John F. BuckleyEnglish 548.001Seminar PaperDUE: 26 Apr 2013

Driving Passions, Driving Home

In her foreword to the 1995 anthology she edited with

Charles H. Webb, Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond,

Suzanne Lummis speaks of the collected writers “spilling

their vernacular into the urban wilderness” (1). In labeling

Los Angeles an urban wilderness, a horizontally sprawling

complement to so many vertically oriented “concrete jungles”

Back East, Lummis places it in opposition to both the

country and civilization. Into this formulation we may mix

James Fenton’s commentary introducing the idea that the

opposite of the city is the home, especially a home in the

country (Goldstein). To all of that, add a perhaps

reasonable proposal that the home is the epicenter of

civilized life. As an urban wilderness, therefore, Los

Angeles may appear as not only the opposite of what is rural

and civilized, but also doubly the “anti-home.”

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On the other hand, that may just be wrong.

As early as Blake, and then Baudelaire, poets traversed

the city, confronted the alien and alienating crowd. They

left their dwellings, looked outward, charted the cities’

topographies, and collected vignettes. Early modernist poets

like Eliot and Sandburg noted the size and the scope and the

sheer physicality of the city, creating totalizing,

sometimes apocalyptic visions. Later modernists rejected

this totalization, focusing instead on impressions, on the

sundry meanings of the city, on subjective flickers instead

of objective edifices. Depicting the vast, uniform voice of

the crowd gave way to navigating a scintillating polyphony.

Later poets like Derek Walcott, reacting to a preoccupation

with size, scope, and physicality, turned their attentions

inward, to more intimate and abstract concerns. Each new

generation of poets makes their city more familiar,

domesticates it, and ultimately makes it a home. And so,

even in the case of Los Angeles, Nathanael West’s and

Bertolt Brecht’s grand mythologizing and handwringing over

Hollywood subsides into more unique, more human concerns.

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Lummis and Webb’s Grand Passion does contain grand passions,

but they belong not to the famous icons a non-Angeleno may

presume, but more modest figures making a home of the big

city.

One may next ask whether there is some common means by

which Angeleno poets accomplish this process of

domestication, of making the metropolis familiar, of

integrating the outside urban landscape with the individual

psychological landscape. The answer may be, “The same way

all Angelenos do…in their cars.” As Reyner Banham observes

in his chapter “Ecology IV: Autopia,” “The freeway is where

the Angelenos live a large part of their lives” (214), often

caught in the traffic that has supplanted the crowd of

Blake’s or Baudelaire’s times. As each person drives his or

her car through Los Angeles, he or she becomes familiar with

Los Angeles, begins to define Los Angeles, and thereby also

begins to define his or her domestic sphere, the world of

maximum comfort and intimacy for the self. Pulling all the

operant components together results in the analogy [self :

home :: car : Los Angeles].

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So is Los Angeles anti-home or home? Even the casual

reader of Grand Passion may notice that in psychologizing the

driving experience itself and/or the conflation of car and

driver, many of the poets in the anthology not only explore

the creative impulse, “a tendency toward cohesion and

unity,” but what Freud has called the Todestrieb, or death

drive (Evans 33). He attests that the death drive can only

be perceived because it, in fact, always coexists with the

life drive, in differing proportions. And so, keeping this

fusion in mind, one may see navigating one’s car around Los

Angeles as simultaneously an act of domestication and

integration and an act of dissolution and disillusionment,

an act fusing multiple grand passions. To drive is to be at

home is to be away is to live is to die. Counterbalancing

time spent driving aimlessly, feeling “a sense of

empowerment at times so overwhelming that it [has]

frightened [one]…a rush as strong as cocaine…as if my

individual existence had for once escaped its narrow bounds”

(Rieff 49), is time spent familiarizing oneself with the

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city, of making it seem smaller, cozier, more tailored to

the usual parameters of the self.

Carol Muske’s aptly titled “Little L.A. Villanelle”

punctuates an evolving array of significant images with the

repeated lines “I drove home that night in the rain” and

“After months of drought, the old refrain.” The poem’s

formal rigidity counterbalances its theme of passions

misguided or improperly directed. The refrains’ references

to natural phenomena like “rain” and “drought” call to mind

the original pastoral roots of the villanelle, but such a

recollection is undermined by the gritty, particularly urban

imagery Muske employs. First, her speaker sees “The

gutterless streets filled and overflowed” (2), that which

should provide passage becoming increasingly impenetrable,

those streets that should help define the city—as well as

life, death, home, and the self—becoming increasingly

indefinite. She hears “A cheap love song on the radio, off-

key pain,” romance rendered askew (4). She sees “billboard

sex: a red stain / spreading over a woman’s face, caught

mid-scream” (7-8). Lipstick and orgasm? Blood and violence?

