The Inward Empire

The Flaneur resumes his regular feuillton from the tree-lined boulevards, the noirish back alleys and the bald pedestrian bridges of Berkeley. He has relocated to a long-familiar section of town called in its storied history the McGee-Spaulding District.

It unfolds its deeply Berkeley character to me as I observe it's mostly peaceful streets at all hours of the day or night. Like many of us, its vegetation could use a trim and there is an artful recycling of vintage elements. Amid the inescapable chatter and beeping of 2010 a strain of 20th century hip style remains--as artfully applied as the patches on Neal Young's old bell-bottoms.

The borders of my new part of town are set as between Sacramento Street and Martin Luther King, Jr Boulevard; and between Dwight Way and University Avenue. California Street is somehow it's center and on a traffic island at the intersection with Dwight, a sign marks its history.
It seems that in 1820, King of Spain granted the land to a Luis Peralta. His children sold it to a San Francisco businessman who in turn flipped it to an intrepid Irish immigrant named James McGee. On the land he ran a successful farm and he became one of the leading political voices around town. In an effort to promote his property values and his own prestige he funded the original St Joseph's Catholic church and proposed the area as town center. Newspapers ridiculed the idea of a City Hall built in the middle of a farm and before long the facts on the ground settled the issue as it stands today. City Hall landed not very far away from St Joseph the Worker as the church is now named and whose occasional bells toll a somewhat mournful sound in my solitude.
Fields of barley, orchards and livestock remained. Apparently the area stayed farmland through the 19th Century, long after the entire city was subdivided for housing. It was only after the San Francisco Earthquake of 1908 that real building took place, notably by 1912 when the Southern Pacific railroad ran a train down California street. A sort of grandness persists in the lay-out of very wide streets hosting rows venerable trees. There are some distinctive older houses and an occasional showy newer place but a rather humble middle-class architecture prevails.

And yet somehow in my perception the area retains a strangely rural flavor--an old fence, a raspberry bush, the noble, aged trees, the wild fauna and domestic gardens, the house cats strolling unmolested down the center of sidewalks.
I picture this central region of Berkeley as having an unexplained analogy to the Central Valley of California sometimes called the Inland Empire. In my solitude and contemplation I have come to regard my new neighborhood and my new abode as an inward empire. After my 30 year long habitation, after serious consideration of migrating elsewhere, in an outward direction, I had instead moved inward toward the heart of Berkeley. A less public nervous cerebral scary exciting happening dreadful crowded competitive part of town than university-side central Berkeley where I had been living for six years.
To digress perhaps on the Inland Empire... it has struck me for quite a long time that when seen from an aerial topographical map the San Joaquin Valley as defined by two long rather labial mountain ranges resembles the topography of a vulva. One can stretch the symbolism of this any number of ways, but in my own subjectivity the womb association extends from Inland Empire to my local Inward Empire. It has to do with the face I wore before I was born.


It is also a neighborhood that begins a more racially integrated Berkeley. Oddly, sort of a Mason-Dixon line can be detected after which, African-American owned homes begin to proliferate. There is still such a line discernible at Dwight Way and it determined what sort of activities took place south of it. The gun play has diminished as far as I can tell. I walk some of the blocks in that direction in tranquility. Most of the houses are attractive even if there is an occasional crime-watch tone, a grim suspiciousness, say a barred window. Even in the hot crack years, the action was outside the Spaulding-McGee district. This is not to imply that we don't see cops with flashing lights racing around the hood now and again. Berkeley is always ready to respond with profuse cops-in-cars, often just one cop per car. This policy is perhaps in inverse ratio to the idea of foot patrols as the most humanitarian and effective way to keep urban communities peaceful and safe.

