Nietzsche's Mustache

In the fall of 1888, Friedrich went for long walks in and around Turin, Italy. He was returning to his modest apartment when he felt the corners of his mouth curl up as if pulled by a string. He was enraptured, and could not stop smiling. His laughter, too, had become uncontrollable. Is it any wonder that a man this intense, this erratic, this volatile should have an extravagant forest of hair between the bottom of his nose & the frontier of his upper lip? “My face was making continual grimaces in order to try to control my extreme pleasure,” he wrote in a letter, “including, for 10 minutes, the grimace of tears.” One night, perhaps due to the noise, he was discovered in his room naked, playing the piano, and dancing. His entire being shook with tremors of music, the raptures of the void, as if spirited by some inner demon, or mustache.

Aphorism 381 in Book IV of Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, reads as follows: We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent and as such he will be treated.

So there’s that. If you’re a male of the species, there is that option. But a lot of animals go further, and employ various modes of camouflage. A giraffe melts into vegetation. The Baron Caterpillar of Southeast Asia is indistinguishable from the leaves of the mango and cashew trees on which it feeds. A Blue-crowned parrot vanishes into the verdant rain forests of Belize. My preference is to wear cardigans and jeans and disappear into walls, most of which are imaginary, and drip with hairy succulents. The perpetual look of stunned amazement puts everyone at ease, as they believe themselves to be the cause of my astonishment. The reality is something different. It always is. Sometimes it resembles a continuum curve, and sometimes it’s you and I, hapless as poor Tom running naked on the heath in a thunderstorm, camouflaged as reality.

You can think of a skull as a round dome with the stuff of dream in it, like the string of a kite, or a circus in your pants. I bring it up now because it’s stucco, and the horses are restless. A feeling of increased power is natural after robbing a jeweler. But not this constant French skepticism, however exquisite it may be. I have in my hand that something you may be interested in. It’s only a pen, but if you work hard toward maintaining a dream, the passions running against the paper will fold themselves into yaks and pull the stars with them all the way to Kathmandu.

The interior of my skull is opaque today. I forgot what it was I was going to ask. I had a question concerning Nietzsche’s uncanny reoccurrence as a barber in downtown Memphis. I remember now. It was when he slipped on a contradiction & fell into a catastrophe. Changed his mind about everything. Even his mustache seemed to say have a nice day. One is best punished for one’s virtues, he laughed. But really, when it comes down to it, one’s tonsorial preference should indicate a mood of alleviation, acquittal, and a reliance on geometrical principles. I didn’t want a crewcut. But he gave me one anyway. Like I said. The interior of my skull is opaque today.

Should I grow a mustache? Would a mustache help? Why not a beard? A long one, à la ZZ Top. And a funky hat with an ostrich feather. It’s why I plucked a plume, and began writing. Times when I have my shoulder to the grass I like to think about sidewalks. The flesh of fish under gloomy circumstances can permeate an entire sentence if you let it. Let it what? Let it walk forward on its letters and shake like a package filled with a storm on somebody’s porch. I’ve seen sentences do that. Turn into palm trees on South Pacific islands. Or camouflage themselves as welcoming fragrances of sage during a time the clocks forgot, and morning slid over the grass. 

  

Singing Into Amber

Singing into amber during a metamorphosis may cause sudden rashes and outbursts of joy. Beauty becomes an immersive experience and shakes its suppositions out of the reach of children. It rattles astronomy until the universe shivers in its nudity. Death comes into contact with the maximum dosage of life and rains dextrose over most of Iowa. It’s an empty sophistication to organize the verdure of anything beyond the call of beauty. Therefore, explode. Arrange yourself in giant collisions. Button a birch with speculation. Feel yourself among the many competing theories of David Bowie. Take a long hot shower. Consider the lily. If a single atom can emit Chicago, why not exist in multiple states simultaneously, and order pizza?   

