Creature of the Shade

mount currie, british columbia (lil’wat group, stl’atl’lmx nation)

Who was that, in a shiny rental car, who stopped to photograph the defunct Big Smoke? 

He seemed especially interested in the "For Lease" sign that's falling out of the top window, so that you can't read the phone number.

And why did he drive back off the highway to Rancheree Street to take this photo?  Did he think I didn't see him? 

Does he know why, whenever he photographs a person, the picture will be blurred?  Is it because he didn't ask permission?

Is that why, when he paused by the swap meet (big blank green building, tiny handwritten sign on the door) and saw three children playing happily in a dumpster, he turned around, drove back downtown, and took this photo instead?

Does he understand our religious life?  Does he want to?

What was he looking for in that photo?  The mountains, or the laundry?  Can he see both at once?

And what of this photo?  Did he think it looks like some kind of classic of poverty journalism, the old woman with her bag walking along the road? 

Of course, the photo is blurred.  Because he can't really see us, can he? 

And who are we, anyway?  We don't talk like this. 

The man in the rental car, talking to himself.  This is how he talks.

we are the folk

Folk music festivals do change, but it's easy to imagine they don't.  Going to the Vancouver Folk Music Festival last weekend, I told myself I wanted to check out new music, but I really wanted the sound of my own memories.  Not to hear exact songs that I knew, but even better, new songs that sounded exactly like hearing a new song for the first time 30 years ago.

So I steered away from the big dancing stages with their rockish worldish electro folk, which were all in glaring direct sun anyway.  The shade was set aside for the old fashioned stuff:  men and women who dared to get onstage with nothing but a guitar.  Nothing today comes closer to the cultural milieu of my childhood -- my memory's conflaton of art fairs and protest concerts.  And while the politics could be sentimental at times, I knew without a doubt that if things got rough, I'd want to be with these people.  I would rather endure their earnest impracticality than the efficiency of their enemies.

Jericho Beach is the perfect site.  A north-facing beach, gentle in the summer, it looks across English Bay at the towers of downtown Vancouver, and above them the impossibly sheer mountains of the north shore, the beginning of a thinly inhabited glacier-and-fjord country that extends up the coast to Alaska.  Gazing out on the water, most of inhabited North America is behind us.  With home at our backs, we can all feel like exiles, even the Canadians, as we sing of our lost loves, distant battles, and dreams as persistent as weeds.

what the storage unit said

I'm back in San Francisco for a wee bit to visit possessions that have been sitting in storage here during my year in Vancouver.  Here are not just 20 boxes of books, but also life's archives.  Now that I'm moving to Sydney, anything I keep must be worth shipping across the Pacific. 

O to have settled in the classic large house, where things could accumulate in attics with no need for these annual cullings.  My storage unit asks harder questions than any mountaintop guru.  "What matters?" the unit asks, frowning as I cower in the flourescent corridor.  "Should you keep the three inch stack of grieving letters and clippings, surrounding the 1985 death of a student of yours in a climbing accident?"  "Should you keep yearbooks full of hopeful commentaries that can only intensify your regrets when you reread them now in middle age?"  "Should you keep the complete letters to you of your late great aunt, a remarkable woman who was an army nurse during WW2?"  Some may be able to answer these questions, but before I can hurl the item decisively, I hear the followup:  Why or why not?  Discuss.  Each of these questions deserves a long essay, covering (a) the history of the item in question, in its personal, political and social dimensions, (b) ethical precedents on the question, and (c) just enough sensually rich narrative about the memories evoked by the item, both to ground or enliven the essay and to overwhelm any clear thinking that might arise from (a) and (b). 

Or perhaps each question is a koan.  Where neither logic nor emotion can decide fully that something deserves its weight, some sort of magical insight is required.  My 1991 acceptance letter from Shakespeare Quarterly, announcing my first and last publication from my scholarly days.  Love letters and poems from a great love 14 years ago -- they might still teach me something, no?  A fine copy of Marlowe's complete plays, a gift from the cast of a play I directed 20 years back -- with my theatre days so far gone, will I ever read a Marlowe play again? 

This storage outfit has locked dumpsters.  I can lift the lid enough to slide things into them, but there's no getting them back out.  In a few cases, I managed to walk to the dumpster with a freighted item and slide it in.  Sometimes as I did this the item seemed to wiggle in resistance, as though trying to turn soft pleadinh eyes to meet mine.  No question, if the dumpster had been open, a few would have crawled back out and snuggled again into my packing, like cute but hopelessly mildewed teddy bears.

Still, I will ship many of these things to Sydney, but some part of me would be relieved if they never arrived. 

first contact: ficus macrophylla

Thanks to Dave Bonta of Via Negativa for organizing a Festival of the Trees, of which this is a last-minute entry. 

Visit me in Sydney, and I'll have many trees to show you, but we will start and end with Ficus macrophylla.

Look close, just to the right of trunk, and there's a park bench with human being for scale.  The black and white thing in the foreground is a magpie, who is mumbling a long perfect-pitched twelve-tone commentary, like a random outtake from Schoenberg played on a recorder.

Foliage?  Chipper.

Hard plasticlike leaves, brown and hairy underneath, all perked toward the sun.  At moments, the tree resembles a thousand-strong flock of birds ready to take flight.

It's hot, though, so come in underneath.  Everything's upside down here, so the vast buttresses seem to support the earth more than they do the tree.  Here is a city of shade, with many secret chambers behind high walls. 

There's room to think here, and just enough darkness that we can see.