Jerry Gordon (3.26.06)

Castles of Smoke


"Man is most nearly himself
when he achieves the seriousness
of a child at play.” -- Heraclitus

I started growing buildings when I was in junior high. It's what started me smoking. I've never liked smoking, really, and don't need the nicotine to calm down, but I keep it up as a sort of nostalgia for those early castles I exhaled. Those still have a purity I continually strive for, something that is perhaps only visible in the eyes of innocence. Those early castles are what inspired the whole field we now know as Grown Engineering.

In elementary school I began experimenting with growing buildings. I did it with milk in water. One morning while eating my breakfast cereal--for no real reason--I leaned forward and spat a little bit of milk into the goldfish bowl on the table. It was simple act and virtually free of motivation. I just peeked over the glass rim and “bloop.” That was the extent of the inspiration: bloop.

I wasn’t shooting at Pinch, our fish. I was just spitting. But, then what I saw was somehow so beautiful. I was attracted by how complex a structure the milk made in that little environment of semi-balanced gravity. Every arabesqued wing and elaborated strut and the curvilinear column of the main trunk of the spit-milk revealed the amount of energy it carried for as far as it extended within the turbulence and drag of the water.

I didn’t understand any of these ideas then, but I knew it was marvelous. From my deviant little lips, beauty played itself within three liquid and gravity-soft dimensions.

I kept it up that morning, turning the fish bowl into a murky mess. I changed the water again and agian. Each time, the spit milk shot into the tranquil clear water with an energy. Then, it would slow into a calm stasis, become semi-stable as a structure and then begin to drift and dissipate, vanishing into a total graying of the water. The energy of the milk created ripples and turbulence that undid the castles. And, of course, the gold fish didn't help any. Finally, I felt his little movements were destroying things too quickly. I knew I couldn't continue to experiment with him there, so I asked my mother it I could flush him down the toilet and out to the ocean. She said, no, because he'd die in the treatment plant before making it out to sea. So, I poured him into a coffee cup and gave him a bit of clean water and a Cherrio to chew. Then I filled his bowl again with new, clear water from the tap and got down to further experimenting.

I refused to go to school that day, my adamance slightly scaring my mom. But I went the next day and brought my bowl to show all the kids.

As it turned out, no one understood the significance of my discovery. Some of them said, "Cool" but then just wanted to try spitting into the water from greater and greater distances. Most just said, "That's gross."

I eventually got a big empty fish tank of my own, specifically for engineering purposes. That's where smoke castles actually came from. Water was a good environment to work in at first, but it was ultimately just too wet. Besides, it required changing water all the time just to see the structures. Smoke was, and still is, a better balance of exhalation forces, environmental turbulences, soft-gravity and spontaneity. All that, and it's more conducive to contemplation because it's dry and you can lean back in a comfortable chair.

To do anything creative, a person can't have too much control. Mastery is not really about having total control. While it’s true that precise control of some skills is essential, this is because having this ability makes it more possible to open up larger areas to play. Then real creation can happen. The artist's job, ultimately, is to be a passionate witness, to see what was previously not just invisible but unseeable. That's how something can be made from nothing, which is where the ancient origin for the word poetry comes from: “To do; to bring into form from nothing.” The best artists are those who can watch the most honestly, the ones who can see what even they can't admit is imaginable. The artist is the one who can't look away from even his own death, and in that way transforms it and everything into moments that can’t be fixed as life, death, play or any other form of purpose.

And, perhaps for this reason, the very first castle of smoke I made is still the finest. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I have unwillingly compared all the subsequent to it--or because I have reimagined it in infinitely greater degrees of fantastic abstraction and theory ever since first noticing it churning and coming to a pause in the air beyond my exhalation. Regardless, that first castle of smoke has taken on the pathetic but grace-filled elements of a romantic quest. No matter how much I resist it, I know I hope to see it again. To examine that first one’s mystery with the tools of analysis I have developed in these subsequent decades of reflection. I hope to retouch the naïve with the hands of the master. Like some sort of arrogant Utopian in the Industrial Revolution, I harbor the hubristic hunch that that castle can save us all.

Of course, the monkeyfooted brat in me that first leaned out and spat into that fish bowl knows there's nothing to save us from, but the only thing more complex than turbulence is the workings of one's motivations, so please don't crucify me for my contradictions, okay?

. . .

