Meaning & meaninglessness

I don't know where to start.

With Charles Taylor being convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 50 years in jail or the report that Barack Obama personally decides which terrorist target to assassinate--formulating a hands-on 'kill list' in the manner of Caligula or a movie by Quentin Tartantino--while reading Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

If literature is 'news that stays news' as Ezra Pound put it, what am I to  make of what's happening in the world I live in at the moment? And what responsibility do I have?

I used to think writing a poem, or trying to write a poem, was enough to prove my humanity.

And that reading good books would make me a better person.

I see that I was wrong, but I don't know what else to do. And it's too late to change.

Somewhere in my memory bank is something Leo Tolstoy wrote on the meaninglessness of art. He wrote it near the end of his life. It was a withering piece of prose, written by a deeply troubled man. I'm going to look through my papers for it right now.

Impermanence

The spiderweb is to be seen on the porch of the lodge at Sea Ranch.

It was great to see, back-lit by a simple flourscent bulb, that it was attached in all four directions to solidly fixed points and had found such a nice place to live.

Is and was.

I didn't know what a privilege it was to be with my uncle when he was dying. At the time, it seemed very painful. I remember one time especially. Laying in his hospital bed, he opened one eye when I entered the room and said, "get me out of here." Another time, he told me he had some pills in the glove compartment of his car. Could I "get them for him...the keys were in the pocket of his pants..." Of course there were no pants as there were no keys as there was no car, but I pretended to look anyway, leaving the room and taking the elevator down to the parking lot. By the time I returned he'd fallen asleep.

In retrospect it was a great honor to be there with him, though I didn't know it at the time.

Loved ones don't just come and go. They stay in our lives as long as we are living. They settle into our beings by gaining their silence. Silently, they ask to be heard.

Man is a thinking reed

What I don't know often comes to me when I'm out walking.

It's been there all the time, a little lake far away from my thinking, semi-hidden by trees and tall reeds, slightly off the walking path in the Presidio.

Sometimes at a certain time of day--early evening or late afternoon--I stop walking and sit on one of the wooden benches beside the lake and think about how I think my own life may be eluding me. The predisposition I have of thinking of my life as something separate from me that happens all by itself, whether I want it to or not, soon follows.

(It sometimes helps me to hold my iPhone when having such thoughts, so as not to feel so alone. And taking a picture of where I am is always good therapy).

Though there's no mountain here and it isn't much of a lake, these thoughts soon pass and I'm able to sit quietly for a few minutes in the sun and watch the birds on the water, thinking that they're not thinking at all about their own lives.

Bayview, near the corner of Carroll & Ingalls, San Francisco

Diebenkorn left a little known masterpiece on the side of an old building in Bayview (Hunter's Point), not far from Candlestick Park, another masterpiece and so often misunderstood.

It's unsigned, but the provenance is unmistakable.

The deep feeling for space and the relationship between vertical and horizontal planes, the abstract gestures informed by a sensibility grounded in the figurative, the palatte...

To view the piece, proceed south on Third Street and turn left--east--on Carroll.

Birthday of the bridge

I'm proud of the bridge, and happy to have it in my life.

It's there every day for me, from the moment I open the venetian blinds in the morning to the moment I close them, very often late at night.

The bridge gives me hope, a quality I otherwise don't put much stock in, believing that hope is a form of a type of magical thinking I am tempted to indulge, much to the displeasure of reality, if there is such a thing.

This morning the bridge is smothered in onions and the sky has the tint of the biscuits and gravy special I used to order at the counter of Duke's Coffee Shop on Pico the morning after excessive drinking. But that was long ago and in Los Angeles, a  city not noted for its bridges.