McClure's Mephistos

It’s a mystery to me where all this pollen comes from, but our Subaru  -  paprika red  -  was coated in a thick beige layer of the stuff. We decided to swing by the Brown Bear Car Wash at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill over on the west side, facing the Olympics and Puget Sound and the maze of railroad tracks at Interbay, on our way to the library to pick up some movies (The Silence of Mark Rothko and Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park). I also had a copy of Michael McClure’s Mephistos waiting for pick up. So after the sudsy slish slosh of those octopal fronds dancing over our windshield as Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” poured out of our speakers, we stopped at the library, got our movies and book and came home.

Mephistos: curious title. The word makes me think of firecrackers. And Goethe and Faust and Promethean rebellions of philosophy and science. Amorous flute-playing Pans with double sex and gently moving thighs. 

Also, laundry. Did I mention folding clothes? I folded clothes. Then I laid back and opened Mephistos. 

And within minutes I was in that wonderfully exquisite state of awareness induced by McClure's work, that keen sense of proprioception put forward so vigorously and insistently by Charles Olson, the body itself, its tendons, muscles, joints, its elbows and wrists, its pulse and eyebrows and bones and containment in skin, this walking talking constellation of mitochondria “in which the organs are slung,” “the body of us as object which spontaneously or of  its own order produces experience,” “SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM / BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES.”

You get the idea. And believe me, at my age, the body matters. Did it ever stop mattering? Sure, back in the day when I routinely binged on alcohol and launched myself into Dionysian odysseys that ended at Denny’s at five in the morning. I had youth, the sweet luxury of youth. As one comic recently expressed it, when I was in my twenties I could stab myself with a knife twenty-seven times and then stand in the mirror and watch it all heal. Yes, I can dig it. I can see that happening. They body is so forgiving in your twenties. So supple, so resilient. It would be a stretch to say that it didn’t matter, of course it mattered, I wasn’t that cavalier. Let’s just say I was on the road of excess and had a long way to go before I reached the palace of wisdom. 

I recovered easily from the ecstasies and abuses of my Bacchanalian romps all the way into my mid-30s, but increasingly, with age, that ceased to be the case. Nursing monster hangovers while trying to focus on stupid musicals like Hello Dolly eventually shifted my mind toward a greater appreciation of all things corporeal. My body in particular, this garment of skin and bone I walk around in. It’s not a toy. It’s not a machine. It’s a galaxy of cells, a fragile community of eukaryotes and organelles. You (whoever ‘you’ turns out to be) are in the wheelhouse, watching out for shoals and rubber tires. Don’t sink, don’t break, don’t get dead. That’s your job. 

These days, old and sober and a whole lot wiser, whenever I stand for minutes on end staring at Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase waiting for a flow of urine, I become acutely aware of my body’s infirmities and strengths. Age gets your attention. It insists you pay attention. Things break easily. Other things toughen. It’s an amazing process. 

When it comes to biology, there is no greater poet than Michael McClure. He IS biology. His poems get up and walk around and flop to the ground with their arms splayed out. He is the slippery cold of beach wrack in the hand, the tentacles of a squid spreading out like the rays of a chrysanthemum as he jets toward a school of krill in the Sea of Cortez. It's amazing how alive his poetry can make me feel. And he's a really old guy now. Eighty fucking five. 

Do you like paradox? I do. Here’s a great paradox: as you get older you get younger. You do. How does that happen, you might wonder. It happens naturally, instinctively, viscerally. You grow out of experience. Experience gets refined, distilled, concentrated. And as experience deepens, it becomes powerfully generative. The end result is élan. Élan vital is Henri Bergson’s term for the spontaneous morphogenesis of an emergent system in an increasingly complex manner. Morphogenesis means, literally, “beginning of the shape.” As we age, our shape increasingly assumes the imago of our spirit. The fuller reality of our being comes through more urgently, more emphatically, inspired by griefs and losses and occasional joys, the ephemera of our pilgrimage on this plane. It wants out. It hungers for elsewhere. And that makes it dangerous. A little touch of Mephisto in the night. 

It takes a lifetime to reach the genius and purity of childhood. 

“Emily Dickinson writes that Mephistopheles would be the best friend if he had fidelity,” McClure comments in his forward. “If so, he would then be thoroughly divine.” 

McClure also reveals in his forward that the thirty-seven strophes of Mephistos “resemble a medicine bundle. American Indians gathered spirit objects to make medicine bundles that they carried along, whether in the heart or in a pouch. One bundle I have seen is wrapped in a green-dyed otter skin.” 

A medicine bundle can contain anything of significance for the person who puts it together, seeds, feathers, rocks, horse hair, pine cones, animal teeth, bones or particles of bone. The traditional material of the bag itself is “brain tanned buckskin.” Brain-tanned refers to the use of animal brain and water to create an emulsified solution. Brain matter contains lecithin, which is a natural tanning agent. 

I like the spin Spinoza put on matters relating to the divine, particularly the notion that there is one existing substance, God, but infinitely many modes. That’s helpful. Because when a tornado blasts across the countryside tearing up people’s homes and hurling cars at telephone poles, you’ve got to wonder what the divine spirit had up his sleeve that particular day. 

War is man-made, that evil is easy to explain. There are a lot of assholes out there. You’re not going to find much divinity on Wall Street or in the boardrooms of the oil companies. The divine might be all-pervasive, but why isn’t it pervading those guys? Maybe it is, but they’re not feeling it. Not honoring it. The behavior of these people is anathema to me, an enigma, but who am I to make these kinds of judgements?  

Shit I don’t know. I’m getting lost here. 

It’s a thorny subject. How do you make a case for the divine in a world facing mass extinction? In which people crossing a bridge or standing in line at an airport are suddenly run over by a truck or stabbed or blown to bits? In which thousands of men and women die in the Mediterranean each year migrating to Europe because of the violence and despair in their home countries? In which the elderly and maimed and handicapped cannot afford healthcare in the richest country in the world? How has life on this planet become so tormented and oppressed? What is evil? Does evil exist in nature, or is it strictly a product of humankind? Does it coexist with the divine? Is there truly a Divine Being or Energy holding this universe together that is so much vaster and sublime than anything I can imagine that what appears to be evil is fundamentally insignificant because it is we who are self-aware that give meaning to these things? I don’t know, I truly don’t. But I know it’s there. The sublime, the divine, the sacred. I can feel it. When I read poets like Michael McClure my eyes and ears open. Ironic, that in this instance he invokes a trickster-deity like Mephistopheles. 

