patterns

It is a chilly afternoon in San Francisco. On the asphalt playground across the street, raindrops puddle and stream in predictable patterns like tide pools bereft of color and life. The schoolchildren are inside or have gone home. My second story view is short of panoptic, but it’s more than reasonable for a perpetual student. From the left pane of my bay window, I can crane my neck to see Twin Peaks, fog draping over its mellow curves. The steep Castro hill rises directly in front of me, while the art deco columns on James Lick Middle School salute me from the right. I live above a Laundromat. Heat rises from tumbling clothes and takes the chill out of the hardwood floors, still shiny despite months of neglect. I am surrounded by books.

In his memoirs, Nabokov recalls a friend of his father, a general, who shows him a trick with matches; fifteen years later, the same man, disguised as a peasant during wartime, turns to Nabokov’s father and asks for a light. On the motif of matches, he writes: “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.” The same can be said of other genres, including ethnography. Telling stories, whether about oneself or others, demands greater attention to pattern than to detail. In turn, this requires a constant awareness of scope and distance. Like Icarus, writers fly a precarious path between sun and sea.

Watching the rain, I feel even more distant from those I write about – the Uyghurs in northwestern China. I want the rain to bring me back to a particular memory, but the memory refuses to speak. I am stuck asking myself, over and over, if there, like here, there is fog when it rains.