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.