A kind of metaphysical autopsy (a mode in aping of Harold Ramis)

So, what happened?

He died like a week later.

But how?

It wasn’t immediately clear. Some hiker - a middle school math teacher, we found out later - found the body at the bottom of a ravine at the base of Harney Peak.

Was it foul play?

No. It wasn’t necessarily even a surprise. We didn’t know if it was accidental or intentional. Eventually I decided it must have gone down like he slipped and fell while trying to find the right place to jump.

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So it goes . . .

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Slapdash Organism, or Yes, please, I would appreciate the receipt

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It is a trick of magic for works to deny the censorship they promote.  If the reaction to an offensive speaker is to demand that the program at which he appears be cancelled, then the reaction is all there is.  Pardon me for making my narcissism part of the conversation, but . . . 

I like to tell the story of the hanging gardens of Babylon with an asterisk that I know of Babylon only through the work of The Rolling Stones, not beggars banquet either.  

Tristan Tzara suggested that an authentic act might involve running through the street with a gun, shooting indiscriminately.  If only we could presently cancel authenticity . . . I once bought a glock 9 mmfrom a friend as a birthday present for my father.  It was not whatever the opposite of patricidal ambition is.  The gun had a button, when depressed, shone a light that traced wherever the barrel pointed.  If you don’t think that’s cool, even if just at an atavistic level, then you did not grow up on the movies I grew up on.

The authority figure’s thing was wanting  his honesty to be pungent and to be praised like a pugilist, as though bluntness was a seduction method above and below sophisticated deflection. His exhibitions betrayed this habit of mind and then some.  Straight talk about old people and senescence is far less art-world salient than revolution and the exchange-value of misanthropy. Four white walls yes you could ask for more but let’s start with accepting what’s on offer before we order off menu.  

Staggered elections in Calvinist garb

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The mistake is not in succumbing to the idea that all this (gesturing) is rendered absurd by the idea that all this (gesturing) could be laid low by a virus.  It is in forgetting that absurdity is the baseline, the starting point, at which all this (gesturing) bottoms out in the first place.   Mud not bedrock. Objects, not descriptions, but aleatory objects, at that.

And sentimentalizing that acknowledgment of the absurd with archetypal accessories ( bad acid jazz, gesticulating young males in a smoky room, a mime playing chess on a cutting board with no squares) - keeping at arm’s length the finite parallax view and the kitschy end-times ballads - does not expiate the barren foreign feeling.  Rejoice in the click of the door that locks shut behind, without asking for something more.  Puke your guts out and then go back to hot buffet sizzling under the sneeze guard. Eo nomine ludere, et lux in tenebris lucet. That sort of thing.

Child is Father of Man

“We go back to the poetry, the poet. I see a figure in a field. There is genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts.” 

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A body with very few clothes

An old radio

Some apples

You get to eat

as many slices of bacon as you want

the morning of a home game

The way his sweater smells

It gets so hot it smokes

After awhile

just when Sam Cooke’s new song

comes on

Worms and a homely girl from Texas

who can read quicker than you

Good marks

and a lost crop

like a whole season

that passed without a letter

from my brother

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Aspects and Extensions

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Benzodiazepine Blots

Arrhythmic sighs from the shuffle of ice against the shore, on that first March day to hit 60 and all the garbage underneath sits there stupefied and bare, like a drunk who didn’t make it to bed or out of his clothes waking on the floor to a crippling morning hangover. Nature being more playful than purposeful, the random dance of plastic in the ring of open space beneath a canopy of four or five Doug fir.

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Lodge pole pine not Doug fir

The Stack, early-mid-March

If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.

A song of . . . “striving, strain, abrasion, an all but asthmatic song of aspiration”

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The Brain is wider than the sky

If seasons cease to exist, many of our moods will cease to believe in one another. Early spring melt speaks a kind of language that sits beside whatever might pass for conversation in the bicameral mind. Sometimes that language stays recessed back and whispers and sometimes it hit like a cymbal crash or a symbol smash. Either way being primed to hear what is being said comes from a close and recent acquaintance with some other felt reality, say, the overlapping late winter bone-chill. The one conditions and calls forth the other. And too much concrete and too much living in boxes ends up dissuading us from acknowledging the undercurrent. It doesn’t mean it goes away. It just sits unacknowledged, as though skepticism were somehow warranted on its own terms and not willed and honored only in the breach. That we emerge into language at all is a wonder, yes.

