31 March 2006, Berkeley CA

Final reflections on Berkeley before I leave this Sunday. Would this exercise even be possible if I were leaving, say, London? There, I suspect, I would be confined to to observations on my own experience. A metropolis, almost by definition, escapes description. Mater-polis. Mysterious source of life. Berkeley, by contrast, invites explanations. It is continually describing itself to itself, cacophony of voices from every sub-culture, every two-bit academic with a few letters after his name; but it possesses almost nothing by nature except its beautiful hills, the bay, and the overwhelming biological diversity so typical of California.

This state, with its freshly crumpled hills, young rivers, and warm ocean currents, makes homes for a collection of flora and fauna that is truly incredible to anyone who takes the time to notice. But collection is the wrong word. It implies an abstract catalog of species and genera, when all these creatures live in ecosystems, in relationships, all finely-balanced and harmonious. At least for the most part. There is a certain roughness around the edges. Does this arise from the relative youth (in geological terms) of the place? From a slight overcrowding, unresolved conflicts over resources? From the relatively (now in human terms) recent incursions of Homo sapiens urbanis? Wherever it comes from, conflict attends life, and even has its own beauty.

It is tempting to see the same patterns in the human ecosystems and niches here, and after all we are more extensively and subtly influenced by our environment than we commonly like to admit. There is an almost equally unbelievable variety of experiences to be had here. You can be a ski bum, an urban hipster, a cycling fanatic, a fungus freak, a backwoods hippie, a Burning Man hippie, a stock broker, an activist of almost any stripe, a policy wonk, or a farmer, and with the exception of the last, which requires the one commodity in truly short supply – land – you can move between these worlds in the space of a few blocks, literally and figuratively. Identity is always in the process of becoming, and everyone is for the most part painfully aware of their own transitions. Beneath the fragility of all these conceits is a unified habit of self-analysis.

It will be clear to anyone who has lived here that this is something of a caricature. But some degree of caricature is required for a description of an ecosystem, for the whole point of such descriptions is to set one place in distinction to every other. Is there such a thing as a riparian zone? Certainly not in the Platonic sense: every place that could take that name has something different about it. Creatures do not play pre-determined parts only, but create them as well. One species of ant may be better suited to a particular soil, may attract a certain type of frog, may store particular seeds, and in all of these there is both necessity and contingency. Necessity in who needs what, contingency in who happened to stumble into the area.

My point is that I am aware of the temptation to reify these labels at the expense of what is actually there, and I would not wish it to be inferred that I think Californians uniformly self-indulgent, complacent, or flaky. Or that I am not aware of how this magnificent diversity makes room for people who would otherwise be pigeonholed, forced to live in relationships inimical to their natures. But it is the environment we live in, and it molds us whether we embrace it or reject it, and whether we do so consciously or not.

With that in mind, let me attempt to return to my initial observation and hazard a distinction that will show the relationship between a true metropolis and its counterpart, the provincial city. It is related to the idea of self-analysis, and this sense that a metropolis does not admit of it. There is something of the elemental in the metropolis, a power which it possesses by nature. Such power does not need to be examined to be felt, in precisely the same sense that an organism does not need to be rational in order to be conscious, alive, or – and these are ultimately related – influenced by its environment. A metropolis is more than a collection of buildings and highways, more than a collection of beings or their activity. It is all of these things, but its form, its nature, and its power derive from what causes the aggregation. This unifying principle is, put as simply as possible, an image.

There is an inescapable tendency to read our own conceptions into history, and our failure to really sympathize with how the ancients could worship their bewildering pantheons of deities, has, I think, to do with an inability to understand the power of images. We do not quite know what to think of the gods, and tend to either reduce them to meaningless conceits, or amplify them into political tools or woefully misinformed mechanistic explanations for natural phenomena. But they are something a little more than that, and they emanate from that part of the psyche Nietzsche identified as the Dionysian. There is something lurking in the old images of gods. Kali literally was a nightmare, the sort that leaves you sweating and shaking upon waking, Zeus literally was justice, and it is all to easy for us, now that we have forgotten how philosophy dispelled those images, to forget that we once worshiped them.

Something else must be said about the power of images, and it is that in them there was a certain confusion of the physical universe with the human. It was never clear whether the harshness and capriciousness of Jovian justice reflected something in human nature or in Nature itself – in the general order of things, if that capital letter is bothersome. In fact there is something bothersome about Nature: it endows us with desires directed at our survival and at the same time visits us with famines, plagues, storms, wild animals, viruses, and earthquakes (to name a few). We spent much of our history trying to extract ourselves from nature, and we were fantastically successful. Only to find that in doing so we had to destroy something that was a part of us. The earth is scarred with our habitations and mines, and we have driven all kinds of animals and plants extinct. When the ecosystem that supported a species is no longer coherent the animal can only live in zoos and preserves. I doubt I am the first to see a correspondence between those places and our own cities. We too live in isolation from the places that gave birth to some of our deepest longings.

But it is not for me to make a judgment on the history of civilization. I know what I would do, given the choice between Tyre and Rome. I only wish to point out that the metropolis exerts the same sort of power that the gods once did. It holds sway over its inhabitants and those of its provinces by holding up a particular image. That image is, like those of the gods, a reflection of some aspect of nature, human or otherwise. The provincial cities, which if Berkeley can be called a city at all it is one par excellence, are forced into a peculiar self-consciousness by being drawn toward that image and simultaneously pushed away by a need to establish their own identity.

What is that image, and from where does it emanate? In this age of fleeting and widely traveled information it is tempting to say that geography matters little, but I think we need look no farther afield than Los Angeles. Some will no doubt be offended that I allowed my gaze to go even that far, but in fact there is no city so desperate to get out of LA’s shadow than San Francisco. This was not always the case, but in some sense LA has managed to capture the world’s attention with its peculiar image. If I were required to be its iconographer I would unhesitatingly paint it as a man trying on a part in front of a mirror.

Determining the image of Chicago is left as an exercise to the writer.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 31March2006 )