Wednesday, May 19, 2010
We Will Return to Regularly Scheduled Blogging After These Words From Reality
It’s not like I think that any of you are compulsively stopping by to see if I’ve refreshed the compost here at the Chucklehut, but to the extent you are wondering about the pace of my updates, or lack thereof, I owe you this much of an explanation: I am busy. There’s enough going on in my real life these days that I will be taking a bit of a blog-pause. I am still writing, and may get around to posting some of it someday soon, but for now the pressure even of a weekly post is more than I really need. Drop me a line if you are starved for Hutletude and I’ll hook you up. Meantime, back to reality for me. Wish me luck, it can be very intense sometimes.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Getting Stonehenged; or, It’s Not What You Find, It’s What You Bring
1977, England: We were domiciled in gracious but isolated quarters outside of Oxford for six weeks while Dad did research. I’d suffered a sudden precipitous deterioration in my vision, losing most all of my distance acuity over a few short months and not even realizing it till we went out sightseeing at the famous Salisbury smudge and the renowned Blur of Myopia. I wasn’t seeing much of the sights when we took our tours, but some things remained in my range of perception. I could smell and sense the history; the creme anglaise and clotted Devon were plentiful, rich and fresh; and sometimes we visited places that even a purblind yankolescent such as my 13-year-old self ought to have been able to appreciate, like the rehabbed torture dungeons in musty old castles and the odd decrepit graveyard.
Plus, of course, I was a confirmed fan of British humor, and took full advantage of the opportunity to immerse myself in it. To begin with, there was Python - I’d known about them forever, as a 13-year-old measures such things. There were also the Goodies, too, but they already seemed a bit juvenile to me. Flanders and Swann had by then already ceased to produce new material for my delectation, perhaps in part due to Flanders’ demise some years earlier, and I’d already memorized both their albums long before; but then I discovered… The Goon Show.
Sure, they were defunct, but I’d had no prior exposure to them and in their day they’d been remarkably prolific and even more so silly. Sillier than Python, sometimes, and that was saying quite a bit. As their medium had been the radio broadcast, my visual impairment was no impediment to my full appreciation of their funny noises and non sequiturs. Harry Seacombe was their straight man - they gave him some good lines but mostly he was singing welsh Zeppo to their other-Marx-Brothers, consisting of: Peter Sellers, before he achieved renown as Jacques Clouseau, squeaking and jabbering in a dozen hilarious dialects and cracking his colleagues up on-air; and most significantly for me, Spike Milligan. He wrote most of their scripts; it was his twisted, ridiculous vision that the Goons evoked. His funny noises were the funniest; his silly voices, the silliest; and his nonsense, the most nonsensical. I didn’t have many role models at age 13, but Spike Milligan was definitely a few of them.
Since I felt compelled to get out of our isolated Oxfordshire village occasionally, I’d go on those bus tours with my mom and sister even though I couldn’t see much while on the road. I made up for my limited access to the outside world by expanding the inside one - that is to say, I read a lot. I read Catcher in the Rye, the Narnia Stories, a bunch of things I no longer recall… and Spike Milligan’s autobiography. Following the example of T.E.Lawrence, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom verbosely described his experiences in Arabia during WWI, my man Spike wrote about North Africa during WWII, where he served without apparent distinction as a foot soldier. Except, instead of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this was more like Four Fingers of Fleam. He was always getting into trouble and goofing around and generally making the living hell of service to the Queen against Rommel sound like a good bit of fun with a spade and a gun.
And thus it was that, one relatively less-overcast day, Mom and sis and I set out from wherever we started such things, as passengers on a right-hand-drive bus that took us to the Plains of Salisbury, a vague greenness flashing past the window next to which I sat, where I clutched a book the reading of which while in motion experience had taught me would nauseate me, but the eventual consumption of which I eagerly awaited. In the interim I watched England zip past, lulled by the rumble and thrum of the diesel engines and the cottony indistinctness of the landscape. We were headed, though, to a site which promised an experience as clear for me visually as historically. Megaliths benefit little from clear distance vision - roughly-hewn, massive and looming, they’d be the opposite of my trips to murky churches with their delicately-worked reliquaries kept yards away behind railings, details obscured by distance and darkness and visual defect. After visiting (but not seeing) too many of those, I was relieved to be on my way to open fields and huge crude monuments. I was in the mood for something obvious, and Stonehenge was not reputed to be excessively subtle.
The bus arrived, in 1977, at 2000 BCE. We pulled off the highway and could see the circle of orthostats and trilithons standing nearby, shadowless under grey skies. Even I could see them clearly against the meadow and horizon. Toward the, obedient, if not druidic, we all marched - the busload of tourists, mom, sis, Spike and myself. Spike, of course, accompanied us in the form of his penguin-edition autobiography, but in my myopic world his voice was so clear that he really seemed to be there with me - more than the other historical spirits haunting those earthworks, at any rate.
In 1977, historical preservation was a work in progress. Some sites kept visitors far from the erstwhile action, behind barriers and between the lines. Stonehenge wasn’t like that then. It was just a bunch of big rocks, after all - what could late 20th-century tourism do to it that nearly four thousand years of just sitting there hadn’t? I guess someone figured out the answer to that question because within a few years fences went up to block visitors from the immediate presence of those brooding stones. I got there before all that. When I visited Stonehenge, I walked right up to the circle, around it, through it, between its elephantine elements, under its looming lintels, dragged an impertinent finger along the mottled flanks of an unnatural formation more ancient than its own constructed ancientness by virtue of its geologic pedigree, caressed surfaces once wrought by hands so long since gone as to be lost to history’s history. For a while there, I was dwarfed by its magnitude, physically and historically. I was a blip, a wafer in a sedimentary formation that began before the past and extended beyond the future, an enduring chain of ages all linked together by the presence, there, of those stones, eloquent in an unknown language, marking seasons and years like Foucault’s Pendulum made permanent, and I was less to it than an equinoctial sunbeam or a solstice moonrise. For a while, was was really there, in it, within it, of it. For a while, anyway.
