I was lucky to take my third little pilgrim Nor Cal road trip at the end of June. Holding on/returning to spaces that contain some deep solace and mystery, and some evidence of divine creativity overlapping with human desire is an ongoing quest. Memory is made of these spaces. New, repaired, or reinvented spaces are made through the memory of other, older ones.
I think Teilhard de Chardin said something like we are here to help spiritualize the earth. Sometimes this means leaving some places alone. The Carmel beach facing Point Lobos that is never, ever crowded is a place whose white sands I’ve sunk my toes in for years now, on infrequent visits, my eyes watching nothing in particular except the strident, blue-emerald, wind-cut quality of the place.
I spent some silent, wandering time here last week. As ever, I was filled to the brim with impressions, mainly of quietude, mystery, the astonishing ongoingness of organic and cosmic life, the reassuring littleness of my own life.
A place of “secluded majesty” I told my friend. A place that makes you feel as if at a source of a rare kind of contemplative tranquility. So of course, the town of Carmel that encloses the beach is one built for millionaires. This unpolluted natural beauty is pricey. Sacredness is forever entangled with money concerns. Perhaps the work of sacredness is to make money serve it instead of being money’s servant. But this beach has always remained subtly vacant and oddly pristine-seeming, possessing, I imagine, a wildness that is not exactly luxurious or lucrative. But I could be wrong. I know that I’m also wrong about what is sacred. For it is probably entered into where I should least expect it.
On a run there, this last road trip, I threw myself in the very cold ocean afterward, rising up, foamy and howling. I then sat under a driftwood structure, saying a prayer, my body buzzing, alive, and exhilarated from the cold ocean water, the whistling wind, and the mild beach light. This is the only beach I’ve been to housing so many driftwood structures. This is the only beach I’ve been to where I felt I could pray so effortlessly, even as I still don’t quite understand what prayer is. Often my prayer is just a short praise-phrase in Arabic or a thank you or just breathing with the tides.
I keep trying to pray in times of calamities; in times of feeling the world’s sacredness being more and more desecrated by the privileged and the powerful. Along with many of my friends I consider the blasphemy of feeling spiritual in a world whose leaders are so visibly committing atrocities. Again and again. We may argue that this is/has been all the time, just often we are lucky not to see it, not to feel it, not to know it. Luck of course has a lot to do with it. So does selective knowing, selective seeing, selective delving. Discrimination, which keeps some of us sane. Prayer remains difficult and takes on for me peculiarly dark tones. Yet darkness has never been occluded from the path. Prayer, perhaps, is not meant to be easy. Darkness is meant to not be understood but only bravely beheld, another part of the cosmos. The biggest, brightest part.
This is the beach that exudes a serene, raw beauty that is hard to compare to other shorelines. It feels both mountainous and Mediterranean, ruggedly tempestuous and sensually mollifying. The inland vegetation of tightly-bunched sage, lilacs, marjoram, bindweed, scrub, and mock heather - a weave of purple and yellow, fuchsia and dark green - resembles that of Corsica or Cornwall. The copper-blue river inlet that rushes into the ocean requires a bracing barefoot crossing. The oval curvature of the shore fringed by dark green-furred ridges holds the mind’s eye so gently in its sweep. The sleeping crocodile shape of Point Lobos extending into the wild waters evokes an ancient and coiled landmass, akin to buried Lyonesse.
I keep retuning to this beach and hope to in the years to come.
On this last road trip, I began my first stop by going to this beach and nearly ended it there, too, on my way home among all the 4th of July crowds and Central Valley heat waves.
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My creative work and my teaching, my imagination of myself, my desires, my sense of meaning, my fears and tics, my chosen energies, my devotions: arts/acts of return.
At the same time, the worst manifestations of human arrogance, brutality, greed, and hubris, in both individuals and groups: arts/acts of return.
In the textbook I’m writing and its related book of essays, I consider the prefix “Re” and its many analogous, though varied applications. These “Re” words are so prevalent in my vocabulary and imagination, and in the works of others I gravitate to:
Revive
Research
Rebirth
Revise
Reinvent
Reimagine
Reconcile
Resist
Rekindle
Repair
Recuperate
Revisit
Restore
Rebuild
Response
Reaction
Recover
Refuge
Return
These words and their promises, their connotations, their implications pop up, again and again in my life. Indeed, they are words that condense the energies of the word “Again” just like how recently I was writing about how love hinges on the word “Almost.”
