The Green Mountains Are Always Walking

Reflections take two forms: images that appear in a mirror or a shiny surface and thoughts or images that appear in our mind. I find it interesting that we think of thoughts as reflections. They do, in some sort, reflect things: situations, experiences, phenomena, landscapes, sensations, excerpts, prophecies, judgments, interpretations, speculations. Things that exist, and things that do not exist.

Dividing things that exist from things that don’t exist isn’t as easy as it might seem. Once anything gets into your nervous system and begins knocking around in your brain it can seem pretty real. If you feel, for example, that someone has injured you unfairly with a comment or brush off or cold shoulder the emotion can be quite real. But is it real? Or is it a misinterpretation? And even if it’s an accurate reading of a presumed friend treating you like an asshole what does it matter? It might feel like they stabbed you in the gut but they didn’t and if you look down you’ll see that none of your intestines are falling out and there’s no blood just an untucked shirt and a gravy stain.

There’s no mirror in my brain. The images in my mind don’t have the same value as the images reflected in the bathroom or bedroom mirrors. Those images are mundane. My face, the bed, a basket overflowing with bills and letters.

The images in my brain are an erratic flow of junk and butter and art and impressions. It’s the ruminations that cling. That keep circulating. That keep going around and around like clothes in a washing machine. And never resolve. Never reach an end. A conclusion. A consummation. A culmination. A denouement.

People call it closure. Closure is generally the feeling I’m hoping to find when I stretch out a thought and peer through its membranes and veins and bounce it against the wall and dribble it down the court and hold it and turn it around and draw it and bake it and delouse it and bowl it and branch it out in a jumble of moss and fungus.

They’re like unsolvable equations. Goldbach’s conjecture. The Collatz conjecture. The Hodge conjecture. The Riemann hypothesis. The election of Trump.

Men say women. Men can’t figure women out. And women can’t figure men out.

You never know what’s going to bubble up. As soon as you think you’ve got an answer, you’ve got people figured out, you know what motivates them to do this or that, a hole in the fabric appears and you fall through and discover a whole other universe you didn’t know existed. This happens to artists all the time and they love it. They begin creating holes to fall through.

The mind that sees into the impermanence of all things is enlightened. We can see this illustrated in a poem by the Japanese Buddhist priest Dōgen Zenji:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.

The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.

Although its light is wide and great,

The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.

The whole moon in one dewdrop on the grass.

We live in a world of reflections. They’re everywhere.

Enlightenment is harder to find. I don’t know what it is. It’s not a place or a time. It’s not a location. It’s not a string. It’s not a bingo game or a beating heart. It’s a strawberry. It’s a snowdrift packed against a door. It’s a range of mountains walking through the sky. It’s the sky walking on the ground. It’s the ground walking in the eye of a water buffalo. It’s a woman diving into the still waters of a river. A tug crossing the sound. People assembling in a room. A catalogue of bathroom fixtures. The raised gold letters of a wedding invitation. A neuro-ophthalmologist carefully examining the interaction between the eyes and the brain. Mark Rothko at work in 1961 rubbing a red corner with a rag dipped in turpentine. The edge softens and allows us to see through layers of paint. Water roaring down La Rue Molière. Howler monkeys leaping from tree to tree in Costa Rica. A man coughing in a movie theatre. Rope. Movement. Monterey Cypress leaning over the Pacific in Big Sur. Words in a paragraph. The flow induced by a sphere oscillating in a viscous fluid. It’s all these things. And none of these things.

How do I know what enlightenment is? I don’t. This is a disclaimer.

I wouldn’t know what enlightenment is if I tripped on it.

Shit! I just tripped on a cord and hit my head against the door. Am I enlightened? Not sure. But my head hurts. 

A Voice In The Dark

How do you do. I’m a ghost. I was once alive and now I’m dead. I’m a voice in the dark. I’m speaking to you from the void. From oblivion.

I was a human being, a weird animal with a large head and brain and amazingly supple appendages and a bizarre organ for reproduction which came in two essential forms, one a dangling tube-like thing and a sack laden with two oval organs that produced little wiggly creatures called sperm and the other a membranous cavity at the mouth of which were several inner lips and a small erectile organ called a clitoris and these two articulations, male and female, became the focus of much of our attention.

