Remembrance of a Walk

In a semblance of continuity I pick up on the same Memorial Day walk...

A semi-deserted quality prevailed on campus. My path led me on to the 3-D ziggurat bridge. It crosses the creek in the form of a ziggurat with projecting elements. The creek was still vigorous despite a Spring turned dry. The greenery was burgeoning in the May time as the male birds were in giddy singing competition. Alongside, a guy leaned against a back-pack chattering away, maybe he was making a phone call.
In the brisk air around the Campanile, the shadow of long pine needles on branches above played on the white marble sundial. Clean-shaven Abe Lincoln's nose was prominent on his haunted carotid. In the distance the Golden Gate bridge stood before an even more remote optical illusion caused by sun light on a fog bank, the Western sky cleft by similar fissures of cloud. The horizon had disappeared in an effect almost arctic in its seeming unreality.

Across the way the Bancroft library building renovations are starting to look like they may be finished this decade. I regularly walk to this spot around midnight and recall with amusement the nights when I witnessed a small tractor vehicle climbing a ramp into the front entrance of the gutted building under floodlights. It resembled nothing more than the scene in Kubrick's 2001 where they have excavated the Monolith in a construction site on the moon.

When I visit at night and see the Greek-revival building and grounds brilliantly lit and deserted and surrounded by darkness, I experience what I call the "metaphysical effect" in viewing the physical landscape. This derives from notions of of perfection in design, approaching the heavenly realm. But my idea derives even more strongly from the paintings of De Chirico and his fellow Italian moderns like Carra and Morandi who were known as the Metaphysical painters. Their deserted city-scapes with classical detritus and uncanny figuration suggest the psychological or metaphysical made visible. They are lonely paintings-- as if solitude allows the world to manifest your mind in front of you.

At times like this I can occasionally summon the awe and delight I experienced when I first visited this campus--it's huge artfully grown trees, sweeping lawns, neo-classical architecture; it's goofy decorative emblems, its saber tooth tiger statue, its topiary clock. Topiary clock? Right and I was headed there to be my turn-around point today.

But I do have to be the curmudgeon and gripe about how much has happened to endanger that impression. All the heedless construction with its resultant unpleasantness and pollution, its loss of open space, and its increase in population and traffic. An endless procession of heavy construction trucks come rolling down the hills like run-away trains. A lady was killed when one truck's brakes failed and flattened her car; a pedestrian was killed by another one at Haste and Dana. Just today (as I write this) I witnessed a close call as a truck, one of two carrying untold tons of scaffolding, what, didn't see the yellow light on Bancroft? As a sandal-footed youth entered the crosswalk the driver of the first truck had to suddenly brake loosening some of the steel he carried. Both trucks proceeded to pull into the bus stop to adjust their dangerous loads. An older lady with a cane tried to catch her bus that just kept going. That whole length of Bancroft is a locus for outlaw trucker and tour bus driver manoeuvres.

The worst offenders by local standards are the tour bus drivers. They leave their big diesel buses running literally for hours ignoring Berkeley's law banning more than 15 minutes of idling, ignoring air pollution and global warming, and ignoring our health. And those profuse campus and Berkeley cops, they never say a word to them about it. The cops just circle endlessly in their cars rarely setting foot to pavement, unless they have some prey in their trap. Then five cop cars rush up, each cop more eager than the last to come and kneel on somebody's head.

I cleared the library and there it was across Memorial lawn, the new East As1an Library, with it's fragmented fool's gold screen, its dreary foundation of concrete cubes, and its arrogant intrusion into the historical footpath. Coming down from the Northside, walkers must detour now so to allow this elephantine monstrosity to dominate the landscape across from the Main Library which is presumably now relegated to housing the semi-moribund Western languages.

More on this day's walk will follow.