I've decided recently that occasionally my writing time should include planning, sketching sessions. This is one of them. An attempt to think through what I have on the table and where I might want to go with it.
Current story projects:
-The Blackest Blue
-Diablo
-The Inevitable Spree
-The Corso Essays
-Anoint
-Moira
-Young Love
-Sometimes Lonely Hearts
Recently I've been dealing with these under the auspices of variant authors. Charles Author stories are generally set in the fin de siècle or earlier and are written in a more elaborate and nostalgically older and verbose language. The Inevitable Spree and Diablo along with Anoint fall into this category.
With the exception of the Corso Essays, which are pretty much just my own essayistic rants, the other stories are Peter Blue stories. They're written by a 20 something man in the 90s and tend to be more slangy, full of cursing and generally youthful and rebellious. They are also a bit naive and that isn't really an affectation so much as a chance to let myself just roll with the silly childish things I want to write.
Currently it's all fairly poorly written, which also isn't an affectation and hopefully something that can be remedied.
The Blackest Blue is currently a plotless mess and needs to find some basic motivation. I have an angry character who is trying to have her identity literally exist only as a mass of stories. Her goal is to ride the edge of the stories in an expert surfing like capacity. I think this is lead story right now because it thinks through some of the coolness issues I'm trying to develop. Plotwise I think I need to get her into a lot of social settings where people can talk about her and she can tell stories or have stories told about her. Currently it is all made up on lies. What's the point of that I ask myself? It puts me into the position of having to have her defend the lies and makes it seem like she is running from something. And I really want her not to be running from something. Maybe plotting it this way is good because that's precisely the demon that dogs the story. How can she be making her life up out of lies and still be totally true to herself?
"I'm a liar if I'm anything at all. A good old fashioned con man."
Diablo has hit a sticking point too. I've set up a crazy complex set of characters and I really don't have a story yet. It's intended to be a picture of the Bay in that era first and foremost. It's also supposed to be about the interface between lies and reality, where hopes and dreams enter into the real world. Okay. Those are some thoughts. More to come.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Friday, October 15, 2010
Diablo II
G gripped tensely a rock jutting up above the precipice, unseen. His right foot was turned fully parallel to the stone face, his left awkwardly raised above his midsection pushing the weight of his body up on just the very point of his toe. The final action of ascent was swift and he slumped ragged onto the top of the mount. A towered over him with her hands pressed defiantly into her hips.
-Glad you could finally join us Mr. G, laughing haughtily. Sitting to her left flank and enjoying a sandwich lay H.
The three had taken up early, the only true adventurous spirits in the camp—at least the only adventurous souls of a certain age and a certain type. Q, their cook for the expedition, had brewed them quick cups of coffee and sent them off packing with sacks full of fresh produce and sandwiches. They were on the north side of the mound, as A continued to call it with depreciating joy. She loved it as she loved any unperturbed outdoor world, but laughed to think of these gentle hills as the height of adventure for any of her cohort. The north side flats led into leagues of foothills before revealing much of the primary mountain itself so they traversed directly south on foot. They made good time through the various undulations and by noon struck upon more verdant hills and, to A's astonishment, a sizable outcropping of rocks. G's eyes too gleamed at the thought that this mass certainly warranted appearance in its minute detail in his maps—and a sizable description to boot. It was soon to be his dismay when H and A began to ascent the shear face of the tallest of these exposures.
-We should look around and try to find another way up. Plaintively. They were already giddily searching out toe and handholds in their spider-like climbs. His desire for the better of him and soon he was panting where we first encountered him.
-Old boy talks somewhat more assiduously of the wild than it seems he is prepared to command it. H was having a laugh. He'd faced some turmoil climbing the face as well, but then again claimed no special pride in athleticism or mountaineering. Indeed he seemed better suited for a Paris salon than a Californian rock face, with his slight form and decadent hair. He carried his own tho, A glimmered at him, wondering how a man so apt for social scenes could so easily adapt to this rugged world she felt so natural in. G she understood. He dreamt big of the wilderness from the parlor chair. And suffered on the mount. She understood herself too, as the reverse. Suffering all the while in the confines of the social and then gliding easily as a bird when loosed into the open air. The mystery of this hybrid man made her wish to test him, to push his abilities to whatever limit point she could find. She was quite willing to through herself into the social fire, if he failed to have limits on her own front, her desire to win was such.
-Blast it all. I have no experience catapulting my body up rocks. You two must be damned spiders. Settled atop the rocks now he pulled out his level and spied across the expanse. We've quite a view up here, y'say?
-It does go on. Tho those western hills block out any hint of Oakland. That there might be civilization at all beyond, seems a marvel.
-If we had a glass, I'm sure we could find a herd of cattle or their fences. Hardly the wilderness, but expansive and open indeed.
The haughty two leapt like gazelles around the top of the rocks kneeling to examine various scraps and pits.
-Look here, A called. I think this is a mortar hole, a few of 'em. She was examining its edge with her fingers, a natural roughness, but smoothed circular all the way around. There were three pits of varying sizes. The natives used these to mill their acorns and remove their tannins. Bloody brilliant with things we won't even touch today.
-We're nonetheless enamored in the oak, H let in. Whole of western culture has always admired the beasts. These big old lazy bulls dotting the hills here, I can't help but love them. And what with these young upstart eucalyptus creeping over the hills. Boo to them and their lank swaying. A different model of success in the world. Lonely, sturdy old oaks glowering on the hillside, protected for years by the hapless natives, revered through fire ritual.
-He's off his nut again G. He thinks the eucalyptus are impure invaders. Next he'll be telling us that they bear with them criminals or aboriginals. That they'll dominate with their impure blood, their lack of civility. When of course he neglects that all those "fire rituals" were just another form of land maintenance. The natives preferred the oak not because of its majesty, but because it produced a food they liked. What of all the other native species they burned and felled because it endangered their fair oak? What if mister Darwin were to come in and explain that an older cousin of the eucalyptus has long ago flourished here, but was put down for its upstart behaviors, its untenable success? Mr G, H loves his metaphors, but he has a tendency to carry himself away. Let the world battle it out as it will.
Down bellow them a deep ravine of mottled oak and shrubs. They heard a stirred coming through and a rustling in the lower shrubs.
-Now we really need a glass. What beasts go there?
Emerging out of the cover now even at a distance they could make out the adventurous snouts of pigs.
-Boar! A whole pack of musky buggers.
And they were. Trampling through the underbrush without a care. Young scrub oaks be damned.
___________
While these three adventured, the rest of the camp enjoyed the slow early morning of outdoor life. Rising from their cots in canvas abodes as if forced out into the social world just after dawn. Something, the noises, the heat works upon the unconscious mind. Perhaps it is just the remnant knowledge of being in unfamiliar space that pushes us up from sleep into unencumbered morning. Somehow, all rose within half an hour of the sun's rising and felt as if it must be much later in the day.
The canvas creatures that held the party were spacious, but cold in and of themselves having no floors and no insulation, but they were affixed with small wood burning stoves. The largest tent belonged to the Mr Bs and contained a partition to safely house Miss C, as Mrs B was acting as her guardian. The necessary disruption caused by the fact that Miss A refused any such protection was quelled this morning by the fact that she had already absented herself in leu of adventure. The inner luxuries of this largest tent included two tables on either side of the partition, in the B side serving as a writing desk and in C's her dressing table, where Mrs B now sat with her preparing to meet the morning.
The two ladies were in mutual counsel about how one prepares for the morning in such a shabby array. Indeed, what look one is even to effect for the presentation of themselves as an adventurous in the out of doors. There were, as far as either women could tell, no rules of appropriateness in which to clothe themselves. They were then left to their own devices and the stark limitations of a dirt floor expanding for miles around them.
While they figured this perfectly figured composure, which certainly they did as two geniuses of appearance must, Mr B sat writing business correspondence across the canvas. A tableau of the scene with the forth wall removed would be titled 'You can't leave yourself at home' or 'en arcadia ego' depending on your classical influences. He'd promised himself as a condition of abandoning San Francisco for a prolonged journey that he would none the less return having kept his business sorted. The letters would haunt the city and his phantom activity would lay the groundwork of so many transactions that he could return home to complete. As a brilliant chess strategist, he didn't even imagine himself laying traps, but as calculating myriad contingencies within reasonable odds. It seemed as well that keeping his real eye upon X and Y was his most pressing matter. Currently they were all the real business that mattered.
