The Gods in Everyday Life

My Senior Discount

The other day I went into the Goodwill in Menlo Park, where I found a shirt and a sweater. When I took them up to the register, the woman behind the counter said, "Senior?"

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Senior discount?"

I said, "How old do you have to be?"

She said, "Fifty-five."

I said, "Well, I am fifty-five."

But she must have noticed the look on my face, because she said, "You look young," and then gave me the ten per cent discount.

I know that the store clerk was looking at me casually, and she was, after all, offering to do me a favor, but I have to admit I walked back out onto the sidewalk feeling weak in the knees, as if she had, with no warning, punched me. Had I just crossed some threshold? Nobody ever asked me if I was a senior citizen before.

Being older is one thing; the character and dignity and depth of "older" doesn't bother me a bit. I'm attracted to older men, and I like being one, and a number of the most vital and interesting people I know are older than me.

But being "senior" is something else entirely. Golf carts, planned communities, irrelevance, cuteness, triviality, retirement, hobbies: I refuse senior, I hate senior.

One friend in his seventies is a strapping and energetic weightlifter with a boyfriend a third his age. Another is a beautiful and vibrant single parent in her sixties. I know marvelous poets in their seventies and eighties, deepening their work, following where their practice leads. I wish that this knowledge weren't shoved aside, at least temporarily, by the ridiculous category into which I tumbled while buying some secondhand clothes. So that I suddenly felt thoroughly used and ready for the Goodwill bin myself, which seems to be in some insidious way what that category is intended to do: separate one from real life.

Object & Image

In the Cantor Museum of Art at Stanford there are some wonderful rooms devoted to the Stanford family and the founding of the museum collection. There are, for instance, the ears of the horse that Muybridge photographed for Leland Stanford, to settle the question once and for all of whether all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground while running. Muybridge invented stop-motion photography in order to solve the problem, and in the process discovered the working method of the motion picture, which you can see in action in a marvelous reconstructed machine -- something like a very early movie projector -- call a zoopraxiscope.

Stanford's son Leland Jr began an eclectic collection of natural objects (stuffed hummingbirds, curiosities, the snowy owl flattened into a shadowbox frame above), and then became interested in antiquities. When he died of typhus in Florence at the age of 15, his parents' grief caused them to memorialize the boy by founding a university in his memory. Early in the twentieth century, the new institution hit hard times, and in order to raise funds, Mrs. Stanford decided to sell her jewels. Since she was attached to them, she commissioned a portrait painter from San Jose to represent them first; above is his representation of the gems, spread on a red cloth, each one numbered. (It's a big painting, so in this little photo it looks more like trompe l'oeil that it actually does "in the flesh.") As it turned out, only one piece of jewelry was actually sold, so now her diamond-encrusted pocketwatch sits beside the painting. The third picture above is the precious timepiece, and the final one its painted double.

Goethe is supposed to have said, looking at a lavish still life by the Dutch painter Willem Kalf, that he would rather have the painting of the golden vessel than the vessel itself; he would prefer the representation to the thing to the splendid and valuable object itself. I'm inclined to agree, but there's a strange pleasure in going from the fancy watch itself to its painted image. It's partly that objects have a funny quality of timelessness -- there's the watch, in the room with me, in late January of 2009. A painting is an object, too, but you can't look at without being aware of when it was made; art always has a style, it carries with it the history of looking, the way of seeing and representing of its moment. Strangely, the object seems current (and not especially interesting, for all its value), but the picture has a sweet, dated charm to it, and it makes a sort of museum of this woman's jewelry, numbered and catalogued, and thus it seems to speak to the loss of these things, of treasuring what she imagined she'd lose. What did she think of the painting, I wonder, later, when she still had the sparkly stuff it depicted?

Pacific Sublime

I've been thinking about Robinson Jeffers, surely the great California poet of the twentieth century, and the cold vigor of his response to the coastal landscape, the world of rocks and tide, fog and hawks and seals. A few days after posting the photo below of sea lions floating off the pier at Santa Cruz, I came across Jeffers' poem "Animals." It's an odd poem, in the way that it moves from an evocation of the marine creatures in their cold element to consider the hot colors of sunlight, and to suggest that the sun is also alive with burning creatures. Jeffers often wants to put human life in its place, in a long, geological perspective, and that impulse must have to do with the sublimity and scale of the Pacific Coast. This poem's unexpected final sentence considers the world's many lives, and chemical processes entirely unlike our own. Weird, given where this poem started out, that it ends on "amino-acids."

The painting above is an Arthur Dove, from the Cantor Museum at Stanford, and roughly contemporaneous with the Jeffers poem. It feels like it's also interested in the dynamism of natural processes, of bringing the conceptual vocabulary of science into art.


ANIMALS

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea,
Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kind to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and singing,
      can float at ease
In the ice-cold winter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives in the sun:
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with oxygen
      and salted water; the would look monstrous
If we could see them: the beautiful passionate bodies of living flame,
      batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride
      the storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There are many
      other chemistries of animal life
Beside the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino acids.

California Light

Something about this image -- an Andre Derain from the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco -- makes me think about the light here, the way each individual thing seems to stand out, in a kind of relief, especially as you get closer to the coast, when the sun's shining. Which it has been quite a bit lately, gift of heaven, unlikely thing.

This is a cell phone snapshot so it's not the best quality. I was a little startled when I realized that the SF MOMA lets you take pictures, so I could point my iPhone at anything, and be a possessive collector, as if I were stealing color. Now my phone's full of Matisse and Max Beckmann, stuff it would seem immoral to erase.

Starting Today

The poets Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg have a great project going: one hundred poets are writing a poem for the first 100 days of the new administration. You can read them as they're posted at Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days.

CAMERA OBSCURA

Yesterday Paul and I spent the day in San Francisco. I'd read that there was an old camera obscura at the Cliff House, but yesterday when Paul and I walked around that marvelous, unlikely place. I assumed that the old optical amusement had bitten the dust, but it turns out we just didn't walk far enough around the building. The small building, which is itself a giant camera, is just around on the south side of the building, and it's on the National Register of Historic Places, so it'll be there when we go back. It was built by a fellow who also designed structures like it at the Garden of the Gods and at Lookout Mountain, though both of those are long gone. The sign above is one I photographed above the beach in Santa Monica; as far as I could tell, the camera itself is shuttered now (forgive the pun), but the sign's still tempting. For a wonderful site with many examples and much info, click here.