Leap Day Stack

Not enough daylight . . . .

Sominex and a Thousand Sheep

For every sour moment in a quicksand year, the Tyrant who runs this rudderless ship of a place masquerades as the tenant whose name is on the lease and we are but temporary roommates. The Tyrant takes every whimpered plea for less prevarication and more timely rental payments as an admission of more misery to come.  That is the Tyrant’s function, to twist pleas into admissions, to contort earnest efforts at connection into static silence, and to conjure out of thin air a manic need to fill this hole with empty calories.  

It is not a homely place, this premises.  

Outside gray blasts of warm wind strip the leaves off trees and make the residue of corn husks pirouette in the air.  Vulnerability is this mound of snow reduced to a shuddering puddle.  It was months ago that we got the crops out of the fields and still the deer pick through it under a quarter moon and wispy nighttime nimbus clouds. Inside it is either too cold or too hot, and the units that would calibrate sit downstairs in the basement always running in conflict with the directive I give them, turning the thermostat.  

In my memory, a coffee pot is always on, and the tv plays the price is right or old green acres episodes.  That was a different era and a different geography but it all sits here, memories piled up on top of each room’s slightly less than rectangular contour.  Tonight the screen is clamped shut, a photograph somewhere in there eager to be exposed.

The Tyrant wears an eye patch and has a hideously precise soul patch that frames his thin pink lips. He lunges up the stairs, skipping a step and closing the distance on whatever chore he is half-assing. He bloviates about sinfulness.  Is it fear or habit that makes us declaim about all this in cloying whispers?   There is nothing like unqualified false assertion delivered in dulcet half-hearted tones to make obvious a contradiction.  You may!   You are now free to obey!   That sort of thing.   Exhausting choice-adherence.

Knowing where the skeletons are is not the same as feeling comfortable cleaning out closets.  Somewhere I learned a spell of how to summon ascendancy from the pet cemetery, how to make a sculpture out of this Walmart of thwarted acquisition.   We are equipped to make do.  The pizza place is *6 on speed dial.  Avoidance is all the rage.  Pity the fool who pins a notice to quit on this door.   Pity the snow and the corn and the clouds.

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Funereal City

City of unrest, unsolved murders, machinations at the top of glass boxes glimmering high in the sky like slung-shot diamonds, rough-edged hoods and finks with like-minded schemes, sewers full of warring basks of crocodiles, Dutch elms dying of eponymous disease as arborists turn in their shears and take up on skid row for rotgut reveries, canned tuna subsistence, and the boring kind of cirrhosis . . .

city of Nordic angles, fanboys of austerity, where every barbershop has talc powder with or without asbestos, and every step you take isn’t just a Police song but is a police data point, hunger artists flourish here and the meth comes from Mexico up the 29 corridor. It gets stepped on three times before the middle schoolers sling it to their teachers guardians and the powers that be. the mayor - fat bald and psoriasis flaky - has a sign above his desk that says - you guessed it - repent repent repent nigh is end times. He contemplates tax increment financing and runs the numbers each weekday afternoon as he stands looking out the window slurping potato soup from a can . . .

god this is awful. At least laugh at its awfulness.

Rarefied air, actual American water, remember don’t repeat

Hack away at the parts of yourself that feel true for long enough and with a sharp enough scythe, and it’s not that you will be reduced or re-used for some ulterior purpose. You’ll end up venerating a life stroke that does almost nothing but keep your head above the surface. Life as the scroll of the TV guide channel, a monument to streaming descriptions of the thing that is overshadowed by its own synopsis.

Parsec Perspective

We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than 1 trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life. The tiny variations created during that while beginning of the seas of the galaxies we see today.

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Image from Light [=] Image from Black

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THE PLANET IS THE CAMERA

The thing we see as an “image” was constructed from data produced not by a conventional camera, but by Event Horizon, a network of telescopes harmonized to focus on the same location at the same time. The resolution of any image depends on the aperture of the camera, and this noncontiguous perception engine linked telescopes from Greenland to Antarctica— an aperture as wide as the Earth. To make this image, our planet itself became the camera, peering out and looking back in time at ancient light that traveled to Earth—indeed, in this case looked out at time. Locally, the eight sites of the Event Horizon array were locked into synchronization by a GPS time standard and after their scans, five petabytes of data were developed into the “image” of the black hole. The mechanism is less a camera than a vast sensing surface: a different kind of difference engine. What we see in the resulting image is the orangey accretion disc of glowing gas being sucked into the void of M87*, outlined by all the non-void it is about to consume. It is 6.5 million times more massive than our sun and roughly 53 million light years away. The light that hit the Event Horizon telescopic sensing array was emitted during the early Eocene period here on Earth, a time of dramatic climate methane flux. Much closer by, there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way. That’s right, we have always been circling an omnivorous void.