Q had made up a proper breakfast for the remaining elements of the party and they sat around a long make shift wooden table—boards slatted over sawhorses. Q did his version of classed up frontier cooking focusing on whatever could be fried in a skillet. The fry bread particularly resonated with the diners. It seems that particular institution—breads cooked in the grease of departed meats—had become something of a metaphor for all Western life. It combined the at-home-ness of bread with the hearty and rugged limitations of the frontier world. One could always count on bread, but it must be augmented to survive the harsher climates, the absence of the civilized world. Indeed, it might be the promethean flame of the west. And tasty to boot. The fry could have convinced even a old world east coaster that civilization had not died out in the west, but grown instead a new kind of rambunctious deliciousness. Q was an artist, gastronomically, tho his efforts were under appreciated.
The rest of the day was spent in a form of acclimation to the outdoor life. Not that they were at any heights whatsoever, but that they were adjusting to the camp itself, feeling out the new limits of the society it offered them. It made them somewhat an island. A lone eight survivors—and their three working men—cast out into the varied world. X & Y sat over some business papers and smoked cigars. They spoke confidentially and paced the outskirts of the camp pointing. Later in the day, B joined them at their cigars and they took up a game of cards. Pinocle. A vicious sport when taken up by three businessmen. Luckily all were equally eager and none fell easily under the axe. The beauty of cut throat Pinocle beings that alliances while easily formed against any one party are always as quickly sundered by the remaining play. Rarely does an alliance last so long as to outcast any single member of the play. And fortunes favors is terribly fickle. X & Y were even perhaps at pains to avoid any appearance of conspiracy—having spent the whole day apart from the rest is serious dialogue—even allowing a moment or two of easy collaboration against B pass unused.
When the adventuring party returned it was time to dine. The sun was still high in the late summer sky, but had lost its luster in the winds of an encroaching fog. They experienced here—later still in the night—the sensation peculiar to this valley of the sun rushing down and large bank of fog rushing up. It gives the sense almost of a tidal action. The wall of fog held now just above the far side of the valley's foothills. A menacing stagnant wave. One might think of Moses holding back the sea, or Poseidon towering within the wave his ferocity temporarily head at bay as Odysseus passed beneath—depending on one's particular cast of mind.
-Glad you could finally join us Mr. G, laughing haughtily. Sitting to her left flank and enjoying a sandwich lay H.
The three had taken up early, the only true adventurous spirits in the camp—at least the only adventurous souls of a certain age and a certain type. Q, their cook for the expedition, had brewed them quick cups of coffee and sent them off packing with sacks full of fresh produce and sandwiches. They were on the north side of the mound, as A continued to call it with depreciating joy. She loved it as she loved any unperturbed outdoor world, but laughed to think of these gentle hills as the height of adventure for any of her cohort. The north side flats led into leagues of foothills before revealing much of the primary mountain itself so they traversed directly south on foot. They made good time through the various undulations and by noon struck upon more verdant hills and, to A's astonishment, a sizable outcropping of rocks. G's eyes too gleamed at the thought that this mass certainly warranted appearance in its minute detail in his maps—and a sizable description to boot. It was soon to be his dismay when H and A began to ascent the shear face of the tallest of these exposures.
-We should look around and try to find another way up. Plaintively. They were already giddily searching out toe and handholds in their spider-like climbs. His desire for the better of him and soon he was panting where we first encountered him.
-Old boy talks somewhat more assiduously of the wild than it seems he is prepared to command it. H was having a laugh. He'd faced some turmoil climbing the face as well, but then again claimed no special pride in athleticism or mountaineering. Indeed he seemed better suited for a Paris salon than a Californian rock face, with his slight form and decadent hair. He carried his own tho, A glimmered at him, wondering how a man so apt for social scenes could so easily adapt to this rugged world she felt so natural in. G she understood. He dreamt big of the wilderness from the parlor chair. And suffered on the mount. She understood herself too, as the reverse. Suffering all the while in the confines of the social and then gliding easily as a bird when loosed into the open air. The mystery of this hybrid man made her wish to test him, to push his abilities to whatever limit point she could find. She was quite willing to through herself into the social fire, if he failed to have limits on her own front, her desire to win was such.
-Blast it all. I have no experience catapulting my body up rocks. You two must be damned spiders. Settled atop the rocks now he pulled out his level and spied across the expanse. We've quite a view up here, y'say?
-It does go on. Tho those western hills block out any hint of Oakland. That there might be civilization at all beyond, seems a marvel.
-If we had a glass, I'm sure we could find a herd of cattle or their fences. Hardly the wilderness, but expansive and open indeed.
The haughty two leapt like gazelles around the top of the rocks kneeling to examine various scraps and pits.
-Look here, A called. I think this is a mortar hole, a few of 'em. She was examining its edge with her fingers, a natural roughness, but smoothed circular all the way around. There were three pits of varying sizes. The natives used these to mill their acorns and remove their tannins. Bloody brilliant with things we won't even touch today.
-We're nonetheless enamored in the oak, H let in. Whole of western culture has always admired the beasts. These big old lazy bulls dotting the hills here, I can't help but love them. And what with these young upstart eucalyptus creeping over the hills. Boo to them and their lank swaying. A different model of success in the world. Lonely, sturdy old oaks glowering on the hillside, protected for years by the hapless natives, revered through fire ritual.
-He's off his nut again G. He thinks the eucalyptus are impure invaders. Next he'll be telling us that they bear with them criminals or aboriginals. That they'll dominate with their impure blood, their lack of civility. When of course he neglects that all those "fire rituals" were just another form of land maintenance. The natives preferred the oak not because of its majesty, but because it produced a food they liked. What of all the other native species they burned and felled because it endangered their fair oak? What if mister Darwin were to come in and explain that an older cousin of the eucalyptus has long ago flourished here, but was put down for its upstart behaviors, its untenable success? Mr G, H loves his metaphors, but he has a tendency to carry himself away. Let the world battle it out as it will.
Down bellow them a deep ravine of mottled oak and shrubs. They heard a stirred coming through and a rustling in the lower shrubs.
-Now we really need a glass. What beasts go there?
Emerging out of the cover now even at a distance they could make out the adventurous snouts of pigs.
-Boar! A whole pack of musky buggers.
And they were. Trampling through the underbrush without a care. Young scrub oaks be damned.
___________
While these three adventured, the rest of the camp enjoyed the slow early morning of outdoor life. Rising from their cots in canvas abodes as if forced out into the social world just after dawn. Something, the noises, the heat works upon the unconscious mind. Perhaps it is just the remnant knowledge of being in unfamiliar space that pushes us up from sleep into unencumbered morning. Somehow, all rose within half an hour of the sun's rising and felt as if it must be much later in the day.
The canvas creatures that held the party were spacious, but cold in and of themselves having no floors and no insulation, but they were affixed with small wood burning stoves. The largest tent belonged to the Mr Bs and contained a partition to safely house Miss C, as Mrs B was acting as her guardian. The necessary disruption caused by the fact that Miss A refused any such protection was quelled this morning by the fact that she had already absented herself in leu of adventure. The inner luxuries of this largest tent included two tables on either side of the partition, in the B side serving as a writing desk and in C's her dressing table, where Mrs B now sat with her preparing to meet the morning.
The two ladies were in mutual counsel about how one prepares for the morning in such a shabby array. Indeed, what look one is even to effect for the presentation of themselves as an adventurous in the out of doors. There were, as far as either women could tell, no rules of appropriateness in which to clothe themselves. They were then left to their own devices and the stark limitations of a dirt floor expanding for miles around them.
While they figured this perfectly figured composure, which certainly they did as two geniuses of appearance must, Mr B sat writing business correspondence across the canvas. A tableau of the scene with the forth wall removed would be titled 'You can't leave yourself at home' or 'en arcadia ego' depending on your classical influences. He'd promised himself as a condition of abandoning San Francisco for a prolonged journey that he would none the less return having kept his business sorted. The letters would haunt the city and his phantom activity would lay the groundwork of so many transactions that he could return home to complete. As a brilliant chess strategist, he didn't even imagine himself laying traps, but as calculating myriad contingencies within reasonable odds. It seemed as well that keeping his real eye upon X and Y was his most pressing matter. Currently they were all the real business that mattered.
