Moon Sticks, Georhythm and A Night Walk in The Marin Headlands
Geo-rhythm: I am not sure if there is a science for such a thing, if it can be called a “thing” at all. As a walker, or when walking, I identify the rhythm as a felt thing - a vertical one - the way the feet touch the ground, one after another to gradually create a confidence with the quality of the geology (slippery, firm, grassy, hard) and its shape (level, an up or downward slope, one broken by rocks, etc.) Some kind of birth – through a buildup of breathing combined with motion – takes place through the torso and legs and leads, if I can sustain the courtship metaphor, to a wedding of physiology to geology. The head atop the union of which operates the attentive eye looking forward, rotating left and right, gathering the presence and particulars of space. In fact, as the walking takes hold, the consciousness fills with an enlarged sense of spaciousness, at once both gratifying, humbling and variously, depending on the walk - its sense of quest - challenging.
Thursday is full moon, the legendary “harvest” one rising in the East across San Francisco Bay, a little to the south of the pale outline of Mt. Diablo. In the darkening blue sky we first see its still pale, yet large presence as we rise a steep, five hundred feet up the steps and switchbacks of the Morning Side Trail, its opening head just off Spencer Drive, a couple miles north off Highway 101from the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s six o’clock and I am doing a night walk with two of my oldest friends, Arthur, the psychiatrist, and Andrew, the epidemiologist. I guess they would call me “the poet” though we rarely call each other anything. We – with a variety of friends, wives and lovers – have been walking, variously around the Bay Area and within the City for more than twenty years.
Half way the bluff we stop somewhat startled by a sight south and parallel across the adjacent ravine. An Eucalyptus tree, one is maybe a hundred feet tall has fallen flat on to the dark green brush where it lies titled against the severe angle of a cliff. It’s marbled white and light brown trunk and branches, and the white and green mint colors of turned-up under-leaves are caught in the yellow light of the fading rays of the sun. The downed tree gives off the apparition of a fresh and sudden ghost. If we were in the African bush, this enormous tree would be surrounded by villagers expressing grief for a fallen and revered member of the community. Breath taken, we are astonished and walk on.
The geo-rhythm of the walk, I have learned – similar, but different than the rhythm of a long meal – propels combinations of speech and silence, as if the activity of one replenishes the other. Tonight, after arriving at the top of the bluff, and moving on along the first ridge, the moon is a foot stopper. Elevating higher now – an increasingly light warm yellow - it’s omnipresence in the sky is a friendly, yet already overwhelming presence, creating, perhaps, the same sense of surprise as a larger than life, uninvited guest who stands at the gate and is about to enter a neighborhood party. To the southeast is the fading skyline of the Oakland hills, the thin gray web work of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Direct to our west and the direction of our trail, actually a fire road, there’s the firry deep red, now cadmium infused shag drift of clouds and fog over the Pacific Ocean horizon. It’s the last of the sunset. Off to the right, to the north, is the dark, high profile of Mt. Tamalpais, and to the south - interwoven between the rim of broken hills - one of the Golden Gate Bridge’s two red towers, a little of the opalescent gray City skyline, and then, further on, as we pick up Bob Cat trail, which is also a gravel fire road, the view south down San Francisco’s Ocean Beach along the edge of the Pacific to the hilly dark outline of Devil’s Slide as it descends into a now barely visible, more black than gray ocean.
The first rise up from the trailhead to the bluff is usually quiet while the gut is gently or harshly broken open by fresh air. City tensions start to exhume and release during the first downward slopes off the bluff and junction on to Bob Cat. This evening its disgust and disbelief that Arnold Schwartznegger is elected the State’s Governor and what that will all mean. We don’t say anything very smart, the whole steroid inflated muscular image of this guy as Governor is still so thoughtlessly disgusting and hard yet to talk about. Fortunately, a black and gray fur coated Jack Rabbit- in the last glow of dusk light - catches our attention as it is stopped still, up on his haunches, some fifteen off the side of the road. We all variously talk to it, saying simple things like “Hi”, and gesture with our waving hands, as if our sweet cordiality will kindly govern and somehow cause this wild animal to lope over and nuzzle against the backs of our fingers. He doesn’t, naturally, move an inch towards us.
