Launching the Eggmobile

If you want to skip this piecing together of images, enjoy a straight slide show by clicking on "View All Images."

Using a Photo Taken by Fred Goldsmith...

Friend Peter in Portland sent me this birthday greeting...from his patron saint? from my patron saint?

Waiting for the Bus to Oakland

...staring at the wall in the bus shed.....

15 May 2008 in the Castro District

During the heat wave, I feel langorous, in shorts and sandals, drinking coffee and reading Cavafy at a table outside a café at Sanchez and Seventeenth in San Francisco. I look up from the words about young men glimpsed on the streets of Alexandria to look at a young man passing in T-shirt and shorts. He eats ice cream on a stick with nonchalance, too young to fear that his slim body will gain weight from the treat he licks. He moves on flipflops, as if on flippers that slap the cement sidewalk, seemingly unaware of the world around him, pulled along by a mongrel pug on a leash. The little dog so quick and curious, searching the world as he pulls the beautiful, bland young man like a child pulling a toy that rolls on wheels. The dog is more attractive than the absent-minded youth. Young man, you have failed me. Back to the streets of Alexandria, looking for that mirror that reflects the beauty standing behind us as Cavafy borrows coins from me and purchases Turkish cigarettes. Our purchase done, I see that the beauty reflected has disappeared into the street. But his memory enlivens the mirror that trembles, the beautiful poison of liquid mercury.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that gay people may marry. The Castro District is sleepy with the heat. Later in the afternoon some reporters show up who try to arouse some strong reaction in passersby who are more curious about the behavior of reporters than obsessed with the ruling.

Later Andrew and Donatella Minama (I think that is similar to how Gregg B. spells the name of our mutual friend) are in the Castro Theatre watching Jean-Luc Godard’s CONTEMPT when it begins to sound as if a mob is going to invade the theater, the sound of the celebration that has commenced out on Castro Street. We older three leave after the movie, quietly making our way through the happy throng, eager to find the more peaceful streets. One of us for a long time “married.” Two of us having had our “marriages.” All of us accompanied by ghosts, some of our best companions.

There are all kinds of gay people in many stages of life and with different ways of celebrating life. No judgement. As I have written

UNITED/UNTIED

Both married and single
are terrible things
but what a man suffers
is what a man sings.

Stanley Wade, Poet, Translator....

reading her translations from Turkish literature, ancient and modern, on 13 May 2008, at the Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco...
I enjoyed Stanley's reading, but I am also very happy that, as Poetry Editor of SUBTROPICS, at University of Florida, she intends to publish my translation of a Baudelaire verse in their January 2009 issue.

Publication is Fun

I let one of the surviving Cockettes, Rumi, know that THE GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW has just published a version of an essay he had seen (and passed along to Peaches Christ), although, since he read it, it has gone through changes, and was finally edited and given a certain slant by editor Richard Schneider Jr. It is a fragment of San Francisco history from the late 1960s. I wondered if Sebastian (AKA Milton Miron) would dislike being referred to, on page 4, in the editor's opening remarks, as "founder of the Cockettes." I know that Sebastian supported the Cockettes phenomenon once it was set loose, and he seemed to have a theatrical acumen and so he might have been more directly involved with their shows than I know. I hoped that Rumi would let Sebastian know about the essay, especially as the editor titled it, "Sebastian's Nocturnal Dream Shows."

With my article, Professor Schneider also published some of my photos of posters by Todd Trexler and Steve Arnold. I suppose I should eventually give the posters to the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, while, on the other hand, I wonder if there is any person or place that would like to buy Cockettes posters. I told Rumi again that I feel a bit silly to have something published, written by someone like me, a peripheral witness to the Cockettes and Nocturnal Dreams Show, but I think it adds a valid little fragment to the whole picture -- the experience of the audience, as the actual performers and participants could not so often experience their work from "out front." In a month or so, elements of this May-June issue of the magazine should appear on their website, but not necessarily my article: http://www.GLReview.com

Strange New Mobile

Strange new mobile, pieces patterned with much-reduced copies of Martha Hubert's paintings -- Not sure it works or should be allowed to survive...

