nonuments
San Francisco Bay Guardian
[Author’s note: This essay introduced the Urban Living section of the Guardian's annual Best of the Bay issue. Written near the height of the dot-com boom, when the character of San Francisco seemed threatened by a certain commericial mania, the piece celebrates a quieter aspect of city life. —E.M.]
ONE EVENING a friend and I were strolling in the Mission when we encountered a scattered puddle of uncooked rice in the middle of the sidewalk.
There were footprints in it, and scratches—as if shoe tips had been dragged this way and that.
When we stepped closer a motion-control floodlight popped on, revealing the church behind and throwing its beam on the rice.
With Sherlockian bravado I offered my deductions: (1) there had been a wedding at the church earlier in the day (the rice—I imagined a leaky bag), and (2) later, after nightfall, someone must have done what we just had—triggered the motion-control flood—and, suddenly in the spotlight, with a convenient smattering of irresistible ball bearing–like antifriction aids at foot, he or she had performed a spontaneous soft-shoe routine for no one but the night.
Unfortunately, the evidence of this delightful concurrence of circumstances and the little dance it inspired is long gone.
But our exuberant, mysterious city is filled with far less ephemeral traces of the humanity that calls it home. One need only look.
• • •
On Rose Street, between Octavia and Laguna, a rectangle of sidewalk has forever captured a similar moment of joyful impulsiveness.
On one end, two footprints sit side by side in the concrete. Their depth creates shadows and catches your eye. Then you notice the trail of paw prints running over to them. You can picture the scene: The solitary dog walker. Fido has gone on ahead (as Fidos always do). Dog walker encounters rectangle of newly poured and smoothed cement. Looks at feet. Looks at Fido. Pause. Looks up street; then down. Leaps. Here, boy! Fido obliges. The rest is... history?
• • •
This nonchalant section of pavement is an example of what one might call a nonument. Not a monument. A nonument is not monumental.
A nonument is anti-epic. It celebrates the greatness of those who are not great. Of events that are not events. Of moments that are not momentous. No equestrians wielding sabers; no presidents wielding rolled-up proclamations, altering destiny with a swipe of the hand.
A nonument might be devoted to people who go unnoticed. To quiet achievements. Even unconscious ones. To flashes and flourishes of human creativity that—while fleeting, small, and spontaneous, inspired by nothing more than inspiration, with no reward promised, no recognition, no financial gain, no chance at immortality—are no less impressive in their way than the Transamerica Pyramid or the dome of City Hall.
“Why is there no epic of peace?” asks The Iliad’s Homer in the Peter Handke and Wim Wenders–penned film Wings of Desire. There is—to counter those of war, those of industriousness and progress. It’s all around us. lf we look. Nonuments are everywhere—some even hide beneath the noses of monuments proper. And they’re not necessarily carved in stone.
Enter the Van Ness lobby of our aforementioned City Hall at 2 p.m. on a sunny day and you’ll discover one. Walk to the east end of the lobby, near the information desk and the bust of Major General Funston.
Look back at the doors, then down at the floor. Walk slowly this way and that. You’re in for quite the visual surprise. The sunlight from the glass doors and the tungsten from the fixtures dances in the swirling, feathery patterns of wax laid down with a floor buffer by a nameless janitor. As you walk back and forth, the spirals fan out and vanish, snake, arc, draw and undraw themselves. The floor is marbled paper come to life. And you can see where this janitor walked, see where he or she stepped and turned, curved around a column, kicked out a foot, waltzed with the humming machine.
Bakewell and Brown’s dome is glorious. So is this unknown janitor’s glowing calligraphy.
• • •
A nonument might also be whatever you make it. Wherever you make it. Indeed, to discover a nonument is to create one, and vice versa. You’ve probably found several yourself. And these nonuments stand (or sit) as memorials to the inspiration, accident, or whimsy that created them.
Across Van Ness from City Hall are two tree-lined walks, in the plaza between the Veterans Building and the War Memorial Opera House. They’re stubby trees, cut short and clipped year after year to create low-ceilinged tunnels. Enter the plaza from Franklin Street—again, midafternoon is best, in the summer. Choose the walk on the right. Obey the impulse that tells you to stop at the eighth tree down on the left. Step up on the curb next to it and tilt your head up into its branches. You’re looking into a Fabergé egg of luminous sunlight and layered leafy green. And the Beaux Arts buildings have vanished. Or they’ve shrunk in size and grandeur outside this sphere of quietude and color. That tree and walk, your step onto the curb, the tilt of your head might also be a nonument.
And some nonuments, too, are deliberate, like silverware that hangs in a tree. At the easternmost end of Hickory Street, off Buchanan, between Oak and Fell, is someone’s secret garden. You can peek in through the back gate at the intimate, shady space. And when you hear a bell ring, search the trees until you find that the bell is actually wind chimes, homemade of ingeniously twisted spoons and forks, tintinnabulating like a couple of busy diners. A nonument not only to the unconscious music of the eating place but also to an afternoon spent with needle-nose pliers and inventiveness, and to a time when such afternoons won out over trips to Pottery Barn.
• • •
But nonuments are not always joyful. The small is easily crushed. Yet somehow it endures. In part through nonuments. On Octavia Street, just around the corner from the dog walker’s commemorative sidewalk scrap, is another square of pavement. Someone scratched a eulogy in the quickening cement:
God rest its soal [sic]
On Oct 30 89
A beautiful
Chinese elm
was killed and
covered with
this slab
of cement
Across the street, no longer screened from view by the beautiful Chinese elm, is the sullen Central Freeway. And above, in the telephone lines, is all that remains of this unknown person’s beloved tree. A chunk of branch, the size of a fist, hangs from one of the wires, around which the full branch had grown. This is a nonument to something no longer there. To the nonexistence of the thing that once was, to the void it left behind.
• • •
Nonuments, then, involve sightseeing without the “sights.” They require only sight, and seeing. Again, they’re everywhere. And in a city besieged by commerce, by movers and shakers, by the mad plunge into “progress,” it’s important to seek out these traces of something different—of looseness, of stillness, of joy for joy’s sake. Of what’s been lost, and what we stand to lose. You’ll no doubt find a nonument or two listed in the "Best of's" that follow. The others you’ll need to discover yourself. +