You ask what is the color of freedom. I’m next to demonstrating it crawling towards the bump under the bistro. It’s never what you think it is, is it? Grieve its loss among the elves accelerating this narrative by nerve and raw elation. We’re ephemera in the house of the rising sun. Sometimes it takes a stunning necklace to think about syntax in addition to quinine. If you have some participles to spare, reach inside yourself with a little inclemency and pull the hands. I’ll let you know when we reach the end of the universe. You’ll see a vacancy sign and a purgatory. You have the power to change the world. But the bed requires a quarter if you want it to vibrate. A great soothing light will announce its presence in your shed. Or head. When is the head a shed, and when is the head a utensil? When it’s on live TV, & when it’s a dense molecular cloud.

Gleefully, I stood on the sand crackling with hieroglyphics. My plan to play confusedly with the cream failed to divert the conversation. It only amplified the sound of the surf as it flowed into punctuations of sand. How can you trust what you cannot control? My body, in particular, was a problem for me: its inability to remain within itself, its subordination to the eccentric demands of needs. It wanted food, flesh, voluptuous amusements and volumes of De Materia Medica with golden spines and beautiful illustrations. How does one go about appeasing the cries and shouts of the body? Indeed, my body began to go off the rails. I couldn’t keep up with the mania of its appetites. I’m not against desire. I just want to corral it a little. Lasso it. Study it. And let it go.

I never doubted my existence. The problem lies elsewhere. We remain incapable of possessing our existence. That’s one problem. Mortality is another. Our lives are continually slipping away. It’s a pretty big problem. It’s much more appealing to forget the whole thing and ride against the wind. Spend an entire afternoon sipping absinthe at a Paris bistro. These are what are called fantasies, and create swirls of lovely improbability in the mind. The roar of the crowd as you reach a high soprano C. Old friends returned from the dead. It is by courtesy and sheer carnality that our quarrels with existence defer to the textures of the moment. And thereby hangs a sock.

 

Happy Accidents

We walked down to see a demonstration of Japanese calligraphy yesterday afternoon at the A/NT Gallery in the Seattle Center. We arrived early and had some time at our disposal to wander around and enjoy the artwork. My first feeling was one of total illiteracy.

I get greedy. I want to take in all the beauty, everything it has to offer. But here I was stymied. I was confronting a language I didn’t know and a discipline of which I knew very little, but felt profoundly fascinated by it. There was a time in my life when I developed a mania for writing haiku. I got pretty good at it, but felt strongly that if I wanted to continue in this artform I would need to learn Japanese. Haiku never looks completely right in the English alphabet. Our alphabet doesn’t have the same lively aspect as Japanese characters. It looks stark, pragmatic as a car battery. Japanese kanji resemble leaves and birds and the gaiety of cherry blossom. It does service in the realm of linguistic expression as well as in the realm of beauty.

It’s deeply frustrating to look at a piece of Japanese calligraphy and not be able to read what it says. Which is stupid. Because I’m missing a wonderful opportunity. Since I have no knowledge of Japanese, I have the opportunity to appreciate the discipline strictly as a visual art, not as an exhibition of signs that refer to something else. You’d think nothing could be easier. But it’s not. I find it strangely difficult to focus on these signs simply as gracefully rendered forms, lines and squiggles and splatters and dots, invigorated entities of black ink on white paper. I know they’re signs. I know they mean something. I know that hidden in their magic is a mountain, a frog, a water lily, or a dragon whose ancient eyes can see into you. The frustration is like staring at a safe that you know is filled with priceless jewels, but you don’t know the combination. It’s hard to stand there and admire the craftsmanship and quality of the safe. I want what’s inside. Or should I say on the other side, where the snow falls, the dragons fly, & stars twinkle in the void.

Fortunately, R brought her smartphone, which allowed her to access a QR code, which provided a translation. Here, for example, is a poem from one of the pieces:

Spent the night at a temple in the haze.
The moon illuminated the ship at night, the monk came back.
Clouds rising at dawn, it was like a dragon had appeared.

There was a shadow of the trees in the middle of the river.
I heard the sound of the temple bell.

