Nice Feeling

Nice feeling, to stand in August heat while a cooling breeze blows over the skin. These occasions are rare in Seattle. Summer is never a fully realized idea. It’s more of a flirtation. I hear the door close. R disappears. There’s a young dog freaking out somewhere nearby. I go out to investigate. I hear loud voices in the park. I see R at the end of the driveway, hose in hand, watering plants. The average pressure from a home water faucet is about 40 to 60 PSI (pound-force per square inch). Power, which is the rate of energy transfer, is measured in Joules per second, also called Watts. Horsepower: unit of mechanical power. Why horses? Why not elephants, elephant power, or camels, camel power? They don’t have the same ring. R returns. Did you hear that dog? It’s there every night, the same yippy dog. “Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus,” writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic Monthly, “and despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered.” Wakefulness is a desirable state, I prefer it to drowsiness, though drowsiness is pretty nice, too. Can you be wakeful & drowsy simultaneously? I don’t see why not. Adrift on a bed while paying heed to the things that drift through the mind. Or the weight of the body on something soft, mattress with springs, but you don’t really feel the springs, the springs are there like a set of mathematical elements, emulsions in a lowland of undress & spirally connection. Giant explosion in Beirut today. Jaw-dropping. Over 100 people dead, 4,000 injured. The cause was 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely in a warehouse for six years. The blast was so powerful it was felt in Cyprus, 120 miles away. A man in a shirt splattered with blood points to his car, upside down on a highway guardrail. Hot August afternoon we go walking by an eggplant purple Scion sedan, the front panel just behind the front tire on the driver’s side riddled with bullet holes. He must’ve gone through a bad section of town, says R. There should be a curtain for words, so that when the curtain raises on a word, we see the full theater, etymology, connotations, meaning. The King & Queen as little puppets hitting one another with sticks. Sliding mirrors for the bedroom closet: another room with another version of me. Assuming that’s me. Thud thud thud. Sound of footsteps from upstairs, followed by clatter of dishes, followed by hiss of water. The river Doubs has gone dry in France, due to chronic drought & over-development. "The waterproofing of the soil is due to the increase in residential areas, roads, commercial areas. We notice that there is hardly any wetland, no more marshes, no more buffer zones which retain the water." When did human life begin to live so detached from nature? Nature isn’t external. Nature is everywhere. It’s another word for life. Where there’s life, there’s nature. And where nature is under assault, life is under assault.

 

 

 

Syllable Cloud

Engage the bleeding. Art springs a pitcher. If they yank a tempting loaf a system of laws limps toward protocol. Opens. Pounds. The arms represent a complaint. If the thesis invites hearts the encyclopedia boils with bric-a-brac. Reflects my ripe hammer. Apples sweat. Despite a widened pink that includes snow. A collar stud engine & a concertina that squeezes pain. Parliamentary draw stumbles through offices shooting. And ponders a brass problem, the one that everyone thinks is recognizable, but unnatural. Invisibly religious vividness carved from a syllable cloud. Our tea fastened to balloons. Fantasy bouillon. Hills of contrasting tread. Paradigm change. Flower walk. Sparkling. Surface scrounged for deeper meaning. Incendiary bells. Unfettered capitalism in a cackling soliloquy. The weight of a face in a bleeding forehead. Meanings catch the living process as it crawls out of its shell & dances for money. Searches books aggressively written by Gothic spiders in a permissive stupor. Books offer solace. Supposition. Quarks eating regret until it turns malleable. Deepening metamorphism. I pray more & more each day. Amplified strings lost to seclusion cause old emotions to heave into conversational grandeur. The fondling flaps until the ultramarine falls into rawhide expanding the glass & making an octagonal Friday walk on its hindlegs. Hot ganglions developed into sequins by comparison to a cruet. Tensions folded into words that busy the mind like the gnarled roots of a humid idea. Mosquitoes blacken the ceiling. Beams. Pharmaceuticals burning through emotions, trickling penumbra. Nails prominently featured by divisions of time. Knobs. Age falling through cracks. Ambiguities on the glittering sand of a nuclear ocean. Abstract cherries entertaining life’s illusions with perfect aplomb. A description of mind rendered in truffles & stars resumes its twigs in subjective iron, causing words to blossom into sleighs. We declare ourselves on a piano of snow. Water drags the lobster. We jump out to paint the magician. Ganglions insinuate density by roaring at cracks of phenomenal webbing. Cézanne’s swans revolt. Travel crushes space. Chisels become proverbs, innocence becomes a watercolor. I wiggle the ocean in my mouth. That thing called life sits at a desk reaching for paradise with a sheaf of paper & a tremulous hand. I glue the constancy of ovation in a box of applause. Mysterious signals from distant galaxies imply that a melody might also be a node of optimism in an otherwise indifferent universe. Or nothing at all.

