Oakland Museum Construction Wall

Oakland Museum, undergoing some reconstruction, has this colorful construction wall:

Friends With Great New Websites, or New News

Added to my accompanying list of blogs/websites,
ONE
Be sure to check out the beauty of the work of Gail Horvath at www.gailhorvath.com



TWO
Already in that list, but check Louise Nayer's website again to get news of Louise's book, BURNED, that will be published in April. Let her know if you have ideas on where and how to promote her intense and important book. Read more about it on her websitehttp://www.louisenayer.com/ which has a link to her blog.



THREE
While I have a link for him, when Fred Goldsmith has finished his new website, with his unique photographic vision, that will be added to my accompanying list of blogs.

Exploring My New Neighborhood

Settling Into My New Space

REDISCOVERIES, Part 2

When I lived on Rhode Island Street in San Francisco, I ended up with two cats. The black Burmese whined constantly, which was very annoying, and yet when she died I was more distressed by her death than by the death of my other cat Cirrus. Here is that annoying Sweet Pea Hecate Isis Marie, peeking in.


Cirrus Psylocybin, when I brought out the camera, always began to strike poses, like a Vogue model, and in this case knew that she would reveal how brilliant she was by sitting on the Collected Verses of Wallace Stevens.



Responding to a False News Bulletin in San Francisco
on Saturday Night, October 18, 1980

A cloud of radiation is floating over from China tonight.
The Wise Virgins’ Suite I am playing may be my last tape.
Skipping the fact that tomorrow night I may be puking out
my intestines like a string of sausages, I carry on. Give us
this day our daily death. A stack of quarters rests on zebra’d
wood: the coins belong to empire, but I sanded and stained
and polished the wood on that table and brought out the grain.

My cats purr. Recorded strings reanimate the row of human
arms that sawed them once so gently, while recording.
The cloud of radiation from China – Will it arrive in the shape
of a dragon? A cat rumbles at my shoulder. The one at my side
leaps away, chasing nothing, it seems – no mouse. A moth!
She leaps in the air, a flight of my black cat Sweet Pea Hecate
Isis Marie – or, for daily communication, simply Sweet Pea.
She’s at my foot, enticing me to drag my toe along her spine.

Will I be scratching the cat’s back when the heavens scour
us out? Sweet Pea chases out Cirrus, the cat at my ear:
replaces her mother behind my head, eager to be a pillow
for the dead. Dead cat. Dead cat. Dead killer. Sitting in
my electric chair, will I have crazy cats in my hair? a fur
fire cap? my brains a blaze? A terrible unknowing comes
toward us, cats. It is forgetting us hour by hour, and nothing
of us will be here in the dawn – so let’s trail away
and along the wind – smoke-cats, man-moth blasted.
James McColley Eilers, copyright 2009

MORE THINGS UNEARTHED FROM STORAGE. For its significance, you must know that it is from a period when the San Francisco State Strike of 1968-69 had come to an end. Many were uneasy about ending the strike and returning to work, fearful that Strike demands would not be met. Following the poster is a verse I wrote at the time:



At that time, Beverly Dahlen included this in our AFT #1928 newsletter:

In 1969, Ending the San Francisco State Strike


Anger, tears, and resentment fill the hot, smoky room

where the teachers deliberate: Shall we end the Strike?

In the distance the firecrackers of the Chinese New Year:

a snorting sound. I dream of a great blue dragon

twisting through the empty streets, tearing aside the veils

of rain. It approaches this room, hot with betrayal,

thick with regret, “Whatever may influence our decision – “

With the possibility of violence ever present – Boom!

a firecracker lands outside. Tension breaks into laughter.


Like a room full of frantic mice our Magic Markers

dance and squeak as Local 1928 rectifies its picket

signs, and races back to the picket line. The teachers

return to abandoned classrooms, ponder the future

in deserted offices, and repeat their rosary of intangibles.