Words that become horizons and thresholds, conjurations and covenants.
Any sense of the word “Again” also evokes words that take on more negative meanings, like nostalgia, sentimentality, romanticism, attachment, repetition-compulsion, fixation, remorse, regret. Or, in the case, of wars and genocides: the fact that some human actions that are so inhuman and evil can keep returning, can keep happening again without modification, without rectification, without censure.
Things, places, feelings, thoughts return and are remembered involuntarily a lot of the time. Some are intentionally summoned and even charmed into slightly different forms as they flicker into conscious awareness. (Someone once told me that most of consciousness is memory. Yet consciousness is also hard to define and isolate.)
Any act of bringing something back also entails change and mutation. Distortion and illusion. Quickly meditations on the many forms of the word “Again” and its “Re” words leads into the uncanny and the spectral. The word “haunt,” whose trajectories I never tire of exploring, originates in the phrase,“to frequent a place” and also “home.” This also makes me think of “frequency” but now this is becoming a different conversation. More usually, if I write about “memory” I will likely also write the word “dream” - the mnemonic and the oneiric always in uneasy mixings.
But here I want to mostly talk about the return to some places that I love and have, mostly recently, made a point of revisiting. I also want to think about how memory is involved in these arts of returning.
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A quick return to San Francisco recently, and I’m regretful I couldn’t make time to see more people I still know who live there. Although I was blessed to see a few. And I was grateful to enter into the streets of this uniquely beautiful city and walk several miles a day - and up many hills, too, as I was staying on Nob Hill. Walking in San Francisco has been one of the great and most vivid joys of my life, both when I lived there for about a decade and in my many trips as a visitor. The walks immerse you in qualities of light and color, expose you to startling contrasts and to urban ambiences that are charming, pleasant, dazzling, and sometimes disquieting. As you are swept along and shaken by them, many are hard to describe or name. One of these includes the angles of morning light as they gild the fire escapes on downtown apartment buildings. I always say the noir-ambient image of fire escapes is one reason why I wanted to live in a city in the first place.
Plus it was Pride weekend and my heart lifts seeing all the costumed, exuberant, and blissed-out people freely celebrating the mosaic of their identities and experiences. Walking first in my old neighborhood, Bernal Heights, I was reassured to find a new little bookstore had opened up there. I talked to the owner and mentioned the bookstore I used to work at in Bernal, which is now an artisanal food shop. I took note of the many businesses that are still enduring from when I last lived and worked there. I walked past the house of my friend Neeli who died this last spring. This was the first time I had retuned to this neighborhood in years.
Later I would think about how I wanted to return, if only in imagination, into the tidal serenity of our patio conversations that we had so many afternoons with espresso and books overlooking Neeli’s garden. How often do we imagine returning to a particular conversation with someone? How much of who we are was partially influenced by dialogue we had with another?
So then I strode to the top of Bernal and gave my face over to the cleansing winds and the clear, blue-tinged, glimmering grid of the cityscape below. Bernal seems to be fed by the cultural streams of at least three neighborhoods, which I think is part of its unique charms.
This city, I thought, has always been invested with a “wind mysticism” that I’ve never felt anywhere else. There is a specific feeling of being on a high plateau or summit and surrendering to the native winds and gusts there that has no particular word, at least in English, but I want to think of one. I remember many San Francisco days and nights when I was hounded by some difficult emotion so I sought out a steep road or promontory just to let the sea-salty wind rush over me. The winds of the desert serve a similar purpose. But when I think of the San Francisco winds they always encountered me as “reminders” — reminders that I am more than just the visible elements I seem made from and much more than the all-too-human preoccupations consuming me. My face awash in cooling reminders, I felt renewed.
It wasn’t always clear to me that I wanted to return to San Francisco as a visitor. At one point I had felt so personally affronted by the City’s changes that I vowed never to visit again. But the loss of my dear friend had somehow changed all that for me. Now I am glad and grateful to be a regular visitor to this City, when time and money allow, while knowing this gratitude and joy is also rooted in mourning. Emotions return to us in new forms with added layers. So I also contemplate about how being a denizen and being a visitor entail different and sometimes overlapping perspectives. Being a guest, generally, is a permanent condition experienced in many different contexts.
