The sprawling geography of Los Angeles is hard to envision for those who live outside the region. Friends and family members in New York, gripped by apocalyptic images of the fires in 24/7 news reports, have had difficulty accepting that I live far enough away from the hills and the coast to be relatively safe.
“Still OK?” is the text I’ve been answering daily. “Yes, I’m still safe,” I reply, which is truer than I’m still OK, for how can anyone be OK knowing that just a few miles away, people are grieving the loss of their homes, belongings and communities?
The Beverly Hills Flats has become my default home, and it’s here where I’ve been getting reports on the devastating fires. The smoke has been insidious yet manageable with a mask. Facebook posts from acquaintances and former colleagues who have been evacuated or lost homes have brought the situation nearer to me, but it’s hard to imagine the scale of such suffering when you haven’t experienced the destruction firsthand.
Shakespeare helps me envisage the unimaginable, and a speech from “The Tempest” has been running through my mind since images of charred sections of Pacific Palisades and Altadena started circulating. In Act 4, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan who has been exiled to a desert island with daughter Miranda, and his magic book, interrupts his revenge scheme to conjure a supernatural theatrical pageant in honor of the engagement of Miranda and Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples.
The masque, performed by gentle spirits, enchants the betrothed. But Prospero is jolted into an awareness that Caliban and his confederates are plotting “a foul conspiracy” against his life, and he abruptly ends the show.
“Our revels now are ended,” he tells a dismayed-looking Ferdinand. “These our actors/(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, into thin air.”
The lines that Prospero speaks next have been echoing in me with the persistence of an earworm as I have tried to mentally put myself in the place of fellow Angelenos whose homes and neighborhoods have suddenly been erased.
“And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-cappped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Shakespeare was accustomed to making the stage a metaphor for life. “All the world’s a stage,/ and all the men and women merely players,” Jaques declares in “As You Like It,” and his melancholy set piece reflects a standard Elizabethan trope that Shakespeare as a man of the theater couldn’t resist.
But in “The Tempest,” Shakespeare takes this proposition a step further, directly equating the ephemeral conjurations of the theater with the transient reality of the audience. Metaphor become actual. The world offstage is no different from the world onstage, no matter the differences in duration. Impermanence is the common denominator.
Those gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, along with the planet itself and all who inhabit it, shall one day disappear and leave not a rack (or “wisp of cloud,” as “The Riverside Shakespeare” defines the word) behind. Prospero’s mind is understandably vexed, but the losses he’s already endured have sharpened his vision.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on” is a Shakespearean maxim emblazoned on T-shirts and trotted out in high school yearbooks, but the greeting card sentiment can stand only if the line isn’t quoted in full. The notion of our little lives surrounded by sleep is too death-haunted for Hallmark. But those whose lives have been upended by the fires can attest to the truth of what Shakespeare is describing.
A home is first and foremost a shelter designed to protect from the vicissitudes of nature. We are reminded of this basic function when there’s been a failure during a natural disaster. But the spiritual and symbolic aspects of where we live are as vital as the practical protections these lodgings afford.
A home is, after all, a private stage set, imbued with meaning by those who live there. And a neighborhood is made up of a collection of homes, businesses and civic trusts that extend the private imaginings of individuals to the broader community.
These dwellings and districts are indeed compounded of dreams, and all of us know how destabilizing it can be when we move and box up these hopes and fantasies. I moved five times in my first nine years in L.A., and each move brought intimations of mortality that were more unsettling than the physical work of setting up a new home.
As a renter, I don’t perhaps have the same sense of rootedness that those who have invested a portion of their life savings into home ownership. But a recent dispatch on the Los Angeles fires by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in the London Review of Books helped me understand more personally how the fires jeopardize not only real estate but also identities.
Writing from Highland Park, Tóibín concludes his report with a sad anecdote on the library of iconoclastic writer Gary Indiana that arrived in Los Angeles from New York on Jan. 7. The books were ultimately headed to an artist residence in Altadena.
If the collection “— the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured — had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday, unfortunately, there was still an address.”
Last year, I inherited a library of books from theater critic Gordon Rogoff, a colleague of Indiana’s at the Village Voice. The welcome addition of my mentor’s library compelled me to add more shelves to my already book-crammed apartment.
If I lost my furniture, clothes and apartment, I’d obviously be thrown into a state of emergency. But if I lost my books, I wouldn’t know who I was. It’s how I’ve defined myself as an adult making my way in the world.
The grief of those bearing witness to the fires is more than sympathy. We’ve all been given a shocking lesson in the “baseless fabric of this vision” we call reality but which Prospero recognizes is no more solid than a dream.
Shakespeare, however, doesn’t leave his audience in despair. The play ends with an epilogue in which the protagonist addresses the audience directly, a not uncommon practice in Shakespearean comedy. But in this late romance, as Shakespeare critic Anne Barton has pointed out, Prospero remains in character, courteously asking the audience for release from the island so that he can return to his dukedom.
By the grace of the audience, the play can continue offstage. The material world may be vulnerable to disaster. But our lives are the product of imagination, and that is a zone no inferno can touch.
