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.