·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

At 8:30 I am off to my Saturday morning Adobe Photoshop class. Sandy’s in Sweden for the weekend and this time I am walking down the tracks from my place to enter Dolores Park from the top southwest corner. High gray fog and a low-lit emptiness over the dipping bowl of the green park. Only one dog in the distance, its gray skunk-like striped tail flipping the air.

The bench where the homeless man sits is empty. Well, it’s kind of empty. There’s luminous silver script on the green painted seat:

Embrace the Ecstatic
Scrap the Sensational

One line each on two of the bench’s wood lathes. A little separate to the side, there’s an admonition:

Create
Don’t
Hate

On the ground in front, there is a lose pile of color crayons, maybe 50 of them, broken and variously used. I am not sure of the connection between the language and tools. It looks like something went wrong, as if someone without skills got very frustrated while trying to draw an elaborate flower.

The homeless man appears to be getting more complicated! Or has someone else expropriated the meaning I have previously given his space?

In Class I am very frustrated. I was late and it took me a half-hour before I could access the program and the exercise for the day; it is one that involves the manipulation of three elements with a garden landscape: a medieval stone gate, a door, and the head of a female statue. The frustration and initial difficult grasp of program tools makes me remember a personal humiliation in the second grade: my color crayons - each one breaking again and again - as I tried, futilely, to follow the teacher, Mrs. Carey, while, with color chalks, she seemed to effortlessly draw an elaborate bouquet on the chalkboard. The flowers were in a vase, a bouquet she brought to class from her own garden.

Then, the reprimand about the broken crayons I could not jam back into the Diamond matchbox. The fingers became more anxious and could not draw for years. In fact, rarel wanted to draw.

With a Garamond Typeface I use the Text tool to expropriate the language on the Park bench. I place the words inside the stone doorway arch. As if to say, perhaps obviously, that when one enters the gate into the garden, “Embrace the Ecstatic/ Scrap the Sensational.”

Under those lines I put the vertical admonition, “Create/ Don’t/ Hate.” The type for each of the lines is a muted, warm yellow: lines in juxtaposition to the green garden.

Everything in Adobe - that is each element on the monitor screen - may be manipulated. Adobe 7 makes it possible to parse the different elements into layers, and then transform each element’s objects or landscape into various colors, perspectives, shapes and volumes, etc. etc. Then the layers can be all combined and manipulated again. The screen layers and program tools provide a potentially infinitely complex labyrinth through which - without any particular aesthetic or practical objective - one could “mouse” click, travel and experience without finish. Until given the permanence of a “Lock” or a “Save”, every element on the screen is potentially liquid.

“My goodness,” my 91 year-old dad says on the phone, “What happened to the lenses, the filters we used with all the different colors, and the different light speeds.”?

“The monitor is the new lens, Dad.”

Goodbye to one portion of history and welcome to the next. I wonder.

“‘Waiting For Godot’ Cast: If the Elevator Does Not Stop on the Sixth Floor, Go to the Eighth and Walk Back Down.”

Computer printed sign taped to the elevator, lobby of Grant Street entrance to the second floor Galleries on the corner of Grant & Geary. The way a piece of text suggests a possibility to interpret or ignore. I cannot ignore this. The idea of actors, most likely carrying “Waiting for Godot” in their backpacks, or with their lines already memorized, wandering up and down stairwells, unable to find their stage. Lucky and Pozo (?) without a tree. Talk about cause for real hysteria. Text without a space within which to disclose itself.

Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation”? No, when lost, I suspect most actors worth their salt would start screaming and create all sorts of agitation.

At Rena Bransten’s gallery, Regan Louie’s color photographs looking down at construction workers either ambling across or focused at work on the high cortin steel beams of a new Hong Kong skyscraper. Deja vu and echo of 1920’s black and white photographs of the construction of New York City skyscrapers.

Vertigo: the relaxed, casual, fearless male poses. The confidence of structure versus the deep void. The new building’s skeletal, rectilinear, steel structure: history’s series of muscular and stacked paragraphs within which a new economy and culture will be visualized and written.

History’s trembling, vertical vertigo. Like an adolescent boy imagining sex.

All happening - fresh and new - across those shores to the East.