Mephistopheles, McClure attests elsewhere in his instructive forward, “is an angel who helps God in constructing the universe and in the creation of orcas and giant sea mammals.” 

In the Judeo-Christian religions God is a supreme authority. Society invokes God to enforce civility and good behavior. Ergo, the dark side provides an avenue of rebellion. The dark side prevents the social order from becoming overly oppressive. It recognizes impulses that do not seem consistent with the edicts of the Supreme Being. The dark side recognizes the impulses of raw, undomesticated Being, however wild or savage this energy happens to express itself. William Blake argued that it was religion and the enforcement of laws contrary to the natural impulses of Being that are the ultimate evil. 

“Without contraries is no progression,” declaims Blake in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a passage titled “The Voice of the Devil,” he has this to say:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. 

1.     That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 

2.     That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body. & that reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.

3.     That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True

1.     Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age

2.     Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3.     Energy is Eternal Delight. 

As for the Divine, there are as many conceptions of it as there are people. Some people find it in religion, others in a shot of bourbon. Some people find it in psilocybin or peyote, others in a hard oak pew in a Lutheran or Presbyterian church. Some people kneel and face east at a certain time of day and say prayers to it. Others attempt to reach the Divine by spinning in circles. Some chant, some sing. Some climb to the peaks of mountains. Some sit and dissolve into nothingness. 

Here’s what I think it is: a force. A numen. A divine presence. The combined dynamism (according to Cicero) of a divine mind (divina mens) and a divine power (vim divinam) “which pervades the lives of men.” McClure’s word for it is “meatspirit.” It is “the odor of the fat pink rose / pressed to the face / before / the burial / of ashes.” It is remarkably evident in the life of a calico cat staring “…upward into morning / Every moment and whisker / is startled / into / totality of her being / EVERYWHERE.”

McClure's observations and most importantly his feelings about the universe are uncannily explicit, palpable in their expression. A reading of one or two poems brings you deeper into a sense of being, an exquisite immediacy to everything in you and above you and around you that is so sudden in its effect it's almost startling. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but something is going on in this work that borders the supernatural. And by supernatural I don't mean witches and ghosts and flying monkeys, I mean that Promethean sense of boundless perception Shelley hinted at in his great poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." An unseen power given tangible specifics in wet black rocks and Kenyan cow shit, the ding an sich of blackberries. 

AND THAT’S THE TOP LAYER

of the interweaving of matters

and non-matters

BURIED IN CONSCIOUSNESS

way down in the star banks

that hang like mud at the edge of a puddle

for the lengthening red and brown

earthworm under the forest of gold-sided ferns

Like that.                                            That is it.

The Manufacture Of Dirt

The airs of the ants annoy my chest. The fat night goes askew in its myriad flashing. Traffic lights, headlights, moon. In the morning, it is dazzling to see the grain open to the rays of the sun. My hot attention flies with the wind. My marshy head begins humming its swamps. I see an empty parking lot and think, rocks are the panacea of Asia. 

The vague prayers of my temperament sprawl in the air for my rescue. I feel the warm sugar of a gelatin knee. I hear the cry of a fork as the knife wiggles its plumage. The ruby indicates that the ocean is at ease. The garden swoons in the legs of the bees. I have twisted a nail in the wood of a splintered arena where enactments of semantic nebula fill the rapiers of tact. The coconuts of a complicated sky tumble to the ground in another paragraph. 

Whose nomadic knee has furrowed the dirt for my trickle of thought? I hold a cathedral in my hand: four wings and an abdomen. It lights up like a refrigerator. Grape juice, mustard, painted ladies. The gentle spirit of yesterday hovers over tomorrow dropping parables and syntax. Audacity joins us at the table and swallows a chair. I like it that a spin of sheaves stirs in the muscle between my legs. Can I say that the beak of that sparrow churns with a providence that I’m not done rowing? 

I have caused perception to open and lift the day into mending. The back door slams on the smells of the kitchen. The verdure favors the manufacture of dirt, not belt buckles, not tricky guitar strings. Just intentions. They’re obvious. They’re everywhere. But what’s underneath them? Dirt. Every time I hear of a chance to rid myself of memories I shiver in the cold and need them back. 

I get stormy sleep. My knee drinks the heat of the waves. I force an old dazzling temperament to tangle with theorems of disentanglement. The air gets up and hovers over a terrain of vagrants. Asian hay carpets seethe with the myths of catastrophe. I feel subversive. I relax control to stimulate the vagaries. 

To examine antique realities. 

A subtle velocity tints the seaweed surrounding my plough. I spread a soft light of memory in the tibia kitchen and the commas cry with the burning hot plop of a twinkle on the miasma of my inner humidity, which is entangled in mysteries of violence and space. Power to the regatta. Power to the pounce of the panther. Power to the empire of the light bulb. Power to the swirls of light in my pretty maelstrom of augurs and tom-toms. I’m willing to change direction at any time. There are samples of my flexibility on the edge of the soap. Help yourself. 

Power to the saliva that drools from the mouth of reverie.

Swimming is divine. But walking is faster.

Power to walking. Power to swimming. Power to the follies of asphalt, which favor the charity of wheels. Power to the ideology of socks, which is soft with sequestration. Power to the tenderness of cork, which is porous, and to coffee, which has blends. Power to the theatre, which tends toward action. Power to humming, which accompanies strumming, and the ring of syllables, which are assimilable, and the blossoming of speech, which circulates in words. Power to the symmetries of structure and the enchantment of floating. Power to the oval, which is almost round, and to the ellipse, which is a generalization of the circle, and resembles a circle, but isn’t a circle, and has eccentricity. Power to the jackknife, which folds and can go in a pocket, and to the shoebox, which is full of tissue, but mostly to trays, which carry glasses, and may be cleaned with a sponge, or a brush, and used again, which is a form of repetition, which is a form of rhythm, which is an element of music, which is a conveyance of value, which has to do with the worth of something, which is a proposal of what is good, and a proposal of what is bad, which is comparative to the understanding, which is a mental process, a charge of energy slopping around in the head, which chafes against the skull, and splashes against the rocks, which are also in the head, and are called images, which are pictures, dishes in the sink, mist rising from a river, or anything, really, which serves my purpose here, my mandate, if you want to call it that, which is how this got started, this thing, this momentum, this intuitive zone, this field of resonances, which is an amplification of something I feel, something I try to pedal, perturb into being, assert, coordinate, try to get across, squeeze into words, into an idea, a yo-yo, an imbroglio, anything I can work into further tumult, which is comprehensive and vague, and expansive like the ocean, which is wet, and deep, and full of strange and luminous fish. 

