The Place Which Everyone Occupies

Cicero compares the earth to a vast theatre: Quemadmodum theatrum cum commune sit, recte tamen dici potest ejus esse eum locum quem quisque occuparit. “As the theater is common, yet it may rightly be said that it is the place which everyone occupies.” For years now – decades, really – I’ve been playing a man devoted to the arts, mainly poetry, who followed a different drummer, the beat of the beats, a fool, essentially, who pursued chimeras of alchemical glory.

Now I’m old and I don’t know where I am. The curtain is coming down. But I don’t hear applause. I hear Bang A Gong (Get It On) on YouTube. 96 Tears by ? and The Mysterians. Water running in the kitchen sink. Barely audible little electrical beats coming out of a desktop clock. Must be cogs, whatever mechanical delicacies mesh in unison. Big thumps and grind of scraping objects, cookware of some sort, emanating from the kitchen upstairs. The U.S. of A is a noisy place. A theater of jackhammers, cars, sirens, fireworks, garbage disposals, vacuums, backhoes, forklifts, nail guns, chainsaws, framing saws. And music. The noise is permanent. The music is occasional. All Along the Watchtower. Jimi Hendrix. Needles and Pins. Jackie de Shannon. What is the difference between music and noise music is a sound which produces a pleasing sensation while noise is an unwanted and unpleasant sound. But is music always pleasing? It’s the dissonances the make music interesting, give it its texture and edgy grin.

I didn’t audition for the part. I grew into it. I didn’t know my lines at first. I just stumbled over the few words that dropped from my brain into my mouth. When I discovered alcohol, I found this much easier to do. I blubbered. I howled. I spewed poetry for attention. This is the thing that puts us on stage. That craving for attention. And to play a role that gets us out of our skin and into the skin of someone else. Someone like you. Or that guy over there, sitting in a chair at the library, reading Confederacy of Dunces. Imagine picking someone at random and slipping into their body for a day. Saying things they’d never say. Doing things they’d never do. So that when they were themselves again everyone in their life would be asking a lot of questions.

I played a man who devoted himself to literature, novels and poetry and even some journalism. Then, toward the end of his life, he watches the death of literature. People no longer reading. Curiosity dead. Intellect dead. Imagination dead imagine. So that it’s sad, even, to hold a book in the hand, that solid thing dense with perspective and berth between piers, the bobbing and rolling of ideas on an ocean of words, on paper, in a book, with a title and a spine. What will become of Shakespeare? Gertrude Stein? Viriginia Woolf? Calixthe Beyala? Marcel Proust? Bei Dao? Yasunari Kawabata? Henrik Ibsen? James Joyce? Samuel Beckett? Edgar Allan Poe?

If this was a play in progress now would be a good place for a soliloquy. Fuck these zombie turds. I’m going to keep writing. Even if the thinking gets muzzy and convoluted does it matter? Once the idea of an audience is squelched the writing is liberated, but purposeless. The two go together. It’s an anomie that results in a lot of mongrel anomalies. Godzilla in a Noh play. Liberation is sexy and makes you giddy but there’s always that sinking feeling that what you’re doing is done for nothing, for the sake of what, the sake of nothing. I’ll say it again: the sake of nothing. When did a body of writing ever stop people from killing one another? Hint: it wasn’t the Bible. It wasn’t the Vedas. It wasn’t the Mahabharata. It wasn’t the Divine Comedy and it wasn’t Moby Dick. It wasn’t The Canterbury Tales and it wasn’t The Art of War.

Right around 1965 when the impulse to write first began producing its lovely array of symptoms – indolence, reverie, that constant mad paddling toward other shores – that photograph of Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Robbie Robertson and Michael McClure standing by the City Lights Bookstore caught my attention. These were the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Rock and beat poetry aligned in a marriage of melopeia and smokestack lightning. 

Wild Animal Joy

I get a letter from a fellow poet younger than me by a few decades, how many I’m not sure, but his exuberance and preference for rap rather than rock indicates at least several. I’m drifting into my late 70s now, unthinkable that’s happening, even though it’s been happening for over 60 years, and I’ve had time to adjust, but haven’t, every day gets a little weirder.

