14 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I cannot seem to write any, which is not to say they would not be true, rather concede to the exhaustion of taking it in, nasty words and more simple needs. I argued against truth, thinking it too grand, preferring in its stead some notion of poetry as a tennis racket punching each lie away at the net. My students do not understand the fiction-as-a-higher truth idea, preferring non-fiction. All ideas in facts. Fake news is fiction, but what is fact but inverse fake, some way the novel gets turned inside out like a sock, becomes the narrative of a real person seeking out real facts in a real book on a real shelf. If truth is beauty, what are facts? The highest rate of rainfall ever, turning highways into rivers and hillsides into mud puddles. The beauty of these facts is abstract. That might be the rice in the salt shaker, absorbing damp, out of commission in the starch department. A Fox host thanked the president for bringing the apocalypse closer, and this morning's news from Jerusalem might bear her out. There's no clean break in history, just vents spilling poison over the landscape. One commenter noted that Pele is reclaiming the land for Kanaka Maoli, and who's to disagree when meaning is as up in the air as a lava bomb at the highest point of its trajectory? Who's got the claim on “magical thinking” and who on “actual fact”? Men's voices approach through rain's remainder and crease of bird song. Yesterday, a white crab cartwheeled into the ocean. Today there will be more violence. Evanescence is too soft a word for what this world offers. It breaks us. Only if we're lucky is there glue at Long's and enough pieces left to angle together as if one is a number we could ever get to again. There's too much history between then and future then, lapsing into the tense that is not present, nor any other that we know. No electrical gadget gainsays its wobble, tunes us in.

--14 May 2018