The Oneirica Method
I. Witness from the betweened self.
I. Layer witnessings upon
witnessings, selves upon
selves, across layers of time.
I. Fabulation as Narrative Key.
Weekday Morning (October)
My right fibula hurts when I walk as a Boricua in San Francisco, dreaming of the home I left. Nobody knows my name here, nor my true designation—“Boricua”—which marks me as a man from Puerto Rico, my island-nation—in the US’s eyes, their island-colony—far away from here. But I still make the pilgrimage to the tallest point of Mission Dolores Park at least once a week, if not more. Because I live on the 500 block of Guerrero Street, my usual entry point to the park is at the corner of 18th and Dolores. Past the crosswalk, you get to the quadrilateral path of pavement that circumambulates the entire park. 18th Street cuts the park at its northern end, as 20th Street cuts the southern end; the park itself occupies the space between Dolores and Church Street, meaning that it swallows 19th Street into its greenery.
On the corner of the park at 18th and Dolores, there is a small garden of bushes and shrubs that welcomes the walker, it includes at least two specimens of quite large evergreen savila (or aloe vera) plants. Thick and fleshy-serrated leaves, with small white teeth along their edges. I imagine if my mother were here, her first thought would be, Bueno Rolo, if you get hurt for any reason, don’t go to the pharmacy; go here to 18th and Dolores, pluck out one of these leaves, and press out the dense healing juice from the inside. (But she’s not here. She’s in Puerto Rico, where I was born, the home she never left, the house in Caimito where my compulsivity to write saw its first days. She’s with my father and my siblings in a house surrounded by mountains and chirping coquí frogs, supporting me from afar as I begin art school courses in San Francisco.) And she would say, after pressing out the savila’s dense healing juice, to spread it over the wound and then hang out for a bit. La savila can be used for everything, she says. That is how it has been used in our family for generations, and back at home, she grows savila in her garden, for whenever anyone gets rashes, or any other kind of body pain, like my haemorrhoids last summer. But when she gets the pains that send her to the hospital, it’s because nothing in her garden—that small plot of land in our backyard back home, visible through the kitchen window, where she grows these and other flowers—none of the pharmacological instruments in her cabinet, none of the cannabis even—nothing helps. Nothing helps when the iron in your blood is low. Then it’s just the hospital. And hope. That the internal bleeding stops, that the iron treatments work.
Weeks of uncertainty. And if they misdiagnose you—a common theme in the our family history—you might yet survive. Not because you’re getting proper medical care, but because the López-Torres genetic stock includes so many resilient strands—the Spanish campesinos who macheted their way through centuries of indentured work, the enslaved Africans and Taínos—that, even at this point, a little resilience goes a long way. Trudging up this park up its steep incline from 18th and Dolores to 20th and Church is a chore on the leg-bones. But the view of the skyline from 20th & Church is worth it. Let’s begin.
Morning in Dolores Park
A short film by Rolando-André López
Starring
the unhoused man sandwiched between the comforter he’s wrapped around himself and the tarp he is using as bedding to protect himself from the morning dew on the park’s grass, the only body at 9am in the big lawn; by pm, he will be gone, and the park will be full of happy people who wear good vibes along the sleeves
the Caucasian Mother wearing a tennis hat walking her child on a stroller behind another homeless man whose zigzag walk makes it difficult for her to ride past him
the Fit Caucasian Male in his 50s doing leg stretches on one of the benches, who breaks the stretch band he’s using to strengthen his legs and then says, Shit, I knew this would happen, to his dog who seems to always go to workouts with him
the Fit Asian Female in Probably Her Twenties playing tennis with her friend on the courts that go along the stretch of the park between Dolores and Church along 18th street, wearing a form-fitting black tank top and a skirt that lets her legs-for-days feel the air when they run; also her friend, with whom she goes back and forth on the tennis court, also Asian, who wears a long wide black skirt and black tennis hat; on average, the ball passes between them 4-6 times before someone drops it
the straight couple making out; the gay couple making out; the pink-haired boy rubbing his arms all over himself as he summons forth OM-like incantations in the lotus position; the lovemakers; the gay bears airing out their hairy bellies on all the towels they’ve spread out, big is beautiful; the shirtless man looking for friends to talk to, walking up to random people and saying, Will you play a board game with me? Nobody wins, he says, we just answer deep questions about ourselves. He left his boyfriend six months ago.
