The Bright Hills of Boston

I went down to Jamaica Plain, one morning--which is a neighborhood to the south and west of the city, away from the peninsula.

I walked there, past several colleges (I swear, Boston has more institutions of higher learning per capita than--well, anywhere...), following a line of park the wound (and several times, nearly disappeared) past Fenway Park and down around the edge of the city.

Jamaica Plain has something of a reputation for being a "lesbian neighborhood"--which I wanted to see, because I'd never really seen one. One of the first people I saw was an exceptionally large, exceptionally butch young lady, walking two very small terriers. I smiled at her. She glowered at me.

... is the visual equivalent of testing someone else's grip. I looked down--but I bet I've got better forearms. Scratch. I know I do...

... terriers don't have a lot of torque, if you know what I mean.

Jamaica Plain was not quite the oasis of organic produce and pastries that I was hoping for (thus problematizing the lesbian-cupcake nexus I've been theorizing. more cases and a broader comparative approach, I think. including, I suppose, one from Africa--always throw in one from Africa...) I did manage a decent cup of coffee...

What was truly fantastic about that area, though--was the spur of hills rising between the main street and the railroad tracks. Steep and twisting, they rose to a high point above the city--so that, from the summit, you could see the streets falling away towards the city-center, to the north. And rising and falling, with the hills--was a fantastic collection of houses. Some of them had been completely renovated, and some were a few steps away from derilection. Most of them were somewhere in between, and as I walked up and down the side-walk, I could smell the scent of wood dust and oil, mixing with the smell of pine-needles and wet dirt.

I circled a few cul-de-sacs, making furtive eye contact with people leaning over hobby-horses in the open garages, or hanging out of the windows. Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood on the move.

It reminded me, as I was really stretching my legs--for the first time in months--a bit of Silverlake. Silverlake is just off the center of Los Angeles, off Sunset Boulevard, when Sunset Boulevard turns south and east. With the tall buildings and the clubs off in the distance (sometimes you catch a disoriented club-kid, who has come too far--wandering the sidewalks in flash of skin and befuddled glitter)--Silverlake is still money, but it's arts-and-entertainment mid-level industry professional money. And some of the money goes into the houses...

... which rise up and down the green hills and ridges encircling the valley. There are differences--in Boston, it is more modernizing victorian and in California, much more strongly mid-century, with its askew squarishness and tendency to thrust various bits of itself off into the ether. And Silverlake has been "renovated" for longer, and so has been subject to that accretion of additions and porches and odd bits of landscaping (terraces) that builds up over time in places like that.

Still though--what I like about both places is the sense of possibility. Something very utilitarian about a city, and something a little alienating (I'm not the first, not the last...) about that usefulness. But in places like this, you see all the oddments--both intellectual and sensual--of the human mind made "flesh", architecturally-speaking. If great buildings, really well-thought out--masterpieces--are music, then places like Jamaica Plain and Silverlake are conversation. Chatter, in fact, within a large group of friends (some of whom hate each other)--comfortable and easy-going, and really, not so important, but out of the whole mess you get something like that weird sense of the "spirit" that rests in, you know, most people. Rather than being raised and abstracted so far from the seething mass (it's not really seething--more like milling, aimlessly. ambling masses!) that it sits apart from them.

Clutter. The very best of clutter.

Los Angeles

... this is the most beautiful city on earth.

And whatever divides us--we witness, collectively, this beauty.

This is what draws us together. This is what sets us apart.

Tank Gardens of the Mojave

... as stated previously, the really is very little between Phoenix and LA.

There's Coachella--which comes up as a puddle of green at the end of a fifty percent grade--and the exit for Palm Springs. Which looks, from the freeway, like a small aggregation of strip malls extending in two directions, and lacks... for future reference... a Starbucks.

But, aside from that, there is just the Mojave--which is empty and flat in a way that is slightly claustrophobic. Like you'd like to rush across it as quickly as possible--and not stop--because leaving your car, and exposing yourself to such openness, might just drive you mad. I had a similar experience in Northern Nevada, once, and five minutes after I had left the gas station parking lot--to stretch my legs--I was turning and rushing for the safety of my Subaru. Too much sky. Burning sidewalk.

So, just the Mojave then--and Blythe, I went through Blythe... where two old friends from school live... and so, notable in that respect...but not really any other. And there is the Tank Garden.

I was looking for a place to get gas, and as I was turning into the last gas station for who knows how many miles--I noticed that the off-ramp went curving behind a collection of minature tanks and desert plants behind a chain-link fence. There was a sign, under the out-stretched guns, asking drivers to "Keep Our Desert Clean".

What I thought I had run into was a deep desert art installation--constructed by hold-over hippies, who had fled into the wilderness and somehow gone the wrong direction (north, in California--very seldom east). Very striking way of stressing the importance of low impact travel. I was still, probably, in a Phoenix state of mind.

What it turned out to be was the William S. Patton Museum--the location stemming from its proximity to Twenty-Nine Palms--where most of the tactical testing for American tank warfare in World War Two was done. There was a bronze statue of him out front, just a few yards from the semi-permanent trailer settlement (it had its own chapel)--the burger restaurant, and one of the nicest gas stations I'd run across on this particular trip (almost as good as a Flying J).

I didn't go into the museum--less than two hundred miles from LA--and I wanted to be home by sundown. But spent a really excellent five minutes staring at the little monsters through the fence. They weren't full-scale--just about large enough for a single operator--and somehow that made them seem even more vicious. The smaller size let you really take in all the nasty little details--and I think, for the first time, I understood how terrifying tanks must have been when they were first released onto the battlefield. Imagine being a solider, yes, and there's a zippy little piece of artillery (at least--zippy compared to, like, an emplacement) that can follow you around, and which you can't really--by yourself--do anything to stop. Ghastly. And there they were--a whole little fleet surrounded by some nice landscaping--white flowers growing around the wheels, turrets rising out of the manzanita...

...

... I've been having an odd experience recently. I think it has to do with having left at 23 and coming back at 25. Here's the thing, though--when you're in school, before you and your friends have been thrust out into the murky murk of reality--you're nearly certain that you, collectively, will one day come to rule the world. The first year or two after you graduate, too, the illusion persists. Because, you think, it takes some time for people to stoke their fires, to marshal their resources in preparation--for the time when they will go screaming across the face of everything.

--go away. Go away for awhile. Go away and come back to find your friends as powerful and vicious as they ever were, but--like the tanks--in miniature, and still.

It seems that that promise, which seemed so obvious... but we had one of everything... so you can pardon the mistake. There was the fallen genius (now on a leave of absence at his parent's house out in the desert), the Doyenne (who managed various peoples' relationships with a kind of beneficent malice--think Emma, the Early Years), the Prima Donna (who everybody wanted to screw, more or less expected), the Burgher (he's actually on his way to becoming one)... and me. Who I think... I liked to think, at the time, that I was "the practical philosopher". But my manners were much worse back then--so possibly "the critic"...

You do not come to rule the world.

I was at a Thing. There's a thing at the end of every week--where a varying set of folks come to talk. It's held at house in the neighborhood by a nice pair of older folks, who provide the setting and some of the food. We all know each other through somebody (LA is like this, a bit), and the point is to eat a bit and drink a bit and shoot the shit. It's not quite, y'know, a salon--but it's a good way of getting out and meeting some new people... salon-esque, say.

So, yesterday, I was at the thing--and some of the people I had known before, and some were new to me. And what struck me, what finally became clear is--most folks rise, you know, during their teens and early twenties--and then you get the start of a gradual declension as folks begin to "come down to where they ought to be"... start to settle into their lives.

What I was seeing were the effects of this "settling" process. And especially in contrast to those who were a bit younger--the people I'd known before seemed a bit... rounded off? Blunt, maybe.

That girl was there. God--that girl. I think I had to have loved her--I must have. Because after she went away (it was interesting how that happened) I felt like I'd lost something crucial. I'd wake up, and then--at those times during the day when I'd used to see her, there'd be... phantom limb syndrome, more or less.

So. I saw that girl. And she has also begun to settle. No longer at the height of her powers (she was "the Doyenne")--and reft of the intricate web of interpersonal relations she manipulated so adeptly--she expends her excess energy on hobbies. (I'm beginning to hate "hobbies". As form of self-actualization.)

And it didn't matter. Because just seeing her, just talking to her, a little--I felt that same old sense of peace, that stillness in the soul. An unwinding. So there is this:

I hate Nancy ("nan-see"... French.). Nancy writes that people are constituted by their connections with other people--and that only love creates between an individual and the multitude of ties of which they are made up--a break. (And I will never be comfortable with a philosopher that denies the existence of an autonomous, independent, transcendent self...)

But where I agree is this: love is a unique for the effect it has on the self. It's the seating of the self in another--reaching. And the process of reaching out--"dedicated" interaction between two independent entities... is liberation in a sense. Or expansion. There's a way in which loving someone else makes you more yourself...

... and changes, perhaps, how you construct the world around you and your place in it. Is the back door out of the scrum of everyday existence--and gives you a view on the subtle sanctity of things. A window.

And for all she's changed, this thing remained the same. I could feel the echo.

...there's hope, yes?--some.