My young friend mentions John Muir in a discussion about class conflict and the obscenely rich befouling our planet with their yachts and wars and private jets.

John Muir, yes, a consciousness detached from worldly pursuits and devoted to the sanctities of the forest, à la Thoreau & Edward Abbey. People like Abbey, Muir and Thoreau are antidotes to the popularity of the prosperity gospel in the U.S., which dates back to the 17^th century New England Calvinists, and their twisted notions of material success, and fear of the forest, except – of course – as potential wealth to extract. Wilderness terrifies that mindset. They get a kick out of calling experimental writing “word salad.” Word salad being, in their minds, a put-down. But I love word salad. Especially with Roquefort and semantic rebellions in my lettuce.

Muir (the name doesn’t come up often) reminds me of my hippy-dippy days in California in the 60s. Bay Area. Muir was on everyone’s lips, and most everyone was familiar with the poetry scene, even teenage girls in well-heeled neighborhoods south of San Francisco like Cupertino and Saratoga. Poets had the status of rock stars. A few months ago, while culling through mountains of memorabilia, I came across a letter from a girlfriend, 15 at the time (I was 17) raving about Allen Ginsberg. Can you imagine an average 15 yr old today raving about Allen Ginsberg? What do they rave about? Taylor Swift? 

I never got around to reading John Muir. I order an ebook from the public library, My First Summer in the Sierra. It’s marvelous. Full of wild animal joy, to borrow a phrase from Muir. Muir's language is vibrant and alive, "mountan manuscripts," "icy cold, delicious, champagne water" of a mountain creek, or the glassy surface of a still pond mirroring Muir across the Yosemite of my imagination.

Muir’s prose is vigorous and highly detailed, constellated with botanical specimens and gorgeous descriptions of the wilderness that call Albert Bierstadt to mind, open vistas of pristine grandeur, a turbulence of paint reflecting the violence of creation itself. He describes Yosemite Creek in a plethora of botanical enthusiasm:

Calm, beautiful, and nearly silent, it [Yosemite Creek] glides with stately gestures, a dense growth of the slender two-leaved pine along its banks, and a fringe of willow, purple spirea, sedges, daisies, lilies, and columbines. Some of the sedges and willow boughs dip into the current, and just outside of the close ranks of trees there is a sunny float of washed gravelly sand which seems to have been deposited by some ancient flood. It is covered with millions of erethrea, eriogonum, and oxytheca, with with more flowers than leaves, forming an even growth, slightly dimpled and ruffled here and there by rosettes of Spraguea umbellate.

A single raindrop explodes into a cosmological garden of Edenic exuberance; he reads the terrain like a divine manuscript.

How interesting to trace the history of a single raindrop…Some, falling on meadows and bogs, creep silently out of sight to the grass roots, hiding softly as in a nest, slipping, oozing, hither, thither, seeking and finding their appointed work. Some, descending through the spires of the woods, sift spray through the shining needles, whispering peace and good cheer to each one of them.

He converts the wilderness of rock and fern to the wilderness of the word, the towering architecture of the forest to the spiraling associations among words.

His real purpose for being in the Sierra that summer (June through September of 1869) was to guide a flock of sheep through the meadows of the Sierra abounding in rich green grass. He notes an instance of phantasmagoric revelation: “This evening the show made by the circle of fire was very fine, bringing out the surrounding trees in most impressive relief, and making the thousands of sheep eyes glow like a glorious bed of diamonds.”

Muir – like Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman – offered a vision of the United States utterly untainted by the sordid extractions of mining and industry, the worship of technology and industry and the deathly obsessions with capital and property. To think of the Sierra as property, as private real estate, is an abomination. Muir’s writing was instrumental in getting Yosemite to be declared a federally administered park. Yosemite National Park became a reality in 1890.