He’s hungry for a guy like me, I can tell. But we are still strangers by the end of our conversation, even if acquainted. Hungry boys are dangerously fickle, they fall easily out of loves they themselves light afire. Be wary of charming, hungry men.
the man (pictured below) sitting along the branch of a sad tree becomes the tallest head in the park, the most relaxed fellow; who, when I pass by him, looks down at me and says, in solidarity, what’s up, my boss?
the Franciscan capuchín, the monk with the brown robe and the triangular hood draped down his back; bald, white-bearded walking his sato—mixed breed—dog through the park; he is the only man at this hour who has his dog on a leash; brother to sun and moon, tamer of wolves
Just Business (early September)
I’m sitting on a bench, at the stretch of the path from Dolores to Church, on 20th street, overlooking the San Francisco skyline from this here spot in the Mission. It’s Friday afternoon and I have just returned from my first poetry class. A voice interrupts me. She’s one bench away from me, and I welcome her instantly; I forget what she says before: “I’ll come over and sit with you.”
Golden hour in San Francisco is never crystalline, there’s something pale about the sunset’s gold. It’s the fog. But it shines enough on the beautiful Latinx woman who sits beside me, with rose tattoos across both her arms, a black T-shirt, and a mischievous smile. I feel familiar with her already. Unlike Joan Didion, I don’t look at her dispassionately. I haven’t been with a woman’s body in a long time, so any nearness clears the air. She smiles at me and says, “What do you want, edibles, prerolls,”—prerolls, what they call joints these days—“mushrooms?”
I bought a Golden Teacher and then she left. I ate, and then evening lasted into the next day’s afternoon. It was Friday; it was Saturday; at one point it was both. It was the Time Suck. When I woke up, I was still in San Francisco, not at home, nowhere near my mother’s garden, though there’s a place in my mind where the dream of her garden and the mapa onírica of Dolores Park are as near to each other as one ear is to the other. Still, even the space between two neurons can be infinite in memory, emerging from the bottom of my consciousness, on my bed in the apartment complex on the 500 block of Guerrero Street.
A Lonely 9am on a Fall Weekday
A layered witnessing. Today this lonely field hosts a sleeping man without a roof. On this same stretch of grass, I sat with S, my former housemate, an influencer, one evening during my first week in the Infinite City. On that evening, the park was the opposite of the picture above: very few of the unhoused; instead, it was covered with droves of twenty-to-thirty-somethings and their dogs, with people smiling and smoking and getting fucked up. S, the influencer, was charismatic and advertised her love to all tenants in the complex on her Instagram and TikTok pages, where she frequently tagged us in her Stories, talking about how we were the “angels” she lived within the apartment complex. As if to magnify her generosity, she had a Tattoo of The World (the Tarot card) on her chest. Watching her advertise her love for us was a bit like meeting a hen who claims to donate her eggs by throwing them at your face. Do you accept the gesture, even if the gift is shit? It was the only time we hung out before she got evicted three weeks later, after she got into a car crash. Over the course of that time, she offered me mushrooms, DMT, marihuana, edibles—all for free, or rather, all at the price of friendship with her. The moment you accept even a grain of generosity from her, it means she has permission to broadcast your friendship to all her thousands of followers. It means on any given day you’ll be tagged on some post where she calls you “angel.” All of this for accepting to sit with her at the park after rejecting every single drug she offered you. That same influencer speaks differently to people whom, she claims, owe her money. In the hallway of the apartment building, she raises holy hell, delivering threats in you-fuckinʼ-owe me mobster style, invoking the devas when she says, I am capable of destruction and creation and I will curse you. She got into a car crash. I remember what it was like to drive with her around the city. I count myself lucky, a survivor of this situation.
The Tallest Head in the Park
Some weeks ago, I sat in this bench, which runs along the western path of the park, on the other side of the Metro track. Sat to read an interview with Karen Tei Yamashita, where she described the novel as a narrative project ‘layered in time’. I decide I will use this; she speaks of more than just the novel, even more than the experience of story on the page; it’s the imprecise locus of narrativity itself, the imagination, where documentation meets invention, the foundation for this mapa onírico. I reproduce below the reflection that gave rise to this project:
Only the act of reading gives a novel-place reality. A narrative place becomes real only as it engages time. And a novel, Yamashita says, is “a book layered in time.” In her own theorizing about fiction, she cites the influence of Magic Realism, where rules about chronology are more fluid, and the present is always dipping into the past.
In Gabo y Mercedes: Una Despedida, Rodrigo García, son as memoirist, reports that his father Gabriel García Márquez often referred to the novel as a “terreno movedizo:” “movedizo” means “shifting, unsteady;” the Spanish term for “quicksand” is arena movediza: thus, the proper narrative map is a terrain of shifting quicksands, layered in time. The discipline of a writer in generating these layers works beside that of the reader who agrees to make space for the writer’s partly invented, partly documented language-world.
In the photograph above, a man sits atop a tree, staring contemplatively into the horizon, the view of the city. I am reminded of Rafiki, the Monkey-Shaman from Lion King. And I walk over to capture with my camera a sense of what he might be seeing from there. The result is the following:
What the tallest head sees.