As we continue uphill, Andrew starts asking questions about beauty. It’s usually on this second hilly grade, much more gentle than the first rise over the bluff, but still work, that a deeper conversation begins in which one of proposes something, makes a challenge or an outright pronouncement, or a relatively intimate confession. Personal and family, professional, political or aesthetic. Something comes out in which the other two of us climb on board with a response, or sometimes a counter-challenge. It’s something about the character of going up a hill – working to think and walk at the same time. Maybe that’s really the test of a first rate intelligence, that is the capacity to walk up hill with in a group, hold contrary ideas in the mind at the same time, listen, argue and grapple for a resolution and, at the same time, be open and alert to the sights and sounds that surround the walk’s path. Many are the times – I suspect in frustration with the group dynamic – that I split off to walk ahead of the group, taking the trail at my own rhythm, letting what is inside and outside mingle and unfold without the intrusion of others.
But not tonight. I don’t know if the night’s moon is “glue”, one that hold’s us together, or maybe it is the sight of the gorgeous rabbit, but Andrew speaks of an Arthur Danto book (title) which, apparently, works to deal with the “death of beauty”, particularly that of the Nineteenth Century concept of it, foremost as represented by the Impressionists, one that creates a lush sense of rapturous color and one in which the senses are thereby “transported” into a sublime and transcendent space. Danto, Andrew says, argues that World War I put an end to it. Marcel du Champ – the “ready-made” object as manifested in the formal Gallery exhibit of a male, white ceramic urinal – is the signal of the end of “pretty.” Yet, Andrew suggests, no matter how or why, Danto remains entranced by the resonant desire to recapture the presence of beauty as it may be implicit or found in the practice of making contemporary art.
Andrew – an this is the challenge part - as we continue to make our way up the hill, wants to know what Andrew and I think of that, whether or not the Twentieth Century art has eliminated “beauty.” Behind us, when we turn around, the moon is much more fully risen into a bright white marble figure against the darkening hills and sky. Arthur, whose avocation and practice is choral music, speaks and makes analogies with his current writing on the music and oratorios of Strauss, Britten and Shostakovich. In short, Arthur describes, the emergence of discordance, the shredded envelope, beauty’s dead container.
I retell a story I read once of how in 1915 the artists of Taos – ones who were too old to be drafted into World War I - asked what they could do for the War Department and its training camps located in New Mexico. One thing that many of the artists shared was that they had studied in Paris in the late Nineteenth Century. Impressionism and related schools of painting, as well as their own practice as students, had made them quite familiar with the character of landscapes in the French countryside. Led by the artist Oscar Blumenshein, the local artists went to work painting large panoramic landscapes on thin, tall plywood walls that were linked together into continuous mural on the grounds across the training camp firing range. The new training recruits would target and pound their munitions into the hills and trees to practice killing the presence of the imaginary enemy. I have no idea of how many such artful murals were created and then brutally destroyed.
“I have always thought that story represented the end of Nineteenth Century painting and the start of the Twentieth.”
Andrew says Danto would probably say something comparable and then he switches back to Danto’s argument and desire to recover “the beautiful”, in particular the shock Danto had in the early 1960’s when he first discovered Andy Warhol’s “Brillo” pad series. How, if I am correctly interpreting Andrew’s interpretation of Danto, that Warhol’s secret was in the way the artist took what is not considered traditionally beautiful, in this case, a commodity package made by a graphic designer (i.e. not an artist) and mediates and transforms the brillo pads into something, ironically, considered both suspect and beautiful.
Like the now fully gone sun, the conversation fades without any attempt at further resolution. The hill we climb continues to rise above the deep valley of the Headlands – one that eons ago were filled with seawater and marshes. The dry grasses, brush, trees and stone outcroppings on its various slopes are now filled with the light of a moon that – other than providing gradations of dark to white – provides no specific color to anything. The luminescence, in fact, is oddly - though not without some familiarity - liberating. It’s as if the weight of the ordinary, the volume and weight carried in light of every day things has been, at least temporarily, lifted, or is it better to say, “suspended.”
We are headed – I did mention “quest” - to a place we call “The Medicine Wheel.” After we have gone over and little down the last high crest, we break away from the road on to is a relatively short path uphill and south across the edge of high bluff that faces out toward the Western horizon and, in the light of day, down through the slot of land that forms Tennessee Valley Cove.
The Medicine Wheel has no permanent surviving stones with which it can be easily identified. Tonight, however, it’s easy. The moonlight clearly catches the white glow of the barely visible and variously chipped foundation of stones, tightly sunken and worn as these remnants are into the rocky earth. The outside circle is roughly 10 feet in diameter. Indeed the light catches jagged remains of circles within the circle. Where some often dispute whether it’s a real circle or not, the moonlight tonight appears to erase all doubt. No one, yet to my knowledge, knows how the Miwok Indians may have used the wheel and for what rituals.
