When you haven't written in over a month, the task becomes daunting. There are simply too many things I've discovered, experienced and want to share that I just can't seem to find a starting point. Studying writing in college, the first question we were told to ask ourselves is what is the general feeling we wish to convey. With all my paintings stacked around the kitchen, he asked me the same question: "why do you paint, what is behind it, why is there a desire to share?"
Thankfully, he did the answering. Apparently, the Portuguese have a term for this, Saudade, and though the meaning varies slightly between the European and the Brazilian Portuguese, this sentiment is so prevalent as to effect their nationality. According to Byron, it is a longing for something that has yet to occur, yearning. A deep emotional state of nostalgia. A love that remains after someone has gone.
But this isn't nostalgia. It's deeper. According to A. F. G. Bell, 1912, It's a ".... vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."
Looking at the Palace of Fine Arts all lit up for it's 100th birthday seemed to visually exemplify this sentiment. Clearly, I have a deep appreciation for the history here, a desire to float between the past and the present, fusing time into one.
"... and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I'd just discovered about love - that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we've maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions - all right, I admit they're not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute - but they fade, they - look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fantasies but dribble away into mud." Denis Johnson
In his book, Already Dead, Denis Johnson illustrates the lost souls of a few California residents in such a way as to almost make their personal wrecking enviable.
"I cried out my last words, I shouted my love to my wife. I went to the preacher. I went to my father's grave. And then to the hotel bar, the cathedral of parched souls with its big screen of heaven and in every hand a cigarette smoking like a nightsome, griefly thurible. I dived deep into the woman I no longer love. And all the time it tasted and sounded like any other day, I went to sleep terrified and woke up falling forever, and only the sight of her beneath the sheet like half a thought, like a tentative scribble, saved me - "
Similar to saudade, The Spanish have a word, anorar: meaning "remembering with sadness the absence, deprivation or loss of someone or something loved."
Am I relating to these sentiments because Valentine's Day just passed? Because my good friend's father passed away the same day? Because on the eve of the birth of their second son, I found myself crying over the passing of their mother? Because he fed me oysters and Sicilian wine? Because, even though it poured almost the entire time we were in Calistoga, I still found myself struck dumb by the beauty of the vines? Because at my age I'm already turning into a sentimental old fop?
Looking for advice, I looked to San Francisco's favorite satirist Ambrose Bierce. Cupid: "The so-called god of love, this bastard creation of a barbarous fancy was no doubt inflected upon mythology for the sins of its deities. Of all the unbeautiful and inappropriate conceptions this is most reasonless and offensive. The notion of symbolizing sexual love by a semi-sexless babe, and comparing the pains of passions to the wounds of an arrow- of introducing this pudgy homunculous into art grossly to materialize the subtle spiral and suggestion of the work - this is eminently worthy of the age that, giving it birth, laid it on the doorstep of posterity."
Our one time resident (she now resides in San Rafael) and renowned author Isabel Allende was seeking a book about food and seduction and when she couldn't find one, decided to write it for herself as a 50th birthday present. Titled Aphrodite, the book begins: "I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by because of pressing tasks or puritanical virtue. Walking through the gardens of memory, I discover that my recollections are associated with the senses."
In one chapter, she was describing living with her 80 year old mother, and how she found herself embarrassed by the strange collection she was amassing in her research. Being an easily recognizable person, she began wearing wigs and hats, huge sunglasses, on her excursions, and burying her objects in elaborate hiding places around her house, until one day, sneaking back into the house, she found her mother at the dining room table with everything laid out. She told her deeply embarrassed daughter that if she needed a soup recipe for an orgy, all she had to do was ask.
In the 1970s, the Mitchell Brothers brought hardcore pornography to main circulation in the film, Behind the Green Door.The film showed at the O'Farrell Theater, called by Hunter S. Thompson, the Carnegie Hall of Public Sex in America.
Speaking of films, there have been over 200 shot here. All three Around the World in 80 Days have had a scene or two filmed here. The second, in 1956, cost $6 million, included 112 locations, 13 countries, 140 sets, a cast of 68,894 and a gaggle of animals "including ostriches, six skunks, 15 elephants, 17 fighting bulls, 512 rhesus monkeys, 820 horses, 950 burros, 2448 American buffalo, 3800 Rocky Mountain sheep and a sacred cow that eats flowers on cue."
