Startled by Existence

Fun with bikes and Imagination

The following is transcribed direct from tape; I recorded it while riding my bike to a janitorial night job – No hands!

3:45 AM 9/9/86

(singing) Oh … sirens in the tranquil mix … When will you come to fix the throb? Stuck between the stars and swing, lovely birds and everything .. Oh why did the air have to tear, why was the beauty wrent?

(spoken)

I wake into a Remington blue silver-night sky; full moon – with a purple velvet ring around. I mount my Voyager and ride into the triple dot (Orion). There is a flush of stars besides, though the weaker made obscure by the brightness of the moon. It is a night to read print. And I would on my bike if it weren’t for the chug holes. A night of wind and middle-warm and short sleeve shirt and black silhouette of tree throb. I’m riding down an old familiar alley with the tambourines (crickets) ablaze, though I do not think they are quite the tambourines they were a month or two ago. Oh, how I love the toss and tear of tree form by night. When the moon is pressed flat and firm behind the shaking mass, and I ride by and under fast, looking up …like a car speeding past a picket fence. I see the shimmering of grass skirts – leaping hay bails, I hear clacking rhythm of the train within my head, something kike a kddddd- shhh kdkdkkkkddd … shaking shimmer. I think of the two subways passing (Chicago) and the blinking flash of people that you see but don’t and ghost and strobe and gasp) passing under the moon-flowing under it, I find one lone leaf – etched clear and held crisp for a millisecond then swept into a shimmering blur, a shattering, a “pdd tchtch” rhythm of trains. Almost so that it becomes …. (Continues into incoherence.)

Tonight I ride my bike up the cliff of the world. It isn’t such a hard thing, though it did take some getting used to as a kid. I remember when I learned that our world is a ball; I thought of people sticking out from it like pins in a cushion. It was hard to grasp that we should not slide off the sides, sticking out and unsupported as we were. They told me that gravity created the sensation of a perpetual down, no matter where you were on the globe. Even so, I find it find it great fun to forget gravity for the time and consider my standing in relationship to space. So now I’m riding north. With a mental kick, I “lay” on my back and ride upward and straight. The idea works pretty well except for the things coming at me. I quite expect them to loose their grip and come smashing down on me.

Given the terror, I turn my bike. Now I ride on the side of the world. I remember some man at fair who rode a motorcycle on the inside walls of a high-walled bowl. I feel like that man, except that I have no centrifuge to pull me out and against the sides. One big pebble under the tire and I might lose my grip and slide side wards and off in to space. Turning south I ride straight down. I’m thankful for the wind in my face, good brakes, and a little friction. Even so, I worry that the back end of my bike might just flip over my head.

Now I ride upside down on the world. I know I can’t achieve full upsidedowness if I see North as the top; I would need to be riding my bike on the South Pole… but why should the thing we call North be considered the top. Is it some kind of European chauvinism that made us first think of North as the top of the world? Couldn’t all our maps and models make just as much sense if South were the top and the sun rose on the west? This is funny. How, even given space, we think top, bottom, and sides – right, left as if the thing were a box. And couldn’t we just as readily envision our planet rolling like a tire, and on a track like a Ferris wheel. Why not see our solar system as a rip saw, slicing space with a vertical cut.

Riding upside down is the most fun of all. I think of myself as a stunt pilot, skimming the world close and upside down. Last night I achieved the sensation for near ten minutes. When I flipped back to normal I felt like you do when to take off roller-skates and put on street shoes, the normal thing feels wrong.

Fun with bikes and imagination, part 2:

Another night of zoom and swoosh. Rapid race around like a bobsled over asphalt … Oh how I love these streets by night, steeling under stars and riding like a hawk through the valley of homes, bodies shelved and slow, while I go like a ghost between their lives. Forget the place by day. …

And I’ve gotten quite used to this riding upside down. In fact, I’m on the next step; I see myself this way while walking, or riding in the car. The car thing is a special rush. High speed lane change as I wave to other inverted folks.

Then there’s the flips. I start in normal (ground at the bottom) than roll to the left. The ground goes to wall, and then to ceiling and over to the other wall. I do a log roll, ever seated in my seat. And now, today …a new sensation. No longer will I ride my bike to work zooming past the trees and homes. Now the trees and homes zoom at me as I, like an arcade game, see myself as the fixed point in the cosmos. With muscles crunched and pushing hard -- I churn the world beneath my wheels.

Key to my poem life

Riding to the rhythm of the right brain takes:

an old clunky bike

a “C” in math,

and, a job cleaning urinals

till 4AM.

So if you see some monk

spouting visions of

angelic thorough-fare,

Don’t check the ardor of his prayer,

Check beneath his eyes

for circles.

From the Journal of the Kirk – “no hands”. -- On my bike and riding. The Cumulous are climbing and the asphalt speeding under .. Or, as it is, on the roof of my inner eye. Given that the image cast in my eye is upside down -- the asphalt streams just under my eyebrow like spackled jet stream while the sky, big and full, fills the bottom like lake. The sky in my eye is one Great Lake, Dear, and my cheekbone a dam!

