Van Gogh's ghost

clouds hang grey and heavy like bad memories, and the sunshine of perfect clarity burns strong and yellow straight through to the unbelieving ground. rain is the stuff of hungry desire, when memories become too great to contain and they collect in a weight too great to be held by the mind, come flowing forth, flowering like a California field in April. the shards of memory fall to the lowest possible point and flow down to the streams of consciousness, overflowing the banks of comprehension in dreams. the ground is like the canvas our mind chooses upon which to splash the gaudy floodwaters of the dream state, and as the artist knows, any canvas can only hold so much color. Van Gogh already tested those limits, and his own canvas was one severely overburdened with dark clouds and skewed visions. when, in his or any case, the palette no longer has an outlet in the dream world, colors begin to spill over into the waking life, a flood of image with no discernible boundary between creation and creator, life imitating art imitating life imitating art.

dreams and feelings settle upon the base of our brain stems like rocks on the ocean floor, and accumulate over time, filled in between them are unrecognizable fragments of other dreams and feelings, the dreams and feelings of others, spoken, told, remembered from stories, an unrecognizable slurry of minute memories that serve as a supporting cast to the larger and more immediate memories. this conglomerate shifts with time and tide, bearing with the ages the incomprehendable weight of the ocean of life, and form one solid sedimentary block of a life lived, dreamt, and felt. it stays under the sea, unseen for millenia, until the inner workings of the Earth configure to make the sea rise and make the ground the masses walk upon one day, the solid and unquestionable foundation of all of life that comes subsequently. Van Gogh (or Van Gogh's ghost) knew this phenomena all too well. he collected sediment and great polished and jagged stones for years, while his life probably felt like it bore the weight of all of the oceans combined, and eventually succumbed to drowning or intracranial pressure of aeons. now the images created during that time adorn walls of museums worldwide, walls of humble homesteads, books on the beauty of life and nature, and postcards bolting from coast to coast, continent to continent; a foundation upon which to stand and not question the creation of, though during the time of creation it all went by unnoticed like the cementing of pretty stones within the ocean floor, like must be happening right now somewhere, everywhere, on Earth. the tortured artist and the churning sea bed going unnoticed, until one day hence to be held as magnanimous displays of life, as the only prototype we have to judge all subsequent works of beauty.

12/26/2010

saw the Panamints
covered with snow
and smiled

a hollywood story (longevity pt. II)

i was sent to hollywood
by god
to give a dollar
to the poor elderly lady on fairfax

in front of canter's jewish deli
which has been around
since 1931

and my uncle said
"now that's longevity"

a hollywood story, prose version

the childless wanderers meander down morning sidewalks in the impossibly polished city. a hint of urban renewal hangs in the air on this end of fairfax, once the jewish district, as in all cities a tumble down low rent district inhabited by hipsters looking to strike gold where only bronze has been lain underfoot by the gods. an unbelievably young and beautiful girl walks by at a glacier's pace, her arm providing support for an elderly man, a cane providing support on the opposite side of his body. i am almost moved to tears by this touching display, trembling beauty, a sharp contrast in generations that I somehow feel directly in the middle of, figuratively and in reality. the girl wears the uniform of the modern day urban upstart, complete with colors erratically splotched about that are only found in nature deep within tropical jungles. the garb and her sexually able figure suggest one-night stands, mixed drinks, and dj'ed 80s-themed dance parties. a vivacious urban flower saddled with a slow and staggering moth. i cannot help but to smile once they stumble past, this sweetheart of life's rodeo doing for her grandfather what he must've done for his grandmother back in poland or wherever. and i notice her legs and ass and how they imply "fuck me now." my mind immediately recognizes the contradiction and recoils.

(bollocks. these women walk around in floral aromas and colors evoking the sexuality of life and pollenation. one of my favorite creatures of the wild is the hummingbird: sprightly, non-earthbound, territorial, ritualistically aggressive in mating. in some skewed way the hummingbird is nature's symbol of unbridles sexuality, a phallic beak that penetrates every soft and yielding flower to spread life. i'll be the hummingbird, you be the flower, let us make life, take life, create life, and spread life.)

an elderly vagrant pushes her metal cart south down fairfax. probably a leftover from doing movie extra work or daytime television. hell, for all i know she was one of Johnny Mathis' backup singers in her halcyon days. being a bit scruffed-up looking myself, maybe with a hint of urban Buddhadom, she seems comfortable seeking my help. Henry Miller said if you are ever in a pinch go to the poor for help because the wealthy will not even look in your direction. this may be the impulse she acts upon, especially since her facade suggests many a year pushing her metal cart along cracked streets, and she has adapted the faculties necessary for survival. i have no change, but i do have the feeling we are of the same order: the seeker; unfortunately no one got to her in her youth and convinced her to flee to the mountains or desert and she's spent most of her life sleeping on pavement with flourescence burning her cerebrum all through the night, every night. i find a dollar, hand it to her, she says in response "god bless." "god bless." a favorite phrase of mine, a universal code of appreciation, one not an atheist or agnostic could dare to take away because even the daringest nonbeliever knows it is the most touching sign of thanks and goodwill known to man.