So, bucolic, artisanal, educated yet working class, liberal, casual as the place is, there is still an edge. And in the general disappointment of the American dream, there is some anomie and friction among local residents as well, without doubt.
The trains sounding as they pass West of here are frequent and can seem loud. I happen to love the sound but there has been many over the years who object to the volume, frequency, and duration of the train whistles. In other words, they moved into West Berkeley alongside the tracks, presumably with knowledge of the situation, and then try to force the trains to "keep it down."
A similar disharmony exists between the newer not-in-my-back-yard residents and the older-style Berkeley residents over such Aquarian age hold-overs as People's Park and a free-box on Channing not far from my abode.
Thems-that-got never knew or have forgot what it's like to live and to have not. Some local home-owners are chagrined by the thought of having the needy falling by to look for sweaters or pants or children's clothes. They maintain that it's presence damages their property value. But many more residents bring their donations by the venerable old wooden box with a hinged top and some occasionally score something themselves from it. And many leave useful and interesting housewares in individual sidewalk free boxes as they move-out or merely decide the items are no longer needed. To me this represents an endearing folkway, one that I hope endures.

Recently, I have scored coffee mugs, an as-new audio cassette dubbing deck, a rocking chair, among other furnishings. My most astounding find of them all occurred only after I had rejected the idea of accepting any sort of donated mattress. I can't help but regard a second-hand mattress as the fossil record of other peoples effluvia, you dig? Yet I needed a replacement for the one I tossed-out as I left my last pad. I was dreading the hassle of shopping for a new one and then getting it home.
When, deus ex machina, the house two doors down put something out with the sidewalk shrubs-- a blindingly white oblong with a sign reading "free mattress." I stopped and looked it over. I fully expected to reject it only to decide it merited closer inspection. It has a pure cotton cover over firm foam layers, and overall can be folded once which I did to get inside under the lamp for examination. All the while blessed darkness obscured my ungainly task.
Incredibly, not only was it immaculate and seemingly never used it even had a quite recent date stamped on its tag. Brought home for guests, it may have been little-used and cumbersome to store. I had to accept it's suitability and to be grateful for the good fortune. It perfectly fits my deck bed with its subliminal drawers full of CDs and on it I have the peaceful slumber of the angels. In fact when I recline on it while watching a film on DVD, uncharacteristic for me, I fall soundly asleep.

My new situation is so quiet and dark at night after what I had been accustomed to, I no longer require earplugs and blindfolds. I sleep at any hour, the direct sunlight softened by the great shifting pepper tree; the lone streetlight absorbed by it at night. The burdensome strata of the care-worn years accumulated on my weary shoulders waft away in the billowing peace behind my eyes.

The Return of the the Flaneur: 14 poems of summer

At last our correspondent can see his way clear to resume regular columns in October. Writings will be predominantly in prose and will fulfill the original intention of observing street life in Berkeley, California. The Flaneur has a new residence in a different part of town and he is eager to describe his comings and goings in anecdotal detail.
In the interim, here are a few lines from his lost and somewhat indolent Summer.

* * *

Two brownies alight
at the ashcan near me
Soundless weightless sprites
The lightness of childhood
in June
In sunlight between trees
Up there at this late hour
The rest sinks into deepest green
The nimbus of a squirrel's tail
catches a ray of sun
Crossing a cool glade
on a telephone line

* * *

on a distant hillside
an area still in sunlight
like an unreachable blessed state
an alternative day

floating over the town unaware
the town afloat in fog
a saber-tooth fog
in this never-warm summer

moments when the jewel-like
pepper tree moves in the light
bees coming and going
as seen through a panel of antique lace

hung-up in my tree-house window
receding into the monochrome
gray-green of the overcast world
timelessness the elongated dusk

* * *

asleep but where am I?
gradually zero-in on myself
dozing in a chair in my new pad
jazz drum solo on the radio

* * *

awake at some small hour
look out my new window
as a lone raccoon crosses McGee
backing up even as he walks forward
so sensitive, so cautious

