Vacation

I'll be gone for the next couple weeks. Come back. . . please.

Other

"Salammbo ascended to the terrace of her palace, supported by a female slave who carried an iron dish filled with live coals. . . .  In the middle of the terrace there was a small ivory bed covered with lynx skins, and cushions made with the feathers of the parrot, a fatidical animal consecrated to the gods; and at the four corners rose four long perfuming-pans filled with nard, incense, cinnamomum, and myrrh. The slave lit the perfumes. Salammbo looked at the polar star; she slowly saluted the four points of heaven, and knelt down on the ground in the azure dust which was strewn with golden stars in imitation of the firmament. Then with both elbows against her sides, her fore-arms straight and her hands open, she threw back her head beneath the rays of the moon, and said. . . ."

Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert

Dark Fairy Lands

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.

(from Yeats' "The Stolen Child")

This doesn't look much like what Yeats had in mind, but I don't have anything fitting from a tropical poet.

Anna Tomczak

I spent the last three days at a workshop with Anna Tomczak at her home in Florida.  Just spending three solid days working on a project was good enough, but Anna is herself a delight.  I learned that I am a sloppy worker, too ambitious and too hurried.  I was like this before the digital world.  It is my personality.  Here is a transfer I did from a Polaroid that had already been scanned and printed.  I will post the original later.  This is simply a report.  I haven't time for anything else just now.  

Making Faith

"Dear Cafe Selavy,

I am not certain I agree with you about the faith gene thing. I have a strong compulsion toward faith, but recently I have left the church in which I was raised. I say this without great joy. I have come to a crisis of faith in which I find myself questioning my irrational beliefs. Religion, you see, is irrational by definition. Were it rational, it would be called science. But I want to believe in something, I know that. I am not strong enough to go it all alone. You seem to recognize that in one of your blog entries when you say to your friend who does not want to go on vacation alone, 'I know what you mean.' But perhaps I am reading too much into your words.

I do not know what I will do in the long run, but I am enjoying your stories and photographs, especially the Exotic Postcard series. In those, I think, you create a world that you can believe in, even a pagan religion, of sorts. It is a bit spooky for me, but it looks like great fun. Thanks,

. . . . . ."

I saw Mongol for the second time last night. Mongolian audiences hated it, I hear, complaining that it was not accurate. But everybody knows that. What is?

Jeans and Jeannies

“There’s a theory of residual effect in mathematics,” he said, “that says that subtracting one from two is less than one over time. There is a residual effect that has so far only been observed in prime numbers, but theoretical mathematicians suspect that it is true for other numbers as well.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Seriously. You know that paradox about the hound pursuing the hare that says that between two points lies another point which makes it impossible for a moving hound ever to catch a moving hare even if he is travelling faster?”

“Sure.”

“Well this helps explain that.”

“Does it help explain how some women can get into such small jeans?

“There’s no use talking to you. You are a case of arrested development.” He walked to the bar to get another beer.

I watched him retreat, thinking about his theory of disintegrating numerals, whole numbers able only to be expressed as numerators over denominators in time. Did he make this up? I wondered. It sounded intriguing enough. And of course, I have been arrested in my development, and worse. Something has been subtracted. There is a residual effect. I seem only to be expressed as a fraction of a whole in time.

He might be right, but where the hell does he come up with this stuff?

Ghosts, Djinns, Genes, and Genies

Maddening. The gray days, the moisture, the heat. Frustration and hunger. I want to eat and drink everything in sight. It palliates the weather, I think. Maybe I’ve watched too many food shows on TV.

“Do you believe in sprits?” he asked me.

“Whiskey, mostly.”

“C’mon. I’m asking a serious questions.”

“No.”

“I don’t either, but lately I’ve been feeling things. Last night, I didn’t sleep well and when I rolled over, half-awake, it seemed as if something flew right by me. I could feel it. It made me shudder.”

“I’ve had nights like that. Alone in the dark, all sorts of wild things begin to take shape.”

“Then you do believe in spirits.”

“Nope.”