What didn’t become a park is the fullness of being an immersion in the wilderness can induce. You can’t market the sublime. It’s not for sale. Not up for private ownership. Fewer and fewer people seem to understand that vital connection. We’re all accustomed to a culture that elevates the quantifiable over the immeasurable, the incalculable, the indefinable. Most seem quite well-adapted to it. A suite of luxury apartments for zombie consumers is worth more than a park or wilderness. How do you get that juggernaut to turn around after 700 hundred years of plundering resources? Fortunately, the wilderness is a lot slipperier than people think. It’s not always where you expect it to be. Sometimes it’s just a moment of reverie. Although I hear employers may begin implanting chips in the brain to more rigorously manage those moments stolen from corporate profit. I don’t see that working. You can’t suppress a wilderness. It’s not always a matter of trees and ski resorts. It’s a matter of listening. The mountains are a calling. And their language is in the phosphor of your bones and the ecstasies of your breath.

 

Blue Pompom

What wealth of vision there is in a blue pompom. If we went below to talk about an elephant, would there be a problem? Our sense organs filter the outer world as it permeates our being, but they can be persuaded to relax their governance. That’s how I met your mother, when she was dancing with Fred Astaire. Do you remember the day President De Gaulle held you on his shoulders and declared that the Bordeaux government was illegitimate and that he was the true representative of France? You laughed so hard you peed on him, thus altering forever the course of our planet. There are some things in life so hard to accept that it becomes a crisis. A very sweet and crumbly crisis, but powerful enough to pulverize the sternum. They happen every day, these gestures of appeasement, these desperate gymnastics for things we can’t control, things we can’t pull back into language, the place they began, before they turned wild, and ornery, and created all this paraphernalia, this nest in the badlands, where we brood our young in reverie.

Despair is a science. The search for stupefaction grants it a reprieve until one’s wings grow back. To understand these things we must leave the circle of appearances and enter the parallelogram of shadows. We must iron our shirts. We must learn the Monster Mash. I like throwing balls at walls. It helps me feel abstract. These northern seas are freezing. But the horizons are wide. And golden. When the horn is blown we jump to our oars and make things happen. What is poetry for if not to revise the blundering truth? A few of us have returned to paganism for that very reason. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us. And so we row faster and faster and make discoveries of ourselves in the slop of the waves. Our despairs become phosphor, our words become salt.

We dream of singing in the spring. We spring into singing dreaming of spring. The rear admiral is straining his reason. The excitement mounts as we sail into the mystic. Those faint markings of Cy Twombly thicken in the mind with complexion. I remember the marks made by mail hampers on a certain wall in the old bakery building that was repurposed into a mailing service. It said Cy Twombly, although Cy Twombly had nothing to do with it. A parable has been concocted to restore Makauwahi Cave. For even though all knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. Some things arise from opium. Percepts of the world are structured by time and space. Though I’ve seen enough preludes to know an extract from a tesseract. Many things serve the world description. Gerunds, and the warm attachment of bonds, twirl in perfumes. Would you like a wolf spider? It’s a way of introducing oneself to imagery.

I entrust my musty introversion to the algebra of the moment. Each minute is equipped with the best compulsions money can buy. What is the skull but a sphere of shadows? We walk in exuberance craving the original world at the end of my finger. I think you know what this means. Property is theft. We strike suddenly when we feel arabesque. But this isn’t the time for that.  Look into this viewfinder, tell me if this doesn’t stimulate your sense of trigonometry: Cézanne staring at a tennis net, fascinated by the shadows it makes. We live in a rainbow of chaos. One adapts by watercolor. Engorge yourself with variation, & fissionable isotopes. Read poetry. Refine your escape into nothingness. Things are as they are, or aren’t. I feel increasingly tangible, as if I lived in a house of language, and the windows were open and the fridge was crammed with beer, & so became a biting commentary on the status quo. For which language was not intended. As if I knew. I’m just another fish in the ocean who has never seen water.

