Saturated With Music

Is the world saturated with music? Yes, & it’s also sandy & swarming with ants, particularly if there’s a garden nearby & a man preparing to eat a hot dog. There’s the music of the elements, gold & beryllium, music obvious as tap water, or scarlet fever. The murmur of an old squid in the middle of an audition. The irresistible agitations of a persistent irritation. Stephane Mallarmé leading a prison escape. The sound of the sirens, the braying of the hounds. Every roadbed is worth a laugh. A hailstorm piling reflections by the wall of a garage churns with wind & is resplendent with first steps, initiations of velvet, & the lazy scavengers of night smelling of menthol & gin. Someone singing, slightly off key, & underground. The splash of color on wrapping paper comes to our rescue, providing ravishment & spit. We gaze at one another like pilgrims, falcons on our shoulders, crabs walking toward us with kisses & resumés. We all have our ways, yes? Mine is hauling firewood. And remembering to turn on the music.

        Breath is a franchise for the propagation of sound. Folklore. Icelandic vivacity. The Northern Lights. Gunfire in a sugar refinery. An old woman milking a cow. 

        There are seven shadows in a shark, one of them is sharp & another is shaving. Eight hornets deepen the green. Their drone is a prologue to Being, the calm before the storm, incidents of high concern which have been raised into representation by grace & easy fluctuation. Rain confirms the forest, a baroque jewel on the finger of a plenitude. It’s all a music of meat & gravy, mushrooms growing at the side of the road. The extreme blue of the sky is captured by snow. It lies on the ground obscuring the cabbage & hiding the rubble of a recent war. Patterns are everywhere. Jupiter. Paganini. Prague. Music is organized sound. Meanings shift with the focus, the tempo, the rhythms & melodies. Reality is never any one thing, it’s a multitude of locations & meanings, blossoms & disembodiments. The main thrust is metamorphosis. A slammed door, a cup of tea teeming with Buddhism, bubbles winking in sunlight. 

        Algebra 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. Because a walrus & a forklift have this in common: both are silhouettes of existence. And existence includes tigers. Pebbles & algebra. The taste of existence is stronger if it’s boiled in reflection. The terrain is negligent, solidly quotidian. There’s a theory that shivering provokes agriculture. Farms. Or is it frames? Is a farm a form of frame? The use of arms suggests a kind of signaling. The mind tosses words like grenades, a bouquet of overflowing telephones. Ants are emissaries of nature, reminding 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 knots destined to hold the air together, which are words, which are knotted together to make a city, & which are multilayered like onions, like gold, or the nomads of the desert in their kingly robes. Feelings written in chalk on a blackboard, equations gathered in frisky splendor used to solve the problems of the intangible, make the unseen seen, & articulate dirt.

Secretion Accretion

Does the brain secrete? asks poet Anne Tardos in The Exploding Nothingness Of Never Define. Good question. I go immediately to Doctor Google: the answer is yes. For example, according to Lumen Learning, “strong emotional experiences can trigger the release of neurotransmitters, as well as hormones, which strengthen memory; therefore, our memory for an emotional event is usually better than our memory for a non-emotional event. When humans and animals are stressed, the brain secretes more of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which helps them remember the stressful event. This is clearly evidenced by what is known as the flashbulb memory phenomenon.” And I’m sure there are many more examples. The brain is a mollusk, a convolution of neurons squirting alarums & ruminations in a shell of calcium called a skull. I just watched Derek Jacobi holding one in the BBC’s 1980 production of Hamlet. My brain did a lot of squirting during that production. “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ‘twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder! This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?” Think about that: circumvent God. The human brain secretes religion. God. The infinite. And most especially what the brain craves most: meaning. What are those hormones? What are the hormones that make meaning? That make meaning meaningful? Does the brain squirt meaning? Or does it just slop around in it because it’s got nowhere else to go? Can all thoughts be thought of as secretions? Chemicals? What else does Anne say? “Words on my mind / Page on a desk on my mind / Page on my mind on a desk // Fuzzy-minded thinking / Storm in the brain / Neurons on the edge of chaos.” That bears repeating: neurons on the edge of chaos. That’s exactly how it feels. That mania to write it down, put it in words, those gentle sounds that ripple through the air carrying resonances of otherworldly magic, the possibility of escape. Getting out of the skull. It’s a process similar to building a web. The spider finds a place to anchor a line, then swing out, make another line, then another, then begin from the center spiraling out, secreting lines. Secretion is everywhere. Secretion is the accretion of words in a relentless chain of pitch & idea, a lunatic carnival in a dome of bone. Deborah Harry takes center stage & sings “Heart of Glass.” Is that a secretion, or YouTube? I’m reminded of the sci fi movie Donovan’s Brain: millionaire megalomaniac W.H. Donovan nearly perishes in a plane crash. Only his brain survives, & is kept in a big jar of water with electrodes attached & spends its time possessing the minds of other people while trying to fulfill its agenda of hypercapitalist control. It’s a creepy but highly engaging idea, the secretion of German-American novelist Curt Siodmak, who emigrated to England in the 1930s after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. Funny to think of the brain as a monster. But isn’t it much of the time?

