The Scratch Of Coincidence

The bickering harness does its machinery into words. It’s splendid to be interested in hanging out. Polynesian nerve circled by agates. A running frog suggests elephants in a manner that is suitable to our bulbs. I want some mountain thunder to go with my gaze.

And then it happens: hammers. Nails. Screws. The assembly of froth. This is what I like about initiation. It starts things. It ends things. It extends things. It floats. It stirs. It begs.

Please lend me your eyes. Your interest. Your attention. Your milk and cookies. Your grip and poise and amiability.

The pearl manure has made its emotion apparent to all the conjunctions. It emboldens the cloud magnets, which hold the garden together, and coordinates the sympathies gurgling our skidoodle. My distress is a moiré of celestial fleece and ribaldry. The effulgent marble is bullish with tumult, and the crows are challenged by the contrast. The wind pillow gets up and leaves.

I’m looking for the new world and a palace in the sun. I’m looking for yardarms and ties and a big red caboose.

I like to eat and rent pebbles. Radar is a topic of taste, a languid radiation tale. Oxygen provides a biography for my finger, which is but a ragged baton of geometry. Nevertheless, my fingers are supple, taken as a whole, and when my arm is outstretched to you and my hand is open, what we have is a murmur of words at the edge of reality, the rumble of alternating currents, the ascension of eyes, the personification of dice.

The pain in my right shoulder continues as a phenomenon of meaning. Grenadine sticks to my emotion. My legs are sage and chickens. I have an orthogonal bullish denial that opens like a gallant Sunday and finally accepts the rotundity of the planet. I like Falstaff. Who doesn’t? Everything turns around when the grain hums with becoming whatever it’s destined to become. There is more to genetics than genetics. There is sometimes a frontier, and a curious little weight, the density of something that can’t quite be defined, certainly not as a seesaw or parade float, and a garden to tend to, and a soul to tend to, and eyes opening to the first light of day.

I didn’t choose to come into existence. I was brought into existence. I was set afloat on a sea of words. I grew oceanic. I evolved a taste for strolling, pointing to the arches of wind-eroded sandstone and filling books with description. This makes inflation far more respectable than the thermometer I once saw on the wall of a garage in Hawaii, screaming its temperatures from a blowtorch. I report from the arena dig. Tomorrow is the moiré of today’s algebra, a quantum amalgamation rippling up and down the vertebral column of an éclair.

If you ask me, life is all about art. But what does that mean? I don’t know what it means. But I like art. Art is to life what life is to patio furniture. Not an excuse to sit down so much as a rejection of gravity, a gospel gleaned from the labor of sharecroppers and used like a blanket to warm the coldness of the heart.

So I’ll just go ahead and say it: ablution. All memories are stories we tell ourselves. The sun sponge has genitals, yes, but so do the poplars trembling in the breeze. I have no memory of my experiments. I just remember the crows, how they landed, how they flew away, how they perched on telephone wires, and spoke among themselves, the great councils of birds tinged with the scratch of coincidence.

Welcome

Welcome to the world of syntax. Here we will see words as they truly exist, side by side, fomenting discord, reaching into heaven for consolation and mustard. Think of them as feathers that cohere into a wing. Two wings. A seagull. A hummingbird. A murder of crows.

Let’s go digging for freight at the border. The painting of emigration expresses the echoes and scenes of passage that any testimony will tell you is a tooth of torment.  A similar moment of night stirs among my dollars. I love the planetarium grounds. The attic sailing through my gum.

Who doesn’t want to run away from their sadness? Bring a notebook. Hang out in an effulgent can. The grassland is an emissary to our bizarre bazaar of operatic squalor. This is my blissful axle rice. This is a swarm of mouths at play in my straw.

The paint got mixed up in the aftermath. Fortunately, the honey stick is still tenable. The new abyss awaits us in the street. We break the state brighteners and make them into hats. Crisp, dry, articles of faith emanating whispers of concertina yeast.  Ecstasy offers the woman a scuffle of indigo guffaws. She walks away mumbling the smooth bones of a dead song.

These are the aftereffects of digging up lightning and slathering it with butter. A languorous life climbing into violins. The tremble of coffee at the embassy. A lazy whirlwind. A nerve barometer masticating charcoal.