I use the past tense because our species has since gone extinct. We reproduced ourselves to death. We sucked black gooey oil from the ground and burned it in our cars and filled the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide and the surface became too hot to grow anything and we lost our food and died of starvation. Some of us died because we had cans of soup that others wanted and shot us with a gun or hit us over the head with a stone or a tree limb. Life as a human being was often quite brutal. We had laws but the laws were eventually and inevitably ignored and people became brutish and ugly and killed one another.

This will mean nothing to anyone because we are all gone. If there are intelligences elsewhere in the universe that use language and can decipher this it is possible these words may mean something. But how will they be discovered? They will not be in a book. They will not be in a recording. They will not be in a spaceship. They will not be in a TV transmission floating forever in the cold darkness of space.

Perhaps they will continue to exist as pixels, a cloud of binary digits in some sort of cybersphere.

Our planet was once teeming with life. Microbes, snakes, frogs, butterflies, elk, elephants, bears, deer and trees. Trees were fantastic. Trees reached deep into the ground with roots and grew to remarkable heights and extended everywhere into space with limbs. The limbs were adorned with leaves, beautiful thin green membranous shapes, lacy and indented and oval and spatulate and oblong and obovate. The leaves absorbed sunlight and converted it to food. They did this with a pigment called chlorophyll.

And there were flowers. Flowers galore: amaranths, lilies of the Nile, chrysanthemums, tulips, hyacinths, marigolds and lavender.

Rivers that meandered lazily but inexorably to the ocean. Mountains that rose so high the air thinned to nothing and all that existed was snow and rock and the vapors of nothingness.

It was the cities that killed us. Living in larger and larger groups. We were forced into social units and yet became increasingly isolated and cut off from reality. Our lives became robotic and dead. We praised and feared artificial intelligence because it was so abstract and complicated and hidden. There were towers and wires everywhere. Plugs. Knobs. Levers.

Life became absurd. It lost all meaning. People worked jobs that murdered their spirit and suffocated their minds.

And so it came to an end. The temperatures rose and the crust hardened and the water dried up and the fields that we protected with poisons killed the very insects the plants needed to pollinate them and the poisons found their way into our blood and organs and destroyed us. Many men became rich producing these poisons. But they perished, too.

We all perished. And so this rock on which you now visit is uninhabitable by anything but these words, these derelict pixels adrift in ghostly algorithms.

When The Wood Dries

There’s a private shine in my hammer. My indicative gaze cannot be explained by crawling. Our kitchen is full of mushrooms and pans. Some of the them are quite beautiful. They all shine. They all come into the foreground when the heat is on. I have, therefore, expanded my journey to include a lip or two. A tongue. An appetite for adventure. Mosquitos swarm around the pump. I compile shadows in order to describe the anatomy of the sky. I hope that the wine is good. We all have shadows. It’s why we’ve painted the rattles red and created a door for the crustaceans to come and go at their pleasure. Life enhances its roots by flowering into vines and blackberries. Entanglements. Thorns. But the true treasures are in the appendix of the guidebook. This is where we find trails that have barely been used. They lead to grottos and the touch of moonlight. It was never my intention to pilot a brush through your hair. Each time I hear the flap of a flag I grab a shovel and start to dig. It’s elementary to flex one’s muscles. I do what I can. You do what you’re good at. I’ve evolved mountain streams to startle the wandering gaze of grocery checkers. No one expects a wet arm to punch the air into parenthetical pathos. The coupons reflect the density of autumn. Everything happens among words. I try to create a way to enter another dimension. A new perspective. Let’s call it that. Embryonic sensations find full maturity in the drama of comparison. And sometimes they find expression in music. I suggest that the metamorphosis of insects fluctuates between the ability to swim and the opacity of bluebells. I brush my hair with a crow. It’s always respectable to find someone meditating. Emotions crash through my ribs seeking ecstasy. My eyes wander around a spoon. I fall to the ground and adapt to the eccentricities of my zipper later. The catalogue omits the secrets of mink, and for good reason: the rags of morning offer the wisdom of shoes. I grabbed the lotus and ran. The mailbox gravy was in bas-relief, but the meanings inherent in the nimbleness of the tongue argued for more space and less gravity. Specifically, chisels. We’ll get to them later, when the wood dries. 

