Staying sane while working a steady-eddy phone job requires periodic full-body immersion in art, but petty-betty phone jobs don't provide the kind of money needed to buy theatre tickets or pay for expensive museum admissions. So like any starving artist in desperate need of art, I do what is necessary to throw myself onto or into the nearest art island/slagheap/ burning bush (or swamp).
I volunteer.

This week, I hustled over to SF to serve as a volunteer usher at Forum,  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' experimental theatre venue. I wanted to see  Eiko & Koma's Fragile,  originally produced  as a gallery installation for the Walker Art Center but then recreated as a more formal performance piece together with SF's own Kronos Quartet. It was, I thought, just the thing to take my mind away from surveys and chitter-chatter, maybe push me into the light  . . . or bury me in dark. Either way,  I was ready -- I thought -- to sit quietly for four hours as the two of them lay naked barely moving, caught inside haunting bells mixed with the lapsed strings of the Kronos Quartet.

I would sit -- I thought -- as silently, as still as their unclothed bodies dusted with white rice powder and bits of leaves and feathers. I would be as naked as they, my mind my spirit as stripped as motionless, lying on mounded dirt, while the Kronos played. 

Either I was caught thinking (again) or I should stop already with all this thinking.

I didn't know that my volunteer gig would remove me from the performance space, abandon me to the narrow space of an organized past. I did not know I would  not be asked to seat the audience and then left to my own devices within in the womb of the performance space as expected. I was surprised and a bit chagrined that I was instead positioned as a "guard" of the 'archives,' asked to stand in a back corner behind the impervious black curtain separating the stage from an artificial yet "upfront" backstage where a suspended oversized rack holding costumes from past performances swayed above a floor littered with snapshots from past performances.

Nostalgia gone wild.

I was supposed to keep folks from walking away with the photos, from grabbing the costumes unceremoniously, from sneaking into the  dark unexplored space behind the stage. Control the crowd. But I was alone in that corner. I was expected to guard the past, but, of course, no one was interested in visiting the past. 

No one cared to dive headfirst into the sensuous floor to ceiling cascade of fiber, string, and paper that had been essential to the set of a previous performance. No one reached out to grab the over-sized kimonos, the faux bearskin wraps, or the silky scarlet camisole suspended above the hundreds of photos scattered about the floor. No one knelt to peer at those snapshots or picked them up to hold them closer to the light.

No one wandered into the corral of the past.  The audience was dutiful and respectful. The door opened. The door closed. They walked in, turned left, sat down, and stayed neatly folded onto the benches inside the curtained performance space.

The musicians played. The bells tolled. The two naked dusted bodies curled and uncurled, and I, guard of the past, stayed in my corner, leaning on myself,  splashed color, dim light, and violins, stretched past fragile.

I make a lousy guard -- not really my nature to guard things -- but in this case I was a ridiculous guard, a Beckettian guard, waiting for waiting, standing inside of standing, leaning on nothing.

I was extraneous.

I would like to believe that the audience was more focused on the present and thus ignored the carefully collected past, hanging  unceremoniously off to the side.

Every morning, I wake and flip on the radio, and every morning after a very few minutes I turn it off. I find the brittle language, the constant spew about war, death and destruction exhausting. This morning, my little dog drowsed on the bed and I sat at the kitchen table, eating dry cereal topped with sliced strawberries and almond milk. The radio was on, and a man described drones buzzing the skies of Afghanistan while he and fellow prisoners closed their eyes, knowing they would not hear the missile that killed them. These drones were moving past the speed of sound. Even though I knew that soon there would be a discussion of the great and fabulous imagination of Dr. Seuss, I turned the radio off . . . went and sat on the porch to drink my tea and watch the flowering pear tree, pushing new green leaves against a still blue sky while the tiniest of finches danced from branch to branch.

I know the world is plastered shut with violence. I know that the human need for violence needs to addressed, revealed and never concealed, but I am tired of hearing narratives of violence and violent conversations about a life that could be peaceful and peaceably discussed. Change your language and change the world. Speak about beauty and live beautifully. Speak peace and live peaceably.