There. I said it. And now I want to begin the sculpture. The gargoyle. The anatomy. The cabana. 

I want to suggest an effulgent ball of nailing things. Sometimes a cricket speaks of agitations that offer a way to heat a problem gently to ashes and we begin to poke at time as if it operated by handspring and rattle. A tiny head appears in a woman’s tear and creates sensations of adobe puppet. Our world is unrivalled in horses. There are movements that continue to signal ideas of botany for the briefcases we carry. Believe me. If I could accommodate your touch I would cradle it into milky action, so there. Let me see those nipples. I’m skulking now. You’re right. These words need grease. Dwarf fever sprinkles lung nerves in a line of beautiful irritations. The poultry fulminates to black. Our carpet has scarlet reveries, and this makes us believe that apricots need arms. Although, you know, they don’t. but if they did, they would revise our notions of fruit. Mutation is what it’s all about, baby. That, and seamless cloudbursts. 

Weightless

Drink the onion candle. There is aggression glue for the membrane shade. This works best in complete quiet. This is oats for the jellfyfish, but insoluble for the rain. Below the spout there is nothing but stars. Be a beautiful polish to them. Allow yourself to butter the truth with applause. 

The truth is not always slender. Sometimes it is reptiles. I recollect remaining in the tinted grooves of Blonde on Blonde until the dimes began to shine in exemplification of the scrapbooks up in the attic and the world seemed easy and green. That’s when the streetlights were nearly everything we needed, and the sidewalks had intent. The lightning continued to burn on its open side. It’s as if we were somehow enthralled with Cubism and yet continued to enjoy winter. 

The plunge into powder is my way of saying that the knife delineates a dimension hanging over the evocation of fingers. At least, I like to look at it that way. What else can I say? The towels are clean now and not as hirsute as the hobbits around here, partying late into the night, drinking Old Peculiar and smoking Tolkiens. 

Late afternoon is stirring and the growls coming from the shrubbery convince me of chickadees. Summer is so simple. It is simpler than all the other pulleys strung together making the scenery come closer. 

As for oars, who cares? We can drift. We can let our hands hang in the water. We can continue our sewing later. There’s no hurry, only a few burning sensations and longings to play in a rock band. Other than that, I feel that my escape must come from within. Running is a personal favorite, but desperate times call for desperate measures. It is why I began slouching and hanging out at the drugstore. It bites to think a tree is authoritative. But yes, a twig exhibits feathers, and this, too, is a collaboration. 

Our monthly intake of water does its melodies by making the ink of its descriptions do things in a grimace that, once it’s written down on paper, appears more like the luxurious juggling of tambourines. You can also do this with your suppositions and theories. It’s easy as twine. Space is forgiving. But gravity is hilarious. I mean, come on. Can it be more obvious? I think I’m falling in love with the weight of a movie ticket. 

The greenery of the wind relocates the darkness. The Alps defend Sunday from the pretty clouds of Monday. Nature is mostly scorpions and wasps. Maybe poultry. I’m not sure about poultry. Are chickens natural? If you rub something obscure long enough it begins to shine like varnish and do the hully gully. Every faucet has a mouth, every sentence has a purpose. The purpose of this sentence is frequented by a group of words that want to reflect on the suppleness of the human tongue. They urge conference. Listen to the bees grow into the sensual drool of calculus. Listen to the predicates click their lyrics into the scenery of gills.

This is a moment for pearls. The king thought his bones were expanding and wrote a sullen letter to Egypt. Egypt responded by saying that the encounter with the terrine was languishing in seaweed. This directed the king to seek beatitude in the peripheries, out of the direct sunlight and in the shadows by the window. Egypt stepped into the Nile and shined. 

The lighting here is busy. The bulbs sweat sauerkraut. The eyes groan on the bookshelves. The hives come to us in our dreams, bearing the softness of moonlight and the raw fleece of autumn. Our carpentry is jubilant in its rudiments and demands the glory of fact. Scraps among the harpsichords prove that the effacement of music is paint, not noise as we suspected. Noise is just a sound spinning in the face. Not everyone can twinkle. Some of us have stories that seethe with trapezoids. I like generating peculiarities of failure. Escalators, unicorns, tidepools.  

The eyes are lounges for the judgments of the brain, which are suspended in microscopes. 

There is a movie in which a naked woman welcomes you at the door and a movie in which a fish clarifies hints of clay. 

Welcome away blatant woman. Start your stomach logs. We have toes for the snow and organs for experience. 

Theory blurs the rough terrain. Jelly drags the track chair across the room and Marie Laurencin waits for it in her sleep. The pure way of the monastery is to go hiking and pick blackberries. We seduce one another with a little driftwood and a lot of cupcakes. There is an apricot that feels sad for the pill of regret which is a bear whose veins make a case for the imaginary money of a canary. But it’s hard to swallow. This level of anthropomorphism is alarmingly literal.

Eating exhibits parables. We find a path toward the butter and the imagery of this requires a pineapple. You must envision playground slides for the potatoes to happen. They’ve been mashed and put in a bowl. A drool bends the surface so that it feels kinetic. Postage stamps speak of a floating office. This means that the derivative takes all the cake and leaves us with the cost of shipping. And that, too, calls for the use of infrared filters.  

We cut the lawn with a kind of knife. You’re probably wondering why we skipped the backyard. I think it has something to do with Portugal. Lisbon is beautiful. My sense of the outdoors is a little scratched but zips together nicely in order to tell you that the lions are roaring. Please continue drawing. Congratulate the mass of the street during an era of clouds. This makes eating saws. This makes saws walk. This makes walking saw through making. Making is incarnation. I’ve seen it happen before. It helps make your bones stronger. This is especially important in space. Weight loss diminishes bone mass and raises the amount of calcium in your blood. But now we’re getting technical at a time when we need to be instantaneous. Words don’t happen by themselves. They need snow and limousines. 

