Avo did not pick up, and Sylvie didn’t want to just drop in on him, imagining a happy reception. I suggested we change course again. We could reach San Juan Capistrano in the afternoon, walk around and pray some, relax, and find a place for the night in Laguna. Check out the surf at San Onofre and Trestles on our way to the Mission. That’s not very far at all, and I’m beached out after Ocean Beach, Sylvie said. Let’s head inland and visit the Nixon Library. La Casa Pacifica, that’s what I want, not the $100 million dollar place, a simple place near the beach. Did Nixon suffer from a poor self-image? That’s what others said, who helped him come to realize he’d grown up poor, which in itself was not a problem, because he enjoyed a great imagination, Nixon did, but doors of opportunity were closed to him, and he remained devoted to his family. Takes imagination to want something more than what one has been given. Who knows what he thought of himself. Takes some imagination to see ourselves as clearly as others see us. I always did say so. Takes imagination to see ourselves at all. The artistic imagination is different from other forms, from a political imagination, from an imagination of the body. Yeah, the body politic. Imagine the importance of imagination to a blind person. Without imagination even those with perfect visual acuity are blind. Blind to what? To what others see? How do we know what others see is any more or less what we call real than what someone else sees? Figmentation. Is that a word? It is now. What does it mean? It takes imagination to discover reality. In any event, the Great Stone Church in Mission San Juan Capistrano fired my imagination. The low retaining wall, leaning, reinforced with rusted metal plates and large bolts through old cements, lines of forms still visible in the granular rough face full of notches, chips, divots. Sun weathered, thin brush strokes of yellow-lime moss on the wall in the shade of an ancient pepper tree.
“Mission Imagination” is episode 68 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
The Coming of the Toads 