Hill Towns of the Mind

From Telegraph Hill's white stone pillar rising above North Beach, to Montmartre and the cupola-capped cream cake of Sacre Coeur atop its well tracked lines, hill towns have historically provided a sense of protection for those who brave their slopes daily. There's an embrace that comes with with nesting on a slope beneath a watchful totem -- a church, a monument, a rampart.

On the windy slopes of Bernal, the sense of remove ebbs as people flow by, not in a smattering but in torrents: skate boarders braking downhill, dogs and shoppers loaded with leashes and grocery bags, hillside hikers breathing steadily as one step follows another up hill and down. The streets are busy here, even though the grade is ridiculous. The stairways and slides do make navigating the terrain a bit easier.
Here is where raptors ride air columns just above you, where each step at night brings more twinkling lights into view. Around the summit an encircling road winds with people and their dogs on promenade. The heights are such that when fog rolls over Twin Peaks and obscures Sutro Tower, the hilltop becomes a sky island above San Francisco.

Arles & Why Part II

Carre Voltaire, Arles

(my room on second story by the sign for Hotel Voltaire)

I came to Arles abruptly after a rupture upstream at Savasse, near Montelimar, on the Rhone at the river’s edge of The Drome. The cubist palazzo we stayed in at Savasse had become a family bell jar and a graceful escape after days with child in tow and on her clock, became untenable. After my sharp words in Valence when the ruins were nowhere to be seen (those in another “V”-town to the North), the kid in cranky tears, Grandma having driven and now short-tempered, and her son, my friend, hopelessly irked at all and sundry, I took a walk alone. I had to part, at least for half an hour to later rendez-vouz at an eatery where our presence was almost ghostly to the inattentive garcon. He passed us by in favor of emptier tables long before seeing us. My need to go rose above the scene like a hot moon. I had bee-lined it for the train station when I got my walkabout just to find out how to get gone as swiftly as the French Rail could take me -- from this close encampment to a more lost place. I decided on a southerly route, on Arles somewhat randomly, though I looked out at Avignon in passing the next day, to think that this Bachelor of History ought at least to pay a papal visit to the half bridge and its quarters, but Arles came before Avignon and I needed to restart at the beginning.

Arles and Why Part 1

Vincent. It does go back to that poisoned genius time and again, doesn’t it. Vincent in Arles, I had imagined, standing beside the Rhone painting Starry Starry Night fleetingly free from the wasps of madness. It was not painted there, I discovered, but in St. Remy, to the Northeast, where he was bundled off to really recoup. Starry Starry Night was paintedted after his time in Arles and is a swirling rendition of mad fear. When I looked at his output in the city at the top of the Carmague, the Rhonic delta, I saw another man’s moment of light, paint, creation, a man more entranced than anxious. The many other canvases that were once wet under Arles’ Provencal sun spring now to mind: the nauseating and oddly sinister barroom, the off-kilter bedroom, the woman at a table pre-cursing Picasso, the terrace café so utterly Arletan.