The human genome project found a gene for faith. Those who have it are better able to believe in things without evidence. I’m pretty certain I don’t have that. Once a fellow from Iran told me he knew a shaman who could take me into a cave where I could choose a djinn to enter and purify me. His brother had been a drug addict, and the priest took him there and he has been straight ever since.

“It wouldn’t work for me,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe. I wouldn’t see any genies. You have to believe, I think.”

He considered that and allowed that it might be true.

I have dreams, of course, and I can allow my imagination to run wild. But that is all it is to me. Ghosts and djinns and genies.

On another occasion, I was selling books to a book buyer. He is a great fellow from India. I told him that I had been going to yoga and he got very excited. He told me about practicing yoga every morning first thing and explained his meditation and exercises. When he started getting a little mystical, I asked, “Gary, do you believe in God?”

“Sure man,” he said. “Not in one God, but in all the gods. God is everything and everything is god!”

BAM! A point of enlightenment. I liked that very much. God, it seemed to me, was a metaphor for all that happened, the sum total of all events. I thought of Ralph Waldo Emereson and others. I had a way of answering the question, “Do you believe in God?”

But ghosts and djinns and genies are another matter.

My friend was still thinking about the spirits that haunted his night.

“You’ve spent too many nights alone,” I offered. “When you have been used to being with someone, the night can get spooky. And now there is the weather, the changing air pressures that make the house crack and pop, then the coming of the thunder and the rain. Everything seems to be closing in. Summers are always bad for me. Maybe you should get out of town.”

“Yes, I think a vacation would do me good. But I don’t want to go somewhere alone.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

Fragments

Broken, useless things. A pipe bursts in the garage. A framed photo arrives from France in pieces. I am held responsible for everything, it seems. I struggle uselessly against despair and think of Rimbaud, whose poetry I dislike.

“Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.”

“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”

“I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.”

I pull these quotations from the internet. They are broken as well.

Fragments. Sometimes that is what we have and what we must use to make it whole again.

The bitter struggle back to happiness.

Blinded By The Light

The semi-tropics are a hell this time of year, thick with the madness of vegetation, fungus, mold. The humidity never ceases. Everywhere the air smells sickly sweet with rotten things. Poisonous mushrooms sprout up overnight. The sky is a flat silver turning gray. Violent lightening storms constantly erupt. 

I was driving on the edge of a thunderstorm this weekend. The wind was blowing and the rain just beginning to fall when lightning struck somewhere close by.  I was blinded.  First everything went white, then, quickly, black. This lasted only a fraction of a second, but it seemed permanent. I thought my retina had been damaged. Slowly, however, the world came back. I was still driving, brake lights blinking all around.

I have been stung by lightening three times in my life. I know the smell of ozone, the incredible sizzle that explodes. I’ve been in white outs on mountains while lightening struck all about. Last year I read about two people in different places getting struck by lightening on the same day.  Neither place was more than sixty miles from my house.  A young boy walking on the beach with his girlfriend was killed, his head popped open like a cantaloupe. The girl was unhurt. Forty miles away, a blind man was struck in the head and knocked out. When he came to, he could see his house. He had been blind for twenty years.  I’ve known mountain guides who were struck by lightening that went out through the bottom of their boots, the rubber souls melted, their feet singed.  Others have been killed straight out.

Lightening is a weird and terrible thing, not to be messed with.  Now I will add to a growing list my encounters with storms. I know what it means to be blinded by the light.

Viva Espana

But I have written too prosaically about Spain, about bullfighting and fiestas. I have given no sense of what it felt like to lie on the Spanish beaches and to have stayed alive all night eating bread and olives and cheese and drinking Spanish wine in ancient Roman courtyards under the stars and moon. Spain was hot that summer. Sunny landscapes, dry, warm air bathing tired driving eyes. Rolling hills of brown and gold broken by green olive trees and cork trees and stony outcroppings and crumbling castles standing unguarded, unmarked.


One afternoon we stopped at one to eat lunch, relax, and explore. I rested in the shadow of a stone wall atop a hill. A steady breeze blew through old stone windows and the chinks in the stone. My shirt dried until I was chilled. I do not believe in anything beyond death, but I would swear that day I saw and heard spirits. White, regularly shaped puffy clouds in an azure sky. Surely it was only this and the sound of the wind creeping around corners.

