MY WAY
An oxcart with tacos ready to eat rumbles down the streets of Santa Clara. Cell phone pictures swamp 911 dispatchers at Police Headquarters. At Kaiser Hospital robotic surgery pauses, and the face recognition algorithm at the pedestrian crosswalk just across the street is stymied by an ant wandering across the lens.
It will be the literary approximation of a commissioned sculpture for our Public Library. In the meantime I tickle the legs of the ant with a laser toy red dot that sends Twinkie tearing across the living room, all semblance of reality honed down to an orange bucket in the garage, snatched from its glory days at Home Depot, white stenciled letters: Let's Do This. Now surely this brings everything into focus.
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Yesterday is too far away for sun to burst through trees and Mr. Finch, a creature of habit, lands on the arm of my chair. But I'm not there. I've taken the cushions in. He'll have to go to the bird feeder, and soon, because the rain has gotten ahead of the forecast. Again.
Twinkie wants in and her tail is wet. Dark, dark sky.
It would be worth a foreboding sentence, kite tailing it: Fools of the world, unite! But it's been done.
Who, what or whatever is running this show pushes the limit. And it's like that lawn chair out in the rain – a vacant structure, rafters empty to the sky. Categories of philosophy are dominoes, black and white spots tumbling in heaps. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel is somebody else's game. But like I said . . .
So instead I'm inside playing keyboard, trying something new that came out of where? and after working out a comfortable fingering it suddenly seems familiar. It sounds like something Monk would do. Maybe he did. I'm not sure. “Steal!” Dizzy Gillespie told me. Who can own a tune once it gets out?
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The magic passes through almost undetected. Words have real meanings again. As before, I have no idea where they come from. The origin of a pine tree is temporarily sequestered in its cone, drops to the forest floor, sprouts, and is a mystery still for all that it grows. Who spoke the first word? Can any word overcome its ordinariness? How can it speak that first day? Yet here we are in the midst of very plain ones that in their hum drum way manage to outlive themselves.
To go on speaking in all keys at once, without a tonic that calls attention to itself, is a wonder. It's abstract stuff, is it not? that manages to draw interest without invoking a step ladder. I thought words somehow hid stuff on a higher shelf.
Conversations with my untutored wild friends, who obviously don't rely on such stuff, are magic. Then the everyday life of words in ordinary conversations with civilized unwild people regains meaning that no longer needs analysis. The very rhythm of it is a delight. It no longer matters, as it once did, if anyone else gets it because it's a polyrhythm, subject to many different ears, not all lashed to the same circadian post.
A supposed reality washes over us out of streaming media, live reports full of smashed up words garbled at warp speed, and I chop apples for breakfast. No radio plays in this kitchen. Why bother with all that? The third chakra absorbs everything. The third way to measure water for oatmeal is to listen. As the water hits the pan, somewhere around G# is enough.
I think maybe this might sound slightly crazy, a little off key. Well truly, it is. And rather enjoyable. Nothing much to it. Plain words. And as you read it right here, no ladder needed
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Weeding. It's just a shambles of ordinary bee's wax. That's how it starts on the keyboard. Hexagonal tones built on ancestral tunes that went together well, or words in their purities. In between the lines, or between notes, unexpected whirlpools burble and turp, landing pub darts right on target, right in the center, hedge backed against chimneys, and a trail of explanations left to limp. Soil feels so granular, eludes any definition of perfume, squished up against one of those unfortunate words, hiding its face somewhere in a phrase about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I've no doubt anyone reading this can hereby smell it, too. And the trailing echo of a glacier, scoured through Yellowstone, thumping its washtub rhythm, and the elephant buses prowling. The half dome sculpture, commissioned? Chiseled stone, out there in the sun after half fizzled rain. The good earth. A steam rollered tourist pizza topped with sliced symbology, scattered with bits of black logic, does it not tantalize?
Open the door and out comes Twinkie, ready to knead her blankie and warm my lap. Bach trembles in a corner.
All around today, peppering our imagination, were signs of nothing, all disappearing over an amusement of passing cars with swishing tires, tired ads on passing radios, carrying off absurdities easily forgotten in the placidity of weeding. Afterthoughts forgetting to breathe.
Each little green plant a universe of its own. Pulled carefully to bring up all the roots. There is no thought of murder. I am not god. Isn't this how I began? And these formalisms are the hexacombs of afterthought. It smashes hailstones. And when the side yard path of dirt and gravel stretches out, bereft of wayward roots and UGLY stones, stretching as to infinity, or at least out to the street, the great commissioned public statue resumes its parody. It's temperature is a chord in adjacent thirds, all whole notes, and the white Chinese plastic chair on the front porch assumes its seat of wisdom, settling patriarchs on scrolls and softly chanting bird songs.
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Pot holes are gravy makers, just add woes and stir, and that's close enough for boiler plate. The ads will sell themselves. The more we learn, the more there is to know – that's one. Eventually it all stops.
Perpetual motion is immune to human sacrifice.
Nonetheless, I will continue to remove the yolks. Wouldn't it be great if we found, after all these years, that pure water is the secret of intelligence, and then we learn from Albert Wilson that, indeed, the secret of lawns is water. Now the bits of sand start to cohere, or at least stick to our skin at the beach.
In this way, gradually, the opinions of others become as dreams, real enough until we wake.
I had a '38 Chevy coup with a rumble seat, I think that's what it was, in high school days. And big plans to do something with it, a fascinating thing, but never got much further with it. Dreams are more nourishing than pancakes, or even maple syrup. If you look at a '38 Chevy too hard, you can't hear John Philip Sousa's pipe dream, The Thunderer. And then the sky darkens, black clouds, scurrilous breezes, an etching and damned if it wasn't a rumble seat! There it was, all along. And eventually things make sense. My own way.
The white plastic abode of nothingness beckons. I sit. Mr. Finch, flying in from the backyard, comes to perch on the power line. I say hello. He moves in closer, landing on a rafter of the equipment trailer. It is all so – Bach is jumping up and down, waving pom poms, and foolishly he has chosen black and orange. He never met Oscar Peterson.
