California
I’m now back from San Francisco and the lovely people I met there, and meditating upon travel and what it can show us, and how we can misunderstand.
One of the days I spent going to the SF MOMA. This was a lovely, dramatic building, and it had some fine things in it, but very few. I was pleased to see a large Rothko, a small Picasso, and disappointed that the gallery named ‘Matisse and after’ had only two very small Matisses and one larger, good one, stuffed into a corner. I left feeling I’d been short-changed. Now, how could I feel short-changed when I’d just encountered five really first rate pieces? By the standards of the Boston MFA or New York’s MOMA the offerings were not plentiful or luscious, of course, but then they weren’t negligible either.
That afternoon we took the ferry out to see Alcatraz, with its crumbling walls and prison bars, and with its rightly acclaimed audio tours which surely must be the best I have ever heard. Fascinating. But it is, after all, a place that has human suffering coating every surface, and in a place of such cruelty one couldn’t exactly be cheerful. Those on the ferry back were not smiling and happy or noisy and boisterous as tourists usually are. Subdued and glum would be better words to use.
And then I began to connect the dots. The Art Museum was a scanty collection, but they had gathered together what they could and asked people to come along, to see how it changed their energy. Similarly Alcatraz is hardly a cradle of delights, but you can see it from just about everywhere in San Francisco - it pulls the eyes to it - and the Park Service had decided not to let it crumble but to honor it for what it was, cruelties and all. Both places seemed to be saying: “This is what we have here. We’re not competing with anything else. We’re showing you what is. Reflect on that.”
The Art Museum’s offerings were few in number because most of the world’s major museums got to the good stuff first. Such is life. And in a similar fashion Alcatraz couldn’t be prettified, made to look better than it was, erased, or converted. Instead it stands as a record of what was less-than-perfect in the state’s past. Both places ask us to reflect upon what it was that brought this city into existence.
Later, walking around the Presidio, the recently de-commissioned military barracks that is now a superb park, one gains the same impression. The beauties of San Francisco involve standing on ground that is still uneven with human frailties and fears. How else can I describe walking over a concrete gun emplacement that happens to provide a view of the Golden gate bridge that is picture-postcard perfect? Yet that emplacement was built in fear, and from it artillery could once have sent explosives raining down upon any corner of the opalescent bay, today so peaceful.
San Francisco wears its heart on its sleeve, so to speak.
