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.