Painting Egg Shapes Over the Kitchen Sink

A Code Pink Fundraiser

Thanks to my buddy Martha H., I enjoyed being present for a fundraising evening for Code Pink in Berkeley. I wondered why the wonderful comedian Marga Gomez was standing outside with the rest of us waiting for the doors to open, but it was because she was there as an audience member in favor of Code Pink. But Anne Lamott saw her and recruited her for the program, and, on the spur of the moment, a consummate performer, she did a great "set" that had everyone roaring with laughter.
As Medea Benjamin had just come back from Iraq exploring the dilemma of the millions of displaced Iraqis -- some of her tragic accounts conveyed to us second hand -- she could not attend, as planned, because she was to be part of a panel the next day in Washington, D.C., to discuss the refugee tragedy.
I always love being at these gatherings of activist women, fresh from political action, taking a night to celebrate their solidarity -- and their sisterhood.
As usual, Annie Lamott had great comic timing as she read passages from her comic novels, and Maria Muldaur sang her way through various kinds of songs, and really wailed on "Send Me Someone to Love," receiving a standing ovation. The energy was high for everyone.

"The Lonely Pioneer" - a distant Eilers

Accidentally, I started arrowing forward In YouTube through all the "Eilers" entries, and following any family name will, I suppose, take you on a zigzag journey, one entry having little to do with another. First I found Justin Eilers, and watched him beat someone up in one of those no-holds-barred matches -- He won -- I'm afraid I suddenly felt empowered. There was a young Eilers playing his guitar and singing softly. Eventually, of course, it lead into entries by Eilers in the place the Eilers came from, Germany. But, at last, I found my kind of Eilers. I'll have to let him know that I have made up similar songs that came to me out in nature, along with a tune -- that no-one but the trees will ever hear me sing. What kind of fool am I? Here, followed by one of my own arcane nature songs is my kind of fool! Have a laugh with my new favorite Eilers. Hark! 'T'is the Royal Bard....



One of my own arcane songs. You will have to guess the tune:

Summer Psalm

River, flowing to the sea...
River, flow down to the sea...
River, flow by thee and thee.

Blossom bent to weight of bee –
Lift again and be care free.
River, flow by thee and me.

Dead leaf held in a green leaf’s palm…
Butterfly hymnals’ fluttering pages…
Wordless thoughts of woodland sages.
Spread the balm of summery light
in the shimmering calm.

(23 June 1973, with Michael, Walnut Creek, California)

Copyright 2008

3Penny Opera revived

After seeing the 1931 German film of Weil/Brecht's THE THREEPENNY OPERA a couple times over the decades, I decided it was too much trouble trying to enjoy that original production by looking at fuzzy, foggy images. But friends pointed me to the new Criterion version, drawn from the original negative (the film banned as soon as Hitler came to power). Wonderful to see how the film should look (although I wish director G.W. Pabst had not omitted so much of the songs and music.}
For those who love Lotte Lenya, images like these are such a treat:

What kind of duck am I?

If you walk around Lake Merritt in Oakland (the Oakland Estuary), it is clear that all ducks come in discrete pairs of male and female. But there is one spot where, in recent years, I see this same sex couple. (Of course, the complete variety of sexual behavior in animals has been verified in scientific studies, as presented in books like SEXUAL EXUBERANCE.) So -- sail on, brothers!

Slogging through the Blog

Blogging in April was interrupted by a trip to see my friend Peter A. in Portland. He showed me wonderful things in Portland, including the Japanese Garden, and maybe I will add more Portland photos later.

Unofficially, the Jim Eilers Park

After a lively discussion at tai chi breakfast, Fred G. and I went to see a Potrero Avenue show by a friend of his, Michael Staley (www.michaelstaleydesigns.com) whose art process is strange, and yet results in beautiful things. He covers everything with buttons! For me, it worked especially on the frames of mirrors. Then, before going to a movie, as it was a sunny day, Fred said, "Where can we go?" I said, "Too bad there is no park in this area." Then I remembered: "I will show you a park you have never heard about," and I directed Fred by a tortuous route (I want to use that word now that Fred has pointed out that people often use 'torturous' where they mean 'tortuous') beyond 3rd Street and along the last little fragment of 24th Street.

I could not be offended, and I had to laugh myself as I knew what Fred meant when he laughed and said, "I hate to say this, but this is so Jim Eilers." We surmised that someone had cast a lot of seeds for native California flowers, as there was a wealth of them, as well as a lot of weeds. We discovered some mosaic pieces, half-submerged under weeds and dirt so that someone had tried at some time to bring some beauty to the place. "I see the place as hope," I said. "Hope that someday this funky little park will be surrounded by civilization instead of an industrial wasteland." Here was the picturesque view at the water's edge of the park:
The name of the park is the Something Something "Cove" -- until I look for its real name, I am going to call it Blue Elephant Cove.

