68
PARTISAN REVIEW
Barbara, oil-wealthy air kissing a changing seascape. Economy battered,
landscape ravaged by earthquake and fire, California is yet consecrated by
our America. What exists beyond it lies outside its boundaries but not
outside its influence. California has rooted itself to the nation's spiritual
core. And like it or not, it stands there alone.
Its problems today may be the final nail in the coffin of America's
five-hundred-year-old romance with the West. So far west of the West
that it defines itself as end point
to
America (forget Hawaii, a weigh sta–
tion for Japanese tourists on a shopping spree), west of California is not
a question of geography but an image of what we were supposed to
evolve into as a nation. California never had much to do with what
Americans wanted, but the "California dream" did. As it sheds its role as
western endpoint, California may yet emerge as starting-out point for
the West's East.
No other state inflicts its presence on America the way California
does. Lifelong New Yorkers like me are ashamed to feel so passionately
about a state able to make claims on us even as we frame the future
without it. Staring across this narrow beach at an ocean dotted with oil
rigs and boats that look like models floating in the Central Park sailing
pond, I bend into a landscape that itself seems endowed with the power
of prophecy.
It is easy to be caught up by the state's singularity. The very air hints
at cataclysm. Why does this calm ocean fill me with visions of world's
end? Neither bang nor whimper - but with a slide into the spuming
depths, Triton rising from the ocean to create California empty, the way
it was meant to be. Space dictates one's sense of doom here. As the tide
covers the sand in scrimshaws of water and foam, I think of the rhythmic
drift of our potential end. Like Matthew Arnold's Darwinian sorrow, a
vision of obliteration transforms this superb sunset into a prelude to disas–
ter. Fire, earthquake, flood. On the thin shore I stand, in awe of
California on its way down.
Fantasizing its death throes makes me want to chart California's de–
cline. I want things clearly labeled, like the plastic skeleton in my chiro–
practor's office. Santa Barbara waiting for the Big One demands order,
propriety. Like two opposing linemen in the
NFL
grunting at each
other, the New York-California symbiosis of bruised bodies and tired
egos seeks new definitions. Unable to break free of the ties that bind us
to that other coast, we New Yorkers talk of California with fear: Stay
on your guard, be suspicious of sun and fog, trust no one.
COl/Ira
California - an intimate bile accompanying a monotonous
