The Sound Of Rain

I love the sound of rain in summer and early fall when there’s still enough leaves on the trees to make the rain audible. There’s something really rich about that sound, fertile and quiescent. It’s soothing. Thuds and crashes from the kitchen above our bedroom put an end to the reign of the rain. I don earphones and watch the French news on my laptop, stories about Prince and the subterranean vault containing tons of his music in his palace in Minneapolis and the woman who has been curating it, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic, a man rising out of a deep crevasse where the earth has sunk due to the melting of the permafrost carrying the huge bone of a prehistoric rhinoceros, the exhaustion of nurses due to the coronavirus picking up speed again, a woman deeply moved when she meets the gendarme that saved her during the floods last week in the Alpes-Maritime department. Next day, 7:40 p.m. October 12^th, I conclude a bout of proofreading by watching Stevie Ray Vaughn perform “Texas Flood” live at the El Macombo, July 20^th, 1983. The El Macombo, turns out, is in Toronto, Ontario. This is the same place where the Stones put on a surprise show in 1977, the one where Margaret Trudeau (mother to current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) was observed partying with the stones, somewhat to the embarrassment of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She’s been a busy woman since then. In 2010 she authored Changing My Mind, a book about her personal experience with bipolar disorder, and in 2014 she visited Mali as an ambassador of WaterAid Canada. The French humanitarian Sophie Petronin arrived in Bomako, Mali, in a white flowing traditional dress after her release from Islamic extremists (strange word, ‘extremist’) last Friday, October 8^th, 2020. She’d been helping orphans and other children suffering from malnutrition in the northern city of Gao when she’d been abducted on Christmas Eve, 2016. I watch Gabor Maté give a talk for the Bioneers on YouTube. He talks about the importance of treating disease holistically, taking in all the factors impending on a life, nurturing a life, poisoning a life, inducing a life, indoctrinating a life, soothing a life, including a life, abusing a life, excluding a life, grooming a life, dooming a life, bejeweling diffusing ballooning approving a life. The water we drink, the food we eat, certainly, but also vibes, emotions, including the emotions of our mothers when we were in the womb, it goes that deep, that broad, that far. And how alienated we’ve become. Alienated from nature, alienated from ourselves, perverted by false values, the stresses of a materialistic, competitive culture. Instabilities and uncertainties pumping our systems and internal organs with stress hormones, cortisol and adrenalin. This is followed by Kurt Cobain’s heartrending, shattering version of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV’s unplugged series in 1993. “My girl, my girl, don't lie to me / Tell me where did you sleep last night / In the pines, in the pines / Where the sun don't ever shine / I would shiver the whole night through.”

Freedom From Freedom

I remember floating at the bottom of a swimming pool in the courtyard of an apartment building in San José, California, in the summer of 1965. I’ve always been able to hold my breath for long periods of time and it felt peaceful at the bottom of the pool. What I didn’t count on was how it might look to someone. When I surfaced, I encountered a man on his way to work who had been startled by seeing me on the bottom. He said he thought I might be drowning and almost jumped in to save me. The memory, like so many of my memories, remains brightly lucid and detailed, still charged with the emotion of the moment, and all the might have beens and should have beens and could have beens. All the alternatives that would’ve resulted in a very different present. The past is always pulling me back, engaging my attention, while simultaneously projecting scenarios in the future. This continual dissociation of the self can be experienced in the mode of lightness (I is another) or of responsibility (its engagement by the past and future). 

        “Sartre has a definition of consciousness as a perpetual decompression of the self: it is no longer what it was, it is not yet what it will be, therefore it has no substance, it is always in the rupture, the separation, the tearing away from the past and projecting it towards the future. The truth of consciousness is necessarily a becoming that advances by way of division, rewinding, spiraling, just like History. Such a truth poses the problem of solidarity with oneself: how can I still be myself while perpetually betraying myself? If I never stop projecting myself towards something other than myself, I only exist in relation to my projections. If I just say, ‘I am what I’ve done,’ it means that I’m already dead, a mummy to myself.” – François Noudelman, “Sartre pense à partir de ses contradictions” [my translation] 

        It’s easy to obsess about other actions one might’ve taken in the past; the alternatives are dizzying. And what would’ve been the right action – the unequivocally, unambiguously correct thing to do, to say – is unreachable. It no longer exists except as an ongoing narrative in one’s memory. The more you alter the narrative the more tortured you become. You can’t change it. You might be able to reinterpret it, but you can’t change it. It is both real and unreal. The emotional charge it carries is real. And unreal. It is both mutable and static. All you can do is look for amnesty. But the amnesty has to come from within. The chronicler must frame the chronicle differently, but the picture doesn’t change. There are no clouds in the museum. Only exhibits behind glass. Dioramas and straw. Cognitive maps in the hippocampus.