What’s the first thing to come into your mind in the morning? I mean, besides suicide. Me, I can’t help but think of pine, the cypress of Big Sur, the islands off the coast of Ireland, Great Blasket, Clare Island and Knockmore Mountain, Inishmore, Skellig Michael, Rathlin Island, and its colony of seabirds, puffins, gannets, razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes, fulmars, swooping, diving, swirling, plummeting vertically on shoals of fish.

I hear a border soaking in tables and support the bitter swarm of windows smeared with the burning gaze of a thousand silent muzzles. I hear the shadows calling from a field of streams. I hear the radical tea of prayer, the gentle maneuvering of yesterday’s food. And I throw a peach at the wall.

The ceiling propagates a sense of belonging. The walls create a huge pill fence. The chameleon undertakes kite flying. A vigorous dramatic frost gets my solitary attention. And I search for the moral, the solution to enrichment, the Parisian agates healing the brain of the odor in the corner, the one with the blue trinkets, the bracelet of bones, little bones, bird bones, and the worms outside stirring in the dirt, what do they apprehend, what do their nerves allow into their being, what baptisms, what great sincerities, what biochemistry informs them of rain, of structure, of war and religion?

The triggers become chamomile. I slide under the palm tree stars and dream of water. Evening hammers the ashes of Cairo. Lightning has the substantive weight of an eyelid. I sullenly get dressed in the universe and put on a hat that drips hills and moratoriums. The brim is feathers. The crown is sloppy, but infuriating in a way that makes me glad to be less specific. I will leave you with this bit of advice: height isn’t important. What’s important is speculation, a wild, random trust in thermometers. Syntax is always an experiment, the glazed ovation of incidental strawberries ripened in the spin of abstraction. 

Getting To The Bottom Of Getting High

Last night I got the munchies and learned about brining meat. I grabbed a box of Triscuits and left the cupboard door open and noticed a box of Morton salt. I read a brief paragraph on the side of the box: “Brining creates extra tender, juicy and flavorful meat. It does so by locking in meat’s natural juices, which prevents meat from drying out while cooking. To brine, you simply soak the meat in a solution of salt and water prior to cooking.” This is how I spent the last few minutes of 2018. I heard a motorcycle go by at a tremendous speed. I could hear the scream of the engine. This was followed by the excited voices of men and women. This guy was in a hurry to die. Would he even live to see 2019?

At 11:50 p.m. we went out to watch the fireworks on the Space Needle. I noticed a huge crowd of people just a few feet below, on Fifth Avenue North. Where had they all come from? It was as if a number of charter buses had brought them up here. Was the crowd below so huge that this was now a good vantage point? One of them sent a giant bottle-rocket high into the air. It squiggled its way into the sky and then exploded loudly. Ka-boom! Bright red flakes of fire came drifting down.

One o’clock on New Year’s Day R and I went for a run. I put on my shirt and running pants and did 50 quick push-ups. I grabbed my socks and shoes and filled a plastic baggie with peanuts and put them by the hallway door. Then I did another series of 50 push-ups. The push-ups weirdly alleviate the arthritic pain my right shoulder. I put on my jacket and went out in the hallway and was joined by R. As soon as I went out I saw four or five crows waiting for me. R went back in the building for something and I continued to the bottom of our street and tossed some peanuts on a small patch of lawn. More and more crows appeared and swooped to the ground to grab a peanut. It’s become increasingly obvious that they know where I live and convene nearby at the approximate time I leave the building, which is generally around 2:00 p.m. My relationship with these birds is becoming stronger and I like that. I like feeling close to them. They’re highly intelligent birds and fly with great joy and imagination. R appeared and we began going up the switchback trail through Bhy Kracke Park. We emerged at Bigelow and began our run. It was sunny but bitingly cold. Fortunately it never takes much time to warm up.

There are a few other places along this four-mile run where I encounter crows that have grown familiar with me and my bag of unsalted peanuts. I stopped to feed four at McGraw and a few more by the library. After I toss the peanuts the crows continue to follow me. I don’t know who’s who. I haven’t gotten close enough to notice any mannerisms or qualities unique to a particular crow. I do know that they follow me. They’ll go a certain distance and then stop. I think they have territories.

I began feeding the crows last summer. I noticed a dramatic decline in insects and have since learned that the decrease in insect populations is global and calculated to be in the neighborhood of 80 percent. I worry about the crows getting enough to eat.

