6-1-09
When I returned to Minneapolis, the first bloom had not yet begun to wane from the lilacs and crabapple trees, nor had the sere leaves fallen in September yet crumbled completely to dust at their feet. Spring was young and thirsty, stirring petals in the dry creek bed. There was a groaning of frogs, a perpetual rustling of leaves: of the sea an inland echo that, tempered by the revisiting death of winter, uttered not any sublime, inhuman polyphony but only “hush, hush.”
There was a deep peace on the avenues, risen from the ground like fog where no fog was, and the shadows held still on Summit beside the rustic mansions of limestone and dark wood. The bells rang from the cathedral and from the Basilica for spring weddings. The forecast called for no rain and still no rain as the city began the third summer of its drought.
The last tide to wash over this place was made of glaciers, the detritus of whose wake lies since and ever beached, and these ten thousand lakes are drying tide pools.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Gods
May 13, 2009 (San Francisco to Phoenix): Earth
Past San Bernardino lies a scrubland whose naked hills are the color of flesh, not sensuous but thrilling and obscene.
The sun has burnt the grass to red and golden straw. Every rusted tractor standing alone on the desert floor looks like a shipwreck and whole towns of battered, metal ranch houses like the abandoned base camps of a vain human adventure that wasted itself upon the plain and left no survivors nor even any dry bones.
Even the decadent fields of green that intermittently set themselves against the pale dust of their surroundings, and that are made of vine-draped arbors or rows of trees, appear not as any testimony of human presence but as the armor, soon to be shed, of one chthonic power at war with another.
May 14, 2009 (Phoenix to Las Cruces): Bones
I walked in the mountains north of the city, where were heat and thirst. Gnarled, spined, desiccated brush clung to rocks that were black as iron and could scald your hand. This was a landscape drawn completely out of the numinous mists and burnt to a perfect clarity: a place definite and finished.
I had come to these desert paths to court loneliness, having after all been a student of poetry once. But I had brought too little to drink, and what I felt instead was an almost religious yearning for water. My heart swelled painfully. I believed I had loved nothing and no one better.
At 9:00 AM the air was already 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As I breathed, it dried my gums and the roof of my mouth as though to stone. I could feel the shape of my skull.
The awe I had for what surrounded me was of the primal sort: made of fear and egoless hatred. This dust and rock did not impress my soul with some sublime and horrible insinuation (about scale, meaning, identity) but threatened the life of my body like a jealous god.
May 15, 2009 (White Sands National Monument): Flesh
I drive north and east of Las Cruces. The scrub cover grows thicker over the dust and tawny sand. The land undulates slowly. Then suddenly before me is a desert of white dunes, like the immaculate body of God asleep east of the San Andreas Mountains, east of the earth’s scored and dusky bones.
I leave my car and enter the alkali flats stumbling and almost blind. There I find a dark object on the sands: a small bat with its wings pleated about it and its toes curled, dried light as paper. A dark body, a stranger, utterly alone save for the moment I sit beside it. I am a dark body, sun burnt, frayed at the fingertips. I am red and veined, engorged with blood.
May 16, 2009 (Fort Stockton, TX, to Austin): Rain
Again a garden. First nothing but sand-colored rock sparsely stubbled with low, dull-green brush. You could see the weather coming five miles away. By noon, the dark ceiling of the sky had closed over the plains. A smell of wet rock rose from the ground. Then the rain poured down, and lightening tore the midday dusk asunder. There rose taller trees standing in wet, green grass and fields all wind-sown with yellow wildflowers. I turned onto US-290, a country road that winds through orchards and old frontier towns whose slow decay is clothed and ornamented by moss-covered trees – a ruination less naked, less monumental than that of the farmhouses kneeling with broken spines in the desert. Here will grow peaches, tomatoes, and lavender. Here is a smell of wet leaves. A raw but gentle air.
May 17, 2009 (Austin to Oklahoma City to Emporia, KS): Grass, Shit
The stockyards of Oklahoma City are paved with brick, and the brick is covered with an inch or two of cattle shit. The shiny black cattle have been delivered here from open rangeland, as I can tell from their branded flanks. They look not sick nor afraid, only hot. This is a place of waiting, and they abide. What else? Some low and low to each other or anyone who might hear, but most lie curled in the dung, rocked gently by their own panting.
A worker calls up to me from an aisle between the pens as I stand on the catwalk. Among the stoic, middle-aged, white cowboys roving or lazing about the yards, he is the lone Mexican, speeding around in a muddy ATV in coveralls, sunglasses, and a jaunty checkered cap. The others are possessed of that hardscrabble country disposition that greets a smile and a friendly wave from a stranger with a look to the effect of, “Yup, well, you’re here,” but this guy likes visitors. They get people from all over, he says, white, black, Chinese, trying to take pictures. Sometimes they want to take pictures of him. His name is Francisco. The work is hard work, dirty work. No one is clean here. Guys get kicked, sometimes so hard that they limp away to the hospital. Men come looking for work and leave in a week, a month, because the cows are crazy and the whole place floods when it rains. But Francisco has worked here a long, long time. Too long. He never calls in sick when it rains. After all, the boss hands him a check every week. He used to work in restaurants as a chef. Maybe he’ll go back to that, but it’s all cheap labor. Money is money, he says, money is money. Money is money, I repeat, shrugging my shoulders. Francisco tells me to stop by and say hello next time I pass through Oklahoma City. I will. San Francisco, Stockyards Francisco. The map is shit-spattered with points that are places insisting on a return.
I stomp the manure out of my boot treads, get back in the car, and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas along I-35, on whose shoulders lie shredded tires and belly-up armadillos with their faces smashed to pulp. The Flint Hills of Kansas are the last stretch of original American prairie. Like armadas of clouds across the sky, herds of cattle drift over this enormous lawn, growing fat on the bluestem, soon to be driven into trucks headed south. Green fields spread to the horizon uninterrupted, like a pasture tamed through some enormous labor, but the creek beds are made of mud as red as though it were dyed with the earth’s blood or with the blood of the multitudes long since dead and compounded below – silent but not harmless spirits.
May 18, 2009 (Emporia to Minneapolis): Dirt
Beside the highway, tractors raise dust on black fields still strewn with the waste of crops I saw in their ripeness as I drove west eight months ago. Cattle browse the deep grass ditches. Rusty well-pumps bow like perpetual penitents.
I return. I return to roadwork, mowers on the median, suburban commercial sprawl. I return to brown, slow rivers sunk in the flatlands, to marshes, to bright red barns, to modern farmhouses flanked by silos and stands of cottonwood that shelter them incompletely on the naked fields. I will not drive in silence even for five minutes here. I could not endure to pass with bare senses through such expanse of tamed land. In two months, the corn will be high as an elephant’s eye. Corn and soybeans all around and all over, as far as human eye can see.
Past San Bernardino lies a scrubland whose naked hills are the color of flesh, not sensuous but thrilling and obscene.
The sun has burnt the grass to red and golden straw. Every rusted tractor standing alone on the desert floor looks like a shipwreck and whole towns of battered, metal ranch houses like the abandoned base camps of a vain human adventure that wasted itself upon the plain and left no survivors nor even any dry bones.
Even the decadent fields of green that intermittently set themselves against the pale dust of their surroundings, and that are made of vine-draped arbors or rows of trees, appear not as any testimony of human presence but as the armor, soon to be shed, of one chthonic power at war with another.
May 14, 2009 (Phoenix to Las Cruces): Bones
I walked in the mountains north of the city, where were heat and thirst. Gnarled, spined, desiccated brush clung to rocks that were black as iron and could scald your hand. This was a landscape drawn completely out of the numinous mists and burnt to a perfect clarity: a place definite and finished.
I had come to these desert paths to court loneliness, having after all been a student of poetry once. But I had brought too little to drink, and what I felt instead was an almost religious yearning for water. My heart swelled painfully. I believed I had loved nothing and no one better.
At 9:00 AM the air was already 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As I breathed, it dried my gums and the roof of my mouth as though to stone. I could feel the shape of my skull.
The awe I had for what surrounded me was of the primal sort: made of fear and egoless hatred. This dust and rock did not impress my soul with some sublime and horrible insinuation (about scale, meaning, identity) but threatened the life of my body like a jealous god.
May 15, 2009 (White Sands National Monument): Flesh
I drive north and east of Las Cruces. The scrub cover grows thicker over the dust and tawny sand. The land undulates slowly. Then suddenly before me is a desert of white dunes, like the immaculate body of God asleep east of the San Andreas Mountains, east of the earth’s scored and dusky bones.
I leave my car and enter the alkali flats stumbling and almost blind. There I find a dark object on the sands: a small bat with its wings pleated about it and its toes curled, dried light as paper. A dark body, a stranger, utterly alone save for the moment I sit beside it. I am a dark body, sun burnt, frayed at the fingertips. I am red and veined, engorged with blood.
May 16, 2009 (Fort Stockton, TX, to Austin): Rain
Again a garden. First nothing but sand-colored rock sparsely stubbled with low, dull-green brush. You could see the weather coming five miles away. By noon, the dark ceiling of the sky had closed over the plains. A smell of wet rock rose from the ground. Then the rain poured down, and lightening tore the midday dusk asunder. There rose taller trees standing in wet, green grass and fields all wind-sown with yellow wildflowers. I turned onto US-290, a country road that winds through orchards and old frontier towns whose slow decay is clothed and ornamented by moss-covered trees – a ruination less naked, less monumental than that of the farmhouses kneeling with broken spines in the desert. Here will grow peaches, tomatoes, and lavender. Here is a smell of wet leaves. A raw but gentle air.
May 17, 2009 (Austin to Oklahoma City to Emporia, KS): Grass, Shit
The stockyards of Oklahoma City are paved with brick, and the brick is covered with an inch or two of cattle shit. The shiny black cattle have been delivered here from open rangeland, as I can tell from their branded flanks. They look not sick nor afraid, only hot. This is a place of waiting, and they abide. What else? Some low and low to each other or anyone who might hear, but most lie curled in the dung, rocked gently by their own panting.
A worker calls up to me from an aisle between the pens as I stand on the catwalk. Among the stoic, middle-aged, white cowboys roving or lazing about the yards, he is the lone Mexican, speeding around in a muddy ATV in coveralls, sunglasses, and a jaunty checkered cap. The others are possessed of that hardscrabble country disposition that greets a smile and a friendly wave from a stranger with a look to the effect of, “Yup, well, you’re here,” but this guy likes visitors. They get people from all over, he says, white, black, Chinese, trying to take pictures. Sometimes they want to take pictures of him. His name is Francisco. The work is hard work, dirty work. No one is clean here. Guys get kicked, sometimes so hard that they limp away to the hospital. Men come looking for work and leave in a week, a month, because the cows are crazy and the whole place floods when it rains. But Francisco has worked here a long, long time. Too long. He never calls in sick when it rains. After all, the boss hands him a check every week. He used to work in restaurants as a chef. Maybe he’ll go back to that, but it’s all cheap labor. Money is money, he says, money is money. Money is money, I repeat, shrugging my shoulders. Francisco tells me to stop by and say hello next time I pass through Oklahoma City. I will. San Francisco, Stockyards Francisco. The map is shit-spattered with points that are places insisting on a return.
I stomp the manure out of my boot treads, get back in the car, and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas along I-35, on whose shoulders lie shredded tires and belly-up armadillos with their faces smashed to pulp. The Flint Hills of Kansas are the last stretch of original American prairie. Like armadas of clouds across the sky, herds of cattle drift over this enormous lawn, growing fat on the bluestem, soon to be driven into trucks headed south. Green fields spread to the horizon uninterrupted, like a pasture tamed through some enormous labor, but the creek beds are made of mud as red as though it were dyed with the earth’s blood or with the blood of the multitudes long since dead and compounded below – silent but not harmless spirits.
May 18, 2009 (Emporia to Minneapolis): Dirt
Beside the highway, tractors raise dust on black fields still strewn with the waste of crops I saw in their ripeness as I drove west eight months ago. Cattle browse the deep grass ditches. Rusty well-pumps bow like perpetual penitents.
I return. I return to roadwork, mowers on the median, suburban commercial sprawl. I return to brown, slow rivers sunk in the flatlands, to marshes, to bright red barns, to modern farmhouses flanked by silos and stands of cottonwood that shelter them incompletely on the naked fields. I will not drive in silence even for five minutes here. I could not endure to pass with bare senses through such expanse of tamed land. In two months, the corn will be high as an elephant’s eye. Corn and soybeans all around and all over, as far as human eye can see.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
When in Rome
While driving through the southwest, I turned on the radio and attempted to acquire an appreciation for country music. Within ten minutes, two songs had obligingly provided summaries of the subject matter I would be encountering. Country, I gathered, celebrates all things really American, which include:
• High school proms
• Springsteen songs
• Rides in Chevrolets
• A man on the moon
• Fireflies in June
• Kids selling lemonade
• Cities and farms
• Open arms
• One nation under God
• A kid with a chance
• A rock-and-roll band
• A farmer cutting hay
• A big flag flyin’ in the summer wind over a hero’s grave
• The front pew of a wooden white church
• Courthouse clocks that still don’t work
• Slant rhymes
The music to which I am accustomed, loosely categorized as alt-rock, tends to pace around its subjects, striving to reveal the truth about some idea or experience by complicating it almost beyond recognition. From what I heard in Arizona through Kansas, however, country music don’t complicate nothing. It’s nailed together with concrete images and simple metaphors, and its material is narratives.
