No Year

Not feeling any great deal of excitement for the coming year. sorry.  Decided not to make any commitment toward trying to improve the self or condition. These energies seem better spent learning to feel content with what there is. Hope is only a thing with feathers, and as such difficult to catch and will often fly away when you are not looking. There will be no new job, no new writing, no new body, no new mind set, no new projects, no new future, no new place. In 2011 there will only be the sound of being, which I suppose if you are inclined toward Zenisms, would sound something like water moving through a small stream in a mossy forest. If you are not a zen master this may appear to be resignation or apathy, but your western ego driven logic lies to your mind. What is often called action is really only the sound of the same car crashing repeatedly into the same wall. 

Take for instance the Japanese Maple seeds I got from T's mother's garden in Washington state over Christmas. Getting home Sunday afternoon, after an early morning flight the first things I did was plant a few of them in different environments to see what would happen. I never sleep well the night before flying. Though I am often tired, I toss and turn for hours begging sleep to take me, but when it does my dreams are anxiety ridden catastrophes that leave me feeling more tired than if I had just spent the night awake waiting for the sun to rise. Some of  this stems from a paranoia about missing my flight (something I have done more than once), another part of it has to do with packing and making sure I remember everything I need, then there is the matter of navigating the process that awaits me upon arrival at the airport the next day where a body must move through an endless stream of verifications and interrogations in order to ensure the comfort and safety of all passengers. As a result, I often arrive home feeling as if I am caught between worlds, the place I was and the place I am. In order to secure my own passage completely I always feel the need to ground myself by reestablishing a root connection between both places- some type of tangible proof of the other spaces existence. Thus the need to begin planting immediately. A few of the seeds are spread outside in unused portions of the garden or an outside container and another couple more in small containers inside, and one more placed inside a Wardian case (a gift from T). When I am done, there is only the sound of waiting that moves through the apartment suggesting the fate of these sown seeds in the unnoticed movements of the day. If I have read the signs correctly there will one day be one of these long after I am gone:

 

There is more than one unacknowledged legislator here. 

Perhaps Herzog could clearly depict the struggle that is inherit in this process, the ultimate tearing and reconstruction from which new life springs as a matter of fates colliding. His characters obsession's are often a desire to live this process out to its ultimate conclusion either in mastering it for their own purposes (they, as the ghost of Ahab would no doubt tell them if they were keen to listen for such voices, can not), or in surrendering to it.  They are endlessly replaying the myth of Icarus in the form of conquistadors like Aguirre, or Fitzcalraldo. Timothy Treadwell seeks his own liberation and sanctification in his Grizzly activism. But  Herzog is also capable of turning his gaze inward toward his own megalomania that becomes clear in the Antarctic series, and even with his relationship to Klaus Kinski. Throughout his work there is a battle of wills between two forces of nature, both demanding one another's submission. By doing so, they only confirm their autonomy by revealing the fragile balance that exist between homeostasis and chaos. 

2011 will only mark a period of time, it will seem neither remarkable nor significant until another 100 years have passed. This is the curse of our free will. We have the ability to order the universe into segments but exchanged for understanding the implications of what we do we do the moment our actions occur as events.

Feliz Cumpleaños José Lezama Lima

December 19th 2010 is the centennial of Cuban born writer  
José Lezama Lima:

December 19th 1910 to August 9th 1976

is raising a drink to this person whose writing has the ability to split your head open and draw out from within it the language of infinite origin:

I encountered the word potens, which according to Plutarch represented in priestly Tuscan the "if possible," the infinite possibility we later observe in the virgo potens of Catholicism -- or, how to engender a god by supernatural means -- and I came to the conclusion that it was that infinite possibility that the image must embody. And since the greatest of infinite possibilities is resurrection, poetry -- the image -- had to express its most encompassing dimension, which is precisely, resurrection. It was then that I gained the perspective that I set against the Heidggerian theory of man-for-death proposing a concept of poetry that establishes the prodigious causality of being-for resurrection...So, if you asked me to give a definition of poetry...I would have to do it in these terms: it is the image attained by the man of resurrection.