the banished immortal

endlessly wandering
from east to west
the banished immortal
fills a bag with regrets
and throws it over shoulder
well behind
the mind
far behind
whence he left

(T'ang Dynasty poet Li Po, also known as " the banished immortal")

haiku (a newfound form)

(recently borrowed Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus from my local library; I found in the plaintive wording and imagery of his purely Americanized haiku something grand and elating, just like his prose possesses for me; thus spawned a new endeavor, though I see that I've been writing in this way for a long time, just now finding a new guiding force for a new discipline that the haiku form requires; here are some samples of recent attempts)


wind is nothing
but moving air-
think about it

*

the last oak and maple leaves
race each other in the streets
one final gasp of colorful breath

*

studying maps-
life in
two dimensions

*

shaking branch-
the bird
flew away

*

so many shooting stars-
where they going off to
in such a hurry?

*

starlings on the wire
sing in myriad voices-
little black songbooks

*

a lonesome sparrow
fighting the wind
lands on a powerline

*

famously distrustful of
scientists and historians-
the dreamy poet

*

Joshua tree sings
a hollow song
in November coldfront

*

first snowfall in the Sierra
looks like heaven
from the desert floor

*

trees in the backyard
gone to seed-
sparrows feed on the ground

*

everything in a
haze, a swampy
forest of dreams

*

mountains in clouds,
mountains of clouds-
what's the difference?

*

autumn in the desert
watching ravens dive
in a stripmall parking lot

*

seagulls in the Valley,
so far
from the sea

*

every single
Van Gogh brushstroke
is a haiku

*

on the museum balcony
staring at the sea-
God's artwork


*

frail and submissive
like a child
in another's arms

*

the great tideless
ocean of time-
desert dust on my car

*

show no pity
for the dying
deer, fox, or sparrow

*

heat grows faint
in the long
shadows of dusk

*

cold birds in the mountains
flying west
don't care that it's Christmas

*

sifting the fine sand
with your fingers,
feeling ages slip through

*

compassionate and ascetic,
each Catholic saint
a lightskinned Buddha

*

each in his
own holy place
under the moon

*

three jets' vapor trails
made a crease
in the morning sky

*

we are all
existentialists, because
we all exist

october desert journals

I.

seen the sun rise a few too many times.
when the anticipation, the apprehension, of a new day becomes so great that you feel you must beat its arrival by getting up well before it comes around, to triumph in a human yet inhumane fashion over the forces of the cosmos to prove some kind of superiority through an exercise in absolute inferiority, standing directly beneath the middle stud of Orion's belt and attempting to feel as if with eyes that you can take it all in and own it with a name. the sunrise is owned by the canyons and mountains and the turning globe, not a singular human psyche scratching away for posterity and love, 'cause the sun's risen somewhere else just the same as the sun has set for millions and at the exact same time, somewhere a single tear is shed into the sea by someone staring westward to watch the sun disappear. up before the sun like one person could possess the totality of the cause of life as we know it.

II.

a whisper became a scream; the buzzing sawing sounds of crickets are many in number in the scrubby dry brush, and commingle to sing a deafening roar, one unbreakable hum across the night that is synonymous with sleep, that is harmonious with dreams. a single tear fell in the sea, a signal for the deluge that is always to come; one concentric ring rang out and then retreated inward like a frightened child, before the ocean became a canvas so abstract. one man was born of a single cell, metastasized into a conglomerate, became one million times the size and grew appendages of bone, flesh, cartilage, and blood, spread the seed out among the grasses, forests, swamps, and mountains, and created something unstoppable, a whisper turned into a deafening roar. a pebble dropped from a mountain top dislodged a rock of comparable size and set into motion the drifting of the continents, the collision of borderlines, abolishing the idea of separate, disparate, of differing entities we so often ascribe.

III.

forces combine and conspire to create, to destroy; a world created is another destroyed, and destruction is an ultimate agent of rebirth. in the heart of a dying animal there no longer flows the cascading fluid of the lifeforce, but the decomposition and feeding power of the freshly lain skin is a creation in itself.

IV.

an awe-inspiring mountain was not created in a roar and set in place, more like in a series of infinite whispers undetectable to all but the most minute seers. and what is a roar but 10,000,000 whispers combined and conspiring?

V.

distant voices, heard from afar, may well be the whispers of conscience, consciousness, demons or angels of the mind. you don't know what they are saying, whether they are speaking to one another or to you or to themselves, your inner ear tuned to a far-flung frequency to try to sense the voices that come from afar or within. just as to hear an owl singing at dawn and attempt to get a sense of what the world is trying to convey, something about darkness, somberness, stillness, inhumanity, the absolute reality that goes on without us. a distant voice from across a sandy plain diffused in dry wind and as spread apart and scattered as the grains of sand that carry on the wind, shattered like windswept rock, and just the same the meaning has been slightly skewed to our minds, we don't know what to call it once it has been one thing and disassembled into another form, hence the uselessness of distinctions. a voice may just be the soft music of the wind bent to a familiar tone or tune, but we can call it a voice, perhaps because we've sought the song the wind seemed to be singing to us. a voice in the wind or hidden in a rocky stream: to hear you must not listen to but through the surface facade and find the words hidden not beneath or above but within.

longevity

how much do we really know?

