no lines. Costume, sure. Lines, never. You do that yourself. Compose yourself as you go along. Try to get it right.

At night, when I take my clothes off, I usually start with my pants, let them drop, wrestle my legs out, then unbutton my shirt, toss it on the couch. It feels great. I love that feeling. Love being rid of all that appurtenance. And then there is the final undressing, which is letting go of consciousness, and going to sleep, and sliding into oblivion.

The night is itself an undressing. The world takes off its sky and exposes itself to the stars. Then morning comes with a fresh set of circumstances and errands. Vestments of the new day. Rain on the hydrangeas. Delicious warmth of mid July. Fire engine siren. Car honk. Rise and fall of a cat breathing slowly on a pillow. Smell and taste of coffee. Doors slammed. Ladders raised. Ambitions pursued.

The ultimate wig and chemise is desire. Those are the boots we walk in. Desire. Black, shiny desire. Yearning. Hunger. Revenge.

Some wear uniforms. Some go with cotton and rayon. Some with silk and denim. But it all comes down to finding warmth and protection among the thorns of daily existence. Perception, says McClure, is a shape of the darkness seeing itself.

The softness of human skin is shocking in its vulnerability. Which is why sociopaths seem reptilian. And strippers appear Circean, turning men to pigs.

Desire is clothing. Nakedness is that place beyond death where the dawn sleeps and protons glimmer in and out of emptiness.

Even the president of the United States, sang Mr. Dylan, must sometimes have to stand naked.

Reflections On The Fourth

I hate the Fourth. But I love fireworks.

Unless you have a place of refuge, a cabin in the woods, an isolated vacation rental near Moclips, or reservations at the Hotel Sube in Saint Tropez, you cannot escape the Fourth. Its noise and imbecility are ubiquitous.

Cretins of all stripe and color are given carte blanche on the Fourth to blow their fingers off, destroy property, and commit general mayhem. This is their day. Their day to plumb the depths of imbecility and blacken the name of prudence with acts of raw insanity.

The use of fireworks is banned in Seattle. The regulation is heartily, meticulously, and emphatically unenforced. I have not seen a single cop fine or arrest anyone for discharging fireworks. Ever.

When I say I love fireworks, I’m not referring to the crap sold outside city limits, M80s, bottle rockets, cherry bombs, and sparklers, I’m referring to the big stuff: aerial shells fired out of mortars buried in sand on a floating platform, usually a barge. The kind that squiggle hundreds of feet in the air like an incendiary spermatozoa and explode into chrysanthemums and showers of crackling rain. The shows are carefully orchestrated and timed. They rarely go on for more than a half hour. Unlike the neighborhood cretins who keep everyone awake until 2:00 in the morning.

Seattle used to have two big fireworks displays, one on Puget Sound, the other on Lake Union. Now we have just the one, provided that enough sponsors step forward to finance it. This year’s display was sponsored primarily by Microsoft and Starbucks.

Roberta and I headed down to Lake Union at about 9:00 p.m. Lake Union is a small lake sandwiched between Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east and are joined by the Lake Washington Ship Canal. There is very little open shoreline on Lake Union, which is densely populated with marinas, restaurants, businesses, and houseboat neighborhoods.

We found a spot near Signature Yachts, a viewpoint blocked by a high railing. A few other people were lingering there, mostly young couples with their kids. I pondered the possibility of climbing up and sitting on the railing, but it was too high to make that a feasible enterprise. It would be a precarious perch. I gazed at the water below, which was shallow enough to reveal a huge pipe. If I did manage to get my butt ensconced on the top rail, and happened to fall, that’s what I would hit. Not to mention getting soaked. This summer has been the coolest I have known in Seattle. Highs have barely reached 70. Getting soaked was not an idle prospect to be trifled with.

I folded my arms on the railing and rested my head on my arms.
There were three enormous yachts floating in the distance. Each was as large as a three-story building. I pointed to them and told Roberta that’s where our Social Security and Medicare were going. I indulged in a brief fantasy of aiming a bazooka at each and watching as they exploded into splinters and flames.

There was a huge crowd at Gasworks Park on the other side of the lake. We could hear music. I thought at first that there was a live band playing, but as soon as I heard the distinctive chords of Jimi Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner," it became obvious the music was taped. Almost all of the songs that were played dated from the 60s and 70s. It occurred to me that that music is now 40 to 45 years old. If, say, in 1968 they had played music that old we would have been listening to “Doin’ The Raccoon” and “When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.”

