A dispatch from Los Angeles
☀️ We’re back with the Medium Newsletter
Issue #244: Louise Bourgeois, imperfect information, and the best outdoor photography gear
My philosophy professor once tried to help me understand Kant’s theory of the sublime. “It’s that feeling when you’re inside a house during a raging storm,” he said, rolling a cigarette. (It was 1992 and students and faculty still bummed smokes off each other.) “You get that tingly feeling in your spine because you imagine the danger, but you’re ultimately safe because you’re inside.” He took a drag. “If you went outside into the storm, you would just feel fear. The sublime depends on being safe.”
On Tuesday night in Los Angeles, where I grew up and have lived for the last 21 years after a stint on the east coast, it was supposed to be just a wind storm. With an increased risk of fire, sure, but Angelenos hear that all the time. I left work early so I could climb into bed with the dog and listen to the Santa Anas rage outside. This is always a rush, just like the professor said.
Needless to say, this didn’t last. I live in Silverlake, and am safe as I write this, even though there are five fires still burning. Friends from out of state ask what happened, but I know as much as they do. I don’t leave the house because the air is heavy with ash and I’m afraid I won’t be able to rescue my dog if my neighborhood goes up in smoke. I too get the news by toggling between screens, and see the same images: smoldering ground, lifeguard towers on fire, abandoned BMWs.
What I do know: Somehow, a brushfire started in the Palisades, and unprecedented winds made it impossible to contain. Then there was this puzzle: The city had enough water, but not enough water pressure to move it uphill (with me?) resulting in dry hydrants. The Eaton Canyon fire, which spread to Altadena and beyond, may have been caused by an electrical tower that caught on fire. A few years ago, SoCal Edison, which serves Altadena, had to cough up a big settlement after the Woolsey and Thomas fires and it will be, to put it mildly, annoying if it turns out they didn’t learn anything from that.
On Tuesday night my friend from Altadena called. “I think I should leave,” she said, in an eerily calm way. By Wednesday morning her house had burned down. Then another friend’s house burned down. Then a third. The Reel Inn, where I would get fish and beer after hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, is gone.
Now, I feel something I can’t describe, and it’s not the sublime. (Where are those cigarette-rolling philosophy professors when you need them?) It’s a mix of horror, fear, empathy, a large amount of gratitude that I’m safe and an equal amount of guilt. “How are you?” a friend texted from New York. “I don’t know what this feeling is,” I wrote back.
In between texting friends about all the places that burned down (“Pali High is gone,” I texted my Hami High friends), I stumbled upon this story by Luthfi Abdillah. He describes his relationship to a cumulonimbus, an SAT word for a menacing looking storm cloud. He (unlike me) succeeds in articulating a feeling that seems to have no name, a feeling in relation to something wild, something uncontrollable, something wondrous, writing “the cloud forced me to slow my vehicle, turning my internal monologue into a soundtrack for the journey…[a cumulonimbus] like all of nature’s elements, has its own way of being beautiful.”
I’m not saying these fires are beautiful. They are not. What I grapple with is how thin the line between beauty and destruction seems these days, making it harder to get that familiar rush from the outside world. What are your thoughts?
Also worth reading
- As someone who struggles with writer’s block and would sometimes rather do a deep clean of the sink than write, I loved this story from the archives by Emily Sandiford about the artist Louise Bourgeois. Writers can learn a lot from her process (be bold, see the lighter side, respect the process). I especially loved her refusal to limit herself: “She never committed to a single movement, and resisted narratives about herself constructed by others…”
- Speaking of the sublime, these photos of a sailing trip to St. Vincent and the Grenadines by Cat at life+wild capture it for me. Orange and soot-colored skies over dark water, double-rainbows and neon pink clouds are a good reminder not only that nature continues to offer up a daily overdose of beauty, but that Medium is also the place to share your visual art, especially photography.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
If you too want to get out and document our wild, wild world (but stay safe please!) Derrick Story has some practical tips on choosing the best outdoor photography gear for bad weather. Two lesser-known brands that are built for the outdoors: Olympus and Pentax. “They are tough, and they have great glass.”
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb, Harris Sockel, & Carly Rose Gillis
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