Thomas Lowe Taylor -- AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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Time and Space.
Passing like seasons of air, dark edges in the symptoms of movement; born as though discovered, and furniture and the categories of the floor where the dust disguises the grain of the wood. He walks down the hall, and stops at a window he sees the seasons in their monumental chances, spreading beyond the landscape as roads do, like boundaries or ideas, and leaves them falling.
The air is full of consequences and passageways, labyrinthine, lighted from above. The roasting figures are indicating that he pass left. He passes. Another figure, a man with feathers runs past and leaves the air trembling. The sun releases everything into scale and overturns the city. The sun converges like a line. He leaves and turns and embraces the sun and the old man.

Pearl Harbor
It's not that I was born during or at the beginning of a war, and was hardly even present, but I have been told about it. There was some driving around and a great deal of unsureness. I stopped at the mild truck and watched it, played milkman and driver. The solitude off my mother was unconvincing. When it was dark it was very dark, and we seemed to be playing in ruins. No/one seemed to have anything to say about it. "The Japs." We stayed at that house along time. I don't remember the other one, where we lived, I guess.
The boat spent the days staying in the same place. And cold and foggy when we arrived. At night. Guns booming off the day times, lost my shoes, sick at the railing, and only four.
From the top of the hill the cars looked very small, the streets like a grid. I saw that in Oakland twenty years later, on the hill, with my wife, the hill sloping like flesh all around us into the dark and smog.

Hacienda (a)
My brother is in the trees. The whitewash has a mud/medicinal smell, a doctor in the house. The kitchen echoes, when I had mumps in the coloring book. We spent the war there waiting for someone I had forgotten. Mother left mysteriously. Summers in the orange trees, mixing with other summers, classically serene. The stacks of railroad ties. The house by the cherry tree. My grandfather drove the car slowly uphill to the reservoir where Chuck found the snake.
Voices echoed out of the kitchen, rocking around the house, the house held the war away, and what of the next? The schoolteacher guarding the property.
Mud walls go down to the corner and turn; a gate through weeds to the garden; the lath house might have bats but only ferns and cool, wet air. We go in there and wait. Or lie in bed in the afternoon dragging everything out in long, thin lines.

Hacienda (b)
Medieval, elaborate earth worn. My grandmother's six daughters repopulate the earth with warriors. By warriors, clerks are born, managers of the kingdom, the estate sold to...
The sun beats on my head; cool my toes in orange-tree shade.
Trees which bear.
In the summer we eat fruit and sleep in high-ceilinged rooms in the afternoon, and wake to step through door-sized windows into the herb-garden.
Night fires burn, reflect light of indian rugs.
The sound of Beethoven from the study.
My grandfather smells of his work, drags the sprinklers up the road with his car.
I jump from the wood pile and break my arm. No swimming that summer.
My grandmother shrinks into "red butter." Drifts from the pictures in her nursing home. Away.

Davis/El Centro Streets and trees
The sidewalk goes down, diminishing, into the dark, like an arrangement. The trees canopy the town like weeds. Immense plans of streets when I am either small or large remind me of my movements. I relate to the town in rags; I move with the oak trees and mark one and then the other as a boundary. When I meet this one, town, it is spread out, with all the boundaries present. My senses allow the village and then no more. The desert passes through me; it contains us, our community of houses and orders.
Containment is definition.
The people living at the edges of the desert.
A mine/hole dug into the earth. Which we explore; I dug one, too, covered it with boards and had a candle in there.

Differences caused by time: the vision is double. Living in two places at the same time/the street goes down & turns and when I saw they were late or missing, so I thought, and ran, terrified down through the trees and across lawns and fallen leaves to the (brown & white house, like saddle shoes I sd., even then, to see if they were there but it was a different (not different but looked to be that way
She goes to the market, I walk around, sniffing at the edges of things, turning over these "new leaves."
The houses lay on the ground as though set there, they did not grow; but in the other one, they erupted from the ground like solid rocks. The village in Greece where they agglomerated.
A community, too, in more than one place or time.

