Storming the Gates of Paradise (44 page)

You took the Getty exit and, if you’d been heading north, swung over the overpass and after a few wriggles dove into the garage. You came out of the smog-filtered Los Angeles light (which always gave me the impression that a thrifty God had replaced our incandescent sun with diffused fluorescent light) into a dark passage. The garage was underlit, with a low-slung ceiling and construction that evinced the massive weight first of the cement slabwork and then of the floors and earth above. The weight pressed down on your soul, and the directions urged you onward. Down you went, and down, and further down, spiraling into the seismically unstable bowels of the Los Angeles earth, in these circles of looming darkness, questing for a parking space of your own, farther and farther down. I believe there were nine circles, or levels, in this vehicular hell. Finally you found a place for your car in this dim realm, staggered to an elevator, and moved upward more quickly than Dante ascended purgatory.

But you weren’t in purgatory yet. The elevator opened onto a platform where you could catch a monorail up the hill to the museum. Disneyland too has a monorail, and though on our first visit to the Getty I thought of it as a nice tribute to its sister amusement park, we perplexed everyone around us by walking up the unfrequented road the quarter mile or so to the museum. Altitude, I should add, correlates neatly to economic clout in urban and suburban California; and so, though
the presumed point of the Getty was to let people look at art, first they parked, then they looked at the mighty fortress of the Getty hunched up on high, and then up there at various junctures they got the billionaires’ view. The museum was purgatory. There you went through the redemptive exercise of experiencing art, lots and lots of it, from ancient times through the early twentieth century, room after room of altarpieces and portraits and still lifes and drawings. I knew the British Museum and the Louvre before I ever went to New York’s museums, and those two august institutions are about looting Greece and Egypt, about imperial power; in New York’s Metropolitan Museum for the first time, I caught myself wondering when the United States conquered Europe so as to take home all that plunder, a question the Getty Museum also raises.

Having soaked up more art than you could possibly recall once you were back on the 405, you reached the gardens at the far end of the property. From a strictly real estate point of view, what made the place so imperial was what the San Francisco Bay Area artist Richard Misrach calls “the politics of the view,” a subject he discovered when he moved from the plebeian flats of Oakland to the professorial heights of the Berkeley hills and discovered that what he’d been missing all those years was vista (this resulted in his book
The Golden Gate Bridge
, a series of photographs of the Turneresque-tourist view of the iconic red suspension bridge from his front porch, or rather of the atmospheric effects swirling around it). Irwin is thought to have chosen, out of contrariness, to make a garden at the Getty in which the splendidly commanding and even more splendidly expensive view disappears.

Paradise
is a Persian word that originally meant an enclosed garden, and here you walk downhill, accompanied by a stream in a stony bed, to a garden that, like the garage, is circular, though in this case the circles are truly concentric, a shallow basin whose outer ground level becomes its horizon by the time you’ve descended a few rings through the bright erratic plantings that Irwin, who is no gardener, had selected. Annoying Richard Meier by obscuring the view and cluttering up the rugged modernist space with a fussy garden was one thing; Irwin chose to annoy the rest of us by putting in the center of his garden what looks like a hedge maze but is, unlike any proper garden maze, inaccessible because of a water moat.

But it’s the parking garage that is most memorable of all these three spaces, and it’s the parking garage to which you must return before getting back onto the 405 to enter and merge and exit and otherwise wend your way onward. Symbolically, I suppose, it’s because you can’t quite reach the center of heaven that you end up back in hell.

California has often been imagined as paradise, hell, and everything in between. Paradise is, actually, a small town in northeastern California; I know two filmmakers who grew up there, and it’s now filling up with conservative retirees. Hell is nowhere explicit on the map, though Death Valley, Devils Postpile National Monument, and a few other sites have satisfyingly infernal names. And probably the whole place is purgatory, since nearly all of us are so, so to speak, hell-bent on self-improvement. Something about my dear weird Golden State obliges it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; the
New York Times
routinely portrays it not as Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
, but as another painting by the same master,
The Ship of Fools
. (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as governor has deeply gratified the rest of the nation, which can now reflect even more confidently that, though we have better weather and really are inventing their future, we’re totally feckless freaks.)

