Ghosts of Thought

I sat at my desk and thought about the future and the past in spectral shadow. A group of crows clustered together in a naked tree to share their warmth. Every few moments one lit off into the drab sky, and another glided in stealthily and settled into the vacant seat. Little bits of crumpled papers and unfinished thoughts lay strewn about, in the midst of which swam a pink conch shell, only partially visible. I found it on the bottom of the shallow azure ocean hugging an island which kissed the coast of Mexico. The currents had rocked me so gently in silence as I saw it lying half-buried in the pale sand, and dove down dreamily to tease it out, careful to not be bitten by any hostile residents.
I hold it now and see the rounded over spikes, battered with time, and ignore the little mollusk ghost peeking out at me. The snail may have seen a bigger, more agreeable shell and prudently abandoned this one. Or perhaps it was feeling vain, and spotted a more fashionable, well-shaped shell. We all know the color and pigment of a shell depends on the health, the diet, and also the emotional stability of the invertebrate that created it. An animal, like any artist, experiencing disturbing or stimulating feelings will create intriguing patterns in pigments and blends which can create an orgasm, if viewed correctly.
I saw a home on some strange island that was shaped like a conch shell—the house, I mean. The animal’s blood is rich in a very soluble form of calcium, and we see it secrete with care and precision (as a painter dapples his palette) its secret mix, which, with the beauty and mystery of deep earth geology, is crystallized into calcium carbonate and becomes part of its shell, or colored canvas. We see it patiently eat and look for more food to eat as a normal snail would, but we know its wants and needs—really just building up its blood with precious calcium so that it can paint, once again, its immortal canvas. In front of us faded calendars are fanned through as the shell grows with the animal. Etched into it is its story, with all the emotional ups and downs and the stresses of food and the encounter of hungry predators. Its memories are written as ghosts, and it carries them on its back like a stubborn hairy hermit running from time.

What was I saying? Ah, yes, hairy hermits and the whimsical business of Tense in Transparent Things. I apologize, I sometimes lose my train of thought…
We all know there exist to us thus far three Tenses. It could be argued for a fourth Tense, but we will not address that at the moment. The Three Tenses are concrete and explainable? Goodness no! The mere matter of time and all its enchantment muddles even the more addressable matter of the Present. Don’t think this bad. We do know, however, that Alice is a former love, Beata is his present mistress, and Claire is his future wife.
And have I yet brought up the matter of threes in the book? The number 3, three as a word, trio, thrice—any occurrence of these entities I have recorded: forty-two times it is drawn upon in this book. And what of the words few and several? It is quite know that they are defining signifiers for the magic number three—that Sweet, Sweet number!
Beg pardon? You disagree? Denotations of a small amount? Pish posh! Few and several were coined July 21st, 1933 by a prominent poet with a forgetful name. It is said he was visiting a distant northern land to write about some handsome king he tended to babble about when he was bombarded by numerous occurrences of threes: three turrets here, three white horses there, three pretty little maidens, all in a row. He soon grew weary of repeating in his verses the number three, and like any free-thinking genius, decided to create a more fluid vocabulary centered round this mystical number. Stale verses such as “The bursting of three festive little bombs filled the hall with smoke,” become alive with the man’s music: The bursting of a few festive little bombs filled the hall with bitter smoke.

Get out of my chair.
Beg pardon?
Get out of my chair. What are you doing? I told all of you to stay away from here.
I haven’t finished my thoughts, don’t pull me. “Few” occurs seventeen times and “several” occurs five times, and the sum of seventeen and five is twenty-two, which is a very significant num—
Get out.


For Hugh, time and memory, and even dreams become tangled and blended so that parts of one are stuck in another. Hugh is stuck in the past, reliving it, while being haunted by the ghosts of his many futures. Or is he haunted by his own spectral memories? In Our Person’s lonely world, reality becomes a dream, and dreams become reality. He sees and hears ghosts of his past while he walks around in the perceived present. Without the refuge of memory, of the past, life would be so enormous…Where was that paragraph…


I am the reflection of lavender-tipped flame,
licking like Humbert at one’s window pane.
I am the smudge of dead sooty lust
In a pile of ashes, in a promise of trust.

A thin veneer of Present reality spread
Upon everything perceived—a spider’s sticky web.
Quell curiosity, loiter not Past’s iron-wrought gates,
Please heed the tired call of Future’s fancy fate.

Transparent things, through which the past shines!
And opalescent future like a mewling bitch whines.
Stay Present. Stay Present! Dream phoenix flamed fast,
And rise like a Haze of frozen fog’s past.

