Tell Me True

by Patricia Hampl

  Because none of these frameworks—regret, contempt, burlesque, or irony—satisfies for very long, many of its residents believe that Los Angeles is an unnecessary city. And that belief—abetted by memory substitution and deliberate forgetting—has been the precondition for the past forty years of failed public policy in Los Angeles toward immigrants, commuters, ethnic communities, small-business operators, the homeless and working poor, homeowners, and taxpayers.

  Those of us who expose our lives in public in memoirs will appeal to sentiment as our reason to write, or emotional truth or justice or generational continuity or historical redress or personal therapy or tribal solidarity or just Whitman’s “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” But some of us take the memoir—as I do—as a form of political speech.

  Memory, after all, is the material basis of public policy. Memory insistently reminds us that contingencies dominate the experience of our lives, that time’s arrow will not be stayed by nostalgia, and that authority seeks always to substitute its official recollections for those we have labored so hard to hold. Remembering is an act of courage in Los Angeles, even if we do not fully understand the stories we have to tell. Memory is sabotage against the city’s regime of speed. I have the impression that the disturbing qualities of life here that most commentators remark on—and the tendency of Los Angeles to self-immolate in civil discord—reflect a tragic failure to remember. Yet despite all of our efforts to forget them or find replacements for them, the stories of Los Angeles will bleed through the clichés as if the stories themselves knew how much we need them. The persistent “hunger of memory,” in the words of Richard Rodriguez, is as familiar and feral in Los Angeles as the coyote standing watchfully in the middle of the street in my suburban neighborhood before it trots into the tall grass under the Edison Company power lines.

  I live in a place of presumed exile—in a tract house on a block of more tract houses in Lakewood, a neighborhood hardly distinguishable from the next and all of them extending as far as the street grid allows in a metropolis with thousands of miles of streets all just the same. The hunger of memory is acute here, but it is only a localization of the larger experience of California, which itself is only a portion of the immigrant experience of the West; and the problem of the West is only an especially perplexing subset of the everlasting problem of America, which is how to make a home here.

  We long for a home but doubt its worth when we have it. We depend on a place but dislike its claims on us. Each of us is certain about our own preferences for a home, but we’re ready to question your choice. And no place is immune from the peculiarly American certainty that something better—something more adequate to the demands of our desire—is just beyond the next bend in the road.

  Los Angeles, as a representation of the divided American heart, poses large questions about the uses of memory, and this bears on the memoirist’s hope: Can any part of our past be of any value to us except as nostalgia or irony? Do the places where we grew up have legitimate claims on us? We find it difficult to talk coherently about issues of place in Los Angeles, which inevitably leads to confusion in public policies about the best means to make our home there. Which is not homeowner determinism—locally expressed in Southern California as a fierce NIMBY-ism.

  Lacking a usable rhetoric of place, burdened by a history of regret, and unencumbered by our stories, the makers of public policy in Los Angeles have failed to give the region what it critically needs—and that is not more planning, not more government, and not even the delivery of more housing and jobs. What is needed is more place-bound loyalty.

  Wes Jackson of the Land Institute insisted that Americans had not yet become native to their land. His subject was rural America; mine is the suburb, but the question is true for both places and true on the same terms as well. Every American place is a ruined paradise that demands a common effort to repair—a ruined paradise, and therefore someone’s home. We can no longer afford to erase our homes out of forgetfulness—or worse, out of willful amnesia—and instead imagine, as many want to in Los Angeles, that they live in a historyless city, a placelessness devoid of us and our sacred ordinariness. We cannot afford to be merely sojourners in Los Angeles.

  One source of the narrative tradition about the making and unmaking of places to live begins with the story of the ruin of a city. There are men and gods in the Iliad, and we like to think the story is about them. But the story is really about the fate of places. All cities are like Troy in their potential to mingle tragedy and the everyday. Every city ultimately disappoints, Homer knew, and therefore is to be cherished while you can. Imaginatively, westerners live in sacred Ilium, in a town where the cost of an ordinary life is loyalty to an imperfect place. It is good to recall that every city claims someone’s allegiance, answers someone’s longing, and persists in someone’s memory. And one task of the memoirist is, like Homer, to bring us to these awful realizations.

  My particular place is at the extreme southeast corner of Los Angeles County in a 957-square-foot house of wood frame and stucco construction put up hastily during World War II on dead-level farmland just far enough from a Douglas Aircraft plant that bombs dropped by Japanese planes might miss it. I live in a neighborhood on the edge of the great flat of the Los Angeles plain between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers not far from oil refineries, and I actually imagine that the place in which I live is, in Josiah Royce’s terms, a “beloved community.”4 I acquired my sense of place here and later my belief that a sense of place, like a sense of self, is part of the equipment of a conscious mind.

  My parents bought my house in 1946, less than a year after the war ended, and they felt extraordinarily lucky. My older brother was born into this house in October that year, and I followed in 1948. My mother died from this house in 1979. My father died in it in 1982. I’ve lived nowhere else. The idea of a mass-produced suburb was still new when my brother and I were boys, and no one knew then what would happen when tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives—so young and inexperienced—were thrown together and expected to make a fit place to live.