After dinner we watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad. R gets angrier and angrier as the series progresses and Walter White becomes more and more of a conniving, lying, manipulative, murderous drug lord in Albuquerque. She hates the guy. I hate him, too, but I’m also deeply fascinated by him. I don’t know what personal darkness drives the man to do what he does, what private bitterness is driving this bizarre transformation from dedicated high school chemistry teacher to mob boss of a drug syndicate specializing in methamphetamine, or what the writers of the show talk about as they create the situations in which White flounders and bullies and calculates and does his nastiness, but it sure is gripping.

10:00 a.m., January 2^nd, 2019. I make scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and sit down to eat and read an article in my French philosophy magazine about the psychology and philosophy of the feast, the festival, the Dionysian break from routine, titled “Les structures élémentaires de la festivité,” (“The Structural Elements of Festivity”), by Alexandre Lacroix. He quotes a passage from The Sacred and the Profane by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade:

Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, infinitely repeatable. From one point of view it could be said that it does not “pass,” that it does not constitute an irreversible duration. It is an ontological, Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted. With each periodical festival, the participants find the same sacred time – the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of a century earlier; it is the time that was created and sanctified by the gods at the period of their gesta, of which the festival is precisely a reactualization.

There are two things about this that I find very curious from a personal standpoint: the linkage between the festival as a religious occasion and the festival as how I experienced it, an occasion to get drunk, shitfaced, fucked up. Religion was never involved, alcohol always; there’s no way on earth I ever could have broken free of the profane, mundane time of routine, of jobs, of the everyday, without imbibing a robust amount of alcohol. Alcohol is essential. And, since I haven’t drunk any alcohol in almost 29 years, it’s been at least 29 years since I’ve liberated my being from the shackles of profane temporality.

But it doesn’t feel that way, at least not entirely. There have been occasions in which I felt more than usually exalted, a little transcendent, felt a sense of divine liberation. If I expand the meaning of the festival to include moments when I felt a little more acutely a sense of the sublime, a sense of “sacred time,” then rather than refer to a state of drunkenness I might talk about “getting high.”

I once told a therapist that I was concerned about the length of time that I’d been taking Lorazepam. I’d be taking 1 milligram of Lorazepam daily for over a year. He told me that since I wasn’t using it to get high, there wasn’t anything to worry about.

This puzzled me. Using it to get high? How do you do that?

You don’t. There’s no way on earth anyone can get high on Lorazepam. All it does is relieve you of anxiety and help you into a feeling of calm. That’s not getting high; that’s simply relieving a symptom. My therapist seemed to be giving me credit, trying to reassure me, by suggesting that since I wasn’t abusing – misusing - the drug by trying to get high on it, that I had that much less to worry about. He was trying to do his job as a therapist. But it was apparent that he and I had very different notions about what it is to get high.

Which is what? What is it to get high? Inducing euphoria? None of the benzodiazepines induce euphoria. Valium, maybe just a little. Benzodiazepines will help achieve a sense of well-being. But is a sense of well-being considered a high? Isn’t there more to it than that? Hallucinations, visions, epiphanies, delirium, a state of divine madness, enhanced creativity?

Sounds good to me. Marijuana does a far better job at these things than benzos. Hell, you stand a better chance of getting high on sobriety than getting high on a benzo.

How about enlightenment or satori? Satori is the Japanese term for awakening, comprehension, understanding. Seeing into one’s true nature. Which is what? Which is emptiness. That doesn’t sound like getting high. Not at all.

Altering one’s consciousness is a big part of it, but alter it how? Which way? Up or down? Expanded consciousness or reduced consciousness? Alcohol is great for reducing consciousness. LSD is a powerful way to boost consciousness. The motivating factor behind taking these things is going to have a lot to do with one’s reaction to them. If, as I did a number of times back in the 60s, you drop acid for kicks, chances are good you’ll wind up having the same terrible reaction I had on my last acid trip. I was 18. The incident took place 53 years ago. My mind boggles when I think – as I’m sure a lot of people do – that I’m not dead already. I did a spectacular number of stupid things.

The more I think about getting high the less I think I know about what getting high means. I think I need to get to the bottom of getting high.

I would also rule out cocaine. Everybody’s different. I can’t speak for all people. But I always found cocaine to be a big disappointment. Definitely not worth they hype.

