The Human Condition

What is the human condition? Four features of our condition: our awareness of our own awareness; human existence precedes its essence; the occasional use of semicolons to make a point and the deep-seated sense of alienation that follows from all this. Here it comes: the Columbia River Gorge. It was there all the time. It just required our assent. Our assent to descend. Our assent to ascend. Our ascent to assent. By which we ascertain multiple layers of rock. And this is another condition: the rate at which the car moves with a bad ignition coil. This will need some looking into. Continual searching is all part of the human experience. The search for lost reading glasses (which one is wearing). The search for a charming melody. The search for oil. The search to get away from oil. Or just plain oil. It’s a diphthong, after all, which is the equivalent of being good at ping pong. Diphthongs are fluid, and towns and clouds and deer. The search for love and understanding. Understanding the search for love. Loving the understanding that comes with sharing a bed. The softness in any alphabet based on a cosmology of linen. It was only real when seen from a distance; up close, it resembled pancakes. If you see a compass swollen with syntax please write to William Wordsworth, Romantic Movement, my head. Area code E = mc². Name one compelling thing that doesn’t require an allegory to go with it. Everything in life gives us something to decipher, be it a coffeehouse or an airport. You ask: what is kinetic energy? It's a drive in the country. It coordinates the private walk we do at night when the moon is full and our glass is empty. We freely grant what our requirements emit. And this is how energy becomes an eager participant in our lives, creating matter when nothing matters, and holes where they do. My taste for flying is coming. I can feel it in my toes. But mostly in my imagination. I have a pact with gravity: don’t bother me when I’m sleeping. It invites a bone which brings forth a simulacrum. When this happens, example sees what we beg from the beyond. Swans glide into thick mist. Alchemy greets the rise of my crisis. Everything feels Victorian, with a touch of ice hockey. I think the word is anachronistic. Or is it pantheistic? You decide. I’m done with decisions. From now it’s all about indecisions. Incisions. And peyote visions. Do you understand what I’m saying? Me neither. It appears, so it would seem, that between the two of us, we’ve aroused a different language, a flow of bark and French ochre. I feel an apotheosis on the way. And a new paradigm. And a new sign. To say nothing of puzzles, which will be worked out with predicates, and dragged across the river, without getting wet.

 

The Vagaries Of Oysters

We run willow to my friendly heckle. Below the ultramarine wheels behind the throat is a laugh. It’s gestating. Attach yourself to a fasten batch before the zipper cracks a slide open. Pigeonhole the pimp pimple. I want to tell you something. Writing is a bundle of imponderable brocade for my fingers to do. Often, while doing automobile explorations, writers choose paragraphs to do the harder sensations. I use contraptions if I need to change the epilogue. Formulas, foreknowledge and fountains. Sensations persuade us to go on tours. As I am I am as a flap of mohair. I will go anywhere. Even Reno. While the candy stings, our touch will be supernatural. Open your eyes. Look around. One step is busy while the other one squirts. A limousine will greet you at the next artery. My nebula pulls on it subversively and creates espresso. Feels like my soul has turned into steam. So chew right, we modified a violin. Cod over what hope bungles. Cod on what hope wastes. Good cod. I just saw Milwaukee. It was so completely charming I couldn’t stop smiling. And now I go around clinging affectionately to bicycles. Abstractions waxed our rumbling summer. Later, when no one is looking, in slips the inspirations that we wrinkle. The within lifts our deliverance. A voyage without a phonograph like butter without jam. So I stayed home. And lied down on the bed. And voyaged the ceiling. I saw a big red truck. The motor made a noise by smelling its own velocity. And lowered itself on a thin silk thread. Just to say hello. Then go back up. Twist the old contrasts in a Spanish hotel. I’m growing myself as I hold it together with a woman. There are lyrics to manage the dashboard of my private accent. Waste nothing. Except waste. However spectral my bang, they expand it toward the end. Gasoline this mingle cake to our benefit. Some wobble will be needed to achieve climax. My mind is bouncing around the room. It’s out of control. It could use a theorem. Or the harsh realities of winter, which are out there now, howling. It’s the junkyard grammar that forces us forward, and causes iron to brood. Grope the dance we bruise with our museums. The lobster tugs on my impenetrable gloom and makes an art out of it. And this is where the tuna comes in. My boat is out broken on the shoal this morning. The interior is insinuating, but generous in its conceits. The landscape is crucial to a decision involving a sudden clarity. But it’s even more important to pay attention to the weather, the shape of the hull, and the vagaries of oysters.

