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.
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