Stopping one day to swim in a giant public pool. Sleeping through the noon heat in a room with fifteen foot ceilings in Seville. Walking by the river, eating ice cream. Cafés and tapas bars with plates of food—octopus, squid, sliced hams and olives and cheeses—where you helped yourself and were charged by the toothpicks you accumulated.

Spain newly liberated, Franco now gone, the people beginning to celebrate a new-found freedom. Everywhere the old and new. Cathedrals and Mosques.


Barcelona, the most wonderful city in the world, an onion of concentric circles that leads you back in time to the city's center, old Roman streets winding blindly, opening into wonderful courtyards, unexpected restaurants, children playing. Sitting on the steps of an old church in the blue shadows listening to a young student play a haunting flute. Wine shops, ham shops, the Picasso Museum. Gaudi’s hideous spires. Singing in a hidden bar late one night—“Viva Espana”—feeling the dangerous trouble that was about to explode before it happened. A flash of knife, fists and feet, rushing a woman through the door and into the street, gone before the policia arrived. Entering a flamenco bar in some lost neighborhood. Then the Ramblas where you walk away the night.


Grenada and Alhambra, the rich gardens. Climbing Spain’s highest peak and seeing Morocco across the Straight. Valencia for Paella, eating up the countryside, driving blind. Eating sardines from the can in small villages, drinking local wines beside the car. Always bread and olives and cheese.


All before Pamplona. There are stories to be told, of course, but not this morning.

The Bullfight

I jumped ahead of myself yesterday with a bland post simply because I realized it was time for the Festival de San Fermin and I wanted to say I’d been there and done that, to post photos that said as much, and to create envy and desire in those who had not. And of course, if you were not there then, you will never be or have been. But I went to the blog on CNN.com and read a hundred comments that this festival is cruel and unnecessary and that it does not matter if it is a cultural event any more than human sacrifice or stoning the condemned was. It is wrong.

I went to my first bullfight in Madrid before I got to Pamplona. It was the day I had arrived on a long flight and I was drowsy, but we had tickets and I would go. I was not at all in favor of killing bulls for the sake of sport and was uncertain what my reaction to the fight might be. When they let the first bull into the ring, he ran around the ring shaking his head and stomping, then abruptly, he stopped dead still and threw his head into the air and let out a long, mournful wail. I am not making this up. You could not help but be moved. Then the picadors came on horseback to lance the bull’s neck muscles in order to weaken them so that its head would drop making it easier for the matador’s eventual show. The horses wore thick quilted blankets to protect them from the horns of the bull, but at least once that summer I saw a bull’s horn slip beneath the quilt and reach the horse’s belly. The horses never seemed to be doing this voluntarily. When the first blood is drawn, again, my sympathy was wholly with the bull. I thought of my dog, Wiley, being subjected to something as terrible as this.



In that first fight, as the lancer did his cutting, the crowd began to whistle. Either they loved the bull or just did not want him to be too weakened , but they definitely did not want the bull cut more. Next came the banderlerros whose job was toward the bull at an angle and place sharp banderillas into its neck to further weaken the muscles. At this point, the bull was bleeding and shitting. The next act featured the matador. Matadors then were like rock stars in Spain. They were poster boys for machismo, at least the good ones. Hemingway explains all this in great detail in Death in the Afternoon, and details the ways in which the best matadors can be identified. I liken it to a pro football quarterback who has two and a half seconds to throw a football before one or two three hundred pound linemen knock him down. You can tell the ones who are afraid to take the pounding and even though they may have great skill in throwing a football, they are too nervous to wait until the last second to throw the football. The other’s, the ones who are not nervous, have multiple concussions and get into the Hall of Fame. Maybe another, better example would be Mohamed Ali.

What I am saying is that the very good matadors work very close to the horns of the bull and thus run a greater chance of injury or death. In each of the corridas I saw in Spain that summer, a matador was gored. One was particularly spectacular. The bull caught the matador in the thigh and swung him over his head, and when the matador fell to earth, the bull had him pinned to the ground, swinging his horns left and right trying to finish the job. The matador was helped behind the barrier right in front of me. He waved off help, tied a bandana around his blood-gushing thigh, and came back out to finish the fight. The crowd went wild.