The Mutiny Of Twilight

Maybe it’s just a foolish game, this desire to get the exact words to describe a feeling, a sensation, a phenomenon, because it’s impossible, words are symbols, not actualities. The illusion persists that the word & thing are married in a wonderful phonetic embrace & exude the full reality to which they refer. Re fur. Reefer. It can all go awry so quickly. And there’s no real match, no connection between words & reality, it’s ultimately a stencil you put over all that stuff out there, inundating efferent & afferent nerves. Language puts a gauze over things. An opacity. And the waves are made for having fun. And the waves are crashing over my small boat. And the waves are predicted to get better for the weekend. And the waves are nouns immersed in sound. 

        If you write a poem, are you really making anything? The words are already there. Aren’t you just choosing which words go where? Clearly, there’s more to it than that. But I can’t pinpoint just what it is. First there has to be a desire to create something. Something out of clay, something out of wood, something out of motion, as in dance, something out of sound, à la music, something out of words, a novel or a story or a poem. Or a joke. Or a complaint. What is the nucleus? The nucleus is the energy. And it happens quick. And it’s more than choosing words. There’s an engagement at a deeper level. There are sensations, feelings, articulations that take the air & sculpt it into a circus of words, the boil of creatures scraped from the unconscious. 

        But here’s the good part: making something that has minimal – if any – commercial value, is inherently joyful & liberating. Doing things for money can be a gas. If I could write a hit song & get a gazillion dollars for that I’d be pretty happy. But doing something with no intent of making money is subversive. It’s exhilarating. And hilarious. Maybe this only works in a capitalist culture. So be it. If this is the case, this is an excellent age for writing poetry. People are obsessed with money. People evaluate everything according to its value as a commodity. And this poisons everything. Poisons the mind. Poisons the spirit. The antidote, clearly, is art. And the highest of the arts is poetry. The least likely to lend itself to commodity. The most likely to liberate you. What happens when we put things into words? And what do I mean by things? Sumptuous daubs of nimble real estate. Ideas chattering among themselves in jackhammer rapture. 

        As I was leaving the laundry room I spotted a dead moth on the floor. I went back to pick it up. As soon as I touched it, it flew away. I let it be, and went back to making the bed. 

        There’s an art to making a bed: I begin with the tags. I like the tags to be at the bottom. And smooth. I like everything smooth. 

        What was it Heidegger said about tools? The object reveals itself to us in its use. Or something like that. If memory serves. You can write with a tripod or a harpoon. Pens work. I’ve never tried a quill. I’ll bet they’re messy. I like typing on a laptop. It makes me feel like Chopin. Playing a nocturne. And dreaming of serums made of moonlight. Disillusionment sometimes has the tartness of olives. The sudden clarity is good, but the overall feeling is acrid. You want to get that into writing. So much ignorance & evil arises out of illusion. Denial. Childishness. And you want to avoid symbols. Even though writing is symbols. It’s all symbols. But avoid them. Avoid symbols. Use depression. Minarets. Hydrants. Sorrows. The mutiny of twilight.

