Left Coast Thinking

About a year after moving to San Francisco, I stood in the public library in front of the small shelf of books on Russian literature. The big room had a carved, painted ceiling and was airy and bright. The classical Beaux Arts building reminded me of the library where I had worked for several years at Luther College, though it used the sad Dewey Decimal system for classification. Its collection was also sad, compared to the university libraries from which I had recently come: Oxford and the University of Michigan. But what could you expect?

A friend turned up, Ira, who was among the Jewish intellectuals I hung out with in Michigan. “You know, I think I’m beginning to get it,” he whispered as we stood there along the wall of the big reading room. “I’m beginning to understand the west coast.” 

By this time I was way ahead of him. Though I was still combing the library for information on my favorite Russian authors, I had spent much of the last six months of my off-work hours either drunk, stoned or blitzed out on psychedelic drugs. It was 1971 and I was coming out of that brief hallucinatory period, but I certainly did “get” the west coast. And it wasn’t because of the drugs. It was due to the generalized field of exploration and experience that seemed so open to me at the time.

“I think it is more about who you are, about your feelings, than what you think,” Ira said. For Ira this was progress. I thought of him as a woolly-headed mama’s boy. “It isn’t so much about competition, as about authenticity,” he said, and I could see that he too had been having experiences.

I nodded. I was so happy my own journey had taken me to San Francisco. I thought it was the perfect place. And I did think place mattered. In my own mind I had committed to the city, sure that if I stayed in one place, the community of like-minded people I sought would collect around me. I don’t remember seeing Ira after this chance encounter. He probably went back to Brooklyn. But I have thought a lot about what makes the left coast different.

Mostly it is that individuals don’t identify as strongly with institutions and social strata as they do on the east coast. The great nature religions, Taoism and its offshoots, and Native American beliefs, are more in evidence here than Christianity. And then, of course, we are geographically on the Pacific Rim, that great ring of fire created by plate tectonics under the Pacific Ocean, which makes us have more in common with our neighbors around this ocean than with those on the east coast of the United States.

These large forces, plus the coming and going of people on the coast, has led to a more loosely organized society in which individuals thrive, but don’t have a thorough underpinning or root structure. There are exceptions, of course. Families often have very strong bonds and groups of people accomplish a great deal. But I can give some anecdotal evidence of what I love about the left coast which has led me to be a unique hybrid of Minnesota and California culture.

For over 30 years I have studied tai chi with a group of people from the Kai Yang Tung Academy, based in Los Angeles, but with roots in Hong Kong. Teachers and students are now dispersed all over the world, but its thickest concentration is in California. Tai chi is an aspect of a wholistic art of living which depends on practice, either alone or with others. I still practice a little every day and feel connected to other practitioners.  My inner commitment to it has had a huge impact on my external life.

I somehow gravitated to Asian friends and philosophies long before studying tai chi, in any case. Books on Taoism made complete sense to me and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (an acceptance of transcience and imperfection) described the world I saw around me. I love coffee, But I can’t handle the caffeine, and I early became a tea drinker in the Chinese tradition. And though English and Russian literature, especially in stories of the countryside, entrance me, my deepest connection is to Chinese poets, for whom mountain landscapes, weather, blossoms, rivers and trees make up reality.

Perhaps I am not innately driven to identification with institutions or teams, but on the left coast it doesn’t seem necessary. We had a New York friend who didn’t want to tell us the college she had graduated from, for fear of intimidating us. To us, the name Sarah Lawrence meant very little. We did not know its history or the many famous people who had gone there. Nor did we care! People, as we know them, must stand on their own.

When I lived in and around San Francisco, it seemed a shame that what most people read was published on the east coast. It is still true. Stories of San Francisco’s rich culture abound and in the 60’s and 70’s its young and transient citizens helped democratize art. Today, however, San Francisco is somewhat insular, preserving itself as a playground for tourists, Disneyland for adults. It is a city of magnificent views, great restaurants and a haven for the performing arts, but it is not currently a home for writers, musicians and artists.

When we decided to move to Los Angeles, I realized I didn’t know much about the city. I made lists of books to read and learned a lot.  The Ramona story by Helen Hunt Jackson, which fueled a tourist industry after its publication in 1884 and is still the name of a town and a pageant, was new to me. And I found many contemporary writers, such as Eve Babitz, whose love of the city is legendary.“You can’t write a story about LA that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost,” she says. “I can’t keep everything in my lap or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning.” Eve had me from the beginning. I also loved this video, called Wonderland, made by a Dutch documentarian, which shows what LA singers and songwriters were thinking about in 1977.

Upon arrival, I found that Los Angeles is a wide open, welcoming city, with many ethnic communities and a burgeoning east side. Ten million people crowd Los Angeles County, many of them in the film and television industries, but also many others. The flow between New York and Los Angeles is constant, but LA has a few of its own publications too, the Los Angeles Review of Books, for instance. And the LA Times is getting better.

The left coast, from Seattle to San Diego, is the fractal edge of our (hopefully) post-imperialist country, still powerful, but so divided as to negate ourselves. I have found it the perfect place from which to spy on the world. Its habits and mores are (in general) my own. The coast itself imbues our lives with so much light and wind-swept energy that it is always present. And art, music, literature? Take your pick. They are all strong here.