Going to Watsonville with George

George Washington and George Washington Birimisa


TRIP TO WATSONVILLE [Very much abridged to omit the names of some who might not want their personalities broadcast to the world.]:

With an impending trip to Croatia, the native land of his parents, George Birimisa wanted to return to Watsonville where he spent his early years with those parents, Charles (Charlie) and Anna. He wanted to revisit the sites of early trauma, but also to see a man (T.M) who has arranged for him to meet with surviving Birimisa cousins there in their native area of Croatia, and to meet a man there who has written books about that part of Croatia and who will be able to clear up a lot of family history for George and to show him where the Birimisas had lived. We agreed to meet T.M. at the town plaza, that used to be the center of town where George, at 9, in 1933, saw his father give a fiery Communist speech from the Victorian bandstand to a large crowd. The police disbursed the gathering with a fire hose and arrested his father. In jail he developed pneumonia and died soon after.

....Seeing three white bearded men enter the Blue Sky café, the young waitress, pretty, with long, straight black hair, asked us if we were brothers, and later she would say, “Do you boys want anything else?” T.M. and George pieced together a network of family and community associations in the Croatian community in Watsonville that also touched on small town class structure. We went to visit the large Victorian house belonging to wealthier relatives
that had been even larger to George’s childish eyes when his mother had dressed herself and her three children in their best clothes and came to that door to seek financial aid only to be turned away. The same relatives took over their house after his father's death made it impossible to keep up on house payments.

We went to a cemetery and found Charlie Birimisa’s grave, a slab where we left George for a while so he could sit and have a cry.
T.M. knew of an old woman whose great grandmother was a sister of George’s great grandmother, making her George’s second cousin, from the wealthier relatives, but Tom arranged a visit, and she gave George a sense of acceptance that somewhat mollified his grim childhood.

Mrs. V. lived in a large comfortable house where she had always lived; it overlooked a valley and mountains. The valley had fields of rows of raspberry plants, some under large aluminum hoops that were covered in white plastic sheets, looking like giant white caterpillars. She missed the days when the valley was all apple trees when she could watch the changes through the seasons, and I could imagine how beautiful it must have been when the valley was all white apple blossoms.

The three Croatians pieced together family and community relations and the local cultural events of the Croatians (with specific strange dishes), but their knowledge extended also to the links with the villages in the old country to the local Croatians. Mrs. V. remembered George’s family, although George, later, felt that in her lady-like way she had painted an innocent portrait of him, his siblings, and their parents. She revealed another nickname for Charlie Birimisa: “Rough Rider,” that she assumed was because of some association wih horses (how he rode? how he trained them?)

There is no way to summarize the traumas and divisions of members of George’s family, tragic separations and tragic ends, but, as an orphan, after his father died and his mother abandoned her children, George spent time in various Catholic facilities and orphanages, and T.M. left us finally at the site of one of those schools. We went into the church over that school (St. Francis Something Or Other) to pay our disrespects....


George had not liked the route I followed, from Mapquest, to get there, and insisted he would guide us home. We happened to enter some construction zone where the cars were bumper to bumper for miles, resembling the scenes in Godard’s WEEKEND.
I am not sure yet where we ended up before we guessed that we were on the wrong highway. Was it Nevada? At first when we saw a vast body of water, we asked “Is it the Bay?” It was some kind of San Luis Something Or Other Reservoir, and it was worth getting lost to see it near the end of the day on that particular day where the particular twilight coloring on the hills and the unbelievable shade of blue in the water created a scene of ineffable beauty.
When a Latino man tried to explain how we would have to go back in the direction from which we came, almost back to Watsonville, and that it would probably take us about 45 minutes to get back where we started before we began again to travel to San Francisco, we began a long period of mad hysteria that made everything funny. It became a theme that no matter where we drove, we would end up back in Watsonville, drawn back to that kind and helpful man, T.M.
We retraced our way, past previous minor stops for coffee; a walk down a tree-lined country lane that was like an outdoor garage sale; a fruit and vegetable stand that had closed for the day; and found our way back to Highway 101.
If we had not been so terribly delayed, we would not have arrived back in the City at an hour where we could be amazed by the appearance of a golden full moon, mammoth in the sky. I dropped George off at his building on Berry Street around 10 p.m. As I drove across the Bay Bridge to my own home, I saw that the moon had become a normal-size white moon, merely full and perfect.

Nothing Knits Nothing

NOTHING KNITS NOTHING

Nothings looks in the window
where the knitting needles clatter
that no-one holds. X's and W's
are written over the easy chair
where no-one sits. The words in the message
the letters make are misspelled.
No sense can be made of it.
No ball of yarn unwinds,
drawn into the needles to knit a new line
in a garment that doesn't appear.
No-one gets up and looks out
the window where nothing looks in.
Something, something there is,
that wants to be there but cannot
remember and so has forgotten to be.
The world is at peace at last.

-- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007

W.S. Merwin, Poet and Translator, 15 April 2008

I am enjoying lunchtime presentations at the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. On 15 April 2008, poet and translator W.S. Merwin began at the beginning, ready to suppose that poetry and language were born at the same time, “as a reaction to unbearable passion, like a mother in Iraq confronted with the body of her murdered son.”

Merwin said that one of the lines that always comes to mind for him as a perfect line that symbolizes the mystery of language is Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” As well as I can remember, or discern from scrawled notes, Merwin explained, “Shakespeare never said that line to any woman or man. It is not something you would say to someone, and yet it is perfect. So where did it come from? It is not stilted. It has the flow of natural speech.”



Merwin quoted Pound who said that young writers should write a lot but they don’t have anything to write about at that age so they should study languages instead and make translations. “Translation will teach you your own language,” said Pound.

Merwin said he was originally simply a translator – translating plays and other materials for the BBC, and only then did he think of writing his own poetry. Merwin read a verse by William Stafford (probably in a particular cohort of poets including Merwin). Then he read his own verses “The Blind World” and “Gifts.” Merwin spoke of the influences that Pound liked to write about – that modern verse was born with the Troubadours of Provence who got rhyme, he said, from the Arabs. [I think others, such as the Welsh, would feel that poetry began with their own early bards.]



Before reading from his new translation of Dante’s PURGATORIO, Merwin said that he sees Dante’s INFERNO as being a succession of stories that demonstrate the “locked-in ego,” never able to escape itself – hell as it reappears in Sartre’s NO EXITS. In the INFERNO, Dante becomes whatever he is looking at, afflicted with anger when he sees and hears those in the circle of the Wrathful, etc. With the PURGATORIO, Dante emerges back into the light, steps from the underground back onto earth. After reading a passage from his translation of the PURGATORIO, he read from his translation of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. As he enjoyed that Welsh work, he seemed to welcome the card on which I wrote the name of Welsh-American poet and translator (of THE AENEID), Rolfe Humphries and the title of his book that spells out and demonstrates all the elaborate verse forms of the Welsh bards, GREEN ARMOUR ON GREEN GROUND. I hope he can find it in print.



When I had last seen Merwin in person, he was not this old man with white hair. It was at a party that the poet John Logan was throwing for the poet Jon Anderson (Jon, who died in the fall of 2007, was still a young man, and at that time in his life Mr. Logan had grown very fond of young men). Almost a side tableau at that party, Merwin was lolling on pillows, a beautiful woman on either side of him, symmetrically, as if they were attendants. I thought, “This must have been how Dante Rosetti looked,” for Merwin and both women comprised living figures in a pre-Raphaelite painting. I think he was wearing a brocade vest, and perhaps velvet trousers, but I may be wrong. The two beautiful women were also glowing with a natural splendor of feather and cloth and different textures. In 2008, the glamour of youth was gone, but the frail-looking, white-haired Merwin of today had a sweetness that was more impressive than the romantic image of the late 1969.

Jon Anderson and his second wife, Linda, were staying with Robert Minichiello (They had been friends in their native Boston) and me, and so we were there with them. I had just guided Jon and Linda on their first acid trips (a foolish thing to do) in Golden Gate Park, starting at the lagoon by the ancient giant ferns that some called Paradise #1 in those days – a good original starting point for first acid trips.

My lover at the time joined us at the Logan party – Robert Helps, composer and pianist, alternately teaching six months at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and six months as the Boston Conservatory of Music. Jon said that at last I had a lover he approved, having seen some of those I was always trying to “save,” and certainly Bob was at ease in his usual milieu, an intellectual and artistic crowd.

My memory fails about the others who were there, but I remember that poet Linda Gregg was there and her lover, a poet of equal reputation.

It was 1969 and there had just been an epic poetry reading at Glide Memorial Church in support of those involved in the San Francisco State Strike, with a stellar line-up of poets, John Logan included with the likes of Muriel Rukeyser. The alcoholism that was destroying John was no secret, especially as, at that event, he read his hymn to his failing liver. Poet and teacher, and onetime student of Logan, Louise Nayer said that Logan was bemused by the word "La Foie" as it could be either his "faith" or his "liver,” as both drink and the Roman Catholic Church were his obsessions; a series of his verses were dedicated (tongue in cheek?) to Mother Cabrini.

