Aerophant is orbiting

We'll be back to Earth soon.

The future

Brought to you by you.

First storm of autumn

And finally, I have a red umbrella.

On reading Mrs. Dalloway

"Do you remember the lake?" she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said "lake." For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it?
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I don't think any writer has depicted the thoughts of a woman in midlife better than Virginia Woolf: the penchant for thinking many things at once; the nonlinear breathlessness of one's attention; the time-traveling between past and present; and the moods, ever-changing, like quicksilver.

One of the themes of Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway is that all the people you meet in life (and even those whom you never meet but only hear about) make you who you are; even a fleeting acquaintance leaves an impression. And once you reach the middle years of your life--or the middle pages, as I like to think of them--you have met and seen and known and loved and forgotten so many people that it becomes dizzying; their influence is indelibly etched upon you and with each year there are more versions of yourself, all these mirrors into which you have looked and seen yourself reflected and stories into which you are projected; and how does one make sense of it all?

The geography of my inner world is so different today than when I was younger. Rivers that once ran clear are muddied, cities have sprung up where villages once stood, dense thickets obscure the road ahead. It is so easy to lose one's way. That's why I find the quote above so arresting. Everything has meaning and weight. Even language is treacherous; you can be surprised around every corner. A seemingly innocuous word like "lake" can raise the specter of the past, cause bittersweet pain, evoke a tempest of emotion. Clarissa Dalloway's lake is more than a sentimental memory; it's a shimmering reflection of her fear that she has squandered her life.

The roots

George Angell, who founded the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1868, was often asked why he spent so much time talking about kindness to animals when there was so much brutality against human beings in the world. "I am working at the roots," he would say.

Puck-in-the-grass

Because it's Friday.

Ubi sunt

Where is the stone staircase, where are the morning glories that covered the wall? Where is the white cat that slept beneath the porch? Where are the birds that nested in the olive tree? Where is the golden light that shimmered in the tall grass, where is the little smile that danced across your lips one summer day when you thought no one was looking?

The face in the tree

I was walking down my driveway this morning to fetch the newspaper when I saw the face in the oak tree.

A tree doesn't have a face, of course. A tree doesn't need eyes to see the sky or ears to hear birdsong. It doesn't need a mouth to taste the morning mist. Yet today there was a face in the oak tree.

The face was neither kind nor unkind. It was peacefully indifferent. Serene, equanimous. The tree was indifferent to my pain and my joy, indifferent to whether I lived or died, just as the Earth is indifferent, because no one animal, rock or tree is more or less important than any other animal, rock or tree.

Perhaps an oak tree only presents its face when it wants to communicate to a human being, a creature insensible to the more subtle language of wind and rain. The oak tree and I were equal. We were the same. The clues to this are everywhere; I was only just now beginning to understand it.

Between gravity and levity

I know how it feels to leap into the sky and I know how it feels to come back down to earth. And I know how it feels to hang suspended, frozen between two acts, caught in a moment that can seem like infinity.

Giraffe days

The man in the office next door has a megaphone mouth. He roars into the telephone, bellows and barks his way through the day. Speak up, he says to me. Speak down, I reply. But I'd really rather say nothing, just curl my neck in response, speaking only the silent language of giraffes.

Ghost field

Lighthouse Field, in Santa Cruz, is a windswept 36-acre expanse of grass, trees and fallen logs, surrounded on all sides by road. It's one of the last undeveloped headlands left in any California city. I walked into the field one summer afternoon and soon the sounds of human voices and vehicle traffic faded into the background.

With a little editing you can imagine this area as it was 200 years ago, before the Europeans came. An entire culture of native people, over 10,000 California Indians, lived in the coastal region between Big Sur and the San Francisco Bay. For centuries they hunted and fished in a world so immutable they named individual trees, shrubs and rocks. The water table was closer to the surface and the landscape was dense and swampy, crisscrossed with springs, ponds, and brooks. Herds of elk and antelope once grazed in this same bright field.

From the middle of the field you can see the lighthouse, which has been there in one form or another since 1869, and beyond that the rocky Pacific shoreline wrapped around the Monterey Bay. I sat down on a eucalyptus log and listened for the silent footfall of the Ohlone moving through tall grass. A pair of red-winged blackbirds flew overhead. The afternoon lengthened and the sea changed color. And still I remained.

Summer's end

A song sparrow is singing its heart out in the oak tree; the black tail of a doe disappears into the brush on the hillside; and someone down the street is playing Peter, Paul & Mary: Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing. Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago. Young girls picked them every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Existential Puck

Cat exists in a state of distance from the world, yet cat is of the world. What is cat to the world? What is the world to cat? And what is the meaning of cat?