 

The demonstration began with a quiz. A spritely, charismatic woman dressed all in black and speaking only Japanese began drawing rudimentary kanji on white sheets of paper. She held the first one up and asked – with the help of a translator - if anyone in the crowd might want to guess what it was. R thought it might be an island. The woman seemed amused. But it wasn't an island. It was an eye. Another simple drawing consisted of a line with a small indeterminate shape above suspended in space. I thought it might be a horizon line with an asteroid floating above. Asteroid seemed a bit farfetched so I remained mute. The correct answer was 'above.' It wasn't a depiction of things, asteroid or flying saucer. It was a depiction of spatial relation, a preposition. The woman turned the paper upside down. We all said "now it's below."

During this activity, a 12- or 13-year-old girl sitting to the woman’s immediate right steadily ground an ink-stick on a small slab or ink stone which also contained a shallow pool of water. The woman thanked the young girl, and emphasized the importance of using alertness and vigor to rub the ink stick on the ink stone as the ink liquefies. A vigorous immersion in the process will enhance the quality of the ink while the action of grinding helps settle the mind and prepare a suitable degree of focus for the creative moment. She then demonstrated a wrong way to do it, which she expressed by lowering her head and leaning slackly on the table while slowly and indifferently moving the ink stick in languorous circles. It was quite comical.

The quiz segued into the main demonstration. A man in his sixties, completely bald and wearing a dark robe and smiling jubilantly entered the space and began making some elementary shapes. He invited a young man standing nearby to try some of the shapes – tiny circles around a small oval – which the young man obliged, somewhat timidly, to do. The old man gleefully smiled, dipped his brush, and began another composition, making vigorous, graceful movements with the brush, modulating its pressure and angle while ink trailed behind in differing shades of black, some thick and assertive and others diaphanous and wispy, like veils of calligraphic inflection.

The old man reached to his side and pulled out a book full of kanji. He remarked on the blocklike form of the characters. They were rigid, and lacked expression. None of the characters showed anger, or hunger, or delight, or volatility. Calligraphy offered a way to awaken their expressive nature.

With the help of some assistants, the old man spread a large sheet of white paper on the floor and asked everyone to step in closer. I moved in closer and got down on my knees so I wouldn't be blocking anyone's view. It felt good to get a little rest from standing. The man got out his set of brushes and with a few brisk, spontaneous strokes and dabs created a branch constellated with blossom. The branch looked like a real branch. It had the same squiggly irregularities and quirky certainty of a branch reaching into space for dollops of sunshine. It was more than a work of representation, it was the spirit of creativity itself. This was a discipline that seemed to call for spontaneity and a shrewd appreciation of imperfection, a welcoming spirit toward happy accidents. He accompanied his drawing with a poem that celebrated the beauty of the mountains surrounding the city, the pleasures of travel tinctured with a yearning for home, which he did his best to describe, given the awkwardness of two languages, and using a tongue instead of a brush. 

 

Schopenhauer's Flute

Afferent nerves can make a dark winter next to a flower of prose, as controversies do. George Eliot comes to mind, and mints and licorice. The mood can feel driven by propellers, as an idea of ​​life assumes contradictory status through its stings and caresses. Efferent nerves act like manifestos. That is to say, they initiate action. Which is how I came to be here. I walked part of the way. I cheated the rest of the way. I flipped a hammer and reversed the direction of time. Everything expanded. My mouth roared with space hunger. And when I arrived, I realized the destination had been entirely false. There was never a destination. Just a rip current. And a raft.

I woke up dizzy in a state of disarray and defrosted my attitude against logic. There’s a flowery storm inside a plow and I aim to bring it to light. I want everybody to see what a straw looks like caught in the light of a Kansas sun. It’s the daily awning among the citizens of a luxuriant plumage. A scorpion with the neurons of a meanwhile. Everything beyond matter could be fiction or conceptual. The birth of an apricot next to a whisper scratched into the wall. I see the darkness speaking to me in bed. I see it chain itself to a thrift store. I swell myself for a fat heat against the depths of a woman’s heart. Is this how I plan to go through life? I guess. I’ve been doing it for over 70 years. Which means it’s either a huge mistake or a big wad of happenstance.  