Scrambled Eggs

This is the peculiarity of scrambled eggs, that once scrambled eggs have become a habit of mind, this habit of mind converts everything that comes within its purview into the language of scrambled eggs. The territory of the scrambled is unlimited. The potential for scrambling is endless, each group of natural phenomena, each phase of social life, each stage of development past or present is matter for scrambling. Order and symmetry have their place, but too much order and symmetry deaden. They must be counteracted. They must be subject to scrambling. Without scrambling, there can be no eggs. Without eggs, there can be no scrambling of eggs. But there will be scrambling. Scrambling will occur. Scrambling cannot be restrained. Everyone strives to be scrambled. Scrambled in all the colors of distress, ecstasy, rapture, mortality, seminars, station wagons and office supplies. The essence of all scrambling is located in its method, not in its material. Sometimes shortcuts to scrambling may be found in books. Or amusement park rides. Bank robbers making breakfast. Jackson Pollock in a dance around a canvas making energy visible. The individual who sees relations in all things is a born scrambler. The facts may belong to the social statistics of our cities, to the atmospheres of the most distant planets, to the digestive organs of worms and cephalopods, to the quantum mechanics of the subatomic domain, but until they’re scrambled, the facts are inert. The facts are dull and without life. It is not the facts themselves that form cognition, but the tumult in which they ignite.

The Realm Of Fugitives

Writing is the realm of fugitives. If you don’t like reality, you can write a new one. All you need is a few words. You do the work of a mason: you assemble the words one by one, you slather on some mortar and voila! a freshly constructed reality.

Will it be an actual reality? No. Reality, at least the parts of it we can see and smell and hear and touch, is not made of words. It’s made of actual bricks and actual mortar not the words brick and mortar. It’s made of hydrogen and water and iron and clay. Molecules. Atoms. Subatomic particles. Chamomile and cement. Ginger root and rocks. Pittsburgh and breasts.

I recommend chalk. You can go much further with chalk. You can do equations. Equations are where it's at. Equations tremble with abstraction. Equations of power. Equations of mass and density. Torque, rotation, angular momentum. These all help describe the smell and activities of a hardware store.

The virtually soundless circulation of blood. The absurdly ordinary assurance of parachute receipts. The strangely unreadable expression of people's faces when they are in grocery stores.

 Is there a physics for this? Of faces lost in reverie? People enraptured by a smartphone?

This is where words and equations fail. Everything is conjecture. Everything is a blip on the radar of the heart. Just be sure to place a separator on the conveyor belt. Try to be friendly. Move with the stealth of a moose in a hastily drawn cartoon. Use your words carefully. But remember: they’re just words. If you drop them, they won’t break. You can drain a word of meaning by lying and equivocation, but you can’t break it. They’re made of air and sound. They have the power to heal. They have the power to injure. But they can’t duplicate a banana unless you inflate them with ontological uncanniness and step back and watch them explode into giant fireballs of semantic instability.  

If this happens, apologize. Construct another sentence. See if you can create a paradigm that can be shared with your neighbors. Or just say fuck it and write poetry. Put your words into the developing fluid of extreme speculation. The image will slowly appear. It won’t be my image. It will be your image. It will be the image of a compass. Or a chair.

Add some invectives. Cultivate refusal. Spit. Chew your food. Grow a library big as Belgium. 

Distortions Mutations Limps

The wind has something to teach me about me. It helps me to understand oil. Dry kite radar. I get dressed in distress like a tale about poultry. Sinking knots embalmed in paint. Abstract expressionist sneezes carried into quicker echoes of awkward materialism.

And why? Why are burdens necessary?

Why is pain necessary?

Sullen chestnut rowing. Undecided flair swarming with plumage. Metal theatre. I eat to live in exultation of a field of wheat. And this confirms the prickles of dance I sometimes feel in the halls of photography.

The captain’s sad sumptuous gear is a testament to exile.

Arizona walks by carrying its canyons in a basket of reverie. It has the weight of snow on a night of silhouettes and legends. Inflated oceans big as hope and just as visceral as food. I see a set of teeth pass against a storm and reflect on the burlesque of circumference. Pendulum glasses for the diving board. Vagaries for our physics.

Did I hear Raymond Roussel enter the room?

It is the drama of the bear in the bell tower. The texture of a noble idea. The weight of the unknown in a whisper of ice. A flood of hard glass in a skein of toes.

Why does the universe exist?

Gothic angels lend us the crime of desire. Hot sapphire the warm flexibility of wax.