Q had made up a proper breakfast for the remaining elements of the party and they sat around a long make shift wooden table—boards slatted over sawhorses. Q did his version of classed up frontier cooking focusing on whatever could be fried in a skillet. The fry bread particularly resonated with the diners. It seems that particular institution—breads cooked in the grease of departed meats—had become something of a metaphor for all Western life. It combined the at-home-ness of bread with the hearty and rugged limitations of the frontier world. One could always count on bread, but it must be augmented to survive the harsher climates, the absence of the civilized world. Indeed, it might be the promethean flame of the west. And tasty to boot. The fry could have convinced even a old world east coaster that civilization had not died out in the west, but grown instead a new kind of rambunctious deliciousness. Q was an artist, gastronomically, tho his efforts were under appreciated.
The rest of the day was spent in a form of acclimation to the outdoor life. Not that they were at any heights whatsoever, but that they were adjusting to the camp itself, feeling out the new limits of the society it offered them. It made them somewhat an island. A lone eight survivors—and their three working men—cast out into the varied world. X & Y sat over some business papers and smoked cigars. They spoke confidentially and paced the outskirts of the camp pointing. Later in the day, B joined them at their cigars and they took up a game of cards. Pinocle. A vicious sport when taken up by three businessmen. Luckily all were equally eager and none fell easily under the axe. The beauty of cut throat Pinocle beings that alliances while easily formed against any one party are always as quickly sundered by the remaining play. Rarely does an alliance last so long as to outcast any single member of the play. And fortunes favors is terribly fickle. X & Y were even perhaps at pains to avoid any appearance of conspiracy—having spent the whole day apart from the rest is serious dialogue—even allowing a moment or two of easy collaboration against B pass unused.
When the adventuring party returned it was time to dine. The sun was still high in the late summer sky, but had lost its luster in the winds of an encroaching fog. They experienced here—later still in the night—the sensation peculiar to this valley of the sun rushing down and large bank of fog rushing up. It gives the sense almost of a tidal action. The wall of fog held now just above the far side of the valley's foothills. A menacing stagnant wave. One might think of Moses holding back the sea, or Poseidon towering within the wave his ferocity temporarily head at bay as Odysseus passed beneath—depending on one's particular cast of mind.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Diablo I
Having got up the services of a team of mules for the week, they struck out quite like a band of gypsies. In the dull heat of the inland summer morning it quickly became the fashion for the women to don headscarves. And with that the resemblance was complete.
It had been a terrible flurry of organization before they set out. Hiring all the appropriate materials for such an expedition had become considerably more difficult as the time of any serious or sensible individuals considering mining—which is not to discount the far reaching boons still being had by those incorporated groups—crept further into history. And on the reverse, it had not yet become the vogue for large parties, including ladies, to test the wilderness for leisurely adventures. The resultant admixture of too delicate finery and gruff worksmen materials gave the party a joyous—perhaps delirious—air of the ramshackle.
The ferry ran regularly from the Pier buildings to Oakland harbour and the on to Port Costa, a newly bubbling hub for railway traffics. Ferry travel, especially in such a calm bay as San Francisco's gives one the sensation of mastery over nature's formidable elements. The ship steams and skips along the flat water pushing wind delectably through one's hair. And yet with just enough bounce, one recalls readily enough that they are yet upon the same water that runs the world round is the peril of so many brave men. The simplicity of the ferry contains all the art of man's ability to tame nature. Or perhaps better, the art of tricking nature as long as reasonable conditions remain. The genius of the ferry is as a contrivance. They are not only simple beasts that skit rapidly and headstrong along the waters. It is their conscious limitation that lends them the air of brilliance. They always play the same hand again and again and are all the while fairly reassured that they will take the trick. This too is mankind's genius: the ability to judge in advance whether or not a game is worth playing. Usually that alone is enough to save one's hide.
Despite the delicacy of the party, such games of several varieties were afoot amongst them. The ferry ride and the initial clatterings of the band, however, were terribly uneventful.
_________________
They stayed the night at Port Costa where they were to obtain the next day their horses. A ride of nearly twenty miles stood before them and tho the mules had the gear that there were no mechanized means of traversing the distance seemed ghastly, even appalling. That none of the modern marvels of mechanization could aid them in penetrating such a distance seemed fairly unthinkable. At least to some of the party, who had unshakable faith in modern innovation and stood frustrated when faced with any of its particular limitations.
Luckily there were still significant roadways heading south out of Port Costa for some miles. They could take a carriage through the foothills' easy undulations and on into somewhat of a valley. They would then, however, trudge some three miles easterly to make their first camp at the northern base of the sleepy beast they wished to summit. Of course the summit itself would have been an easy feat, perhaps a mere day's stroll had not a man in their party, ______, been interested more in surveying the whole of the surrounding lands. That and of course there were ladies in the company that had to be considered. All three had sworn, however, that no special consideration would at all be necessary to accommodate them. And while they were perhaps eager to prove this, it was an impossibility within the gentlemanly mind. Even the mere mention of a ladies presence will cause a man's mind to snap into all kinds of decorum. In the man, this need not speak well of him. Indeed it may be all the clearer sign of his own guilt at what he might have done had not a women been present. Suffice it to say, they had brought with them the traveling caravan mentioned before with all the fineries of the city made portable—a transition which is nonetheless mutating, occasionally to the point of satire. They had also hired several horses on the thought that those who wearied of the hike could hop aboard for a break. All in all they were excessively over-encumbered for a wild so near the heights of civilization—if one can yet call San Francisco that—so mild in its demeanor, so tame.
Port Costa proved a joyous, if rough around the edges, town. It had not lost the western character of the masculine public sphere. The town was nothing more than a commercial trading hub with its attendant saloon social life. At this date, however, it seemed already a nostalgic recreation of freer times when men were not gathering to discuss the volubility of the Peruvian rice trade, but the dangerous work of mining and land speculating. This phantasy crept along in the backs of bars, unspoken but appearing in the gruff gestures of the otherwise upstanding entrepreneurs.
To the party, the town seemed the authentic frontier past, so far was it from modern San Franciscan social life in which one could no longer pretend that the domestic world was something for the eastern cities, something for men to return to after they'd made their fortunes. The party's ladies revealed in this freedom more than their men. To them it was a novelty and not a nostalgic loss. It was their first stop on a pastward trajectory that would eventually take them to the beginnings of civilization by viewing—albeit from a safe and comfortable distance—the lives of the Indians. If the men didn't share these illusions it was not for more liberal hearts, but from an intense focus on making the journey profitable, of that continued speculation that ran just below the surface.
Of course, speaking of either the ladies or the gents of the party as a lump is like to abuse everyone at once with opinions they would never din to accept.
As such, the party:
Mr. X, the founder of the trip, a land speculator with a reputation as somewhat of a playboy (with sights on land and Miss C)
Mr. G, a cartographer and naturalist by efforts, the trust fund recipient of a large mining operation by trade (with star-eyed wonder at Miss C...ohh...competition)
Mr. Y, a brilliant old businessman and socialite, wearying of the game (with eyes for no one in particular, but as an old bachelor, happy to meet nice young ladies of any stripe)
Miss C, a beautiful young heiress with romantic notions and old world grandeur (really just happy to be in dazzling company, distracted by these worldly things, but not consciously shallow)
Miss A, a headstrong young women testing the limits of the social fabric, raised in the California wilds (with eyes of fire and determinations, ruled by her unhappiness at a women's limitations in the open world)
Mr. H, a poor adaptable sort, a hardworking, jovial writer for the San Francisco papers & emergent arts and critic scene (the ascendant middle class mind worker, too kind hearted to social climb)
The Mr. Bs, a lovely couple having in compact with each other produced a large amount of newspaper wealth (no one had ever known which of them was indeed the brains of their fortune or if perhaps theirs was a true symbiosis)
It being the West social forms were never rightly allowed to crystalize. There certainly were pretensions towards such a thing throughout, but they could hardly survive the continual tumult that left one without a solid set of peer on which to place the hopes of descent society. Anyone claiming to come from an old aristocracy was either from back east—and therefore willfully alienating themselves—or some poor holdover from grand old Europe itself—in which case they were usually so broke that the charm and novelty of their position was all they ever had to trade on. And this, rather than the high mightiness of true aristocracy, was more of a carnival feat that would allow them to entertain the gawking westerns with tale of having once met Victoria herself. Which, once told immediately began depreciating in value on each subsequent telling.
This party, described perfectly the highest of the San Francisco scene, for one cannot properly related that scene without such an enjambed set made up of some higher, some lower, some smarter and some duller. It would be impossible, for instance, in these late days with Victoria dead and her cloud of feminine submission disappearing, to imagine San Franciscan society without a headstrong young women—testing the limits of the social fabric. In this party, Miss A played that role to a tee. She had not married and appeared not to be interested in doing so. She had plenty of money from her father and had found a set quite willing to let her into society with only a modest amount of fear at her liberal tendencies. It was conjectured that she too would eventually marry, but that it would likely be some poor chap content to writhe under her thumb all his days. Presumably also, had she any desire for serious travel there were still all too many places she would be immediately barred from without the aid of a husband. And she was much too smart to be barred from anywhere.
