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My on-time entry for this week's Photo Friday challenge:
For a mostly vegetarian (which I am), the display of dressed meat is like a glimpse into the fringes of pornography. But hey, at the heart of it, when you think abut it, is nothing more than a muscle.
My belated entry for last week's Photo Friday challenge: Autumn
The signs of autumn in the parts of California I call home are rarely the riot of colors typical of climates with delineated seasons. If anything, the dominant color I associate with autumn around here is fresh, pristine green. That's because when the weather finally cools and the first rains have come down like an ancient memory the grass emerges with new shoots above the carpet of tinder-tinted gold that has been the ground for the dance of wind and fog all summer long.
Not long ago, friend complained about the impossibility of finding a place in her world – reconfigured by the death of a parent, the marriage of her son and the breakup of her own – that she can truly call home. My advice to her to keep exploring neighborhoods where she can see herself living were, of course, useless.
As we talked, she said that the problem of her quest for place was that she lost the compass, that fine-tuned magnetic guide to direction, that was her life defined by her relationships. It was the relationships that gave her – oriented her – in space. It was as if she had staked her place on the map, instead of familiarizing herself with the territory.
We all live in the space surveyed by our desires, rather than our senses, to different degrees. There is no trick to making the map come alive. But it is possible hop along, even without the compass, between map and territory. More than possible, because in the end that is the stakes that delineate the shape our lives.
On Sunday, we went to the farmers' market at the Civic Center in Marin. I was still in the mood to cook, or rather to feed people and so share more conversation in their company, as I had done in New York so recently that the tastes of the meal my friend and I cooked for mutual friends lingered still on my tongue.
And so I cruised through the aisles of our splendidly bountiful market, each heaped to the gills with organic produce that shamelessly seduced the senses while making quite a cogent plea with the mind over the shameless prices it asked us for the pleasure to consume them. Of course, I had to remind myself, one doesn't go to this market to save one's health or the environment, for that matter. One goes, because, well, it's the market in a sense in which it evokes nostalgia about how life once was or could be some day: immediate but seasonal, unpredictable but deeply satisfactory for the senses, local and sustainable, and all sorts of other juxtapositions that can't be made about supermarkets.
Within 20 minutes of going from aisle to aisle, we were loaded down with bags of produce, bread and cheese, and fish, all of which we hauled to our car. During the drive home, I planned the menu, now that I had the ingredients. In the afternoon I cooked and cooked, and when dinnertime came around, well the son living with us had no interest in the dishes I made and cobbled together a meal of his own, the husband sat down with his plate at the counter with the newspaper spread out, and I retreated to the couch with my plate and turned on the television. That we all sat like this in the same room, made it the more absurd.
It's not that I forgot to invite people for dinner. It's more that the kind of impromptu meal we had in New York, where we went from having one person invited over for dinner in the morning to having four more come as the hours went by as an impossible event in the space of the suburbs where I live. That Marin used to be known as a New Age capital of sorts, with spontaneity ranking high on the list of crazy things seems ironic to me, because its never something I ever experienced here. Arranging dinner dates with people here seems to be a complicated affair that requires super skills with synchronizing calendars, all of which infuses each dinner I manage to organize with an element of formality that spoils both the cooking and the conversation for me, in spite of the great ingredients, the lovely climate, and the spacious dining room – elements that didn't feature so prominently in similar events I had when I lived in Vancouver or all the times I went to see my old friends, originally from Vancouver, in New York.
If yoga is, as Patañjali says, the settling of the mind into silence, then, this man, sitting in the middle of the hubbub in front of the New York Public Library, is a master of sorts.
Then again, he appears settled only because of the furtive frame I imposed on him as I went about shooting timidly – and without any method, that is: artlessly – trying to do the exact opposite of what yoga is about: agitate my mind through forcing my eye to see beyond what it was taking in.
I took a lot of pictures while I was in New York, most of which I deleted already. The ones that remain on my hard drive are unsettled images not of place so much as of a mind wondering (and wandering) about, well, images. That's because, while in New York, I had two conversation about photography with two gifted “seers.” One told me of a long time spent in studying the images of other photographers to see how they solved certain problems for making of the image more than a representation. The other photographer told me of frustrating times spent in having to make a way to seeing again and again, in spite of a seasoned past of shooting.
Oddly, I realized later, these two approaches to photography describe pretty much what the “craft” of writing has been for me. For years I studied texts to see how others have solved the problem of making words into gateways to worlds. Then, as I got older, and the world became more obscure in a dimming field of vision, I mistook the loss of clarity in the world for a loss of words.
The problem I have to solve then is not “re-presenting,” or even “presenting,” but being present, even if in a world that exists only in the blink of an eye, as it did in the lens, in which a man, though troubled he may be, appears to have mastered calm for all eternity.
When I was in New York last week, I got lost briefly -- or rather, lost my bearings just as the sun was setting. It happened after having spent a lovely afternoon in conversation with an individual whose wit, verbal acuity, and artist's eye took me to a place I only know these years through haunting it in memory.
So it was unsettling, to say the least, to find myself on strange streets intersecting into a grid that mapped nothing familiar to my mind that was also trying to make sense of a map to a lost territory.
It took a while to remember that I had a Blackberry that I could use for navigation. at least for getting me physically back to my hosts' home. As for that other displacement, not even the setting sun can provide a compass point, because there is no point to it. Or rather, in it.
Nearly 40 years since I first met one of the friends I saw in New York. Back then, we were students at UBC in Vancouver, Canada, and within months, also roommates. A few years later I met my other friend (at whose place I was staying in the Village) at the other university in town, Simon Fraser University.
That some October day, decades later we would be sitting around the table as US citizens (though still listening to Leonard Cohen) was not something we would have imagined for ourselves.
I spent the weekend on a yoga retreat a stone's throw (well, more like one-hour's drive) from my backyard, here. That I have nothing to write about in terms of what went on there is like to serve as the best proof of having lived completely in the moment, for at least two days. Well maybe something like that -- or perhaps yet another opportunity to show of my lazy side. Which, by the way, got quite a workout, poolside...
