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July 19, 2011
Two Ways of Seeing a River
When I first came here, I took the GPS off of my bike and stuck it in my backpack. Without it, the city maintained it's mystery. I'd drive until I was blissfully lost in the 11 hills of San Francisco, dodging pigeons and the shadows of pigeons, deftly and nimbly skating across the city's cable car tracks.
When I drove across Mexico on a dirt bike, I deliberately didn't take a map. I intentionally did not research the trip before I left, because I wanted to discover the country, as Cortez had seen it.
There is immeasurable value in being lost. In searching and discovering. This is the goal of being alive. To somehow, carry around this mystery and hand it to others. In my mind, this is "the pearl" that Kerouac was referring to.
But after grid searching the Mission, the Loin, and SOMA for graffiti, the city has lost much of it's mystery. I'm finding it much harder to get lost in San Francisco, these days.
I've spent a great deal of time studying the flowers and trees of the city, culminating in my recent purchase of "The trees of San Francisco", a ghastly misstep. Now, instead of carrying these mysteries around with me, turning them over and over in my mind, bathing them with attention as an oyster coats a grain of sand...instead of this, countless mysteries were slain in a single misstep. I have the book beside me now and if I had any sense of integrity I'd throw it in trash.
The book does to the flora of San Francisco what the GPS does to the city streets. It eviscerates the mystery of the city. Reduces the city from an idyllic, mysterious xanadu to didactic grid of streets and blocks. An urban soliloquy. Something less than the sum of it's parts.
I used to see the delicious murals splayed across the cityscape as magnificent, romantic dreams of some clandestine artist creating art for art's sake. Beautiful visions of naked altruism in city by the bay. Pure, unadulterated beauty to lift the spirits of the city's denizens. But now, I see them differently. Now, I see the murals and I think "oh, that's by Amanda Lynn, Chad Hasegawa, Andrew Schoultz, Dan Plasma, ROA, or Chor Boogie. And I know which gallery is displaying their work. And even the hours that the gallery is open. And who owns the gallery. And it's not that it's not great art, it's superb art. But when the mystery is stripped away, some of the lustre is peeled away as well.
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, made a number of insightful observations. One that I especially liked was when he made reference to an observation by Mark Twain. Pirsig wrote:
"Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty."
I loved the observation. What he alluded to is singularly brilliant. Something I'd always felt, but never admitted. However, Pirsig didn't quote Mark Twain exactly, or make reference to the exact source of this observation anywhere in his book. Of course, I wanted to find exactly what Mark Twain had said and last night, after grid searching the mission for graffiti, I stumbled across this:
"Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!" - Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi - Two Ways of Seeing a River
Yes. Of course. Always I've felt this, but never had the courage to admit it. I admire Robert Pirgsig, Samuel Clemens, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller because of their courage. It's difficult to imagine saying what you truly feel, without considering the consequences. As my uncle once observed, "we all wear different hats for different people". We all expose different truths and fears to different people. Only among our closest and most trusted friends do we truly approach being ourselves - expressing our deepest fears and greatest hopes.
And yet, Mark Twain comes out and, after studying the river in depth, instead of bragging that "I've now mastered the Mississippi River, and I know it as well as most riverboat pilots"...instead of this...he comes out and admits something that's deeply disturbing...that something's found, but something's lost as well. The river's mystery is irretrievably lost.
And this is where I am with San Francisco, I'm afraid.
After work, I drive to Central Computers and try to return my new laptop, but they're not interested. I'm stuck with this brick. Brilliant.
The homeless turn a trash can over in the street, a dig carefully through the contents. A homeless pinata. They dig through the city's entrails like oracles reading tea leaves.
Now home to clean my camera's sensor with listerine and qtips. Probably not officially sanctioned by Canon, I imagine. Now, to wander the city. Where to go? Where to go? I decide to scope out the Haight, so down to Haight street and rolling through lower Haight and upper Haight. I find a few new murals I've not seen before. Recognize many I've shot before. Eventually, I grow bored with the Haight and decide to go off in search of the West Portal.
I roll up Market and once Market starts to climb up Twin Peaks, it just turns into the autobahn, apparently. People are racing up the hill going like 60 mph and I'm trying not to get run over is all. I get lost trying to find the West Portal, and some people are shouting at me. I pull up to them and kill the engine.
"Pop a wheelie," they call to me.
"Uh. OK. Where's the West Portal?"
"I'm going there now. Follow me." So I follow this stranger to the West Portal and he wave to me when we get there. It's sort of odd, this place. I remember clearly when I first stumbled onto it. I was like...what the h3ll? It's a tunnel, that goes into the mountain, and where it leads, no one is sure. There is no East Portal. I'm not really clear what happens to those people the West Portal swallows.
Now back up over the hill on Portola, to Market and back down from Twin Peaks. At the bottom, where Market turns back into a nightmare of traffic and red lights, I'm paralyzed by sirens and flashing lights.
I hear the city's sirens in my dreams. They haunt me day and night. At home. At work. In my dreams. Ambulances and car alarms. Wailing civil defense sirens and fire trucks. Police cars and earthquakes. Tires squealing as the cars crash into each other in the streets below. This mad, inescapable cacophony of life and death is carved indelibly into my brain.
This cop comes flying up behind me and I don't know what to do. I'm not going to run. I'm not going to flush like a pheasant from the field. I have no idea what's going on and I just hold tight and this cop comes flying up behind me, swerves around me, nearly killing me in the process. He goes screaming by and misses me by a couple of feet maybe. Scares the living hell out of me and I swear it will be a miracle if I live through my project here. It will be a miracle.
Posted by Rob Kiser on July 19, 2011 at 12:11 PM
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