California

I am sitting on the back porch of the dome, feet on the table, beer in the hand, watching with a sort of Buddhist vacuity as the sky changes from navy to baby blue above a band of smoldering orange at the far end of the valley. There is something singular about these colors: they seem to exist only in California in the summer between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. Seeing them on this peaceful, windless evening, I am struck with a strong sense of my youth, a time perhaps too much given to the long and mindless contemplation of those elusive solar halos arching along suspected horizons. This is not memory, it is something more intense: sitting here tonight with sun going down at my feet, I think not of but in old patterns, am brought back to a mode of perception that I had long lost track of: a quiet, non-invasive way of seeing the world that is spiritual, imaginative, and dangerously undisciplined.

It is difficult to explain to someone who has not wasted years of their life watching California sunsets what is so spectacular about this light. The sun creeps not just behind the flora, but beneath it, inside of it, so that the sweep of the wild barley, the elegant sparsity of the native oak, the serrated contours of the pine, all these things begin to burn with a slow, glowing fire that connects, for one luminous, precarious moment, the earth, the sky, man, God, the individual and the collective, and there for a brief moment it holds, a pulsing, living symbol of relentless and inescapable unity, before the peak fades and the light ebbs and that strong, amber glow of connection slowly cedes to a lingering sadness, a darkening awareness of doomed dreams and impossible beauty.

These are the sunsets that I remember. I watched them for three years in Parkfield, with its vast silence and endless rolling hills, and then for four more in Atascadero, where the valley lay like a fiefdom below the brow of the Old Man's pleasure palace. Perhaps so much light-gorging went to my brain. Many of my present memories of place are associated with certain qualities of light, so that now, when I think about that day at the beach with Beem and the Crew, or that time we shot skeet with Uncle Bob, or holding hands with Tiffany by the lake, or the final set of tennis in our match for the league, what I remember are less the activities themselves but rather the shape of the light, its eddies and its pockets. My memories are Transcendent-pink, Lugubrious-amber: always wordless, always aching, dying and turning black.

I was shooting the shit with The Old One the other day, trying to explain why the last several months had been so difficult. At some point in the conversation the word 'regret' surfaced, and though his council was to avoid that road at all costs, these sunsets remind me that even if he's right, it would be useful to find a way to express the ways in which these could-have's gnaw and pull at my consciousness. These are the agonies of Heimweh. And though I realize if they remain unchecked they devour the Self, it is also true that their existence reflects some key truth about our character, our assumptions, our basic constitution. The I that triggers our various worldly contortions may not snap into clear relief simply by understanding how this light, this place, these trees and this ocean and these magnificent mountains that roll on far farther than the native habit of one man's natural imagination, how these things integrate to a sense of Home, but it will almost certainly remain obscure if we don't.

Of course there is more than self-knowledge at stake: there is also the Future. And what has slowly become clear to me is that a man with no sense of native place is weak and vulnerable, incapable of either living or dying with grace. What has become clear to me, now that I have spent two aimless seasons among the Cloud-people and fathered a son and worried escape on no savings and no plans and no relevance and no reasons, what has become clear to me is that Home is for the lucky and the skilled, that it is a whirling club Fate throws us as we cross the narrow gap between Going and Coming, and that if we flub our footing or look down at the wrong moment, it falls and disappears forever.

Francisco says that if you've been happy in some place, you should never go back. I consider Francisco a wise man, but I wonder if the reasons for his dictum were rooted in memory or in light. It makes all the difference: I don't think much about having been happy in California, but tonight, sitting alone on the back porch as the sun set set over the valley, tonight in this simmering light I am joyful as I haven't been in years.

Vacation

In the dream vision we are writing furiously in our nook amid the pines while child-starved family members eagerly Zoogle-sit for hours at a time. The vision also includes incense bearing trees, demon-lovers, Abyssinian maids, and all kinds of hanky panky on the banks of the river Alph, of course: a richly textured opium dream as beautiful as it is doomed.

