All Soul's Day Night Tidbits

I'm drinking a coffee float at nearly ten at night and listening to Dead Moon's Dead Moon Night-Thirteen Off My Hook. In a little bit, we're gonna go climb the hill with its hidden garden staircases, its parched lunar landscape and admire the All Soul's Day full moon. What we did on All Soul's Day was active, sun-lit, muscular.

We went down to Alemany Farm and spent part of the afternoon constructing a road of mulch, an activity that required lots of pitchforking, wheelbarrowing and raking. Seemingly simple, seemingly tedious but then we got to harvest the last tomatoes of the season -- orange-red bombs of tart sweetness -- while our muscles thrummed in the dying light.

Update: we didn't climb the hill, we went to Alamo Square Park and stared at the moon and heard bats in heat surrounding our heads and talked about communes until 3 a.m.

This is the legendary and amazing Dead Moon.

I woke up with a bad taste in my mouth from October, so I ran in the dry, November heat -- an odd phrase to say -- until I coughed up party gunk. Gunk from Chicago, from Halloween, from pre-Halloween, from the compulsion to only live in festival-time. How to break habits in favor of adventure? Constantly asking myself that, constantly asking myself the same questions and wondering whether they are worth asking or better worth shelving.

I've been slipping in and out of fevered note taking but cannot confine myself to one river of thought. The novel I'm etching out is slightly halted after my excited reading of Erick's Lyle's punk-pastiche-history-memoir of S.F. pre and post dot-com bust: On The Lower Frequencies.

Really it's about a time when people still wanted San Francisco to be for the working class, the artists, the punks, the squatters, the poor, etc.

I'm remembering thanks to him, that most of what I want to do in my novel is to tie in personal history with the larger mystique of Bay Area history, and not that I need to drown in research but just discuss simple things, like the history of Cayuga Gardens, or the high crime rate in McClaren Park or the fact that underneath 6th street there are tunnels, or the fact that if you look at old footage from the '89 earthquake you can see, despite the surrounding wreckage, the dirty windows of my old Oakland warehouse still intact and gleaming in their sepia-wash glory.

When you come to live in a city, how many ghosts do you inhale without even knowing it? That's the question of October.

If nothing else read Lyle's book for a completely raw look at what cities are like when you extract all the suburban pretensions, when they become places where people just want to live, where ruins are habitable and where, when it comes down to it, what matters is not having to spend your life paying off for basic necessities like coffee and friendship and music.

Dreams briefly:

I don't like talking about dreams but lately my subconscious has been in upheaval. Today I woke up with sickly dreams of guilt, not just your usual guilt, but something I prefer to call "wisdom-guilt": guilt about not trying to be wise enough.

This philosopher I've been reading compulsively, Cornelius Castoriadis enjoys contrasting in many of his works how the Ancient Athenians viewed the world compared to the Modern West. One of the distinctions he makes is how the purpose of life by Athenian conceptions was for wisdom and beauty and today the purpose is happiness, both collective and individual and usually based on prosperity, excess and financial surplus.

Perhaps, an over-simplification but he backs it up with compelling scholarship.

For instance, I admitted in last night's dream that I was stealing money from the store I'm working at. Why? To fund a trip by camel to a magical lagoon that has pearls at the bottom of it that are worth more than most human souls.

Who was to join me on the trip? Many of the guys I spent cavorting with a little over a week ago at Al Capone's old nightclub, The Chevy Chase, in the Chicago English countryside region. At least to me, it resembled the English countryside. But inside it was like a German dance hall with a polka band in the balcony and rumors of smuggling tunnels that burrowed all the way to the Chicago River.

And then even before that dream: some volatile, vinegar concoction that you pore into aquariums in order to change the colors of the fish, merely for fleeting entertainment.

I remember a phrase from that dream: "Look my love, blue and white are the colors of control, always remember that."

I woke up with the urge to run. In the odd November heat.

John Berger, Tears and Dead Moon

The day I turned 30, I was in Santa Cruz with Katy, already a well-documented trip, and went to my old place of employment, Logos Books and said what the hell, maybe they'll have something I've been looking for, something my own store doesn't have or that I haven't seen yet.