Those still out walking the line hope to free themselves

from their elders’ dreaming. Roger Alvarado says that

enough bites from enough fleas can make the dog get up

and move. If now we too must return, break momentum,

we tell ourselves, it is but to loose our frightful mice

on the haunted rooms where ghosts are lecturing ghosts,

and hope we will not become ghosts ourselves: We are

determined to be forever biting the Dog of State.


[Printed, AFT Local 1928 Weekly News, Vol. I, No. 5, Mar. 7, 1969]


Another rediscovery -- the poetry reading at Glide Memorial with an amazing collection of poets, to raise funds for the strike:

THE FIRE

How do you explain to anyone the experience of shipwreck – call it great exaggeration to use that metaphor for the effect of a fire in my old apartment building in an apartment above and one apartment over, leading to smoke and water damage (water sloshing the deck on the sinking ship) that forced me to move. You think first of survival. Find something to cling to and stay afloat.

The surviving parts of my cabin are transferred piece by piece. I am a strong bird constructing a nest from the detritus of my previous nest. In a few weeks my cabin looks much the same as my cabin in the ship that sank. I recreate the illusion of stability that I had before, but now it feels like a preparation for an Egyptian tomb. Death is imminent now, and I have gathered all I will need in my afterlife.




But this is my afterlife, the life after I, whose sole and most urgent longing all my life has been to have a stable habitude where my inner life might thrive, may briefly be free of the constant fear of merely floating on an ever melting ice floe, waiting to be forced into the next dislocation.

The cabin looks a great deal as it looked in the old ship, but inwardly the shipwreck lives on – the broken beams and floorboards, and the sinking into the cold ocean waters. And you know it is just a matter of time, too short a time, when you will be forced to move on, not even into death, just another laborious, mundane Judgement Day, an0ther grim reckoning, while comedians make jokes about how old people “seem to move into smaller and smaller spaces.” We who are growing older are not supposed to mention what it is like.

I feel like the man in Galway Kinnell’s verse “The Man on the Hotel Room Bed”:

“a man lying alone to avoid being abandoned,
who wants to die to escape the meeting with death.”

Meanwhile my numb self looks whole, polished to smoothness like a stone on the shore (that wishes to be that stone that skips merrily on the surface of moving water), and that is better than for anyone to see that inside you are all sticks thrusting out in all directions and wires impossibly entangled. After this time while you still lack the strength for the distraction of the common everyday lies, you will find the old awareness-deadening routine? Or be a changed man?

Of course, I can only write this because I have finally stepped out of packing, moving, unpacking, arranging, and played the idle man, spending an hour in a coffee shop – in my old neighborhood.

I told friends how, during the transition, I awoke one night to find the hose of my apnea C-PAC machine wrapped twice around my neck –


In that twisted time of the move, sleeping first on a mattress on a floor, then, amid debris, in my old bed, I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote,

“The lonely animal awakened again, having slept only briefly, and, using one hand as a grip, slide it down the length of his other arm as if removing an invisible sleeve. He froze there for a moment, his long thin arms hanging away from his bed like the two crossed legs of a sleeping deer.

“What vigil must his body make each night, waking to know-not-what. Wander out of bed – bathroom, kitchen – nothing needed there, but he takes a drink of cold water.

“Soon sleep will cushion him again, take him back into its arms, an invitation to return to some dark place in the foliage, nest of the soul.”

It reminded me of another time when I felt displaced and became a sleepwalker. At about age 8, after returning to my family from the year when they left me with an Italian family, the first clue that I was having a nervous breakdown was when an aunt discovered that I was a sleepwalker. Was I looking for a way to return to my Italian family? They, of course, could not accept my living with them forever while that was precisely what I was looking for, trying to find my way back to the Marantos, although there, too, I would feel displaced, on loan, borrowed. Am I always longing for “the place” (I know I am, but I never know for sure what that is), and never finding it? Is that true for everyone? Does everyone have a sense that anyone’s life is an exile? Maybe this newly reconstructed nest will become, albeit briefly, my “place.”

It feels important to find my “present life” again, but, with this move, even more than previous ones, I am looking through every storage box – This will be a slow process -- and each box releases some number of ghosts, dragging me back into the past to reconcile why I have kept these mementos, like old bones. A couple packets of letters – not many, but saved, clearly, because they were the most intense and meaningful. On my blog, I may have a series of “REDISCOVERIES.”

