The Wilderness Shall Blossom: A Wrap-Around Prophecy in Pasadena (Copy)
Driving through the streets of Los Angeles, lowered from the level of the highway-sky and slowed by the tangles and fabric of the city, the suburban Londoner will soon become aware of the presence of medieval architecture.
As a British citizen holding lightly to the status of Los Angeles resident, I choose to use the local terminology, “medieval.” I.e. that sloughy European durée before the invention of the handheld firearm, when self-defense was limited to swords, maces, and lances – an era sufficiently captured in the arena of the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament in Buena Park, Orange County, where knights on white horses engage in staged combat, while a four-course feast distracts attention from historical accuracy.
In a city where residential architecture is adjacent to movie studio sets, the flat-packed façade is an accepted element of the Los Angeles vernacular. Of the many options of mythologies on offer, the Dark Ages have an unexpected appeal – surveilled by near-constant sun, the floodlit city finds its shadow and escape in the creaky design features of the olde worlde.
Medievalism at street-level has two primary modes. The high-theme sales pitch – motels modeled on gingerbread storybook cottages, squat mini-malls posing as wattle-and-daub villages; or amnesiac assimilation – polyurethane-beamed shopfronts for vape shops and taquerias, the origin of their style long absorbed into the walls.
If the sight of these buildings makes me feel at home, it is not because they reconnect to a root system of Chaucerian garderobes and English Heritage-funded castles. Rather, they are reminiscent of the neo-Tudor homes that line the inferno circles around Heathrow, or the late Victorian villas built for solicitors and pharmacists, each door capped with a domain name inscribed in Gothic font – Rosemont, Edelweiss, Beulah.
Yet even as I think I have found a source of grounding – is Los Angeles pastiche really so different from English aspiration? – a doubt starts to seep into my mind like rising damp. Those suburban follies I knew in England were pungent with desire, whereas Los Angeles consumes olde worlde aesthetics just because it can – part of a global pic-a-mix of architectural styles, empty of either context or craving.
However, it would be wrong to assume that Los Angeles is bereft of craftsmanship. This is a city that takes its stage sets seriously, with guilds to protect the labor of expert technicians. Visit the Tam O’Shanter in Atwater to experience the hospitality afforded to a kilted Scottish laird, your whiskey glinting beneath blazing wall sconces and warmed by the fortifications of wood-paneled walls. Slide into a booth at the HMS Bounty in Koreatown and witness the seafaring camaraderie of the captain’s table; dusty alcoves stocked with ships-in-bottles, low ceilings hung with dim red lamps. These are the places I would go when yearning for solidity – to the most effective stage sets.
But to really capture the Los Angeles love of craftsmanship, we need to gain access to the most coveted stage sets of all – to that dark interior of the Los Angeles psyche, the object of desire that launched the city’s sprawl – the so-called “single family home.”
*
Leaving behind the hungry streets of commercial zones – as wide and hostile as a motorway to the English mind – you’ll find tree-lined avenues intended for children to play safely and for dogs to convey status. Here, along the high-palmed avenues of West Adams or the arcadian lanes of Pasadena, you will encounter the craftsman bungalow – an architectural style based on the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement, an aesthetic philosophy that originated in England in the mid 19th century in response to the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution.
The movement advocated for the value of skillfully crafted handmade objects as the premise and expression of unalienated labor. Inhabiting a house that emerged from the landscape and living among objects of beauty and use, the householder would once again feel at home in the world – with himself, with his work, with the rhythms of growth, time, and decline.
For the English art critic John Ruskin, whose writing and social reform campaigns established the foundations of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the archetype of the joyful laborer took the form of the medieval craftsman. Ruskin imagines the masons who built the great cathedrals of Europe, absorbed in the arduous toil of carving saints and gargoyles, euphoric as they clung to the giddy scaffolding of spires.
The craftsman – Ruskin speculates – was sustained and sublimated by the conviction that he was working for the glory of God. But how could this figure – simple of heart and sure of hand – survive the Victorian age, threatened by the chatter of apes and the long withdrawing roar of faith? Cut loose from the support ropes of his God and relocated to the soot-streaked streets of Manchester and London, the craftsman found an alternative source of orientation. He redirected his efforts towards transforming a sick society; infusing a morality into the material culture that served as ballast and backbone for Britain at the height of the empire.
