"Killing our infinite on the finite of the seas."

-Baudelaire

Andrea Gibson: 

"My mouth is a fire escape.

The words coming out

don't care that they are naked.

There is something burning in here."

On Caesar Chavez there is a new billboard that says in bright white letters, Porn Kills Love, Fight for Love. I had two thoughts, the first being the most alarming. People still think about love? And then, wait, didn't San Francisco already kill it?

A few weeks ago, I found myself walking behind this elderly couple holding hands. Their age made me think of vinyl kitchen tables and lace aprons, of huge Cadillacs and wide old, rambling roads. I thought of slow dancing, of smoking jackets, of the sound television used to make just being on. His polyester-wool blended pants matched the sentiment of their held hands; an animated picture of the past. These two were relics of a lost land, a place in which people still did things like fall in love.

I had a dream last night that while I was trying to write you a letter, perfectly illustrating the thudding in my chest, I used too many acronyms to make sense of anything. It made me feel like a spy, having to decode my own intention.

In planning my trip to Europe, I'm tumbling head first into the world of history again. Medieval castles, in particular, fascinate me. Could you imagine living in such a confined and fortified place, the perpetual fear of feeling the enemy at the gate? 

Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a book called In Search of Duende, duende being a Spanish sentiment akin to a black feeling: 'the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art."

He says, "Every man and every artist, whether he is Nietzsche or Cezanne, climbs each step in the tower of his perfection by fighting his duende, not his angel, as has been said, nor his muse. This distinction is fundamental, at the very root of the work."

Each nation has it's own point of inspiration or a point of departure. The Germans have their muses, the Italians their Angels; Spaniards have their duende and the Portuguese the saudade. 

I bring this up because in Portugal, they express tradition in Fado music; in Spain, Flamenco. Having just returned from New Orleans, I've been deafening my ears on their brass bands. Painfully bored by San Francisco's cultural ennui (constantly looking for the thread that might keep us together), I picked up this book called The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas. This book illustrates a writer's foray into both participating and witnessing Documenta 13, the massive contemporary art festival hosted in Kassel every five years or so. 

He begins the book by talking about how contemporary art makes no sense to him, how historic relics from the age of Hitler hold no merit when it comes to the avant garde. But art is politics and joy and sacrifice and presence. 

He goes on to illustrate two beautiful stories. The first is about this man who is incarcerated in Dachau during WWII. He wound up creating four different varieties of apples and painting them, having named them KZ1 to 4 ("KZ is the German abbreviation for concentration camp").

The other tale is of a woman from Moscow who was sent to prison in the Brezhnev era, "to a cell with no light, no paper or pen, because of a stupid and completely false denunciation; that young woman knew Byron's Don Juan by heart (seventeen thousand lines or more) and in the darkness she translated it mentally into Russian verse. When she got out of prison having lost her sight, she dictated the translation to a friend, and it is now the canonical Russian version of Byron."

Though both tragic, they are beautiful examples of the human need to create. To quote Andrea Gibson, 

"We have to create.

It is the only thing louder than destruction.

It's the only chance the bars are gonna break,

our hands full of color

reaching towards the sky,

a brush stroke in the dark."

But what can be done when living in a sparkly cell without love? In a fortified modern city afraid of the non-monster not pounding at the gate?

In a lengthy discussion with my good friend Amanda last night, we were talking animatedly (she kept saying arguing, but we were in full agreement) about the various effects of living in information overload. She was relaying a recent article about how professors are now giving up, quitting teaching because everything is considered a trigger and without proper warning, people are going into a type of shock. One example is that one university (I wish I could remember the name, but I blame the cocktails for that) has banned using the term 'rape' in law school. 

We all shared a good bitter laugh when my mother described the shock she found being allowed to climb atop craggily castle ruins in Scotland, unattended, when here we are here banning swing sets.

"Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

Rivers and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside- 

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown-

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down!"

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Having been accused for being a romantic, over and over again, I quit hoping.

In a letter to Dan Savage, the love guru, I asked him to advise me in this plight. My friends tell me to have meaningless sex all the time, that romance no longer exists. Look at Tinder, have a hella personal conversation in the park, and you'll quickly fall into the void. Amanda was telling me of this 'silly'' zine she made years ago in which she had this list citing the ten crappy things about living in a big city. How, despite being constantly surrounded by people, we are more alone here than being close to one. That as the space available for us keeps decreasing by the second (as I write, I'm watching this crane carry steel beams to the now third floor of the huge hospital being built across from me, blocking the second to last tree line I can see from my room) we step on each other, racing to be the one to land. Though certainly not a novel idea, it is one that has been plaguing me lately. With the announcement of the Precita Eyes eviction, I kind of lost it. 