The others in the party accorded just as well with the great Californian originality. Mr. H was another potentially anomalous figure, but contained as well too much genius to be put out my any simple laws of formality. His birth was too plain for anyone to regard with any interest. His father was not a blackguard and therefore couldn't raise any contempt. Nor was he a man of any consequence. H's upbringing, as such, was ignored in total. He had, however, proven himself an eloquent wordsmith at all levels. He seemed to operate at once as a petty contract journalist and the most astute lecturer and social critic. All the while, he presented an air of sweet timidity. His insights in the nature of man were not undercut by this but entered the hearers consciousness as if they had been thoughts of their own, so natural they were. If H's success had been limited thus far, it was only on account of its renown being enclosed within the relatively minor net of San Francisco's society. This was an adroit move on the part of that city's society, so conscious of other brighter scenes across the country and the world with whom they were not yet able to compete. And H's freedom—with no history, family or monetary ties—would assuredly allow him to fly from their grasp without a moment's hesitation.
While Mr G. was not a calculating man, this very trip was one element in fixing Mr H to the environs of that fair state. G had a passion of California's landscape. The ochre hills of Autumn presented to hill all the loveliness of Elysium. Even as a grown man he had vivid visions of himself running freely up their easy incline into some bright and unknown land. It was as if the hills would at once give onto some perpetual landscape that would no longer have need for social propriety or even the base necessities of life. Upon reflection, an activity he excelled in, these loves were precisely why he had made such a hobby of cartography. Happy, in this age, with his wealth, hobby had easily transported him to the forefront of the field. New surveys were being done throughout the state and his expertise had gotten him awarded the role as Executive General Comptroller of Land Survey in California. That is, he accounted for and reviewed every element of the new survey. This trip, however, allowed him to once again be an active member of the project on the very land he loved. Somehow this little inland region had been thus far neglected offering nothing so daring as large granite peaks, nor so languorously luxurious as the wave addled shores. No, these were merely undulating hills of dry grass. And he loved them unduly.
But the rest of the party can attend to themselves for presentation. The night at Port Costa wrought little in the way of adventure. The entire party supped the Bull's Inn's dining room. The ladies adjourned then to the salon to take café. The gents abjured and paced the town instead, presumably to talk shop and perhaps reconnoiter the local trade scene. Miss A was ruffled to be stuck in a shabby hotel's drawing room without chance of escape or adventure. All the more so for the fact of their so near proximity to wild areas free of social restraint. Her own party knew well her rebellious nature and were quite content to let her indulge it. It would even in a more gruff trading town, however, be impossible for her to enter society unattended. She roiled as the coffee percolating. A shabby room indeed they were in the same room as the cookstove, tho it was also the room's source of heat. Whether that added to or detracted from the scene varied for perspective to perspective.
Outside the men walked the boards two by two by awkward lingering one, as groups of odd numbers on thin walks must. Tonight Mr. G was left to speed up or hang back as the two conversations in advance and behind him required. When left to his lonesome he dreamily looked around at the scant buildings modeled after those of San Francisco. They had an austere loveliness heightened by their being cut into this slim valley. They huddled like a brilliant group of settlers in the early days of the west, surrounded on all side by encroaching savagery and none the less holding their heads up high. Rightly or wrongly thought Mr. G. Who while a homme social to the highest degree also held deep sympathies for the land and those who had so much better tended it before civilization's arrival. Their lack of records, of course, was their defining fault. One he meant to correct. In his surveys, he stressed not only intense accuracy to the land, but also did his best to discover every last ounce of traditional lore—names, myths, traditional uses—about any and all distinctive features therein. He'd worked within the limits of scientific accuracy and decorum to include as much of this information as possible. Whenever there was no new name for a landmark, he would insert the original name transliterated as best he could. Even when there were more modern names, he would occasionally sneak in the former names as the labels of various other local peaks and outcroppings which stood more as the precise details of the place rather than their overarching names. He'd also recently begun including, as in maps of old, small caricatures of native legends at the edges of his maps. These he would label and pawn off as simply a reference to maps of less scientific times—a history he was terribly proud of.
Diablo, were they were headed now, had a complex history that both vexed and perplexed him. It figured so prominently in the myth of the local natives and yet seemed to carry no name at all. Its current moniker as well, coming from California's spanish times, was simply an amalgam of misinterpreted tales. The tale that had stuck embedded this misinterpretation within it and seemed simply not to regard it as a trouble. It went that natives early in the Spanish conquest had seen an fully regaliaed conquistador emerging from the thickets and thought him—metal clad and ferocious—the very devil. The colonialists laughed at the native simplicity, tho they perhaps missed the clear implication against the invaders in the figuring of that simplicity. The name stuck, but unfortunately on the wrong locale. Bad translation had moved the story from thickets to the grand mountain that lumbered well beyond them. Perhaps the centrality of the mountain for the natives lent the air of authority and fear implicit in the name Diablo to the mountain. No matter how it occurred, three cultures converged into an embedded pattern of error. G did not know what to make of it. His desire to correct it ran strong, but he had no sense of how.
His current hope was for some bit of inspiration to direct him once in the mountain's presence. It had remained hidden throughout the ferry ride despite its persistent visibility from so many other approaches. If they had come from the north or the east, it would have been their landmark for the entire voyage. Now it was only a too near spectre sitting in wait for them. Even crooked in this ravine now they could make out nothing of the swelling behemoth whose foothills they were already amongst. He felt the need to correct himself even now. The mountain was no towering giant. Its massiveness lay in its sprawl. It was indeed a fat mountain that slinkily let onto its surrounding foothills without notice. Essentially it never transcended its landscape. Instead it consumed it. It was a pinnacle only in the sense that it swallowed up the region. The greek omphalos rang in his mind. The only word he really knew for a mystical center of this sort. A word that then gave onto images of umbilical feeding.
These were the thoughts, growing ever more magnificent, that caused him to jumble his part in both the conversations to his fore and aft. The two sets were appropriately mismatched and could both use G's social lubricant to make their conversations go. This was better for everyone, however, than the appearance of closed ranks the reverse order would of produced. Their natural pairings would easily have splintered the group leading inevitably to one set or the other fearing some sort of social coup or conspiracy. As such X and B strolled side by side with Y and H trotting slowly behind. The only other possible division—besides the aforementioned which would have put newsmen in one place and speculators on the other, natural enemies those—would have split the party by age and youth. While a less volatile combination, nonetheless divisive for someone.
"H, you're a young devil taking our world by storm. It makes me proud in a ridiculous way. I've only felt fatherly about one thing in life and that's being able to get on." Evident in Y's tone was the landman's natural aversion to publicity and all those associated with its being brought out. But H's brilliance had won his reluctance acceptance. H'd awed quite a lot of people in his coming to the fore. He held himself with perfect poise as he straddled the myriad fissures of the social, intellectual and greater public worlds. He never wrote gossip, never traded at all on the caché of his associations. Nor did he bully anyone with his intellectual acumen, tactfully grasping that the social world's limits were not sound, reasonable logical boundaries, but rules of the game.
"I've always only done what I can. I've had help every set of the way. B has been a pure patron for me, of the kind that seem to have died out long ago."
"You're right I'm sure. But help was never free and many a better man than I threw it away without making the slightest use of it. You've got an eye for these things, or a fire more likely. And that's what I like to see. No man ever made himself, but more than a few have unmade themselves with one fool move or another." Y pulled on his long cigar whose plume hovered along the boards in a general accumulation with the expiring smoke of every other cigar. Not a small exhaust hung over the entire time from simply this activity. One grew used to it like anything else. San Francisco, of course, was permanently stained from its fabrics to brick facades with the scent. Out here, however, it took on the masculine aroma of conquer, a small chimney stack in the wilds billowing forth the still faint emanations of a culture on the move. Both Y and H had philosophies of the cigar and despite the fact that it could never have been a topic of their conversation they were more or less in general accord with each other. Cigars were democracy par excellence. They were the right of every man and existed in such ways that every man could have one from the lowliest beggar to the highest born, from the fiery desperado to driest bookkeeper. What made this availability possible, however, was the grandest variety. A mean cigar could be got up from the cheapest of leavings and do its job. Or, as Y dragged and sputtered out smoke, one could be produced of any particular rare strains, any delicate tannings and dryings, any propitious blend, all kept of course at the height of freshness. The danger of course, that was not one in the eyes of Y, was that availability of one kind was not equivalent to availability of the whole or of choice. Y could of course have anything he wanted at any quantity he wanted. This seemed right enough to him and he was happy just to know that even the destitute could have something, tho he'd no wish to limit himself or help them much further than that. H, not having come from money or as yet having much himself, felt perhaps more liberal in his consideration of the differences between excess and privation, but at the same time liked it when his metaphors lined up as neatly as this. For him, cigars offered a clear visible representation of the real state of things in democracy that was more likely to hide behind the niceties of political and humanitarian speech. And so he was pleased seeing it even if the sight itself belied something slightly ghastly.