There are a lot of drugs and substances I haven’t taken: peyote, psilocybin, DMT (a.k.a. “the spirit molecule”), ecstasy, heroin, or opium. I’m not an expert. Not a psychonaut. Not like, say, Terence McKenna. That’s the guy you want to go to for information on psychedelic experience. Another is Rupert Sheldrake. I would also highly recommend the essays in Michael McClure’s Meat Science Essays. These are brilliant, poetic, highly imaginative and intensely descriptive reactions to substances such as peyote, heroin, and cocaine.

Drugs aren’t the only way to get high, achieve euphoria, or gain insights into one’s consciousness and the mysteries of the cosmos. There’s also long distance running and the sweat lodge ceremony.

But again: get high? I still don’t know get what that means. Why high? Why not “get low,” “get wide,” “get specific,” “get ambiguous”? Hey man, let’s go get ambiguous!

The English word ‘get’ has always struck me as a rather odd word. It’s so aggressively possessive. I feel the grip of a hand in that tight little fisted word.

I like the term “well-being.” I like that basic Heideggerian ring in the word ‘being.’ So down to earth, so full of blood and fluidity and the pulse of being. 

Eating Dressing Talking

I feel the immediate squeeze of circumstance. But what circumstance? There is the circumstance of weather, which is all around me, and time, which is monotonous as a bedspring. These are not the nectarines I had in mind. The sensation is more scattered, more intermittent, more like drawing or cartilage. I believe there are forces at work, few of which involve the concertina, but rub against the bulwark, creating gracefulness and the color green.

That's what happens if you watch proteins build a mussel from scratch.

French buttons roar their annotations into muslin. This is where we begin to drift into leather. The sonorities of maidenhair transmit teakettle reveries in the shadows of the opera we call life.

Feelings pull us in and out of history. A prodigious energy animates the sky. There’s a form of magnet that functions like a library to capture the flow of ideas and stimulate them with a spirit of revolt and contradiction. A murder of crows awaits me outside.

Some people walk poodles. Others walk postulation.

Some people posit sand. Others posit seeds.

There’s a sky stirring in my brain. Fluffy thoughts drift through dropping pirates and pioneers on the softness of a boundless equivocation. A huge flower blooms from my throat. It declares itself a cylinder of being and pounds its way into chiaroscuro. A doorknob in a powdered wig declares the door officially open. And I can’t help but feel a little glad. My favorite hat confesses to counterfeiting the spontaneity of dogs.

Is it possible to think a sky? To think it into being? Why not? What is thinking, anyway? It's some kind of activity in the brain. Thoughts getting shaped, molded, assembled, greased, polished, disassembled, broken, repaired, the mechanism is uncertain, but the formations resemble rock, trees, mesas, ravines, the feeling of mental activity acquires the shape and color of a landscape, the pathos of distance, incalculable reaches, of outer space, moments when the mind focuses, or tries to focus, on space, on nothingness, on the hard cold reality of existence, a million stars bubbling in a cauldron of time.

What the fuck?!?

This is the phrase that pops into my brain the most on a daily basis.

I’m really not an expert on thinking. I do very little of it. I do as little as possible. Thinking isn’t fun. Sometimes it’s fun, but mostly, it’s not fun. Thinking takes my mind to places I would prefer to avoid.

So let’s think about something else.

Let’s think about judgment. What’s that? It’s a form of thinking, but what kind of thinking?

According to Kant, a judgment is a specific type of cognition. It’s a form of structural creativity with respect to its representations. Which means what?

It means that judgments are propositional cognitions. Humans are propositional animals. A judgment is an act of logical predication whereby a concept is applied to a thing, as expressed by the copula ‘is’ or ‘are.’

Ok, sounds simple enough. The mockingbird is a songbird. It’s also a perching bird. The box is a container. The paper towel is absorbent. Most vowels are sounds produced by a vibration of the vocal cords. Vocal cords are sometimes gravelly, sometimes silky. Do you see how it works? Reality is assembled by using the formula ‘is’ and ‘are.’

Kant believed that the human mind has two essential cognitive faculties: an understanding of concepts and thoughts and intuitions about sense perception and mental imagery. Both are served by the faculty of imagination, which is the engine of synthesis. Imagination mediates between understanding and sensibility by virtue of being a third, autonomous cognitive capacity. It doesn’t weigh anything, but it can thunder, and bend, and tumble around in the brain like a load of wash in a Maytag dryer.