Eighteenth and Mission. The cloth sign over the high sidewall of the permanent “LIQUIDATION” furniture store outlet:

$499 SOFA AND LOVE

Embraces everywhere.

Fog filters warm, white light into the City. I am back up on the edge of the Park. As if on schedule - it’s 8:45 - the man on the bench is blowing very large bubbles, maybe up to three or four inches in diameter. If it’s the release of dead souls, these are out of the mouths of important figures - Rabbis, community leaders, large shop owners or those of Ohlone Chiefs, heroic warriors, beloved mothers, and, who knows, maybe those of ancient shamans.

There is absolutely no wind and the large spheres float along the trail and meet my eye as I walk beside them. The interior skins embody and radiate what appear as global land shapes - variously and intrigingly silvery blue, yellow and crimson - each holding their own until the bubble suddenly disappears.

Then - for me - a most astonishing thing happens. When I pass behind the man - who still never looks up - I notice there is a new paperback, face up, on the top of his satchel. It is no longer, “City of Bones.” I can hardly believe the title. It almost seems saccharine to acknowledge it. Particularly since I have been letting my intuitions flow wild. But I am astonished. The language of the title - in all of its pulp paperback gaudy orange and black colors. But there it is. Believe it or not:

The Music of The Spheres

Homeless, homeless, homeless. Take it, as I must, from there.

This morning the man on the bench is blowing bubbles - a proflic number of small ones that float out beyond his knees - free born - into the already warm morning light: the transparent bluish luminescent spheres momentarily juxtaposed against his faded gold baseball cap and full, rust colored beard.

Yesterday I somehow got the suspicion - or recall a faint,oblique memory - that Dolores Park was once a grave yard. Back home, courtesy of Google, I do the research. Indeed, I learn:

“…The Ohlone Indians were there first. They had inhabited the area for several centuries before Spanish missionaries arrived in 1776 to establish Mission San Francisco Dolores. Thereafter, the Ohlone shared the land with Spanish ranchers and shopkeepers until the 1949 Gold Rush, when new settlers, gamblers, and tavern keepers joined the mix. In 1861, the site was purchased by Congregation Sherith Israel for a cemetery which became inactive in 1894…”
(http://www.sfneighborhoodparks.org/parkhistories/dolorespark.html)

“New world” Jews and, perhaps, under them, the Ohlone. “City of Bones.” The spherical bubbles. The man on the bench - a kind of Charon situated on the edge of the buried buried - takes on new meaning. Release of the spirits. Gently bringing them up. Giving them birth. Liberating each of them - large and small, adults and children - blowing them, globe by globe, back into the hemisphere.

Last winter’s first marches against the possible war in Iraq, demonstratrions against the occupation of Palestine, annualy demonstrations against the death penalty, against gender discrimination, in support of Farm Workers, Reggae concerts, Mayan coming of age ceremonies, the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Mime Troupe - the common and the uncommon good - over the bones of Jews and Indians, it all starts here

The curious dialog of the living and the dead. The dead ultimately want out. The release of souls. Bubbles. Out they float across the park. One by one. Gone.

I been watching this man every morning for several months. In the morning -when I climb the concrete walkway from 18th up the westside of Dolores Park- he sits on the same bench overlooking the park and the skyscapered skyline of downtown San Francisco. He is either blowing soap bubbles or reading a paperback. He’s homeless. Next to him, on one side is a square shaped and faded red, white and blue rafia satchel. It’s packed with clothes and personal items. On the other, a sleeping bag.

He blows the bubbles through a plastic red ring that pops up from inside a little dark blue bottle. The slightly irridescent rainbow and transparent bubbles - in small to large diameters - float up into the air to cross the park. Some descend toward the group of dog owners - some watching their animals tussle with each other, others making them chase green tennis balls with jai-lai-looking plastic rackets. Other bubbles float up into the sky catching and reflecting the light off the morning horizon.

Between bubble blows, the man gazes, as if he is looking through and beyond the bubbles. I take the daily ritual as a kind of prayer, one in which he variously enhances an illuminated vision of the City. Who can say whether the bubbles are a gift for himself alone, or whether the bubbles are intended as a kind gift to us, the public, as well. Other than staring at the rising and disappearance of the luminous works, he never turns to look at any one.