        “On the responsible side, you have to be accountable and supportive of your actions: you have done something or not, and you cannot say that this me was someone else. To try to solve this problem, Sartre finds a Hegelian solution, a movement of totalization - detotalization and re-totalization - where meanings are constantly reabsorbed, diverted and redirected by others and by History. The result is a sense which both depends on me and does not depend on me. It is the movement of History, of ideology, of otherness that I live, which means that I am not totally in control of the meaning of my actions.” – Ibid. 

        Are we mistranslating our own lives? What responsibilities embolden us and what responsibilities drag us down? Does art make us selfish? Do perforations token weakness or convenience? Wouldn’t it be nice to crawl into a parenthesis in the middle of our narrative and hibernate for an entire winter? Or go back in time? Drop out of the narrative and surrender to the inevitability of it all? Then return with a sack of drugs and a smile. 

        Everyone wants freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom from doubt, freedom from chores, freedom from tedium, freedom from ourselves, freedom from others, freedom from routine, freedom from guilt and remorse, freedom from commitment, freedom from pigment, freedom from bewitchment, freedom from infringement, impingement and the beaten path. What would it be like to enjoy a minute of freedom? Real, absolute, total freedom. Would that newly opened space leave us with more decisions to make? More possibility? Overwhelm us with possibility? I’ve heard some people talk about how exhilarating it is to be in the military because there nearly all your decisions are made for you by other people. And that is a sensation of total freedom. Is this why people are drawn to totalitarian regimes? To dictators? You don’t have to be yourself in a uniform. You don’t have to take responsibility for yourself. You give that responsibility to others. 

        "Therefore, freedom, Sartre's favorite word, is woven with responsibility and otherness. The truth of free conscience follows the tortuous paths of bad faith and inauthenticity. There are no moral values that would guarantee any of it a sincere uprightness. Value is only an external virtue. How, then, to escape the pretense, the lie to oneself? On the theoretical level, the rewinding of consciousness is a metamorphosis which conveys past commitments and reincarnates them in new projects, new bodies, new situations. Consistency is saved. On the other hand, on the existential level, it is a divided subject, fractured, which compartmentalizes and seeks solutions of continuity, as evidenced by the life and commitments of Sartre. And the connection between these two dimensions, moral and existential, arises from an endless debate with oneself and with others. As the closing line from No Exit says, ‘Well, let's continue.’” – Ibid.

Confessions Of A Rogue Cliché

It occurs to me a lot lately that I’ve become a cliché: an old man disoriented by a new world in which nothing makes sense. Customer services run by robot. References nobody gets. I met a young man once out walking & in a casual conversation referenced Jimmy Page. He didn’t know who Jimmy Page was. I said he played with Led Zeppelin. He hadn’t heard of Led Zeppelin. And so that world is gone. And we’re in a new one. I wouldn’t call it a brave new world. I’d call it a crisis. A catastrophe. A dystopia. But these are the words of an old man. They go nowhere. They get rendered in pixels in social media. For other old people. Who are likewise dazed & confused. 

        There’s an advantage to listening to music fifty or more years old. Many of the musicians are gone. They looked beautiful at the time, engorged with their own sense of beauty, polished & sent into the world in songs like “Walk Away Renee” & “Unchained Melody.” It’s a good lesson. I guess. The lesson being nothing lasts, grab it while you can, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. It’s a not a hard lesson to figure out, any child could do it, but it’s a hard lesson to achieve in a really meaningful way. It’s hard to swallow the fact of one’s non-existence when big emotions are coursing through your body, & most of the people from a particular time are gone. But the angst & urgency to live makes damn good music. “I am a passenger / And I ride, and I ride / I ride through the city's backsides / I see the stars come out of the sky / Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky / You know it looks so good tonight” 

        Gotta hand it to Iggy Pop, going out on the stage at the Sydney Opera House at age 72 with a bare torso revealing a modest paunch & a rugged Viking face of hardship & joy & smiling crags. He’s still on the lithe side, & muscular. My molecules are having fun today. And yes, I wanna be your dog. Pain increases the savor of life, gives it piquancy & range. So does sniffing butts. The main thrust is metamorphosis. One minute human, next minute poodle. Or a churlish chihuahua. Or a metaphor wandering around looking for something to do. “And now I'm ready to close my mind / And now I'm ready to feel your hand.” Roll over. Show my belly. Let my tongue hang out.