Love stories dominate. During one stretch of driving, I heard the tales of five men who married their high school sweethearts, one whose daddy married his high school sweetheart, one who married his third-grade sweetheart, one married a woman with whom he slow-danced in a bar, and one who was proud to be a “stand by your woman man.” These twang-voiced fellows get down on one knee to propose. They fantasize about their wives having a baby on the way, their wives growing gray-haired. They are often the same men, or at least too similar to them for me to distinguish, who sing paeans to soldiers and righteous war, but their wars are all overseas against an unseen enemy (who, though the subject is never breached, almost certainly did not take state back in ’63 or woo a homecoming queen). The homeland is a bastion of peace, where men of integrity safely inherit and perform a cycle of domestic rites.
Fidelity is exalted, and marriage is as much a forgone conclusion in these songs as in a Shakespearean comedy, though the version of the songs is much sweeter and considerably less troubled, less sexy.
I heard also, however, specimens of a randier strain of country music. This subgenre presents a worldview kindred to one prevalent in contemporary hip hop. The piece “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” for instance, addresses many of the same themes explored by Juvenile’s “Back that Ass Up.” Along with nation, family, small town values, and true love, therefore, the country man can be said also to love the sight of a woman with a rear-end so round, he can’t imagine how she even got them britches on.
• High school proms
• Springsteen songs
• Rides in Chevrolets
• A man on the moon
• Fireflies in June
• Kids selling lemonade
• Cities and farms
• Open arms
• One nation under God
• A kid with a chance
• A rock-and-roll band
• A farmer cutting hay
• A big flag flyin’ in the summer wind over a hero’s grave
• The front pew of a wooden white church
• Courthouse clocks that still don’t work
• Slant rhymes
The music to which I am accustomed, loosely categorized as alt-rock, tends to pace around its subjects, striving to reveal the truth about some idea or experience by complicating it almost beyond recognition. From what I heard in Arizona through Kansas, however, country music don’t complicate nothing. It’s nailed together with concrete images and simple metaphors, and its material is narratives.
Love stories dominate. During one stretch of driving, I heard the tales of five men who married their high school sweethearts, one whose daddy married his high school sweetheart, one who married his third-grade sweetheart, one married a woman with whom he slow-danced in a bar, and one who was proud to be a “stand by your woman man.” These twang-voiced fellows get down on one knee to propose. They fantasize about their wives having a baby on the way, their wives growing gray-haired. They are often the same men, or at least too similar to them for me to distinguish, who sing paeans to soldiers and righteous war, but their wars are all overseas against an unseen enemy (who, though the subject is never breached, almost certainly did not take state back in ’63 or woo a homecoming queen). The homeland is a bastion of peace, where men of integrity safely inherit and perform a cycle of domestic rites.
Fidelity is exalted, and marriage is as much a forgone conclusion in these songs as in a Shakespearean comedy, though the version of the songs is much sweeter and considerably less troubled, less sexy.
I heard also, however, specimens of a randier strain of country music. This subgenre presents a worldview kindred to one prevalent in contemporary hip hop. The piece “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” for instance, addresses many of the same themes explored by Juvenile’s “Back that Ass Up.” Along with nation, family, small town values, and true love, therefore, the country man can be said also to love the sight of a woman with a rear-end so round, he can’t imagine how she even got them britches on.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Relenting
Three weeks ago, I stumbled upon some flaw in my left knee. I can no longer run.
I subside. With relief I subside. I turn back from the extremity. I return.
I had thought to escape, run wild into space to be cold-hearted and lost forever. But gravity has me, and I go back – not to stay, beached, but to visit that shoal again, again. I am the tide washing in again. I am the orbiter swung back around.
I subside. With relief I subside. I turn back from the extremity. I return.
I had thought to escape, run wild into space to be cold-hearted and lost forever. But gravity has me, and I go back – not to stay, beached, but to visit that shoal again, again. I am the tide washing in again. I am the orbiter swung back around.
Possessions
March 21, 2009
Though I have been inside few of San Francisco’s hidden places, its dim rooms pounding with music or warm, cluttered rooms whose windows glow in the night, though I have not wormed my way into the city nor stumbled in a drunken rapture through its doors, I feel I know the place.
This morning I took my tea to the rocky outcrop at the end of the street and stood there naming what lay below me: There was Stern Grove, the Stonestown Galleria, Lake Merced, Fort Funston. To the east the Bay. To the north Davis Hill. To the west the Pacific. I have not seen the city’s secrets, but I have seen the pattern they form in aggregate, their skeletal reef, like a map spread at my feet. I have stood over it and looked down, turning in a circle: the bay, the hills, the ocean, the hills. I have been reminded that I am living on the surface of the earth.
Therefore, much to my surprise, San Francisco is more intelligible than Minneapolis, which must be navigated from the inside. One has no map there but a dim constellation of feelings, like a constellation of black holes, its objects detectable only by the effects of their gravity. Somewhere to the north there is downtown, a river, train yards. There are neighborhoods too dangerous to enter, though one cannot say for certain where their borders lie; one’s path is bent away from them like light bent around a great, dense mass in space. There is a lake somewhere nearby. There is a park. One cannot see one’s way. One feels one’s way, running hands over railings and walls, stumbling upon new places, perpetually surprised. Minneapolis is small and full of secrets, like an attic where sun slanting through a dirty window illuminates columns of swirling dust and leaves the corners in shadow. It bears its history as an attic does, letting it grow worn and dusty but also cherishing it, holding it safe to be discovered by the grandchildren on some rainy day.
February 21, 2009
Driving up the coast, I saw clinging to the sea cliffs houses whose entire fronts were banks of windows. I wondered in what ways I would have to reshape my life to possess a perpetual window onto such gorgeousness.
It is better that I never do. I would have to become voracious. I would have to indenture myself to some bland undertaking and set the house with the wall of windows as my exceeding great reward – labor dimly for the promise of a long view into the west. And for what, in the end? To live every day on the continent’s extremity, with the ocean crashing at my feet, and make no headway against that confounding beauty? My elation would be overthrown by familiarity or made dumb by the overwhelming insistence of the scene. It would be to have the window, not the beauty: to have what I desire always before me, outside of me. Better to live inland, in exile from it, but hold it in my mind like a fountain of language and like a cherished beacon casting illumination over some humbler landscape.
Though I have been inside few of San Francisco’s hidden places, its dim rooms pounding with music or warm, cluttered rooms whose windows glow in the night, though I have not wormed my way into the city nor stumbled in a drunken rapture through its doors, I feel I know the place.
This morning I took my tea to the rocky outcrop at the end of the street and stood there naming what lay below me: There was Stern Grove, the Stonestown Galleria, Lake Merced, Fort Funston. To the east the Bay. To the north Davis Hill. To the west the Pacific. I have not seen the city’s secrets, but I have seen the pattern they form in aggregate, their skeletal reef, like a map spread at my feet. I have stood over it and looked down, turning in a circle: the bay, the hills, the ocean, the hills. I have been reminded that I am living on the surface of the earth.
Therefore, much to my surprise, San Francisco is more intelligible than Minneapolis, which must be navigated from the inside. One has no map there but a dim constellation of feelings, like a constellation of black holes, its objects detectable only by the effects of their gravity. Somewhere to the north there is downtown, a river, train yards. There are neighborhoods too dangerous to enter, though one cannot say for certain where their borders lie; one’s path is bent away from them like light bent around a great, dense mass in space. There is a lake somewhere nearby. There is a park. One cannot see one’s way. One feels one’s way, running hands over railings and walls, stumbling upon new places, perpetually surprised. Minneapolis is small and full of secrets, like an attic where sun slanting through a dirty window illuminates columns of swirling dust and leaves the corners in shadow. It bears its history as an attic does, letting it grow worn and dusty but also cherishing it, holding it safe to be discovered by the grandchildren on some rainy day.
February 21, 2009
Driving up the coast, I saw clinging to the sea cliffs houses whose entire fronts were banks of windows. I wondered in what ways I would have to reshape my life to possess a perpetual window onto such gorgeousness.
It is better that I never do. I would have to become voracious. I would have to indenture myself to some bland undertaking and set the house with the wall of windows as my exceeding great reward – labor dimly for the promise of a long view into the west. And for what, in the end? To live every day on the continent’s extremity, with the ocean crashing at my feet, and make no headway against that confounding beauty? My elation would be overthrown by familiarity or made dumb by the overwhelming insistence of the scene. It would be to have the window, not the beauty: to have what I desire always before me, outside of me. Better to live inland, in exile from it, but hold it in my mind like a fountain of language and like a cherished beacon casting illumination over some humbler landscape.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Away
February 21, 2009
(Elma, WA, by way of Hwy 101)
So up the coast I went, from dawn until midnight, hurtling along the coastal highway with my mouth hanging open. I stared so hard at everything around that I was in constant peril of smashing into the side of a cliff or plunging into the sea. The land itself looked to have some such inclination, always leaning like a wedge into the ocean, with a trail of small, rocky islands scattered before it as though it had flung itself at the horizon, broken, and fallen.
I hurtled through the little coastal towns of souvenir shops, gas stations, and rickety houses – by day like some curious flotsam that had washed up these fifty years past, by night like shoals of multicolored light in a sea of darkness.
In Oregon, the evergreen forest grows right down to the water, and the trees stand with their feet in the white sand. I think such sights are almost too beautiful, confluences of Paradise and Eden – nature decadent, nature unspoiled.
February 23, 2009
(Seattle)
While M was at work, I took a walk through Beacon Hill and along the bank of Lake Washington. Seattle in February feels autumnal, sedate. The trees are bare-armed and thick with moss, standing on lawns of sparse, dull grass and fallen leaves. They are trees of modest proportions and unostentatious postures. No towering cypress, no palm, no rigid desert trees standing sentinel. There were some pale, yellow crocuses gathered about the foot of a sapling on a boulevard. There was something of Minneapolis, something of Bennington, Vermont. Ambling by the water, I felt like a convalescent, my senses muted, my restlessness palliated. The naked trees cast a mottled shadow on the mind, threatening peace. The sky dims at the horizon, even at midday, and the edges of the mind dim.
April 4
(back in San Francisco)
A long walk to Pacifica reminded me again how different this city is from the one where I was born. There is such a difference in the way the genius of the place makes itself felt.
The beauty of Minneapolis is an old ghost with creaky joints. It walks slowly beside you, laying a hand on your shoulder as you cross the Hennepin Ave. Bridge, as you stand beneath the mill ruins. It rumbles in the throat with the engines of buses that struggle awake in the morning cold.
The beauty of San Francisco smacks you right in the face. It smacks you silly, and the April wind lashes your clothes about you, spins you around, and drives you downhill with your mouth agape.
One beauty is a titan with a crumbling face, with rust stains running from the mouth. The other, though as old, approaches you always as a young god at the height of its powers. It flexes its muscles; it beats its chest, with the wind rushing in from the ocean and waves smashing against the rocks. Strong and amorous, it bares its best treasures at once and demands you fall in love. I was of course swept off my feet. But I have been here some months now. I have woke of a morning and, looking out over the hills covered in dingy, pastel squares of houses, thought it an ugly city. Sometimes the sun shines too brightly for one raised further north, and inland, and beneath the shade of elms.
I begin to miss the green corridors of the avenues. Ivy-covered houses. Hastas. Grim skies promising snow. Promising thunderstorms. Yellow skies before hail. The faceless, handless statue of Longfellow standing alone in that forgotten field. Shade trees. Shade trees. That dappled, relenting light. It casts a shadow on the soul. It whispers in the throat of history, age, and a great river eating away the banks, carrying them away south toward an end, and leaving every year, proud and diminished, the remains – like some original place.
(Elma, WA, by way of Hwy 101)
So up the coast I went, from dawn until midnight, hurtling along the coastal highway with my mouth hanging open. I stared so hard at everything around that I was in constant peril of smashing into the side of a cliff or plunging into the sea. The land itself looked to have some such inclination, always leaning like a wedge into the ocean, with a trail of small, rocky islands scattered before it as though it had flung itself at the horizon, broken, and fallen.
I hurtled through the little coastal towns of souvenir shops, gas stations, and rickety houses – by day like some curious flotsam that had washed up these fifty years past, by night like shoals of multicolored light in a sea of darkness.
In Oregon, the evergreen forest grows right down to the water, and the trees stand with their feet in the white sand. I think such sights are almost too beautiful, confluences of Paradise and Eden – nature decadent, nature unspoiled.
February 23, 2009
(Seattle)
While M was at work, I took a walk through Beacon Hill and along the bank of Lake Washington. Seattle in February feels autumnal, sedate. The trees are bare-armed and thick with moss, standing on lawns of sparse, dull grass and fallen leaves. They are trees of modest proportions and unostentatious postures. No towering cypress, no palm, no rigid desert trees standing sentinel. There were some pale, yellow crocuses gathered about the foot of a sapling on a boulevard. There was something of Minneapolis, something of Bennington, Vermont. Ambling by the water, I felt like a convalescent, my senses muted, my restlessness palliated. The naked trees cast a mottled shadow on the mind, threatening peace. The sky dims at the horizon, even at midday, and the edges of the mind dim.
April 4
(back in San Francisco)
A long walk to Pacifica reminded me again how different this city is from the one where I was born. There is such a difference in the way the genius of the place makes itself felt.
The beauty of Minneapolis is an old ghost with creaky joints. It walks slowly beside you, laying a hand on your shoulder as you cross the Hennepin Ave. Bridge, as you stand beneath the mill ruins. It rumbles in the throat with the engines of buses that struggle awake in the morning cold.
The beauty of San Francisco smacks you right in the face. It smacks you silly, and the April wind lashes your clothes about you, spins you around, and drives you downhill with your mouth agape.
