|
|
|
|
L.A. is a city of damned ghosts, fallen angels, and smooth hungers. Had a number of odd living experiences and jobs: business manager of a dinner theatre company; milieu therapist in a "structured living" home for psychotics; lived on Ocean Blvd., Santa Monica, in an 11th floor room one-room sublet with ocean view — vacated a week a month so the leasee could use the apartment for work. Lived in a garage in Burbank, for a year, depressed in the Spring, rain running down the insides of exposed walls, hanging with my friend James, a studio musician, blind guitarist, band leader, mixer, and audio-post genius—struggling with his family situation. It was always to find/expand/change my career (blazingly undefined) that I moved from Boulder, Colorado — three times. As the flat, concrete, consumerist, mall-bound, segregated life-breath of L.A.'s underbeat slunk into the clouds hovering in the Summer-Heat-In-Which-No-One-Walks, I, audio mole (working in audio studios, which are sealed capsules) begin to respond to the brilliant midnight sun of the perfect weather-dark schmooze fest of contemporary entertainment society. L.A. got under my skin. The desert mole took me as an ally through invisible tunnels to love. The wet, early morning mist covering the leaning streets of Hollywood Hills, the dry mesquite aping trees, defining the distant horizon of the Valley, never reaching out—never enfolding yet become as arms. A deeper thrum permeates waking life from under the Valley sands. This resonance did not lead anywhere. Every place one settles ("settles": a place where a good portion of the shit you need for daily live ends up) has a pattern; a patterning is revealed between what you are and it is. Cities never reveal their secrets no matter how long you live, they cannot become your own. The intransigence of a transitive kenning: a relative, positional wisdom. What L.A. gave me was a patterned mode of devicelessness as a lifestyle; the blank white wall of a future clouded by the fade-to-white at the end of "unbearable lightness". Is that white death the final fate: wall, cloud, light, sky, sheet, transparency? However long the wait, no characters appear in the foreground, and nothing of the future, though it's impossible to imagine this white lacks a beyond: an urgent white is pummeled into a sense of impending creation. There is no ripple or wave, thoughts are absorbed, as in Basho's haiku:
The desert mole approaches whiteness, quivering in the sound of traffic, rustlings of newspapers at a cafe. There is an end to the basin though no lines converge, thoughts desirous of wholeness are absorbed within the cicada's cry. The haiku posits a location, a psychic landscape: paradox yields to an oxymoronic condition wherein the paradoxes never existed in the first place. So time is an impossible child who never develops: Eros, this is a certainty: the love child who ages not a day, for eternity. Does the first strike of passion really develop, or does it hover, subtly separated from us as we imagine ourselves again into evolution (Eros darts behind a tree). That imp is damnably unseen. People talk about living a spiritual life. What I discovered in L.A. was how the spirit of a place penetrates. Richard Gilbert |