I like crowds gatherings swarms I can’t say why maybe it’s the profusion I’m in love with profusion a surge of words for example words in a swarm of description words floating tumbling spilling through the mind as if the mind were a huge arena an empty space in the skull and light entering through the eyes was without substance or meaning until the energy of the light its photons activated nerves traveled in electrical impulse congealed commingled coagulated assumed the weight and form of meaning something red something shiny something viscous something urgent and moving like blood the way blood will appear on the skin after a thin barely perceptible cut and will bead and smear and eventually coagulate forming one day a scab.
It is sweet to carry an umbrella I must go public with this I will use antennas sticks goldfish apples sparklers myriad currents morning in the mountains mirrors and camels.
Nothing escapes necessity except the necessity to escape.
The world is a place of migration constant pursuit dusty banging cars meat bumped into action moving dunes cracked hands anarchic winds. You never know when it might rain but the desert is always encroaching. The hunger for freedom persists like a glowing metaphor the biography of time a palace in the clouds waves crashing on the shore blobs of meaning splayed on the sand gelatinous transparent lustrous.
Kerosene is a proposal a puff of breath on a feather.
The restaurant was closed. It had its own atmosphere. Clusters of hyacinth scintillating brocades a parable of green stirring as a summer in Seattle.
Glue speaks to the point of adherence, and adheres. The farm is an abstraction. Only the lonely recognize it as a place of pragmatic heresy. Fatalism is an oversimplification, like carving a bank robbery out of a Texas drawl.
Lust in a caress demonstrates the soul of the apricot a handkerchief inflated into a bird perched high and defiant on a finger of stone gargling the literature of the heart.
Description grows eyes. I feel purple. I want to linger here. Electricity is amazing. Have you ever played bingo during a lightning storm? Each muscle fulfills the motivation of bone.
Thought is a form of exploration. Thought renders life more agreeable, although some adjustments may be necessary, a little water tossed into the air a transcendental hat a palomino on a surfboard instants before it swells into a theory whose circumference sprawls over the terrain like sunlight.
This flowing this silver this business of writing is like finding mounds of cocaine on a Peruvian mirror I am awed by the alchemy of words odors that reflect the discourse of the forest upside down and Fauve the private sensations of genitalia the feeling of romance waxed like a console in the hall of mirrors at Versailles then pushed into morality or joined into sticky halves of DNA hippopotamus or slug the song of a mockingbird the hectic antithesis of insects.
The ground shakes the details of the horizon the phenomenon is delicate arms akimbo. I feel old but malleable. Can a lobster fly? Of course it can. It is like an anthology of poetry: another form of willingness.
Cotton is entirely mental but it can be worn with an air of moody approval or immersed in suds until it fades into broad-minded images of granite. Heady abstractions. Eyes floating in a bowl of milk.
Distance evokes the sky, which is indispensable for a diagnosis of turmoil.
Evocation rides the dragons of discourse. The sky bends into a worried look. The logic of glue implies contingency. Propositions are complex entities bound together in a certain way. There is syntax, which is a species of glue, and semantic properties, harnessed together by declension and chain to form new, complex relations. Milwaukee. Mania. Sedimentation. Stars in a puddle, oarlocks and collar studs, a giant crystalline lobster tap-dancing on a treadmill.
A constellation of drums excites a conception of art based on the weather. And when we arrive in Limoges, the thunder dissolves into punctuation. A river curves into the color ocher. The MGM lion runs down the aisle of the theater with an intestine in its mouth.
If you wrinkle a sheet of tinfoil in your hands a certain way you will discover a passion for politics, undress, and do fifty-two push-ups.
A skull unearthed in Denmark adorns the dashboard of a red Mustang convertible. We have all made this voyage at one time or another. We have all watched as the rain moved over the crest of a mountain in a veil of ephemeral agitation and felt the first few drops on our skin as we hurried to clear the picnic-table and make it back to the car before the heavens opened and the rain came down in torrents.
All the world requires an epilogue, a perfume or equation that expresses our essence, our endeavor to find rebirth in stone and quietude.
Deliverance comes in vermilion, gallant and stirring.
The sunlight surrenders its strawberries. The night secretes its definitions of pain. Larynx and eyeball bloom in the sun. A huge black snake weaves its way through a sentence, following an apparition of meaning, some possibility of warmth, references to worlds and times that map our relation to the universe and bring some materiality to the gauze of our understanding.
I see it all in a painting. In a still life by Cézanne. Undercurrents of sexual fury in a bowl of fruit. The sheen of initiation. The shine of expiation. The wobble of wood. The penchants of peach.
Finally, we turn to algebraic approaches. The ability to disengage oneself from a concrete situation. A combat, for instance, or riot. It isn’t adequate to say that speech equals thought. It just isn’t.
What one can say is this: a man speaks as a lightbulb becomes incandescent, that is, without any idea of why.
Feeling inclines toward feeling and detours are genial when the yearning is soft.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Because The Sky Is Crying
Rivers start as threads
Of water in the mountains
Tumbling down in inexpressible purity
To become tea or coffee
Words are the residue
Of a long incubation
Let’s talk about God
Fireworks in all the colors of the spectrum
The poet chisels the air
With the roar of a wildcat in an antique store
Pain is sometimes a diversion
Or a simple drink of water
I struggle every day against the embarrassment
Of the pump on my grandparent’s farm
Eyeballs and olives and other beautiful spheres
Balance it out
With the taste of rain
The rivers of China
Are radical as ants
Even the lobster has a purpose
On a spectral farm with spectral cows
Drink the sky
Hoist a sentence on your tongue
A word emerging from the tip of a pen
A broken beer bottle in the street
A poem written in 1971
Teleological as the color yellow
Tendencies of deep affection bubble at the surface
Of a dime on the coffee table
An abalone gliding in a mountainous wave
Is the eye in the wind
Of a soul in a storm
Dissonance is indispensable
Observes Marcel Proust in a rowboat
I hold in my hand a fire
Forged in the pathos
Of cause and effect
Because the sky is crying
And poetry is a suitcase
Full of soothing walls
And a voice hanging in the air
Here for instance is a pair of pants
With belt buckle in the form of a swan
The curtain rises on a pair of lovers
And Erica Jong in an airplane
Jotting everything down
Fondling the vapor
Of the human breast
In a motel room in Omaha
All the rivers are nerves
Of light flaming into space
Of water in the mountains
Tumbling down in inexpressible purity
To become tea or coffee
Words are the residue
Of a long incubation
Let’s talk about God
Fireworks in all the colors of the spectrum
The poet chisels the air
With the roar of a wildcat in an antique store
Pain is sometimes a diversion
Or a simple drink of water
I struggle every day against the embarrassment
Of the pump on my grandparent’s farm
Eyeballs and olives and other beautiful spheres
Balance it out
With the taste of rain
The rivers of China
Are radical as ants
Even the lobster has a purpose
On a spectral farm with spectral cows
Drink the sky
Hoist a sentence on your tongue
A word emerging from the tip of a pen
A broken beer bottle in the street
A poem written in 1971
Teleological as the color yellow
Tendencies of deep affection bubble at the surface
Of a dime on the coffee table
An abalone gliding in a mountainous wave
Is the eye in the wind
Of a soul in a storm
Dissonance is indispensable
Observes Marcel Proust in a rowboat
I hold in my hand a fire
Forged in the pathos
Of cause and effect
Because the sky is crying
And poetry is a suitcase
Full of soothing walls
And a voice hanging in the air
Here for instance is a pair of pants
With belt buckle in the form of a swan
The curtain rises on a pair of lovers
And Erica Jong in an airplane
Jotting everything down
Fondling the vapor
Of the human breast
In a motel room in Omaha
All the rivers are nerves
Of light flaming into space
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The Smell Of Rain Aboard A Train
Pain is sometimes a diversion, like a simple glass of water, or the smell of rain aboard a train. The dreams of the lobster are the property of the lobster, whereas the rivers of China are spectacular with the physiology of the fugue. Nothing is static. Everything moves. Each story has its paths, each washing machine its cycles. Pleasure and pain are one and the same. I know you don’t believe me, but believe me, extend this cognition into something soft and permeable, so that it may be better understood as a tongue. A muscle. The raw volume of a skinny inquiry doing cartwheels on a strawberry.