* * *

Turkey in the Straw

chill sunday evening
pink ice cream truck jingles by
no children outdoors

* * *

skeins of clouds
cascade over the gate

break free of the vast
impending fog glacier

and form ghost columns
marching over the still sunny bay

others embody free white sprites
that lead on the immense onslaught

somnolent vales brace themselves as
on come the clouds the cold the night

* * *

a thought that life was over
a cloud skull
turns into a clown

* * *

Berkeley Marina

a hundred boats at rest
no one on them
the sound of the freeway
almost far enough away

to the westernmost point
choral wind in a dense pine
seagulls in cinemascope
sound like rusty hinges

distant fog hovers at the gate
kites never stop pulling
strollers are whisked off
in the wordless wind

in the orchestral quietude

* * *

a line of sailboats scoots
this way across the bay
fleeing a thick marine layer
disappearing into it

* * *

Notes on an Old Dark House

The house cat sleeps out back and is owned by no one
with no fixed name
A dozen years old he has exquisite articulated markings
on his pangolin jacket
He wears a stark white waist coat after dark
lurking behind flowers hidden by leaves
At the far end of the gourdy garden
on ground strewn with straw
He takes a drink from a child's wading pool
under jupiter so brilliant and near

In the pantry a ghost moves one afternoon
shifts imperceptibly as I pass
like a ripple in a mirror
A moth enters in the window
in tranquil night time
Wings turn red on the lamp-lit wall
by the red smoking sign

An early land grant haunting
a house built of old growth trees
Vertiginous windows over the treetops
roof-top mammals look back in at me
Older arbors arch into the maxfield parish sky
the magazine sunset over the sea
Planets and the moon revolve this way
over the yellow hills, over my green green bed

* * *

low sunlight on trees
in front of the dark fog bank
hyper reality

* * *

Stars come into my bedroom
I can't keep them out
film loop of jupiter

* * *

Garden Rhapsody

dragonflies sew my eyelashes shut,
bees venture deeply into my ear canal,
lady bugs decorate my loincloth,
earthworms emigrate into my night soil,
spiders bind my ankles to hoist me perpendicular,
grasshoppers make me jumpy,
infinitesimal ants explore every inch,
butterflies alight on my lips,
clapping their powdery wings
they mock my every utterance

* * *

crows bum rush the sky
flying motorcycle gang
black leather feathers

* * *

The Loaf Love Tour (or How I Spent My Summer)

mail art, August 2010 postmark

Big Dream

Strange dislocations and a breakthrough in the Flaneur's fraught dream life.

Waking in an apartment in San Francisco where I'm now residing with room mates. I have to catch a bus downtown like in my old Berkeley commute days thirty years ago.
I walk up two blocks to the street where the bus-stop for that direction is located. A bus comes and I get on without checking the direction. I don't pay and sit up front. Then I remember I should pay and attempt to do so. The driver waves me off instead. Oddly the pay box is located to his left near the window.
Before long I realize he is not going on the intended route. It is a huge circuitous journey through non-descript industrial sections along the bay. Eventually we are driving along a flatland by the bay. The waves wash up and over the road but we plow through anyway. There are no more buildings and no other traffic out here. We come to the furthest point, the edge of a parking lot, and then turn back.
Then we are climbing and the view outside is of an Escher-like maze of girders and structures abstract in their complexity. I realize that we are under the Golden Gate bridge. At the apogee of this trajectory we turn back to climb down again. What I see outside the window now appears in a rhomboid-shaped portal surrounded by darkness. It is an astonishing vista of the bay waters and land, incredibly beautiful in color, movement and light.
Before long we are again on drab industrial streets heading in toward downtown, toward more familiar territory.

Cleaning House

In an attempt to avoid burial in it, the Flaneur sheds his collector's morbidity to reach a lighter future.

