Quantum Scrap

I hugged a rhododendron and tried to listen. It made me gamble and I won a garden. Consider trying to enamel along. This might be a way to knock the moose into life. The biggest emphasis I could find related to water. Harm turns a generation into subtlety. It’s hard to approach them without a cookie. Fidget a denim they harden. Tear the parabola into a scream.

Cézanne made depth become a rain. It moved me to structure this percolation according to what I propose, which is water. The smell of truffles are there to taste in a lifetime, and make the wheels spin in perpetual arrival. A washing mist is not geographical. It's metaphysics. The eyes are clearly visible beams of attention. A light call for the biography of death. And a cap and a knife.

I rap my breath to muddle everyone's ears. The syntax of the stomach has vines but the law is vague when it comes to vapor. I don't know why the heat it is so splendid. What I do know is the spit of its insistence. Ebony is ecstasy for the bandaged plumber. Who knows why. Life is full of quantum scrap. The fabric I write on is smooth as a runway. Please help me find the rest of this sentence. The entire sauce is at stake in the kitchen. If you find it, give it a piece of your mind.  

Superb cringe of the Thumb King. Think of it as a movie, or a punch to the solar plexus. Art is like that. Our panic is the arm of a long pigment. A freshly varnished violin can make us shiver. I feel a hectic seduction in the strings. The picture yawned its appearance into me, turning me anatomical with a sifted and parenthetical science. This is the flower that did it. I wanted to make it sweat. So I raised it up with my tongue and said it. There’s a brocade for all of our contusions.

The example a plaster makes on a wall when it beats a corner to abolish itself and suddenly becomes a window with a dead fly on the sill and a small crack in the upper corner is sometimes the very thing that promotes an irreducible fascination with the saxophone. I think it’s what Cézanne meant when he painted those delicious apples and oranges. He’s got them arranged artistically but they still look like something you can hold in your hand and bring to your mouth and eat. Life can be so tipsy, just like a canoe. Isn’t hard to stumble and land in some muddy lagoon? I modified my problem by cutting it in Costa Rica. There's a taproot to my prominence, if you know what I mean. The horizon struts across the carpet with a pronoun. These are the stars that I protect by the airfield that I made. We solicit what we drum and then escape it.

And so we carried gallons of water to the park to water the surviving rhododendrons. This is a true story if you choose to believe what these words are doing. Though it’s not a matter of belief. Or words. It’s a matter of virtue. And what’s virtue? Virtue is everything. Rain. It’s mostly rain. Depth is what we hope to find in even the most banal conversations, even if it’s just body language, and somebody’s hand on your butt. This kind of verbal nudging is a trick and you shouldn’t trust it. Like the man said, the truest poetry is the most feigning. The sound of robins on a spring morning is a bright and cheerful melody, but really, it’s mostly about worms. Finding them and eating them. Like words. And then I hear rain. And spirits at the border of our shoes.

  

Pictures Of The Floating World

Recently, on a muggy Sunday morning, R and I went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Capitol Hill to see the featured exhibit Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec. This consisted of 90 Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings from SAM’s Japanese collection alongside private loans of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The idea was to genially highlight the perceived parallel between the bawdy energy of Montmartre in the Belle Epoch and the “floating world” of Ukiyo-e. The “floating world” refers – in part - to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period (1603 to 1867). There was a pronounced flavor in both art worlds of an unfettered eroticism and contagious joyfulness which the art reflected with great skill and a genial lack of pretense. In neither instance was there anything remotely doctrinaire about these social dynamics, but there was an understanding that something was afoot, a strong appetite for living openly and freely, unhampered by the weight of an imposed moral code. It wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t decadent. It was a generosity of spirit steeped in an atmosphere of uninhibited glee, and a whiff of dissent.

Asai Ryōi, a Japanese samurai and writer of the early Edo Period, described Ukiyo in these terms: “living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river...this is what we call Ukiyo.”

It's rather odd reading these words during this age, fraught with so much social division and day-to-day uncertainty, WWIII an imminent possibility, an obscenely wealthy minority of elites living in gated communities, sailing catastrophically depleted oceans of heat-stressed plankton and bleached coral in luxurious yachts while millions live in poverty, homeless tents a ubiquitous sight in nearly all the cities of the western world, but especially conspicuous in the United States.

