(no subject)
the ohlone people saw twin peaks as the breasts of a reclining empress-terra, whose curving form makes up the backbone of what is now our modern city
and remember waking up dirty in the half light, under a massive eucalpytus tree to greet the westward dragon
i was there the other day with a watery sun just over the hills and cockledoodledoo of japanese tourists, beside a metal plug declaring our highest civic point (the southward tit, as it were) and stretched my fingers as the first thing to meet the rain in this whole entire town...
good morning all that which is not earth
i routinely get as close as i can on just these two feet. there's no up or down in the vast, and high places aren't really high at all -- they just stick out a little further. an aimless drive last saturday saw five miles up and down a mountain far south of here, and just this morning i was looking at a conservation project with the sherpa below mount everest...
here another random encounter, another jonathan from louisville who forges traditional iron japanese swords (i dreamed one was buried three blocks north of here, dissolving into ether when i pulled it from the ground) and travels the world...
*
we were talking at the table the other night about mortality salience, about israel and weimar berlin and living each day like it's your last on account of an environment that reminds you it could be. i think about this, looking out at this circus of a town that's given us black rock city and emperor norton and the barbary coast, wondering how firmly it sits in our collective that we go about our days atop a hinge, a flux point, a movable landscape with a mistrust of the very ground beneath our feet... you will know all this if you've chosen to live here. but still you will drink and dance and laugh and struggle and be, work a job you hate or marry someone you love, let the ocean rain soak you through or lay in the sand and sun, dance in the streets and chase fire and eat well and wonder at all the art.
each day is your last and every day is your first, no matter where you are.
but this must be the most beautiful city in america.
year-round, anyway.
late at night with the ghosts i press up against the seismograph in the school lobby, and watch its needle tremor less and more and less again... we think sometimes that we can figure it all out with our calipers and telescopes and measurements, that we can actually -know- the nature of nature and classify and clade and explain until the textbooks we write for our children are full of dusty, inarguable axioms...
and maybe we came closer when we related the world around us to our bodies and our deities. perhaps we need new stories. i am not talking about intelligent design; that's just the other side of the same coin. i'm not a luddite, either, but think there are some things we might better understand by accepting how little we do understand. the world is flat and the world is round and the world is something we cannot utterly comprehend...
there are actually modern constellations in the southern hemisphere that were named well after western antiquity, in the victorian era of charming mad science, and thus are things like “microscope”.
*
spending most of friday sorting stacks of dream-like conifer prints from the precambrian, near an ammonite the size of my living room, and even amid all this cataloging and pattern-recognition there is always one box on the table that doesn't have a number or field name but simply says “IS” -- incertae sedis; of uncertain taxonomy. it's the most transcendent object in the whole place.
remember to always mark one of your boxes simply “is”. and if you feel you can mark them all that way, i'd love to have tea with you.
*
through every book and memorization that is the order lately, i've got a secret ... it's that i don't really care about the names. what we call
reducednicotinamideadeninedinucleotidephosphateformationduringphotosynthesis
i also call no less than a wonder; every plant you've ever seen can turn light into sugar
and it's simply my task to imply that miracle through form and shape and line. i'm no scientist.
but maybe an ambassador...
none of our languages are the things they describe, not words or numbers or images, but learn enough of them and something starts to faintly outline... probably the same thing we'd start to see if we had no languages at all. imagine being fluent in every tongue there is, and imagine too the tower completely crumbled in blissful semantic anarchy.
*
similarly, i'd rather give you a color or send you this tone than write these words... i'd rather blast the rhythm you dance to in fuckable unrelenting bass, or feel you in one sustaining moment, and liberate these lines from here like shine off a string to fly fasterbrighterhotter toward the glow they stand for... to surrender all these pages in the radiant alchemy that lies between describing a world and living a world.
*
my life is the best thing that could have ever possibly happened to me, and yours is too. for better or worse, every moment of every day.
go out and be it.
and remember waking up dirty in the half light, under a massive eucalpytus tree to greet the westward dragon
i was there the other day with a watery sun just over the hills and cockledoodledoo of japanese tourists, beside a metal plug declaring our highest civic point (the southward tit, as it were) and stretched my fingers as the first thing to meet the rain in this whole entire town...
good morning all that which is not earth
i routinely get as close as i can on just these two feet. there's no up or down in the vast, and high places aren't really high at all -- they just stick out a little further. an aimless drive last saturday saw five miles up and down a mountain far south of here, and just this morning i was looking at a conservation project with the sherpa below mount everest...
here another random encounter, another jonathan from louisville who forges traditional iron japanese swords (i dreamed one was buried three blocks north of here, dissolving into ether when i pulled it from the ground) and travels the world...
*
we were talking at the table the other night about mortality salience, about israel and weimar berlin and living each day like it's your last on account of an environment that reminds you it could be. i think about this, looking out at this circus of a town that's given us black rock city and emperor norton and the barbary coast, wondering how firmly it sits in our collective that we go about our days atop a hinge, a flux point, a movable landscape with a mistrust of the very ground beneath our feet... you will know all this if you've chosen to live here. but still you will drink and dance and laugh and struggle and be, work a job you hate or marry someone you love, let the ocean rain soak you through or lay in the sand and sun, dance in the streets and chase fire and eat well and wonder at all the art.
each day is your last and every day is your first, no matter where you are.
but this must be the most beautiful city in america.
year-round, anyway.
late at night with the ghosts i press up against the seismograph in the school lobby, and watch its needle tremor less and more and less again... we think sometimes that we can figure it all out with our calipers and telescopes and measurements, that we can actually -know- the nature of nature and classify and clade and explain until the textbooks we write for our children are full of dusty, inarguable axioms...
and maybe we came closer when we related the world around us to our bodies and our deities. perhaps we need new stories. i am not talking about intelligent design; that's just the other side of the same coin. i'm not a luddite, either, but think there are some things we might better understand by accepting how little we do understand. the world is flat and the world is round and the world is something we cannot utterly comprehend...
there are actually modern constellations in the southern hemisphere that were named well after western antiquity, in the victorian era of charming mad science, and thus are things like “microscope”.
*
spending most of friday sorting stacks of dream-like conifer prints from the precambrian, near an ammonite the size of my living room, and even amid all this cataloging and pattern-recognition there is always one box on the table that doesn't have a number or field name but simply says “IS” -- incertae sedis; of uncertain taxonomy. it's the most transcendent object in the whole place.
remember to always mark one of your boxes simply “is”. and if you feel you can mark them all that way, i'd love to have tea with you.
*
through every book and memorization that is the order lately, i've got a secret ... it's that i don't really care about the names. what we call
reducednicotinamideadeninedinucleotidephosphateformationduringphotosynthesis
i also call no less than a wonder; every plant you've ever seen can turn light into sugar
and it's simply my task to imply that miracle through form and shape and line. i'm no scientist.
but maybe an ambassador...
none of our languages are the things they describe, not words or numbers or images, but learn enough of them and something starts to faintly outline... probably the same thing we'd start to see if we had no languages at all. imagine being fluent in every tongue there is, and imagine too the tower completely crumbled in blissful semantic anarchy.
*
similarly, i'd rather give you a color or send you this tone than write these words... i'd rather blast the rhythm you dance to in fuckable unrelenting bass, or feel you in one sustaining moment, and liberate these lines from here like shine off a string to fly fasterbrighterhotter toward the glow they stand for... to surrender all these pages in the radiant alchemy that lies between describing a world and living a world.
*
my life is the best thing that could have ever possibly happened to me, and yours is too. for better or worse, every moment of every day.
go out and be it.