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Perhaps the billboard depicts both, in this dissolving

landscape that conflates Eros and Thanatos.

The next tercet targets Hollywood’s role as “The

Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and calls into question the

speaker’s status, maybe even her safety: “Marquees on Vine,

lit up, name after name, / starring in what eager losses: he

dreamed / I drove home that night in the rain” (10-12).

Multiple people have achieved some measure of fame here,

their names in lights on a major Los Angeles thoroughfare,

but the media vehicles for this fame, though “eager,” are

“losses,” perhaps box-office failures, perhaps some other

admixture of hope and disappointment, of dream and despair.

Extending this motif is the mention of a “he” dreaming of

the speaker’s return home at night (treacherous condition)

in the rain (treacherous condition). Like the names on

marquees, “I” is here the stuff of reveries and concerns.

Does the speaker exist in the waking world? Has the speaker

returned home safely? Is “he” envisioning unrealized peril,

a threat that does not manifest itself outside his dream?

The voice of the speaker persists throughout the rest of the

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poem, so she probably both exists and has arrived home

without encountering disaster. But the threat—the unsafe

conditions inherent in driving home at night in the rain—

also continues throughout the villanelle. Home and self

remain at stake.

Muske develops her elemental danger in a fresh

direction in the penultimate and “driest” stanza, in which

she complements water with fire, recording “Smoldering

brush, high in the hills. Some inane / preliminary spark:

then tiers of falling reflected light. / After months of

drought, the old refrain” (13-15). Off the street, “high in

the hills,” but very possibly still within Los Angeles city

limits, within one of the many wooded pockets dotting its

landscape, a wildfire begins after months of dry weather.

This fire begins not in a grand passion, but an “inane

spark,” an instant of mindlessness. On a symbolic level,

there is an insufficient Lebenstrieb (life drive) that

triggers levels of destruction, a surfeit of Todestrieb. And

the final line of the tercet reminds us that such an event

is common enough, “the old refrain,” one more iteration of

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idiocy. Through this all, the speaker continues driving

home, still navigating increasingly indistinct streets as

she attempts to define self, home, life, death, and city.

Both speaker and reader achieve some measure of

clarity, a heightened vantage point, in the final quatrain,

in which “I wanted another life, now it drives beside me /

on the slick freeway, not [sic—now?] it waves, faster, faster

— / I drove home that night in the rain. / After months of

drought, the old refrain” (16-19). She is now on a freeway

(perhaps elevated?) that is only “slick,” not overflowing

like the surface roads of the first tercet. There seems to

be a Doppelgänger, some sort of Romantic double, not just

riding but driving beside her — could this image indicate the

fusion of life drive and death drive? This second life

“waves, faster, faster,” calling to mind increasing

frequencies, increasing oscillation, Lebenstrieb and Todestrieb

rapidly alternating. She drove home that night in the rain,

but nothing attests to the fact that she ever arrives.

Having experienced the wet, indefinite city throughout this

poem, Muske’s speaker has not necessarily returned to her

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house, only achieved a degree of awareness into her own

self’s duality. Her coming home is internal, the advent of

epiphany.

The motif of doubling returns in the very next piece in

the anthology, Liz Gonzalez’s unpunctuated concrete poem

“Catholic Death.” Shaped like the flame of a votive candle,

“Catholic Death” relates two outcomes for one dead, sinning

father: “Cheated on / mama His biker buds say he / picked up

his cracked head Got / on his knees Recited the Act of /

Contrition Police report states / they found him under the /

front tire” (8-14). Like Schrödinger’s cat or a character

from Rashomon, the father both survives and does not survive

the accident long enough to pray as a penitent and receive

divine forgiveness, to return to a state of grace. Gonzalez

reports that “Inside” the daughter lighting the candle, “she

/ aches God never / forgave him” (14-16). But given the

poem’s lack of end punctuation and the conventional

capitalization of the Deity, the final lines could be read

as either “Inside she aches. God never forgave him” or

“Inside she aches [that] God never forgave him,” the second

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interpretation casting “aches” as something closer to

“fears,” not the pain of absolute certainty.

While death and driving lurk at the heart of Sesshu

Foster’s second untitled prose poem in Grand Passion, there is

no return home, no vision of a Romantic double that

signifies a deep epiphany. His speaker begins by stating, “I

saw their bodies steaming, lying on the avenue. The

motorcycle was crammed up under the car. Their bodies were

unmoving and gray under the streetlights, and I could not

see what they were looking at” (104). More than one

“unmoving and gray” figure has succumbed to the return to

the inorganic represented by the Todestrieb, has been

initiated into some final mystery, but the speaker is unable

to share whatever vision to which the dead people may have

been privy. Still, his gaze and others’ do glean some

experience from the scene, some new awareness of death: “I

had not seen that before. The bodies were steaming on the

ground. People were coming out onto the street to look at

them” (ibid.) The steaming of the bodies brings together the

more “passionate” elements, water and fire (moisture and

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heat), that Muske has discussed in her villanelle. The motif

of the urban crowd recurs as faceless figures enter the

street, which again represents the venue for coming home,

for defining the self, for gaining experience and awareness

of mingled drives. Here, one must enter the street to get a

good look at death. But this crowd may be a false goal, a

red herring for Foster’s speaker; his next, curious claim,

“The people were not shining like the car dealerships”

(105), evokes the conflation of car and driver, vehicle and

agent of discovery, but also connotes dullness, either a

lack of perceptivity or a return to the inorganic via death.

Consider, too, that “the people” may refer not to the

spectators but the corpses. Instead of merging with the

crowd, seeing only what they see, “I kept going, driving

down skidrow at midnight, looking for my brother” (ibid.),

continuing a more individual quest. Yet by driving through

and hence charting the most rundown neighborhood, the bottom

of the socioeconomic ladder, the speaker establishes a lower

parameter for his life and landscape; he effectively makes

his own trip to the underworld. And unlike Muske’s narrator,

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Foster’s driver has no chance by the end of the prose poem

of having reached his destination: finding his brother, a

person that suggests both home and Doppelgänger, end goal

and complement. He remains in the realm of death, without

the concomitant Lebenstrieb that would suggest completion, full

awareness. His story’s lack of title, in addition to his own

lack of name or face, parallels the silence Freud ascribes

to the Todestrieb.

Not all poets included in Grand Passion assign the moment

of epiphany, abortive or otherwise, to the driver. Mary

Armstrong’s “Freeway Shooting” casts the driver as

instrument rather than recipient of a growing awareness of

death and the city. The poem begins with a man’s being

fatally shot in the head at five AM while driving on the

freeway. The main figure of the poem, however, is apparently

the victim’s spouse, whose perspective dominates the

remaining three stanzas. When she first appears, she is

doing housework, making a bed, smoothing “blankets / in the

same hurried way she smooths [sic] / her hair. She has

learned to be fast, / to keep up with the street” (12-15).

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Even at home, as on the freeways, “the street,” synecdoche

for Los Angeles, is a site of modernist velocity, set at a

faster pace than people might naturally move. Even “the

dying was quick,” the woman soon learns (21).

Moving past Romantic doubling to postmodernist

fragmentation and mediation of the self, multiple voices

attempt to capture and package the victim’s fundamental

nature for the reporters that have come by the home, wanting

sound bites. The woman calls her dead partner “’Hard

working’” and “’Conscientious’” (24, 25). His brothers, on

the other hand, focus less on attitude than aptitude,

zooming in on his skill at performing that quintessential

Southern Californian act of self-definition: “’Oh, yes,’ /

they say, ‘he was one hell of a driver’” (26-27). Live by

the car, die by the car.

The brothers refine their perspective in the final

stanza, and in doing so, clarify Armstrong’s own formulation

of the streets of Los Angeles as both anti-home and home,

source both of death and life, alienating violence and self-

affirming meaning. When the woman cries and asks how this

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tragedy could have happened, they reply, “’Hey […] This is

the way it is. If you don’t want / to be shot, stay the fuck

off the freeway, / the streets, the alleys, the driveways’”

(31-34). Defining oneself entails a degree of potential

jeopardy, just as the Lebenstrieb implies the presence of the

Todestrieb; to drive one way is to chance driving in the

opposite direction as well. Notice that the avenues down

which the driver may proceed—and risk getting shot—move

increasingly closer to one’s physical home, from freeways to

driveways. Banham adds, “that coming off the freeway is

coming in from outdoors” (213), reinforcing the sense that

the driver is heading home, to the quintessential “indoors.”

