San Sargasso

Oh the light ...

Two beers' buzz
it takes to remember
how the light flew up
from the waves at Lake Travis
like silver jewelry
only richer
more precious
because he was with me.
And he was with me,
though he may not be with me now,
though I expect
I am not in his mind at all.
It's all the same
because that moment he was with me.
I could reach over and touch him
and he would return my caress and smile.
With his blonde hair and blue eyes
(or were they green?)
and sleek body meant to be admired
like a rich garment.
Breathe.

Oh the light
the golden light
the rosy light
coming into my room
this moment
oh I remember now
I remember everything.
Why can't I remember everything
like this always?
All those things I understood
when I was intoxicated.
Twenty years of intoxication,
twenty years of understanding something
and then it's lost, lost, lost,
for all time.

Has anyone recorded such thoughts?
Perhaps we only understand the rhythm
or the coloration in that moment.
Inexpressible anyway.
Nonrecuperable, though I try now,
I feel it urgent to recuperate the joy,
the energy of dancing,
the intelligence of the body
that appears stupid.

Oh the rosy light,
the dying light
this very moment.
The brilliance of the zoo party
is that the light slowly dies
and the beauty increases
and the time seems endless
and the coming of night
is anticipated
and it comes.
A thousand lifetimes in one night.
Everything is remembered;
everything is recuperated.

Unforgivable Fake Martyr Fireplace

I wrote these phrases on my chalkboard:

unforgivable
fake martyr fireplace

unforgivable:  lately I've been tuning into an AM lounge music radio station that is targeted to elderly "swingers." They play a good selection of the cooler, swingin' stuff of Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Julie London, Peggy Lee, Louis Prima, Bobby Darin, etc. I love the idea of this generation of older people listening to music that to me is exciting and timeless, and I feel a kinship with them. However, it bothered me that the station played Natalie Cole's version of "Unforgettable" because I felt it was out of sync with the other music and had a schmaltzy edge to it. So in my mind I changed the lyric to: "Unforgivable."

fake martyr fireplace: on the way to meet a friend at a bar I passed a warehouse that I think used to house industrial appliances but to my surprise was now filled with outdoor barbecues and fireplaces. In the window was a kitschy fake fireplace with a wheel that cast wavering artificial flames, and I thought, wouldn't it be great to have little statues or images of famous people - or perhaps people you considered your enemies - interspersed in the fake flames with their arms raised like martyrs, or perhaps roasting in hell, Dantesque, with a bejeweled sign on the mantel saying: "Hell." How cozy and delicious it would be to warm your hands against that!

Mixed Company

I live in what is known as the gay quarter of San Sargasso, which lies at the crest of a hill overlooking the bay to the South and West, and a valley of shopping malls and writhing freeways to the North and East.

Now, before you start chalking in the "gay" stereotype of me that comes involuntarily to mind, you should know that I'm the sort of guy who would find living in West Hollywood or Chelsea (New York) anywhere from dispiriting to hateful. Any kind of cultural monotony tends to make me almost physically ill; and I like being able to travel freely in different sexual spheres. I have always preferred mixed company.

While heavily gay in population, the Crest is quite harmoniously integrated with the nongays who live both in and adjacent to the area. In the ten years I've lived here, I can't recall a single instance of friction, dirty looks, cutting remarks, etc., exchanged between members of the two sexual camps (although I did get some eggs thrown at me from a moving car once while walking on the main drag, but those were redneck joyriders from the outskirts).

I share a house with a straight guy and girl (they live in separate apartments), and, except for the occasional noise complaints, we all get along swimmingly. And, perhaps most tellingly, up a few blocks from me, the premier raucous middle-class gay restaurant/disco shares a narrow parking lot with the premier, hip/upscale, mostly-hetero, neighborhood cafe, and the two jarringly different worlds seem to coexist permeated by an offhand, congenial air of mutual tolerance.

This juxtaposition is particularly felicitous to me: I can sit reading in the outdoor part of the cafe (demarcated by an elegant railing and some tropical plants in terra cotta pots) and feel myself to be part of its somewhat rarefied ambience, while at the same time looking up now and then to observe surreptitiously the comings and goings of attractive, loose-moraled men who might arouse my male curiosity. Or I can roll up my sleeves and dive into the gay scene at the restaurant, knowing that at any time I can escape to the aromatic caffeinated oasis on the other side of the parking lot.