Out Of The O Of The Mouth

Sudden hit of fragrance – jasmine – at Highland Drive & Warren Ave North. My nose still hurts a bit after Athena last night maneuvering around my head trying to provoke me into playing while I lie in bed trying to get to sleep, I reached out trying to keep her away from the radio & tablet on top & she dug the claw of her hindfoot into the interior of my nostril. Hurt like hell. I got up & used a Q tip to apply a disinfectant gel. Sound of a power saw all day. Someone doing construction, but where? They must be building an entire house. Funny: the French word for quarrel – brouille – is the same for scrambled eggs, oeufs brouillés. Which gives a clear impression of the French perception of quarreling as a state of confusion, as if the heated parties weren’t just opposed, but mixed up, entangled. People that drive me crazy are the ones who believe they’re somehow superior & open-minded by not taking a stand, remaining neutral, which in their minds is a form of objectivity, but in reality is nothing more than a feigned detachment with little else in it but vanity. Whatever happened to Shocking Blue? They were a Dutch group. Mariska Veres passed away in 2006, gallbladder cancer, three weeks after the disease had been diagnosed. She was so beautiful, exotic looking, with eyes underlined by kohl. My constant efforts to keep the soap dish clean – clean of soap, which is weird – the most Zen thing I do all day. The fifth century Gandharan Buddhist monk Vasubandhu claimed that ultimate reality is both physically & logically irreducible. It doesn’t disappear when its parts are disassembled under logical analysis, nor does it borrow its nature from other things. Nor is it a product of mental constructions, such as causation, or the idea of a continuum. But I still don’t know what it is. Or if it’s all that important. I’m mainly interested in ways to fold laundry, & how to tell when someone is bluffing. I stuck my hand under the faucet to rinse the lather off while shaving but the water wasn’t there. Forgot I turned it off. Weird feeling, like when you expect a step that isn’t there, & lose your balance. Or that bush over on Garfield, just off 2^nd Ave North, wrapped in gauze, which I always take to be a big rock, like the menhirs of Ireland & Brittany, until I get it into focus, & see the gauze, & wonder what the gauze is for. Perception is an ongoing circus. Never quite sure what I’m seeing is the full picture, or salute from another realm, a ghost ship appearing in the mist. How is Cirque de Soleil coping with Covid? To see a smile on a dead person’s face is not unusual, writes Guillevic. Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is like entering a cathedral of sound, organ tones like sunlight diffused through stained glass, voices soaring high into the ether. What would a pallid word be? An opal out of the O of the mouth.

 

My New Trick

My new trick for activating the crosswalk light at Queen Anne Avenue North & Highland Drive: press the button, get across to the other side, making sure not to touch my face with my thumb, then squeeze a little transparent blob of disinfectant gel onto my left hand, press my hands together & rub really good.  What the hell do you do when reality becomes too much to handle? When uncertainty is too all-encompassing? There was a time when alcohol did the trick. That was a long time ago. Different epoch. Different constitution. Now it’s Proust & Oreo cookies. Netflix. LSD: Long Distance Running. But none of these go deep enough. What I need is a rocket ship, a habitable exo-planet, & a nice long gulp from the fountain of youth. Herodotus is the first to mention a fountain of youth, which was in Ethiopia. The Ichthyophagi (literally “Fish-Eaters,” one of three tribes in ancient Babylonia), traveled to Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian king “led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil, and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.” It’s amazing how good I feel after a shower. Hydrotherapy. Cat on my lap preening herself stops to stare at the ceiling then goes back to preening herself, maneuvering her tongue & teeth between the interstices of her forepaw. Paganini must’ve had a phenomenal amount of energy & agility, the actions of the bow are so quick, so nimble, so eccentric it seems uncanny, supernatural. I see much the same magic in Stevie Ray Vaughn. Sound of the router, a mild electronic hum, I don’t notice at all at first, then, after it seeps into my consciousness, I can’t stop from hearing it. I search my mind for a memory, the last time I went to a drive-in movie. Was it the summer of 1967, A Man and A Woman? And aren’t memories like little movies that get stuck in our brains? So that a memory of a movie is a movie remembering a movie. I’ve never acted in anything. That must be strange, assume another identity, give it expression, motion, songs, ethics, caprices, creases, nieces, visas, thesis. I play a woolgatherer playing with a rubber band in a lonely saloon in Missoula. Wyatt Earp comes in sits down & shoves a photograph of Arthur Rimbaud at me. Do you know this man? Story tonight on the French news about a fire raging in the forests of Anglet, between Biarritz & Bayonne, a man’s house totally destroyed, the roof beams charred & still smoking, the only thing untouched – mysteriously - some packages of pasta. An interviewed woman uses the term SDF, which I look up: sans domicile fixe. Homeless. 30-ton humpback whale shoots out of the water near the coast of Rio de Janeiro, startling a group of canoeists. Sometimes I think I’m my own slingshot. I take careful aim at the void & then go spinning into the stars, a fist of beginning. 