Imagination imposes coherence and consistency on all sorts of cognitions, helps carry out pragmatic or moral choices and recognizes categorically normative concepts. It does this by putting the world on exhibition and meditating on mediation with gymnastics and ointment.  

Paradox is convulsive, as are greed and mirrors. When we stand in awe of a hot dog, what we are truly doing is wondering to apply mustard or not, or paddle our canoe further up the river.

Judgment is the central cognitive faculty of the human mind.

One must distinguish between an experiential state (eating, dressing, talking, smelling, listening, pressing, pushing, pulling, etc.) and our judgement or belief underlying this experience: this cookie tastes good, why is that woman talking so loudly, should I wear my red shirt or my green shirt, this new laundry detergent is extremely fragrant and lingers a long time in the wool of my gloves, is there a benign intelligence moving and imbuing everything in existence, how is it possible that something as brilliant as a hand or an eyeball could evolve without some inner force or consciousness guiding the atoms and molecules into this shape and function, I know that it takes billions of years of natural selection and adaptation to form a hand or an eyeball but who or what created the process we call natural selection?

What is consciousness, is my consciousness singularly bound to the neurotransmitters in my brain or is it larger, integrated into something far more vast than I could ever imagine?

Is it possible that what I perceive as a direct awareness of my inner thoughts and judgments is, in fact, a highly inferential process that only gives the impression of immediacy?

I leave a string of words here like a trail of gunpowder. Reading them is a form of ignition. Reading them is tantamount to giving them meaning. The words intend explosivity. We have minutes to run behind a wall. Kaboom!

The knowledge that anyone can use is the only knowledge, the only knowledge that has life and growth in it, and becomes throw rugs and shrugs. The world belongs to cats. 

Being Is A Feeling

Sunset is protected by distance. It can never be caught and put in a jar because it’s always running away into the night. As soon as you think you’re there you discover that you’re not even close. Keep running after the sun fast enough and you’ll find that one person’s sunset is another person’s morning.

The sun stumbles over the horizon in search of something to thaw. Thousands of snowmen melt. Definition arrives in a jeep. It’s another lonely day. But not for everyone. For some it’s a raw reckoning and a tight grip and for others it’s a yodeling competition. Each jar is labeled, each aim is solid. Charcoal drinks the seclusion of rue.

Power is obtained by rope. Rope is obtained by thought. Thought is obtained by energy. Energy is obtained by sunlight. Pronouns are obtained by thumb and forefinger. I am the least interesting thing about me. And then comes wrestling. We must wrestle the thoughts that are the most literal. Metaphorical thoughts are matters of absorption. A paper towel is a metaphor. A worm is not. A worm is literal.

I think I see a feeling. Or does a feeling see me? Am I the feeling or is the feeling one of nature’s divine prodigies still water skiing in my briefcase?

Is being a feeling?

Being is a feeling. It’s also an occurrence. It feels mongrel and atmospheric and ticklish. It feels like being when being is a matter of struggling through life and mud as a worm.

Or not.

Worms live in dirt. Words live in spurts. Which is dirtier, dirt or dandruff? Dandruff isn’t dirty. Dandruff is messy, but it’s not dirty. It doesn’t flash like a road sign. But it can be quite embarrassing at a dance club on a black sweater in a blue light.

It's the wild hour of allegory. Let’s build a bonfire of buttermilk leaves. It takes heat to experience the power of language. The knee glue diver comes up with a chestnut chewed into birth. This makes everyone totemic.

Birth is a matter of perseverance, said the first lieutenant of sociability. Armies of sociability travel the night in search of the social. The social inhabits the jelly of affability. The debris of surrender flops down on a canvas and assumes a posture of divine hysteria. Everyone talks about Norway, how rocky it is, how rapturous in beauty, how topographic and blunt.

Outside of Oslo, I don’t know of a single driveway that doesn’t relish its being, its ontology of necessity and convenience locked in an embrace of imagery and wheel.

The control of cubes is occasionally brick. There’s more than one way to wear a stream of water. My argument is bathed in milk, not description. I see a development of this theme that slithers across Cezanne seething with harps and oboes. I see another rolling into auburn creating diversions of pink and brown. I don’t know which of them is authentic and which of them is arranged in pleats.