Have I mentioned the fire, and the choking black smoke?
It reminded me of a beautiful red Zemblan Royal coat.
And total composure in the face of total death!
And Triple Totality realized, too late, one last breath.

If Charlotte lying dead on the peaceful green grass,
Were to jump with a twitch, and proclaim with a gasp:
“Oh Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?”
Pangs of mysterious mental maneuver—quite bold.

That evil little child, she led me astray,
To a sad frozen lake on a cold snowy day.
The risks scoundrels take when pontificating past,
Before you walked on water, now you sink so fast!

An alabaster fountain, with grace divinity flows.
A misprint on a mountain covered year round with snows.
I thought I saw it once in my crumbled dreams dark:
Seasons blown away, like trash in the park.

Vellum Time folded celestial origami crane.
Future blended past, mixed with memory—sprinkled pain.
Old Man of the Sea in a red flood of seals,
resembled Jared to me, Quilted prophesy he steals.

Retake! Retake! Fly again to Our Glass Lake,
Where we will make love, my Lolita, if only to remake
Under the moon, that dream that I lustily dreamed,
Of ampersands and flaming windows and other Great themes.

While the wind gently blew, and the waves simply crumbled,
In my dreams—even then I tripped and I stumbled.
Nipping at the heels of that trickster who could foretell,
Whether my spirit will fly, or swim lakes of hell.

I see him in shimmering coals, fire’s flinty red face.
I see him crusting icy apple, and like Eve, curiously taste.
I lick my memories like ice cream dripping in sun,
Tasting each flavor until I find the right one.

Without my memories, life would just—be so real.
My dreams would then be my soul’s only meal.
Or maybe a fairy-tale world I could create,
I could jump and dance with tights, graceful ballerinas’ gait.

The light of my life left me lonely for another man.
Her memories haunt me impishly whenever they can.
I strangled my wife, and I killed my lover,
I see in glimpsed lightning, the face of my mother.

And what if you are tossed into a boundless void dark?
An inadmissible abyss, and see shining like a spark
Beaconed grace calling, angels trumpeting sonorous sound!
And shining white light, lemniscates heaven’s doors wound.

Realizing, “I’ve been the most shackled, artistically bound.”
Infinite aftertime: memories loop recursively round.
“History repeats itself,” says the eye-browed scholar,
I blinked and stared, and pushed out my chair with a holler:

“The entire solar system is but a reflection in my eye,
You, sir, are fictional, and like Icarus fly,
With lust to the setting sun, trying in vain to understand
In a blinding white moment what generations won’t comprehend.”

He blinked and shifted the bulk of his weight,
Breathed a great sigh and grabbed pretzel from plate.
“Have you ever given thought to dreams when time slowly leaks,
In confused heaps and hollows, your mind a scared child shrieks?

Or gilded lakes crested in wakes of jeweled gold?
Or crumbling partitions, poisoned mushrooms of mold?”
He bit a pretzel and reminded me, twenty years back, when,
He prodded time’s golden hay, teased egg from mother hen,

“A roaring redness,” he said, “filled my vision and my head.
I quickly tucked it back, not enjoying being dead.
nor the feeling which purloined time’s jewels tease—
The sun with stolen ice, the moon with crisp leaves.

The sun’s a thief and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea, sparking infinite reaction.
But this transparent thingum does also suggest,
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Solus Rex.

You see it infects every part of me as a poet.
Fiery orb’s rays shine down only to clearly show it.
Even the glow-worm found as an incompetent liar,
And ‘gins to pale his unneffectual fire.

The matin is near, like winged Sirens we sing,
But falter with the fear avalanched nightmares can bring.
Who rides so late, is it the late March wind?
Is it father with child, or memory of sin?”

He smiled and reclined: legs crossed, boots mauve.
I asked, “what’s your name?” “Adam von Librikov,
Pleased to meet you,” said he, “just call me Mr. R,
And let us with haste taste the nectar of ‘yon bar.”

Our Person, our reader, did not entirely approve,
Of R.’s luxuriant lifestyle, and whimsical mood.
But what can I say? With death I melancholy sat,
While the cretin went about pretending chit-chat.

And pondering things no business of his.
Like if I would marry, and proceed to have kids.
Or whether my bride would be young and fair,
With soft supple breasts, and golden blond hair.

I asked him, “Are you, sir, but made of ghosts,
With your fancy speech and elaborate toasts?
Can I not be excused from your smell,
No difference, to me, between this place and Hell!”

“Easy, you know, does it, son,” he said with a drink.
Slammed it down, jumped up, and was gone with a wink.
The rogue left only splintery filaments of matter,
And heavily buttered vegetables, coagulating on a platter.

