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Originally Posted by SleazyDream
4. Why do you live in SF?
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I moved to the Bay Area from New York in 1998 -- to take a great job offer at the peak of the Bubble's swollenness.
In the last 6+ years, I have found the SF Bay Area probably the most "correct" place I have ever lived or visited. Something is "right" here in SF that seems lacking just about everywhere else.
I have a theory about the migration pattern of the European influence across the Atlantic, then across this continent.
In the 17th century, when the colonization of "America" may be said to have begun, Europe was at a new height of civilization -- including heights of both artistic, technological and scientific achievement.
In spite of those levels of unprecedented "quality of life" (as measured by the elaborateness of the average European life), a group of people decided to venture into the WILDERNESS, because of their IDEALS.
At that time, the "Wilderness" was the unknown distances across the Atlantic Ocean, and whatever strange lands lay beyond. The prospect was fraught with many unpredictable perils and a high likelihood of death and suffering.
As many of you know about me, I like to look for the
science in things that don't seem to contain science.
In the case of the "Pilgrims", I see their departure from Europe (at that time and for that reason) as a kind of Evolutionary "cut", as evidence of the presence of something in THOSE people that was not present in those who stayed in Europe.
Call it what you like, but these people willingly risked EVERYTHING for what they believed.
That was cut #1.
About two hundred years later, after the wilderness had been considerably conquered and civilization had gained a foothold, another group of people (now "Americans") decided to leave the safety and certainty of the East Coast to head WEST, once again, into the WILDERNESS.
This time, the ideological motivations had changed and, combining a sense of OPPORTUNITY with a tolerance for difficulty and adversity, became what is best described as the Pioneering Spirit.
That was cut #2.
On the West Coast, having no more westward WILDERNESS to venture into, civilization once again developed and evolved into cities -- one such is San Francisco.
Now I couldn't tell you why it happened here, but I think that an amazing thing (seen nowhere else on Earth) has happened in San Francisco.
In this great city, we have the unique combination (after two successive evolutionary "cuts") of an extreme form of idealism plus pioneerism in a TRUE CITY, in the European sense.
By city I mean a settled area whose streets and parks and "places" result from the natural movement of humans through its geography and topography -- and not from the movements and necessities of motor vehicles.
As a result, it is a vibrant place occuppied by some of the most evolved and exciting thinkers I have ever met.
Here are two poems I wrote inspired by living in SF and by the people I've met here.
One describes a way of thinking I admire, the other the migratory phenomenon I described above.
"Hippies"
Turning out a piece of art,
espousing
controversial points of view,
you always do
the things that say to Everyone:
"You're okay, too!"
and make your kids un-anxious,
just like you.
10 May, 2004.
"One Direction of Travel"
Where do we go from here? The West..
is fully occupied. "Civility"
is out of space. And the Idealists
are crying out for Natives to convert.
Nor do the Anarchists
have any wilderness
to shed their clothes and all their common sense.
It feels a bit like Europe! Now...
that we have reached a Coast of sorts,
and face (like the Atlantic, once)
a vast, impenetrable void, again,
what can we do but contemplate
the cities we have built and left,
as if it were our fate?
24 August, 2003
j-