Life is Change, How it Differs from the Rocks

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane wrote the lyrics from the song Crown of Creation, mostly taken from John Wyndham’s science fiction novel, “The Chrysalids”, published in 1955.

It’s Monday evening, BC Day. On British Columbia Day, the city is always very empty. Streets and sidewalks are nearly deserted. It seems the thing to do on BC Day is to leave British Columbia. Or at least leave Vancouver. Every years it’s like after an apocalyptic attack. Thinking about those empty streets this morning, I wanted to do a short drive around town to visit a few places I often make work. Local gardens, a couple of small woodlands, the area near the inlet where I photograph tree forts and lookouts the local teenagers have built near the train tracks. But I started at the Forest Lawn Cemetery. Every state, every big city, must have a “Forest Lawn” cemetery. These are places that are neither forests or lawns.

At Forest Lawn, things were remarkably quiet. The sun was just coming up, and the rays were raking the hills. I sat in my car eating my breakfast burrito and drinking my Diet Coke. I had parked on the highest point, and two small town centers could be seen from there in the distance. One in each opposite direction. It’s assumed that this is the cemetery where Jeff Wall’s “The Flooded Grave,” made 1998 to 2000, a large Cibachrome transparency in a lightbox. I think the original is still at the Art Institute of Chicago. It shows an open grave, a mound of dirt with a tarp beside it, filled not with rainwater but with a full ocean floor scene, starfish, sea anemones, kelp, built into a digital composite. I guess that’s why the Art Institute says 1998-2000; it took two years to put all the separate parts of the image together. But Wall makes a point of saying there were upright stones in the cemetery, and there are few of those here. I guess it’s part of the constructed nature of the image. Everything looks empty and wet. Primordial. The photo was taken here, but somewhere else too.

Today, the cemetery is very empty. Usually there are some visitors on a holiday, not today. I guess no one associates British Columbia Day with visiting their dead relatives.

I have been a bit consumed with memories and the past for a few days now. Yesterday I spent hours sitting in a Wendy’s drinking root beer and locating streets and buildings in San Francisco on my iPad. I haven’t been back there for ten years. The map on my iPad seemed very unfamiliar to me. I wanted to locate the two apartments I had lived in there, the grocery store, and a couple of stores along Market Street I used to shop in. The map seemed to be of another town. I located the Windmill by the ocean. San Francisco actually has two windmills on the western edge of Golden Gate Park near Ocean Beach: the Dutch Windmill (built in 1903) at the north end and the Murphy Windmill (built in 1908) at the south end. No matter how much I thought about this, I could only remember one. The windmill was just a point that I thought I could use to remember where I used to back my car into a parking space and read in the early evenings, preparing for the California Bar Exam after working all day. Before I lived there, I would drive in from Vacaville and park there, study for a few hours and go to a coffee shop. I also wanted to remember the name of the record store I spent hours in every Christmas looking for weird holiday music. Finally, I found Amoeba Records on the map. Turns out someone renamed it, Amoeba Music. My eye goes back to the windmill, near there; I climbed over the sand dunes and lay on the sand with DaGang. He arrived in San Francisco after I left. I remember his voice, how he walked, how he turned his head, but even though he is there, he is little more than a memory at this point. There are too many of those.

And there was a grocery store at the corner; it’s a Whole Foods now. I don’t know if it was a Whole Foods then. I had started an essay and needed to get my facts right. Several times, often enough, we recognized each other, I ran into Robin Williams there. He owned a home in nearby Sea Cliff, and several times after 8 pm we ran into each other in the deli section and talked about fruit and bread. I never said his name, and pretended to not know who he was. Just another middle-aged guy buying something in the deli department.

The last place I couldn’t be sure of was along the main street, Haight, yes, Haight Street, down past the restaurants. I remember walking down Haight and reading little memorials on the trees; they were memorials to rock and roll groups, with a little blurb typed out that was laminated and hung by string. Google, and every AI, says I’m misremembering that; there was no such thing. But it’s clear in my mind.

Farther down there’s the San Francisco Zen Center. One day I was waiting for my partner, who was picking up some friends to go have Thai food, rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The new copy, with a cover I didn’t like. It had a new end page about Robert Pirsig’s son Chris, who was stabbed in a street robbery at the corner of Haight and Octavia. And that’s where I was sitting, on some steps, looking right at that spot, waiting for my partner and 4 other friends. Reading that was a body slam. My own son had recently died of AIDS, and, well, it caused some real distress. Mental turmoil. Is that a good way to put it?

I’m gathering details like this lately. Making little notebooks of names, places, dates. I found my last resume a week ago, and was rather surprised at the dates and even the sequence of events it presented to me. But I feel a need, due to my writing, to have these things written. Not to be in the middle of a sentence and think, “What was the name of that record store?” No, that’s not true, the reason to gather these things is to start the sentence. To re-member the broken past. Where was the laundry mat where I found that copy of Granta Magazine, and the woman at the desk said, “Go ahead, take it. That’s what they’re for.”

It’s Joan Didion who’s got me thinking about the past, about the loss, about keeping good notebooks and sprinkling what I write with facts and details. Making shadows real. Being a witness, not so much to my own life, but to a moment.

And that’s why, this morning, I took my camera out of the car, at Forest Lawn and made use of the three recent graves to turn dead flowers into something that, even as they fade, dry up or start to rot and fill with bugs, still can be seen beautiful and meaningful.

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All photos are taken at daybreak, using available light with my Sony A7R5. No filters. Just me, my camera, and tripod. I had looked up most of the flowers and then decided -unnecessary. While “the truth is in the details,” sometimes the details are distractors.

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