And yet there is the book. After the bubbles, he always opens the paperback, holding it open with two hands over his folded knee. For days I have been trying to look at the cover, as if the title might give me a clue as to what’s going on inside. But, yeah, this morning, while he blows bubbles, the cover is face-up in the satchel:

City of Bones

Bubbles and bones, bones and bubbles. It suddenly all makes sense and no sense. Living between the two, the transcendent and the dead. There on the bench every day sitting in the morning light. Rising on the one (the bubbles), digging down into the other (the bones). The limbo of living between the two. Like any half-way imaginative soul, riding the images that clarify the moment.

My heart goes out to him.

This is the second time I have tried the entry. The first, of course, was a beauty! But when I went over to Google to find out how to spell “Badminton”, the entry disappeared when I returned. I suffered in the residual cosmic smoke, you bet. But here goes again:

It’s 8:55. Walking up 18th, I stop in front of the green sidewalk fruit stalls in front of Bi Rite, our expensive local but good organic grocery, deli and butcher. My eyes and fingers are stopped, some might say “called” by a bin full of little stacks of “donut” peaches which are flat, circular and with slight ripples around their sides. $3.99 a pound. Outrageous, but, no doubt, the last of any California season. I pick up a light one. Maybe 50 cents. Behind the open door a Latino is sweeping the floor. “I am sorry. Not open for five minutes.” I put the peach back down and contine up 18th.

It’s still warm, Indian summer and the morning light lifts everything. Inside the Dolores Cafe, the langauge pops off the green chalkboard signs: “Loose Leaf Tea in a Pot”, “Soup of the Day: Tomato Basil.” I indulge a Rasberry Ring (too sweet) and carry my coffee cup out the door. Crossing the intersection, ahead of me a young woman with a cell phone and two badminton rackets, announces to somebody she’s got a new job with “USA Sports.” The sunlight splashes across her dark green shorts and brown thighs and calves. In white block letters the word, “D A R T M O U T H”, saddles across both cheeks, her butt ostensibly praising the University, but one simultanously wonders how the school’s pious founding New England fathers, or anyone else, might want to interpret the double entendre! (There must be a better way to say this!)

But the morning is really a story of light, the radiance striking everywhere, the orange, the yellow and the warmth, the way in which Indian summer provides this last visit, the gathering of light into pockets between the darkening, new autumn shadows from the south. Pockets to carry towards winter, like little intimate torches. And curious, the way nature cans its own self, the emergence of ripe pumpkins as containers of the last summer light, the interior flesh as light concealed to be opened again on Halloween, the candle lit interiors shining back the yellow light through eye, mouth and nose.

Walking by the tennis courts, I am some how thinking of the radiance of the book, the title, Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl”, the promise of reading, the experience of sitting with a great book, prose or poetry, in which the immersion of the eye in the page and the emergence of word, image, rhythm and time simultaneously collude, waver and suspend themselves in this unfathomable radiance.

This morning - on the way back up to my place from Sandy’s - I stop in Tartines (the fancy new and great bakery at 18th and Guerrero) to take out a cup of their good coffee. A young woman is sitting at a sun filled table against the east window. A raisin scone next to a bowl filled with cafe latte is situated around an open blue sales binder on the edge of which sits a naughehide colored cell-phone. In bold black letters the chapter heading on the white page reads:

The Land of Happiness and Class Live in The Same Zip Code

I don’t even want to think about that. I walk up Eighteenth and go left along the edge of Dolores Park. There are still a few homeless folks stretched out on blankets in the sun. This slope of the park, at least on a sunny day, I call, “The Homeless Riviera.” It is already so warm this morning, no one has their blanket on.

A little way up the street, a young man in a plaid shirt is still sound-a-sleep, his arms spread up and out on to the grass. Parallel to his chest there is a six or so inch transparent plastic cylinder with vertical and variously diametric tubes inside with two size D batteries at the base. It’s a coin separater for pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Panhandling must be his daily business and the separater must make it easier for him to count a days proceeds and to deal with local merchants.

Last Friday night - at Small Press Traffic - Renee Gladman read from “The Activist” which - though she does not say it outright takes place partly in Dolores Park. I sensed the location immediately. Renee used to live around my corner and I would occasionally talk with her while she let her her dog run in the park. After the reading, I ask her where is “the tall grass” in which the revolutionaries are really or pretending to hide. First, she says, “It’s fiction,” and when I am incredulous, “It’s fiction,” she repeats with a laugh. When I continue to press her, she says “It’s down by the tennis courts.”

