the parsley.blog.landscape.life

somewhere along Firestone Boulevard, where I must have been taking the opposite of a shortcut from one place to another, I saw a big warehouse with its wall painted in giant letters:

TESOROS MISTICOS

with a legend that went on to list what even I, with my non-existent Spanish, could identify as amulets, candles, oils, incense, other things of that nature.  a whole warehouse full of tesoros misticos.  this must be where the botánicas get their stuff.

a few years ago, the Fowler Museum at UCLA had an exhibition about botánicas, accompanied by altars created by some local spiritual practitioners.  apparently the various spirits of Santería each have their own aesthetic, their own set of objects and colors that attracts them, that makes them comfortable, that puts them in a better frame of mind for coming to lend assistance.

I don’t have pictures, but there are some impressions I remember.  one spirit really likes yellow; another wants a space draped in green vines; another is attracted to clear glasses of water; and another likes feminine trappings, bottles of perfume, fans, shawls.  there are bottles of liquor, spangles, photographs, flowers, plastic toys.

clearly, the spirits like a lot of the same things we do.

‘materialism’ isn’t just about SUVs, McMansions, designer sunglasses (although that tends to be what we think of first when we use the word here in Los Angeles.)  as a kid, like most kids, I had my little treasures; when we were taken to museums and cultural attractions on our epic family road trips, I always wanted to get some little thing from the gift store, some object to mark the occasion of having been somewhere.

this impulse may be born in us, rather than being only the result of living in a society drenched in floods of material goods – much if not most of it cheap, disposable, lacking any essential integrity.   as shoddy and imperfect as much of our stuff may be, it still addresses a deep need to speak an older and more fundamental language than the ones that rely on words – the language of objects.

it seems our belief in the language of objects is so strong that we use it to communicate with the dead.

despite sharing this primal urge to possess, to somehow say something about myself and where I have been through accumulating things … I find that having lived some years and hauled it all from place to place (tiny apartment to tiny apartment), my appetite for accumulating treasures has definitely waned.

but I am sure I am as greedy and possessive as ever, only now my appetite is more often directed at images, impressions.  I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for when I set out to wander, but I often manage to bring back something of value, if only to me.  I think I can define some of the things the spirits I commune with are attracted by; but some of them I can’t quite manage to put into words.

earlier:  raw materials

originally posted November 17, 2008

a couple years back I spent a long day wandering up and down the Mall in Washington, DC as part of some more general wanderings up and down the East Coast. I know Washington pretty well, as my dad lived there for years before he retired.  but since I hadn’t been there in a while, there were some new things I wanted to check out.

the World War II Memorial was quite new at the time, and especially stark in the winter weather. I asked the friend I was staying with what he thought of it, before I headed out to see it myself. he’s not an architecture geek like me, and had to think about his answer for a while: “It didn’t make me feel anything.”

I saw what he meant when I arrived there. it was certainly impressive, but when you go up to it, you feel like a bug on a driveway.  I spent some time watching people in and around it, clearly trying to figure out a way to interact with it.

it seemed that the place people were most likely to huddle was in the little rounded balconies that jutted off the main colonnade. there, at least, there was enough of a little enclosure that people didn’t seem to feel so loomed over and exposed.  I saw a lot of people take each other’s pictures inside the balconies:

it turned out there wasn’t much else you could do, besides take a few pictures of the impressive architecture. you can’t even make a wish:

in the course of that day, I visited a number of the other memorials along that end of the Mall – the Lincoln, the Korean War, and the FDR Memorial (which I’ve posted about previously)…and of course everybody knows this one:

I saw it soon after it initially opened in 1982.  at the time, I was on a trip to Washington with a children’s group that supported the nuclear freeze, and we were taken to see the memorial.  I can still remember the initial impact of walking down the ramp next to the wall as it got taller and taller and the volume of names grew and grew.

there are a lot of things one could say about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and I won’t try to get into all of them here. but for now, just consider the question of human scale and human contact. there is a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead that we can’t cross, but this is a place where there is just a thin wall between the two.  we can touch the wall, and leave messages there.