The Art of the Toothpick

"What's that in your mouth?' his granddaughter asks as they emerge from the restaurant and she looks up to him to take his hand now that they're outside in the hazardous world.

"It's a toothpick," he says, thinking he should explain that as one ages, one's boody changes shape and the physical structure deteriorates. Instead, he removes the toothpick from his mouth and flicks it aside, telling his granddaughter not to worry, that the toothpick biodegradable.



Well

What you think is the situation is not and never could have been, is something else you can't imagine until you see it.

And there's only one way of seeing--the way you see--and seeing this way you see things you hadn't seen before.

The artist

He remembers being downtown. It was late. He'd just seen a movie and was walking back to his car. One of the people he was with said, "look up, see how beautiful the buildings are, the lights."

He reached for  his camera, agreeing that the lights of the buildings against the dark night sky were beautiful and deserved to have a picture taken of them.

He stopped, took his cell phone out of his pocket, and took a picture.

Days later, at home thinking about the movie he'd seen--what it meant, the striking visual images, the language etc.--he realized he'd made a mistake and had taken a picture of the pavement, on which his right foot could be glimpsed, and not of the beautiful buildings as he'd intended.



Coffee and Light

I meant to talk to you last night, but I didn't; I was concerned that my words might hurt your feelings. Now it's too late, and the moment I knew that what I had to say might save you--even if my words were difficult and might have turned a friend into an enemy--is past.

I knew the truth, but said nothing; instead I remained silent, thinking there would be a time when I could speak openly. Sometime in the night, what I hadn't said woke me and I thought I heard your voice say that what I'd withheld had real meaning.

Seven ways to say hello

1. Hi.

2. Hi, haven't we met before?

3. Bonjour.

4.Hello, and where have you been all my life?

5. Hello, how would you like me to inscribe my autobiography?

6. What did you say your name was?

7. Let's have lunch again, sometime.



The writer at sixty

There's a cardboard box in the attic where I keep everything I don't want to think about. It's heavy, a masterpiece made of the whole weight of the world, crammed with at least one apocalypse, several civil wars, and lots of small stuff I can't remember keeping.

To reach the box presents a real challenge: I have to stand on a ladder, push a heavy wooden door with my head so I can keep my hands free to fasten the latch that holds the door up. The act is extremely dangerous and complex, not unlike like defying gravity.

Lately, I've been thinking that it's time to start taking things out of the box, bringing them down into the house one-by-one to think about again, shake the dark space out of them and watch how the light becomes a poet right before my eyes.



Above the University of San Francisco

When we yearn for something we don't have, we act so differently.

We look up, like the clouds can help us.

And maybe they can, maybe they're trying to say something

Adrenaline kayak

How quickly the day warmed up to possibilities and became a true story.

We paddled around in it, calmly.

People waved from the restaurants; they too were eating the sun, but indoors where things are safer and light is made of matchsticks struck one by one. We waved back from the open water and kept going, each in our own magical flotilla.

How innocently the shore receded, dissolving cove by cove, letting go of us as if we were children ready to leave home.

Little did we know the tides were inching up, as responsible as dawn to certain inexorable tasks,  creating an impossible current, a vortex, a situation from which there might be no return.

For the sea had drawn a line in the sand and we had crossed it.

The kayaks stalled, one by one, in the open sea.

And for much longer than I could remember, it was as if the ocean was in possession of the oars and kayak, and that I had nothing but the small alert energy of my hopelessness to get me to shore.

Christian science

The image searched for its real home, its right place, and came to rest in a clump of bushes near the intersection of Liggett and Presidio.

It clung to its old life, shivering, like it had been given up for dead.

True, it was only a beer can, thrown out of the window of a passing car by a careless human, but it too could have feelings.

The landing was soft, so there was a chance, however remote, of enjoying new life in an invigoratingly strange environment.

That there are no accidents in divine mind is some consolation. 

Steep

(Pacific & Divisidero)

More difficult now to walk down than to walk up.

Far more pressure.

Contrary to thinking, with what the mind is making of the world on a morning walk when the sun shines and walking is as close as he can come to the practice of no mind, walking past a silver Lamborghini at rest in the carport of a house in Pacific Heights, wondering what the person who wanted such a thing might look like, which is contrary to thinking. 

(Pacific & Presidio)

Coming upon the rear of the tableau, not the front,

and seeing that the shadows agree

with this perspective.

(Fillmore and Sacramento)

Walking backwards, buying a sugar-free mocha and smoking an American Spirit cigarette

for a reason that is no reason at all, then finding a seat in the sun to watch passers-by until time

comes and walks him back home.

artist's statement

Dear Friend,

somewhere in my papers i have a statement by tolstoy himself
on the utter folly and meaninglessness of art.

he's ruthless.

and it certainly is trivial, this making of images, scribbling, making marks on a piece of paper
or a canvas and pretending that it 'means' something.

nurses and teachers do the real work.

since you seem interested in such things, i'll try to find the statement for you.

it's probably up in the attic in the box where i've put everything

i don't want to think about.

Pretty happy

When someone asks, "how are you?", I answer "pretty happy," instead of "I'm well" or "I'm pretty good" or even more egregious, "fine, how are you?" which turns the whole matter back to the questioner.

"Pretty happy" seems honest, an invitation to the possibility of real conversation, a dialog in language that attempts to be an accurate and open description of a human situation without being either too corrosive or discouraging to a questioner presumed friendly.

A place on Clement

The left brain gets dressed up and goes out for a night on the town. Nothing much looks good and what looks good is closed; it's Monday night.

Lights sparkle at the far end of the street, signaling some sort of welcome.

Stepping inside the brightly lit yellow building, where a small group of strangers were eating and drinking, it was time to be saved.

Photoshop

I have been made to appear as a very small person, looking at what I'm looking at as if there's nothing else to look at; that is, I am made to look to be in a world in which I'm not, a place I don't mind being, as it turns out, with a nice garden, a

few buildings with classic pretensions (presumably filled with the books I'd always meant to read).

Looking at a thing this way transforms it, so that the object is able to live a full, happy life; and the observer, in this case
me, who has been put into the scene so that an object appears to be being observed, is not really there.

I am imperishable, walking through a well ordered campus of intelligence and beauty in the age of Photoshop, neither having to be where I am or do the looking.

Insect

The future is brightly colored and by summer can often be found at the end of a fish hook.

When it thinks it's going forward, it's sinking.

For the moment, dry land, which consists of dirt, twigs, thistles and pine needles on loan from a national forest, serves quite well as a home.

Slowly, with great patience but no particular consciousness, time crawls through the perilous landscape of change, of summer becoming fall and fall winter, leaving behind a body of work wherein the possibility of growing wings and flying away, or of putting on a robe to enter the pavillion of annihilation, is left to the mercy of a disinterested god.

Evening in The Richmond

Night was already feeling good about itself.  Just a couple of more things to do before it could call it a day and go home.

True, the house wasn't much--a small, humble place in the Inner Richmond, across from a Safeway market--and passersby were not particulary impressed by the architecture, which was unremarkable.

Still, one could imagine that the warmth of the evening, suffusing the exterior atmosphere in a golden light, was also alive inside the house and that thiswas a real home, a place where private matters of life and death, of sex and love were discussed in completely human language.