Book cover

The Metaphysical Touch

by Sylvia Brownrigg

Excerpts

"It wasn't that Pi had lost her conscience. Nor was it that strange sense of shame that sometimes afflicts the afflicted. It was, appropriately, more of a metaphysical problem: Pi had lost her belief in the university's existence. Everything about UC Berkeley -- it's silver square buildings, its learned cement, its redwoods, what Rob called the "babbling brooks" of its bucolic campus -- had become a fairy tale to Pi, a fiction that had ended dramatically, the way fairy takes do, with a dragon breathing a firestorm across the pretty picture and devouring its meaning." (Page 77)
"Even me -- absurd, sloping-shouldered, pet-owning me -- even I in my wilder moments used to ponder the graduate school option. More books to read! Lots of sitting around drinking coffee! The ability to go on protests about one social ailment or another and get very self-righteous about the people who don't show up for them! The right to have office hours, affect people's GPAs and their futures!" (Page 370)

Commentary

I'm a graduate student at Cal, I've driven on the street where Pi lived before the fire, and I've sent e-mail that sounds like the e-mail Pi and JD write. Of course I liked this book. Now, my experience of Berkeley was different: I arrived three years after the fire, when the internet was gearing up to turn the Bay Area into the finest example of economic growth in the country. I missed the fires and the riots and the massive unemployment when all the state's military bases closed. Instead, I've lived through the floods and the Prop. 187 and Prop. 209 fights and the spiralling out-of-control rent situation. Pi wouldn't be setting herself up in a clean white San Franscisco apartment so easily these days, I assure you.

Brownrigg doesn't embrace the landscape the way Kingston does in Tripmaster Monkey, Mendocino and Berkeley are just places for people to live while the real action takes place elsewhere. The fires and the riots that bookend this book were uniquely California, but they were also uniquely of a moment, a moment that doesn't show up much on the landscape anymore. You can still see where the trees are missing on the Oakland Hills, but the houses are back, and to my uninformed eyes they look bigger and richer and more mud-slide prone than ever. I can't attest to the riots: I avoid L.A. pretty much altogether. The most important geography here is metaphysical, even if Pi and JD are as much a part of California as we imagine their Japanese modems and DOD internet networks to be. And in the metaphysical geography fueled by Bay Area businesses, who doesn't dream they'll find the abiding friends who haven't happened to cross their paths in the physical world? Why not just talk about these books with the dear friends I already know?

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