Mr X and Mr B conversed as well. Tho their discussion were of lighter stuff. X was an inward man, at least this early in a business.
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In the morning they rose early expecting a hot day. After taking coffee and laying on their expedition clothes—leaving at the hotel the transitional finery they'd worn on the previous modes of travel—they descended to the board, where, in the street, there was a small produce market. Miss A advised they load up on comestibles with such a bevy before them. Of course they had food enough already. But it was the dry ratty stuff of long western exhibitions suited better for long stays in the mountains than brief jaunts to the foothills. As happy as A was to get back into the outer world, this journey seemed fated to be more of pleasure fête unable to leave behind the real trappings of the city than any true escape from it. Along with their food and the mules to carry it and the horses to carry them, there were also two or three cook/guide/everymen who would be tending to the particular side of things. This took so much joy out of the thing for A. Luckily they were hearty men and she hoped late to loosen their tongues on their own stories, to share with them the distain for things so delicate, fine and false. That would have to wait of course until the civilized world has sloughed off at least a little more of its delicacies.
The day was indeed hot. Even by eight in the morning you could snuff it in the air, that world as oven scent, the faint earthen nose. The smell was also dust, for they were entering into the dry grass hills and every clop of hooves shot up more plumes of the stuff. They were to ride in the foothills for some time before dropping into the valley. The logic of this had nothing to do with ease or even the beauty of the landscape—tho these mild hills cut a languorous impression of easy and immense natural freedom—but for some small business Mr. X had with the rancher who owned the majority of them. Perhaps too it was in attempt to avoid the increasingly seedy business regions surrounding Martinez, which while indelicate for the ladies, might also have brought both Mr X and Mr Y in contact with quite a few unfriendly competitors.
The party moved along quietly on their mounts. They had been warned against rattlesnakes by their guides but had as yet not had a moment of trouble. Indeed the day was all stillness and the hot buzz of crickets like electric current passing always at the distant edge of your step. The ladies—Mrs B and Miss C that is—were already showing a faint disappointment at not seeing any wildlife. When it came out that they had expected the outside world to be just teeming with creatures large and small the party had a friendly laugh. No, they were told, animals were by nature skittish of people, but we were bound—once settled into a camp further into the wilds—to glimpse the stray creatures unaware or untroubled by our presence. Soon after, however, they met with a group of grazing cattle. These, tho not wild, beasts were enough to content the ladies that they were indeed in a wilder place than San Francisco. At least as far as creatures go.
They soon descended into a grassy plain, empty in itself and giving over in nearly all directions to increasing foothills and, tho beyond there vision, the numerous inlets of the delta—that last faint grasp of the Pacific ocean. The emptiness of the valley struck them with a coddled beneficence. Those earlier peoples, now scattered to the wind—a kind metaphor to replace 'driven by the bloody point of a spear—must have felt in these valleys a satisfied motherly embrace. Tho dry, there was near consistent temperature and the perpetual presence of water. G was gone in imagining les petits villages indigène. He had romantic notions of their simple egalitarian world, free from ascendant mobility and the charades of social grace. The limits of his thinking would make him blush it pushed to examine them. He was a rational enough man, but there were certain fantasy spaces that we had over-invested himself in, perhaps in his earliest youth, when at the edge of his cultural horizon he knew there still existed an alternative world to his youth. In his fantasy still, he let the kind metaphors will out, letting himself imagine that nomadic as the people were, they had simply moved on into some unseen distance in which they could not be squeezed onto thinner and thinner tracts, in which indeed he might on day follow if he found himself severely broken on the social, civil scene of his own world. A was more a realist, H a critic. Somehow the valley had reminded them too of the earlier populations and they took up a conversation amongst themselves of the people.
A'd met any number of natives out in the wide world under various conditions. She'd been witness mostly to the 'reservations,' which seemed to her empty of all things preservative. H rejoined this with an argument to the very nature of the preservative. Why, he opined, are we so convinced that we can stay things simply by setting a fence around them, cordoning off a specific subset as if it could in anyway maintain the semblance of the whole. It is the particular disease of our time to believe anything can live which is represented. Anything can be saved 'neath the bell jar. A in retort spoke of the beauty of bell jars, tho primarily in an attempt to rile H. They were indeed immaculate creations worthy in their own right...perhaps she mused, even deserving of their own bell jars. Both laughed at the image of the matryoshka jars. But quite seriously, H continued, as we reinvent the world with machines, we allay our fear of change by demonstrating this ability to preserve. But all is just delay and falsehood. Does the caged beast of a zoological preserve retain, transmit and continue its life as such? Certainly it can't. Tho you might say it is capable of producing offspring who might. But isn't that just a pure vision of the machination of the whole world? Ten centuries of tigers bred in cages cannot in one day return to all their wildness. They are house cats. The ancestors of house cats. It is as if we believe the beast were an organic clockwork capable of remaking itself exact in its kin and that is all that is needed to retain precisely that machine. The same for these people, gone. Tho we, we, are granted exception.
They'd traversed in valley in good time and at its edge where the foothills begin to roil, they laid camp. They would be three days in the mountain and environs and this camp was the start of that world and that time, their own petit village.
It had been a terrible flurry of organization before they set out. Hiring all the appropriate materials for such an expedition had become considerably more difficult as the time of any serious or sensible individuals considering mining—which is not to discount the far reaching boons still being had by those incorporated groups—crept further into history. And on the reverse, it had not yet become the vogue for large parties, including ladies, to test the wilderness for leisurely adventures. The resultant admixture of too delicate finery and gruff worksmen materials gave the party a joyous—perhaps delirious—air of the ramshackle.
The ferry ran regularly from the Pier buildings to Oakland harbour and the on to Port Costa, a newly bubbling hub for railway traffics. Ferry travel, especially in such a calm bay as San Francisco's gives one the sensation of mastery over nature's formidable elements. The ship steams and skips along the flat water pushing wind delectably through one's hair. And yet with just enough bounce, one recalls readily enough that they are yet upon the same water that runs the world round is the peril of so many brave men. The simplicity of the ferry contains all the art of man's ability to tame nature. Or perhaps better, the art of tricking nature as long as reasonable conditions remain. The genius of the ferry is as a contrivance. They are not only simple beasts that skit rapidly and headstrong along the waters. It is their conscious limitation that lends them the air of brilliance. They always play the same hand again and again and are all the while fairly reassured that they will take the trick. This too is mankind's genius: the ability to judge in advance whether or not a game is worth playing. Usually that alone is enough to save one's hide.
Despite the delicacy of the party, such games of several varieties were afoot amongst them. The ferry ride and the initial clatterings of the band, however, were terribly uneventful.
_________________
They stayed the night at Port Costa where they were to obtain the next day their horses. A ride of nearly twenty miles stood before them and tho the mules had the gear that there were no mechanized means of traversing the distance seemed ghastly, even appalling. That none of the modern marvels of mechanization could aid them in penetrating such a distance seemed fairly unthinkable. At least to some of the party, who had unshakable faith in modern innovation and stood frustrated when faced with any of its particular limitations.
Luckily there were still significant roadways heading south out of Port Costa for some miles. They could take a carriage through the foothills' easy undulations and on into somewhat of a valley. They would then, however, trudge some three miles easterly to make their first camp at the northern base of the sleepy beast they wished to summit. Of course the summit itself would have been an easy feat, perhaps a mere day's stroll had not a man in their party, ______, been interested more in surveying the whole of the surrounding lands. That and of course there were ladies in the company that had to be considered. All three had sworn, however, that no special consideration would at all be necessary to accommodate them. And while they were perhaps eager to prove this, it was an impossibility within the gentlemanly mind. Even the mere mention of a ladies presence will cause a man's mind to snap into all kinds of decorum. In the man, this need not speak well of him. Indeed it may be all the clearer sign of his own guilt at what he might have done had not a women been present. Suffice it to say, they had brought with them the traveling caravan mentioned before with all the fineries of the city made portable—a transition which is nonetheless mutating, occasionally to the point of satire. They had also hired several horses on the thought that those who wearied of the hike could hop aboard for a break. All in all they were excessively over-encumbered for a wild so near the heights of civilization—if one can yet call San Francisco that—so mild in its demeanor, so tame.