Or should be arranged in pleats.

Morality should be arranged in pleats. There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic. It looks more like fish. Thus the pleat, which is suffused with sunlight at a certain time in the afternoon, lingers in the mind as a form of overtone, an inflection of air if the window is left slightly open, a puff of palliative, a stirring of cotton, a bulging of fabric that reminds us – however haphazardly - of scallops. Cephalopods, gastropods, polyplacophorans. Elegy, laughter, Montmartre. We are alert to nuance. There are no polarities of yes and no. There are no clear answers. There is only the mania of milk-secreting glands and the pantomime of excuse.

In other words, communion.

No admonition is vexatious if it is made by a sad man on the corner of a street. Money isn’t food. It isn’t even pretty. It's a medium of exchange, like folklore, or power. It’s in the sneeze of process that the dollars of heaven come raining down as potash.

The hour of sleep is upon us. The toad is welcome. Welcome to Being. Welcome to the garden. Welcome to squatting. Welcome to underbrush and description and flies.

The sediment of a word lifts the toad to our mouth and we say it as a refund. It’s a mechanical maneuver, mostly, with a little pulp to incite it into category. The oyster is my comrade, but the pillow is my gym. My head is full of seashore. But the hay is easy by the lake. I will go there. This is the place where fingers exhort the palpability of rings to shine more energetically, as if syntax could mimic the properties of glass. The fresh spin of thought has been sewn together by insects. I know what shouting is. Shouting is solid and loud. The quiet simmer of language absorbs the light and fondles our elbows.

I’m sorry. Am I being obscure? I meant to be snow. I meant to be obvious and bones. I meant to push these luxuries forward where they might be seen by pilgrims. It’s so nice to have a diversion. Bugs are signs. They rarely shine now. They stopped increasing and began decreasing. Autumn isn’t what it used to be. Consciousness isn’t what it used to be, either. It used to be rocks but now it’s more like horses. All urgency and play, glistening and breath. 

The Ballad Of Zopitty Bop Bop

I am sometimes amazed at the pain in my right shoulder. And arm. It used to be content to reside in my shoulder. Now it’s occupied my entire right arm. I give it high marks for protraction. It's so persistent. It’s been there so long it has formed a personality. Think of the grouchiest person you know. The way they look in the morning. The way they look when you talk to them. When you ask a simple question. Did they sneer? Look askance, as if to say, my God, what an idiot! You know the type. Patrician. Intolerant. Jealous. Constantly seeking attention. Insisting on their importance. Their gravity. Their greatness. Their nobleness and rank.

That’s my pain. I should give it a name, David or Mark or Bruce. Or how about Arthur, for Arthritis. Or Harald Wartooth, the legendary king of 8^th century Denmark who was a fierce, indefatigable warrior. His memory could radiate in my arm like the thunder of the waves crashing against the cliffs of Skara Brae.

Why do I suppose the pain has a masculine gender? It would be hard to think of this pain as an Olivia or Emily, but there’s no reason not to believe this pain is female. It’s a mistake to believe that women are inherently sympathetic whereas men are not. It’s been my experience that neither sex is more compassionate than the other and could not be identified with a merciless, arthritic pain. What characterizes masculinity? What characterizes femininity? Let’s not get into that. It will only lead to more pain.

This is a sharp, pinching pain. I feel it at night simmering in my arm like charcoals in a hibachi. Throbbing, stabbing, ceaselessly agitating. If it were a book, it would be a long book. It would be War and Peace. It would be Ulysses. It would be Les Miserables.

If it was a trip, it would never reach its destination. It wouldn’t even have a destination.

If it were a planet, it would weigh more than Jupiter. It would have gravity and attract objects. Our furniture would go into orbit around my arm. My arm and its planetary pain.

Am I exaggerating? No, I'm not. I do not speak for myself. I speak for the pain. I lend my mouth to the pain. Here is what the pain says: you have arthritis. You're getting old. I am the sign of age, and wear and tear, and inflammation, and joints losing fluidity and cartilage, of bone grinding on bone. That’s who I am. I’m the voice of deterioration. I’m the voice of wreckage. I’m the one in the choir gurgling glockenspiels of dissonant steel.