The burden of the past and my tendency to accumulate photos, books, recordings, artifacts, objects of all kinds in addition to one's wardrobe, furniture, cooking equipment, and the many necessities of life, have all been on my mind of late.
Great when your writing criticism or doing research to have the vastness of an obsessive-compulsive library at yr disposal. And of course there is the aleatory joy of discovering a unread great or an old favorite book among one's shelves.
Then there's the insight and nostalgia available in old photographs and the myriad cultural souvenirs of an avid enthusiast's past. But really, it all ends up as the detritus of one's learning, thinking, and unconscious tides. It forms a weight, a dragon one's forward movement, like the Surrealist hero in Le Chien Andalou dragging his yoke of ropes, pulling an accumulation of bound priests, donkey cadavers and a grand piano through a bourgeois drawing room.

Woefully I concede that I am more of a 20th century man than any longer a man of my times. Yet I have finally seen the wisdom and resolve to roll with the new to the best of my ability. All the yellowing culture clutter I'll shed will still be with me and will resurface in my mind as needed. I can always research on-line now when I need to. Of course everything, including all information, will still decay or be lost or destroyed.
The digitally-stored will go just like even the carefully preserved books and drawing of Michelangelo and Blake, the great paintings in oil on canvas, and most art of all kinds will go. Somethings may be unearthed again intact but even the pyramids must one day come to dust.

A Year in Mourning

On 8 January 2010, one year after my mother passed on at age 96, I sat outside in the sunshine musing over memories of her. Risking sentimentality, I transcribe here some of what I wrote which is in turn a mere glimpse of the remembrances that I didn't get down.

December nights my Mother and I would venture out in the cold night after supper to see the lights, to see how people had decorated their homes for Christmas. There was an abundance of trees, wreathes, and front porches outlined in the fat-bulb colored lights. Some homes had succumbed to modernist kitsch with silver trees and revolving color-wheel spotlights. We would walk a few residential blocks over to the vicinity of George B. Stone school and back home the same way. My Mother was well-read, intelligent and full of humor and we would carry on conversations as if we were both adults. She would inspire me with her sense of wonder at the adequacy and outright goodness of life, of the profound experience of viewing the starry sky. What ever inklings of wisdom I have today I owe to her nature and her example.

On my first day of pre-primary school at George B. Stone, my Mother stayed along with the other mothers through the morning. The idea was to gradually get the kids used to being apart from their mothers who generally were home with us during our first five years.
When we came in from a recess in the schoolyard, I looked around and quickly saw that she was now gone. I ran straight out of the classroom, out of the front door of the school, up Globe street, and around the corner to Garfield street, yelling "Ma"! I caught up with her mid-block. With her typical good-nature she dutifully walked me back to school. She stayed a while maybe until school was out, but by the next day I had accepted the fact of our separation and was dropped -off while many mothers were still required to stay and placate their jittery kids.

Once we were walking with my brother at an undeveloped area known as the circus grounds. It was a Summer night and dark there--we may have been there for the Fourth of July fireworks. Then without warning my mother stepped in a hole and fell down onto the long grass. It was a new experience for me, a frightening realization that even adults were subject to spills. She was the ship, the rudder and the mast that kept our family afloat. I think I came to a new maturity with the realization that I needed to help her and try to protect her from hazards.
She later told me that when she was a little girl a man had appeared in broad daylight at those circus grounds and attempted to entice her and a friend. She said he eventually exposed himself to them as they ran away.

I remember vignettes from that old disappeared way of life in the 1950s--such as the Christmas parties at the American legion Hall downtown. Refreshments and entertainment of the homiest sort prevailed. They gave us kids those old-fashioned red-mesh Christmas stockings, packages for candy and toys that were made-in-Japan. My Mother occasionally spoke, giving a report or something and she was later elected head officer, but I think we were able to skip going ourselves by then.

