Roots In A Curlicue

In what sense are the contradictory desires that seize me also mine? It’s weird, you know, when those feelings happen. Feelings that don’t feel like they belong to you. But in what sense did any feeling belong to me? Isn’t it just energy passing through me? The same energy that travels through you. And you. And you. And you. The intellect is what is most universal in us, it is this part of the divine which is identical in everyone. Reflecting on the soul basically amounts to reflecting on what I am by doing without the notion of subject, without something that brings me back to an introspective subjectivity whose canonical formulation we find in Descartes, over there, sitting on a barstool, listening to Patsy Cline. What interested the ancient Greeks regarding the matter of personal identity had much more to do with oversoul than the identity of any one person. Here’s what Plato has to say about this in Timaeus:

And as regards the most lordly kind of our soul, we must conceive of it in this wise: we declare that God has given to each of us, as his daemon [an attendant power or spirit] that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the Divine Power keeps upright our whole body.

So: we’re plants, and we’re upside down, our roots pointing toward the sky, for divine nourishment. It could be a painting by Magritte.

Why do we write? This is the question that occupies the end of the Phaedrus. One reason is to amuse ourselves, to divert, to rejoice, to console. But what Socrates is getting at in this dialogue is that writing represents dead knowledge. Writing encapsulates a body of knowledge that isn’t inhabited or internalized, it’s frozen, nailed down, stationary. But there’s a way around this: if the writing reproduces the movement of thought, as it might occur in conversation between two people who aren’t in agreement but searching, feeling their way through the incertitude that surrounds us, then the writing is ad-lib, impromptu, without restraint, noises and conversation at a truck stop, abrupt deviations, U turns, nirvana, midnight revels, glass breaking in a street, murmuration of starlings in undulations over a field of alfalfa, pyrotechnic blooms of fireworks in a summer sky. It’s why Kerouac’s writing & Cassady’s Joan Anderson letter make such compelling reading. I like the slop & solecisms of their mercurial dromomania. Bombardments & spouts of nutball jibber jabber fueled by the insanity the absurdity the crazy persistence of life.  

The Indomitability Of Fragility

Life, because it’s weaker than the matter it works into guns and swords, into ships and bridges and Wall Street transactions, symbols of war, symbols of peace, lecture halls and great postulations on the nature of the universe, insinuates itself, trickles in a silver line down a wall of granite and diffuses into the warm blood of a mammal or mingles with the proteins and lipids of an egg, grows into a grizzly or human or albatross. It’s an inexorable and uncompromising weakness that finds its apotheosis in the muscle of the ox and elephant, in the fierce eye of a warrior, the paintbrush in the hand of a madman working out bizarre choreographies on the wall of a building, sentiments to erode the greatest of oppressions, the divine graffiti of delirium. It takes the inertness of matter and kicks it into gear. It’s a nihilistic impulse that accompanies the exhaustion of faith and derives impetus from the negation of illusion and affirmation of form. The world has been corrupted by belief. Faith is reduced to opinion. This is why people are vulnerable to believing anything. The hypermarket of beliefs feeds on rampant, free-floating anxieties. The weakness of believing perverts the art of doubting. The more we deny our fragility by wanting to protect ourselves the more we lose the true exhilaration of being alive.

