I saw his billboard--www.VaticanHidesPedophiles.com--and drank it in. He saw me, and I saw that he saw, and we locked eyes. His twinkled like Kris Kringle. He wasn't irate; he was exuberant, rather like a convert. He shuffled forward and reached over two rows of passengers to hand me his pamphlet, a cut-and-copied sheet railing against the moral imbecility of Pope Benedict and all the progress haters in the Vatican. I drank this in, just like his sign, just like his face. I absorbed it. I drank.
The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.
Godspeed.
.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
On Venice Beach
The ocean is like my breath; except that it will go on longer.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)