In the end, the bull is tired, it’s head hanging low, and the matador must rush it with a small sword, a muleta, between its shoulder blades so that it will enter the heart. If it is done correctly, the bull dies instantly. But it is not often that it is done correctly on the first attempt. I saw frustrated matadors try to finish the bull in three or four attempts while the crowd whistled and jeered.

When the bull is dead, it is whisked quickly from the arena and, I am told, butchered, the meat given to the poor.

I will not speak here of the symbolic and religious suggestions of the corrida here. I only mean to describe. I attended several bullfights that summer before got to Pamplona, and there I ran with the bulls in the morning and watched them killed that afternoon. I understand the concerns of those bloggers at CNN. I would not imagine it will be long before they convince authorities to put a stop to all of this. The world is changing and most people do not need the bullfights any longer. They have the internet.

Festival de San Fermin

This week is the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the Festival de San Fermin. I went in the mid ‘80s, travelling through Spain and France, hitting as many towns and events as possible that made up the geography and events of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I have slides that I began scanning a few months ago but have not completed, so I will post the few I have here and look to maybe scanning more tonight.

We arrived in Pamplona to find that the rooms we thought we had reserved were gone, so we ended up staying in a dormitory at a local college. We bought shirts and scarves and wine bags and joined the throng of revelers in the city. People were camped in every available space, but most people stayed up all night drinking and dancing. It was like a marathon for most seeing how long they could continue without sleep. We went to the pen where the bulls for the next morning’s running were kept, six steers and six bulls. They looked intimidating enough. We would run the approximate mile down the slippery cobbled Roman streets and hope to get into the arena with the bulls.


The next morning we met at a bar where Hemingway drank before the running. There were thousands of people gathered both on the streets and behind the barriers that separated the non-runners from the bulls. All was raucous until the rockets went up and the bulls were released. Then there was a flurry of activity as people tried to climb the barriers only to be shoved back into the streets by the laughing crowd. The first part of the run is uphill, and we could see the crowd thinning and as the bulls charged ahead. The first glimpse of their horns brought me to a realization. What was I doing here, I wondered? Did I think I could outrun a bull for a mile?


Suddenly, they were upon us and we were running. The object was to hit a bull on the nose with the morning’s newspaper. All about, people were falling to the ground. Had so many slipped, I wondered, or were they tripped. But in most cases, it was neither. It was more a case of nerves, a half-fainting, legs weakened by fear simply collapsed, and therein lay the danger as you ran, keeping one eye behind you on the bulls and the other ahead of you on the battlefield of fallen celebrants.

You could not believe the size of the bulls as you ran before, beside, and then behind them. I managed to hit a steer on his rump.


But we made it into the arena which was filled to capacity with revelers. And of that, I will write tomorrow.

Inventing the Other

Here are some notes from Paul Theroux's introductory essay to Exotic Postcards, just broken phrases mingled with my own thoughts. I don't know which is which right now. Summary, paraphrase, quotation and outright theft.

An exotic photograph is an invitation, a beckoning to the faraway, the fantastic. The exotic is always elsewhere and meant to produce yearning. Ornate, like an odalisque, a Romantic promise, an Occidental lie. These are stereotypes of "The Other." The image closes the distance between our desire and what isn't. They say everything about those who need to be furnished with images for their dreams.

Some of the words and phrases are Theroux's, but I don't think that's what he said. Read the essay. Ideology got in my way. The other night, I told a group of academics that all pleasures were guilty. They looked at me like I was an idiot. Maybe, but mine seem to be.

I Need to Quit It

“Hey, you ever hear from that girl that went to California, the one from the café?”

“Sure. She sends me pictures of herself naked just about every day,” I said. His face twisted up violently with outrage and envy.

“You’re shitting me!” he shouted.

“Yea, I’m fucking with you.” He was like a giant balloon filled beyond its capacity, the gases suddenly released. “It’s not that often.”

I don’t know why I do such things. I don’t think about it, it just comes naturally. He had gone too many ways too quickly. He looked ill, weak.