Before I passed through SF on this road trip, I went to Big Sur down the Hwy 1 from Carmel. One of the refrains in recent years in terms of Big Sur is whether its freeway or parts of it are closed due to damage from storms and collapsing road sections.
This time I was able to return to the Henry Miller Memorial Library which is not exactly a library but is a bookstore, community nonprofit space, and arts venue.
Notwithstanding the understandable objections to and criticisms of a lot of his work, a large part of Miller’s essays, especially, have been concerned with trying to bring together spirituality, creativity, literature, utopian possibilities, and unorthodox communitarian values. They were among the earliest essays I read in my life which had a lasting impression on me. In the mid 1940’s Miller began living in Big Sur, alongside and with the help of several other kindred bohemian friends, paying something like 5 dollars a month for rent and subsisting largely off food and goods shared with others or mailed in from supporters. The appeal of Miller, for so many, stems from the question he was constantly trying to respond to: how can I live a life of beauty, freedom, and inspiration without getting beat down by the many systems that enforce drudgery, ennui, hopelessness, banality, and oppression?
His answers to that were often accused of being uncouth and offensive. This question, of course, is posed and explored by many other writers who had far fewer privileges and advantages than Miller and whose perspectives speak to a wider range of voices. I’m not here to make any argument about Miller’s work, but to suggest that the experimental, rebellious world he was a part of in Big Sur, and its ongoing legacy today, helps people grapple with this enduring question in often inspiring ways.
This “library,” nestled so discreetly in the woods, testifies to the fact that culture can still help create feelings of freedom, mystery, wonder, and alternate ways of participating/playing in the world. Culture can provide refuge energies. The disheveled art garden on the grounds is the kind of place I want to always be able to visit simply because of how it makes me feel. How it makes me feel is what connects me to entangled traditions of art and spirituality and radical community making.
These last few times I’ve visited the Memorial library I’ve talked to the young man — two different young men, at this point — working the counter. Both have sung the praises of staying temporarily in Big Sur, as long as you’re ok with a little rustic discomfort. This most recent young man told me that he and his girlfriend were staying nearby in an arts residency that I should check out. The young man is a Miller scholar living in France, I learned, but who frequently comes to Big Sur. (Part of me wanted to ask how his girlfriend felt about Miller, but I didn’t.) The residency had just begun and they were the first to be selected.
My two recent returns to the Memorial Library, in spring and in summer, with its decaying, hermetic art garden, its cozy little wood-paneled bookshop, its wraparound patio facing the woods, its visitors from around the world that I’ve talked to, its ongoing experiments in art and performance hosting — all this makes me return, in my imagination, to an intricate daydream scenario that I’ve written about here in which I help create, curate, and run a beautifully inclusive, multi-faceted cultural-artistic space that somehow blends bookstore with art space with garden space with educational space with meditation/prayer space with cafe space. The ultimate mystical-cultural space, in a sense. A daydream, and something to work towards still, to keep making blueprints for, talking to others about.
Living within systems that are not invested in honoring the integrity of all living things means we need refuges. A refuge, which means, etymologically “to flee, again”, entailing a place where those in flight can find nurturance, sustenance, safety, again. And again. My classroom I treat as a refuge, no matter what. My home. My friendships and family. My imagination. The place where my head touches earth in prayer and supplication or where I sit in meditation. The remote and hidden beaches and cafes and shrines and soup kitchens. I wish there were more refuges and sanctuaries. I know my hunger for them is because I want to help make more of them.
The rotting piano has collapsed, as the library website reminds us.
After Big Sur and San Francisco, I did a short return to Mount Tamalpais on an overly hot day. I couldn’t linger, for it was too hot. I was the only one out there on the trail. But this view always sustains me, this unimaginable stampede of trees rushing up against the mystic blue of the sea. Some places we return to because others that we love and admire keep returning to them. In this case, the writings of Etel Adnan now circulate through my own imagination and Mt. Tamalpais was one of her spiritual and artistic lodestones. She guided me there. There is something profound and archaic about this mountain that I will keep revisiting with Adnan.
