Friends and mentors

Friends and mentors

                                             JH, CH

We watched our correspondence, begun as occasional fat paper envelopes stuffed with your old lecture notes and my fledgling essays, turn into irony laden emails two or three times a month.

In the years following your deaths my thoughts have gone often to your farming and your project of setting out hardwood trees in redwood country. A kind of natural lecture. An advising.

As I grew strong enough to set an occasional challenge you must have seen some of your own conversation in mine. A-gambol like one of your goats.

In my visit in 2000 we worked through different understandings of proxy wars and mints—and an election four months away. Now, in the context of newer elections, I feel some version of ‘Bella Ciao’ still uniting us, each of our voices in a different key.

August 2019 vacation

Actually, we're just starting out on our August trip. We're off to Ireland on Monday and it seemed fitting to post something here from a previous trip--in this case two photos taken in the Botanical Gardens in Belfast. I was fascinated by the vegetation shown here and look forward to experiencing it again in the gardens. Meanwhile..... Well, sharing the inspiration potentials of the vegetation via pictures.

hands

hands

a seeming center of love

a place from which it expands

in new growth

San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California, August 2000. From the base of Coit Tower I looked down at a tall ship standing at the wharf beside a ferry boat—blue Pacific, Golden Gate. And on the other side, the Bay Bridge, the sunlight on the ocean, the asymmetric wake of something coming in—then the pines, the Trans-Am Pyramid.

That same day, in the afternoon, after lunch I sat in a Chinese café and drank tea and watched an earth mover working loudly on a big construction site. Tow-Away, No Stopping Anytime the red letters of a white sign on the chain link fence cautioned. AYKSYP (?) a graffiti artist had tagged up.

Thus some of my notes, anyway, reworked nearly 19 years after those moments of relaxed jotting. And that evening, in the museum, I stood for a long time looking at Magritte’s The Living Mirror,

with its suggested voices

and silences arranged

on a canvas square.

Gas giant

Gas giant

So that someone sold Saturn views

through a telescope tripoded outside

Barcelona’s Bar Zurich when you could.

No crowd. Looked legit.

And there is a certain comfort

some Saturday nights

in being able quite unhurriedly

to lean forward and touch

eyelash to eyepiece,

then see a clear sharp shape

in lensed light—

an apparent sphere

and in memory buzzing

shapes off the sides.

heroics

heroics

no i don’t want the job

two decades & all those close calls

you’re kidding

detained by the queenly nymph Kalypso

as Lattimore translates     sound cozy

think it over

here’s the half hollow sound

of a windblown cold drinks can

rolling along the street

how long’s it been

Pride month and Dalloway Day

Pride month and Dalloway Day

In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway the lead protagonist Clarissa Dalloway is described by a previous suitor, Peter Walsh, as “the perfect hostess.” It is, as I think most readers of the book would agree, an apt description, for throughout the fictional day in June Woolf created, Clarissa’s is the character whose openness to celebration drives the social element and expresses lamentation for the death of “that young man”—her vision of Septimus Smith, the person who symbolizes so many war dead. The fact that the novel, in typical lyrical fashion, takes place in summer appears to me as another of its important life positive features. Obviously the tragic aspect of death is called up—in relation both to war horrors and to the symbolic individual portrayed there as dying—but the social importance of creating peace takes precedence. Hence, one might add, the emphasis on the party that Clarissa aims for at the outset of the book and hosts at its conclusion. Polyphonic novels (almost all novels to some extent, but especially satiric ones) stress celebration by invoking what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “carnival”, the discourse of everyday life and especially the life of the popular festival as opposed to that of officialdom, especially dictatorial officialdom.

But Dalloway Day as a single day coincides with June, the beginning of summer and now the month when many of the world’s cities celebrate gay pride or just pride in loving as one chooses, that hard won right which Modernist art and the art of today work to present and preserve. 

So, happy Dalloway Day to all and happy pride years! May we continue to present and preserve in peace….!