I bought Julia V’s new book of poems the other day. She limped into Mario’s: La Fiesta while Umiko and I were splitting a burrito. I finally had some cash on me, so of course I bought her book–a poet must support the local poet, even when poor and not writing poems. Julia, also know as the Bubble Lady, is a Telegraph Avenue hero. She’s been there from the beginning, when People’s Park was seized from the University, when students fought cops’ guns with flowers, when Ginsberg hung out at The Mediterranean, when Reagan inaugurated neo-fascism…whatever the legends are.
I’ve begun to have low expectations when it comes to these remaining flower power elders. The way I see it, they’re war veterans. They deserve respect, but some of their psychic limbs have definitely been amputated. They have post-traumatic stress syndrome. They see visions of their fallen comrades and jabber senselessly about forgotten, half made-up battles. The captains are all dead by now, the people who had ideas of what was going on–only their confused foot soldiers remain.
A troop of these casualties is stuck in orbit around People’s Park. There is a groove one can slip into around that park, a fluid social circulation of loons, drug addicts, activists, travelers, and local merchants. Anyone can integrate themselves into it if they stick around Telegraph Avenue long enough. It’s structured like the society of high school hallways: daily repetition leads to recognition and the cultural signals gradually settle people into strata. Once settled, you are tapped into an endless engaging flow of intrigue and character acting.
But if you’re not careful, you get sucked into…the local strangeness. It’s a little quantum, maybe. A strange attractor. An edge of chaos. So many people are walking their own loops, over and over again, that the scene has become an unpredictable dynamic system. It churns out its own froth of synchronicity and random, random, random surprises at ever moment. Nothing macroscopic can ever occur, of course. It is forever local, just odd loops and unlikely phenomena. There is no such thing as progress in People’s Park. But the local strangeness is addictive. It’s the deep dark sea, or the rich black void.
Strangeness is rare these days. All the empty suburbs, straight lines, television shows, wide roads, and nine to five jobs drown it out until the average American barely believes it exists. But because we’re so unaccustomed to it, we tend to overlook its danger. We spot a lion and think of it only in the context of zoos. A half naked lunatic raves in the park and we laugh. We forget our old nemesis. We forget: chaos is a trap. Humanity was stuck in it for millennia. It casts a spell of mystery and senselessness in which we can wander indefinitely. If you give yourself over to it, you can’t be sure you’ll make it back out. One day you might remember that this was why man was given faculties, to create order from chaos, but the time you’ve lost in its magic could be decades. Some people never shake off the spell. People’s Park has captured whole lives.
Anyway. Old Man Bill told me about Julia when I first arrived. She’s the poet laureate of the Avenue. She’s heavyset, with a limp from polio as a child. She knew Allen Ginsberg. Back In The Day, she blew bubbles at cops and has since been known as the Bubble Lady. She wears a floppy poetess hat and sells her books for $5 on the street, in the coffeeshops and, apparently, in Mario’s.
I won’t weigh in on her poetry. Maybe I liked it. Who am I to talk?–I read dead Germans and mope about love all day. I will merely say: it is imperative to escape from Berkeley. In fact, that is Berkeley’s Imperative. It is the trial Berkeley presents. A pure soul will delve deeply into the insanity of Berkeley; a strong soul will find its way back out. Forget the balance and Berkeley will eat you up and spit back out a palm reader, a welfare bum, a Hari Krishna, or a Republican.
Tuesday November 27th 2007, 12:44 am
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