This is really strange. I look at the whole outside world, and know that it is in me. These clouds and blue, the helmet blur, the blur of nose … all these cars and curbs, limbs, this chuck hole coming ……. Woo, a little close!

(Pause)

So, all this big circle of world and branch and sky stuffed in me. Talk about camel through a needle’s eye. Whole cities have crawled through my needle. I think of the Dutch boy and the dike, his finger stuck in the hole. When he lets go it will trickle, pour, then smash to flood. But that ain’t my eye. One quick flutter and a visible universe pops in, full and big, with no whoosh for the rush.

I am a wall, with pinhole pierce, bigger than the outside world. Not really. … I just don’t get it. How is it that this outside world is miniature within, and all with this terrific sense of space? I see "the thing" as "out there" -- having a real sense of big, hard, and distance. But the thing that is, is behind my nose, played like movie on a curved screen. Dear! And a double feature.

 

 

Oh what a cavity am I

To take inside and flip the sky

Tossing to and fro on retina field.

Oh what a cavity I am

Consuming rye and ham

Whisking bits, to finger tips

And inner parts of eye.

­­­­

Terra Hall has tilted in,

The lines are drawn,

They cast within,

And image in invert.

A double light shines about.

One warm on skin, has filtered in,

The other filters out..

(From the Journals of the Kirk)

Consider it the fault of a fly, or Stan the man on the trampoline at the Independence Day parade. ….

I remember as a kid wondering how a fly might fly within the confines of our car as the thing went down the road at sixty. Seemed to me that the fly should leap from the dashboard only to be smashed against the back glass. It just didn’t make sense that a fly could fly in lazy patterns at over sixty miles per hour to keep up with us. Dad explained the thing to me this way. Not only were we moving, but also the entire mass of air trapped in the car. The fly might have had a harder time in a convertible or with open windows. But as moved the air – so moved the fly. The fly was caught and ‘pushed’ in a medium of movement, and suffered none for the ware. Even so, I considered it great fun to see the flight of the fly in relation to the ground. Zooming high speed loops.

To be honest, the phenomenon still puzzles me. But I’m glad that it works. Imagine getting on a plane and walking down the aisle. Lift your foot too far, you might step fifty feet – or jump an inch and get pegged against the tail. And if the stewardess spilled ice! Ouch!

----

I feel small. I have just started reading the book by Albert Einstein entitled “The Theory of Relativity.” He says in the forward that his theory is not hard. He says he will explain it in a way that anyone with an eighth grade education can follow. Well, I’ve read the book and I’ve only made it to about the fourth grade. The introductory thoughts and illustrations do make sense. But when he stretches the concept of relativity from motion (or distance) to time, my ability to see time or aging as relative to motion and the speed of light falls apart …(ramble edit)

So if I get it …

Both speed and direction have their meaning in relationship to some other thing -- A fixed point or something against which to measure the movement. But it almost seemed to me that Einstein was positing a world in which there are no fixed points. The whole world is drifting, moving, spinning, or converging, but none of that motion can have meaning unless we just assign some point as fixed. Even space or time is sliding all over the map, but there is no map. If this has any relationship to relativistic ethics, I do not know. I may be guessing where I do not know.

Just the same, I’ve been having a whole lot of fun. First, I envision the Earth. Modern science would tell us that the earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours, and revolves around the sun once a year. Even these time terms are relative to something, namely, the action they describe . But that’s not my thought.

Given the size of the sun in relationship to the earth it is more natural to think of our sun as the fixed point. And it makes some sense to do so, because the model is relatively simple. But we could as readily declare the earth to be static, and measure all movement against the fixed skin of the earth. Given that declaration, the sun would revolve around the earth … every twenty-four hours! And talk about a day … the sun would rotate on its axis once a year. Of course, the whole model gets more complicated. Not only would the sun revolve around the earth, but the rest of cosmos as well. Some comet speeding across the heavens would loop whilly-nilly around the earth, tail pointed in the same direction. And the planets would then sketch some outlandish “Spirograph” patterns of grand dimensions in the heavens. They would circle the sun even as the sun circles the Earth, much like our moon circles both the Earth and with the earth. Motions that had at one been complex but chartable would be rendered bizarre and immense … but still it could be done.

Today I saw a tail wag a dog. Not just the dog, but every dog in the cosmos. For a moment, I envisioned that some point in the dog’s tail to be the fixed point in the Universe against which all other motions are measured. Rather than living on a planet zooming through space but revealed in relative calm and littered with resting dogs with happy tails, I lived in a cosmos swinging wildly back and forth against the fixed point in the dog’s tail. And now I consider the fixed point to be on the very tip of my nose. I turn my head, but I do not. My body and the world twist under me like rope. I am shaking the world. I bounce it like a ball, I am spinning it around me. I am getting sick.

………………………..