My father
Then who is he? Especially when I lose the way; no appeal in memory. I can see about tasks, that one should work it that way and no other, if that's the way it has to be done; you tell yourself that. No appeal in memory, in examining what I think about him, which is in the end remembering myself.
When I saw him last year, he greeted a stranger, I to him thus, and there we were; it is the order of things which is my father, and that flesh only a transmitter (as I am).
Inasmuch as you find a method, you find a new father. Get lodged in that; and so separated, with ;yr. father, that there is no struggle. One is, born. Thus.
Father is blood and death and sons.
Father is love in acts, bending at the work and following it into color and other forms: bird, fish, horse. Father is movement through all the forms of life.

War
The habit of organization, when you doubt yr. knowledge and enter this love agony. The acting out of fear, the highest of the arts of man, to no end, to no relief but, giving in.
The lesson: never give in, never organize beyond your capability, for the far interest lies, to support that contest, as the machine is so designed/designated.
If life is the mirror, and war is the failure of life, then the mirror is empty, black.
A convenience of time, a quality of the elected gods, to battle the inevitable suns and to defeat the commands, to release blood in some design convenient to eloquence; to justify final facts of fear and pleasure.
No hope in that, I grew up on it.

My mother
The fire at the center. Read that. Or whatever else gets that close. Moving in paces and flesh. Mother is no action but being which disintegrates in space.
Rain and evening, or lapsing into the days as passageways. Food or the act of preparation and relief at the conclusions of time or death in other births or acts. Art is the mother. And her flesh, mine that is, is relevant to these certain few specific habits as I melt them.
Location, inasmuch as it is the center, the maker of maps, is the voidless motion, or the space capsule released in the heavens.
She comes after me, still, old and cautious, following the forms as they came into her, too, leavened leavened.
Rhythmic and known. Mother is still destruction.

Living in houses
"House, a machine to live in." Promethean.
Wood or plaster or an estate made from sun/dried/mud. Time's relation as metaphor.
Where I grew up or out was in those communal habits which contained/protected m.
From what, I said. The room, couch, wall; find the corner and consider the rest, the color or the craft. Designed. I never thought about that, as it took shape. I defined in my rooms my vision of what I saw. Desks and pictures still held my memory solid, like mail. The contours of beds are with me. I can see the bathroom lights. When I was sick, the quality of my fevers infected my dreams. Strung about like the solemnity of holidays, my primitive childhood wherein what was real danced and evaporated. Was I ever ready to give up my habits?
The houses: tracks and passageways (meetings), compartments and areas, also inhabitants, as in the experience, that the room changes as you look at it.

Going to school
Was something I didn't understand, but did, and excelled, and did that.
Chairs, iron hinges, books and pictures which compose structures which half interest me as if I glanced at them. The girls, about whom I have endless erotic daydreams, some of which I occasionally enact. The teachers, who I try constantly to please. And the work, which is always secondary to the setting or context in which it takes place, and which seems to me, even at an early age, contradictory.
There are alignments and organizations, official and unspoken which are present in all playground tournaments and chance conversations. The system of the school is universally suspected as something profoundly dangerous.
Occasional conversations, like moments, reveal themselves through the work, and in the memory, then, certain relationships flash out like words.

Living in communities
The clothes are washing, we visit the firehouse/idolatry of machines, the man in his uniform, uniform, brass badged: selling his talents, or changing heads and hands, and talking a very public speech. To meet your others, then, making their turns and changes, wrapped so much in habit, or in the newspaper. Down you go, into streets, into wheat, into blood and soil, like time suspended, like glass spilling from the shelves. These sensuous earthquakes. Where work has use, in the village, and takes the shape of language. Speech, and the city, exchanges and plans. Who has his hat on right (right side up?).
I was "in motion", down tree-lined avenues and in the American movies, and saw where they stopped. Memory: the revision of the senses, dreams, check-ups on your value or state. The community: a reflection of your self, and holy in its rituals, buying and selling. There is a picture; there they are, in front of their machines, looking up into the camera. What I like about snapshots is the actuality.

