Analect 2.87x

24 April 2007, Tuesday. Billowy white clouds over tops of uphill elms. What kind of day? Gary's talk last night--his narrow face, now gray at the temples. Shades of Dan in the wryness. Davis, 1979, a point to begin. Sunlight and straw bales. California Aqueduct, huge pipelines over the Tehachapis, power from Mt. Shasta. Run of the land. Utilities diagram for Units 1 and 2 ("poetically named"), maze of gas and electric, underground. "New York infrastructure as deep as the Chrysler building." All giving one pause. Beautiful chapel in Houston; every shot a sense of repose, intended that way. Light reflecting from narrow channel of water running along inside of a high concrete wall. "This is in the morning." Ending with the tides, Land's End, Sutro Baths...

Analect 2.86x

23 April 2007, Monday. Bright, clear morning. With Alyosha again, slow walk up Tacoma, over the top at the Alameda. Two little boys, on the sidewalk, looking this way and that with great animation, awaiting someone's arrival. They run to him as he makes the turn around the corner, embracing his furry ruff and petting him wildly. But still waiting. Man's voice, baritone, welcoming, "Alyosha!" Seems we know everyone. Car pulls up in front: the cousins. Girl jumps out, a little older, lifts up one of the boys in round-the-waist embrace, his feet caught in mid-air. Bruno Ganz, from a movie-still in the New York Times, found in an yellowed folder. Grainy black and white, a seaside town, quay reaching into the distance. His head is down, the dog alert. All atmosphere...

Analect 2.85x

20 April 2007. Speckled sun to the east, dark wedge of cloud moving in from the west. Rain for later this afternoon. Last night: Dutch sailors' voices, "A Yankee ship comes down the river, Blow boys, blow. A Yankee ship with a Yankee skipper..." This one in English, though the album itself is Pays Bas, Chansons Oubliees... Songs Forgotten. Translated as Songs Adrift, which feels right--with so much of Holland reclaimed with from the sea... Then--images of the ocean itself. A Bering Sea fishing boat--motor churning, rain on cabin window, we're looking out onto blur of a tumbling horizon. Then, engine room of a merchant ship--super tanker, container monster--deep rumbling inside and out. Sailor with ratchet wrench, adjusting a valve. While on deck, heavy breaking ground swells, lots of ambient noise--equipment in the wind. Then, a passenger vessel, modern cruise ship form, lashing about in hurricane winds like some bathtub toy. Filmed from above, out of a Coast Guard chopper, engine roaring full blast over the storm, white caps and rolling seas from horizon to horizon. Nothing else quite brings us in like this--the scale of the open water.

Later, together:

The winter star doth now appear
So boys we'll anchor weigh
It's time to leave this cold country
And homeward bear away, brave boys
And homeward bear away...

Analect 2.84x

19 April 2007. Gray sky, rain impending. That kind of morning, everyone feels it. "We're due for a storm," neighbor's's pronouncement. Mallard talk on some ancient lake, collusion. He's holding a box with bottles in it--not really paying attention, but now they come to mind. Different sizes and colors--an in-between state. Green, brown... Girl with dark lab, a teen-ager, pained expression. "Is your dog friendly?" as Alyosha makes his way slowly up the sidewalk. Is the world friendly. Po Chü-i thought so, writing his words on the face of a cliff, or settling into a second small cup of afternoon wine... Pines to the east, bamboo to the west. Incense Brazier Peak. The world animated, shared. It all happens...

Analect 2.83x

April 18, 2007. Walk this morning, with Alyosha. Beautiful clear sky, one small cloud far to the west. Everything luminous. He takes his time up the hill, rolling on available plots of grass, rubbing his back under a rhododendron branch. Older man in light-colored clothing: "That's a handsome dog." Understanding every tongue, Alyosha gives him a nudge. Years before: spring in Tyumen'. Billboard mural on side of gray apartment block, bleak water-stained concrete. Young woman in red, holding an armful of golden roses. Petals? Pages? Tortilla chips? "Lyublu tebya moya Tyumen'." High-voltage power stanchion to her left, leaning a bit. Gray sky. Rainy street, mud-filled lot surrounding a single anonymous kafé. Reddish mansard roof, symmetrical windows, all horizontal, off-the-shelf, and a triangular sign with narrow white border just over the door. Single palm tree against orange-yellow sunset. In the rain. Girl in foreground, holding what look to be ice creams--one in either hand. Dark clothes, smiling. Her face from afar, somewhere along the Silk Road...

