Luscious

Monday

• Wind rips clouds revealing sun reflecting from whitecaps.  Clarity melts into confusion as senses merge and stray.  Sounds waft pure scents, fresh growth glistens like marketplace fruit.  Immense desire to grasp, engulf, and drink this luscious moment.  A drunken mixed feast of experience, perhaps soon forgotten as giddiness later fades into memories of just another marvelous spring day.
• English has a word for everything.  Mixing of senses is “synesthesia,” famous in literature and psychology and physiology.  Knowing a word is not experience, but it can focus an unusual perspective.  So I can apply it to how I felt while walking along a happy carnival of so infinite an array of brilliantly mixed sensations that I could never separate nor adequately describe their elements.  

Tuesday

Like Rimbaud’s off-cast boat I drift

Propelled by currents uncontrolled

Enmeshed adventures, swept swirled confused,

Dreams mixed and fade pure haunting songs

.

Not quite so drunken, on this day

An older self _ less wild more free

Joints rebelling force a pause

Aching eyes ask ears relief

.

Sweet suns, rot tide scent, life and death

Velvet clamors, neon breeze

Same as back then, as everywhere, I hope

Same as tomorrow evermore

.

There’s more as much in one square mile

Than on this world’s vast seven seas

Swift single sparrow foretells falls

Completely as far shores, soft moon

.

It’s not bright sight, pure sound, bleak touch

Encompass full what I exist

In observation consciousness

Alone, engulfed, becalmed, amazed

Wednesday

• Surely this scene would provide marvelous lunch _ azaleas are worth five stars in anyone’s rating.  Humans themselves may or may not be primarily visually oriented, but this culture certainly is.  Even the most pungent images of Rimbaud _ whale rotting in salt marsh, snake falling putrid from tree as insects devour it _ remain as pictures rather than scents in memory.  Normally, to establish even a glimmer of synesthesia seems to begin with eyes leaking beyond sight.
• With effort, I can often synthesize my moment _ a full experience of ear, nose, taste, skin, muscles, organs, mind, and _ hardly ever least _ eyes.  But recalling that unity proves difficult or impossible.  Only in dreams does everything return, mixed and tenuous, but overwhelming.  Nevertheless I continue to make attempts at being totality, only rarely succeeding even a little.

Thursday

Joan Barbara and I sit gazing, aligned with other human relics, at the sparkling azure carpet spread before us at Northport Harbor.  Behind dogs frolic in soft grass, children scream happily from the playground.  Along the walk in front of our bench, uncounted young couples stroll hand in hand, all but oblivious to surroundings.  Heavy winter garments have been discarded,  revealing attire as gaudy as spring itself.

“Ah, hormones of youth,” sighs Barbara.  “Rose-colored glasses on everything.”

“There’s some older people too,” Joan asserts defensively.  “It’s springtime after all.  Time for love.”

“Well, I do think we tend to see the world more though our hormones than our senses,” I venture.  “When you’re happy and content the weather doesn’t matter much.”

“The weather matters to me!” states Joan.

Barbara enjoys a bit of a tweak.  “Maybe you’re just not in love anymore…”

“I don’t think she ever had a pair of those special glasses, Barbara.  Family trait to remain steady and rational.”

“I like flowers and spring a lot,” Joan glances at us in annoyance.  “I love flowers.  And when the sun is out, I’m always happier than when it’s raining.  I can’t help it, weather affects my mood.”

“Well, I think those two there,” Barbara subtly points to a particularly demonstrative pair, “wouldn’t notice a hurricane right now.”

We all grow silent for a while, probably each thinking that it doesn’t much matter why you enjoy being who and where you are, as long as you do enjoy it.

Friday

• Surely nothing mixes senses as much as water.  Memories scramble neuron connections so associations surface of hot, flavors,cold, thirst, drowning,  rocking, wet, dry, rain, mist, surf, wavelets, sparkles, leaden depth, seen breath and more.  Fear of high whitecapped waves, perhaps, soft meditations in calm reflections.  Tremendous mixtures of everything _ for life is mostly water, and echoes it closely.  Personal experience layers onto primal reaction.  No mistake why Rimbaud picked a boat _ a wagon would just not do.
• I swim in this harbor, although some tremble at the thought.  I have even tasted it, a few times as water cascaded from a cooled wet head in blazing sun, although salt prevents me from drinking much.  Sometimes I swam to shore from a dock that became more distant as I felt myself growing tired, even as I floated without effort in the buoyancy.  At times, we have watched a red sun set hypnotically in double distorted image as gnats flit annoyingly.  Storms have battered the shoreline, ice floes have caked the surface, hard sleet and soft snow have poured from overhead.  And that is without the recalled distant memories of ocean, lake, and pond.  Water is my nature, and how I experience it remains as mercurial as the chemical itself.

Saturday

• Computers are digital apparatus, constructed of hard dry immovable materials, controlling electrons in a flow that imitates water.  They are not life, which is water entire.  Their inputs are not senses, even though our aqueous cells utilize electricity on occasion.  It is almost impossible to imagine synesthesia occurring in artificial intelligence.
• I fear AI only because I distrust those who build it.  Those who try to develop vast grasping rationality, who claim that someday our minds will be poured into waiting crystalline structures and we will continue indefinitely as before, no, I think that most deeply they do not understand our reality.
• Can a computer score beauty?  Perhaps, properly programmed and equipped, it can pass judgement and say this or that.  Can it make unexpected leaps between a work of art and remembrances of an afternoon lunch at a Parisian café?  Can it randomly spin an uncertain feeling that somehow a scene causes the viewer to be slightly disoriented, happy, or troubled. 
• If builders allow such spontaneous connectivity, how to prevent insane association?  We are delicate balances and tensions.  We know when hard rationality shades into daydream, when happiness flips to nightmare, and we react and automatically control and bring our consciousness back to an almost rational calm center.  That has been the outcome of billions of years of trial and error.  What passes for such in the mechanical workshops of today’s Morlocks?
• Our culture, driven by science and pseudo-science, has perhaps traveled way too far along the various branching paths of detailed narrowing specialization.  Focus too much on sight, on hearing, on taste, on feeling and we become less human.  We should allow ourselves to once in a while glory in being confused, in tasting irrationality, and in seeing hot and cold scrambles within our immense knowing and being.

Sunday

• Birches hang out here and there in odd corners of vacant spaces along the waterfront.  Anywhere wetlands exist these trees remain abundant, but local marshes were long ago drained, paved, or flooded.  All for good reason, reducing mosquitoes, providing power, growing salt hay.  In spring, petite long green seed stacks look a lot like early fruit, crisp and ready for snacking.
• Of course people plant ornamental peeling-bark white birches everywhere, a lovely accent to yards in all seasons.  No doubt somebody somewhere is trying to make them fragrant or edible or _ given the speed with which genetic advances are occurring these days _ intelligent or talkative (as we know from our current politics, the latter two traits do not necessarily go together. )  I’m just happy to find this specimen where it was last  year, still making its way this spring, when so much else in this park and along the waterfront has succumbed to one mortal blow or another.