I thought about a brief ten minute video I watched recently of  'the artist as a young man'. . . Eskae, an artist I have known all his life – since that night he drew his first breath – on film, speaking 16 years ago about  the language of living, the language of art, while he and Crayone painted visual narratives, at the request of its owner, over the entire interior and exterior of a house in Napa before its demolition. Floors, walls, ceilings, bathroom fixtures -- everything touched by joy. The touch is gentle, the lines graceful, the images quirky ironic and potent; the transformation extreme. Politics without violence.

Give it a listen and watch as one artist creates a lively environment of gratitude and rebirth in a structure that will soon be splintered and shoveled off to the landfill, making art for life, for living, even in the face of death.

I may be prejudiced – Eskae, after all, is my son – but I find both this Bright Moments video and what this young artist has to say remarkable.  Sixteen years have passed, the house is gone, much has happened, but what he says about language and art  still  resonates today.

Mid-afternoon, as the sun grew longer and golder, I heard voices. First two distinct voices speaking loudly in harmony, and then the many repeating, responding. Those voices were distant but approaching. By the time, I had laid aside my work, a small but active crowd was passing in front of my house. Two young women were out in front with megaphones, followed by a group of thirty or forty people, including  the Mayor, her husband, the Police Chief and other Oakland city workers, marching solidly up Peralta Street. The women yelled out What do we want? and the crowd yelled back PEACE. And the women yelled back When do we want it? And the voices lifted  NOW. 

End the violence. End the violence. End the violence now.

Join us, join us, yelled the man with the microphone. My heart was with them, but I couldn't get up and walk. I was working. I was barefoot. I would have to put away my work, close up the house, set the alarm. I had a million excuses, and even before I could scratch them all on the back of my skull, the crowd was turning the corner to head down Twelfth Street towards Mandela Parkway and away.

_
What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW.

NOW. . .Now. . . Now.

What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW. . . Now.

The mayor's husband, a doctor, a founder of an over-60 health clinic, reached across my fence and handed me a magnet  for my refrigerator. Create a Safer Cleaner Oakland. Report Problems to the Public Works Agency. I thanked him, and then stood still, listened to the gentleness of feet moving together, the pitch of voices rising. Call and Response. Call out and the world calls back.

I did not want to think about how many years ago, how many decades past, I yelled those same words, passionately, convinced that by working together, we could change the world, bring peace to our cities, peace to our land, peace to our world. Almost 50 years. I stood aside and watched them go  -- the years, the people, the voices -- wondering why I cling, somewhat stupidly, to a hope for peace, but I do. I do.

After they were gone, my neighbor to my right went back to working on his car. My neighbor across the street picked up his hammer again. The man who had stepped out from the Western Service Workers Association put away his camera and stepped back in. I went back to work, and somewhere behind some closed door someone went back to cleaning his gun.

What do we want?       PEACE.

When do we want it? NOW. Stop the Violence, stop it now. NOW. Now.  now. . . please NOW.

But how?  Federal funds are funneled off to wars. Schools are collapsing under the weight of senseless and useless bureaucracies. Our society is gasping and grasping and gagging. There's no money for schools, no money for health care, no money for housing, no money except for those who already have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime. Education, housing, healthcare  have become unaffordable for most of us. Real health care is no longer available except to those who can afford to pay for private  insurance and the hefty deductibles. The rest of us make do with aspirin and tisanes. The social safety net is so shot through with holes that if any who has the misfortune to fall into it instantly falls through its rotted netting and hurdles downward into the abyss.

We want peace, but who's going to sign the Peace Treaty and give up war when war is the money machine, the rusted gas guzzling brutal nasty engine that keeping the economy pumping. . . All money goes to war; all money comes from war. Capitalism is war on the people. Once that war was organized with well-defined rules of engagement; now, it is guerrilla war, fought down in the ghettos and out in the streets, and we, the people,  are being unwittingly transformed into soldiers, destined to die in those trenches unless we cast off the uniforms, lay down the guns, and give up on war. NOW.

Now . . . NOW . . . Now . . .

But how?

If we want peace, we have to stop consuming and start nurturing. We are not the brave soldiers of capitalism, marching off to consume and consume some more. We are mothers and fathers, artists and musicians, farmers and mechanics, dreamers and inventors, scientists and doctors, workers, children, grandchildren, lovers, humans with thin skins and giant hearts.