And This Is Why The Poem Must Come

 According to Empedocles, there’s a distance infinitely removed from the day, which is also what is most intimate to us, more interior than any interiority.

The poem is what opens, what in opening is a call for everything else to open, to enlighten itself, to come to light.

You have to know where to look. It could be in a bin of lettuce. Or a pharmacy in Pocatello, Idaho. A sex worker washing windows on a brothel out on the alkali desert 30 miles east of Sparks. A timber king sitting down to a plate of juicy roast beef. Who suddenly takes a dive into the mashed potatoes. Death by myocardial infarction.

You never know just where or how it’s going to happen.

I’m not sure what anything is anymore.

I never really got into religion much. But I do believe in ghosts. Not like the one in Hamlet. More like qualia that stir the blood. Churn of starlings over barren earth. That urge to call a friend or brother or sister that’s been dead for years. That hummingbird hovering inches from your face. That horse on the other side of the mirror. That monkey wrapped around your leg at Angkor Wat. That elusive haiku waiting to be discovered among the ferns in a stand of redwood.

Think of it as a can of soup. You’ll need a can opener. And to escape the prison imposed on you in childhood.

When I was 13, I became obsessed with fighter jets. I remember staring at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It was the power, the roar of jets. But I was slow at math. And captivated by music. Green Sleeves. Green Onions. He’s A Rebel. Twist and Shout. The One Who Really Loves You. Blowin’ in the Wind.

The quality of the highway surface on I-90 worsens markedly once you leave Ellensburg and begin to rise into the Cascades.

Why is that? Why are the highways to the east of the Cascades better maintained than the highways to the west?

We stopped for gas in Moses Lake and headed into the night.

The surrounding country was desolate, flat, and lonely.

I saw Mars to the east.

A glowing red dot as desolate as the highway we were driving on.

I enjoy following the data coming into Nasa from the Mars Rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. The desolation is so stark, so immaculate in its austerity, it’s spellbinding. It looks familiar and strange at the same time. Reddish dust with the character of iron under a pink sky with a shrunken sun gives the mind a craving for life. The drama is quiet. It’s a funny drama. This is a place of giant soliloquies uttered by a phantom life that may once have existed. Rocks resembling faces and bones mock the familiar comforts of a carpet and chair. How did this happen? These fingers typing these words. These words. These feelings. These longings. Propinquity and protein. Kinfolk and kneecaps. Illusions and disillusions. Primal mutterings. Dogs wagging tails. Orioles on a prairie. Clean bedsheets. Egyptian mummies. Nonsense and noodles. Gothic architecture. Tearful goodbyes to the dying.

The sound of our sun is an eerie howl.

The sound of the universe is a low-pitched hum. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ.

But there are no molecules to carry the sound. “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Alien.  Ridley Scott.

Man in a Chevy Silverado doing 90. Hard, determined look. Takes the exit to Ritzville.

A dead coyote at the side of the road.

There comes a point where reality is so hard, so brutal, so unforgiving, so absurdly merciless, it makes you want to laugh.

This feeling of an es tagt, of "the day is breaking," which makes possible - as much of the night as the day - the chaos as well as the gods, this font of divine light that radiates through all of Hölderlin's work, drawing it up with light, pure light, the allure of the pure ray, and because of this the words are suffused with a light beyond the light, which is clarity itself, and all clarity.

For the jubilation of the Universe always tends to distance itself from the earth and leave it stripped; if humans don't hold it back.

…that is to say the poet, calls it so as not to get lost in the expansive infinity that it derives from its origins: as it is, it is indeed a limitless totality and that must be, but it must also be that "without limits" becomes its limit, is integrated into the totality, and this is why the poem must come.

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*Lines in italics from La Parole “Sacrée” de Hölderlin by Maurice Blanchot. 