Do we remember how to be kind to each other here? Have we lost that language? Or are we waiting for someone to create the appropriate acronym?

In researching a story for my new silhouette animation film, I found my old copy of the crack up, a published Fitzgerald notebook. In it, there's a short story called "My Lost City", written in July of 1932. In the story, he creates three symbols that meant success in New York. The ferry (for that was the first method of transportation he saw), the girl (in this case the fusion of two of his crushes, their memories having been blurred into one), and his friend Bunny's apartment (independence and decadence, financial success). 

Setting the stage, Fitzgerald said, "There was already the tall white city of today, already the feverish activity of the boom, but there was a general inarticulateness... There was no forum for metropolitan urbanity."

He leaves the city for a few years and upon returning, is shocked to see the economic shift. Suddenly the waiters were making more money than him. But because of this sudden wealth, he was given the social key to the city becoming a spokesperson for the 'who's who'. Having left and returned once again, he found the economic bubble popped and dismayed, he wandered through his wasted city. For solace, he would always climb the Empire State building. On this occasion: 

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as your eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood - everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's Box. Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country, on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

"For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage."

Henry Miller has many great quotes on his dead and lost city.  "In the moment all is clear to me, clear that in this logic. There is no redemption; the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every past, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation."

I hit a wall the other day with such force that I run the risk of never recovering. In fact, this collision had seemed inevitable since I was a child, to such a degree that I have wrapped myself in silk and velvet padding. I've collected the metaphors and melodies to push in front of me as distracting barriers. I've worn down my fingers from digging through all the flowers. But when, as was inevitable, all these illusions fell, and I lay there, smashed against this cold, listless, colorless slate, I felt all the icicles in me melt, all the lava pour through my feet, my air left me for the sky. I realized that at that moment how much I really think I hate this city. It has taken the one thing I have to offer and mangled it into an ugly, menacing tool for my own self sabotage. 

With huge courageous and choking gulps, I resumed the walk, my never-ending walk. I was reminded of a quote that had been a theme in a lot of my work in college. 

"I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote something, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of some things has always been and always will be you." -Mark Danielewski.

Andrea Gibson again:

"I do not wear a welcome mat

on my chest

just so people can walk all over it

fumbling with the keys

to the locks they keep building

for the doors I keep opening

hoping someone will see the rainforest growing

in my living room."

To be honest, this loneliness is slowly killing me. I have no one to collaborate with creatively. A lot of my friends are falling like flies, being consumed by their own bad behavior. And these perfect cotton-ball clouds dotting the sky above this ugly new hospital isn't beautiful if I'm the only one to see it. 

As Enrique Vila-Matas describes: "This is the kind of thing, I thought, that we can never see on television news programs. There are silent conspiracies between people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being noticed, groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with unheard of fury and blow everything to bits."

I think in our race for faster and flashier technology we have lost our language. People no longer waste time on metaphors. It was as if someone had declared one articulation to be the only articulation making any other attempts seem pointless. And who is this person? What work of art was it? Can you sing me that song? Because I'm pretty sure we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what it means to feel. 

In a slightly racist and relatively poignant description, my current 'crush' wrote, "I just want to say that I think the word I is the saddest word in the English language. To me it means failure, disappointment, heartbreak and death. Nothing good comes of being an I. Know what the saddest word in French is? Je... I don't know any other words for I... wait, yo is I  in Spanish. But yo doesn't sound sad. Maybe that's why Latins are in a good mood most of the time. Ich is the German one. My grasp of foreign tongues is better than I thought. Ich sounds like they're disgusted with themselves. Maybe that's why Germans are so insane. They do seem better lately, though I don't think they'll give the world trouble again, but you never know... Almost all people have a dark period, though theirs was very dark. America is in a dark period right now, since we're leading the way in boiling the oceans and killing everything." (Jonathan Ames)

San Francisco, it's you, not me. I know I have given you my everything. 

"because my mother says

a kid can only swallow so much punch

before he's drunk on his own fist."

my last snapshots for you. Thank you for reading. 

"You are the brilliant ally of your own grave diggers."

-Milan Kundera

Desperate this other morning, sweat beads itching against my spine, I knew I had to walk, just walk and walk like I used to. To climb those hills just because their ascent was interesting. I didn't think about anything but the new beats in my headphones and whether or not the ratio of Daisy pulling vs my new heels was worth the shoe investment. 

But as happens with walking, the light hits a building, the smell changes, suddenly there are cinnamon buns and a dusty sunrise blinding you. This day, I had found myself deeply aware of an 'opening' desire, a sudden want to expose, and, surprisingly, my neighbors' curtain decisions became philosophically relevant. 