“Huh?”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. No, I haven’t heard from her but once since she moved. Why do you think about it?”

“I don’t know. I need to get something going in my life. The summers always get to me. First I get frustrated, then down.”

“Buy an ice cream maker,” I said. “That will cheer you up.”

There is a big hurricane in the Atlantic right now. Summer's weather has arrived. I should be nicer. He is right about some things.

The Obvious

“Jesus Christ, what happened to your hair? You cut it.”

“I had help.”

“I can’t believe how different you look. Well, it will grow.”

“You think?”

People tend to point out the obvious. I guess it isn’t really the words, though, that are making the meaning of the statement. It is the social custom, the noticing, etc. I could tell by the nonverbal stuff that he was happy about my haircut. But maybe it was my own paranoia.

“I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately," he said. "They’ve been strange. I’ve been dreaming about an Asian woman. In the dream, she married one of my old friends. We are not that close any more, so I don’t know why he’s in the dream. But he married her and when I met her, I fell in love. She’s perfect, beautiful and happy, and she is in love with me, too. In the dream. She looks at me and I get sad. I wake up in the night and think about the dream and go back to sleep and I am right back in it. One night, she kissed me. Everything is vivid. It seems so real.”

I thought of a line from Bertolucci’s Under the Sheltering Sky. “Other people’s dreams are always so boring.” But I didn't say it. He seemed too animated in the telling, too disturbed. I said simply, “Dreams can be crazy.” It meant nothing. I had pointed out the obvious.

I am trying to photograph a dream, other places, other times that have never existed. It is slow going and I lose faith, sometimes to the point of despair. I have never been very good at faith, and I haven’t had a dream for a long time.

My hair will grow. That much is obvious. I don’t know about the rest.

The Sad Ballad

I've heard from Sasha.  My paltry attempts to mythologize cannot withstand life's temporal mutations.  There is only time, the constant, uneven flow, the shallows and pools, the lazy floating and the roar of rapids.  Here is a photo of Sasha and Kate taken by a friend, Egor.  It speaks of what is, what is yet to come.  The recognition, the denial, the unhappy acceptance, the stoic gaze, the gently grasping hand. Katerina's sad, soft eyes dead center, Sasha's figure forced to the margin.  There is the blurred gray of the background, the distant, fading light.  One lingering moment, captured, rich with meaning and emotion, bracketed, framed, gone.  

From Sasha:

"I give for her freedom because I love her...
She need a freedom... She must to think...
Ballad of Kate and Sasha never end...
I know she loves me, but she need a time..."

It is what we all need--Love, Freedom, Time.  

We look for the warm yellow light of morning, the deep blue that surrounds us at dusk.  But the gray light falls, those tinny, hollow days of nothingness.  Still, we hold on and on and on, waiting heroically for skies to clear, for the sweet sound of songbirds, the call of the hoot owl, the nightingale's cry.  What book, what drink, what art can replace love?  

I'll wait for the reprise, the good news, the healing, the scar.  What love without scars?  

Independence Day

The month began badly. On July 1st, I got a haircut. The woman who cuts my hair usually does a wonderful job, but at least once a year, usually in the summer, she cuts it short, bobs it horribly, and I am miserable. I know it is a vanity, but I am miserable now—no, more ashamed than miserable. How can a haircut shrink your shoulders and expand your gut and deepen the pores in your face? Yes, I am wretched.

I just finished the short story collection, Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. If you are a reader and have not read this, then run—don’t walk—to your nearest bookstore. I have not read as good a collection since Rick Bass’s The Watch back when he could still write. I met Rick Bass at the Key West Writer’s Conference at the same time I met Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, et.al. I am not enamored with fame, but I do like talent, so when I was getting a poster of the conference signed by the authors for the college that had sent me, I thought I might say something nice to Bass. Everyone likes a compliment, I told myself, so when I got to him I ventured to tell him how much I had enjoyed the book. Bass is approximately the same age as I and of the same build, a medium sized man who had made himself bigger through effort. He did not respond to my compliment. He simply stared at me. I could feel some deep resistance there.