So, Ukiyo in the U.S. is a bit harder to attain than it was when I was a youth in the late 60s, living in the Bay Area and a frequent visitor to the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.

That said, it’s not dead. I have a solid grip on the soft warm buoyancy of Ukiyo. There’s still a good quantity of it diffused among the neurons of an aging brain. I know lust when I see it. I still know what sensuality feels like. I can still occasionally sublimate it out of the soup of cortisol sloshing around in these old bones.

Brothels are another matter. I’ve never been to one. Never had the urge. Or the money. I get a sense from the ZZ Top song “La Grange” that a lot of fun can be had in a brothel. I imagine it’s not just a matter of getting off sexually. The numerous prostitutes found along Aurora Avenue here in Seattle puzzle me – hard to get a handle on the erotic dynamics there – but I can wrap my head around the ambiance of a brothel. There’s not a few of them in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, written a few years after Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was busy with his prints and posters. La Goulue kicking her heels at the Moulin Rouge. Jane Avril lifting a sexy silky sleek black leg at Jardin de Paris while a hand grips the fingerboard of a cello that looks ostentatiously like a massive hard-on.

Many of the Japanese woodblock prints were done by Kitagawa Utamaro, considered one of the greatest artists of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) movement; he is known especially for his portraits of female beauties, and whose sensuous artistry and vivid colors were a huge influence on the French impressionists. One of the prints – A High-Ranking Yujo With A Client – drew my attention. I found it enigmatic. This was an intimate scene of a man with a yujo, a female prostitute. What puzzled me was the lack of sexuality. If it was implicit in the various shapes and colors, the postures of the two people, the overall ambiance created by the intimacy of mood, it eluded me. There are several bare feet, belonging to the man I’m guessing, based on their positions. Other than that, the two people are heavily dressed in multiple layers of silk or cotton kimono. This is how people might dress in a freezing room during a brutal winter, but there’s no sign whatever that the room is cold. They seem completely comfortable, completely at ease with one another. Maybe they’ve had sex and are now just hanging out, enjoying one another’s company.

The man is lying on his stomach and the woman is sitting on his back. The man appears to be saying something and the woman is leaning forward a little, her head resting on her hand. I can’t tell if she’s bored, or listening with rapt attention, absorbed in the man’s talking. The man is holding a long slender implement – I’m guessing it’s a pen with a tiny nib – which is slanted upward, in the direction of the woman’s face. The nib is near the man’s mouth, which is tiny. Both mouths are tiny. The man’s looks like a tiny red butterfly and the woman’s is a tiny red dot. I like to imagine the man has just written a haiku in beautiful calligraphy on the floor and is describing his feelings and aesthetic goals, and that the woman finds this engrossing.

The man is a paying customer and the woman is rendering a service, but there’s absolutely no sense of that in the print. She’s definitely not in a hurry to get this guy on his way and prepare for another customer. They look more like a married couple.

The hairdos of these two people are astonishing. Thick black hair impeccably groomed. Slender sticks crisscross busily in the woman’s hair. Clothing and background wall are teeming with contrasting geometric patterns and strong, sweeping, graceful lines.

Perhaps what this is is an erotica of the intellect. The voluptuousness of thought in a moment of unhurried quiet and respect. Precisely the opposite of what you find in the outer world today, in which the simple act of walking exposes one to the perils of escooters and ebikes and outbreaks of road rage, especially in Seattle’s south of Lake Union district and the glass and steel towers housing the offices of Google and Amazon and Facebook. The energy here is invisible. Except when it isn’t. And people walk by riveted to the devices in their hands, void of expression. Incommunicable as tantalum, taciturn as nickel.

 

Searching

Music always seems to be searching for something, even when it just seems to be wandering around in space, or entertaining grocery shoppers. I saw a symphony once disguised as a cluster of ferns in a forest of words and said to myself it takes a lot to make a sound extend itself across the desolations of modern life. You need a lot of geometry and towels. D minor on a Fender Stratocaster, squeaky bedsprings, ionized arias, and jingly implications. How many drugs does the body manufacture? Enough to function. How many drugs does an individual require to commune with the universe? Depends. Sometimes the moment calls for Duende. Sometimes Baton Rouge. Life can be rigid as a stripper pole. But given the right music, it can bend.

