These people have quite a business. We spend our lives accumulating mountains of shit that we spend our lives keeping in motion. These folks supply all the tools and materials needed to keep it in motion. it’s a grim  enerprise, really.

11 a.m. On the bus on my way to Patrick’s to help him move. All the san Franciscans are awakening and returning home from their sex parties. Brilliant light, cool air now warming. I would drive but I’m loath to give up my parking space. And besides, from the bus I have at least a few minutes to write and post from my iPhone.

What is the salient image here? The smiling woman standing with her stained comforter? The prep cook catching a smoke in the doorway of the restaurant? The unshaven Hispanic wheeling in the vegetable delivery on a dolly? Or the man in the black sweater and draping pink scarf taking it all in?

Descending into the castro, we pass the storefront that once housed Harvey Milk’s camera store. Why did he own a camera store? What was to be had in it? I doubt it was the cameras. It must have been in the film processing. In the 70’s I’m sure negatives would have passed through that shop that would have violated obscenity laws, convention, what we even desire to see. But those are the images that must be developed. Those are the images to seek.

I just finished watching Atonement, the flick based on the Ian McEwan novel.  In the story, a young girl and budding writer witnesses a series of acts that she scarcely understands and tells a story that implicates those around her and changes their lives forever.  For the rest of her life she tries to find a way to redress her mistake.

During the war, as a nurse she tells a dying soldier whom she doesn’t know that she loves him, that she will marry him, that all those whom he knows are fine and well, and she confesses only one truth, that her name is Briony.

Near the end of her own life, long after all the participants are dead, she finds some measure of atonement by writing a book, a true and honest account of the events – no rhymes, no embellishments, no lies – except that she restores the individuals to their original state of happiness.

She believes, we want to believe, in the gracious lie.  But isn’t this the writer’s conceit?  To think that we can undo what we have done simply by writing about it, by telling yet another story, yet another fabrication?  That somehow our imagined understanding of people is commensurate with the people themselves?  I want to tell Briony that atonement must fundamentally be not a statement, but an act.

And so why does she wait until the end of her life to write this book?  This is the tragedy, I think.

The stories that we write are not necessarily those that we were meant to write.  And if it takes a long time to write the stories we were meant to tell, its not for want of courage, but perhaps more due to a lack of wherewithal.  She couldn’t have written it because as she advanced in life, she still didn’t understand, or only understood imperfectly what she had done.  Even at an age senior to any of the participants, we may lack the clarity and prescience to understand and correctly describe and transmit experience.  And we want to get it right, or perhaps even more so, we really are afraid of getting it terribly wrong.  But in the end, we’re left only with our imagination and our pen, and we can only do what we can.  The heartbreak of it all.