CARBONS

152. To Jonathan Williams

July 24, 2006

As you once wrote to me, “You’re way out here in enemy territory.” My interpretation of “enemy territory” is where people believe wholeheartedly in the reality of the material universe—or a sort of yellow school bus driven by a woman named God—and I take your point, if, indeed, that was your point, or something like it.

I don’t know who’s driving my universe, but whomsoever it may be likes paradox and explosions which I tried to put together here in a little book of conformity to the universe in which I live. It’s a place where anything is possible, any old damn thing at all, where the mind of the sage and the mind of the child perceive together and the same, Desiccated Old Creature and Ripeness-is-All placed by the ever-changing and shackled together. How can anyone take it seriously? Remove yourself from it and it is comedy, put yourself knee-deep in it and it is tragedy. The intellect can go away and laugh, the emotions suffer in the mud. Death is salvation and the rest is the worm’s struggle between two poles. What can we do? We can write a piece of nonsense that closely proximates to reality, for reality is mostly nonsense to the rational human mind.

Being born, I have a job to do—at least one—and that is, in this case, to proximate reality with these prose poems, which make no more sense than sense. I believe them to be more realistic than Zola. I believe them to get to the heart of no-matter. I believe them to be more scientific than science. Sometimes even funnier than death. I have read your poems and think you to be a person who can see what I mean, or possibly don’t mean. Deeper and deeper we go, pulling the strings of the string theory apart until we get to the bottom of it all, which the Kabala says is just a laugh. Do you agree?