by joshua heineman                        ( about cb )

A question to ask yourself: Is it that this place has no soul or is it me?

I found a file named nonsense.doc.

When I opened it & scrolled through the text, I forgot how to breathe… the document was words to song after song after song I had written in the fall, winter & spring of my first year living alone in Portland, while I should have been studying or keeping up w/family half-way across the continent. Among the lyrics, there were dozens of songs that I no longer knew how to play or sing & yet I could recall how it felt to be there then, writing those lyrics on a notepad set on the edge of a small bed while looking out the window at the ghostly bridge bringing strangers across the dark river. I was in love w/the world & no one in particular. I was poor & lonely & rich in openness. I was a journalist w/out a paper, walking the words beside me. I wrote a hundred songs that winter just to survive the nights. I sang those songs to the open air above 19th Avenue so many times & for so long that even the morning birds could sing along. How could I forget something like that?

We are untrustworthy narrators, haunted by flawed recollection. We have histories w/out record (& futures w/out forewarning). So here I am, trying to accept these facts. Here I am, trying desperately to recreate the chords of my earlier life… feels a bit like writing the biography of someone you knew well, but hardly recognize. Do I understand this person? Did I forget him for a reason? We have one thing in common still, & that is that sleep feels impossible tonight.

But the worst part of all: A hundred forgotten songs mean no less than the hundred you remember. Maybe they mean more. Permanence isn’t a factor in life, nor does it exist.

Photographs from Big Sur

• Early morning, I let the house dog out into the yard to distract her from the fact that I did not know where to find her food. She looked hungry. The plan worked well - though I later learned she had conned me, as our host had already fed her & gone back to sleep. I went into the yard, too, because I am easily distracted. The large old oaks were strong-armed & stunning, the orange tree seemed to me a miracle of fruit, & the dog & I walked toe-to-paw through the grass… kicking up lizards sunning in the bright spaces between the shadows of grapevine.
• Blissful. Even the spiderwebs felt inspired. I followed a hummingbird across flowers, thinking about the time I watched a bum hummingbird fly confused through the lower Fillmore pecking at parts of brightly-colored Victorian houses & feeling helpless.
• We ate slices of wood-fired bread w/butter & a pinch of salts. The late sun turned the high green hills golden & darkness spread beneath the redwoods. I saw the change because the doors were open-air. Leonard Cohen sang on the loud speakers while we waited for entrees & I couldn’t think of a more perfect sound until the next number played, & then the next, & the next, et cetera.

Notes: Stars in abundance! Stories of mountain lions & bobcats. Palm trees, cactus, sea cliffs & these impossible straw hills. Making plans. Meshes of the Afternoon. Walking the halls of a kind stranger’s beautiful home. Matea & Melissa drinking red wine & reading gossip rags in the near-dark. Half awake & watching Encounters at the End of the World again. Happy, restless in the fleeting moment. The sober retreat of Monday’s sunrise.

Day 1

My eyelids push closed, chin pointed up for a moment. I reopen my eyes to a holy white ceiling &, dropping my head, to a holy room in a holy city next to a holy sea. This process will be replayed a hundred times before the sun sets, or more truthfully before California turns away from its light. I will retrace these steps - eyes closed, up, opened, down - each time my hurried mind refuses to see & replaces the world in front of me w/its faulty memory & ill-proportioned maps. Like trying to sit up straight while writing out a long letter, I cannot be aware of my own failings in the matter until too late - I find myself burdened by the physical or mathematical distance of an endpoint, for example, or grow apprehensive at later having to thumb-wrestle clean a set of dishes in the sink. Each instance, I begin again w/the process & wipe clean the slate. Tabula rasa, & the moment is returned… & w/it, a sense of wonder & appreciation. I return to this beginning not because you have to but because I, personally, recognize a simple road in it - closed, up, open, down - that can relieve my mind from all that unpleasant buzzing. There are innumerable beginnings, you should know, absolutely unlimited roads.
Speaking of roads, late into last night’s features I dreamt** that a woman stopped me in the street to say “there are thousands of writers out there better able to tell a beautiful story.”
I know, I said. Millions.
“But almost no one so able to beautifully tell no story at all,” she finished.
I then woke up wondering, is that cursivebuildings?

… I wrote the above several days ago now &, instead of scrapping the unclosed thoughts, I’ll add to them here. A friend in Portland (Mr. Patrick Lamson-Hall) does this in his letters to me, a narrative tick that I find endearing. Last week he sent me a letter ruminating on the enduring clockwork of human beings. Then suddenly, in handwritten scrawl, he said he sometimes wondered if I was a narcissist “like the rest of us.” No, Patrick. No, all you mysterious readers who rise out of the woodframes like ghosts sometimes & surprise me w/your declarations of love for whatever this is here. I am not a narcissist. Welcome to my personal website (that’s me on the sidebar).

… another few days gone off forever. Yes, yes, yes, & where do they go? & who collects them all. I’m watching these incredibly painterly, puffy pink clouds float overhead & off over the water. Where do they go? There are rusted boats bound for China, hungry seagulls leaving steampipes, the mindless tide in search of its zenith. But where does the time go when it’s gone? For now, all these beautiful things out the window seem to have such an overwhelming weight, it’s difficult to imagine them all floating away for the rest of time. Though I know they are. On the other hand, there are always new clouds coming into view, new boats, new birds, new tides. I see the pattern in myself too. For sometimes the spirits are so high, & sometimes they drag so low… but always there are spirits. Thankfully.

** I also dreamt that I met a wandering child. I asked his name & he replied “H.I.” Really, I said. Your name is H.I? “J/K” he said. “H.I.J/K, get it?” Clever little bastard, I thought, but a bit off. I hope he finds some friends that understand him. Later, upon waking, I realized I had unknowingly commented upon my own sense of humor. & yours. Selah.