The orchid people

I am convinced that orchids understand human speech and listen to our conversations, so that when they're alone they can discuss us in great detail, wagging their dainty tongues in merriment over our unimaginative monochromatic coloring, our inability to cling to trees, and our hilarious attempts at attracting pollinators.

Lost and found prose

-Pharos and Pharillon, E.M. Forster (1923)

Beautiful world

This iridescent green disc is at the tip of the tail feathers of a king bird of paradise in Papua New Guinea.

My inner life

My inner girl is going to spend the day playing with her inner dog on a stretch of wild inner beach.

Flight

In Costa Rica I saw flocks of scarlet macaws flying through the almond trees lining the beaches of Corcovado. Once you've seen freedom, you can never pretend a cage is anything but a prison.

Treasure department

Items used by a male satin bowerbird to decorate his bower:

• 8 sachets of laundry blue
• 10 blue matchboxes
• 1 packet of cigarettes (blue)
• 1 blue envelope
• 1 piece of blue string
• 24 blue glass shards
• 17 blue feathers
• 1 piece of blue marble
• 1 parking ticket, blue print on white paper
• 4 blue chocolate bar wrappers
• 1 blue invitation to a drinks reception
• 8 yellowish wooden shavings
• 2 pieces of green-yellow onion peel
• 8 snail shells
• 1 cocoon
• 6 cicada exoskeletons
• various blue and green-yellow flowers
• numerous green-yellow leaves

Does this look real to you?

When I was living in New York I had an idea for a novel. The protagonist was a night janitor at the Museum of Natural History. He swept floors and polished windows and spoke only to the animals entombed in their Plexiglas dioramas. Several times a week I went to the museum to sit on a bench in the Hall of North American Mammals and write.

I realized after writing 30 or so pages that my tale had no plot—just scene after scene of the lifeless animals, the janitor, and his unfathomable internal monologue. Clearly my novel needed other human characters. I invented two friends for the janitor: an insomniac cab driver and an Albanian woman who sold pretzels from a pushcart in front of the museum.

I tinkered with my three characters for weeks, trying to make their lives intersect in compelling ways. But it didn't work. It was wooden, artificial; I couldn't breathe life into any of it. The janitor was incapable of love or friendship, unable to function outside his narrow universe. Poor man, it was not his fault; I had made him that way. I scribbled on, imprisoned in my pointless story until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I closed my notebook. From my bench in North American Mammals I noticed a small boy gazing at a snarling bobcat.

“Does that look real to you?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

He looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. “Because it’s not moving and it’s stuffed.”

Equivocat

Things are never as black and white as they appear.

The month of the melancholy elephant

September, I am told by a trusted authority, is the month of the elephant. It is also my birth month, so I suppose it is the month of the aerophant. It is a month of equinox; in the northern hemisphere the green leaves of summer begin to give way to the dusky sunsets of fall. Change and transience are all around us. The earth is beginning to let go. In September I feel most acutely a sensation the Japanese call mono no aware, a kind of autumnal longing. One notices how many small beautiful things are on the brink of vanishing. The sound of wind rippling through the eucalyptus boughs stirs a hundred fingers of memory. One reaches for the heart of things and finds the space between; that is mono no aware and that is the month of the elephant.

The chase

The chronic underachievers, the tormented procrastinators, the wishful thinkers of the world may rarely get anything done, but we never stop believing that we will. Someday.

Haystacks

I once knew an artist who painted only fingers, a series of them, one after another. I knew a photographer who only took pictures of empty chairs. Many of us have but a single subject and the struggle to give it form is the central task of our lives.

Tangles

I once rode on the back of a motorcycle from Death Valley to Las Vegas, across 99 sandblasted sunbaked windblown miles of Mohave desert. My hair has never recovered.

Everyone's favorite chair

I found this enormous, overstuffed armchair on craigslist and bought it for a song. It's the reading chair I've always wanted. In order to get it into my study we had to take the legs off, and then we had to take the door off its hinges. Once you curl up in this chair it's mighty hard to get up. At least, that's what I've heard. I'm still waiting my turn.

Signs of life

A new type of cloud has been discovered.

There is still someone in the U.S. who repairs broken umbrellas.

Wikipedia has an entry on love.

The daily battle

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. There are times when nothing but dog Latin can adequately express one's feelings.

Mix it up

"What are you doing tonight?" my older brother asked.