More:

If I shine a flashlight, the light from the tube in hand rushes out at whatever the speed of light is. I guess that means that if I point my light at Alpha Centuria, in four years or so, something of that light should pierce the star. HA – fair chance of seeing that against the blinding skin of star! As kids I remember pointing our flashlight at the burning Milky Way of Placerville, high in the Sierra Nevada’s. Someone said that if we hit a star direct, it would cause the star to fall. Of course we had no concept of the speed of light or the distance, but I must admit, one time lying on my back out a pup tent and aiming at stars, I did "cause" a falling star. Little did I know that that was only the result of some kid, at the turn of the century, aiming a lantern at the sky!

So now, I think of myself in relationship to the tube of light speeding out at space at so many thousands of miles per second. Couldn’t we reason, that in relationship to the front end of that tube, we are racing backwards at the speed of light. If either point could stand as our referent, it stands to reason. So tonight, I do not just aim at the stars and push light forward with a button. No, I’m zooming the planet backwards against the fixed face at the beginning of the tube. Now here is the question. I remember seeing some film in grade school in which it was suggested that if some guys in space traveled faster than the speed of light they would also age at a different rate. They would come back to the planet young, while everyone else had aged. I never understood the logic of this, though I guess it had something to do with the idea that time and speed share some correlation that I don’t get. Anyway. Tonight I’m speeding the planet this way and that, as I turn my flashlight at the heavens. Zoom xxxx thousands of mile this way, then urrrrrrrr, rapid reverse the other way. And speeding back against or earlier direction. So now I walk backward holding the light forward. Does that mean we are now traveling one step faster than the speed of light!

Indeed, I do feel to be getting younger (or aging less fast) but I guess I’m pushing the whole planet with me at near the same speed, so against us all aging less fast together, I don’t see much difference.

United Airways Napkin Ditty:

White blister build and bubble-sud sear

Islands adrift on the sea

Drop cookies spread

On a lead-crystal bed,

Flat on the wrap of invisible air;

Oh, see below

As lake Ontario

Floods the sky

With a backward rain.

Pneuma Soup:

The clouds

clip, clip, climb

In minute hand time.

Blinded:

He steals a peek

Through a hole in the wall

we call the sun.

The Code:

A seed is power

Spewing tower

Stink, or weed,

or common flower.

Willows are waterfalls in the round,

Pines are pinnacles pouring down.

Rocks are quadriplegic deaf-mutes, heavy with praise.

Cricket and cicada calling

A walling falling on dawn --

Black-audio, rainbow snow

Falling like a blizzard in my ear.

The trees of the Lord

fall upward, into predestined form

They tumble in the freedom

of the open-wind and warm,

But even molecules of oak

Know,

when they reach

into the liberty of air,

they dare not reach like elm.

Arkansas :

The trees are thick and stiff

Like hair on a hot brown hound -

And we be fleas between the shafts.

“Author” ( from the on-the-napkin” series):

He made the plankton

Polly-dust of sea;

But we killed

the author of life.

Answer: Mushroom

Question: What is a flume of fertile septic sod and rain, a whirling gill, a rubber flame?

A: Willow

Q: What is a waterfall in the round, the sound of hay bails leaping?

A: Tulip.

Q: What is crimson bullet packing pistil,

splayed on the concrete air?

A: Moon:

Q: what is a blue light special, lunatic sharp,

spread like luminescent whey, on water.

A: Frog

Q: What is a self-inflating bag-pipe, a bubble gum lover with staccato scream.

A: Beach

Q: Where does comedian Steven Wright keep his sea-shell collection?

A: Stephen Wright

Q: Where does God store jokes?

River ( From the on-the-napkins series)

A river is

a contained freedom

from a Family float trip June 22, 2002

I have seen the blood of Terra running red,

albeit rare

and more like rust, than crimson,

colored in the rinse of ruddy plains and that strange

Cream-of-Tomato dirt, in Oklahoma.

 

I’ve seen it too, where her blood runs blue

like mirrors held against a Colorado sky:

But here in Arkansas,

beneath the paddle stoke

the open veins of Terra tumble

in the stuff of our state color:

 

Camo.

 

Indeed, this is the kingdom of the chloroplast;

Every shade of chlorophyll on God’s green earth

is dripping from the paddle blades, pouring over jaded rocks --

carpeting the hills, exploding like whipped algae

with highlights of celery, or the little

moss on train sets, only big.

 

Here is the stuff of new green and old-green,

teen–green and China,

green tea and burnt-pea,

limon, and lima,

pine-tree and kiwi,

forest and kelp,

verdant and virile with

spiral of vine –

 

Oh,

Here is the stuff of

leaf blade

and night shade,

grass snakes, and hoppers,

ten thousand lawns and

leprechaun daughters

(Laughing as they pour,

without canoe

down mint colored rapids.)

 

Oh,

Here is the stuff

of olive and eye and tornadic sky

and bullfrogs and soldiers and

old moldy cheese.

SNEEEZE…

 

Oh,

Here is the stuff

of emerald and Kelly

‘n smelly fresh things,

bean stalks and belfries

and twiggies with wings.

 

Oh here

is the dead naked light

all clean, cold and gold

splashing

back at the sun,

cell over cell

all virid

with life.