One beauty is a titan with a crumbling face, with rust stains running from the mouth. The other, though as old, approaches you always as a young god at the height of its powers. It flexes its muscles; it beats its chest, with the wind rushing in from the ocean and waves smashing against the rocks. Strong and amorous, it bares its best treasures at once and demands you fall in love. I was of course swept off my feet. But I have been here some months now. I have woke of a morning and, looking out over the hills covered in dingy, pastel squares of houses, thought it an ugly city. Sometimes the sun shines too brightly for one raised further north, and inland, and beneath the shade of elms.
I begin to miss the green corridors of the avenues. Ivy-covered houses. Hastas. Grim skies promising snow. Promising thunderstorms. Yellow skies before hail. The faceless, handless statue of Longfellow standing alone in that forgotten field. Shade trees. Shade trees. That dappled, relenting light. It casts a shadow on the soul. It whispers in the throat of history, age, and a great river eating away the banks, carrying them away south toward an end, and leaving every year, proud and diminished, the remains – like some original place.
Marooned
April 3, 2009
Here I am, adrift in another of these formless weeks. Is it Friday today? I used to love Fridays, which were illuminated from behind by the pleasures of the weekends, their plain surfaces translucent so that they glowed like paper lanterns. I used to look through the surface of days to what they promised. I used to feel, with my hand pressed against them as it pressed against the railing of a bus or the panel of a door, their part in the structure of time – an undulation whose next curve or hollow one could anticipate, a shape offering hope or providing some hidden crevice in which to rest.
Now the surface of days is opaque.
I am too full of some desire or some frustration to name it. I am trying to talk with my mouth full. While my left hand struck buttons on the keyboard and my right hand wrote in a notebook, a second set of hands was cramming my mouth with this need and, as with a ramrod, forcing it down into my stomach until I was packed to the lips. Does this bespeak an imminent explosion?
Maybe there’s nothing for it but to go to sea. Going to sea would be like writing poetry, I think: immersive yet denuding; rapturous; confounding. An escape from life into something more like it than itself. This is nonsense. So, probably, is the wish to sail on the ocean – or motor along, however it’s done now. Here’s to nonsense! Here’s to the kind of nonsense that bubbles up from some great body moving far below, leagues down, in the dark, that maybe is a true thing. Not to this lifeless nonsense one is obliged to construct every day in striving to ingratiate oneself to this or that person – like gluing toothpicks to form an ugly, little scaffolding for teacher’s praise. Here’s to nonsense riding the waves endlessly and blinding sailors with wild glares of reflected light. Let’s sail to China and lose, somewhere along the way, our despair to those crushing and pacific depths.
Here I am, adrift in another of these formless weeks. Is it Friday today? I used to love Fridays, which were illuminated from behind by the pleasures of the weekends, their plain surfaces translucent so that they glowed like paper lanterns. I used to look through the surface of days to what they promised. I used to feel, with my hand pressed against them as it pressed against the railing of a bus or the panel of a door, their part in the structure of time – an undulation whose next curve or hollow one could anticipate, a shape offering hope or providing some hidden crevice in which to rest.
Now the surface of days is opaque.
I am too full of some desire or some frustration to name it. I am trying to talk with my mouth full. While my left hand struck buttons on the keyboard and my right hand wrote in a notebook, a second set of hands was cramming my mouth with this need and, as with a ramrod, forcing it down into my stomach until I was packed to the lips. Does this bespeak an imminent explosion?
Maybe there’s nothing for it but to go to sea. Going to sea would be like writing poetry, I think: immersive yet denuding; rapturous; confounding. An escape from life into something more like it than itself. This is nonsense. So, probably, is the wish to sail on the ocean – or motor along, however it’s done now. Here’s to nonsense! Here’s to the kind of nonsense that bubbles up from some great body moving far below, leagues down, in the dark, that maybe is a true thing. Not to this lifeless nonsense one is obliged to construct every day in striving to ingratiate oneself to this or that person – like gluing toothpicks to form an ugly, little scaffolding for teacher’s praise. Here’s to nonsense riding the waves endlessly and blinding sailors with wild glares of reflected light. Let’s sail to China and lose, somewhere along the way, our despair to those crushing and pacific depths.
Hands and Feet
February 14, 2009
(on a bench somewhere)
I can’t find work, but at least for today I am determined not to go back to Minneapolis. I never meant to go back. Today I am convinced that home and family must be surrendered, as surely as childhood must, to the boxes and thin, red tissue paper of memory for safekeeping. How could I face the storms and perils of a contentious life – the only type worth having, according to the determinations of today – if I had such precious things as home and family in my hands? Hands must be empty for grasping, prying, and making fists.
Besides, how can I go back to Minneapolis, having lived in San Francisco? Here are longer bridges, wider views, grander skylines. Here are taller trees, with something of the prehistoric about them. Here are parks like forests, streets that plunge from triumphant ridges of luxury hotels and palm trees down into shadowed valleys at the feet of skyscrapers. Here is more opulence, more poverty, more riotous intermingling of immigrant cultures. Here is a stronger sun. Here is the ocean.
In the end, that is the reason to stay: the Pacific Ocean. Having lived beside it, I cannot now live inland. For here, even if I go weeks without visiting the beach, I feel always that there is some edge of my mind upon which a tremendous force rushes and breaks.
February 17, 2009
So there we stood – what was it? Some five million years ago? – defanged and plunked down on two feet, as though we had fallen out of trees and our legs had caught us. We began walking. We walked out of the forest and onto the plains, that long path away from our natural grace and toward some replacement to be sought in the hallucinations of sun-battered brains, in stone columns, the very air. Meanwhile others remained beneath the dark canopy of leaves, swinging from branch to branch, ready always to flee – deeper, deeper into the forest away from sight, barking and screaming.
So there we stood on feet that could no longer clasp anything but the dirt, their dexterity sacrificed for the upright posture. We put them under us and walked on them forever, and pressing them flat to the ground, we could rear our faces that much higher, stretch our bodies out to long, thin cords between earth and heaven. Like wicks. With minds ignited, we made footprints in the ash of some volcano’s fitful slumber.
But no, that is not right. We made footprints in the ash. We ate the grasses of the savannah. We ran down prey and smashed stones together. Much later our brains were set alight.
We must have been mad from heat stroke for the first hundred thousand years or so, stumbling across the plains in the gawky adolescence of our genus. The spine had uncurled, unfurled down the back, and braced itself with a forward curve at the base. The teeth had flattened, grown thick in the back for grinding. The throat had stretched. The hands were empty and articulate, the front of the body long and exposed. We were gorgeous and monstrous. It is a wonder the great beasts of Africa – with their velvet paws, cruel and noble bearings, arcing horns – did not run from us in fright.
Eventually we learned to build houses and cover our bodies, innovations that restored some dignity, muted somewhat the impression of our astonishing forms. We become formidable in some ways that only we could appreciate. We wrote books, for example, and created law. With the advent of couches and automobiles, our weary feet finally got some rest.
(on a bench somewhere)
I can’t find work, but at least for today I am determined not to go back to Minneapolis. I never meant to go back. Today I am convinced that home and family must be surrendered, as surely as childhood must, to the boxes and thin, red tissue paper of memory for safekeeping. How could I face the storms and perils of a contentious life – the only type worth having, according to the determinations of today – if I had such precious things as home and family in my hands? Hands must be empty for grasping, prying, and making fists.
Besides, how can I go back to Minneapolis, having lived in San Francisco? Here are longer bridges, wider views, grander skylines. Here are taller trees, with something of the prehistoric about them. Here are parks like forests, streets that plunge from triumphant ridges of luxury hotels and palm trees down into shadowed valleys at the feet of skyscrapers. Here is more opulence, more poverty, more riotous intermingling of immigrant cultures. Here is a stronger sun. Here is the ocean.
In the end, that is the reason to stay: the Pacific Ocean. Having lived beside it, I cannot now live inland. For here, even if I go weeks without visiting the beach, I feel always that there is some edge of my mind upon which a tremendous force rushes and breaks.
February 17, 2009
So there we stood – what was it? Some five million years ago? – defanged and plunked down on two feet, as though we had fallen out of trees and our legs had caught us. We began walking. We walked out of the forest and onto the plains, that long path away from our natural grace and toward some replacement to be sought in the hallucinations of sun-battered brains, in stone columns, the very air. Meanwhile others remained beneath the dark canopy of leaves, swinging from branch to branch, ready always to flee – deeper, deeper into the forest away from sight, barking and screaming.
So there we stood on feet that could no longer clasp anything but the dirt, their dexterity sacrificed for the upright posture. We put them under us and walked on them forever, and pressing them flat to the ground, we could rear our faces that much higher, stretch our bodies out to long, thin cords between earth and heaven. Like wicks. With minds ignited, we made footprints in the ash of some volcano’s fitful slumber.
But no, that is not right. We made footprints in the ash. We ate the grasses of the savannah. We ran down prey and smashed stones together. Much later our brains were set alight.
We must have been mad from heat stroke for the first hundred thousand years or so, stumbling across the plains in the gawky adolescence of our genus. The spine had uncurled, unfurled down the back, and braced itself with a forward curve at the base. The teeth had flattened, grown thick in the back for grinding. The throat had stretched. The hands were empty and articulate, the front of the body long and exposed. We were gorgeous and monstrous. It is a wonder the great beasts of Africa – with their velvet paws, cruel and noble bearings, arcing horns – did not run from us in fright.
Eventually we learned to build houses and cover our bodies, innovations that restored some dignity, muted somewhat the impression of our astonishing forms. We become formidable in some ways that only we could appreciate. We wrote books, for example, and created law. With the advent of couches and automobiles, our weary feet finally got some rest.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Spring
February 8, 2009
(Twin Peaks)
I stood on the higher peak and looked down on the city, where wind drove mist over the deep-cut streets. I felt again what I had felt on the bluffs of Marin staring back across the bay: a rising and then subsiding, as of breath in the chest. First exaltation. Then sadness. For the city looked so small and pale, almost subsumed by fog. The buildings of downtown were like masts and protrusions on the deck of some ship lost at sea.
It looked like a thing that could rust. Memory could close over it, and one would look down through those cold waters and see a scene wavering and indistinct. It could crumble slowly and be claimed by the ocean floor of time, grown over by weeds, with creatures nesting in its vacant rooms.
So I thought, standing on a wet, green, high hill. The brilliant vegetation – young grass and starbursts of yellow flowers – so impressed and elated me that I felt I could write pages and pages on it, but the only thing that came out was “green, green, green.” Such vitality of nature, it seemed, could overrun the gray architecture beneath and wilderness reclaim this whole peninsula. I have such notions often in this city, with all its dense, forested parks that overlook the surrounding buildings, rising from among them on hills like volcanic islands made of the true stuff of the earth, lapped by a mutable, inconstant civilization.
(Twin Peaks)
I stood on the higher peak and looked down on the city, where wind drove mist over the deep-cut streets. I felt again what I had felt on the bluffs of Marin staring back across the bay: a rising and then subsiding, as of breath in the chest. First exaltation. Then sadness. For the city looked so small and pale, almost subsumed by fog. The buildings of downtown were like masts and protrusions on the deck of some ship lost at sea.
It looked like a thing that could rust. Memory could close over it, and one would look down through those cold waters and see a scene wavering and indistinct. It could crumble slowly and be claimed by the ocean floor of time, grown over by weeds, with creatures nesting in its vacant rooms.
So I thought, standing on a wet, green, high hill. The brilliant vegetation – young grass and starbursts of yellow flowers – so impressed and elated me that I felt I could write pages and pages on it, but the only thing that came out was “green, green, green.” Such vitality of nature, it seemed, could overrun the gray architecture beneath and wilderness reclaim this whole peninsula. I have such notions often in this city, with all its dense, forested parks that overlook the surrounding buildings, rising from among them on hills like volcanic islands made of the true stuff of the earth, lapped by a mutable, inconstant civilization.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Bridges
January 8, 2009
(Marin)
I crossed the bridge at dusk. Headlands, hills, skyscrapers were softened and blurred at the edges by the air thick with vapor and late light, as though memory had already taken them into its folds. As though I could inquire of memory, and none of this was left to chance. The day would ends thus, and had; the sun would set; the mist would flare just so behind the red-painted beams of the bridge; and a young woman would watch it. It had already and always been determined.
I was a little sad, really, to see San Francisco so small and pale from the bluffs of Marin. It looked like a city of the past. This metropolis, which had once threatened to crush me with its tremendous magnitude and detail, now appeared too diminished to contain my hopes. I felt I had walked through the gate of the city and, looking back, found its promise shut to me. I stared at its chalky walls, opaque and suggesting nothing, like a house with the lights off and the curtains drawn. I would leave, I thought, and efface myself in the darkness that was rising in the sky like ink wicking up through a piece of cloth.
Then I thought of a little house down in the southern part of the city, a door I could open to find myself in a lighted room, a kitchen full of yellow light and the heat of an oven. Comfort. A friend. These things were a beacon in the gray dusk, banishing the histrionic longing and grief of a poetic temperament, opening a crack in the gate of the city through which I could slip and be safe.
January 10, 2009
(Marina parking lot)
Sometimes I think I know what I believe, but I have an alarming habit of changing my mind. It makes me quite ill at ease.
I have already suffered such revolutions of opinion that the girl I was at ten years old has been driven almost completely out of agency over my life. I have traitorously enjoyed many a preoccupation I once denounced.
It would be a comfort to attribute such revisions simply to a more mature understanding of my own true feelings, but it would also be euphemism. I have changed. What I once was has been turned under, like grass beneath the plow. That is the brutal truth of growing up that those who have already grown, in their explanations and consolations, omit: The adult self overthrows the child, usurps her seat of power, and sends her to some thick-walled dungeon if not to execution.
