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.