Translation by James Irby 

    In Mexico he felt strange and aloof. The gods of light drifted off when they saw that that was a subterranean world, a world of chthonian deities. The Mexican had gone back to the ancient concept of the Greek World: hell was at the center of the earth, and the voices of the dead rose up through fissures in the earth. On his first morning in Mexico, looking into the bathroom mirror he could barely decipher the face on the glass. The mist, locked in a foggy blue from the beginnings of the earth, impeded his image's advance. He thought himself the victim of a spell. With a towel he wiped the fog off the mirror, but still he could not arrest the image in its reproductive play. He moved the towel from right to left and as soon as he reached the edges the mirror would cloud over again. With that first terror of his first Mexican morning, the land apparently wanted to open up its mystery and its spell to him.

From Paradiso; Translation by Gregory Rabassa  

Know your rights

Is remembering, is trying to keep the picture clear in my head of the women standing between the right and left lanes of traffic on a small meridian at the intersection of 40th Street and San Pablo in Emeryville.

"No sex for six years!" She announces authoritatively. Her voice is horse from standing and shouting in the cold dark wet traffic of the haunted shopping district that is this place.

"Now that I've got your attention." She starts again,

"No Housing for five years!"

"No Charity for Seven years!"

This goes on for the entire duration I am waiting for the light to change. For a moment I consider joining her on the meridian, I imagine forming a coalition watch dog group for paranormal traffic violations. Our mission will be to announce the procedures needed to maintain multidimensional relations. It is widely known that the sections of this mall region were constructed over the archeological foundations of another people, archeologist hired by the companies who sought to developed the area in the 90's found numerous shell mounds representing millions artifact. This story was told to me during an interview I did for a community magazine in the East Bay the first few months I was working here. The man I was talking to claimed to have been an archeologist on the project that discovered the sites. The job was put on hold and a new team (because every company is a team) of consultants was brought in to reassess the situation. The new team constructed a much more reasonable proposal for the development of the area. In recognition to this territories past 40th street morphs into Shellmound Street leading to Ikea, an AMC Theater, and a little further down the way to Powell Street Plaza Shopping Center. Good things seldom happen here. Not far from where I am right now I was once given a traffic ticket in front of a Pet Co for running a red light on my bike: $436. A few months later I had a bad accident on the same stretch of road just in front of the Best Buy."No employment for 8 years!" she screams just as the light changes and I am off hoping to make it through the area without injury. To do so one must avoid the Emery-go-round Shuttles that travel between the Bart Station and the main shopping centers making frequent stops, there is also a matter of merging into the left lane in order to turn on Hollis Street and right on Mandela Parkway.

Under the MacArthur 580 Freeway are the chain linked lots of fettered concrete slabs overgrown grasses, and bobtails seeding the desolation of this region.From here it is a straight line to the West Oakland Bart station. The Flats, as they are sometimes called, are an uneasy mixture of industrial force aiding and abetting the continued notion of our manifest destination. There are entire lives lived under shadows of the steal and concrete plants near by. The electronic crossing guard on the right side lane of the parkway at the corner of West Grand has been broken for years, the recorded voice of a female endlessly repeats an undecipherable warning to all who pass.
...
Thinking about Blake in the City,

see Milton:


Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place:

putting us somewhere on Davies Street or Oxford Street if I am reading this map correctly. Where Blake lived before and after his ill fated move to Felpham (the only time in his life when he was not living in London).  (Johnson: 234)

There is a map to made of this some how. Blake draws his visions from his surroundings, He is seeing all there is to be seen in space, London appears as we see it and as he does, called by another name: Golgonooza, Created by Los, it is the city of "art and Manufacture" (Damon: 162).

The spaces he draws from his attention to the world not "imagined" because for Blake attention is not complete unless it is fully engaged with the imaginary sense that is needed to see everything there is to see. Where the known world stops, content on the organization of generalities as the limit of our knowledge, Blake urges us to continue past this point. 

....
Finished reading: Hunt for the Eye of Ogin.Great!

Started reading: 2666

It is Friday, Christmas is coming.