Awash in Portis, in Situ in T-town, AL

[FILL YOUR HAND, YOU SON OF A BITCH]

a great gallery of Portisan talkers: brilliant and garrulous con artists, deliriously gifted fabricators, delusional mountebanks, disbarred lawyers, defrocked doctors, disgruntled inventors, dispossessed cranks, and disgraced dreamers who crawl out of the cracks and crevices of Trailways America with confident claims that they have the philosopher’s stone, the key to all mysteries. Or, more often, that they had it and lost it, or had it stolen from them but are close to getting it back.

And if the man had been not merely honest but also forthright, he would have offered that he had discovered the very elixir for which his disjointed and long-suffering search had first commenced, that it was in fact what he had conceived it in dreams to be, and that it had been here, the whole time, hidden beneath all the combustible lampooning and self-helpery by which he had tried to make sense of the need to traipse across the map in the first instance. It was and is America’s bequest to the seekers and the strivers and the holy confounded mess of leaders who are to be doing the bidding of the People who are also the Rabble, “it” being scripture, American scripture, from prophets as diversely voiced as any nation might plausibly hope for, and it impels and implores and inveigled against, attaining a kind of comic poetry that stands shoulder to shoulder with the blazing irascible sun itself.

Seismic Perturbance of subatomic habits

Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves. We’re more scientific now, we know it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.

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I have been assigned to the team charged with the core function - to keep the heart beating continuously - and my office is a sinecure against the evidently inevitable decay of bodily function. My salary is a negotiable instrument made out to the order of survival.

I used to seek refuge in the library of vaulted gothic ceilings, working through the introductions of James, Conrad, and Vonnegut, then catching the last bus back to a studio apartment to fall asleep reading the blue-collar dry heaving of Charles the postman, a self-portrait composed of rat-fucked destiny and sharp shards from shattered mirrors.

It was not until my second or third date with fate that I succumbed to its charms and relinquished my resolve on the vulnerable floor of the mausoleum, staring up at the stars to wonder what may come. Fate’s fingers numbly fumbled in the sepulcher fumes, and for one pregnant pause it seemed like I might get lucky, but to no avail and we soon both lost interest.

My God function keeps me right-sized and armed against the undisciplined squads of emotion whose raid on the inarticulate persists for so long as the hallucinations hold fast. The mature poet’s knave thievery implicates us all after all.

I return to the quartets at least every harvest moon and every Ash Wednesday. I have found if you listen hard enough, that voice still betrays St Louis, the timbre not so carefully cultivated and syntax not so roughly scrubbed as to entirely escape its provenance. From that scrupulous self-fashioning produced in me at most a didact’s idea of what a sage might sound like. The search continued.

It turns out “breaking down the door behind which sits my sequestered beloved ” is a poor metaphor and an even worse realized act, what with the police being called and the cuffs clapped tightly on all that mislaid pique. At least I made no claim on interrogating assumptions. Facts are not feelings. The world may be indifferent, but we are not.

We luxuriate in the awed silence that follows a comeuppance, like that time Nichols called out Mailer for misquoting Thomas re: the dying of the night - “Actually, it’s ‘gentle. Quietly’ wouldn’t scan, would it?” - and someone picked up the phone to report a murder. But at least then advertisements for myself was a marketing ploy. Now it has evolved into an entrenched identifying trait, like a bicuspid bite or prehensile tail, in obedience to which we all now make and self-publish our accounts.

Like two ships passing in the night, this endless enervating loneliness and this anxious cerebellum syndrome, one supplants the other, redoubtable tag-team and no alleviation in sight. For both ships - let’s just let the cliche breathe for a moment - the differential diagnosis mistakes cause for context and leaves the cure to soothsayers and fire-shouters. A middle path, just now visible in the midway journey of this life, offers otherwise. You may be done with the dialectic but rest assured the dialectic ain’t done with you. And the chattering teeth cannot constrain the climb of the tip of the tongue: not one more word. Truly.