Fiction or not, tomorrow I am going to go looking for that grass. The novel is good, by the way.

One of my neighbors makes what’s called a “handsome living” as a breakfast and lunch caterer in Silicon Valley. He operates a Conference Center on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto and provides “on call” deliveries to Hi-Tech firms all over the Valley. This evening - in the beatiful warm, autumn light - I stopped to speak to him as he sat relaxing on the stairway up to his two story, pitched roof house.

“How are things?”

“They’re picking up. We’ve got all nine Democratic candidates lined up for separate luncheons at the Conference Center. Now we’re waiting to hear from General Clark.”

“How about the industry?”

“It’s beginning to take off again.”

“Surveillance big?”

“Oh yeah. We got a client called “Q”. We can’t even go inside. We leave the delivery outside the door.”

“Be careful,” I suggest. “A counter-Agent might attach a microphone chip inside one of your delivery boxes.”

“Don’t worry. They come outside and comb everything.”

Three years ago, when we had the annual block party, he cooked the chicken and hamburgers on a portable black iron barbeque that was literally 8 feet long and 2 feet wide. It folded up into his van or unfolded and rolled around - almost like a wheelbarrow - on two rubber wheels. It’s what he used for on-site company lunches. I remember three things he told us then:

1. Before any meal with a presentation at the Conference Center, the host - usually a Venture Capital firm - would send their own security over to debug the place. “They always find something. It’s amazing.”

2. Hi-Tech companies fed their own employees on site so they wouldn’t gossip out loud in local restaurants about the development of their new products.

2. Many companies refused to take roasted or barbequed chicken. It got their employees fingers all sticky and the grease ended up on the keyboards. The execs didn’t like the way it made things cost more to keep the computers clean.
Hamburgers were still OK.

He already then had a great sense of irony about what was going on - that for many of the companies, the whole charade was pretentious facade in front of a business plan, more often than not, likely to collapse. That day, flipping burgers and turning chicken over for 30 neighbors without worrying about security and custodial issues made him real happy.

Some people say - if you want to know what’s going on - “Follow the money.” I say, “Follow the food.” My kind of surveilance.

I walk across the intersection at 20th and Dolores - at the Southeast top of the Dolores Park - and continue East on 20th towards Guerrero. It’s evening and the yellow, early autumn light of the setting sun angles on to the Victorian windows and walls on the northside of the street. Six or seven buildings in from the corner, on an upper flat, the light catches the thick and slightly rippled, plum and white colored velvet curtains. Small drafts of wind gently shake the lower corner of one, part of its edge barely hanging outside the open, sliding window.

The curtains evoke a sensuality - maybe even the possibility of decadence - like an echo of John Singer Sargeant, his late nineteenth century paintings of upper-class English women dressed in evening gowns, the slightly rippled, illuminated sheen and lavendar silk edges a demonstration of their combined world of social privilege, grace and bonding - and, perhaps, for the imaginative, an implied private, uniquely refined chamber room eroticism. Whatever maybe mud left outside on the carriage wheels.

In the flat below, it’s an entirely different world. In the curtainless window, there is a light yellow poster with big black letters that spell “GONZALES”. I cannot make out the smaller words, but the signs are up in windows all over the neighborhood. Matt Gonzales, the current President of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, is the Green candidate for Mayor. The sign and name are synonymous with Rent Control, compassion for the homeless, pro-bicycle, neighborhoods and parks and opposition to anonymous real estate developments, and against the greed of downtown business interests - the issues that hang on one side of the political earthquake fault that animates the City. The windows without curtains and the singularity of the sign evoke residents head-on about civic issues, righteous, transparent, not overtly complicated.

Next door a young, tall and thin black man is out on this street a rare balcony taking a brief look out on to the empty sidewalk. Inside his living room there’s a black basketball jersey with white numerals hanging from the wall, perhaps retired from more glorious days on the court. Next to the jersey is the profile an ebony wooden African mask, its sharply angled nose distinctly pointed out from the wall.