REDISCOVERIES

I hope I can find (and trust) some historical archive – the Gay Lesbian Historical Society, or the Gay section of the San Francisco Library?) – that would esteem and want to preserve this collage: It is from the first ever showing of the AIDS quilt – at the Moscone Center.

Click on this if you want to see it closer:

I think the photos are arranged well, but, most important, the sad child gives the human touch to the collage. One of the quilts is for someone I knew, Morgan Pinney, who was a one-man Gay Liberation before there was a Gay Liberation. He was a professor at San Francisco State who early on addressed State-wide teachers conferences with the announcement that he was gay. He was also the man who doled out union funds for those who were involved in the San Francsco State Strike of 1969. As with so many gay people, his family’s rejection of him for being a gay man had an embittering effect, but did not keep him from fighting for equal rights. His executor, James Hicks, if he reads this, might want to add more information, but one great irony is that James knew that Morgan would want to respond to gays in Moscow who needed a Xerox machine for their leaflets – at a time when the Russians overturned the old system, and that Xerox machine helped them to spread the word of their new revolution.

I will have to send the Robert Helps Archives at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa a letter that Bob sent when he was granted a residency at the MacDowell Colony so that he could concentrate on composing, away from performing as a concert pianist or teaching half-years at the Boston Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.



Click on the image of the letter if you want to read it:

A Perfect Nugget of Ignorance

In response to the entry (quite a while ago) where I showed the votive candle on which someone had placed Obama's head on the body of St. Martin de Porres (a charming bit of whimsy), I got this comment from Anonymous (Anonymous may not have a sense of whimsy). Wonderful to have such a perfect nugget of ignorance, although I do agree that we should give the country back to the original inhabitants (more about that below).

"From: Anonymous
Date: August 31, 2009 12:36:05 AM PDT
Subject: [The Blue Elephant] New comment on Saint Obama.

"I think that is totally out of hand stupidity! He's more like the anti-christ and is fooling everyone...he's about to turn this nation into Socialist Country and his face is everywhere and didn't do a thing about anything except give his banker friends our money! Give the nation back to the American Indians before the Latinos and Jews destroy it! Long Live the Truth!"

Hey! Anonymous left out gay people! I wonder if the anti-Socialist Anonymous realizes that the original people on the continent assumed that the earth belonged to itself. Those who nearly decimated them felt the earth should be parceled out and owned, and it is ironic that it is they who suffer a sense of rootlessness. As their sense that their portions of the earth were not true places on the earth, real as dirt and grass, but "liquid assets," they too became liquid assets, and thus their mad vision spreads its disconnection from reality (otherwise called "the environment") A mad vision -- Save us, Tecumseh!

Duboce Street Mural, San Francisco

CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE for a trip across the Duboce Street Mural

Event Honoring LGBT Pioneers

CLICK ON HEADING ABOVE to see slide show. At the San Francisco LGBT Center, on Saturday, 22 August, LGBT Seniors were honored. On the slide show you will find a few of those honored and featured: State Senator Mark Leno, State Assembly member Tom Ammiano, Felicia Elizondo, decades-long political leader Howard Wallace, Janaki Tompkins from New Leafe, Lorraine Hunter, Heather Lamborn, and others.

In Gualala, to escape Xmas

On the way north....





Near the end of December 2000, I checked into Cabin #8 at the Mar Vista Cabins in Gualala, California. I readily believed the owners, Tom and Renata Dorn, that Cabin #8 was their best cabin, standing a bit away from other cabins and near the woods.

Every now and then it is good to follow the Buddha’s example and meditate “under a Bo Tree” until you are certain that you can still live with yourself amicably and peacefully. With every solitary retreat, one is visited by the same spirits that visited Buddha: loneliness and desire and the fear of aging and dying.