Half the humanist he used to be, and three times the fun

He became, to use his word, “unapologetic” – in taste, in tone, in everything. - Wyatt Mason on F.S.

[F.S.] has made the brutal postmodern calculation that cynicism is the only defensible moral position. Any other relation to suffering sentimentalizes pain. His is an aesthetics that avoids aestheticizing human grief, sometimes in favor of aestheticizing human meanness. - Dan Chiasson on F.S.

He was what somewhat said of Nixon: “on old man’s idea of a young man.” - Dan Chiasson on F.S.

The subordination of properly first-order moral claims to second-order metaphorical illustrations, no matter how rowdy or rancorous the tone, crosses a line few poets wish to cross.

• somebody or other

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[insert new yorker cartoon caption]

That erased de Kooning drawing

All kinds of transference and all kinds of protestation . . . And more talk. Always more talk to be had and to be taken with.

On the formal evolution of American avarice, E.g., Gaddis on JR

 well for instance, a very basic thing, how to have the character of J R -- who is not very bright, he’s not a genius, he’s not a brilliant boy, he’s just a little, fresh, innocent, greedy little boy, who thinks, How can you make this work?  How can I get . . . but so he not start out -- and this has been a misunderstanding, often in reviews, calling him a little financial wizard -- really what happened in J R, he backs in to situations all the time -- in this essential thing, getting him off to a start, he has bought these bond issues, which have been long since defaulted, in other words, the company has borrowed money, which is what a bond is, then failed to, when it comes due, supposedly a bond issue comes due in 1990 and they don’t, now it’s 1999 and they still, they have never come through with it, they have never repaid, so the bond is pretty much worthless.  So he’s been seeing these and buying them for ten cents on the dollar -- five cents, six cents -- there are these bond issues floating around, and he’s bought these mainly because it says a thousand up in the corner, and he’s getting it for only $70, and he thinks, “Gee, this is a $1000 bond!” and he’s getting it for seven cents on the dollar.  And finally, when creditors close in, throw the company into bankruptcy -- because it’s been losing money all these years, and finally the creditors say, This has gone on long enough, they throw the company into bankruptcy -- any bondholders have first claim, the stock then is all washed out, and if you have owned stock in the company, you get nothing.  But the bondholders then get their interest converted into stock, such as it is.  So my problem was:  how do I get this boy, who’s not brilliant, get him started with a company shell.  So here is this Eagle Mills, a textile company, which has been in a state of semi-bankruptcy for years and just plodding along, and no one has ever bothered to call them into bankruptcy, and finally they do.  And he’s got these bonds, and suddenly he’s a major stockholder, and a very important part of that is, having done this without really knowing what he was doing, and becoming a major stockholder, he now believes he did this out of his own brilliance, and very much what J R is about is him believing his own myth, and he reads something in the paper about these “downstate interests” who have closed in and taken over Eagle Mills and he thinks, “Wasn’t I brilliant?”  And that was not what he had in mind, he didn’t know what he was doing, and so he constantly has these things where he backs into a situation, and then it turns out well for him, and he thinks, “Wasn’t I smart?  Wasn’t I clever?  Wasn’t I brilliant?”  And this to me is very much America too:  first, the chance element, but also the people of “limited” intelligence, shall we say, struggling around in this morass of capitalism, if you like, of investment, of nonproductive money-dealing, who prosper and produce nothing -- this is a very, very . . . J R is now almost 20 years old, I mean the book: this is what the record of the '80s became, lots of money floating around, producing nothing, and no one go on to it, even when I told them this is what’s coming, this whole idea . . . at least in the nineteenth century, in America, in the late nineteenth century -- there was corruption: in the government, in the railroads, bribes, all kinds of chicanery, and so forth -- but it produced railroads, it produced coal mines, it produced all kinds of things.  Now this same spirit of buccaneer capitalism produces nothing; in fact, by now what it has produced is the collapse of General Motors, the collapse of IBM, everything collapsing because the money is what was going on.  This is what J R is about, the nonproductive use of capitalism, where money is the only . . . in fact he invented junk bonds with his whole penny-stock fantasies.  Like Cassandra [chuckling], I told them, and they wouldn’t believe me