        Is the world saturated with music? Yes, & it’s also a persistent aspiration. Someone singing off key underground. Breath is a franchise for the propagation of sound. An old woman milking a cow. It’s all a music of slop & pail, mushrooms growing at the side of the road. Jupiter. Paganini. Prague. Music is organized sound. It floats the idea of metal, as if a walrus flopped forward deepening the sense of address that a forklift loaded with eggs might have of the future, which is feverishly unreal. So the mind ties knots of sound to hold the air together, which become feelings written in chalk on a blackboard, equations to make the unseen seen, & articulate steel. 

        Meanings shift with focus. Reality is never any one thing, it’s a multitude of overflowing telephones, pullulations & gnarly engagements. If you pluck a string a genie appears with a cryptic smile & a cigar. There are cherubs to remind us that the use of levers can liberate the elephants from their labor, if the elephants can be considered as living creatures & not just stewards of wisdom. Consider, if you will, the gallantry of Spain, or the nature of quarks & gluons, which are words, which are used to solve the problems of the intangible, & cell phone signals, which are everywhere, & justify the weight of a pawn with the tweezers of a king.

Day Of The Nail

 R left this morning to get some unsalted peanuts and a new scooper for our litter box at PetCo, then a flu shot and some groceries at Safeway. I returned to watching the Jimmy Dore Show on YouTube. She returned minutes later. Our left rear tire was flat. Again. This tire has been patched not quite a year ago. We called AAA and a truck arrived within a half hour. AAA is an amazing service. They always arrive in a timely fashion, even when they’re busy and the city is teeming with automotive mishaps, and get you back on the road in an embarrassingly short amount of time. AAA roadside assistance drivers are automotive wizards. The AAA driver changed the tire and discovered a big fat nail stuck in it. We speculated on where we might’ve driven over a nail in the road. The most likely culprit is a home remodeling project up the street, at the steep part of Bigelow where the road crests. It’s a bit dangerous there, the western sun in your eyes, people driving fast over the hill on the downside, people rocketing up. It’s amazing there aren’t more collisions there. This is where various workers, electricians, plumbers, glaziers and carpenters have been parking their trucks, half on the sidewalk, half off, creating yet more hazard. It’s also messy, bits of wood and glass and plaster strewn about. The nail might’ve fallen off of a truck. There are lots of remodeling projects and building construction in our neighborhood. Home expansion and remodeling has been going at fever pitch for the last few years. The intensity seems to increase with every catastrophe, the latest being Trump’s testing positive for Covid. We drove out to Carter Subaru on Aurora to get the tire patched. They’ve got a nice waiting room there. We found a desk with several stools and I got out my French edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, a New Directions English translation and a French dictionary. R brought Revenge of the Lawn, a collection of short stories by Richard Brautigan. It’s a nice waiting room, spacious, everyone wearing a mask. It was quiet as a library. Two women with a big white poodle sat together, the poodle's forelegs on one of the women’s lap as she caressed and petted him and he returned the affection with a big wet tongue. A middle-aged rather rugged looking man with a beard did paperwork at a small table. Another bearded man sat in an armchair reading a book. There was a TV on, but it was close captioned with the sound off. I wish they did this at the airport, where the TVs are ubiquitous. I wonder if we’ll go to the airport again. The pandemic feels endless. It keeps getting worse. And yet they’ve opened the fitness gyms. That’s insane. We prefer to exercise outside, where we’ve been able to work out a new running trail with fewer people to dodge. It was disappointing not to go for our usual run and feed the crows and scrub jays. It was a beautiful sunny day, uncharacteristically warm for early October. A warranty covered the tire repair, which helped take some of the sting out. We stopped at PetCo on the way back, got three big bags of unsalted peanuts and some canned cat food, and returned home. Hot dogs and three-bean salad for dinner, we watched people in the mountain villages of the Alpes-Maritime department in the south of France dig themselves out of the mud left when the rivers were engorged by three months of rain in ten hours, swelling over the banks and collapsing houses and tossing cars like dice. A man used a bow to shoot a rope across a river to use as a line to deliver food and other items to the villagers still trapped on the other shore.

 

 

Wilderness Of Pain

Where do you go looking for American mythology? It was easy to find in the 50s: John Wayne, tough individualism, taciturn straightforwardness, distrust of language, useless book-learnin’. Early 60s the Kennedys, Martin Luther King. Social unrest jiggled the mythology jar, up bubbled a weird utopian fervor for outer space, technology. The rationality of science. This was before corporate money began influencing what came out of the lab. Science was noble. Superstition was ugly & dangerous. But things got weird again. Weirder in a good way. The Beatles. Humor, eccentricity, imagination defeated the darker energies of misanthropy & militarism. The jocks in high school took a back seat. Jim Morrison appears, writhing, contorting on stage: lost in a Roman wilderness of pain / And all the children are insane. 

