Three Lines By Hölderlin

Heilige Gefäße sind die Dichter,

Worin des Lebens Wein, der Geist

Der Helden sich aufbewahrt.

I became very intrigued with the above little poem by Friedrich Hölderlin's recently. I neither speak nor read German, but I wanted to present it in German because Hölderlin chose his words very carefully, and I wanted to come to know them in their original German. Words have a very specific meaning in German and are key to unlocking its essence. As the Japanese man who appears at the end of the movie Paterson puts it, “poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.”

There are a number of online German to English dictionaries to help unravel the meaning of this deceptively simple poem. There’s an entire philosophy – Weltanschauung – packed into the stratification of these words.

No matter how small of a word or what language is involved, each word has an evolution that corresponds to a particular range of perceptions and orientations and attitudes within the domain of human experience. “Speech,” observed the linguist Edward Sapir, “is a human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies – not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples.”

So: heilige Gefäß. What’s that? Heilige Gefäß means “holy vessel.” Vessel in the sense of glass, or cup. A receptacle. Something that holds, that contains. Why holy? Because of the content, the substance (though in this case more like an energy, a noumena) of what it contains.

“Sind die Dicter.” This translates roughly as “are the poets.” Poets are holy vessels. Who didn’t know that? Poets are holy because…why? What makes poets holy? The nature of their endeavor, which is one of transcendence, of attaining the sublime. The nature of their work, which is alchemical. The goal of the poet is to take the base ores of everyday experience and transmute them into gold. Into the giddy exhilaration of autonomous innovation.

Poets are receivers. Transducers. Antennae. The cosmological energies that comprise the universe find a human voice among poets. Some of these energies are benign and some of these energies have a more destructive impulse. Violence and beauty do not uncommonly repulse one another. Au contraire.

When Christ tore through the temple of the moneychangers he was behaving like a poet.

What’s a “moneychanger?” they’re like hedge fund investors. Bankers. Assholes who think strictly in terms of money and how rich they can make themselves no matter how many lives are capsized and made miserable in the process.

The Bible got it right: you cannot both serve God and Mammon.

Poets tend, as a rule, to be a little averse to the whole business of making money, though not entirely as a matter of principle. They’re not very good at it for one thing: the market for books of poetry is less than robust. Writing poetry does very little to twist the combinatorial lock on the bank vault. It’s a dubious investment. The wealth poets are after is speculative, but not in the sense of finance. More in the sense of divinatory, conjectural, phantasmagoric.

Poets don’t make money at poetry because poetry isn’t merchandise. There’s no demand for poetry. There’s plenty of it to go around, but few - and I do mean few - people want it. They can do without it, thank you very much.

So why does anyone bother to write it? Good question. Everyone will have their own reason. My addiction began with Arthur Rimbaud. “The Drunken Boat.” I like being drunk. I especially like being drunk on language, because there’s essentially no hangover, and the side effects are relatively minor: a tendency to buy more books than you need, a tendency to chatter, a tendency to use polysyllabic words.

“Worin des Lebens Wein.” “Wherein the wine of life.” The “wine of life” suggests a heady brew of euphoria, intensity, elation and intellectual exultation. Pretty much the same phenomena as I was discussing above, with one important exception: all experience, even bad experience, serves the inventive mind of the poet.

Much of life is shit. Let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a whole lot of pain in life. Loss, rejection, grief, frustration, fear, anxiety, despair, confusion, meaningless toil. But if, like a poet, you can take these experiences and torque and twist the language until something different emerges - a transcendent glory, a sense of grace, a liberating fumarole of blistering invective - you’re doing good, my friend.

Poets have a great knack for getting drunk. The way they feel about life is cosmic. It’s very large and dizzying. Open-ended. Infinite. “Energy,” said Blake, “is eternal delight.”

“Geist.” This is important. Geist, in German, means both mind and spirit, as in the word ‘zeitgeist,’ or “time spirit.” English makes a distinction between mind and spirit. This is where a translation of the German into English might trip up a bit. Geist also means ghost. Ghost, mind, and spirit are fused into the one word: geist. Important to keep that in mind.

Der Helden sich aufbewahrt. This is where things get really tricky. Der helden means “the hero.” The poet, as has already been suggested, cuts a heroic figure. The poet is also a bit of a tragic figure, a bit like the fool of the Tarot cards. ‘Sich” is a reflexive pronoun meaning ‘themselves.”