Analect 2.82x

17 April 2007. Milky blue-green pool water, early, hint of sun through windows to the east. Last night: Alyosha impatient, pacing, laps from metal bowl in the dark, then finally to bed. Stories from the south: the taste of salt on her unwashed neck. "I am a good wife." Woman's form at a piano--graceful, bending to impossibly small set of keys. In gloves, even. Like Coco Chanel from 1964. Isabel Ettenauer--a career of toys. Photographed in violent red dress, against background whites and grays--a miniature ebony grand. Another shot, from above, again in place at her tiny black charge. Wires to various recording devices, then a space of polished maple, and a circle of listeners, also on the floor. The appeal of all this--a return to childhood? World free of cares? An island? Österreich--fun to write, so many syllables for a land-locked land. From the south--St. Poelten--also an odd number of syllables. Catholic diocese. Mountains? A lake? As opposed to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Raw thumb pick runs on a white electric guitar. An off-the-shelf Gibson. Wealth of the world.

Analect 2.81x

16 April 2007. Sunlight through upstairs window, soft on camphors and plum. Wild spread of branches arching over what was once a garden path...squirrel or two dashing along fence top plank--autostrada to the back yard. Alisia's face, bending to open the blue van, her dark hair surrounding a smile... Last night: Edward P. Smith, black Virginia in the 1850s... Lives intertwined--each person's worth, a kind of absolute, measured against kindness, intelligence, good sense... To make the best of what's possible--and to dream of change. To make one's way down a road, perhaps, live under another sky. A kind of hunger. Elias and the young boy who brings him water. Blue tin cup with chipped edge, once then again. "He loved him as much as he had ever been able to love another human being." Redemption. Also: the memory of his mother, decades in the past. A large ship, dark brown, sunny sky, gone...

Analect 2.80x

13 April 2007. Morning.

"Street Sense is my horse. We're gonna run him tomorrow, let him stretch his legs..." John from the hole-in-the-wall take-out place just up the street. Gravel Camel-smoked voice, crew cut with touch of gray, weathered face. Paddock and field. Last night: the cowboy. Rottweiler video clip--why on earth did I show it--running without sound, powerful dog, low to the ground, lunging at the heifers to get them in line. Jumpy resistance of the cows themselves--amazingly agile, given their bulk, dodging his every move...but also acquiescent--slow-eyed gaze, impassive. Better without sound, just their liquid movements...

Hojin's Taoist interpretation of the Orpheus myth...all that we turn towards, yet must need leave behind...

Analect 2.79x

12 April 2007. Sunny Thursday morning, late start. Up reading Martin Cruz Smith--his first book, Gypsy in Amber. Not quite Arkady--the character in a way doesn't yet have a voice--but still very promising as to wholesale plot evaporations and attentiveness to detail. Lists of words in Romany, for example--and the set piece galore... An imperfect circle, man and bird. Ghirlandiao, no Giotto di Bondone. In a universe of chaos the form must be whole. But here, today, in a world of signs-- Prints From Your Digital Camera, High Volume Scanning, Enlarge the Small Ones to Poster Size... A note of imperfection, Pierre Bonnard in the '90s, how much more so his friend, Eduouard. Preserving the future--rough, wiggly, off-handed...

Wszystko na sprzedaz...

Analect 2.78x

11 April 2007. Beautiful rainy gray morning--luminescent slab of sky hovering over 7-eleven. Line of silver roof flashing above dark mansard shingles, marking one horizon.

Laurentie-lief, Laurentie mijn,
Dat ik bij mijne Laurentie was...

From an old Nederlands street song--straatliederen... Amsterdam cobblestones, winter canals--the Uilenberger, Nieuwe Prinsengracht... Cars rolling up Solano in gray light--whoosh of wheels on wet asphalt. A pair of red tail lights just across the way--maroon electric vehicle backing out. Rain mist over dark magnolia...