It is dreadful to change our minds, for we are our minds, aren’t we? If, over the course of many years, we come to feel differently about everything really important, haven’t we destroyed and replaced who we were? And therefore who the hell are we?
January 23, 2009
(another giant mood swing)
Yesterday I was standing at the sink washing the little saucepan that my mother gave me right before I left, and I thought what a good, strong pan it was and how it would probably outlast me on this earth. I am not used to thinking that about my possessions. I expect to cast things off, use them up, outgrow them. But here was a thing whose weight would be placed upon the permanent part of life.
Later that night, my supervisor e-mailed to tell me that my seasonal contract would be allowed to lapse at the end of two weeks. No more job. Immediately I thought of leaving San Francisco and being alone again. I had never been completely reconciled to stopping anyway. Yes, I had happily learned faces, bus schedules, the tenets of retail, cupcake recipes, street names. But quickly now I was eager to abandon it all. I wanted to put on baggy cargo pants, pack a cooler, and hit the road. I would leave the saucepan with J.
I would leave a whole identity here, to survive only as long as the memories of other people kept it, to be gradually eroded and distorted by the atmospheres of other people’s minds. I could relinquish this story of myself completely to them, for after all I have no claim on it. It has no claim on me. We talked about this once in philosophy class: We are not objects but subjects, to which nothing is inextricably tied. On which nothing is indelibly written. No flaw, no merit belongs to us. Therefore, we can do anything. But how I forget this when I stand still and the weight of a human gaze falls upon me.
(Marin)
I crossed the bridge at dusk. Headlands, hills, skyscrapers were softened and blurred at the edges by the air thick with vapor and late light, as though memory had already taken them into its folds. As though I could inquire of memory, and none of this was left to chance. The day would ends thus, and had; the sun would set; the mist would flare just so behind the red-painted beams of the bridge; and a young woman would watch it. It had already and always been determined.
I was a little sad, really, to see San Francisco so small and pale from the bluffs of Marin. It looked like a city of the past. This metropolis, which had once threatened to crush me with its tremendous magnitude and detail, now appeared too diminished to contain my hopes. I felt I had walked through the gate of the city and, looking back, found its promise shut to me. I stared at its chalky walls, opaque and suggesting nothing, like a house with the lights off and the curtains drawn. I would leave, I thought, and efface myself in the darkness that was rising in the sky like ink wicking up through a piece of cloth.
Then I thought of a little house down in the southern part of the city, a door I could open to find myself in a lighted room, a kitchen full of yellow light and the heat of an oven. Comfort. A friend. These things were a beacon in the gray dusk, banishing the histrionic longing and grief of a poetic temperament, opening a crack in the gate of the city through which I could slip and be safe.
January 10, 2009
(Marina parking lot)
Sometimes I think I know what I believe, but I have an alarming habit of changing my mind. It makes me quite ill at ease.
I have already suffered such revolutions of opinion that the girl I was at ten years old has been driven almost completely out of agency over my life. I have traitorously enjoyed many a preoccupation I once denounced.
It would be a comfort to attribute such revisions simply to a more mature understanding of my own true feelings, but it would also be euphemism. I have changed. What I once was has been turned under, like grass beneath the plow. That is the brutal truth of growing up that those who have already grown, in their explanations and consolations, omit: The adult self overthrows the child, usurps her seat of power, and sends her to some thick-walled dungeon if not to execution.
It is dreadful to change our minds, for we are our minds, aren’t we? If, over the course of many years, we come to feel differently about everything really important, haven’t we destroyed and replaced who we were? And therefore who the hell are we?
January 23, 2009
(another giant mood swing)
Yesterday I was standing at the sink washing the little saucepan that my mother gave me right before I left, and I thought what a good, strong pan it was and how it would probably outlast me on this earth. I am not used to thinking that about my possessions. I expect to cast things off, use them up, outgrow them. But here was a thing whose weight would be placed upon the permanent part of life.
Later that night, my supervisor e-mailed to tell me that my seasonal contract would be allowed to lapse at the end of two weeks. No more job. Immediately I thought of leaving San Francisco and being alone again. I had never been completely reconciled to stopping anyway. Yes, I had happily learned faces, bus schedules, the tenets of retail, cupcake recipes, street names. But quickly now I was eager to abandon it all. I wanted to put on baggy cargo pants, pack a cooler, and hit the road. I would leave the saucepan with J.
I would leave a whole identity here, to survive only as long as the memories of other people kept it, to be gradually eroded and distorted by the atmospheres of other people’s minds. I could relinquish this story of myself completely to them, for after all I have no claim on it. It has no claim on me. We talked about this once in philosophy class: We are not objects but subjects, to which nothing is inextricably tied. On which nothing is indelibly written. No flaw, no merit belongs to us. Therefore, we can do anything. But how I forget this when I stand still and the weight of a human gaze falls upon me.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Men
December 23, 2008
(Bus: 49 Mission/Van Ness)
A young man romanced his lady over the phone.
“You’ve got me like a dolphin here, baby. You’re so fucking sexy. I love you so fucking much. If I had, like, four or five hearts, it wouldn’t be enough to love you… You’re not, like, one in ten or one in a hundred – you’re like one in a million… I think these are my favorite pictures that you sent me… No. No… If you think you’re ugly, keep being ugly, baby, because I love that shit. That one, “A Kiss for You,” damn, baby… and I’m not drunk, either… I need to, like, pray to God a hundred times for sending me an angel like you.”
I had spent the five minutes prior to this conversation silently cursing him for allowing his gangsta rap ring tone to play repeatedly. Eavesdropping on his protestations of love (arousal) however, my heart was softened toward him. There was none of the unctuousness or complacency with which I am used to hear young Lotharios speak to their conquests on the bus. This guy was vulgar but earnest. He was without guile or pride. He was clumsy, a romantic.
I rather liked his metaphor, too, about the four or five hearts. I empathized with the feeling that this one heart, only the size of a fist, could not hold as much love as its cherished object deserved.
January 30, 2009
(19th Avenue)
Every time I drive to work, I pass through the General Douglas McArthur tunnel. I think that, though I would very much like to be famous, I would not like to be famous in a way that gets a tunnel named after me.
February 2, 2009
(Coin Wash&Dry)
The corner with the Laundromat is overrun with gallants. Young drug dealers ask a girl if she needs help carrying her laundry. Men smoking on their stoops bellow compliments as she passes them on her morning jog. When she sits reading in her car, waiting for the dryer to finish, an old man with an eye patch knocks on the window to ask her sign, offer to buy her a soda, and tell her that, in his sixty years on this earth, she’s the only woman he’s ever been weak for.
She would like to know how it feels to be a man. How do men look at other men? What do they say to each other when they’re alone? She would like to be tall and very strong, to be hard. She would like to be grabbed firmly by the hand and clapped on the back.
She thinks of jogging this morning by the lake. The haze was in the air, making the middle distance appear impersonal, historic. Cypress trees stood like pillars on the golf lawn, dividing and framing the scene. How monumental they looked. How unlike the feeling of seeing such things is from the feeling of sitting in a hot car while men look in at you, drawing conclusions, such as that in all their years they’ve never been weak for anyone else. She would like to be like a man. Or like a cypress tree. She would like men to be like cypress trees: towering, stark, and blind, casting not their gaze but only shadow upon the ground.
(Bus: 49 Mission/Van Ness)
A young man romanced his lady over the phone.
“You’ve got me like a dolphin here, baby. You’re so fucking sexy. I love you so fucking much. If I had, like, four or five hearts, it wouldn’t be enough to love you… You’re not, like, one in ten or one in a hundred – you’re like one in a million… I think these are my favorite pictures that you sent me… No. No… If you think you’re ugly, keep being ugly, baby, because I love that shit. That one, “A Kiss for You,” damn, baby… and I’m not drunk, either… I need to, like, pray to God a hundred times for sending me an angel like you.”
I had spent the five minutes prior to this conversation silently cursing him for allowing his gangsta rap ring tone to play repeatedly. Eavesdropping on his protestations of love (arousal) however, my heart was softened toward him. There was none of the unctuousness or complacency with which I am used to hear young Lotharios speak to their conquests on the bus. This guy was vulgar but earnest. He was without guile or pride. He was clumsy, a romantic.
I rather liked his metaphor, too, about the four or five hearts. I empathized with the feeling that this one heart, only the size of a fist, could not hold as much love as its cherished object deserved.
January 30, 2009
(19th Avenue)
Every time I drive to work, I pass through the General Douglas McArthur tunnel. I think that, though I would very much like to be famous, I would not like to be famous in a way that gets a tunnel named after me.
February 2, 2009
(Coin Wash&Dry)
The corner with the Laundromat is overrun with gallants. Young drug dealers ask a girl if she needs help carrying her laundry. Men smoking on their stoops bellow compliments as she passes them on her morning jog. When she sits reading in her car, waiting for the dryer to finish, an old man with an eye patch knocks on the window to ask her sign, offer to buy her a soda, and tell her that, in his sixty years on this earth, she’s the only woman he’s ever been weak for.
She would like to know how it feels to be a man. How do men look at other men? What do they say to each other when they’re alone? She would like to be tall and very strong, to be hard. She would like to be grabbed firmly by the hand and clapped on the back.
She thinks of jogging this morning by the lake. The haze was in the air, making the middle distance appear impersonal, historic. Cypress trees stood like pillars on the golf lawn, dividing and framing the scene. How monumental they looked. How unlike the feeling of seeing such things is from the feeling of sitting in a hot car while men look in at you, drawing conclusions, such as that in all their years they’ve never been weak for anyone else. She would like to be like a man. Or like a cypress tree. She would like men to be like cypress trees: towering, stark, and blind, casting not their gaze but only shadow upon the ground.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Habitation
December 2, 2008
(Fisherman’s Warf)
Walking along the Embarcadero today, I realized that I had once again become unhappy. The feeling was lent a particular urgency by my sandals, which had been chafing my ankles something fierce for a good forty-five minutes, but the substance of it belonged to a more intractable irritant. I had come all the way here. I had crossed the plains, driven up mountains, driven down mountains, passed through deserts and woods, and arrived finally at the shores of the great western ocean. I had placed myself under a hotter, brighter sun, in a land of eucalyptus, cypress, palm, cactus, and climbing vines full of magenta flowers that seemed to bloom all year long. A different geography, a different botany, a different architecture, climate, and human energy were now brought to bear on my life. For all that, however, I did not feel that I had been made better. My mind did not burn hotter, brighter. Nor was heart stronger. I had experienced no lasting creative awakening. For all that this adventure had made me feel, it had not made me an adventurer. It had not made me a writer.
December 4, 2008
(in the kitchen)
I am now the one who bakes. My coworkers have bemoaned their thwarted diets as they ate my orange cupcakes and banana chocolate chip cookies, and J and I have made short work of more than one sweet potato cake with toasted coconut and pecan buttercream frosting. I am now the provider of desserts. This is, apparently, how I make home.
I drove away from the stucco house with mismatched shutters on Wentworth and believed myself homeless of spirit, to remain unmoored until I built a new home – over many years, through toil, through sweat, perhaps a bit of blood and tears for good measure. Home was to be a labor of the heart. Little did I know that the way to my heart was through other people’s stomachs. I have been out from under my mother’s roof for less than three months, and already I was beginning to feel established, not through any rapturous communion with the place but simply through flour, sugar, and heat.
I say the apartment is like a cave, being dim, chilly, and often damp, not to mention sort of subterranean. J jokes that at least we have fire. We have the gas stove. That is our current degree of sophistication: We have the technology to heat our food. When we are bored or cold, we both end up in the kitchen, toasting various things and making tea to justify our staying. I sit on the counter, J leans in the doorway, and we talk. Sometimes, after we have baked something, we leave the oven door open to cool down the oven by warming up the house a little, and we stand in front of it with our hands stretched out as though over a campfire. Sometimes it seems my life is taken up with these efforts for the sake of simple comforts, with trying to feel full, to feel warm, to feel safe. My hope is anchored to them. Perhaps the adventure of moving from home was too thrilling for the deep chambers of my brain to bear – the most ancient chambers, not fine but strong. I went too far, too fast. It was a stepping over of the circumscription enforced by habit; it was a breach of my nature. For though our minds have strength to rove like planets, our flesh is made to return.
December 19, 2008
(in the living room, reading up on nylon-lycra blends)
You work your way into a life, burrow deeper into the skin, the job, the friendships and errands and small, daily triumphs that must sustain you. You work your way through and through these things, like a network of veins, losing yourself in them. And you are tempted, then, to relent in your efforts of narration and give up on being the author of your life in favor of being a character. You become less watchful and more aware of being watched, feeling that your acquaintances are making something of you for themselves, narrating your part in the events of their days. As you pass from one to another, your entire story is told many times over. It no longer need be repeated and refined in that private chamber of your own mind, where the thick, still air belabors every movement and every breath. No, these people around you, for whom you increasingly care, shall draw in aggregate the outline of your self.
They shall make you out as the sturdy, bookish, Midwestern girl, who bakes cupcakes and carries boxes, who reads poetry, who is a little clumsy with people sometimes but means well. You want them to think you clever or soulful or kind. You begin to labor not on your reckoning of the world but on the world’s reckoning of you. You become the object. This transformation constitutes a dismaying vulnerability. Also a relief.
For it is not so bad, after all, to play a part, if you play it by heart. You can be the aborted author turned retail girl, whose steadiness now and then parts, provoking suspicions, among friends, of some sad, lovely inner life. It is probably easier to be loveable than to love.
