"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours we live." Richard Jeffers, 1884.
You would think that in my quest for beauty, I would be a treasure chest. My skin would sparkle with diamonds; my hands, cupped together, would barely maintain the waterfall of pearls, posies, and poetry. My mouth open would reveal a rising tide at sunset.
But instead, my quest finds me still. I sit on my broken ottoman with a dinged up and rusty pail, watching. My cabinet of curiosities is made up of broken shells, glass animals and flattened pennies. I catalogue everything, keeping lists of the perfect words you subconsciously spill, reclined on my roof at midnight. I keep the ticket to the event that we almost went to when you still had mystery. I keep my hope tightly squished in a cheap old jewelry box I got for Christmas seven years ago.
I would like to think that when I was younger, I believed in a muse. That whole romantic notion of artist and muse, inspiration incarnate, a person to respond to, to reflect upon, to return that gift of beauty, understandably could define the making of art. I had thought that until you had that kind of dialogue, you simply weren't able to produce. There was no reason to. After all, if a tree falls.... I had thought, until the other day, that I had given up that ghost. I am alone. I have no one to have a push-pull with, and yet I have to produce. I can't help it. It's my breath.
Have I been waiting my whole life, stock piling my own beauty as a type of dowry? Am I still waiting for that person to come and take it all? Or am I more of a Miss Havisham, and this is my wedding table?
"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries." Carson McCullers.
" The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully
now that already
it pierces the heart."
Denis Johnson.
And so, I walk the streets of San Francisco, keeping sacred the little glimpses of this treasure chest. This morning, I found the secret doors that justify the need for fairy-tales. I count the windows on my block of service bedrooms. Are those actual stained glass windows or cheaply painted glass? Does it matter either way?
As we all know, I like my ornamentation. February marks the one hundred year anniversary of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, in case you haven't heard, which has me all a-flutter. Daniel Burnham, the genius behind the City Beautiful movement prior to the expo, had designed a new San Francisco, one that would rival Paris. His plan involved great boulevards cutting through the city's existing grid, converging in a 'spider-web' like central axis. He designed a magnificent city center, making the city designate 1/3 of its land for parks and gardens with grand structures set atop the hills to commemorate our pioneers. And though he had the city's support to make this happen, the earthquake leveled the city, and his vision of beauty was bulldozed by private business.
According to SF Gate, "San Francisco's most tantalizing 'what-if' after the 1906 earthquake came when civic leaders turned their backs on one of the most ambitious plans ever crafted for an American city."
The forever naysayer Chronicle said, "We may allow visions of the beautiful to dance before our eyes, but we must not permit them to control our actions."
Nevertheless, beauty did manage to reign supreme, and in preparation for the PPIE, Edward Bennett got to work. He wanted to create a walled city, mimicking the Mediterranean and Asia, using the colors of San Francisco as his palette. "I saw the vibrant tint of the native wild flowers, the soft brown of the surrounding hills, the gold of the orangeries, the blue of the sea, and I determined that, just as a musician builds his symphony around a motif or chord, so I must strike a chord of color, and build my symphony on this."
As the PPIE opened, everyone knew it was to be dismantled later. Phoebe Hearst thought that was stupid, and created the Palace Preservation League to protect the Palace of Fine Arts, the only relic of such ambition. In my pale and dinged up little bucket are traces of these old buildings. They perched on our city like little stones in some woman's ring. They are the colors of our hills, the shadows of our clouds, architecture directly in correspondence with its place. Are they therefore beautiful because they had to be dismantled, made precious by their own mortality? Would we cherish them in the same way should they be commonplace?
Ambrose Bierce, "Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
A few weeks ago, my date took me to the Legion of Honor up in Lincoln Park. This park used to be the Golden Gate cemetery, until purchased in 1908. Sadly, coffins and bodies were still discovered during a retrofit in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Alma de Bretteville Spreckles (of the statue in Union Square) needed a place to house her Rodin. According to Adolph, "it was the purpose of my wife and myself to contribute to the beautification of our native city something not only beautiful in itself, but also something devoted to patriotic and useful ends: which might be dedicated as a suitable memorial to our brave boys who gave their lives to their country in the Great War."
In the Dream Endures: California enters the 1940s, by Kevin Starr, "It took only one patron, however, Alma de Bretteville Spreckles, to get the city into the museum business. Then in her fifties, Alma... deserves a novel, an opera even, capable of reflecting the will, the self-determination, the self-invention of a displaced aristocrat, an artists' model, lush and Rubenesque in the style of the fin de siecle, who used her sexual magnetism to parlay her way back into the upper class, if not quite to the respectability that ever eluded her."
It opened on Armistice Day in 1924, "to honor the dead while serving the living". It was dedicated to the 3600 California men who died in battle.
FYI: This ostentatious building has been featured in Hitchcock's Vertigo, was the sight of the eminent demise of Norman Neal Williams in Maupin's Tales of the City, and offered an office to Dr. Crippen in the Maltese Falcon. The plaza and fountain out front is America's first road to ever be improved for cars.
Last night, while drinking wine of the roof, we got to talking about reincarnation and spirituality.
Bierce again, "Heaven: a place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs and the good listen with attention while you expand on your own."
Bear with me on this. Having been raised atheist, I was taught that when we die, we die. We are nothing after. And yet, as I keep saying, there is the past all around us. Things continue, they change, they evolve. Maybe I am incorrect in thinking that I don't have a muse, mistaking a muse as being of the human variety. Perhaps I am just like the Spreckles and Burnham, giving my heart to this city. Or maybe I am just doing what I do in this point of time, another butterfly wing flapping in a third floor walk-up. How, then, can I address this sorrow I feel? When I eat dinner with my friends, I feel justified, appeased. Alone, I dance like a fool with a paintbrush between my teeth. Where is the lack? My pale and dinged up bucket is overflowing with failed attempts at lace making and torn stockings, pressed two dollar bills and lost socks; my increasingly bizarre collection of beauty.
In the Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke wrote, "If sadness were a competitive event, I'd have broken the subdivisional record. Sometimes when you're sad - you have to sit around and wait for your sadness to turn into something else, which it surely will. Sadness is in this way being like coal or most sorts of larvae."
Normally, I adore sorrow. Bad days are lovely, in that they are rare enough to serve purely as reminders of just how much I love my life. I love listening to the blues and taking long walks, and holding my breath, careful to keep the sacred protected within me. But lately, this sorrow just won't quit. I fear the fate of Turgenev: he quit writing when he fell out of love and subsequently died. "I am too old to be in love and unless I am a little in love, I cannot write."
And then there's the alternative. I could get back on that saddle and reach for the glory, but as my favorite little dating guide from the 1940s reminds us, "No girl wants to be treated like a caged animal by a circus clown," and we all know that that's usually how the dating world goes.
I think I'll take Martin Luther's words as advice. "Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing... so when the devil says to you, do not drink, answer him: I will drink and right freely, just because you tell me not to."
A tiny glimpse from inside my pale and dinged up little bucket:
