A New Context

Ceramic wall at White Adventist Hospital

This month I have finally gotten back a usable personal computer and my writing materials, packed up since October. During the intervening months, among random reading and lots of physical labor on the townhouse we were renovating, I paid attention to two writers who, in their quest to reboot and renew Western culture, hark back to Nietzsche. Jordan Peterson, holding up Beyond Good and Evil, from which he proposes to read in one of his many Youtube videos, says, “This is a book, but every sentence in it is actually a bomb.” One of Nietzsche’s ideas which Peterson uses is that “there is something about the body that is integral to being. … It’s not really possible to have a disembodied being."

James Hans takes this further. In The Sovereignty of Taste, he writes: “Nietzsche believes that lives are built on an ongoing awareness of the rhythms and patterns of which bodies are a part. Humans become who they are through careful attention to the dynamic interchanges with the world that constitutes their lives, a form of attention that prompts them to note that their lives are always tied to a context.” He goes on to say that human lives are aesthetic engagements with the world long before they become encounters with the social world. Thus, there is a mechanism within people, taste, which they hardly notice, but which constantly reminds them to seek out ways to adapt to the rhythms of the world so as to feel comfortable in it.

I am quite aware of my own physical rhythms, mostly through tai chi study, and I knew that moving 400 miles south would have some effect! Though we are still in California, our new home in Los Angeles is quite different from the Bay Area. Before I can settle down to write (and I am very anxious to do so!), I have found myself orienting to the new. Los Angeles is a vast campus of creativity and it will be quite a while before I feel that I know it at all. But I am making a space for myself in which my body is happy!

First I need to know the cardinal directions, where the sun is going to come up and go down with relation to our apartment, how it is going to lay its late afternoon slanted light on the bed, whether there will be enough to plant a bougainvillea beside our back window. I would like to know the same of the moon, but we have only been here three weeks, and almost every morning and evening have brought light fog, locally known as June gloom. These atmospheric conditions keep the place cool, but I haven’t seen much of the moon.

I get used to the noises, which are city noises. There is plenty of birdsong, but also helicopters, planes, yapping dogs, our neighbors’ music and smoke alarms (as well as our own!), people coming and going, children’s feet running on the floor above, even the occasional domestic brawl. The street sweeper comes through twice a week, as well as civilized garbage trucks. In the afternoon, the ice cream vendor plays its sappy little tune and another man honks a horn as he bicycles by, to see if you want fruit drinks.

I walk the wide, and often empty streets, looking at the houses with their southern plants, succulents, aloes and palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus, datura, jacaranda and brilliant red poinsettias. Most are enclosed in grills and fences, with more stones and concrete than lawns, reflecting a landscape where it rains seldom. The nearby hospital complex has beautiful murals and sculptures as well as a weekly farmers’ market. There is also a well-watered park close by, lush with grass and trees, where I do tai chi near a children’s playground.

I’m timid about transportation so far, given my limitations, but there is plenty of it, both buses and the Gold Line train within a few blocks, which can be used to travel all over the city. The central library downtown is on a direct bus line from our house and the local library is within a 15-minute walk, oriented more to Spanish speakers. My favorite grocery is a Whole Foods smack in the middle of the newly-branded DTLA (downtown LA), but I also like to go to Little Tokyo, only ten minutes away on the train. We’ve found many restaurants nearby, and a few coffeeshops where I can stop in to write or read.

It’s quite a different context than I am used to, just across the Los Angeles River (i.e. trickle) from the city itself in an old part of town. I found bricks under the asphalt on a nearby street. I am trying to be open to everything at the moment, though my own needs and rhythms are strong and emerging. I have never doubted that people are primarily aesthetic creatures. We express it in many ways, in sport, in music, art and dance, but I was also thrilled at James Hans’ statement: “I conceive of the great literature of the world as the ongoing testament to the taste that drives the species.” Very soon now, I will get back to Line, Marty and Paul.