The wheel is often the terminus of our night walks. Ancient circle or not, we’re often in the night taking stones to build our own circle. The architecture and design will vary. It can be a simple circle with maybe 10 or 12 stones. Often a large base stone is married to two or three stones, one on top of the other. We make much of the way the stones are pointed, the quadrant ones to the various horizons, other stones pointed either against or towards each other. There is attention to the spaces between stones, the openness just as much a value as the solidity of the rocks. Other kinds of stone creatures take shape in relationship to the circle and are given names and roles in some imaginative cosmology. There are sometimes arguments. Once Arthur and Pilar - his partner, and most often our friend and companion in these building escapades- independently built a stone staff and musical composition, as if they senses some need to resurrect a mediated or “civilized” sense of culture. Andrew and I were its opponents of this imposition, arguing only from instinctive gut sense that the musical artifice was false and at odds with the energies of the site. Indeed the shapes wanted are as simple as the circle and hopscotch patterns on an elementary school playground. Indeed, the site of the Wheel is for us a kind of playground.
We have not been up at the Medicine Wheel all summer. Whatever is built, I should mention, never survives. Except for a mysteriously surviving wall of maybe 10 short, evenly spaced out stones that Andrew constructed several months ago, whatever we create is always dispersed by the time we return. We have several theories, the most prominent is that the Park Rangers purposely break up circles, mazes or whatever structures may be found wherever on Parkland. Our suspicion is that “paganistic” structures and practices are considered a taboo and envisioned as a potential danger to the park habitat and its public use. We do joke that what we are doing is “pagan.” And maybe in some ancient sense it is. Even though we create structures that we like and wish to see survive for others to see - and we do occasionally see that the site has its other visitors and players - I don’t object to the stones redistribution by the rangers, windy weather or whoever - the pleasure is the building and rebuilding structures that respond to the spirit of each visit.
Tonight I am astonished by quality the light from the moon, now much more higher in the eastern sky, and now, in addition to the circle – which indeed looks like a skeletal echo of the moon’s shape - the light illuminates several of the loose wedges of small and large “chert” stone pieces that lie variously around the circle and in surrounding dry grasses. In daylight the stones are a light brown stained white color. Raised up and facing the moonlight, the stones provide a crystalline, garneted visual echo and glint back at the moon, as if the two have formed a kind of illuminated communion.
These rocks, I have learned, have broken away from what are called “Franciscan chert ribbons.” These ribbons were made “by thrust faults that formed during the underplating of the Marin Headlands.” (You can see these “ribbons” curved like pillows into the sides of cuts made to open roads along the local hillsides). The Medicine Wheel, if I under the geology correctly, is sitting atop one of these “thrust faults” created by the once slow and violent clash of geological plates. The Medicine Wheel can be described as sitting on an ancient “power edge.”
Andrew tonight - nursing an airplane cold - is not into moving stones. Arthur is more anxious than usual about the weight of picking up stones and hurting a fragile spine. I can’t hold back and find myself following my fingers like magnets to the available and various stones. I find a wedge of chert that is over a foot long and roughly four by four inches in width. I go to the Eastern edge of the Wheel and stick it straight down, grinding its bottom edge into the shallow, gritty earth, standing it up to make a stick to the sky. I find some smaller, rounder stones to buttress and support each of its sides. It’s a stick – or, perhaps obviously, a phallus – for the moon. I go to work looking for similar stone sticks. With Arthur’s help, starting from at a three-foot distance the first stick, we build a sequence of sticks going from east to west, right down the diameter line of the circle crossing through its other side. “Pricks. Pricks,” we shout and joke, a little punch drunk on the process of bisecting and raising a phallic pilgrimage across the Medicine Circle, an apparent offering to the moon and its light. The moon gives each pillar the thin angle of a shadow behinds its back
After brief witness – maybe a moment of awe before the stones against the light - it’s time to go back, which we do, talking cheerfully, as if something has been put together in the universe, and that somehow what is good outside also feels very good inside; maybe not a visitation to the gods, but the lesson of stone and structure, the art of repositioning the particulars (the stones) to gather and connect with light, making a frame for the inside to meet the outside. I don’t know if that’s what can be called beautiful but it certainly is.
On the way back, Arthur uses his powerful flashlight to catch the white underbelly of an owl circling over our heads. And that was beautiful, too.