The Nob Hill Murder

A crow got quite angry with us today. He’s a member of the Nob Hill Gang. Or I guess you could call it the Nob Hill Murder. We began doing circles up and down Nob Hill Avenue North and 2^nd Avenue North. These are quieter streets, so we don’t have to dodge quite as many people, as we do on our usual route, which follows the crown of Queen Anne Hill, and there’s significantly less traffic, so that when we do encounter anyone on the sidewalk, we can run easily in the street. There’s a dense population of crows on Nob Hill. It may be the same murder that followed us down Bigelow last winter in such numbers it looked with we were being followed by a cloud of black wings. These crows are insatiable. We stop feeding them when our supply of peanuts runs low; we want to save some for the lame crow who comes out when I whistle on Highland Drive. When we stop tossing them peanuts, the crows become all the more persistent. They fly over our heads, coming close enough to feel the rush of their wings. One of them dropped a twig on R’s head. It might have been the same one we encountered later at the top of 2^nd Avenue North where it meets Galer. He flew down right in front of us and flapped his wings and chattered angrily at us. R relented and tossed him a peanut. He pounced on it, flew across the street and gobbled it up while his mates cawed raucously. The lame crow didn’t appear today. I think she gets discouraged by all the competition. She has to hobble around on one leg and is a little more vulnerable to attack, though she can be quite feisty. One of the homes we pass on Nob Hill is quite interesting, a lavishly decorated Victorian house with an elaborate Turkish turret upon which is inscribed in large black letters Quo Amplius Eo Amplius, which is Latin, and translates roughly as “Something more beyond plenty.” The interior is just as lavish, chock-a-block with antiques and curiosities from the Victorian era. I call it the Edward Gorey House, though it reminds me more of À rebours, a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysman published in 1884. The narrative centers on an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aristocrat and aesthete named Des Esseintes, and is mostly an agglomeration of Des Esseintes’s musings on art and religion accompanied by his exquisitely refined descriptions of hyperaesthetic sensory experiences. In his preface for the 1903 edition, Huysmans wrote that it had been his desire to depict a man “soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewelry, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.” The decadent tenor of the book was intended to fly in the face of bourgeois convention; hence the title, À rebours, which is French for “against the current.”

 

The Ever Elusive Tao Of The Here And Now

Ok Mr. Guru I’m ready now I’m ready to find now ready ready ready to be in the now soak in the now stretch my whole body out in the nowness of the now now is a noun but is it is now a noun now is a noun but it’s also an adverb a ripple a trill a paroxysm in time a sausage in a grill a nucleus with a shiny thesis the thesis of now which even now has already slipped away it slipped away as soon as I wrote the word now. I know the future isn’t real I get it it hasn’t happened yet whatever is going to happen isn’t real because it hasn’t occurred hasn’t commenced hasn’t emerged hasn’t cropped up broken apart materialized transpired perspired backfired retired inquired or gone haywire it’s just a thought an imagined event that may happen may not happen will most likely happen in a way I didn’t expect and so yes I get it there’s no reality there but isn’t it in some way apprehended doesn’t it have contours that can be reasonably predicted and doesn’t that make it at least a little real? And the past is even harder to overcome because there are things that happened things occurred concurred whispered in the dark yelled across a fence pounded on a door argued with passion argued with subtlety mistakes made awful things said terrible actions taken regrets made remorse stinging like iodine on a cut a constant ache in the brain a deep irreversible frustration how are these things not real they have real emotional depth and resonance the images aren’t hallucinated they may be distorted there is that no memory is without its distortions its magnifications its mistranslations but still it’s there swimming back and forth in the aquarium of the brain monstrous speculations climbing up and down the spine and spitting their black ugly ink in the accepting moistness and convolutions of the brain. Who wouldn’t love to ditch all that see it dissolve in a moment of enlightenment it’s not real none of it not like this fork on the counter this sock on the floor this blanket on the bed this song in my head this endless pursuit for forgiveness and peace. So where is it this wonderful sanctity this elusive now the power of now the ambience of now how would I know if I’m there ensconced squarely in the now the nonlinear now the juicy loosey-goosey now can I be immersed in it without knowing I’m immersed in it was it here long enough for me to know it was here or did it just pass by without a hint without a mind to fuel it bring it fully into existence toss an anchor out and keep it here keep it close and singing like a parakeet in a cage a cat on the lap a talismanic energy staving off death and loss and tragedy? Is it a matter of focus? This is silly. This is going nowhere. It’s not like looking for a rare butterfly. It’s like looking straight in the eye of time and seeing out the other side which just slid into the next moment which is happening now this very second unraveling in the aftermath of the first thing to come into your mind.