So I saw in all those towns in the ages of my own youth, before they were swept away into same/ness. they were all the same when they were different, and now they are all detail, and I hear my own breathing constantly. Twenty-five towns, maybe; spread as far as they went, and no further. Cabbages, or colonies, strewn from the soil.
The photograph, again, bending the light away, into lost, flat space. Incongruous.

Beer
Fifteen. Air of mystery: such seriousness. Steal a case, drive around. Drink. Wait.
Of all the passages, the strangest compression of all space, to locate the holy rites in such external activity, to identify, to become, to elucidate, to let froth, to capsulate, to initiate.
The metaphor of being drunk, and of appropriating all the gods for your own, for friends, to enable scale. And then to see it lose, as faith or as words drop and fall.
Where do you get off with this vernacular. I tell it from this distance, that the visions I've had have been terrifying in their commonness. Leave that! and get on with it, with your own business, language, and make it work.
Beer, eloquent metaphor. Loses its reality to the test. It all moves away from that, too.
Beer, asker of questions, making tastes spoil!
Beer, no singer, no song, no companion; medium.

College
"Moving from the present to the present."
These initiations of speech were profound. Voices now distant and motivated, style sensed as the content of language. That as a decadent culture discovers itself, spent, that is, it decorates. Time you say, and utter the colloquies like the tough air they move about in. Right thought, right behavior, right mind.
Well, do the papers, do the weeds, do the floors with wax. There is no relief but doing them over.
Making lists and signing names. He has his journeys tended. Energy is time, and time is spent in journeys. Define.
Today, these colors: orange, red, pale green. The body's blood. Released and tended, opaque, like a vision of flesh on flesh. Energy, like exhaustion, diminished in form by the pulsating rhythmic figures inside the bells, inside the monumental stone buildings.
"to accommodate more and more."

Space
Silent climax fulfills. The air, the air is too immense! Out beyond, peering through windows or curtains, parted like...a pause....
Sawing wood is close work. Songs dim and loose. The rejection of space for the personal. Following and following, as if syntax were lost to ether. Like the habit of eating, like the noise of ghost-buffalo.
Who knows?
Make taste follow the dictates of reason. Of reason. A journal follows these dimensions. Twenty-seven miles to the far left. Stop. Twenty-two miles ahead of that. Stop. Turn. Go twenty three miles to the north, then eat lunch. Fuel. Head inland, go past three oak trees, their leaves turning bright dark olive green blue. Watch sunset. Eat, sleep. Next day head back, diagonally (how the mind divides, and turns it down).
Every mark counts, accumulates. A secret taste.
The air beckons, empties, chases the moon inside, like data. Translations follow, other languages develop, the moon differs.
"Ruined by time, the architecture of the present displays a less than sensuous arrangement." Nada.

High schools
Your topic, fruitfly. The seasons passed, like watching.
He moved again, into orange-red trees and the rocks spent with their seasons, too. The rhinoceros charged. I doodled on the topic. What is the topic. Definition, that's teaching. Health, and round rubber balls. Assigned, like colors, and the walls.
Approve.
Night turns out like that, dark and empty, where the visual fails, where sleep fails. And where sweat diminishes time like energy.
Well, it works, and at this close close movement, where the glands eat at language.
Explain.
Words, like training, are diminished by use. "What did you find out?" The velvet mortuaries, apples from the moon, inevitable and tall, rotund aliens from the tree.
When it moved, without reward, and the categories fed themselves... History, like Science, a construct. The mind glorifies its movements. You resent reading.

Graduate school
Maybe these voices and rooms are only programs, designs, or steps heading to a goal. First time I say, "Put it all together!" The voices almost drown me out, first time at heresy and good work. Still, I'm in the dark and I know it, primitive, merging from a selfish cave/cage. I manage footnotes, laundry, a love affair, poetry, and the first images of death. Temporary freedom has no limits, frees language and the imagination, develops moods from which there is never a release.
Pressure in doing. And holiness of books, which evaporates, as I encounter living minds/flesh in word, self evaporates in process, history manifest in the execution of form.
The wind blowing through the buildings is not separate and not poetic, only the wind. The grass has a cultivated look. It is, after all, a state school (tribe/cosmos/unit//thought control yields predicted output/machine lubes itself)
My heroic teachers, I think. Clerks. I fill in the forms. Harvey collects books and a wife.
at the end I buy a camera.