Such juxtapositions - whatever the illusions of power and place - it’s hard to imagine if any of these neighbors ever talk to each other, or even would want to! Insular privacy - protected to a fault - a value and virtue. It’s always, I assume, been the draw of Cities over the familiar and painfully probling eyes and judgements of extended families and nosey ‘tight’ neighborhoods.

Walking is sometimes the only way I get to know who lives here, taking peaks inside the windows, checking out the emblems in which it is possible to begin to imagine the identity of people’s public and interior lives. If nothing else, the solitary voyeurism - the counter-cubist juxtaposition of images - brings a certain kind of visual joy. It’s a little like the Victorian novel where the hero is only able to imagine the real body of the heroine by the excited bare glimpse of her slightly exposed ankle. And it is a City - I have found - with many different kinds of “ankles”.

Well, I will let that be a gradually unfolding mystery!

Several buildings up from Sandy’s flat on Guerrero towards 2Oth Street (Sandy’s my partner of now almost 15 years) there is a garage literally filled with cardboard boxes of books. The door is rarely up. But at least once a week, the owner of books sets four of five of them up against the door on the sidewalk for people to take, and much of the time the titles are variously interesting, often academic, and rarely anything to do with art or poetry.
One evening I was delighted to pick up a first paperback 1968 English edition J Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theater. During those years I took workshops based on his physical and vocal exercises - probably the most extreme thing (bar a couple of drugs) that I ever did to myself. (My Dinner With Andrei, the Andrei side of it is really a film about the impact of Grotowski). But that’s a whole other story.

Two days ago - again on the sidewalk - Sandy picked up and brought home New Directions 16 published in 1957. What a rich trove and, ironically enough, in a book that was about to become lost - its pages a sepia color from acid discoloration - the magazine features an article entitled, The Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams or The Past Recaptured by John C. Thirlwall. Done in cooperation with Williams, the 43 page piece includes poems between 1913 and 1950 which had been typed, even published, but variously misplaced or forgotten and not included in the then current Collected edition. I suspect they have all been recovered into later Collected editions.

I have been reading the poems with - often in the kitchen out loud to Sandy - delight for the last couple of days. Given the chronologically scatter shot editorial selection, it’s amazing the shifts in style, and wonderfully, poems that don’t make any coherrent sense at all and that’s part of their point. As he says:

Down-Town

is a condition-

of bedrooms whose electricity

is brackish or made into
T beams - They dangle them

into place at masculine risk-
Or a boy with a rose under

the lintel of his cap
standing to have his picture

taken on the butt of a girder
with the city a mile down-

captured, lonely atop
iron girders rose-petal

smile- a thought of Indians
on chestnut branches

to end “walking on the air”

(1934)

As if Williams had also been looking at the NY skyscape paintings of John Marin. He’s quoted telling an editor, “I liked the picture of a man riding the end of a girder because it is masculine, like the skill and audacity of masculine games. I expressed an equal adacity in writing something that could not be understood.”

Whether or not Williams’ - in a surrealist ploy - is toying with the editor and by extension contemporary straight critics, I don’t know, but I like the freedom expressed in the gesture. That nonsense can be good sense, at least good aesthetic sense? But more than that, I like the discovery of these poems, reading and watching them climb up off the dank smelling brown pages, helping them fight their material ephemerality back into presence, momentarily rescuing them before they will inevitably get shredded somewhere, somehow. Of course, beyond that, the whole idea (concept) of “lost and found.” This could go on, but I won’t. This evening.

The September issue of Sentinel, a London based African oriented on-line mag features the second part of an email interview with me conducted by Nnorom Azuonye! (The first part was in the July issue)

http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/

I taught creative writing, English, etc. at the University of Nigeria in the mid-sixties (Peace Corps). I talk about my fellow Nigerian writers and students and poetry readings, the making of language, etc. etc. (In talking about readings, I put in a plug for the great experience of the domestic New Brutalist readings this past summer!) In the July issue, Nnorom also published a number of my poems - from my book “Walking” he considers influenced by the Nigeian experience. Without rambling on, it’s a delight for me to see. . Nnorom is the brother of a former student and poet, Chukwuma Azuonye who,until recently, was head of the African Studies program at U Mass. After no communication in 30 years, Chukwuma recently discovered me via the internet. But that’s a whole other story. What goes around, comes back in such nice ways.