BODY Chapter 3.0

So many would-be vampires

who confuse

“the prosaic light of day.” 

for the bright moon.

Isn’t night enough for dreaming?

is the accusation.

What bullshit

is this?

We want to stroll our apatites

On the avenues in broad daylight thank you.

What does it take

to be astonished these days?

                                                ED

                                   

Pre-Apocalyptic San Francisco

Which explorers found SF Bay and which missed it?

Do you know the orifice of the bay is so small and only golden-mouthed

if you are looking at the chrysostomos from the hills of Oakland. You have to be like so many things, away from it to appreciate it. But it is to say you can only see the light at the end of the anus from deep inside the alimentary canal, where the sun don’t shine, not when you are outside of it. So it is not surprising that Drake and so many hundreds of eyes floated by it. Imagine seeing an asshole and predicting a gateway to the promised land. It boggles.

For 200 years after Fernand Cortez, la vainqueur du Mexique, on August 13^th 1521, came to the Pacific Coast, no one found SF Bay.

In 1542 Cabrillo missed it.

In 1565ff the Portuguese galeões from Manila on their way to Acapulco used the northern Pacific current and came to Northern California to turn right & sail down the coast in journey after journey & missed SF Bay every time.

In 1579 Francis Drake and his pirates, landing in Drake’s Bay south of Point Reyes, 30 miles northwest of SF, claimed California for Queen Elizabeth, leaving a plaque and staying 6 weeks. While in Drake’s Bay south of Point Reyes, they never saw SF bay. The Brass Plate, they “found” in 1936, was a hoax invented by local historians as a practical joke. It was only debunked in the1970’s when someone noticed you didn’t spell Elizabeth Regina with a V. The Brass Plate was displayed at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley until 2005.

In 1595 Sebastião Rodrigues Soromenho, a Portuguese explorer appointed by Felipe II de España/Filipe I de Portugal, made harbor in Drake’s bay and renamed it La Bahia de San Francisc,o then he suffered shipwreck and built a replacement craft with the help of the local native people and made it back to Acapulco. Afraid of another shipwreck, he avoided/missed the entrance to SF Bay.

In 1602 Sebastian Vizcaino sailed to Drake’s Bay—well, La Bahia de … and named many places, like Monterey and San Diego and Santa Barbara on the way, but not SF Bay.

In 1750 the Russians came to the West Coast and colonized Krepost Ross, from Ros or Rus, a poetic name for Russia, not a Scotsman, 85 miles north of SF near the Russian River, which they called the Slavyanka. They took thousands of otter pelts. They did not see the Bay.

In 1769 Gaspar de Portola hiked up the California Coast from Baja with 60 men, including Juan Crespi, who kept a diary. A hunting party of unnamed soldiers from this larger band finally saw SF Bay, looking from the top of Sweeney Ridge west of what is now San Bruno on Montara Mountain, the northern spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains. So the bay was discovered by accident and on horseback in early November 1769.

In 1808 the Russians sent a secret mission to Northern California to bury plaques in several places, like Trinidad Bay, Bodega Bay (Port Rumyantsev) and San Francisco, claiming possession of every important harbor. It was the first real affront of The Cold War.

In 1846, Commodore Sloat claimed California for the US on July 7^th & Commander Montgomery arrived in the village of Yerba Buena aboard the USS Portsmouth on July 9^th.

January 30, 1847 Lieutenant Bartlett, the first American Alcalde, changed the name of Yerba Buena (Good Grass) to San Francisco (Brother bird, Sister rock). He also named Sloat Blvd, Montgomery St, and Portsmouth Sq. when, as Mayor, he drew the maps. He who draws the maps, as Amerigo Vespucci said, names the world. After all, who was Adam to name the animals?

January 1848, James Wilson Marshall found gold while building a sawmill on the American River north of Sacramento.

2 February 1848, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848. Mexico was paid 15 million dollars for everything above the Rio Grande, including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, plus of course all of Alta California.

Finally, in May, 1848, Sam Brannan ran down Market Street, turned left on Montgomery Street & skipped into Portsmouth Square shouting  “Gold Gold Gold” holding a bottle filled with gold dust. 4 months after Marshall, people finally believed the stories were true. The New York Herald printed the news. In 1847 San Francisco had 80 buildings and shacks; by December 1849, 100,000 people lived there. It was a city constructed by the delusional for the chumps from all over the world.

In 1849, Shouting Aiaia or Aeaea, they came upon what Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in 1500 called the Island of Queen Califia, which they fell upon to fondle the gold from the Sierra’s streams and became swine, but happy swine, and, like all sailors turend to swine, they forgot to go home. Who handed the shovels to the usufructious bastards?

      So the intoxicated goldfilchers abandoned their swift ships in San Francisco. And it was a liitericious feast of hollow ships sitting uselessly at shoreside. They say hundreds of ships, a murder of prows!—Is this the face that munched a thousand chips?— packed the bay by SF elbow to elbow or yardarm to yardarm, beak to spanker, hull to hull. You could walk across the bay from the Yerba Buena cove to Alcatraz Island.

      Some clever Aeneas decided to beach the orphaned craft opposite Portsmouth Square and beyond along the Embarcadero in a solid row of ready-mades, some jibboom sword on their prows piercing the shore, others bassackwards, creating a neighborhood faster than you can say HUD. They created the Barbary coast and the edges of China Town and the hills full of Chileans & Irish until someone from an Aussie gang called The Sydney Ducks burned the silly hillside of substandard shacks along Goat Hill. On which they hung a semaphore, like a stick man with long arms, to signal the arrival of ships, ergo Telegraph Hill.

       At war with the inherent plagiary of cities, nothing can be comfortable being itself or becoming itself, but must have what belongs to others. The Shakespearean fish stare from the deep waters and laugh at what they see just over the shore’s edge:

      You are either astounded, like the bespectacled in They Live. Or astounding, like the feckless walkers. It isn’t impossible to pick out what really lives on the ground and what really climbs? As D.T. Suzuki said, Zen masters walk on their feet like everyone else, “only a few inches above the ground.” So what ascends is delicious and what hugs the ground is insipid. It differentiates the pointless walkers from the ones who right now are pumping their terrified blood. You have no right to walk in a city without being terrified. A scoch of terror makes you thrive, barely contained terror. It doesn’t just strike from hijacked airliners either. It comes in with the tide in the morning and flushes out of the houses at night.

     A city is the production of the appetites themselves of the people who live in it. It is not the answer to their problem; it is the invention of the problem itself. We do not invent solutions to desire, we invent desire-puzzles because we are factories of desire itself and languish in it, bathe in it, swim in it all day long through the Boulevards, the collectors and the arterials. To track them is a blur but suffice it to say four of them came together at the corner of Market and Beale at 10 minutes before nine o’clock, Noor, Jack, Sameer and Danseur and then fragmented into four corners of the Bay Area, one toward the sea, one to the right, one above us, and one falling into the abyss. Sameer saw them getting off the Muni car and they seemed to touch one another and she smiled and he spoke. But Hitchcock-like the sound was not there, only the gestures. So desire constructed the scene as end of the inbound line setting and unanalyzed action, no music to make it romantic, but rather the pornographic absence of buffering music in favor of the troubling tuneless eroticism of deboarding and plunging into the traffic on Market Street.

      So many ghosts in any average city. In this case you can smell the residue of what lived before you and still lives in our imaginations and what will live as well. “Past or passing or to come.” Who to pay attention to?

      The car was a Camaro, late model, a travesty of a muscle car with a few additions to make it more imposing. It was unearthly cerulean blue. Inside a young man watched with curiosity and no emotion as Jack and Noor got off the streetcar. They seemed to be together from a distance, especially when Jack approached her for a minute and spoke to her. She nodded and then smiled and walked away to meet Maryam and go with her to South Park and work. Jack looked back at her in a guilty way as he walked in the other direction to his work at Yellow Dick’s. The man in the Camaro, Sameer, was sitting with his car idling in a red zone. He was pitched into the depths of the blue devils jumped when he heard a bus honk and put the car in gear. Heartsick he roared away heading south to the startup Future Games in Daily City. Behind him a large mud splattered Ford 250 truck with Quebec plates also started up and with a growl followed the women.

The ascent from the maelstrom

suddenly thrust into the swirl of the centrifuge,

an unfolding of the “widening gyre”

being thrown, “Un coup de des

jamais n'abolira le hasard,”

Noor was helplessly thinking in French.