 

 

 

Tombs

R and I work out a new route for our run/walk. We’re fatigued from having to zigzag from sidewalk to sidewalk, dodge people constantly, many of them without masks, many of them in groups, blithely oblivious to the insidious, asymptomatic virus undermining world economies and crushing equilibrium. What used to be fun is now a stressful gauntlet. We plan a route that takes us up and down the quieter streets. My Achilles tendinopathy continues to dog my heel so I use the interval timer, five minutes running, five minutes walking, which I wear on my wrist like a watch with an elastic band. The digits have worn away, but I can still feel it vibrate when the five minutes is up. There are a lot of crows. They come swooping over our heads to get our attention and land a few feet ahead, awaiting their peanut. As we proceed down 2^rd Avenue North R digs into her bag of unsalted peanuts and finds the set of house keys we spent hours looking for just as we were about the go to bed nestled among the peanuts. We decide to keep our running and walking confined to a space of a few residential blocks, avoiding the more popular routes on McGraw and 7^th Avenue West, with its panoramic view of the Olympics. There is no snow on the Olympics, which is very strange. They’re normally capped in snow throughout the year. Now they look more like a range of mountains in Arizona, or New Mexico. The decision to confine ourselves to these quieter streets pays off; there are far fewer people to dodge, not as many cars traveling the streets. When we reach the corner of Highland and Bigelow I whistle and a few minutes later the lame crow appears with her two family members. I toss them some peanuts and we cross Bigelow to look at the big chunks of Chinese chestnut tree lying by the stump where they formed a trunk just a few hours ago. 24 trees are slated to come down on Bigelow, many of them dating back to the 1880s. They’ve all succumbed to disease and the stresses of climate change. You can see hollowed out areas in the center of the wooden slabs, evidence of disease. The Chinese chestnuts were once so numerous on Bigelow, their branches arched over the street, creating a tunnel. Most have already been replaced by oak and cherry trees. We shower and have dinner, Greek pasta. Afterward, we watch a documentary on Netflix about the discovery of mummified animals – including a lion cub – in the Saqqara necropolis about 20 miles south of Cairo. Some of the tombs date back to the First Dynasty, 4500 BC. The skeleton of a high-ranking priest named Wahtye who served under King Neferirkare Kakai during the Fifth Dynasty was found along with the skeletal remains of his family, his mother Meretmin, his wife Weretptha, his sons Seshemnefer, Kaiemakhnetier, Sebaib and a daughter named Seket. Tired from last night’s search for the house keys in our apartment, I keep drowsing off. I awake to see men crawling in and out of pits and shafts, dusting off artifacts, little statuettes, speculating on the scene unfolding before them, my eyes opening and closing as it seems I peer out of my own tomb, the plethora of ancient epiphanies and skeletal regrets winking like flashes of gold in the effulgent darkness, then sink back into voluptuous calm, “half in love with easeful death.” And I think of the silhouette of the clipper ship on a cornerstone of the retirement community on 4^th Avenue North. Why a ship? Maybe it’s a metaphor. The people in there are close to passing over, as they say, euphemistically. And isn’t a death a voyage?

 

Signs

Bright, sunny but cold October afternoon. We’re going down 2^nd Avenue North being followed by a woman on a smartphone talking loudly at the top of her lungs. She’s walking fast. We can’t shake her. This isn’t uncommon. I encounter at least one to two people talking loudly on a smartphone, though sometimes in a conversation with a walking partner. The loudness is what gets me. Why so loud? It occurs to me that these people are so terrified of solitude that they feel the need to fill the space around them with the sound of their voice. They’re terrified of what’s inside them. What’s inside them is nothing. They’re hollow. If it weren’t for their remodeling projects and baby carriers and home security systems they’d have nothing whatever to talk about. At least this is my theory, take it or leave it. Down on 9^th Avenue West we spot an orb web with a spider at its center. We’re captivated by it. The web is on a median divider with a stop sign and a few shrubs. The spider has anchored one part of the web to a small flowering plant and the other end to the top of the stop sign. I wonder which end she began first. I would guess the stop sign; she waited for a breeze to blow her to the shrub. Then, when she established her two anchor points, she began her web. I imagine there’s a good amount of thinking involved. Planning, strategizing, scheming. The web is protected from the traffic while at the same time taking advantage of the open space to catch whatever stray bugs come flying through. We come to a section of road where a city crew had done some repair on a sewer or gas line and covered it with cement. There were a set of tracks in it. We looked at the tracks and tried putting together an identity based on the tread and shape and shoe size. The tread was light and tightly patterned. There weren’t running shoes. They were designed for casual walking. They were small, about a size 6. We guessed it must’ve been a teenager. The toes came to a point, so we surmised a feminine identity. A young teenage girl. Did she do it on purpose? Or was she lost in thought, listening to music on a headset, or gazing at a smartphone? Our narrative fell short. We needed a better tracker. We imagined an expert putting an entire identity together based simply on the tread imprinted in this cement. Which is, really when you come down to it, a form of reading. Signs in the dirt. Signs in the sand. Signs in cement. Nearer to home we travel down the little trail through Bhy Kracke park. R’s blue jay puts in an appearance. R tosses her a peanut, which she pounces on immediately and flies off to bury it somewhere. Everything is a sign of something, it seems. Though clouds, I think, are a different story. No intent, nothing deliberate, just the drift of vapor, serendipity of form, illiteracy of air, blowing nowhere in particular.