Music might be defined as “a vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” It might also be a man preparing to eat a hot dog, wheezes of air squeezed out of a bottle of relish, or that deep audible breath Marianne Faithful takes before launching into “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” There’s the music of audition, which is a persistent anticipation mingled with anxiety and the propellers of ambition, and the music of Stephane Mallarmé leaning against the wall of a garage churning with wind & Paganini. Summer rain. Gunfire in a sugar refinery. An old woman milking a cow. 

I love that cocktail lounge jazz which sounds defeated, but defeated in a good way, resigned, that sweet feeling of relief that envelops you when the realization finally unfolds revealing all the formidable obstacles and impossible feats you’d have to perform to conquer whatever evil, whatever depravity, whatever arrogance, whatever stupidity, whatever asshole held all the cards. It’s really not a defeat at all, it’s more of a triumph. The triumph doesn’t feel like triumph, not until a spirit takes you out of yourself and puts you somewhere else. It’s a form of transcendence with a hint of hedonism. The quiet, unvoiced rebellions learned and refined in adolescence that blossom in the adult mind like a golden abdication. It feels cathartic, like all the birds and barking dogs going silent during a solar eclipse and watching moon shadows roll over the earth. 

Music is personal, sympathetic as a home. Gustave Mahler’s Adagietto. Absolutely sublime. Eileen, by Keith Richards, performed on stage. He plays the guitar with such joy, such confidence, such easy skill and impish insouciance, that he can’t remain still, he’s all over the stage, kicking a leg as if in a mock alley fight, pulling out chords with limber panache. 

Etta James. Live at Montreux, 1975. Look out, she says. And launches into I’d Rather Go Blind with a full spectrum of feeling, so broad, so full, so intense it rips a new reality out of a world of stupefying indifference, and coaxes it into being with a husky female fire. Somebody in the crowd shouts something witty and smart and she responds, “you should be up here.” 

Leaving, by Chet Baker. It begins with a cello, segues to a trumpet and ends with a long slow purgation. And because this is YouTube, his face fills the screen: craggy, beaten, sad, but undefeated, there’s heaven in his eyes, and the quiet dignity of pain. 

What I'm Trying To Do

Though it may not be immediately apparent, these words have been carefully arranged on the shore of this sentence and are waiting for someone to pull them into their mind and set them afloat. This will have the effect of lightning in the sky, the one over there smiling and winking over the top of a mountain, and ruffling the world like a French impressionist. This will trigger a disorientation in some people, and epiphanies in others. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. Not in this frame of mind, however crooked it may seem to hang on the wall. The sunset looks funny. And now you know why. Next time I see you reading this paragraph, I’m going to follow you home like a dog. I’ll show you some magic tricks. Please don’t be upset. It'll be fun. But if you see me opening doors where there are no doors, it means that I will have connected with something larger than a magic trick. It will mean I’m here, hanging from the edge of your eyelid.

Riding the elevator of the Grand Hotel, Proust notices an open window of frosted glass that’s normally closed, and enjoys a view of the countryside from a novel perspective. This is like reading a difficult sentence repeatedly until it suddenly opens and you see at last what it’s been opaquely concealing. One day it’s a school of dolphins keeping pace with my understanding of intuition, and on another I might see an old man walking on the side of the road. Have you ever felt something urgent stirring in your caviar? It was probably this indistinct thought finding its way to the center of what I mean, which is glowing in the distance. I keep driving in that direction, but I never get there. And that’s what keeps me going, word by word, page by page.

What I’m trying to do is build an emotion I can live with, and talk about later. I like it when a guitar sounds like a wounded animal. But I can’t do that. Does money still exist? I can always start a podcast. Usually, if I want to show a feeling I take it out of my mouth and hang it in the air. But this often backfires. As soon as you dress an emotion in words it becomes a crisis. Shape manipulating the meaning of itself. You could say it’s all a semantic game in the end. One thing I’m sure of, I don’t want a gadget on my head. I crave the wilderness. The sparkle of irrational beauty. Be it nothing more than a migration of words moving toward a gleeful delinquency. 

