Sunday, 10/31/04 - 12:04
Two Mondays ago (that was "today" last time I thought about posting this entry) we stayed in bed 3 hours after my alarm clock went off, under the blankets listening to the rain. Now I know this goes without saying, but it was really nice. We hadn't had any rain in half a year, and that weekend it just started coming down all across the South Coast, way down to San Diego. I discovered it by emerging from the library Saturday evening at nightfall. The library lights were reflecting in the concrete steps, and my first reaction goes huh, they must be washing the concrete, I wonder what happened. Then I saw it was actually a light rain, grabbed my cell phone and called Ted, completely giddy with delight, even though the dark and rain made me decide against driving into the student ghetto to fetch us boba tea. Okay, now count how many things in the previous sentence mark me as a nascent Southern Californian.
That was my reaction even though rain was gathering in the air for weeks. Since late September, it had been foggy every morning. It's hazy in the afternoons. The trees become mysterious grey silhouettes and the ocean and the sky blend together inseparably on the horizon, as above so below. The damp air means that the frogs are quacking again and everything smells better, especially the eucalyptus. On the way to school several patches of big bright golden yellow mushrooms sprang up, and even though I'm fond of big bright golden yellow mushrooms, I can't help but see them as a grotesque Lovecraftian parody of fall color. I was so delighted to see bright yellow things on trees that I've been playing them up to everyone I talk to, far more than the scant number of mushrooms warrants. It's completely cliché and appropriate for the land to look dreamy and mysterious right before it bursts into rain and goes green for Christmas. I might even say that it was beautiful, if I didn't know that fall is supposed to be about radiant blue skies, crisp winds, and crisper leaves in all sorts of colors. We do have a few trees losing leaves, but, hey, the rest of the foliage is turning greener. It's a wash.
Fall always used to be my favorite season, followed by winter. For the last two months or so I've been bitter and angry, angry and bitter, reading everyone's descriptions of the glorious seasonal change that's happening back in the real world. I'll be bitter until sometime past Christmas. Maybe it means it's time to start playing Animal Crossing again to get in my vicarious experience of the seasons, since that worked so well last year -- yes, really.
Or at least that's what I thought when I started this entry. I got less bitter once the autumn rains started and I could wear long sleeves again at night and see my breath. Now I'm only somewhat bitter! The truth is that this is the first fall here that's made any sense to me. It's made sense to me partially through the process of writing this journal entry -- which I started in what? late August? -- and that means that half of what I'm saying here is no longer completely true. On the other hand, I figure that rather than rewriting any more of it, I'll just post the thing and let it stand as the palimpsest it is, even though it should clearly be cut for length.
Southern Californians and everyone else say there are no seasons here, that if you want there to be seasons, you have to play along and pretend. Go buy some second-rate cider! It doesn't seem to bother them. Like I said, maybe it wouldn't bother me so much if I hadn't been so fond of the bright windy falls and if I didn't love the snow. I'm the sort of person who goes for a walk in a blizzard just to see what it looks like over the lake.
But it's not just that -- my sense for the passage of time has suffered (I blame the lack of seasons for my still unfinished MA! Those of you who are behind in your work should do the same!). I no longer feel quite so temporally adrift as I did when I first moved here, but I'm still frustrated. Every single visiting professor who comes here asks the rhetorical question, how can you work here? After all, it's paradise, and we have the iconic landscape to prove it. And somebody in the class always shrugs, you get used to it. Thus it's sorta stupid that I'm still slogging through the year alone, dumbfounded by what isn't here and trying to give what is here at least some meaning I can inhabit. (which I do successfully sometimes, but it keeps slipping away from me)
I like to think that I'm right to complain and that everyone else is wrong regarding the virtues of living in paradise. As Mike Davis points out in Ecology of Fear (keen book, I recommend it), calling Southern California Eden tends to lead people to think of "natural disasters" as flukes. The environmental myths based on the slow sort of change in more humid climates don't fit California very well and lead to a neurotic approach to the climate and its disaster ecology: "The new settlers found it almost impossible to form a consistent picture of the capricious climate or protean landscape. [...] Description veered between images of garden and desert, fertility and sterility." (11) I'd add that paradise stories are not simply about the environment's beneficence, but about how humans should inhabit it: self-indulgently and without worrying, except in places where their vision of Eden gets dubbed endangered, and those places need to be protected in a completely pristine condition. Not that I know much about a better way to imagine the seasons and climate here, but at least I can tell you that there's a need. Davis suggests that the Bible itself is excellent climatalogical literature for the land we live in here (though he himself seems to use Biblical metaphors of the apocalypse mostly as a fun way to convey a sense of scale, not for their environmental specifics).
Be that as it may, the problem at hand is seasons. I wrote most of this entry a long time ago and failed to post it because it turns out that I never get tired of googling information about agricultural celebrations around the Mediterranean. I'm still trying to verify what the deal is with the Biblical harvest festivals -- Passover and Shavuot in the "Spring" had harvest components, but so did Sukkoth in the "Fall" -- have there always been have two grain harvests in Israel as there are now, or was Sukkoth originally more focused on the harvest of olives, grapes for wine, and other fruit? -- and it occurs to me that I haven't even looked at whether the Muslims have anything interesting. On the other hand, since the orthodox strands of Abrahamic monotheism aren't terrifically engaged in making mythic sense of the seasons, I think Davis' analysis of the Bible's promise doesn't hold much for me. End googling (for nowwwwww...).
We live in a Mediterranean climate. It's not just like Bible Country; it's even more like Greece or Spain. The point is that a lot of the Ancient Mediterranean cultures have myths about how the seasons work, and all us kids from further north have latched onto these myths as descriptions of London or Berlin or Chicago, not Santa Barbara. But you know what? Persephone goes to Hades in the summer.