Before long, the craftsman was being called upon to etch his memories of medieval emblems into kitchen cabinets and fireplace inglenooks; techniques for stained glass, borrowed from Orvieto and Chartres, found new and lucrative uses when applied to the windows of downstairs lavatories.
Itinerant by nature and well-suited to a nation of materialist-idealists, he found easy passage to the United States. Settling first in Boston, the craftsman received a courteous welcome from Italianates and Anglophiles who sought a unified scheme of aesthetic and moral order for their Grand Tour souvenirs. His ideas were treated decorously and translated fairly accurately – enshrined within the catechism of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, flickering in the last light of the Victorian age.
With the blank canvas of a new century before him, the craftsman embarked upon his own mission of manifest destiny. Venturing west, his new-found detachment from antimacassars inspired the expansion of Prairie Style. Funded by Buffalo railwaymen and Cleveland steel moguls, he combined American mod-cons with his own primordial instincts for tangled vines and sacred geometry. In Iowa, he was reunited with his countrymen, and settled for a while to learn bookbinding and quilting techniques from neighboring Scandinavians.
Having come of age among fin-de-siècle decadents, the craftsman was not designed to withstand Midwestern austerity. After a winter of stitching hymnals and consuming cabbage from a jar, he joined a convoy of Swedish settlers in search of sun. Someone had once seen a speculator’s postcard of palm trees and orange groves; they made their way through the southwestern deserts in search of the oasis.
By the time he reached California, the craftsman had developed various food intolerances, a penchant for Japonisme, and a tuberculosis cough that called for open air and sleeping porches. In The Craftsman magazine – which published his principles as a pattern language for replication – he read of the benefits of Hydratite waterproofing and Sanitas washable wall-covers – technologies sufficient to exorcise the traces of any Canterville ghost.
The magazine gave its name to the modern craftsman house, providing floor plans and stylistic guidance for readers inspired to build their own. Launched in 1901, its pages heralded a new and progressive age built on the best of what had come before – a contemporary approach to artistic and skillful living, featuring in-depth analysis of Flemish tapestries alongside articles extolling the benefits of ju-jitsu gyms.
In the language of Los Angeles real estate, the craftsman house is compressed simply to “craftsman.” Thus, the medieval laborer – now so far from his origins at the roots of the green world – is finally converted to architectural form. He manifests, static and sturdy, heftily belted by a wrap-around porch, his gables supported by tapered columns of boulders or bricks. His eaves are deep, and exposed rafters with filigree brackets reveal his aesthetic tensions – an instinct for structural straightforwardness, entwined with a liking for ornament and organic curves. His elements, his pattern language, could be cut and rewoven like strands of DNA in shades of rust, ochre, and sage.
Here, at home, the craftsman finds a place of rest – his evolution suspended, earthy and idyllic, before the arrival of sanitorium aesthetics and the strictures of war. At a time when doomsday narratives of rapid technological development and the global ecological crisis hold equal media sway, the moral argument of these houses has attained a new relevance. The craftsman makes tangible – inhabitable – a vision of engineering and industry continuous with nature’s telos, a shelter for the son of man as free of neuroses as a burrow or a nest.
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It was several years after moving to Los Angeles that I crossed the threshold of my first craftsman. I had observed these houses from the outside, passing by on warm evenings just as the glowworms were starting their nightly vigils. I had admired the patterned window panes of floral motifs and geometric tracery, and found my gaze drifting to the gestalt of the interior – seeking the recesses of built-in cabinets and heavy-mantled fireplaces, occasionally modeled by the slow and lamplit movements of residents as they engaged in the closing of the day – the dusting of a desk, the construction of a smore – until my eyes seemed to attract some unconscious apprehension, and the blinds were lowered against the dark outside.
I hadn’t been inclined to investigate further. As a transplant to California, still thirsty for seemingly limitless resources of sun and the fractal surfaces of Hockney-esque pools, craftsman houses seemed to me an aberration, a dark and hulking retreat to the world I had left behind. I selected my friends carefully and accordingly. Semi-successful and committed to cleanliness, they gathered on the premise of a shared liking for modernist aesthetics, tennis, and chaparral scents. Almost all of them lived in houses with an east-facing breakfast nook, a single basil plant, and a blue Matisse cut-out print framed on the wall.