Or rainfall in North Dakota. There is a power in bread called life. Climb through the tangle of thought in your head and tell me why the sky is leaning against the ground in August. It takes a lot of sweat and wood to build a fire, but sheer bravery to combine pineapple with bacon.
I live in Seattle, as you may already have guessed. Here is a map of the Rio Tinto Zinc Mines, and here is a strand of Pythagorean string dripping words. You will find a pair of fingernail clippers in the drawer to the right under the bathroom mirror beneath a beige comb. The Sumerians scratched their alphabet into clay. But you can do better. You have a pen. You can tease the surface of a sheet of paper into revealing interactions of cause and effect.
The sky is crying. But not because I love hamburgers. Not that, no. But because it is harnessed to a paragraph where it is bullied into performing the function of an image. An image of air. Of heaven. Of clouds and stars. Everything that a sky does, including totems in the fog.
Here, for instance, is Shakespeare dipping a quill into a bottle of ink. The texture of his words have been baked in a philodendron, moistened with a rag, and pushed into unthinkable abstractions, a storm at sea, the redemption of trees, witches on a moor, oak and iron and hope, an old harmonica with the sheen of infinity. Fold it into a sparrow and give it to a sorrowful Elizabethan.
No prison can imprison the mind. The mind is a pigment that is easy to smear into a sweet conflagration of arms and legs in motion around a lotus. Infinity is real. Saturday is an illusion. The pickle is an appliance. Violins and bugs implicit as a web. And yes, these are only words, but they cry out for utterance, stamp and envelope.
Dear Bob Dylan why are you always juggling piles of laundry in the hallway? Can’t you see that the smell of spice has imbued the room with dragons and indigo? That a Wall Street Bankster is playing a fiddle next to a window? That the world is throbbing upside down? That if a balloon of thought excites the globe of the head it must result in a sonnet? How many roads must a man walk down before he becomes a seagull snatching a French fry from the lips of fate?
Life is green and lifts itself into a fist of anger. Coffee dances among the nerves. My thumb is out I am hitchhiking in my sleep. Here is a sentence lathered with the absence of stolen money. Here is the sensation of a cherry bursting in the mouth, and here is a fury of rain pelting the surface of a river. Enhance your behavior with sweat. Put some quarters in a jukebox and toss that old bleeding heart into a song of woe. I am all shook up with no place to go.
Except Texas. Willie Nelson driving a jeep ignites a mockingbird and ruminates on a bag of nails. There is a balloon of thought over his head and he realizes that he is in a cartoon called life.
Life is funny and strange. We all know that. There is no reason for it. For life. For struggle. For birth and death. Pin the cocoon to a human tear and it will one day emerge as a butterfly, eloquent and chronological, a mask of indigo on a face of rust.
Time imitates the movement of stars, but life is forged in the furnace of a wound.
The hole in the wind, said the poet, is where the intoxication of trees find their symbol of grace. It is where the appeal of gauze is in its sympathy. And where folds of cloth flap for no reason. Red buttons on a white shirt. A vague emotion resisting description. A spectral cow. A cripple’s brace.
Money is the engine of war. You can’t wear it. You can only exchange it. Its value is gained in honor, and lost in dishonor. It’s very simple. Simpler than you can imagine. Soap furthers the glide of the hand on the skin, while Joseph Priestly describes the air to a skull on a painter’s table.
Or rainfall in North Dakota. There is a power in bread called life. Climb through the tangle of thought in your head and tell me why the sky is leaning against the ground in August. It takes a lot of sweat and wood to build a fire, but sheer bravery to combine pineapple with bacon.
I live in Seattle, as you may already have guessed. Here is a map of the Rio Tinto Zinc Mines, and here is a strand of Pythagorean string dripping words. You will find a pair of fingernail clippers in the drawer to the right under the bathroom mirror beneath a beige comb. The Sumerians scratched their alphabet into clay. But you can do better. You have a pen. You can tease the surface of a sheet of paper into revealing interactions of cause and effect.
The sky is crying. But not because I love hamburgers. Not that, no. But because it is harnessed to a paragraph where it is bullied into performing the function of an image. An image of air. Of heaven. Of clouds and stars. Everything that a sky does, including totems in the fog.
Here, for instance, is Shakespeare dipping a quill into a bottle of ink. The texture of his words have been baked in a philodendron, moistened with a rag, and pushed into unthinkable abstractions, a storm at sea, the redemption of trees, witches on a moor, oak and iron and hope, an old harmonica with the sheen of infinity. Fold it into a sparrow and give it to a sorrowful Elizabethan.
No prison can imprison the mind. The mind is a pigment that is easy to smear into a sweet conflagration of arms and legs in motion around a lotus. Infinity is real. Saturday is an illusion. The pickle is an appliance. Violins and bugs implicit as a web. And yes, these are only words, but they cry out for utterance, stamp and envelope.
Dear Bob Dylan why are you always juggling piles of laundry in the hallway? Can’t you see that the smell of spice has imbued the room with dragons and indigo? That a Wall Street Bankster is playing a fiddle next to a window? That the world is throbbing upside down? That if a balloon of thought excites the globe of the head it must result in a sonnet? How many roads must a man walk down before he becomes a seagull snatching a French fry from the lips of fate?
Life is green and lifts itself into a fist of anger. Coffee dances among the nerves. My thumb is out I am hitchhiking in my sleep. Here is a sentence lathered with the absence of stolen money. Here is the sensation of a cherry bursting in the mouth, and here is a fury of rain pelting the surface of a river. Enhance your behavior with sweat. Put some quarters in a jukebox and toss that old bleeding heart into a song of woe. I am all shook up with no place to go.
Except Texas. Willie Nelson driving a jeep ignites a mockingbird and ruminates on a bag of nails. There is a balloon of thought over his head and he realizes that he is in a cartoon called life.
Life is funny and strange. We all know that. There is no reason for it. For life. For struggle. For birth and death. Pin the cocoon to a human tear and it will one day emerge as a butterfly, eloquent and chronological, a mask of indigo on a face of rust.
Time imitates the movement of stars, but life is forged in the furnace of a wound.
The hole in the wind, said the poet, is where the intoxication of trees find their symbol of grace. It is where the appeal of gauze is in its sympathy. And where folds of cloth flap for no reason. Red buttons on a white shirt. A vague emotion resisting description. A spectral cow. A cripple’s brace.
Money is the engine of war. You can’t wear it. You can only exchange it. Its value is gained in honor, and lost in dishonor. It’s very simple. Simpler than you can imagine. Soap furthers the glide of the hand on the skin, while Joseph Priestly describes the air to a skull on a painter’s table.
