Chaparralville

There are a few sprigs of Eriodictylon in what I think is called a bud vase - narrow neck bulbous body, clear glass, about ten inches high, provenance unknown, sitting on the kitchen counter. Because of the narrow neck and the sprigs' short stalks they have required a little top up of water the last two mornings; because they are right by the sink where I fill the kettle for my tea, they are the first thing I focus on in the morning. I collected the pale blue blossoming Yerba Santa, Eriodictylon crassifoium, (sometimes called Indian chewing gum) on two successive runs this week: first one flower stuffed in the pocket of my running shorts snatched from a plant somewhere up in La Broche Canyon, where it grows alongside a track from which there are, on a clear day, sweeping views of the Oxnard Plain and beyond to Point Mugu and the ocean; then yesterday, a further two sprigs from a stand of the leathery leafed plant growing in the dry, braided creek beds that serve as overflows for Sisar creek (not required for the past four years and thus fully vegetated). 

This little display of a chaparral wild flower gives me sufficient pleasure to fully recompense for any fleeting guilt I might have about snatching these blooms from their parent plants quietly minding their own business in the largely untracked hinterlands of the Topatopa foothills. So, it comes down to this: it's all about me; the chaparral a verdant tableaux from which I may pluck at my pleasure whatever floral bauble (so to speak) strikes my fancy, imprison it (them?) in the none too salubrious environs of my shorts' pocket and thereafter impale their heads on a spike (in a manner of speaking) for my morning's fleeting delectation, my conscience almost entirely untroubled by this flagrant act of anthropocentrism. Why then, dear reader, this barrage of rhetorical exposition? 

It's Spring! I'm back blogging after the deaths of two close friends and I am, once again, reporting to you, my imagined audience, about entirely inconsequential minutiae set against sometimes portentous, sometimes mildly philosophical and sometimes, regrettably pompous considerations of our place in the cosmos (all in service, ultimately, to a consideration of my place in Upper Ojai or yours in Woop Woop). It's time to continue building the brand one twelve hundred and fifty word blog piece after another (this is number 230); building a state of mind as a prophylactic: a mildly dystopian antidote to my (our) unthinking acceptance of neo-liberal bondage. Call it urbanwildland, call it Chaparralville.

My not posting in the first three months of the year was also the result of my teaching an on-line seminar for the Viridis Graduate Institute on ecological ethics. The reading, lecture writing, subsequent recording of a forty minute talk and hosting the two hour seminar for ten successive weeks not only reduced the time I had available to devote to Urbanwildland but also, in many ways, supplanted the reason for this blog (see also above), which is to investigate the moral, spiritual, aesthetic, practical and ethical impacts of my relationship with the natural world - specifically as I experience them here, in a particular place. I return to this investigation within a slightly altered context: our house is now augmented by a newly constructed guest house - a small step towards more gracefully accommodating others in the attitude-altering environment of Chaparralville.

Much of whatever foreboding I feel (see 'portentous' above, listed as a brand ingredient), when confronted with evidence of the sixth extinction, weather disrupting climate change, rising sea levels, desertification around the globe and the agricultural, infrastructural and commercial development of the world's remaining wildernesses, is shared by the many. It functions as a leitmotif of our contemporary existence: it is woven into the low level angst that urban dwellers experience when considering the fate of the world. For me, these concerns are exacerbated by the intense pleasure I derive from a surrounding wilderness that I recognize to be representative of other wildernesses under far greater existential threat. 

California chaparral has survived at least partly because it is so unassuming, the land so incapable of being harvested for commercial profit (except in the case of oil and real estate) and so indomitable in its resistance to flood, fire and drought. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of acres where it has been bent to the will of successive waves of colonial conquerors and now is under pressure from the expansionary forces of capitalism to which, as the developer of a wildland site for a residence (and now guesthouse) I am a small contributor.  

And yet, as Joachim Radkau writes in his new book, The Age of Ecology, 2014, "the Eco-age may be conceived as the New Enlightenment" capable of elucidating the choices available to us and guiding us, against all odds, towards a safe haven where a reasonable and sustainable balance between humankind and the natural environment is achieved. This 'Age of Ecology' can be traced back to Alexander Von Humboldt early in the nineteenth century. Andrea Wulf's popular history, beguilingly titled The Invention of Nature, 2015, weaves the story of the great German polymath, (the Aristotle of his age), together with those of Jefferson, Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel (1834- 1919) who coined the neologism 'Ecology' in 1866. 

As Wulf indicates, the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was founded on the revival of classical thought, Natural Philosophy, and Rationalism, while 'Ecology', in the nineteenth,  emerged out of a primordial soup of discoveries and speculations (often sourced from expeditionary travels) by Maupertuis, Lyell, Lamarck, Darwin, Haekell, Agassiz, and, most importantly, Von Humboldt. Meanwhile, in America, as Roderick Nash demonstrates in his Wilderness and the American Mind, 1967, the initial fear and revulsion experienced by the early European settlers towards this country’s wildlands were transformed by Thoreau and John Muir into an attitude that fostered the establishment of the National Parks and the Sierra Club early in the twentieth century. An American environmental movement was then forged from the ideas of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, David Brower (Friends of the Earth) and Dave Foreman (Earth First!); the establishment of Earth Day in 1970, precipitated by a massive oil spill off of the Santa Barbara coast, marked the beginning of a more generalized ‘green’ or ecological awareness.

I am privileged to experience my ‘green’ awareness at ground zero, grubbing in the broken margins of the chaparral, pulling out Tocolote (Centaurea militensis) with my trusty Pulaski. Tocolote is a close relative to the notorious Russian Star Thistle (C. stolstitialis) and marginally less toxic. It has colonized  swathes of grass (mostly non-natives) along our driveway that border the dark, green lines of chaparral beyond, where this stable, 30,000 year old plant community continues to resist invasive species – until you mess with it. Having built at the Wildland Urban Interface I am now engaged in trying to mend its native landscape. 

In this Age of Ecology, the fragility of our diminishing wildlands demands that they experience a minimum of disturbance - that we establish a kind of cordon sanitaire around them. Or better yet, perhaps, as Roderick Frazier Nash suggests in an epilogue to the fifth edition of his seminal book, that we create human clustering on a global scale, where giant megalopoli, perhaps one hundred miles in diameter, contain (and entrap) all human activity. These points of light would then exist in the dark space of the wildlerness which would exist untrammeled, unexploited, untraveled and forever self-willed. He calls it Island Civilization.  

My residential life is lived within the confines of our built structures, a gravel terrace and a pool. Beyond, slowly healing from the disturbance of their creation, and reverting, slowly, to a reasonably pristine state, are the surrounding wildlands. I call it Chaparralville.

Vector of Force

There is, close by The Beverly Hills Hotel, six acres that will forever be Los Angeles County; and there is, in this island of County jurisdiction, just north of Sunset Boulevard, the world's largest King Palm forest outside of Australia and there is too, set in this lush pleasure garden, a tennis court with a faded pink aggregate surface backed, at the east end, by a wall flamboyantly draped in pink bougainvillea originally sourced almost a century ago from South Africa: and it was here, in phalanxes of white chairs, that we were seated to celebrate the life of Bridget Hedison. 

This is the Virginia Robinson Estate, deeded to L.A. County in the 1970's by the widow of the department store magnate. Bridget is my erstwhile landscape partner who died on February 22, after being diagnosed with stage four cancer some three years ago. Carleen Cappalletti, a former client of ours, and friend to Bridget, organized the event with all the precision that she brings to her professional work producing entertainment, corporate, political, and fashion events around the world for a division of AEG. But here the tone was muted - a quiet remembrance of a remarkable soul, in the grounds of this garden paradise.

Bridget wove her career in and out of ‘Hollywood’ – that chimeric society that insinuates itself throughout Los Angeles, but finds its apotheosis in Beverly Hills - both in film production and later in garden design. Deeply influenced by her Italian heritage, an English insouciance (where she was educated) and profoundly impacted by the Islamic sites she had visited in Spain, her work as a garden designer exhibited an understanding of the transcendence afforded by the rigorous pursuit of an abstract order. Her work aspired to achieve the impact that Vincent J. Cornell captures, writing in Voices of Islam, 2006,

“at the sight of glittering waves or of leafage trembling in the breeze, the soul detaches itself from its internal objects, from the ‘idols’ of passion and plunges, vibrant within itself, into a pure state of being.”

So we got along just fine. In our Laguna project, where she and I worked most explicitly in an Islamic idiom, those glittering waves were not incised within a field of tilework, but were simply spread before the garden in the bay below. Bridget provided the trembling leafage in generous swathes of citrus, olives and Ligustrum lucidum (a tree privet); I provided a stepped and terraced way down the precipitous site and the destination of a walled pool which Bridget surrounded with olive hedges and punctuated with giant palms craned in from above. Bridget plotted to install fountains and rills, but in the end the sparkling cerulean waters of a lap pool and a spa, both plastered in white with an aggregate of tiny pearl pebbles and shell fragments, had to do the work of transporting the viewer into a pure state of being (or not).

She worked then, in the tradition of Southern California as a tabula rasa upon which could be installed fantasies of an earthly paradise. By the time I came to work with her I had already come to the conclusion that the riches of Los Angeles landscape, afforded by extravagant sprinkler layouts, hid a more authentic layer of paradisial planting that was revealed only at the edges of the great conurbation - in the native chaparral. But here in Beverly Hills, Virginia Robinson spent six decades directing her ample garden staff to create a lush, notionally Italian style Mediterranean garden on a knoll graced with ocean breezes, and views of the Pacific and Catalina Island beyond - banishing, in this process, all traces of the indigenous chaparral.

Great human energy, water and financial resources continue to be expended in maintaining this alien, although reasonably climate adapted, plant community plucked from the global, Mediterranean biome (of which, of course, California’s chaparral is a part). More capriciously, Robinson let her close friendship with Coco Chanel dictate the signature color of the garden as Chanel Pink – echoed in camellia plantings, a garden of pink David Austin Roses, the bougainvillea, and the faded pink of the tennis court surface.

The idea of the garden as a paradise was first developed in Persia and was subsequently adopted in Islamic cultures and, in a mutual exchange of ideas, became incorporated into the Renaissance gardens of Italy. As Barbara Bend notes in Islamic Art, 1992, “every vision of Paradise which Islam offers is that of a garden with running waters, and every garden in the Islamic world tends to be seen as a metaphor for Paradise”. Persian gardens and their Islamic successors inspired subsequent gardens around the Mediterranean - their aesthetic principles eventually dominating their generative symbolic underpinnings.  So it is that in the Virginia Robinson Estate, in southern California, there is a water rill of upturned clay roof tiles that runs down the middle of the brick steps that descend from the top of the knoll, through four terraces, each with a fountain or water trough (with crudely carved lion’s head spouts) to the foot of the site in a classic Islamic gesture originally adopted from the desert paradise gardens of Persia……..via Italy! Bridget would have loved it.

On the occasions that Lorrie and I visited Bridget and David at their aerie on Trudy lane, high in their City’s eponymous hills, it always gave me pleasure to see her copy of Mirrors of Paradise, The Gardens of Fernando Caruncho, 2000, laying in the living room, somewhere close to hand.  I had recommended it to her (the book was introduced to me years ago by Sarah Munster) because I believed it spoke profoundly of what Bridget achieved with apparent ease (that English insouciance born of an ethos that preaches: ‘don’t let them see you sweat’). Her design solutions arrived, she said, via her muse - some ethereal garden sprite perhaps, that would whisper, at the very last moment before a critical client meeting, a list of appropriate trees for the site. In reality, I knew that many hours of subliminal thought and a few sleepless nights went into finding just the right solution.

She intuited much of what Caruncho learnt through his study of philosophy. She understood the dualities of the visible and invisible, the sacred and profane, the light and the dark, without reference to the ancient Greeks. Many moons ago, she studied astronomy at UCLA, and this choice of discipline reflected, I think, her practical approach to the mysteries of the cosmos. She did not employ metaphysics in her work, nor even metaphor - just plain speech and she mostly let her landscapes do the talking.

Caruncho works with massed plantings usually organized in some sort of grid or linear arrangement. Flowers are almost entirely incidental to his designs. He works in greens and browns and ochres; his groundscapes of stone, gravel or decomposed granite resonate with intense shadow from heavy penumbral foliage or reflect the fierce light of Spain; water becomes an earthbound sky. Ditto Bridget, southern California substituting seamlessly for the Iberian Peninsula.

Bridget’s commitment to her muse’s vision was breathtaking. Rick Passov was a fellow student alongside of Bridget back in the day: he tells the story of her upbraiding a professor for failing to adequately explain Vectors of Force in her UCLA Physics class. The professor had no need. Bridget had ample self-knowledge – and she, intrinsically, was a Vector of Force. With great strength of will and an unerring sense of purpose she pursued her design objectives with a powerful focus.

Don't know much about History

Brits often disparage American History as being short - almost to the point where the association of the one with the other is imputed as oxymoronic: what they are suggesting is that the duration of the Republic, of these United States, is comparatively short-lived when weighed against the venerable statist traditions of the English kingdom. What they ignore, is that in terms of nationhood, this country is older than most, and predates that great efflorescence of nation states that occurred throughout, but often towards the tail end, of the nineteenth century (think Italy and Germany). More crucially, the very idea of assessing the venerability (or any other characteristic) of histories through the matrix of political associations (in which Nation States hold a privileged position) is decidedly reactionary.

This epiphany emerged out of my reading Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World, 1992, at more or less the same time that I ingested the great Marxist historian E. J. Hobsbawm's  Nations and Nationalism, 1990, about twenty years ago. It was in this latter work that it became apparent to me that fictions of nationhood were the convenient tool of elite groups wishing to conduct feats of social engineering conducive to their aggregation of power. Quoting Ernest Gellner, Hobsbawm writes, "Nations as a natural God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent political destiny are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality" - a reality, incidentally, almost totally reflected in the initial establishment and subsequent development of the United States. 

We all move on. Now there is an understanding that what matters to us, at this cosmic moment, is history on a geologic time scale. The whole world, it seems, is obsessed with the human impact on the ecologies that envelop us. Us: a.k.a. Humans. This Anthropocene is an age when we (We) are creating sedimentary strata of toxic waste, collapsing aquifers, reshaping and perforating the lithosphere, drastically reducing levels of biological diversity and fundamentally changing the composition of the earth's atmosphere. 

Set against this elemental reality, the disfunctions or otherwise of political arrangements validated by nationalist mythologies which, in this country, are based on moldering documents crafted by a few wealthy British diasporans more than two hundred years ago, or in this and other continents, less transparently, on histories of pillage and conquest, are of trivial import. 

 In Britain, the nationalist religion of patriotism is nurtured by a Royal family founded just 99 years ago by George V as the House of Windsor: an act of xenophobic re-branding (from the Germanic Saxe Coburg and Gotha) at the end of World War One. (There was, in Ojai, a faint echo of this, in the same year of 1917, as it was transmuted from its erstwhile Teutonic place name of Nordhoff). 

Part of being a nation is, as Hobsbawm points out, getting its history wrong: but neither this country nor Great Britain have national histories, however delusional, of any great consequence except as they contribute to the great Modernist project that has seen the planet globalize under the flag of Capitalist convenience, Neo-Liberalism. It is, operating under this credo, that they are assured of a significant place in new histories that operate on a millennial and geologic time scale and have as their protagonist, not petty princes or nattering nabobs of nationalism (to paraphrase the late and unlamented Spiro Agnew) but the Lonely Planet itself.