This is the song of the pain. This is what the pain sings in my arm at night. These are the shrill high notes of the pain when I lift my right arm to hang a shirt or a coat in the hallway closet.

I think about going to the doctor. I think about surrender. I think about giving myself up to a merciless and extortionate healthcare system. Astronomical, incomprehensible bills. Bill following bill following bill, ad nauseum. I think about MRIs and arthroscopy and synovial fluid. Technology in the service of the healing arts. Expensive technology. Wonderful technology, ingenious technology, but very, very costly technology.

I think about learning to live with the pain. Making friends with it. Learning from it. What is there to learn from a pain besides its denotative function as a warning of disease or inflammation? Can I learn the ways of the Stoic? Can I learn how to interpret unpleasantness in a different light, from a different aspect?

Is there a philosophy of pain?

Most definitely. There is indeed a philosophy of pain. Many philosophies of pain. Ancient Egyptians believed pain other than that caused by wounds was the result of religious influences or spirits of the dead. I’m not sure you can call that a philosophy, it’s clearly more in the nature of superstitious belief than an inquiry into a phenomenon that does not yield its treasures easily to logic or reason but must be coaxed into expression with tortuous inquiry. Examination. Investigation. Empirical study. Research. Sleepless, distraught, time-consuming experimentation. This is the equipment you’ll need to extract a truth from an enigma, a serum for a disease, a balm for the worries of the mind.

Plato believed pain could restore order to the soul. He viewed pain as in conjunction with pleasure. An unbridled quest for pleasure leads inevitably to pain. It’s all about balance. If our being is in harmony with nature then we will be rewarded with pleasure. He puts a moral spin on it. But the morality of it eludes me. I don’t see arthritis as the result of pleasure-seeking. I don’t see it in relation to anything, except a ball-and-socket joint worn into a state of constant friction due to nothing other than long use over a long period of time. Yes, it indicates a disharmony, a disintegration from a natural state, but it’s a disharmony born of endurance, enduring longer than what nature intended, perhaps. Is that what Plato means? I don’t know. I should investigate further. I find it frustrating that he doesn’t focus on pain in and of itself but conjoins it to pleasure, or that he avoids treating it as a quale, as a mental entity responding to a physiological or phenomenal condition. He makes no appeal to a mental intermediary between the object of pain (pain as a simple somatic response) and the subjectivity of pain, the interior theatre of our private dramas.

Aristotle viewed pain as a matter of the soul. Pain was primarily emotion and that it could be overcome through logic. I would have to assume that Aristotle managed to go through life without experiencing much pain.

Ibn Sina, a famous medieval Muslim philosopher and physician who is also known by his Latin name Avicenna, wrote numerous insightful treatises on the practice of medicine, most notably The Canon of Medicine. He classified pain into 15 types (itching, pricking, compressing, stretching, breaking, penetrating etc.), but ascribed several different causes, one of them being the temperamental change produced by “an incongruous stimulus.” It was an interruption, a rupture in the general harmony that generates pain. He also wrote extensively about brain anatomy and its role as a center for pain sensation.

Descartes defined pain as “fast moving particles of fire” that pass along nerve filamentation until they reach the brain. I hurt, therefore I am.

Nietzsche believed pain was the only way to achieve self-growth and meaning. It was the source of great art. I’m reminded of some lyrics in Bob Dylan’s song, “Not Dark Yet”: “My sense of humanity is going down the drain / behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.”

Pain is a universally felt sensation, but our relationship to it is personal. Life without pain would be as empty as life without pleasure. Pleasure can sometimes be derived from pain, and pain is quite often the result of over-indulging in something pleasurable. Pain is erratic, chronic, and weird. It can appear as suddenly and mysteriously as it will sometimes disappear.

My relationship with the arthritic pain in my right shoulder is anchored in reflection. How can it not be? It’s in me. I can’t run away from it. I can’t return it to the manufacturer. I could lull it with pain-killers, oxycontin or Vicodin, but that leads nowhere good. I can only do one thing (outside of surrendering to the crime syndicate known as the U.S. healthcare system), and that is to make friends with it. Give it a little respect. Enjoy some conversations with it. Give it a name. Yolanda Squatpump. Shit Fun Chew. Doo-Doo Zopitty Bop Bop.