(Fisherman’s Warf)
Walking along the Embarcadero today, I realized that I had once again become unhappy. The feeling was lent a particular urgency by my sandals, which had been chafing my ankles something fierce for a good forty-five minutes, but the substance of it belonged to a more intractable irritant. I had come all the way here. I had crossed the plains, driven up mountains, driven down mountains, passed through deserts and woods, and arrived finally at the shores of the great western ocean. I had placed myself under a hotter, brighter sun, in a land of eucalyptus, cypress, palm, cactus, and climbing vines full of magenta flowers that seemed to bloom all year long. A different geography, a different botany, a different architecture, climate, and human energy were now brought to bear on my life. For all that, however, I did not feel that I had been made better. My mind did not burn hotter, brighter. Nor was heart stronger. I had experienced no lasting creative awakening. For all that this adventure had made me feel, it had not made me an adventurer. It had not made me a writer.
December 4, 2008
(in the kitchen)
I am now the one who bakes. My coworkers have bemoaned their thwarted diets as they ate my orange cupcakes and banana chocolate chip cookies, and J and I have made short work of more than one sweet potato cake with toasted coconut and pecan buttercream frosting. I am now the provider of desserts. This is, apparently, how I make home.
I drove away from the stucco house with mismatched shutters on Wentworth and believed myself homeless of spirit, to remain unmoored until I built a new home – over many years, through toil, through sweat, perhaps a bit of blood and tears for good measure. Home was to be a labor of the heart. Little did I know that the way to my heart was through other people’s stomachs. I have been out from under my mother’s roof for less than three months, and already I was beginning to feel established, not through any rapturous communion with the place but simply through flour, sugar, and heat.
I say the apartment is like a cave, being dim, chilly, and often damp, not to mention sort of subterranean. J jokes that at least we have fire. We have the gas stove. That is our current degree of sophistication: We have the technology to heat our food. When we are bored or cold, we both end up in the kitchen, toasting various things and making tea to justify our staying. I sit on the counter, J leans in the doorway, and we talk. Sometimes, after we have baked something, we leave the oven door open to cool down the oven by warming up the house a little, and we stand in front of it with our hands stretched out as though over a campfire. Sometimes it seems my life is taken up with these efforts for the sake of simple comforts, with trying to feel full, to feel warm, to feel safe. My hope is anchored to them. Perhaps the adventure of moving from home was too thrilling for the deep chambers of my brain to bear – the most ancient chambers, not fine but strong. I went too far, too fast. It was a stepping over of the circumscription enforced by habit; it was a breach of my nature. For though our minds have strength to rove like planets, our flesh is made to return.
December 19, 2008
(in the living room, reading up on nylon-lycra blends)
You work your way into a life, burrow deeper into the skin, the job, the friendships and errands and small, daily triumphs that must sustain you. You work your way through and through these things, like a network of veins, losing yourself in them. And you are tempted, then, to relent in your efforts of narration and give up on being the author of your life in favor of being a character. You become less watchful and more aware of being watched, feeling that your acquaintances are making something of you for themselves, narrating your part in the events of their days. As you pass from one to another, your entire story is told many times over. It no longer need be repeated and refined in that private chamber of your own mind, where the thick, still air belabors every movement and every breath. No, these people around you, for whom you increasingly care, shall draw in aggregate the outline of your self.
They shall make you out as the sturdy, bookish, Midwestern girl, who bakes cupcakes and carries boxes, who reads poetry, who is a little clumsy with people sometimes but means well. You want them to think you clever or soulful or kind. You begin to labor not on your reckoning of the world but on the world’s reckoning of you. You become the object. This transformation constitutes a dismaying vulnerability. Also a relief.
For it is not so bad, after all, to play a part, if you play it by heart. You can be the aborted author turned retail girl, whose steadiness now and then parts, provoking suspicions, among friends, of some sad, lovely inner life. It is probably easier to be loveable than to love.
Passages
November 24, 2008
(riding the bus to work at night, being now employed as a salesperson clear across town)
The ride to work, undertaken in darkness, lit by banks of glowing windows in storefronts where young couples leaned forward across the table over steaming bowls or a woman with hair falling in her face undressed a mannequin, provided me an hour of existential joys and terrors.
A man sat next to me, holding in his lap a little girl who looked to be four or five and wore purple gloves several sizes too big. She was one of those exquisite little children who possess, rather than the common bulbous shape, the proportions of the adult body in miniature. The girl spoke a few words now and then, only enough to answer her father as he told her about the route, and otherwise remained silent, still, and watchful, like a small animal. She was one of those children whose behavior, rather than drawing attention merely to itself, instead suggests the workings of a hidden mind. She was a whole person. Yet she was also small enough to be held on a lap.
Watching from the corner of my eye as her gloved fingers slowly curled and flexed like feelers and her deep-set eyes gravely observed the other passengers, I experienced the sudden attack of my first maternal urge. I wanted such a child. I wanted to watch and guide such a consciousness. It would be like ministering to a saint – bathing the holy body and laboring to decipher the encrypted wisdom of the occluded mind. I wanted to carry such a child, to make her of my own body, to deliver her into the world through my own pain and my own might. I wanted to know every mundane detail about her and still be mystified, astonished.
For a moment this desire, this delight, overwhelmed my other creative ambitions. I laughed at myself for succumbing in an instant to what I had so stubbornly rejected.
Then I became afraid. This was my body attacking my mind, seducing me away from my true work. This threatened the labor I had intended for myself, of forging for myself a keen and unbreakable intelligence and wielding it powerfully against the ugliness of the world. This sudden longing for the child threatened me with selflessness, abidance, and a relenting of the mind’s testimony. It threatened me with peace and quiet joy.
The bus lurched a halt. The man rose, set the little girl on her feet, and walked hand and hand with her off the bus. I looked up to catch her eye, but she was watching the driver manipulate the door lever. As she passed, I caught sight of a reflection in the window opposite me. I could see a girl with her hair pulled tightly into a bun, with deep-set but dull eyes, dressed in something like business casual, and pointing her toes to steady a dish covered with tin foil, which appeared to be her greatest care. She had baked a treat for her co-workers, and this was all that made the night special. I could see in her no suggestion that she bore through the night something of beauty soon to be revealed. She bore cupcakes. She was going to work and was happy that she was now well acquainted with the back office.
It was not hard to imagine myself contented with such a life. Or not contented but placated. It was more plausible that I should continue on in this way than that I should muster latent strength and skill to create something remarkable. It was plausible that I would spend my whole life intending to do something important and never do it. The mind travels quickly at night, (Here we passed through the vacant park.) when the black, blank windows offer so little to catch and hold it back, and is suddenly arrived at death. I thought of dying and leaving nothing of myself here. I had not realized what consolation I had taken from the promise of fame’s legacy until I allowed it to fall from my mind. Then I saw a naked death. My body would fail, and I, clutched in its ribcage, would go down into the earth with it and cease to be.
This was a vision to recommend that I think again of that child and consider how my life could have some consequence. But the joy of my first longing had been too sternly rebuked and could not now revisit me. Instead I thought coldly of the bid for immortality that was extended by biological reproduction. I thought of Shakespeare’s sonnets and history plays, which made much of the issue, invested much comfort and even triumph in it, but always uneasily. To live on in the blood of descendents is a grim hope. The prospect of being translated into a something else is almost as terrible as the prospect of being erased.
December 1, 2008
(driving to Turlock)
Fog lay on the hills the whole way, divulging at times the suggestion of a butte, a basin, a field – but hiding the rest from view, as though the land were suffering a secret birth that the sunlight of later days would reveal. While back in Minnesota the cold and dark of winter was forcing spirits indoors, to be held with the tissue-wrapped contents of old boxes under lamplight, here in California wet air had finally relieved the oppression of the autumn heat and now drew life to the surface of things. Rolling down the window, I smelled in the air a richness promising that, behind the drifting veils of fog, the land was becoming green.
It was spring in December. The ground, the trees, and the cracks in the sound barriers beside the highway were all spilling tendrils of dripping, green leaves. The earth was wet and raw. I saw young, emerald grass at the feet of olive trees and almost cried at it. I was driving to the Turlock Livestock Auction, so I anticipated all this beauty and life soon to be cruelly contradicted: in place of mystery, nakedness; in place of an arbor of brilliant vines, a dead pile.
But the yards were deserted. I drove by twice and saw not a soul of any species. The vacant pens and catwalks of splintered wood could have been the ruins of a market closed some twenty years or more. I drove on into the next town, where little knick knack shops and a coffee shack stood across the street from a gas station and church made of concrete slabs but formed as though to resemble a fairytale castle. The rest was fields, moldering barns, and a trailer park. I adored and thanked it all.
December 22, 2008
(Fort Funston)
I returned to the ocean beach and walked south into the stretch of it called Fort Funston, where the dunes are covered with green and orange ice plants. Again I felt that time was waylaid. Or more than that – regressed. That the human presence was muted. Here were trees and succulent plants growing from the sand, fed by the air, as though the air were as full of life as it had been before the gasping of six billion throats and the hunger of machines had emptied it. The dunes were populated almost exclusively by seagulls, pelicans, and dogs who roamed in large troops or wandered in ones and twos. A mastiff and a yorkie lounged on a hillock in the sand, looking native. The few humans to be seen walked quietly down the shore, now and then throwing a ball to the hounds.
Above, seagulls snapped their wings and quivered taut on the air or rode invisible currents swiftly down to sea. Among them were also men and women strapped into hang-gliders, moving as the birds moved – the human form translated into one with greater power to see, less power to harm. They swept over miles of coastline and left no trace.
We have left our traces on the ocean, in contradiction to Byron’s exalting praise – “ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.” We have polluted it, dragged its depths, scraped its floor, and left behind us islands of plastic bags and unintended prey. We have despoiled the ocean. But still it has the power to silence and enthrall us. At its edge we drift, unmoored from our own world and compelled by the forces of another, made into hermits or birds. The ocean translates us, but we cannot translate the ocean. Its sound is too polyphonic to be like our breath; it neither roars nor murmurs; it does not speak to us at all.
(riding the bus to work at night, being now employed as a salesperson clear across town)
The ride to work, undertaken in darkness, lit by banks of glowing windows in storefronts where young couples leaned forward across the table over steaming bowls or a woman with hair falling in her face undressed a mannequin, provided me an hour of existential joys and terrors.
A man sat next to me, holding in his lap a little girl who looked to be four or five and wore purple gloves several sizes too big. She was one of those exquisite little children who possess, rather than the common bulbous shape, the proportions of the adult body in miniature. The girl spoke a few words now and then, only enough to answer her father as he told her about the route, and otherwise remained silent, still, and watchful, like a small animal. She was one of those children whose behavior, rather than drawing attention merely to itself, instead suggests the workings of a hidden mind. She was a whole person. Yet she was also small enough to be held on a lap.
Watching from the corner of my eye as her gloved fingers slowly curled and flexed like feelers and her deep-set eyes gravely observed the other passengers, I experienced the sudden attack of my first maternal urge. I wanted such a child. I wanted to watch and guide such a consciousness. It would be like ministering to a saint – bathing the holy body and laboring to decipher the encrypted wisdom of the occluded mind. I wanted to carry such a child, to make her of my own body, to deliver her into the world through my own pain and my own might. I wanted to know every mundane detail about her and still be mystified, astonished.
For a moment this desire, this delight, overwhelmed my other creative ambitions. I laughed at myself for succumbing in an instant to what I had so stubbornly rejected.
Then I became afraid. This was my body attacking my mind, seducing me away from my true work. This threatened the labor I had intended for myself, of forging for myself a keen and unbreakable intelligence and wielding it powerfully against the ugliness of the world. This sudden longing for the child threatened me with selflessness, abidance, and a relenting of the mind’s testimony. It threatened me with peace and quiet joy.
The bus lurched a halt. The man rose, set the little girl on her feet, and walked hand and hand with her off the bus. I looked up to catch her eye, but she was watching the driver manipulate the door lever. As she passed, I caught sight of a reflection in the window opposite me. I could see a girl with her hair pulled tightly into a bun, with deep-set but dull eyes, dressed in something like business casual, and pointing her toes to steady a dish covered with tin foil, which appeared to be her greatest care. She had baked a treat for her co-workers, and this was all that made the night special. I could see in her no suggestion that she bore through the night something of beauty soon to be revealed. She bore cupcakes. She was going to work and was happy that she was now well acquainted with the back office.
It was not hard to imagine myself contented with such a life. Or not contented but placated. It was more plausible that I should continue on in this way than that I should muster latent strength and skill to create something remarkable. It was plausible that I would spend my whole life intending to do something important and never do it. The mind travels quickly at night, (Here we passed through the vacant park.) when the black, blank windows offer so little to catch and hold it back, and is suddenly arrived at death. I thought of dying and leaving nothing of myself here. I had not realized what consolation I had taken from the promise of fame’s legacy until I allowed it to fall from my mind. Then I saw a naked death. My body would fail, and I, clutched in its ribcage, would go down into the earth with it and cease to be.
This was a vision to recommend that I think again of that child and consider how my life could have some consequence. But the joy of my first longing had been too sternly rebuked and could not now revisit me. Instead I thought coldly of the bid for immortality that was extended by biological reproduction. I thought of Shakespeare’s sonnets and history plays, which made much of the issue, invested much comfort and even triumph in it, but always uneasily. To live on in the blood of descendents is a grim hope. The prospect of being translated into a something else is almost as terrible as the prospect of being erased.
December 1, 2008
(driving to Turlock)
Fog lay on the hills the whole way, divulging at times the suggestion of a butte, a basin, a field – but hiding the rest from view, as though the land were suffering a secret birth that the sunlight of later days would reveal. While back in Minnesota the cold and dark of winter was forcing spirits indoors, to be held with the tissue-wrapped contents of old boxes under lamplight, here in California wet air had finally relieved the oppression of the autumn heat and now drew life to the surface of things. Rolling down the window, I smelled in the air a richness promising that, behind the drifting veils of fog, the land was becoming green.
