·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Sunday
To examine the structure: particular houses, particular buildings. To perceive each building as a skin, as an individual. To see the buildings, the way they relate to each other. Is there any air between them? What bearing do they hold with or against the sky. To ask the question. Is this a healthy community? Is there a mix of young and old? Are the elderly taken care of? Have the young thought of the old? Are the buildings listening to each other? Are they bonded siblings? Or are they at war? Who’s the mother building? The father?

When I walk down a street, I am taken by brilliant rebels, respectful but invasive. I am taken by those elders, the thin. well-swept passageways between them. I am taken by harmonics, those who speak to each other as friends. I am taken by the raucous, those unique ones that disturb, silently yell and push away. At dusk, particularly a blue, crisp winter dusk: clean, clear shapes. An architecture resplendent with identities.

Saturday

The gravity. Walking. In two days my birthday. 58. Walking. Mid-afternoon, on the east side of Church Street between 22ndand 23rd The sky ballooned into various grays, a stiff wind from the south against one’s step. I remember a theater workshop in my twenties, a walking exercise the Director learned from Jerzy Growtowski’s book,Towards a Poor Theater. Rehearsing in a Church, five of us took turns walking through a life’s various phases: as a baby on hands and knees, variously crawling across the floor; up off the knees, cautiously “cruising,” gripping the sides of the pews, taking the first steps; an adolescent, shoulders angling sharply left and right, swaggering; then chin-up, poised, assuming a confident, adult profile; intense steps, marching straight ahead, confronting, staring down imaginary obstacles and resistance; a middle-age slowing down, a slackening ; finally, the older person’s walk – I remember it well – the body leaned back against an oncoming crowd, young and random forces against one’s fragile form; sensing, as it were, the Reaper’s hands, gravity’s force taking one back, eventually each of us flattened back down, quiet. lying prone to the floor.
Today, walking into the wind, my shoulders pushed back, maybe for the first time, a tinge of that. Today, I also learned Jerzy Growtowski has just passed away. It made me instantly start crying: a giant and part of my youth, fallen.

Houses on 22nd. Street between Sanchez and Noe.
Something about the houses. Some are siblings, closely matched, if not exactly the same in architectural style. One could write a family saga, perhaps a story of sisters, based on their relationships. Others are loners.
The little old Victorian up on blocks, its back against the hill, it’s not clear whether it will be rebuilt, or moved. Replaced by artificial supports, the portion left close to the sky is shaky. She appears ready to fall and crash from age. One way or other. the landlord, in some act of faith, appears bent on its restoration, whether here or at another site.

Friday
A man leaves a job. With anxiety he leaves a job. It is no small thing. No small thing to do. To leave a job. To let go. To let everything erupt. To let the small push one forward. The small thought all gathered. All gathered into one force. To move through, to move beyond the containers, the space. To break the boundary, to articulate a new space. To find it, to believe it will be there, a place to hang the hat, to turn on the machine, to hear the hum, to hear the lickety-split, to know that it will be there – a hot magnet to touch – to move with it, to not only trust it, but to fling it upside down, the chair floated in space. Forward, move, he said.

Thursday

City goes pale, pink, a morning pleasure: reflections in the crescent pool,
the Terrace, Moscone Convention Center, over Yerba Buena Gardens.
************************************************************
Holbrook Teter, Maker of Books & Human Rights Activist:
In Memoriam

A man dies and you hold yourself accountable.
Holbrook died and I am not accountable.
He’s dead because he’s dead because his heart
gave out, plum gave out. He gave out so much.
It was global what he did: victims of torture
in El Salvador, of radiation in Chernobyl, the homeless
amongst us in San Francisco, the convicts
in the State Prisons in California.
He was there, pushing the investigations, listening
to the hurt, his ear to the pain, the sheer
telling of it, over and over again, to take the pus
out of the victim. How could he bear it
so constantly? Some inner-belief, some inner-generosity,
a compassion unrequited. I know him. I knew him well.
He lost his lover, the artist, the love of his life; he who
gave him the chance to play. Something, something dangerous
went awry. The lover, the darling, daring lover
was lost. Something went awry. It turned him around, one
dead man turned him around, took the art, left him,
left him to flounder, flounder until it was impossible.
No visitations from the dead, those whispering voices
in the night would not fix him, no matter how hard
he searched or prayed. There was only one way to go.
Out, out, back into a world, no thought of art,
no redemption, until he went out there
among the homeless, the tortured, where
he found his blues, his sadness, his loss. Like mirrors
they talked back and forth to each, the human,
the music, the enduring music,
the enduring sadness.