I have mentioned Clive Ponting's seminal 1992 text: it opened up a space which has been populated by a plethora of 'green' or environmental histories of the world. Enter Joachim Radkau with Nature and Power, A Global History of the Environment, 2008, in which he notes that "environmentalism is the only ideological alternative to the absolute hegemony of the quest for private profit and consumption".  

Remarkably, in this nation based exactly, explicitly and proudly on the pursuit of private profit and consumption there has been a parallel history of appreciation and concern for the natural world. It has been advantaged in this by the scale and variety of its natural setting and its convenient extirpation of native populations who fully inhabited its vast range of ecological niches. Absent indigenous peoples, killed in great numbers by introduced disease, by the U.S. Cavalry who supported the western migration of Anglo-Americans, by frontiersmen and women on their own account, or forcibly removed to marginal lands where their traditional means of sustainability were no longer viable, the nation’s great and glorious landscapes were fetishized in the nineteenth century as objects supporting a range of broadly romantic ideologies centered on our relationship to the divine. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many of these areas were institutionalized as National Parks and in this process the last vestiges of their indigenous populations were banished. The Eurocentric traditions of Emerson, Thoreau and Muir were validated in this creation of vast reserves set aside for the aesthetic, moral and spiritual delight of newly wrought and quickly populating ‘Americans’, enabled in their peregrinations by the mass production of the automobile by Henry Ford and others.

In the 1960’s and 70’s an Environmentalism emerged in the U.S. that truly challenged the cash and consumption nexus and, arguably, initiated an epochal shift toward a revision in the ways the natural world might function as a sustainable setting for its top predator: humankind.

Not much these days goes uncolored by the recent death of my friend Will Reed with whom I hiked the Sierras last summer, along with Victoria Salmon (Wild America). He was a man without a nation, having left his native New Zealand in his early twenties and subsequently been refused permanent status in both the U.K and the U.S., despite his living in one or the other place for over forty years. I regret that he will not read this piece which touches on the spurious nature of the nation state and might give him a reason for celebrating his statelessness. Now he has truly transcended such petty considerations!

He and I were, in different ways and in different places, children of the various revolutions that occurred a little after mid-century which established in us an anti-authoritarian ethos and a profound love of the natural world. We both arrived in Ojai about eight years ago and quickly established a kinship. We subsequently co-taught at Lori Pye’s feisty on-line start-up, the Viridis Graduate Institute, where we wrestled with many of the issues with which this blog concerns itself. We both lived in a world where the concerns of environmental histories were very real. He, perhaps, was more comfortable in the timelessness of the eternal present that holds sway in the lives of indigenous peoples and his mind, I believe, actually resonated on a frequency that enabled insights into the natural world that were profoundly pre-verbal, while I am forever pursuing intellectual fashion in such histories, true to my more academic, very western understanding of wilderness as cultural artifact and ideological talisman.

The last book we talked about together was Roderick Frazer Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, 1967, just a few days before he died. Will’s was not an American mind; he disliked this country precisely because it was mired in materialism - but he loved its wildlands and understood their history on a millennial and geologic scale, his mind in harmony with the cosmic energies that pulsed through his lanky frame. 

Old Ways vs. New Spirit

I have just finished reading Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s magisterial work, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2007. It is dense, closely argued and revelatory. The thick trade paperback now bristles with yellow post-it notes marking passages I thought particularly significant, or more often, just felt that I fully understood. If it is not quite a Theory of Everything, it did offer a thrillingly explanatory ride through fifty years of my lived experience in the working world. It now prompts these thoughts:

Capitalism is a system in which money acts as the medium of transaction between subject (individuals and groups) and object (goods and services) within a theoretically unencumbered or free market.  Within that system, it is also characterized (as Boltanski and Chiapello would have it) by “an imperative to unlimited capital accumulation by formally peaceful means”. In other words, it represents (now in the guise of neo-liberalism) an advance in civilization from societies driven by warfare, plunder, and territorial acquisition towards those that formally value peace where individuals have the ability to grow rich through the socially approved accumulation of wealth. Blood lust has been transmuted into entrepreneurial spirit: ‘Capitalism’ thus represents the hive mind of the bloodlessly acquisitive.

Within this system of producers and consumers there exists a world of work. There has been, at least since the industrial revolution and its mass migrations from the countryside to the city, a clear distinction between the personhood of an employee and their contributions as a worker. Previously, workers were involved in close personal bonds with their master or mistress arising out of ancient feudal fealties - evidenced by a total subordination as well as ties of loyalty and mutual aid.

The rise of Capitalism afforded the opportunity for the working man and woman to establish an independent sense of self despite the often onerous demands of factory or trade work. This working class condition, established in the eighteenth century, characterized by a simple contractual arrangement based on work performed, between employer and employee, endured until late in the twentieth century.

It was then that increased possibilities for the values of creativity, freedom and authenticity became available within Boltanski and Chiapello’s construct of ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’ which developed in the era of social upheaval in the 1960's and 70's, immediately after the interregnum of what the French call Les Trente glorieuses  (those three decades after the end of WWII when the standard of living greatly increased for most people across Western Europe and the USA). The new spirit was shaped by a virulent critique partly in reaction to the oppressive regimentation and control imposed by large scale, bureaucratized industrial conglomerates that dominated American and Western European commerce. For a moment, it seemed as if an entire generation had decided to vacate the world of work and reinvent Life on Earth. They (we!) were eventually reined in by this revised spirit of capitalism that co-opted many of the freedoms demanded by the Hippes, Yippies, Feminists and Civil Rights workers who populated the era.

This emancipation was achieved, over the last forty odd years, at the cost of job security, lower real wages and a crumbling social safety net. As the authors note, wage earners are now simultaneously more autonomous and more constrained as they seek a foothold in the working world absent the protections afforded by secure long term employment, vacations and benefits. Their work lives are episodic or project based, and depend for continuity on the personal and professional connections that are nurtured during brief tenures of employment (or transitory relationships). The establishment of networks is necessary to the securing one's next gig (or relationship) and both depend on social and spatial fluidity: immobility presages exclusion from the ranks of the successful.  The power of place has been re-placed by the power of real and virtual rhizomorphic links and reticular adjacencies (a linguistic thicket in the spirit of B&C) spread across the world’s array of urban nodes bound within an electronic web.

The illusory freedom, individual empowerment and authenticity offered within this new Capitalist workplace are mirrored in its attendant consumerism. The mass production of identical goods has been replaced by their customization and niche marketing. American taste has been fragmented: 'Middle America' has been shattered into a hundred taste cultures by which individual consumers are offered goods that are differentiated and 'authentic' to their particular taste culture - despite the fact that these disparate goods remain within the commodity sphere and must ultimately yield to the “cycles of infatuation and disappointment” inherent in a fashion, marketing and advertising driven consumer society.

The distinction between persons and their labor power, and between disinterested relations and relations marked by self-interest traditionally establishes the division, in Capitalism, of what may be commodified and what may not. Now, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s formulation of ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’ (under the influence of which people continue to be persuaded to participate in endless orgies of production and consumption), this distinction is under challenge: individuals are mired deeper and deeper in the processes of making, marketing, personal branding (which is directly related to their employability) and networking, all of which combine to submerge the authenticity of their personhood.

It is into this world that we must now consider the introduction of the ecological critique: for the hive mind of Capitalism is mutable. In a recent interview, Eve Chiapello commented, “The market economy has adopted some of the ideas of critical movements, but only those that did not call into question profit-seeking and the pursuit of its objectives”. She notes, however, that the ecological critique does precisely that and thus has the potential to fundamentally alter the central tenet of our neo-liberal political system; as long as growth of GDP is seen as essential to societal well-being there is unlikely to be any willing accommodation of the ecological agenda (except at the greenwash margins). Chiapello suggests that ultimately, biospheric well-being almost certainly depends on the development of localized, solidarity based sustainable economies dedicated to meeting basic needs and which entirely eschew the superfluous (i.e. Hippie communes redux). Any large scale adoption of such local, down-sized centers of production serving newly temperate consumers will most likely cause the transportation, information, education, healthcare, energy and control networks of modern society to atrophy and current levels of population to decline.

Capitalism has capitulated to demands for the greater freedom, authenticity and personal empowerment of its worker bees but it has done so by demanding increased flexibility and offering less security, benefits, generally lower wages and has undermined the sanctity of its workers personhood by commodifying their personal relationships. It now exists, within the embracing rationalizations of its New Spirit, under attack from a critique that privileges biospheric health above the values of 'freedom' its promoters have been shilling for almost half a century and which are now thoroughly embedded in the neo-liberal project.

Should the ecological critique succeed against all odds, are we then faced with a new dark age from which will inevitably spring the warfare, plunder and territorial acquisition that history has banished? Let’s dispense immediately with idea that economic growth is somehow a natural, historically validated phenomenon. Eduardo Porter writes in The New York Times,

“It’s hard to imagine now, but humanity made do with little or no economic growth for thousands of years. In Byzantium and Egypt, income per capita at the end of the first millennium was lower than at the dawn of the Christian era. Much of Europe experienced no growth at all in the 500 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution. In India, real incomes per person shrank continuously from the early 17th through the late 19th century.”

He goes on to make the contrary argument that “Zero growth gave us Genghis Khan and the Middle Ages, conquest and subjugation”. One is aghast by the inclusion of half a millennium of high culture, great learning and spiritual achievement in a list clearly intended to conjure a civilizational abyss. The last two hundred years of the West’s economic growth have been afforded by our plundering of the earth’s carbon riches which, by aggravating climate change, will potentially ravage our coast lines and foster disease and famine on a scale besides which a little old-school pillaging by Ghenghis and his cohorts seems positively benign.

Gary Snyder characterizes the “wisdom and skill of those who studied the universe firsthand, by direct knowledge and experience, for millennia, both inside and outside of themselves” as the ‘Old Ways’. Traditional cultures were of a place, in which the inhabiting of a coherent bioregion forged a profound kinship within a world that provided for their people’s survival. The sanctity of human life was contingent: it existed only as a reflection of human reverence for the web of life. 

Capitalism requires a rethinking such that the natural world is revered as the one and only medium of transaction between humanity and its survival. If that world is not to be devalued or destroyed, a radical critique of our economic system (predicated, as it is, on eternal growth and the ravaging of the biosphere) must be established. The hive mind is listening.

Local

Thoreau threw up a hut in the woods partly of recycled building materials sourced in his local town of Concord, Mass. It was, at ten by fifteen feet, not far off of the dimensions of a hojo, and served much the same minimalist function as the zen monk's traditional cell - a place deliberating lacking in the fripperies of the age that might, whether in medieval Japan or mid-nineteenth century America, focus the mind on the deep pulse of the universe.

When they worked, these simple dwellings, often situated in rural or wild settings, enabled their inhabitants to recognize that their own intrinsic life force was beating within the more expansive rhythms of the cosmos. The simplicity of a life lived locally, within a shelter that barely kept its inhabitant warm and dry, with a food supply foraged, hunted or grown within walking distance, only occasionally provisioned by an itinerant rice merchant (or supplemented by merchants in the local town), heightened an awareness of humankind's larger, universal context. To live small was to think large.

A life lived locally was barely possible in 1850's America. Thoreau's attempt, essentially bankrolled by Emerson, and in large and small ways dependent on the support systems of an eastern seaboard intricately enmeshed in mercantile relations with the Southern states, the Caribbean and Europe, was a conceit: he was an anachronistic artist living on the fringes of a burgeoning global economy and living within earshot of an iron-road that would shortly open up his own continent to economic and cultural despoliation.

That was then. We are now even less capable of successfully living ‘Local’. Our attempts are doomed to fail in the face of a thoroughly co-mingled planet. Any pretense at limiting our individual impact to a particular place, to our locale, can only be maintained by denying the realities of our twenty-first century world. In truth, local has not been viable since we, as a species, moved off the plains of the Serengeti in search of specialized ecological niches across the world, where plenty in some aspect of sustenance inevitably encouraged trade with other groups who produced a surplus in another. We are done with Local. It is a pre-historical fantasy, it is stone-punk: it is intellectually, practically and morally dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Mired in the metaphysics of western thought, stuck in the tar-patch of individual identity, there is little possibility of denying our global interconnections with the material world. And yet, perhaps there is a Way.

We are consumed with the impact of our own agency. What if we are but shards of a greater consciousness reified in moments of perceiving the natural world? It may be that it is not so much a matter of our effect on the environment, of consuming locally, but of perceiving locally and allowing the presence of the natural world to fill the absence within us.

Turns out that these vague premonitions of the relationship between being and Nature are cogently investigated in a slim volume I purchased recently at Banyen Books in Kitsilano, Vancouver, where there were displayed several shelves of works devoted to eco-psychology and ecological ethics. Hunger Mountain, helpfully subtitled A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton, Shambala, 2012, is a gem. It is a remarkable primer both to Chinese cosmology as reflected in the language’s graphs (alternatively, glyphs or characters)  and to one of its major works, the Tao Te Ching.

I wrote the last couple of paragraphs whilst waiting for my car’s tires to be rotated at Fred’s Tireman in Oak View. The mountains are not so much a presence here as in other parts of the valley, and as I looked around, I focused less on nature than on the works of entrepreneurial humankind, wondering at the survival of an odd selection of stores that eke out a living for their owners in the harsh economic climate of this beleaguered township. Here, in front of me, exactly in a row, as in some sort of ecological climax community of the tawdry were Donuts and More; Nails Forever; Herbs of Hope; 805 Vapes Vapor Lounge; His ‘n’ Hairs; Gold ‘n’ Essence Tanning Salon; and anchoring the eastern end of this block, the unimaginatively titled Oak View Coffee. Across the street is the newly opened Jack’s Dollar Plus. Then it’s Ojai Valley Muffler; Rte. 33 Laundry; and the about to open Ojai Valley MAMA (Modern American Martial Arts) before the stand-alone red-trimmed Ojai Valley Glass which sits next to Fred’s.

On the stretch of the State Highway from the 101, through Casitas Springs (Bait and Liquor), Oak View and Mira Monte, the commercial presence might reasonably be considered woeful to those of bourgeois tastes and proclivities, but like the drought-plagued plants of the chaparral, the very persistence of its stores and services and the unfailing optimism of the new ones that replace the failed, against all the economic odds, possesses a kind of grandeur. Their openings and closings represent the ongoing process of transformation, in which all things arise and pass away, that is at the very heart of the Taoist understanding of the cosmos.

In his introduction to Mountain Home: The Wilderness poetry of Ancient China, Counterpoint, 2002, Hinton notes that “for two millennia, China’s tradition of rivers and mountains (shan-shui) poetry represents the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history”. In Hunger Mountain, he proposes that it is the pictographic language in which these poems were written that allowed for the immediate engagement of ‘the ten thousand things’ of which the world is made because the glyphs of which the language is composed refer directly to elements within that world. By contrast, the western tradition is enabled by a higher level symbolic language that allows for the buffering of self and cosmos, or more simply, the separation of us and the natural environment.

 In shan-shui, the world is not a stage for human events: the poet’s renderings of rivers, mountains and shafts of sunlight, moonbeams or enveloping mists, connote profound human connections within a cosmology where issues of being and non-being are demonstrated by the ten thousand living (including humanity) and non-living things which themselves are in constant transformation.

