CA

“Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.” 


“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.” 


“This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.” 


“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.” 




To plagiarize myself: 


We spent that winter trying to find beauty. In the morning, we'd place green tinted glasses of water on the table and wait for the light to come in the window and illuminate it like Orthodox art, or make rainbows on the surface. We had decided that winter that we were going to live off art, off words, rather than the prosaic and unrelenting requests of our the shallow vessels we call bodies. We were determined to follow in the footsteps of art, the painter Renoir said, "The pain passes--but the beauty remains." 

On weekends we'd travel to the coast, admire steep hillsides draped in yellow sunflowers that plunged to the turquoise water below. We'd marvel at the rakish hair of the sage, the old costal live oaks, roots growing from shale, trunks silvered, bent but not broken by the wind. In the evenings we'd drive up dark roads, slithering up the mountains until we reached remote places. There, we'd climb on granite rocks and sit with our legs crossed, listening to the Santa Ana winds melting the white alders and Manzanitas, mimickign the sound of the ocean that we'd left behind. 

We'd walk through cemeteries veiled in early morning fog, run our fingers across the rough names of the dead. We'd marvel at the light on stained glass in old churches, the white bellies of gulls against pale blue sky. At dusk we'd sit with the graves behind us, on a small sea cliff, the voices of the dead but memories of lives misspent. Below us, the ocean, beating its same old tune, always on message, at our backs, the dusky arms of fig tree, slivered by light. We drank beauty in as easily as if it were water. 

We left behind, for those few somber months, all the things that we'd failed to be: good lovers, good friends, hard workers, the children our parents had dreamt that we'd be. Our dreams were no longer rimmed like an old cup with regret. We remembered fondly those who had loved us. We imagined the fingers of our mothers, our lovers, pulling softly through our hair; a child' rake across the sand. We forgot the places we'd left behind, and didn't bother imagining the places we'd be. We were here, or there, in a cobble stone courtyard with artists drawing pictures of children in bright colored chalk, in the balconies at ballets, on cold walls at midnight, admiring the shape and pull of the moon. 

Towards the end of that season, we saw humpback whales near sunrise, their bodies, like gargantuan brass dressers we had left behind in the houses of our youth, slipping through the water like rain through the sky. It was that morning, my body chilled by the sea, with those leviathans playing some indecipherable game at our feet, that I remember acutely from that lovely and bizarre winter. It's the last clear memory I have of you, standing next to me on sandstone cliffs, bare foot and windblown, looking out across that steely water as if we were explorers bound for some new valley. It is not the precise image of that morning that I remember so well that my heart briefly leaps, even now, years later. No. It is the reflection of that morning through your eyes. Just look at them! Look! They are on fire. Only beauty remains.