Port Costa proved a joyous, if rough around the edges, town. It had not lost the western character of the masculine public sphere. The town was nothing more than a commercial trading hub with its attendant saloon social life. At this date, however, it seemed already a nostalgic recreation of freer times when men were not gathering to discuss the volubility of the Peruvian rice trade, but the dangerous work of mining and land speculating. This phantasy crept along in the backs of bars, unspoken but appearing in the gruff gestures of the otherwise upstanding entrepreneurs.
To the party, the town seemed the authentic frontier past, so far was it from modern San Franciscan social life in which one could no longer pretend that the domestic world was something for the eastern cities, something for men to return to after they'd made their fortunes. The party's ladies revealed in this freedom more than their men. To them it was a novelty and not a nostalgic loss. It was their first stop on a pastward trajectory that would eventually take them to the beginnings of civilization by viewing—albeit from a safe and comfortable distance—the lives of the Indians. If the men didn't share these illusions it was not for more liberal hearts, but from an intense focus on making the journey profitable, of that continued speculation that ran just below the surface.
Of course, speaking of either the ladies or the gents of the party as a lump is like to abuse everyone at once with opinions they would never din to accept.
As such, the party:
Mr. X, the founder of the trip, a land speculator with a reputation as somewhat of a playboy (with sights on land and Miss C)
Mr. G, a cartographer and naturalist by efforts, the trust fund recipient of a large mining operation by trade (with star-eyed wonder at Miss C...ohh...competition)
Mr. Y, a brilliant old businessman and socialite, wearying of the game (with eyes for no one in particular, but as an old bachelor, happy to meet nice young ladies of any stripe)
Miss C, a beautiful young heiress with romantic notions and old world grandeur (really just happy to be in dazzling company, distracted by these worldly things, but not consciously shallow)
Miss A, a headstrong young women testing the limits of the social fabric, raised in the California wilds (with eyes of fire and determinations, ruled by her unhappiness at a women's limitations in the open world)
Mr. H, a poor adaptable sort, a hardworking, jovial writer for the San Francisco papers & emergent arts and critic scene (the ascendant middle class mind worker, too kind hearted to social climb)
The Mr. Bs, a lovely couple having in compact with each other produced a large amount of newspaper wealth (no one had ever known which of them was indeed the brains of their fortune or if perhaps theirs was a true symbiosis)
It being the West social forms were never rightly allowed to crystalize. There certainly were pretensions towards such a thing throughout, but they could hardly survive the continual tumult that left one without a solid set of peer on which to place the hopes of descent society. Anyone claiming to come from an old aristocracy was either from back east—and therefore willfully alienating themselves—or some poor holdover from grand old Europe itself—in which case they were usually so broke that the charm and novelty of their position was all they ever had to trade on. And this, rather than the high mightiness of true aristocracy, was more of a carnival feat that would allow them to entertain the gawking westerns with tale of having once met Victoria herself. Which, once told immediately began depreciating in value on each subsequent telling.
This party, described perfectly the highest of the San Francisco scene, for one cannot properly related that scene without such an enjambed set made up of some higher, some lower, some smarter and some duller. It would be impossible, for instance, in these late days with Victoria dead and her cloud of feminine submission disappearing, to imagine San Franciscan society without a headstrong young women—testing the limits of the social fabric. In this party, Miss A played that role to a tee. She had not married and appeared not to be interested in doing so. She had plenty of money from her father and had found a set quite willing to let her into society with only a modest amount of fear at her liberal tendencies. It was conjectured that she too would eventually marry, but that it would likely be some poor chap content to writhe under her thumb all his days. Presumably also, had she any desire for serious travel there were still all too many places she would be immediately barred from without the aid of a husband. And she was much too smart to be barred from anywhere.
The others in the party accorded just as well with the great Californian originality. Mr. H was another potentially anomalous figure, but contained as well too much genius to be put out my any simple laws of formality. His birth was too plain for anyone to regard with any interest. His father was not a blackguard and therefore couldn't raise any contempt. Nor was he a man of any consequence. H's upbringing, as such, was ignored in total. He had, however, proven himself an eloquent wordsmith at all levels. He seemed to operate at once as a petty contract journalist and the most astute lecturer and social critic. All the while, he presented an air of sweet timidity. His insights in the nature of man were not undercut by this but entered the hearers consciousness as if they had been thoughts of their own, so natural they were. If H's success had been limited thus far, it was only on account of its renown being enclosed within the relatively minor net of San Francisco's society. This was an adroit move on the part of that city's society, so conscious of other brighter scenes across the country and the world with whom they were not yet able to compete. And H's freedom—with no history, family or monetary ties—would assuredly allow him to fly from their grasp without a moment's hesitation.
While Mr G. was not a calculating man, this very trip was one element in fixing Mr H to the environs of that fair state. G had a passion of California's landscape. The ochre hills of Autumn presented to hill all the loveliness of Elysium. Even as a grown man he had vivid visions of himself running freely up their easy incline into some bright and unknown land. It was as if the hills would at once give onto some perpetual landscape that would no longer have need for social propriety or even the base necessities of life. Upon reflection, an activity he excelled in, these loves were precisely why he had made such a hobby of cartography. Happy, in this age, with his wealth, hobby had easily transported him to the forefront of the field. New surveys were being done throughout the state and his expertise had gotten him awarded the role as Executive General Comptroller of Land Survey in California. That is, he accounted for and reviewed every element of the new survey. This trip, however, allowed him to once again be an active member of the project on the very land he loved. Somehow this little inland region had been thus far neglected offering nothing so daring as large granite peaks, nor so languorously luxurious as the wave addled shores. No, these were merely undulating hills of dry grass. And he loved them unduly.
But the rest of the party can attend to themselves for presentation. The night at Port Costa wrought little in the way of adventure. The entire party supped the Bull's Inn's dining room. The ladies adjourned then to the salon to take café. The gents abjured and paced the town instead, presumably to talk shop and perhaps reconnoiter the local trade scene. Miss A was ruffled to be stuck in a shabby hotel's drawing room without chance of escape or adventure. All the more so for the fact of their so near proximity to wild areas free of social restraint. Her own party knew well her rebellious nature and were quite content to let her indulge it. It would even in a more gruff trading town, however, be impossible for her to enter society unattended. She roiled as the coffee percolating. A shabby room indeed they were in the same room as the cookstove, tho it was also the room's source of heat. Whether that added to or detracted from the scene varied for perspective to perspective.
Outside the men walked the boards two by two by awkward lingering one, as groups of odd numbers on thin walks must. Tonight Mr. G was left to speed up or hang back as the two conversations in advance and behind him required. When left to his lonesome he dreamily looked around at the scant buildings modeled after those of San Francisco. They had an austere loveliness heightened by their being cut into this slim valley. They huddled like a brilliant group of settlers in the early days of the west, surrounded on all side by encroaching savagery and none the less holding their heads up high. Rightly or wrongly thought Mr. G. Who while a homme social to the highest degree also held deep sympathies for the land and those who had so much better tended it before civilization's arrival. Their lack of records, of course, was their defining fault. One he meant to correct. In his surveys, he stressed not only intense accuracy to the land, but also did his best to discover every last ounce of traditional lore—names, myths, traditional uses—about any and all distinctive features therein. He'd worked within the limits of scientific accuracy and decorum to include as much of this information as possible. Whenever there was no new name for a landmark, he would insert the original name transliterated as best he could. Even when there were more modern names, he would occasionally sneak in the former names as the labels of various other local peaks and outcroppings which stood more as the precise details of the place rather than their overarching names. He'd also recently begun including, as in maps of old, small caricatures of native legends at the edges of his maps. These he would label and pawn off as simply a reference to maps of less scientific times—a history he was terribly proud of.
