Some Thoughts about the Local
This morning (6 June 2023), I had a long and vivid dream that I was at a party hosted by Jo Ellison, the editor of the Financial Times magazine HTSI, and her family in a stone-walled ranch house with a large garden that fronted on a beach and a sea. A pelican landed at one point, and I recognized it as the east coast variety. The house combined elements of the Manhattan apartment of the designer Gaetano Pesce with what I identified later as the Memphis of Ettore Sottsass and others. I had a conversation with her daughter about the family dog, and also spoke with her husband, a playwright. I haven’t met Ellison or her family; I only know them through Ellison’s articles and Instagram posts. “How to Dream It,” maybe.
My dream incorporated a profile I read the night before about Ellison’s playwright husband. It also reflected an article in HTSI about Pesce and another about a singer turned actress, married to a man who may or may not be better known than her. She jokes about walking through Brooklyn with him, both unsure who the fans might recognize. In his profile, the playwright says he hasn’t written a novel because he’d miss the audience’s direct response. This may explain why novelists still do book tours.
I’m reading An Oblique Autobiography by Yve-Alain Bois, a book that traces his long involvement with art through a series of annotated or prefaced articles. “With art” is only partly true, because it’s more of an account of the people he knew — teachers and mentors, collaborators, subjects, opponents. Many were friends. On the one hand, this is like a tutorial on art after 1960, comparable to those Bois had early on, whereas mine is decidedly late, yet in some sense no less timely. On the other hand, it exemplifies the sense of “local” that my dream prompted.
Bois and I are roughly the same cohort, born five years apart in the first decade following World War II. The first entry in his memoir, which chronicles a long friendship with an episodic collaborator, speaks first of visits and correspondence, and later of phone calls that augment and sometimes supplant them. Email appears, shifting their discourse. Visits continue, trying and often failing to get to the same exhibit at the same time in cities as distant as they are from each other. Yet the arc of their friendship is set out memorably, drawn from letters and remembered conversations. Each has his own network, overlapping and not. Part of their friendship is a comparing of notes and an impulse to point to someone or something new. There are gaps, failures to appear, but the friendship continues until the friend dies of Parkinson’s Disease.
Engines of conflation
The Buddhist idea of “mind” refers to the entirety of our lived experience, which disappears with us. We share it in slivers rather than the whole picture, yet our minds are engines of conflation, especially when we dream, pulling the most disparate parts into rough order: a stone ranch house; a long friendship. What Bois wrote about his friend is a remembrance, not so much from the life as from his impressions of it.
Because of our tendency to conflate, our “local” includes people we don’t actually know, including some whose lives don’t overlap our own and may even be fictional. Media is complicit in this, creating a sense of proximity that feeds our impressions, even if it’s illusory. We know it is, but our minds could care less. As in neighborhoods and work settings, people come and go. We lose track of some of them, but others have lives of their own, floating through memory or making brief but notable reappearances, with remembered pleasures or regrets or both attached.
This “local” is scalar. Celebrity complicates it, as the extent to which one figures in the “locals” of others rises exponentially. Those celebrated have to contend with this, including its ebb and flow, and recognize the emotions that come along. We’re also engines of attachment, an adaptation strategy that can kill us if we fail to understand the hardwiring.
By “scalar,” I mean that the local of a celebrity is as local to her as our local is to us. Not reciprocal — it’s not a natural act to count strangers as local, even when they’re one’s adoring fans. A consummate player like Ronald Reagan mastered a perpetual sunniness and the ability to keep moving. The Princess of Wales has it down pat — a different strategy from her husband’s regal grandmother, but one better suited to our era, in a role that has lost little of its soul-killing potential, per her sister-in-law.
Yet the underlying nature of one’s local remains the same. The variable is how one relates to it, especially at times of disjunction. We have shockingly little preparation for this, except to the extent that the typical disjunctions are dramatized as cautionary tales or underscored as “how to do it.” But people fail to see themselves or misconstrue how life actually works.
Our local reflects our ongoing tensions with our immediate, time- and place-bound context. All unfolds inseparably, but we may feel at points that we lack agency (or, conversely, that only our agency matters). It may help to accept the randomness bound up in context — how luck figures and how “right time, right place” is ephemeral, try as we may to evade the fact.
Aiming for a rough balance
Endowed with imagination, we can usually find an exit from any context that isn’t working. (There’s a countervailing stream of tragic exceptions, endemic to life.) What’s often missing is an innate confidence in our local as sufficient unto the day. We try to ward off threats, refusing to step down or away, but also refusing to step up or in. Any step can be a threat if we’re unsure where it will take us. This imagines local as stasis, but local is homeostatic by nature. It’s there to provide us with a rough balance.
That John Donne almost disappeared from notice for 200 years, only to return as a literary force, speaks to what Walter Benjamin called reception, how we resonate with others by dint of how we were seen, our traces and their meanings. Two other hopeful images for me are the red handprints our ancestors made on a cave wall, and the fact that they buried their dead. All of this speaks to connection, which I think is how celebrity relates to the locals of others (and vice versa) — why I found myself in a house I dreamt up with Jo Ellison in it, a house that’s in a sense our cocreation, an unanticipated outcome of her work as an editor; and why I find myself writing this — not just the dream itself, but some thoughts it generated.
The local is the local is the local, to borrow from Gertrude Stein, and we have to live with this, accept its rough balance at every juncture, not just across our own lives but in relation to the lives of others. (So, as much as possible, no envy of them and no trepidation about our own.)
I recently visited the Oakland Columbarium, a labyrinthian repository of the ashes of the dead. While admiring its oldest part, designed by Julia Morgan, aesthetically, I found the idea of it repelling. I’d rather put my faith in a local that stretches out only God knows where. As the I Ching notes, if we’re actually kind, there’s no need to ask if this is true. We either are or we aren’t. Or as the Buddha said about the afterlife, there’s no way to know and anyway, the question is unimportant. Our local is sufficient unto the day, by definition. Like the dharma, it’s all we can depend on.
Notes
The photo at the top, cropped by me, was taken by Chris Stulpin. The photo of the man on the sofa, Gaetano Pesce, also cropped by me, taken by Olga Altapina, appeared in his 3 June 2023 HTSI profile. Diego Rivera’s desk is preserved in his house-museum. I don’t remember the source. I use this opportunity to thank Jo Ellison for brilliantly reviving HTSI.