I can feel the real. It’s soft, because it’s real. It’s smelly, because it’s brimstone. It’s intimidating, because it’s laminated. It’s constantly clenched. It’s indiscriminate as water and twice as wet. It defends itself with hail. It enlarges just below the waist. It has three eyes, four compartments, eight arms, and a freely adjustable free will. It is not redundant. But it is abundant. It has a harbor and a grammatical case of Bolivian leather. It conceals itself with conservatism. It reveals itself with citrus. The wheels of its progress make a noise almost erratic as Gaelic. But not as gríosghoradh. What makes it real is primarily how it sounds when it’s amusing our opinion of it.

Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, played the flute.

As an anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and of what is possible, poetry murmurs its irritations in sanguine usurpation, grasping at content then dropping it on the heads of the unsuspecting. You’ll need to run some cartilage for clapping your hands among all these drifters, these flaneurs of implication. Knuckles, mostly, and signs of rheumatism. Suspension has more value than greed both as an element in composition but also as a flautist from Vienna. Objects in art and objects in reality are entirely illusory. The conception of pulchritude is nugatory. It is therefore deviating into inquiry. I can’t wait for the dilatory. Or wary. I must proceed apace. I must give empirical reality its due. Even if it means structure, or taking the trash down. If I look up at the sky I’ll see a semblance of freedom. And when I look down, I see grounds for assertion.

Beauty merging with poetry which, in being "of nothing and nowhere," is in Reverdy's eyes "the manifestation of the irrepressible need for freedom that is in man." It is this certainty that Ossip Mandelstam went so far as to pay with his life, recalling: "What distinguishes poetry from mechanical speech is that poetry wakes us up, shakes us right in the middle of the word. "

I could multiply the examples of this desperate quest for what is priceless. In fact, few people settle for giving up the desire to make it their own in the sparkle of an eternal present. That the emergence of beauty accompanying it with its unpredictable horizons has never ceased to worry all the powers, this is precisely what they want to take away from us, including even the memory of it.

To what extent will we continue to remain indifferent to it? To what extent will we agree to contribute to it, even if it is through inattention? Until when will we agree to ignore that this is the establishment of a new type of enslavement if not corruption?

-        Annie Le Brun, What Is Priceless (my translation)

Being of nothing and nowhere is precisely what I had in mind when I sat down to breakfast this morning. The sparkle of an eternal present, like the lady said. There are fish crashing into the wave behind you. There are those who will call it painting. And those who sense exhilaration before necessity becomes a problem. That irrepressible need for freedom, for example. It may require some struggle. A regime rich in protein. But there it is: dolphins racing alongside the hull, and the chrome of the wheel blinking in the Sicilian sun. Which will assume an entirely different form a minute or two from now. Something deep and soulful, like a cello. Or shrill and exquisite, like Schopenhauer’s flute.

 

 

Have You Noticed

Have you noticed, the harder people find it to face reality, to acknowledge the truth of things, the more they resort to censorship and propaganda to maintain the self-deluding servicability of an obfuscating narrative? Infantile, yes, and cowardly and shameful. But can you blame them? Things are not looking good. There used to be just enough civility, just enough warmth, just enough honesty to live in the world with a sense of decency and benign liberality. The raw truth has fangs. It’s terrifying. Horrifying to discover the world has no meaning, that you live in a society that is just barely a society, cities unwalkable due to maniacs on e-scooters and e-bikes whizzing past people crouched smoking fentanyl or walking determinedly indifferent to the surrounding dystopic squalor while dodging mounds of human poop and laboring hard to convince themselves we live in a moral universe. A media that glorifies empty suits seeking positions of power and wealth and demonizes people of principle who protest the manifest evils afflicting the world’s populations. That calls a genocide a conflict. That calls a heavily militarized totalitarian oligarchy a democracy. That calls journalists who reveal the truth terrorists. And arrests them. And muzzles them. And claps its hands with delight. 

Before syntax, we used jukebox buttons. We punctuated time with hit songs. Most everything was assumed to be genuine. But there are methods for finding out the undercurrents of the banquet hall. Analysis is held together by paper clip, if it is explicit in meaning. If not, then paint the light next to a light bulb. See if it doesn’t turn bovine. I’m serious. The fire lasts longer when we read. This is because of syntax. It holds everything together. Otherwise things go crazy. There’s meaning all over everything. Ideas crash into each other like protons. The book perceives it is being written even when someone is reading it. And this is a cause of wakefulness.