“Aufbehwahrt” means “kept,” and is from the present tense “aufbewhahren,” which means to store, or keep in a safe place. The poet conserves the sacred. This is what makes the poet extraordinary and heroic. This is particularly true of our current historical period. Humankind is in dire straits. Four hundred years or so of intense industrial and technological commerce have permanently destroyed the ecologies that human beings and countless other species require to live on this planet. Because it’s just the one planet. We don’t have another planet to hop onto when this one goes berserk, as it has already begun doing.

Poets resist these general trends toward endless accumulation and technological answers for all of life’s complexities and needs. And they often do so in financial distress, working at humiliating jobs or (if they’re lucky) lucrative and prestigious teaching positions. Universities provide haven, but they’re still a few steps away from full membership in mainstream society.

I don’t blame science and technology. But it’s clear that a one-sided obsession with these things to the exclusion of the holy and non-commercial has put things way out of balance. If people become obsessed with these things, other more important things will be neglected. Things like real wealth. The vitality of language. Community.

I like money, but I have never understood what it is to have an exclusive obsession with money. Money is not real. Money is not real wealth. Real wealth is available resources: respirable air, drinkable water, food security.

Money is a form of language, but as a tool of capitalism, it does more to harm community and destroy real wealth. That’s the irony. Money can make you poor. Capital can be a disaster. And it has been. Just look around you. The floods, the draughts, the stressed and overpopulated infrastructures, the wars, the depletion of aquifers and lakes and rivers, the acidification of the oceans, the calamity of plastic choking those same stressed-out oceans.

Unchecked capitalism is toxic. It’s a hazard for everyone except sociopaths. But its lures aren’t easily dismissed. The thrill of a luxury sports car or all the time in the world to cruise the Adriatic in a private yacht with an unlimited supply of haute cuisine are temptations for the shallow. But enough money to never worry about adequate health care? That’s tough to avoid. A lot of people will be willing – to one degree or another – to compromise their values if it means they and their children will have access to health care and a good education. And who can blame them?

Resisting these forces is the task of the poet. It’s like a priesthood. The role of the poet is shamanistic. It’s also a role that most people in western culture look down upon as the province of silly bohemians or elitist academicians comfortably ensconced in ivory towers.

That’s what Hölderlin is getting at: the conservation of a sense of the sacred is a heroic task. The poet is up against some very powerful enemies, not the least of which is Wall Street. Another is indifference. And still another is literalism, the inability to see interrelationships, to get beyond the one-dimensional.

So what, then, might Hölderlin’s words look like in English? One translation might be: Poets are holy vessels, / in which the wine of life, the spirit / of heroes is kept. This gets the basic idea across. But it’s not the same. I’m in the shower, but I can’t seem to get that raincoat off. 

Fiddle

I don’t entirely understand Kierkegaard on despair, but I understand despair. I know how it operates, how it breeds and propagates, how it unbolts the door of monsters and lets chaos loose. But let’s not dwell on that.

I solder the elements of a strange equation. The universe always seeks balance. I’m working on it. I’m building a chassis. I’m dwelling in a realm of dyspeptic substitution.

Whatever gets you through the night, right?

There’s a bend in the river and as we come around we see a volcano in eruption. Flames and billowing black smoke vomiting into heaven.

What can I say? Even candy has details.

Psilocybin is in a misty state. Two hundred teeth chase me down the street. The Blue Angels roar over Seattle. They fly crazily low. You can feel the thrust of their engines shriek and vibrate in your bones.

The spirit of contradiction is difficult to transmit. But it can be done. The branch declares its connection to the trunk, the trunk to the roots, the roots to leaves, the leaves to the sky.

Music gives us hope. But I don’t know if hope is a good thing these days. I don’t always like reality, it can be pretty disturbing, but I need to know its features, I need to define its condition and shape in order to craft a response. The right response. The response most apt to sustain a modicum of comfort.

Is Iggy Pop our man? Is he the guy that’s going to keep us going, give us traction? It won’t be Mick Jagger, as freakishly athletic as he remains in his 70s. He’s just too happy. Grinning all the time. How can you trust anyone that grins all the time? Or tries to sell you a Cadillac Escalade during the Superbowl, à la Bob Dylan?

