topics
The mythical Los Angeles that spawned the Hollywood dream and also its opposite is now largely reduced to ashes, but this is the consequence of what fire? We live in an overheated world full of incontinent passions.
As Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy said, Los Angeles created the American dream and its opposite in Hollywood. Both books are set in Los Angeles, the second largest metropolitan area in the United States. The Big Sleep is one of the most beautiful books ever written, and L.A. Confidential is one of the most beautiful movies ever seen; both convey a dark distrust of people in general and institutions in particular. Mythical Los Angeles, Malibu, and the Palisades, with modernist villas designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s disciples, with rainforest and blue sea in wood and glass houses, with the distinction between interior and exterior erased, with large windows facing the ocean and patios overlooking the beach, naked bodies in the waves and sunshine inside and out, Oscars and Disneyland for virtually all ages and wallets – all of this has largely turned to ash.
There is poetics of fire, and there is the mercy of ashes. In this respect, T.S. Eliot’s merciful poems “Ash Wednesday” are unsurpassed; Eliot knows that life is short (“because I do not hope to turn again” is the leitmotif of the poem), he knows that we are dust and to dust we shall return. In Genesis 3:19, biblical scripture reminds believers of their sinfulness and unreliability; therefore, it warns against excessive pride and vain arrogance. These warnings were not only paramount to religions; roughly speaking, in the Persians’ heyday, the Axial period (472 BC), hubris was “the great mother of calamities” for both individuals and empires.
Chapter 35 of Lolita in its own way clearly refers to this ancient meditation. From the first page, Nabokov emphasizes that Lolita is the affectionate name of Dolores, which is her real birth name. And Lolita will be the cause of tragic pain – even in relation to herself. The theme has been reworked in thousands of versions; Carl Löwith said: “Christianity is a religion that triumphs over suffering,” and yet it has led to a West that is “as Christian in origin as it is unchristian in its overload of consequences.” In Nabokov’s final pages, Professor Humbert Humbert (the double in the double) kills the Mephistophelean Clare Quilty because she is guilty of depriving him of his “right to happiness” with a twelve-year-old nymphet. You have to see the faces of James Mason and Peter Sellers in the Stanley Kubrick version to fully appreciate the metaphysical meaning of the scene. Nabokov reads Ash Wednesday’s gracious poems before the revolver’s trigger is pulled. It’s not just Eros and Thanatos: There is Dolores in Lolita and Lolita in Dolores, as there is the promise of ashes even in the hottest fire. In short, fire and ashes relate to each other because one inevitably gives rise to the other.
We live in a fiery age: a world in the heat of rising temperatures and incontinent passions
What fire resulted in the Los Angeles ash? Some believed that these great fires were the result of the weakness of the American empire. The head of the Los Angeles County Fire Department stated that his service is prepared to handle one or two major wildfires, but not four and in particularly harsh weather conditions. He didn’t have sufficient funds.
If California were an independent state, it would boast the fifth largest GDP in the world, and Silicon Valley would be only a few hours away. A concentration of billions and science. However, is it underfunded to predict, counteract, tame, mitigate a natural phenomenon that appears periodically in the same area? What if wind gusts reach 264 kilometers an hour again, as they did in December 2014?
To make a long story short, the problem of unpreparedness and lack of resources is recognized by the authorities themselves. However, the Los Angeles fires are a show of strength, not weakness. They demonstrate what has been Empire’s priority for years: it has deliberately prioritized cultural, economic, programmatic commitments, military superiority, and war. Meanwhile, increasingly unpredictable, uncontrollable, destructive phenomena rage in increasingly fragile, defenseless, and dangerous territories.
As wily reactionaries like to repeat, tradition is not about preserving ashes, but about remembering the fire. However, in this case, the memory of the fire has nothing to do with Eduardo Galeano: it is the forgetting of the aftermath. Our most distant ancestors are those who first learned to tame fire over a million years ago; they used it for transition from raw to cooked, for warming, and then for making an endless variety of trinkets. However, now fire has become synonymous with destruction and powerlessness. We live in a fiery age: a world gripped by rising temperatures and unbridled passions – in the West, the will to power seeks to impose itself everywhere, with no limits or rules except those dictated by pure profit and arrogance.
The gods punished Prometheus severely for his gift. In the same days, under the same omnipresent skies, fires blazed in Los Angeles, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Somalia. The environmental crisis is intertwined with the geopolitical crisis, and they are erupting simultaneously. From the carnival of all human follies, with its many masks and latest novelties, volunteer firemen disguised as pyromaniacs, only ashes threaten to remain.
