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Ark & Sacrament
At a small table on the sidewalk, w/coffee steaming through the sun, I sat for a long time thinking about the charms of place. How we directly experience so little of our environment & how, by definition, most of our impressions are both impersonal & overwhelmingly fictitious. These thoughts did not bother me… just spilled milk, spilled milk. I finished my coffee & decided never again to assume a thing I could see for myself.
I know I said 7:30 am was a monochromatic nightmare, but that was just the sleep deprivation talking, heavily influenced by the summer fog, which spends months sitting overhead like some fat hen trying to hatch an egg. The truth is 7:30 am also looks like this. (via cellphone camera!)
The Difference
Half reflecting, half absorbing… imperfect, uneasy, between worlds. But here, & now.
My Reaching for the Out of Reach project is featured on NPR’s The Picture Show blog today, along with concert photography by the very talented Jaime Martínez. Check it out here.
(Full Disclosure: I am not bored w/2-Dimensions.)
One Thing We Did In The Pacific Northwest:
Recreated my father-in-law’s favorite Modigliani painting from memory using items on hand.
This is contemporary life.
You piss in a pot under blacklight in the back restroom of a great restaurant in Southeast Portland. Late afternoon. The sunlight outside is pure gold, & the sky is quiet & easy in its summer. Only a few hours pass & the night rises up from the shadows in the grass & behind buildings & under mountains. You see the transition from the windows of a half-empty airplane, some 30,000 feet above the coast, above the clouds. Soon the only light is a small planet pinprick above the wingtip, then the unholy glow of San Francisco in the fog. Near midnight the elevated platform outside the airport in Oakland is full of preachers & thugs & people like us. A train appears, apparently from the seventies, & takes you home, through a tunnel resting on the floor of the bay more than 100 feet below the surface of the saltwater.
Frisco is lit up like a disco on Market Street, but the hustlers are slow tonight & the cabs seem eager. You see the towering antique hotels of your neighborhood standing on the hill - it’s like taking a sleeping pill. Your shoulders slump as you enter the taxi.
These Things Of Equal Value
The immediate problem is that you cannot be in more than one place at a time. The larger problem is that it takes a long time to build an honest home.
Now has no meaning.
Yesterday does, but not when it was here. Tomorrow does, but not when it appears.
TENET FOR BASIC LIVING
There are two people living our lives: Who We Are & Who We Want To Be.
Others can only see the first & we tend toward the second. This is the problem.
Bring these two together & lose all the stupid, subtle tensions they evoke.
In Somnie
A wall of green blooms serenely near the river. Près de la Parc du Champs de Mars
I am there, eyes wide, mouth sharp, in another year, long from now, far far from here
& old Paris seems so complete, so completely covered in concrete & meaning
I’m only bone-tired & ready to be swallowed up again by the din of Europe’s evening
Reborn as a Basque tour guide, or a pigeon on a park bench facing the seaside
… never leaving. My Mediterranean mothers & the gentle nudging of Italian weather.
Impressed by ordinary men less than humbled by the overwhelming obesity of time
Who go on, set apart from location, station to station, & fashion some sort of home
In love like long rambling walks w/no destination, safe from deadly games & favorites
Teach me the language, let us live in fantastic vacancies, explosive pleasantries
Run out my weakness on the roads of history stretched out to infinity & still arriving…
A thriving marriage of humanity & patience. I am there, Paris, unthinking.
Until the sober cathedral bells shake me & reclaim me from my dumbstruck stupor
Here are the paved sand dunes of my poor California, America’s bold boutique future
Here are four hard years of tracks, from hill to bay & back, & one dull wall of plants
These nights lit like fires in the center of stars die out entirely. Morning in ruins, running
Two tickets to Istanbul & then the Serbian countryside & then… nothing.
& finally, that life can still be like this.
- San Francisco, 2010
[ last page from love letters to saint francis, a collection of poetry i’m writing ]
Summer morning.
![Reaching for the Out of Reach 59:
A bicycle race near the finish line, New York, 1890.
[ more from this project (nypl permalink) ]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3gzvntnd71qz7avgo1_400.gif)
Reaching for the Out of Reach 59:
A bicycle race near the finish line, New York, 1890.
[ more from this project (nypl permalink) ]
Bookself
My good & talented friend Joshua Longbrake visited San Francisco recently from Seattle &, among many other touristy things, stopped by early one morning for a pot of coffee. While the living room is blessed w/a mighty fine view, we took our drinks & conversation up the stairs to the roof because Matea was still asleep. There are a lot of great photographs from his trip (including several from our makeshift rooftop coffeeshop) on his website, which I recommend in general.
He photographed this part of our bookshelf w/his Hasselblad while waiting for the coffee to brew in the kitchen. I remember the moment. I remember because I imagined myself looking at the resulting photograph sometime in the future (now) & wondered how it would feel. Now that I know how it feels, I want to recall exactly how it felt to watch him take the photograph, to drink that pot of coffee on the roof in wood chairs & then wander all lit up w/caffeine & stories through Chinatown. But I suppose that’s gone. Such is life, always reaching for what we see but cannot touch, while racing unceasingly toward what we cannot see.
The experience of looking at some of the books I’ve read &, for whatever reason, held on to through the years is unnerving… like standing too close to a mirror. Some of these titles don’t even rightfully belong to me. But they’re all mine. Listen, a book is half what the author intended & half what the reader lives through. The same is true for music, of course. Secretly it’s true for most everything.