To find peace, refuse war. All war. All violence. Live simply. Consume less. Do no harm.

I have been feeling purple blue  ever since the Occupiers went on their rampage through downtown resulting in the arrest of 400 and the "banishment" of a dozen. I was as disappointed by the arrests as by the violence; both actions resulted in expenditure of tax payer dollars that might have been better spent creating housing for the homeless, subsidies for public education, or any number of public works such as filling potholes, cleaning trash from parks, etc etc etc. In these still hard days of budget cuts, we don't need the expenses incurred by violence and mayhem, and we don't need more people behind bars. The United States is, as the ACLU correctly states, a nation behind bars. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. If we are going to find across the murky swamp of violence that has become commonplace in our cities, we need bridges, ways to communicate that work.

I don't  purport to have any concise precise answers; I know there is no magic wand to wave, but I also know that if we want generous loving lives in a compassionate world,  we need to revise old tired systems, abandon violence and war, long favored and applauded by the hierarchies of power, including most political systems and organized religion.

We're not going to save the world by maiming  and killing one another. I know what you're  thinking -- oh, goodness, how naive! Tell that to the politicians. Tell that to the corporate raiders. Tell that to every sneering mean-spirited pompous self-righteous man or woman who has blamed the poor for their poverty, the sick for their illness, the ignorant for their ignorance, the grieving for their sorrow.

Okay, do that.

Tell them, quietly and firmly, without shouting. Forgive student loans. Regulate financial systems and insurance companies. Adequately fund public education. Reduce the cost of health care and make it available to all. Help our world to bloom.

Elsewhere ice is still holding back the green, but here it is spring. Perhaps it's a spring too early, but it's spring, the season when imaginations run to dreams of peaceful days and visions of verdant summer gardens alive with fruit and flowers. True, this year rainstorms have gone missing, and that's a worry. There are more and more people crowded up against the coast, more and more water consumed daily, and the skies are brilliant blue even in the earliest morning hours.  No rain, but in all that blue, can't we find a rock near a hidden spring perhaps where we might anchor a human bridge that might take us hand over hand from old to new, here to there?

Or are we going to once again leave it up to God and/or Government?

I've always thought of God as nothing more than the space between, that which both holds us apart from one another and simultaneously provides connection,  a borderless place where we store all our knowledge, all our love.  The only God I know is love. I never could imagine 'a' God, slipped inside a body, perched upon a throne, soberly surveying the troubled paradise below. Thinking of God as that vibrant space between, human life can perhaps be imagined as the Bridge between.  We are the builders of the Bridge. We get to decide which stones we'll use, how much concrete we pour, how high our Bridge will soar, how far its reach. We can choose to eschew those flimsily manufactured pillars of violence and cruelty, choose instead to build the every day with sturdier stock, using only the willowy branches of love and hope lashed together with kindness and generosity.  As for Government.  .  .  well that would be us, wouldn't it? We the people, remaining flexible and fluid, retaining the dream.

Spring is a hopeful dreamy season, a kind Bridge built of earth spirits and sky shadows, one that allows us to slip from darkness into light. Nothing is yet ripe (except the citrus fruits, lemons everywhere) and anything rotten is being greedily consumed by the new growth of old plants. Bursting in bloom, flowering cherries and plums are redrawing horizons, coaxing winter skies to the earth below where those flowers that are the true markers of a Northern California spring -- poppies and oxalis -- are opening to the sun as exuberant and as brilliant as they are short-lived._

Life is short. Live lovingly. Do no harm. Practice random acts of Kindness. Be generous. Make art.

Why not?

When skies collapse, the earth breathes.  Storms redraw our world by erasing distance and focusing shadow, highlighting as essential those tiny details more easily missed on brighter crisper wider days when what I notice are the broader strokes – the slant of the sun and the growth it encourages, fragile leaves, unfolding flowers, green hills, and all that rolls and rattles toward unreachable horizons. On sunny days, I am electric. My skin leaps out.