Meditate to apprehend all that is empty. Or so they say. I say thrash the current beneath the wave to catch a fish. Read things carefully. Read like a catheter. Penetrate. Sew acceptance in the heat. Use the thread behind the eyes. The needle of the mind. Thread it with thought. Plus bursting around awkwardly attracts laughter. And for intestinal peculiarities, we have the highway. Emerson’s cutlery touched on the slice between heaven and so-called necessities. It happens when our nature is galvanized towards the fiber to be folded. It’s easier than you think to climb the planets against the void after dreaming. It takes a minute of old rails to explain a train. But once this is realized, the path to satori trails us until it trips over itself, and gets lost in the rain.

 

That Vague Cabbage At The Frontier Of The Soul

When new moments of pleasure arise that might otherwise be summarily dismissed as something thin and linear, place a wax mailbox in the center of an aromatic peccadillo and wait to see what happens. The imagery of life is preponderantly indelicate. Guns, penetration, and hardheaded subtleties too stubborn to shout Madeira. Power has a cosmetic effect by the pool. It helps mask inner frailties. If you can imagine the heat of the sun in a Hollywood bungalow, you can imagine electrolysis. And if you can do at least one credible push-up you can distinguish a membrane from a bone. So I ask you: why are you here? Don’t answer that. I’m just glad you’re here. Don’t let that monstrosity in the corner intimidate you; it’s an inflatable Picasso. Somebody needs to blow it up. Someone with a lot of breath, and artistic instincts, like bug-eyed Jack Elam in Once Upon A Time In The West. Dueling a fly. That vague cabbage at the frontier of the soul is really just a section of time folded in half. Or maybe the Sunday Times with another boomer exposé. What will become of that generation of youth who knew how to set a needle down in the vinyl groove of Like A Rolling Stone, or Layla, or A Whiter Shade of Pale? What, exactly, was their legacy? They reinvented pleasure. They dug graves and filled mausoleums with the ashes of war. And a lot of other stuff I’ve long forgotten, but feels like something underground making newspapers and manifestos. Can you hear it? It’s a herd of metallic clouds stumbling over a line of poetry. There are things in this life that cannot be put into words but must lifted to the gates of heaven like the musk of a voluptuous afternoon. I'm tempted to say something about overflowing panacea wheels and how to deflate an ego with the prick of a desperado, but I’ll leave that for another time. A time less leaden than what passes for time on this plane and all of its self-destructing machinery waltzing around the language in a black negligee and a stovepipe hat. If I ever get to Tulsa I must thank my lucky stars. Because the highways at night get weirder each passing year. If I had more time I could deepen the vision and come out the other side holding an old lampshade and the frantic sugar of a failed laxity, but for that I would need a magnolia and an archaic southern theme to set the stage for more knickknacks and fluffy rhetorical hardware. Stencils deepen the secrets of abstraction. It’s one of the reasons I don’t own a horse. I listened to the engine turn red. Everything twists inside and stops holding on. This isn’t the first time I've plunged into Baudelaire feet first. I enjoy chattering streams of myriad sugar just to arouse some bacteria. I say yes to the advent of pomegranate I will never allow it to seem hollow or misunderstood. Go now and tell the conductor there’s a fire in my brain. Get yourself a banana split. Let the moment be distressed by something visceral and hungry. Catch yourself under the fireworks as various feelings emerge. Upon arrival I’ll want to ask some questions. We all do. Life moves too fast to figure it all out. Listen to the rain smash against the hectic undertones. The sound of greed as it slithers among those alert to its sorcery, and the elegance of its dismissal.

Some Thoths On The Book Of Thongs

They say that if you follow an unpredictable thought you’ll eventually discover temptation. Nothing in life is certain. Not even certainty. Certainty is a ruse invented by roses. The fragrance is exquisitely ironic. Or you could say something different entirely. Words are decisions wrapped in nomenclature. A rose by any other name might consist of more than three dimensions. That there is mystery in the universe is a coefficient proven repeatedly by slurps of chicken noodle soup. If you’re going to include it in your description, it should cause cubes in addition to fuses. It all depends on how comfortable you are with the current décor. It’s ok to like everything and rub against things and all that. But if you’re looking for escape, you’ll want to go into the hills to find the right medicines. Culture is either Marie Laurencin or it's a garden: you decide. There will always be a certain amount of aluminum around to boost your confidence in abstraction.

