Parsing Romance from Reality

In the early part of 1990, my architectural office dispatched me to Los Angeles to help our new branch office get started. I carefully carried computer disks I would load onto the personal computers through airport security. Newly divorced, I was very open and uncertain, about everything. I stayed at my boss’s house in Glendale, but I had a rental car, and a car meant freedom! It meant the keys to a city I didn’t know, but whose cultural relevance hit me at every turn. “Ventura Highway in the sun …”

It wasn’t the movies, the American dream machine, that thrilled me. I knew very little about studios or stars. It was really music, the fact of Laurel Canyon, the Troubador, the songwriters who gathered to write, sing and record together. It was also street names, places that conjured up long-held associations: Sunset, or Hollywood and Vine. There was no GPS, but I had a map! When I wasn’t working, I was footloose. What was to become of me? What was I doing?

From my journal: “March 15: I have become an itinerant, at home wherever I am. I have learned on the Los Angeles freeways to be at home now.  And so I was last night, driving from the airport to Glendale, in the amazing light, through the tunnels and into the amazing mountains. March 16: I come down the Santa Monica in the twilight, blasting in my little white car, playing popular songs with the volume turned up and the window open. There is a haze over everything and the palm trees are skinny sentinels against the fading light. I am in a pinball machine, maneuvering myself on a mechanical game board. The crosstown freeways float above the landscape.” 

I ate breakfast at the Biltmore, close to our office, alongside the Japanese businessmen who flocked to the city at that time. At night I drove out to Manchester Avenue, where our tai chi academy had its headquarters, to take class. I had dinner with a friend in Silver Lake. I went to Market Street in Venice with a New York friend who was visiting Morphosis architectural projects. I tooled up and down Melrose. In May the jacarandas were blooming in purple clouds. And I was there. For real.

For many years, I have had this sentence at the end of my biography: “Connie’s been parsing romance from reality for most of her life.” What do I mean by this? The chief reason to know what is romance and what is reality is to keep us present in our lives. We need to appreciate and see what is actually going on around us. Romantic flights of fancy or received ideas can get in the way. We stash reality behind tropes and memes, sarcasm and irony.

In each of us are natural tendencies that incline us in a particular direction. I began to realize my predilection for grounding in empirical facts with my love of Chinese and Japanese poets, Li Bai, Du Fu, Shiwu (Stonehouse), and Basho. Their poetry celebrated the natural world, what could be apprehended by the senses and bloomed in the heart. Only the thinnest excuse for Taoist ideology backed them. In our tai chi classes also, there is no ideology, only practice. 

Does anyone need ideology? I don’t think so. We are better off just observing, triangulating information strands to get at the truth of a situation. History will sort it out in the end. But most of us do have romantic ideas about ourselves and our futures. I don’t think the desire for peace, for a family, for sustenance and shelter is an ideology. It is just human. 

In 1990, I was longing for a meaningful partner, after several unfruitful relationships. To be what I thought of as a “real” woman, with a family. I relied heavily on my sister Solveig’s family at the time, though they were in the process of moving to England. It took time for me to settle, to find my way. But then I met Don Starnes and began the conversation which doesn’t end. He is even more interested in reality than I am.

For me, the most insidious romantic idea to cut through was probably the concept of being a Writer, with a capital “W,” readers and friendships with other writers. I did pursue it. I went to writer’s conferences and workshops. But I found that each of us must develop our own path and do our own work. As with tai chi, the most important thing is to practice.

And I am a writer. I have written and published ten books. And I find that my friends, if not writers, are all artists.  Ceramicists, textile workers, printmakers, architects, filmmakers. I live and work in the company of artists.

Today when we tool around Los Angeles, it is Don that is driving. I take the train often as well, going up and down a corridor from Pasadena to the Arts District, the LA that has become mine. It now seems like a collection of small towns jammed up against each other, diverse, lively, a volatile place. It doesn’t feel like a cultural mecca, however. The corporate entertainment offered is an ideology in itself. “Give me all your money and I will waste your time for a bit.”

But I do continue to study the music scene which happened most authentically here in the late part of the last century. Songs I love turn up in my head unbidden, and I learn the lyrics, those of Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson. (Sorry Joni! Not yours.)

An ideology fills your teacup with thoughts you think everyone should subscribe to. Romance gives you ideas of what should happen in your life. Both of them keep you from looking at what is actually going on. This is why I continue to parse romance from reality. There is plenty going on in my teacup, ideas washing through, longings, plans and paradoxes. But none of it stays there long! I trust the real and give it lots of space.