Weed

It began with a cream. Cannabidiol. This is a compound found in marijuana plants that relieves pain, reduces anxiety, and helps sleep. The product I use comes in a small white canister with a dial on the bottom the lifts the cream to the surface much like a roll-on deodorant. And it works. Not as much as I’d like – it doesn’t get rid of the pain entirely – but there is a significant reduction in the pain, which is a nagging case of arthritis in my right arm, exacerbated by dislocating my shoulder after a fall over two years ago. I rub the cream on my shoulder and biceps right after stepping out of the shower to maximize its effects. The skin pores are more porous after a hot shower. Within several minutes I can feel the effect of the cream, cooling and soothing the pain. The real benefit, however, is how the cream makes me feel once it has been absorbed into my bloodstream. It relaxes me. It gives me a pleasant, overall sense of well-being. It helps me sleep. It helps me write. It helps me read. And listen to music and gaze at the wall and a million other things as our planet and its once teeming life glides distressingly into the sixth mass extinction.

And so began an exploration of other marijuana products.

Marijuana was my least favorite drug in the sixties. It made me paranoid. My heart would beat so fast and so intensely that I was sure I was about to have a heart attack. The simplest, most banal and ordinary statement that anyone made would be wrapped in an enigma with slightly sinister overtones. I read omens and prophecies in everything, most of them bad. It was exhausting. How could anyone get high on this shit?

But most everyone did. Almost without exception the people around me were having a good time. There was laughter and brilliance and flashes of wit. Conversation would often turn toward wildly speculative and colorful topics: extraterrestrials, metaphysics, the occult. Even when the conjectures seemed a little paranoid no one seemed particularly paranoid. Except me. Catastrophes of all sort seemed imminent. I would have to contrive expedients to calm myself down. “Just ride it out,” I would tell myself, “if you can stay calm a few more minutes the murk will settle to the bottom and I will see things clearly once again.”

Which was true. The panic never lasted long. A few minutes later I’d be right as rain.

Years later I would discover that I suffered a condition called GAD: Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It’s important to know this about oneself because marijuana – like all the hallucinogens, of which weed is the mildest – don’t provide a buffer from your feelings the way alcohol and the benzodiazepines do. Au contraire: they will increase your awareness of them. They will, however, also alter your relationship to them, which makes them so valuable therapeutically. You can distance yourself from the emotion and ponder it reflectively, as if it were an item of curiosity, a strangely gnarled root or the shell of a Florida crown conch. Your emotional life and consequent perspectives become a cabinet of wonders. Goofy, engrossing, a little less threatening and tyrannical. You begin to realize that it’s all about being alive and experiencing things and not being able to make your mind up right away. One’s judgements become as intriguing as they are suspect. Most everything unpleasant is ego-driven. Diminish the ego a little and feelings of isolation and alienation recede like a red tide. Blake was right: when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything becomes infinite. Infinite in perspective, infinite in aspect.

Now that marijuana is legal in the state of Washington, you can choose a variety of tinctures whose intensity can be controlled. Indica, for example, is extremely mild. I’m glad that you no longer have to smoke it. I quit smoking cigarettes 27 years ago. I don’t want that habit rearing its ugly head again. The tincture is applied by dropper. The CBD tincture tastes awful, but the THC Indica has a very sweet and pleasant taste. It kicks in almost immediately: a heightened awareness accompanied by a feeling of light-headed glee.

Another product I like is Deeper Sleep capsules. These are gel caps that come in a blister pack. They contain Indica cannabis concentrate oil, myrcene and linalool terpenes (a terpene is an aromatic organic hydrocarbon derived from isopentenyl phosphate), ashwagandha, theanine, passion flower, white peony, magnolia bark, chamomile and coconut flakes. It takes about 30 minutes to kick in. The effect is a highly relaxing sense of well-being accompanied by a heightened response to color and music. The Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio show is particularly fun to listen to.

Until last September of this year, I’ve been able to tell people that I have 28 years of sobriety. Not that that comes up in conversation very often. It does not. But it is strange that this development has occurred with so little feeling about it on my part. Using THC recreationally with the deliberate intent of getting high (whatever “getting high” means) is not the same as getting drunk. Alcohol numbs. Marijuana sensitizes. They are two vastly different experiences. Alcohol will probably always continue to pose a threat to me. It still has a powerful allure. But I feel completely safe with marijuana. It doesn’t give me a hangover. I wake up the next day feeling better.