I do not believe (more exactly: I chose not to believe) that summer vacation with a toddler is an intrinsically fantastical concept. Were I a banker and my wife a socialite, with the joint objective of catching up on light reading in the spas of Baden Baden, I believe that relaxation, at least to some degree, would be within our reach: we would simply hire a nanny named Gerta Schliessenmaul, hand over the zumopfergehoerendeerbse and be done with it. At 9 we would hand off the Zoogle, at 10 my wife would take the Mud Treatment, I would smoke my pipe all day, and early every evening there would be a knock at our bungalow, the matronenhefte Gerte with a beaming Zoogle in her arms, a wriggling, happy child glowing in the dual delights of reunion with mama and liberation from Biederfrau.

But we are academics, not bankers. The defining characteristic of our job is its lack of leisure time. Academia (at least pre-degree or pre-tenure academia) represents a kind of indentured contract with Posterity, wherein any time not spent teaching or sleeping or eating Chinese takeout is time that really ought to be spent developing one's Gesammelte Werke. The academic is always looking over his shoulder, always wondering who will be asking about his latest Productions, always anxious about his grant applications, always cultivating his great, writhing hoard of good ideas.

In effect, then, vacation is just a code word for 'doing everything you usually do, with the added challenge of more social expectations.' Zoogle still gets up at 6 every morning. Redeye shift, anyone? Nary a taker, and no wonder: just about every evening is filled with low-key, desultory conversation that drags late into the night, the sort of loose, fragmentary talk that gets mixed with drinks and mild boasting and family stories, slowly building the slender structure we call Clan. And Clan can be a beautiful thing, but it pays no heed to child bio-rhythms, and doesn't recognize the relentless metronome of the Tower, and runs rough-shod over anything shy of a Deed.

Being on vacation at the Dome is a wonderful thing. The air is clear and calm, and in the late afternoon native birds loose their long, lazy lovesongs in the wood below the lawn. The clean, forgiving scent of pine acts as an absolution from the soot and exhaust of the Big City, seems to purge my body of Pittsburgh's diesel fumes and restore the animal edge to my bludgeoned senses. From the back deck, one can watch the sun set over the valley, the smouldering orange glow of the desert a mortar of light holding the living green of the pines into a firm but fading natural mosaic. This area is a place of spectacular natural beauty, and not a day passes in which I don't consider myself exceptionally lucky to be here. But it one thing to be lucky, quite another to be rested: I anticipate heavy eyebags when we return to the grind in August.

Microsaurus

Zoogle has become a Microsaur. In baby-geologic terms, what this means is that he has evolved from Palaeozaic-ridiculous (think charcol and paper sketches of gimpy, improbable life forms) into Mesozaic-monstrous (think raging flesh-rending terror.) More concretely: from haphazard fusion of parts whose functional design brings into serious question the wisdom of evolutionary advance, he has evolved into the sort of hellraising, hair lifting, spine tingling life form whose shear ferocity suggests that it could, maybe, conceivably, in just the right circumstances and in just the right microclimate, find some competitive niche in the biological world.

None of which is to say that he is any less goofy now than he was nine months ago, of course. If anything, he is goofier: his primary interests are still ceiling fans and airline stewardesses, and he derives unreasonable pleasure in giving long winded lectures on the nature and taste of floor particles, flapping his wings for emphasis as he drones on in Babylonian duo-tones. But these and a few other evolutionary picadillos aside, he possesses some formidable talents. He can scamper on all fours at about the same rate as a startled mountain tortoise, for example. His fingers clench and tear like osprey talons. And he roars and thrashes like an Amazonian manatee, his three fell teeth flashing and snapping as he spasms along in mad and forgetful pursuit of The Shiny Thing.

Scientists agree that the Microsaur is probably the dominant life form in the Modern American Household. Though it appears weak and clutzy, in reality it is a prince of domestic destruction whose sharp-eyed, quick-scrambling, high-energy wail of pending chaos sends chills through his slow moving parents. Some speculate that the key to understanding the microsaur's success lies in the critical balance between brain mass and body strength: while the Tyranosaurus Rex set the standard with its walnut sized cerebellum and cargo ship sized body, subsequent life forms have had to carve out their niches at different points along the brain-body spectrum. Zoogle's is a luminous mind in a jewel box, and as such he keeps the house in shambles.