 

Sad Face

I’ve never seen such a sad face. Geronimo, circa the 1890s, wearing a thick greatcoat with broad lapels, wooden buttons, a medal of some sort pinned on the right side, a long black scarf flowing down from a tight knot below the neck. The word ‘sad’ falls far too short. There’s so much character and knowledge and mystery in his eyes, his mouth clenched, long gray hair parted in the middle and swept back. Hard to say what he’s feeling. I see desert in his eyes, and capture, and the millions of tricks for survival and escaping enemies. But that’s me reading things into his eyes. I do feel them penetrating me. Is that my imagination, or his vivid but phantasmal appearance in this photograph printed on a library bookmark? I’ve been using it to keep my place in Communicating Vessels by André Breton. This book - illustrating the interplay between reality and dream - seems like an appropriate place for this bookmark. 

        I’m closer to Geronimo’s world than the one I’m currently inhabiting. Geronimo died in 1909, a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I was born in 1947. We’re separated by only 38 years. I know with absolute certainty we could have a good meaningful conversation, and that would be an unlikely scenario with your average zombie adult in the 21st century. The information on the back of the bookmark says that Geronimo converted to Christianity. I find that hard to digest. Not that I’m against Christianity. Not in its original form, before its central message was distorted by the fundamentalists who are incapable of reading metaphor in the New Testament and can only think of it as a literal text. What is it that drew Geronimo to Christianity? What did the Chiricahua Apache believe? 

        “Two elements are thought common to most Apache medicine men (shaman) and their relationship to diyi’,” writes Charles River, author of The Apache and Comanche: The History and Legacy of the Southwest’s Most Famous Warrior Tribes. “As renowned Apache scholar Keith Basso explains, ‘the term diyi’ refers to one or all of a set of abstract and invisible forces which are said to derive from certain classes of animals, plants, minerals, meteorological phenomena, and mythological figures with the Apache universe. Any of the various powers may be acquired by man and, if properly handled, used for a variety of purposes.’ Thus, the primary responsibility and expectation of the village shaman is to effectuate and maintain a personal relationship with such forces.” 

        I wonder if Geronimo’s conversion to Christianity came about as a natural perception of Christ as the Geronimo of his time, a seditious energy in the Roman Empire as it extended into the deserts of the Middle East. There was that, but also the way kindness and mercy are put forward as central values.

        Toward the end of his life, Geronimo became a national celebrity. He was able to attend the St. Lewis World’s Fair in 1904. He was surrounded by guards wherever he went. He wrote about his experience at the fair. “One time the guards took me into a little house that had four windows. When we were seated the little house started to move along the ground. Then the guards called my attention to some curious things they had in their pockets. Finally they told me to look out, and when I did so I was scared, for our little house had gone high up in the air, and the people down in the Fair Grounds looked no larger than ants. The men laughed at me for being scared; then they gave me a glass to look through (I often had such glasses which I took from dead officers after battles in Mexico and elsewhere), and I could see rivers, lakes and mountains. But I had never been so high in the air, and I tried to look into the sky. There were no stars, and I could not look at the sun through this glass because the brightness hurt my eyes. Finally I put the glass down, and as they were all laughing at me, I, too, began to laugh. Then they said, ‘Get out!’ and when I looked we were on the street again. After we were safe on the land I watched many of these little houses going up and coming down, but I cannot understand how they travel. They are very curious little houses.” 

        Geronimo also rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.

        “According to Smithsonian,” writes Bess Lovejoy in her essay “When Theodore Roosevelt Refused Geronimo’s Plea,” “a member of the 1905 inaugural committee asked Roosevelt, ‘Why did you select Geronimo to march in your parade, Mr. President? He is the greatest single-handed murderer in American history.’ Roosevelt replied, “I wanted to give the people a good show.’”

