Metaphysical Grounds

Rather than follow a more-or-less linear narrative I expect to fashion tesserae in an envisioned mosaic...

I'll describe a typical peaceful walk around my vicinity. But as Yeats said "peace come dropping slow" in "the bee-loud glade." And were that bees were allowed to be loud in this world, the vital yet threatened bees. It was a blessedly quiet day due to the Memorial Day holiday. The record store/cafe downstairs was closed, so no sound-bleed of classical music greeted me with the day. The University was closed for business and the traffic on Bancroft Way was very light. It was nearly tranquil until the early afternoon when a representative of the new student majority came to the little concrete breezeway between Lower Sproul Plaza and Bancroft. It functions as an echoing box for the insect-like robotic disco that a group of students gather there to dance to. Today not a troupe but a lone wannabe dancer showed up with some sort of small but super-sonic boom box and cranked that. As he did his little hops and assorted cliche dance moves. I decided to yell something figuring my neighbors were all away. He heard me and may have lowered the volume infinitesimally. And fortunately he lost interest after a while. No one else had shown up to join him--sometimes they are there past midnight. They are worst and most persistent recreational noise nuisance here. The triumphalist taiko drumming is more maddening but generally is not as frequent or as die-hard as these slithery dance cadres.

The day was cool and only intermittently sunny. People not familiar with the Bay Area may be surprised to learn that one often appreciated hat, scarf, and gloves even in late May. And so attired I set out. Even the main entrance to campus facing the terminus of Telegraph Ave. was relatively quiet. As usual appeared to be individual loitering in an inconspicuous vantage point as if keeping surveillance on a free people. They are always in evidence when the right of free speech is being exercised as when every Friday the kindly older Jewish ladies for justice for Palestine assemble around an information table as the Women in Black. At this safe distance in time the University likes to acknowledge the legacy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. They of course ignore the reality that the administration and its police force did everything it could then and has ever since to undermine free speech.
A few years back on a quiet unused lawn near Boalt Hall, we demonstrated against John Yoo and the shameful policies he abetted . As indifferent students walked past blown-up photos from Abu Ghraib, speakers addressed the small gathering over a microphone connected to a small amplifier. A UC cop stood anxiously looking at his watch until an hour had passed and he could insist the mic be turned off. The dignified Daniel Elsberg who had been speaking softly over it was thereby rendered inaudible over the nearby incessant University-driven automobile traffic. This is from the same police who see little problem with the insane levels of noise pollution that goes on for hours on Upper and Lower Sproul including their own piss factory The Bear's Lair, a malodorous campus bar. But then that deafening racket, unlike the quiet speech we listened to, doesn't proclaim the University complicity in vast war crimes. Maybe it celebrates it by obliviousness to it.

So I walked past the deserted fountain and on uphill. There was Barrows Hall under renovation, its exterior marked with squiggly loops of paint, looking like a vast sketch by Dubuffet or Leger. There was the fond familiar green metal pelican statue. There was the striking new music library in green slate shingles with scattered burgundy windows. I crested the hill alongside and ambled down an incline to visit a notable dogwood tree. Its old growth trunk, half-hollowed out and burled resembling a Dali figure, was crowned by a flowering canopy of newer branches. It looks frail and precarious. But as I have noted when I've climbed it and when I regularly stretch my back by hanging from a branch, it is solid and sturdy. Just past it in a small grove of rhododendron, is the statue of the last Dryad. It is a likeness of a beautiful long-haired young girl amazing for unabashed open-legged pose showing her body's own flower. As if to emphasize her timeless free spirit, people place flowers in her cast bronze hair. Unhappily the rhododendron flowers burn away very quickly these days. A lady gardening at St. Mark's Church told me Northern California has become too hot for "rhodos" as she affectionately called them.
I remember a song from my youth by Donovan in which he sings of "meditating rhododendron forest", a point of transcendence. And I often visit the splendid rhododendron grove in Golden Gate park, if only in my mind. Then I am compelled to recall a comment by the California poet Gary Snyder, rather Zen and austere. Someone was bewailing a possible future extinction of Redwood trees. "Something will replace them," Snyder replied. Some of us, however, don't always find it as quite as easy to think in terms of geological time.

More on this walk later on.