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Tao Of Water
Clouds are water. Odd to think a substance can change so radically from one thing to another. Liquid, solid, gas. Water.
Montaigne writes about inconstancy among humans as if it were pervasive as rain. But I’m not sure I agree. He writes: “Nothing is harder for me than to believe in men’s consistency, nothing easier than to believe in their inconsistency.”
This has not been my experience, except in the case of politicians, such as Obama, who say one thing to get elected, and do another once elected. But this is duplicity, not inconsistency. Most of the people I have known over a long period of time have been very consistent. My view of them may have altered, but they have remained very much the same.
“Our ordinary practice,” observes Montaigne, “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstances carries us. We think of what we want only at the moment we want it, and we change like that animal which takes the color of the place you set it on. What we have just now planned, we presently change, and presently again we retrace our steps: nothing but oscillation and inconsistency: ‘Like puppets we are moved by outside things.’ Horace.”
This was true when I drank alcohol. There were mornings far too numerous to number upon which I awoke with the pounding headache and sharp anguish of a hangover, after swearing to myself for the umpteenth time I would never drink so immoderately again. But once I made it to AA, and quit drinking, and eventually smoking, I was left with a course that was pretty steady.
I’ve led a pretty Spartan life, largely self-imposed as the result of pursuing a chimera called poetry. Maybe that’s why my behavior has been so spectacularly consistent. I haven’t had the financial means to indulge my desires. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. And read. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved writing. I’ve done what I could to support myself with menial jobs that provided just enough money to procure shelter, food, and a few creature comforts.
Which isn’t to say I’ve been free of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy has been a pretty useful cover for working around people I could not stand. It has been a tool of survival. I don’t have any reservations in that regard. No one can hold down a job without pretending to like people you otherwise loath. Particularly managers and supervisors.
What troubles me now isn’t a chaos of contradictory actions left in my wake, but the inheritance of the decisions I made when I was in my 20s. Despite the mythology of opportunity engraved in the stone of the great American swindle, there are few opportunities available to those below a certain income. And those opportunities are becoming fewer as the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. The career path you have chosen after leaving high school, if not before, will remain your career path for the rest of your life.
I decided very early in life to become a writer. This was at a time when it was still somewhat possible to make a career out of writing. Not journalism, necessarily, which used to be a pretty good opportunity for up and coming writers, but creative writing: novels and short stories and poetry. Writers such as Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Joan Didion, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates demonstrated that it could be done.
I recognized by the time I was 18 that, unless I hit the jackpot à la Brautigan or Kerouac, I would never be financially well off. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. But then, I was only 18, it was 1966, and Bob Dylan made the open road look sexy and cool. “How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / like a rolling stone.”
The biggest change I saw in people came between 1970 and 1980. People who, in their 20s, had been full of passion and creativity and joyfully embraced a life of simple, inexpensive pleasures, became obsessed with careers in their 30s. They became dull, lifeless zombies. It was sad.
For someone who prides themselves on their creativity, it is embarrassing to admit to being so consistent, particularly when it comes to one’s principles. I wish I could say I have changed my mind more often. But I haven’t. I have always despised war, the military, the ludicrous posturing of male aggression, a vulgar, craven materialism that seems so much a peculiarly American trait, willful ignorance, bullying, intellectual squalor, Babbitry, and sentimentality.
The one area where I have felt the most out of control, the most regret for past actions and stupid, mean things that I have said, is anger. Rants. Dry drunks. Occasions upon which I am grateful there wasn’t a recording device around.
I’ve never hit anyone, killed anyone, or cheated anyone. Never stole, never told a lie that hurt anyone. This is depressing. I’m starting to feel like a little goody two-shoes.
The closest I have come to betraying my principles, is when, in a moment of weakness, circa 1973, when I was in my mid-twenties, I applied for a job at Lockheed. My application was not taken seriously. No one called for an interview. I can’t even remember what I applied for. I probably left that part blank. I just wanted a job that paid enough money to allow me to rent a decent apartment and feed myself.
Life must have been very different in Montaigne’s time. It is highly probable that I simply haven’t been tested. Life was rougher in his day. My life has never been so hard that I’ve been tempted to steal or kill. I’ve had it pretty good as far as that’s concerned.
“No one makes a definite plan of his life,” says Montaigne. “Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.”
What if you become the sea itself? One day salt and waves, the next day vapor splayed out against the sky. One day ice. The next day bubbling and boiling.
But always water. “The best man is like water,” says Lao-tzu. “Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it so near Tao.”
Montaigne writes about inconstancy among humans as if it were pervasive as rain. But I’m not sure I agree. He writes: “Nothing is harder for me than to believe in men’s consistency, nothing easier than to believe in their inconsistency.”
This has not been my experience, except in the case of politicians, such as Obama, who say one thing to get elected, and do another once elected. But this is duplicity, not inconsistency. Most of the people I have known over a long period of time have been very consistent. My view of them may have altered, but they have remained very much the same.
“Our ordinary practice,” observes Montaigne, “is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstances carries us. We think of what we want only at the moment we want it, and we change like that animal which takes the color of the place you set it on. What we have just now planned, we presently change, and presently again we retrace our steps: nothing but oscillation and inconsistency: ‘Like puppets we are moved by outside things.’ Horace.”
This was true when I drank alcohol. There were mornings far too numerous to number upon which I awoke with the pounding headache and sharp anguish of a hangover, after swearing to myself for the umpteenth time I would never drink so immoderately again. But once I made it to AA, and quit drinking, and eventually smoking, I was left with a course that was pretty steady.
I’ve led a pretty Spartan life, largely self-imposed as the result of pursuing a chimera called poetry. Maybe that’s why my behavior has been so spectacularly consistent. I haven’t had the financial means to indulge my desires. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. And read. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved writing. I’ve done what I could to support myself with menial jobs that provided just enough money to procure shelter, food, and a few creature comforts.
Which isn’t to say I’ve been free of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy has been a pretty useful cover for working around people I could not stand. It has been a tool of survival. I don’t have any reservations in that regard. No one can hold down a job without pretending to like people you otherwise loath. Particularly managers and supervisors.
What troubles me now isn’t a chaos of contradictory actions left in my wake, but the inheritance of the decisions I made when I was in my 20s. Despite the mythology of opportunity engraved in the stone of the great American swindle, there are few opportunities available to those below a certain income. And those opportunities are becoming fewer as the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. The career path you have chosen after leaving high school, if not before, will remain your career path for the rest of your life.
I decided very early in life to become a writer. This was at a time when it was still somewhat possible to make a career out of writing. Not journalism, necessarily, which used to be a pretty good opportunity for up and coming writers, but creative writing: novels and short stories and poetry. Writers such as Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Joan Didion, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates demonstrated that it could be done.
I recognized by the time I was 18 that, unless I hit the jackpot à la Brautigan or Kerouac, I would never be financially well off. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. But then, I was only 18, it was 1966, and Bob Dylan made the open road look sexy and cool. “How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / like a rolling stone.”
The biggest change I saw in people came between 1970 and 1980. People who, in their 20s, had been full of passion and creativity and joyfully embraced a life of simple, inexpensive pleasures, became obsessed with careers in their 30s. They became dull, lifeless zombies. It was sad.