Also, consider that the roughness of the victim’s brothers’

reply may imply some degree of irritation that the woman has

forgotten a crucial fact about the city, that she has

overlooked a rule that she should know, Los Angeles being

her home. The conflation of opposing poles—in this next

case, hostile stranger and family member, surviving spouse

and unknown assassin—continues by means of the gun imagery

included several lines later, as the brothers recommend she

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stay in her bedroom “’until the blood / is powder in your

veins and prayers click / on your tongue like misfires’”

(37-39). Only then can the woman leave Los Angeles, walking

“’backward, away / from this place, as if you were dancing’”

(41-42), not by driving, an activity that would leave her

still defining herself as an Angeleno, still traveling

toward a home located in the Southland.

In her passage from the prose poem L.A. Love Cry, Wanda

Coleman quite readily accepts the binary oppositions—dream

and reality, adoration and dispassion, life and death—that

arise from integrating oneself into the metropolis of Los

Angeles, another writer using her literal vehicles (car,

language) as interpretive vehicles for navigating the

polyphony, for converting urban context into personal text.

Romance and death come together from the start, as she

writes, “Loving you is to embrace violence in broad daylight

in South Central” (210). Her speaker’s car is recast as

“your brand-new, chrome-finished piece of the American

Dream,” just as “you,” previously presumed to be the city of

Los Angeles,” is reformulated as a person, maybe the speaker

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herself. The human “you” is robbed of the “dream,” the car,

by “some little diddy-bops half your age,” who leave the

person “gunned down by automatic fire” because she “ain’t

wearing their colors.” She calls an lover “with deaf ears”

with her “dying words.” As Coleman advances this narrative,

she provides incomplete sentences, each beginning “Is to

[verb]…,” each example a predicate for the subject with

which she began the prose poem, “Loving you [i.e., Los

Angeles].” Loving Los Angeles is to achieve dreams, to court

doom, to find oneself on the wrong side of the blue/red

color line, and to erase the lines separating dream and

reality, passion and dispassion, life and death, city and

self.

Coleman seems to recognize the paradoxes in her scheme

as she begins the next paragraph, “Loving you is to embrace

the irrational and the disarranged.” After the relative

linearity and narrow focus of the first and largest unit,

the poet casts her net wider as she proceeds through the

remaining four paragraphs, encompassing larger groups and

abstractions as the grammatical sections grow shorter and

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shorter. She continues, “Is to welcome halfway house

refugees and hospice hangers-on.” These two groups appear to

be the “irrational” and “disarranged” spoken of in the first

sentence of the paragraph. The “hospice hangers-on” are in a

liminal state, poised at the threshold between life and

death. Even more complicated are the “halfway house

refugees,” caught in a state of existential superposition,

both/neither imprisoned and/nor free, both/neither at home

and/nor away from home, riding both sides of the line with

regard to criminality, chemical dependency, and/or

residency. However one places these people, they are human

ciphers to be decoded, organized, or merely accepted by

those driving themselves to self-definition across the

landscape of Los Angeles. Next, moving beyond its

inhabitants to the city itself, the final three paragraphs

are single sentences, each shorter but more decisive than

the previous one, each one subsiding syntactically but

developing thematically:

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Loving you is to love a special brand of

madness as sweet, as spicy, and as dangerous as

clove.

To love L.A. is to love more than a city.

It’s to love a language.

This passage from L.A. Love Cry thus ends on a sort of

Wittgensteinian note, something along the lines of “All that

we know of our passion for our home city is that which is

linguistically encoded.” The reification of dream or desire

as car at the beginning evolves into a poet’s verbal vehicle

by the end.

