The Other White House

There's no such thing as land. I want to tell you about the first time I even thought of what that would look like. Because taking in the whole experience, it was more like a revelation. In a City of Lights, in retrospect, I was really one that Went On the night I went there for the first time.

This happened when I lived out in Los Angeles, and it was enacted into small-r reality at the top of the Summit they call Griffith Observatory. It's truly amazing, that place. Once you visit it you can't resist seeing it up there in the Hills when you're around down below doing errands anything East of Fairfax. Strange how you never saw it before, you think to yourself. It's so right-there, sticking right out. Huh.




The summit where the Observatory peeks out of the pines and overlooks downtown Los Angeles and absolutely everything else between -- sometimes even out to Long Beach and that's water. I'd say the building itself looks a little like church, not science. Because it's a telescope hut, it's really kinda mosque in a way -- a little lighthouse of mason white amid the slightly green and mostly tan desert tundra hills. Perched up there, right along side the Giant Letters, those that say where the stars TRULY are. Here's this mighty mountain museum really looking like nothing more than a white canary perched on a coalminer town's cave walls.



Every once in a while a penis to the sky called a telescope emerges, searching for the stars. Absolute morons we are not to see this almost mechanical irony. A Rosemary's baby feeling when you walk around. Things happen there, and it's been in movie after movie. As you walk around its balconies you gaze out into the gaping vastness of endless Christmas treelight lives all twinkling in rows and columns and making nothing more than a really big, soft, fluffy sound.

Not loud at all. Forgotten, really.

So ever since my first visit I became part of a moving (literally thing thing went around) museum piece, one that really made me stop once and for all on something. It was a giant bronze-looking globe which you could walk all around and pick out continents and their shelves and mountain ranges never even seen and stuff - but not one word printed on its surface.

The display rested on a simple idea: to show us Nature's Skull. Peeling away a biospheric skin to show the ugly bones. Stripping clouds and sea off what we call Earth to expose a certain truth. Grass and Trees the makeup of It All - eveything's just land underneath. So, three-quarters of a something I was told was actually more like clothing and not the thing itself.



So there is the SHELL a.k.a the rock layer. LITHOSphere. To water, everything is a VESSEL. It's one thing: it's all just land. And even Science dare break the great taboos of naming still the regions of Gaia's skull, tectonic plates floating on molten core. Even the oceans are land, in the technical sense of it of course. Just buried under lots and lots of waterskin. But seriously, 75% water they say?

Us too I know. Our bodies, that is. That's for Another Time though.