Have you noticed this? Entire lineages could be determined based on their chintz or venetian decisions. Lace tied, frayed, hanging limp. Solid blinds, the roll-up kinds, the ones that came with the apartment, the ones meant to romanticize a view. And then there is the question regarding an apartment's conclusion. Just how many windows on this facade are the property of one, or two, or ten? When you start speculating on that level, a deeper psycholocial concern enters. If each one's curtain, and helpfully if they are matching, are raised at varying degrees, should this be a concern? A flagging of warning?

When I was twenty, I was smoking some weed with friends in a car parked up on this hill. Before us was a thirteen story hotel/community living place, and up on the maybe eleventh floor we all watched in slow motion some man approach the central window. Because of the layout, we knew he was in the stairwell, unaffiliated from the rest of the private spaces. And while he stood there, a Gatsby or Alexander surveying his profit, the light behind him performed an SOS type of flicker. 

This car full of six twenty year old stoners froze. What do we do?

Often, the only thing to free me from myself is this "peeping" element. There is a desperate lurking within me, an addiction to ascertaining people's lamp choices, favorite plant pairings, whether or not they are a carpet or hardwood floor type. I often play a silly game with myself where I pretend I'm entering my room for the first time, but then I usually just get deeply overwhelmed.

The personal carrot always dangling in front of me are these San Franciscan walls. You know the kind. They are huge, non-descript concrete slabs. They seem to take up a rude amount of space on the sidewalk, looming and leering over you, unforgiving. And like their European predecessors, these huge barricades come equipped with a tiny door. Should you be be lucky enough to see that door open, the feelings of sidewalk claustrophobia scatter, dissipating in this now lovely expanse.

I'm talking about il giardino segretto, the secret garden. 

Planning my trip to Rome, I was researching various gardens. Doria Pamphilj was one of the first to implement the secret garden technique. It is a raised garden, high above the street. It's walls are topped with citrus trees. From the house, you can look down into the garden; from the garden, you can look up to the house. This dialogue of vision was to change the Roman experience. Typically, these gardens were used to plant the herbs, vegetation and medication needed to sustain the family within, or for monastic uses as a place of meditation.

It wasn't until the late Renaissance that these walls came down. 

As lonely as ever, I balance my difficult schedule of park visits and watching old classics. Reading, traveling, walking, walking, walking, each day is different and yet feels exactly the same.  Watching An Affair to Remember yesterday, Cary Grant takes Deborah Kerr to visit his grandmother in France. Waiting for her outside her small chapel, Grant explains to Kerr that she's here waiting patiently to be reunited with her husband in death.

In Frankie and Johnny, Al Pacino explains to Michelle Pfeiffer that there is no giving up, no walking away, as this is love. 

(Have you ever noticed how much the 1980s work ethic defined their concepts of love? As if the higher the sleeves were rolled, the more frantic the movements, the larger the sweat bands, the greater their capability for love was?)

In Immortality by Milan Kundera, he wrote: "I found a beautiful saying: true love is always right, even when it is wrong. But Luther says in one of his letters: true love is often in the wrong. I don't feel that as good as my dictum. Elsewhere, however, Luther says: love precedes everything, even sacrifice, even prayer. From this I deduce that love is the highest virtue. Love makes us unaware of the earthly and fills us with the heavenly; true love frees us of guilt."

Without romantic love and having lost many of my closest friends this year, my love is my intention. From my fingers, I wish lace and vines would pour forth. I wish the wind would turn my hair into trellises, a new kind of hanging garden.  A few months ago, I had this dream in which, having descended a lapis lazuli mountain, I was made to choose a path. Before me was an amethyst one leading blindly around a small island in the ocean, and a spiral jetty made of rose quartz. Neither one struck me as particularly optimum: blind knowledge or circular loving. Having told my friend Chris this, she was thrilled to report that on a recent trip to the House of Intuition, she found a rose quartz/amethyst chevron, a natural fusion.

They don't teach Ovid's Metamorphoses in school anymore. Though not surprising, I do find that irritating. If nothing else, the tales of change, evolution, shape-shifting are as relevant today as ever. In fact, it was the publication of Metamorphoses that started the giardino segretto movement, as he described the ancient gardens of the Romans.

Noting collective change, in his chapter "The Ages of Mankind", he wrote:

"Men were content with nature's food unforced.

And gathered strawberries on the mountainside

And cherries and the cluutching bramble's fruit,

And acorns fallen from Jove's spreading tree. 

Springtime it was, always, for ever spring."

And later, "Last came the race of iron. In that hard age

Of baser vein all evil straight broke out.