I can’t remember a time when I felt anything like a patriotic emotion. I remember a time when I felt lucky to have been born in a country that offered such a high quality of life, free and open access to education, colleges where the tuition was so low as to be non-existent to nominal, public schools that encouraged students to think, where learning anything by rote was discouraged as the activity of a crass and vulgar mind, doctors that made house calls and charged a very modest fee, books published for the quality of writing and originality of idea rather than sensationalism or fame, free clinics, free parking, water fountains galore, roads and highways where hitting anything like a pothole or bump only occurred in the most remote and dismal of places, apartments and houses where the rent was so cheap you could get by on a part time job while pursuing a more creative occupation such as painting or writing and have plenty of money left over for food and bills and eating out occasionally, or a lot. Where the idea of a bridge collapsing was as remote as a volcano erupting in midtown Manhattan. Where a single parent doing even a menial job as a janitor or parking attendant could afford a house and raise a family while the other parent stayed home to watch the kids and maintain a clean and orderly house.

That country is long gone. It feels so utterly remote now as to constitute a once mythical utopia, the lost continent of Atlantis or the golden city of El Dorado.

I feel a great admiration for the people who fought against the British in the late 1700s. They put their lives on the line for a cause and the misery of a great injustice. They refused to be exploited. I wish it were that way now. The United States is once again under attack. But this time it is under attack by a tiny cabal of über-rich oligarchs. The enemy is insidious. Treacherous. When the President publicly states that he is considering cuts to vital programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, one realizes that one is no longer represented by the people holding power, but threatened. Under attack.

Thoughts of patriotism do not enter my mind on the Fourth. No more than a belief in Santa Claus fuels my enjoyment of Christmas. I just like the fireworks. Those immense explosions. The burst of colors and lights followed seconds later by a loud report. Thud. Bang. Boom. It’s exhilarating. Like watching the universe burst into life out of the void. Out of nothingness.

The United States, as a political entity, fills me with shame and revulsion. It murders, pillages, oppresses and tortures using national security as the flimsiest of excuses for such flagrant immorality. But the United States as a culture in which people such as Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau and Janis Joplin and Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and Billy Holiday and Mark Twain and Martin Luther King have been shaped is something else. It’s like a subterranean United States. It’s not the United States that is seen on television or babbled about on right wing radio shows. That United States is monstrous. Despicable and evil. The other United States, the one in which people find means to resist and lead lives of joyful energy and creativity, that one I can live in. That one doesn’t give me a bad conscience, or fill me with fear and loathing. That one isn’t called The United States. It doesn’t have a high falutin’ title. It’s the weird old America of Wild Bill Hickok and Sitting Bull. Vikings roasting a goat. Arapaho naming a mountain peak. Choctaw inventing verbs for sewing and talking and riding a horse to the moon.

Soft Warm Smooth And Conscious

Is a line I stole from the poem Priapic Hymn
By Philip Whalen who apparently took the time
To celebrate slippery dong and balls all over
The appeal of this line if it is not apparent already
Is the lovely way it sums up the feeling of being
Alive and human a mammal with hair and legs
Testicles toenails fingernails opposable thumbs
Eyes ears nose a torso a cock a pair of shoulders
With a head on top thinking thoughts about consciousness
It’s my favorite topic my biggest fascination
My hypothesis concerning consciousness is this
As soon as nerves evolved a feeling of being alive blossomed
Out of what I’m not sure a glop of protein
That grew into stalks and eyeballs
And needed to eat to say alive and so went looking
For something to eat which requires a small degree
Of planning and strategy an organism is largely urged
To interact with the environment out of a desire to eat
Or procreate the whole thing is baffling what’s the purpose of it all
Where does it lead the planet is dying there are too many humans
         on it
You cannot say human intelligence developed so as to maintain
         balance
That clearly is not the case the planet is dying
From too many wars too much oil dug up and burned into the air
Radioactivity ignorance greed cruelty madness veins squirting
         blood
Bones protruded cadavers everywhere in the street
Rock stars riding in limousines dictators eating pretzels figure
         skaters
Twirling on Helsinki ice all aglitter all awhirl and why not it’s
         pretty
We all begin as an embryo a multicellular glop of neurons and glial
         cells
Which later turn into a dentist or dictator depending on a
         confluence
Of circumstances called destiny when the mouth develops a
         thought
Of raw sienna the need for expression is partially redeemed
In the movements of a brush on the surface of a canvas
Or a series of words written down on a sheet of paper or pumped
Into sound in the form of speech which is another form of
         gestation
The syllable is an embryo the sentence is a fetus a paragraph is a
         giraffe
Or elephant or ape or homo sapiens male or female Elton John or
         Lady Gaga

Words Words Words

I have a head full of words. They’re easy to extract. I can either extrude them through my mouth, à la aluminum tubes or beryllium blocks, shaping them with my tongue and lips and filling them with air and sound, or write them down on paper, or a computer screen. But as soon as I launch one batch, another set of words appears, demanding expression. They seem to self-propagate.