The Idea Of Other Possible Worlds

I’ve made a lot of dumb choices, done a lot of dumb things. But I’ve always felt that there’s another world in a parallel universe where I made better choices and did smarter things. I’m not going to say I’m fully invested in such an idea. I’m not. But I find it weirdly comforting.  Multiverses represent all metaphysical possibilities. It’s a paradise for all the sad, modal statements I make: “if only I had done this or that,” “I should’ve done that, gone there, not said that,” and so on. It’s got the flavor of fantasy about it, and remorse, and regret, and impotent wistful wishing, but if these imagined alternate worlds are actual, then there’s a plate at the table of an alternate world for me with a heaping mound of mashed potatoes & a chicken cordon bleu dripping with Dijon cream sauce. But would the food in an alternate world be the same food as this world? And what evidence do I have that multiverses are a real possibility? I don’t. I’m not a physicist. Not in this world. I’m a physicist in that other world. I’m doing equations. And in one of these equations I discover a world in which mashed potatoes and chicken cordon bleu exist. It’s the same world as this world but in that world I work at CERN and I can afford a big house and healthcare and plenty of places to put my books. And people behave more responsibly and less savagely so that the climate remains stable and rain cycles are robust and the air is sweet. In other words, it’s the same world as this world, but different. The differences are subtle but they have large consequences. It’s a better place. I have no reason to assume that it’s better, it’s just better. I can feel it. But how do I get to that world? I might be just a breath away. Is the air a membrane? Are there invisible doors we can open? Yes. They’re called words. Words are the very coinage of possibility. The currency of conjecture. That’s what makes them so delightful, so devious, so mercurial, so potent, so delicate, and so indestructible. Each word a world. Each world a word. I write them down and for a while I’m elsewhere. I’m here but elsewhere. And were it not for memory, & staring in a rearview mirror, I’d avoid collision. I’d pull to the side of the road and smell the air. And find that other world in my left pocket, with some loose change.

 

Hemopoiesis

It may be an oversimplification to say that our likes and dislikes define who we are. Likes and dislikes are discernments, not nutrients. Though I do like peanut butter. And strawberry jam. Put that on bread and you’ve got matter for tribute and conversation. A dialectic of food that could easily evolve into performance, symbolization and sneezing. Why not get the peripheral nervous system involved? I’m sympathetic to homeostasis. I think of it as a melody in muscle fiber, epinephrin dancing in the bloodstream. And lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about bones. They’re more than a framework to hang one’s flesh on, more than mere levers for the enabling of movement. They have connective tissue, cartilage, which requires sustenance, the diffusion of nutrients, omelets and oxygen. The bones themselves consist of calcium and phosphorous. Twain’s story of seeing the glow of buffalo bones in the Rockies comes to mind. Phosphorescence of radio dials late at night. Luminescent comb jellies. Protoplasm, ectoplasm, metaplasm, cataplasm. Gels, cells, and bicycle bells. Knobs, blobs, and globs of gaub. Bone cells are connected with each other by canaliculi, little canals that also connect with tiny blood vessels. It’s all quite dizzying. There’s so much intricacy, lacunae and lamellae, concentric layers of the intercellular matrix. To say nothing of the engineering, the ways the bones connect and move and allow me to stand up and walk and gaze at the sky. Toe bone connected to the foot bone foot bone connected to the heel bone heel bone connected to the leg bone. And bones make blood. It’s called hemopoiesis. I find that astonishing. I had no idea. And stress. Stress is necessary for the integrity of bone. It’s why astronauts have to work out in space. Do treadmills in harnesses and belts or droop forever like jellyfish on earth. Funny, the embodiments of bone, druids and drummers and potbellied rogues named Falstaff. When I think about the processes that keep me alive, that brought me into this life to begin with, and will one day expire, bones to dust, and how I have virtually no control over any of it, it happens despite whatever I may be thinking at any given time, consciousness goes about its business, feeling itself free, unattached, and which may be expressed in the quick maneuvers of a violinist, the friction of a bow making vibrations, the sounds that hang on the bone of any given moment, the catgut making Bach talk.

 

Poof

I love listening to Rachel Podger. I love having the pure sounds of a violin going on in my head, the brightness of Bach making my brain glow with sublime sillinesses, solecisms and nurturing ounces of turquoise embedded in lovelorn sound, wistful melodies palpable as rope, the hemp of reverie, glistening radiances of sound in sanctioned sawhorse territory. By that I mean wood. The smell of it. The look of it. The grain of it. The shine of it lacquered in a Venetian studio.  Cows grazing on the slopes of the Dolomites. And then there’s Lucinda Williams singing “Magnolia,” a song by J.J. Cale. My God it’s beautiful. It sounds and feels as authentic as old wood. Sunset breeze over the buffalo hills of eastern Montana. Melancholy as the whippoorwill. I get completely lost in this song. It puts Putin and his army in the Ukraine out of my mind long enough to get a bearing on what’s real and what’s left for the senses in this senseless world. O world please don’t blow up today. I keep seeing that flash. Then poof! I’m gone. Without knowing I’m gone. Everything gone. You gone. Me gone. We gone. That’s how I imagine it. The big one. The big explosion. Planet Earth blasted into rockdom. Icy and forbidding as Pluto. And why? Is it worth it trying to find cause and effect around here? Very little in human experience has been logical. Though given a chance, I can rationalize almost anything. Almost. The rest is silence. Hamlet carried offstage. Ophelia drowning in her fairytale gown. Rimbaud in a caravan crossing the Ethiopian desert. It always comes down to that. Barrenness. Bags of ivory & coffee. The riches of the world exchanged in crowded souks. Voices of old women. Sleep of old men. Kids gazing into wells. The world spun in protozoan glee. Ended with a grimace. And a blink. 

