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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
GOING TO CALIFORNIA
Irene Kral
Gilles Peterson Digs America, Vol. 2
Luv N Haight : 2007
[Buy It]
CALIFORNIA LOVE
2Pac
All Eyez on Me
Death Row : 1996
[Buy It]
JUNE ON THE WEST COAST
Bright Eyes
Letting Off the Happiness
Saddle Creek : 1998
[Buy It]
In October, I took a much-needed 3-week vacation in California. My partner Ashley and I flew into San Luis Obispo, where she's from, and borrowed her father's car. We camped our way up the coast, all the way to Arcata, in Humbolt county. Then we camped our way back down, making tangential trips inland. It was more than a vacation - it was an experiment in radical freedom, one that I needed very badly after a grinding, monotonous summer filled with work, a summer that mostly passed me by. It seems as if all vacations should be, by nature, such experiments, but I've been on many, mostly as a child with my family, that were not: Often, when we go on vaction, we trade one restrictive schedule for another; we bring the same mindset of accomplishment that shackles us to our work to our interstice of freedom. But on this trip we got away from all that, gave ourselves over to the rhythm of the road and the basic imperatives of survival-- find shelter, build fire, prepare food. A simplification of options and a lack of goals opens the way for palpable experience. It felt like a dream as it was happening - all the more so because as we tread the landscape, always with the Pacific intuited if not seen to the West, Southern California burned and burned - and it feels like more of a dream now, sweet and distant and completely unreal. The spirit of clarity one can attain outside of one's routines is such an ephemeral thing, hard to hold onto after the fact, sand sliding through a hand. Already, I've forgotten so much, like the names and faces of people we met, the names of towns we passed through, exactly how the sun looked on the water as we wound through the cliffs of Big Sur. But for everything I've forgotten, there's something I haven't, through which I can access that spirit of freedom - the memory and possibility of it, if not the palpable reality. I remember a great cliff in Yosemite that looked like a sleeping alligator. I remember a gully in a Redwood forest, with canted walls of stone and fern, cantilevered battlements of brush and eucalyptus, cold water trickling down from unseen elevations, great trees felled like medieval battering rams. I remember tiny mushrooms holding fast against a stream. I remember walking over the fallen teeth of dragons, and waiting for a herd of sentinel-elks to finish patrolling the road. I remember the constant sense of bears padding, invisible and implacable, through the darkened forest. I remember children dressed as animals conjuring iridescent bubbles from their hoops. I remember sprawling naked on the deserted shore of Shaver Lake, blinded by the pale fire strafing the placid water. I remember a spider levitating against a silver skein of clouds, a seagull nailed to the raw gray sky over the beach at Arcata, crab husks and sculptural driftwood scattered below. I remember a crow on a post presiding over a cenacle of sunning elephant seals in San Simeon - their gentle human faces and stuffed-sausage bodies - how they spooned each other, yawned and scratched their noses with finny hands, idly scooped cooling sand onto their velvet backs. I remember standing on a bluff and capturing the moon in the meniscus of my lens, quivering. I remember meeting a leaf that lived on a stone. I remember playing a harp that had just been born, sawdust stinging in my nose, and I remember serenading a campfire burning providential wood with a small, cold singing bowl. I remember reading Eleni Sikelianos, Tony Tost, and Carlos Castaneda, from whom I learned how to turn my head into a crow. I remember peanut butter and bread and cheese and chocolate, strong black coffee in an earthenware cup, night-cooled pinot noir from the bottle. I remember my mouth being wet with the taste of apples, hair dense with ash. I remember falling asleep under Orion's bow and waking up inside a temple of bright, burnished brass. I remember cheweing a thimbleful of tubers and watching the forest come alive. I remember clambering over stream-slicked roots and polished stones, drinking through the soles of my feet, earth under my nails. I remember learning that butterflies have eyes on their genitals, and that bears can open a car like a tin can. I remember writing certain phrases in my notebook - "wolf intervals," "spooky action at a distance" - without understanding precisely why. I remember a boy with green hair showing me a tilted cabin where gravity goes to get high on secret mineral deposits or alien spores. I remember standing at a forty-five degree angle, growing taller or shorter at will, walking up the wall. I remember acres of recreational vehicles, great metal sphinxes stewing in pools of their own light and heat and excrement - unslumbering insides that follow you around. I remember pulling a corner of the night around myself like a cloak and feeling like a child trying on his father's suit. I remember a voice inside my head that sounded remarkably like my own, and a dream in which I recognized my own hands.Labels: brian, california
posted by Brian
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