Rain and rain and more rain represents what the beginning might have begun when it began to begin. It’s the closest thing I have to a tattoo. Except for Groucho Marx teasing a flamenco dancer. My God water is wonderful when you’re thirsty. Every day I spent in Kauai I gazed into infinity. It broke my brain into a million gazebos. I can see infinity but I can’t think infinity. Infinity is thoroughly unthinkable. And so I turn to the Bee Gees and their illustrious career. I know my frame of mind. You ain’t got to be so blind. Words are residue. This sweetens the proposition. Experience without thermodynamics is bloodcurdling, but thermodynamics without experience is mere introspective popcorn. So here I am, reaching out for a house in the rain.

 

The Logic Of Illogicality

I have a vision of life, and try to find equivalents for it in coin-operated machines, which often leave me feeling coconut. Even the hills are monologues whose wooded temples cry out for Apollinaire. The fights and conversations beyond the museum are a play about religion. I always keep a pattern handy in case of chaos. I occupy a zone of impartial ups and downs. By nothingness I mean the thing that nothing is. Everything that is not a thing becomes a thing by the quintessence of its qualia, its atoms & molecules, hardware & context. I drilled a parable in the waiting room. Several of the watercolors weren’t bad. I felt jolted into some new reality. My ascension began at 5 a.m. when I was delivering newspapers and saw my feet leave the ground. And as I approached the stratosphere, I could hear it: the chatter of meat arriving in heaven.

I learned to appreciate logic when the world broke apart. But I was so unfamiliar with its use that I'm not sure it was logic I was employing but something else that looked like logic, a legal loophole, perhaps, or a carefully calculated verisimilitude. Or maybe it was simply wishful thinking. We’re all delusional now. We’re doomed to spend our remaining years in a carnival funhouse. Knock a noise into astonishment and the outcome will be gravy. This is how impressionism began. Paint tubes and attitude. Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. Said Benjamin Franklin. Who invented the Franklin stove, urinary catheter, glass harmonica and bifocals. I found him stumbling around in a prose poem once. He’d tripped over a metonym and landed on a metaphor. I helped him up and he thanked me. What are you up to, I asked. I’m looking for some logic, but this appears to be the wrong address. It’s the right address, I said, but the wrong altitude. Welcome to Laputa. 

Logic is inadequate to tackle the problems of existence. Logic cannot explain a suicide or a coincidence. What logic can do is bring consistency to one’s thinking. But consistency does little to help thinking to think it’s thinking when it’s thinking in knots and columbines, like a physicist on a mountain meadow in the Swiss Alps trying to make sense of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Consistency is a dead end. It only exacerbates the quiver of the quixotic. It’s a lot like Kinbane Castle in Northern Ireland. It sits on a raggedy old rock confronting the batterings of the North Atlantic simply because this is where it happens to be, empty of people, empty of service, empty of purpose. But a defense, nevertheless. A defense against oblivion. A defense against utility. A defense against utopia. Every defense needs a defense. Defending the defenseless against the undefendable can be a questionable employment of time & resource, but a noble one.

Logic is at its most logical when it’s illogical. The logic of this is tablespoons. Think about the curvature and backdrop. The context and shoes. Is there a cowboy singing and playing guitar on a horse? If so, then the heliotrope is worth the strain, and the banana split is worth the calories.  There is, curiously, a fertile inconsistency to our opinions concerning X-rays. They’re a miracle of electromagnetic radiation, but all they reveal are bones. The logic of this is based on an understanding of French impressionism. One must wrestle the symptom to find the apparition. Every disease has a signature handle. Rheumatism, tourism, fauvism. I’ve been diagnosed with incurable logorrhea. I feel like an evergreen. All my needles are turning red, and when the wind shifts, I feel as if I could touch the pallor of calamity. But my sap is amber, & there’s logic in it.

The Holiness Of Holes

Did you know that if you wear green on St. Patrick’s Day Krispy Kreme will give you a free doughnut?

I wonder what happens to unsold doughnuts. Do their bodies disintegrate leaving behind a hole? Where do holes go when things fall apart? They cluster together in holy places. There are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire alone.