 

The View From The Back Of My Mind

The store is never closed at the back of my mind. Thoughts are stacked like dishes on a drunken boat. I like diversions. The Ganges flows in my blood. I’ve got eight arms and a voice like Iggy Pop, which is tricky, because I can’t sing. But once my instinct for speech has been triggered and I’m feeling a little blue I can chatter like a chafing dish in Chattanooga. I once meditated on a pillow and suddenly I found I was flying around the room with big swollen fingers and a red brick. It’s always exciting to leave the earth behind. It diminishes into a little star and I see the ways of the nail have to do with well-placed blows. I like circles with red bark and botany and whistles. Even quarks have charms. I’ve been ghosted so many times I feel like a phantom. All I ask is to be exhumed. I will lead you to a body of evidence in the mouth of a dollar bill. Have you ever heard a train signal in the middle of the night? My seclusion is gargantuan. But I like it that way. I do a lot of deep study and if I see a broken string on a guitar I will be a teacher of entanglements. I’ve been to Bihar and seen its many buttons. A Hindu swami with bony elbows and a twinkle in the eye once told me that if I ever enter a village of parallels I should keep my analogies at room temperature. Time is a door. One it’s been opened, the movie can begin. The color of expansion fills the screen and the conditions on the train are luxurious. Even the folklore surrounding dinner has a scent. And why shouldn’t it? The snow is transformative. And the washing machine is ageless. The lines of a poem should weigh like a tidepool between the lips. The mind is a drunken boat. We fix our coordinates around certain expectations, then launch ourselves into the river with the darkness wrapped around our waist. The night is a mélange of dripping stars and misshapen metaphors smoldering among the bones. Gypsies doing flamenco around the fire. Polymers forming resins. Here I am in my robes of science. But what good are they? I feel naked as a punchbag on the bright side of redemption, and simple as a blade of grass.

True

If required a bobblehead needs a stick to get the storm across. There’s always an echo following the perception of self. I bungled the ablution but made up for it when I bent the sky toward Texas. I’m not against biting a chronicle if it serves the needs of breakfast, but despite the polish of the stove there should be more light in the window. My sleep blasted the slide into smithereens. The water crashed against the winch and my eyes caught it full on. Shout cartwheels when there’s enough faith going around to believe in our parliamentary fury. It will ease the moment when the structures of old age prove queasy. Squeeze the stimulus, don’t let it just sit there. We’re the crackle of ourselves. The copper harmonica issues hints of nomadism. The winter hymns warp the melody and certifies the lingering patterns that pulled the final notes across the horizon. My smear of life fulfilled the pull of night. I saw an alligator swim through your skin. And after a compelling indentation I felt the need to ponder the oddities of an ancient hammer. I banished all paradigms from the spin of our wild float. Grace is a mockingbird below my soul. Think of it as an excerpt of inner fornication. Follow a trickle beneath the chin and go mingle with the spectators in their presumptuous milieu. Lucidity excels from its bungled attempts at tile. It swans to me against the verdict of walking. A basket of emotion is sometimes left at someone’s doorstep and as it solidifies into sumac we study the biology of the Fauve movement. I don’t pay enough attention to linen. I like to explore a clutter now and then. Drink blazes of henna while segments of gravity move along a wire of lovely cognition. What war ever solved the problem of utopia? Will it ever exist? Can you kill a dream? Here: pepper this paddle with the salt of salvation. Move it back and forth. There are proverbs for this. And the power to trudge through the mud of the estuary, where the light spreads itself everywhere evenly and true.