For someone who prides themselves on their creativity, it is embarrassing to admit to being so consistent, particularly when it comes to one’s principles. I wish I could say I have changed my mind more often. But I haven’t. I have always despised war, the military, the ludicrous posturing of male aggression, a vulgar, craven materialism that seems so much a peculiarly American trait, willful ignorance, bullying, intellectual squalor, Babbitry, and sentimentality.
The one area where I have felt the most out of control, the most regret for past actions and stupid, mean things that I have said, is anger. Rants. Dry drunks. Occasions upon which I am grateful there wasn’t a recording device around.
I’ve never hit anyone, killed anyone, or cheated anyone. Never stole, never told a lie that hurt anyone. This is depressing. I’m starting to feel like a little goody two-shoes.
The closest I have come to betraying my principles, is when, in a moment of weakness, circa 1973, when I was in my mid-twenties, I applied for a job at Lockheed. My application was not taken seriously. No one called for an interview. I can’t even remember what I applied for. I probably left that part blank. I just wanted a job that paid enough money to allow me to rent a decent apartment and feed myself.
Life must have been very different in Montaigne’s time. It is highly probable that I simply haven’t been tested. Life was rougher in his day. My life has never been so hard that I’ve been tempted to steal or kill. I’ve had it pretty good as far as that’s concerned.
“No one makes a definite plan of his life,” says Montaigne. “Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.”
What if you become the sea itself? One day salt and waves, the next day vapor splayed out against the sky. One day ice. The next day bubbling and boiling.
But always water. “The best man is like water,” says Lao-tzu. “Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it so near Tao.”
Monday, August 1, 2011
Reality Is A Cobra In A Magician's Bag
I like crowded restaurants where plates and silverware clatter and different conversations go on simultaneously at all the tables, voices meshing and sewing and interweaving. Looms of sound and image. Keep your sleeves off the table there’s bound to be goop or syrup. Waiters and waitresses are all busy. It is a marvel how they remember what plate goes to which person. The patience is monumental. Flavors search for you as you search for flavors.
I turn to answer the glass, the structure of things. The light that separates night from day, day from night, and the light in between. The twilight light. Half light. Light of reminiscence. Reflection. Moisture. Coiled hose, still dripping. The strange silence amid the tangle of plants.
Orchids tremble in the smell of dirt. The greenhouse humidity brings tears of sweat to the skin of men with the sea in their eyes.
The words drink themselves drunk, until there is history. Buffalo graze on South Dakota hills. The morning has a girth and heft, it has been hammered together in a valley of sweating gods. The day is bronze. Our effort, as artists, is to make the invisible visible. Piebald, slalom, and facet. Robin Blaser bends over the steering wheel, thinking of the miracles of Mary in Egypt.
What do you call the craft of the poet? How does a poet barter for food? What form of work is it to build a house of words? For what flowers? What African birds? What new Picasso knocks at the door of the new? What stream of words turn to limestone and grow hungry for heft? Sometimes the river finds itself in a kitchen sink. There is power in walking. There is a wilderness in words. You can go anywhere. Reality is a cobra in a magician’s bag.
Linger there in the trees and listen to the birds. Robins, sparrows, jays. Bobolinks, flickers, cedar waxwings. The cliffs are vertiginous. Nothing represents anything. Each thing is solidly its own thing. Unique. Rough. Smooth. Edged. Round. We are in the realm of the immediate. A woman gazes out of the window. Someone across the street is sawing and hammering. The city is the human grasp. Property is the blade of exclusion. There is a large, interior war in everyone. The battle for autonomy. Freedom from the needs of the body and its insane desires.
Summer warms the wood of the boardwalk. Abstractions kill the clouds. The clouds kill abstractions. No ideas but in things. No prawns but on prongs. Everything is in flux. Powerful flux. Even flux is in flux. Flux would make a good name for a laundry detergent. Churn of water and clothes and suds. The noise of machines. The punch of the real. Designs hammered into leather. Thesis flies when the tongue wags. Have you ever seen a tongue wag? No, but I have seen a thesis fly. Flutter in words and hover over a sheet of paper like an hallucination of animals. Animals that appear hungry. Hungry for expression. Hungry for meat. The expression of meat in hooves and legs and muscle and blood.
Images on a cavern wall. A sacred subterranean world of stalagmites and stalactites and dripping limestone columns and places were the skulls and bones of Leviathan mammals repose in the soft cool dust of eternity.
Paradigms of stone, beautiful asymmetries, curves, voluptuous lines adjusting with mastery and grace to the incongruities of stone, horses stampeding Paleolithic plains. The air is charged. Dragonflies hum over lava beds. Obsidian bubbles. Bare feet. Fires in pools of water. There is no point. Nothing with a point. The mind is a ship sailing insoluble water. Waves are ovations, water applauding the infinite horizon. There is a railroad underwater. We can hear it gurgle.
My words are contrary to the world. My words run wild among olives, participles tart and luminous. The sun is a bomb of continuous explosion. Explosions of gold that drool warmth among the bones. That lick the skin until it is dark. Nerval dreams in a forest where the trees eat the light and birds in their parliaments chatter until the sun drops.
Poke the fire. The flames curl around the wood. Flames from the words squeezed until the juice of meaning dribbles on paper. All shook up. Please don’t step on my blue suede shoes. The effervescent hair of the trees in the emerging wind is a mark of ablution. Sandstone indicates the passage of spirit.
Capitalism is dying. The dollar is losing its value. People are buying gold like crazy. The flow of money has stopped. The market is black and gangrenous. I wear whatever is tangible. These are tangible years. These are empirical years. Time itself has become obsolete. Talk is nimble in the bars where dissolution grows ripe and the faces are wooden and women cover their bodies in tattoos. An alligator rides a woman’s bicep. The sheen of the bar reveals the grain of mahogany. A brook ripples through a man’s mind.
Let’s all yell French ocher! French ocher! French ocher! at the dump. Morality is a thing of the past. The halcyon past. It’s been ripped to shreds. It’s worthless. It’s taking up room. Valuable room. Box it. Put it in the attic. Build a birdhouse. Make it out of clay. Shoot the rain. Shoot it with a machine gun. .50 caliber Browning. With butterfly bullets and the brain of a moose.
If you’re looking for coherence you should visit the ocean. There is wisdom in the ocean. The wisdom of salt. The wisdom of depth. The wisdom of wave and wind and trough and crest. Essence and flight and hymn and marrow. Push and pull. Scurry and lark. Watch those waves swell, grow higher, crest, and curl, and crash into the sand. The way the water murmurs and whispers as it moves up the sand, then pulls back, revealing bubbles, little holes and places where the sand puckers, reflects the clouds until it dries.
The sky is butter at sunset. The blue of the sky darkens into vermilion and solferino. Star by star glimmers into incident scintillation. The water comes in again, slaps itself down, and says listen, listen to this eagerness, this eagerness to engulf. To seduce. To bring you into my depths, where it is dark and silent at the bottom. Where walls of rock glide with the smoothness of breath into an abyss of lambent apparitions. Where Neptune sits on a coral throne, and the light turns blue as the language of drifting souls. Where quarts of eye and spine move in the lassitude of reverie. Where idioms of being fold into light. And the ink of eternity trembles on the verge of language.
I turn to answer the glass, the structure of things. The light that separates night from day, day from night, and the light in between. The twilight light. Half light. Light of reminiscence. Reflection. Moisture. Coiled hose, still dripping. The strange silence amid the tangle of plants.
