beautiful morning, by Hannah
‘From Brockwell to Berkeley’ is an ongoing series of snapshots from life on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It’s written by two close friends: Hannah (who moved from London to California in August 2020 to study overseas) and Jaleh (who remains in London).
Everything feels very wild and beautiful this morning: it is a Wednesday and nothing remarkable has happened, with the exception of the sun loudly surprising me just now. Uncharacteristically, the sky is cloudy; we have had rain (if you can imagine such a thing) these past few days. Abruptly the sun has just come shining through.
It is almost two weeks since the Saturday the election was (finally) called. That Saturday was remarkable, for the obvious political significance of the day and for the rare atmosphere it inspired. We had booked tickets to the SF MoMA earlier in the week, for earlyish (10:00) that morning. The news came through at around 8:30, while I was sleepy-eyed at breakfast (toast/coffee), and outside became a flurry of car horns and distant cheering.
Driving to the city, there were people in the street with celebratory signs, people on porches bashing at pots and pans, people in cars (including us) sustaining the cheers and honking. We had the windows open; I had my hair in the wind. The sun was, predictably, shining. We crossed the Bay Bridge; all ocean and sky and music.
The gallery was total saturation of colour, sound, feeling. I was arrested by intimate gospel music in an art film by Theaster Gates, briefly caught up in a riotous layer-painting by Gerhard Richter, deeply absorbed in the ghostly, meditative beauty of Paulina Olowska’s ‘Portrat of the Artist — Indoors’. I am still thinking about (many things but) this electric blue sponge, a sculpture by Yves Klein, has stayed with me the most.
We picked up some lunch and went to Dolores Park — palm trees, the whole of San Francisco laid out before us. The park felt like a festival: how often, these days, is it possible to encounter such an almost-crowd of people? There were at least three birthday parties happening in that park, all balloons and trestle tables. There were two people with a giant set of freezer bags, packed with little plastic pots of clear liquid, a bag of limes, ice: a mobile cocktail bar. There was one admirably confident person in charge of a vast speaker, imposing their taste in (largely UK grime and trap) music on a large portion of the park.
The sun glanced off sequins, glitter, dancers, and green — the grass a blur of crazy good outfits and movement. Whenever a car drove by, horn on repeat, everyone would erupt in a waveform cheer.
We stood on a bench for a while, quietly watching, overawed and overstimulated by how much more than usual this day had already been. We eventually drove home for jasmine tea and melon, briefly to rest before meeting friends at a bar. More friends at a bar became, in the end, many friends at our house, until night was exhaustion and it was time to sleep.
This day was joy, but the feeling behind it was something closer to relief. Still there is so much uncertainty as to how the political situation will unfold here and the pandemic is still very much a reality. This was a flash of something to hold onto, almost-certainty, an end to the week of suspension that had gone before.
Here is a poem from subsequent days, registering something of relief at this change; at the change in the weather. Also how I have (just??) discovered Joni Mitchell, with the shock of Elaine Scarry discovering the palm tree — the shock of never entirely registering her beauty, until now:
‘my november is right now’
bottlegreen, a hummingbird; chlorine still on my skin,
the days are getting colder and I savour how familiar
this feels, this season, as the clouds come crowding in,
joni sings to the moment light is mellifluous, unravelling,
lantern flowers strawberry against the viridian, so green,
there were rains the earth had longed for and I am travelling, travelling, travelling,
looking for something, through the window; amber, vanilla and pine
around my shoulders and neon lightly clinging to tarmac belts,
tiles of lipstick red, resinous hush and I wanna have fun wanna shine
like the sun she sings to the ocean promised the touch of a sky
a mass of powder and evening fringed by telegraph wires and
traffic, street signs, still I listen and wonder why and I
could not stop the clouds from breaking, could not turn away:
I could not stop the honey and smiling, all day.
Read the rest of the posts in ‘From Brockwell to Berkeley’ .
Originally published at http://jalehbrazell.wordpress.com on November 19, 2020.