Everybody's Wearing Masks In The Streets Of Lille

Everybody’s wearing masks in the streets of Lille. There’s been a surge of Covid-19 infections next door in Belgium. Strangely, today was the first day here in Seattle that I noticed most of the people weren’t wearing masks. Until now, this has not been the case, everyone has been wearing a mask. My eyes drift right where a nude woman stands in her Nice hotel room languidly holding a bath towel that flows to the red carpet below & little tufts of black hair protrude from her shower cap. Matisse. To the left, my broad-brimmed winter hat is parked on the corner of the big mirror on a bureau of drawers whose top is covered with a multi-colored tightly woven blanket. I will begin wearing it again in a few months as summer wanes & autumn begins to manifest. Big computer mess today: R lost the functioning of her touchscreen after a recent Microsoft update, which seems to have loused up a lot of other computers. She called Microsoft tech support & said she needed firmware, whatever that is, & should call Lenovo. Lenovo walked her through a factory reset, but that did nothing to resolve the issue. It was just a big headache, for which she was charged $70 dollars. She called back & asked for a refund. We’ll see. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. The only thing that stuck out during this odyssey was the incompetence of the technicians. Probably not their fault; my guess is, they’re paid dirt, & aren’t trained properly. Globalization. They all have foreign accents, one of which was Russian. I stand at the corner of Highland & Bigelow by a giant old chestnut tree & whistle. Two crows appear, the same ones I feed every day, toss unsalted peanuts. One of them is lame, a useless bad leg that just hangs there while she balances on the one good leg. I worry about her tailfeathers. They keep disappearing. I don’t know why. It’s frustrating. Whatever happened to Neal Sedaka? He’s 81 & lives in Brooklyn. I wonder if he still sings. I love, I love, I love my calendar girl. Our calendar hangs in the hallway & features a small black & white horse named Toby. It’s a PETA calendar, so the story about this horse is disturbing, but has a happy ending. Toby was found in a muddy pen cluttered with manure & garbage & without food, water, or shelter. The owner agreed to let him go & Toby was examined by a vet who discovered an eye infection & a neurological disability caused by blunt-force trauma. Toby now resides in New Mexico with geese, goats, & a pig. “When he’s extra happy, he drops to his knees, rolls onto his back, and kicks his hooves in the air in an equine version of a touchdown celebration.” Delicious muffin this morning, soft & sweet. Scrambled eggs. Grape juice. We haven’t been to a restaurant or movie theater in months.  A big chunk of culture in mothballs. This crisis is strange. Invisible. Indeterminate. Hush of water coming from upstairs kitchen. Voices outside in bright summer air. 75º Fahrenheit. 

 

Snippets

 I turn the car around, head west up the easement, can’t see for the sunlight, pull the visor down, doesn’t help, I’m blinded by the light. I find the Hotel Recamier on a bookmark in Proper Name by Bernadette Mayer, Un Hôtel Chic À Saint-Germain de Prés. I remember passing the wall mural of “Le bateau d’ivre” early in the morning to go for a run in Le Jardin de Luxembourg. Paganini’s violin bow going all over the musical spectrum on YouTube, coming to me through noise-cancelling earphones, drowning out the noises from the kitchen above. Tuxedo cat sleeping on a blanket of fluffy blue sheep on a white background, curled, white nose on white paws. Those squiggles on Oreo cookies, a text for the tongue until it crumbles followed by a surge of sweetness in the white frosting. Sinking feeling when I overhear one of the internet cable workers announce to his colleagues “I discovered something.” Not what you want to hear after several days of service disruption, confusion, misinformation, chaos & noise. Another reminder of the precipitous drop in competence in late capitalist society. Story on the French news about men in Senegal devoted to saving the sea turtle, a group of men pulling a huge sea turtle into their shallow draft wooden boat, one of them stroking the turtle’s head as the creature is examined for wounds & ill health. One of the men dives in after it’s been released, legs & flippers agitating in clear water. A female acupuncturist in Phoenix, Arizona has signed up for a trial test for a Covid-19 vaccine. How do I know this? I check Google News every day for reports on a vaccine. R tells me two more Seattle businesses went under, Bamboo Garden Vegetarian Cuisine & the College Inn in the University District, where I used to eat dinner after work at Mailing Services every day after my divorce. I keep thinking about Rod Stewart’s model train layout & the extreme attention to detail. Even the pavements look used. Magritte’s The Human Condition – an oil painting of an oil painting on an easel in front of a window that is itself a painting of the scene from a window – is reflected back at me on the bedroom closet mirror, with the name Magritte at the bottom in big black letters spelled backwards.