She would take us, three boys and herself, downtown in a taxi. We would ride as far as a certain beauty salon on Second street and then walk the rest of the way to save funds. We would shop for clothes at McWhirrs department store with it's great wall-plaques with taxidermy sailfish and swordfish. We always had finery for Sunday Mass and other best wear events, and generally were dressed nice enough to draw comments from others.
The downtown then was thriving, lively and a great deal of fun. Huge Christmas decorations were attached to the facades of buildings. The five-and-dimes were packed with everything from 45 RPM singles to pet shops. We always seemed to have parakeets or a canary or two at home and plenty of records which somehow we never got tired of playing.
On occasional Sunday nights, she and I would take a cab to the beauty shop and walk another block to St Mary's church for Mass. Afterward we would go to Adams' drugstore where I would get a reward of a candy bar and a comic book or a Mad magazine.
Some nights after church, I would escort her to the Eagle Annex restaurant. It was sort of a soigne affair. It was my introduction to "fine dining" and I would always get the fried clam plate. We would leave as the orchestra began to play and my Mother's impeccable sense of decorum dictated that it was the right moment. The eagle was transforming into a nightclub for couples, adults only.

On one night still vivid in my memory, we were walking on Stafford road, a high road that capped our street. Our destination was a firehouse where she was turning in the proceeds from some door-to-door appeal she had volunteered for--the March of Dimes or the heart fund or something similar. Men were gathered in a vacant lot across the street, silhouetted against a large bonfire of branches and leaves. She shared my sense of wonder and enjoyment of the nocturnal, autumnal scene slanting toward Hallowe'en.

At some point in my early childhood she began to cook for the nuns at the convent attached to the school I attended, St Patrick's. A half-day's work brought her a small stipend and some foodstuff from the school larder to take home, helping to sustain her three sons. It was strange on the odd occasions when I would see her there, outside of her familiar context, when we were both on best behavior. She enjoyed the increased circulation and became dear friends with a saintly nun named Sister Matthew who didn't join the other nuns as our teachers but stayed at the convent with Mom. Sister Matthew died while I was still at school there, as I was for eight long years. They marched us kids through the convent to see her in her coffin I believe. I know we had done so for Sister Vincent my first grade teacher who died the year afterward--I was in the second half of the baby boom and my class finished off many an out-moded teacher and teaching as we passed through the system. Sister Vincent had been rather mean to me after the unconditional love from my Mother and after the sweet old-maid Miss Taylor who had been my pre-primary teacher at George B. Stone and who lived in an immaculate house on nearby Garfield street. I cannot say I felt terribly sad when I saw Sister Vincent in her casket.
When my Mother started working there, the nuns eased up on punishments for my brothers and me, saying they would tell my Mother instead-- she who rarely punished at all. That was most agreeable to us.
And my Mother's presence at the convent was a great help in one singular incident from my youth. One day a week, we used to withhold the twenty-five cent payment for a cafeteria meal and, under the banner of going home for lunch, go out to local diners. The food was more fun and we would have freedom on the open streets until the bell rang. This sometimes led to a little trouble as it did one frigid winter noon.
Two daring pals and I had walked out on some recent ice over a pond connected to a factory complex. I was recklessly pounding my foot on the ice testing its strength, when it broke though plunging me into the drink. I pushed myself toward the surface only to find a ceiling of dim daylight through the opaque ice over my head. Somehow I struggled and found the hole I came through. I endeavored to push myself back into this day-lit world only to have the edge break again followed by another shallow plunge. One friend came back on the ice to try to help but the whole ice surface began to break up with my desperate activity. I had not even learned to swim by that age, yet somehow I persevered and made it to bank where the friend pulled me up. The other continued to laugh hysterically, because, in that sociopathic way boys can have, he thought it was unbelievably funny.
Dripping wet in the cold noon, I made it back straight to the convent where I knew Mom and the most certain rescue would be. we rode home in taxi and I was dried, rubbed with rubbing alcohol, and given a little brandy as I was put to bed. The brothers came in hear what happened and to laugh at my wet proto-beatle boots. I gained the name "Swampy" from their snarky friends. I didn't mind... everyone knew they admired me for saving my ass with valor.

