Mark

Bannam Place
North Beach
Wednesday afternoon

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I meet a lot of people who recognize me from the documentary film, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I find that there’s a fairly common perception of me as having led a lost and dissolute life until I found the parrots. I understand why people think that, but it’s not quite accurate.

When I was growing up there were a lot of people interested in self-discovery—the inner voyage. I didn’t know anybody who wanted to go into business. I was too young to catch anything more than the tail end of the counterculture, and by that time there were a lot of different schools of thought on what constituted “the true path.” The one I ended up following said that one needed to strip away all pretensions, give up all means of support, and have a tough one-on-one experience with reality. The best place to do that was said to be on the road or on the streets. You can’t really just march out onto the street and do that. If it were that easy of a place to get to, it would be just as easy to leave. But by believing in it as a path, I eventually did end up on the streets. In North Beach. Living on the street turned out not to be the transcendent experience I’d imagined. It was extremely difficult and taxing. But it was also the most disciplined period of my life. I’d once thought it was some kind of bohemian idea, that it began with the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. But actually, in its pure form, it’s an old spiritual yoga that can be found in many cultures throughout history. The Homeless Wanderer. The parrots were part of that path. There was something I wasn’t quite getting—something I needed to learn.

I was on the street for fifteen years. I’ve been off it now longer than I was on it. I have no regrets about having lived the way I did. I can’t overstate how much good it did me. I know it’s difficult for most people to understand—especially given this particular time in history, which is almost completely given over to material success. I’m working on a book that tells the whole story—Street Song. I have around three more years of work to do on it.

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You can see a slideshow of Mark’s photo shoot here.

Mark’s writing and current projects can be found at: