Forget Dionysus

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Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, U.C. Press 2010, is a sort of San Francisco field guide for thinking people, the basic message being that life here is AWFULLY DIVERSE. To prove it there is a map of "queer public spaces"—we used to call them gay bars—coexisting, just to be clever, on the same page with a chart of local butterfly habitats. Three pages of euphoric prose by Aaron Shurin follow, coyly celebrating the “soul” that gays continue to bestow upon the city.

Well, whatever. What I thought uncompromisingly stupid was the relegation of  resident “whites” solely to Pacific Heights, indicated on the map entitled “Tribes of  San Francisco.”  But I won’t bother to be bothered by the absence of any mention of hippies, which happens, in the words of a UC alumni magazine reviewer, because the author “eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight.”

Regardless of its ensuing commodification / reification, the hippie experience affected the lives of tens of thousands, and helped enable all kinds of social change. What followed in the Reagan period was a sort of damnatio memoriae of the hippies. It still continues, and I suspect the present volume is more evidence of the same.

Speaking as an unrepentant hippie, I refuse to be upset. It always occurred to me that the Haight in 1967 resembled not an infinite city, but more accurately an invisible one. It descends from the skies every hundred years or so like Brigadoon, enabling the more percipient members of society to worship Dionysus with all means at our exposal before it goes away again. It’s like the movie “King of Hearts” (1966), when the doors to a French nuthouse are accidentally unlocked during WWI, and the inmates run out to play in the deserted streets of the town and enact their various phantasies.

It’s a question of grace, not merit, and the best way to ensure that Dionysus returns with his cult to our city is to forget about him completely.



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Oh hai, here is Ceiling Cat

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Instead he makinkgz Urf n stuffs.

Later Ceiling Cat joyn teh Crusades.

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Priestly Pedophilia

San Francisco writer and poet John Norton came over for a visit the other day, and we found ourselves talking about pedophilia in the Church, which has reached crisis levels in the eyes of the media.

I opined that thirty years ago Communists were considered the worst people in the entire world, and that these have been replaced since 1989 by pedophiles and suicidal jihadists. I also thought that French films in former times tended to laugh or poke fun at pedophile priests, accepting them apparently as an institutional given in the quotidian rhythms of a Catholic education.

Later I thought of a perfect example, found in Louis Malle’s 1971 film, Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au cœur) a wonderfully funny story about a 14-year-old lad growing up absurd in bourgeois Dijon in the 1950’s.

Perhaps French school kids are simply more savvy than ours, but judging from the movie it didn’t look that they were greatly surprised or affected by the gropings of horny priests, finding the Church totally ridiculous to begin with.
But perhaps they were secretly gathering evidence to launch injury suits against the Church 25 years later. 

Maui

A friend from schooldays returned recently with his wife from a couple weeks in Maui, which started off a series of reflections upon my own visit there in 1971.

Compared with today the island was still relatively undeveloped for tourism. Surfers from L.A. converged upon Lahaina annually, and returned with stories of an undeveloped beach area near Makena, a huge tract of land owned by the Matson Navigation Corporation. 

Word got around, and soon there were a couple hundred California hippies camped on Black Sands Beach. We lived naked and slept under the stars, boiled our brown rice and green tea over campfires on the beach, enjoyed the fruit which fell down from the trees, and took turns fetching fresh water from a well on the Makena Road. We scorned alcohol as stupid-making, took psychedelics instead, snorkeled, meditated, exchanged life-stories with complete strangers at the evening campfire.

It proved one of the most educational experiences of my life, worth at least two years of grad school, with no tuition costs. I learned that white people turn brown as a berry when left out in the sun all day. I learned that sexual attraction is not such a big issue when nobody has any clothes on. I learned that people will almost automatically form tribes and live communally by instinct, if left to their own devices. And I learned that inwardly it feels completely right to go to bed an hour after the sun goes down and rise with the sun in the morning, and that you learn to avoid buried kiawe thorns subconsciously when you run around barefoot at the edge of the beach. 

My two months on Maui were probably the best of my life, amplified in my imagination no doubt by the infallible judgment of the righteously ripped. It was a holy space, and I decided to protect it by never going back. I wrote this journal-poem when I returned to San Francisco:

Maui 

Vagrant heaps of clouds stood piled

at the rim of the volcano. Like a tribe

of natives we lived naked on the island.

I hunted cowrie shells in pulsing tidal

pools and watched whales playing

in the channel. I got sick with dysentery

and lay two days half-dead in a kiawe grove.

Once a large black bomb washed up

onto our beach. A Navy helicopter landed

on our beach one morning, scooped away

the bomb, and flew off with it into the sky.

One afternoon I watched a mongoose

steal a loaf of bread from my camp. 

On the road to Ulupalakua I dropped acid

and tasted my own seed. Evenings we sat

at the ocean's edge, chanting OM

to the setting sun. We slept under

myriad shining stars of the universe.

Once I awoke before dawn and saw

a comet, a pale blaze in the eastern

sky, vast as a galaxy.

 

The Practice of Zen

It is the continuing awareness that whatever has attracted you, and whatever has supported you in life, will be taken away, and that there is nothing anywhere to hold onto.
And that the practice of meditation is a pathway through this state of free-fall, awakening compassion for all that lives.

Litigation required

Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger, which won the Booker Award some years ago, provides a clever Gottesbeweis: God must exist because how else could things have gotten as utterly screwed up as they are. It has often occurred to me that if God should prove locatable at some point, we should not lose the opportunity to file a class action suit.

No sex please, we're Christians

I had always assumed that the early Christian anti-sex agenda was thought up by St Paul, whose role in the formation of the early church was so pervasive. But a close reading of Acts 15:1-35 puts the matter in a very different perspective, and apparently provides the oldest record pertaining to sexual prohibitions in the history of Christianity.
Around 20 years after Jesus' death, Paul travels to Jerusalem to discuss with the local elders what position should be taken toward the Gentiles -- should the church admit them, or should it remain a sect of Judaism?
The Council of Jerusalem, as Biblical editors later called it, comes to a rather remarkable decision: Gentiles are invited to join, and male members do not have to be circumcised. (This is clearly a water-shed moment; the new church will not remain a sect within an ethnic-based religion, but will become so to speak an international movement -- and you get to hold on to your foreskin.)
But there are two conditions attached: new converts must adhere to traditional Jewish dietary laws, and they must agree to "abandon fornication," as the older English versions put it, or give up sexual immorality, as newer translations suggest. (The operative word in Greek is pornea, which in our present context may have simply meant "sex," devalorized.)
The Council of Jersualem's decision suggests a compromise solution reached between opposing factions: the church will expand and go public, but only if the Gentiles agree to eat kosher foods, and also to follow traditional Jewish restrictions regarding sexual practices.
Why is it important? Because the decision determined the turning point when European civilization abandoned its long history of comparatively amoral, free-range sexuality, and when the body became not only an object of moral urgency, but also a hostage to religious authority.

Latin mass at Church of the Advent this evening, the Anglo-Catholic communion in San Francisco. Arguing against 18th c. Deistic notions, the preacher disclosed his conviction that God is pantheistically present in all things, material and not. This is indeed exciting news: now I'll know whom to blame the next time my hemorrhoids start acting up.