I realized with dread I was alone in my bed,
While visions and memories formed a halo round my head.
I shrieked, “Is is all there is, my world will not restore?”
A raven lit upon my window and croaked, “Nevermore.”

I ran outside and saw, nothing, and cried,
“Is that what you say, I already have died?
What happens now? Will I be able to fly—
Will I turn to a butterfly, and bumble up high?

A sweet peace surrounded my senses, my sight.
To live, to float on, in a soft reflected light.
And fly through my past, in a fluttering sky,
And drift on the wind, like a sun dot in the sky.

For some reason passages eluded me as I tried to capture them, bumbling like Lewis and Clark in the Corps of Discovery. A certain page kept turning up, and quickly became suspect in the plot to hide from me information: 542/543. Continually I would stumble onto a prophetic passage and fumble around for my pilfered pen, turning back to the book in my lap like a prince brandishing a bodkin—only to find the elusive passage had slipped away, leaving me only these unrevealing pages as a clue, which fittingly hold the sentence: “An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to violet through the half-drawn curtains and illumined the deadly white papers he had left on the table.”Over and over this happened, and I found myself blaming my slippery pen every time a passage was lost, every time the same two idiotic pages stared at me with feigned innocence. What was happening here? Every time I turned my head the page reappeared like a naughty little nymph, showering me with confusion. What can I expect? Life is but an illusion…

Part of a Poem

I am the reflection of lavender-tipped flame,
licking like humbert at one's window pane.
I am the smudge of dead sooty lust,
in a pile of ashes, in a whisper of trust.

A thin vener of Present reality spread
upon eveything percieved--a spider's sitcky web.
Quell curiosity, loiter not Past's iron-wrought gates,
Please heed the tired call of future's fancy fate.

Transparent things, through which the past shines,
and opalescent future like a mewling bitch whines.
Stay present. Stay Present! Dream phoenix flamed fast,
and rise like a Haze of frozen fog's past.

Have I mentioned the fire, and the choking black smoke?
It reminded me of a pretty red Zemblan Royal coat.
And total composure in the face of total death!
and Triple Totality realized, too late, one last breath.

If Charlotte lying dead on the peaceful green grass,
were to jump with a twitch, proclaim with a gasp--
"Oh Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?"
Pangs of mysterious mental maneuver--quite bold.

That evil little child, she led me astray,
to a sad frozen lake on a cold snowy day.
the risks scoundrels take when pontificating past,
before you walked on water, now you sink so fast!.....

Just a Thought

I was just pondering the mention of circling vegetables by the ghosts that haunt Hugh and play with his dreams. I think these ghosts may be his own memories. Anyways on page 553 the ghost narrators say (I coould quote the whole page, but will not):
"Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetables of our first picture book encircled a boy in his dream--green cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potatao pere, Potato fils, a girly asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning ronde going faster and faster and gradually forming a tarnsparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet."

i picture a person's memories spinning like a halo around their head, like remembered salvation. Dancing in a variety of forms around oneself, like always trying to find ourselves, or something? Or different years of a person's life?

Something about Sight

There is an issue of sight for Hugh Person in his quest (for the Present?) In veiwing the world around him he is more often than not seeing it through the eyes of his past. In this way he "behaves as a ghost," by continually breaking the tension film and falling through to the past. Person needs a phoropter, as pictured above, which measures A. Person's "refractive error."

pg. 543: "that he would have to consult an ophthalmologist sometime next mouth. He substituted an 'n' for the wrong letter and continued to scan the motely proof into which the blackness of closed vision was now turning." Ha! That little trickster!

Tangled Tenses

I was just reading Transparent things for the ninety-ninth time and I noticed that the fire scene is played out three times: Once when Armande wants to simulate an escape from the fire by crawling out the window, once in his dream when he kills Armande, and then, of course, at the end of the book when he perishes. The only question is, what tense is represented for the three respective fires? Hugh dies while being reminded of a memory from childhood, a memory of a story from a book. He dies not only in the past, but thinking of a fictional story--he dies in art. When Armande demands they rehearse an acrobatic escape, she is foretelling the future--Hugh fails the escape, just as he will fail it at his death. She ends up peacefully wrapped in a blanket of the third floor, which can be seen as the future. She is living most comfortably in the future. We are left with the Present. How does the fire in Hugh's dream represent the present? That would be saying that the most tangible reality of the fire is brought to life in a dream, which would be saying, it turn, that the most real perception of our lives takes part in our dreams. Interesting.