Analect 2.77x

10 April 2007. Tuesday morning, Moeser pool, Emory's gnarled hand through small window, how ARE you...since sometime in the winter a year back, cold mornings, before dawn, black sky with misty moon. Today, hint of sun over eastern hills. Visit with Jane, each year at this time. Dad's salad bowl, turned wood from top shelf. Peter's guacamole--just green onions and fresh jalapeño. Sense of smell, the most atavistic...carries us back, zeroing in on some until-then-unremembered moment--kitchen on Fowles Street, for instance, the same bowl at end of counter, my father the produce man, holding cucumber or radish in one hand, a paring knife in the other, adding them in, his particular patience--an enjoyment of the moment, the ongoingness, humming under his breath--I'd try to catch the tune--or did I try? Maybe it just became a part of me...

Analect 2.76x

9 April 2007. That's my baby, Nick Tosche, late at night. Brilliant, informative, unpleasant. His runs of adjectives, describing country-music players and their lives--puce suits, lizard eyes. A version of truth--one slice, adjusted to a falling-barometer... Whereas Wang Wei, above, on top shelf--Sung dynasty print on dark gray-green cover, running all the way across...a copy, from hundreds of years later--his record of attentiveness, everlasting. Shanshui--rivers and mountains. What we put into the world...

Analect 2.75x

6 April 2007. Gray again, morning. A very dark-complexioned man in white cut-offs, white top, climbing into white Chevy van--windowless, small illegible sign on end of side--another man, also in white, hops in the facing door. White backing lights blink on, then two red gashes just below, pulling out slowly...

Image of electric guitar against white ground. "I've been listening to Lonnie Johnson all week..."

My baby's so evil she can't keep straight in the bed
She gets full of wine at night, wish everybody was dead

Birta from Rejkevik--in amazement--no, that's not quite the right word. Recognition, maybe--that these` feelings can be shared, even when they seem to be so far from her own. "She can't sleep straight in the bed." Lyrical, incantatory, that polished single-string guitar line--like some kind of cosmic ice skater--true blade path through the Milky Way. Madelyn, too...the reality of who we are--starting with herself. "Now my apron strings won't pin..." And Cindy, mysterious half-veiled presence, set in old wood... Elizabeth Cotten--implacable face, not looking away--if Mount Rushmore were true, this too... Small electric locomotive model, rolling along at some miniature scale, someone's patio--the plants, the fence, the flash of turquoise pool. A sound track--also lilting--harmless jazz, the open road...

Analect 2.73x

5 April 2007. Also gray, warm tones in the sky. Single side-burned figure, leaning over the top of older black Porsche, newspaper spread out on the roof...cigarette, sleeveless sweatshirt. Morning ritual. George, across the street, even earlier--his smile. "Bon giorno." Another smile. Tiny holiday lights in window of darkened pool. No hint of occupancy. Girl at the desk: "I like it this way."

"When did you first come to Berkeley?" Sitting on 9th floor of Wurster with Forrest, Robbie and Dan. Bare review room, gray walls, covered in some smooth, non-descript fabric. Narrow skylights at each end. Late afternoon. That kind of day. Robbie's drawings of Birmingham. "Memory sheds" he calls them--lines merging into tonal areas, then into prints from old photographs, cut away to reveal the incompleteness of the view--any view--tiny figures here and there, included as part of a possible story, like the drifting touches of white--late-winter snow on the Rockies from 35,000 feet--my association--no, the roofs of cars in moonlight...

Analect 2.72x

4 April 2007. Warm gray skies, bus with glowing golden sign. Yesterday, Room 491, upstairs at school--somewhere in between a gaucho and a figure at the parrilla... Modeled in clay by some unknown Argentine sculptor, criollos típicos, the ones who really seem to belong there...becoming images of themselves, however sentimental--for the feelings are there, at heart--as with Botero (if for all the wrong reasons)--they win us over with a kind of undeniable presence--as if things had always been so... esencia, lo verdadero...

Analect 2.71x

Pesach 2007, with Alyosha in the madrasah...

Analect 2.68x

23 March 2007. Catalpa, sunlight, Chinese elm...Stephanie's smiling face after three sleepless nights in New York--two small paintings--that same afternoon, on return. Alizarin embedded in moody grays... Messonier and the army of Napoleon--a line into the distance, winding--troop in winter, furrowed road...wagon path, the wheels biting deep into the earth. Ancient movement--cities of the plain. Anthony's song--dark, refashioned Stephen Foster. "He died at 38, of alcohol..." Beautiful dreamer...the lovers, both right and wrong--the bridge. As if from something too well known. We know as well--making the journey alongside...

We will walk through the world
We will walk through the world
We will walk through the world
As one...