Reflections... From San Francisco To A2
The first night in San Francisco, I dreamt Albert Ayler was performing in an outdoor amphitheatre. The sky was crackling with approaching thunder and lightning. Albert blew a saxophone while floating overhead wearing a large white parachute which billowed behind him. Afterwards when he walked by, I tried to convey my happiness at seeing him alive (Ayler's body was fished out of the East River more than 25 years ago); all I could sputter was "you are a beautiful light with a beautiful shadow." Albert seemed amused. Then he was gone and the place was empty. I sat, in my dream, listening to the storm, which had arrived in all its electric glory.
No matter how we pump up our stress level here in Ann Arbor, the coffee, not to mention the driving, is more dangerous in California. Living on a fait line can nut you right out. So spake my lady and as usual she's right as raindrops. The red cafés have been happening out there for a good long while. Ann Arbor's high-profile coffee shops are expensive imitations of these genuine cappuccino joints which originated in the old Italian neighborhoods.
One element which is sure to follow you wherever you might travel is the small but loud knot of professional men flushed with Self, glutted with Power. They gargle and chew at the air without listening to each other. It's sad. I had to leave to get some quietude, which the acacias, azaleas and yuccas were happy to provide. It was a peaceful day. The ground was perfectly still, though there was mint growing up through tell-tale cracks in the foundations of most of the buildings, l've often compared myself (as a writer) to a seismograph. Walking down the street and contemplating earthquakes, the metaphor suddenly seemed reckless and uncanny. I took refuge in a bookstore.
In fact we raided every bookstore we could find, on a daily basis. Ann Arbor and San Francisco have this in common; biblio-heads can romp with abandon through many different spaces devoted exclusively to bounded texts. No matter what town you're in, the independents are the ones to support. That doesn't mean "avoid the bigger stores," but rather "find the most precious and sow your dollars accordingly." Our favorite was "Bound Together," the Anarchist bookstore on Haight Street. There it was we found a couple of copies of Judith Malina's diaries (1947-57). (Nobody in Ann Arbor had been able to find this title. "Bound Together" had a stack of 'em.) Across the street, where the cashier was playing an Eric Dolphy tape nice and bud, Lindsay pinned a first edition of Diane DiPrima's Revolutionary Letters. Utter, total elation.
KPOO (89.5 FM) is as cool as WWOZ (home of John Sinclair) in New Orleans. The KPOO people played visionary Free Jazz (David S. Ware) at eleven-thirty in the morning. No apologies, no coddling . Undiluted Blues and Serious Oakland Funk in the afternoon. Every Tuesday at mid-day, the station is turned over to members of the Church of Saint John Coltrane, a storefront on Divisadero Street which is dedicated to acts of charity and tong doses of Trane's best recordings. As l'm fond of saying: If you're going to call yourself a church, either feed the poor or be quiet. These people are setting an example which the rest of the world should follow.
Get a good snootful of the city and then slip the hell away and up Highway 1 to the estuary of the Russian River. Cauldron action of foaming salt-smash against the rocks. Verticle gush. Pay attention to the birds, particularly the tone hawk hanging immobile in the steady ocean wind, wings outstretched, a miracle. Lindsay took me up Mt. Tamalpais; we sat and leafed through Lew Welch's poems, realizing this is where he sat when he wrote: this is the end of the world, there's nowhere else to go. Here at the very edge of a continent, it is so. This the same ocean Balboa claimed for the Empire of Spain, including all shores touched by the vast pool. "Now that we've killed everyone within 50 miles of this place, let's name the ocean Pacific."
Schlepping down the dark side of the mountain, we come upon a big hole in the road, poorly marked, with nothing but a lot of air underneath. Vertigo! The car would fit right through it if we weren't careful. Then around the bend a vulture gnawing at the body of a fox, red rib bones in the air. Round the next turn, an elderly man sat at an easel, painting a suitably dark study of the precipices of the Sleeping Lady. This succession of images continues to haunt us. "The lichen ate the road," says Lindsay , "the lichen ate the road." And it's true: everything must answer eventually to the silent patterns of change.
We packed up our sizeable accumulation of books, along with one seriously potent stash of fragrant oils from the botanica in the Mission district, and brought ourselves back to Michigan. Ten days later, during a blustery snowstorm, Lindsay and I sat on her living room floor, lit candles and said our vows. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. A couple of nights ago I dreamt of a very amiable dragon, long in the body with short arms. It stood and gestured. Peace and protection.
The McDonald's on Maynard is boarded up and gone. I can only attribute this to the excellent french toast across the street at Frank's Restaurant. Dan Gunning, in town for the Film Festival, said he'd like to believe they will take away the empty burger dungeon and replace it with the house which used to be there. Many articles ago I told you how years back we hung an effigy of Ronald McDonald from a tree which, until recently, still stood in front of the place. The poor thing died; its trunk looked like driftwood. Now somebody has cut it down. I have gathered sawdust from the stump and plan to use it in an amulet designed to prevent more burger franchises from invading Ann Arbor. Every little intention is helpful.
And just yesterday I took myself to a stretch of land which lies between the Power Center and the Horace H. Rackham building. This is the site of the first Jewish cemetery in Michigan. Back to 1848. There's a bronze plaque explaining that "Several years earlier, immigrants from Germany and Austria had organized the first Jewish community in the state" and how "by the 1880s this original Jewish community no longer existed. In 1900 the remains of those buries here were reinterred in Ann Arbor's Forest Hill Cemetery." (Got to make way for the new university campus, folks.)
Sudden flash of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, composed 1852-58: "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport." I walk around this site, puffing a cigar and thinking of the Silent Majority. Not Nixon's Silent Majority, scared of their own shadows, but the original use of the term; and that takes you back to Homer, who used it to describe the dead. (This last observation I borrowed from Gore Vidal. Thank you, sir.)
Can the same plot of land, facing E. Washington: a statue of an individual wracked with grief. The dedication reads: "In memory of the six million Jews murdered in the holocaust. In memory of the millions more destroyed by prejudice and hatred during World War II. In memory of those righteous and courageous few who risked their lives to save the victims of Nazism . May this memorial inspire us to resist tyranny and inhumanity wherever and whenever they threaten." -Ann Arbor Holocaust Memorial Foundation March 13, 1994.
It's good to be back. All soil speaks. I leave you with Diane Di Prima's Revolutionary Letter #10: 'These are transitional years and the dues will be heavy. Change is qiick but revolution will take awhile. America has not even begin as yet. This continent is seed."