I met Nick and Stephane for lunch at Cancun, and we went to the
bookstores at 2141 Mission and looked around. I should go back,
especially since those bookstores are so close to where I work.
You'd never know they were there from the outside, unless, of
course, you saw the "Bookstores of 2141 Mission" sign.
Zack and I got a fancy eight-foot ladder -- used! -- at the cool
hardware store around the corner from us on Mission. It was
immediately useful for a variety of things, like changing a light
bulb and eradicating mildew from the ceiling of our bathroom.
I'd invited some people by for a bootable business card meeting,
and they all came, and stayed nearly twelve hours, during which
time we ordered both lunch and dinner from Indian restaurants
(not the same restaurant, though). We all practiced using
GAR to build packages for the BBC, and got quite a few packages
done; it would be great if we could get some momentum going and
get a new BBC out soon.
The crowd -- Duncan, Andrew, Jon Webb, and Nick -- dispersed at
about two in the morning, with Duncan heading out on his
motorcycle with a wild assortment of computer hardware crammed
into a shoulder bag.
Zack got a bench for bench pressing, and some weights. I've
tried it twice and got the sense that my arms could be
reconfigured if I used it enough.
I got up late and ended up deciding to go to Ocean Beach instead
of doing some errands. It was a beautiful day, much as it's been
recently, with clear and deep blue skies, though I didn't manage
to get out of the house until late afternoon.
I caught the BART to Civic Center and transferred to the N Judah,
which I rode west, and promptly fell asleep and didn't wake up
until the end of the line. Conveniently enough, the end of the
line is at the ocean.
I climbed up a sand dune and watched the sun set and watched some
of the couples there, watching it, kissing each other, talking.
I realized that "walks on the beach" -- a stereotypical thing
people would like, as though a symbol of being romantic -- is
actually something which people literally do in practice with
their romantic partners, at least here in the Bay Area where there
is such a thing as a beach. I've been to Ocean Beach three times
before, but I never noticed the couples, only the sea shells
(the first time), the ULTRIX licenses (the second time), and the
ocean (the third time).
Every time you go to Ocean Beach, you notice something new, like
reading Gödel, Escher, Bach or "Civil
Disobedience". "Suddenly, you notice a couple."
So I saw the sun set over the ocean, and I put on my sweatshirt,
obscuring my tie-dye shirt and "Free Mickey" button, and instantly
changing others' likely perceptions of me. I looked back and
forth and thought about how big the ocean looked, and how little
of it I could see, and I thought of one of Newton's famous
self-deprecating comments:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem
to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.
I've thought about that quotation many times, but always, always
when coming across it in a book -- never while looking at an ocean.
There is something powerful and unique about thinking "the
great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me" at the
moment that an actual ocean lies before you. But don't take my
word for it; go to an ocean and try it.
Photography is very good at capturing objects which could
naturally lie within our field of vision, and producing
representations of them which can also lie within our field
of vision, so that seeing the representation mimics the
sensation of seeing the original. That doesn't work for
objects which we could never see all at once, like an ocean;
part of the sensation of seeing an ocean is the realization
that you have to look back and forth to see even
the part of the ocean which is exposed to you. It's tough
for a picture to capture that, unless it took up an entire
tabletop, or an entire room.
As soon as the sun had set, I started to walk toward the
Cliff House, having a sense that the Cliff House wasn't
particularly far away from the end of Judah. Although I didn't
know it at the time, the Cliff House is fully the width of
Golden Gate Park, plus five blocks -- according to my map,
about a mile in all. I had never thought about Golden
Gate Park extended all the way to the ocean (I haven't seen
much of Golden Gate Park yet), and I didn't even realize it
as I walked across the park's western border.
When I reached the end of Ocean Beach, I decided to try
climbing the cliff to reach the Cliff House (rather than
talking the road). This turned out to be a serious
challenge. The rocks at the base of the cliff were all
covered in soaking wet seaweed (since they were regularly
lapped by the ocean), and extremely slippery. I tried to
move in toward the cliff, away from the ocean, but the
cliff was much too steep at its south end (where it met
ocean beach) and I had to walk north along the seaweed-covered
rocks until I found an incline which could take me up and
to the north, out of reach of the waves.
Now the rocks were dry, and not at all slippery, but there
wasn't a path (actually, I saw two paths on my way up, but
no path ran from the base of the cliff to its top), and
the cliff was not necessarily meant for climbing. (I did
see a few people climbing it just ahead of me, so I knew it
was possible.) Not being a skilled rock climber,
but always having loved to climb, I thought "I need to climb
up this without assuming that I have any more or better
climbing skills than I did when I was six" or "I need to
climb this as though it were the glacial potholes in
Shelburne Falls".
So I gradually made my way up the side of the cliff, but
always took care to stand on horizontal ledges and outcroppings
in such a way that I didn't need my arms to keep my
balance and so that I could rest at any time. I didn't want
to end up hanging on the side of a vertical face (as some
skilled rock climbers will) so that I'd fall off if I let go.
I decided to explore a little further north along the cliff on
my way up, rather than taking the most direct possible route,
but pretty soon I started to get intimidated at what I'd gotten
myself into. I looked down (oops) and realized that I was
thirty or forty feet up on the side of a cliff above the
Pacific Ocean; if I fell, then if I were lucky, I'd
land in deep, cold, salt water more than a hundred feet from
the beach. That would be no good at all.
