The myths we carry

[pjthompson]

A series of random, synchronous events have colored the last few days...

1

It seems like I've been encountering "cityscape palimpsests" a lot this week, first reading of them and discussing them in the blog of sartorias, and discussing them in my own blog. Then last night I was standing in line at Sav-on and the cashier started discussing with the woman in front of me how different Lincoln Blvd. used to be in the old days.

"Like how?"
"Well, there used to be open fields all around here."
"And," I found myself saying with an overwhelming sense of dejà vu, "there used to be stables here."

So of course I had to talk about the stables from my extreme youth which occupied the exact spot on which we stood in line.

2

I went to late lunch-early dinner at Panini, my favorite coffee shop in Marina del Rey (just across the way from Sav-on). It's situated just about where I rode English saddle for the first (and last) time in the opening ceremonies of a gymkhana. I was a good rider (for a five year old) on a Western saddle (with specially shortened stirrups), but I did not like that English saddle. The rider in front of me was leading the horse I was on (I was stuck on the saddle just for the adorable factor), but I got bored halfway through the ceremonies and decided to slide off the horse and get out of there. Much hilarity ensued in the crowd, followed by much horror as I wove in and out of the legs of the horses. The horses were very patient and I emerged unscathed.

3

At the coffee shop I was reading The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur. I've been reading it on and off for months and months and months. It's a fascinating book, but I don't seem to get to it much, what with all the other reading and writing I do. It's become my default Saturday afternoon at the coffee shop reading material. The section I picked up on today talked about the myths we humans carry around with us.

"Myths," says Harpur, "are imaginative templates which, when laid over the world, make sense of it. We cannot think without them, because they provide the structures which determine the way we think in the first instance."

These myths include not just the obvious—one's spirituals beliefs, et al.—but such things as the analytical method, societal norms, national identity, etc., etc. They are all a form of myth, all part of how we define ourselves and the filters through which we see the world around us. If you were from Papua New Guinea, for instance, your templates would probably be radically different.

And of course this made me think of the week's "cityscape palimpsest" mojo floating through the air and those ghosts of memory we also overlay on the world.

4

After eating supper, I felt restless so decided to go for a drive. I wound up on Culver Blvd. heading towards Playa del Rey, then I drove along the beach towards Manhattan Beach. I thought, "This stretch of beach hasn't changed much since the old days. Well, all except for the big honking airport just to the east." I realized I couldn't remember this stretch of beach all that clearly as my family and friends tended to go to Venice or Santa Monica beach, not the one on the butt end of LAX.

5

In Manhattan Beach, I turned around and drove back the way I'd come. By that time the sun was getting low in the sky. The sea was a slate grey, highlighted by blue-white facets of light. Small craft bobbed lazily out on the swells and in the distance, large tankers headed north. Garth Trinidad on Chocolate City began to play Sade. She sang, "I couldn't love you more/Never change a thing." It was prime—the perfect song for the perfect moment.

But when it was over, I couldn't help saying, "Sade, darling, everything changes. Nothing remains the same. Especially human beings."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Before the airport took over that portion of Playa del Rey my dad used to speed down some of those steep hills. My sibs loved that, and I hated it, but pretended to like it.

Later on, after the airport took over, built the north runway, and then introduced 747s, we as teens used to go sit on the hill directly under the takeoff path and look up at the enormous 747s screaming directly overhead, our teeth and bones thrumming with the noise and shockwave.

Weird to find out it hasn't changed since then--behind it, of course, my old neighborhood is still a ghost town, blocked off by fences.

[pjthompson]

Oh, so you used to live in one of the "cleared" neighborhoods, huh? I always thought that must be so strange to not be able to visit the old 'hood.

Of course, where my childhood home sat is now a huge public storage place. Such is life.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yeah--they started moving some of the houses out on giant flatbeds at three a.m. back in the early seventies.

My brother and I made the mistake of visiting the old house in 1977 or so--after my sister had had it, when it was condemned and there was no chance of selling it. All run down, and of course after it was empty, the streets were overgrown with weeds, windows all broken or boarded, graffiti and smells everywhere.

But those houses all got taken out eventually, and now that block is just blocked off.

[pjthompson]

Did they move any out before the seventies? My surrogate grandmother, Elsie, in the old neighborhood bought a house from a cleared neighborhood and moved it onto her property. I had thought it had been from an airport condemned neighborhood, but I was just a kid and may have gotten that wrong. They demolished her place (which I loved), an old rambling cottage from the early 20th century, and it upset me a great deal. The new house was nice, but I loved all the hidden corners of that old place.

Later, when the public storage people bought out the block, the "new" house got torn down, too--so it moved from one condemned neighborhood to another. Elsie was long gone by then, though.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think they starte carting them out around 1971, though I could be wrong on that. But not much earlier.