Father Christmas

12/06/10, 7pm. Monday night. The grocery store across the street from me closed while I was away, sometime around Thanksgiving, laying off everyone in the process - several of whom I have known for the last five years. Way to go America! I have night terrors about finding a Whole Foods or a Trader Joes catering to each and every green urban yuppie's wild consumer desires where my normal grocery store with crappy produce and expired diary once was. Now that it's against the law to be homeless in San Francisco (ie no sleeping on the sidewalks) (Way to go Left Coast! Way to rock those progressive values!) I'm guessing people from the Marina and Noe Valley will feel a lot better about moving here. It was never a great grocery store, but you could get the things you needed for a lot more, however, they did have the best intercom radio station playing continuously that I have ever heard. Lots of R+B and old Soul; where else in the world could you hear Small Face's, Itchychoo Park other than your living room? Beneath this section of space once lay the track for the San Francisco San Jose Train line made possible by generous contributions from Henry Mayo Newhall and Peter Donahue. The latter of whom would eventually form what would become PG+E  and father Baroness Mary E. Von Schroeder (born Mary Ellen Donahue) who built the house I live in and most of the houses on our bloc in 1890.

Moss Eye

Rockridge Bart Station, 8 am 11/23/10 

Traffic Light post on Forest and Claremont 

Garage door on 58th street, 8am 11/23/10

58th street sign post, 8am 11/23/10

  Gas main on 58th street, 8am 11/23/10

River Moss

Lines 58th st, 8am 11/23/10

 Canning street between 59th and 62nd street (moss cartography)

 62nd street, 11 am 11/23/10

Field Moss 59th and Telegraph, 11 am, 11/23/10

Rockridge Bart Station Plug, 5 pm, 11/23/10 

Starting at the Rockridge Bart station walking down Miles Ave, turning right on Forest crossing Claremont Ave and turning left on to Ayala Ave:

Plan de Ayala was the original Zapatista manifesto outlining their vision for national agrarian reform in Mexico. A fascinating revolutionary document written between 1911 and 1914, composed mostly by Zapata with some help from a local school teacher in the town of Alaya, Morelos. It called for the de-privatization of all land in Mexico. Arguably the only real organically intellectual statement to come out of the Mexican Revolution, it was ultimately considered either far too radical to anyone within the conservative republican forces of the revolution and too problematic for the left due to its lack of ideological clarity.   

Martin Street is a walk under a side section enclosed by a private garden on the right and a row of ceder trees on the left whose branches form an archway running the length of it before the physical exertion of traffic from Vicente street forces the change to 58th street completing a sort of geographical axis of private illusions:

Vicente being the Spanish incarnation of my middle name: Vincent, the anglicized pronunciation that comes from my mother's side of the family; French protestants- Huguenots- who arrived to north America sometime in late 17th or early 18th century; who would have said Vinson, derived from the Latin Vincere; to conqueror.

When they number their blocks they mean business

 -For Nemmie 

Jack Spicer

Taking me into the parking lot of the facility where I work. There is nothing buried under this lot save for the remains of furies. 

The photos from 11 am where taken during my 15 minute federally mandated morning break walk that starts in the parking lot of the facility I work at, turning left on 58th and right on Canning Street. I walk a sort of horse shoe path up Canning, turning left on 62nd street, and then left again returning back to work along the length of Telegraph Ave.

The winter sun is waiting for a train for San Francisco at the Rockridge Bart station again. There are more strange looks in the station, on the street. I try to be as quick as I can about taking them because if someone asks I would have to say:  "taking pictures of the moss." which would only give rise to even stranger looks and questions. Growing around the fixtures at the Bart station which is on an out door platform island between the East and West sections of the Grove Shafter Freeway. Moss doesn't have a root structure thus doesn't need soil and can ultimately grow on whatever surface area has a high PH balance (such as exists with rocks and metal) out of the reach of the sun, verdant green fixtures, the space charged with numinous intensity, a point of convergence between time and eternity, everyday appearances and ultimate reality, natural effects and spiritual causes.*


*(From Milton and its Contexts; Mary Lynn Johnson: The Cambridge Companion to William Blake 2003)

Saturday as Field

The rains came early this year, washing away the large wolf spiders that cover the Bay Area every autumn and illuminating the mossy patches they guarded.

Pruned the lilac bush to revel the garden within the garden. Cleared away the vines tangling their way around everything, redirecting traffic upward. Pushed back at the miserable weed growing wherever there is unclaimed land with its sticky clawing at; the struggle against this subversion is a never ending, year round battle. I garden the same way I read; randomly collecting as much of what I can.