Orchids tremble in the smell of dirt. The greenhouse humidity brings tears of sweat to the skin of men with the sea in their eyes.
The words drink themselves drunk, until there is history. Buffalo graze on South Dakota hills. The morning has a girth and heft, it has been hammered together in a valley of sweating gods. The day is bronze. Our effort, as artists, is to make the invisible visible. Piebald, slalom, and facet. Robin Blaser bends over the steering wheel, thinking of the miracles of Mary in Egypt.
What do you call the craft of the poet? How does a poet barter for food? What form of work is it to build a house of words? For what flowers? What African birds? What new Picasso knocks at the door of the new? What stream of words turn to limestone and grow hungry for heft? Sometimes the river finds itself in a kitchen sink. There is power in walking. There is a wilderness in words. You can go anywhere. Reality is a cobra in a magician’s bag.
Linger there in the trees and listen to the birds. Robins, sparrows, jays. Bobolinks, flickers, cedar waxwings. The cliffs are vertiginous. Nothing represents anything. Each thing is solidly its own thing. Unique. Rough. Smooth. Edged. Round. We are in the realm of the immediate. A woman gazes out of the window. Someone across the street is sawing and hammering. The city is the human grasp. Property is the blade of exclusion. There is a large, interior war in everyone. The battle for autonomy. Freedom from the needs of the body and its insane desires.
Summer warms the wood of the boardwalk. Abstractions kill the clouds. The clouds kill abstractions. No ideas but in things. No prawns but on prongs. Everything is in flux. Powerful flux. Even flux is in flux. Flux would make a good name for a laundry detergent. Churn of water and clothes and suds. The noise of machines. The punch of the real. Designs hammered into leather. Thesis flies when the tongue wags. Have you ever seen a tongue wag? No, but I have seen a thesis fly. Flutter in words and hover over a sheet of paper like an hallucination of animals. Animals that appear hungry. Hungry for expression. Hungry for meat. The expression of meat in hooves and legs and muscle and blood.
Images on a cavern wall. A sacred subterranean world of stalagmites and stalactites and dripping limestone columns and places were the skulls and bones of Leviathan mammals repose in the soft cool dust of eternity.
Paradigms of stone, beautiful asymmetries, curves, voluptuous lines adjusting with mastery and grace to the incongruities of stone, horses stampeding Paleolithic plains. The air is charged. Dragonflies hum over lava beds. Obsidian bubbles. Bare feet. Fires in pools of water. There is no point. Nothing with a point. The mind is a ship sailing insoluble water. Waves are ovations, water applauding the infinite horizon. There is a railroad underwater. We can hear it gurgle.
My words are contrary to the world. My words run wild among olives, participles tart and luminous. The sun is a bomb of continuous explosion. Explosions of gold that drool warmth among the bones. That lick the skin until it is dark. Nerval dreams in a forest where the trees eat the light and birds in their parliaments chatter until the sun drops.
Poke the fire. The flames curl around the wood. Flames from the words squeezed until the juice of meaning dribbles on paper. All shook up. Please don’t step on my blue suede shoes. The effervescent hair of the trees in the emerging wind is a mark of ablution. Sandstone indicates the passage of spirit.
Capitalism is dying. The dollar is losing its value. People are buying gold like crazy. The flow of money has stopped. The market is black and gangrenous. I wear whatever is tangible. These are tangible years. These are empirical years. Time itself has become obsolete. Talk is nimble in the bars where dissolution grows ripe and the faces are wooden and women cover their bodies in tattoos. An alligator rides a woman’s bicep. The sheen of the bar reveals the grain of mahogany. A brook ripples through a man’s mind.
Let’s all yell French ocher! French ocher! French ocher! at the dump. Morality is a thing of the past. The halcyon past. It’s been ripped to shreds. It’s worthless. It’s taking up room. Valuable room. Box it. Put it in the attic. Build a birdhouse. Make it out of clay. Shoot the rain. Shoot it with a machine gun. .50 caliber Browning. With butterfly bullets and the brain of a moose.
If you’re looking for coherence you should visit the ocean. There is wisdom in the ocean. The wisdom of salt. The wisdom of depth. The wisdom of wave and wind and trough and crest. Essence and flight and hymn and marrow. Push and pull. Scurry and lark. Watch those waves swell, grow higher, crest, and curl, and crash into the sand. The way the water murmurs and whispers as it moves up the sand, then pulls back, revealing bubbles, little holes and places where the sand puckers, reflects the clouds until it dries.
The sky is butter at sunset. The blue of the sky darkens into vermilion and solferino. Star by star glimmers into incident scintillation. The water comes in again, slaps itself down, and says listen, listen to this eagerness, this eagerness to engulf. To seduce. To bring you into my depths, where it is dark and silent at the bottom. Where walls of rock glide with the smoothness of breath into an abyss of lambent apparitions. Where Neptune sits on a coral throne, and the light turns blue as the language of drifting souls. Where quarts of eye and spine move in the lassitude of reverie. Where idioms of being fold into light. And the ink of eternity trembles on the verge of language.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
The Summer Of My Awakening
Beyond this universe of countless worlds and stars I find many more, wrote Philip Whalen in July, 1965. Beyond this temporary imagination I call myself and mine there are countless others. Far away, all by their lonesome.
Where was I in July, 1965? Who was I, in July, 1965?
I was a 17 year old high school graduate who was clueless about the future. I had no particular ambition, other than some vague sense of becoming an artist, probably a painter. I was not a big reader at the time, nor had any intellectual inclinations outside of a fondness for Shakespeare. I was adrift, inchoate, with nebulous longings and opaque intuitions.
I was living at my father’s house in Seattle. I had one other brother, and two stepbrothers, who were also living there. My stepbrother Mike, who had been one year ahead of me in high school, had graduated the year before and was working at one of the manufacturing plants at Boeing. He seemed to belong to another world. A notorious bon vivant and lady’s man in high school, he became silent and distant and carried a large black toolbox. My brother was four years younger me, still just a kid. The other stepbrother was the youngest, a quiet, obedient little fellow who would one day become a Republican, supervise a department at Boeing, and drive a Leviathan four-by-four.
I had to fill my summer with something other than loafing. My father was a man who believed strongly in the character-building value of work. He did not take kindly to malingerers, particularly when the malingering had the appearance of habit and earnest intent. I was now officially out of school. Lacking a fuller, more defined goal, a means to an income and independent way of life that did not smack too heavily of tedium and cramped, spirit-killing routine, I decided to postpone my entry into the world of commerce and industry at least another month or two. I decided to go visit my mother in San José, California, who was married to a car salesman named Carl, an affable, balding, middle-aged man with a nice sense of humor.
My mother was living in a two-bedroom apartment with a swimming pool in the central courtyard of the building. She worked as a secretary. I was pretty much on my own during the day. I spent a lot of time by the pool, lying on an adjustable chaise lounge listening to a transistor radio. Hits that summer included “You Were On My Mind,” by We Five, “Help!,” “Ticket To Ride,” and “Yesterday,” all by the Beatles, “Unchained Melody,” by the Righteous Brothers, “Just A Little,” by the Beau Brummels, “California Girls,” by the Beach Boys, “Come See About Me,” by the Supremes, and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stones.
