Yesterday, Saturday, the sky was a-flood in gray; the early winter rain poured down relentless, unabated. There were other difficult, painful things in the air. Yet, I will not go there. Sometimes, most of the time, I find, it takes time for things to wash, which is to say, to rise and take shape after an initial drainage of the stuff that carries little weight: the relatively superficial dust and detritus that curls around to fall after any major disturbance
It’s now Sunday afternoon. The fresh sunlight cuts in at an angle, a bright shorn interface against the painted wood Victorians, the wet peach and beige stucco Spanish-Moorish architecture, the rain scrubbed sidewalks. The Palms in Dolores Park, their fan-shaped fronds make louver patterned shadows - pushed open and shut in the winter breeze- to offer illuminated saw-toothed laths of light that scale downward across eastern side of the Park’s shiny green grass slopes.
Kenneth Rexroth, the late poet, once – and I think rightly – said that San Francisco was not a City of weather, but a “City of light.” It’s not that we do not have variations in the weather, but that it is light that defines the way we look at the City – from morning to night, season to season. The angle of light defines and redefines architecture – its shapes and colors, and equally well, the temperament of the day, the energy, the intimacy or distance between its citizens: a variation from the ecstatic sublime to the remorseful and flat. It’s a quality that alters from neighborhood to neighborhood and is as factual as what may be grown in the summer across its seven mile expanse, from the Embarcadero along Bay to the edge of the Pacific. Gold to green: corn on Portrero Hill, Brussels sprouts in the Richmond and the Sunset.
At the top of the Park, looking down from the corner of Church and 20th – is arguably one of the most splendid views to the Downtown, extending north-east across the Bay to Berkeley, or, split by the gray suspended towers of the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, east to the Oakland hills to the bluish top of Mount Diablo in the far distance. And yet, there is the Park, its slopes dipping radically down from the 20th Street sidewalk, first to the plateau for sunbathers and dog walkers, and again down to the Tai Chi teacher and her five students making geometric gestures and stretches in front of the beige sand and wooden and metal climbing structures and wood boat within the ‘free-form’ contoured playground. Always the formation of Palms, special small circular groves of them, mostly close to Dolores Street, where more Palms form a rhythmically, occasionally shaggy line down the street’s grass filled, divider strip.
“Sacred Space” – or any similar abstraction - is not the first phrase that comes to mind either walking through or on along the edges of the Park. Yet, the Dolores Street side makes such an association inevitable. The high, shiny gold shingled, large dome of the Christian Science Church - between 20th & Cumberland –dominates (and beautifully so) – any view across the eastern, upper edge of the park. Though the Church, built in 1915, seems barely used and by few, the dome, in particular, promises a singular configuration of harmony – an uncontestable architectural testimony to a community’s desire for spiritual perfection.
In the next block down – between Cumberland and 19th – is the Lutheran Church, a stodgy dark, frosted window, red brick survivor. It has that early emigrant feel of Germans and Scandinavians reviving the Northern European village in an architectural model emblematic of survival against tough weather, tough wars, hard lives. The Protestant struggle against evil and harsh nature are implicit to its design. Not unsurprising, it’s a Church that houses the homeless at night in its basement. It’s community rooms are constantly busy with 12-step support groups – Alcoholics, Narcotics, Sex Addicts Anonymous, and others, as well as a Buddhist mediation group that has met there for 18 years. It’s a Church that thrives on serving and supporting the struggles and agonies of individual and communities for redemption and/or liberation. The current, relatively peaceful state and care of Dolores Park, in fact, is the result of many such struggles; not too many years ago there were murders related to Mission District gangs, open dope dealing and homophobic bashings and outrageous murders. Today, and on-going, the moral struggle of the Church and its neighbors is to figure out in what ways to deal equitably and compassionately with the inhabitation of the homeless, so many of whom still sleep their nights and live their days along Park’s edges.