Kansai Underground

Last night, drunk with two friends.
Wine and wiskey.
I'm sure God keeps track
of such things. brash temptation.
Back at the last-train station,
everybody on God's folded little list.
So many blushing knuckles and glasses askew.
I ask you, yes you there across from me,
"Why is it only the end of night
when we can meet?"
Yes, noone else knows either. So, i imagine
stacking stones between this creeping distance.
A little mound of rocks
on the floor of the subway car,
piled in the unmortared way
God likes His gravity.
A salaryman turns to watch me
shifting brain-sized bulks of basalt, and then
he's down on the grubby floor too,
his fingernails getting chipped and noble,
working amidst the floating ghosts of hair
as each lump of dust gets balanced
in the rattle and the bump
of the train pouring through the dark.
And then a girl with a mouth so full of teeth
there's barely room for words
hunches down and from her purse
pulls out rock after rock the size of hearts, each
sung smooth in a river beyond our echoes.
She fits them in, like keystones to lock
all the world's cracks and steady the impossible architecture.
I look up, looking for more eyes unwilling to look away,
and say, "Don't mind us, late-night commuters.
We're not building a wall
or barricade. It's just our way
of giving to the community,
to us as we
speed deeper into night
together, our flesh one breath
and stinking booze."

. . .

The Instant that Isn't

The crowd, too, is a trio--
three strangers here becoming
nothing less than unknown
as ourselves. Why else sit
with this look of
jazz in our eyes? I see you
and before the glance decays
there is time to forget
the 64 words for now.
There is the instant that isn't
before or after.

Beyond the end of your boot
begins the logical curve
of your calf.

The flawless flow
from limit to limit;
how many worlds are lost
in a language?

Thus, this is
how we unknow them,
much as ourselves. The invisible
within invisibility. And, so I love
to say, "Your face," and
"Let's behave like the dance of smoke
that shows our grave is smouldering."


3.10.06
watching Bebop International at Savannah

. . .

How I Started Smoking

I am not a trend-setter. I am more of an inventive imposture who follows the wrong details.

And, so I started smoking.

We've all been there. The group pressure. The room is packed with so many stripes of cool and I feel awkward, as though even the way I hold a glass of beer shows I am a poser, as though everybody else is weaving notes into their memories: "Alert! Alert! Dork drinking from a pint glass like it's some sort of trough of butter, thumb and fingers all up at the ceiling. Do American's really have no education system at all?"

And, so, one night in a crowded room around a glass coffee table littered with deep red Marboro triangles and flat red Lucky Strike dots and the tiny promises made by Hope boxes and bags of roll-your-own streaded leaves and a famously phallic Cuaba Generosos smouldering on a $80.00 ash tray, I decided to start smoking. I saw into the rhythmic beauty of hands performing intricate simplicities of work and gesture. The way the flame is cherished. The way delicate paper is held and moved. The way the embers glow more faintly than candle light. These were the pressures that got me to start smoking. But, I should clarify that I smoke incense sticks.

I'm no idiot. I'm not going to suck the stuff into my body. I have enough trouble with alcohol and starchy carbohydrates. I don't need to add nicotine. I just want to join in the ritual of timing. And, so, I started. Of course, in bars and other public places where the priests of the personality cult gather, there are pauses and some looks weighing me for mockery when I slide a very thin steel case from my pocket, open it like a book and carefully remove a stick of incense. I can almost hear people think, "What the fuck?"

I hold the stick just below my face and carefully light the tip with an expensive micro-lighter. A tiny flame burns silently for a moment. Then, I calmly wave the stick through the air to out the flame and start the thin and constant line of white smoke into its life of ephemeral calligraphy.

At this point, it’s hard to find any difference between my smoking and others'. I tend and care for the stick throughout its burning, making sure to not let the accumulated ash fall anywhere but in an ash tray. To do otherwise would be uncouth. I usually hold the stick between my fingers, but, of course, I never put it in my mouth. Beyond not sucking on it, I can find almost no difference. Well, that and the smell. But, do any two tobacco's really smell the same? Cigar smokers speak of the aroma being one of its ritual pleasures and they give it as a reason why they won't smoke cigarettes. Clove cigarettes. Pipe tobacco. Each has its kind, scent and brand. Each has its individuality. And, within the intricate subtlties of culture, the task has become just this, to define oneself as unique without becoming a dick. Wouldn’t you agree?

Civility then seems to be to know where “interesting” transforms into “freak.”