We are lost to that world of a pictographic language (although we tread here on a land that for fifteen thousand years supported peoples who scratched, pecked and painted on rock in ways that echoed across millennia, the voices of those ancient ones expressed in rock art, that most primitive of written languages) but we can still directly engage with a primal world in spite of the remove imposed by our sophisticated means of communication. This is what Thoreau attempted. This is what we urban-wildlanders attempt, poised on the cusp of rivers and mountains in (speaking personally) our tricked-out, solar-powered huts.

The energy that flows through Oak View, along the 33, is mostly provided by the woosh of traffic that passes: drivers and passengers intent on the road ahead and casting barely a glance at the enticements offered along the commercial strip – Forever Nails passed unnoticed in a moment; but it is in the act of noticing and being present that the swirling cosmic currents that the Chinese represent as chi’i can be discerned, whether in a strip mall or a mountain trail - those tender breaths of energy that, as Hinton describes them, cascade effortlessly “through fusion-lit star-generations”.

This is what can be perceived locally: our enmeshment within the cosmos. Hinton writes of a concatenated ideogram which interpreted literally denotes breath-seed home. Time and space are woven together in the ancient Chinese notion (as in most primal cultures) of the eternal present and animated through the agency of breath, or chi'i; time is the dimension where the ongoing transformation of the ten thousand things can occur. The glyph which depicts a seed sprouting in a thatched roof denotes home and is set within this space-time continuum (which stands quite apart from the Western notion of time as a relentlessly flowing river). Taken together, Hinton writes, the cosmology represented in the glyph combination "recognizes the fundamental dimensions of the Cosmos to be our most elemental dwelling place". 

In the chaparral, beneath the looming presence of the Topatopas, or wandering a strip mall in Oak View, my urban wildland ‘practice’ (to use that charged word) is as it was for the shan-shui poets, medieval Zen monks in Japan, Thoreau in Concord and is for David Hinton in the wilds of Vermont: to observe the empirical world as it is inflected by the chi'i storm of the cosmos. This much remains local, yet it references "the boundless breath of the planet's empty mind". 

Tree Fall

As Ojai slips gently into fall, I am filled with longing. A longing for the coming of winter: for the synchronization of my personality with the cold and gloom, the creeping damp of early mornings, rain-blackened tree trunks and lowering skies. Across three continents, I have experienced the same grim pleasure as the sun, in its elliptical orbit, swings closer to the polar hemispheres - its warmth thinned as its reach widens.

 In Australia, living by Sydney's North Shore beaches, the beginning of autumn presaged good surf and empty sand. Come March, off-shore winds whipped across the inland sea of Pittwater and rustled the parched leaves of tall gums: a wooded spine separated my house from Whale Beach where these same cool, off-shore breezes smoothed the in-rushing waves and held up their exposed faces. 

 In the 1970's, with no thought of ozone holes, Australians remained great sun fetishists, their oiled bodies splayed across the summer beaches like colonies of anorexic, bipedal seals. In the water we wore zinc ointment on our noses but otherwise embraced our blackened skin as a sign of our dedication to the most sybaritic of sports. In fall and winter, we wore wet-suits that glistened black in the water. It was as though the summer seal colonies had taken to the waves; the depressions where they had formerly lain erased by the wind.

 In England, in the village where I grew up, the oaks that remained after the paroxysm of road building between the wars (linking London with provincial market towns and the beaches of Sussex and Hampshire) were fleshy monsters, towering over road, houses and traffic: clouds of green on massive stalks like atomic explosions of foliage. Come fall they were transformed. 

 Drifts of pale brown leaves gathered at the bases of concrete tank traps that had been readied for deployment a few years previously to block the arteries that might permit invading Nazis a clear run to London. These squat columns, of about the same girth as the oaks, were manufactured replacements for the trees felled to make way for concrete and tar macadam: the great defensive forests of the realm decimated for the convenience of day-trippers, owners of country houses, provincial merchants and outlying commuters.

 There was a row of four or five of these trees at the end of the road which linked the major routes to Sussex and Hampshire, growing in a nature strip placed between the main road and a service road onto which our house fronted, about halfway along its length. By chance, another ancient oak stood in our front yard, this one a survivor of the post-war boom in public housing which blighted requisitioned farms, estates and common land throughout the villages of the so-called home-counties that ringed the metropolis. In my young mind, these half dozen oaks were vastly old, sentinels of pre-history, and gravid with occult significance. 

 Their summer raiment was discarded in autumn to expose the wiry filigree of their armature: the stiffened arteries that had so recently fed and supported their mounding green canopies. Rooks nested in the twigs, their caws replacing the susurration of leaves. Off at a distance, lines of bare trees, oaks among them, scratched at the grey skies.

 On both sides of the Pacific, the dominant trees are evergreen - they shed their dead leaves throughout the year. The gums maintain their emblematic grey-olive foliage and the live-oaks of California keep their dark, oak-shadow green. Signs of fall are carried in the chill of the wind, a shortening of the days and a quickening in the biotic life-force as the storms of winter loom. 

 Autumn in Europe, Asia and East of the Rockies is accompanied by flamboyant fall colors which quickly give way to displays of twiggy chiaroscuro -  their deciduous forests presaging a waning energy, a time of hibernation in the natural world. Here, and in Australia, the mood darkens, but the landscape is vitalized: it stirs in fall after the oppressive heat and drying winds of summer. My spirits rise as I anticipate another winter in the chaparral. My heart beat quickens as I welcome the possibilities of trails being threaded with creeks, of seasonal streams roiling rocks and fallen tree limbs and scouring their weedy beds; as I welcomed the thinning of summer crowds on Sydney's beaches and the arrival of wind-whipped winter waves and celebrated the arrival of the massive edifices of trunk, branch and twig that centuries old English oaks manifest in winter.

 The Gum, as Australians call Eucalypts, is mostly a tall, willowy thing with bursts of foliage pitched apparently randomly against the sky. Its peeling, or sometimes shredding, bark can be a milky white, pink or reddish brown. Its leaves hang mostly vertically, pointing at the tree's litter below (which they will join on entirely individual timetables) and often provide scant shade. In their native land they are trees of exquisite elegance. In the looming bush at the edges of Sydney, they tower over the chaotic underbrush. The punctuation of their trunks and sky-strewn foliage seem to echo the wheedling thrum of the didgeridoo as it might have emerged from some ancient corroboree while their etiolated, bone-like structures mirror some aboriginal dreamtime phantasm. The metallic rustling of leaves is their signal that fall approaches.

 How different the mushroom cloud of the English Oak. The stout, phlegmatic long-lived foundational tree of the British Navy, of much of Britain's architecture and of its primeval wood henges - concentric rings of ritual (or as William Logan (Oak, The Frame of Civilization, 2006) calls them, "monuments about the mind") that were expressions of visionary or entoptic geometry designed to expand the consciousness of the celebrants. Sacred tree to the Druids, their conduit to the 'otherworld' of the pantheistic divinity, the English oak is literally rooted in Celtic pre-history, reaching far back to the swirling mists of the melting ice age when, at the margins, the oak forests were submerged in the rising waters that isolated Britain from Europe, creating an undersea world of bog oak.

 Here, in Upper Ojai, a lone scrub jay probes the rocky soil and disgorges an acorn into the hole it has made and then covers it with soil and leaf litter. Perhaps it will remember where this one is buried come winter. Perhaps not......and, if the rains come, the acorn will germinate and become a part of the profusion of plant life that emerges in the great lottery of fecundity which is the chaparral winter. 

 Last night we waited patiently for the advertised total eclipse perigee blood moon to appear over the eastern ridge. A little after 8:30 I looked up from my chair facing the ridge line and saw a sliver of a crescent subtended from the shadowed moon. I had allowed the moon to rise on my watch, so to speak, without my full attention because it was well-nigh as dark as the night sky behind it: only the dazzle of its tiny illuminated crescent alerted me to its presence. As the shadow of the earth passed over the moon, ‘the red of a thousand sunrises and sunsets’ failed to impact the coloration of our lunar satellite, although today I did see fairly compelling images showing an orange orb scaled beside the Washington monument, and hanging above picturesque skylines in Europe. A little late on the total eclipse, because of the looming ridge to the east, and denied the orange wash, we went inside feeling a little cheated.

 This morning, the day dawned with a fiery orange-red sky to the east and as its color faded the western sky assumed a soft, rosy hue. Still fairly high in the sky, the super moon appeared to be wrapped in pink tissue – in drifting filaments of cirrus cloud reflecting a single, sanguinary sun rise.

 The Harvest Moon, the first moon of fall, announced the season’s arrival with just the kind of subtlety we would expect in California, where the changes in weather and landscape reward close attention. I remain on high alert.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Ojai’s economy relies on tourism, agriculture, oil and the wealth of the retirement and second home communities all of which combine to drive its service and retail businesses. Here on Koenigstein, oil is the dominant economic product with a minor assist from avocado and cattle ranching. Its residential community is comprised of a mix of weekenders, retirees and those who commute to work beyond the Topatopa foothills. Nowhere, along this dead end street, with the possible exception of a single avocado farmer and a part-time cattle rancher are there examples of families living on the economic resources of their land. It is predominantly an urban wildland dormitory sustained by incomes generated beyond Upper Ojai while its indigenous oil wealth flows to widely dispersed workers, management and owners.

Of culture workers there are a couple, evidenced, at least, by the Ojai Artist’s Studio tour, which features two neighbors, the recently widowed fauvist painter Nancy Whitman (R.I.P., John, another Death Comes to Koenigstein) and Shahastra Levy who creates romantically lush landscapes entirely at odds with the harsh realities of our surrounding eco-system.

 I have constructed a life and now, at Urbanwildland have worked hard at creating a persona at least partly based on an attachment to the chaparral, but that is a long way from living with the land as an economic resource. I have had the luxury of developing a primarily abstract, intellectual and at moments spiritual connection to the land without actually ever having the need to grub a living from it. I accept that that puts me in a privileged position and one from which it is hard to critique the ways and means of those who have a direct economic interest in this landscape.  

Nevertheless, as someone who wishes to use the environment as a cultural artifact, I deplore its exploitation on a purely economic basis. The activities of the rancher, the avocado farmer and most of all of the oil companies that besmirch an erstwhile pristine landscape with their noxious mechanical, arboreal and bovine infrastructures are entirely antithetical to my concern to re-wild this land and make metaphoric hay of its adjacency to the urban technological, economic, legal and political conditions that characterize the tentacular conurbations that sprawl across southern California and are themselves links in global communications and commodities chains. I accept the urban as urban but dearly wish for the wild to be truly wild (excepting my presence within it as your intrepid correspondent).

These musings are partly prompted by having read The Shepherd’s Life by James Redbanks, 2015,  based on the author’s life tending his flock on the rugged uplands (or fells) of Northern England’s Lake District. Redbanks does not altogether ignore the irony that he farms in an area which was ground zero, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for the cultural construction of its rugged landscapes, lakes and mountains as fodder for the feeding of the Romantic sensibility and that this construction, evidenced by continuing tourism (both by car and fell-walking) far outweighs the value of the rough grazing it affords his sheep. He argues that there is value in his continuance of a traditional way of life that reaches back at least five thousand years, provides his family with a living and some part of the general population with meat: it surely does this, but it is at the cost of continuing a centuries-old mono-culture that has contributed to the reduction of local floral, arboreal and faunal species and that now exacerbates the impacts of climate change.    

 George Monbiot sums up the impact of sheep on Britain’s marginal uplands as ‘sheepwrecking’ in Feral, Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, 2013. Despite the proclamation, as you enter National Forests, that you are broaching a Land of Many Uses, Monbiot makes the point that most human endeavors, driven by remorseless entropy, tend to devolve into monocultures. National Forests are mostly about protecting the nation’s timber supply; lacking oversight by C-Frog and engaged neighbors, Koenigstein would become an oil super-highway as Mirada opens more wells in the Topatopa foothills on its exploratory drive into the Sespe Wilderness; in Britain, the marginal uplands of Wales, England and Scotland, once mostly lightly grazed common land became, upon their privatization through the lamentable Enclosure movement, intensively farmed by landlords hoping to profit from the wool trade. Now, with wool a largely devalued commodity, it is the arcane traditions of sheep breeding, sheep-dog training and the insatiable appetite of up-scale restaurants for English spring lamb that drives the five thousand year tradition that, over the millennia has entirely transformed the uplands forest ecology into a grass monoculture incapable of absorbing winter rains and erased much of the complex web of life these primeval hills once supported.

Wordsworth and John Clare among others, bemoaned the enclosure (and thus taming) of the rough edges of England’s lowland arable land that traditionally remained marginal commons available for coppicing and mixed grazing of pigs, sheep and cattle to the landless local peasantry. The industrial revolution then, as in China now, depopulated the countryside leaving it to capital intensive crop mono-cultures necessary to the feeding of urban populations. Monbiot is careful to exclude these highly productive farm lands from his critique: it is the marginal grazing lands that he sees suffering unnecessarily from the ‘white plague’ and which could be most fruitfully re-wilded.

Now Koenigstein, and more generally Ojai, are on the margins of the Southland’s major oilfields (despite the area’s historical status as the location of California’s first oil well in 1867) and could usefully dedicate its wildlands to its prowling top predator, the mountain lion (reliably reported as currently resident in these parts by two neighbors and filmed on security camera by a third) rather than to the economic advantage, on Koenigstein, of the Price family (as owners of Mirada) and the continuing debasement of the climate through carbon mining and gas flaring.

Monbiot favors the reintroduction of the wolf into Britain’s uplands, a move predictably resisted by farmers but one that could quickly re-balance the wild and the tame and remove, once and for all the plague of sheep that infest the uplands and inhibits their higher value as carbon sinks, rain infiltrators and true wildlands. Similarly, greater State and Federal protection for the range of the Puma concolor, black bear and steelhead trout might reasonably re-establish these chaparral lands as untrammeled wilderness - surely now their highest and best use - unthreatened by oil interests, cattle and agriculture and safe even, for the reintroduction of the Grizzly, that great symbol of California (last sighted in Santa Barbara County in 1924).

 In creating a redoubt and by re-dedicating the surrounding acreage to its highest purpose, of chaparral, there is an ecotone established at our house on Koenigstein balanced between the wild and the urban: it is here I can practice a dialectic of the tame and the untamed and at this interstice, to paraphrase Marx: live a life that determines my consciousness. It is where, in practical terms, a run in the pre-dawn or a walk in the gloaming requires that one carry an air-horn. It is where I can, in odd moments and in these postings, add value to the neighborhood by honing it as a cultural artifact.

On a Sunday Afternoon

Very early this morning, Rita whooshes down Koenigstein in her red Tesla. Perhaps she is driving to the west side of Los Angeles to meet with a client. She is a personal trainer.

 Three years ago, she and her husband bought the old Hansen property (Death Comes to Koenigstein) at the top of the hill. A Los Angeles architect designed a modern re-model of the 1960’s stucco ranch house and after a protracted construction period approaching two years, Rita moved in earlier in the summer. The major views and windows are all to the west and despite a roof laden with photo-voltaic panels I imagine the house falls short of being net zero in energy consumption: of an afternoon, the searing westerly sun is likely to defeat the best efforts of even a continuously running refrigerated air cooling system, and then, when it cools down and the a/c finally shuts down, there’s the six or seven hours to charge the car’s battery at a 240 V outlet. As Kermit sings, “it’s not easy being green”.