I liked being underwater a lot. I could stay underwater for an amazingly long time. I enjoyed hovering on the bottom like a manatee. I surfaced once just as a man in a business suit was preparing to dive in to save me. He thought I had drowned. He was quite relieved to find that I hadn’t. I was relieved that I surfaced in time to prevent him from jumping into the pool in his suit.
My mother got fed up with me lollygagging around. She and Carl drove to a nearby Car Wash and waited in the car while I went to inquire about a job. I felt very awkward. I had never asked anyone for a job before. I definitely didn’t want one. I preferred swimming and TV. But I recognized the fact that I would be turning 18 in a few weeks and that the luxurious irresponsibleness of childhood was about to go away for good. I hoped the manager of the car wash would recognize instantly that washing cars would be a ludicrous pursuit and a terrible incongruity for a shy and surly 17 year old fresh out of high school and urge me to seek employment elsewhere. He didn’t. Much to my amazement, he hired me. I started the next day.
I lasted four days. Four days of rubbing cars with a rag. That’s all I did. It seemed incomprehensible that rubbing cars with rags was any kind of a way to make money. I worked with a man who appeared to be in his late 20s. One day, a car appeared and some men got out and arrested the man. Handcuffed him and led him away. I never found out what this was about. No one stopped working. We all just kept rubbing cars with our rags as the man was led away. In some marvelously intuitive way, I realized that the captivity of this man being led to the car was not much different than the captivity of wiping cars with rags for eight hours in exchange for money.
My mother was not the least bit pleased when I told her I had quit my job at the car wash. She persuaded me to make a visit to the navy recruitment office at a nearby shopping center. I did it to please her. There was no way on earth I was going to join any branch of the military. The navy seemed far more benign than the army, just in case I fell prey to the lure of life in the military and an immediate solution to my employment problem, but four years rather than two gave me serious pause. I told the man I would give the offer serious thought. He gave me some pamphlets, which I threw away as soon as we got back to the apartment.
I was aware that when I turned 18 I would have to register with the draft, and that there was a war going on in Vietnam, but I did not think of it as a war, it seemed to be more of an occupation. Everyone was told that Vietnam was being invaded by communists and that U.S. intervention was required to keep the Vietnamese safe from communism. If Vietnam fell, the rest of the world was in dire jeopardy. It was all a bunch of bs as far I was concerned. Growing up, adults perplexed me with their fear of communism. They talked about it as if it were a disease like polio or tuberculosis. I never understood it. It was simply a political system. How could a political system hurt anyone? It made no sense.
I knew instinctively that I was not cut out for the military. It would be a disaster. Means would have to be found to avoid it, but that particular summer, it was still a distant reality. In fact, it seemed more than that: it seemed to be a total irreality. There hadn’t been that much protest to it yet, but I sensed something immoral about it, something nefarious and completely wrongheaded, and wanted nothing to do with it.
I also met a young woman named Jill that summer. She was 15, a couple of years younger than me, and was a member of the Santa Clara Swim Club. She was smart, pretty, and athletic, in many ways the quintessential California girl. Unwittingly, she became something of a guru to me. She was much more aware of current trends, and this was an age in which fashion was more than a superficiality, but a whole new way of perceiving and thinking and being in the world. She was aware of figures like Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.
Jill had a passion for the British rock groups just coming into fashion. Except for the Beatles, I hadn’t seen what any of them looked like. I was a bit startled the first time I saw the Rolling Stones. I was familiar with some of their early hits, such as “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly classic, and I had imagined them as being very cool in the manner of Steve McQueen, or James Dean, detached but masculine, tough but vulnerable. Well-groomed and slick like Ed Byrnes’s “Kookie” on the TV show 77 Sunset Strip.
This was patently not the case. Their hair was not only incredibly long, but shaggy, their expressions strangely, unashamedly effeminate. Not sissy effeminate; effeminate in a challenging, surly, rebellious way. It was the effeminacy of libertine outlaws, romantic rakehells, audacious sybarites.
I was confused. I didn’t know what to make of these Rolling Stones, whether to mock them, or emulate them. They were so contrary to the image of the American male embodied by Elvis and Yul Brynner and John Wayne. There was nothing about them to suggest stoicism and taciturnity. They looked neither combative, nor aggressive, nor hard or emotionally sterile. They looked wild and subversive, more like the tough, motorcycle jacketed rockers of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent than the modish, somewhat genteel look of the Beatles, but without the usual male hubris. There was an evident sensitivity there they made no effort to hide or contain. They resembled the romantic poets whose portraits adorned the walls of an English literature class I had taken in high school, Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, with a large dollop of James Dean’s male vulnerability and intensity mixed in for good measure. I sensed in this new look and music a path opening up, a fresh new potential for creating a life of poetry and creativity. When I returned to Seattle that August I felt that something in me had changed, but what, or how, I couldn’t say. The standards for what constituted the good life seemed less credible, and quite possibly harmful. I had been offered a new possibility.
Possibilities. There was more than one world.
And then it happened. I was riding with a couple of pals in a ’55 Plymouth sedan, on our way to a junkyard to buy a used automobile part. I heard “Like A Rolling Stone” blare from the backspeakers, “how does it feel / to be without a home / like a complete unknown / like a rolling stone,” and that was it. I felt like I exploded all at once into the person I was somehow meant to be.
Where was I in July, 1965? Who was I, in July, 1965?
I was a 17 year old high school graduate who was clueless about the future. I had no particular ambition, other than some vague sense of becoming an artist, probably a painter. I was not a big reader at the time, nor had any intellectual inclinations outside of a fondness for Shakespeare. I was adrift, inchoate, with nebulous longings and opaque intuitions.
I was living at my father’s house in Seattle. I had one other brother, and two stepbrothers, who were also living there. My stepbrother Mike, who had been one year ahead of me in high school, had graduated the year before and was working at one of the manufacturing plants at Boeing. He seemed to belong to another world. A notorious bon vivant and lady’s man in high school, he became silent and distant and carried a large black toolbox. My brother was four years younger me, still just a kid. The other stepbrother was the youngest, a quiet, obedient little fellow who would one day become a Republican, supervise a department at Boeing, and drive a Leviathan four-by-four.
I had to fill my summer with something other than loafing. My father was a man who believed strongly in the character-building value of work. He did not take kindly to malingerers, particularly when the malingering had the appearance of habit and earnest intent. I was now officially out of school. Lacking a fuller, more defined goal, a means to an income and independent way of life that did not smack too heavily of tedium and cramped, spirit-killing routine, I decided to postpone my entry into the world of commerce and industry at least another month or two. I decided to go visit my mother in San José, California, who was married to a car salesman named Carl, an affable, balding, middle-aged man with a nice sense of humor.
My mother was living in a two-bedroom apartment with a swimming pool in the central courtyard of the building. She worked as a secretary. I was pretty much on my own during the day. I spent a lot of time by the pool, lying on an adjustable chaise lounge listening to a transistor radio. Hits that summer included “You Were On My Mind,” by We Five, “Help!,” “Ticket To Ride,” and “Yesterday,” all by the Beatles, “Unchained Melody,” by the Righteous Brothers, “Just A Little,” by the Beau Brummels, “California Girls,” by the Beach Boys, “Come See About Me,” by the Supremes, and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stones.
I liked being underwater a lot. I could stay underwater for an amazingly long time. I enjoyed hovering on the bottom like a manatee. I surfaced once just as a man in a business suit was preparing to dive in to save me. He thought I had drowned. He was quite relieved to find that I hadn’t. I was relieved that I surfaced in time to prevent him from jumping into the pool in his suit.