Gnu Glue

Every day we see our lives play out in miniature what the universe does at large. The day rises, a scattering of clouds flare into gold, the sky goes from a twinkling black to a lighter and lighter blue, activities gain traction, grow, people interact, floors are swept, money exchanged, coffee poured, food eaten, cars started, traffic entered, curses shouted, insults hurled, acidities endured, jobs worked, products shelved, houses sold, ideas taught, civilities exchanged, dates made, the sun grows higher in its trajectory, then slowly, imperceptibly begins to lower, the shadows lengthen, the sun moves toward the western horizon, then (if you happened to be watching) the last portion of sunlight fades from view and night unfolds from the sky, the darkness diffused by streetlights in the city, an ocean of stars in the country unpolluted by light. 

We follow the same pattern. We rise, get out of bed, and begin a trajectory that will lead us through a chronology of pumps and bumps and exploits and joys. There will be an arc to our day. We will do what the sun does but do it in miniature. We will attain a certain fullness of being and then feel the tautness of that being relax bit by bit until we return to bed and pull the covers over our head and vanish, enveloped by oblivion.

Losing consciousness is a delight. It always is. Don’t ask why. I don’t know why. The reverse is less pleasant. Entering into consciousness has never been an entirely pleasant experience for me. It varies, depending on circumstances. How much sleep I had, what lay ahead of me in the day. 

I suspect everyone has their own way of doing it. Mine is most often prickly. It’s a delicate operation. If I’m not careful, I get the DTs. 

Doesn’t matter. I get the DTs anyway. The DTs are unavoidable. 

By DTs I don’t mean delirium tremens. I mean Donald Trump. The DTs happen when I have a moment or two of forgetfulness, a nice blithe somewhat foggy insouciance as I run water to shave or open the refrigerator for a jar of blackberry jam. And then it hits me. Creeps back into my blood like a virus, dyes my red blood with a black ugly bile, grows into a mass of panicked awareness and crashes around in my head like an Iberian fighting bull bristling with banderillas, rivets me to the ground with the dead weight of a thousand dying suns: that face, those jowls, those freaky little hands. I remember that this unevolved, loutish, lumbering man-baby billionaire is president, and he and his billionaire cronies are looting the government, and taking away health care, and taking away science and education, and destroying everything good and decent and caring, and turning everything to shit.

How is this even possible? Nothing rational can explain it. I lose hope. But I don’t give up. I don’t succumb completely. I learn to develop an attitude, a reinforcing mindset writer China Miéville calls “undefeated despair.” 

What a marvelous phrase! 

Hope is over. Forget hope. Hope makes things worse. It leads to denial. You start to hope for hope and then feel duped. Doped, dumped, duped by hope. So you let despair happen. You make art, you persist, you keep going. It works. Despair is a lousy feeling, but it’s real, it’s more affordable than health care, and it’s not that bad. It doesn’t kill you. It’s not strychnine. It’s just despair. It’s the stuff of great novels by Cormac McCarthy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Hope is fragile. It needs to be coaxed into existence and assiduously maintained. Hope requires a lot of work. Not despair. Despair has a built-in invulnerability. That’s why I often feel so weirdly protected when I’m feeling it. Optimism is Norman Vincent Peale’s idiotic grin on West 29^th Street. Pessimism is a femme fatale in a sexy black gown offering you a shot of heroin. 

I’m most susceptible to the DTs in the morning. It figures. I’m vulnerable. My mind is still afloat in that foggy milieu of being half-awake. Once everything gels, once I begin forming sentences and making plans and figuring things out, that’s when the bad comes rolling in with the good. I put the heat on. The water starts to boil. The day begins to roll. 

There is also the narrative arc of our lives. We follow a pattern similar to that of the sun on its pilgrimage across the sky, but without the fanfare. We arrive in blood and mucous. We are dropped or tugged into life. Screaming. But we begin. We grow, we develop, we evolve in much the same way as wine maturing in a cask, we season in nuance and character, our lives become complex, conflicted, ambiguous, huge. And then, imperceptibly, we weaken, we diminish. Some are struck by disease and go more quickly than others. Others go and go getting wrinklier and wrinklier and hobbled and awkward and barely coherent until at last they let go. Which is what we do. What we all do. There is no getting around it. We let go. We have to. There is no other choice. You can’t cling to life. There is nothing to cling to. It’s not a merry-go-round. There are no poles. You simply let go. At least, that’s what I’ve seen people do. Both in real life and in the movies. They let go. They shut their eyes and something vague and important sighs out of them. 

I apologize for these generalities. These descriptions have the balance and simplicity of allegory. Nothing that lives is ever that simple, or balanced. Most of life is a huge, chaotic mess. But it is the model, the central narrative for sentient, mortal beings. The trajectory is as certain as it is ancient. 

Our main injunction in life is to reproduce. I failed at that. I chose not to reproduce. In the same way I got out of the draft, I got out of reproducing. I didn’t want to kill people and I didn’t want to bring people into this world. I knew very early in life that what I wanted to do is write books and that writers, generally, do not make much money. Some writers make a lot of money. Most writers do not. I don’t know that the formula is for making a lot of money at writing. It’s probably a lot simpler to make money by making movies or telling jokes on a stage to a crowd of people but for whatever reason I chose writing, or writing chose me. In any case, I did not reproduce. I made books. I will leave books behind. But whether people read them or not is a huge uncertainty. 

The good thing about books is that you do not need to save money to send them to college, or support them in their endeavors, or invite them to your house on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The great frustration of books is that they require readers. I can read only so many books. I write books and hope for readers. Some writers don’t care if they have an audience or not. It’s enough just to write. That is, of course, the ideal situation. To write, to enjoy writing, to find and fulfill oneself in writing, and not need an audience. What a heavenly situation that would be. 

I’m the kind of writer that craves readers. The bigger the audience, the better. The words don’t even seem fully alive until someone else reads them. Until that happens, the words are ghosts. Wraiths of intention, wreathes of desire. This means that 99% of my life is spent in frustration. The one per cent happens when someone enjoys reading or hearing something I wrote. It is that one percent that drives the other 99% to continue doing what I was born to do, which is put words together. 

Which I do as weirdly and bizarrely as possible. I write carnivals. I write crazy sideshows. I put words together so as to maximize their enigma, their possibility to make meaning, to make worlds out of nothing. 

Why? I could lure an audience much more easily by writing about drugs and sex and murder and violence. But I don’t. Not directly, anyway. I don’t cater to that stuff. I cater to the weird and surreal. I like constructing sentences that get up and walk around like birch canoes on a surgical table.

I like phantasmagoria. The bizarre. The ineffable. I like putting words together in odd assemblies of syntax and grouping so that meaning erupts in flares of fluky association and the words jut out in the crudity of their being like outcropped rock. “Civilization,” observed Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, “consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.”