Frequencies Of Atomic Scallop

Blithely configurational, we lobster against aesthetics. We have nothing against aesthetics, we just want to flirt, spend time in a laboratory mingling chemicals and brains. The lobster is a totemic spirit. Insults are crucial to my stock of photos. If I want to capture a look of despair, I don’t have to go far to do it. Repose is more of a challenge. Repose is private. It has to be coaxed. It cannot be coerced. A linen of Egyptian silk spreads in easy testimony. The eyes are closed. The breathing is easy. Except for bingo, I like to spew my guts and write sonnets. To mix the anonymous with the notorious, the serious with the delirious, the lyrical with the spiracle, the chimerical with the regrettable. If you’re tied up, hurry up, and give your casino a name. Gambling is a conversation with folly. Dark nights full of risk and inspiration. Gerry Marsden pulling to the side of the road to write “Ferry Cross the Mersey.” Wyatt Earp immersed in Middlemarch. It takes a special kind of focus to read a novel during a gunfight. No palette is a calliope. Try getting Jesus on your smartphone. We can do this all night. If there is but one thing worth isolating it's the sound of improbability. Put your pants on backward. Jiggle your qualifications. Frequencies of atomic scallop clip to the breast pocket in a perfect renunciation of irony. Scratch the entrance as I pull it into the sentence kicking and screaming. I shall do a structural dance around the ovulation of your umbrella. I must draw a little pollen from these phonemic anthers to create the nectar of propagation. Fertilization is a complex process beginning with thunderous interactions and climaxing with union. I believe, now, we’re getting somewhere. The possibility of achieving a fresh new perception trembles in the eyes of the reader like a flock of honking geese flying in a V formation over the meadows of Nova Scotia. The atmosphere grows thick with foreign energies and skittish intuitions. It seems we’ve aroused the suspicion of the guards. No matter. We shall disappear through the window I’ve placed here. The sky is the saga in which we sink to fly homeward. I put it on the coffee table. The coasters have sayings. Things like saws. Stilts and guided tours. Our curiosity is the boil of intellect, but our lineage is the sputter of blood on the lips. Burst grapes and decadent banquets. The point I’m trying to make is stuck in the wall. I threw it there in a rage. It only makes sense if you drape it with gauze and wear it like a gymnasium. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s like I said. The point is stuck in the wall. But there is no wall. It was summarily demolished behind these words.  

Funny Name For A Lather

Like a lot of people, I resist wisdom. If a bit of advice is not to my convenience, I will ignore it. And pay the consequences later, as I do now, with a stubborn case of insertional peroneal brevis tendinitis. There are 19 muscles in the human foot. If you strain them too much they fray. They become inflamed. You can’t run. You’ve got to rest. Hope the damn thing heals.

So. I bought a pair of Brooks’ Ghost. DNA Loft foam (a combination of closed cell ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer foam, rubber, and air) is a premium cushioning material that is a soft, lightweight and durable compound that absorbs and reduces shock as the foot contacts the ground. So far so good. I did two miles on Westlake. Minimal pain.

Flaming candles on a stone wall. Witches gathering moss. The Cranberries. Dreams. Official Music Video. Tiny woman in a white dress, long eyelashes, dreamy look. Dancing with a microphone. And oh, my dreams. It's never quite as it seems. Never quite as it seems.

You can’t live without distractions. Not in this world.

Barbasol. Funny name for a shaving lather. Sounds like the name of a pirate. Or a famous philosopher who never existed. Barbossa Barbasol. Bertrand Barbasol. Beverly Barbasol. Her theory on the criticality of naming things concretizes the human condition with a white blob of ambiguity.

Why would anyone want to put their ideas in order? Thoughts are messy. Thoughts are amorphous riots. Ideas roll out of the madhouse in flames. Ideas are gloves, painkillers, derivatives, regenerative agriculture. The kneecap is genius. Phonemes are phenomenal. Needles and pins. Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. A giant mutinous thread. Flowing freely like water.

You get to a point where it colors your entire life. Every mood. Every thought. You can’t escape it anymore. This profound evil. This season of atrocities. And that’s it. It’s in you like a virus. There must be palliatives. No one anticipates a cure. Not this far in.

The Talisman of Charlemagne has a large glass cabochon on the front, a large blue-gray sapphire on the back, and an assortment of garnets, pearls, and emeralds. But does it work? That’s what I want to know. Will it keep evil at bay? Can I sleep with it? How do I spread its energy around?

You can feel done with this world, but it won’t let you go. It’s like when you get ready to leave a party and no one wants you to go and conversations keep happening, even though, deep down, you know there’s deep undercurrent of fear and panic. Enough to wade in. And everyone’s feet are wet. Wet like Jean Valjean escaping the barricades of the June Rebellion in the sewers of Paris. And not like that at all. If the room suddenly turns quiet and people are staring at you, congratulations. You’ve said something honest. 

