SurVision Magazine / John Olson

The First Phenomenologist in Space

If I wiggle it's the wig I wear not the rig I ride. Sometimes jewels are the lechery we harbor inside when the kitchen light is off and the traffic in the brain is in delinquent exchange with a piece of cheese. I listen to the scales for the scapegoat I sulfur. It makes me pencils to lunge into drawing. The pictures are all gulped by halos of picnic appetite. So hand me a pickle. It's time we did some serious volume. Sounds come in from the street and restore the understanding we understood as ravenous for a subterranean wildlife. Which begs the question: how tall is Jodie Foster, anyway? Answer: 5'3''. All those FBI men in The Silence of the Lambs tower over her. Something to think about as one might stand in a kitchen thinking about such things. Now would be a good time to introduce some diplomacy to the footwork required by conversation. This might not apply if one is aboard the International Space Station, but even there one might stumble over a bookmark in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. I saw it floating around last night in a dream about turtles. Turtles are idiotic. But really they're not. And this is Dostoyevsky in a nutshell. In other words, the common perceptual paradigm that involves an awareness of something and then interpreting that awareness as a physical, biological event arousing notions of purpose, purposeful purposelessness, setbacks, gender division, efferent and afferent neurons, environmental stimuli, body oil and mirrors, involves sticking one's head out from under your shell and joining NASA's team of astronauts to become the first phenomenologist in space.

Way Out West

A crackle begins the balcony on my rounded eye. Our paint falls close by if the obsessions pick their way through the picture. I declare myself shaking and weigh what falls out of the sky. There it floats in the river what a nice clean murmur. A tricky ripple puzzles a glow there. My phantom clothing is worn from within and if there's enough space I might include a thermometer and a lamp. A nail stems the mountain to a robbery. The wood hauls me to it as a guitar might say fondle my biology and I'll make some music and I shout what about the skeletons can they dance too? The oil milieu across the creek is going all somnolent and pretty while the cook does justice to a trout. I press the house and it moves toward our turn with the couch on the porch. I smell a snake it's what we call a job my brother got trapped in it and disappeared. The nearest language is English it houses all of our tender buttons. The structure of a plywood bicycle is hot for a blue description. Out on Blood Road all the trucks have rifle racks and all the vagabonds come to this saloon with a fundamental understanding of alcohol and how it works. My wife paints like Remington and is busy now illustrating the jail walls with the eloquence of bullets. I coast my way out of the problem of justice and bag it in big silver dollars. A tall quiet man from Chicken Bristle, Kentucky arrives to investigate a murder. Sterno Brain hoses the barn down. We fix the mutations and use abstractions to amplify the noumena on the kitchen table. If I steep myself in oblivion sooner or later I'll get around to assuaging the convulsions with a poignant somnolence. We work the tractor during eyebrows. This buys us some time at the mine. I've got a constant urge to thunder. A rogue punctuation affirms this by wearing an expansive tonsil to the nightly whine. And it's when I sit down at last that I discover the universe in a sip of wine.

Entangling Worlds

I'm often amused to see men in those movies that take place in the 18th century sucking tobacco up their nose, snuff, as it's called, good name for it, yes, onomatopoeia in action. Can't imagine that leads to a good feeling, but what the hell, chacun à son goût. I'm particular about what goes in my nose, like the night that guy from Guatemala came to text our closet, text in this sense meaning to spray texture on the walls before applying paint, the smell of it so intense our neighbors on the upper floor on the opposite side of the building called with concern, they could smell it. Or those wildfires we get in the summer, the skies choked with smoke and soot, dark with it, apocalyptic. Point being you can't help what goes in your nose. It's a reminder. It's all connected. That's the fundamental essence of being. Ripples in time, vibrations in the web. Spiders are able to sense vibrations so finely that they can sense it in all eight legs, they form an image of the world through these vibrations, so much so that the web is an extension of their senses, of their mind, and take it in like the vibrations of sound we call words, which form webs, spider silk can vibrate at a wide range of frequencies, just like a paragraph, or a man sitting at a bar who can hear himself in a song on the jukebox, and when a stranger comes in and sits at the bar can sense the web of attraction and repulsion immediately, intuitively, and this comes of sitting in bars a lot, which forms his education. The air is full of the gossamer of gossip, busy tongues, eager ears, the flap of laughter, the flop of a hand on the table, the clinking of glasses, it's a culture, it's a satisfaction. And when a change in the air of humidity or temperature or mood or humor alters the properties of the web, this metaphor I'm forming, that we form together, the spider can tune its signaling capabilities by modulating the tension of the webs, and if that doesn't work there's tremulation. Tremulation is a trembling, shaking or jerking the body, bouncing up and down on the web, and this creates transverse vibrational waves, for the web is a finely tuned instrument, and in courtship rituals the spider will send a signal to a female spider at the other end of the bar, who walked in a moment ago and sat down, and this altered the mood of the place, and the predicaments of predation and desire, or simple easy companionship, like this.

John Olson lives in Seattle. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose poetry, including Weave of the Dream King, Dada Budapest, Larynx Galaxy, and Backscatter: New and Selected Poems. He has also published five novels, including The Seeing Machine, In Advance of the Broken Justy, The Nothing That Is, Mingled Yarn, and Souls of Wind, which was shortlisted for a Believer Book of the Year Award in 2008.

