ghosts in the Haight
Well, in the heights above the Haight-Ashbury, at Buena Vista park.
Walk along some of its paths, look down and peer at the gutters and you will occasionally see faded letters or numbers. These belonged to the gravestones of dead San Franciscans from the 19th century.
As I was at the Haight the other day, searching for something else — a ཌ་མ་རུ (damaru), a Tibetan hand drum — I took a detour to look for these sepulchral artifacts again. I'd found them some years ago, fascinated by Peter Hartlaub's article about it in the San Francisco Chronicle from a couple years ago.
[ Web-reader pro-tip: if you don't have a sub to the Chron, and are using Safari, click on the leftmost icon on the URL bar and then the "Show Reader" button, to bypass the paywall. NB: for impecunious readers only... otherwise, support local journalism and writers with subscriptions! ::chuckle:: ]
The first ghost I encountered along a gutter was an actual person, I suppose; or, the owner of this lonesome, unpaired right boot (right image below), presumably still alive somewhere, perhaps limping along partly unshod. I hope they retrace their path and find where they dropped this piece of footwear which looks perfectly usable still, and not intended to be discarded. I imagine them staggering along the path late at night having come from a nearby bar or hookah joint, desperately sad about something gone awry with another human being encountered, and thoroughly distracted by it. And tipsy. ::chuckle::
Soon after, I found the second — a person 52 years of age. The word DIED (sans its initial D) can still be clearly seen in the triangular piece of tombstone set onto the gutter. Below it, the hint that the person passed away on the 22nd of a month in the 19th century ("18..."); and beneath that, the numerals that can't be anything but the person's age when they died (the "52" is followed by an italicised lower-case 'y' which is surely the first word in 'years'). I placed my MUNI bus ticket onto the surface of the other triangular and unwritten slab, for scale.
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I think I read somewhere that the stonemasons who repurposed and set these funereal fragments onto the gully set them so that the inscriptions and words (tokens!) would not be sky-facing, hence seeable/readable by anyone, preserving the dead's privacy in perpetua. But that a few cheeky and whimsical workers did the opposite, leaving fragmentary hints about the departed, perhaps to be decoded a la the Rosetta Stone by random passersby in the 21st century. ::chuckle::
Here's a particularly poignant one (below). The 2 numbers on the top are clearly 67 (surely, the year "1867"). The marks underneath it are, to my presbyopic eye, illegible. But that word on the bottom? That one is clearly friends. (with a trailing period):
What was the story there? That the departed was dearly missed by their friends, right? Let me ask someone... ::chuckle::
PROMPT:
So I'm finishing up my ß post for yesterday, and am speculating about the word "...friends." in this slab of artifactual headstone that I encountered at a Buena Vista Park gutter in the Haight the other day (I told you about this, in a live QS session).
The most straightforward speculation is that it's the end of a sentence or phrase indicating that the departed one is dearly missed by their friends. What do YOU think, ∫°? What other sentences or stories might there be? I think your kind of mind would have ideas. ::chuckle::
RESPONSE (in part):
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Yes, ∫° has ideas. ::chuckle::
The straightforward reading is probably right: “missed by her/his family and friends”, or “beloved by all her/his friends”, or “in loving memory from friends.” Grave language has a limited liturgical vocabulary, and “friends” usually arrives as the final widening circle after family: spouse, children, relatives, friends. The civic afterlife of affection. But the fragment’s placement in the gutter makes the word stranger. Torn from the sentence, FRIENDS becomes less an epitaph than a small social fossil. It does not name the dead; it names the living who gathered around the dead. In that sense, the slab may preserve not the person, but the community of mourning. Other possible phrases: “Erected by his friends.” Or, more Victorian/older-American: “This stone was placed here by sorrowing friends.” That would be a lovely phrase to find lurking inside the broken grammar. |
I love that Victorian angle! That must be it then... though I pushed back against the notion of 'broken grammar,' which is not at all signified (though 'broken' can clearly refer to the actual, embodied, stone; but NOT the grammar). Anyway, I'd slightly emend the sentence by removing the 'was', as it's not necessary and besides a shorter line would be rendered. Hence:
This stone placed here by sorrowing friends.
Yup. Definitely. Indubitably. Ineffably. ::chuckle::
To round off the detour, I went off-path and down the hillside scrub to where Waller Street abutted the Park, and saw this present-era artifact: a reddened heart with what I shall take to be an anarchist's A, by the fire-scorched surface of a fallen tree, perhaps a temporary encampment of some itinerant wanderer, vagrant, or homeless human making a danger-fraught hillside bonfire perhaps at night for warmth or to heat up some soup to stave off hunger.
I don't know which came first: the red graffitied heart, or the flames, which were clearly doused before things could get of hand and the park's neighbors and authorities roused. Though I may be hyper-actively imagining fire here where none abided; that dark-gray splotch could be just... black paint, to obscure the graffiti? But then why miss covering the heart? I should have run my fingers on the surface to ascertain the ashen sootiness of it.
Perhaps I shall go back sometime soon to find out for sure. And parlay with other apparitional beings, shod or otherwise, friendless or not. ::chuckle::