Brown: The Last Discovery of America (23 page)

Here in San Francisco, in summer, sleeping revelers incorporate an aching horn into the narratives of their dreaming. Coast Guard officials tried a few years ago replacing foghorns with more efficient sonar, but the citizenry wouldn’t hear of it. After a hundred years, we demanded our accustomed meteorologic lullaby. Foghorns were reinstalled at taxpayers’ expense, and worth every penny, for those accustomed to being awakened know it is the horn that makes fog—whimsically and at concupiscent intervals—manufactures fog to puff it under the bridge or pump it down the hills to swill about the wharves. Bellows atop poles broadcast the agnostic alarm with a basso blast—Boris Godunov in H
₂
O.

Except for the sound of a horn, fog never enters a room. Or swirls about an opened door, as in B-movies. Even when you are engulfed by it, fog remains distance—not even as tangible as regret. There is nothing to be done, nothing to cancel or celebrate—picnics, plane flights, executions will all take place—nothing but to note the conditional. The unclear. The tarnished. You are alive. You wake up staring. Turn away from the parted curtain. Another foggy day.

This summer I am mordant enough to name the last summer of my youth (it is the afternoon of my fiftieth birthday), I have come to Point Reyes, a promontory from which one can see for miles along the coast of California, north and south. The ocean, seen from this height, is tarpaulin.

Just below the lighthouse, warning signs have been posted by the National Park Service. There are photographs of nineteenth-century shipwrecks. Cautions to swimmers. Illustrations of the physics of undertow. Charts of species of shark.
Beware, beware . . .

Whales pass by here.

I descend to the water’s edge. Appropriate for a middle-aged man to turn up his collar, roll his cuffs, and play at the edge. The ocean is young—unraveling and then snatching back its grays and pinks, celadons, and the occasional bonny blue. The relentless flirtation of it loses charm.

Adam and Eve were driven by the Angel of the Fiery Sword to a land east of Eden, there to assume the burden of time, which is work and death. All photosynthetic beings on earth live in thrall to the movement of the sun, from east to west. Most babies are born in the early morning; most old people die at sunset, at least in novels of large theme. We know our chariot sun is only one of many such hissing baubles juggled about, according to immutable laws.

Fuck immutable laws. Fuck mutability, for that matter. I just had my face peeled. I go to the gym daily. I run. I swallow fistfuls of vitamins. I resort to scruffing lotions and toners. Anywhere else in the world I could pass for what-would-you-say? In California, I look fifty.

Besides. The older I become, the further I feel myself from death. It is the young who are dying. A few days before her death, Lynn and I came to this beach. She wore a red baseball cap over her bald head. Lynn regretted the impression our bodies left in the tall grass over there. She took off her sunglasses to face the brightening scrim with burnt-out eyes. I wondered, at the time, if she was forcing herself to remember this place for eternity or if she was consigning herself to Nature (the motion of the sea intent upon erasure).

I remain unreconciled to the logic of an alleged Nature. I am unnatural. As a boy, I read Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast.
What I remember is the furious storm as the ship tossed about the Horn, all Nature pitched against us. My Dana was not the Dana whom D. H. Lawrence mocked for returning to Boston, to Harvard, to a clerk’s position, a clerk’s fizzing kettle. My Dana was a white-throated, red-lipped romantic who sailed away.

Odd the convergence of loss and rescue at one place. A few years before, Lynn met a malign shade here. She had been picnicking with a friend from New York when the shadow of a rifle trespassed upon their blanket.
Pick up your things!
In the guise of gathering, Lynn slammed a purple-spilling bottle against the shadow’s skull, then kicked its softer groin. The two women ran through the tall grass, across the parking lot, to safety.

Around the rock where I am sitting now, seabirds gather to rotate their silly heads; zoom unblinking lenses toward my fists, patient for the manna I might be concealing there. It is the last day of July, the feast of St. Ignatius. The wind is picking up and the waves come pounding in from the gray towers of Asia.

This morning I had been studying an illustration on perspective in the encyclopedia because I was interested to understand the vanishing point. Might not the vanishing point allow for another, an inverted vision, an opposite vertical angle? If lines of perspective cross at one point, might they not continue after that point to open up again? This is the same day I read in the paper that the universe is flat; that the universe is expanding outward, rather than gathering to a foamy flush as those galactic photographs suggest. I begin to imagine pagodas and lanterns, gardens of spice, that lie beyond this scrim.

Imagine how California must have appeared to those first Europeans—the Spaniards, the English, the Russians—who saw the writing of the continent in reverse, from the perspective of Asia, adjusting their view of the coast through a glass, silent and as predatory as these birds.

The little person in the encyclopedia illustration of perspective is me. A little man wearing a suit. He is fifty. Little dotted lines travel from his eyes out to the horizon (which we shall call the Pacific) to stop at the vanishing point. The dotted lines are tears. That much we know. But where is Lynn? That is the question confounding all perspective.

Lynn again:
“What if . . . ?”
As we toured an exhibition of Japanese armor, Lynn marked the similarity of Samurai head-dresses to American Indian war bonnets, buffalo heads, horns, plumage.
“What if the Americas had been discovered by Japan, rather than Spain?”

What if ?
What if you are not a clump of sea grass, my darling? What if your pleased soul rides a lantern-rigged gondola through the Catholic arrondissement?

By the time he returned to the East Coast, Richard Henry Dana was about the same age I was when I moved to Los Angeles. I was determined to throw off all clerkishness. Only to become a writer. Twenty-five years ago in L.A., one sensed anxiety over some coming “change” of history, having to do with finitude and recurrence.

