Does text anchor a memory and preserve it from floating off into the unyielding tides of the subconscious, or does text corrupt a memory, tainting it like mold, covering it in black-ink scrawl, like a blank page slowly turning black? Why write a postcard if it takes you out of the moment you are supposed to be experiencing if it weren’t a means to assure its preservation? This assumes the whole point isn’t to brag, to prove the meaningfulness of our actions, the same way we now constantly punctuate our days with these proofs, the world stopped in order to capture it on a device, share it on the internet while your companion does the same. Can a moment be more thoroughly re-experienced than if it is one in which you stopped and wrote and an alchemy cast the place, its people its horizons—everything you thought felt saw heard smelt tasted—whatever it was that moved you, into an objective tangible thing that years later you can bring out of the drawer, the box, the closet and sit down and read and be taken back to that moment? How can we quench the infinite appetite of nostalgia without perverting that for which we long? What is a memory we can’t recall? And how do we tell the story of ourselves if we don’t first formed the words in our heads? Which story is more real: the one we tell or that which is never voiced?
In October I was visiting a friend who was teaching English at a high school in Andorra, a mircostate squeezed between France and Spain. I wrote this poem on the bus from Barcelona to Andorra and wrote it on a postcard I bought upon arrival.
She wanted me to come to her classes the next day, but not the first one, she didn’t want to put me through that. She suggested I wait in Viena, which I did, where I wrote a poem on this postcard.
Then I read Death in the Afternoon until it was time for me to go to her next class. I read this passage and decided I would photocopy it and replace “see a bullfight” with “play bocce.”
I bought the book in a very multilingual book store in Amsterdam and thought it would be an interesting preparation for my trip to Spain, following my trip to Andorra. I had no ambitions to see a bullfight—and I learned by October the season was already over—but I liked the idea of being able to read Hemingway as a travel guide. And when I read the beginning of CHAPTER 7 I realized that a similar necessity exists in describing bocce, it become necessary that the reader, to have any real participation in making meaning of the text, plays bocce. But one can’t expect the reader to participate in the very event that the book is supposed to simulate.
In January, in Portland, after I had already made five of the eight ‘zines, I bought a book about hiking in the Olympics and read that it was intended as both a guide to exploring the National Park and Forest and a way to transport yourself to the trails from the comfort of your living room. When we went there the week after I referred to it as “The Fireside Imagination Tool.” The bocce book should also work that way.
In February I took the train down from Washington to Los Angeles, and I made the 7th and 8th books. I considered how I could bind all of the installments together into one book. I asked Alexandra how I should finish it, as I was now finishing the journey and I had used just about all of the writing I had intended to include. She said it should come in a box with eight installments, like an eight-ball bocce set. Of course, how had I not thought of that from the start! This was a brilliant idea, I told her. People could toss the books toward a golf ball or a pog and play a round of indoor, low-impact bocce with the books! No, she said, that is not what I meant. You shouldn’t be encouraging people to throw your books.
So I made the 7th at her mom’s house and photocopied a poem I had written the year before after taking the same train ride in two installments for the 8th. I really can’t stop you from throwing the books if that’s what you want, but I suppose I shouldn’t encourage it.
While in LA I went with Alexandra and her mom to Eagle Rock, the neighborhood where Steinbeck lived briefly with his wife in the house of his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, who taught at Occidental College, the small liberal arts school in Eagle Rock. It is a lovely part of the city, as though a quiet section of Altadena were dropped between downtown and Glendale. I didn’t make it in time to see the Eagle Rock Historical Society’s archives. A well-intended master’s class/concert was just about to return from a break when I went into the Center for the Arts where the society keeps its headquarters. I was allowed to take the elevator to the basement to make sure the man in charge had in fact left. He had.
On the way back we stopped for seafood—crab, oysters and mussels—in Glendale, which we prepared and ate back at Alexandra’s mom’s house in Burbank. I mentioned that bocce courts are topped with crushed oyster shells, and Alexandra’s mom insisted that I make one in the back yard, which I did for the rest of my stay there, another few days. It was a good start, but the court sits unfinished. I am back in Salinas, finishing something else.
This is intended as a brief set of instructions, like those that came with the bocce set that we took to Seattle and brought back two years ago. And I don’t mean to explain the rules of bocce and how to toss the books with a friend as a diversion. I simply intend to give some context, though not too much. I intend to present these things with a minimum of manipulation. Whatever makes something more accessible or recognizable generally makes it, obviously, formulaic, and boring, or worse. I’ve been told I shouldn’t use the word fascist in reference to media too much, so I won’t.
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