I’m biology, the same as a tidepool. The same as a seriously overweight philosopher from West Texas defending Derrida with a western drawl.

Some people, myself included, gravitate toward friction. It calls for a diagnosis.

What becomes of a sense of distance under the influence of psilocybin?

Oil knocks on the door. I open the door and Mr. Oil hands me a wad of blood-stained money. That’s no way to go. Let’s back up. Let’s return to the cave. Hand prints on a wall of rock. Phantoms in a shell of wick and animal fat.

We’re drawn to the unknown but afraid to enter its domain. Let’s dive into our store of secrets and share those. Some songs sound the geology of anguish. Metallica on Mars. A representation of warmth strolls through a metaphor and comes out the other side making a convocation of fire. I want to meditate a while on heat. I find it difficult to let go of things. I need someone or something to teach me how to let go of things. For example, that lampshade in the closet for which we do not own a lamp. The sky is gray and the hills are derelict. Sooner or later one must accept death. Even when breakfast begins to taste like a glockenspiel. It’s so difficult to avoid eating meat. But think of the dragonfly. They ability to see instantly through a thicket and formulate a path that will bring it in a flash to its prey.

Me, I try to find old friends on the Internet. I come up empty. What happened to them? Are they still living?

Consider the aerodynamic qualities of the wasp. How does that not dazzle you with its genius?

Each atom of my body owes its existence to earth. Acetylene anticipates the properties of a wanton realism.

Using only a palette of English grammar, can you explain why the violin is sometimes called a fiddle?

Adjectives produced by fever are black and bald. Why would anyone dream of living on Mars? Who or what created the universe?

The faucet is a fugue of chrome.

I stare at the dog-tie embedded in a concrete column at Safeway while R goes inside to buy a bag of peanuts we can feed to the crows. It’s a simple shape, a courtesy to customers, an anchor for dogs.

I think of dwarfs in a goldmine. Working the earth in the dark. Outside, sunlight hugs the earth. I can endure almost anything but a utopia.

The worst thing you can invent in a dystopia is a utopia. It just makes things worse. But if it’s already worst can it become worse? Can worse be worst?

Seasoning can be tricky. Watch that you don’t use too much basil. It can make your food bitter and unpalatable.

It’s cruel to awaken the dead. Don’t do that.

A blue whale can dive to a depth of 2,500 feet in two minutes. Try doing that.

These are the words that milk the moon and puzzle the sense.

A certain number of women have found me insupportable over the years. This may be one reason why. Words parade on a sheet of paper and I clap my hands and urge them on. Each time I open a book I feel the vibrations of the void stream through my nerves. The long heat of life, the brief heat of gratification.

Trying gratifying the world with words instead of money.

Do you see what I mean? Is this why my shampoo hasn’t been foaming up on my head as usual?

A chromatic frog hops across my mind and reminds me that my bureau drawer is full of socks and underwear. Thank you, frog. Thank you, world. Thank you, universe.

Writing poetry is weird.

Words As Cubes In A Tray Of Abstraction

Ice implies preservation. Freezing things inactivates microbes. Bacteria, yeasts, molds. It also means preserving the polar ice cap, which stabilizes the jet stream, which stabilizes the climate, which insures the growth of food crops. We’re losing the ice at the north pole. I write during a period of immense crisis. Not that words preserve anything. Words aren’t ice. Words refer to ice. Stand in for ice. They are not ice. But they could be. If imagined as such, these words could be hard translucent cubes that clink in your glass. But they won’t save the world. Nothing can save the world now but Superman. And a colossal quantity of ice.

Yesterday I discovered a city of elves beneath the bed. It’s nothing unusual. I find strange things under our bed all the time. I find everything except what I’m looking for.

Does fragility awaken a sense of beauty? Yes, I believe it does. Beauty is often fragile. But to what extent does frailty create beauty? It’s generally hue and nuance that dazzle the eyes with beauty. But aren’t mountains beautiful? Are mountains frail? There’s often frailty in the mountains, but the mountains aren’t frail. Mountains are enduring. Mountains are sublime.

A lot of experience eludes words. There just aren’t words for certain perceptions and feelings. There may be whole dimensions of experience and physical laws that puzzle our grammar and sounds. Our own biology may have limits to what we can and cannot experience. And yet I keep putting words down, putting words out there, pushing words forward, trying to sound what’s out there, what new thing, what new perception, what new insight might save us from imminent peril, might save us from ourselves.