I can’t get away from them. It’s part of being a human being and living within a certain culture. One that shares words. One that makes sounds that have meaning for one another.

And then one day I got drunk and starting tossing out words whether they made sense or not. I had a lot of fun doing that. I soon learned that the very process of tossing words out willy-nilly produces a state of intoxication. Handy, if you like being delirious, not so handy if you need to find employment.

Today I want to avoid anything unpleasant. Making an appointment to have a new molar installed, or doing the laundry. I often have an urge to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling.

Eyeballs are created out of muscle, jelly, blood vessels and nerves. Light waves stream through the jelly activating nerve impulses that carry the shapes and colors to the brain where they are identified according to patterns learned while growing up. Today those light waves consist of just about everything. Lamps, cat, stove, plants, sunlight, cars, rocks, towels, tomatoes, onions, jars, drawers, computer keyboard, computer screen, glasses, soap, coffee grinder, thermos. Words. More and more words. Fucking A.

And then there is the matter of ears. This morning I awoke to the sound of the washing machine. Though I didn’t know it was the washing machine. It sounded more like a cement truck whining away as it spewed wet cement into a cavity. It was a large, intrusive humming and whirring sound that later developed into a rumbling. The building shook. Someone was doing laundry early this morning. It must have been an emergency. Whoever it was must have needed some clean clothes pronto. The machine was set on heavy. What were they thinking of wearing? A double breasted cement suit? An earthquake? Tornado tennis shoes and a hurricane tie?

I was trying to listen to Hal Sparks on the radio. He’s filling in for Stephanie Miller and The Mooks. He’s a terrible radio host. He does not have a pleasant voice and his speech mannerisms are annoying. He inserts um between all of his words. This morning he was going on and on about how gays should be able to marry. Of course they should be able to marry. What a boring subject. Why does this need to be debated. Christians called in and said they objected. When gay people marry it destroys the institution of marriage. I don’t follow this logic. Sometimes people use words in a manner intended to convince you of something but the process gets so muddled it goes backwards. It reverses. Instead of sounding rational it sounds insane.

All marriage is is a promise to stay with someone for as long as possible. Until death do us part they say. So it’s pretty serious. That’s a heavy commitment. Because if you stay around anyone long enough, no matter how much you like them, it’s a guarantee they’re going to drive you crazy at some point. But that’s all marriage is. That simple promise. And whether you fulfill that promise is a lot of work. It’s not just words. Some things are just words. But marriage is not just words. It’s punching a wall instead of a person. Or staying by somebody’s bed when they’re sick. Possibly dying. It makes no difference whatever whether you have the same genitalia or not. Genitalia are only marginally involved. Either for having kids, or having a good time. But that’s not marriage. You can share the pleasures of genitalia without being married. People do it all the time.

So who wants to hear a bunch of crazy ass Christians denouncing gay marriage on the radio? Hal Sparks does. It makes him look cool and smart to argue with these people.

You never see words stuck in a beard like food. That’s because words are just sound and air. Hallucinations, really. Because they represent something or someone not present. If I say there is a giant parrot eating the Eiffel Tower it may or may not be true. I could even say it in French. Il y a un perroquet géant mangeant La Tour Eiffel. But that does not make it any truer. It may be true and it may not be true. You would have to go to France to find out. Or turn on the TV and see if anyone is reporting it.

There was a time when people used words like jewelry to show off their education. Big words like ‘distensible’ or ‘ithyphallic.’ But now that it has become cool to be ignorant and illiterate you don’t find that to be the case quite so much anymore. The American empire is crumbling and so is its language. Ironic, when you consider the fact that this is occurring during a time when people have access to so much information and so many tools for communication. But that’s why they invented twitter. So people could remain stupid while communicating with one another.

Stupidity has its charms, no doubt about it. But on balance, it is richer to be curious and expand your knowledge of things.