 

Sun Basket

Pork chops tonight with blueberry sauce & mashed potatoes & kale. R had the kale. The meal was delicious. I don’t remember the last time I had such good food. It came to us by providence. The delivery person made a mistake & left the box containing all this good stuff on the porch of our apartment building. We called the company - Sun Basket - & told them that the driver got the address wrong; the meal was for a party on Prospect; we’re on Highland. They thanked us & said we could keep the food. They’d give a refund to the person who ordered it. Man it was good. I want to order more. We went for a short walk through the park today. A woman stood to the side of the little switchback trail & went harrumph harrumph. Neither of us know what was intended by that. We were wearing masks. She had a mask but she wasn’t wearing it. Blackberry vines hanging down from overhead. Gotta watch the thorns. I wonder if Graphorrhea would make a good title for a book. It best describes the writing I do. “Disorder expressed by excessive wordiness with minor or sometimes incoherent meaning.” There’s also Graphomania, “an obsessive impulse to write.” That pheasant feather quill I picked up at the Renaissance Faire in Novato, California in late summer, 1972: still leaping heavenward after 48 years. “I climb, if only within myself,” writes Guillevic. Clunk of the lid of the laundry bin. The cat opens her eyes. I scratch my ear. There seem to be patterns everywhere. Sounds organized as tusks. Elephants rampaging through a jungle. This is where the imagination goes. West Africa. Senegal. Four men pull a pirogue to shore. It’s loaded with scientific gear, bathythermographs, Nansen bottles, thermometers, bottom samplers, Secchi disks, and plankton nets. When you’re underwater, there’s no way of knowing if a fish is crying. Do fish cry? They look so amazed & inscrutable lying on shaved ice at the fish market. Open your eyes now, tell me what you see. If I was a colonel in your army would you feed me life with purpose & maps? Purpose is important. It’s important to have a purpose. Even if it’s a purposeless purpose. A light green fluffy scarf occupies a place on the bureau beside a wooden duck with a clothespin beak for holding bills. That’s what I mean by purposeless purpose. The various uses to which we put paper. Sonnets, documents, maps. Letters, manifestoes, notes. Blue jay pops her head out of a shrub, eager for her afternoon peanuts. The meaning of Being is self-evident, but not entirely adequate to explain dreaming. Red cloth I use to clean the computer screen neatly folded by the radio. And how interesting the folds of R’s sweater, flowing among its sinuosities at the end of the bed. Joey Ramone leans forward with the mike & says “we’ve got a little tearjerker for all you lonely hearts out there.” “I saw her today, I was saw her face, it was the face I love, and I knew, I had to run away, and get down on my knees and pray that they’d go away.” Holes in both my socks. 

So I'm Running In The Street

So I’m running in the street, the sidewalks full of people, not a lot, not really, just enough to make the necessity of social distancing a nuisance, & with pedestrians on either side, the street makes sense, I keep close to the parked cars, but as a white sedan goes by the driver yells something at me, can’t make out the words, but he flips me off, so they can’t be good, I flip him off in return & shout to him to go get fucked, don’t think he heard me, he keeps going, & I have to wonder, what if he did stop, took a swing, would my 73 year old bones hold together, would my knuckles break, all these old bones are so brittle, so old, who knows how that might’ve gone. Did Vivaldi really live in Venice? Feeding the crows in our neighborhood is becoming more of a problem. These are wealthy homes with wealthy people living in them & they do not like finding peanuts in their rain gutters or squirrels burying peanuts in their gardens. We get the stink eye a lot. Vivaldi spent most of his life composing music at the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage. I sometimes wonder if it’s the song that draws the voice out of the body. Charles Mingus in the air like some form of meat that my ears can chew. I go for the nucleus of things, the glow inside, the hectic photography of the pharmacist on his day off, & encampments & herbivores. Poetry as an undertaking that might actually make you sweat, the rapture of words transmitting epitomes. If you dig a hole into darkness, does the light come rushing out? If not light, then what? A hunchbacked horticulturist from another dimension? Frankenstein on a unicycle? Our neighbor has sawn enough wood for a high school gymnasium. I guess that’s one way to get through a pandemic. If I see a saw I say I saw a see saw. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the cabinet of consciousness after one has gone out & grasped it. It’s more like catching a butterfly in the desert. That great word dépaysant in the French news tonight, which means, roughly, in English ‘exotic’ or ‘unfamiliar.’ Literally translated it means traveling outside one’s country. Tonight it was used to refer to La Réunion. The drop in tourism has been catastrophic. Shame. Such beautiful hotels, surrounded by palms, cooled by ocean breezes. Not sure how truly exotic that is, but it would do. All things take pleasure in the definition they give themselves, writes Guillevic. That moment when you step inside a big stone cathedral & time seems to stop, the vaults & walls keeping temporal time at bay, the world of commerce, I can see why people go for religion. It’s a respite from the hectic pace of the streets. Light diffused in a stained glass window: wine pressers & saints.

 

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.