Los Angeles, more than any other city, exists and functions as a place built from memory and fantasy. We know with certainty that Los Angeles is a real place, and yet so much of what is known of her is fabricated by the writers, architects, and filmmakers who, so inspired, craft fantasies in her likeness and attempt to conform the landscape to their ideals. A city built where no city by right should be, a city where there is no water. But she is a city created by sheer will, the intensity of millions of dreams made manifest.
Having found paradise, a person arriving to the Pacific Coast would want to make it theirs. To be as close to the dream as one could be without falling in. Beach houses constructed near Las Flores Canyon in Malibu in 1920 were humble affairs, intended for a day or so, if the weather was good. Maybe someday, a person could dream of staying longer.
A person could dream of staying forever.
It is tempting, lying in the glittering sun and soft sand, to keep this phantasia for oneself. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the daydream writ larger—in glass, in stone, in marble—and this unnatural perfection could continue all year. A manufactured bliss without seasons and without time. To build a monument as though one had conquered the elements. As though the dream had come true, and now would never change.
Los Angeles is a projection of our will to see her beauty as stable, her qualities as malleable, and her tranquility as permanent. Yet something ancient in her stirs and rocks, trembles then thrashes. It is terrifying. Terrifying because her rhythm proves how delusionary visions of her have been. The violence pierces the veil, tears the postcard illusion. The celluloid burns and reveals what we have tried to hide beneath our visions. Not only can she not be controlled, we have failed to fathom her power or depth.
I have lost many things in my life, people and places, but I have never lost Los Angeles. Because she is physically impossible to possess. I lose her every time the light changes, every time an old building is torn down, every time a wildflower appears and then vanishes again. It is in this elusiveness that she is her most constant. The word ephemera comes from the Greek words epi (“on, for”) and hemera (“day”). Like a breeze, like a still sea, like the Garden of Allah—only meant for a day.
What I have not inherited in heirlooms or certainties I have inherited in passed-down folklore of Los Angeles. The relics that endure in this place are not written in stone but in stories. When she disappears, she lives elsewhere—in memory, in film, in literature, in legend.
It is Los Angeles in a photo of my grandmother, June, in the 1930s, smiling in a garden that no longer exists.
To love Los Angeles is to hold two things at once—the elusive mirage of what she seems to be alongside the knowledge of her supine danger. As with any tremorous passion, attempting to engage with her contradictions can lead to obsession. A determination to make it work, to make it last, to understand her wild logic as no one else has.
When the landscape changes, when she turns over in her sleep and her form shifts and the Los Angeles I knew disappears, it is disquieting. It upsets the certainty that those memories happened at all.
The wet wood sizzling
The sound of ghosts leaving the trees
The Chumash and Gabrielino-Tongva people, the original stewards of Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, called these places by different names. They knew these areas could never be defined by their man made constructions or imaginings. It is believed the word “Malibu” derives from the name the Chumash gave the area of “Humaliwo,” which refers to the sound of the waves crashing on the shore. To name a place after a sound is to acknowledge its temporal nature. A name is the same as a sound—it exists for the one who is present in the moment, the one who experiences it into existence. But the land itself does not know itself as Los Angeles, or by any other name.
As a place, as a spirit, Los Angeles has history and nature we have forgotten in our desire to possess and form her—her ephemeral beauty, her subterranean cadence.
Fire into water and water into mountain, over and over, thrumming in the dark.
And those will exist long after all human life has left her forever.
Greer Sinclair is a writer, director, and actor living in Los Angeles.
