Hobgoblins and Imps

I’m not particularly fond of raisins but I do like rum raisin ice cream. Nor do I care for walnuts but if caramelized with shrimp I can set aside my dislike. Thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson I can live with myself. He declared that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. It’s comforting to know I don’t have a little mind. I’ve made room for my hobgoblin.

If it is those goblins urging consistency then I must also contain other imps or sprites. They are the mischief-makers who embody the illogic which leads me away from still waters. They probe and snoop and delight in their deviltry. Shakespeare had his Puck. Mark twain gave us Huck. How else to upset the old order and move the margins an enormous inch?

Back in the day when I knew everything life seemed so tidy. True or false. Natural or synthetic. Ball games and wars were either won or lost. Crime didn’t pay. Elementary, my dear Whatshisname. If this, therefore that. Follow those breadcrumbs and step on it.

Now I reserve the right to be wrong. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I agree with myself. On Tuesday and Thursday, I’m not so sure. On weekends the context may change. In baseball terms the ump may turn into an imp. When a hobgoblin and an imp walk into a bar a brawl is likely. Look out for that flying chair. The poker table is overturned and the card sharp has more than an arm up his sleeve. I wonder who choreographed those scenes? A dance of sprites.

John  Keats said it first when writing of Negative Capability. F. Scott Fitzgerald agreed with these words: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Catechism is consistent. Poetry is not. Astonishments are inconsistent. So are epiphanies and punch lines.

          Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?

          It looks like the backstroke to me, sir.

Life is dissonant. It misbehaves. Bring on the improv, the jazz as in a jam. A Charlie Parker riff, the blurt, the mishegoss. The speckled banana is a narrative. The second banana becomes the first banana when the star slips on a banana peel. Who ever thought? Didn’t penicillin come from a nearly-forgotten moldy Petri dish? Segues and non-sequiturs are playing a softball game. The sudden swerve in the road takes me to a eucalyptus grove. The typo is my best line.

The step-by-step argument leads to nowhere as in the cartoon of the construction worker building a staircase on a high-rise and calling down, Escher, get your ass up here. Ray Bradbury’s advice to young writer’s was to go to the edge of the cliff and jump. Build your parachute on the way down.  It’s OK to trust your resourcefulness even if it let you down yesterday; you aren’t the same person you were then. Today, your walnut may be caramelized. Make that two scoops of rum raisin.

Before GPS we had maps in our glove compartments. They were neatly folded like a well-conceived arguments into equal rectangles. Open them and trace your journey, then simply refold the paper according to the creases. Simply? Count me among those who struggled to restore the folds back to their original state. My imp wouldn’t allow me. With the energy expended I could have written a blog.