Diablo, were they were headed now, had a complex history that both vexed and perplexed him. It figured so prominently in the myth of the local natives and yet seemed to carry no name at all. Its current moniker as well, coming from California's spanish times, was simply an amalgam of misinterpreted tales. The tale that had stuck embedded this misinterpretation within it and seemed simply not to regard it as a trouble. It went that natives early in the Spanish conquest had seen an fully regaliaed conquistador emerging from the thickets and thought him—metal clad and ferocious—the very devil. The colonialists laughed at the native simplicity, tho they perhaps missed the clear implication against the invaders in the figuring of that simplicity. The name stuck, but unfortunately on the wrong locale. Bad translation had moved the story from thickets to the grand mountain that lumbered well beyond them. Perhaps the centrality of the mountain for the natives lent the air of authority and fear implicit in the name Diablo to the mountain. No matter how it occurred, three cultures converged into an embedded pattern of error. G did not know what to make of it. His desire to correct it ran strong, but he had no sense of how.
His current hope was for some bit of inspiration to direct him once in the mountain's presence. It had remained hidden throughout the ferry ride despite its persistent visibility from so many other approaches. If they had come from the north or the east, it would have been their landmark for the entire voyage. Now it was only a too near spectre sitting in wait for them. Even crooked in this ravine now they could make out nothing of the swelling behemoth whose foothills they were already amongst. He felt the need to correct himself even now. The mountain was no towering giant. Its massiveness lay in its sprawl. It was indeed a fat mountain that slinkily let onto its surrounding foothills without notice. Essentially it never transcended its landscape. Instead it consumed it. It was a pinnacle only in the sense that it swallowed up the region. The greek omphalos rang in his mind. The only word he really knew for a mystical center of this sort. A word that then gave onto images of umbilical feeding.
These were the thoughts, growing ever more magnificent, that caused him to jumble his part in both the conversations to his fore and aft. The two sets were appropriately mismatched and could both use G's social lubricant to make their conversations go. This was better for everyone, however, than the appearance of closed ranks the reverse order would of produced. Their natural pairings would easily have splintered the group leading inevitably to one set or the other fearing some sort of social coup or conspiracy. As such X and B strolled side by side with Y and H trotting slowly behind. The only other possible division—besides the aforementioned which would have put newsmen in one place and speculators on the other, natural enemies those—would have split the party by age and youth. While a less volatile combination, nonetheless divisive for someone.
"H, you're a young devil taking our world by storm. It makes me proud in a ridiculous way. I've only felt fatherly about one thing in life and that's being able to get on." Evident in Y's tone was the landman's natural aversion to publicity and all those associated with its being brought out. But H's brilliance had won his reluctance acceptance. H'd awed quite a lot of people in his coming to the fore. He held himself with perfect poise as he straddled the myriad fissures of the social, intellectual and greater public worlds. He never wrote gossip, never traded at all on the caché of his associations. Nor did he bully anyone with his intellectual acumen, tactfully grasping that the social world's limits were not sound, reasonable logical boundaries, but rules of the game.
"I've always only done what I can. I've had help every set of the way. B has been a pure patron for me, of the kind that seem to have died out long ago."
"You're right I'm sure. But help was never free and many a better man than I threw it away without making the slightest use of it. You've got an eye for these things, or a fire more likely. And that's what I like to see. No man ever made himself, but more than a few have unmade themselves with one fool move or another." Y pulled on his long cigar whose plume hovered along the boards in a general accumulation with the expiring smoke of every other cigar. Not a small exhaust hung over the entire time from simply this activity. One grew used to it like anything else. San Francisco, of course, was permanently stained from its fabrics to brick facades with the scent. Out here, however, it took on the masculine aroma of conquer, a small chimney stack in the wilds billowing forth the still faint emanations of a culture on the move. Both Y and H had philosophies of the cigar and despite the fact that it could never have been a topic of their conversation they were more or less in general accord with each other. Cigars were democracy par excellence. They were the right of every man and existed in such ways that every man could have one from the lowliest beggar to the highest born, from the fiery desperado to driest bookkeeper. What made this availability possible, however, was the grandest variety. A mean cigar could be got up from the cheapest of leavings and do its job. Or, as Y dragged and sputtered out smoke, one could be produced of any particular rare strains, any delicate tannings and dryings, any propitious blend, all kept of course at the height of freshness. The danger of course, that was not one in the eyes of Y, was that availability of one kind was not equivalent to availability of the whole or of choice. Y could of course have anything he wanted at any quantity he wanted. This seemed right enough to him and he was happy just to know that even the destitute could have something, tho he'd no wish to limit himself or help them much further than that. H, not having come from money or as yet having much himself, felt perhaps more liberal in his consideration of the differences between excess and privation, but at the same time liked it when his metaphors lined up as neatly as this. For him, cigars offered a clear visible representation of the real state of things in democracy that was more likely to hide behind the niceties of political and humanitarian speech. And so he was pleased seeing it even if the sight itself belied something slightly ghastly.
Mr X and Mr B conversed as well. Tho their discussion were of lighter stuff. X was an inward man, at least this early in a business.
______________________
In the morning they rose early expecting a hot day. After taking coffee and laying on their expedition clothes—leaving at the hotel the transitional finery they'd worn on the previous modes of travel—they descended to the board, where, in the street, there was a small produce market. Miss A advised they load up on comestibles with such a bevy before them. Of course they had food enough already. But it was the dry ratty stuff of long western exhibitions suited better for long stays in the mountains than brief jaunts to the foothills. As happy as A was to get back into the outer world, this journey seemed fated to be more of pleasure fête unable to leave behind the real trappings of the city than any true escape from it. Along with their food and the mules to carry it and the horses to carry them, there were also two or three cook/guide/everymen who would be tending to the particular side of things. This took so much joy out of the thing for A. Luckily they were hearty men and she hoped late to loosen their tongues on their own stories, to share with them the distain for things so delicate, fine and false. That would have to wait of course until the civilized world has sloughed off at least a little more of its delicacies.
The day was indeed hot. Even by eight in the morning you could snuff it in the air, that world as oven scent, the faint earthen nose. The smell was also dust, for they were entering into the dry grass hills and every clop of hooves shot up more plumes of the stuff. They were to ride in the foothills for some time before dropping into the valley. The logic of this had nothing to do with ease or even the beauty of the landscape—tho these mild hills cut a languorous impression of easy and immense natural freedom—but for some small business Mr. X had with the rancher who owned the majority of them. Perhaps too it was in attempt to avoid the increasingly seedy business regions surrounding Martinez, which while indelicate for the ladies, might also have brought both Mr X and Mr Y in contact with quite a few unfriendly competitors.
The party moved along quietly on their mounts. They had been warned against rattlesnakes by their guides but had as yet not had a moment of trouble. Indeed the day was all stillness and the hot buzz of crickets like electric current passing always at the distant edge of your step. The ladies—Mrs B and Miss C that is—were already showing a faint disappointment at not seeing any wildlife. When it came out that they had expected the outside world to be just teeming with creatures large and small the party had a friendly laugh. No, they were told, animals were by nature skittish of people, but we were bound—once settled into a camp further into the wilds—to glimpse the stray creatures unaware or untroubled by our presence. Soon after, however, they met with a group of grazing cattle. These, tho not wild, beasts were enough to content the ladies that they were indeed in a wilder place than San Francisco. At least as far as creatures go.
They soon descended into a grassy plain, empty in itself and giving over in nearly all directions to increasing foothills and, tho beyond there vision, the numerous inlets of the delta—that last faint grasp of the Pacific ocean. The emptiness of the valley struck them with a coddled beneficence. Those earlier peoples, now scattered to the wind—a kind metaphor to replace 'driven by the bloody point of a spear—must have felt in these valleys a satisfied motherly embrace. Tho dry, there was near consistent temperature and the perpetual presence of water. G was gone in imagining les petits villages indigène. He had romantic notions of their simple egalitarian world, free from ascendant mobility and the charades of social grace. The limits of his thinking would make him blush it pushed to examine them. He was a rational enough man, but there were certain fantasy spaces that we had over-invested himself in, perhaps in his earliest youth, when at the edge of his cultural horizon he knew there still existed an alternative world to his youth. In his fantasy still, he let the kind metaphors will out, letting himself imagine that nomadic as the people were, they had simply moved on into some unseen distance in which they could not be squeezed onto thinner and thinner tracts, in which indeed he might on day follow if he found himself severely broken on the social, civil scene of his own world. A was more a realist, H a critic. Somehow the valley had reminded them too of the earlier populations and they took up a conversation amongst themselves of the people.