Who knows how long the Microsaur will reign supreme. We've been scanning the developmental sky for signs of comets, but thus far have seen nothing that looks like it has cataclysmic potential. Perhaps that is not so horrible, however, at least on the level of historio-biological narrative: after all, how many kids would go to the natural history museum if old T.R. hadn't had a good long run of things?

A Chicken in Every Pot

Either a campaign photo to accompany Z's future bid for fraternity president, or blackmail material when I run for national office.

Geometry

If René Descartes had stopped after his cogito, posterity would have had the benefit of his genius without the burden of his prolixity. As it happened, he kept on, and a consequence Western civilization inherited not just ontological security, but a lot of footnotes and a Mind-Body dualism which continues to rankle as the fundamental division of modern man. Not that I blame the box-faced Mr. D: with a mug like that, who wouldn't try to set a little distance between la chair and l'homme?

Even without going to the extreme lengths of becoming a polymath of surpassing genius, however, it's not hard to see why sequestering the Self from the accidents of organic form makes a certain sense: the human body is weird. We look at our toes, stiff, stumpy, helpless as newborn mice, or the elephant skin on the back of our elbows, or the tufts of hair sprouting like tundra grass from our ears (perhaps I should speak for myself) and we wonder how it can possibly be that the entity perceived by passersby has any relation to these accidents of carbon based biological bonding. Mind-body duality emerges as a natural response to the basic absurdity of biological expression.

Of course, there is absurd and there is absurd. Absurd as I find my own body (I find it hard not to compare it find all sorts of marmasets and cockatooes and three-toed sloths crawling around below the surface), I must confess that I find Benjamin's packaging truly ridiculous. His foot is as thick as it is long, with soft, shiny skin, translucent nails, and a big toe that curls like a pig's tail. His hair is a field of barley after the harvest, sparse golden stalks protruding forlorn and alone. His cheeks are silicon implants, his fingers are small albino traffic cones, his brows furrow with the smooth, expressive fluidity of the managing director, and his legs are the drooping, cellulite-splotched appendages of an aging cheeseweib.

Babies allow you to reconsider some long held prejudices about human texture and geometry. Perhaps because you spend a long time looking at them, you begin to observe the strangeness of their component parts, start to extend this strangeness to yourself. Round, smooth surfaces giving way to rough, bristled surfaces giving way to slack, wrinkled surfaces: the progression of organism, the evolution of human texture. I suppose no stage is intrinsically stranger than any other, but they all conjure up the basic dissonance of being a thinking creature in a physical body, beg questions about the relation between spirit and geometry, form and function. Perhaps it is not surprising that the man who embodies the Mind-Body split is also the originator of analytic geometry.

Zoogle Finds His Stride

Catalina reports that at Zoogle's nine month pediatric appointment, Dr. Springer walked into the consulting room just as Z. was launching into one of his love songs. It was the Queen of the Night come to check on the sterneflammende Taminino, and as their eyes met and the song faded, Dr. S. stumbled, caught her breath, and burst into uncontrollable laughter.

"Apart from having memorized the Zauberflote, anything new?" she asks.

Little to report, of course. There was the usual, a touch of eczema, a chronic splotchiness on the ass, the eruption of a tooth and a propensity for horsey chuckles. Standard baby.

But that was two days, several worlds ago. Today, today everything is different. Today Benjamin sprouted wings, grew fangs, erupted in curly black fur and began to howl at the full red moon rising above the tombstones. Jesus save us, we got ourselves a crawler.

"Crawl" is actually a little strong. "Gimpy wiggle-hobble" is more like it, a Quasimodobaby with malice and angst swapped out for ineptitude and confusion. There is still a strong degree of randomness in his movements. He is a Brownian baby, each lunge a stochastic compass. But behind this flailing one discerns an intention, a definite preference for There to Here, There being where the parent is, the ball, the lead paint chip, the kitchen knife. And although linear trajectories seem plagues of the distant future, they rumble unmistakably on the horizon, dull and gray and vague and ominous, mushroom clouds in postwar America.

Dr. S. concluded her consultation with the observation that Z. was a 'raging bull' of a boy, healthy as a Finnish farmer and a force to be reckoned with. Two days ago we took this as good news. Today, with 'raging bull' boy suddenly self-propelled and honing in on mass destruction, we are wondering exactly how much Dr. S. meant to say.