The Old Man in the Bottle

It had been many years since he'd been back to the bottle. How long had it been, he wondered? Twenty-five years? Thirty? It looked old now, but everything looked old now, even the things that were young. The mouth of the bottle was worn smooth by years of flying sand and its rim was pocked with chips. But the bottle was still the bottle. He remembered it. The warm amber glow of sunlight through the glass. The way the wind would moan across the open mouth, when it was blowing right. Sometimes there would be fifty, sixty others huddled inside for the night. Of course those were the bad times, but they were the good times too. They had each other and that was something. Inside the bottle it was cooler in the summer and there was safety. Inside they couldn't be seen by them. And they couldn't be taken. There were other things to worry about, but they were protected against the worst inside the bottle. They came and went fairly steady in those first days. But he was the only one who stayed on. There was talk of other places, other shelters, but if any of them made it to those he never heard about it. None of them ever came back. Once there was a boy and his dog. The dog was a fine Labrador with a great square head and he could understand English like a man. The boy was lucky to have that dog. His name was Farlo. He was an excellent watch dog who always knew when they were coming and would fight them off if they got inside. It had the heart of a lion, that dog. He forgot the name of the boy. On another occasion there was a man. He must have been in his eighties. Could hardly walk. He kept repeating the same thing over and over with that faraway look in his eye. Matilda, he said. You didn't listen Matilda. You didn't listen to me. He wouldn't come inside the bottle. He insisted on standing out near the mouth. Always looking up. Always watching, as if Mathilda might come walking in any second. She didn't come. And he vanished on the third night. Gerald his name was. They were always coming and going. They seemed to only have first names. It no longer mattered who you were anymore, what you were. There was only in here and out there, and he was the old man in the bottle; and sometimes they'd come and call him by that name and they'd ask him things whose answers he only guessed at but which they took as pure gospel truth. They took him as some sort of mystic, some desert sage, but he was neither. He was just an old man with a bad hip who had a lot of trouble walking in the sand, let alone running, and the bottle was the easiest option. He stayed on for many years and now the birds are gone. Everything is that lived. Insects, the larger animals. It all just died off and now they can go where they want, live where they want. But now that he didn't have much time left he wanted to spend the last of his days inside the bottle. It was warm inside and he liked the color of the light.

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High Steel and Hands

There used to be a type of man who made his living securing girders and large slabs of iron together to create geometric forms designed to hold us other, more rational, humans above the ground. He built bridges and skyscrapers and dams. He built oil rigs and towers and monuments that seemed to defy gravity; and logic. He did this for money of course, but there was also the special thrill of being suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, or in the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, above water. Often he was not suspended at all. Most of the time the men of high steel, as the iron workers were called, worked untethered and free to plummet to their deaths; which they often did. We don't think about these people when we look up at a skyscraper or a bridge, nor do we think about the people who designed them and championed their construction against overwhelming opposition and odds. It is fascinating to know how a bridge like the Golden Gate was conceived and constructed, but this is not Wikipedia and those facts have no place here. For the known names of those responsible - Strauss, Ellis, Morrow, Moisseiff - are forever etched in bronze on bridge footings and plaques. It is to the men whose names we will never know that such monuments must be dedicated and remembered. Like the tomb of the unknown soldier, which speaks for all those who did not return home from war, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge speak for the 11 killed in its construction, and all the others who fell, and would have been killed were it not for the safety netting pioneered by Strauss. We don't know how long this bridge will last, but as we have seen recently, other great monuments of technology and engineering proved to be more fragile than we had anticipated. The World Trade Center was also a marvel of its time, and the men of the high steel who helped to build it could not have imagined that what they had risked their lives to achieve would last a mere 28 years. 60 construction workers lost their lives building those two steel towers. We don't need another reminder of how many perished when it fell. But ultimately a monument such as that, or as the Golden Gate Bridge above, is not a monument to our superiority over nature, or materials, or to our evolution. These great steel structures are monuments of names. While machines and tools made such endeavors possible, it was human minds that made them probable, and human hands that made them real. Each rivet, each weld, is a man. These structures are infused with the spirits of men, the blood of men and the will of men. But we must never forget that if man can build it, man can destroy it. The hills of Greece and Rome offer ample proof of that. One day, even the Parthenon will be gone. And if we fail as a species, if this facade of steel, and stone and sand crumbles, all we'll have left are hands. If we're lucky.

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 North Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Sunset, © 2011 Vincent Louis Carrella

Analog Tweets

There's graffiti and there's the other kind of rogue messaging you find written out there in the world that is much less narcissistic. Sometimes poetic, sometimes informative, sometimes a little of both. As we increasingly read more and more off of electronic screens, the chance discovery of printed words on walls, bathroom stalls and picnic tables is a welcome and refreshing diversion (and change). Take this simple statement found on a piece of exposed, WW II era copper conduit in the Marin Headlands just above Ft. Cronkite. If you hike these trails you will notice that they are frequented by the animals identified on the crude sign above. This is because coyotes habitually defecate in the middle of human hiking trails, and their stringy gray, mostly mouse-hair droppings are ubiquitous. The land here supports a large population of these wily predators, and they make sure we know it; which is why a more appropriate tag for this pipe may have been H U M A N S. What's interesting is that this particular conduit once supplied power to the gun battery just a couple hundreds yards further up the bluff above. It is obviously defunct, and this land has been reclaimed by its natural inhabitants. Again, see above. Most people now habitually write what they think and feel, they choose to communicate publicly and, thanks to social networks, no thought seems to go unexpressed. That's why graffiti, the original status message, the original tweet, is now a legitimate classic art. The best graffiti is legible, logical and terse. It speaks aloud, and it comments and it ponders. When smart and funny people think carefully and leave little poetic breadcrumbs, it's a treat. It's nice to encounter virtual intelligence. And smiles bloom unexpectedly where the rain of wit and wisdom falls. 