A Tale Of Infinite Variables

The sky sparkles with beatitude. A section of gauze brushes my consciousness. I can see through everything, but it’s all quite vague. This is a journey that progresses by sips and swigs and mimics the bursting of long suppressed emotions, each one of which holds up an insult with monumental aplomb. I need to do something totemic and intravenous. I tremble to weigh a vending machine. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since birth. I look to the sky for support and wisdom. Distant rock trinkets hang from an asteroid belt. Swoon hammers find a parable. I was never so glad as when I discovered tiptoe. Furrows in the field make pillows of the earth and fill my genitals with a storm of relevance. I think I've come as far as I can go without overflowing with huge overcoats. I crave to do something on the grass. Mud sucks the soul of the island until it becomes big and maternal like a tabloid. Everything on this planet is so weird all the time. Pain visits my knee in the form of a patellofemoral pain syndrome (everything is a syndrome here, or a syndicate or a synthetic), and smashed icicles make trails of mimosa silver. It must be obvious that to see something growl its way into palpable form can be a traumatic experience. This is why we use language. It speeds up the process and minimizes the level of pain. I can smell the earth sweat when tar is applied to a highway or a book struggles with its own perplexities. I sometimes forget that snow is the sugar of the gods. Close your eyes. Look deep in your mind. Ideas sparkle when they revolve like decadent aristocrats at a masked ball. This is a function of infinite variables. The stone is nothing until it creates a quotient. A stick divided by a shadow equals a moment in time. But when we do it, we are always amazed at how kids respond, especially those living deep in the bayou, where all the integers are divisible by moonlight. I once had a vision of the body as a coconut palm making out with the wind. I took an old dagger and stabbed the darkness. Night collapsed and spread its blood like starlight over the waves. I do these things not out of spite, but because I must, & because all my remaining needs require vivid descriptions to keep going, acts of desperation disguised as prose, otherwise what’s the point? I was mad to leave Norway. But the oysters here are delicious, & taste like madrigals of meat.  

Lately It Has Occurred To Me

Lately it has occurred to me that if I hadn’t made all the dumb choices I made in life, really stupid decisions, completely irresponsible, utterly mindless, that are somewhat compensated by some of my more prouder decisions, that if I had given into temptation on such and such an occasion, or if I’d not given into temptation on such and such a whim, or said this, or said that, or quit that job, get fired from that job, and so on and so forth, I would not be at this place, this circumstance, this adventure, this kismet, this karma, this eudemonia, which feels perfect to me.

Outside our gloom we can sometimes redeem ourselves through vagueness and fabrication. A gothic mailbox grows a beard and we call it a letter from God. Treasure this rapture. Map it. Smack it. Toss it like a stone among the beatitudes. It may not make a ripple. It may not make a wave. It may seem a little questionable, a little too sweet and difficult to digest. It may produce a fish. Sometimes a trout may seem like a donation, or a Hittite. You may call me wrong. You may call me pretentious. But is that any different than two suspicious characters in the park dismantling bikes? You can’t stop a perception from meaning something. All it takes is a smell, a pendulum, a face, or a stick of gum to send the imagination on a mission of import and daring. There is a room nearby in which I can dedicate my life to cinnabar. Please join me. Bring a cave. Bring a buddy and a crowbar. Together we will decipher codes from the death of the traffic light.

Some things in life are achieved through chicanery. Swelling, bloating, turgescence. All of it an act, of course, a representation possessed of sabotage and sackcloth calculated to arouse esteem and opportunity in the eyes of the pious. I think you know where this is going. If your answer is the latrine, I salute you. We can laugh now, and relax. No, this isn’t a survey, it’s more like a filiation mulled in balderdash with a dollop of bunkum and a side order of flapdoodle. These things come in handy when you’re attempting to swagger across the barroom floor with your spurs jingling and your conjectures lagging behind like a three-legged dog. And don’t you know that literature has gone the way of the deadlight? If you’ve spent any time at all eavesdropping on Kerouac’s letters, you’ll know there’s a place for ecstasy, and is revealed to you by flashlight. 

If you see a mountain in the distance, don’t rush towards it. Let it come to you. Point a stampede at it, of words and definitions. Write things down. It is with pleasure that I splash the notation with nouns. The immense sleet that blew it there continued its journey north. I felt within me a feeling of humble beginnings develop into a story. I was somewhere south of lethargy coming to in a bar in the Black Forest of Germany. I could hear a gust of wind outside, and injustice and clamors of deification. A flash of lightning as The Elves of Redemption thundered across the bridge. It has always been such. Some people want to know what. Others want to know why. I want to know what distant green knowledge is harbored in the skull and why it’s so hard to find.