My eyes occupy two holes in a somewhat spherical skull, two holes in my nose, two holes in my ears, a hole in my rear, and a hole beneath my nose which only appears when it opens and words come streaming out in a spectral wavelength of ultraviolet frequencies.  

The biggest hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Kola Peninsula of Russia, near the border with Norway. It descends seven miles deep in the earth’s crust.

The word ‘hole’ appears 26 times in 253 speeches within 39 works of Shakespeare.

As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney,

as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib’s

rush for Tom’s forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove

Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his

hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen

to a wrangling knave, as the nun’s lip to the

friar’s mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin.

 

-          All’s Well That Ends Well, Act II, scene 2. Clown.

 

Nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth. Whoa. What’s that about? What’s a nun’s lip doing on a friar’s mouth?

We originate from holes. Take a long sweet look at Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It is the holiest of holes.

Some physicists speculate that what we perceive as cosmic inflation – some sort of field that provides an energy inherent to space itself – an energy so robust and powerful it causes the universe to inflate, refusing to dilute even as the expansion of space continues – marks the creation of our universe from an ultramassive black hole.

I often fantasize walking into a wormhole and reentering the year 1966. The year Blonde on Blonde came out, and Aftermath and Sunshine Superman and Sounds of Silence and Fresh Cream and the Moods of Marvin Gaye. A hamburger, on average, cost 15 cents, and a two-bedroom house went for about $21,400.

The rock group Hole, with lead vocalist Courtney Love, disbanded in 2002. The hole itself, the idea hole, the many perforations and performances of holes, holes as a group, holes upon holes upon holes, echoing with tender invitations to be entered, to be filled, to be fulfilled, to be nucleated and nudged into interplay, is hunkered in a hollow somewhere, forlorn as a lover on a dock scanning the horizon for a ship, hollow as the hoop of hope on a chimney on a hill, fueled by nothingness and fire, crackling and alone. 

A Trinket Of The Mind

You can say bliss is yellow. You can call to the root of the baobab during a storm on the plains of Zimbabwe. You can write a paragraph that flames like a mushroom in a forest of words. But to create a fact with a luxurious sting you must drink the flight of the hummingbird.

An iron knowledge helps establish a meaningful wind in the life of a hippopotamus. And yet the ink that dreams of being a nail will sometimes be confused with a swamp.

This is a book of radar in a ginger terrain. Here, scratch the snowball card. This will prove that money is hurt by nicknames.

I mixed a nightcap with a nightclub and found a hibiscus in my shame.

What beautiful foam this water makes. The intake is a dagger. It’s like a mouth one blurs with quintessence.

Is this getting anywhere yet?

Eggs drink buttons. It’s how chaos moves through a sentence. I rattle my birth at a little aroma. It gives me a sense of scarlet identity. Out on the prairie time has mellowed our noises. Our pearls of rain mimic the bustle of sage.

I see enough reason for an alpine shadow that I hurry to sell it to the moon. It's a beautiful night. The stars are scattered like ingots of golden vertigo. Somewhere near Cutbank an elephant smells raspberries in the sweet prairie air. Memories of Botswana warm her mind.

The state of being is to be considered as an ebony ambiguity becoming correlative to all things through a trinket of the mind. How might an ambiguity be lipstick if it already has a diameter? The reason is simple. Because percussion has a gnome in it. And his name is Kolbein Butter Penis.

Blink against the wall showing off the spoke of the wheel. Step forward. Take a breath. Jump to me now suggesting darkness. Together we will move forward through the sentence allowing the rain to belong to the waves. And in the end cause beautiful things to happen to our bodies.    

 

What Makes Rock Rock?

What makes rock rock? Or should I say what made rock rock? Rock is dead. I think. I don’t know anymore. Intricacies abound in the daily phantasmagoria. Everything that constitutes life comes into focus. Ginger Baker in a frenzy of sticks and rhythm. There are days I can feel all the cells in my body subtly vibrating with cosmic cymbals. This is generally an indication that I’m pregnant with something fine and elegant, an embryonic opera swirling in a turbulence of light and darkness or elephants grazing together in the savannah of my private musings. The brain is a womb of musings, unending elaborations of Sein und Zeit. The labor went hard but the delivery was a success: a 9 lb. sonnet howling with magma and crystallizations of raw perplexity.