  Maybe you wouldn’t regard a house like mine as a place of pilgrimage, but my parents did. Perhaps their one big move, from the Depression in New York and through the world war to here, on the edge of Los Angeles, had been enough. My parents were grateful for the comforts of their not-quite-middle-class life. Their aspirations weren’t for more but only for enough. Their lives together seemed to be about that, too—about the idea of enough. Their neighbors had the same idea (despite the claims of critics then and now, who assume all suburban places are about excess). Despite everything that was ignored or squandered in making my suburb, I believe a kind of dignity was gained. More men than just my father have said to me that living here gave them a life made whole and habits that did not make them feel ashamed.

  My neighborhood was one of the places where suburban stories were first mass-produced. They were stories then for displaced Okies and Arkies, Jews who knew the pain of exclusion, Catholics, too, and anyone white with a steady job. Today, the same stories begin here, except the anxious people who tell them are as completely mixed in their colors and ethnicities as they can be. I continue to live here because I want to find out what happens next to these new narrators of stories I think I already know.

  I once thought my suburban life was an extended lesson in how to get along with other people. Now, I think the lesson isn’t neighborliness; it’s humility. Perhaps that’s because I am one of those Catholics, too, who lives in a California suburb built all at once in 1950—17,500 houses in thirty-three months!—and when I stand at the end of my block, I see a pattern of sidewalk, driveway, and lawn that aspires to be no more than harmless. I somehow see that as a sign of faithfulness, or at least of loyalty. We live in a time now of great harm to the ordinary parts of our lives, and I wish that I had acquired all the faithfulness my neighborhood offers.

  Wh
at kind of imagination is at work to prompt that absurd claim? It’s not idiosyncratic or exclusive to me. The imagination at work is particular and peculiar in ways that I’ll call “Catholic.”5

  “Catholics live in an enchanted world,” Andrew Greeley asserts in the opening pages of his extended essay on the Catholic imagination.6 “A world,” he says, “of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace.”

  Some of those revelations are habits, which Flannery O’Connor might have called “habits of being.” Greeley has said that Catholics remain Catholic because they like to be Catholic, which he ties to the imaginative life that even humdrum, everyday Catholicism makes habitual. But some revelations of grace are things themselves, and that, I suppose, is my own bias. We touch the much-handled things we grew up with, and they touch us back, a relationship that implies a sacramental extension, a corresponding touch that you might rightly mistake for God’s. All of my writing is, in part, a meditation on the fate of ordinary things—the things we touch and the lingering effects of their touch on us. Manipulation is precisely what happens, but it works both ways. What we seek, I think, is tenderness in the encounter, but that goes both ways, too. In some of us, however, the touch of the everyday inspires dread. The imagination dwells on what Joan Didion memorably called “the unspeakable peril of the everyday.”

  And some revelations of grace, as O’Connor might have said, are encounters that render you so wounded by grief or exaltation that divinity infects you; encounters that gut your self-regard. As Stephen Schloesser has noted, in locating the roots of the twentieth-century Catholic novel, some Catholic writers sought to “out-grotesque the grotesque” in order to show that behind even the ugliest phenomena—even suburban sprawl, in my case—there is a supernatural force at work. “God lurks everywhere,” Greeley told an interviewer from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly in 2002. “That’s the fundamental Catholic instinct: That on the imaginative and poetic level, God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there’s God.”

  This imaginative apprehension of the immanent in the everyday has a political outcome—that is, the establishment of a sympathetic bond between strangers who might be neighbors leading to shared acts of community building. As much as it is a sense of wonder and delight, the Catholic imagination, as Greeley sees it, is a tool that helps men and women trust one another and to be faithful to each other, and that faithfulness supports our efforts to form communities and to breed in them O’Connor’s habits of being.

  One habit of being that I regard as a grace is a sense of place. When I walk out the door of my home, I see the familiar pattern of house, street, parks, places of worship, schools, and stores. I see the human-scale, porous, and specific landscape into which was poured the ordinariness that has shaped my work, my convictions, and my aspirations. My sense of place is based on the belief that each of us has an imaginative, inner landscape compounded of memory and longing that seeks to be connected to an outer landscape of people and circumstances.

  The author and environmentalist Barry Lopez asked a question some years ago about the San Fernando Valley,7 like Lakewood another place of terrible ordinariness. For Lopez a sense of place doesn’t begin with any of the conventional markers of community building: institutions, political processes, or assertions of a tradition. He asked a more insightful question: “How can we become vulnerable to a place?” With the deepening and widening of our imagination as an aspect of faith, we become more and more trusting. In becoming vulnerable, we acquire a sense of place. With that sensibility, we become implicated in a particular history and the common stories that bear our individual and shared memories.