One of the oft-cited reasons for the American film industry to settle in Hollywood is Southern California’s ability to simulate almost any part of the world: the place has lush agricultural districts, deserts, mountains, forests, oceans, and open space in which to build Babylon or Atlanta, all drenched in endless light. That is to say, to be in California is to be everywhere and nowhere and usually somewhere else (in the posher parts of L.A., every house seems to be dreaming of elsewhere: this half-timbered job is in the Black Forest, and that one next door is the Alhambra). And, as Los Angeles writer Jenny Price recently remarked, to say, “I ate a doughnut in Los Angeles” is a different thing altogether than to say, “I ate a doughnut.” The invocation of L.A. throws that doughnut on a stage where it casts a long shadow of depravity or opportunity (which might be the same thing here). She added that just as Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals are
how we think, so Los Angeles, and by extension California, are also how we think—think about society, about urbanism, about the future, about morality and its opposite. It’s as though in the golden light, everything is thrown into dramatic relief, everything is on stage acting out some drama or other.

Sandow Birk, who early in his career restaged the great watery paintings of history—
The Raft of the Medusa, Washington Crossing the Delaware
—as surfing scenes, has long been picking California’s allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself (and one who insistently foregrounds his surfing as Robert Irwin a few generations before did his car-customizing and hot-rodding), he painted a brilliant series some years before in which the cultural clashes between San Francisco and L.A. were depicted as a duly multiethnic battle, complete with fast food sponsors and gang colors carried by the armed factions, published as
In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias
. Another of his series, a more serious inspection of the state as heaven and hell, represents all thirty-three state prisons in this incarceration-crazy state (published as
Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century
). Each is a landscape painting, harking back to all the finest traditions of that genre; they just happen to have, in the foreground, middle ground, or background, a prison (whose architecture, come to think of it, has much in common with airports, parking garages, shopping malls, and the other new spaces of human management, now that ordinary life in the United States is more and more like prison, at least in terms of security and surveillance technologies). New hell surrounded by old heaven, though the prisoners were not put out there for the scenery but for the cheapness and the obscurity that rural places offer.

And now comes Birk’s California
Divine Comedy
. His
Dante’s Inferno
is in print as a large-format paperback; the
Purgatorio
’s artwork is completed (purgatory is my own hilly hometown, San Francisco), and that book should appear in another year; and
Paradise
, presumably—location undisclosed—will come in 2006. Hell, naturally, is Los Angeles. Literally Los Angeles: Birk’s edition of the
Divine Comedy
is faintly reminiscent of Gustave Dore’s, and its line drawings depict not a landmark Los Angeles, but the back-alley L.A. of anonymous deadends. Every canto has a frontispiece above the argument and a full-page illustration
inside. Canto I sets the stage nicely with a tipped-over shopping cart on the cobbled ground of what appears to be a vacant lot. The words
Canto I
appear to be spray-painted on one of those oblong, cement wheel-stops that mark the front end of a parking space—Dante’s dark woods become desolation-row parking lot.

Birk’s editor told me that he initially considered approaching a rapper to translate the
Divine Comedy
’s terzarima into street slang, but when he was told that this would turn the project into, for example, Ice T’s
Comedy
with illustrations by Sandow Birk, he took on the project himself with a friend, surf journalist Marcus Sanders. Their translation is into the vernacular of guy inarticulateness, with a little slang, which is to say its frequent awfulness must be intentional and is certainly appropriate. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, citizens speak English like, well, native speakers, and the ability to speak well is a pleasure and a power. But from George W. Bush on down, the United States, particularly its male portion, is fraught with inarticulateness and often committed to it as well.