Nevertheless, several of us on Koenigstein are attempting to present a virid face to the world. It is all, to some extent, a sham. The three overtly ‘green’ structures feature enough newly embedded energy to discount whatever savings to the grid are effected by their solar strategies. In the bigger picture, our contribution to saving the world is precisely nil. We remain part of a society that is dedicated to endless economic growth – of which so-called ‘green’ industry is a contributing factor.

It is the fatal model of expansionary capitalism (if that is not a tautology), consuming the world’s resources and producing biosphericaly threatening levels of greenhouse gases that requires immediate mitigation – not our relationship to the power grid. There is, of course, a connection between these two phenomena, but an amelioration of the latter is unlikely to make much of a dent in the former.  Indeed, it has been argued that the replacement of dirty, fossil energy with clean solar, hydro or nuclear power is entirely beside the point: what we need is a society that uses radically less energy, of whatever provenance, since its consumption is largely devoted, at present, to the rape of the world. 

The Pope, in his recent ‘green encyclical’ has called for a "truly communitarian economy", where "human beings in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life".  In other words, he is calling, at least in this speech, for the revolutionary overthrow of the results of at least half a millennium of Western colonialism in which the Papacy has been entirely complicit, as well as the financial structures that grew out of this exploitative model and that now support the plutocrats, oligarchs and kleptocrats who conspire to rule the world irrespective of the political arrangements that pertain in individual states.

But he goes further. He has nominated as the foot soldiers in his Revolutionary Army, "social poets" who remake "social reality" along their own unique paths, person by person, generation by generation. It is a fantastically bold vision that entirely transcends ideology and attempts to return the world to a prelapsarian Eden where individuals can create their own destinies certain of "access to education, health care, new technologies, artistic and cultural manifestations, communications and recreation". Nothing here then, that cannot be achieved in the kind of primal harmony evinced by tribal societies intimately connected to their local ecosystems and surviving within them by hunting and gathering - in a return, in other words, to traditions from which Homo sapiens has only very recently departed. The Pope may believe that his Edenic vision can be achieved without abandoning the technological infrastructure of the modern world, but that infrastructure is entirely dependent on the exploitative model he deplores. The Pope, as Unintended Revolutionary is, perhaps, not quite ready to follow the full implications of his utopian, populist rhetoric.

Neither are we, emerald hued ones, on Koenigstein Road. Our position, as beacons of energy responsibility, does not quite elevate us to the position of social poets. We are acting in the belief that the same kind of thinking that got us into this mess can be utilized in extricating ourselves from it - that ever more sophisticated, nature alienating technologies can save us from the previous generation of sophisticated, nature alienating technologies; that embedded energy is somehow free provided we use it to demonstrate our conservation bona fides; that conspicuous, individual consumption can be justified if it models a slightly better than average understanding of how to build responsibly in the urbanwildland.

Not a social poet then, but at my best, perhaps, a lyrical observer of the rural scene: a watcher of the weather, a cataloger of the light, of the twilight and of the dark and, betwixt all this, a writer of jeremiads, a doomsayer, an unrepentant nostalgist and occasionally, a bringer of hope - my bleak outlook flecked with gold seams of optimism, like July's drenching rain in an unending season of drought.

As the veil of rain lifted a world of yellow green was revealed, punctuated with late blue-grey evening shadows; the two galvanized corrugated steel water tanks at the base of the hill pulsated with a silvery, aqueous light - their conical lids reflecting, in a colloidal amalgam, the concentrated light of the tropical skybowl. The infinitely subtle colors that surround our house reach through the windows (despite the impediment of their solar bronze coating) and inflect the pure white of the walls. Our house, as I was reminded when dining at a friend’s place at the tippy-top of Foothill, sits in the landscape, partakes of it and is colored by it. Our friend's, sits on the landscape, in sublime difference.

The unexpected July rain had me thinking: are we, in Hawaii yet? Or better yet, Japan.....where Rikyu grey might so perfectly describe the eventide chromatic impact of tropical depression Dolores on the parched chaparral of Upper Ojai? No: just another Global Warming impacted Ojai summer long since returned to normal: dry, bleached and hot - 106 degrees Fahrenheit this Sunday, 16th. August, an Ojai record high for the day. Now, at the end of the month, it is still warm, soft and the day capable, if one takes a moment to bask in it, of inducing a delirious drowsiness. Meanwhile, we thrill in anticipation of a major El Niño promised us by N.O.A.A., which, in conjunction with the hemispheric air pressure variable, the Southern Oscillation, (ENSO) is a reliable indicator of heavy winter and spring rain in California…….

Not then, a social poet enrolled in God’s Army (as proclaimed by Pope Francis), nor a Green Crusader, but simply the creator of a place (by virtue of building a structure and tending the land), and the creator of an ecotone, between town and country (manifested both physically and through the posts of Urbanwildland): a place where I can observe the confluence, at least within my own psyche, of drought and rain, of the wild and the urban and of hope and hopelessness. Alternatively,

We'll keep on spending sunny days this way
We're gonna talk and laugh our time away
I feel it coming closer day by day
Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly

Edward Brigarti and Felix Cavaliere (of The Rascals)

Little Boy Lost

In the time I have spent living off of Koenigstein, there have been three births, two deaths and now, a small boy found somewhere along the road. Sammy Evans was discovered at 7pm on Monday, after he was reported lost some six hours before, having last been seen on Tree Ranch Road.  He was located by a bloodhound named Roscoe and Michael Grossman of Ventura County K9 Search and Rescue. "He's a wonderful kid who got confused and got scared and they found him," his father Steve Evans said. "The gratitude we have is unbelievable."

 In the early evening, as the wind dropped, the search-dog picked up Sammy’s scent and led his handler up Koenigstein Road. The prescient mystic, William Blake, has most of the details right: 

 “Then they followed

Where the vision led,

And saw their sleeping child

Among tigers wild.

To this day they dwell

In a lonely dell,

Nor fear the wolvish howl

Nor the lion’s growl.”

Sammy was found, according to media reports, in a wooded area about a mile east of where he was last seen. No mention was made of finding mountain lions, coyotes or even foxes in the vicinity, although, on occasion, all three roam these parts. The media was mute too, on the exact nature of the woods in which he was found. I should add that young Sammy was apparently awake when discovered and spoke with his human rescuer. No word on his interaction with Roscoe, the bloodhound.

 I am an essayist not a journalist:  a quick check with local scribe Chris Wilson suggests that he is not following the story – he referred me to the Ojai Valley News’ intrepid Misty Volaski who after a cursory report in the local rag has moved on; fellow blogger and esteemed Ventura reporter, Kit Stolz, is missing in action, hiking the Pacific Crest trail somewhere along its more than twenty five hundred mile length; Urbanwildland is therefore attempting to pick up the threads in its author’s amateur, essay-ish kind of way.

 The story, as I have outlined it, is based on news reports. As a long-time historian manqué, however, I understand the value of original research. So it was that I drove the length of Tree Ranch Road hoping to detect some latent, psychic echoes of the parent’s panic on discovering the loss of their child or perhaps of Sammy’s desperation in attempting to flee the family unit. Note that I am discounting the notion that our boy wandered off unintentionally and became disoriented and lost. Ending up on Koenigstein involves traversing the County divide separating the Ventura and Santa Clara River watersheds, and requires a serious intent - a concerted effort to put distance between oneself and one’s nearest and dearest. Was there some inkling on Tree Ranch of what made Sammy run? (Ancient reference: What Makes Sammy Run, the 1960’s Broadway musical based on Bud Schulberg’s story of the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, archetypal Hollywood Jew – stereotyped as smart, ruthless, savvy and crude). Our Sammy is black, ten years old and four feet tall, but he too has demons that impel him to run.

Tree Ranch Road is mostly horse-properties. Not of the Kentucky blue grass, white fence, lush meadows kind, but the dry, dirt and dust, metal corral, hard-scrabble Ojai kind. It appears to be mostly a street of pick-up trucks and horse trailers casually parked in front of one story ranch houses; but as you drive north, across intermittent speed bumps, something changes. The 12700 block, where Sammy was reported missing, is composed of mostly two story structures of dubious architectural provenance and irrigated grounds that have aspirations (mostly unrealized) of achieving estate status. These gardens cling to some European ideal while their northern aspect is dominated by south facing native chaparral hills that rise up to Fuel Break Road, running along the near ridge, as it heads over to High Winds and Boccali’s Ranch. Lush exotics and schlerophytic natives are thus poised in a Mexican stand-off - nature and nurture unresolved and unresolvable.

 Sammy most likely stuck to the road, eschewing what for him were probably the unknown pleasures of bush-whacking over to Sisar, and then going cross-country to Koenigstein. Let’s face it: the kid was in escape mode, out Tree Ranch, east on the 150 then up Koenigstein - terra incognita – until he decided that a rest was in order and he hunkered down among the oaks on our property up the hill (favored hang-out, too, of recalcitrant Thomas Aquinas students, who chug beer and wine while enjoying the westerly views of the Upper Valley and the shade of our ancient live-oaks). I don’t mean to be proprietary, just saying that Lorrie and I are the chumps that pay the Ventura County property taxes on the only ‘wooded area’ directly off of Koenigstein. In other words, “Whose woods these are I think I know”.

 I am delighted to have played host, albeit unknowingly, to runaway Sammy. But it was the trees and their shade that appealed to him. It’s an old story: as William Bryant Logan points out in Oak – The Frame of Civilization, the genus is intimately involved in the recent development of humankind; as he says, “People stayed and went where the oaks were. There is some basic sympathy between oaks and humans.” Sammy was seeking comfort from Quercus agrifolia, the Coast Live Oak, the same tree that helped nurture ten thousand years of successive Native Californian cultures, finally ending with a constellation of balanocultures (oak and acorn societies) epitomized by the Chumash. As Logan notes, these were the last cultures on earth that continued to rely on the fruits of the oak where once they were a mainstay of the temperate belt that girdled the Northern Hemisphere after the end of the ice age.

 When he was nine, William Blake saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”. In Martin Frederick’s, The Life of John Clare, 1865, he recounts that Clare had a favorite place where he would write his poetry. “it was the hollow of an old oak. Inside this old oak, John Clare used to sit in silent meditation for many hours together, unmindful even of the waning day and the mantle of darkness falling over the earth”.

How long did Sammy sit under the oak and what did he see? By the middle of August it is dark not long after eight. Was Sammy mindful of the waning day? What did he plan for the night? A few hundred yards to the south of his resting place are the trampled depressions (now mostly covered by chaparral) of the house sites for a small band of Chumash who lived on the banks of Bear Creek. Foxes begin to snarl as the light fades. Spirits of long dead Indians may still haunt the oak woodlands. Owls hoot and bats jink and fade as the sun drops into the westerly haze.

 Enter Roscoe: slobbering over the child and foreshortening the night of his young life. Safely back in the bosom of his family, under the now ever watchful eye of his parents our Little Boy Lost may yet be planning his next great escape. May Blake’s arboreal angels watch over him…..

Wild America

Peering over time's fence, into the deeply shadowed back yard that is the twentieth century, where still linger the remnants of some fifty years of my phenomenological experience (some lived directly and some absorbed, in my youth from, for instance, a close reading of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia), I would venture that from a viridic (or ‘Green’) point of view, the two most significant events of that particular time (which, with good reason, is called the American century) were this country's establishment of the National Park system and the landing of a man on the moon.

Both events profoundly impact the way we understand our place in the world, particularly in this country (although the branding of Wild America is a global phenomenon) while, at the same time, both remain firmly rooted in the traditions of two millennia of anthropocentric imperialism predicated on our Christian, God-given dominion over the Planet. But the carving out of vast tracts of land in North America as partly manicured, but still plausible wilderness, and the perspective afforded by Armstrong's moon-walk are now key elements in a shift that is beginning to re-wire Humanity's relationship within the enveloping physical, biological and spiritual ecologies that support life on Earth.

Having gotten these two declarative paragraphs out of the way (but to the theme of which I will return) I turn now to the existential matter at hand. The condition of my Life. Right. Now.

I am entirely clad in polyester: perhaps for the very first time. I have long been a fabric snob - certainly since I was dressed as a child in sample clothes that my aunt liberated from Harrods' where she was the buyer for their children's department. Petit Bateau and Grenfell were my brands, although I longed for the more plebeian, provincial togs of my mates, sourced from dubious 'outfitters' in the nearby town or a barrow at the Saturday market. One particular item I craved, affected by the local nine year old toughs, was a spearmint green, rubberized wind-cheater with an elasticized waist and a jaunty flair of fabric over the hips, redolent of a sleeved doublet. I had to make do with a stinking poofter jacket made of the finely woven cotton cloth that had been standard equipment (as my father encouragingly told me) on the Everest expeditions of 1936, 1938 and 1952.

Now, in a strange turn of events, cotton is considered to be fatally conducive, if allowed to get wet, to hypothermia, and the prospective mountaineer, trekker or back-packer in the High Sierras is advised to don synthetic fabrics.  As a member of that third class of intrepid adventurers, I am done up in a plastic khaki shirt and grey, oil-derivative pants, branded as Mountain Hard Wear and manufactured in Vietnam - perhaps by child labor.

Driving from Ojai, up the 33, we three - friends Will, Victoria and I - journeyed over the magnificent Santa Ynez range and into the strange confluence of oil and agriculture, of carrots and crude, that supports Ventucopa and Cuyama. Then arrives Maricopa: a disappointed town awash in poverty porn and the grim nostalgia of failure squeezed between the Carrizo Plain and the huge Midway-Sunset oil field, where only a kitty litter factory on Golden Cat Road in the near-desert scrublands, offers any hope of local employment. Skirting oil-rich Taft, we motored on to the 99, heading into a vast pall of dust and diesel smoke that hung over the Central Valley, blotting out the Sierras beyond; across the 5, past egregiously exogenous fields of cotton and rice, onwards to Bakersfield, the storied destination of Dust Bowl migrants but now a boom town targeted by California’s incipient bullet train. Then, Visalia, gateway to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, beckoned.

After a night at the Atwell Mill campground we arrived next morning, kitted out in our polyester, at the Mineral King Ranger station - the National Forest Service guard-post at the wilderness frontier. Once cleared to proceed on our five day hike we began down the glacial valley and within twenty minutes, like some ambassador of the Wild Kingdom, there appeared a black bear squarely on the trail showing no inclination to move. Once assured, perhaps, that we fully acknowledged that we had entered its ursine world, the bear moved away, lumbering up the meadow.

Although both Sierran National Parks were founded in 1890, some eighteen years after Yellowstone, it was not until the establishment of the National Park Service, under Woodrow Wilson in 1916, that these repositories of wilderness began to assume their contemporary form. They had been founded, more or less, as pleasure grounds, a familiar nineteenth typology, but the new administrative structure was mandated "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”.

Thus it was that the development of the picturesque qualities that had been the guiding aesthetic principal in the nineteenth century was replaced with notions of conservation – the explicit preservation of Wild America within borders patrolled by the quasi-military styled Park Service. Wilderness was henceforth to be sequestered in secure reservations and on full view, in perpetuity, to curious visitors from an increasingly urban and suburban America. The porosity of the frontier, where wilderness leaked into and around the infrastructure of civilization was banished in this organized attempt to corral the unruly (and usually economically marginal) and frame the scenic majesty of Wild America both as a backdrop to Imperial ambition and as a freely available instrument of commercial branding. Nevertheless, we three somehow believed we could transcend these socio-political realities and bask, for a while, in an unfettered natural world.