"The scenes of the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by steamship took place off San Francisco and were shot on a specially built prop steamer, a converted barge mocked up to resemble a small ocean-going steamship, with mock paddles driven by the electric motor from an old streetcar. In his memoirs, Niven described the whole thing as being dangerously unstable."
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Did you know that in 2007, the film Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry by the LIbrary of Congress for its "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significance"? McQueen had based his character on Dave Toschi, the famous San Francisco inspector involved (with partner Inspector Bill Armstrong) in the Zodiac Killer, copying his signature 'fast draw' shoulder holster.
Another San Francisco film selected for preservation is the 1971 Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood. A huge fight scene was shot at the base of our gigantic cross at Mt. Davidson. The killer Scorpio tells the Cop Harry "now turn, face the cross, come on, put your nose right up against the cement."
Having just read an article mentioning the supposed giant cross hidden in Golden Gate park, I became deeply confused as to why we would have two. With at least two churches on every block, I understand the deep spirituality and religious practices of a lot of the residents here, and yet the liberal politics would seem to keep such grandiose and specific religious symbolism at bay.
Looking into it, I found out some funny things about the cross. The one we have now is the fifth incarnation, with the first two having burned, the third being struck by lightning and the fourth having blown down. (See, San Francisco WAS fighting it). I'll spare you the long history of the mountain, but it did get it's name from George Davidson, one of the original founding members of the Sierra Club. In 1929, when the third cross was erected (at a staggering 80 feet), the city purchased 26 acres in order to stop development on the mountain.
Services were often held at the base of it, and during 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression, these services were broadcast nationally.
In 1934, a time capsule was built into the new base including the original deed to Mt. Davidson, and on March 24, at 7:30 pm, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pressed the telegraph key to light the world's largest cross (103 feet) "cultivating the principles of the Golden Rule into American business."
In 1979, CBS broadcast from the cross in response to the deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. And in 1991, the ACLU, American Jewish Congress and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued the city over ownership, resulting in the city auctioning it off. The Armenian Organizations of Northern California bought it, but for some reason, in 2007, the Armenian Genocide plaque disappeared from the top.
Johnson again, "And then Army Street with its flat-faced, secretive hotels, the pauper's breath of its doorways, stinky old men in the parks, unrepentant winos standing on the corners like figures in a parable. If only I could decipher them. No I don't want to. Ultimately all these old men turn out to be somebody's father. And how frighteningly old he's become, each one of them. Ultimately all these old-men thoughts turn out to be aimed at the matter of my own very ill probably dying dad (as he was that day, but now as you know all too well, no longer). And the faces, the faces, the faces: the murderous faces of children and the innocent faces of old men, the happy faces of the dead (Yes, and I want to tell you about that, I did actually see a dead person later that day). The planetary faces of gluttons. The faces of the rich sealed and locked. Also don't forget the day-old immigrants with their stupid clothes and suddenly useless life histories and their faces like broken toys. I should have seen the beauty in their stares. The religion. Instead I parked and bought a newspaper right away because you can't hide from them anywhere but in the movies."
Calderon de la Barca wrote:
"What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction
For all of life is a dream
And dreams? dreams are dreams."
Walking through Precita yesterday (which, by the way translates from the Spanish to 'condemned to hell') she kept talking about how insignificant she felt, how unable to solve life's mysteries. Over wine on the roof again, he went on a rant about how he didn't ask to be born, that life is full of pain, that it's all insignificant so why not just take and take and take. She laughs at my dating stories, calling me brave to take so many chances, when for me, it just boils down to a deeply morbid curiosity.
We all live differently, chose different paths. Some of us feel a compelling desire to share and communicate, others to upset the natural flow before them. I'm not Portuguese, but I think I do understand the saudade, and in learning it, feel like it is the only sentiment.
Or, there's the Albanian term, mall: Feelings of passionate longing, sadness, and at the same time an undefined laughter from the same source."
Or, the Finnish kaiho: "State of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult or tedious to attain."
The final Johnson quote (I promise)
"She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren't 'good' and things are never 'bad' - no, in this lush eternity by the sea, we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay. Anything better to a degree, all the way up to a colossal jackpot or the return of Jesus is neat."
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