October 2008 Archives

Where I live is where most Californians live - in a tract house on a block of more houses in a neighborhood hardly distinguishable from the next, and all of them extending as far as the Jeffersonian grid allows. My exact place is at the extreme southeast corner of Los Angeles County, but that's mostly by accident (the ambitions of imperial Japan and the collapse of the sugar beet industry in Los Alamitos). I reside in Lakewood, but my home might as well be almost anywhere in L.A.

I've lived here my whole life, in the 957-square-foot house my parents bought in 1946 when the idea of this kind of place (our kind of place) was brand new, No one knew what would happen next when tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives - so young and inexperienced - were thrown together and expected to make a fit place to live. What happened was the usual redemptive mix of joy and tragedy. (In my neighborhood, the songs of Hank Williams and the country music coming out of Bakersfield were consolation.) My parents and their neighbors were grateful for the comforts of their not-quite-middle-class life. Their aspiration wasn't for more. Only for enough.

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In the late 1970s, I used to go looking with an old friend - Michael Ward, an artist who had a passion for old buildings...any old buildings: industrial, domestic, indeterminate. Michael had a camera. We’d meet on a Saturday morning, early, in front of my house and drive with only the vaguest plan.

Michael and I had looked through the 1977 edition of Gebhard and Winter’s Architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California or the skinny 1966 edition. We knew where the iconic architecture was located - the Neutra and Schindler houses, the Lloyd Wrights, his father’s, and the Green and Greens. Buildings scattered as solitary monuments separated by miles and miles of in-between.

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I’m sitting at a bar in a restaurant in Long Beach and with the celebrants of an impending wedding. The gush of a bottle of Champagne just uncorked, and a table of eighteen settles into the pleasures of its own company. Conversations rise, pass, and I’m alone, the only drinker at the bar in the light fading from a late afternoon in September. I’m alone. I’m alone in a scene of ordinary conviviality, telling you that I’m alone, aware of the irony. Every man is an island (a libertarian reformulation of John Donne); so who isn’t alone? Except the imperial self might just be a historical oddity, made by central heating and the triumph of the middle class. Just as likely as any triumph to disappear. “Civilization will go on whether you attend the block party or not.” lonerist Anneli Rufus (Party of One) says. But what if civilization won’t? “Your participation is now optional,” Rufus says. But what if it isn’t? Few can bear the risks of being alone...well...all alone. It takes a village, minyans, congregations - but kept at bay - to be god without a religion. Then pitiless solitude and having no one to forgive.

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So far, a morning’s and evening’s walk across my bit of Thomas Jefferson’s national grid. From township (thirty-six squares, each exactly one mile on each side) to section (each a square exactly 640 acres) to quarter-section (160 acres) to a “forty” (forty acres... but never a mule) to the subdivision of house lots in Los Angeles (mostly but not universally a 5,000-square-foot rectangle). Each step down toward your front yard is a fractal of Jefferson’s imperial imagination at play on the empty white space of a continent-sized map. His grid’s the same at every scale. Own a Los Angeles house lot; acquire a Jeffersonian dream of the West. And possess, some will tell you, suburbia. Capitalized, the word first appears in the 1890s as the proper name - Suburbia - for an imaginary place on the outskirts of London (but with real toads, as Marianne Moore would later say of poetry). Suburbs (a much older word) are on the edge of someplace else. (Here, suburbs are the edges of suburbs.) Suburbia is, however, a loaded word. It houses low-key contempt. Suburbia isn’t about geography; it’s about the limits of the imagination. It’s not a word that I use. The word I use is home.

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The recently late David Foster Wallace said to students graduating from Kenyon College in 2005, "[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.." Right after that he said some things retrospectively painful about suicide... tragic irony is the water we are born to live in... or (in other words not his) the inability to imagine yourself not dead, which point comes to a lot of us. And for some at that point, the imagination will not be revived... not “cannot” but “will not” (I choose carefully, but with my eyes closed)... which can be followed by all the perfectly ordinary and mechanical details of managing to die, pretty much like fixing a crappy lawnmower or wiring an electrical outlet, with straightforward stuff that has to be done in a certain way and with tools to achieve the result that the engine turns over, the blades cut, the kid’s computer turns on without sparks or the smell of burning plastic. But this specific failure of the imagination and the efficiencies that followed are for Wallace’s wife and his family.

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I’m probably known... although, perhaps not to you... as the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. That was a book about a lot of things - water, sin, carpentry, Catholics and Jews, land use policy, the Laws of the Indies, Lakewood, and a dead cocker spaniel. They seemed, at the time, to be related.

It was more of a long, solitary conversation with myself than a book. Years long. Held morning and evening during my walk from my house to my office and from office to house, the predictability of each step eliding into each sentence. Eventually, that conversation turned public, because the back-and-forth was an argument, too... an argument with myself initially over the folly of staying here (here = my parents’ house, then my house) or of believing . . . particularly of believing that so much ordinariness would add up to anything. Then it became an argument about falling in love.

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