So, rather than take risks on the steep face (which looked to
involve ledges and outcroppings almost a hundred feet in the
air), I decided to backtrack a bit and take a much more gradually
sloping route I'd noticed earlier. With some relief, I crossed
back over a narrow gap in midair (the same gap which had first
provoked some thoughts about the undesirability of falling
off) and fairly quickly got myself onto a gently sloping face,
which, annoyingly, was covered with plants. (I can see why
the plants like to grow there, rather than elsewhere.)
I cut my finger on a stone as I was pulling myself up there,
but, having reached the plants, it took me only a minute or
two of easy climbing to reach a man-made wall at the top of
the cliff. I was relieved to find that the wall (made to
protect people on the inside from falling out) wasn't too high
to climb over from the outside. With a final effort, I swung
my leg over the top of the wall and then pulled the rest of my
body up. I was on top of the cliff, by the Cliff House, with
dirty pants, a cut finger, and lots of exciting memories.
I wandered around the outside of the Cliff House, hoping to
find somewhere to rinse off my finger, or something with
which to wrap it. Instead, I stumbled across the
Musée
Mécanique. I had only recently
read an article about it, thanks
to Biella and Nick. So I'd heard that the museum was supposed to
be closing in September, and that people were supposed to flock
there to see it while it was still open. This
sounded like a reasonable idea to me, but I hadn't expected to
run into the Musée on my trip to Ocean Beach. "It can't be
open", I thought. "It's a Sunday and it's already after 6:00p."
It was open. So I spent about three dollars in quarters, fed into
various contraptions, contrivances, devices, and artifacts. I got
my fortune told twice. I watched two player pianos give rousing
performances (and noticed that the music industry failed to go out
of business). With a single quarter, I brough a whole carnival
to life; I watched a mock execution and a 3-d peep show (in black
and white, of course). I saw a man arm-wrestling against a machine.
(I think that machine, unlike any human I know, could beat Mr.
Demaine.)
I put another quarter into a machine and made a derrick pump
crude oil out of the floor (er, ground) into a cup (er, tank).
Here, again, were a large number of couples, out on dates.
(There must be some time pressure on account of the museum's
plans to close in September; if ever people want to go there
on a date, they've really got to hurry.) The designers of
the carnival attractions from years gone by had accounted
for this; so many of the machines had an intangible "watch
this, or do this, with your beloved" aesthetic. Sure, some
of them were aimed at people who wanted to show off (like
the arm-wrestling machine, and other tests of skill and
strength), but others, which gave exhibitions in which
spectators were totally passive, still somehow said
romance.
Incongruously, the Musée Mécanique has a large
collection of fairly contemporary coin-operated video games.
Maybe the idea is to show the progress of coin-operated
entertainment over the last hundred years and more. There
were definitely some video game classics (arcade games from
the early 1980s, Pac-Man, Pole Position), but there wasn't
real continuity. There was no Pong or Space War;
there's a gap and all the entertainment machine history
of the 1960s and 1970s (and a fair amount on either side)
is omitted entirely. Maybe the arcade games are there to
"give kids something to do" as their parents play with the
mechanical stuff. I think that would be a silly idea,
though.
By the time I left the Musée Mécanique, it was
dark out, and there's very little artificial lighting up by
the Cliff House, so it was dark out. I certainly
wasn't about to climb down any cliffs in complete darkness,
so I took the road, and walked along the beach a while,
and thought about things like what my heart's desire was,
and whether my arms would ever get better, and what I was
going to do in life. On the beach, in the darkness, nobody
could see me, not even the few people still left on the
beach, and I felt a kind of solitude I hadn't experienced
in a while, where nobody knew where I was, nobody could
find me, nobody could see me...
I thought of Iliad I, 34 ("poluphloisboio thalasses").
Fitzgerald takes an interesting approach to translating that line:
he has "by the shore of the tumbling clamorous whispering sea".
So Fitzgerald decided to render "polu-" by using several different
adjectives in a list. Alexander Pope was more conventional, or
at least his style has become conventional for us:
The trembling Priest along the Shore return'd,
And in the Anguish of a Father mourn'd.
Disconsolate, nor daring to complain,
Silent he wander'd by the sounding Main:
I think it's important to contrast the priest's silence with the
sea's roar; it makes us imagine what Chryses was thinking
in that silence as he retreated, just before he began to pray.
After almost a mile's walk along that much-resounding sea, and
some contemplation, I ended up among the small groups who'd
come at sundown and started fires. You could see their fires
from around the Cliff House, but that at that distance they
were just tiny dots of light. Up close, each group had its
own substantial bonfire raging, but between the groups
there was no
commerce.
I caught the N Judah back to the Inner Sunset, and read on the way,
and got off at 9th Avenue (where it looks like 9th Avenue Books is
going out of business! or did I confuse it with another business?)
in the hope of eating at
Einstein's Cafe. As I was about to enter the cafe, Philippe Tapon jumped up
from inside and called "Seth!" and then said "I'm Philippe Tapon".
Philippe is a journalist who interviewed me (and Zack and Nick and
other people) about free software last year. He was eating at
Einstein's with a friend of his, and, since I'd been planning to
eat there myself, I ended up joining them and staying until the
place closed.
