To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Joan Didion
I have never been to California. I wonder, should I be exposed to its reality, if what I choose to write would differ. It is a myth, and I have listened to enough music, watched enough films, read enough books that inevitably, the myth has stuck.
It is sun-kissed, sixties hedonism and it is the Manson Family Murders. It is Jim Morrison arriving late, or not at all, to record with the Doors. It is San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and inevitable wildfires. It is a land where rain is a mystery; it is rattlesnakes, liberalism and experimental drug use. It is gun crime, bears and the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. It is that scene in Rebel Without a Cause and it is the catastrophe in Annie Hall. It is Hollywood, it is experimental, it is glamour and it is decay. It is the Pacific Ocean, Scientology, endless highways, Coca-Cola, Venice Beach, Beverly Hills, consumerism and car travel. It is palm trees, wealth, plastic surgery, poverty and original hippies. It is bare-feet, bikinis and volleyball before breakfast. It is contrast. It is beach weather on the coast and it is snowing in the mountains. It is synthetic light, nonetheless real, and it is the deepest black.
It is timeless, yet constantly advancing.
It is construction, yet utterly real.
It is the beginning, and it is the end.
Most significantly, it is an eight-hour time gap. It is one of the few times in my life that my erratic sleep patterns have proved useful. It is chatting to someone eating their breakfast whilst you have tea, and it is avidly listening to stories of a place that you’ve only ever heard, seen, or consumed in imagination. It is still the myth, no matter how real the story seems to be.
You told me you think LA would suit me. I’ve never considered the notion of being anywhere else. I am northern, and have forged my entire identity through belonging to this conflicting space. However, recently I begin to understand the appeal. The younger version of me was appalled that my favourite northern artists would choose to relocate to sunny California yet there they are; Morrissey would rather have predictable sunshine over constant drizzle, and Alex Turner finds it much easier to be a rock-star on the West Coast than the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. The North of England is about as far away from Los Angeles as a warm breeze in summer from the biting cold of the depths of winter, yet to those of us resigned to small terraced houses there seems to be an intense preoccupation with the prospect of fluorescent skies, turquoise waters and endless palm trees.
Maybe it is because they could be so similar, if only we’d see it. There is vastness and there is isolation. There are signs of life, but nothing to actually back up the thought. There is a forceful obsession with nostalgia; we harbour the cultural events that shape us; good or bad, and we allow them to seep unashamedly into our collective imaginations. We live in worlds that are stills from films; every turn an opportunity for documentation. We record only what we know, who we are, and where we exist, because there is no need for make-believe when the world that surrounds us is so full of wonder. We are filled with a subdued pride, alongside the knowledge that by simply being we contribute to the myth and that, for us, the story is intensely real.
This could be any moment, in any American Dream. But it is not. It is this singular place and it is immediately present. From afar it is easy to imagine a vast narrative; witness time advancing as trees gather their full height, experience the passing of day after day, indicated so starkly through precise shadows formed from a glaring sunrise. It is easy to wonder who inhabits symmetrical houses, and who drifted from room to room generations before them. It is so very easy to create a story, built upon broken reports that one has gathered from music, film and literature, which will inevitably conform to the great idealisation of America’s West Coast. Reality does not feature in my version of this space. Life becomes leisure, and leisure becomes art, and art is ultimately pleasure; nothing bad happens in the California my brain has so readily constructed.
We will always differ about which moment is our favourite. I’ve a preoccupation with the presence of people, whereas yours lies more in the natural world. Both landscapes are impermanent, subject to change, through growth and decay. All these instants will never look the same again. They could be anywhere, in any moment of time. But they are not. They are here, and they are now.
The permanence is that you have come to terms with the myth, whilst I still chase a story I’ve fallen in love with.
Camera: Olympus OM1, Film: Kodak Tri-X 400
SAFFRON RAIN 