A Moral Question

In abstractions, the magic is thin -- more holes than net -- but casts wide. It's not nothing, but it is in limbo: less than material but more than immaterial. Like a list, or an argument, or the feeling of a kiss, the kiss aside. I don't want abstractions. They're just signposts of what I want: reified understanding, in the form of a netherworld as real as this one. A place I could hangout in and haunt, with the benefit that the beauty that here I struggle to find in the fog and then keep close would be built into the place, as everywhere obvious as the lined or unlined sky.

In the heated idle hours most of my present life is made of, I square the circle by discursively meditating, breeding thoughts and brooding around them, looking in at them radially; every so often brainstorming out of memory the simplest mathematical facts that smirk something mysterious, curiosities curiously more than accidental, or so they seem.

It's not emptiness I come to but it's not understanding either. Shouldering the path is a moral question: Should I need a reason to return to thoughts I entertain always with the backburning hope that I can possess them -- like marbles of worlds caught in a drawstring pouch -- but with the knowledge that I can't? Can anything intimate in the end be remembered as more than the nameless, orphaned joy (of having meant something once) it soon enough becomes?

Revitalization

I could tweak the algebra, smooth the curves, and stitch a better-flying kite. High and wide as a cicada song. A symbol of the tents underneath, and underneath of which conversations wander happily, one leg for comfort talk, the other taken with an odd energy for ideas. Thinktents, with everyone invited. Woodstock with books for music (and music and bonfires on the beach, come dusk); time to be social and time to retreat, at the same time. Found objects, the whole lot, and found subjects too.

But the field of play would still be this one, full of dirt clods and anthills. I'd make the field a park again, but how? I'd need to reinvent the town—from this dried one, from these beer and soda lives, on their long slope down from few dreams to fewer—from this no place, to a place. From utopia to eutopia. But how?

By holding to the text and threading it through the day. I'll invite friends with words and keep them with wine and words. Some words will slip their clothes off, and fuse for afternoons of jamais vu. We'll encourage them in this.

With more words, I'll ask the businesses if they might sell the town the town, rather than remedies for it. Rather than antidotes of unending strip malls of dead silk flowers and movies to rent and auto and marine supplies (sooner to forget and escape the place) and second-hand lives of clothes and tapes and toys that never mattered much the first time (sooner to store it away).

I'll stand tall enough to ask: Whatever the exchange rate, can we trade in this kitsch for an ideal or two? Can we relieve this drought?