For me, San Francisco is touched with more than a little bit of nostalgia. I never visited in its Haight-Ashbury heyday, but even when I did briefly pass through in the mid-70s it was a wonderful place, with lots to see and experience, and with many people who seemed connected (and therefore kind to each other) because of some common, but unspoken bond.
There was something in the air. Part of it was the greenery and warmth. It was February when I arrived, and it seemed nothing short of magical that further north where I had just come from, British Columbia was frozen in mid-winter.
And the massive Bay (the largest estuary on the west coast of North America) was undoubtedly adding a special element in my imagination at least, an ozone from the crashing of the waves below the Golden Gate Bridge, together with the long skeins of kelp that twisted and spun on the rocks.
I remember, too, the fascinations of Chinatown, the most exotic and foreign place I had ever visited up to that point in my life. To my complete surprise, I discovered that there was such a thing as Chinese bakeries, and I can still recall the sweetly strange tastes of bean cakes, both yellow and black.
Visiting now, some forty years later, much has changed. San Franciscans may be some of the most liberal people in America, and little touches like excellent street corner recycling bins, great street-side plantings (including heaps of New Zealand pohutukawa), and public transport for handicapped people, show an institutionalisation of some of the ideals of an earlier age.
However, the city has become very “gentrified” in that particular way you see in many spots in the country. In an attempt to fix everything up, buildings and streetscapes become so “finished” that they lose the little rough edges that create originality.
The most striking place in the Bay area where I saw this was Sausalito. In the early 1970s, Sausalito was almost magical, with a slightly run-down shopping area full of a mixture of counter-cultural boutiques, and hardware and chandlery businesses serving a fishing fleet.
There was also an exotic collection of houseboats on the pier, including one owned by Stewart Brand, the founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, that was more-or-less a walk-in centre for people interested in all the back-to-the-land/whole foods/small is beautiful ideas espoused in the book.
The “Catalogue” was a dream book, really. It contained mostly reviews of other books, but also resources like descriptions of mail order companies that sold heritage seeds, or Troy-Bilt rototillers, or parts for old-time, walk-behind seed planters.
It was all there (or thereabouts). Want to build a geodesic dome? Check out the catalogue (but don’t forget a really good caulking gun). Need to find out how to use a froe for cutting “shakes” (cedar shingles)? There’s an excerpt from some book or other, with line drawings, in the WEC.
Brand was also really keen on regional bio-geography, and The Whole Earth Catalogue was undoubtedly a driving force in what became the wilderness environmental movement in the western part of North America.
The Whole Earth Catalogue was a rollicking jumble of immense possibilities, all tucked in an unwieldy paperback with the dimensions of an atlas, and about as thick as the New York City phone directory. In fact, you couldn’t call yourself a real “back-to-the-lander” unless at least one of the covers of your copy had fallen off.
In Sausalito, all that is now gone, replaced with a string of store fronts so re-done to look quaint and maritime that they’re anything but. And the houseboats have disappeared from the foreshore, along with all the people who made the place such a mecca in the past.
All that remained at the pier when I visited was a busker, who billed himself as the last hippie in Sausalito, and his sunglass-wearing, guitar-strumming “sausage dog”.
But while San Francisco appears to have gone either way up-market, or way down (Fisherman’s Wharf is as crass and full of cheap souvenirs as Coney Island), at least one place remains as a beacon to how it all used to be.
City Lights Bookstore, which was founded by the poet Laurence Ferlinghetti in the 1950s, and became both the hangout and publisher of the Beat poets, is just the way it always was – books stacked floor to ceiling, with a creaking staircase leading up to a second-floor room full of poetry.
Along the walls as you climb the stairs are pictures of times long past. There’s Neal Cassady, the inspiration behind the main character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; Allen Ginsberg, looking wild-haired and wide-eyed as always (but certainly a lot younger), eating cornflakes out of a massive chipped bowl, the only piece of china he owned; and an almost “team” picture of many of the greats, looking youthful if not a bit spaced, standing around the tall, thin, bearded form of Ferlinghetti himself.