We walked over colls and passes, along creeks, through pine and redwood forests, across hanging valleys and the bleak geology above the tree line where glacial cirques supported lakes of unknowable depth. We swam in the late afternoons and at night, slept intermittently under bright stars and a waning gibbous moon.

Begun over fifty years ago, the mission to put a man on the moon was a product of American hubris, lingering national shame over the successful launching of the USSR's Sputnick, and the notion of extending the Imperial frontier into Space; it was enabled by an infrastructure established by the military industrial complex (initiated in WWII and expanded during the Cold War), rocket scientists looted from the ashes of the Third Reich, (personified by Wernher Von Braun who headed up the Atlas and Saturn rocket programs) and the inspiring, nationalist rhetoric of a young and supremely charismatic president.

The mission’s success had unexpected consequences: rather than heralding the dawn of America's Space Age (so long anticipated), it was Bill Ander’s iconic photo, dubbed Earthrise, shot from Apollo 8’s first manned lunar orbit and showing the moon in the foreground, that instead turned many Earthlings inward, towards a new appreciation of the fate of their own planet and their obligation to work for the survival of its ecosystems.

1969 was marked by both the first lunar landing (and Armstrong’s NASA scripted “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”) and a massive blow-out at a Union 76 oil well, off-shore of Santa Barbara. The following year, prompted by this environmental calamity, the first Earth Day was observed across the United States marking the formal beginning of the ‘Green’ movement.

Was it necessary for man to step foot on the moon? Was it necessary that I spend five days trudging past fractured granitic cliff walls and metamorphic spires, across scree, up talus slopes and down treacherous moraine drifts in Sequoia National Park?

To have vicariously trod on the moon and seen the Earth from Space, means nothing. To have back-packed in the Sierras, variously dressed in the Wild America, adventure branded, synthetic fabrics of REI, Patagonia and Mountain Hard Wear, means even less. But to be a part of the great up-welling of environmental awareness that began with the founding of the National Parks and that has acquired a new urgency in the last half century – as a tiny neuronic particle vibrating from deep within the ululating harmony of the collective human consciousness, as it is begins to give voice to a new, post-Carbon song of the world  - is something.

Sci-Fi Metaphysics

We are children of the Big Bang. In a helplessly atavistic recapitulation of the Universe's creation story, Humankind has now developed an algorithm by which the little world that we know on Planet Earth, trapped within its fragile atmospheric skin, is exploding.

It began when woman first planted seed and our species began to farm. The human collective went on to establish local markets with its surpluses, then riverine and subsequently Mediterranean trade. These regional markets, transformed by the Industrial Revolution, metastasized into Atlantic mercantilism and eventually global capitalism. Now, in the twenty first century, this slow burn has resulted in the mineral, animal and biotic resources of the planet fueling the expansionary process by which we blight the land with kipple - Philip K. Dick's term for the material stuff that is exploding across the planet.

In other Philip K. Dick related news, we ask the question,

Does the Elfin Forest Dream of Crystal Rain Drops?

Although the author's prescience in his classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968, (on which was loosely based Ridley Scott's 1982 noir sci-fi movie, Bladerunner) can be seriously questioned, most obviously in the setting of his futuristic tale of hovercars and laser guns alongside of cigarettes, pay phones and carbon paper memos, he nevertheless broaches one of the central questions of our newish age: to what manifestations of Creation can we reasonably extend our empathy, our care and concern? Or, as Dick frames it, what is real?

In his tale, reality, as opposed to the ersatz or cyborgian, is equated with the ability to emote in ways exhibited by a normal, well-adjusted human, and our hero Rick Deckard, employed by San Francisco Police Department as a bounty hunter, is charged with 'retiring' the non-human, but entirely convincing replicants, or Androids, that have escaped from Mars where they are offered as personal slaves to induce emigration from Planet Earth - rendered almost uninhabitable following what Dick calls World War Terminus.

The Nexus-6 android is well nigh indistinguishable from a 'real' person, and in place of their Miranda rights, Rick administers an 'empathy test' which differentiates the human from non-human.  Despite its highly sophisticated engineering, the Android does not emote in an entirely convincing manner when confronted with certain hypothetical scenarios concocted by a team of psychologists at the SFPD. Failure to shed a tear when confronted with the scripted suggestion that your dog has died may result in your immediate offing.

How we as a species react to mountain ranges, aquifers or zoophytes and zygotes - whether we can can successfully embrace the non-human with the levels of empathy we customarily extend to each other (and our pets) - clearly impacts our relationship with the biosphere. Can we shed a tear when confronted with the decimation of a plant community or the demise of an ecosystem and generate action out of empathy? Failure to do so may ultimately compromise our place within the biosphere, if not in our species-wide offing.

At Urbanwildland there is a concerted effort to extend the readers' range of empathy towards the natural world via the sharing of my reactions to the local plant community. As your hack chaparral reporter (embedded, with my series 6 i-phone, somewhere on the Wildland frontier) I make no excuses for posting this latest dispatch on my well worn trope of seasonal dissonance in the topsy-turvy world of the Elfin Forest.

'Tis the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness here in the Upper Ojai chaparral. Leaves are turning orange and brown, stalks to straw and seed heads have replaced flowers. Only the doughty, foundational, schlerophytic shrubs retain their full quotient of chlorophyll and amongst them, it is laurel sumac which is putting  on the bravest show with a late burst of creamy pyramidal blossom and still, in places, the bright green leaves of new foliage. Chamise is more typical: seeming to hold its breath while the tips of its branches venture into the red-brown spectrum, yet drawing on its phlegmatic resilience to somehow remain in character as an evergreen shrub. Fruits of the holly leafed cherry are ripening and reddening amidst the plant's still shiny green leaves while rust is curdling the milky buckwheat flowers below.

A thin veil of mist this morning, but across the valley, the deep dark of the oaks can still be discerned dotting the meadows, amongst the barns, houses and refined, Italianate fingers of cypress point skyward in the languorous vapors. Beyond, the oak riven mass of Sulphur Mountain looms like a heavy cloud on the horizon. Calendrically, it is high summer, but the local ecosystem is hunkering down for the season most beloved by that most romantic of Romantic poets, Keats.

There are outliers to this general drying up of the sap: tar weed remains spritely with tiny yellow flowers on its antic armature, deer weed is sometimes still in bloom (whilst others of its kind have succumbed to the seasonal desiccation, their stalks turned an orangey, brick-red); Turkey mullein has erupted across over-grazed pastures in white, psoriatic patches and vinegar weed is newly sprouted, along a stoney track up the hill, with its cornflower blue flowers and strong turpentine smell.

Overall, the mood is somber. Sweet, maple-syrup perfumed California everlasting has decayed into a frouzy fuzz of seed heads on mahogany stalks and acourtia bristles with seed atop its kelp-like structure now turned a tobacco brown. Gauzy seed balls of the local clematis are draped forlornly across parched shrubs, while elsewhere in the Elfin Forest poison oak foliage is now carmine. The plant community may have mostly retired for the season, deep in summer sleep, but does it dream of its awakening, come October, with the first kiss of rain?

That question drives us to the heart of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi metaphysics. When we have empathy, we confer on its subject the presumption of sentience  - we transmit our feelings to what we believe are potential receivers. To impute dreaming in other beings is to imply sentience. In Dick's fictional world, almost all plants and animals have been destroyed in the nuclear carnage of WWT. The remaining humans crave the company of pets and those who cannot afford the high price of the rare living examples, choose replicant animals such as the eponymous Electric Sheep. Hence the titular conundrum.

Living in a deluge of hyper capitalism that threatens to flood the natural world (in metaphoric augury of impending ice-melt) we can expand the ambit of our inherent anthropocentrism by an imaginative embrace of the non-zoological, far beyond, to the global sum of all ecosystems, the biosphere.

James Lovelock has already pioneered the notion, in Gaia, 1979, that our home planet is a living, self-regulating, sentient entity of which we and our civilization are a tiny part (as ants and their anthills are of the human realm).  It dreams, we can dream of it. We can empathize with it; it registers, in some infinitesimal way, our empathy.

Are mountain ranges tickled by the babbling streams that wriggle down their flanks and, do androids dream of electric sheep? Locally:  Does the Elfin Forest Dream of Crystal Rain Drops?

Enchanted Islands

A long, thin, dove grey cloud hung over the Nordhoff ridge, floating like an island in the sky. Enraptured by its color, morphology and juxtaposition I stood and watched as the water vapor slowly changed shape: a shoreline receding here, a mountain swelling there and an islet calving from the mother island's northern promontory.

In those last days of June, it was preternaturally still, unusually humid and very warm.

Early in the morning the sky is awash with a pale silver that my right, metaphor seeking brain reads as ocean and the darker, grey clouds as land or occasionally Cetacea. Come evening, the intense blue canopy has spent the day being over-written by blossoming contrails and criss-crossing wind strewn wisps of stratus (belying the thick stasis at the ground) while bright clouds have drained towards the horizon and sit glowing atop mountain ridges.

Earlier, there was bird song, swirling across the morning - in a shrill punctuation of the temporal equilibrium. The silhouettes of diving, jinking, spiraling creatures paper time and space: black or brown, sometimes with flashes of white against sky or the massed shrubs of the chaparral - they are birds mostly unknown to me, but eerily familiar. One stands out for its sleek raffishness. Almost all black, revealing flashes of under-wing white only in flight, it is crowned with a ragged, gothic crest. It has the distinction of being the only bird in either Sibley's or Peterson's Field Guide to Birds that has no common name. It is known simply by its Latin genus, Phainopepla. Our specimen is almost anorexic in its slimness, crowned with punkish head feathers - aloof, alone and attitudinal.

At last light, the sky is washed almost clean of cloud; a few vaporous bruises to the west flush with pink, Venus is a bright jewel and just above, a more reticent Jupiter; an almost full moon has risen over the eastern ridge - it's light glittery behind a last remnant of wind-frayed cloud.

A realignment of the human presence on planet Earth, such that it is symbiotic with the rest of the natural world, rather than antithetical, might begin with such an embrace, by the collective human consciousness, of the enchantments that nature offers. Theory: I am enthralled by the physical, emotional and spiritual emanations of our enveloping life-giving atmosphere and its ecosystems so there's a chance that that makes me more concerned about their stewardship – and that chance, I think, is worth propagating. So I try to be alert to these experiences, and when sufficiently moved, to write about them.

Many have written of our relationship with the natural world (of which we are intrinsically a part) by enveloping this association in myth, fairy tale or Jungian archetypes. Nature both mirrors and impacts our psychological demeanor and in literature it is routinely evoked to suggest mood: the titles, Under the Volcano (Joseph Lowry, 1947), A High Wind In Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1928), The Man whom Trees Loved (Algernon Blackwood, 1912) and Jean Giorno's Song of the World, 1934, all denote works where natural elements have agency in shaping human destiny.

But increasingly, nature is seen as a place to establish facts rather than mood: to be experienced objectively rather than subjectively. The divide, between those who see the natural world exclusively as an arena of empirical study and those whose embrace encompasses a more pluralist range of enquiry is neatly summed up by the descriptors, Scientist and Naturalist. More broadly, the prism through which one views nature offers a spectrum that spans from science to religion. Locating its value is dependent on your viewpoint. The British Romantics and American Transcendentalists sought a universal spirit that an etheric nature might reveal while those with a more materialist bent, shaped by a rationalist intellectual tradition founded in the mid-seventeenth century, seek scientific information and biological wealth that might add to humankind’s comfort, well-being and prosperity. Both positions demand something of nature.

In calling for an ‘ecocentric spirituality’ Patrick  Curry in Ecological Ethics, 2006, suggests that the problem lies with our firm distinction between the material and the spiritual, inherited from Platonism, Christianity and modern science. He writes that “We shall never be able to understand and appreciate nature until we re-learn to see it both as ‘spiritual’ subject and ‘natural’ object”. Desacralizing nature, a key feature of the modernity project, is the pre-requisite of its commodification, and to that extent resacralization is critical to any solution to the global environmental problems caused by such exploitation.

How we achieve such a thing presumably begins with childhood experience. With some friends in the Arbolada, sitting around an outdoor table, with crickets chirping and frogs croaking as sonic background to a velvety Ojai evening, talk turned to the issue of grandchildren growing up with i-phones and Androids and by extension, missing out on the self-made nature play with which we had all grown up. Richard Louv summed it up in the title of his 2005 book, The Last Child in the Woods, Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. E.O.Wilson has developed the notion of biophilia, by which, as a part of our array of adaptive mechanisms, we are all instinctively drawn to nature.

Given such an innate predilection, only opportunity, it would seem, needs be provided to ensure continuation of this bucolic tradition. I certainly enjoyed opportunities both at home, where my father route-marched my sister and me over hill and dale and the village school where so-called nature walks were an essential part of the curriculum. My early education was thus still very much under the influence of the nineteenth century naturalist Louis Aggasiz, who insisted that children study nature not books. This pedagogical approach worked well at the local Parish school I attended where only the most precocious students learnt to read before moving on to Secondary school at age eleven. I was a veritable prodigy and mastered the art at age nine, and quickly went on to devour the entire Enid Blyton canon.

Based on my experience, early-reading might be as big a culprit as the availability of electronic media in keeping children out of the woods. The Waldorf curriculum of early childhood education developed by Rudolph Steiner, actively attempts to inculcate a sense of wonder in children by deferring reading until nine. Children are encouraged to believe in elves and other elemental spirits that then animate a mysterious natural world. Reading nature thus prefigures a more conventional literacy. Is it far-fetched to believe that this might facilitate what Curry calls “a pluralist, embodied and locally engaged ecological spirituality”?

I haven’t seen the Phainopepla these last few days. Our Houston weather (as someone described it to me) has broken and normal service resumed: a thick marine layer in the mornings shrouding the towns of Ojai and Santa Paula - we, up above it all on the upper reaches of Bear Creek - then warm and sunny days. This morning, a sea of fog lapped at Black Mountain at the west end of the upper valley, its cone shape (as seen from Koenigstein) circumscribed by the enveloping fog, creating the swirling, vaporous shoreline of an enchanted island on the land. 

Pyramid Power

A field of flowers is a powerful thing. Heading up the hill, my vision was filled with the miniature pointillism of the alpine meadow that rose up before me. For a moment, I was lost in the celestial matrix that the tiny flowers described. Asters, phlox, and stonecrop, it seemed, reflected some heavenly order, as though in floral reification of the ancient cabalist's dictum of as above so below.

On this field of flowers there was no sign of its medieval accompaniment, the Unicorn, but once up on the ridge and heading over bitter brush (Purshia tridentata) and sage (Artemesia tridentata), the foundational shrubs of these high prairie grasslands, I saw a female pronghorn antelope and its tiny calf scamper down the track.

Alert Reader, you may have the feeling we're not in California anymore.......

The trails over the 100,000 acre ranch where Lorrie's family holds its annual retreat, are maintained primarily for the benefit of horse and rider. Searching out wildflowers involves both the recurring stench of horse manure and the proliferation of Canadian thistles spread by the horses, for whom the seed head of this noxious weed is a favorite treat.

Buffalo still graze these pastures, but as a domesticated breed rather than the rampaging herds of yesteryear. Cattle have negatively impacted the grasslands because of the constancy of their grazing within fenced boundaries; wild herds of Bison, by contrast, were nomadic over vast areas - grazing, fertilizing and breaking up the soil crust in one area before moving on, and rarely visiting one particular spot more than once in a year. The wild buffalo, despite the density of their herds, tended to have a beneficial impact on the native flora by cropping, enriching the soil and enabling water penetration.

