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October is overripe. The Moroccan lamp hangs alone in the corner of the bare room. In a certain light, Los Angeles is Marrakesh, and tastes like ashes. Hidden in the hills and the valleys are wandering Barbary lions, and a panther who drinks deeply from the banks of the Nile river.
If you go to where the trees create their own canopies of green light, you will find the deep spiritual wells of the land, the way the earth here invites the Other.
The soul of Los Angeles has been preserved in amber, thickening in the trees, melting in the Indian summer. This is the ideal place to dissolve into the Sun. I could refrain from falling in love but as I lie here, the Light overtakes me. Everywhere I go becomes a potential set piece to our romance.
The waves recede, and come in, breathing endlessly, at the edge of the world.
Many have tried and failed to inhabit Babylon forgetting it is also the City of Angels. If there are angels here (there are), they remain in the shadows, growing tall at dusk. If there is a heaven (there is) it might look something like this: along the banks of Nile, thick with reeds and lotus, and the sound of alligators moving through water.
Babylon was once a spiritual oasis, with life coming forth amidst bursting acanthus. Still, there has never been an absolute truth here, both the source of beauty and undoing. The snake who entered the garden lies in wait somewhere in the backlot of Sodom and Gomorrah (Los Angeles).
Los Angeles is a mirage, which tricks people into thinking they can turn water into wine. Have you seen the stars and their temples of gilded lilies? All in the end turns to water, and fire. Elemental effigies of holy wood set ablaze and turned to dust.
I can think of Los Angeles and feel Los Angeles as a state of being in the world, between heaven and hell, and always at the edge of reality.
The pink marble of Hollywood Forever gives way to the white domes indicating the Basilica where one can take the sacrament. Surrounded by a purity of the senses, you can perpetually sense Bethlehem just out of sight. At the crossroads of Sunset and Hollywood Blvd, I come to the Chapel of Milk Grotto. I suck on an olive and dream of a pair of white doves and pray to Our Lady under my breath. I pray that Isis will find the body of Osiris.
In dim rooms around the city, there is the breath of exotica, and the Sheik sings of Kashmiri to his bride by the light of red lamps. I am allowed to sleep and dream in a room heavy with damask and blue velvet. I fantasize of being ravished by a swan in the Temple of Love. In my dreams I almost always drown, sinking endlessly into the depths of the Pacific.
This is the place you find the fragments of illumination. I knew someone once who attempted to touch the sky, only to turn into a cobra, and he is still rising, rising. I told you no good could come from playing with the spirit board.
According to the stars, you and I should be kissing right now, beside the Shalimar.
I find my way to the Temple of Karnak at Luxor. An obelisk is waiting, burning obsidian. I am left to fend for my own vision amidst the sands, and only with what I can see through the window of green glass.
I come across the remnants of Griffith’s biblical Babylonia, where ivory elephants and lyres are strewn across an abandoned ancient palace made of plaster. I can smell the salt of the ocean from here, and the seaweed drying in the heat.
We are still in Los Angeles.
It is November now and it is burning, and the sun is exalted. I lay in the ruins of the palace and dream the day away. I cultivate an illuminating vision seen through stained glass. You turn to me in burning blue light, and your well-mannered eyes pant in the desert stillness.
I can smell the burning incense of myrrh and see the celestial underpinning of the city and as Ra rises and sets, I wonder if his boat passes over the heavens of Los Angeles.