A'd met any number of natives out in the wide world under various conditions. She'd been witness mostly to the 'reservations,' which seemed to her empty of all things preservative. H rejoined this with an argument to the very nature of the preservative. Why, he opined, are we so convinced that we can stay things simply by setting a fence around them, cordoning off a specific subset as if it could in anyway maintain the semblance of the whole. It is the particular disease of our time to believe anything can live which is represented. Anything can be saved 'neath the bell jar. A in retort spoke of the beauty of bell jars, tho primarily in an attempt to rile H. They were indeed immaculate creations worthy in their own right...perhaps she mused, even deserving of their own bell jars. Both laughed at the image of the matryoshka jars. But quite seriously, H continued, as we reinvent the world with machines, we allay our fear of change by demonstrating this ability to preserve. But all is just delay and falsehood. Does the caged beast of a zoological preserve retain, transmit and continue its life as such? Certainly it can't. Tho you might say it is capable of producing offspring who might. But isn't that just a pure vision of the machination of the whole world? Ten centuries of tigers bred in cages cannot in one day return to all their wildness. They are house cats. The ancestors of house cats. It is as if we believe the beast were an organic clockwork capable of remaking itself exact in its kin and that is all that is needed to retain precisely that machine. The same for these people, gone. Tho we, we, are granted exception.
They'd traversed in valley in good time and at its edge where the foothills begin to roil, they laid camp. They would be three days in the mountain and environs and this camp was the start of that world and that time, their own petit village.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Something Comes Across
{An early work of science fiction, this story functions primarily as an allegory about the problems and possibilities for communication between all forms of separate entities. A theme that would later become the focus of Charles's opus Anoint...}
It had appeared at some point in the night, was there waiting gently nestled in the grass when they'd woken up in the morning.
Johnny, upon seeing the bit of rock, was recalled to a cataclysm of his youth, seemingly unrelated. It was an emotion he didn't know then and would only later decide to call loss. Not that he'd never lost anything before that, but in those earliest instances nothing to was firm even to define loss against. He would to have had to have lost. But when the dog died it crystalized both the having and the losing, as well as backforming a whole host of having hads--certainly a new creation as well and distinct from either having or losing, a compound really that computed through time and memory past hads, past losses and their absence in the proper moment of either. Complicated stuff really.
All this was at first glance at the stone laying gently in the grass rushing back to him. It wasn't an orb or anything that appeared constructed for a purpose. It was rough just like any other stone. It lacked, or rather the ground around it, lacked anything like evidence of its transmission. So its placement said something about purpose. The surprising thing was that he would have expected the opposite: a clearly meaningful object propelled haphazardly into the lawn around their house. That might have meant that purposeful things are prone to chaos, that best laid plans and all that can't account for all the tiny variations of grass blades and the hole he'd dug as a kid at the far side of the yard that at least would have caused the thing to skip if it had careened out of the sky.
So that memory that wasn't really a memory but more of a feeling that hit him was giving way to other thoughts. But the first one hadn't gone away really. It just sat there at the ground level of his mind without moving at all. Not becoming more articulate except as it spiraled outwards into a memory about trying to tell this to his sister and her not really following him but holding him anyways.
When practical matters came to, he decided to call some people he knew at the university who studied local artifacts including the rocks on the hillside. He didn't think it was anything valuable like gold or silver. It was a dirty mud clump looking thing.
"Well it certainly isn't from this planet." Johnny was sitting in the little dust motes floating perfectly still in the air of the cramped little university office. "We've never seen a thing like it, right down to the molecular level. It's like a different kind of carbon. Not like it is heavier or lighter or differently arranged, but a different kind altogether. If I knew a way of saying something further out than 'not of this planet' I'd be saying that to you."
"And I suppose you all will want to keep it now. Play around with it and figure out where it might have come from."
"I'm telling you, we don't know a thing about that. I mean, this didn't come down from Mars. Hell it didn't fly in from further out in the universe. We've seen asteroids and they are something. We've seen new molecules. We know what it is to see something new and add it to the chart." He's tapping the edge of the periodic table with a lit cigarette. The canvas chart is away from the wall and swings as he taps it, but doesn't catch.
"Well that is certainly something. All I meant to say was that you all can hold onto it. I wouldn't know a thing to do with it myself. Put it on the mantle or in the garden. Make up a good story about Martians and moon rocks and charge people to come and see it. But I'm not much for showmanship."
...
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Something had come unhinged in the social contract in the middle 1800s in the states. Perhaps the nation was getting loose at the seams, between the continual growth and the internal strife. But whatever the cause, the standard terms for trust got tangled in the growing pains. All shades of hucksters appeared out for a quick buck, an easy lie on a still half stuporous public. But it went further than that, the era of Barnum and Poe giving something like real world legitimacy what had until then only been the providence of sailors and small time tricksters. Deal of bright white American devils began springing up in quite legitimate newspapers. Tho the idea of a legitimate newspaper was only beginning to be established.
What was going on, wrong if you want to be pessimistic about it, was more difficult to say. Author's hoaxes went somewhere very different from the likes of Poe. You could read in them a joy that didn't drag a willing public over a cliff through naivety that would lead to an ever growing disappointment. How can one not read of life on the Moon or the ability to sail airbourne in a balloon across the Atlantic and not feel that mankind was at the cusp of an important change. And that for once the public was right there at the forefront eyes wide and ready to appreciate every last bit of it. Not burning anyone at the stake or off-with-their-head-ing. Pitchforks carefully stowed, they were ready to accept the men of science and let them have their day. And what'd these men do? Sold them out for less than the price of getting ink on your hands. Merely for a laugh.
And maybe they meant it good natured. People loved a yarn. Enjoying the game of veracity. Attuning themselves to all sorts of market speak that would be quickly coming their way (tho always at least one step ahead enough to turn a profit). But all of it was at its very core unkind. It traded in inflating and then dashing hopes, if only the hope that the momentum of progress was just a tick faster than the public had thought. That the day had actually arrived this time. A quiver of the heart. And sure. You want to spread that word of palpitation. But what is it when the heart quivers and the next moment drops? In the medical professions that is guaranteed cardiac thrombosis.
No. Author never went for anything big enough to be disproved. People were certainly called upon to doubt. Like the time his articles--unsigned--claimed a man living in the mountains of northern California had found a miracle cure for gout by following a pack of wolves out on their hunt. Figuring they never had such problems he wanted to see what they ate. And along with the flesh of whatever poor small creature, he saw they were consuming tiny mushrooms that grew up at the site of their previous kills. These 'blood mushrooms' as the article termed them had a distinctly pink pallor and a gamy, tin-like flavour. ***
But that article wasn't hocking anything along with the story. There wasn't a hidden pitch for some miracle cure or even a subtle affirmation that such a potion might be well worth the cost to give a chance. Instead, the short piece ended like an old morality tale describing how the man learned to get along with the pack and share these magical mushrooms with them, even how he offered his own blood sacrifice--not literally his own blood but that of a raccoon he'd earlier caught. The notice seemed to say, get to know the world around you, play fair with it and all'll come up roses. Or mushrooms as the case may be.
Tho there were certainly some larger hoaxes perpetuated by Mr. Author whose good-naturedness is at least more dubious...
Friday, August 28, 2009
We're all still so like children. Its platitudes of all kinds that keep ours lives on living. Not one for the progress narrative, but it seems like we should be able to be straight with ourselves. God closes a door, there are plenty of lesser devils worth getting to know out on the fire escape. Way it seems was that the Greeks had one path that babied them through the hard times, told them why shit went wrong when shit went wrong, as shit is want to do. But the Christians just changed one its all out of your hands myth with another equally inane. One more way not to take blame onto yourself. Or maybe, to take a different kind of blame. Metaphorical blame that ain't never helped a person.
Not that I'm down on metaphors by any means. There are plenty of things that just don't make sense unless you translate them into comprehensible symbols vengeful gods or nationstates. Doesn't matter. Out on that fireescape you don't have to lie to yourself and you can still pal around with the nonliteral entities of the world. There is plenty of space to see that you're the one jamming a pointy tipped bayonet into another man for the simple fact that its rainy and muddy out and he came running at you for some complex and completely indiscernible--from the point of view of you in the rain and mud for your own nearly indiscernible even to yourself reasons--reasons and at the same time, to cast it all into a grand narrative of how the world moves in big broad strokes, a view from which your pawn moves must be incalculable at best. You've both got and excuse and you don't. Both work without invalidating the other. And we all know that already. We just keep it tucked away somewhere and cipher through the easier one at the appropriate moments. Simple as that. We just built are systems full of lies. Maybe that's the way it works and any shaking up of it will make it not work. But it seems, at least a bit, not to be working all so well. So why not shake?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
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