        In the U.S., success is gauged according to how much money one has. How big your home, how sleek and powerful your car, how attractive your wife, how handsome and alpha your husband. It’s a grotesque mythology, a psychology void of weightless transcendence. Everything is pragmatic. It’s a mythology of consumption. People taking selfies at Maccha Picchu. 

        Meaning isn’t easily packaged. Odysseys are involved. One doesn’t live one’s life so much as engineer it. Components are arranged to promote self-esteem. The idyllic place of consumption is a cruise ship. Everyone is untethered from the bleak anonymity of the landscape. Life is centered around alcohol, food and entertainment. Time is endless, like the ocean. But there are no white whales in these oceans. Just ice skating and surfing simulation. Classes in personal development. “The Story Of You,” a story-telling festival “where guests share their experiences and a video booth where stories can be uploaded to social media.” 

        What if any average day was like meeting Jack Kerouac on a bus? Would you be gregarious or coy? Would you feel the friction of commerce? Are these questions necessary? 

        The percentage of people who enjoy reading compared to the percentage of people who prefer playing video games is disturbing. But there’s no harm done if everything is protoplasm. We dwell in kettledrums. We wear ornaments in our ears & tattoos on our arms. Old men doing jigs in jukebox joints. And nobody has a secure job and nobody fully trusts anyone else. And every day is like meeting William S. Burroughs on a bus. A blue bus. Headed west. 

        Have you noticed how people look lately? Everyone looks lost. Answers are hard to come by. So is the truth. And reality. And other things that aren’t things but hyperrealities whose topographies are easier to navigate when they’re properly seen for what they are: simulations. Jokes. Substitutes. Illusions. Real things are incalculable and therefore codified. Domesticated into easily consumed pixels. Honor. Virtue. Quality. These are the things that seem to disappear first when an empire collapses. 

        “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.”

        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. We lead such freakish lives these days. 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. 

        “As Michel Foucault explains in his lecture of February 7, 1979, there is a latent conflict between society and capitalism. This conflict stems from the ‘irrational rationality’ of capitalism. Capitalist reason reveals its irrationality, among other things, in the field of public health: in a model where only the search for profit counts, health is seen as a cost that must be reduced. But this isn’t rational, because the poor health of its workers cannot guarantee a strong economy. Knowing that capitalist logic can destroy society if it attacks education, health, care for the elderly or undermines the environment, the role of the state is to ensure a balance of power.” – Teresa Pullano, “Bienvenue dans l’Europe d’après”

        Late stage capitalism is a juggernaut crushing everything in its path of any genuine value while exalting wealth and property and exulting in its ceaseless propaganda. High-end jeans with fake mud on them. Sterling silver Tiffany and Co ping pong paddles. Moschino dry-cleaning bag dress. Think rich to get rich. Bullshit packaged in luxurious smiles. Rags to riches. Rugged individualism. Fake it till you make it. “Everything is worshiped and nothing has value,” to quote Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) from La La Land. 

        “The artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine.” 

        That day in Paris some few years ago (and yet what now feels like an epoch ago, due to the pandemic) while walking down the rue Bonaparte I spotted a window display of letters by luminaries such as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust & Francis Poulenc. There’s an elegance in the written word that has disappeared from the digital age, which has decimated print media & resulted in a society of zombies. The pens are graceful, the dark ink alluring. The paper must be high quality: it’s still white. It’s such a pleasure to be reminded of a time when language & writing were synonymous with thought, visions transferred from absinthe to ink, ink to infinity. 

       Writing has taken a backseat to the podcast, tweet and YouTube bullhorn. Everyone is big on oral communication networks now. What writing does is allow talking a space to find its revolt. Writing isn’t talking. Writing is redemption. It’s where we redeem our confusion for the wisdom of silence.

Spark Muffin

Clean hair stabs the plywood. Guzzles wealth. Eyes gaze at umber. Development. Ovation. Find France without brooms. Steer murder invite asking. Starry arms drive. Complete the ultramarine consonant cake. Start contrasting pyramids with exhumation. Anthology regrets tumble in restless phenomena. Thickly. Draw a palomino. Wrestle and skulk. Concepts include a boiling cello. Spark muffin. Exhortation necessarily chills despite drums. Spangles the tube farm. Ponder the force of personality. Does it hawk or does it crackle? Rocks cure the greeting. Walk the dachshund Corot road. Polish this attraction in magic. Twist bacteria. Press on hunger. Let the collar stud flap its monsters.