Wednesday

The tree. The shadow. The building.
The way in which desire is framed.
The shadow. A self walks:
Olive green, Irish carriage cap,
Scuffed brown leather briefcase.
No one can see inside a shadow,
The adjectives dissolve.
What I know about myself
is what you see.
A shadow is a noun
in disguise.

(Building - southside - Harrison neard 3rd)

Tuesday

A stranger, a “she” and I lie flat on our backs on a living room floor. A doctor – the most lovely, slightly roly-poly man –speaks to us about the process in which each of our bodies will be “re-impassioned”, even, in fact, go beyond ‘mere’ passion. He uses a word with “pad” in it; he points his hands to indicate there are muscular pads imbedded through out one’s torso and legs. His unique massage system will “unlock” each pad.

The room, which is now a kitchen, is full of a silvery white light. I pick up a massage tool off the counter-top; I gently rub its round, conical rubber shape back and forth across the top of the back and shoulders of the stranger. It’s spiral motion reminds me of an Osterizer, but, instead of cutting and grinding multi-colored fruits and melons into sweet juices, the Doctor explains that the device is a “ body blender.” One that eliminates what he calls “impadination” to revive the body into its natural, ecstatic state.

Waking up one thinks how curiously strange the way the sublime – yesterday’s hike up around the Palisades- infuses the nocturnal. The flipside of passion becomes the word “impadination.”The “pads”, one suspects, are the tight leg muscles, still sore from climbing four miles up, then back down the mountain. Each one – each permeated “pad” - a solidification of the ecstatic.

Welcome, Doctor. Welcome, stranger.

Monday

Sunday

A three hour walk up to the Palisades: the rugged, volcanic butte columns that tower over the mountain range just east of Calistoga. At the trail’s upward outset, a series of empty white wood signs on rusty metal stakes. The erasure of language. The ambiguity about loss. “What was it? What was being said?” Alternatively, an excitement about a future. What might become the new spells? If one does not live within a fixed rhetoric, is it not the writer’s job to make new signs? To announce the territory, to point, perhaps reveal? Or, alternatively, engage the mystery – the blank sign – what may be lurking, what may not? To be quiet, to hear. Halfway up the trail, the tiny white Manzanita petals, falling. A sound without a name. Cracked, melting ice; little streams across the craggy, rock bed trail under the northern shadow of the cliffs. Omens of spring.

Sunday

Dr. Wilkinsons, a health spa, Calistoga.
Two blue swimming pools form an L-shape around the two story, rusty-pink cinder-block rooms. On the concrete patio – at the corner of the “L” – the lounge chairs are angled in parallel rows to face the sun. It’s two o’clock. The white metal framed chairs, crossed by parallel gray plastic straps, are tilted half-way up in back. In the light, in front of the also empty pool, the chairs look relaxed, graceful; quiet witness to an invisible show.

*** *** ***

The two white plastic patio chairs in a darkened corner. The way they face each other, one at a slightly greater angle than the other: a moment in a conversation, a revelatory one, where one person turns to acknowledge the other to confide something about someone else, a mutual friend, or a relative, possibly diseased. The elbow upheld, hand holding a drink, the person begins to speak; finished, a sip to relax, settles back into the chair. A new element has entered the relationship.

**

The anthropomorphic potential of an object, or series of objects to alert one to what one might already know, or, alternatively, to portend an image drawn from the obscurity of a future moment. Those chairs.

Friday

L’affiche of a hung man. The 8 1/2 by 11 inch white flier with the black line drawing is glued to the concrete pillar in the parking lot. Words under the image have been scratched or clawed away. In the dark, after work, people returning to their cars are apparently repelled by the image. More than one has attacked it as if were an offense not only to the eye, but down to the depths of one’s psyche. I pass by it once and then come back. In the Tarot – I once heard say - the image of the hanged man indicates change is about to occur. It’s a transition zone where one is paralyzed without breath. In order to move forward, something inside must die. Here, walking in the dark light between the cement pillars, it’s hard not to wonder if one’s not been given a compelling sign.

In fact, I wonder if what one registers as one walks - a structure being built, or one coming down, or the particular aggrieved look on someone’s face - if what the eye involuntarily chooses to see merely corresponds to who one is at a particular moment, or, is it more broad than that? Consciously or not, is the eye constantly drawn to an image - or maybe a particular sound – of whatever parallels one’s most significant moments orchanges within the span of an entire life? The small squeaky wheel the stroller carrying one’s first born.

((Notice: I now have the skills to scan and import photos. Look for them soon!)