the parsley.blog.landscape.life

9/1/09 – Tuesday.

the light slanting across our parking lot at the end of the day got the attention of the artists in the office.  “red gold underglow,” it was decided.  the sun was going down orange, and I felt around for my camera.

took one shot from the parking lot and headed west toward Venice Beach.  the cameras were out in force, from the real professional-looking numbers to the little digital snapshot cheapies like mine.  cameras never seem to have viewfinders any more; mine still does, but most of the snapshot cameras don’t, so I was surrounded by people peering down at their screens in the orange light, like presbyopes trying to read very small books.

but plenty of people still have cameras that lead you to adopt that intense squint that seems to denote the heartlessness of the true photographer, uninterested in exclaiming at the horror and destruction inherent in what they see;  completely focused on the image.  or, perhaps, on the girl in red.

so I joined the hordes of photographers, wandering up and down the beach and feeling the strange sense that I’d been here before.  not the same beach, not the same fire, but the same impulse; to capture a moment that will be gone long before you can fully realize it has arrived. 

don’t wait, I once was told by a little sticker on a park bench.  don’t wait, you may not have this chance again.  despite some efforts to persuade me, I am not interested in getting a tattoo: but if I did, that’s what it would say.  don’t wait.

I shared some pictures of sunset and smoke and a friend wrote:  Can I like the picture and un-like the cause? another wrote: a shame the price we pay for this.  everyone is very anxious to point out that they can’t really enjoy this beauty for itself.  they don’t seem to feel free to do so.  we must remind one another that the fire is a terrible thing, that it is destructive, that people have died and been hurt, that people have lost what they love.  were we in any danger of forgetting these things?

other pictures were sent to me and I wrote back: those are astoundingly beautiful.  the reply came:  I would have said, terrifying.  I replied: I see no contradiction.

9/2/09 – Wednesday.

the wife of a very important friend of the firm and the boss has died.  terrible news, though she had been ill a very long time and it is not unexpected.  we need flowers to bring for a condolence call.  without thinking, I said – what a great excuse to go to the orchid place!

for condolence, we decided, white orchids.  although the orchid place has many other fancy kinds, they don’t seem to suit the occasion.  white, so often the color of mourning.  is it for purity, for innocence, a desire for blankness in the face of pain?  conspicuous consumption, in ages before washing machines; or conspicuous plainness, in places and times when bright colors were coveted and costly?  someone told me recently that white is the color of mourning because it is the color of bone.  a reminder of our last end.  a memento mori.

normally it takes 24 hours notice to get an arrangement made up at the orchid place, but I prevailed upon them to do it right then.  and while I was waiting, I almost allowed myself to get seduced by some of the most indecent anthuriums I’ve ever seen.  I mean to say, anthuriums are never subtle about their intentions, but these had a dark, dark red to them that was particularly…flagrant.

orchids have a more alien kind of appeal,  more carefully calibrated to the interests of insects, and thus a little more ethereal. anthuriums, on the other hand…

I stood around waiting for my white orchids, thinking about flesh and bone, and the pressure exerted by each, their insistent demands.

the orchid arrangement made up, I pay and go to my car.  white ash is falling on my shirt and on the roof of my car.  but already the air is growing much more humid.  moist air is being pushed up from a hurricane to the south of us.  but the sun went down red again tonight, regardless.

I’ve got to stop tagging every post with “love and loss.”  might as well rename the whole blog.  from “the parsley” to “the love and loss blog.”  in every post, I will discuss how each thing we gain has inside of it the seed of its loss.  and a few people will read it, and they will get depressed.  but  that’s not my intention.

once in a while, I surprise myself with the realization that I’m actually free.  that is, free to see what I’m seeing, or feel what I’m feeling, without having to hold on so hard to the terrible cost of everything.  it doesn’t last, this realization; but then again, it shouldn’t.

