Palawoo after the fire
They are some of the most beautiful photos I’ve even taken,
but when I see them, my heart shatters like glass windows in a fire
from February 8 -
Here were my clothes, records, camera bag, all my paintings, photos and prints by artist friends, here were my inexpensive but irreplaceable trinkets from around the world, film negatives and journals and creative tools and love letters and heirlooms and photos and little fragments of my soul outside of me -
I guess I thought I’d find a trace of them, but anything that was left in that room was completely covered by roof shingles and other people’s remnants of home - there were three apartments upstairs and the ceiling caved in so - anything we had now shares the same resting place in a pile of roofing, melted glass, metal sludge, bits of tile, stone and ash. The whole neighborhood is kind of like that now - we all share the same pile of rubble - our individual homes and belongings became unrecognizable identical ash and debris, sharing the same pile of rubble and floating on the same gusts of wind
But I can’t stop thinking about the landlord’s library
Tucked in a thin hallway and the only part of the home that still had a semblance of a post-fire roof coverage, this one little sliver of debris strangely preserved from wind and recent rain -
I never saw it in waking life (wow - I just wrote this automatically and realized what I implied - “waking life” as if this is a dream)
Anyway, I never saw the library before the fire, that’s what I meant -
But now without the walls separating our apartments I went inside… there isn’t much left to determine that it’s a library except book-shaped ash piles with crisp edges of pages and even some words still legible - it’s all so surreal - I reached out to touch and turn a page and it dissipated into a puff of air - disappeared before my eyes - earth to fire to air and gone on the wind
(continued)
the library
these are/were books
library hall - the arch to the right used to be solid redwood. my bedframe is in the corner
vault?!
opposite the library
Palawoo was really my dream* house -
The iron work, the archways, the hand-painted tile, hand-carved stone, the fireplaces, the European esque religious iconography built into the sacral architecture, the stone statues, the fountains…
I’d seen a lot of the house but never the full thing - that place is WILD - hidden hallways through hand-carved stone archways - Grecian style interior fountain - the Madonna and Child stone sculpture piece is on a vault (?) door (I tried to move/open it but it’s stuck likely from rubble falling behind it).
There are secret rooms even behind my apartment that I didn’t know existed.
And also of course - the land, the view, the altitude, the (formerly) clean air.
*I’ve had dozens like this… it’s a common dream theme - dreaming of a place or home you know well, but suddenly you find a new passageway, a doorway to a few room or another level or a secret room - have you had this kind of dream? Exploring Palawoo was like this… I thought I knew the layout but it is just not as it seems…. “dream” house in many senses…
(continued)
Maybe the strangest thing was leaving
Just few blocks south I’m heading back to the highway - life goes on - someone posts a garage sale sign on a street corner, the taco stand is setting up, a man tries to sell me a bouquet of flowers while I’m stopped at a red light (did he see me crying?)
Life goes on
I take off the hazmat suit respirator goggles ear plugs gloves and boot covers and
re emerge into Los Angeles and
Life goes on
I place my few relics of this former home in a friend’s garden to clean them from the ash and
Life goes on
I look at these photos I took and think WOW it’s never looked so beautiful - and I cry - and yep -
Life goes on.
I recently learned that the “blessing” comes from old English word that originally meant “bleeding”
Some days when all I can feel is the wound, all I can smell is the blood - I try to find the blessing in it all.
my heart is here
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