the paddle to alcatraz and back
February 21, 2012
Imagine for a moment kayaking the entire length of the Bay Bridge. Just a quick numbers crunch that’s 23000 ft – roughly 4.5 miles. Now imagine paddling pass the Bay Bridge and pass Treasure Island and pass the Embarcadero through a 6.2 ft drop in the tides and a current rushing out of the Golden Gate at 4.7 knots. (Check it here)
After two days of lackluster windsurfing and some great paddle-boarding my roommate Cameron and I thought that sounded fun. So we found a kayak and dipped it in the water with only one goal in mind – Alcatraz. What were we thinking? I don’t know. Crazy or stupid? Yes.
After 2.5 hours of paddling, singing, yelling, talking to ourselves, being tired, thirsty and stoked all at the same time – we touched the island. Both hands and everything. And we weren’t on a ferryboat.
The rest of the story is honestly history. 2 hours later we made it back to shore. Paddled part of the way. Had to be towed by a sailboat part of the way. Were picked up by a search and rescue skiff and taken back to shore the rest of the way.
At the end of the day we learned quite a bit. We found out that the Coast Guard had been called and a search party was out looking for us. Found out that being within 100 yards of Alcatraz in a non-contracted vessel was apparently breaking federal law. Found out that we had gone 4.5 miles outside and across the CSC safety-zone boundary areas. Found out that the bay’s ebbing tide could have sucked us all the way down to Dumbarton Bridge or out from under the Golden Gate to the open ocean.
And then after all that we finally found out that our violations got us suspended from any and all ocean bay activities and that we were told to do community service.
Crazy or stupid? Yes. Will we do it again? Maybe once the federal law gets repealed.
Still – we touched the island. Both hands and everything. And we weren’t on a ferryboat.
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the blue line was us charging-
| More: writing
Infra
February 17, 2012
I once said that I believed in movement. The movement of river water as it rushed forth from me to you, out of the forest and into our world. The movement of a rolling wave under moonlight with its silence and its crashing. The movement of the bird’s soaring, the child walking, you falling and your heart beating. The dancing fire and our staring and singing. Our hands as they wave and cry and the stringed bow and the poet’s tongue as they make their soft and beautiful music.
Nothings changed. I still believe in it. All of it. But do you know that moment when what you believe in and have for a long time, suddenly all at once strikes you, unexpectedly in the corner of your heart? You’re whole life you’ve been a bell but have never known it til the second you were lifted and struck. You’re scared, terrified, mournful, happy and delighted all at the same time. You’re walking in your backyard under the cedar and the mourning doves and all of a sudden the birds roost charged and transfigured with each cell buzzing aflame. You’re lying in your bed or on the grass and everything everywhere becomes wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. The fact that you’ve finally found the tree with the lights in it hits you like a brick on the head. The vision’s come but you have no idea what to do or where to go, who to tell or how. The illegible word has come talking and you’ve lost your voice.
It’s the ringing that really gets you. Not necessarily the seeing but the feeling of being for the first time seen. The standing up after being knocked flat on your back. The standing up after being knocked breathless.
Why am I talking about this? I’m talking about this because the other night I went to the Downtown Opera House to see the San Francisco ballet. I’ve been before but this was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen and it was in the last thirty minutes of the performance that the hammer hit. There the bell rung. The astonishment and the hugeness. The depth and the warmth. It knocked me down and up, sideways and ringing. Four days later and the ringings still there. Still loud. Still unbearably light.
And its times like these when I’m watching a dancer on stage, watching him or her move from measure to measure through the melody that I get shivers up my spine and down my hands and I feel my feet cold as the deep shore-waters of time uncreated come flowing at my ankles. And its as my knees start to get wet that I find our hard heart’s turning and our heart’s slow learning breaking over the dazzling darkness of dawn as it rises above the far slopes of time and into the floodgates of our hearts.
Sitting in my chair watching Wayne McGregor’s Number Nine I realized that my belief in movement was really and more actually one of the great laws of life. It is the primary medium of our aliveness. It’s not only the flow of the river and the bell swinging but also your eyes as they close and open, your hands as they hold another’s, my mother’s feet as they danced with my father’s a long time ago.
It’s our behavior, as we wake and sleep.
And now I think it’s the dancer and his dance.
And perhaps that’s why ballet amazes me. It’s the perfect and beautiful excruciating pain of something I can’t understand or describe. It’s more than poetry and it’s more than art. The written word will always be tied to the page. It is stuck in a time it can never escape. And the great sculptures – they inhabit a space they will never leave. That marble will never breathe. It will never move. But what if it did? What if Michelangelo’s David turned from rock to flesh and started dancing around your soul? What if Bernini’s Apollo or Daphne came to life? Caught you with an arrow in your heart and destroyed your life with love and beauty? What would you do? Where would you be?
I think you’d be in front of a stage. Watching the ballet. Seeing music being made visible. Seeing poetry being made visible. Seeing the physical moving manifestation of everything you are hearing and reading and dreaming and wishing. It’s not something transcribed or carved. It’s not a translation or an abstraction. It’s the thing itself. Life itself. Breathing. Pulsating. There is a rhythm of fear and joy, of peace and sadness, of happiness, pain and exhaustion behind the lofty and graceful movements of every ballet dancer. There is finesse and form and poise but there is also blood and sweat. The tiring and the trying. And yet behind every pirouette there you go seeing the landscape where the light roars in spate through the crack. The mountains slam and you’re left alone on the floor wondering what the hell happened.
What I see in ballet is the glory of music found in and through the body. The dancing doesn’t necessarily give the inarticulate a voice so much as a vision. If we can just be there – present and engaged. We can see it.
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One of my favorite composer’s, Max Richter, and one of my new-found favorite choreographers, Wayne McGregor, collaborated on a ballet called Infra. The ballet just premiered for the first time in the United States yesterday in Chicago. The Royal Ballet in the UK however has been performing it for a couple of years. Here you can listen to a great interview with McGregor talking about the performance or you can watch an interesting video short about him going into the details of making the piece. He shares his thoughts on technology and the body and personality and physical signatures, imaginative experiences, inspiration and ideas and it’s absolutely fantastic.
And if you have 30 minutes watch this recording of the actual performance (especially at 4:08, 7:20, 15:04 and 24:00). If it doesn’t put a lump in your throat I don’t know what does.
| More: interview, video, writing
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words
February 13, 2012
I thought I could write once. I used to hear the soft silence of syllables and laugh. Turn them upside down and shake em’. Hear the cracking in their linking and breaking. Like a redwood growing old in the wind. I was the potter making clay, making love. Love that overthrows empires. Love that binds two hearts together come hellfire and brimstone. Come the hail and the locusts, the blood-rivers and darkness.
A sentence used to buy me a lifetime of days and for a nickle a line, I could raise a riot in a nunnery. Command flowers to pick themselves and tell the pope he was mad. Make the fire in your heart burn. But now I hear the music and am speechless. I don’t know what to say. Too much is spent trying to listen and hear and understand and listen and hear and understand again that no words are left over. Not the slimy snail of their course. Not their heavy bar of beauty.
The quill hasn’t broken so much as the organ of my imagination has dried up. These shingled roofs are thwarting my rainwater. I can hear the tapping ivory keys but I can’t taste them. It’s as if I’ve lost my gift. It’s as if the – illegible word – of my genius has finally collapsed.