Thursday, 31 May, 2012
I took some chiding two years ago when I wrote not only that I had gone to Flamenco Heaven in Berkeley, but also that the burg itself was something of a miracle ground in which, despite its petty and sordid and sometimes massively depressing sides, there sometimes occur redemptive moments when you realize something mind-blowing is happening to you, and it could only happen in Berkeley.
OK: let me admit to the tautology. Something that happens only in Berkeley logically only happens in Berkeley. But the events here at least happened and in Berkeley.
Once again I had gone up there for flamenco, this time to hear a great of the old school, Manuel Agujetas. I had stopped for tapas and wine at a putative Spanish joint in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto. The expression is irritating, since its components, gourmet and ghetto, have shed much of their original meaning. What was once a witty oxymoron is now an empty cliché. Berkeley, we should never forget, is in California, whose overall contribution to world culture seems to be the de-culturation of everything cultural it can lay its hands on.
When I came out of that tapas bar I saw a number of what I class as Berkeley-types performing what appeared to be standard ill-prepared pinhole-through-sheets-of-paper solar-eclipse-watching behaviour. But I charged on, since I was late for the pre-show fino at Freight and Salvage. It was about 6.20 PDT.
About 50 paces further down the street, on the sunny side, I thought to check out that working hypothesis. So I googled “eclipse may 2012”. Since sunlight was falling on my touchscreen, I moved into an adjacent zone of shadow. To my astonishment my hands began flickering with little scimitar-shaped shadows.
I had a brain attack. The same thing had happened to me in Houston in the Fifties when I was “inside” a bush, a sanctuary to which I used to retreat on occasion (as recorded in Sad to Be a Child). There, in that hideway, I saw the same pattern of shadows cast onto the underbrush, played across twigs and stems. I later learned there had been a partial eclipse.
The inside of bushes was a habitat of mine then, as was the summit of trees, especially sycamores where the upper branches turn willow-like, swaying queasily in the breeze. In both cases, it was a joy to eclipse oneself from open society, another reason I loved the old bayous of Houston, before they were converted into giant concrete culverts.
I’ve been debating with myself the date of that particular eclipse in Houston. My memory tells me I was old enough to enjoy erections and yet young and small enough to fit inside bushes. In any event, the visual effect was the same at both privileged mysterious moments. The interstices within foliage serve, when the focal distance falls right, as innumerable pinhole cameras projecting myriad shimmering images of the occluded sun.
I turned to my left and what I saw before my eyes and this is what I saw:
Not to plug Harmony Yoga Studio, nor César or for any other business along Shattuck Avenue. They just happen to have been the venue of a strange visitation of the universal, which can be seized incarnate only in particular times and places.
The effect was even more pronounced on the adjacent blank wall where a local tattoo artist had plastered his poster. The sun, I quickly intuited, has a more fluid sense of inscription.
Hair rose along the back of my neck. I was on Miracle Ground, having come full circle back to a boyhood mystery in Texas.
On the spot I didn’t stop to contemplate the array of information this photo contains about pinhole optics, the leaves along the trunk sufficiently sparse so to project but a few miniature suns, the center of the scene where the focal distance was optimal to create the sharpest images, then the zone of big blurs in the lower right, still sickle-shaped but generated by foliage further away from the wall. Different F-stops.
I looked back up Shattuck Avenue. The gaggle of graying Berkeley-ites, pretty much the norm these days as the glut of boomers to which I too belong head out to pasture, were still trying to project their pinhole images onto the wall behind them, this despite the fact that the whole façade of César above them was alive with quivering crescents — in which event some might find allegory.
At this point I am afraid I became something of a bore, though one perfectly consonant with Berkley, whose denizens, notorious busy-bodies who bristle with proper attitudes to all things, are always eager to explain things to the unknowning. I launched into a mini-lecture of what was happening solargraphically in front of our collective eyes, then veered seriously into the personal, also a local custom in Berkeley. Local this, global that.
Yes, I informed the unknowing, by astonishing coincidence there had been, on May 30, 1984, 28 years ago, another partial eclipse in Berkeley. I remembered the date because I had researched the matter when I published my poem Penumbra. which begins: Partial eclipse one afternoon, fog too thick to notice. The fog that day had never lifted, as it had the morning of May 30, 2012. As the reader will see, that previous eclipse marked a rather bleak period in my life.
So in front of César I started histrionically even hysterically reciting the poem I had written, as if I were a deranged denizen of Telegraph Avenue, only a short distance away, not just passing through the Gourmet Ghetto for old times’ sake.
Here is the poem is in its entirety.
Partial eclipse this afternoon,
fog too thick to notice,
further proof it’s all one stuff,
mist, shadows, the moon.
I cannot say to what ends
all day this thought has preyed:
the death of my friends’ fathers,
those, unknown, of Father’s friends.
Things I once thought don’t
make a whit of difference
anymore, a jot of sense.
Not by wit I live, but wont.
Now night has come so close
alone in bed at last
the only sound, my breath apart:
foghorns, remote, morose.
Rest assured that there is a sequel to “Penumbra” in the works, a second poem also beginning Partial eclipse this afternoon, one which will speak of the ecstasy I experienced for a brief fifteen minutes three decades later just as the sun, by extension my own sun, was slowly setting. These notes can be considered preparatory to it.
***
Date and place of an eclipse can be tracked at NASA’s Solar Eclipse Explorer, where I determined that my memories of bush-bound erections during the first eclipse I ever noticed are doubtless mistaken, since I was not even six on March 7, 1951, the only afternoon eclipse in Houston until 1960. It is hard for me to imagine crawling inside a bush nine years later, when I was fifteen. So the erotic dimension of that memory was definitely a false memory — as so much of the erotic is.