I sometimes wonder if there are parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us. Artists struggle to extend our perceptions through heaving tongues of steel and vibrating fictions. There is a marbling in the mind, intermixtures of ooze and dock. And the way the waves move and the tides come and go and the universe continues its squawking of background radiation. I love this chair and its framework. But this time it’s different. A universe just fell out of my head. It rolled out the door and down the street. I apologize to the driver of a Tesla and bring it back. I carry it with my mind. I’m spilling it in words. The driver of the Tesla is calling her lawyer. It’s an imperfect universe. It’s not as perfect as a Tesla. Which is from another dimension entirely.

There are taut veins under the ochre. It accentuates the belt that old man is wearing. As you can see, it’s ringed with skulls. It’s me. Before I existed. I walked into life on a bet. It was a one-horse town. But I get by. I embody my own cruel tendencies. This is my arm. It matches the other one, which is just now reaching for a bow. The incentive of the violin isn’t music, the incentive of the violin is arbitrary and slippery, like the spirits that reside in mushrooms. This is how languages evolve. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream. You can’t take anything for granted. Colors surge. Shapes of air die softly and fall away. Their residue is called reverie. The kerosene of emotion blazes at the darkness and the night steps softly across the universe, dripping stars. We shiver in the cold and get ready for a new reality. 

 

The Waltzing Testicles Of Thoth

Is the energy running throughout the universe – which is the universe – primarily neutral, or is there an energy one could call benign? The answer is, in some way, yes. But how does a banjo sound in grunge music? The banjo is a happy sound. Grunge is a dark sound. I can already hear disagreements, and this is a sign that the ocean is unbalanced. For instance, have you ever stood in a bathroom listening to the Brandenburg Concertos? You can do that if you’re alive, and stand on your legs, and maneuver your eyes, and most importantly have a set of ears on your head. It all adds up to one thing: an ocean of consciousness which is shared with billions of other souls. This is the essence of music. Or is it more like spars on a ship, or ruffles on a shirt? This is no time for ruffles. This is a time of T-shirts and baggy pants. “Maybe,” by The Chantels, was my end of the rainbow. So yes, the energy is benign. A woman’s voice cutting through the chill of existence. 

More and more language seems to me a kind of echolocation, not for the darkness bats inhabit, but the cognitive darkness humans inhabit. Even if the words are written down in quiet with no sound attached at all they rebound from hidden realities, or increase the insistence of things on our consciousness, radiant knots and luminous details. I don’t know what goes on neurologically, but having a medium like language between our experience of the world and our thoughts on the world can lead to some very strange distortions. They play the mind into a restless probing of what is real and what is simulacrum. Ping, ping, ping. Looking. Always looking. “As if there is a ‘god’ outside of / the inside of my skull.” And “the poem waits / for us to discover the larger mind at play.” Paul Nelson, The Day Song of Casa del Colibri. And it does have a point, however pointless it may seem, it will puncture the air and drop its candy like a burst pinata.

I've seen words mutate in meaning in very odd ways, but this one takes the cake: I looked up the French word 'valseuses,' meaning 'waltzers,' and was quite surprised to discover that it has acquired an alternate meaning, a variation in slang, which means 'balls,' as in 'testicles.' "Oh mes valseuses, elles vont craquer." "Oh my balls, they’re going to explode." "Il glace ses valseuses." "He's icing his balls." How do you go from waltz to testicles? Is it because they may be imagined to swing back and forth in a ball sack? The image of testicles waltzing to the sound of Richard Strauss is difficult to entertain. First I think of a China dragon drone show, then I think of the Secret Service finding cocaine in a cubby in the West Wing of the White House, and then I think of Ingenuity – the four pound NASA helicopter - phoning home from Mars, breaking a 63-day silence. Then I try to put these things together in a way that makes sense of life on planet Earth in the 21^st century, and what this has to do with the mutation of words, etymologically speaking. I’m looking for clues. Which – spelled ‘clew’ – once meant “a ball of thread or yarn.” The shift in meaning references the clew of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to use as a guide out of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology. The way out of the labyrinth is gathered from seemingly random phenomena, a semiosis of the anomalous. The vas deferens in the waltzing testicles of Thoth.  

In the same way that you cannot isolate a phrase of music from the rest of the composition because of its fluidity, no one can predict precisely what a word is going to do given the linguistic orchestration in which it has been played. This is how a universe behaves. Particles pop in and out of existence. Find a position, you lose velocity. Find velocity, you lose position. It’s all about probabilistic quantum fluctuations and semantic fluidity. The universe does what it does because it’s the universe. Language does what it does because it’s a wilderness. These things are intertwined. Each sentence is a primordial universe. What’s going on in your mind? Does it feel primordial & hot, or stable and stale and stippled and flat? Most of the time, I don’t even know what's going on in my mind until I ornament it with words. You know, like a mime.