Manufacturing reality out of words is a difficult but highly stimulating project. It also demands a lot more effort from the reader. Most people want an easy ride. I know I do. When I go to an art museum and see a painting of a barn that looks like a barn and a mass of color and form that doesn’t look like anything other than what it is  -  a mass of color and form  -  it is the barn that looks like a barn that I have the easiest time appreciating. It is the intensity of detail that brings the reality of that barn into the barn that is my brain where I can mingle it with all my memories of being in a barn, the smell of straw and burlap and cow manure. The weight of things. The experience of things. Horns, udders, massive bone. Old, rotten wood. Daylight bursting through little cracks and holes. I’m on familiar ground there. I’m experiencing a barn. The artist has done something to renew the phenomenon that is a barn. 

Or owl or awl or lonely midnight street. It doesn’t have to be a barn. It might be a Roman ruin, Thomas Cole’s Ruins in the Campagna di Roma, Morning, 1842, which is a rendering of the Torre de Schiavi (Tower of Slaves), casting a broad shadow over a shepherd and his sheep while an intense blue and golden light suffuses the sky and planet with its bountiful grace. 

A mass of color and shape such as Convergence by Jackson Pollock or Canticle by Mark Tobey requires something different from me. This is work that requires an openness to the immediacy of things, to the immediate presence of color and shape before it has been worked into a familiar image. The public now knows what to call this painting: abstract expressionism. But it still stumps a lot of people, including myself. Is it supposed to be beautiful? Or is it ok as something ugly?

Either of these paintings would sell in the millions. How that process happens, I do not know. The commercial valuation of art stumps me completely. 

I do know one thing. If you’re starting out, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make money getting people on board with what is recognizable, with what they can understand, than something that makes no reference to anything with which they’re familiar. No one likes to be in a position of feeling dumb. Or clueless. But I can’t help it. I like doing what those abstract expressionist guys liked doing. Throwing things, splattering things, creating happy accidents. I like to put words together so that they fling themselves into the air and bruise the mind with ineffability. 

I like reading things I don’t completely understand. I’m drawn into the intellectual challenge of trying to figure things out, finding layers of meaning, sometimes paper-thin like the layers of an onion, and sour, wonderfully sour, or thick like the layers of pasta in lasagna, chewy, toothsome, fulfilling. 

The public is different. The public likes Disneyland. And Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey. Treacle, trash, garbage. Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Public, but your taste in things sucks. Go listen to NPR. You can have American Idol. I’ll take Moby Dick. 

Intellectual endeavor has never done particularly well in the United States. Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter goes into the history of this. It’s a well-written book, a good read. 

I got hooked on intellectual creation early in life. Maybe I did so to help disguise the fact that I’m essentially stupid. I don’t know. But by age fifteen or so I loved Aldous Huxley and Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare and Jack Kerouac. 

It was still possible in the 60s, and even the early 70s, to make a living as a writer. A writer of quality literary work. Wild, crazy, idiosyncratic work. There was an appetite for that. People weren’t so one-dimensional. They had a sense of adventure. They didn’t dismiss work they didn’t immediately understand. You didn’t have to dumb it down or fill it full of garish sex and violence. You could sell a literary product based on the merit of its style alone. People were well-read and despite the advent of TV circa 1947 (the year I was born) people liked  -  and continued  -  to read. They were able to appreciate a well-crafted sentence. 

The Internet has totally destroyed that. The Internet does not respect readers. There are, of course, exceptions. Some wonderful can be found on the Internet. But by and large, the Internet’s ubiquitous pop-ups and advertisements that suddenly begin blaring when you’re immersed in a text (…where the fuck is that coming from?) and pages that jerk up and down while you’re trying to direct your attention toward something do not make for focused, concentrated reading. Not to mention the awful grammar and infantile shallowness of most the writing that is plopped, flung, and deposited there. 

By the late 80s, writing had begun showing signs of obsolescence. There were a few authors such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Danielle Steele who still sold books in the millions and made a good living, but writers like Richard Brautigan, whose suicide in 1984 underscored the growing abyss between commercial, mainstream writing and the already severely marginalized writing of a more experimental or higher literary merit. It was a dark premonition for the future of writing. Midlist writers were being dismissed from mainstream publishing and urged to submit their work to the burgeoning small press arena. It was easier to get published in that world, and the readers were more sophisticated, but you could not make a living. Literature emerging from the small press arena was a labor of love, never a commercial enterprise. 

Even journalism was dying. Newspaper circulation has been declining precipitously since the 80s, at least. It’s extremely difficult to make a living as a journalist. The implications of that are pretty disturbing. Chris Hedges discusses this in depth in his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. 

Nevertheless, I persisted. I’m a writer. It’s what I do. It isn’t denial. I don’t know what it is. I can’t explain it. Why am I like this? Why do I chase chimeras? 

Am I on the wrong planet? Is that it?

Was I born on a planet that was in the process of being destroyed and my parents put me into a capsule for travel in outer space and set my craft to travel to a planet they thought might be favorable to my survival and well-being? I don’t know if this is the planet they had in mind, but I don’t have superpowers. I don’t even have tights. Just a drawer full of Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear. 

Earth is, in many ways, a beautiful planet. It offers lots of water and blue skies and ocean surf and strawberry jam. But I don’t feel that I belong here. I feel like I’m the wrong kind of animal for the wrong kind of terrain. Maybe I would’ve preferred being a bird. 

I was eight when the Broadway musical Peter Pan with Mary Martin in the lead role appeared on television. I was quite taken with Peter Pan’s ability to fly. It seemed completely feasible. I spent an entire day jumping off of a knoll in the attempt to take flight. I could feel the possibility of flight. It felt as if I put enough passion and will power into it I would just naturally take off and fly around the neighborhood. This didn’t happen. I finally gave up and surrendered to gravity and the human condition. 

My father flew. He was a pilot during WWII and continued to fly gliders late into life. I could’ve learned to fly. I could still learn to fly. But the sensation I hunger is better satisfied in the action of putting words together and watching them pound their way into reality. I don’t know what to call this sensation. Transcendence sounds too serious, a little pretentious. It comes from Latin, transcendere, meaning to climb over, to step over, to surpass. The mania I feel vibrating my nerves has nothing to do with stepping over anything. It has to do with penetration. Immersion. Feeling my subjectivity dissolve into the largeness of things, the universe. What do you call that? 