Suzanne Lummis herself contributes “Three Blocks” to

the anthology, the editor’s poem returning more squarely to

this argument’s consideration of the multivalence of drive

for the inhabitants of Los Angeles. Like Muske’s, Lummis’

speaker drives on a wet night, although the latter poem’s

driver seems less at the mercy of the elements, taking “the

rain head-on like / a diving bell burrowing still deeper and

/ up this homliest [sic] of streets” (1-3) and “my four

radial tires [spinning] off / sheets of water as they cross

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6th” (40-41). She drives both a deep-sea bathysphere

exploring the unknown and a car down the most familiar of

roads. Either way, the primal force of the rain is rendered

figuratively as well as literally atmospheric, a touch of

noir as the woman sallies forth. Maybe more than any other

character discussed here, Lummis’ speaker is at home driving

in Los Angeles, her heading down three mere blocks a journey

that performs the concurrent functions of domestication and

alienation, of gaining and losing a history and a home that

orient the self within the metropolis. The lights that guide

her way are “just things were loved and lost and have now /

found but must leave behind again” (6-7). She spots “the

wonderful drug store, last / Rexall on earth” (9-10),

possible emblem of nostalgia for a past generation of

Angeleno businesses, certainly redolent of the Schwab’s

Pharmacy at which Lana Turner was alleged to have been

discovered.

Indeed, Lummis’ speaker may regret that her city has

become too manageable at its present moment, too lacking in

Hollywood grandeur. She regrets that “our dreams are getting

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smaller . . . / smaller . . . Now they can stand on a

shelf / with the ceramic animals, now pocketsize, / now two-

for-one in that bin there” (15-18). Gone are the grand

conceptions of Coleman’s speaker. But Lummis proceeds past

despair into equanimity: “So what, I’m happy anyway in this

rain. / And when I die, it might be like that / old man

lying on the sidewalk, / facing the sky” (19-22). Her

narrator’s reverie about a happy, public, urban death

continues as she crosses “the low river rising / on

Wilshire” (24-25), a temporary Styx, and she muses on the

inconsequential voices of her would-be rescuers, “so tiny

they could be the queries of mice” (30). (But what sort of

mice makes queries? Perhaps Cinderella’s. This brief jaunt

through Los Angeles is Lummis’ personal myth, her speaker’s

fairy tale.) Again, the speaker hedges her bets, appreciates

both sides of the equation, as she claims, “Death is more

dignified than life. But tonight even life’s not bad /

[….] / and I’m not dead yet” (37-38, 42). The creative

energy of Lebenstrieb and the stillness of Todestrieb find

themselves as perfectly balanced as we’ve seen so far.

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As “Three Blocks” nears its conclusion, Lummis draws

our attention once more both to cars driving through Los

Angeles, domesticating the landscape and helping define

their drivers’ worlds, and to the ability of water to wash

away such definitions, to obliterate meaningful

distinctions. Her speaker stays aware of this world but

ready to imagine another:

I’m just watching those tail lights

vanishing forward which make me think

of a surface of dark water, something

valuable dropping, now

sinking from reach,

now

rising (43-49).

Meaning is made. Meaning is lost beneath the dark surface.

Meaning is regained. Her drive almost over, the speaker’s

brief fairy tale finally ends with an epiphany that brings

illusion and reality together, as well as life and death,

self and city, poet and her literary Doppelgänger and the

City of Angels: “And oh this must be it: / Thing of Legend,

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Boulevard / of Put-Back-Together-Again / Dreams . . .” (50-

53). Lummis synthesizes all of her grand passions.

Los Angeles is not the oldest city—it’s too young, for

example, to have been listed and fallen into ruin in The

Waste Land alongside Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna,

and London. But its status as the most important city in

contemporary America, cultural capital center of the world,

has lent it a textual and actual potency that perhaps even

New York City can’t match. And like the line of urban poets

before them, the contributors to Lummis and Webb’s Grand

Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond have had to make sense of

this metropolis in its sprawling heterogeneity. Moving

beyond earlier writers’ easy cheers and jeers at excellent

weather and Hollywood excess, the poets of this anthology

make a home of Los Angeles in their cars, their driving a

metonym for engaging with deeper impulses like Freud’s

twinned psychological drives, in the process defining the

city and themselves, transforming the urban wilderness into

something accessible to their vernacular and ours.

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Bibliography

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New

York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Goldstein, Laurence. "W. H. Auden Epilogue." Modern Poetry

and the City. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 15

Apr. 2013. Lecture.

Lummis, Suzanne and Charles Harper Webb. Grand Passion: The Poets

of Los Angeles and Beyond. Los Angeles: Red Wind, 1995.

Print.

Rieff, David. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1991. Print.

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