My mother got fed up with me lollygagging around. She and Carl drove to a nearby Car Wash and waited in the car while I went to inquire about a job. I felt very awkward. I had never asked anyone for a job before. I definitely didn’t want one. I preferred swimming and TV. But I recognized the fact that I would be turning 18 in a few weeks and that the luxurious irresponsibleness of childhood was about to go away for good. I hoped the manager of the car wash would recognize instantly that washing cars would be a ludicrous pursuit and a terrible incongruity for a shy and surly 17 year old fresh out of high school and urge me to seek employment elsewhere. He didn’t. Much to my amazement, he hired me. I started the next day.
I lasted four days. Four days of rubbing cars with a rag. That’s all I did. It seemed incomprehensible that rubbing cars with rags was any kind of a way to make money. I worked with a man who appeared to be in his late 20s. One day, a car appeared and some men got out and arrested the man. Handcuffed him and led him away. I never found out what this was about. No one stopped working. We all just kept rubbing cars with our rags as the man was led away. In some marvelously intuitive way, I realized that the captivity of this man being led to the car was not much different than the captivity of wiping cars with rags for eight hours in exchange for money.
My mother was not the least bit pleased when I told her I had quit my job at the car wash. She persuaded me to make a visit to the navy recruitment office at a nearby shopping center. I did it to please her. There was no way on earth I was going to join any branch of the military. The navy seemed far more benign than the army, just in case I fell prey to the lure of life in the military and an immediate solution to my employment problem, but four years rather than two gave me serious pause. I told the man I would give the offer serious thought. He gave me some pamphlets, which I threw away as soon as we got back to the apartment.
I was aware that when I turned 18 I would have to register with the draft, and that there was a war going on in Vietnam, but I did not think of it as a war, it seemed to be more of an occupation. Everyone was told that Vietnam was being invaded by communists and that U.S. intervention was required to keep the Vietnamese safe from communism. If Vietnam fell, the rest of the world was in dire jeopardy. It was all a bunch of bs as far I was concerned. Growing up, adults perplexed me with their fear of communism. They talked about it as if it were a disease like polio or tuberculosis. I never understood it. It was simply a political system. How could a political system hurt anyone? It made no sense.
I knew instinctively that I was not cut out for the military. It would be a disaster. Means would have to be found to avoid it, but that particular summer, it was still a distant reality. In fact, it seemed more than that: it seemed to be a total irreality. There hadn’t been that much protest to it yet, but I sensed something immoral about it, something nefarious and completely wrongheaded, and wanted nothing to do with it.
I also met a young woman named Jill that summer. She was 15, a couple of years younger than me, and was a member of the Santa Clara Swim Club. She was smart, pretty, and athletic, in many ways the quintessential California girl. Unwittingly, she became something of a guru to me. She was much more aware of current trends, and this was an age in which fashion was more than a superficiality, but a whole new way of perceiving and thinking and being in the world. She was aware of figures like Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.
Jill had a passion for the British rock groups just coming into fashion. Except for the Beatles, I hadn’t seen what any of them looked like. I was a bit startled the first time I saw the Rolling Stones. I was familiar with some of their early hits, such as “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly classic, and I had imagined them as being very cool in the manner of Steve McQueen, or James Dean, detached but masculine, tough but vulnerable. Well-groomed and slick like Ed Byrnes’s “Kookie” on the TV show 77 Sunset Strip.
This was patently not the case. Their hair was not only incredibly long, but shaggy, their expressions strangely, unashamedly effeminate. Not sissy effeminate; effeminate in a challenging, surly, rebellious way. It was the effeminacy of libertine outlaws, romantic rakehells, audacious sybarites.
I was confused. I didn’t know what to make of these Rolling Stones, whether to mock them, or emulate them. They were so contrary to the image of the American male embodied by Elvis and Yul Brynner and John Wayne. There was nothing about them to suggest stoicism and taciturnity. They looked neither combative, nor aggressive, nor hard or emotionally sterile. They looked wild and subversive, more like the tough, motorcycle jacketed rockers of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent than the modish, somewhat genteel look of the Beatles, but without the usual male hubris. There was an evident sensitivity there they made no effort to hide or contain. They resembled the romantic poets whose portraits adorned the walls of an English literature class I had taken in high school, Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, with a large dollop of James Dean’s male vulnerability and intensity mixed in for good measure. I sensed in this new look and music a path opening up, a fresh new potential for creating a life of poetry and creativity. When I returned to Seattle that August I felt that something in me had changed, but what, or how, I couldn’t say. The standards for what constituted the good life seemed less credible, and quite possibly harmful. I had been offered a new possibility.
Possibilities. There was more than one world.
And then it happened. I was riding with a couple of pals in a ’55 Plymouth sedan, on our way to a junkyard to buy a used automobile part. I heard “Like A Rolling Stone” blare from the backspeakers, “how does it feel / to be without a home / like a complete unknown / like a rolling stone,” and that was it. I felt like I exploded all at once into the person I was somehow meant to be.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Driven To Drive
A central fact of my existence has been defined by driving. Stepping on a pedal, feeding gas to a set of pistons, moving through space and time in a shell of glass and steel, hands on a steering wheel, eyes forward, occasionally checking the rear view mirror, changing lanes, passing other cars, going places in what amounts to a stupor most of the time, devoting just enough attention to the vagaries of the external world to prevent collision and death.
My first car was a blue Ford ’55 station wagon. The paint had worn and the outer shell had a somewhat mottled, calico look, that I very much enjoyed. It looked funky and strangely welcoming. I can’t remember what became of that car. I was 18, fresh out of high school, my highest ambition in life was to become perpetually drunk, party, chase girls, and welcome whatever life and adventure happened to plop on my adolescent plate. I remember taking a trip to the ocean with a group of friends, four men and four women, caravanning in two cars. Since I had a station wagon, my car was loaded with cases of beer. We went to Oceanshores, a little resort town on the Washington coast with a long broad sandy beach, built a bonfire, swilled beer, got drunk, laughed and frolicked until it was time to return home. One of the cars returned without a member, a tall, affable, though highly volatile young man from North Dakota, who had chosen to wear a wet suit and flippers, got into an argument with the members of the other car, insisted on stopping and getting out, and hitchhiked back to Seattle in his wet suit and flippers.
I went a long stretch without owning a car, or driving, in my late teens and early 20s. I moved to San José, California, and lived very simply while attending San José City College. This was 1966 and the Zeitgeist was very much on my side. It was considered cool to be poor, avoid commodities, cars and houses in particular, and commune intimately with the planet. Much better to walk barefoot and feel the grass and asphalt beneath one’s feet than the rubber and plasticity and linoleum and tile of a world grown severely Cartesian and detached from the natural world. It was high virtue to shun the world of commerce and industry, vigorously protest the war in Vietnam which was an immoral, sinister extension of capitalist predation, tune in, drop out, and absorb the wisdom of the east. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Taoism. The Beatles incorporated the sitar into rock ‘n roll and incense burned and hair grew long and clothing got colorful and zany. It was a good time. The Volkswagen bus was hugely popular. It was low key, funky, and easy to work on.
I got married in 1970 and we bought a Volvo. I don’t remember much about it, except that one morning it wouldn’t start, which put me into a towering rage, and made me late for school. San José did not have a viable public transit system. I waited an hour for a bus to come, which never did come. The marriage didn’t work out, and a few years later, I found myself back in Seattle.