Ineffable. From Latin ineffabilis, meaning unutterable. Your mouth can’t make the right sound with the right meaning for a body of sensation that feels simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. This is how Zaum came into being. Zaum is a Russian word coined by the Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh and translates, roughly, into “transreason,” “beyonsense,” and “transration.” It can be defined as an experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminate meaning, a transrational language that crashes its way out of the chains of the rational to become something fully, insanely, maniacally ACTUAL.  

These words fail: I am not suggesting that logic is bad and madness is good. I am not anti-science. What I’m trying to get at is an intensity of expression that derives from eccentricity, incongruity. Sparks flying out of welded contrarieties. 

There have been other literary endeavors as well, projects calculated to transcend the bind of logic and attain heights and intensities of experience: Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Symbolism, or just plain jism, the language of ejaculation. 

Zaum, Zoom, Zinnia, Zipper. I celebrate all combinations of sounds, all inflammations of language that vivify experience in mutant volatility. Anything that builds a horse out of vowels and a gnu out of glue.

Adventures In Drywall Repair

I bought a drill today. I paid 40 bucks for it. It’s the first major tool I’ve bought in many years. I live in a one-bedroom apartment. I don’t use tools a lot. On occasion I’ll need a screwdriver or hammer but never anything like a power saw or electric drill. I’m not a builder. I don’t do construction. The last big job I did was to change out the fill valve in the toilet tank. I do own a toolbox and there are a few other tools at my disposal, wrenches, pliers, etc., and these items came in handy for the fill valve job. So why the drill?

Several months ago our building had a leak in the entry hallway. A slow drip. One of the members of our condominium scheduled some plumbers to come out and fix it. They had to make holes in the drywall in a number of places to get at the leaky pipes. The leak got fixed, but we were left with four big holes on the upper landing and a section of ceiling removed in the downstairs hallway ceiling. Contractors are hard to find for these jobs in Seattle because they don’t profit from it sufficiently to make it worthwhile in a city of such extreme affluence, and it’s the type of job that requires repeat visits to slather on the drywall mud. Fortunately, one of our neighbors with experience in construction, volunteered to fix the holes himself. He did so, and he did so with great aplomb and expertise, fixing the holes with such mastery that you can’t tell there had been so much as a scratch in the wall, much less a gaping hole. I was impressed. Inspired, in fact. How is this magic done, I wondered. I began watching YouTube videos about drywall repair. I almost wished that we had another hole to experiment on.

And then I remembered, we did. This was in the laundry room. A small square hole at the base of a narrow wall where we had been storing gallons of water in three big blue plastic tanks for an emergency, most likely the “big one,” a magnitude 9 megaquake seismologists have been predicting for the northwest since at least the 1980s, warning that the 700-mile-long Cascadia Subduction Zone is prone to big quakes in cycles of 200 to 300 years. The last big one occurred 317 years ago. If we’re still here when the next big one occurs, it will be a glad day when -  happily assuming any of us survive  -   one of us manages to dig through the rubble to find that water.

The hole in the laundry room had been there a long time. Years ago, there had been a leak in the apartment on the other side of the wall and the plumber had removed a section of wall to see if the leak was coming from a pipe. The leak turned out to be coming from elsewhere, but we were left with the hole. Our neighbor was just finessing the last smoothing and texturing of the drywall repair upstairs when I told him about the hole in the laundry room and that I’d seen some videos and was thinking about repairing it myself. I didn’t want to impose any further on the guy and ask him to guide me through it, but he was kind enough to glue a slat into the hole that I could use to foundationally screw the drywall into, and left some nails, some drywall tape, and a little left over mud. I asked one of our other neighbors if I could borrow his drill. He said he would do it himself. The weeks went by, and the work hadn’t been done, so I thought fuck it, I’ll buy a drill and do it myself.

The drill is a Black & Decker cordless 12-volt drill with a “smart select clutch” which allows the user to choose the correct power and speed appropriate to the work to be done by twisting a dial about the chuck with the icons of differently sized screws (the bigger the screw, the bigger the power), a 3/8 inch chuck and a motor delivering 130 foot-pounds of torque. It has a nice rubber handle that feels pleasing to the grip, a charger similar to the one I use for my laptop, 12V battery, and a double-ended screwdriver bit tip clasped to the base of the drill.

The first screw went in easily. Until it didn’t. That is to say, it went through the drywall plaster easily, but then hit something hard and stopped. The drill was unable to move it any further. I pulled it before damaging the motor. I tried screwing the rest in manually, but it was extremely tough going. I had to resort to a ratchet screwdriver we had had the good fortune to purchase earlier in the week to remove a stubborn screw from out DVD player when a disk got jammed inside and I had to remove the top to get at it. I was able, at last, to get the screw flush with the wall. It occurred to me later that the wood our neighbor had glued in there was scrap lumber from the ironwood balcony that had recently been installed on the front of our building. The lumber used for that job was ironwood. Ironwood is not a misnomer. I had wondered why our neighbor had glued the wood in there instead of screw it, in the usual manner. Now I knew.

The next three screws went in easily. Too easily. They penetrated the drywall but didn’t seem to get traction in the slat of wood on the other side. This puzzled me. I knew it was there. I knew I was drilling in the right place. But the screws weren’t catching.

Putting the mud on was easy. I added some pre-measured tape and smoothed it all out with a joint knife. Then I let it dry for a day.

I added more mud on Wednesday and let it dry. I needed to add another layer of mud so I went to the Five Corners Hardware store on West McGraw and bought a quart of lightweight spackling compound (I would’ve preferred joint compound but I didn’t want to buy a whole five gallons of pre-mixed joint compound) and a 3M Drywall Sanding Sponge. I lightly sanded the patch and then added the spackling compound which was a little gobbier than the mud and harder to work, but I managed to get it pretty smooth the joint knife.

On Friday I went to paint the wall, but noticed a tiny nail-head sticking out. I have no idea where it came from. I did a little more sanding, then dabbed some compound on the offending nail-head, and mushed it smooth with the joint knife. Hopefully that will keep it hidden. I began to suspect that there were things going on behind that drywall patch that bordered on the supernatural. What next? A finger poking out?