If ice didn’t exist, but a cube of words, a paragraph described ice so perfectly that it created an idea of it, we could say that ice had a potential for existence. Can we say the same of gods and angels?

I like writing paragraphs that cohere around a thought, a motif thematic as mushroom. Paragraphs full of anger and sunlight. Methane embedded in permafrost.

I like the idea of words lifting things. Lions, lips, solutions. Lift your lips and say distend. Timber. Vivacious.

What would you do if a foreign language followed you home? Would you give it a bowl of milk and a pat on the back? Would you try to speak and understand it and ride it around the room?

You could knit a gallant canary.

Here’s a whisper of something knocking on your brain. What is it? Georges Braque rattling a shape at a palette of paint.

I keep seeing a pair of socks at the end of the bed. A colony of meaning floating in the room. Music on my earphones. “No Stars,” sung by Rebekah Del Rio.

Music soothes the lonely. Though it also helps to be palpated occasionally. Massaged by someone.

The signals of night are naked and strange. I consider living in Senegal. It’s a nice fantasy involving warm, friendly people and walking down streets of lively activity and the scents of a thousand different flowers and foods. The fragrance of tea, the pungency of garlic.

My body likes to float. Whose body doesn’t feel good floating? Making and drinking coffee in weightless conditions is quite difficult, but it can be done.

Biology has a face of papyrus. It’s ancient and holy. Yet no one is satisfied. I hear the constant sound of construction.

You know that feeling you get when you shove a shovel into the ground? It’s a rich sensation. Sometimes it’s a matter of planting something and sometimes it’s a matter of burying something. The context can be a broad range of things. But the actual sensation of sinking steel into the dirt is a divination of subterranean forces. Worms and roots. This is the world in its rawest form. Not even the chronology of a bottle or the sound of thunder has the force of a worm seeking direction in a sudden exposure to cold and light.

The great, wonderful physicality of the sun. Those constant explosions. Day after day.

My neighbor pounds the dirt. He’s putting in a patio.

I choose my words carefully. Amphetamines are pretty. I have an antique disposition. The habit of doing dishes. I can be shrewdly obtuse or obtusely shrewd. Each life is a novel. The narration might change from day to day. It’s an ongoing project.

I think of the thousands of juices and liquids that compose the functioning of my biology and wonder how it is that the amalgam of all these cells and membranes has found a story to pursue, a shore to explore.

What place is this? It’s a place of dislocation, a grave unreality. Yet some of it remains real. Pain in my right arm from a dislocated shoulder. Pain in my heart from a dislocated country. That country for old men in the Yeats poem. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees. 

The Wildness Of Spoons

Wash the locomotive in Anchorage. Power the rattan in plywood. Hum pounds of gluttonous learning. My wallet extrudes flowers. Interior abstractions hustle my face to you. I’m the chowder inside the drum. Enrich the paraffin by incursion. Dachshund jar of adjectives. Harden the tumble taxi. Skim the abandoned steam. Throw and emerge and verify. Butter the nascent dream. Manipulate the crackle cream. Elegance sends its assembly. The myth of the jug stove is available to you in indiscriminate octaves. The moon rises congenial as papier collé. I mourn the wrap club. The sophisticated skidoodle dump. Shiver the slouch paint. I ship my mark in drops. I exclaim a public crack. My map explains the trek by pylons and cups. I spin the weather and burst. Choke and squeeze the strings to a resonance that we can remember. I need to feel to fit you. I grasp the hammer to amplify the probability of bolts. Tangle the details in glaze. Attract a climate and give it to a saga. Soliciting secretes you into building an argument and pioneering the new despair. Are you ready for the Hinduism ablution drill? I embark in chains and squirt. The red soubriquet velvet is my gift to translucence. I’m suitably clumsy and soothed by intercourse. The boat ripples with hunger. Pound the dollars into purchase. Events are the narrative stream. A block of power crashes through itself. The stimulus that is algebra has been approved by epoxy. Maturity grumbles in its pronouns. The buffalo are pungent and their poetry is flaming. I’m focused on a naked crowd of grass. I believe in the wildness of spoons. A whisper emerges and cuts the air into consonants. Vowels move them into fact. 

