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.