Of course, in terms of the sacred, going further north on Dolores leads to the Catholic Mission of St Francis at 16th facing the Synagogue Sha’ AR Zahav across the street. Neither one are within view from 20th Street nor from the Dolores Park Café at the corner of 18th. And a block to the west on 19th is the surviving façade of the B’nai David Temple, now converted into condominiums, and once the home of the few Mikvah ritual baths for women in the City. In the latter quarter of the Nineteenth Century two Synagogues used the current site of the Park for adjacent cemeteries. Indeed, given the number of Churches that extend along Dolores, it is difficult not to imagine – going back to the Ohlone Indian presence - that the original neighborhood must have been considered a sacred zone, a place of reverence, including ceremonies for the burial of the dead, communion with ancestors, maybe even discourse, argument and questions between shamans and tribal elders. Back then, the site would have also included the waters of what later became known as Mission Creek, either pouring or trickling, as it once did, down from Twin Peaks by way of what is now the tar and asphalt covered 18th Street where – needless now to say – the artery carries mostly cars and the water goes unseen, underground into sewage pipes. Ironically, probably not on account of divine intersession, but the presence of a reservoir tank filled with water, the devastating fire subsequent to the 1906 earthquake was stopped at the corner of 20th and Church at the top edge of the now Park, a fact permanently celebrated with a gold painted fire-hydrant.
The Café is situated on the southeast corner of the intersection of Dolores and 18th Street. The high, wide western window and the sidewalk tables especially invite the afternoon light. The Café is the kind window through which the Park also bestows itself, a space in which issues, both secular and religious, appear transparent. Perhaps it’s the great light that feeds in from the park, as well as the northern windows, but once inside there is an inherent reflective quality to sitting at a table. It’s definitely not a place that invites a sales or marketing meeting. In the morning, among its customers, it’s a meditative read through the morning Chronicle or the New York Times. In the afternoon, a serious novel or a book of non-fiction – political, religious and/or psychological issues - occasionally a book of poems. There is the inevitable University student with homework or, even more likely, the either young or older someone with a personal journal – varying from custom hand, colored clothbound kinds to simple, small spiral ones – into which pens are being pushed and pulled while poems, diaries, or “to do lists” variously unfold. Laptop computers seem the rare exception and there is no Internet connection.
The staff is multiethnic – mainly Latino and Anglo - and the clientele as well as definitely multi-gender: straight, lesbian, gay, trans- and cross-generational. The dress is either bland “survival modest” or, particularly on weekends, occasionally crowded and spiced with dramatic versions of cross-dressing – multicolored feathered boas and lavender and pink blouses possibly combined with dramatic orchestrations of elaborate leather overcoats, vests and pants, the ‘dandy’ works. The Café, one can notice, is also an acceptable place to meet out of town parents and introduce a new or established partner, usually of the same sex.
The Café is the arena of quiet or barely audible inner and outer struggle, personal, political or other. In couples or in groups, it’s most often done in an atmosphere of subdued conversation in which intimate issues are being disclosed, discussed and potentially decided. Identities are being built by struggle, and with each little struggle won, such are celebrated with smiles and/or sighs.
So it is no shock – well, actually a shock, one of transparency – when I walk into the Café to find the current exhibit: the walls are filled with several large, up to 3 x 5’ scriptural, mostly gray and white paintings and prints. From the door way the tight script – the multiple lines of which filled the canvas from top to bottom and side to side - is unreadable. When I get up close, I see the artist - a man named Tim Fowler - repeats the same word again and again, vigorously cutting the word into the surface paint. One diptych – black canvas on one side, white on the other – is filled with the word, “Faith” in white on the black, and “Doubt” in black on the white. The caption below reads, “Faith/ 2030 times”, “Doubt/ 2040 times”. Subsequent paintings feature the similar repetition of other individual words, “God, 15,201 Times”, “Sin /20,188 times”, “Sex/ 20,188 times.”
Though, as a writer I am intrigued by the use of words in the making of visual art, I do not particularly like the work. I find it kind of cold and absent of beauty. But I am drawn to the process, the way it is clearly a public act of exorcism. Yes, there may be some irony in the obsessive repetition of a word like “Sex”, but the work is more an act of cleansing, an expiation in which the intense physical act of writing the words is an almost heroic attempt to relinquish and wash away each word’s powerful grip over the consciousness of the maker. More simply put - as in an ancient rite – the struggle to arrive at a clarity and liberation through the repetition of a singular word.
Interestingly, when I step back from the canvas’ the opposite edge of the space, the repeated words lose their clarity, become opaque and dissolve back into the omnipresence of the café’s afternoon light. In fact, different from the churches up and down Dolores, I begin to think of the Café as a church of immediate light, replete with its own ceremonies and rituals; indeed, a situation that is variously mirrored behind the windows of other City cafes, bars, restaurants, homes, public offices, even “window rooms” in downtown skyscrapers. Not just any window, but those with the combination of one or more angles that draw in and magnify the transmission and presence of the light. It is the gift, I suspect, behind the City’s architectural love of Bay Windows, the way they multiply one’s possible sense of interior illumination.