Mosaic

Hammer the triangle and cut it into songs. Indispensable henna. Polish the melody. Recruit the rhythm from a resilience written as turpentine. Fiddle with a little wisdom. Widen and flow. Branch into subtleties. Ride a hormone. I have smooth skidoodle arms. You need them to lift the symmetry around here. Meanwhile, I continue my search for Paris. A mineral Baudelaire that expands into birch. My aim is improved by flipping the wood into motels with lovely blue beds. I ache all afternoon trying to absorb the idea of signs. Isn’t there something semantic about a giraffe? What is the world trying to tell us? Do we truly belong here? Swimming soothes my tools. I abhor the stethoscope but not the hand that holds it. The fingers are a little overdeveloped. They glow like glue. I see motion in the window and something perturbing the flowers. The wind. Birds. Explosions along the fence. The gardenia simmers in its beauty. The clash of meanings is more than a little hypothetical. I answer the clasp on my shirt with a burning alchemy of creamery butter. I freely employ the string. The music is a mosaic of melody and anvils. I squeeze the wind and it drops like a word. Needs energize my craving for knowledge. The planet has an engine whose properties are marked in the firmament as a ghostly mutation of secret things. Redemptions that crash around us like chains. Granite folds the sky into dimes of shiny supposition. Each of us impels a fantasy, a thicker eyebrow than venison. Wander into Hinduism and enhance the drums. Clench what you clench, clutch what you clutch. Clenching and clutching is what we do when we listen to the newer dimensions stream into our probability theories. The candles are all cracked. It happens. It has something to do with light, and singing, and hitting a tambourine. What do you believe? I believe the interior of a word is fur.

Odor Plume

The wind takes what it wants and deposits it elsewhere. Whoever has owned a flying carpet is familiar with this effect. You don’t always go where you want to go. You don’t always arrive at the destination you had in mind. Movement is sometimes a joy, sometimes a great exposition. A 10,000-pound tractor in Harding County South Dakota sitting in 14-inch high crested wheat grass was hoisted straight into the air by a tornado and deposited, in pieces, a mile and a half away in Montana. This would tend to indicate a presence in the air, a movement whose predilections are as capricious as they are enigmatic.

Our interpretations of this world are often overstated and misleading. What can anyone say? Nobody understands this planet. Nobody understands this life. If they did, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. Thanks to the many heat engines that comprise civilization and its emissions of methane and carbon dioxide, the atmosphere is a complete mess, jets streams meandering in tropospheric chaos creating climactic havoc all over the planet, drought in England, murderous heat waves in Japan, forest fires in Sweden, tornados of fire in northern California. Typhoons, monsoons, hurricanes and cyclones howling through our cities like merciless banshees. Crops failing, the sea rising, the ice sheets of Antarctica tumbling into the sea. Greenland will soon be green again. The Arctic Sea a deep blue where the ice once deflected the rays of the sun back into space. That heat will be added to the oven that is now our planet.

We fucked up. Royally. Has there ever been a species this misguided? This wrong-headed? This stupefyingly myopic?

How did we lose our way? Did we ever know the way? Is too much consciousness too little consciousness? Is walking erect with a big head bobbing around not actually the silliest permutation to ever emerge from the goop of polymers that brought us here?

Bees have learned far better ways to inhabit the world and navigate. They use dance and magnetism. We use needles and glass. Latitude and longitude. Bees use pheromones and ultraviolet. Cognitive maps.

We use Rand McNally atlases. Roadside museums and postcard racks.

We have very little in our language that actually conforms to reality, whatever reality is. We have nothing in our vocabulary that links directly to the phenomena oscillating through our nerves and aggregating into the appropriate words, the right syntax, the right grammatical machinery to convey the ontology of a chrysanthemum. The disconnect is abyssal. We have nothing as expansive as echo location. Nothing as informative as odor. Nothing as illuminating as a waggle dance.

We invent Gods. We devise religions. We create philosophies and customs.   

We use mobile phones to buy drugs, pesticides to grow biofuel.

Bees use associative learning. Bees pair stimuli together to form three-dimensional models of the world. Bees abstract orientation or symmetry and integrate it into a global representation.

Our methods are empirical, heavy on technology. Sextants, astrolabes, ring dials, chronometers. Our understanding of the world requires satellites. Global Positioning System. Automatic Radar Plotting Aid. Electronic Chart Display and Information System. Long Range Identification and Tracking.