The next day the nuns busted me for not coming to them first to ask permission to leave school. While I was soaked in ice water walking back in the twenty-degree day I had made a line of survival to my Mom and so questioned their authority. This was despite the fact the nuns knew, my Mother certainly called, and the two other rascals were back in class to tell the tale of my absence.

"Look at the sky tonight, Stephen! Look at that sunset!" My Mother would say.
And I still do. With the love she gave me.
In perpetuity.


(more to come)

Peace Comes Falling Slow

The familiar strange quietude descended on Berkeley as soon as the students decamp for elsewhere.

Today the poignant skies are calling me--solid violet-gray to the north, the evocative light of broken Southern skies. Trees reveal their skeletal complexity, the beauty of organic design. I sit and savor a particular art nouveau tree, a favorite roost of the now-abundant crows. It's behind a stop-light and it goes largely unnoticed by the heedless traffic.
In Peoples Park people sleep in broad daylight, covers pulled over their eyes. Damp ground perhaps but the absence of rain keeps them from more dire straits.
I move along to Willard Park and rest on a bench where a fellow slightly older than myself plays airs from an old Joni Mitchell song quietly on his acoustic guitar. we talk and soon learn we have Massachusetts roots in common, going back to Canada as well.
The Beat generation comes up and he turns out to be a fellow child of beatitude. He mentions a film on a Beat poet he'd recently seen. How he shared the philosophy of his poem he half recalls. I paraphrase it for him: all that matters is to do the work, to lessen suffering, the rest is drunken dumb-show.
He tells me he is living in his car again. He had been taking care of a disable person in Marin but had to quit due to the person's crazy roommate.
I clue him into the network of free meals available to the needy hereabouts.
Off we go, I'm bound for a hospital visit but somehow don't find my friend Faye who has respiratory difficulties. En route I sent off a flock of cards to my late-arriving Christmas correspondents. Afterward, I join the avid consumers at the natural foods supermarket, I'm one of the more careful, frugal ones as I observe conspicuous purchases of all the delights available by those heading for New Year's celebrations. I'm headed there too in my own discrete way.
But I can't help but notice those souls whiling away the afternoon at bus stops and innocuous perches along the way. One bearded young fellow with soulful eyes lingers in my mind.
May God bless us all. May peace and the other necessities of life remain in reach for us all.

An oddly moving documentary on the band Flaming Lips, "Fearless Freaks," ends with a outtake/deleted scene of a new Year's Eve countdown. It leads to a version of "Seven nation Army" by the Lips combined with the White Stripes. Just as it finishes the bells of the campanile begin to strike new Year's midnight. They never toll ordinary midnight.
So I dress and go outside with a mug of Raven's eye organic imperial stout (an Xmas gift from Joe). I have time to prop open the outside door and step out just as last bells are tolled. They continue on in a carillon concert commencing naturally with "Auld Lang Syne."
Another nearby church begins striking midnight as the carillon chimes on and widespread firecrackers and gunshots volley into the distance for a half an hour. Signs of life erupt all over the otherwise ghostly town.
Earlier I'd eaten half of a cannabis caramel, and as twelve neared I refreshed with a few puffs and more stout. I would describe my state of being as a perfect buzz, far from over-indulgenge, as the year ran out. Overhead the about full moon is evanescent in the racing high clouds of a warmer air mass. In a clear view of San Francisco I can see the fireworks off of the Embarcadero. Red and blue predominate in the pyrotechnical blooms. helicopters can be seen flying above them, filming no doubt.
It is really a joyful moment so often scarce in these days of plentiful woe.
Just then a romp of slightly intoxicated chines student girls comes out into the backyard next door. "The full moon, the full moon..." they enthuse. We are invisible to each other behind the intervening avocado tree. They giggle awhile then go back inside.
I head back into my fleeting house myself. There follows a light midnight meal and yet another film-- undersea and outer space with Werner Herzog. The film unspools, the DVD spins, and the stars revolve into the as yet unknown.