Because if you ever find yourself in prison, I guarantee that if you know enough words, you can always get out. Consciousness itself can be a prison. Ignorance is a prison. Language is the key to open the doors of that prison. Words words words said Hamlet with ironic contempt. You can never get rid of them and sometimes they tire your brain but most often they’re your ticket out of this world.

Breaking And Entering

Last night I broke into the Louvre. I was home, reading a magazine, when I suddenly felt an acute hunger for art. Do you know what it is to crave something? Of course you do. But this was different. This was beyond craving. There is no word for what I felt. My blood was electric. I was driven. I felt like a tiger trapped in the furious oils of Delacroix.

I am not a young man. I know what desire is. I have been driven by it a thousand times to say stupid things and do stupid things and finish an evening’s revelry with the sting of remorse and the angst of dissolution. Multiply this by a hundred, by a thousand, and you will begin to get a glimmer of what drove me to break into the Louvre.

I discovered that breaking into the Louvre is easy. But there are alarms everywhere. Duh. It wasn't long before the police arrived.

They looked everywhere. But they did not know where to look. Police are unaccustomed with phenomena such as this. It is not in their training. And yet I was there. I was there the whole time.

You could see me in the Mona Lisa's smile. In the soft cerulean sky of Odilon Redon's Le Char d'Apollon. In the lush green trees of Titian's The Pastoral Concert. In the wings and golden halos of Giotto's Lamentation. In the candle flame and shadows of George de La Tour's Saint Joseph The Carpenter.

I'm the man in the tophat holding the rifle in Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People.

I'm the fur and jewels in Rembrandt's portrait of Henrickje Stoffels with a Velvet Beret. I'm the tenderness with which he painted her. The bristles of the brush. The texture of the paint. The moment itself forever eluding the vicissitudes of time.

I'm The Buffoon With A Lute, Pandemonium, and Boy With A Club Foot. I am the frill in Titian's Man With The Glove, the heavy black robe in Erasmus of Rotterdam. In Louis Le Nain's Peasant Family, I am a spoon and a ladle and a cat on the floor. I am a beard and a wrinkle. I am the dirt and the folds of old, dingy clothing. I am the table. The chairs. The darkness, the weariness, the quiet dignity and resignation.

I am the boy playing the flute in the middle of the painting. The flute is so thin you can barely see it, barely see that amid this misery is a boy playing a flute. It is a wonder. This kid playing a flute among these sad, bitter people. No one appears to be listening. The old man at the table under his big floppy hat appears to have lost all hope. He takes what is given. He assumes nothing. His feet rest solidly on the ground.

When it was agreed that no one was in the museum and that something accidental, bad wiring or a mouse, must have tripped the alarm the police left the museum and it all turned quiet again. I dripped from the ceiling in beads of light and made my way home in the soft Paris night. Someone shouted: look! A tiger! And someone else, no, no it is just a boy with a club foot. And someone else, no, it is neither a boy nor a tiger, it is a fierce woman in a green dress crossing a barrier of debris and wounded men clutching a rifle and a flag. The top of her dress is undone and her magnificent breasts show us the voluptuous promise of the future. Follow that woman's breasts! She is leading the way to wholeness and liberty. And one old man opened his eyes in wonder and said, mon Dieu, c'est le Char d'Apollon! The Louvre has escaped!

Making Sense Of Sense

How many senses do I possess? Are there more than five? Is there a sense I haven’t discovered yet? Is poetry a sense, or simply a literary form? That is to say, is language an antenna, or a ganglionic mass of syntax and nerves?

If I had another sense, wouldn’t I simply sense it? I don’t think about touch, I touch. Don’t think about hearing. I hear. Don’t think about seeing. I see. Don’t think about tasting. I taste. If Ismell a rose I smell a rose. I don’t think about smelling a rose. I don’t think, smell a rose, then smell a rose. I simply smell a rose. None of these things are cerebral. They just occur. Happen.

But what if a sense were so subtle, I didn’t know I was sensing it, even though I was sensing it. Sensing the sense. Without sensing the sense. Because it’s too thin, too delicate, too ethereal.

But that doesn’t make any sense. How would I not know I was sensing something? Something not touch, or sound, or sight, or taste, or smell? Something ineffable. Something beyond the scope of language. Something I felt but could not say what I was feeling. Or that I could not affirm that what I sensed corresponded with something in the outside world. In the same way that something wet and sweet on my tongue is translated into a cherry, or an unpleasant quality on the skin is interpreted as cold, or something liquid and black and bitter to the taste can be identified as coffee.

