Wed 2 Nov: Pearly blue with breeze
Sun strains gently through a bank of cloud. Freeway roars. Up on the roof watching my breath, feeling back to cold mornings in the van. In the time between waking up and getting coffee, there was mist; dripping cacti along our paths to the ocean; birdsong in bottlebrush; dolphins.
In winter on the coast in San Diego everything is the color of dolphins: the clouds, the waves, the outlines of palm trees. It could be hours before the sun breaks through and recasts it all in yellow gold. It seems easier to feel spiritually healthy in beautiful, comfortable places. Soft, bright sun, sea, sand. But pleasure, or comfort, does not really put you in the present any more than pain, or discomfort, does. Attention there (on pleasure or on pain) is not quite the same as centering, being still or calm. There are tricky steps to take between these states; and I no longer assume (having been born raised and returned to southern California) that there are preferable environments that make these steps easier to learn about, recognize, and take.
Speaking for myself, however, I know bliss in the sun. I know more than a handful of people who have moved to California expressly seeking healing transcendence. I imagine that the powerful spirituality of some vanlifers develops as a way to make productive meaning out of our generation’s existential aimlessness and poverty. It may be a chicken-egg conundrum: which comes first, New Age-y beliefs and practices, or the self-described life of a ‘seeker,’ one who is literally always traveling the path / on the road? (cf. Dharma Bums). Either way, these ideas invest each other with significance; they’re motivating and motivated. For certain millennials without access to or interest in traditional professional ladders to scale and achieve, vanlife provides a setting with crystal-clear problems, deadlines, and goals: find a bathroom; keep your hands clean; forage dinner; find a safe and quiet place to sleep; fit all your stuff in your van in such a way it doesn’t roll around when you’re on the freeway…
It is warm in California, and the climate is dry, which is conducive to living outside, or living ‘out of’ a car. The climate and the vicious income inequality help explain why so many people live in cars and vans here. The well-documented spiritual ‘seeking’ character of the left coast has existed since this land was ‘settled’ by covered-wagon-dwellers. “California is the telos of western civilization,” one of our surfer friends (an East Coast transplant like JR) told us in the parking lot, half-joking and half-serious.
The correlation between spiritual access and ‘mental illness’ is also an interesting one to consider in light of the unhoused populations here, seeing them/us as one illuminating facet of what you might call the California temperament. For Freud and Marx, in different ways, religion and religiosity are fundamentally coping mechanisms. Freud diagnoses belief as a type of paranoid nervous disorder, an issue with the father. Marx, of course, understands religion as the addictive, soporific tool of the oppressor in class warfare. Both senses may apply to the unhoused Californian.
Esoteric spirituality, meanwhile, has surged in popularity over the last thirty or so years, entering and proliferating in the mainstream of consumer capitalism; adhering, however loosely, to such ideas (and incorporating idiosyncratically elements of ritual in one’s life) may also be a simple way for atomized individuals to cultivate a sense of non-physical community, to generate feelings of connectedness, that disregard constraints like space, time, and tax brackets.
Both the hideously rich and the hideously poor here may be seen chanting Om, even in the same parking lot in some cases (Encinitas). A dilapidated Previa full of shells, feathers, and ratty bedding may neighbor a gleaming black bulletproof Land Rover, itself completely empty inside but for one equally-gleaming Gwyneth Paltrow doppelgänger, chanting. They share the same cerulean palette, the same basic lostness, sense of struggle. Most people, if they can find ways and means there, are soothed by placid surf.
I used to pity the rich—from my childhood, and my teenage friends, I knew how it felt inside their houses—and then circumstances changed. I pitied the poor more concretely. I never felt rich, although we were; feeling poor came easily.
To formulate oneself around this hollow, empty sphere . . . To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out. Then, quietly, it would be as objects placed along the top of a wall: a battery jar, a rusted pulley, shapeless wooden boxes, an open can of axle grease, two lengths of pipe . . . We see this moment from outside as within. There is no need to offer proof. It’s funny . . . The cold, external factors are inside us at last, growing in us for our improvement, asking nothing, not even a commemorative thought. And what about what was there before?
(John Ashbery, from “The New Spirit”)
From the pier, San Clemente, late 2022