Persephone goes to Hades in the summer, and during that time Demeter keeps seeds under the earth. Nothing much grows; everything is withered and brown. Thus the Greek festival calendar celebrates sowing in November and harvest in the "spring." And that's what I put together from all my web searching. It's creepy how easily this piece of information slips out of articles mentioning the myth, as if it's something really inconceivable. It's not uncommon to observe common-sensically that having a good harvest was very important to ancient societies to see them through the winter, and then not two paragraphs later, to note that the autumn holidays in honor of Demeter were sowing festivals, not harvest festivals. (for instance, here or here) If just one article made this mistake, I'd think its author didn't know the meaning of "sowing." But when you see a lot of people making the same mistake -- that's some combo of those two great incuders to sloppiness, ideology and plagiarism.
In the version of the story I learned when I was little, the slim-ankled maiden went to the underworld in the winter, and if you just look up Persephone, you can tell that most everyone in the US heard the same thing. Now it pisses me off that everyone gets this myth wrong. Normally I'm all for reinterpreting myths to make them relevant yadda yadda, but not this time. You're telling me that I've spent the last three years alienated from time and struggling to find some meaning in this place when in fact the stories I've always been told about the seasons at home were miswrought perversions of what happens here? And until now you didn't tell me that the story I was always taught was some loosey goosey fraudulent reinterpretation? Well, no. Of course not!
Of course modern California isn't Ancient Greece, and we have quite the irrigation system here. Rice and cotton grow in the summer in the desert, while a lot of wheat still grows in the winter. Irrigation does render the seasons here ambiguous. But since I'm not a farmer, the crops aren't what I notice when I look around me to see what season it is.
I'm in the process of developing my own set of seasonal icons. Those of you who live in Southern California, let me know what you think and how this tallies with your sense of things. In case any of you ever have the misfortune to move to the northern part of Southern California, I post this summary of what I've found out about the seasons in Santa Barbara. When I started this entry, we were at the end of Birthday Season. Now we've moved through Gathering Rain and are headed into winter, the rainy season.
Birthday Season. Bees in dead clover, kelp washing up when it's too hot, hills from a documentary about African elephants, time to harvest eggplant. Fragrant eucalyptus with nuts like car parts or coat buttons, hot crunchy grass. Shoes covered in dust. Time to drink iced tea.
Gathering Rain. Time to plant spinach and onions. Blooming iceplant and mornings at the end of the world, when the fog covers the playing fields on your walk to school. You start to get wet feet again in the morning, and then the rains start. The sycamores lose their leaves, but they are always losing their leave. Plus this is the season for everything else I described above.
Christmas lasts from sometime around Halloween until Valentine's Day. New grass, spring green, sprouting around the base of taller dead golden grass. It's the rainy season, though most days are still sunny. The Duck Frog returns (the tiny frog with the big quack!) with an invasion of ants. The waves pick up and get numbingly cold. Several kinds of bright pink and purple flowers in bloom for the holidays, as well as a bright yellow plant that isn't mustard on the walk to school. Clementines and new wine. Frosty mornings, wet feet.
Spring. Seeing clear to the mountains, last pretense at sweaters. Your feet will still stay wet all day if you walk to school in the morning. You still walk home in the dark. Wild mustard, green hills, white and pale purple wildflowers, a tree with bright orange flowers.
Skittering Things -- and yellowing grass, jasmine still in the air. The skittering things are lizards. I don't know whether there are more of them sunning themselves on the path coming home, or whether they're so much easier to hear because of the drying weeds. Most days year round I see at least one lizard, but I still think there are more of them in May. Oh, and there are swallows diving and chasing each other over the athletic fields.
June Gloom. Grey skies, purple jacaranda, and red tides!
Deep Summer. Wild fennel with flowers like yellow queen anne's lace, air full of cheerleaders, eating peaches, not too hot, surrounded by blue like a piece of heaven. Surrounded by blue like a piece of heaven -- blue oceans, blue skies, blue mountains. Waves flat, good diving, but probably not warm enough for the beach around here.
These seasons overlap, as most seasons do, and I'm using that as a disclaimer, because I still have no idea what I'm talking about. The other day I say that the bushy bushes with flowers in white and various shades of pink are blooming already, though I never remember noticing them before until Christmas. It's because at Christmas, I'm always thinking about what a holiday visitor from the North would see, whereas during the fall, I'm just busy being bitter and the specifics of what's wrong here don't so much matter. But it's odd that I've already become accustomed to noticing certain things in certain seasons. Is the eucalyptus always as fragrant as it is in the early fall? I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day, and to my delight, he independently ventured that things smell better in the fall -- so maybe it isn't just me. Anyway, I know I'm still missing a lot of things in this list. If you have seasonal icons for SoCal, let me know what's different.
If I wanted the weather outside to correspond to my personal psychology, the cycle of seasons here would be close to perfect. Summer is the time for lying fallow -- much as it's theoretically the best time for productive growing, doing so takes more effort, irrigation, and weeding than it does in the winter. In birthday season, everything is yellow and dying and finds itself a year older -- another year gone, time for the annual set of doctors' appointments. I don't personally sprout until school starts again in the fall. The fall quarter is almost always good, because I feel lively enough to do anything. By spring quarter, working is like pulling hens' teeth and all I really want to do is something else. Meanwhile, the plants outside are get less lively, too, and the paths are filled with their distraction of skittering things. The one thing that you might think the seasons here miss is the dramatic escalation of activity toward the end of each quarter, but you'd be wrong if you thought that. My garden always turns brown and yellow at the end of the quarter, just like me. So there!
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12