Carson Dreams the L.A. River

Chapter 7 – Carson Dreams the L.A. River

             Never has it been as it seemed; never the way as in dreams. Under the shimmering surface of languor – a sweet cool profusion never cloying – lay a bottom hard and man-made, a coarse skin partition laid down in methodical slabs. The liquid that came for miles on high, or from a fiery depth, way low in pre-thought, isolated and unreflective and too real, was suffocated by the great wall, under which the nutrients of the soil, the timeless molecules, were kept clamped and aggravated in their tight understanding.

I saw the beauty of this slinking and meandering surface, whose origins I guessed were extraordinary and grand, but also, and mostly, quite plain. I was drawn to this moving light and I dipped into its surface and opened my mouth to drink it because I must drink, we all must drink, and our thirst is unquenchable, and my mouth was filled with fabrications and by-products, the plastics and synthetics of a cramped and mad civilization that lives by the science of shifting rationalization, and the gewgaws of myriad colors reflected in temple mirrors, where we become giddy with the recognition of our form as it swishes and cavorts in our little play field that has been all marked out, we think, by us, by the unfolding of our entrails, rushing on as we are, like horses driven to sweat, and dogs panting after the sweet flesh of foxes and hares.

I want to taste your beauty so ferociously that I will kill myself and others just to glimpse it, caress it for a mere moment and then all the other moments that were a disappointment, were a frustration, were a sorrow because of the losses sustained and the years without your beauty, even in dreams where your loveliness slipped from my hands at the moment of union and I awoke angry at myself that even in dreams I could not possess you; even in my dreams cruelty prevailed someplace where I had no control, punishing me, restraining me from…what? A simple desire to be whole? Not even that is ours, not even in our sleep. Even there we struggle fitfully with what wishes to destroy us, to deprive us of our pleasure.

I see this tributary and I do not think of hope. I think of what has been taken. I think of the ceaseless wanderings through the desert of all the solitary nomads who have been sold dreams because that is what we do. There is no conspiracy here, unless to be human is a scheme to fool us, leading us on, whispering that the self is immutable, permanent. This river begins immaculate and reaches the sea rank. This desire begins innocent and reaches the heart and the brain deadly and cut by appetites for domination. This will to possess beauty is the need to devour it. Morality gets in our way. After all this time we are unsure why it gets in the way, seeing its device for the weak to survive, to keep from being eaten.

I look from my parapet, from this span above time, and I see an encampment of favelas and barrios, ghettos and hoods, heaving, thriving, procreating; killing, maiming, torturing; filching, loving, sucking; scavenging, deceiving, praying; forgetting, dying, crying; lamenting, whoring, scoring; making music, making art, making poetry; envying, striving; waiting, waiting, waiting; counting, counting, counting; the days, the years, the goddamn time it will be, the time it will take, the time that must be served, before a man can be cholo grande, big daddy; before a woman can be the pussy everyone adores; have her own talk show; star in her own movie; shit on the help for all the years her mother was shit upon. Revenge, revenge, revenge. “You there in the hills,” they shout, “we’re watching you outside your Italianate gates. We’re watching you count all your beans and train your juicy daughters and your lanky, taut sons to take up from where you’ll leave off (hard as it is to believe that you’ll ever leave off, that you’ll ever have to leave, that you’ll have to DIE, DIE, DIE, motherfucker!!!). We want what you have. You make us want what you have. We will have what you have one day, because this is America, no? This is the land of the free for all, where we’re at liberty to steal your soul, and there is justice for all who can pay. We are standing on your slick ass streets that we bend down to scrub. We’re watching you as we cut your grass and clean your gold and porcelain shit contraptions, where you deposit daily your chewed and masticated braised MAHI MAHI, your low fat CRANBERRY MUFFINS and MOCHA FRAPPES. We’re watching you. We’re copying your every move. We’re studying how it’s done. And it’s easy because you are so goddamned stupid. You give away all your secrets. You think your lives are inviolate, that nothing will ever happen to take away your entitlements. And while your wives are having their fat sucked out by big fucking sucking machines, by their oily plastic surgeons, and your husbands are having thousand dollar hormone treatments so they can muster a hard on to fuck their secretaries (not you), well, we will be fucking, and fucking, and fucking some more, and we won’t be taking any pills to stop the bambinos from flying out the chute, swarms of fuckin’ Mexicanos, and pitch pitch blacks, and soon we will overpower you, by our sheer numbers. And then:  We will make the laws! We will elect our politicians! We will decide who gets paid, and who doesn’t, and who wins, and who doesn’t, and who gets a cut, and who doesn’t, and who shall die, and who shall live, who shall lose and who shall win. We are watching you. We will know, when our time comes, just exactly how it’s done.”

Where one wishes to see a river, the river is dry. The river is not even real. Going there for some kind of resolution, even absolution, and I find a cement cataract harnessing the rain, the little rain, and the run off, the slop of our dreams, finding its way via streets and sewers, the scraps and afterthoughts of our dreams, in which we have tamed, finally, nature, and turned her into a cash machine, nothing but a dispensary feeding our desire. Nothing is attained without a medium. What experience, thoughts, no memories, ecstasy or sorrow can there be in these ungainly spindles of water, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen? Even these forms cannot be navigated without a name, a description, a definition. Not even our rivers are free. Our rivers, an image of ourselves, carried along to the embrace of infinity – not a cool impersonal emptiness, but a richly textured infinity of meaning and purpose, a concord afforded us at last, with no medium, no naming, no striving, or the envy and fury that rips at us as we contort and tumble beneath the canopy of skeletal trees and the scorched sky.

Where is the center? I see the steel and glass erected with the honeycomb cells waiting to drip. They are hollow. They are brittle. The insects, the colonists are fleeing the center for the safe periphery, where the monochrome shines. We fugitives from the center, making our getaways in our sacrosanct buggies, those inviolate tubs, transporting, shielding, another medium cutting us off, shuttling us all to our pods on a 30-year promise, where we’ll commune with electronics, with images that are shaped and brushed with mercantile precision, with pecuniary elaboration and the schemes of stockholders’ best wishes. The experiment has failed. The great experiment in melting pot idealism. Free market money makes us free from the obligations of the body politic. It buys us a ticket away from the neighbors we don’t like because our cultures don’t blend, refuse to blend. Our money exempts us from plurality. It buys us protection from the other tribes. Let them have their rights. Maybe. Let them make their money. Maybe. Do not force me to like them. Do not force me to pretend we are alike. Los Angeles, you do not make us alike. America, you forge our unbridgeable differences.