        Geronimo’s plea was a simple one: he wanted he and his people to return to their native land. They and their cattle were dying in Oklahoma for lack of the proper means for survival. “Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough and is free,” he put forward to Roosevelt. Geronimo’s request was never granted.

Looney Tunes

Remember the logo at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons? Concentric orange-red rings with Porky Pig at the center stuttering “tha tha tha that’s all folks!” That was on the cover of the French philosophy magazine I get each month. In the place of Porky Pig, the Statue of Liberty. Below the closing statement “That’s all folks!” is the statement De La Fin De La Démocratie En Amerique  (The End of Democracy in America). Wow. A lot of us have been aware of the death of democracy – or at least some hollow, phantasmal semblance of it pushed and propagandized by the media and history textbooks – for at least the last 20 years – but to find this acknowledgement from an overseas European country is stunning. Downtown Seattle looks like a war zone. Tent cities, graffitied buildings, boarded up windows. I’m a crusty, cynical, misanthropic septuagenarian and I’m still shocked by the rapidity of our decline. Not to mention the deep sadness and tragedy of it all. The magnitude of suffering. Nancy Pelosi getting all huffy-puffy and red-faced and indignant because Wolf Blitzer, of all people, persisted in asking her why she was holding up the stimulus bill that had been offered when so many people are suffering. That segment had volumes to say about classicism in America. It wasn’t so long ago she sat in front of her $24,000 refrigerator bragging about all the ice cream she has. Good God. Meanwhile, Trump has wasted no time going around spreading coronavirus to his loyal fans. If you were to ask me for an image that best illustrates our predicament, I’d say The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.

 

Stephane Mallarmé Leading A Prison Escape

The mind tosses words like grenades, a bouquet of gold & beryllium. The murmur of an old squid in the middle of an audition. Stephane Mallarmé leading a prison escape. The splash of color on wrapping paper comes to our rescue, providing vivacity & spit. We gaze at one another like pilgrims, falcons on our shoulders, crabs walking toward us with kisses & resumés. There are seven shadows in a shark, one of them is an occipital lobe, & another has locations & meanings. The main thrust is a cup of tea teeming with Buddhism, bubbles winking in sunlight. Existence tastes stronger if it’s boiled in reflection. Sing the desert nomads in their kingly robes. 

        My position is separate from your frond. I have longitude but I’m clean out of socialism. Can you lend me a can of isometrics & an incessant straddle that I can use to mute the song of the shoulder blade? My right arm is indicative of the moon in whose light I plead for the spasms of the tenderloin. And you call this poetry? I’m not calling it anything, least of all a guitar. I know a hallucination when I see one. The majority of my noises are nocturnal. The rest is silence. Perfect as the feather of a chicken. Noble as the periphery of a stanza parked in the eye of a urethra. My transmissions are mere protons, but the midnight trilogy is the wink of a wildcat. 

        I sometimes wonder if I know what it is I’m saying. When am I saying something & when is language saying something? Everybody listen to me & return my ship. I’m your captain, though I’m feeling feasible these days, & quite palpable. It’s a vulnerable position, especially at my age. Am I a magician? I have a box of magic next to me. It’s a book called Take This Accordion & Squeeze It Hard. Can I sell you anything? Would you like a library? A study? An aviary? A glockenspiel? An odor? Can I sell you a perfume? This is a fragrance called Consider Me Holy And Buy Me A Home In Hollywood. It shoots out of the bottle in a spray of minivans. 

        The prattle turns stagnant unless someone comes along with the right equipment & gets eccentric with the string. For example, the very presence of poles makes the nosegay plausible. The purring is unnatural, but nubile. The hummingbirds hover by me like the protons of a slippery piece of thought. No, I can’t forget this evening, or the look in your face as you were leaving. But I did forget the sorrow. I let it go. It grew wings & took to the sky, like all good compulsions longing for the vapor of nothingness. Years later, it all gets scattered in social media. It’s a technocratic world, but the underpinnings are noble, & live like worms in the jaws of the earth. 

        And sometimes I just sits. If it fits me. If it suits the time & place. If there’s a good chair to sit in. Or a floor. Preferably a carpeted floor. Although hardwood is de rigueur, there are other options. Hypotenuse steppes with right angle choices & lightning on the menu. The ball is fictitious. Let me roll it to you. It is my duty to inform you that eczema is not a condition it’s a teleology involving skates & Hollywood Bowl. The rupees are russet this time of year & the incentives are vicious. This pass will be good until the spurs come. If you stop acting like a horse people will stop treating you like an IOU. This isn’t flypaper. But the doughnuts are free for registered holes.