"Nothing really," I said. "I don't do very much during the week. I guess I'm in a rut. I'm stuck."

"If I could suggest something a little different," he said, "to put some life in the routine?"

"Of course." I waited for his wisdom.

"Gazpacho. It's just a cold vegetable soup, but it's very refreshing."

A very tiny rescue

I still think with regret about a certain spider I saw being sucked down the shower drain. He was sodden and crumpled, but two of his slender legs were reaching out, questing, seeking something solid to grab, and I tried to save him but it was too late. I also feel sympathy for a fly that has been buzzing up and down the hermetically sealed hallways of my office, looking in vain for the sky. This morning I found a ladybug on my sleeve and I wondered if she had come all the way from Oakland with me. I cupped her in the palm of my hand, took the elevator downstairs and crossed the street, where there is a Unitarian church and a Baptist church on opposite corners. After some thought I left the ladybug with the Unitarians, inside the petals of a rose bush.

Huts and what's inside

My friend Sarah became so enamored of the abandoned Quonset huts that dot the lonely landscape of the Alameda military base that she started the blog Quonset Hut. The more you look at these huts, the more you ponder them; there they sit for what's left of eternity, alone and obsolete, sheltering the unknown. The huts, says Sarah, "represent how I feel about a lot of things right now: temporary, comical, yet possibly deadly serious."

Oxygen

The first thing I do when I come home is go outside and take a big breathful of my garden. Then I look for beans.

Memory cat

Sometimes I look at Zazu, the gentle, owlish cat who has been with me for 15 years, and I wonder what she remembers of our life together. Does she remember basking in the sun on the red-tiled porch of the apartment in San Jose? Does she remember the cottage by the harbor in Santa Cruz with the mouse rustling in the kitchen at night? Does she remember watching pelicans from the fire escape of my apartment at Lake Merritt, her wide eyes growing even wider? Zazu is in the frame of so many of my memories; a soft, warm presence curled on my lap, sleeping on a chair, gazing out the window. I can hardly imagine a life without her.

The days

Five mornings a week I drive to the West Oakland train station, park my car in a nearby lot and walk two blocks to the station. I wait on the platform to crowd through the doors, standing pressed against swaying bodies as the train rocks through the dark tunnel beneath the bay. Thirteen minutes later I crowd out, entering the stream of people racing up the escalator to the surface, as if we cannot start the day fast enough.

I walk to work along the piss-soaked sidewalks of Van Ness, passing maimed pigeons, homeless men with outstretched hands, and others like me, cradling their deadened hearts in their hands. My building is the color of war. The windows are sealed. I take the elevator up to the fourth floor, turn left in the hallway, and then I enter my office and sit down.

In the afternoons I listen for the wild parrots that sometimes fly by my window to alight on the roof. I can hear them calling to each other and I wonder what brings them here to the ugliest building in San Francisco, but I think I know the answer: they come to the war-colored building for the sheer joy of flying away from it.

In the early evenings I walk back to the train station, my jacket zipped against the chill of the fog curling over the city. When I come to the grassy plaza in front of City Hall, I pause in my rush toward the escalator to look and see if a child is flying a kite, if a man is playing with a dog, or if a shaft of late sunlight is glancing off the golden-edged dome in just such a way as to look beautiful.

Another me

There is another me
A mystery me
Watching myself live and die

-Greg Hall

The butterfly farmer

I met a butterfly farmer in Maui last spring. She and her husband had some land on the flanks of Mt. Haleakala, and there they raised Monarch and Gulf Fritillary butterflies. They had so many butterflies that they released the extras to flutter around the property pollinating all the flowers. Indoors, there were butterflies too: perching on the bathroom towel rack; getting a sip of water in the kitchen sink; clinging to the bedroom curtains. She'd gotten so used to seeing butterflies, she said, that when she opened her eyes in the morning and didn't see a butterfly, she worried that something was wrong.

Contrariety

I really want to travel around the world and I really want to stay home in my nest.

Why the elephant

No creature is more silent than the elephant. But they are far from speechless. Most of their communication takes place at a pitch below the threshold of human hearing. The great ears flap. Trunks sway. Cushioned footfalls are soundless. The quiet that surrounds the elephant is charged with comprehension. They are fluent in the language of vibrations, thunderstorms, wind currents. When it rains in one part of the country, elephants 100 miles away begin to walk toward the water. Motionless, the elephant detects each instrument in the symphony.

