The speed of San Francisco is unlike that of any other city I have lived in. There’s a sense the current movement is in New York because what’s happening there —happenings, basically— is still a known cipher. What is taking place here is barely scrutable by sheer virtue of velocity. San Francisco is about to give birth or explode. I’m betting on both.
I’ve noticed this gradually by keeping correspondents all across the globe. From where I’m standing, conversation with the world has a bit of delay; it snags and tears in places, for want of a common ‘timezone’. There’s a gulf —and a lag— between what I can say and how and when it’s understood. Some interactions I can only have with locals who are on the same wavelength.
I have lived with exceptional intensity in this city, and it is possible that, in so doing, I have found my speed.
And it is definitely inflecting my writing. I am steering ideas into even stranger places and shapes. I am being reshaped —and in a sense, replaced— by San Francisco, too. Having experienced a forced metamorphosis in this city is different to having it done elsewhere. It’s requiring a revamped lyric aerodynamicism. I’m creating not in a vacuum, but from vertigo.
Los Angeles and San Francisco are two superb hallucinations (very different amongst themselves). As it turns out, I’m not for Cities upon a Hill; I am for the Cities of the Plain.
Photo of Hayes Valley by me.
I can hear some echoes of Calvino. I lived in Philly for some ten years and Houston before that. I came to interpret big cities as egregores. They have their own personalities and, as you point out, their own pace. Never a sum of buildings and people. The result is always greater than that.
I’ve noticed a new kind of energy in your recent writings, and I am loving it. Good vibrations, as it were. Glad SF is thrumming with you.