  Trust, vulnerability, and a capacity for stories: it is with these habits that we become loyal. It’s really a question of falling in love. “In an enchanted world,” Greeley writes, “the beloved is both enchanted and frustrating.” We cannot, or will not, understand the reason why attraction to a place and its circumstances asks so much of us, but we act on that desire, which lets us yearn for what we already have.

  There’s an education in straight and narrow streets when they are bordered by sidewalks and a shallow setback of twenty feet of lawn and framed by unassuming houses set close enough together that the density is about eight units per acre. With neighbors just fifteen feet apart, we’re easily in each other’s lives in my suburb—across fences, in front yards, and even through the thin stucco-over-chicken-wire of house walls. You don’t have to love all of the possibilities for civility handed to us roughly by these circumstances, but you have to love enough of them.

  The strength of that regard, Royce thought, might be enough to form an intentional community—a community of memory—even if the place is as synthetic as a mass-produced suburb or the sudden gold rush towns of California that Royce was recalling in the 1870s. I believe Royce was right: at a minimum, loyalty to the idea of loyalty is necessary, even if the object of our loyalty is uncertain. There are no perfect places, only places where memories and longings may persist. Paul Wilkes, in his review of Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination, referred to this sensibility as “sympathetic pragmatism.”8

  And then for some of us, that feeling evaporates into disregard. After all, we’re well-trained consumers, TV remote control in hand, and ready to switch channels or affections or hometowns whenever we’re distracted. We run the risk, of course, of becoming so distracted that the imaginative connections between inner and outer landscapes break down entirely.

  I don’t really know how to make myself more vulnerable to the place in which I find myself (or perhaps I do, but only dimly). But faithfulness to what can be found in its history—to what can be found in our shared stories—impels me forward, drawn into a problematic landscape by the pragmatic sympathies of a Catholic imagination.

  The imagination is a power of appropriation that, like the Word being made flesh, enmeshes the ghostly and the definite. That entanglement is experienced, for writers like me (I suppose) as a dialogue, a continuous narrative within and without that I understand to be prayer. Because my imagination inclines to being analogical, habitual, communitarian, and commonplace, I assume that it’s Catholic. The complication for that imagination, as Mark Ravizza has noted,9 is the appeal of the too domesticated, a tendency he notes in Greeley’s conception of an analogical imagination framed by statues, stained-glass windows, gilded altarpieces, tapestries, votive candles, rosary beads, and holy cards.

  There’s more, of course, than all this lovely kitsch. My faith uses ordinary things from the marketplace: oil, bread, salt, wine, and wax. It values unappealing debris that everyday life leaves behind: bones, mummified remains, and, in the form of analogs, blood and broken flesh. After all, the Catholic imagination must consider daily the consequences of a state-sanctioned murder by public torture. For pilgrims journeying through the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, a contemporary manifestation of the Catholic imagination as an entire landscape, the end of the journey is Simon Toparovsky’s life-sized bronze figure of a man, black skin flayed, nailed up to a post. There is nothing sentimental in that image, no appeal to a consoling immigrant Catholic experience of folk piety. It isn’t possible to be nostalgic about a crucifixion.

  In his defense of the analogical (or sacramental) imagination as an accomplice of faith, Greeley offers a beloved aesthetics. “I am still a Catholic,” he writes in Why I Am a Catholic, “because of the beauty of Catholicism, beauty being truth in its most attractive form. It is the beauty of the images and stories of Catholicism which keep me in the Church.”10

  But sometimes the analogies are weak; b
eautiful effects fail to materialize. During the sermon at one Sunday mass at the Los Angeles cathedral, the altar servers brought out a large brazier to help illustrate a point the celebrant was making about the nature of prayer. He poured a handful of incense onto the coals and more incense until flames drove up a thick column of gray smoke. I anticipated that the cloying odor of liturgical incense—a powerful instigator of Catholic memories—would fill the air. It didn’t. By an accident of geometry in the design of the nave or its superior ventilation, the cloud ascended, spread into a veil, and joined the indifferent light overhead. But the burning incense left no smell.

  In the Catholic imagination, the Holy haunts the everyday, but so does disappointment. As Greeley notes, because the Catholic imagination believes that everything is a sign, it is prone, in its disappointments, to superstition, cults, and the substitution of religion for faith, the replacement of authority for loyalty. The brokenhearted can make a redemptive turning to the Incarnate, or they can turn away to the idols of institutions and ideologies or their own comforts.

  I’m satisfied because my imagination dwells (on and in a community), but I’m anxious that having a Catholic imagination will unsettle me, too. That imagination should flinch when blows are laid on another’s back, lift in sympathy with the prayers of another’s worship, and savor another’s wisdom even when expressed in cadences that are wholly foreign. It’s a sacramental imagination, surely, but also a moral one, and it is the means both by which I have written myself into the story of my place and its mix of tragedies and joys and through which I have negotiated my way from the personal to the public, from a flawed private life to the flawed—but sacred, human, and humanizing—body of the ruined paradise where I have a home.