        Rattle Cubism and wander a time. Fulminate. Raw stratosphere. Anarchic ecstatic rain. Imagine a language that yields balloons. Buffalo Bill mushrooms nutmeg and art. Send a respectable glow. Become a slogan. Prophecy needs reflection. Operated iron. Incidents roar amplification by pleading. Wild indicative steel. We shout a ruffled metamorphosis. Writing can be a mimicry. But when it’s not it’s infinite. Our reach has appetite. The mouth spits its buckles and the tears come. Solace jiggles its cream. Wilderness threatens the chronology. History apprehends its detonation. And so begins a beautiful dereliction.

        Steal excuses. Excuses are landscapes. Sand. The trumpeted army swelled into history. And this stepped into stilts. The prospects ached. Fondle autumn it will crawl into upheaval. Green paradox harked by blossom. Wheels drool a sparkling velocity. A lobster’s cracked intentions burn into sound. Pounds of heaven. Whales. Bubbly reality chopped into dreams. Give me more. Collect these words and make them display herself. Marry it in tin. Teeming with behavior. For it impels reading. My plays mutate into loons. And the zippers come undone. Easels caressed by circle. We give them angels. And they surface in tools.

        Beaten copper. Fold the smell into hope. Or despair. One will bring wonder and one will bring crying. Eat the boiling elegy. Snap it into place. Place is where the area spreads into ribs. Trickle about the ponder cogs. My favorite instinct is about to turn vermilion. The cemetery offers union. But who wants union? Sweeten the sneeze with celery. Wear earrings and juggle vowels. The consonants will follow in tilted ensembles. Explain spoons. Greed exaggerates computers. We saw it coming. And it came. And it’s still here. Tension mirrors and sticks of light.

Stowaways Alleyways And Castaways

A green locust has been hitching a ride on our Subaru these past few days. We first noticed him as we were getting ready to drive to Ballard. He was crawling around on the windshield. He crawled to the bottom and disappeared in the narrow space between the metal of the hood and the glass of the windshield. He reappeared when we returned. Crawled out of his hiding place and went for another promenade on the windshield. I noticed him today as I was backing into our parking space in back of our building. The sunlight revealed the glistening strands of an orb web over the rearview mirror and when I glanced to the right I saw the locust on the surface of the other rear view mirror. I wonder why he – or she – is so attached to our car. It’s not unusual to find spiders living in the hollow cup-shaped mounts of the rearview mirrors, especially this time of year, late September, early October. The air has been spectacular, clear and fresh with a very slight chill imbuing an otherwise unseasonably warm temperature.  A neighbor tells me more smoke is on its way from California, the wildfires now raging in the Napa Valley. I hope not. The last smoke lasted a full week and appears to have decimated the population of songbirds. I haven’t seen any chickadees, sparrows, robins, starlings, pine siskins, goldfinches, flickers or red-breasted sapsuckers since the smoke cleared. Just the usual scrub jays and crows. Corvids are hearty birds. I remember the family of crows on Bigelow that flew down late in the afternoon on one of the worst smoke days – the sun a vague yellowish blob in a sky of sooty grey – gliding down to the grass after I tossed some peanuts on a neighbor’s lawn. It’s a nice spot under a giant chestnut that’s probably over a hundred years old and is slated to come down soon. It’s been struggling with some sort of disease the last several years, some of the branches are already dead. It’ll be sad to see it gone. We got a pizza after picking up prescription at Safeway and ate it while watching The Mystery Of Henri Pick with Fabrice Luchini and Camille Cottin about a library on the coast of Brittany consisting entirely of rejected manuscripts – The Library of Refused Books – inspired by a Richard Brautigan story. A young female publishing executive discovers the manuscript of a book called The Last Hours Of A Love Story ostensibly written by the owner of a pizza parlor in the same small town; the novel is published and becomes a huge hit. The plot thickens when the host of a TV book show – Fabrice Luchini – refuses to believe the book was written by the owner of the pizza parlor and becomes so obsessed with finding the truth he loses his wife and his job and goes to Brittany to vindicate himself. It was a lighthearted movie with a lot of commentary on the publishing industry and book culture in France. It was inspiring to see houses and apartments chock-a-block with books. It was like watching an alternative reality, a place where serendipitous treasures reside in the quiet splendor of the outcast and castaway.