-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.