And honor fled and truth and loyalty,

Replaced by fraud, deceit and treachery

And violence and wicked greed for gain."

According to Kundera again, feelings themselves are of value. "The transformation of feelings into a value had already occurred in Europe some time around the twelfth century: the Troubadours who sang with such great passion to the beloved, the unattainable princess, seemed as admirable and beautiful to all who heard them that everyone wished to follow their example by falling prey to some wild upheaval of the heart."

Adolphe Ritte wrote "The dominant characteristic of an époque of transition like ours is spiritual anxiety. it is not surprising we are living in a  storm where a hundred contradictory elements collide; debris from the past, scraps of the present, seeds of the future, swirling, combining, separating under the imperious wind of destiny."

Last I was in Rome, we circled this one block about eight times until finally giving up. The huge concrete walls didn't seem to allow an entrance. There was no way into that church.

Desperate to not repeat that mistake again, I've been researching that little block. In art school, they teach you of these opposing little churches, made famous for their ovular shape, sweeping arches, the essence of the Baroque. I promise to keep it short, but there are two men I adore from that era: Bernini (for his sculptures) and Borromini (architecture). I recently discovered that the two were rivals and so four years after Borromini began his ovular church, Bernini decided to copy his style, on a much more elaborate stage. Borromini's is considered more contemplative, gentle, an hommage to San Carlo, whereas Bernini's has been likened to prosciutto, having used a red and white marbeling, too graphically reminding us of Christ's violent death.

What interests me in this example is that Borromini knew San Carlo, having actually worked with the man years prior, and was so moved by him that he actually took his name. San Carlo's surname is Borromeo. But what happened was a few years into the project, riddled with depression, Borromini committed suicide before ever finishing this - his most successful work. Having written a desire to be entombed here, the church was unable (and apparently deeply saddened) by their inability to inter a suicide.

Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote, in the Secret Garden: 

“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”

Pliny the Younger describes a concept of otium vs negotium. Otium is seclusion, serenity and relaxation, whereas negotium is the urban busy life. In ancient Rome, houses were built around the atrium, open courtyards that let in light and ventilation. Because they were in the center of the house, they cut out the street sounds and smells. 

Pliny described the differences of living. To live "a good life and a genuine one, which is happy and honorable, more rewarding than any 'business' can be, you should take the first opportunity to leave the den, the futile bustle and useless occupations of the city and devote yourself to literature or to leisure."

Standing on the lighthouse, I watched her watching the whales.

Kelpie: a water sprite who comes in the form of a horse to drowning sailors.

"The time has come; the idea of love will be communicated to all men; art will return to the light in a new form, the earth has been worked from which the new flower will rise, but we will not see this rise before the complete obliteration of the present." Henry Van de Veldo, 1894

In Immortality, there is a passage in which a married couple debate nature. She glories in it's beauty, power and mystery, whereas he is adamant, "cement it all". For him, nature is nothing but gruesome, extremely violent and malicious. I think of Goya's Black Paintings, in which otium and negotium seemed to come together. Towards the end of his life, he bought this villa (La Quinta del Sordo - the fifth deaf, or the Deaf Man's Villa) already richly decorated with landscape paintings on the walls. I cannot find the source that clarifies his mental anguish at the time (I remember reading that he had developed brain tumors from eating his paint - a thing Van Gogh did as well), but whatever the case, you'd be hard pressed not to find some deep mental instability at work here. 

According to the New York Times, "These paintings are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western Art."

Though his work is thought to be premonitions of looming war, products of the Romantic notion of artist as original, "many of the characters in the Black Paintings (duelers, frail old men, nuns, spies, and informers of the Inquisition) represent a world that was rendered obsolete by the French Revolution."

Even Goya was a dinosaur?

And yet you see his dog painting. There is nothing time specific about it.

Manuela Mena, curator at Prado, "There is not a single contemporary painter in the world who does not pray in front of 'The Dog'."

Kundera adds, "The basis of the self is not thought but suffering... In this intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centricism."

And yet, "the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles."

Resigned, tonight, I put my shoes and binoculars under the bed. I fear the threat of the chase. Am I too addicted to the adventure to recognize the destination? Am I too in love with what I can't have to never be happy with what might be? Am I to live the fate of Echo?

"Shamed and rejected in the woods she hides

And has her dwelling in the lonely caves;

Yet still her love endures and grows on grief,

And weeping vigils waste her frame away;

Her body shrivels, all its moisture dries;

Only her voice and bones are left; at last

Only her voice, her bones are turned to stone.

So in the woods she hides and hills around,

For all to hear, alive, but just a sound."