It was spring in December. The ground, the trees, and the cracks in the sound barriers beside the highway were all spilling tendrils of dripping, green leaves. The earth was wet and raw. I saw young, emerald grass at the feet of olive trees and almost cried at it. I was driving to the Turlock Livestock Auction, so I anticipated all this beauty and life soon to be cruelly contradicted: in place of mystery, nakedness; in place of an arbor of brilliant vines, a dead pile.
But the yards were deserted. I drove by twice and saw not a soul of any species. The vacant pens and catwalks of splintered wood could have been the ruins of a market closed some twenty years or more. I drove on into the next town, where little knick knack shops and a coffee shack stood across the street from a gas station and church made of concrete slabs but formed as though to resemble a fairytale castle. The rest was fields, moldering barns, and a trailer park. I adored and thanked it all.
December 22, 2008
(Fort Funston)
I returned to the ocean beach and walked south into the stretch of it called Fort Funston, where the dunes are covered with green and orange ice plants. Again I felt that time was waylaid. Or more than that – regressed. That the human presence was muted. Here were trees and succulent plants growing from the sand, fed by the air, as though the air were as full of life as it had been before the gasping of six billion throats and the hunger of machines had emptied it. The dunes were populated almost exclusively by seagulls, pelicans, and dogs who roamed in large troops or wandered in ones and twos. A mastiff and a yorkie lounged on a hillock in the sand, looking native. The few humans to be seen walked quietly down the shore, now and then throwing a ball to the hounds.
Above, seagulls snapped their wings and quivered taut on the air or rode invisible currents swiftly down to sea. Among them were also men and women strapped into hang-gliders, moving as the birds moved – the human form translated into one with greater power to see, less power to harm. They swept over miles of coastline and left no trace.
We have left our traces on the ocean, in contradiction to Byron’s exalting praise – “ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.” We have polluted it, dragged its depths, scraped its floor, and left behind us islands of plastic bags and unintended prey. We have despoiled the ocean. But still it has the power to silence and enthrall us. At its edge we drift, unmoored from our own world and compelled by the forces of another, made into hermits or birds. The ocean translates us, but we cannot translate the ocean. Its sound is too polyphonic to be like our breath; it neither roars nor murmurs; it does not speak to us at all.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
With a Roof Over Our Heads
October 15, 2008
(in the new apartment, after some frantic cleaning)
Once we had moved into the apartment, we bought food, and I rediscovered hunger. On my journey, I had broken free of it. I had driven the length of days eating only morsels of sandwich and only when I judged it necessary to renew my strength. I had walked the length of San Francisco on a few handfuls of trail mix. I was on the move, needing only new sights about me, desiring only wakefulness to see them. When my body had exhausted what substance I fed it, I felt not hunger but emptiness, lightness.
Now, no longer free of eating, I have become obsessed by it. In a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter, there are fuji apples, bananas, avocados, peppers, and sweet grape tomatoes. The cupboard is larded with brown rice, pasta, oatmeal, tomato sauce, canned corn, black beans, soup, and bread. I have hung my clothes in the closet. I have bought a desk and loaded it with books. I have stopped moving, and my hunger has caught up to me and settled in my stomach, demanding that I make house, take a job, and see to its needs. I cook furiously, having come, in this little apartment far from my mother’s hospitable roof, to hold my comfort in my own hands.
October 19, 2008
(surviving a three-hour ordeal at the DMV by having an identity crisis, since I forgot to bring something to read)
How strange to have all these possessions, enough to fill an apartment of four rooms. I had once aspired to own no more than could fit in a backpack. That was before I had the car, back when freedom had seemed to require that I bear the necessities of life on my shoulders. I had desired to move across the surface of the earth without friction, leaving no scratch upon it. I had desired to belong to no place.
I am a little older now. A little time and a little reading have made their insinuations to me about the necessity of loss. We must die eventually. It is better, as the years erode our strength, that we should feel the abrasions of the earth’s surface and be carved and transformed by them, be forever changed from what we were. One reads of the glaciers, which during the last Ice Age scraped slowly over the earth of the northern United States and wasted themselves against that landscape, leaving in their wake boulders and the ten thousand lakes of Minnesota.
How strange to have collected these objects, and yet of course. I have a set of thank-you cards, table settings for four, a cast-iron pan. I have a stapler. I have three pairs of jeans. I have scarves, a wooden bowl, an exercise ball, a box of earrings. These things require dusting, washing of dishes, frequenting of laundromats. Therefore they require rags and vinegar, dishtowels, hampers, detergent – all of which lend the place a greater feeling of home. We taped prints of Monet and Sargent and vintage French travel posters to the wall. The seashells on the bathroom shelf add weight to our presence here. We have set down marks that, though we could almost erase some day, betray no inclination to be erased.
Sometimes, however, we are inclined against them. We are inclined, in fact, against this whole enterprise of living somewhere, despite what we’ve learned from books and despite how we’ve thought to have grown. This morning I had almost reconciled myself to the humble comforts of home. Then this day, like yesterday before it, turned against me. That is what happens when one stands still in a place: One falls prey to the machinations of certain days. The little tyrannies of the commonplace overbear on the spirit. Thus, one spends an entire afternoon at the DMV to no avail.
I want to drive my car the length of California. I want to watch the landscape change and be thrilled but unclaimed by it. The aperture that had contracted in the wooded mountains had opened again, at first imperceptibly, in the dim, cluttered rooms of home and the crowded city streets, exposing me to a landscape that overwhelmed not with its vastness but with its detail. It was laid bare in its ponderous burden of minutiae, its pleasures, its duties. And of course this excessive clarity was caused not by the nakedness of the place but by the nakedness of myself. It was my life that had widened, unfurling from me in the form of dishes, flannel sheets, desires, commitments, ill-fitting dress shoes. I had become unbearably broad, and I wanted once more to squeeze my life into the hard, little frame of my used Corolla with the hand-crank windows. Such a life does not sprawl flat upon the surface of the world but pierces it.
October 28, 2008
(sweeping broken safety glass off the sidewalk)
How life always tugs us back into these cycles. While we would be striding forward and bearing our stories alongside the straight line of history, perhaps someday to be united with it, time is finding all these little means by which to bend us away from such aspirations and occupy us with repairs. You buy a car; it breaks (or is broken); you fix it; it breaks again. No progress is made. You can fix nothing permanently. The car, the computer, the phone, and the roof will not allow you to forget them and move on to loftier thoughts. You eat; you grow hungry again. You sleep and again tire. You clean; you get the dang thing dirty once more. So you eat, sleep, and clean again, never escaping. How are you to get anything important done? Anything of beauty?
But, of course, as we are told by monks and philosophers, the beauty must be found in these humble repairs and spun from the cycles of life like golden thread from straw. Meaning shall not be caught by casting our hopes before us along that line of history, allowing the reasons by which we justify our efforts to flap and fray in the winds of that inscrutable night that is the future. Meaning shall not be caught. It rolls around the cycle, riding the crest of the present.
October 30, 2008
(the neighborhood)
Around 10:40 AM I walked down the hill to the Market Basket. The sun was hot. It fell on the front of a Catholic youth center and cast the shadow of a telephone pole so that it made the shape of a cross on the wall, as though to assure that this day would offer its signs in only a perfectly appropriate manner.
Strolling in the community garden, I had again encountered the large, blond, Germanic fellow who was so informative upon our first visit. His name is Peter. I like his vigor, his cheer. He impresses one as strong and guileless – like the sun in this part of town, though kinder than the sun – and one could believe that he has scarcely gone indoors or ceased to work in his life.
And why cease? And why retire into the dusk and murmuring and muted bumping of objects being placed upon a table in some carpeted room contained in some house, when the weather insists on remaining so fine all year? Rather, become relentless, turning the earth in some garden, turning the black soil up toward the light all day and long after evening has cooled the air. Rather let the sun bake our skin to leather. It beats on our faces, making us a little dizzy, for everything is so bright and so big. Perhaps it is this dizziness that will make us hardy and friendly, like Peter, for we feel that we are falling perpetually downhill, and there’s nothing for it but to crash gaily into all passersby. We will no longer hold ourselves jealously in our own chests, for we have lost our grip. We will fall along the wave like surfers.
That’s the beach disposition, isn’t it? These surfers, peeling off their wet suits, are every one of them gorgeous, for every face wears an expression of ease and surety, an expression of mastery and peace. Every one is used to falling off the edge of the world, falling and feeling perpetually caught.
November 3, 2008
(Ocean Beach)
I walked toward the ocean by way of Lake Merced, whose still banks looked prehistoric: the water, the giant weeds, the cypress and eucalyptus, and the wet air thick with light, as though thick with time.
For the whole afternoon, I felt time was waylaid. It broke upon the day, and receded, and broke again, folding over itself like the tide. I found the beach and put my feet in the Pacific for the first time. I could hear talk and yelling intermingled with the surf but could discern no words nor distinguish one voice from another. The late sunlight was refracted by the mist rising from the water, and its radiance obscured the edges of the beach and the land that jutted out into the waves. The waves themselves issued from a nimbus as they returned and returned to the shore, rearranging its broken shells. Everything inconstant, indefinite. The surfers bobbed like driftwood. As they waded back to land in their black wetsuits, the sun shone from behind them, gilding their outlines but effacing all other detail, leaving their faces in shadow – so that they appeared simply human. Primitive humans, without names or features. Dark bodies walking upright on two legs, emerging from the tide.
(in the new apartment, after some frantic cleaning)
Once we had moved into the apartment, we bought food, and I rediscovered hunger. On my journey, I had broken free of it. I had driven the length of days eating only morsels of sandwich and only when I judged it necessary to renew my strength. I had walked the length of San Francisco on a few handfuls of trail mix. I was on the move, needing only new sights about me, desiring only wakefulness to see them. When my body had exhausted what substance I fed it, I felt not hunger but emptiness, lightness.
Now, no longer free of eating, I have become obsessed by it. In a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter, there are fuji apples, bananas, avocados, peppers, and sweet grape tomatoes. The cupboard is larded with brown rice, pasta, oatmeal, tomato sauce, canned corn, black beans, soup, and bread. I have hung my clothes in the closet. I have bought a desk and loaded it with books. I have stopped moving, and my hunger has caught up to me and settled in my stomach, demanding that I make house, take a job, and see to its needs. I cook furiously, having come, in this little apartment far from my mother’s hospitable roof, to hold my comfort in my own hands.
October 19, 2008
(surviving a three-hour ordeal at the DMV by having an identity crisis, since I forgot to bring something to read)
How strange to have all these possessions, enough to fill an apartment of four rooms. I had once aspired to own no more than could fit in a backpack. That was before I had the car, back when freedom had seemed to require that I bear the necessities of life on my shoulders. I had desired to move across the surface of the earth without friction, leaving no scratch upon it. I had desired to belong to no place.
I am a little older now. A little time and a little reading have made their insinuations to me about the necessity of loss. We must die eventually. It is better, as the years erode our strength, that we should feel the abrasions of the earth’s surface and be carved and transformed by them, be forever changed from what we were. One reads of the glaciers, which during the last Ice Age scraped slowly over the earth of the northern United States and wasted themselves against that landscape, leaving in their wake boulders and the ten thousand lakes of Minnesota.
How strange to have collected these objects, and yet of course. I have a set of thank-you cards, table settings for four, a cast-iron pan. I have a stapler. I have three pairs of jeans. I have scarves, a wooden bowl, an exercise ball, a box of earrings. These things require dusting, washing of dishes, frequenting of laundromats. Therefore they require rags and vinegar, dishtowels, hampers, detergent – all of which lend the place a greater feeling of home. We taped prints of Monet and Sargent and vintage French travel posters to the wall. The seashells on the bathroom shelf add weight to our presence here. We have set down marks that, though we could almost erase some day, betray no inclination to be erased.
Sometimes, however, we are inclined against them. We are inclined, in fact, against this whole enterprise of living somewhere, despite what we’ve learned from books and despite how we’ve thought to have grown. This morning I had almost reconciled myself to the humble comforts of home. Then this day, like yesterday before it, turned against me. That is what happens when one stands still in a place: One falls prey to the machinations of certain days. The little tyrannies of the commonplace overbear on the spirit. Thus, one spends an entire afternoon at the DMV to no avail.
I want to drive my car the length of California. I want to watch the landscape change and be thrilled but unclaimed by it. The aperture that had contracted in the wooded mountains had opened again, at first imperceptibly, in the dim, cluttered rooms of home and the crowded city streets, exposing me to a landscape that overwhelmed not with its vastness but with its detail. It was laid bare in its ponderous burden of minutiae, its pleasures, its duties. And of course this excessive clarity was caused not by the nakedness of the place but by the nakedness of myself. It was my life that had widened, unfurling from me in the form of dishes, flannel sheets, desires, commitments, ill-fitting dress shoes. I had become unbearably broad, and I wanted once more to squeeze my life into the hard, little frame of my used Corolla with the hand-crank windows. Such a life does not sprawl flat upon the surface of the world but pierces it.
October 28, 2008
(sweeping broken safety glass off the sidewalk)
How life always tugs us back into these cycles. While we would be striding forward and bearing our stories alongside the straight line of history, perhaps someday to be united with it, time is finding all these little means by which to bend us away from such aspirations and occupy us with repairs. You buy a car; it breaks (or is broken); you fix it; it breaks again. No progress is made. You can fix nothing permanently. The car, the computer, the phone, and the roof will not allow you to forget them and move on to loftier thoughts. You eat; you grow hungry again. You sleep and again tire. You clean; you get the dang thing dirty once more. So you eat, sleep, and clean again, never escaping. How are you to get anything important done? Anything of beauty?