 

Once When I Was Standing Next To A Potato Chip

Once when I was standing next to a potato chip, I rocked a puff of thought back in forth in a cradle of introspective glass. Nobody seemed to notice. It's like that sometimes when you get to thinking about things. You suddenly feel removed from the chatter of society. People seem to sense that. You’ve gone inside. You’re no longer there. Unless somebody rings the doorbell. I can't even remember what I was thinking. I'm going to guess it had something to do with the nerve it takes to describe the color red to a blind extraterrestrial. Another time I chiseled a spirit out of the air and wrestled it onto a sheet of paper. Words are often attracted to wine. But in this case two hundred penguins battled a rogue participle. This caused an almanac to happen. A man in a velvet robe told me how Chicago worked. Ezra Pound wrote it under some windows. There were implications attached to this, including parables and paddles. So we all went home by canoe. That’s when I discovered my sexual identity was chewable, and could relieve heartburn. They called it rottenness, foulness, sloughing of the sore. But I’m fine now. I’ll make you so proud of me. I’ll use magic. I’ll use surgery and perseverance. Gowns and sounds and vowels. The concentric noun is neither abstract nor deciduous. But it is cylindrical and epigrammatic. This is the heaven I fall through trying to get there. I assembled it with a poignant seamlessness. I always say that if you need to get something down, you’d better use a verb; nouns just sit around being things. I adapt to things by wondering about them. And then I thrust myself forward like a texture. I get a little religious around these things. For example, I have to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” in order to induce the flow of urine. Stars heal nothing. But they put on a good show. It is curious. The distances are too large to be measured with a conversation. The fact of it is impenetrable. You have to knock your head against it. Anyone who has looked deeply into the universe walks away charged with the voltage of location. Do you know where you are right now? You’re in a body of writing putting your life together with words and twine. You’re like an angel too good to be true. More than anyone in all of Venice. It’s all about the music. The mirrors, the indignations, the fire escapes. The day you find out what's going on inside yourself is the day silk will feel like intent. But you’ll go around in burlap, shaking hands with eyes. 

 

The Ghosts Of Uncertainty

It's true what they say of vermilion, that the longer it can express the willingness to heave itself into "The Glass of Wine" by Johannes Vermeer, or “Lucca Madonna” by Jan van Eyck, the further will it extend into our lives scrounging for the vapors of tendency. For these are the perfumes of color, garden variety abstractions endeavoring aloud to solicit the attention of a greenhouse grandmother or the Air Force pilot bending to smell a rose before going on a dangerous mission. Sounds more like Norman Rockwell to me. Oh well. Here. Have some eggnog. It’s red because I’ve been talking about vermilion and all things red, all things burgundy and carmine and crimson effervescing in our emporium. Pinch my arm if I get carried away. Or let these words wander your mind, unprecedented and blue. The thin old vermilion on the wall is something more demanding of our attention because it has hurled itself outside the parameters of discrimination and become completely random, like a suitcase or a crumpled napkin. Vermilion may be observed in various ribbons, atriums, stadiums, excesses and gowns glazed with madder lake. Give me a wrinkled nail and I’ll give you a strum on the guitar. The blue one. The one that doesn’t exist. It’s basically just an idea trying to get its hands on some music. Excuse me while I take this moment to get dressed for some exercise. I’m standing next to a house, trying to sell it, and watering a rosebush. I like doing such things and creating sentences for them. Anything I do rarely gets past the stage of clashing cymbals together and waiting for the clarinets to blend with the strings. The book I always wanted to write is an aerodrome waiting to house the strange and unnatural. Things with wings. Membranes. Trumpets. Hairy spheres of timpani. Eyes like red eggnog. Airs of vermilion. The roots of oblivion, which are golden, and smell like Wisconsin. We shall endeavor together to find the meaning of this. It will be a lifetime adventure. Starring Bruce Willis, Etta James, Edgar Allen Poe, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg as the ghosts of uncertainty. There are times I ache to find the truth in things, while simultaneously ignoring it, even when it’s standing right in front of me. Which is most of the time.