A few short centuries ago, the high prairies were home to vast herds of these animals living in balance with their primary predator, humankind. Then, in the nineteenth century, over their entire North American range, their numbers swelled to over 60 million as the native tribal populations were decimated through introduced disease and systematic annihilation. These thundering herds were then brought close to zero, after the Civil War, in a frenzy of industrial-scale killing by Anglo-American 'sportsmen'.

The horse, closely associated with Plains Indians of the historic era and with ranching (and thus with our notions of the Old West), like the cow, is a non-native species, although it's remote ancestor Eohippus evolved some 50 million years ago in the woodlands of North America. It's extinction on this continent occurred about 10,000 B.C.E. suspiciously close to the arrival of north-eastern Asians bearing Clovis flint points capable of downing the mega-fauna that still roamed the land (despite the stresses of climate change at the end of the Ice Age). The horse, by then of something approaching modern-day size, was collateral damage in this slaughter, but it survived on the steppes of Eurasia and was re-introduced by the Spanish in the sixteenth century to become emblematic of the roaming cowboy lifestyle.

Now, the smaller of the above-mentioned  meat bearing ungulates and the horse continue to be both the real and mythic underpinnings of the guest-ranch where the Brown family were quartered early this June in what was once the south west tip of the Archean era Wyoming Craton, formed about 2.5 Billion years ago, and which constituted the initial core of the continental crust of North America.

The passageways, over earth and through sky, in which I journeyed between Upper Ojai and this ancient, seed pearl Craton, were experienced as placeless, dead zones: Sargasso Seas wherein float the hectoring detritus of corporate America. By plane (Boeing 737) and rental car (Hyundai Accent), across the heartland, wrapped in a civilizational membrane I was held in a state of fecklessness, helpless before the assault of the meretricious and the ribbon-like erasures of Eisenhower’s Interstates: except for a moment when increasing sleepiness forced me to pull off the highway. Escaping the cocoon, I ventured where landscape and memory went unbranded, to a memorial which time had forgot - a memorial to a passageway from the past, the nineteenth century Transcontinental Railway.

Along a mile of dirt road, urged on by signage proclaiming an historic monument, the pyramid that rears up on the featureless plain is almost alien in its red-rock, Martian adumbrations. It retains, in its two-stepped form, an echo of its formal progenitor, the ziggurat. On each of its eastern and western faces, midway on the upper tier, “a shattered visage lies" and thus the monument inevitably (for me) references the collapsed edifice in the boundless desert sands of Egypt, conjured by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem of 1818, and on which, he tells us, is inscribed,

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The land in which we voyaged was genuinely “Antique” (Interstate 80 had already broached the mighty Craton) and truly,

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

What, I wondered, was the source of this double-headed exercise in egregious hubris? Helpful plaques provided by  Wyoming State Parks were at hand. Built in the 1880's a few years after the death of both of the Ames brothers whose bullet pocked faces adorn the upper reaches of the pyramid, and designed by the noted architect H.H. Richardson, it was financed by the Union Pacific Railway to restore the reputations of the brothers who, while achieving the goal of building the Transcontinental Railroad (originally at Lincoln's behest), did so while inflating the costs, bribing half of Congress and cheating the taxpayer.

 But the relevance of what was intended to be an enduring monument beloved of those who traveled the Transcontinental Railway (it was built close to the high point of the iron road) was cut short In the 1890's when Union Pacific went broke, the railway was re-routed to the south, and the tourist town that had sprung up around the memorial withered and died. The monument itself was thus left in the almost perfect isolation in which I stumbled across it - a memorial to a proto-modern passageway, little more engaging of the physical world, perhaps, than today's equivalents, but uniquely capable, in the late nineteenth century, of providing a moving platform from which buffalo might be shot.

At the Ranch, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of cousins-by-marriage about Urban Wildland - both the blog and the house in the chaparral where is lived the life upon which it is loosely based. I mentioned in passing that some find the blog pieces indigestible. I have since come across a far better description of this project in lines that Virginia Woolf used to slam James Joyce after reading Ulysses ("an illiterate, underbred book") in which she characterizes the work as that "of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating"......Well, I do try.

Sex and the City

In the scrublands between Sisar Road and the braided, currently dry creek bottoms that cross the Ojai Oil Company leases that back up to Koenigstein, there's a spot where nothing grows. Until now.

Now, it is transformed by an efflorescence.

The flowers are a deep, reddish pink (a more venturesome writer might even suggest heliotrope but I think the tiny blossoms lack sufficient blue to make them a candidate for this description- and as a chaparral denizen such highfalutin, literary color names are inimical to the cultural setting in which this plant community finds itself (see below)). The stalks too, have a reddish cast. They grow low to the ground forming a loosely woven carpet with a pile that is about six inches deep. They are stunningly beautiful: their name is Turkish rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides).

This sandy patch, strewn with small rocks, pebbles, twigs and scat where previously nothing grew, is about twenty five feet in diameter and has revealed itself, for this moment in June, as a plush Fairy circle.  Elsewhere along the trails I am revisiting, after almost a month in Europe, acourtia is in bloom. It's pink-purple flower heads are lifted high atop stalks wrapped in ragged, papery leaves. In places where there is an understory of popcorn flowers (now mostly dried and gone to seed) there is this floating field of purple with a low understory of grey fuzz. Between the floral plane and dwarfish thicket floor, the antic acourtia, its foliage susceptible to every passing breeze, undulates like a terrestrial kelp forest.

Higher up in the Topatopa foothills on a switchback canyon trail, passing through early morning sun and then deep shade (where the cliff side plants seem to welcome, as do I, their respite from solar irradiation) I notice the white flowers: white sage barely in bloom, convolvulus, sprinkles of remaining-in-bloom popcorn flower, and yucca. From elsewhere in Ojai, I think of the giant roadside flowers of datura, of the at-our-front door California everlasting and everywhere, the heavily planted Matilija poppy (although there is no sign of it in my chaparral neck of the woods).

Of them all, the yucca stands out: exhibiting its buxom blossoms in a wanton display to lure a pollinating embrace of its blooms from its dedicated moth-toys. In the demure surroundings of the self-effacing chaparral, such brazen floral displays seem oddly out of place. What we notice of flowering plants is most often their means of reproduction - their flowers, their sex organs. Unnervingly, the voluptuous Yucca whipplei stands, in spring, at the very edge of species transgression.

Back in the garden (those areas of the chaparral turned into weedscapes by the soil disturbance of the development process) I have been busy culling the aliens, primarily brassicas and tocolote. The grasses are terminally bleached, but the deer weed and tar weed are in bloom, giving a yellowy-green cast to the meadows; the hills, where the chaparral plant community has remained undisturbed, except by fire, for thirty thousand years, remain largely unchanged from a month ago, although the fruits of the holly leaf cherry are now fully engorged and ready for consumption by the family of foxes that has taken up residence just across the seasonal stream to the east of the house.

In short, I have resumed my Thoreauvian transcendental triathlon of trail-running, weeding and ruminating - an activity first mooted, in slightly different form, by Jay Atkinson of the New York Times. In the week that I have been back these ruminations have sometimes been clouded by the pall that descended over me in Paris, where I spent the last three days of the trip.

Paris began as an Iron-age fishing village founded on the banks of the Seine by Pictish bands of Celts. It was a significant outpost of the Roman Empire after Julius Caesar conquered Paris in 52 B.C. Under Charlemagne, it became a center of learning and by the end of the first millennium it was firmly established as the French capital.

As the power of its Kings increased it remained a seat of theological and secular learning. The Renaissance saw Louis XIII's chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, establish the French Academy and build the Palais Royale and the Luxembourg Palace. In the seventeenth century, the Monarchy turned from the Arts to support men of science. The Enlightenment provided an illumination that revealed the threadbare nature of medieval mysticism and thus doomed the power of absolute monarchies (its early supporters had imagined an entirely different outcome: where kings and queens controlled the new sciences to further their hold over their kingdoms). After the Revolution, Napoleon enriched the Louvre (re-purposed in 1793, from Royal palace to museum) with artworks plundered from the countries he and his armies had conquered.

Haussmann's renovation of Paris was a vast nineteenth century public works program commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III which swept away the old medieval city and replaced it with axial avenues, parks and squares. While the plan provided needed light and air and vastly improved sanitation, it was visibly a scheme dedicated to the glorification of the Emperor rather than his people. Now, having uniquely survived the twentieth century's two world wars with nary a scratch, Paris remains a city historically redolent of a great deal of plunder and very little redistribution.

Despotism didn't entirely stop with the demise of aristocratic absolutism. A new kind of tyranny emerged from the Revolution and predictably the response was a military coup. Under the pretext of protecting the Homeland, Napoleon began a world wide campaign aimed at global hegemony. Sound familiar? In Paris, the architectural artifacts of the French saga of Ancien Regime, Directory, Consulate, Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Constitutional Monarchy, the Second Empire (Napoleon III), and the founding of the Third Republic retain their power to chill me to the marrow.

The latest iteration of societal control is now evidenced by a bloated bureaucracy that attempts to fully occupy the vast hulks that loom over the streets of central Paris. The Nazis too, took every advantage of the palatial digs available to them in their conquered city. Now, the Baroque gaucheries and Gothic pinnacles that rise up along the avenues, mansarded with green-grey zinc, or steeple-roofed in lead, still weave their architectonic spell of an authoritarian and spiritual disdain for the sans culotte who beetle along the pavements below.

My longest mile in Paris was the walk between the imposing flanks of first, the Louvre, formerly the palace of the young Louis XV, then the Palais Royale - after Richelieu, home to the Duke of Orleans, regent to the pre-pubescent Sun King and later the official residence of the Bourbons. In 1848, after the Bourbon Restoration, it was looted and trashed by the Parish mob. In 1870, it was fire-bombed by anarchists still acutely aware of the building's status as a symbol of aristocratic oppression. It survived: now, as one moves through central Paris under the dread architectural influence of the first and second estate (the aristocracy and the clergy) one can feel, not unreasonably, a momentary soupçon of regret that the Nazis were unable to follow through on their intention of razing the City before abandoning it to the triumphant American liberation of 1945.

No matter: as the lively bans lieu foment future insurrections (continuing the long tradition of resistance offered up by Parisians to the establishment) and the Financial, High-Tech and Entrepreneurial sectors establish camp in the La Defense district beyond the old city, where the triumph of Capital is announced by gleaming towers of commerce that cluster like giant crepuscular ice shards on the horizon, the irrelevance of Central Paris becomes increasingly apparent - except perhaps as a bizarre chamber of horrors that caters to the blissfully ignorant tribes of global tourists who still gather there.

The great Romantic philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who died on the eve of the Revolution) wrote in his Discourse on Inequality, 1754,

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

We can only hope that the French rule of aristocratic absolutism marked a high-point of such imposture.

It's good to be home where the democracy of the chaparral plant community remains unassailable.

Memorial Day

As Patrick Leigh Fermor observes in the first volume of his pre-WWII walk-across-Europe trilogy, A Time of Gifts, 1977, the old gods of Germany were driven out by an Englishman, St. Boniface, just a century after St. Augustine had arrived in Kent and performed a similar purge of the ancient Druidic deities.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Pope Francis should have decided to proceed with the canonization of Fr. Junipero Sera so that he might stand alongside his predecessors St. Augustine and St. Boniface in the sainted Pantheon dedicated to the eradication of cultures that now seem possessed of an entirely healthier relationship with the planet than is typically demonstrated in the modern world.

The infrastructure of Christianity still remains embedded in Britain, France and Germany (as elsewhere) but its God is now in the process of similarly being usurped by new deities ensconced in the heavenly clouds of consumerism that have descended, like a noxious gas, across the land.

Box stores have mushroomed alongside the churches, abbeys and cathedrals. These latter may still serve as signs of community, professional reverence, and urbanity while continuing to function as places of worship for diminishing populations of the devout, but their primary purpose is now to act as signs of the past against which the modernity of our current lives, succored by the adjacent temples of consumption, may be measured - or as tourist bait.

In the early twenty-first century, at the very beginnings of the Anthropocene, many of our informational, cultural, commercial and social needs may be attended to virtually, leaving the ritual gathering of sustenance in cavernous, industrial buildings a rare opportunity to experience community in the real world. Yet as we push our carts through Carrefour Plus or Costco, carefully avoiding contact with other trolleys and their prime (human) movers we remain in splendid isolation (a condition now abetted by the availability of self-checkout at many such stores).

We are shopping alone amidst urban and suburban infrastructures that privilege fast point-to-point transit (via trains, planes and automobiles) between centers of employment, education, entertainment, and housing that no longer support the kind of rich multi-layered engagement with the natural and built environments of agriculture, artisanal production and support services that I imagine (Romantically) may have existed in the past. We are increasingly physically and socially isolated from such conditions, cocooned instead in the complexities of making, saving, and distributing money (our abstract means of commodity exchange) - geographically and experientially isolated from the world's workshop in the Middle Kingdom and from the exigencies of factory farming, wherever it is conducted.

The France that I have experienced over the past week, speeding through the vastness of its depopulated countryside now devoted to large scale arable farms, remains studded with erstwhile touch-points of intense (as imagined) environmental, spiritual, social, political and economic interchanges - those medieval villages, towns and cities that now function as metrics of our perceived progress and economically, in part, as tourist attractions.

The pay-off for this expensive, resource depleting tourism is the consummation of one of those actual intense experiences felt in the present but transmitted across time through our historical imaginations - epiphanies that enrich our constrained, contemporary lives.

In Europe, evidence of these complex interdependencies of humans, domestic animals, waterways, pathways, buildings and farmlands exist in isolation, supported now by tourists and those city-dwellers or retirees who maintain cottages in the country, or else as nuclei of villages, towns and cities which have a continued viability and have grown, over time, around their medieval buildings. Remaining in evidence too, although less explicitly, are the networks of political and spiritual power in which these communities originally existed marked by domestic, defensive and administrative structures and commemorative statuary. Today, the sinews of power that run through society are largely hidden: sheathed in a camouflage of faux democratic institutions or hidden behind the media burlesque and, quite simply, because power in an electronically mediated world is manifested in less concrete ways.

Walking through the ancient settlement of Saint Armand de Coly in the Dordogne valley, anchored by its massive abbey, I was reminded that the synergies of plunder and redistribution (Karatani's short-hand for the mode-of-exchange that characterized feudalism) can render comparatively benign results of community, compassion and, evidently, spiritual passion. At least this was the inkling I gained walking between the elements of the village now supported by a tourist trade in foie gras, truffles and hand made copper pots, pans and bowls. The simple, unadorned nave of the chapel is an awe inspiring space grounded in a stone floor worn into unevenness by eight centuries of the shuffling feet of Augustinian monks - testament to a powerfully consistent social, political and spiritual ideology.

In the abbey there is a memorial to those of the religious community who lost their lives in World War One; the dead and the missing included the Abbot. Elsewhere in the village is a memorial to twenty or so other souls who lost their lives during the war. The massive die-off of young men during this conflict (still actively commemorated in every community in France) marked the end of the old ways both because there was no longer the male population to support labor-intense, self-sufficient, village-scale agriculture but also because the war marked a tipping-point in the triumph of modernity (heralded by the industrial-scale killing in the trenches) over medievalism, of the overturning of the social, political, military and religious hierarchies that had developed over a millennium and which, it was understood, had all contributed to the apocalypse.