But, of course, as we are told by monks and philosophers, the beauty must be found in these humble repairs and spun from the cycles of life like golden thread from straw. Meaning shall not be caught by casting our hopes before us along that line of history, allowing the reasons by which we justify our efforts to flap and fray in the winds of that inscrutable night that is the future. Meaning shall not be caught. It rolls around the cycle, riding the crest of the present.
October 30, 2008
(the neighborhood)
Around 10:40 AM I walked down the hill to the Market Basket. The sun was hot. It fell on the front of a Catholic youth center and cast the shadow of a telephone pole so that it made the shape of a cross on the wall, as though to assure that this day would offer its signs in only a perfectly appropriate manner.
Strolling in the community garden, I had again encountered the large, blond, Germanic fellow who was so informative upon our first visit. His name is Peter. I like his vigor, his cheer. He impresses one as strong and guileless – like the sun in this part of town, though kinder than the sun – and one could believe that he has scarcely gone indoors or ceased to work in his life.
And why cease? And why retire into the dusk and murmuring and muted bumping of objects being placed upon a table in some carpeted room contained in some house, when the weather insists on remaining so fine all year? Rather, become relentless, turning the earth in some garden, turning the black soil up toward the light all day and long after evening has cooled the air. Rather let the sun bake our skin to leather. It beats on our faces, making us a little dizzy, for everything is so bright and so big. Perhaps it is this dizziness that will make us hardy and friendly, like Peter, for we feel that we are falling perpetually downhill, and there’s nothing for it but to crash gaily into all passersby. We will no longer hold ourselves jealously in our own chests, for we have lost our grip. We will fall along the wave like surfers.
That’s the beach disposition, isn’t it? These surfers, peeling off their wet suits, are every one of them gorgeous, for every face wears an expression of ease and surety, an expression of mastery and peace. Every one is used to falling off the edge of the world, falling and feeling perpetually caught.
November 3, 2008
(Ocean Beach)
I walked toward the ocean by way of Lake Merced, whose still banks looked prehistoric: the water, the giant weeds, the cypress and eucalyptus, and the wet air thick with light, as though thick with time.
For the whole afternoon, I felt time was waylaid. It broke upon the day, and receded, and broke again, folding over itself like the tide. I found the beach and put my feet in the Pacific for the first time. I could hear talk and yelling intermingled with the surf but could discern no words nor distinguish one voice from another. The late sunlight was refracted by the mist rising from the water, and its radiance obscured the edges of the beach and the land that jutted out into the waves. The waves themselves issued from a nimbus as they returned and returned to the shore, rearranging its broken shells. Everything inconstant, indefinite. The surfers bobbed like driftwood. As they waded back to land in their black wetsuits, the sun shone from behind them, gilding their outlines but effacing all other detail, leaving their faces in shadow – so that they appeared simply human. Primitive humans, without names or features. Dark bodies walking upright on two legs, emerging from the tide.
Terra Firma
October 3, 2008
(downtown San Francisco, having stayed two nights with a friend in Palo Alto and preparing to spend many more nights with a friend in the East Bay town of Dublin)
I walked for nine or ten hours, north, south, east, and west, to the Mission, to Bernal Heights, to Russian Hill, to Fisherman’s Wharf. Toward evening, deciding food was necessary to prevent the embarrassment of some sort of fainting incident, I bought a burrito from a greasy little shop that smelled of limes. I was sitting on a bench eating it when dusk began to climb up from the edges of the sky, summoning with it sadness and bewilderment, for the dark made me think that I ought to be getting home. Then I remembered that, at the moment, I had no home. I would sleep at R’s house tonight, but I was not magnetized to that point. The compass in my chest spun wildly.
October 5. 2008
(Dublin)
A bad day. No one will hire me. No one will rent me an apartment. Amidst the hordes of educated, ambitious, young people out to have their way with San Francisco, I am unremarkable, if not invisible. This city is too big, too hungry, too heavy for my hopes to survive in it.
Wasn’t the west coast the place where a particularly American magic was alchemized? The destination of the Gold Rush; the lode star of transcontinental railroad endeavors; the home of Hollywood; the haven of revolutionaries, visionaries, and eccentrics; the epicenter of the dot.com boom and land of Silicon Valley; that crucible of innovation, in which the opposing pressures of the mountains and the ocean forced the human mind to a high pitch of ecstasy? Why then does it feel to me like the reef upon which my particular American dream is dashed?
October 10, 2008
(after my second day of work as a canvasser, stopping people on the street and trying to convince them to give me their credit card information for the sake of destitute children in third world countries)
I have met many friendly tourists, commiserated with a few beggars, teased some businessmen, and not sealed the deal even once. In two days I have received more dirty looks than the average person probably receives in a year.
There is much encouragement from my three peppy co-workers, a clique of young women who are, much to their advantage in this line of work, fluent in inanity. Despite their intervention, I am sort of enjoying myself. My fear diminishes. I am becoming inured to rejection, to disdain, to contempt. You build up your resistance doing this. My Hapkido instructor in Minneapolis told me about something called the iron shirt, which comes of taking many blows to the body. Your flesh becomes harder, and you feel less pain when it is struck. The iron shirt I have been making for my mind these past two days both gratifies and unsettles. I am gaining a new power with which to get my hands into life and take the good stuff, but I am also dulling a sensitivity, and therefore one view into the heart of life has dimmed. What I mean is, I can survive the hostility (or, worse, low esteem) of other people, because I have shut my mind against wondering about them; I have stopped thinking about what they are thinking. What caused me to fear other people was also what awed me: the workings of the hidden mind, which, though held forever separate from mine, must be somehow kindred.
October 12, 2008
(Dublin)
Saturday was a reprieve. J, A, and I sat for hours in a coffee shop in Palo Alto. We remembered Bennington together, reciting the old stories – incantations, I felt, to summon the protection of the past against the uncertainty lapping at the edges of that day.
Later, we drove out of town, parked in a certain spot A knew, and hiked among the redwoods in the dusk of their shade. There was a coldness and stillness, as though we trod a valley of the ocean floor. A coyote paused as he climbed a hill, catching sight of three other small creatures astir at the feet of the trees. He resumed his climb but turned back again and again to stare.
We returned to the car and drove further, in order to reach a view that A and J had visited three months ago. We wound around hills burnt to golden straw, in which the dark, sere trees seemed to wade. The sun was once again upon us, the light thickening with evening and getting caught between blades of grass and in the edges of leaves and in the very air. We reached the top of a hill where stood a single, gnarled oak and under it a bench. We sat, looking out over the hills to the bay, and A used his pocket knife to cut up apple. He gave a piece to J, then a piece to me, then a piece to himself, and again until it was eaten up. We were silent. I climbed the tree. Before we left, A took pictures of J and me standing together in front of the view – looking into the distance, looking at him, looking at each other.
On Sunday J and I dashed around the city visiting apartments, yelling in to our phones, muttering curses at the incessant Fleet Week flyovers, and in general feeling harried by San Francisco, which was hot, loud, and full. When night finally fell, we drove back to Palo Alto. The lights of the city lay in the dark hills like iridescent beads held in the folds of an apron.
October 13, 2008
(after my third day as a canvasser)
During my second break, J called to tell me that we had the Ingleside apartment and could sign the lease tomorrow. That meant, blessedly, that I could quit my job. (We had found that we needed employment in order to secure an apartment. Good credit scores would also have been helpful.)
I could fail. It was time to fail. Then fate did me a bad turn and put a very sweet, very accommodating young man in my way. He probably would have said yes to a fund providing body-image therapy to ugly cats. Starving children were a shoe-in. He put me at one sign-up in three days and saved me from getting fired at the end of the shift, redeeming me and dooming me to try once more tomorrow. Says the man in Moore’s “Pangolin,”
“Again the sun!”
October 14, 2008
(having just signed the lease)
Oh, screw it. I quit.
(downtown San Francisco, having stayed two nights with a friend in Palo Alto and preparing to spend many more nights with a friend in the East Bay town of Dublin)
I walked for nine or ten hours, north, south, east, and west, to the Mission, to Bernal Heights, to Russian Hill, to Fisherman’s Wharf. Toward evening, deciding food was necessary to prevent the embarrassment of some sort of fainting incident, I bought a burrito from a greasy little shop that smelled of limes. I was sitting on a bench eating it when dusk began to climb up from the edges of the sky, summoning with it sadness and bewilderment, for the dark made me think that I ought to be getting home. Then I remembered that, at the moment, I had no home. I would sleep at R’s house tonight, but I was not magnetized to that point. The compass in my chest spun wildly.
October 5. 2008
(Dublin)
A bad day. No one will hire me. No one will rent me an apartment. Amidst the hordes of educated, ambitious, young people out to have their way with San Francisco, I am unremarkable, if not invisible. This city is too big, too hungry, too heavy for my hopes to survive in it.
Wasn’t the west coast the place where a particularly American magic was alchemized? The destination of the Gold Rush; the lode star of transcontinental railroad endeavors; the home of Hollywood; the haven of revolutionaries, visionaries, and eccentrics; the epicenter of the dot.com boom and land of Silicon Valley; that crucible of innovation, in which the opposing pressures of the mountains and the ocean forced the human mind to a high pitch of ecstasy? Why then does it feel to me like the reef upon which my particular American dream is dashed?
October 10, 2008
(after my second day of work as a canvasser, stopping people on the street and trying to convince them to give me their credit card information for the sake of destitute children in third world countries)
I have met many friendly tourists, commiserated with a few beggars, teased some businessmen, and not sealed the deal even once. In two days I have received more dirty looks than the average person probably receives in a year.
There is much encouragement from my three peppy co-workers, a clique of young women who are, much to their advantage in this line of work, fluent in inanity. Despite their intervention, I am sort of enjoying myself. My fear diminishes. I am becoming inured to rejection, to disdain, to contempt. You build up your resistance doing this. My Hapkido instructor in Minneapolis told me about something called the iron shirt, which comes of taking many blows to the body. Your flesh becomes harder, and you feel less pain when it is struck. The iron shirt I have been making for my mind these past two days both gratifies and unsettles. I am gaining a new power with which to get my hands into life and take the good stuff, but I am also dulling a sensitivity, and therefore one view into the heart of life has dimmed. What I mean is, I can survive the hostility (or, worse, low esteem) of other people, because I have shut my mind against wondering about them; I have stopped thinking about what they are thinking. What caused me to fear other people was also what awed me: the workings of the hidden mind, which, though held forever separate from mine, must be somehow kindred.
October 12, 2008
(Dublin)
Saturday was a reprieve. J, A, and I sat for hours in a coffee shop in Palo Alto. We remembered Bennington together, reciting the old stories – incantations, I felt, to summon the protection of the past against the uncertainty lapping at the edges of that day.
Later, we drove out of town, parked in a certain spot A knew, and hiked among the redwoods in the dusk of their shade. There was a coldness and stillness, as though we trod a valley of the ocean floor. A coyote paused as he climbed a hill, catching sight of three other small creatures astir at the feet of the trees. He resumed his climb but turned back again and again to stare.
We returned to the car and drove further, in order to reach a view that A and J had visited three months ago. We wound around hills burnt to golden straw, in which the dark, sere trees seemed to wade. The sun was once again upon us, the light thickening with evening and getting caught between blades of grass and in the edges of leaves and in the very air. We reached the top of a hill where stood a single, gnarled oak and under it a bench. We sat, looking out over the hills to the bay, and A used his pocket knife to cut up apple. He gave a piece to J, then a piece to me, then a piece to himself, and again until it was eaten up. We were silent. I climbed the tree. Before we left, A took pictures of J and me standing together in front of the view – looking into the distance, looking at him, looking at each other.
On Sunday J and I dashed around the city visiting apartments, yelling in to our phones, muttering curses at the incessant Fleet Week flyovers, and in general feeling harried by San Francisco, which was hot, loud, and full. When night finally fell, we drove back to Palo Alto. The lights of the city lay in the dark hills like iridescent beads held in the folds of an apron.
October 13, 2008
(after my third day as a canvasser)
During my second break, J called to tell me that we had the Ingleside apartment and could sign the lease tomorrow. That meant, blessedly, that I could quit my job. (We had found that we needed employment in order to secure an apartment. Good credit scores would also have been helpful.)
I could fail. It was time to fail. Then fate did me a bad turn and put a very sweet, very accommodating young man in my way. He probably would have said yes to a fund providing body-image therapy to ugly cats. Starving children were a shoe-in. He put me at one sign-up in three days and saved me from getting fired at the end of the shift, redeeming me and dooming me to try once more tomorrow. Says the man in Moore’s “Pangolin,”
“Again the sun!”
October 14, 2008
(having just signed the lease)
Oh, screw it. I quit.
The Voyage Out
Anthropologist Marvin Harris, on the failure of homo erectus to make significant innovations in the technology inherited from its homo habilis predecessors despite its possession of a much larger brain:
Now brains are expensive organs to operate. Big brains make big demands on the body’s supply of energy and blood. In a resting human, the brain accounts for 20 percent of metabolic costs. So extra brain cells would be selected against if they did not make some important contribution to survival and reproductive success. If the brain of erectus was not good for making inventions and changing the face of the earth, what was it good for?... It was good for running.
…
A bigger brain made it possible for erectus to run in the midday sun, at a time of day when most predators seek shade and water and refrain from the pursuit of game… having extra brain cells, the brain of erectus was less likely to break down while experiencing heat stress during long-distance running.
…
When it comes to covering long distances, humans have the capacity to outrun every other animal.
