You would be excused for mistaking the above picture for some apocalyptic event overtaking Los Angeles. It is no mushroom cloud of course, it's ordinary wildfires ravaging the California landscape. These are mythic images. Fire behind a city, the plumes of smoke dwarfing the spires of men, and the crackling, consumption of the fire draws ever nearer to the city.
The images below are equally mythic. Cars in the foreground, flames in the back. Flames creeping towards a cabin on a hillside. Flames fanning across a hillside, devouring power cables and engulfing electricity towers. You might think these fires are a world away, but fire is becoming part of the national vocabulary in Australia, in Greece, in South Africa.
While I was in Cape Town over the past few days, James Kunstler was in Los Angeles. He offers these descriptions:
To say that LA is all about cars is kind of like saying the Pacific Ocean is all about water. But one forgets the supernatural scale of the freeways, the tsunamis of vehicles, the cosmic despair of the traffic jams. The vistas of present-day LA make the Blade Runner vision of things look quaint in comparison. I found Hollywood utterly exhausting. On morning walks down in the buzzard flats below Sunset Boulevard you almost never saw a human being outside the protective carapace of a car. I think I was the only person who ever walked down Melrose Avenue this calendar year.
The life of this nation became little more than a "narrative," a story-board, a montage of wishes superimposed over the harsher mandates of reality. Hollywood now is a mere cartoon of what Wall Street and Washington have turned into. We're a civilization of fluff now, riding on a river of toxic sludge.
The city of Los Angeles, indeed the whole state of California, seems exhausted too. Apocalypse is probably such a rich theme out there precisely because everything about that particular way of life seems to be nearing its end - whether it's the fiscal fiasco or the water supply, or the aerospace economy, or the music industry, or the once-great university system, or the Happy Motoring fantasy of cruising for burgers in what Tom Waits called the dark, warm narcotic American night.
As for me, I made use of cheap flights and cheap motoring and had a thoroughly good time. I suppose the difference is while I would dearly love to make a habit of doing fly-drive tourism, I know that it's one of those entitlements our parents had and that we expect will be around for the course of our lives. It's interesting to note that children alive today will live to see some of the goodies and gadgets run out. Whereas my generation was one where there was a before-TV era and television was added into our frame of reference, children will tend to see things subtracted, like airline travel, corporations, choices ultimately.
I noticed on Survivor China that the group voted for Todd and so proved that we acknowledge and respect liars and manipulators above all else; we're dangerously susceptible to flattery and ego massage, and lying to each other and ourselves is part of the currency of reality [whatever that means].
I drove over 800km over the course of 4 days. I swam with whales [well, 200-300 metres away], I even found some of South Africa's first wind turbines. Of course, Eskom has recently announced plans to push forward with three mammoth coal mines, at a cost of around R500 billion, whilst shelving three other projects, one a solar array near Upington, another a more elaborate wind farm project and a third also related to renewable energy.
So you have three projects, based on fossil fuel, going full steam ahead. And all the renewable projects get stalled. And then you wonder why the pictures above have any relevance. If you're not sure of the relevance it means someone [and you] have been lying very effectively.
For many reasons we cannot continue to pursue the sort of energy ambitions and the level of pollution we have to date. Coal is an easy option. It's not expensive. But environmentally, of course, it is. It's expensive in terms of the climate. So do we want the lights on, and we're prepared to tolerate fires and famine? It looks that way.
Speaking about mythic images, I was walking through Hout Bay harbour and I chanced upon this. A stairway, a gangplank, to a ship. The boundary of this causeway is festooned with razor wire. I found myself thinking that with each step, each day that progresses, our path becomes a prison and we leave behind us choice upon choice upon choice.
But we don't have to despair. That's a choice too. One morning, during the course of the past few days, I went to Llandudno and did a 1 mile swim in the sea; fairly rough sea I might add. It wasn't my intention to swim; I'd been in the waters of False Bay, alone, and became cold and frankly, unnerved. I didn't expect to want to try the even colder waters of Llandudno. But I did. I did the swim in 30 minutes on very little preparation. Curiously I intersected, during the race, a swimmer that I'd photographed earlier in the weekend, who would finish some 11 minutes ahead of me.
Which brings me to the following point. I talk about beauty being truth, and this swimmer whom I photographed I found attractive not so much for her outward appearance, but for that inner strength. Of course daily swimming sessions manifest as muscles and clear skin. But the true beauty resides within; and that is a choice is work, to try, to champion some or other cause. It seems to me the world has gotten it back to front. We try to rubber stamp beauty; cover it in make-up and dress it up. You might produce something fairly attractive with plastic surgery and fancy clothes, but it doesn't last. What does last is something deeper. Who we really are; something nature has bestowed on us, not men. And as long as we listen to our own lies and those who profit from telling them, we risk seeing our hopes catch fire.
It is time the fire came from us, because the time to fight fire with fire is here, and now. The fire I am referring to, of course, is the antithesis of lies and deceit. It's truth and reality.
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