Amazingly, I found this first edition of To The Wedding by John Berger for a very good price. Inside was a postcard of the cover of the last book I had read: Jean Rhys, The Complete Novels. A simple, if somewhat strange coincidence. Later we went to a spa with our books and didn't get them wet and when I got home, I inscribed my name in the book, with Logos and 30 underneath it.


Of course, it hadn't taken me long to become enraptured with Berger's works.

All I had to do was become reappraised of him and to judge among his large, and bewilderingly varied output and to read one of his latest works a few months back, Here Is Where We Meet, a poetic, fictionalized autobiography of landscape and loss that still dazzles my memory and haunts my own writing.

Today, in an infrequently patronized cafe, I finished To The Wedding and found myself dabbing away hot late morning tears over my large cup of weak coffee. Crying doesn't usually happen when I read but Berger, at least based on these two novels I've read, deals in a sort of transformative poignance that is unlike anything I've encountered before in fiction, except maybe for Coetzee in Waiting For The Barbarians and Life And Times Of Michael K.

But Berger's vision is even larger, large enough to contain historical episodes, artistic interludes, geographical quirks, odd species and local customs, among the whole range of variation and fable that are his palette.

Speaking of found objects, because so much of Berger's work feels like a chain of found objects possessing its own logic:

I had forgotten until the other day that I had since replaced the postcard of the young lovers in Brassai's French bistro with another, older postcard that Katy found in one of the books in the sale cart in front of my store.


By all accounts, Eastern European peasants or Roma of some sort, and a mysterious piece of writing on the back.



I hadn't started the book after my birthday trip but instead had laid it aside while I finished another birthday present, The Secret History, a wonderful novel in its own right.

But with To The Wedding, I took my time, I savored the gem-like sentences, the undulating episodes that often, in their telling, take on the form of the wondrous landscapes that Berger, with his painter's eye, renders palpable on the page, mostly black, night-darkened mountains that are being pierced by a sagely motorcyclist and long rivers with many fingers and conduits upon which a melancholy, Czech woman with an aching finger is idly floating down en route to a rendezvous.

The wedding in question is truly, purely bittersweet; and the love story that initiates it feels like one of the most honest, uplifting ones that can exist, mainly because corrosion and mortality and disease are such a defining feature of it.

To love someone unconditionally who is doomed to a wildly premature death, who is tainted with a terminal, ravaging virus, to know that she has 2, maybe 3 years without a blemish before the disease starts to do its rapid destructive work. Berger poses this quandary amidst the plane trees and fields and rice paddies of rural Europe, in the shadow of Communism's failure, in the general soul failure of middle class existence and in all the little things, the trinkets, the food, the palaver of life that constantly bubble to the surface of his prose.

Berger, while remaining staunchly a Communist, a farmer, a man clearly on the side of the earthy and the earthly, turns books into prayers almost, but prayers to the earth, to mortality itself, not to get even with death but to sing of the paradoxes that beset us, as if acknowledging them in the most beautiful, haunting way possible will make them more understandable.

It's a beautiful book, quite possibly as beautiful as everyone has claimed. I would be hard-pressed to distill from all the complex tragedies and joys of life a book that seemed so much like an invocation, a promise to the dead, some ancient Greek form of homage that has long been forgotten.

As Michael Ondaatje says, "In some countries it must still be the writer's role to gather and comfort. . .to hold and celebrate a moment before darkness. With To The Wedding, John Berger has written a great, sad and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death. Wherever I live in the world I know I will have this book with me."

It left me kind of shattered today after I read it, and then I had a strange day at work, with many awkward, misunderstood and tantalizing encounters. For some reason now I feel sore and beaten, but for no good reason and I better pluck up because I got to go to Chicago in a day from now for a wedding as well! A very happy wedding I'm excited to be attending.

Oh -- and because brute passion really is the stuff of good art, I'll leave you with a band I listened to at work that reminds me of the passion of John Berger: a three piece band from Portland called Dead Moon who played for nearly 20 years, husband on guitar and vocals and his wife on bass and vocals.