I saw him again a few years later at a college where I was teaching as an adjunct. He was reading from his works, but mostly he proselytized about saving a stretch of Montanna, the Yak Valley, where he had moved. After the reading, I sat at a table next to his wife and him. I was invited over but declined. I swear I could see some atavistic memory at work in his face. He was a smaller man by then, but so was I.



I am pulling for Pollock even though he has told some of the stories I had hoped to write some day with much less ability. He has done it so goddamned well it is terrible. I am going to start over and read the collection again.

Here is a passage I read last night sitting alone in the usual sushi place at an outdoor table as all the beautiful people paraded by:

“We were stopped at a red light right outside of Portsmouth when a silver Lexus pulled up beside us. Glancing over, I was startled by the bold, sparkling eyes of the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. She was checking us out, laughing into her cell phone. Every inch of her radiated money and happiness and fine genes. Though there had once been a time when I would have yelled over and asked her to fuck, now all I felt was shame that she’d had to look at me at all. My hair wa s uncombed and greasy, my teeth coated with yellow scum, my tatoos meaningless and outdated. I turned my head and waited for the light to change.”

I think I’ll go back to the woman who cut my hair as soon as this holiday is over. Maybe she can fix it.

Old Heros

My father was in the navy in WWII.  He was drafted.  The thing he talked about most from that experience was becoming the Pacific Fleet boxing champion.  He claims to have beaten Walt Hafer, the only man to beat Joe Louis as an amateur.  I've never had the courage to research it, but it seems highly unlikely.  Hafer did fight Louis as a pro in what amounted to an exhibition fight, but he certainly didn't beat him.  Still, I have not bothered to research Louis's amateur bouts.  I don't know if Hafer was in the navy, either.  

It was a different world, then.  It wasn't as easy to verify or debunk. I think there were a lot more heros.

I found this photo of Hafer on the internet. I'm pretty sure my dad could have taken him.

Transforming Experience

I love this photograph. It is from my friend's family album. Old photographs are transforming. We are never as good as the people in old photographs, it seems, not nearly as funny or serious. In comparison, we lack depth like pieces of sheet tin.


Here is a picture of my father's family, his brother and sister-in-law, his nephew and his nephew's future wife. Why do I never take off my shirt and lift girls onto my shoulders? I just don't know how to have fun, I guess. Or maybe it is just a lack of living, too many hours with television, then computers.  The cold xenon light.  Shallow, like sheets of cut tin.

Almost a Writer

"Where you been?" I asked him standing near the beer cooler in Whole Foods.

"I went out of town the last couple weekends.  Other than that, I haven't been doing anything.  I don't go out at all.  I'm starting to go stir crazy, though."  

"Too much alone time can do that," I said.  "I did that for about a year once.  It changes you."  

"Yea.  I got up yesterday and went to the refrigerator to get some milk for my coffee and I saw two chilled bottles of wine and thought about having a glass.  If I start that, I'm sunk.  But I stay up writing every night, drinking wine and just writing."

"You writing a novel?"  

"No, not yet.  I write these long emails, though, that are pretty good.  Some of them are real good.  But I'll put all this effort into writing them and get back a few lines that don't even address what I wrote about.  That's if I'm lucky.  Sometimes, I don't get anything back at all.  It really pisses me off."  

"Well, people don't write much any more.  First they gave up on letters, then they gave up on email.  Now most people don't write much that is longer than a text message."  

"Well, it's wrong," he growled.  "The world is going to shit!" 

"Sure, sure it is, but you can't get too caught up in how other people are going to respond to what you do.  You just do it for yourself."  I said it, but I could tell he wasn't hearing it.  I picked up my bottle of ale and told him I had to go.  

"Good luck, man," I said.  He was obviously distraught.  

When I was in Manhattan, the people I was with never talked on the phone.  That was cool.  But they always had their iPhone or Blackberry on vibrate and every few minutes, they would get a text.  They'd thumb out a reply and say, "Hey, there's a crowd at Crumleys.  You want to head down there?"  This went on all night.  

It's all OK, but I'm going back to writing letters.  As silly as this sounds, it seems an art to me now, the handcrafting of letters on paper, ink, textures, etc.  I like the new world well enough, but I'm too romantic to let go of the old.  Maybe I'll have a glass of wine this morning.