The tongue isn’t the strongest muscle in the body. It’s not as strong as some of the other muscles, such as the quadriceps, gluteus maximus, and masseter. It’s still pretty strong. Strong enough to lift words like death, Dharma, and floccinaucinihilipilification. Before the larynx, there was the Vortex, from which, through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing. The tongue, in its early days, sewed images of lamp black diphthong. That’s how it found a berth in the mouth. When the mind is on a journey, the tongue remains silent. But it’s a restless animal. It can’t stay still for long. It transforms the air into discrete energetic events of sound and meaning, things like dumbbells, crash test dummies, and clumsy philosophies. And it starts conversations. And divides things into portents, predications, which often weigh more in the mind than in the air.

I stumbled around the operating theater looking for my glasses. I found an umbrella and a sewing machine but not my glasses. I found my glasses later, which were on my face. These things cease to embarrass me. You can’t embarrass an old man. Not when he’s seen the things I’ve seen. Heard the things I’ve heard. Felt the things I’ve felt. Been slapped a hundred times by the sober truth. Fucked by voluptuous deceits. Fooled by mesmerizing solicitations. It’s been quite an education. Here’s what I learned: beacons are the bacon of the backpack cafeteria. Belief is the harness of our prayers. I am furthermost from myself when I rotate. Jodhpurs are good for ping pong, but bad for credulity. Avoid altercations. Intuitions work best where the current is swift.

One of the greatest women of the last century, who was largely responsible for sewing a hurricane to a consonant, was said to have a magnificent faculty of silence in ten languages. No, it wasn't Cher. She had less formality in getting to meet her. One felt elect to feel bliss around her. A feeling of reassurance to the exclusion of everything else. It’s how I lost my shyness. I found I could go up banging and talking about mahogany to just about anyone. Bookcases are made with mahogany, I’d say. If you gaze at it long enough you can see an idea sleeping in the grain, surrounded by wonderful hallucinations. It’s how writing was invented. And lingerie.

Is something art because I say it's art? I remember thinking that once. I still do. A little. A little wistfully. A little pretentiously. I never thought of art as a magic trick, a deception, although in many ways it is. Especially self-deception. I knew the empire was decaying. I just didn’t expect it so soon. Hence, the need for trickery, and mirage. The persistence of values. The persistence of science, and hot dogs and condiments. Credible goals. Plausible vignettes. And the aurochs and bulls of Lascaux. Books in bookstores. A good conversation. And light in everyone’s eyes.

Why are the leaders of collapsing empires always so strange? Is it because they embody all the vile corruptions of the oligarchs and aristocrats? Take Elagabalus, Roman emperor from 218 to 222. He developed a reputation for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. Edward Gibbon wrote that Elagabalus "abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” The Rolling Stones pale by comparison. George the III of England would sometimes speak for hours at a time without pause. He would foam at the mouth as his voice became a dark vibrato of bones and gargoyles and his vocabulary grow increasingly complex and colorful, creating stratospheric chimeras and intricate polyglottal cathedrals. Now look at our emperors. Let them stride through your mind with their struts and giggles, solemn oaths and shrill proclamations. That mean nothing. But are inflated with the stuff of dreams and euphoria.

The answer is blowing in the wind. Creaking in the mattress. Curdling in the counterpane. Reaching into my soul via YouTube. Tossed to me via algorithm. Indexed at the back of the book. The Book of Everything. The Book of Maladjustment. The Book of Tongues. The Book of Thongs. Which is a coffee table book. I will leave it your imagination. Last night I had the answer to everything but it slipped away. The mind gets slippery at night. It becomes a place of excess. And imbroglios and monotheists. One person’s answer is another person’s problem. Answers are sectarian. Utilitarian. Seminarian aquariums. Once it is firmly established that 2 + 2 is 5, you’re well on your way to introspection. And confetti. I’m sorry. What was the question?