Equally Alive

I remarked the use of the phrase "living with cancer" on the radio. One also says now, "living with AIDS." This of course has supplanted the terms "dying of cancer/AIDS" and as such represents the kind of enlightened thinking, no doubt promulgated by one or a few impassioned crusaders, that gets assimilated into the general culture and helps us escape the tyranny of wrongheaded concepts. For, the fact is, while one may be able to plot a graph of this or that physiological function and gain some insight thereby, on a human and immediate level, each person who is alive in the present moment is equally alive.

Terror and Bliss

Can you imagine the degree of terror experienced in the nervous system of a spider's prey in the moment of capture? It's hard to imagine an equivalent in our world. But perhaps terror is only a neurochemical reaction programmed in for preservation of the individual, and, after the struggle is over, the prey experiences a moment of surrender, and perhaps that moment is very much like a divine state of bliss.

Intimations

While in Los Angeles to see a show of Diane Arbus's photographs, I was thinking, as I often do, about whether or not I should write things down. The monologue was falling more and more on the side of not writing. Whenever I do start to narrate thoughts or things that happened - it seems as though I would have to cover pages and pages just to do justice to a single theme, and while I'm doing that I'd be missing out on life - not only that, but in the end the product would in any case be unfaithful to life. It seems futile to go on about things, just as I often find photographs to be futile and pathetic as representations of reality.

Diane Arbus appears to have had an irresistible urge to take photographs, which I suppose is what makes an artist. It is said that a real artist must create - there is never any question of whether to create. "It is said" equates to cliche, but there must be some truth to it in the sense that one could never get anything of value accomplished without a certain amount of obsessiveness and zeal.

From reading excerpts from her journals that were on display at the museum, I got the impression that she was overbrimming with excitement and lyricism, and that the photographs, rich as they were, were really just inadequate recordings of the richness of her experience. At least we have the works: intimations. "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

I thought perhaps that if I do any writing the best form would be the brief aphoristic distillations that I have written in the past. I must ask myself what is essential: if I knew I were going to die tomorrow or in a few hours, what do I have to say that must be said, or at least that would be a pity if it remained unsaid. Could I save someone else a lot of trouble by saying something simply? Could I have saved myself a lot of trouble if I could express something I know now to myself 30, 20 or 10 years ago?

For example, this idea that keeps recurring to me that each and every life form, and possibly even what we think of as nonliving matter, is a momentary and sacred locus of sensation and consciousness that is acting and being on behalf of the whole universe. The hummingbird I saw today that paused on a power line and turned its head this way and that - the eyes and consciousness of the hummingbird are the universe contemplating itself in a very specific, momentary and sacred way.

And if we must speak of a "meaning" or "purpose" to life, is it not sufficient to say that we are here to serve as the eyes of the universe in the act of contemplating with joy and curiosity its own being? This is not of course an original idea - I believe I encountered it in Tolle and/or the Bhagavad Gita or perhaps James Campbell - but it is one thing to entertain intellectually a spiritual/mystical idea (which is all I think many people ever do), and quite another to experience it and see it and live it and understand it deeply and intuitively to be true. How lucky I am to have lived long enough to do that. But perhaps that is my reason for being.

Edge of the World

There are times - usually at night - when I'm alone in my second-floor apartment and all at once I stop still and listen because it has become so uncannily quiet, and I say to myself that I feel as though I am at the edge of the world. Though there is perhaps a bit of forlornness in it, more often than not I am thrilled by the supernaturalness of it, and it is energizing to have the illusion, at least, of solitude.

Can you hear the night? It's deafening.
- Near Dark

A Magnificent Glimpse of Enough

I live on the top floor of a circa 1920 house on a hill above the ocean. From time to time I've lamented the fact that I live so close to the ocean and so high up, yet I don't have a view. Like most people who don't have a view, I dream of having one someday.

But today as I was walking about I caught a glimpse through an open door of a bit of gold-orange sky and purple clouds which had that certain rich illumination the sun gives as it is setting behind the ocean, and I paused just for a moment to admire it, and I thought, that is so beautiful, that is enough of a view for anyone. In fact, I felt it was so magnificent and abundant, that it was really all that I could require or expect or desire out of life, and I realized that my job was not to struggle to get to a place with a better view, but rather to make myself more susceptible to the plenitude of what is available and present to me at such moments. The limitation was not in my circumstances, but in myself.