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An international online magazine that publishes Surrealist poetry in English. Issue Eleven JOHN OLSON The First Phenomenologist in Space If I wiggle it's the wig I wear not the rig I ride. Sometimes jewels are the lechery we harbor inside when the kitchen light is off and the traffic in the brain is in delinquent exchange with a piece of cheese. I listen to the scales for the scapegoat I sulfur. It makes me pencils to lunge into drawing. The pictures are all gulped by halos of picnic appetite. So hand me a pickle. It's time we did some serious volume. Sounds come in from the street and restore the understanding we understood as ravenous for a subterranean wildlife. Which begs the question: how tall is Jodie Foster, anyway? Answer: 5'3''. All those FBI men in The Silence of the Lambs tower over her. Something to think about as one might stand in a kitchen thinking about such things. Now would be a good time to introduce some diplomacy to the footwork required by conversation. This might not apply if one is aboard the International Space Station, but even there one might stumble over a bookmark in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. I saw it floating around last night in a dream about turtles. Turtles are idiotic. But really they're not. And this is Dostoyevsky in a nutshell. In other words, the common perceptual paradigm that involves an awareness of something and then interpreting that awareness as a physical, biological event arousing notions of purpose, purposeful purposelessness, setbacks, gender division, efferent and afferent neurons, environmental stimuli, body oil and mirrors, involves sticking one's head out from under your shell and joining NASA's team of astronauts to become the first phenomenologist in space. Way Out West A crackle begins the balcony on my rounded eye. Our paint falls close by if the obsessions pick their way through the picture. I declare myself shaking and weigh what falls out of the sky. There it floats in the river what a nice clean murmur. A tricky ripple puzzles a glow there. My phantom clothing is worn from within and if there's enough space I might include a thermometer and a lamp. A nail stems the mountain to a robbery. The wood hauls me to it as a guitar might say fondle my biology and I'll make some music and I shout what about the skeletons can they dance too? The oil milieu across the creek is going all somnolent and pretty while the cook does justice to a trout. I press the house and it moves toward our turn with the couch on the porch. I smell a snake it's what we call a job my brother got trapped in it and disappeared. The nearest language is English it houses all of our tender buttons. The structure of a plywood bicycle is hot for a blue description. Out on Blood Road all the trucks have rifle racks and all the vagabonds come to this saloon with a fundamental understanding of alcohol and how it works. My wife paints like Remington and is busy now illustrating the jail walls with the eloquence of bullets. I coast my way out of the problem of justice and bag it in big silver dollars. A tall quiet man from Chicken Bristle, Kentucky arrives to investigate a murder. Sterno Brain hoses the barn down. We fix the mutations and use abstractions to amplify the noumena on the kitchen table. If I steep myself in oblivion sooner or later I'll get around to assuaging the convulsions with a poignant somnolence. We work the tractor during eyebrows. This buys us some time at the mine. I've got a constant urge to thunder. A rogue punctuation affirms this by wearing an expansive tonsil to the nightly whine. And it's when I sit down at last that I discover the universe in a sip of wine. Entangling Worlds I'm often amused to see men in those movies that take place in the 18th century sucking tobacco up their nose, snuff, as it's called, good name for it, yes, onomatopoeia in action. Can't imagine that leads to a good feeling, but what the hell, chacun à son goût. I'm particular about what goes in my nose, like the night that guy from Guatemala came to text our closet, text in this sense meaning to spray texture on the walls before applying paint, the smell of it so intense our neighbors on the upper floor on the opposite side of the building called with concern, they could smell it. Or those wildfires we get in the summer, the skies choked with smoke and soot, dark with it, apocalyptic. Point being you can't help what goes in your nose. It's a reminder. It's all connected. That's the fundamental essence of being. Ripples in time, vibrations in the web. Spiders are able to sense vibrations so finely that they can sense it in all eight legs, they form an image of the world through these vibrations, so much so that the web is an extension of their senses, of their mind, and take it in like the vibrations of sound we call words, which form webs, spider silk can vibrate at a wide range of frequencies, just like a paragraph, or a man sitting at a bar who can hear himself in a song on the jukebox, and when a stranger comes in and sits at the bar can sense the web of attraction and repulsion immediately, intuitively, and this comes of sitting in bars a lot, which forms his education. The air is full of the gossamer of gossip, busy tongues, eager ears, the flap of laughter, the flop of a hand on the table, the clinking of glasses, it's a culture, it's a satisfaction. And when a change in the air of humidity or temperature or mood or humor alters the properties of the web, this metaphor I'm forming, that we form together, the spider can tune its signaling capabilities by modulating the tension of the webs, and if that doesn't work there's tremulation. Tremulation is a trembling, shaking or jerking the body, bouncing up and down on the web, and this creates transverse vibrational waves, for the web is a finely tuned instrument, and in courtship rituals the spider will send a signal to a female spider at the other end of the bar, who walked in a moment ago and sat down, and this altered the mood of the place, and the predicaments of predation and desire, or simple easy companionship, like this. John Olson lives in Seattle. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose poetry, including Weave of the Dream King, Dada Budapest, Larynx Galaxy, and Backscatter: New and Selected Poems. He has also published five novels, including The Seeing Machine, In Advance of the Broken Justy, The Nothing That Is, Mingled Yarn, and Souls of Wind, which was shortlisted for a Believer Book of the Year Award in 2008.
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