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Analog Tweets

There's graffiti and there's the other kind of rogue messaging you find written out there in the world that is much less narcissistic. Sometimes poetic, sometimes informative, sometimes a little of both. As we increasingly read more and more off of electronic screens, the chance discovery of printed words on walls, bathroom stalls and picnic tables is a welcome and refreshing diversion (and change). Take this simple statement found on a piece of exposed, WW II era copper conduit in the Marin Headlands just above Ft. Cronkite. If you hike these trails you will notice that they are frequented by the animals identified on the crude sign above. This is because coyotes habitually defecate in the middle of human hiking trails, and their stringy gray, mostly mouse-hair droppings are ubiquitous. The land here supports a large population of these wily predators, and they make sure we know it; which is why a more appropriate tag for this pipe may have been H U M A N S. What's interesting is that this particular conduit once supplied power to the gun battery just a couple hundreds yards further up the bluff above. It is obviously defunct, and this land has been reclaimed by its natural inhabitants. Again, see above. Most people now habitually write what they think and feel, they choose to communicate publicly and, thanks to social networks, no thought seems to go unexpressed. That's why graffiti, the original status message, the original tweet, is now a legitimate classic art. The best graffiti is legible, logical and terse. It speaks aloud, and it comments and it ponders. When smart and funny people think carefully and leave little poetic breadcrumbs, it's a treat. It's nice to encounter virtual intelligence. And smiles bloom unexpectedly where the rain of wit and wisdom falls. 

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Look Upon a Tree

 

There is strength in a tree. There is majesty in it. There's even immortality in a tree. Trees seem to defy time - and logic. Trees that are tall are stunning, and to stand beneath one is to behold a true giant. And bigness in this case is beauty. What we see here is a Monterrey Cypress along the California coast just north of Miramar, close to sunset. Those golden boughs at lower and middle right are reflecting light off the ocean and they are quite literally glowing, as if they possessed some inner source of illumination. But all living things radiate light, if you look for it. Trees are often overlooked as living things since they don't move or make much noise. Until one topples in a storm. Or until one stands quietly in the woods and listens. Then you will hear them talking. We cut them down by the millions to build our structures, dwellings and our roads, but now we see how fragile those structures are, as images of floating debris, much of it wooden, dominates the Tsunami footage coming out of Japan. What nature giveth, nature taketh back. Even the oil we pump from the prehistoric ground is composed of organic matter in the form of long dead vegetation - trees among them. One could say, quite accurately, that our world was built with trees, yet how often do we consider the karmic repercussions on a civilization that cuts, slashes, kills, burns and then callously discards its most important resources? Look upon a tree and see that it is something alive and, like us, striving to stay that way. Look upon a tree and see that it serves so much more than itself. Look upon a tree as a fellow traveler aboard spaceship Earth, a friend who will, if you let it, bring you back to earth and ground you, as no other living thing can. Look upon a tree in any way that soothes you, just look upon a tree.

Monterrey Cypress, Miramar Beach, CA © 2010 Vincent Louis Carrella

The Love Bus

The Volkswagen bus is a symbol of a bygone era. The passenger train is too. The abandoned building with its windows broken out looks like it's haunted and that's because it is haunted. Anything that was once occupied by people possesses a vestige of those people. You know that people sat inside them and thought inside them and lived and worked inside them. They were designed by people and built by their hands. The mark of people is on them. A hand screwed on that old black license plate when it was once shiny and new. A hand hammered in all those rusty nails. Everything you see here but the grass was made by hands that have long since decayed beyond recognition while those objects they have fashioned from steel and glass still retain their essential shape. We know it's an automobile. We know it's a train. We know that structure is a building. But we don't see the hands anymore. All we can see are the remnants of handy-work. Somebody fitted each pane of glass into those window frames and somebody installed those windshield wipers. A hand painted the words SKUNKMOBILE and a mind thought them up. The front of the bus looks like a bright 1970's smiley face and that's because humans anthropomorphize what they see and what they create. We make things that reflect us and when we abandon them the latent image of ourselves still remains. Even the old building feels somehow like an old man. Maybe the reason why decaying objects are so compelling is because we are looking at our dead and dying selves and maybe facing our own mortality. Like road kill we cannot look away because we need to understand that we, too, will die. We don't get death so we veer toward it and poke at it like a child poking at a dead bird with a stick to see if it's really true. The bright yellow VW bus is especially disturbing because it is a symbol of peace, and love and joy that will never again spread that sense of hope in the future. That's what the love bus used to be - a symbol of freedom and optimism in the potential of people. The love bus was a vehicle of escape designed just prior to a terrible era of upheaval and violence. Its popularity grew as the tension grew, as JFK and Vietnam gave way to MLK and Woodstock. Tin soldier's and Nixon's coming, we're finally on our own. But hey, tune in and drop out. Take the love bus to San Francisco, see the Dead and escape death. Cast the die. Wear a dye.  Do anything but actually die like all those kids over in Nam or Bobby Kennedy or Medgar Evers and Emitt Till. But there is no escaping death. There's only the vain desire to stave it off for as long as possible. We'll deal with death and all our other problems later, when the gas runs out and the tranny drops and the old love bus coasts to its final resting place back of the trainyard where it sits and fades in the grass like some daffodil plucked from the ground. And every once in awhile somebody will come along with a camera or maybe just a memory and say far out, I once toured in a van just like that one right there. And he, or she, will only remember the joy.

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