(Nikos Kazantzakis 1883-1957)Tonight the wind blows cold across the Siskiyou Mountains. The air is merciless, full of ice and minerals, filtered clean by snow, rock, and frozen fir trees. It's supposed to be spring. Once again I have planted too early. The peas, mesculin ( chicory, chervil, cress, dandelion, sorrel mustard greens) will be black with frostbite by morning.
Five days ago I was in Lubbock, stuck in a hot windstorm that rattled the windows in the airport. The air full of grit, the sun a brown butter stain. I spent an afternoon watching a farmer fold his field, trying to keep the topsoil hidden. By the time I flew out it was too late to make my connection. I found an airport hotel in San Francisco. The next morning I woke early, opened the sliding glass door, and crossed the cigarette strewn patio, the highway and airport parking lots to get to the edge of the bay. Then it came over me: the smell of the ocean! Even the gray clayed corner of the bay that sits still beside the SFO runway, even this emptied body of water is full of dreams. I sat on a bench, my eyes shaking at the sunrise until I finally closed them and just breathed in the sweat, the salt and water, the primordial sperm and egg, the musk from God and Mother Earth screwing. I called Jill and vomited longing all over the wireless phone. "I need to live by the ocean. Who can keep their soul without the ocean?" The waves, the beach, the churning blue and what it brings. It is more than a symbol. It is the motherlode.
But here, miles from the sea, where the Cascades and Siskiyous bang shoulders, the air is cold, stone polished, sharp enough to sliver your lungs. Still, I stood outside tonight and breathed the silver air and watched the sun burrow itself into these same rough mountains, until the sky went deep black and purple and my ears fell from my head and shattered.
Now it's late. The wife and kids are in bed, sick with chest colds and fever. I have built a fire and sit reading Kazantzakis, my dead father's pipe burning between my teeth. I love my inheritance: the dark smell of the tobacco, the burning leaves in this tiny wooden bowl. The smoke is heavy and weaves a dark, fragrant ribbon through my beard. My book, printed in 1961, lies under the glowing pipe and now smells like the cedars of Lebanon, or the wise men's camels, rank with the incense of God.
Listen with me by this fire for a moment while I read you a passage, eyes red from smoking at this late hour. Listen to Nikos, to Nikos Kazantzakis and his longing. See if he doesn't describe the ocean Kirk-- the bay in San Francisco, the orange fire in this stove, the soft ash from my father's pipe blanketing my beard:
One night as I was passing through the Turkish quarter, I heard a woman singing an oriental amane' in a voice full of woefully convulsive passion. The sound was somber, raucous, very deep; it issued from the woman's loins and filled the night with despair and plaintive melancholy. Finding it impossible to proceed, I halted and listened, my head thrown back
against the wall. I could not catch my breath. My suffocating soul, unable any longer to fit within its cage of clay, was hanging from my scalp and weighing whether or not to flee. No, the singer's female breast was not being convulsed by love, not by that total mystery the coupling of a man with a woman...It was being convulsed by a cry, a command to break our
prison bars of morality, shame, and hope, and to give ourselves over to, lose ourselves in, become one with, the fearful, enticing Lover who lies in wait in the darkness and whom we call God. Listening to the woman's woefully convulsive song on that night, I felt that love, death, and God were one and the same.
Five days ago I was in Lubbock, stuck in a hot windstorm that rattled the windows in the airport. The air full of grit, the sun a brown butter stain. I spent an afternoon watching a farmer fold his field, trying to keep the topsoil hidden. By the time I flew out it was too late to make my connection. I found an airport hotel in San Francisco. The next morning I woke early, opened the sliding glass door, and crossed the cigarette strewn patio, the highway and airport parking lots to get to the edge of the bay. Then it came over me: the smell of the ocean! Even the gray clayed corner of the bay that sits still beside the SFO runway, even this emptied body of water is full of dreams. I sat on a bench, my eyes shaking at the sunrise until I finally closed them and just breathed in the sweat, the salt and water, the primordial sperm and egg, the musk from God and Mother Earth screwing. I called Jill and vomited longing all over the wireless phone. "I need to live by the ocean. Who can keep their soul without the ocean?" The waves, the beach, the churning blue and what it brings. It is more than a symbol. It is the motherlode.
But here, miles from the sea, where the Cascades and Siskiyous bang shoulders, the air is cold, stone polished, sharp enough to sliver your lungs. Still, I stood outside tonight and breathed the silver air and watched the sun burrow itself into these same rough mountains, until the sky went deep black and purple and my ears fell from my head and shattered.
Now it's late. The wife and kids are in bed, sick with chest colds and fever. I have built a fire and sit reading Kazantzakis, my dead father's pipe burning between my teeth. I love my inheritance: the dark smell of the tobacco, the burning leaves in this tiny wooden bowl. The smoke is heavy and weaves a dark, fragrant ribbon through my beard. My book, printed in 1961, lies under the glowing pipe and now smells like the cedars of Lebanon, or the wise men's camels, rank with the incense of God.
Listen with me by this fire for a moment while I read you a passage, eyes red from smoking at this late hour. Listen to Nikos, to Nikos Kazantzakis and his longing. See if he doesn't describe the ocean Kirk-- the bay in San Francisco, the orange fire in this stove, the soft ash from my father's pipe blanketing my beard:
One night as I was passing through the Turkish quarter, I heard a woman singing an oriental amane' in a voice full of woefully convulsive passion. The sound was somber, raucous, very deep; it issued from the woman's loins and filled the night with despair and plaintive melancholy. Finding it impossible to proceed, I halted and listened, my head thrown back
against the wall. I could not catch my breath. My suffocating soul, unable any longer to fit within its cage of clay, was hanging from my scalp and weighing whether or not to flee. No, the singer's female breast was not being convulsed by love, not by that total mystery the coupling of a man with a woman...It was being convulsed by a cry, a command to break our
prison bars of morality, shame, and hope, and to give ourselves over to, lose ourselves in, become one with, the fearful, enticing Lover who lies in wait in the darkness and whom we call God. Listening to the woman's woefully convulsive song on that night, I felt that love, death, and God were one and the same.
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