someone i love told me that gregory alan isakov and lord huron are cowboys of the cosmos.
their first love affair was with the universe, lost in time and space—he loves their music because it’s all about longing and things bigger than yourself. i love it for different, smaller reasons. i love the women flitting through huron and isakov’s oeuvres, i love she always takes it black and the night we met. both discographies feel like love letters to women who aren’t exactly femme fatales, but aren’t destined to be wives, either. they’re love letters to transitory women, the travelling one deified in leonard cohen’s winter lady, arrangements of hollow plucked chords that ring out with no resentment, no anger, only melancholic joy at the moments the narrators got to spend with this ephemeral lover. and that woman, you know, is like the universe—never owned, never understood, but beloved nonetheless.
i poached a number of words from clarice lispector to describe love. poached and starlike are my favourites. but i don’t want my cosmic cowboys described by stolen words, although there’s an ironic satisfaction on it; i want to invent an otherworld so tangible the reader can touch it, i want sentences as malleable and unassuming as living bodies. i want to raise the hair on my reader's arms, i want them to hear your voice. the underbelly of my similes, the current beneath the high school graduation party. that tiny, insistent voice, murmuring: not yet, not yet. pasting in semicolons, correcting grammatical errors, all in service to the muse made man.
is it possible to write about life while maintaining a safe distance? of course not; writing is the artificial lens we apply to make sense of reality, in the absence of reality there would be no place for it. fool for love was not composed in thoreau’s woods, nor could “if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone” be borne from an isolated mind. the thing which forms poetry is a sparse gilded web of interpersonal relationships and interactions, as if life were growing above these tenuous ties and writing were growing down below. the planet i am from is an underworld of allegories.
my effort is to explain to you that things can be ephemeral—indeed, a human life is just that, one train stop between the first Beyond and the second—and still worthwhile. the task of my existence is to take the language of my home planet and put it into words you can understand. i am telling you, one person can feel more and do more and love more in sixty seconds than others can in sixty years. this is more in accordance with the mathematics of poetics than the mathematics of psychology but i believe in both and neither of those things. i believe that reality is constantly litigated by the observed and the observer.
you may notice i tend to be repetitive. it is only because i am never sure that i have articulated exactly what i mean, and think that in the retelling of my personal mythos overarching themes may become more apparent to you. i never strive for the ideal of perfect understanding; i strive for a lot of ideals, but digestible writing is not one of them. i don’t mind if my sentences cohere so long as they are glittering diamond dust and not a stack of unappealing carbon atoms which nevertheless follow familiar patterns from chemistry. you might not see the relevance of folk music here.
caveat: folk music is always relevant.
you wanted to marry me; so be it. but save your rings and promises of grandeur for women born of and to the real world, save your heart for someone who will know what to do with it. i am not a doctor. i stare blankly at your organs and talk about currents. i am not a psychologist. i listened to your fractured speech and produced this text in response, which doesn’t help either of us, which doesn’t move the needle in any way. maybe it’s an oyster. if so, it will produce a pretty bad pearl. ‘you’ is not a definite article, it transmutes and transfigures the words around it, it guides the lens of solitude with the idea of someone to talk to.
ingenuity is merely the ability to pick up this thread and give it different forms. should i take complex analysis? i asked. i think you can do whatever you want, you said. i think you can do anything. what i am writing is the colour of air. aimless and seamless, one line flowing into the next, subjects picked up and discarded in tandem. i am in a long dance with the universe. i am waiting to tap out, to give credence to my diminishing depression and equilateral visions, i am waiting for a sign that i was not made for this. that this was not supposed to be my life. no such image arrives. in the silence in the shadow in the silo we created a monolith of explanation and that explanation we termed god.
whatever i held did not come to me easily. whatever i held i let go eventually. there is someone, i assume, who understands the appeal of such a construction. i know why you had to go, croons isakov, not loud enough to be heard, but beneath all his mosaic paste lyrics. i never aspired to understanding but i always accepted it. i never grew small enough for you to comprehend. i never grew large enough to make sense to myself. so be it, my life isn’t over yet.
in the early mornings i read and suck my coffee through the gap provided by a crooked tooth and i look at leafless trees and sometimes think, there is a pulse here. there could be decades here if i were brave enough to accept them. the concrete cracks and swelters beneath my feet. every place i sought as sacred was defiled by the laundry list of subjects i paraded through its doors. i built a series of chapels to the same god. the only place in which anything survived was my bedroom. i don’t trust the ancient world since i don’t believe in ruins only ruination.
diaristic writing is constrained by the facts and the constant demand of blank pages to articulate how you feel. i often write about events. i follow a logical sequence from one step to the next. i analyze a series of reactions and the steps we might have taken to avoid the result. i do not know how i feel about it. i learned how to demonstrate i feel by mimicking my observations, my subjects of study. i am a colosseum of observatory mechanisms. nothing i came up with was unique to me. i only wanted to show you i could be one of you. this is not an autobiography. this is a eulogy.
this is for my cosmic cowboys, who witnessed that list of contradictions and composed an opera.
i never wanted anyone to see me raw and bloody. i only wanted to conscript language to do that translating for me, to show you a vision of tragedy which conforms to expected narrative. i would rather you not see me blown to bits; it isn’t as pretty as my invented poisoning. the second viscera ends up in your bed i’m gone the morning after. it is the reason you can remember me kindly. when i imagine myself i see a flash of long dark hair. when i see you the door is still open, you’re cross-legged on the bed. when i see you, it is in penelope’s image. you still imagine that i will come back.
you can decide a lot of reality for yourself based on what you choose to believe. facts are fragmented and not necessarily always in service of truth, conversely what we agree upon to be truth does not always agree with the facts. one physics textbook which acknowledges this disparity opens with all these experimental facts are only approximately true. if truth is untenable, how can we decide on the accuracy of our approximations? if truth is unreachable, on what grounds do we have the right to look for it? i think it is one of those ideals worth holding. i think the answer much be in the attempt. i think we should go looking even if the night is dark and full of broken glass.
the broken base of a whiskey bottle also looks like a star.