I happened to be in South LA (we are told not to call it “South Central” any more) late in the afternoon yesterday, looked up and to the north  from the site I was photographing, and saw a plume of smoke above the San Gabriels.

this picture was taken probably no more than half an hour after the Morris fire broke out in the Angeles National Forest, now well above 750 acres and burning out of control.  a second fire started nearby, today.  even here at home on the Westside, there is a thick pall of smoke in the northeastern horizon, and the setting sun is casting the most beautiful pink-gold light.  time to open up a new file in the photo database under Southern California: “Fires 2009.”

here’s one from the “Fires 2007″ folder, from the roof of the Kaiser parking garage, October 07.  you can just see, very tiny, downtown LA, against the smoke coming from the south, some of it all the way from San Diego county.

I was there for the annual skin inspection, getting another little piece of me taken off, just in case.  the cloudy landscapes of my pale ancestors did not prepare my DNA for life in Southern California; once my mom had a few melanomas taken off her back, I was doomed to the yearly skin inspection and the occasional removal of some small piece of my external self.  although really, when it comes to the dangerous stuff like melanoma, the original sin was already committed long ago; just one or two sunburns at the crucial moment in childhood and the timer is set.  no amount of sunscreen and careful shielding as an adult will make any difference.  prometheus only had to get his hands on that fire just once.

but of course everybody knows what the original sin of Los Angeles was, and why we are regularly punished with fires, with floods, with drought, with smog, with riot and unrest, with the plagues of our own false values.  it wasn’t fire that we stole.  here’s a good book I’m reading, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, by William Alexander McClung:  (nice name, he must come from pale cloudy people too?):

In the Arcadian mythology of California…acts of “improving”, epitomized by, but not limited to, the funneling of water from the Owens Valley, have become its primal error.

and later on in the book:

Defined as the land of low rainfall, the West of course includes Los Angeles, which, as everybody knows, hauls its water from afar.  This importation, which is logically comparable to bringing fuel to heat northern cities, but is rarely so defended, arouses embarassment or even guilt over the compromising of a dry wilderness landscape.

so you see, los angeles, the sunny golden dream, the object of desire and jealousy,  burns every year in the fires of envious rage.   when our disasters befall us, people in the rest of the country are often known to take a certain amount of glee in our misfortune.  we deserve it; we asked for it.  we are eternally culpable for living somewhere we shouldn’t be and taking something that didn’t belong to us.  (unlike, you see, all the rest of anglo America.)

when the riots came in 92, I was in San Francisco, not long out of college and working at a nonprofit; trying to get home from a work event while helicopters circled and windows smashed around me.  but nobody said, afterward, that there were riots in San Francisco because San Francisco deserved punishment for its extremes of wealth and poverty, its envies, its injustices, and its beauty and pleasures, although it had all of these things.  the riots started in Los Angeles, and only the beauty and pleasures of Los Angeles really deserved them.

well, nature is having another go at us this week, for all our errors.  the smoke is getting everywhere, like joyce’s snow, falling like the descent of our last end, upon all the living and the dead.  and upon the lucky and the unlucky, the poor and the rich, south LA and the smug entitled Westside, and on all the guilty.  I would say it is also falling on the innocent, but there aren’t any of those here.

I stole the title for this one from one of my weekly podcast fixes, the Scientific American podcast.  I’m listening again to a podcast from April, in which Martin Blaser of NYU talks about the “changing human ecology.”  which is in fact a reference to our internal ecosystems and not the ones out the window.

lately I’ve  been thinking about all these populations, these communities that are living inside us as well as the ones that are living outside of us.  the term I’ve learned is “residential organisms.”  or “indigenous microbiota.”  some of them live with us all our lives, having the same lifespan; some of them last only a couple of months or weeks.

there is a bacteria that lives inside us, Helicobacter pylori.  it lives in our stomachs.  apparently we don’t have as much of it as we used to.  the later you were born in the 20th century the less likely you are to have it; only 5% of children in the developed world have it, but it used to be incredibly common.  having it (or certain strains of it) apparently increases your risk of stomach cancer and ulcers; not having it seems to be associated with esophageal cancer, acid reflux, childhood asthma – all conditions that are on the rise.   lacking this bacteria may also affect the production of hormones by the stomach,  leptin and ghrelin and other hormones that regulate energy homeostasis – that is, appetite, fat storage, obesity.  there is still a lot that is not understood about the effects of this partiuclar inhabitant of our bodies, but it seems that it is disappearing rapidly, with effects that are unknown and quite possibly more detrimental than positive.