It may seem strange (even improbable) but on sunny days, I feel as if the wind offers me wings cut from the furthest edges of the sky and when I slip them on, all that blue above stretches my spine until I’m sure I’m on my way to stars, pulled way past the tops of trees. On stormy days, however, when blue skies are layered deep in grey, I am compressed, rolled into the earth. I feel in danger of short circuiting, blowing necessary fuses  . . . fortunately for me, I guess, I have discovered in this new non-fuse virtual world of motherboards and cloud computing, fused circuitry is easily replaced with the imaginary.

 
So let the fuses blow. As the rain draws in the details of otherwise dusty trees, washes clean the stones beneath, I fold into my heart, restart the dream.

That doesn’t mean I use rainy days as excuses to curl up under piles of blankets. When the rain came, I was up early and out early, anxious to discover some of those focused shadows, made more visible by changed light and the close quarters of a newly shuttered world. Like Francis Bacon who wrote in Novum Organinum that knowledge is built usefully from observable detail, I seek detail, knowing those details as representative of emotional states, collective decisions, that are at first invisible or insecure to the observer, but I never enter into a day certain as to what that day will offer me. I cherish that insecurity and what it yield, and here I part from Bacon and his belief that If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. I share his interest in doubt but have little interest in certainty.

Indeed, I have never encountered it.

On this day of rain, I was hoping for surprises – spiders descending suddenly from rain-sogged pine boughs,  shiny stalks of mushrooms pushing through previously dry soil, inexplicable blooms of earth and stone that might recall those pitch black airy explosions that happen on the hot bottoms of ovens when yams burst and drip sugar-sweet orange flesh onto metal. Of course, I found none of that. What I did find was detail revealing a much larger picture. Imagine, for example, spying the spoke of the wheel belonging to a chariot so huge, so fast and powerful that it might  erase the distance between earth and sun in less than the amount of time than it takes for a poppy to unfold ts petals. I found  distant views brought close, great trees bowed down, cities compacted by roiling clouds, light collapsed by dark. That kind of detail.

Sometimes it is very necessary to see small bits of the larger picture up close – especially in these times when the world seems to have lost all reason. How can it even be possible, for example, that Newt Gingrich is even being considered as remotely presidential? Now there's a detail that troubles me.

_Who would support a sadist who wants to expand Guantanamo Bay and advocates for “enhanced interrogation procedures,” i.e. torture, and a two-tiered justice system that includes military tribunals? Who would even listen to a homophobic man who as the co-author of the Defense of Marriage Act speaks hatefully about same-sex marriage and seems to feel that it might be good idea to reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”? Who would even offer to listen to a miserable misogynist who supports a ban on granting Federal funds to any organization offering abortion services? Who would pay any attention at all to such a hater of freedom and free speech who believes the Patriot Act is a good thing and wants to expand its powers to provide closer and more intense surveillance of American citizens? Why would anyone vote for a mean-spirited narrow-minded man who supports the re-establishment of orphanages to save on welfare? How can there possibly be folks who would think it a good idea to have a man in the White House who abandoned his wife because “she’s too old to be the wife of a president and besides she has cancer”? Have Americans become so heartless, so cruel, that they would consider voting for such a mean man, or are they just impossibly stupid, ignorant of the man’s words and acts?

There he sits, beefy red, a detail focused by the fog, a festering sore on the body politic, a man who declares (and believes) that he “articulates the deepest felt values” of American voters. I certainly hope not, but as someone who understands how specific detail can reveal the larger picture, how a flower speaks the spring, how a tree etched into a rain-swept sky can outline the days of drought it has endured, I tremble. I hope this  boorish man is not representative of American thought and deed.

_ And so I rest my eyes (and my heart) on details that remind me of the power of the earth. I watch waters move from the ocean into the bay, think about the great distance those waters have traveled, recall the healing power of the sea. I watch rain drip from leaves, soak the earth below, and think of the simplicity of growth. I know when I am walking uphill under trees, watching the waters of the Golden Gate, I may be engaging in a sort of escapism, experiencing a kind of foolish hope, but I cannot allow myself to drown in the putrid swamps revealed by the pockmarked detail of mean-spirited nasty folk like Gingrich.

The Devil may well be in the details, but I have to believe that an awareness of those details and the larger picture that they represent can build useful knowledge, even wisdom, something that some might call salvation. I believe that to look closely is to remember well, making bold revision possible.