Teaching and marriage
"Say this and no more."
Socrates, midwife. I try the voice out, yell, burst, retreat and simultaneously divide myself a thousand ways and all succeed. In the fall, I marry, fall and winter falling like travel. The opening, without limit, without expression, into my own life, where the imagery finds its source, where I get embarrassed by the tools. It is not so unusual; fictional.
Modes generate thoughtscapes, lingua-tones. The roads in Michigan are also well traveled. "No thing but in doing." The photographs, too, adorn the walls like advertisements for a camera, which they are.
In the end, movement; the landscape changes (trees, wind, color of sunset, sun stretched ten miles wide by water vapor/heat/fog clouds. Snow piled higher than the roof.
The authority: a voice descends like music; programs spread out in the dust, the organization of the intellect diminishes according to size, problem, mode, form and direction of movement.
Peter goes to India: we go to Hartford, Greece, back.

Travel
At a certain point it is all experiment. You leave that, go from that. A village colors: the mind shrinks and stretches. You know less and less, and finally the donkeys speak back, open letters, calculate fares, pace back and forth.
They are all talking about it, about defining their lives in what they are doing and yet they are all visitors. Success! The superior man walks on the clouds of the ceiling. The sea breaks and splits, the fish grow legs and leave for the city. The open boxes virtualize. When you return, you leave for another place; the new city, the one you left, has flattened overnight, only because it didn't change. It works, too, and you are never the same.
What you talk about changes, the nights change, love changes into the night. Food emerges from the closet, bright music from the streets.
Are they all blind? The corridors move like waves and rivers of sense and space and divide like time and organization. The visual emerges.

Baby
So that's what it's all about: the houses, food, clothes, sex, books, community, law, cookies, land, formulas, poetry.
The fantasies of responsibility break like winter's ice dragging through the year: ideas take on flesh and come to speak. The inertia of myths becomes another song, immediate and trivial. That's all there is to it.
Speak up!
He is crawling on the table again, where's the order. The purpose of furniture is less to attract than to control. The room is a gymnasium,full of padded platforms. The sense of specialty, unique; visitors full of the same questions. Local details, images of infinite processes diminished and compressed. Opening and closing, rhythms of opening and clos/ing.
Like money, power in the possession of strong wills, moving through the acres of possibilities with their means about them; history where it comes through children, changing according to the voice, and not changing at all. What the voice sings is passion, or speech.

Berkeley, costumes, and the mail
When you go after it so wilfully, what you miss is the ease of it, how it passes you by, the arbitrariness of your own point of view... The movies are repeats and that's where the energy lies, in the succession of days and nights, like time, like suspension, like the varieties of immediacy. "Balance in all things, most of them unknown." Well, what do you know about that! The open door of decoration, where (the) poetry is as obscure as it is personal. Passing it on, too, like unspoken messages, when you look, at style, or the newspaper, there it all is, what you think is there.
What you get is a return address in the corner as a clue. Other writers (to they speak at all?) are flowing through the hallways, one who is very tough, and another just learning how to use a movie camera.
The machine speaks again and again. The machine speaks again and again. The voices, traveling from peak to peak, like echoes, like clothing, like the mountains, like night time and sentiment.

El Centro
The end is only an opening. Continuity is a disguise, a category. What is fact is laid out there on the sheet, in black and white, most American of statements, especially the one that goes... "don't misinterpret this..."
So the wind opens like a hat. Get the newest permutation down, where the present is, and tell it to understand the specific ordering of dreams, that they are not arbitrary but that they are only dreams.
Capsule statements.
Let's examine the proposition of the autobiographical: let's ask where the rolling trucks come from, how old they actually are, and dismiss the driver as (only human.)
Most American of facts, where we began all this, of space. ("Let it go open.")
The dust is growing in the air, compressed as we are 43 feet below sea-level, from village to village. Your mind, friend, what happens to your mind?