I’ve love to write about rock but I know very little about music, and having never played it, I don’t have a visceral sense of what’s going on. Writing about music is a difficult project if you know little about the construction of music. Of course, everyone, even the deaf, know something about music. It’s rhythmic, it creates vibrations, and it’s lively as a nest full of cuckoos. Unless it’s not. Unless it’s soft and reflective like still water in moonlight. A frog on a rock like a note on a sonata. The steady languorous rhythms of an albatross in flight, à la Peter Green.

Beethoven, who was nearly deaf, used a pencil in his mouth to catch the vibrations of the piano. He could tell by the vibrations the sound as it emanated from the string and permeated the wood.

Here’s what I do know: rock changed everything in my life. I remember the very afternoon it grabbed my soul and yanked it out of the dingy adolescent cell it was crouching in and let it loose as a Blakean angel. The song was “House of the Rising Sun,” sung by Eric Burdon. It had everything in it: New Orleans, a life of decadence and ruin seeking redemption in a desperate howl of epiphany and pain. It’s an intense song. It was the intensity of this song that grabbed me and shook me and made me turn into Arthur Rimbaud. Who doesn’t mythologize their past when they hear this kind of music? It’s different with a piece of music like Mahler’s Adagietto. This is what you listen to when you’re old and at the brink of something sublime. Mountain summit looking down. Lights changing and oscillating in movements across the long grass of the valley.

What makes rock rock is a strong backbeat, usually in 4/4 rhythm. It’s an emphasized offbeat. Unconventional, unusual. It hooks you with its off-kilter bravura. Going against the grain of what is expected. A sly contrariness leading you into a spirited confrontation with propriety. Propriety has its place. It helps people exchange ideas without killing one another. But it’s confining. It can be deadening. This is why rock and roll upset the world so much circa the early 50s, beginning with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, and culminating with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” in 1955.

The most vigorously idiosyncratic drumming appears in the Beatle’s “Come Together.” Ringo was left-handed, and so the drumming is shaped naturally around that idiosyncratic style. I’ve watched several videos of drummers demonstrating the complexity of drumming propelling this zany song, and it left me feeling dizzy with its rhythmic intricacies.

The electric guitar is essential. Or is it? There’s no guitar in the Beatle’s “Eleanor Rigby,” or Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” That said, the electric guitar is pretty important. Bo Diddley wouldn't sound Diddley without Diddley’s Jupiter Thunderbird. It wouldn’t have a spine. It wouldn’t have Bo. It wouldn’t have Diddley. That diamond ring won’t shine. No mojo. No cocoa. No cat black bone.

Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is mainly an E minor pentatonic with a bit of Dorian. The guitar work is lush and classical, serving a wistful melody with a heavy flavor of what the Portuguese call saudade. It opens with an acoustic guitar and builds into a powerful crescendo of fury and spiritual dilation. I think it’s much more moving than Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” I prefer Zeppelin’s more obscure numbers, like “Boogie with Stu.” The goofy Tolkienesque lyrics don’t really synchronize that well with the edginess and bite of an electric guitar.

And then there’s the most iconic beginning to a rock song in the Stone’s “Satisfaction,” the fuzz tone distortion produced by the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone seemed perfect for a song about the eternal dissatisfactions of consumer culture.

I don’t know where rock is today. I’m almost 77. I don’t go to clubs. My auditory system couldn’t take it. I’ve experienced heavy hearing loss and as early as 1966 acquired a lifelong case of tinnitus. Most of my listening is done with a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Sometimes I keep my hearing aids on, and sometimes I remove them. They tend to distort music. They have minimal effect on most of the rock I listen to, but completely destroy the more delicate sounds of classical music.

That said, going a single day without music is unthinkable. I agree with Nietzsche: “without music, life would be a mistake.”