Lana Turner says, Yes

I have courted thought. I have read it, considered it, and discussed it. I have argued about it. I have thought hard, been thoughtful, and thought it over. But I know nothing about thought. I have even stopped thinking. Oh yes, I no longer think.

What I do is I perform and behave as one who has thought, and who, I fancy, is not stupid. The critical issue in thought is to not be stupid, or oblivious, or mean. No, the glory of thought of not in what you might come up with but in avoiding error. A person who avoids error is, well, impossible. But thought is not the answer to what it means to be wise. It is the answer to what it means not to be stupid.

I may not be stupid, but I am willing to think about it. See, I believe that progress consists of taking away. Sometimes. Certainly there is nothing I want to say.

HOWEVER! This leads to...what? Well, it leads to writing, because writing, like thought, is both not what we hope for it, but more interesting (meaningful) than our expectations allow. Meaningful is not a word I enjoy typing out, because it gives license to thinkers. But I do not like licenses. I like thought kept in its place. I like everything kept in its place. Who decides what place? Not me, that I can assure you! We can discuss who, when you stop pretending that thinking is the end-all of human existence.

I am happy to discuss anything, not that anyone asks. It's not like people are lining up for conversation with me. But, I do write poems, and I have breached the walls of thought, I have cleansed the Augean Stables of self-doubt, so that I am left with what I do. I write poems. Why. Because. The tendency to write poems is the cause, the effect is poems having been written. One publishes these poems. I publish my poems. How I publish them is my business. I have lost the sex of scourging myself for the this-and-that of publishing....

Because...I don't care. I don't care how anyone publishes. How much less should I care how I publish? How much? Plenty much, like, I don't care at all. At. All.

I am alive, being, doing. and developing. What I say now is not what I have said before, though certain threads reoccur. For one thing, it is achingly clear to me that the influence (or confluence) of the tendencies (or, thoughts?) of David Hume runs through me like the kind of thing that runs through people, etc.

David Hume, the Lana Turner of Skeptical Thought.

We are done for now, but we will do more, because in the fact of doing, we will have left evidence of having done. This may qualify for thought. It certainly serves as an axiom. On the other hand, what is new? The stars, the leaping things of the field, your warm hand.

Where I have gotten to is to not worry about what I do. But first I had to learn to disregard what I have done, or to offer to myself an understanding of it that would serve as a counterweight to other ways of writing and publishing. Therefore, I do not care one way or another. It is all equal, and passes for a kind of accumulation of behaviors and tendencies. I am alive and writing one particular history which is inexorably tied into other histories. I control, to an extent, the words I type as having been sponsored by my predilection to write. But there is no plan.

Do not let me convince you that there is a plan. There is a cause, but no plan.

I am a twig. a leaf on a river. I have no purchase. I have no point to prove. I represent what I can, and whose work I might, but this is not intended to...do...anything.

In time the sun outshone its works, where love outshines the sun.

In Which I Cheer Up

Hedgehog leaps the sty, plants his feet, and arms outstretched, breathes deeply. To the West the old weather-vane, fresh on the heels of Winter, trots out a squeaky spin. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is repaired. Only time has transpired to produce the effect of gain or relief. Which or both, I cannot say.

In a sudden movement, the tectonic plate tilted and in a blinking render itself as a vast plain of erect and colored sails, spread as from wave of wind, spread and on moving.

A man arranging colored glass ages as the glass cannot know to age, not having asked how, and being incapable, if it were, of establishing proper controls, or even taking notes.

Sentences, like street savvy & muscular blonds, swing past the pressed suits of business as usual, except that one, there, the little man crumpled in a corner, his colored socks, mismatched, the skin of his face shifted around like rumpled bedding, but that was all you could ever say, at least to me.

A man drops a coin and picks up (solicits) a paragraph that hangs in the air like a pressed foil ornament, the air of the day apparent where there should paper be white, the space gelatin like, and the paragraph - why, it's a prose poem, a perfect block - described in letters so black they seem to absorb the light from one's eyes.