One of the pleasures of walking in San Francisco and certain, other cities is stumbling on tucked away urban gardens, especially in areas where their existence seems unlikely. Here is a little peephole view of a Nob Hill garden I found on one of my recent walks. Next time I want to visit Oakland again because I remember thinking that the most unsuspectedly beautiful urban gardens thrive there.
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As I was leaving SF, I suddenly remembered a place that I hadn’t returned to in years but that had become a mythic space in a lot of my writing. In the very hinterlands of SF, the Cayuga Garden and Playground is tucked away down a cul-de-sac, like a hidden cove of grass and trees.
I have written here about discovering this garden over a decade ago and the dazzling, almost paranormal sense of surprise, rarely replicated, that the place inspired. Throughout the years I had absorbed perhaps unreliable narratives of how the garden’s statues had been decimated, gone missing, destroyed; how the garden itself had been paved over and developed; how the magic had gone from the place and would never return. I’m glad to see that not much of this was the case.
Although, as I’m noticing as well in San Diego, urban designers and planners feel the need to add extra paving or concrete as well as more purposeful-looking structures in public places to mitigate the untidiness of plant life and the invitation for sketchiness that unchecked foliage might inspire. Concrete and paving seems to help people with orientation and they foster focused movement maybe. Or so the thinking goes.
Despite my misgivings about the newly paved parts, I was so glad I made this last-minute stop and had a quick walk through the park. Although it’s not the same as it was — but how could it be? — the magic endures in nuanced tones and shades, and I was aware of several statues that I had not remembered from my earlier visits.
This kind of return was not nostalgia but something else. I also loved how I recognized in some cases favorite statues that had been given a new coat of paint or some that had been left to naturally erode. I remember what that face used to be, I thought. An earth-tone building and what seemed to be a little museum inside it had been built to honor the distinguished gardener, artist, and visionary who made the place: Demi Braceros.
With this particular sacred space, as with so many other places I return to, my vision gets bound up with research. Research is endless. Research can sometimes get in the way, but at is best it provides rhythm and nuance. It gives a foundation. I remember when there was scant information about Cayuga Garden online and what I could find when into my very brief backstory I initially wrote about the place. But today I stumbled on an incredibly loving and exhaustive online page dedicated to Braceros and to the garden. Below is the site’s link to a lovely biography of the artist and gardener, as well as a link to an amazingly detailed catalog of the statues he made. Since I only discovered this today, I have more to look at and follow and explore.
Sunlight Entered His Hands Biography
Sunlight Entered His Hands Art Catalog
Here is a brief snippet from the biography above: “In 1973, Demetrio “Demi” Braceros, a practical arts teacher, immigrated to California with his wife. He came as part of a wave of Filipino migration to San Francisco in the 1970s through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which ended racial discrimination in immigration policies. Demi had grown up in the small town of Cabugao in the province of Ilocos Sur, a rugged coastline in northern Philippines where he had learned how to farm. In college, he studied wood carving and then mastered his craft over a decade, while working as a teacher. Like many migrants, Demi took up a variety of jobs in his first few years, from portering to a position at a law firm, but then opted for a shovel and shears tending to the trees at the Golden Gate Park Arboretum. In 1986, he accepted a gardening position at Cayuga Playground with San Francisco Recreation and Parks and remained there for twenty-three years.”
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On this last road trip up north, I knew my late friend Neeli’s book had just recently come out, so I made a point of buying it at City Lights Books. I didn’t realize I bought it the exact day of Neeli’s birthday. He would have been 79 years old. Momentarily I felt his presence next to me or I felt my need to wish so hard for that presence. I don’t know why but I flipped towards the end of the book and read this poem and the tears came, again.
“On a newborn shoreline/under aged sun” - a phrase for the ages.
There is more I wanted to say about returns. But this will suffice.
I am now back in San Diego, holding these memories up to the light, both the sun’s and the moon’s, feeling the summer’s stickiness, the torpor, and the nervous expectations of the Fall. All the places and voices and friends will remain, even if changed. Roots. Homelands. Lineages. Ancestors. The work is reimagining them when they seem gone. The Miller book of essays I ended up buying at the Big Sur Memorial Library is entitled Remember to Remember, a phrase I’ve heard before, a phrase I’ve said before. A phrase that explains it all. And I will certainly add more to this again, later.