California Living Magazine/ June 17, 1973
(One of the San Francisco newspapers: Chronicle or Examiner
published together on Sundays.)

The Shaman of the City

by Gene Fowler

I am standing in Union Square with Sandro Frank, a shaman. He is a small, slight man of indeterminate age. Perhaps thirty-five. Perhaps fifty. His hair is a grey ruff about his ears and collar. His dark eye is a condor's eye - but the pupil is not tiny to search out tasty details: it is an expanding, magnetic pool gathering everything into an evolving design.

He suggests I call him San.

"You do not know Union Square unless you know it as a pigeon knows it," he says. "And as a man knows it who sees it only through eyes washed by wine and confusions. And as a tourist knows it, in static replicas he will transfer from his eye to coated plastic.

"Watch me. Let yourself feel what you see me feel."

This fierce hunger of a man becomes very still. Holding his stillness, he walks into a crowd of pigeons. They shift in their waddling and pecking and puffing and scurrying to allow him to come among them.

He stands for a moment. Then, he "ruffles." His clothing seems to flake and shuffle like ruffling feathers. His arms move slightly with the habits of wings. He puffs. His head begins darting forward and back with a ritual rightness. He waddles among the pigeons with occasional little "scoots".

The air around San begins to suggest blue-grey and silver-grey. It becomes difficult to keep San separate from the pigeons in my mind.

San ignores me, yet his feelings seem to call to me. I feel hints of ruffling on myself. I feel myself puffing up; I see visions of bread bits and fascinating seeds and know urgings in my neck and shoulders; my two eyes take in two planes from the square and in each tiny nuggets dart at my mid-brain.

Then, it is over.

"You see," San says, peering into my eyes.

Next, we climb Powell Street toward Nob Hill hotels and a blue-white sky. A cable car jangles past like some frontier hunting bug-god, it's belongings, the 'persons' it wears, piled on its back and sides to overflowing; Having reached San Francisco, it lunges up the last hill to take off for the sun.

Now, the fierce-eyed shaman breathes, "what about knowing this hill?" He seems to coast forward toward the rise in steepness of the walk. As he tilts back at the rise, he reaches forward his right arm and pulls it back toward him, as though netting something below the arm.

He seizes it. A catch in his "coasting" and he is moving strongly, but with almost imperceptible jerks, up the hill. He rocks slightly, side to side. He seems to be leaning out from his central axis, to one side, then the other, each time at a different angle. He seems to be a crazy, laughing myriad hanging all about his axis, waving, sight-seeing, clamoring.

The ratcheting and racketing of the serpentine cable of woven dream under the pavement is a huge metallic melody. Flashes of green and wood-stain and bright skirts dazzle my eye, as I imagine knowing these coated dunes as a cable car knows them.

Standing on Russian Hill, we look at the orange bridge across the mouth of the bay. "It is the golden bough. The fiber of light that links two headlands otherwise separate." He turns in a quick movement, waved at the curving bay bridge.

"That is a spine. Crossing it is to spin - everything is shifted and shuffled to a new view."

He absently reaches back and fingers his own spine as he sweeps his eye along the bridge; his body suggests the slow opening turn of a spin as he seems to touch that curve out over the oiled green of the water.

"You may, at some moment, lose your 'person' and come to know San Francisco."

Enrico's terrace is not crowded in the early evening. The neons of Broadway glared up at the still soft royal blue of a sky with daylight left in it.

San leans across a circular marble table, peering into my eyes.

"The things men make are natural. We are agents of nature. Take these tables, these discs. They echo the rest of nature. Picture a dried money plant. The leaf is two round Japanese fans of silk pressed together. Dark shapes move in the center. Peel the fans apart and you find flat, black seeds. Peel these discs and your images of them apart. You find the flat, black surfaces of coffee pools.

"Look into these pools. You find reflections. Here is your face, staring back at you, and the shoulder of a passing waiter. All reversed. Reversed again at the eye. Again in the brain. Spinning."

He looks at people sitting at other tables. I can see him noticing differences.

"Each one here is carrying his heavy 'person' - even as the cable car was carrying its 'persons'. Phantoms. Machines we've made to do much of our living for us. But they are not unnatural.

"They are our webs.

"The City, too, is our tapestry."

ANOTHER morning, at sunrise, we stand on Telegraph Hill and look around the great curve of bay in its changing colors. The wind comes to us in dancing shapes across and around hills and mountains.

"Diablo. Tamalpais. Hamilton. I climbed one of the three mountains for each sunrise and each sunset. But these words are not right. The earth, with San Francisco in its three mountains perched, just here, like a condor with wings folded back, is doing a shaman's spin. It turns from the sun to shade its eye. And turns back toward the sun from its other side to catch something just beyond the dazzle.

"If I am not on the mountain, there is no vision.

"The three mountains of San Francisco are its wings, its brains. Diablo is the instinctual brain - and the humped back. Tamalpais is the emotional brain - and sloped wing. Hamilton is the mental brain - the other sloped wing. And I, the dreamer?

"One evening I climbed all three mountains at the same time. Six legs on three paths. All working together like some great segmented centipede working its way up our triangular pyramid, the condor's eye. Looking inward, into the bay, I dreamed San Francisco, upside down, haloed by the sun."

WE WALK out along the pier near Aquatic park on a spring afternoon. At the end, we lean against the wall and look back toward The City.

"I am a shaman because I seem to dream; that is, I let reality grow in me," he says. "My dreams produce drama and ritual to make life alive and shapely. I have thrown away the sham 'person' or the ego, the eggshell.

"I am a shaman because I listen to the drums of my city. Listen. The water slapping the pilings beneath us. Drum beats. They have a rhythm. Now, far away. Irregularities in streetcar wheels clicking against tracks. Pistons hammering in cars. Feet on sidewalks and hardwood floors, dirt and carpets. Seagulls crying. Doors slamming and opening and slamming. Leaves battering windows. Boards or steel beams rocking against each other. Roofs shaken by downdrafts of wind."

San's eyes glint like faceted white coals in an ancient fire.

"All the city's drums. A great telegraph system aimed at me." The wind plays a Morse message on my eardrums. The City rises white and pastel in the shimmering afternoon light, with occasional coffee pools of newer, darker buildings.

It begins to be myself.