The heating of the grotto wheel is trees ahead of autumn. It opens to the ash of nothing and then stuns the sediment with a career of snow.

Heaven is a knowledge we undertake later in life. Early in life, heaven is everywhere. Later in life, heaven is an animal blinking confusedly in a mailbox. It’s a warm coat in a winter storm.

I approve of the funny weariness I’ve become. The herd makes its way toward the shore in the light of the coffeehouse. A shaman enters the cave. Heat moves the ebony wheels of a fierce consonant. The consonant squeezes a vowel and a bear lumbers by. A rattle calls for resilience. Texture assumes the dimensions of sight. This is natural. We have built indulgences based on nothing but stucco.

We’re not empty. Not at all. We’re just gliding. It began with a radio and ended with a gamble. The spectrum widened, and we went in. Even the sidewalk held still. Nothing is so impersonal that it doesn’t require nipples at some point. Embrace it. Embrace the ambiguities. They need our certainty. Our expansive definitions. Which are cast to the wind. And return to the hermitage heaving with charming syncopations.

Distortions. Mutations. Limps.

The buttermilk is wearing alpine. We elect more shadows to cast on the wall. It doesn’t help much. I move the oysters in my notebook. The king rides by on a horse made of lightning. This is what writing is, what it’s been along. A compensation for my lack of math, certainly, but also a fence in the fog claiming to contain what it doesn’t understand. 

An Agate Searched By Rain

Wave gently calculated by abstraction. By distraction. Frolic in the gold of spirit. Parables of wing and claw. Parcels of sound smashed into relation. Priapic perturbations. Exultation of contrarieties. I see something in flames, it's hot as a subjunctive, a call for calm. But not really. Something like calm. Akin to calm. The calm that churns secretly for singularity, a marriage of the moon and sun.

Element butter. At a box check a box star. Elongations of a moment of hair. Alembic goat kicking while blinking. A distant fishing embalms the manure of the office. And in the orchard a bear wanders the pungent odors of late fall. Rotten fruit. The glint of a needle in a black helicopter. Altimeter soup. The dizziness of altitude. The muslin belongs to an ancient gerund.

A distant path is dressing our spring in blackberries. Street lighting brings out Saturday’s colors in a lavender masculinity. Which is as feminine and chrome as anyone’s breasts, including chameleons and antique explosions. The sound of the table is based on chamomile. The sound of ants is lush with letters whose rustlings and propagations are awakened by your eyes.

Think of it as the sound of ointment throwing itself into a nutty jurisprudence. Law, all law, is an aching and a convulsing cross-eyed crocodile with an appetite for adjudication by jaw.

Am I overly negative? Am I admissible evidence? Is writing a burden of proof? Am I guilty? Am I innocent? Are words a continuance? Am I in contempt? This is a dismissal. I’m dismissing everything on grounds of malfeasance.

Aurignacian feet. Medieval underwear. This room makes craving a pencil a penetrating exercise in foam. I expressly run to approve a segment of nose in thematic meringue. What a beautiful feeling: I am blatantly against the jewels and cloths of the month of forks.

I support the strange beauty of realism, which is chloride and hurricanes, a scalding sense of demurral in a courtroom I invented for the love of mahogany. The tensions brought about by dying dwell in the sky like a cathedral whose stone has been quarried from a drug.

The carpenter’s algebra is a prolongation of spirit in the snow. The commas of the refrigerator blossom in the breath of the living. The sentence pauses to reflect on Hollywood, helicopters in our neurons making crochets of thought and thimble, and then rushes into battle, howling like a face. The tale of the stars finishes by lifting a bronze goblet in a claw heavily veined with Viking blood. The silverware streams juicily through lumps of rice.

The forests work themselves into twists and turns of elaborate, bifurcated wood. The splendor of Norway manifests its rocky aggregations and breathes its granite into the breath of heaven. This can be a sunset folded and put in a drawer. This can be a piece of music. Mushrooms grinning in a parable of accommodation.

Hold this. Hold these words in your eyes. Let them come into your cave and cause pounds of music to unroll on the earthen floor. Bear teeth, man with the head of an antelope with blood squirting out of his nose. It’s dark. But here comes a light. A wick afloat in animal fat. Think of it as a body of words, as a paragraph, as a geoduck, as a pebbly beach. The big eyes of a seal. An agate searched by rain.