Native peoples studied by anthropologists used this capability to capture prey species by running them down relentlessly, sometimes for several days. Among the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico, for example, “hunting deer consists of chasing the deer for two days – never less than one day. The Tarahumara keeps the deer constantly on the move… [He] chases the deer until the creature falls from exhaustion, often with its hoofs completely worn away.” (Our Kind. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. 50, 52. Harris quotes from: Devine, John. “The Versatility of Human Locomotion.” American Anthropologist 87: 555.)
September 28, 2008
Minnesota, South Dakota
Ripeness
I am unmoored. I got in the car. I lifted my feet off the ground and was spun loose, careening across the continent. I am like a space ship in orbit. I crest a hill, the world ends, I fall off the edge, the road catches me like gravity. Going eighty miles an hour, I feel as though my size has increased in proportion to my velocity. I want to stand face to face with a wind turbine; I want to run my hand over a field of ripe wheat.
Two trucks full of corn lumber onto the freeway. Threshers labor waist-deep in golden hay. There are vast fields of sunflowers with burnt faces.
September 29, 2008
Wyoming, Utah
Wilderness
Red, veined cliffs cut up from the plains like the flayed shoulder blades of the continent. Evening approaches, and the light begins to purple. The majesty of a line of great, craggy mountains feels always concentrated to particular poignancy when a lone silo is set before it or a few small homesteads are scattered at the mountains’ feet. The water tower, the little house, the barn and leaning fence show so pale against the dark, reared earth. They draw out the loneliness of the scene, serving as a reference point both of physical scale and of the magnitude of nature’s impersonality.
September 30, 2008
Salt Lake City
Perfection
They have built a citadel with an Eden at its center. The streets are laid almost in a perfect grid, and the buildings are pale, clean, and enormous. The peace and cleanliness of the square are tended meticulously. The Temple appears built to suggest no past in which it grappled crudely, ardently with the world to achieve its current perfection. It bears the stateliness that accompanies age but is as though newborn. Certainly it has secrets in its keeping, for the walls are set with windows that are ever curtained, but somehow their mystery is without darkness. It does not thrill and frighten the soul with fire and smoke and blood, as do the rituals of the Catholic Church, but instead imposes, as does the high afternoon sun, with a pureness and whiteness that mute the mind.
In the suburb of West Jordan, a new temple rises from its scaffolding, its sharp steeple reiterating the peaks of the mountains behind it, as though to distill their power and bring it into the light.
October 1, 2008
Utah, Nevada, California
Loneliness
I went out from the city and came to a plain of salt. It was flat, white, round, and perhaps three miles across. I was alone. I walked to the center and stood there under the bare, hot sky and was only myself. I felt a shiver in my chest, not of excitement but of exposure, as of skin come suddenly into contact with the air. As of stepping forth from a dark, curtained recess onto a stage.
It is a reverberation, I thought, of the thrill that pierced a certain ancient ape. He came to the edge of the forest and stared out at the sprawling, grassy plains. He took a step out from the trees, let go the thick trunk – which had curved like the ribs of the sky, holding him safe – and found himself naked under the sun with empty hands. In those fields, he found himself erect, head pounding with blood. His body quivered upright like a pin that was magnetized to the sky and to which was magnetized his own awe.
What was next was doggedness. He began to run. His brain swelled, becoming not more potent but harder for the heat of day to break. He began to defy the sun. He chased prey through light and darkness, across and through the land, and when at last it fell, lunged upon it with shards of rock and tore the flesh from the bones. He was without language and art. He and his kin crouched in the grass, smashed stones together, and devoured raw meat, grunting and barking. But they had already broken time. Through stamina, through long abidance, they had bored through the walls of those cycles that rule the lives of animals and worn a passage into that persistent stream that somewhere, millennia after them, widened into history.
Before we were exquisite, we were relentless. That is how we conquered the savannah. That is how I conquered the American desert. With no fineness of approach, with no keenness of vision, with no grace, I forged across it and ground its dust beneath my tires. The plains of northern Nevada were merciless, confronting me hour by hour with burnt hills and flatlands covered in sagebrush. I saw no antelope, no prairie dogs, no cattle, no birds. Yet I saw everything there was. The ground sprawled from one horizon to another in numbing repetition, in overwhelming clarity. Heat oppressed my brain and impelled it insistently toward mindlessness and sleep. In the mythology of this road trip, Nevada was the part where I died.
Then I returned to life. California rose from the plains in huge, wooded mountains. The sight of trees cast a shadow across my mind that woke me, as a shadow upon one’s eyelids makes one start up and say, “What is that?” Lines of towering evergreens stood close by the highway like walls. The land was once again covered, hidden, full of suggestion. The plains, confounding in their nakedness, had at last fallen back, and what a relief. I was not made to see so far. The mountains took me into their folds, and it was as though an aperture that had opened wide now suddenly contracted.
Now brains are expensive organs to operate. Big brains make big demands on the body’s supply of energy and blood. In a resting human, the brain accounts for 20 percent of metabolic costs. So extra brain cells would be selected against if they did not make some important contribution to survival and reproductive success. If the brain of erectus was not good for making inventions and changing the face of the earth, what was it good for?... It was good for running.
…
A bigger brain made it possible for erectus to run in the midday sun, at a time of day when most predators seek shade and water and refrain from the pursuit of game… having extra brain cells, the brain of erectus was less likely to break down while experiencing heat stress during long-distance running.
…
When it comes to covering long distances, humans have the capacity to outrun every other animal.
Native peoples studied by anthropologists used this capability to capture prey species by running them down relentlessly, sometimes for several days. Among the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico, for example, “hunting deer consists of chasing the deer for two days – never less than one day. The Tarahumara keeps the deer constantly on the move… [He] chases the deer until the creature falls from exhaustion, often with its hoofs completely worn away.” (Our Kind. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. 50, 52. Harris quotes from: Devine, John. “The Versatility of Human Locomotion.” American Anthropologist 87: 555.)
September 28, 2008
Minnesota, South Dakota
Ripeness
I am unmoored. I got in the car. I lifted my feet off the ground and was spun loose, careening across the continent. I am like a space ship in orbit. I crest a hill, the world ends, I fall off the edge, the road catches me like gravity. Going eighty miles an hour, I feel as though my size has increased in proportion to my velocity. I want to stand face to face with a wind turbine; I want to run my hand over a field of ripe wheat.
Two trucks full of corn lumber onto the freeway. Threshers labor waist-deep in golden hay. There are vast fields of sunflowers with burnt faces.
September 29, 2008
Wyoming, Utah
Wilderness
Red, veined cliffs cut up from the plains like the flayed shoulder blades of the continent. Evening approaches, and the light begins to purple. The majesty of a line of great, craggy mountains feels always concentrated to particular poignancy when a lone silo is set before it or a few small homesteads are scattered at the mountains’ feet. The water tower, the little house, the barn and leaning fence show so pale against the dark, reared earth. They draw out the loneliness of the scene, serving as a reference point both of physical scale and of the magnitude of nature’s impersonality.
September 30, 2008
Salt Lake City
Perfection
They have built a citadel with an Eden at its center. The streets are laid almost in a perfect grid, and the buildings are pale, clean, and enormous. The peace and cleanliness of the square are tended meticulously. The Temple appears built to suggest no past in which it grappled crudely, ardently with the world to achieve its current perfection. It bears the stateliness that accompanies age but is as though newborn. Certainly it has secrets in its keeping, for the walls are set with windows that are ever curtained, but somehow their mystery is without darkness. It does not thrill and frighten the soul with fire and smoke and blood, as do the rituals of the Catholic Church, but instead imposes, as does the high afternoon sun, with a pureness and whiteness that mute the mind.
In the suburb of West Jordan, a new temple rises from its scaffolding, its sharp steeple reiterating the peaks of the mountains behind it, as though to distill their power and bring it into the light.
October 1, 2008
Utah, Nevada, California
Loneliness
I went out from the city and came to a plain of salt. It was flat, white, round, and perhaps three miles across. I was alone. I walked to the center and stood there under the bare, hot sky and was only myself. I felt a shiver in my chest, not of excitement but of exposure, as of skin come suddenly into contact with the air. As of stepping forth from a dark, curtained recess onto a stage.
It is a reverberation, I thought, of the thrill that pierced a certain ancient ape. He came to the edge of the forest and stared out at the sprawling, grassy plains. He took a step out from the trees, let go the thick trunk – which had curved like the ribs of the sky, holding him safe – and found himself naked under the sun with empty hands. In those fields, he found himself erect, head pounding with blood. His body quivered upright like a pin that was magnetized to the sky and to which was magnetized his own awe.
What was next was doggedness. He began to run. His brain swelled, becoming not more potent but harder for the heat of day to break. He began to defy the sun. He chased prey through light and darkness, across and through the land, and when at last it fell, lunged upon it with shards of rock and tore the flesh from the bones. He was without language and art. He and his kin crouched in the grass, smashed stones together, and devoured raw meat, grunting and barking. But they had already broken time. Through stamina, through long abidance, they had bored through the walls of those cycles that rule the lives of animals and worn a passage into that persistent stream that somewhere, millennia after them, widened into history.
Before we were exquisite, we were relentless. That is how we conquered the savannah. That is how I conquered the American desert. With no fineness of approach, with no keenness of vision, with no grace, I forged across it and ground its dust beneath my tires. The plains of northern Nevada were merciless, confronting me hour by hour with burnt hills and flatlands covered in sagebrush. I saw no antelope, no prairie dogs, no cattle, no birds. Yet I saw everything there was. The ground sprawled from one horizon to another in numbing repetition, in overwhelming clarity. Heat oppressed my brain and impelled it insistently toward mindlessness and sleep. In the mythology of this road trip, Nevada was the part where I died.
Then I returned to life. California rose from the plains in huge, wooded mountains. The sight of trees cast a shadow across my mind that woke me, as a shadow upon one’s eyelids makes one start up and say, “What is that?” Lines of towering evergreens stood close by the highway like walls. The land was once again covered, hidden, full of suggestion. The plains, confounding in their nakedness, had at last fallen back, and what a relief. I was not made to see so far. The mountains took me into their folds, and it was as though an aperture that had opened wide now suddenly contracted.
An Introduction
As my subject matter is my life, I cannot begin at the beginning. To begin even with my own birth would be to start the story in medias res, for there are the circumstances of my parents’ meeting, their births, their grandparents’ immigrating to America from various homelands across Europe, the origins of the wars and famines that made their homelands places to leave, the codification of the governments of modern Europe, the Enlightenment, the invention of the printing press, the fall of Rome, the rise of Sumeria, the invention of agriculture, the inception of human evolution, the emergence of life from the primordial soup, the birth of continents, the formation of earth, and the Big Bang. The Big Bang would be a place whence to begin with some confidence, but unfortunately I was not there at the time and have very little to say about it. Therefore, I begin on September 3, 2008.
I was living with my mom in Minneapolis. The previous year, my first year out of college, was occupied thus: Eight hours a day, five days a week, I sat in a windowless room and counted paper. Timidity, appreciation for excellent health coverage, and our current economic doldrums all conspired, though not alone, in my long tenure at the legal archives where this paper counting occurred. Amusing coworkers and a boss who frequently brought food also played their part. Eventually, however, I decided I had to knock myself free. “Go west, young man!” I decided (or young woman, as the case was) and began to muster my resources for a move to San Francisco.
September 3, 2008
As September begins, and a chill now persists in the air well past dawn, my desperation ebbs. The cold rebuffs my aspirations, chasing all roving thoughts back indoors to be warmed by the slow-burning furnace of a heart inured to five-month winters. I think of anodynes: a mug of tea, a better jacket, movies to rent, nice restaurants, books.
Is this what keeps so many of us here, this chill in the morning air? Perhaps from the very first winters of our childhoods, when that deep cold pressed against the windows of the house and threatened to endure forever, we braced our hearts against such capricious desires as those for adventure and peril, and every autumn afterward, at the first suggestion of the dark, freezing days to come, we settle in a little deeper for the long haul. That is the quality I recognize in some of these lifelong Minnesotans, a settling-in, an adaptation to the pleasures of cyclical time.
They are deterred from rash offensives against circumstance, favoring instead a bolstering and edifying of the lives they have at hand. They are the sort to build a house and fill it with comforts, defying the attacks of history and nature not with stridency but with abidance and slow progress.
I was living with my mom in Minneapolis. The previous year, my first year out of college, was occupied thus: Eight hours a day, five days a week, I sat in a windowless room and counted paper. Timidity, appreciation for excellent health coverage, and our current economic doldrums all conspired, though not alone, in my long tenure at the legal archives where this paper counting occurred. Amusing coworkers and a boss who frequently brought food also played their part. Eventually, however, I decided I had to knock myself free. “Go west, young man!” I decided (or young woman, as the case was) and began to muster my resources for a move to San Francisco.
September 3, 2008
As September begins, and a chill now persists in the air well past dawn, my desperation ebbs. The cold rebuffs my aspirations, chasing all roving thoughts back indoors to be warmed by the slow-burning furnace of a heart inured to five-month winters. I think of anodynes: a mug of tea, a better jacket, movies to rent, nice restaurants, books.
Is this what keeps so many of us here, this chill in the morning air? Perhaps from the very first winters of our childhoods, when that deep cold pressed against the windows of the house and threatened to endure forever, we braced our hearts against such capricious desires as those for adventure and peril, and every autumn afterward, at the first suggestion of the dark, freezing days to come, we settle in a little deeper for the long haul. That is the quality I recognize in some of these lifelong Minnesotans, a settling-in, an adaptation to the pleasures of cyclical time.
They are deterred from rash offensives against circumstance, favoring instead a bolstering and edifying of the lives they have at hand. They are the sort to build a house and fill it with comforts, defying the attacks of history and nature not with stridency but with abidance and slow progress.
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