Bees have figured things out abstractly. They’ve evolved the honey of cognition into cells of active memory.

Sleep will sometimes carry us to distant places and leave us there until the tides of consciousness rise and we awaken to a new life, or an old life with a new interpretation, something like Petula Clark singing “La Nuit n’en finit plus.”

The pendulum, meanwhile, swings back and forth. A biography trembles with seagulls. Sandy eyelids judge the Salvation Army to be full of goodwill.

Flannel deepens our sense of tincture, how juicily the light of the chandeliers enchants the luster of music.

Wherever you go, there you are. My sentiment regarding cartilage is generally allegorical, as it should be. Allegory and bone are the fundaments of this narrative we call life. They structure narratives of illusion and truth. Plato’s cave. Orwell’s Animal Farm. The oranges are hypothetical, but we sense that their juices intend a communication of elves and algebra.

I may appear a little irrational at times, a bit unkempt, a little delirious, but I know a hawk from a handsaw when the winds are southerly.

I was thrown into this life like everyone else by a set of circumstances unique to the time in which I entered this world. War was one, the splitting of the atom another. Bombers, uniforms, raging dictators. The film footage suggested that humanity had gone insane. But we had television to comfort us. If you want to call Howdy Doody comforting.

Whatever life may be about, it’s certainly interesting. Percussion stirs the air. A rhinoceros adorned in rubies stands in the Kenyan rain.

Ghosts bring us the soft light of other dimensions. Our speech thickens into wax, malleable transparencies that will sustain a small flame of listening cognition. Whatever consciousness is, it’s been having a good swim in our heads. Our eyes shine all afternoon, renewed by the smell of rain.

Enthusiasmos

I think of North Dakota and look for a letter from my father. The snow speaks to the trees in powdery whispers. The drawer is overflowing with letters. Manuscripts. Submissions. Rejections. Proofs.

I remember that little lake in the Turtle Mountains. It was too small, too common to have a name. If I had the right words, I could lift it into reality and show it to people. The universe isn’t entirely in my head. There is no boundary that begins and ends at my skull. A skull is just a skull. The stuff inside is amazing, but has its limits, until the limits dissolve, and the universe comes flooding in.

They say the sun is a nuclear reactor fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. I have no reason to doubt that. But isn’t the sun also a star? An angel of heat and light?

I don’t remember the last time I saw a circus poster. That era seems to be over, thank God.

What we have now is more puzzling. People in trances gazing at smartphones. The Great Barrier Reef dying. Oceans dying.

The camber of the road is a tumescence for the rain.

Helicopters and mollusks pursue different objectives, but are otherwise ideas based on common sense, on physics, on extraordinary principles of mathematics.

The odors of summer are different than the odors of winter. The odors of Dakar are different than the odors of Denver.

I know a man named Noah who lives in Denver.

I know a man named Ron who lives in New York.

I see a large Russian woman in a bikini teaching Pythagoras.

Dispersal occurs naturally in locution. The erection of beams, the pouring of cement.

I’ve been following the construction of a building at the base of the hill. It’s a colossal enterprise. Everything carefully measured, carefully placed, hoisted by crane then slowly brought down, men in yellow helmets whistling, signaling, waving.

What is energy, energy is a pile of dirt. I have memories of dirt. Some of them good, some of them bad. Some of them weeds, some of them flowers. I know the smell of dirt, the feel of dirt, the power of dirt. Images of wheat rustling and waving in the hills of the Palouse.

Decomposition is a chief cause of composition. There can be no composition without decomposition. They say the sickly odor of a dead python is what led the Greeks to name the high priestess of Apollo’s Temple at Delphi Pythia. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies by being filled by the spirit of the god, or enthusiasmos, from whence comes our word ‘enthusiasm.’

The bowl, any bowl, accommodates space inside and out. The skull is a bowl. The skull is a sphere of bone.

And what is thought? Is it a pin or a nail? Is it a hammer? Is it sod? Is it a clump of dirt?

I think it’s a clam squirting water from its siphon. I think it’s Iceland. I think it’s a package of new underwear. A species of space. Manolo Millares. Materialistic informalism.

Spoons. Metaphors. Latitude. The brain is a forge. But the puddles are upside-down, and the world desires our communion.