Dr. Glaser went on to mention the human microbiome project – an effort to catalogue the organisms living within us and without us.  he said the h. pylori is disappearing at a rapid rate.  and, like mysterious species deep in the rainforest, others may be disappearing before we even get a chance to identify them, let alone understand all their complicated interlocking effects.  some things we think of as ‘infections’ might just be an imbalance, something overgrowing the niche it’s supposed to live in, maybe because something else is missing or in decline that would normally keep it in check.  some things we don’t fully understand, or might have attributed to other causes,  may be intimately connected to changes in our internal ecosystems.

up at the top there, I posted a picture of coastal sage scrub, our rare and endangered California coastal ecosystem.  most of us in urban coastal California live in an environment once occupied by coastal sage scrub.  it’s both an incredibly fragile and incredibly tough ecosystem.  it lives in an environment with very little rainfall and difficult soil types.  it has certain adaptations to our Mediterranean climate and drought cycles; it goes dormant in the dry season and a lot of the plants drop their leaves.  but there are other members of the coastal sage scrub community, not immediately apparent to the eye, that are helping hold the whole system together.

here’s a little piece of remnant coastal scrub clinging to the western edge of the Baldwin Hills, smack in the middle of the urban megalopolis, next to a roadway and an urban oilfield (the largest in the United States), on a highly erodible slope made of silty soils.  elsewhere in the Baldwin Hills, you can very clearly see just how erodible the soils are.  the intact parts of the coastal scrub seem to be holding things together; but where it’s missing or damaged, things have a tendency to just let go.

and the other things on my mind this week, so many to do with bodily functions; grappling with restroom issues at work.  when you work with parks, you gotta deal with restrooms.   (I really did not get into this profession to spend so much time thinking about waterless urinals, and yet, there they are on my desk.  well, the cutsheets anyway) also, on a multifamily residential project, we are struggling with the knotty problems of using greywater systems, reading all the vivid descriptions about what’s really in greywater.  there’s skin cells and diseases and stuff.  and shampoo.  after a long afternoon of dealing with this, I’m ready to announce my conclusion: greywater is PEOPLE!!

greywater, it seems, is pretty poisonous.  or toxic.  or whatever.  there are a lot of elaborate precautions you have to take in order to irrigate a landscape  with greywater.  it’s a daunting prospect.  I am told, you must consider the toxicity of all the things that go into people’s drains.  soaps, detergents, shampoos.

I do consider those things.  and to me it eternally begs the question, what are we doing marinating ourselves in all those things in the first place?

here’s a little bit of public art at a Metro stop near Lincoln Heights.  she’s carrying water.  still a huge part of daily life for many people around the world, particularly women.  it used to be that nature delivered the clean water; never as much of it here as in other places, but certainly enough to support the systems that evolved under those conditions.   nobody fully understood how it worked or where it all came from; attributed, perhaps,  to divine providence, or whatever the equivalent concept would have been for the native people.  thought of, anyway, as a gift to be grateful for.

what produces the clean water, what holds the hillsides up, what makes us healthy or not healthy?  lots of things, apparently, not visible to the naked eye.  wetlands filter water (and are often compared to our kidneys); there are a lot of symbiotic organisms living on the roots of wetland plants that help make this happen.

the intact sage scrub community holds the hillsides together, not just with a diversity of plant types and their roots, but by supporting a soil crust made up of bacteria, lichens, mosses – called “biological” or  “cryptobiotic” soil crusts.  they are a common characteristic of arid environments.  they don’t look like much, at least not at our accustomed scales of visual importance.

“cryptobiotic,” by the way, means hidden life.

just as hidden as the stomach bacteria and the other stuff that’s colonizing our various personal niches and crannies.  perhaps our need for ecoliteracy extends inward as well as outwards.     life crosses every boundary that we might try to draw between inside and outside; between the house, the body, and the world.

I learned a new word from my sister’s (long anticipated, UTTERLY BRILLIANT) art history PhD dissertation – ‘staffage.’  I am sure it’s a completely routine piece of jargon for art historians, but somehow I, in my only dilettante-ish exposure to the field, had missed it up until now.

classmates at the Santa Barbara courthouse, 2006

“staffage” is the word used to refer to those little people or animals stuck somewhere at the bottom of a landscape painting,  to give the thing scale and convince you that it is the habitation of living creatures.   sometimes they will be helpfully pointing toward the thing you’re supposed to look at.  sometimes they are deer or cattle and will not be helpfully pointing at anything.  in a Bierstadt it pretty much always seems to be a couple of deer, not very convincing ones either.

in my own ill-educated way I find this word somewhat hilarious.  its etymology must have some kind of common root with “staff” as in hired help, which irresistibly leads to mental pictures of paid hollywood extras in the corner of a painting, calculating their timesheets and hoping for their union cards.

nevertheless, it’s a concept we in the world of architecture certainly understand – the need for figures to give scale and life to the image of a place.

my teacher, watercoloring, at the Santa Barbara Courthouse, 2006

what a pleasure to look down from on high and see miniature people, living what suddenly seem to be miniature lives.  when my graphics class went to the Santa Barbara courthouse a couple years ago, I was up in the tower almost the whole time, watching the little figures of my classmates move around and do their site analysis, and my teacher calmly watercoloring on the sidewalk while the class blundered around.  a nice lofty feeling, which of course belies the fact that I was in no way on a higher plane than my classmates.  metaphorically I was down at the same ground level as the rest of them, if not somewhat lower than most.

Will Rogers State Historic Park, polo field, 5/10/09

today I arrived at the Will Rogers park too late to see the polo – they play most weekends in the summer, and it’s a dreamlike experience to watch the ponies fly up and down the polo field, not seeming to touch the ground despite the thundering noise they make – and instead plunged into the morass of a million Mother’s Day picnics.

tons of family groups, a few soccer games, some unsuccessful kite-flying, and really a bit more cacophony than I had been bargaining for today.  so, I fled up the trail.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

you don’t have to climb very far to get to a state more nearly approaching isolation, but there were still plenty of people going back and forth on the trail, on foot and mountain bikes.  I overheard many snatches of avid discussion.

what to do if you meet a mountain lion.  what was it like the first time someone fell in love, I mean really adult love, in college.  what the problem was with someone’s knee.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

what someone was going to do to fix up their place and get a renter.  four little curly-haired girls and their – father? – getting them all lined up to march and sing a song.

lots of moms.  one elderly woman wearing a corsage, right there on the trail.  lots of panting dogs, working really hard to be obliging and get up that trail with their people, if it killed them.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

polite mountain bikers saying “excuse me” as I stood aside on the trail for them.  plenty of figures in this landscape; no splendid isolation to be found.

I got up as far as the bridge:

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

and had it to myself a good long while; but then along came two teenagers.  she had dark hair and he had flaming red hair and a yarmulke.  they took up a position at the other end of the bridge.

I could tell you what I think they were really talking about, but the conversation was all about food.  there was some mention of pie, and of bottled water, and which brands are better.  is there really a difference? they agreed there probably wasn’t.  and then they talked about yogurt.  he said he had no problems eating yogurt.  she allowed as how yogurt is really good for you.  they both agreed that some kinds of yogurt are really too sour.  I had to leave; they were breaking my heart.

I went back down into the crowds of moms and babies and extended families and their long discussions about where everyone was going for dinner,  and lay on the polo field berm like a corpse, watching the soccer game with one half-open eye.  seemed that everyone was working hard at populating the landscape, except me.