Last week on the summer solstice LA was bathed in a quivering sheen, as if the world itself passed through a set of translucent stripper heels. After work I walked the canyon trails above the city—grassy hillsides golden and brittle, lizards poised in the dirt—to take a break from my pet insoluble problems of the day. With each step up the steep incline I felt a little lighter. Stray thoughts popped into mind: I remembered how I’ve seen a handful of friends grow into themselves with the miraculousness of YouTube time-lapse videos, whereby some nondescript floral bud erupts into an exotic blossom.
One afternoon, maybe ten years ago, by coincidence I met R in a parking garage. She seemed lost, I gave her directions, we became friends. That afternoon she wore a crisp vintage dress cinched at the waist; she looked like a doll beaming cheerful perfection into the void of that Mid-City concrete superstructure. In those days she lived in a Hollywood apartment next door to a guy who played video games while swearing at wall-piercing volume through the night. Even in our super brief back-and-forth between cars, I felt an inexplicable nod to each other as creatives and vectors on related paths. I don’t know how that happens, souls have hooks.
Not long after, she passed a billboard on I-5 offering free hypnotherapy, so she called the number. For a few months the instructor at a hypnosis school demonstrated techniques to his class using her as a subject, and she said that apart from being pretty boring, the hypnosis implanted a deep confidence she’d never been able to achieve before. Bit by bit her work expanded and some years later she became a sensation in her field. By then, in a complete 180, her day-to-day outfits had simplified into rando t-shirts and jeans, though this happened so gradually I only noticed in hindsight. It’s not about clothes—apparel is usually a proxy for subtler shifts, another way we might express mimetic and other desires. R always stood out as one of the most creative people I’d come across, yet when we met her force had been shunted into producing an image that wasn’t actually in synch with the genius of who she was. That diversion took a ton of energy, which needed to be freed.
It’s so much simpler to think about other people’s stories, to look back and architect a beginning, middle and end, teasing the hinge on which a transformation swung. As I noodled on this Kasra’s latest piece hit my inbox, with his reminder that the so-called turning point—those dodgy I-5 hypno-school moments—in before-and-after anecdotes tend to be way more complex than they seem via the usual telling. A typical post on How This One Self-Help Trick Changed My Life never quite reveals the author’s decades of minute choices along an unreplicable path. But for a brief moment it does make living seem irresistibly clear-cut. I love them nonetheless. It’s fun to tell stories, maybe the problem is holding on.
The next day I head back to the trails above LA, as if they were a still point by which I could gauge the seasons, of the city and my own. The summer light is celestial with a powdered sugar aura; I shut the car door and climb out of my befuddlement toward that tissue-y sky. And I think about how my body keeps rejecting medications with vehement side effects—a patch of skin necrotized and slid away, I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night for a week. The stories of my internal monologue are just as intolerable, usually some version of I can’t possibly do x because y. I need the wide open space of bleached gradients, misty pollen and smog, to loosen the grip of those sneaky old programs. Fear loves to embellish itself, to embroider mini world-prisons for our protection. And I wonder, how do we slough off the thick, calcified fictions we’ve told ourselves about who we’re supposed to be, to uncover what we already are.
Incredible! “as if the world itself passed through a set of translucent stripper heels”
...love it!!!
Gorgeous amble ... "souls have hooks"!