From 1975 to 1978 or so I drove a four-door Dodge Dart. This was a good car, reliable and easy to drive, but at the time I did not really want or need a car. The Dart had belonged to my stepmother. My parents insisted that I take it. I told them I did not make enough money to properly take care of it. I can’t remember what made me finally give in to their insistence, but the results were sad. Unable to maintain it, or buy insurance, the car eventually decayed into immobility. For a time, I played a game with the meter maid. It was parked on a city street. The apartment building in which I lived did not have a garage or driveway. In Seattle, you can keep a car parked on the street for a maximum of three days. On the fourth day, I checked the tires. There was a chalk mark on the rear right tire. I removed it with a rag. This continued for about a week. The meter maid decided to get tricky and left a tire mark on the left side, on the side opposite from the curb. But I got it. This went on until I sold the car, which wasn’t even running. I think I sold it for $50 dollars. The people that bought it were extremely happy. To this day I wonder why. What is it about a ’65 Dodge Dart that made them so happy? Their happiness made my dereliction seem all the worse.
My next car was a Toyota two-door sedan and appeared during my second unfortunate marriage. I have few memories of it. I do remember waking up one morning to discover that some malefactor had systematically gone down 19th Street on Capitol Hill and shot out the windows of each car, ours included. We had to pay to have the windows replaced. After our divorce, I resorted once again to Seattle’s public transit system, and rode the 43, 14, and 7 to and fro from the University District, a ride of about 10 minutes, enough to read a paragraph or two, or gaze out the window dreamily on way to work, or even more dreamily on my way home from work.
The car my wife and I now own is a red ’94 Subaru which continues to run quite well (knock on wood) although a few mufflers have rusted through and fallen off. This is because our drives tend to be very short, little errands we run to Costco and the grocery store, so that condensation builds without being fully evaporated. The furthest we have driven the car was Denver, Colorado, in 1995. We went to visit a friend of my wife’s who was attending Naropa, in Boulder. I remember how the brake linings smoked and burned on our way down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, on Interstate 70.
Roberta and I dream of one day not owning a car at all. No more expenses paid for oil changes and check-ups, car insurance, gasoline. During the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we did not have the heart to drive at all. We stopped driving. It wasn’t a protest staged to effect change, because such a minor alteration of our behavior would be futile as far as bringing the nefarious oil industry to its knees. We just sickened each time we got behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. It felt like slapping mother earth full in the face. I bought some gear at REI, a little backpack and carrier for my wallet, and incorporated errands into my daily run. It felt good. When the ultimate mode of transport becomes your own body, you feel in harmony with the air, the birds, the trees, and everything else sweet and good on the surface of his old spinning planet.
My first car was a blue Ford ’55 station wagon. The paint had worn and the outer shell had a somewhat mottled, calico look, that I very much enjoyed. It looked funky and strangely welcoming. I can’t remember what became of that car. I was 18, fresh out of high school, my highest ambition in life was to become perpetually drunk, party, chase girls, and welcome whatever life and adventure happened to plop on my adolescent plate. I remember taking a trip to the ocean with a group of friends, four men and four women, caravanning in two cars. Since I had a station wagon, my car was loaded with cases of beer. We went to Oceanshores, a little resort town on the Washington coast with a long broad sandy beach, built a bonfire, swilled beer, got drunk, laughed and frolicked until it was time to return home. One of the cars returned without a member, a tall, affable, though highly volatile young man from North Dakota, who had chosen to wear a wet suit and flippers, got into an argument with the members of the other car, insisted on stopping and getting out, and hitchhiked back to Seattle in his wet suit and flippers.
I went a long stretch without owning a car, or driving, in my late teens and early 20s. I moved to San José, California, and lived very simply while attending San José City College. This was 1966 and the Zeitgeist was very much on my side. It was considered cool to be poor, avoid commodities, cars and houses in particular, and commune intimately with the planet. Much better to walk barefoot and feel the grass and asphalt beneath one’s feet than the rubber and plasticity and linoleum and tile of a world grown severely Cartesian and detached from the natural world. It was high virtue to shun the world of commerce and industry, vigorously protest the war in Vietnam which was an immoral, sinister extension of capitalist predation, tune in, drop out, and absorb the wisdom of the east. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Taoism. The Beatles incorporated the sitar into rock ‘n roll and incense burned and hair grew long and clothing got colorful and zany. It was a good time. The Volkswagen bus was hugely popular. It was low key, funky, and easy to work on.
I got married in 1970 and we bought a Volvo. I don’t remember much about it, except that one morning it wouldn’t start, which put me into a towering rage, and made me late for school. San José did not have a viable public transit system. I waited an hour for a bus to come, which never did come. The marriage didn’t work out, and a few years later, I found myself back in Seattle.
From 1975 to 1978 or so I drove a four-door Dodge Dart. This was a good car, reliable and easy to drive, but at the time I did not really want or need a car. The Dart had belonged to my stepmother. My parents insisted that I take it. I told them I did not make enough money to properly take care of it. I can’t remember what made me finally give in to their insistence, but the results were sad. Unable to maintain it, or buy insurance, the car eventually decayed into immobility. For a time, I played a game with the meter maid. It was parked on a city street. The apartment building in which I lived did not have a garage or driveway. In Seattle, you can keep a car parked on the street for a maximum of three days. On the fourth day, I checked the tires. There was a chalk mark on the rear right tire. I removed it with a rag. This continued for about a week. The meter maid decided to get tricky and left a tire mark on the left side, on the side opposite from the curb. But I got it. This went on until I sold the car, which wasn’t even running. I think I sold it for $50 dollars. The people that bought it were extremely happy. To this day I wonder why. What is it about a ’65 Dodge Dart that made them so happy? Their happiness made my dereliction seem all the worse.
My next car was a Toyota two-door sedan and appeared during my second unfortunate marriage. I have few memories of it. I do remember waking up one morning to discover that some malefactor had systematically gone down 19th Street on Capitol Hill and shot out the windows of each car, ours included. We had to pay to have the windows replaced. After our divorce, I resorted once again to Seattle’s public transit system, and rode the 43, 14, and 7 to and fro from the University District, a ride of about 10 minutes, enough to read a paragraph or two, or gaze out the window dreamily on way to work, or even more dreamily on my way home from work.
The car my wife and I now own is a red ’94 Subaru which continues to run quite well (knock on wood) although a few mufflers have rusted through and fallen off. This is because our drives tend to be very short, little errands we run to Costco and the grocery store, so that condensation builds without being fully evaporated. The furthest we have driven the car was Denver, Colorado, in 1995. We went to visit a friend of my wife’s who was attending Naropa, in Boulder. I remember how the brake linings smoked and burned on our way down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, on Interstate 70.
Roberta and I dream of one day not owning a car at all. No more expenses paid for oil changes and check-ups, car insurance, gasoline. During the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we did not have the heart to drive at all. We stopped driving. It wasn’t a protest staged to effect change, because such a minor alteration of our behavior would be futile as far as bringing the nefarious oil industry to its knees. We just sickened each time we got behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. It felt like slapping mother earth full in the face. I bought some gear at REI, a little backpack and carrier for my wallet, and incorporated errands into my daily run. It felt good. When the ultimate mode of transport becomes your own body, you feel in harmony with the air, the birds, the trees, and everything else sweet and good on the surface of his old spinning planet.
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