This bookstore was the absolute centre of both a time and genre of American literature that fascinated me as a young man. And while I never quite entertained dreams of my extremely sparse and not very good poetry ending up on the City Lights shelves, I nevertheless visited it almost every day while I was hanging out in San Francisco that early spring.
The biggest highlight of my time in the city was crowding up those same creaky stairs and standing (for sitting was totally impossible given the crush) while my literary hero Gary Snyder gave a reading.
Snyder, in my mind at least, wasn’t really a Beat. He was much more of a mystic naturalist, combining the hard-scrabble workingman consciousness of loggers and fire-watchers (people who work up fire lookout towers in remote areas of the West), with an unencumbered literalness in describing the back country.
Added to this in his writing was an exotic appreciation of some of the world’s first written poetry, in the form of the Taoists Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, and supposedly the grandfather of Zen Buddhism, Han Shan.
Synder didn’t just write his own poems, though. He was also famous for his “renderings” of those ancient Chinese masters, rendering in this case being a literary term that means sometimes a translation, and always a reworking in modern words.
In doing so, he masterfully took his many readers on a journey of the mind linking one of the oldest philosophies in the world with what soon became known as the environmental movement, bio-regionalism, and “deep ecology”.
So my returning to City Lights became for me a bit like someone re-tracing a childhood visit to Disneyland, and for once I allowed my wife to take my picture standing in front of the place, an excited smile on my face, holding a copy of the complete works of a much older, but still just as wise, Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr. Snyder. It was a wonderful end to a magical day in the “City by the Bay”.
ooOOoo
What follows is my homage to Gary Snyder, something I wrote soon after seeing him all those years ago at City Lights. It’s a very loose rendering of a famous tale by Chuang Tzu, who lived in the 4th century BC. In the West, I guess, we would call such tales parables.
Hopefully it will give you some idea of both the naturalism inherent in the teachings of the Tao masters, as well as the sort of way Synder has always seen the world around him.
“The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and then tell a good story when we get home.” – Gary Snyder
THE CARPENTER AND THE OAK
There was a carpenter named Shih. Once, while on a journey with his apprentice, he came upon a most unusual tree. One hundred hands around, it was of such girth that an ox, standing behind it, would disappear. Taller than the neck would bend, it rose eighty lengths of the arm before throwing out a single branch.
The tree was known throughout the countryside. People were drawn to it like crowds to a market place. And yet the carpenter walked by and did not even stop.
The apprentice, seeing only the tree, was left behind. He touched its bark and looked longingly at his saw. Finally, noticing that his master was gone, he ran on.
Re-united, the apprentice questioned the carpenter, not even waiting for his breath. “As long as I have followed you, with my hammer and my axe, I have never seen such a wonderful pile of lumber as this! Why, sir, would you not look it over, but instead go on walking?”
“There is no reason to even talk about this tree,” Shih replied. “Make a boat from it. The boat would sink. Build a chair. It wouldn’t be safe to sit. A pillar from its limbs would be so riddled with worms it would probably fall down. Believe me, this tree is of no use. That is why it is so old and so tall. No one ever found it worth cutting down.”
The next night, in a dream, the Oak appeared to Shih and spoke:
“Listen to me, carpenter, before you speak again! What other tree can compare with me? The pear tree, the apple, the plum? They must produce or be destroyed. When their fruit ripens, it falls to the ground and rots. Or else they are so heavily laden, they snap their own limbs. Their lives are bitter to them and they die in the middle of their time.
When I was younger, I wasted such effort worrying about my uselessness, it was nearly the death of me. I wonder no more. My uselessness is of the greatest use to me. How else have I become the Great Tree that I am.
So talk no more! You and I, we are both merely things. Paper does not pass judgement on the brush. How is that you, a lowly man, passes judgement on me, a Tree!”
The next day, Shih the carpenter sold all his tools. No one ever heard him speak of wood again.
ooOOoo
~originally composed in May, 2011~