Rereading Dana, I am struck by the obvious. Dana saw California as an extension of Latin America. Santa Barbara, Mon terey, San Francisco—these were Mexican ports of call. Dana would not be surprised, I think, to find Los Angeles today a Third World capital teeming with Aztec and Maya. He would not be surprised to see that California has become what it already was in the 1830s.

From its American occupation, Los Angeles took its reflection from the sea, rather than the desert. Imagined itself a Riviera. Knowledge of the desert would have been akin to a confession of Original Sin—land connection to Mexico was a connection to a culture of death. Los Angeles was preoccupied with juvenescence.

More than aridity, America fears fecundity. Perhaps as early as the 1950s’ film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
nightmare images of pregnant pods and displacing aliens converge. Fecundity is death. (To manufacture life is to proliferate death.) Who’s going to pay for fecundity? The question reminds us of scarcity, for we live at the edge of the sea. What is scarce is water. Metaphors Californians summon today to describe the fear of the South are, appropriately, fluid. Waves of people coming. Tides of immigrants. Floods of illegals. Sand, the primordial image of barrenness, uncivilization, becomes an image of unchecked fertility.

The reflection of the sea has its perils, too. One Sunday in December 1941, Hawaii became the point on the map Americans would remember as our vulnerability to Asia. After the war, Hawaii began our boast:
The Pacific is ours.

Nineteenth-century California resisted the Asian approach. Though coolie labor built much of the American West, Chinese laborers were persecuted by California for coming at the continent from the fishy side. Celestials, we called them, had a devilish language of crossed sticks and broken banjo strings. The custody they exercised over their eyes inferred they had discovered evil here but they were keeping the knowledge to themselves. Inscrutable, we said at the time.

Now Californians complain that Asians are taking all the desks at the University of California.

Coming upon the continent from the Atlantic, English Puritans imagined the land as prehistoric; themselves cast onto Eden. The Indian they named Savage, rather than Innocent, keeping innocence for themselves. The Atlantic myth of Genesis worked so powerfully on the first non-native imaginations that future generations of Americans retained the assumption of innocence—a remarkably resilient psychic cherry. Every generation of Americans since has had to reenact the loss of our innocence. Smog over L.A. was the loss of our innocence. Vietnam was the loss of our innocence. Gettysburg was the loss of our innocence. Ingrid Bergman’s baby was the loss of our innocence. Oklahoma City was the loss of our innocence. The World Trade Center was the loss of our innocence. Other nations are cynical. America has preferred the child’s game of “discovering” evil—Europe’s or Asia’s, her grandfather’s, even her own.

The east-west dialectic in American history reasserted man’s license to dominate Nature—the right endeavor of innocence. Railroad tracks binding the continent are vestigial stitches of the smoke-belching Judeo-Christian engine, Primacy o’ Man. Having achieved the Pacific Coast, settlers turned to regret the loss of Nature. That is where the West begins.

Twice a year, along this coast, crowds gather to watch the epic migration of whales, north to south, south to north. The route of the whale holds great allure for postmodern Californians, because it is prehistoric, therefore anti-historical (as we will ourselves to be), free of all we disapprove in human history. The Pacific totem pole might be an emblem for a New Age, marking the primacy of Nature over man—a new ani mistic north-south dialectic that follows a biological, solstitial, rather than a historical, imperative.

The old east-west dialectic in America moved between city and country, the settled and the unsettled. The plaid-suited city slicker disembarked at the western terminus of the nineteenth century to find himself an innocent amidst the etiolated foliage, the overwhelming light, the thicker blood, the conversations in Spanish. Today’s children, children of the suburbs, hitch between tundra and desert, Alaska and Baja, cold and hot—versions of extremity beyond which unpolluted Nature lies or oblivion or God.

The sole religious orthodoxy permitted in our public schools is the separation of paper from plastic. Not so many miles from this beach, great-grandchildren of westering pioneers chain themselves to redwoods, martyrs of the new animism.

There is a stand of eucalyptus in Pacific Grove, seventy miles, as the crow flies, from where I stand. Californians have for years gathered there to experience themselves as northerly, as spiritually related to Nature. It is a skimpy, tawdry sort of Nature, in fact—a city block in length, in depth—surrounded by motels. This grove is the meetinghouse, nay, nothing so plain; this grove is the cathedral of the Monarch butterfly. Every autumn, caravans of ragged wings propel themselves hence according to some fairy compulsion. It is a mystic site. We stand with our mouths agape; we look up, up, up—
Look! I see them!
—circling clouds of stained-glass wings descending in a gyre. Despite the surroundings, the beauty of them is so surprising, so silent, so holy as to be wounding to the soul, for they resemble what clouds of angels in baroque paintings resemble, what toccata and fugue resemble, or what galactic kaleidoscope resembles.

I assume you know more about butterflies than I do. I experience awe, not expecting to, but do I misunderstand the thrall of instinct displayed to me? The solemnity is one of death, is it not, as much as of beauty? The spectator infers from this rite that the individual life does not matter. The pattern matters. Generation matters.

There are things one must do. There are things one should do. Moral imperatives propel my soul’s journey. One’s human instinct is to murmur superstitiously, to enumerate the things one must do before Nature pulls one under. One is drawn nevertheless into this beguiling gyre. For these angels describe existence softly, silently as petals fall. We cannot hear the engine that has shredded them. We see only flecks of amber, drift of blossoms. These angels are several generations removed from ancestors who departed this grove last year; several generations removed from ancestors who will return next fall. They alight to hang like sere leaves upon the branches. As the sun turns its face from them, they quieten; some will die, fall, blow away, to catch with scraps of paper, gum wrappers, and twists of cellophane in the crevices of logs. But others will gather strength, others will hoist sail to rise like windmills on torrents of air, to worship, I suppose; to submit once more to the same cruel engine, the same piercing joy that grinds the sea.