Charles Olson did mention something about a proprioceptive sense. This is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body. The cavity of the body in which the organs are slung. Lungs, stomach, kidneys, intestines. All that gooey gooshy slimy convolution. Blood moving and moving through the veins, pumped by a muscle, the heart. The body of us as object which spontaneously or of its own order produces experiences of depth. A position, as being seated in front of a computer, a movie screen, cockpit of an airplane, or dentist’s office, someone, man, young woman, is bending over, concentrating heavily on our open mouth. They have latex gloves on their hands, and the radio is so low it can barely be heard. There are mountains on the ceiling. And a bright fluorescent light, for which the dentist has kindly provided sunglasses.

It gets to be a story. The senses combine to bring us the world, and it is delivered all at once, which makes it hard to organize in a paragraph. Poetry is more adept at this sort of thing.

Consciousness as ego, followed by judgment. Judgment has, of late, acquired a negative flavor. People often say: don’t judge me. Or, it’s so nice to be around friends who don’t judge you. That’s stupid. These aren’t friends, these are morons. I’m friends with people because they have judged me. They have judged me worthy to be a friend. And so there is friendship.

But’s matter for another discussion.

So let me ask you: do you have passions beyond your understanding? Beyond your control? Beyond the bounds of polite society? If civilization were to disappear tomorrow, would you miss it?

I would miss running water, electricity, and cellophane, but not much else. I imagine myself sometimes as living in harmony with the world, with nature, as a Laplander, a Sioux, a Choctaw, a Mongol shepherd or Celtic farmer circa 800 B.C. I could deal with that. No salt for my meat and vegetables, no place to shit except outside, behind a bush, but that’s no big deal. I would do that in exchange for a planet. Because the planet cannot sustain the kind of technology we have imposed on it for transport, houses, TV, computers and energy. The oceans are dying, the bees are dying, the planet itself is dying. I wonder if there will be enough protein left to begin another species. But how will they survive the radioactivity?

Certainly none of this makes sense.

And how do we know what is sensed is real? I have had my share of hallucinations. Hallucinations are fairly easy to identify. They’re like cartoons, all full of color and goofiness. Monsters, angels, phenomena not commonly found in the external world. But what of delusions? Beliefs that turn out to be false? Is there a surefire way to discriminate between what is real and what is not? If there is, I haven’t found it.

Let’s say you believe in God and one day a tornado comes along and blows your house away and kills your pets and spouse and children. Or leaves your pets and spouse and children safe and sound. But your house is gone. And you have no insurance or place to live, except the high school gymnasium, where the Red Cross has provided some blankets and a cot. Do you thank the same God who made the tornado for selecting you, out of all those other people, for saving your life? Or do you get pissed like Job, and say what the fuck, I was pious and prayed and went to church, and this is how you repay me? Destroy my house? My job? My friends and family?

Spinoza cautions us about language: Again, since words are a part of the imagination --- that is, since we form many conceptions in accordance with confused arrangements of words in the memory, dependent on particular bodily conditions, --- there is no doubt that words may, equally with the imagination, be the cause of many and great errors, unless we keep strictly on our guard. Moreover, words are formed according to popular fancy and intelligence, and are, therefore, signs of things as existing in the imagination, not as existing in the understanding. This is evident from the fact that to all such things as exist only in the understanding, not in the imagination, negative names are often given, such as incorporeal, infinite, &c. So, also, many conceptions really affirmative are expressed negatively, and vice versa, such as uncreate, independent, infinite, immortal, &c., inasmuch as their contraries are much more easily imagined, and, therefore, occurred first to men, and usurped positive names. Many things we affirm and deny, because the nature of words allows us to do so, though the nature of things does not. While we remain unaware of this fact, we may easily mistake falsehood for truth.

It’s so easy to slip up, and assume that an idea has weight, and substance, when, in fact, it is less substantial than a palace of vapor floating over Düsseldorf.

I believe, right now, this minute, that what I am sensing is summer, moderate warmth, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and the lingering taste of coffee, and fingers on a keyboard, dancing, making these signs, pixels, words, and if I want a boat, I will make a boat, write boat, and a boat exists, at least in my imagination, though in actuality, there is a boat in my future, assuming the future is real, which it is not, it is always a fiction, a ball of myriad possibilities, rolling toward the void. Where there is life and potential. And assurances and oceans. Floating a boat of the future on a suffusion of words.