*

5 billion years of mountain building
and we marvel at skyscrapers
mountains scrape the sky too, ya know

*

"first level your own mind
then the earth will be level
even unto Mount Sumeru"

*

there is no beginning, no end
only a flash of lightning
or a drop of dew

*

how much do we really know?

in bosch's garden

an eschatology

no less complex

than the stratigraphy of Pompeii

yet as readable

as teen romance

deeply embedded in our cryptobiology

lunar dust

and all the detritus

beneath us

six billion bodies

writhing

in Bosch's garden

in various states of disconnect

each a tectonic converging

on the verge

of volcanism or subduction

seduced

by no less

than life's alchemical devotion

to ending

smoking

on the corner of sepulveda and rayen
taking in the amnesia of that which is artificial
snubbed out a cigarette on the side of a painted brick building and flicked the butt end into the street, at that place where the blacktop meets the curb, so when the rains come the little fiberglass boat will be able to take that journey down the l.a. river, swim with the contaminated fishes, be released at sea somewhere down by long beach and go on to ride the currents all the way to the phillipines, my dna all over the end of that filter, so a living part of me will be along for the ride. what do people think about leaving their saliva all over the streets of life, every flicked burned out stick of nicotene on all the avenues, boulevards, freeways, interstates, parking lots, parkways, driveways of life, leaving little love notes out of an infatuation with mortality, always flirting with the end of things, our own flame so aromatic and divine, snubbed out at some indefinable future point, leaving behind the great golden state of dust and smoke and too many people.
snubbed out and rotten, the landscape smolders and molds over, leftover from heartier feasts, a glowing orange flame so aromatic and alive, now rubbed out and suffocated, all's left is tarry and dead, smelling something awful. the landscape begs and whimpers like an untrained dog up on its hind legs scratching for a scrap of the good stuff. all of it is begging, begging for release, for relief, for refuge from the heat of the blacktop that sparkles with broken glass that melts back into sand in a post-desert sun.
nighttime, broken bottles - remnants of a sordid evening alive at one time, the emerald and chestnut glinting shards beckon with the headlights of each passing car. all's silent, until a jet rips the sound barrier or a siren breaks from its sleep like a bat into flight. dread the sounds of this Goya scene, because at some point you will come to rely on them for solace. despise the shards of glass; at the same time the texture underfoot is like that of a stony beach, you will come to love it. dogs' barking into the post-midnight inky soup will come to be as the birds of the forest, so much so that you will know each yowl by name and face. each baby crying across the stucco and brick corridors will come like that wind that blows off the ocean and across your skin, chilling and comforting at the same time. you'll go to sleep one early autumn night and sleep the sleep of restful things, wake up to see the mountains on fire, go about your day as if the rapture were not rolling down from the north. amazing how the fires of fall can roar across the horizon and blot out the sun, cover entire neighborhoods in a blanket of soot (continuing the cycle of transformation of all things) and not invoke so much as a collective turn of the head in recognition of a very tangible something, the only real thing most people will ever witness in their urbane lives. and the mountains will smolder like a snubbed out 7,000,000 ton cigarette, as a reminder: we are merely wingless insects in trackless deserts beneath a huge magnifying glass

smoking

sundays

sunday has its own character, unique among the other days. if a man were to fall asleep for a year or a decade, and if he awoke, bearded and bedraggled, on a monday, he'd think nothing of it. but if he happened to wake on a sunday, surely his first thoughts upon recollecting his senses would be the confirmation, by sight and feeling, that it was the holy day, and not mourn the time lost but rejoice in the special sunlight and otherwordly choir of the sabbath.
i do not know if it is a human thing or a natural thing, whether man just decided upon the 7th day to consecrate, or if something about the angle and quality and consistency of the light just made the 7th day something inherently special. to put it another way: was a sunday chosen by man for the diffuse and perfectly angular solar glow? or did the atmosphere of the day change its character to meet the demands of the pious mass? which came first, or which was subsequently changed as a result?

simple twist of fate

knowing what we know (or think we know) about the universe, the creation, the random acts of indifferent bodies in random configurations of time, space, place, origin, and direction, how can this body, these thoughts, be my own? surely not. must be another minor step, a miniscule turning of the gears of serendipity, when something beautiful is uttered, when someone laughs out loud for no reason, when the clouds in the distance poke little looking holes for the sun so the beautiful light can come streaming down in beams and dance off of those meaningless particles of dust that seem to always populate the air. and it is all just chance, what we consider beautiful, what sickens us, what we see, how we see, when we see, what it is that stands before us at the moment when we choose to see, strictly chance. but chance can be fateful, as much as we are defeated and left coughing in the dust by chance, we also meet our grace by pure chance, none of it has been orchestrated, but we can still call it fate, because it is just how the coins fell, and nothing more.