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.

Learning to live off hundreds of species of plants and animals required an attention to color, light, shape, and motion that must have bordered on obsession.  No wonder we began painting in such fine detail so early in the course of human events.  It is as if we were brimming with observation and had to let it all out.  The way we preserved our species during our formative years not only made us hunters and gatherers, but painters, singers, and poets…

- Richard Manning, Against the Grain

at one time, the Los Angeles basin was home to hunter-gatherers.   this seemingly barren ‘semi-desert’ produced such an abundance of food that agriculture wasn’t necessary, at least not to support the levels of population that existed then.

almost all physical traces of these people have been removed from the landscape, and the culture of the Tongva (known as Gabrielinos) suffered a very early and very thorough obliteration.  the Tongva don’t seem to be quite as well-documented as some other Southern California native groups (there is a lot more literature to be found about the Chumash, for instance) but there are still survivors, and a fair amount is known about how they lived.

a little while ago, I went on a quest to find out more about the native plants that people ate and used here, and the way they lived in relationship to the plants.  at the San Gabriel Mission one day in October, there was a native plant expert with a display of plants and native foods, and I went to see her.  the display was quite beautiful:

I asked her right away:  Have you eaten acorns?  because I’ve never eaten acorns!  there are no acorns at the health food stores!  it was the most important food for native people almost everywhere in coastal california, and yet we have completely forgotten how to eat them.

she said:  yes, I have.  frankly, they are pretty bland!  but then she went on to describe all the different plants and seeds that might be used as seasonings; and how some plants might even be burned, and the ashes used as seasonings.  about this she knows probably more than anybody; but I imagine the total body of knowledge is lost.

one thing we know about hunter-gatherers is that they typically eat hundreds of species of plants, whereas most agriculturalists live off about a half-dozen at most.  even our modern, affluent “varied diet,” in which we foodies might congratulate ourselves on picking up kumquats and cherimoyas at the farmer’s market and actually knowing what to do with them, consists of such an impoverished few kinds of plants compared to what hunter-gatherers know of their landscape and what it can provide for them.

I read in the LA Times that today is the blessing of the animals down on Olvera Street.  this must be when the Catholics do it; I recall from my Episcopal upbringing an observance called Rogation Sunday, when we brought our pets in to church for a blessing; it’s held on a different date, later in the spring.  of course, as you can imagine, hijinks ensued.   I remember trying to bring gerbils, and cats on leashes, and lizards and various things;  did we ever bring fish in a jar?  we probably wanted to, but the parents may have vetoed the effort.

of course, originally the observation of a rogation day was a blessing of the crops, of our agricultural efforts – plants and animals.  “rogation” is one of those oddball words you’d only know if you have a churchy background;  it was a humble supplication to God not to come down and destroy everything, which so frequently tended to happen.  the observation of rogation days was accompanied by a solemn procession around the boundaries of the parish.    rather than a cute Keystone Kops scene with kids and their pets, it must have been an occasion of the greatest solemnity and anxiety.  the whole agricultural enterprise has always been so fragile and vulnerable; it is as if we balanced a rock precariously on top of another rock and then prayed that strong winds would not blow it down.

consider how we live in los angeles: at the base of steep granite mountains, prone to violent flooding, like looking up the barrel of  a cannon; in the midst of extremes of dry and wet, drought alternating with torrential rain alternating with harsh desert wind, and prone to wildfires, made much worse by the changes in vegetation we have wrought on the hillsides and our habit of building up into the canyons. we’ve channelized our rivers to preserve all our investments on their banks, magnifying the effects of the floods when they come.  we’ve paved, and we suffer the consequences every time it rains.

surely a little rogation is in order. we have put ourselves in a highly vulnerable position.

the tongva, somehow, survived all the violence of this environment, and by all accounts were fairly peaceful and content.  they must have had rough years, but they knew how to work around them in ways that are no longer available to us.  they did not depend on the massed monocultures of industrial agriculture; they had options, not just plan A and plan B, but hundreds of plans, different paths through the rough times.

it’s not my intention to be sentimental about the native americans’ mystical balance with nature; there is a lot there that I don’t have access to, and I wouldn’t claim to have the right to go on and on about it.

but I recognize, in myself, the hunger for knowledge, images, sensory experiences, as being tied to those primal evolutionary urges; when we evolved as hunter-gatherers, as Manning describes, we evolved the ability to collect, store, catalogue, cross-reference, and synthesize information gathered through all of our senses.  and we are, perhaps, happiest when we are exercising those abilities to their fullest.

the Rogation Sunday prayers ask for mercy, but also for justice; it seems to me there is no justice without understanding.  we lost a lot of living things when we paved; but we also lost a lot of knowledge, perhaps never to be regained.

the day I went to see the new Orange County Great Park – that is, the little bit of it that has been built, and the drawings and visions for the part that is yet to be built – was a day between two rainstorms.  in fact, as it happened, it was valentine’s day.  the kind of weather, a blindingly blue sky day,  that just about forces you into an optimistic frame of mind.

now mind you, the temporary “preview park” is about 30 acres in itself, which is an amount of open space that most of us in southern california would shed blood to reclaim. never mind the grand vision, the 1200+ acre total that is planned, that is going through the long long process, too exhausting and exhaustive to detail here, from vision to conception to reality.  it has been well documented elsewhere, and it will be going on for quite some time.

the question I didn’t realize I had in mind when I went to the park was, How do we as designers talk about what we do?  I was privileged to see a long and detailed presentation at the design offices and learn a whole lot about the process, but then we got out in the sunshine and saw how it’s being done in the preview park.  that to me was almost the better lesson.

there’s a visitor’s center, with plastic walls flapping furiously in the breeze.

big graphics on the wall, plan views at different scales.

stuff for the kids to do.  the cylinder in the corner explains about on-site water treatment systems that will be part of the design.

and then through the plastic windows…

outside, there was some kind of special event going on, and they were giving out free orange frisbees that were flying all over everywhere. every so often one would land at your feet and you would try to throw it back in more or less the direction it came from, which didn’t matter too much because there were so many around that no game would ever be interrupted by the temporary misplacement of a frisbee.  an impossibly friendly scene.  even the trees were introducing themselves.

and the boxed trees in the parking lot, and the temporary lights, were telling you all about themselves too.  urban heat island effect.  dark sky lighting.  I like this kind of textbook.

now, you gotta go up in the  big orange balloon.  I don’t want to hear any weak excuses about being scared of heights.  all around the balloon launch place is a berm decorated with the local specialty building material – “el toro stone”, the broken pieces of super-thick concrete that result from the breaking up of the original air base runways.

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here’s the balloon.

it’s free, but you have to make a reservation on site (and sign a pretty hefty waiver form.)  I think the snowflakes must have been because it was, you know, winter.

the berm area from above.

you can still see the marks of the original runways in the turf.  perhaps you always will be able to.  this strikes me, though, as something better than erasure of the past.

I have to admit, all the fresh air and sunshine and people chucking frisbees and the visions of what will come to pass all went to my head.  this is my kind of post-industrial playground.

it was valentine’s day, and I am a single person, but I gotta tell you, going up in that balloon into that sky was some romance.