Starting with the function of space in text; The Garden then is a fluid example. Laid out for the reader via the viewer/a voice(s)/a flawed but seeing specter, an I/eye independent of objectivity, comfortable in the logic of their fiction.

This led me back to thinking about the garden in Under the Volcano again; admittedly a favorite subject. Malcolm Lowery's Garden contains the ultimate warning:

Do you like this garden? It is yours, Make sure your children do not destroy it.

The Consul's Garden has gone wild:

The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular though his dark glasses perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst..."Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend... Considering the agony of the roses... Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You don't know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food... UTV Chapter III

Chapter five, taking place as it does in the garden, amid the thundering effect of alcohol poisoning transforms an unkempt back yard into a symbolic jungle through which the consul staggers searching for a bottle of Tequilla he has hidden there for just such desperate occasions. After procuring the necessary drink needed to regain a toxic equilibrium, the Consul discovers he is not alone, as his next door neighbor, Quincey, witnessed the whole sorry dash into the bushes. Being English, the Consul attempts to maintain a civilized appearance with his compatriot by making light of the whole affair. Commenting on having seen a snake a moment before he says:

"And it made me think... do you know, Quincey, I've often wondered whether there isn't more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn't really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it--...--what if his punishment really consisted," the Consul continued with warmth, "in having to go on living there, alone, of course--suffering, unseen, cut off from god... UTV Chapter V

Pretty sure the essay introduction to the new Modern Library edition of UTV talks about the "environmentalism" of the novel. This might be going a bit too far, but there is something in Lowery's attention to nature. It may be closer to the truth to say that the Consul, and for the most part the person I understand Lowery to have been--via Pursued By Furies-- suggests an eco-consciousness, not necessarily Green in the contemporary meaning, but aware of nature. There is also the prevailing sense of a split throughout, the Consul is divorced from nature but still there in the corporeal sense. The nature of the fall then is this: To be aware of something is to be separated from it.

killing floor

shitty week. crappy month. canceled future.

Been reading:

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski: Great seeing eye prose. The stripped down style suits its brutal logic to a t. I am really glad I didn't read this book when I was younger though as it most assuredly would have encouraged my self destructive behavior even more. This book should be read with some manor of distance.

Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire: My first thoughts on this book are somewhat mixed. I really like the prose poem style and there are some truly amazing sections. Interested as I am in place in literature I was hopping there would be a bit more direction, the city appears mostly in the people the narrator encounters or the distorted humanity inhabiting a horrific geography. A child whom B falls in love with comes to live with him only to hang itself in his closet after B reprimands it for stirring up trouble. The Flâneur engages the citizen as the representation of place.

"What Oddities can't you find in a big city, when you know where to walk and how to look? Life swarms w/ innocent monsters. Lord God! Though the creator, though the master, though has't given us the law and freedom. Thou the sovereign dost permit, and thou dost pardon." CB Paris Spleen

Started reading Down River by Iain Sinclair: Didn't immediately take to it and jumped to Nadja by Andre Breton after the first chapter. Hope to return to the other soon, my first impression is that its a quite dense (not that this is a bad thing, just that it calls for a certain attention I didn't have at the time). As for Nadja: this book first came to my attention during a conversation with Neeli Cherkovski the first time I met him this summer after he had been kind enough to give us some poems for a magazine James Cook and I put out this past summer called Polis: Resistance (Neeli also ties in some to my picking up Bukowski). He had mentioned Nadja to me after asking about the story I had written for the issue. In part my story involved a walk around the city following an old train right of way that dates back to early San Francisco history. This reminded NC of Nadja, since a great deal of the book involves walking through Paris and the chance encounters he has with a women by the name she has given herself. The story I wrote was more inspired by Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge and the movies Robinson in Space and London directed by Patrick Keiller; it sticks to a pretty straight narrative of a walk through an urban area (San Francisco's Mission District- where I live) that leads off into the history of the city and the train line. After NC had mentioned Nadja I knew I would have to read it this year but it wasnt until I was reminded of it again this fall when it was mentioned in an essay called Remarks on the Literary Transformation of San Francisco by James Brook in an anthology called Reclaiming San Francisco, which I am currently working on a response to. As with Paris Spleen (though of course they are separated by time) the city is here, much more so than in PS, there are landmarks, points on the map to follow, but they are not really the point (I may regret saying this later). My feeling at the moment is there is not too much meditation on these locations as there is a wonder for the situations they produce:

"to the complete lack of peace with ourselves provoked by certain juxtapositions, certain combination of circumstances which greatly surpass our understanding and permit us to resume rational activity only if, in most cases we call upon our very instinct of self-preservation to enable us to do so." AB Nadja

This is all fine and good, but it still only gets us as far as starring in amazement. The significance of place in Nadja does not merit much attention. We are lost in the city, wandering in search of banshees.

Next up is Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud then something not French.

Contained Fields

The Terrarium seems to be quite popular again, not sure this matters or if my post modern brain is just constantly questioning the things I like in relation to the culture as a whole, but when the New York Times writes about something you thought you had just come to on your own, you begin to wonder who the hell is programing you. Whatever the case, at some point this year I became obsessed with moss, I don't remember what lead me to this obsession now, but I spent a great deal of time this spring researching moss and moss cultivation, which if such a thing appeals to you I recommend finding a copy of George H. Schenk's Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and Other Miniatures . This interest in moss lead me to the notion of shade gardening (again see Schenk on this topic) which appealed to me after years of trying to get plants that like sun to grow in my garden (I say it's mine but it isn't mine in terms of "private property", however, since neither the land lady nor the tenets down stairs ever showed much interest in maintaining the area I happily took over the responsibility), I realized what I had long thought to be a deficiency of sun light was in fact an abundance of shade where a great many foliage plants that might die in sunnier environments, could grow unfettered. Somewhere along the way I began to experiment with moss in closed glass containers. The long and short of it was that the terrarium might be the best place for the moss enthusiast since the constant demand for a moist environments makes it difficult to keep moss going green year round (especially in California where water is a rather complicated issue...perhaps another post in and of itself). These were the results:

bart as field

"Is tired, is remembering to remember to write, is trying to find optimism in the dark whole of a country stymied by the undeniable circumference of the moon in relations to the width of matter inside my head."

"Is the constant reanimation of life assured? The good hope that something is possible outside of decline. off the precipice, into the white, one can find hope that we will endure this trial. the slowly creeping death of it. but also I believe the holy imperial trinity has it in for us. is giving us the rub, so to speak."

"The mention of dulled voiced antiques brings out the worst in real whiskey drinkers. we are not them. the hushed tones of voices transmuting through talk back systems the warnings of the sirens in regards to the followers of rhetoric whose chanting is a bold letter of influence from no uncertain powers."

"Am I the prodigal son, or the son of Sam?" Said the first Tweeker.

"Is this our stop?" asked the other one stretched out on the forward facing seat next to the doors. His glazed eyes stared down ward, his face bulging bright red--in all honesty he looked like he was dying. He never got his answer.

"Neither." his friend replied. "Maybe I should move to Kentucky... I even like blue grass, I like all that hillbilly shit man." he continued talking while his friend faded quickly into a series of groans and personal hells, the other remained oblivious to his companions condition. "God loves all his children." He said sweetly just before I got off at 24th street.

Toward a Working Theory of Place

This term, in so far as it refers to art (here specifically literature) perhaps needs some definition. For clarity's sake then, When I say place, I mean a location constructed from a geographic arrangement informed by the accumulated, shared knowledge of its inhabitants. This seems to me to be the fundamental make up of the City or Town, and of course the natural heterogeneity of most places these days means that multiple groups reside in a single place and that over time each develops their own unique relationship to such a place.

So when I say Literature of Place, I mean writing that engages a location as an entity. The point being not simply the construction of a backdrop or setting to a series of actions taking place. Place is the essential fact that each I/eye is constantly constructing, reevaluating, transferring, and negating within the geographic boundaries of here.

I think a definition is necessary, because (aside from the fact that I want to make myself clear) we have reached a point where there is now enough of a tradition of writing about place to do so. If we can define something we can begin to work toward the construction of a history of said tradition. This is more or less the purpose of this blog.