I think of these two short short short ones as rather out of left field. I have no idea who "Larissa" might have been or when she told her story, or what was its context. But I just like it and evocative it is. The second one? Dad never liked Los Angeles so maybe that feeling generated the reverie. As usual, whatever religious content, and so much of his writing I see had it, is, cynical. I have this feeling I know what house he might have been describing. You can see it as you go north on Fairfax, a kind of cement circular object, plopped, not built.
Larissa
It was only a crumb of bread in a world of starvation. She told me how she picked it up and placed it on her tongue, and savored it for a brief moment of its precious existence--and then it was gone. Only the memory clung and imbedded itself in her psyche--perhaps for all time.
She related the story simply, her head down as if she were in a solitary reflection aloud. We listened in silent empathy to the words, halting in their transition from the Cyrillic to English. When she looked up there was an expression of surprise at our reaction to the story, a tale out of the depths of despair and want, and a trace refection of an elusive apogee of pleasure, however transitory.
Her story has intrigued me for some time. I am not unfamiliar with want and deprivation having lived through the great depression and witnessed the calumnies of war visited by one group of humans on another. Still, it is not the negative aspects of this tale that motivates me to reflection. In that fleeting moment when the precious crumb dissolved on the lady's tongue, she experienced the ultimate potential of pleasure, then the despair of reality--survival, need, hopelessness. What can we compare the moment to? Perhaps the fleeting occasional hugs of the mother for her child who has been without comforting since birth--an effusion of dammed up love that is released by the momentary affection, however desultory? Then, like a chastened dog it returns to its state of perpetual hunger.
Human wants are limitless, so said my professor of economics many years ago. I am thinking of the egocentricity of physical and emotional necessities--the unrelenting grasping for comfort and gratification-relentlessly unforgiving at that which is withheld.
Without this primordial pursuit, without the impediments to realization in a cornucopia of satiated desires, there is an abundance of salt--a flatness in the ingestion--never that reaction of highly-honed taste buds on a preciously charged essence.
The House on the Hill
It sits upon a barren topped mountain apex, a square white quadrangle of unremarkable aspect. When the perpetual haze of the area allows, one can see it placed like a mammoth paper weight on an immense mound, to no aesthetic purpose.
I have never been to its summit. I can only imagine the view towards the south, where the corpuscular traffic starts and stops and exudes its corruption to the skies.
Of course, this is during the day. The views of Los Angeles are different at night. I have been in the hills, on many occasions in the past, when the panorama of kaleidoscopic lights seduces the imagination with the dissimulaton of illusion.
Nor is it different in the pointed spires of New York City. I remember looking down from the observation tower of the Empire State Building. Down below, the ant-like clusters of people vied with the clamorous automobile for the supremacy of the concrete streets until night fell and a magnificence lit up the city.
How to describe the play of neon, the perpetual motion of streams of light, red, sometimes white, in equal measure, depending on the direction of travel.
These scenes defy description. Perhaps is is the promise of the Divine or a preview of things beyond fulfillment--for He is an enigmatic Creator--something, perhaps, like the view from the mountain that Moses was allowed of Canaan, before he was told he cannot go down and see for himself.
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