For the pangs of loneliness and fantasies of desire that flew around my “Bo Tree” – that is, Cabin #8 – there was the fish-slender Japanese-American youth at the Cove restaurant in Point Arena, like all the waiters, wearing a black T-shirt with a logo on the back, an altered yin-yang – the tip of the white part ending with the peak of a wave, the end of the black part being a tiny surfer.

It was also a writing retreat, but I found time to write in a journal too, where the part about aging flowed from my pen, and gave me some lines that evoked laughter and nods of recognition when they were spoken in my one act play, TURNING:

THOMAS:
Trying to pull on my sox this morning – What are these toenails? I say to myself. I live alone now so I talk to myself that way. Growing strange – hard to pull on sox without getting caught on some odd splinter of a toenail. I’m growing stems now – I’m growing branches – I‘m becoming a tree!

LENNOX:
What’s with this long list of complaints? It goes on and on –

THOMAS:
Well, excuse me, world. It’s just that I am feeling a little worn in places – one eye, one ear – the way any fabric will grow thin in time, and then holes appear. Like old wallpaper, yellowing, drying, but not flaking off the wall – a picture that no-one sees anymore.

No longer troubled by that Xmas phobia in 2009, it is difficult to remember that I was also in that cabin for a few days in Gualala as a means of hiding out from Xmas. What that was all about would require a separate exposition, but now it seems very silly. Among the people I know, Xmas does not exist so I have no need to fear the day, the things that day used to evoke.

I don’t know if they are still there, but Tom and Renata Dorn were politically liberal, friendly toward guests with dogs, and had a watchgoat Buster tethered with a generous length of rope in the yard near their office, the red cabin amid all the yellow cabins. Renata had given personal attention to everything. Was it a little painful to see that Cabin #8 was set up for lovers? Everything in twos, including two champaigne glasses and a sprig of mistletoe over the bedroom door? The embroidered and ribboned window curtains were clearly her handiwork, and she must have placed the book of local women writers, given to her by her mother (as it said in the front of the book), inviting us to share her mother’s gift. Looking out the window one afternoon, I saw that Renata was sitting in a chair under a pine looking toward the sun and Buster the billygoat. Lonely people create cottages, and lonely people stay in them, I mused, inviting too many people into my loneliness, except that the solitude of natural places seems to open space for everyone.

Mid-mornings I would drive to do tai chi on a cliff where three sides looked over white water crashing against cliffs – a space just wide enough to do all the steps without falling off into that beautiful swirl of water where rainbows sometimes lingered before the spray fell back into the sea. I am most in love with the ever-changing beauty of water, the patterns of water close up, or the rucked and sequined sea. And in that place, and before reaching it, the sea was the dominant character. Driving past Valley Ford, I came into a landscape less familiar to me, and I felt the old paradox – You can be in a “quiet” forest and realize that it has its own “traffic noise.”* Nature at that point of the coast was not calming to me, as I saw foam slather around the monumental black teeth of the sea, those rock sentinels compact with millions of years of earth-time. Driving past those ominous dark and ancient ogres, electricity shivered through me.

I loved to cross the road from the cabins, unhook the leather thong that held a gate closed, and stand on cliff’s edge, over a hundred wooden steps down to the beach. The pre-dawn might be purple and red, and you heard the bull of the sea snort and stamp loudly on some mornings. That night, the ocean might still bellow, stomp, tear, and snort – while the stars…were silent.

*Wind in the Pines

Listening to the wind in the pines,
I hear the traffic in distant towns;
the roll of surf; the cheers from
a stadium crowd; the falling away
of the world when it rushes by
a diver or a suicide; the restless
murmur of an audience before
a concert or a play; the faint wail
of a far-off train; the keening
of an antique song: The wind
in the pines sings to me every day
in the voice of the bustling Earth,
with, once in a while, a hush
when it pauses to take a breath.

A Few Recent Photos

CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE to see a few new photos.

New Design

July 2009, Lake Merritt, Oakland

Click on subject line above to see slide show

Oakland Cathedral, Part Two

Click on the heading above for additional Photos of the new Oakland Cathedral...with an unfortunate climax:

Deborah Butterfield's Horses

...currently on exhibit off Market Street, downtown, San Francisco: