Fragments and overview

At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There’s no battery in it, there’s no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I’d watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is a standard trope in LA novels and poems. And somehow, because it’s the middle of the night, and the bland white plastic cover of the smoke alarm has a strong metaphorical/cultural resemblance to all that bleakness, I am bothered for hours by visions of a land without magic, of culture without depth, of imprisonment in the leisurely and meaningless.

Although I’ve lived in Los Angeles, and was comfortable there, and even wanted to go back there to work; and although I ultimately distrust Atlantic cultures more than the Pacific ones (I kind of like the Mediterranean ones though!); and although I think the Western European dismissal of Los Angeles culture, especially films, is motivated as much by a sense of jealous competition as anything else; nevertheless – that bleakness does exist, and there are times in LA when everything seems to have that disturbing depthlessness, even the plants and the sky.

I was reading some minor books and stories by Alexei Panshin, whose one excellent book – Rite of Passage (1968) – is still rereadable, a delight, and won awards at the time. His other work is hardly worth keeping (or worth ordering through the Internet – there’s a few pounds I won’t see again). I get the impression of a pleasant and intelligent guy, interested in growing up and in ethics and in society, but whose development as a writer stalled in a certain amateurism or pedantry. But the ideas of the short stories – not the stories themselves, they’re alternately clunky and sketchy – suggest that disturbing disparity between what we want and what we have. Panshin and his wife were the kind of 70s counterculturists who moved to a farm; they reminded me of my vague, intermittent desire to see copies of the Whole Earth Catalog again – though I was too young and self-centered to take the counterculture very seriously, its values have colored much of my imagination.

Of course, I’m more of a child of the 80s – I was just too late to really connect or identify with 1968 and its aftermath, except as a bewildered spectator and younger brother. So, for me, the dominant experience of the post-1968 era is a Reagan/Thatcher one of yuppies, mirrored office buildings, rapid upswings in heartlessness, corporations, and hostility, and equally rapid downswings in naturalness, social supportiveness, and the arts.

It makes me wonder: how does our contemporary urban Western culture look from the outside? It’s not a good era, of course, by any means; probably not as bad as, say, 1930s Germany, or the late Roman Empire. (Although, admittedly, some day we may look upon this as the last golden era before climate change destroys everything.) But it is hard to really take our own temperature; would it be accurate to see us as comparable to, say, mid-19th-century France, an era of dull prosperity and desperation? No doubt about it: a certain bleakness is the norm in our time – and I don’t think that’s just me imposing the images of my own problems on the world.

And I can’t help thinking: the way out is… what? Imagination? I can’t manage the extreme exits of high spiritualities (meditating one’s way to a world that makes more sense requires immense discipline, and a willingness to ignore a lot of things); but it seems as though simply imagining our world as somewhat different than it is would give us a great deal more flexibility. And, perhaps, the possibility of transformation….