John Logan was high with spirits or high with the pleasure he took in bringing Jon Anderson out to the world of poetry with such a splendid gathering, spilling over from the Strike Benefit. Logan scanned my eyes happily as he took my hand, the hand of one of Jon's friends. Except for that evening, my impression of him is created from his poetry and the stories of others.
But I was impressed with John’s sweet personality, and somehow ended up writing a verse about him later, when he died:

Memorial Remarks on a Poet

Like the man in the Dada film who watched
ants crawl out of his palm, he used his body
as an inkwell and wrote with his blood. Father
of nine, then lover of young, talented men,
he came at last to be the saint he wished to be,
Mother Cabrini's child. He tattered himself
with drink, feathered his flesh with fire, changed
in the phoenix nest of the Church to keep love
stronger than life. At last he winked into light.
His blood twinkles now, black wit on bright pages.


-- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2008

Writing about the War

In the East this week, veterans of the war in Iraq testified in an event called WINTER SOLDIER about the atrocities they had committed in Iraq. A documentary film will probably follow, and I am glad for that. I only hope it will be shown on a double bill with the previous WINTER SOLDIER documentary -- confessional testimony of those who served in the American War in Vietnam and committed equally horrible atrocities. The reasons will be the same: "They were not White so we did not see them as human," "I wanted to serve my country and believed my country would not lie to me" -- more than tiresome -- sickening, stupid, although one must have compassion for the victims on all sides. And then in 2045 there will be the WINTER SOLDIER testimony of stupid U.S.Americans committing atrocities in some future war. It is a crime that no-one educates each new generation -- certainly not the cowards of the media (including so-called Public Television). All this made me recall a verse I wrote early on in the war and how writing such a verse means nothing, has no effect whatever. I do not believe in courting despair, or in avoiding action by taking on the escapist attitude of cynicism, but I do wish I knew what asses might most effectively be kicked to try to dislodge this circle of ignorance. I was happy to hear from my friend Martha that Buffy St.-Marie was in Washington, D.C., on 19 March, and sang her song "Universal Soldier" -- It has been maddening to me that no-one -- not one of our so-called radical singers or radical organizations -- has been willing to sing that song or bring back to public attention that great anti-war song. There is moral cowardice on all sides. To urge soldiers to disobey orders is too fearsome, it appears. Anyway, in this mood I picked up the latest issue of POETRY FLASH today, and read this verse that reinforces what I was thinking, and what I am saying:

THE EFFORT - David Ray

He was feverish, nearly manic
when he turned out his poems,

staying up far into the night,
rising early, sometimes before

dawn, for he thought his poems
might stop the war. In time

they were published by a small
press, and received no reviews.

A few friends did not mind
being given copies, even asked

politely for them to be inscribed.
He went on writing poems,

although he now knew the war
would go on, and on, and on.

And no poem would stop it.

The gulf is wide, and the runner with the all-important message will never reach the ear of the distant Emperor (cf. Franz Kafka's brief parable, "The Great Wall of China"). I wrote one of those poems, but I knew that none of the literary journals would ever publish it (it is not dull enough, not abstract, does not conform to contemporary attitudes about writing verse as imposed by the American Academic Poetry cohort, and, on the other hand, it is poetry, and so no political journal would print it):

NOT WISE, NOT RATIONAL (23 March 2003)

Not wanting to add to anyone's pain or anger,
not knowing what's right or wrong, and meaning
no harm, and knowing everyone's beyond what
they can absorb already when it comes to world events,
should I refrain from saying that it feels as if

the white dove is charred meat in the flames
of Baghdad. My tears are molten lead and trivial.
The injured babies of Iraq – with eyes older than mine
or yours – listen to the daily complaints of Americans
and, meaning no harm, puke blood and grieve in our streets.

I cannot, I cannot see why. I cannot,
cannot keep from asking why?

So the male gender can demonstrate its latest
clever toys? Make up your own list of reasons – But, oh,
children of Iraq, don't listen. I wish all words were water,
or medicine, and not so stupid, not so hollow,
not so useless. I would that I could find a way to say Peace,
weaponless as a baby's hand as it shakes a scepter of air.



-- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2008

And here is Buffy St.-Marie's song -- too subversive as it addresses those who accept personal existential responsibility (in other words, none of those happy to get mindlessly diddled by some so-called "God") -- or those who appreciate Bob Dylan's "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters."

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears

He's all of 31 and he's only 17

He's been a soldier for a thousand years


He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you


And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,

he's fighting for the USA,

and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way




And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls



But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war

and without him all this killing can't go on


He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.

[She writes, “I wrote "Universal Soldier" in the basement of The Purple Onion coffee house in Toronto in the early sixties. It's about individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal thinking kills us all. Donovan had a hit with it in 1965.”]

GUCK FOD

Vernal Equinox