Memo to the bats

TO: Bats
FROM: Aerophant

Calling all fruit bats and insect-eating bats, leaf-nosed bats and furry-tailed bats, dawn bats and evening bats, Brazilian bats and Hawaiian bats, megabats and microbats, gray bats, red bats, big brown bats and little brown bats, old bats and new bats: please fly on over around twilight and share some echolocationary secrets with your fellow aeromammal.

Little black shoe memory

In high school and for several years afterward, all I wore on my feet were black cotton Chinese Mary Janes. All my friends wore them too. We called them China shoes, or little black shoes. They were made of black cotton canvas and sometimes had flowers or dragons embroidered on the toes. I couldn't imagine wearing anything else. It still surprises me when I look in my closet and find not a single pair of little black China shoes.

The looking war

In seventh grade I was in the same algebra class as Freddy Moreno, the neighborhood bully. The teacher had arranged the desks so that one half of the room faced the other half of the room. Freddy and I are on opposite sides, directly across from each other. We are both tortured by this arrangement. It is impossible for us not to look at one another. Every time I lift my eyes from my desk I see him. He sees me see him. I see him seeing me. The harder we try not to look the more compelled we are to look. Finally, one day after class we discuss the situation:

Quit looking at me!
I am not looking at you!
You are too.
Why don't you shut up?
Why don't YOU shut up?
Why don't you stop looking at me?
I'm NOT looking at you.

Photographic memory

In my imagination there's a girl standing in the foreground of this photograph. The girl is me, and the photograph, now lost, was the only record of my five months in Death Valley. I'm standing at the edge of Ubehebe Crater, wearing a white T-shirt and a blue cotton skirt. My arms are thrown over my head in a gesture as expansive as the crater is wide, and I'm smiling at the camera. I am nineteen years old. The image no longer exists yet I can see it so clearly; the girl in the blue skirt and the immense hollow in the earth; a volcanic crater emptied not from without, but from within.

Our lady of the river

I saw an oak tree on the banks of the Upper Klamath river, its trunk dappled with sunlight reflecting off the water, and I suddenly remembered a tiny roadside chapel in New Mexico, the adobe walls mottled by the flickerings of a hundred votive candles.

Observations

Walking to work every day I pass a homeless man who stations himself at the corner of Elm and Van Ness. He wears a fedora and a silver sheriff's badge pinned to his black jacket. A shopping cart, piled high with his worldly belongings, sits at a parking meter. "Morning, Sheriff," I say. I pass him again in the evening on my way to the train station. "G'night, Sheriff," I say. He never speaks, just nods at me cordially; the practiced nod of the neighborhood peacekeeper.

Early influences

The spiritual descendants of Walter Mitty are always welcome here.

Escapading

Aerophant is going on a lark! We'll be back next week.

Local superstitions

In our house it is considered bad luck to step over a reclining cat without first rubbing the cat's belly spot.

Lost and found prose

"Out of the softening sunset came the airship, and the manner of its moving was beautiful. Few inanimate objects attain beauty in the persuance of their courses, and yet, to me, at least, the flight of the ship was far lovelier than the swooping of a bird or the jumping of a horse. For it seemed to carry with it a calm dignity and a consciousness of destiny which ranked it among the wonders of time itself."
—Author unknown, circa 1934

In my next life...

I'm going to be an enchantress.

Puck-in-a-mist

Students of botany will recognize that Puck is sitting smack-dab in a bunch of Nigella damascena, or love-in-a-mist.

Support system

Please send mules.

Adios mis amigos

On Jan. 29, 1948, The New York Tmes reported the wreck of a "charter plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland to the El Centro, CA, Deportation Center.... The crash occurred 20 miles west of Coalinga, 75 miles from Fresno."

Twenty-eight migrant workers died in the crash and were buried, most of them unidentified, in a mass grave in Fresno. This was the incident that inspired Woody Guthrie to write "Deportees."

Of the thousand or so songs he wrote in his lifetime, "Deportees" is one of the most devastating. I have the lyrics tacked to the wall above my desk at work. To listen to Woody's son Arlo singing it is to hear protest music at its finest; it's an exposé, a memorial, and a heartache you won't soon forget.

Rainbow news bulletin

On the evening of July 11, a double rainbow was seen shimmering over the city of Oakland, Calif. People put their dinner forks down and left their homes, children climbed up on roofs, diners streamed out of restaurants, and traffic stopped as motorists craned their necks to get a better look. For the 8.4 minutes the rainbow was visible in the skies of Oakland, no crimes were committed, no oaths were uttered, and all malice was banished from the human heart.

Brace yourself

I feel an attack of bathos coming on.

Home

I've always wanted to live at the end of a dead-end road named Whittle. And now I do.