If this is a notebook then why does it strive for sense? Because Kurt Schwitters made sense, bending to trash, making wheels of rocqueford wrappers. Fragments become cohesive. Example:
Once, in the Museum of Modern Art, I was allowed to don latex gloves and spin Marcel DuChamp’s readymade bicycle wheel. It was a thrill. I’d always wanted to do this. If you know your modern art, you know. Then I turned and walked into a wall. You do that kind of thing when you can’t see very well. Fragments are at the heart all lived experience. As for making sense, I wasn’t following basic blind navigation rules—namely, if you have a dog, let it lead; if you have a cane, probe ahead.
Kierkegaard titled one of his key works Philosophical Fragments, where he argued that truth arrives in pieces, incidentally, never as a consummated system. Lots of other philosophies and poets have agreed. But I’ll bet none of them ever walked into a wall in a famous museum.
Afterwards I went out into the autumn air and smelled roasting chestnuts. I’ve always found the smell to be disagreeable. You can of course know a city, any city, by its scents. Chestnuts, piss, cigarettes. The nose struggles to make sense in New York. Writers tend not to dwell on these olfactory bits speaking of sorrow. More fragments.
There’s an emptiness that goes along with this. Every moment an unfinished house. Larca wrote in “Poet in New York” which is still the best poem about New York City (sorry Whitman) “Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.”
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