Walking in Two Places
Kima is a dog I rescued from the Jefferson Parish animal shelter in New Orleans for $65 back in 2011. A and I had been together for three years, and we were running out of steam. Since we weren’t married, just college students, the “baby we had to save the marriage” was a dog we rescued (I paid for) named after one of our favourite TV characters, Shakima Greggs, from The Wire. We broke up that year. She left with a friend and got married and had a kid and started a family. I still have Kima.
At Dolores Park, there are few sentient beings I think of as much as Kima. I miss her deeply. She has travelled through the world. From New Orleans she moved in 2015 to Puerto Rico, where my mother has been taking care of her since then; she did not move up with me to Boston that year because I couldn’t find an apartment there within my budget that could afford her. So it’s not until 2020 that I move back to PR during the pandemic and have the opportunity to spend quality time with Kima again. Except in PR, it’s more difficult.
For one thing, it’s common for my neighbours—within this closed-access, guarded community—to leave their dogs walking about the streets, leash-less. Which is why if I step out with Kima into the street, I’m already flirting with the chance of her getting attacked. It’s already happened twice. She’s old and not a fighter so both times I’ve ended up squaring up with the dogs. One time I lunged my hand into the jaw of a sato, letting his mouth hang open in my grasp. That’s how far I’ve gone for Kima.
Secondly, taking her outside the gated neighbourhood would be an even worse idea. We live right by a caserío—a tenement of public housing—and no childhood is complete in this island without you surviving being chased by at least one caserío dog. Now, caserío dogs are strong, mean, and heavily territorial. They catch you; they rip you. I’ve managed to run away from caserío dogs once or twice, but Kima lacks the speed. The mental image of her getting ripped apart by some mangy grey dog is one I avoid with horror.
So, imagine how I feel now, in 2021, as I sit at Mission Dolores Park, surrounded by dogs loosed from their leashes, dogs who seem to have no thought of what their teeth could do if they decided the time had arrived; domesticated dogs, American dogs, purebred dogs; dogs set free on the field by parents and monks. Oh Kima, you would love it here, I think, and that is why this place, this map is a dream, because when you are a Boricua like me, when you are the Boricua that is me, you walk here dreaming of the home you’ve left, you walk here and your foot hurts because wherever you sit you are like you heard a gipsy bruja say, sitting on two chairs at once, unable to tell one story without splitting up; it is feeling the distance, a map tended taut between American extremities, here and not with a defeated desire.
Walking in too many places
I’ve been an ironist for a long time. To the point where double-thinking and twofold meanings are everywhere I write. Michael Che starts his most recent Netflix standup special with a joke that riffs on the theme, “You can be anyone you want to be in San Francisco.” I have seen this aphorism play out in the last four months of living here in the Mission. Wherever you are on the social scale, there is a freedom in the streets to exercise the project of who you want to become at that moment, ways this city allows you to have your little corner, where you can live what you want to live, believe what you want to believe, be who you want to be; if you live out the religion of one human being, and that religion is you, and you require no other followers; then you can find a street corner in San Francisco, claim it, and live out the rest of your devotion, the rest of your years. Same if you have a religion of two or three, or a clan of more. You can make it on scratch. No one will challenge you. They will just walk by and mind their business. And if you intrude too much on someone’s project of themselves, they will ask you to mind yours—and might not even do that. They might just walk on too.
Not far from Dolores Park, near the Tenderloin, I walked by an aesthetically composed homeless encampment. It was one huge tent. Every single piece of tarp of it was painted with fluid, abstract patterns in bright greens, reds, and oranges. A makeshift home and work of art. The encampment was designed as a habitat for one person. When I peeked inside through the gaps between the curtaining tarps, there the artist was—a man, beard long as Gandalf, wearing multiple layers of jackets, sitting on a heap of clothes, painting a new canvas, battery-powered lamp by his side, heaps of clothes and appliances around him. He has enough for the essentials. He is an ascetic for his art. Maybe like others I’ve met, he spares his few dollars he scrapes for his materials and for his vices. I have met many ascetics of this sort in this city.
People who live in their art, musicians, painters. I love to call myself beloved of these folks. But it’s all an image, it’s all from afar. Under a ramp in San Francisco. Now, this same city will everywhere show you the work of its artists: under this ramp, on the side of that building—that restaurant, that bank, that dispensary; business owners commission work everywhere, and not just them. Go to the Women’s Centre in the Mission to see the building-wide mural, Mother Teacher of Peace… where social workers help the women of this city find services… street art, commissioned art, uncommissioned art, volunteered art… Bob Kaufman, a jazz poet of the beat age, was too mentally unstable in his lifetime to receive awards or to be invited to dinners. He lived in the streets and wrote poetry and after his death, his poems have been collected into a volume that’s selling in City Lights Books. The space is there for you, recognition holds you in the asphalt. All it takes to be a poet here is to walk as one. What that means from the bottom up is up to you. But in poetry, there is no bottom. It’s infinite, endless. And San Francisco holds it.