But I was also thirteen, and I lived on a steady slow simmer. I could only take so much of anything. Before our tour group had been called back to the bus I had reached my megalithic limit. I had been well and thoroughly stonehenged, and I was ready to move on. But the bus was across a broad field and likely still locked. I couldn’t tell, with my inept eyes, whether the driver had left me a way back to my cushioned seat, and I didn’t care to walk away from those chilling stones all the way across the meadow just to find that at the end I’d have to come back again. I was stuck at Stonehenge, for a little bit more of our respective slices of time. Thankfully, I was prepared for such an eventuality. I had my friend to keep me company.
And thus it was that my clearest recollection of Stonehenge, after treading its ancient paths and breathing in its antique air and letting its granitic impenetrability seep into the palms of my hands, after familiarizing myself with its utter mystery till I had neither room nor patience for further quiet contemplation of its majesty, was when I found a huge stone sinking on its side into the English turf, and I clambered sacrilegiously up onto it with my book and read about Spike Milligan’s misadventures. It wasn’t a great book, as such things go, but I’d had a crawful of greatness by then. What I wanted was comfort, distraction and the accelerated passage of time. Stonehenge couldn’t provide those, with its frowning stones, overwhelming presence, and timelessness. However, I knew how to do for myself what the monument could not do for me. It was not the lesson I’d gone to the stones to learn, and it was not the only one I learned from them - but it does seem to be the one that’s lasted the longest.
Moral: What you take away is what you bring with you, not what was waiting there for you to arrive.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Two Days in Pictures, Day Two: Traveling to Sacto and Back
You thought I’d forgotten about our little deal, didn’t you? Okay okay don’t gloat, I had excuses, as I always do, but this time they were really good ones - lots of meetings for Z’s impending graduation from pre-school (yeah, but after 2 years there, it’s like 40% of his life and we’re gonna do it up right for the boy), the final conclusion - finally - of the getting-into-kindergarten saga (way too much drama but a happy ending), getting a new computer for the back of the house, getting new glasses, all kinds of craziness at work with my now being a union dude and having special new other-peoples’ problems to deal with, and a load of other crap you don’t EVEN want to know about.... but enough about that. Let’s go back to April 26, a day that will live in… hm, what’s the opposite of infamy? A day that will live in famy, I guess. It was lobby day, which I celebrated by avoiding my building’s lobby and going instead to the lobby of a few train stations and a few legislator’s offices. It was a good time, and potentially a constructive one, but the best part of all as far as you’re concerned, you image-starved webzombie, was that I took public transportation the whole way and took a camera and took - a lot of photos! Some didn’t even suck, so I’ll share them with you..... now.. (a click’ll swell’em right up for ya.)
mothball fleet
On the ride east, we went past the hundreds of old navy vessels moored in the north part of the bay. Soon they’ll be carefully dismantled, to stop them from rusting away into the water completely. For now, it’s a sight that is, for me, both sad and inspiring at once.
railstation benchend
I was pleased to arrive in Sacto at a real train sation - not some cinderblock emplacement that was put up as some transit-planner’s afterthought, but a palatial masonry structure that clearly once witnessed the romance of rail travel when that was not an ironic term. When people waited there, they got to wait on wooden benches that were proud to stand by the tracks. This design is incised on the ends of each bench, and fit right in with the overall aesthetic.
railstation awningprop
Outside the station were massive theater-type awnings, richly ornamented and suspended from metal rods that, today, would be little more than glorified re-bar, but back in the original day (O.D.) they were decorative and visually stimulating. I rather liked the way the light played off the twists here.
bay ripples
On the train ride home, I particularly liked these tiny, perfectly-spaced little wavelets. On the calm, flat water it had a very serene, geometric feel.
waterfront property
Heading toward Benecia there are a lot of run-down industrial sites. This one in particular seemed evocative, with the two bridges and big transmission towers looming over the desuetude of the shack on the pier. It was a tricky shot, what with the interior reflections off the train window and the constantly-changing framing as the train rounded the bend, but I think this mostly captures it....
Benecia Bridge pier
This is a big, or “big-ass,” bridge. Well, not the whole bridge, you understand. Just where it goes into the water. Inviting, no?
Berkeleyffiti
As the train rolled ever closer to Oakland, these images were among the hundreds or thousands spraypainted brightly on the flat faces of the soundwalls and security fences lining the tracks. I don’t supposed many people see them without riding the train, and I doubt that many who do ride very often notice.
new bay bridge
Finally, from the window of the bus that took me from the train depot (hardly a station, now that I’d seen Sacramento’s) in Emeryville back to San Fran, here is a view of the dual roadbed of the new bay bridge, or that part of it being constructed to replace the east span that broke in the ‘89 quake. This new one looks pretty sturdy. Anyway, one must hope.
That’s all I’ll bother you with for now. The words are piling up in my notebook. I guess you’d better brace yourself for some of that good stuff next.