While Europe and many other areas of the world are favored with such concrete evidence of past cultures which can serve as both potential exemplars and warnings of future societal arrangements, in California there is often the sense that there existed a tabula rasa upon which has been inscribed, over the last two centuries, a priori, a triumphant western civilization. In fact, the old spirit paths, the old cosmologies, and the old life-ways of the Chumash were driven out of Southern California by St. Junipero.

Here, the pre-existing human community lived lightly on the land and although M. Kat Anderson demonstrates in Tending the Wild, 2005, that they shaped their environment in subtly advantageous ways, early settlers understood themselves to have arrived in a primordial wilderness sparsely inhabited with environmentally passive, but nonetheless inconvenient, savages.

The remaining physical evidence of the Spanish conquest of California is the trail of Missions along the west coast that were designed to function as the nuclei of an attenuated system of feudal holdings - using the slave labor of the local Indians and the natural beneficence of the land. This arrangement was intended to render the entire enterprise financially self-sufficient.

Of the lives lost in this ultimately genocidal operation there is no record, let alone commemoration, while the chief administrator of the charnel houses is now subject to beatification.

Spring Romance

There's a place where bleached grasses form a ridge when viewed from Koenigstein Road  looking south over the valley in which Highway 150 is enfolded. Nowhere, from this viewpoint, is the road visible but instead, the top third of the north face of Sulphur mountain rises up beyond the grass like a dark scenic flat so that the foreshortened view is of blonde on black.

In the foreground is an old oak set amidst the grasses. Its shadowed leaves create a tenebrous void that somehow sinks into the mountain oaks beyond as though a ragged hole has been torn in the time/space continuum. The valley of Highway 150 is swallowed up in an existential warp - the third dimension, for the moment that this view exists, entirely absent.

The experience is one of a brief dissociative trance, a return to the primitive mind where the intellect is subsumed by the elemental and experiences a return to the animus mundi, the animating spirit of the universe (the light hidden in the darkness) and represents perhaps, a brief moment of clarity in our numbingly mediated lives. Or not. But I am a Romantic, and I cling to these moments of grace (as I choose to perceive them).

Perhaps I had been primed to experience this aperçu by my casual rumination on the meadow flowers of late spring. Along the track that leads off of the local metaled road, in the hard pan over-trodden by Lorrie and I on our evening walks, there are yellow pincushion (Chaenactis glabriuscula), wild Brodiaea (sp. jolonensis), purple Clarkia and Mariposa lilies. Bordering the track are wild oats, foxtail bromes, erodium, rye, native bunch grasses (stipa spp), occasionally the golden-star lily and often the pink flushed milky flowering buckwheat: sometimes, the warm honey yellow of Mimulus monkey flowers.

Across the way, the north facing slope harbors ferns, solanum, poison oak, toyon, walnut, coffee berry and bay beneath the predominant oaks but engulfed in oak shadows it registers as a dark, mounding mass lightly riddled with oak foliage that is scarcely less somber. My mind attuned to the pointillist blooms against the bold masses of color, tone and the blank canvas of the whitening evening sky, I am alert to the phenomenology of this place.

Recently, I have been in England and it is traipsing across the nation's beleaguered countryside long ago that I first developed a Romantic susceptibility of mind - the most fundamental trait of which is a nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past which now, in Ojai, manifests (for me) as a fascination with the tribal society of the Chumash and their predecessors, the Oak Grove People. Like figures such as William Morris, an avowed Marxist, Arts and Crafts designer, writer and architect, the great British Romantics fantasized about a return to the societal structure of the early medieval era, or perhaps to the even earlier times of the indigenous pre-Roman tribes.

To suggest that England is a palimpsest maybe a truism but the image of the much overwritten map reflecting a cultural and infrastructural layering is irresistible in Norfolk where Ickfield and Peddars Way mark the spirit path of the Iceni (and other more ancient British tribes) rising south from Avesbury; Roman roads and ruins lay across the land and the city of Venta Icenorum lies beneath modern-day Norwich; where the earliest Saxon village yet to be unearthed is just north of Bury St Edmunds and where medieval tracks have now been substantiated as B roads, Royal Highways as A roads and the wide, all-obliterating erasures of the twenty-first century Motorway have made inroads into the west of the County.

Wherever you drive, the route is measured in Ancient Market Towns, heralded in signage as though the development of a vicious system of proto-capitalism inherent in regional trading zones and with their rise the devolution of cooperative  systems of patronage (of feudalism)  is something to be celebrated - as glorious way stations in the history of western civilization that David Graeber condemns as 'the first 5,000 years of Debt'.

A return to reciprocity, to a world of exchange and gift giving is a profoundly romantic impulse.  As. Karatani notes in the Structure of World History (2014) in primitive societies, "reciprocity was not limited to the living; it was assumed that reciprocal exchanges were also carried out with the dead (ancestors) and the not-yet born (descendants)." This profound sense of the cycle of life engendered a stewardship of the environment now entirely lacking in a global culture predicated on inexhaustible natural resources existing at the service of the system of industrial production. Thus in harkening back to pre-Raphaelite (and then some) societies, the Romantic outlook contains within it an implicit critique of capitalism. Karatani suggests that in adopting modes of exchange based on exploitation, humans have "disrupted the processes of exchange between humans and nature......The only hope for solving our environmental problems lies in our first superseding  capital and state".

Having identified the three stages that characterize the economic history of mankind as Gift Exchange, Plunder and Redistribution and Money and Commodities (which more or less align with tribal society, feudalism and modernity) Karatani identifies a borromean knot of State, Capital and Nation that supports what he calls the 'the modern social formation'.

In the U.S., the State, comprising the military, the bureaucracies of taxation, intelligence, international relations, domestic law enforcement and justice, exists largely independent of the oversight of the people (manifested by electoral politics and its farcical representations in Washington) but is profoundly coupled with Capital. The mythologies of Nation are dutifully spun by the media in ways that reflect their fractal differences across the so-called political spectrum; manifested every two years in the horse-race ritual of voting; and carefully nurtured in K through 12. Capital, characterized by its relentless appetite for growth, is sustained within its own global bubble of structural imperatives.

In the twenty-first century, coalitions of State and Capital vie for the earth's remaining resources and this duopoly continues to act partially under the guise of fulfilling national mythologies. But as the world continues to globalize, national identities wither and personhood is increasingly characterized by life-style choices rather than geographic allegiance: beware the Hipster nation!

The collapse of the philosophical, mythological and psychological constructs that make up the abstract fabric of nations (which in turn provide the emotional and intellectual bulwark to Capital and State) may well unravel the borromean knot that still entwines all three and thus create opportunities for communities based on a variety of alternative ideologies. It is within the poetic imagination that such alternatives may develop. The mind of the Romantic, which attends to the wild Brodiaea (or the daffodil), is such that it embraces notions of an idealized relationship with the natural world - where we may return to the time of gifts and endeavor (like William Morris) to re-enchant the world.

The Village of the Damned

Awakening on a remote mountain shelf in the Carpathians in 1934, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes, in Between the Woods and the Water, 1986,

“There was no dew; but mist wreathed the clefts and ravines. Faraway spurs rose up, stage-wings only defined by the hair-thin line of their summits against the next vaporous upheaval, each a paler blue as it receded, while the valleys that twisted downhill were dusky with timber."

Sounds like early mornings in Upper Ojai. Missing only are shepherds playing small bone flutes, their wives following in their wake spinning wool between distaff and spindle whom Fermor describes populating these wild reaches of Transylvania;  but on cold mornings here in the Upper Valley there is the thrum of wind machines stirring the gelid air and dispelling the icy fingers of Jack Frost as he grabs for the tender citrus; at other times, the creak of pump jacks and the fluttering orange flag that is the nearby gas flare animate the scene. The settings are similar: the ancient human rituals of sheep herding replaced by automatons or, on Wednesdays, when Harrison sends giant trucks that grab our garbage cans and upends them over their gaping maws, before peremptorily setting them down again and departing in search of fresh canned prey - their human operators almost entirely invisible - by a mechanical ballet, staged against the stunning backdrop of chaparral, mountain and sky.

We get by, somehow, without a roster of Arcadian extras to flesh out the bucolic scene. Shakespeare called these all too human bumpkins 'mechanicals'. We have attempted to dispense with flesh and blood in this postindustrial world and the bumpkins exited stage left some time ago; our service workers are made invisible in the interest of creating the flawless, non-human, technological surface that threatens to shrink wrap our existence. Now we see little of our world being made (but suspect that much of it may be happening in the Middle Kingdom) the better to function as creatures of unalloyed desire – units of economic consumption.

In the village of my dreams there are cottages, workshops, crossroads, a church, a farm, stables, a dairy and dark, inscrutable barns. There's a blacksmith at his forge, a farrier, a butcher, a baker at his ovens and a candlestick maker. There’s a thatcher, a brick maker, a carpenter and a tinsmith.

There are shops - a butcher, a green grocer, a grocery store, a bakery, an ironmonger, a toy store, a book store, a stationers, a newsagent (because these reveries are often sourced by memories of England) and a bank.  There’s a laundress, a tailor, a tanner and a gunsmith; even a furniture maker, a seamstress, a tailor and a cook. There is a winemaker and a brewer, a schoolteacher and an undertaker; a farmer, a jeweler and a silversmith; a woodcutter and a miller, a stone carver, a cooper and a wheelwright. There are agricultural laborers and ditch diggers - and Gypsies. At the crossroads there is an inn.

There is  doctor and a lawyer, even an Indian chief (outside of the tobacconist); a fortune teller and a story teller, a bank teller and a musician, a soldier and an artist, a sign painter, a poet, a dancer and a druggist; a witch and a wizard, a cobbler and a preacher. At a distance is a benign despot, The Good King.

Just your average chimerical village - where human activities are clearly attached to material benefits, life processes are attended to by living beings, and our nourishment conveyed to us by its farmers and its cooks, its processors and packagers; where the business of survival (of community, of life) is transparent. Where, in the daily round, the moving parts, the actors and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers and the mechanicals, are all on full view. A life where there is clarity of exposition. An existence where we understand the plot: where we know what's going on for chrissakes. We should be so lucky.

It is in our dreams, in our fairy tales, our myths and our imaginations that we seek exegesis: simple explanations for complex operations - or in economic theory. The fairy-tale village may be a  construction of our childhood imaginations, built at a time when we remain mostly unaware that a taxman is lurking to enforce the social contract that each and every one of this happy throng (except, perhaps, for the itinerant Gypsies) has made with The Good King. Only later do we realize exactly of what those fairy tales had been grimly hinting – of the menace hiding in the bushes, of a wolf waiting to garnish our hard-won wages.

The Carpathian moment in Paddy Fermor’s sepia-tinted youth existed during the erratic rule of the Rumanian King Carol whose government swung between royal absolutism and an indigenous fascism. A brief alliance with Nazi Germany then led into the long night of Soviet domination, which reached its apogee in the nightmare of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s dictatorship which lasted almost a quarter of a century, from 1965 to 1989. Through it all, victors plundered the vanquished whether by taxes or privation. Fermor saw an Arcadian idyll which, if it existed at all, was perilously brief and owed much to his own romantic vision when seen at first hand then further mellowed by the years through which his journey was recalled - something like the illusory village that lodged in my own callow imagination and that I now, many decades later, happily visit.

 But we need to go back further than an idealized village, that figment from some golden age (reifications of which Fermor wanders through in Eastern Europe), to find The Happiest Place on Earth, in a Magic Kingdom (and that kingdom, of course, was not a kingdom at all), far, far back into time, before a long ago global warming presaged the end of the ice age and of the mega fauna that ranged the open tundra. So far back, that neither is it a village; so far back that this ‘it’, this nirvana, preceded the development of agriculture and of what Kojin Karatani calls “The Sedentary Revolution” (The Structure of World History, 2014).

Karatani makes the point that economic activity began with the pooling of resources within bands of nomadic hunter gatherers; they also practiced reciprocal gift giving with outside groups. There was no incentive for nomadic peoples to store food – instead, they moved to an area where fresh supplies could be obtained. Acquisition ran counter to the nomads’ need for mobility and as long as there was room to roam and mega-fauna to hunt there was no reason to settle – where conflict was more likely with outside groups and, within the band, social malcontents could stir resentments; neither was there any desire to reside alongside their dead: far better to bury the departed and move on.

Between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, as the ice was melting, the steppes and prairies began to be forested and the great herds of mastodon, giant bison and other megafauna began to diminish. At the same time, increasing seasonal fluctuations in weather made foraging a less successful year-round activity. Global warming thus generated conditions prejudicial to nomadic hunting and gathering and fishing began to be of increasing importance to humankind’s survival. River bank settlements became proto-villages. Smoked fish created the first opportunity for the stockpiling of food - initiating the long history of resource inequality. Food supplies were soon augmented by the herding of domesticated livestock and the cultivation of crops. Notions of ownership developed that established the rich and the poor, those who had and those who had not.

 As the climate warmed and the rivers ran more freely, construction of permanent settlements dependent on agriculture initiated a complex syndrome we know as Civilization - what Jared Diamond characterizes as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race" and with it, the degradation of the planet.

 Human labor began to be commodified - something bought, sold or stolen. The weak toiled for the strong; leisure for the few replaced leisure for everyone.  For the many, it was in Civilization, rather than in Hobbesian Nature, that life became nasty, brutish and short.

 Long, long ago, the happiest place had been no-place - where there was little thought of tomorrow and little memory of yesterday. A filmic succession of places, a songline, a journeying embedded within the pulses of the planet as it pursued its irregular orbit around the sun, informed all of human life.

Only the sick and dying were sedentary, confined to one place: the village of the damned. 

Earth Dusted

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, responded to a question on whether the art world was broken with,

 "Franz Kafka once said there is infinite hope, but not for us. I guess that would depend on whether you include yourself in that us or not. There's infinite hope. People get up in the morning and make art, look at art, think about art, and sell it. No, the art world isn't broken".

The world of the Lakota Sioux, indeed of all the Native tribes that once rode over the North American Plains on horses bred from those originally stolen from the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico (who in turn had acquired them from the Spanish at the very end of the sixteenth century), was very thoroughly broken by 1890, when the last of their tribe was massacred by the U.S. cavalry. Examples of the art produced in those two hundred years by this nomadic Plains culture - or rather the housewares, clothing, weapons, tipis  and ceremonial costumes, that are now considered as art - is on display at the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York in a show that originated in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

The American military, newly practiced at and equipped for industrial scale killing, effectively eliminated Native Americans from the Plains between the end of the Civil War and the close of the nineteenth century. Their art is now enshrined in a bastion of New York's institutional establishment (originally funded by those railway magnates, land barons and nascent industrial magnates whose lust for profit doomed the very existence of its makers), lauded in Paris, and critiqued in the New Yorker (Moving Pictures, Mar, 16, 2015) . Their lives taken, now their culture is consumed by Western Imperialist, running dog capitalists and fetishized by their cultural storm troops, the art elite.

How else to interpret Schjeldahl's crass dismissal of the Native American genocide with the bland "what ensued is a story of reservations........But there's an ameliorating epilogue of revivals and transformations of Plains heritage"? Huh? Whatever mannerist reflections still bubble up from those genetically related to the people of these once vibrant cultures in no way absolves the epic criminality that attended their original, nineteenth century, pre-meditated destruction.

