What Am I To Do

My stomach sinks each time I fly into Los Angeles with forehead pressed into the triple paned plastic of the plane window. The 4,000 square miles of city begins long before landing. That means one can watch the suburban swirl of cul de sac-ed homes, the sunlight winking off backyard pools, baseball diamonds & the resolute flow of asphalt rivers of road for nearly 30 minutes. It never fails to fill me with awe & terror.

I feel I owe Los Angeles an apology for my last article. I made it sound like a place corrupted, where every person has lost his mind, a city beyond redemption, a layer of Dante’s purgatory.

In truth, Los Angeles morphs and distorts based on my mood, reflecting back to me precisely where I am on the scale of joyous to despairing. A temperature gauge for my mental state. On most days, this is my favorite place on the planet. There’s a reason I’ve lived here for nearly 15 years. In my little east side enclave I see friends and acquaintances everywhere I go. And even those I don’t know feel like comrades in some common cause.

The problems with this city are the problems with humanity at large. They are just more fully laid bare here. We face the waste. We live in the bottleneck of too many cars. We look the homeless people in the eye. We watch the rainbow slick runoff race unimpeded to the drain to the ocean. Our horizon is smudged with smog. We aren’t doing anything different here than anywhere else in this country, it’s only more concentrated. We see more truly if anything. And this scares me. But I think it’s a good sign when the place you live in frightens you a little bit. It holds you to the razor’s edge of life.

And there is so much beauty - the unconditionally beaming sun, the friendly palm trees, the incredible diversity of flora & fauna. And what is dearest to me by far are the people here. I think many transplants to this city relate to the feeling that they didn’t really belong to the cultures they came from. There’s an almost telepathic conversation going on with the people here - it’s unspoken but understood that we simply get each other. For example, in Los Angeles when someone asks me what I do and I say “I sing and make music” no one has ever suggested I go on American Idol.

I am from a land (rural Virginia) in which some people want to condemn the economic, moral & cultural complexity of cities like Los Angeles as depravity. But I’d like to suggest that perhaps they are just afraid. They are afraid of what parts of themselves or their actions they might see in it. Afraid of the actual freedom to be who they want to be. Or maybe they feel condescended to by the urban intelligentsia. Or maybe the changes in the world that are often born from highly populated centers of art & culture & fashion & film are uncomfortable because they are new and newness challenges tradition.

I don’t know the tactical approach to remediating the great chasm growing between different groups of people in this country. But I feel that the answer can always be found in the question. And so to the question “how do we fix humanity” the answer must be “humanity”. More humaneness. That whatever beliefs, grievances & identifications constitute the self you perceive yourself to be, that is only one little fragment of who you are. That our shared humanity assures us we have much more in common than not.

I am moving away in April and the negative criticisms of the city are simply my way of steeling myself against the pain of letting go of this place. I don’t really resonate with love songs in the way I used to, but this one, “What Am I To Do” by The Paris Sisters has felt like the perfect summation of how I feel about this break-up. I don’t know who I will be on the other side, but I am willing to take the leap. Stepping outside the shade of the great and terrifying wings of this city of angels.

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks
for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?
Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.
You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms
out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.
- excerpt from The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke

What Am I To Do by The Paris Sisters

((in our recording of What Am I To Do Guy Blakeslee is on guitar))