Jane Tompkins, in her wonderful
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns
, traces some of this to a frank distrust of language and an association of speaking with opening up, compromising, and otherwise surrendering alpha-male status. John Wayne, she points out, spoke in monosyllables, often to denounce communication and chatter. Yup. Nope. Silence was very golden (it was, after all, gay men who would argue in the heyday of AIDS activism that silence equals death, an equation that goes well with Tompkins’s argument that speech equals the unmanly opening up of an orifice). I sometimes think that a certain kind of right-wing belief system is propped up on syntactical delusion: conspiracy theories and accusations rest on beliefs and associations that don’t make sense politically but can be swallowed by those who can’t make sense grammatically. (Thus when television interviewer Diane Sawyer asked Bush some months ago whether the administration knew that Saddam Hussein had WMDs or thought that he could “move to acquire those weapons,” he answered, “So what’s the difference?”) And this very inarticulateness seems to lead to other means of resolving conflict, so much so that I once caught myself thinking that if these Americans speak English like a second language, perhaps guns were their first language. Of course, a steady diet of television’s sentence fragments helps. Complex thoughts require
complex syntax. I’m not sure Birk’s is always up to the challenge. Thus does Birk’s Dante begin: “About halfway through the course of my pathetic life/I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place. . . . I can’t really describe what that place was like. It was dark and strange, and just thinking/about it now gives me the chills.”

In C. H. Sisson’s superb 1980 translation, Virgil says of himself and the other pagans in limbo, “We are lost; there is no other penalty/Than to live here without hope, but with desire.” Dante goes on, “It grieved my heart when I heard him say that.” In Birk and Marcus Sanders’s version, Virgil says, “We’re all now eternally lost. That’s why/you hear the sighs and despair. We’re barred forever from any hope, and everyone is despondent about it.” Dante cuts in, “Shit, that doesn’t seem right, I thought. How is it fair/that even righteous, decent guys like Virgil should be/trapped in Limbo, forever? I was totally confused, and/I needed to figure out this whole unfair Christianity/thing.” More lifeless than deathless, this version is full of editorials (like the unfair Christianity bit), but true to the Dante figure in the drawings, a white homeboy in shades.

Birk is brilliant at architecture and topography, but his bodies are always a little awkwardly realized, like the language. But this works toward a truly California
Comedy
, one of inarticulate attempts to realize truth, meaning, and complexity. “Text adapted by” is how Birk and Sanders are credited on the cover. Nobody will read their
Divine Comedy
as an ideal translation, though perhaps it will draw in young readers who might otherwise not read it at all. But there’s an odd awkwardness to the street language embedded with the rolling names of medieval Italian sinners and the elaborate scenarios of Dante’s tortures. The classics freely adapt—the
Odyssey
to Dublin in 1904 or to the southern United States during the Civil War (in
Cold Mountain
)—but Birk’s book is too literal to be a real reinvention and too reinvented to be a functional translation. Turning Dante’s greyhounds (in Canto XIII) into pit bulls gives local color, but it doesn’t really do much for the landscape of souls turned into suffering trees. The text is too weighed down by the power and the particulars of the original, and they are there only to situate the arena where Birk is at ease and inspired: the free visual interpretation of the Inferno.

So Birk’s book is better looked at than read. His pictorial contribution is more to the critique of urbanism as embodied by L.A., in the vein of Mike Davis’s
City of Quartz
, than to Dante studies or theology. L.A. has little to give Dante, in other words, but Dante via Birk has much to give L.A. His tour through L.A. in thirty-four cantos is a scrutiny of the invisible territories that so fazed me when I was a young freeway-riding critic, punctuated by the phantasmagoria of Dante’s torturescapes. They go together beautifully: in Canto XXI, the winged devils of the fifth ditch fly over a freeway toward the clifftop Dante and Virgil. There is a Cyclone fence behind them, a one-way sign in the lower right, another shopping cart, this time full of the possessions of an evidently homeless demon, and the flying demons carry the signs that beggars often do, “Will Work for Food,” “Homeless Veteran.” The darkness isn’t just nocturnal. In another full-page picture, hypocrites form a long line winding toward downtown, with more freeway and mini-mall signage in the middle ground. Among the hypocrites are quite a few Los Angeles cops. For most of us, there are days when a few demons circling around the pilings holding up an overpass would be perfectly apt. Birk has also got at the parts of L.A. that recall Piranesi, not David Hockney, the sinister noir terrain of freeway overpasses and cuttings and drainage ditches that create a stacked-up, tangled, vertical landscape far from the flat, sunshiny L.A. of the usual iconography.