Karl Ove Knausguaard asks in My Saga, NYT, March 8, 15, "....the Vikings... discovered America, but they left it, almost without a trace. What if Columbus had done the same?" What if, he conjectures, " the Europeans had said simply, "Let's leave the New World in peace, out of respect for the people there and their way of life," what would the continent look like now?"

The answer, of course, is little different from then, if the land and its peoples had truly been left isolated from the rest of the world. As a thought experiment it reveals a deeply disquieting question: the Met warehouses artifacts from dead and dying pre-modern cultures of the world - what, if anything, makes our one global mono-culture of greater value than these myriad expressions of being? In submitting to the urge to expunge the primitive (retaining only the mute testimony of its surviving artifacts) what damage has been done to our psychic karma?  How wounded are we, as Americans, by our close temporal, geographic and cultural links to those whose genocidal impulse erased the cultures of the land we know as the United States? Now, our Imperial blood-lust dominates our relationships with other nations of the world - a lust weaponized with the frightening capability of terminating the entirety of Earth's human cultures; leaving perhaps, a few carbonized and radioactive artifacts for alien beings to eventually collect and fetishize.

In California, some history runs a little deeper than it does on the Great Plains. Local Indians were confronted by the colonial power of Spain, manifested in the form of Junipero Serra and his Franciscan brothers, in 1769. The Missions built along El Camino Real were the forward positions of a religious and military coalition whose goal was the subjugation and Christianization of the indigenous people who then, it was thought, would become serfs in a feudal system of estate agriculture. In the event, the Missions became charnal houses - ground zero in the entirely deliberate extermination of indigenous cultures - architecturally expressed in crude renditions of the provincial Spanish style.

The material culture of the local Southern California bands was highly developed in the realms of basketry and canoe construction but was limited in its decorative impact. Clothing was minimal, a buckskin skirt for women and a simple skin blanket for the men. Sea otter furs were highly prized. Sandals of yucca fiber were worn in rough country but otherwise the people went barefoot. California casual has been in style for ten thousand years or more.

This modest level of personal adornment and the typical utilitarian shelters of reed thatch and brush stand in contrast to the elaborately decorated clothing, painted buffalo hide tipis and feathered head dresses of the Plains Indians; but the bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche and Blackfoot, who immediately bedizened their dress with glass beads after contact, had formerly lived modest lives as small scale agriculturalists or hunter gatherers.

It was their acquisition of the horse and their adoption of a nomadic culture centered on the hunting of buffalo that has ironically now become the standard perception of Indian life.  The multi-colored, intricately worked artifacts, the buckskin, feathers and red cloth sashes that characterize this short-lived metamorphosis, and that has so entranced us (and the French), was doomed from the start: Anglo-Americans were determined to take the Natives’ range lands and were simultaneously engaged in the mass slaughter of their primary means of material support, the Buffalo.

California Indians endured a slow death well away from this country’s or the world’s attention. It was not until the conclusion of the Mexican America War in 1848, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in the same year, the granting of Statehood, and a little later, the establishment of a rail link across the country that some attention was given to the condition of the Native peoples.

Her report on the appalling conditions of Indians in Southern California ignored by Congress, Helen Hunt Jackson resolved to write a novel dramatizing their plight. Ramona was published in 1884 and was immediately popular but largely misinterpreted as a ‘Romance of the Ranchos’ and spawned a small industry devoted to the romanticization of the Mexican-American Ranchero lifestyle. The impoverished, malnourished and spiritless Indians were no match, in the popular imagination, for the dashing caballeros and senoritas that shared space with them in the novel.

Thus it is that fifteen thousand years of supremely sustainable human habitation, of low-impact, largely peaceable existence and congeries of finely tuned socio-spiritual awareness, have entirely failed to impact the consciousness of their usurpers. For this we should be grateful. The funeral sticks, solstice stones, mano and metate of the Chumash, and before them of the Oak Grove peoples have yet to be collected in global art-world exhibitions. These self-effacing communities of earth-dusted people amidst their earth-dusted clothing, basketry, and thatch, all bathed in the warm Californian light are honored instead by the preservation of their environment – the dour, doughty and drought resistant chaparral: their most un-glamorous companion eco-system, a land that endures now, so little different from then.

On the Road

I woke to the white-noise of a city awakening. It is 4 a.m. in Venice and I feel a mild anxiety slowly filling my consciousness tracking parallel to an awareness that I am not in Ojai anymore…..

It’s salutary to spend time in Los Angeles. How else to confirm the joys of living elsewhere? Yet I carry the stamp of an urban-dweller wherever I rest my head: thus it is entirely apt that this blog is titled Urban Wildland.

I am an outlander, an outlier, an outsider. More urban than wild. But I am at home with myself and at home in the chaparral, that entirely useless, but infinitely valuable eco-system that has never nurtured people – where humankind is intrinsically alien. (The Chumash were careful to situate their villages in areas adjacent to a creek and riparian shade trees or in oak-meadowland). Grizzlies, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, grey foxes, and their animal prey were the mammalian inheritors of this Pleistocene eco-system and all but the grizzly still dominate its dense thickets. In its cleared patches people now farm, build country estates and horse ranches or, mostly hidden from sight, extract oil. Some, like me, live in isolated houses in the scrub-land with cherished access to the city (via Santa Paula to the 126 with a choice of linking up with the PCH, the 101 or the 5) and relish the frisson of the urban wildland - where our expensively acquired liberal educations allow us to parse the relationship between town and country while avoiding commitment to either sensibility. Mostly, we look at the chaparral as an ancient scenic backdrop to our twenty-first century lives.

My parents were both Londoners evacuated from the city early in WWII and ended up spending the rest of their days in rural Surrey. I was born a few years after they made this move, living in the small villages of Eashing, Witley, Churt, Frensham, Lower Bourne, and then, at age six, moving  to a  new Council house on a small Estate (or Project, as such congeries of Public Housing are known in the U.S.) in Milford, a village that suffers the indignity of having a Victorian era Gothic revival church as its centerpiece - still considered, in the 1950's, an example of brash modernity compared to churches in surrounding villages that typically date back to Norman or Saxon times.

My parents were neither locals nor did they maintain cultural and economic roots in London, as did those families whose bread winner traveled daily on the British Rail Southern Region line to Waterloo Station. My father briefly commuted to his insurance job in the City from Churt, but quickly tired of this routine and resolved to work locally. By the time we had arrived in Milford, to live in public housing, we had forfeited any pretensions to belonging to the middle class and settled into our lives of alienation, physically within but socially firmly outside of the stock-broker belt and never likely to be considered country folk, certainly not a part of the local gentry nor, with my father employed as a small time insurance agent, ever likely to ascend to the professional classes. 

Compounding my estrangement from any comfortable niche within the English class system was the fact that both my parents, but particularly my father, had upper- middle class accents of which my dad was very protective and concerned that his children inherit.  After the age of nine I was banned from playing with the local kids for fear that I might pick up a Surrey accent. 

A couple of years after leaving High School, in 1967, the inconsistencies in what might be called my class affect (I was the embodiment of false consciousness) were such that leaving England seemed the only reasonable course. 

In the spring of 1933, a similarly tumultuous time, and perhaps for some of the same reasons, Patrick Leigh Fermor, at eighteen, left to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was an assiduous diarist and eventually turned the material from this epic stroll through Europe between the wars into two books that made his reputation as a writer; a third volume was published posthumously. Although he went on to live an extraordinarily rich life, it was the memories of his walk across a continent that fuelled his literary production into his old age; they remained the well spring of his creative life.

Fermor, who was thrown out of every school he ever attended and never went to a university, acquired great learning at an early age from an adoring mother who was a fashionable haute bohème in London and a famous geologist father resident in India, who introduced young eight year old Paddy to mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps; together they provided enough contacts in Europe's fading aristocracy to assure comfortable lodgings when the boy was not sleeping rough in some remote field or abandoned shepherd’s hut. He also had a weekly stipend of one pound that kept him in food and drink while he was 'On the Road'. 

My journey away from England began by hitch-hiking to Dover and boarding a cross channel ferry to Ostend in Belgium. It was the first time I had left Britain. My previous hitch-hiking experience was mostly limited to Gloucestershire where I had briefly attended the Art College in Cheltenham. It was April and I had a kapok filled sleeping bag. As I recall, I slept rough the first night and then hitched to Paris, then on down the RN-9 to the French Riviera. My first night in a bed was somewhere in Provence - courtesy of a couple who were on their way to their country house. The next morning I was taken to the appropriate route by the husband in his gull-wing Mercedes. Fermor would have moved in for a week and made life-long friends – my almost complete lack of French, despite studying for five years, limited my entertainment value after the first flush of vagabondish appeal. I was, however, given the address of their son in Nice, who was about my age, and I looked him up upon arrival. A deeply entitled young man, he had little time to waste on a provincial lad from England intent on the romance of travel and totally incapable of sampling the wealthy youth culture of the Riviera. I hitched through the string of glamorous resort towns and headed for Venice, Italy.

Emblematic of a trip that wandered across Asia and then ran out of roads in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), I saw the sinking city only through the haze of Northern Italy’s industrial smog: an early success in avoiding the culturally sanctioned sights, lightly sacrificed for the greater thrill of journeying onward and Eastward.  

Now, I find joy in looking north through the foothills to the Topatopas, knowing that onward is a wildland that stretches to Bakersfield and beyond.  It is here, I imagine, that resides the primordial soul of California, nurtured long before people journeyed down the kelp road (in the familiar marine environment that holds constant all the way from the Aleutians), forged in the maelstrom of colliding tectonic plates, pullulating coast lines, disappearing inland seas and finally, grinding mountains of moving ice which, in a warming world, puddled into great rivers, aquifers and lakes.

In my rear view mirror I see the vast conurbation of the Southland, from the teeming tenements of Tijuana to the broad coastal plain of Los Angeles, bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Gabriels, where lives a virulent urban culture that leaks through the canyons and passes, floods the San Fernando valley and is finally sated somewhere just north of Oxnard and the City of Ventura - all woven together with the sinews of a profoundly twentieth century transportation system that found its apotheosis in the freeway.

Somewhere between these hulking, mythic realities lies the urban wildland. It is in this precarious interstice that I have found my place.

Triple Cream

With a stiff neck from watching a one hundred and fifty minute film, I walked out of the Riviera Theater in Santa Barbara on the first day of daylight saving to see a viscous twilight settling over the bay.  Lights had begun to appear across the darkling plain of downtown and at the shore's edge, a white twig-like line illuminated with strings of light was etched into the bay - Stearns Wharf: reduced by distance and the scattering of light through the dust and pollution of earth's atmosphere to a filament, a tiny scratch on my retinal canvas. 

I had, indeed, just seen Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's grand biopic of the early nineteenth century painter. I was primed - stretched and gessoed - ready to receive the faintest optical stimulations of atmosphere, earth and ocean. What I got, as I blinked into the early evening's light, was a cineramic shot of the edenic, sub-tropical, crepuscular, Southern Californian, Spanish provincial revival, stage-set  fantasy that is Santa Barbara seen from the Elysian heights, above the Mission, on Alameda Padre Serra. 

The Riviera Theater is housed in the auditorium of the old Normal School of Manual Arts and Home Economics, built in 1909. The campus later morphed into the original setting for UCSB. Improbably, the Riviera is the one Santa Barbara screen showing independent and foreign movies. The theater still features a heavy beamed mission-style ceiling and amber wall sconces embellished with a gothic ‘R’. Across the street is the newly re-modeled luxury resort El Encanto which utilizes some of the old buildings from the original dormitories for the Normal School.

Turner painted atmospheres of sufficient viscosity to function as dream catchers  -  he created external matrices tuned to capture inner thoughts or visions that might otherwise never escape the unconscious. His subject matter - from the horror of a burning slave ship to the pathos of an old Napoleonic era ship of the line being towed up the Thames by steam tug or the technological marvels of the day, like steam trains - was enveloped in texture, color and impressionist mood sufficient to  stir inchoate emotions from deep within the viewer.  He elaborated  the captured moment in ways that produce a gestalt of meaning that transcend the prosaic realities  of the  original scene. 

Leigh shows us canvases (prepared by Turner's housekeeper with benefits) painted, smeared, scratched, and smudged so that they reflect  those fleeting moments of visual revelation initially caught in the artist's sketch books. The filmmaker's  graceful camera and economical script bring Turner, his domestic life and loves, his rancorous dealings with patrons and the stultifying Royal Academy, his professional jealousies and above all, his fascination with the world of the Thames estuary, so fully to life that our own relationship to place, light and our lived lives is ushered into that delirious zone where the quotidien is ennobled both by a soulful beauty and tenebrous meaning.

This morning, before dawn, a half moon hung overhead giving sufficient light for me to move confidently along the trail; wind buffeted the sage and stirred the scents of the chaparral; no birdsong yet, but the tympanic breath of the warm air filled the aural void. Random fronds of chamise whipped in the breeze and brushed against my body: my senses thus engaged, they resonated somewhere deep within me.

The painter’s contemporary, Wordsworth, practiced a similar recollection of fleeting events in tranquility and then a transposition into enduring verse. Both artists were assiduous in broaching the concerns of the day while expanding the consciousness of their audience with bravura renditions of purely visual, often natural, phenomena. It has not entirely escaped my notice that I practice a journeyman version of this device of sugar-coating the pill. The compulsion to concretize the evanescent too, is an enduring artistic compulsion - as is the use of beauty to cloak intellectual constructs and critiques: they are at the heart of the artistic endeavor. But the Romantics, and Turner is surely one such, were also engaged in the practice of drawing back the veil: of revealing the sublime beyond the everyday surfaces of the world. 

At first light,  the sky is almost fully illuminated and the sun's impending  appearance is heralded by a yellow wash leaking around the back lit silhouette of the Santa Paula ridge. An ocean of fog creeps slowly up the Santa Clara river delta bounded by the headlands of South Mountain and Point Mugu. Here was a Turneresque background in the chaparral: but the master was more than a painter of seascapes, landscapes and atmosphere: he imbued his scenes with social, historical and economic significance.  Turner would require a foreground, at the edge of the waves of fog, and extending picture plane left. A native scene - a collection of thatched, beehive shaped huts clustered along the Santa Clara River valley, blue tendrils beginning to coil out of the hut's smoke holes and about them, the first flurry of the mornings activities animating the plain - would have served. His was an imagination, typical of the nineteenth century intellect, that slipped easily into past worlds.

Turner's, proto-impressionist paintings shot his viewers half a century or more into the future enabling them to see the world with something that approached a modern sensibility. He attached emotion to the everyday and wonder to the extraordinary.  Karl Ove Knausgaard, that voice of the moment who has elevated the neuroses of the Scandinavian schlub to an art form, writes in My Saga (2015),

"The external has to awaken something within; nothing means anything in itself, it is the resonance it produces, in the soul and in the language, that gives meaning to the thing described."

In the chaparral this week, the externalities stirring my soul are the triple cream blossoms of the native clematis, holly leafed cherry, and elderberry. They have no need of artistic mediation - they speak directly to me. Here in the wildland, the veil may be drawn back, transcending the picture plane, abrogating the word and eschewing the moving image. The prickly, scented, untidy and random profligacy of the dull green fuzz that clings to the earth's crust in Southern California - still, in places, in its primal state - can fully reveal the soulful adumbrations so hard won by the Romantics and now, by the logorrheic Knausgaard. It offers transport to the Universe's infinitude where the romantic spirit may collapse into a vertiginous gyre of the sublime.