On Saturday, I decided to go ahead and apply primer to the wall. I got a small stepladder out of the utility closet and poured some of the white primer into a paint tray, dipped the smaller of two brushes into it, grabbed a sheet of newspaper, and went to work. I knew the space was small but it felt more cramped than I’d imagined it would be. It had also had several pipes bending this-a-way and that-a-way and I didn’t want to get primer on them so I tried slipping the sheet of newspaper behind the pipe with one hand so that I could slop and spread primer onto the wall with my other hand. This proved too awkward and the newspaper tore so I just went at it as carefully as possible with my right hand. Roberta came home just as I’d started which proved quite fortunate as I’d forgotten to apply painter’s tape to the sides and my hands, adorned with surgical gloves, already had paint on them. Roberta changed her clothes and came out and applied the painter’s tape. When she was finished I resumed my operation.

The primer stank. I had never used primer before. It’s quite different than the latex paint to which I’m accustomed. It smelled different. There was a faint smell of ammonia. It wasn’t long before I felt woozy and got a headache and my eyes began to sting a little bit. I looked up primer later on the Internet to discover what was in it. All the sites I found made reference to an ingredient called a binder, which is most generally a polyvinyl acetate. Perhaps that was the source of the smell. It might also have been a built-in fungicide to prevent mold, or an anti-corrosive pigment. None of the actual chemicals were mentioned. They might’ve been on the label, but I had already returned the can to our neighbor.

I poked, daubed, dabbed, smeared, smudged, massaged, fussed, and brushed until the wall looked evenly coated in primer. Then I stood back to take a look.

The final job looks pretty spectacular. But I know where all the flaws are. I can see them. A tiny, barely visible crease where the upper part of the patch would be, a seam the drywall tape was seemingly (but just barely) hiding from view. Those screws that never found purchase in wood on the left side of the square chunk of drywall were not there to anchor the loose section of drywall to keep it from revealing an ever-so-slight unevenness with the wall. That bugged me. It will continue to bug me. I can’t edit it any further like I might a paragraph. This paragraph, for instance. Words are forgiving. Until they’re in print. Once in print, typos, grammatical errors, bad ideas and clumsily expressed thoughts join all the regrets, blunders, misunderstandings and bad decisions of our life. The past cannot be edited. Every dumb thing I said or did is now a permanent sketch on DVD. My head is a bin for Blu-ray.

I enjoyed learning how to do drywall. The parallels between construction and writing are pretty strong. A woman who suffered depression once said that she could not find a match between her mind and her words. There will always be those screws that penetrate just so far, but never completely. There will never be a complete match between what I’m trying to achieve and the final result, between the ineffable and the clumsy efforts at making words try to carry that action.

And This?

The autumn wasp acts as an airborne filigree, a mechanical pedestrian dressed in seaweed. What this tells us about cheese is sticky. Gold holds the soft roots of tonality, the élan that draws species into cabbage and bulldogs.

And this?

This is an aggression, a rubric of plumbing that comes to give us musk and music. Who knows if this will place it where it belongs. I'm going to guess Colorado. The unknown sugar of life approves an arena of eggs and so opens the eye of the mountain. It makes sense. The humidity has muscle. It will lower the sky into our hearts where enough fog still lingers to climb into our pennies and exert a little sturgeon on our nerves.

Denver, meanwhile, sparkles at the base of the Rockies and chews the sun like a bas-relief on the side of a leavened dialogue.

With China.

Create an honest mimosa, my friend, and yesterday will sting on Wednesday. For this, it is necessary to overflow reality and steal the grimace of dark matter. The stars wear rubies. But music creates a space for scorpions and books.

Polar man kisses his girlfriend in the Hall of Coleslaw. The kiss is full of blood, as one might expect, considering the nature of grout and the difficulties of dark energy in an itchy sweater. We whistle at the Door of Light and put things in perspective when the hills shout their trees out of the ground. Structure is a rocking motion aroused by words. We pull ourselves into writing. We use binoculars. We use language and diesel. We tell timeless stories of regret and ejaculation. We foster the enigma of creation by waving fragments of gravity at a yo-yo. We deposit words in a greasy paragraph and participate in holes. Winning an organ is a cuddly banana if you can find suitable employment for it in a bubble bath. We have ears for the canary kit, but no nose for the analysis of exclusion. If you would like a sample of assimilation, intimate the unction of a buzzard in a tiny white felony. Please include your phone number, fallibilities, and a crystalline substance. You can find yourself in the auction over there by the barn. Look for the red wheelbarrow. The structure of cosmic voids is embedded in the silences of dirt. Ask for Worm.

Tired of shaving? Would you like a catastrophe to go with your coffee?

Here. Have a sheaf of sauerkraut for a wilder life of Friday enticements and a raw unsettling sandwich of Bavarian airplanes. The beverage of Polynesian bricks has arrived and it’s already sparkling. We’ve put some thoughts on paper, potato catapults, broomstick bubbles, a dictionary of shivering sapphires and a junkyard goose, a sad wad of deduction, broken gods of cause and effect, close shaves with Toupee the Tornado and three hundred cathedrals flooded with infinity. The clouds float by beneath our feet. Listen. They sound swollen, like limousines with tinted windows and a gargantuan pulse. The hummingbird gum is cold with blinking. But the shore is a clean equation. Shake it little baby, shake it like a willow tree.

Pearls glitter in the membrane of a necktie as a pendulum swings back and forth in the package by the door, accompanied by a late night song. Think of this as a sample of cognition, the pollination of an idea of cheese by an errant quadrilateral. Not so much salt as a cardiovascular igloo immersed in thumps. How does one satisfy a craving like this? The propositional sign is a fact. The wall searches for an apricot, but cannot be expressed as a proposition unless it’s coated with primer and then lightly sanded. A name has meaning only in the context of a delicatessen, or shoe store. We are tangled in one another’s arena. The espadrille is tinted with the dreams of walking. Shadows sleep in abstraction. A layer of languorous dress floats in a kind of swimming pool in which a moss accomplishes an idea of birth. All this makes me feel a little extraordinary, like someone who writes with immoderation and memory sauce.

Can you blame me? The hours are in knots and the foundry caresses a moon overflowing with mist. I feel the wings of a dragon begin to lift the body of a paragraph above a bohemian melody. How to describe such feeling? With tourniquets and paper.

With sapphires and pipes. With toads and heat. With foliage and undulation. With anything that can become an actuality of muslin or oak and thoughts adrift in their own birth and development. If the paragraph is an embryo then Baudelaire is a gynecologist.

Said the postman just as he was leaving. The parcel has an electric mustache. This sometimes happens in the post. The mail begins as a treasure of possibility and commerce and ends as a badge of dusty resignation.

All things monstrous are eventually addressed as Mr. and Mrs. Outcome. The narrative is pushed forward by wildlife, elephants and cactus and squirrels. The cactus do most of the work. They use a form of telekinesis called needling. They needle and needle until something moves.

A logical picture of facts is a thought. A bottle of squirts is an interaction. The surf is ratified by drawing. Orchids grab the light and make it appealing, a juice in which colonnades of hosiery rupture with 12:30 p.m. and Ecuador finds a parking space in my heart.

It is essential to a thing that it can be a word, a group of words, or a small intestine at twilight. It’s pretty hard to think of an object apart from its connection with other things. The highway arouses cruising. Feathers solicit flight. A blast of imagined dynamite reveals a face of amber. The shoal is a Möbius of brooding solidarity. Diamonds blaze in the glory of velvet.

So you see, if there is a picture, the elements of the picture will behave in a certain way with one another. The picture will walk out of its frame and shiver until someone drapes a blanket around it.

The silence is gorgeous. The indigo is providential. There is no snow. There is only fire. The wood spits sparks at the moon. The vertebrae of an engine of ice enlists drums of water. The water corresponds to the dictates of rain. The thinness of time in the streets of Paris make one’s sneakers swell until the puddles become drawers full of push-ups and flirts. Ears wander the sounds of Mercury. The feathers are dry as ever at the scarf foundry. The sugar plow is available for viewing between 11:00 a.m. and posterity.

And so on, as if the general form of proposition had to face itself in a boxing match, and the fog rolled in and made everything a form of baptism, a renaissance dripping with sweat. Are opals gems, or hints of paradise? The nouns grapple for meaning, and the sentence pushes its words to the end, where they become Tuesday, and smell of benediction.

A Tatter Of Patterns

Is there a cure for history? You will need lots of rags to soak the blood. Perhaps a harpsichord for the raft. Meaning for the sake of meaning. Narratives for the brain.

As we descend the river, we see a theater of the stars floating in the unknown. Exotic luxuries embarrass us with their arms and planetariums. Morning arrives in a fire of golden light. The perfume of a thousand flowers exhausts our senses and leaves us feeling the full weight of being alive.

What happened to the people that painted the horses and bulls and cattle and bears in the caverns of Lascaux? Who were they? What did they look like standing in the dark, holding stone lamps of animal fat? They looked like any artist absorbed in what they’re doing. Amazed by what they do, frustrated by what they cannot do.

What did those mornings and afternoons feel like in Rome circa 411 AD? Were the streets full of garbage? Beggars? The disdain and disconnection of the rich? Was it chaos? Noisy? Blow jobs in side streets? People shitting anywhere they felt like taking a dump? What did it look like after the Goths got done killing and maiming the population? Were the streets littered with corpses? What did it smell like?

And who, exactly, were the Goths? They were a northern people from Scandinavia and East Germany. There were two main branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. They spoke a language that is now extinct but whose roots were East Germanic. They wore brooches in the form of eagles encrusted with gems. Iron helmets with decorative gilded copper skinning. Lamellar armor: overlapping metal plates sewn together.

The population in what is now called North America was roughly 112 million before the first European contact. The population of Native Americans now (May, 2017) is roughly 2.9 million. Indian youth have the highest rate of suicide among all ethnic groups in the United States.

The empire is falling. The collapse is evident. The president is a thug, a criminal who daily breaks the laws, who doesn’t read, who doesn’t attend briefs, who chooses to live in a luxury penthouse in midtown Manhattan rather than the White House, driving up the cost of security. Security for the Trump family is roughly 183 million per year and includes protection for his son and daughter to go on ski trips to Aspen.

Meanwhile, 43.1 million Americans live in poverty. 17 million homes are food insecure.

Why does it seem that time moves forward? Why do I have that sensation? That a chronology moves forward, evolves, develops, matures? Is this an illusion? Is time an illusion? Does time even exist? My clocks seem to think it exists.

The roar of the gardener’s chain saw trimming the building shrubbery adds to an illusion of progress, improvement. Nature goes wild but we hire men to come and shape it into orderliness and pattern, formations pleasing to the eye. Things are done in sequence. There is a pattern to the way the objective of the gardeners is achieved, pattern leading to pattern.

There is the combined smell of gasoline and freshly cut shrubbery. I don’t see them, but I hear them, and know there is work being done, and that the work is being performed efficiently. How do I know the work is being performed efficiently? I have no idea. I just do.

When the day is over, there will be a series of events left behind all with all the tree branches and detritus in the bed of the gardener’s truck. Food eaten, words written, ideas exchanged, plants trimmed, dishes washed, movies watched, noises heard, showers taken, faces shaved, legs shaved, cats fed, laundry done. Phenomena, for all its complexity, turns quickly to memory in the same way fine particles of earth turn to silt in the bottom of a river. Much of it is lost. Sensations are felt and usually dismissed, if they enter into our consciousness at all. It’s hard to catch a phenomenon in the act of being a phenomenon and getting it written down, described with the fumbling implements of language. Phenomena is always in flux. It comes in a cluster of subtleties and nuance that is so exquisitely singular that it will never be repeated. It comes in waves. The reflections in the sand are memories. You can write in the sand with a stick. When the events are small we call it a thing. When the events are big we call it news.

Today in the news tempers at a town hall meeting in North Dakota boiled over when a man confronted Representative Kevin Cramer demanding to know whether the rich would benefit from the repeal of Obamacare. He tried shoving a wad of cash into Cramer’s shirt collar and was restrained and escorted out of the room by police. Trump, meanwhile, spoke at a Christian evangelical university, lashing out at critics as “pathetic” and describing himself as an outsider besieged by what he calls the “fake news media.”

There is never any one history. How could there be? There is a general coherence to an overall narrative, some of which is true, some of which is not. Some of which is exaggerated, some of which is omitted. There are symbols and flags, monuments and cemeteries. There are paintings and movies, tyrants and myrmidons. Ceremonies and massacres. Palaces and barbed wire. That’s history. Screams and explosions. Medals and dead children.

What is left of virtue? The highest virtue in the United States is work. The lowest is intellect. Intellectual work is considered an oxymoron. Wealth, power, and property are valued above all else, including compassion, charity, and leisure. People in the United States have an odd relationship with leisure. If leisure is squandered on television or golf it seems to be ok. But if it is spent reading a book suspicions rise.