For the most part, this set-up served me well. The brunches were gluten and histamine free, the evenings were early, the microdoses friendly. It was only the holidays that were hard. Not being attuned to alerts that Thanksgiving was approaching (pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks), or Independence Day (flags attached to toothpicks, on sale at CVS), I often found myself without plans shortly before the entire city went into party mode. As a result, I would typically latch onto a friend’s schedule last minute, finding myself adrift from breakfast nooks in a far-flung part of the city.
That was how I accessed my first craftsman. On a dusty golden evening, one Fourth of July, the national celebration of detachment from the English.
The invitation had come from an East Coast screenwriter friend whose English credentials were much greater than mine, given that she could trace her lineage to the Plantagenets. The party was to be held at the Batchelder House in Pasadena, the home of an antiques dealer specializing in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and I received a brief and online-accessible architectural primer in advance.
This was sufficient to expect a c.1910 “woodsy” Swiss chalet-style bungalow built by Ernest Batchelder, one of Southern California’s foremost tilemakers, whose earth-toned, slip-glaze tiles, can be found installed on domestic fireplaces and in public buildings throughout the United States. Single-surface tiles are interspersed with highly-worked relief designs across a wide range of categories for meaning-making: heraldic emblems, medieval knights, mayan patterns, oaks and angels, and – a particular favorite among California homeowners – a whole aviary of peacocks, raptors, and songbirds. The tiles were produced in the backyard studio, alongside a platform for performance where Batchelder’s wife, Alice Coleman, staged chamber music concerts.
On approaching the house for workshops and soirées, the artists and patrons of Pasadena would walk along a garden path of mottled brown and green tiles – and here, expectation cedes to experience. The path spread out before me, as though two peacocks had merged together and pixelated into squares.
Standing at the open front door, that evening of the fourth, my attention could have settled upon any arrangement of objects and materials. The built-in wooden desk that once served as a display counter for Batchelder’s tiles; today, set with Tiffany-style lamps projecting silhouettes of cattle, windmills, and milkmaids. The heavy fireplace of brown glazed tiles, inlaid with motifs of exotic plumed birds and guarded by relief sculptures of shield-bearing lions. The turquoise ceramics and glassware placed on the ledge of the paneling – fluted edges and orbs, reflecting the light cast by Japanese hanging lanterns.
On another day, in another mind – what the eye cuts through to, might be different. What it alights on becomes a sign, an indication of what you are seeing, you are seeking, at that time. The aperture is only ever as wide as the world at that moment, and expands to fit the shape and duration of attention.
As it happens, the first thing I saw, subliminally selected, was not authentic to the origins of the house. It was a layer added later in the 1980s: a wallpaper frieze that wrapped around the room just below ceiling level.
A reproduction wallpaper, based on a 1901 poster produced by the illustrator Walter Crane as a protest against the Boer War. Proud lions, teeth bared, process in linear fashion, making their way between thorny rose stems. The lions are guided by flying doves, and snowdrops bloom beneath their paws; an unbroken scroll of text weaves around their brawny bodies. Its message becomes the mood and meaning of the room; an oblique key that is part poetry, part pageantry, part prophecy:
~ The Wilderness shall blossom as the ROSE ~
The line is borrowed from the Book of Isaiah, in which the prophet stages a panoramic vision of divine judgement upon Jerusalem: the purgation of the city, the salvation of the righteous, and the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. We are told that on the day of His vengeance “the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll”; that the land shall be soaked in blood, that palaces and fortresses shall be overgrown with nettles, brambles, and thorns.
The wallpaper reveals the next scene; the wilderness where humans once walked. In time, God’s people will be granted forgiveness and civilizations will rise again – fountains and flume pools, lending libraries and leisure centers, crystalline domes and highways of holiness. But in the meantime – the dreamtime – the skeletal structures of cities are home to the lion, the satyr, and the screech owl.
What is this blossoming – what is promised? For Isaiah, it is the redemption of those chosen few who can read between the lines of their own desire and restore the Earth to its natural order, a cosmos wrought from chaos. The wilderness is worked-with; it becomes the raw material for human invention and world building.
For Crane, the promise of the blossoming is the socialist vision of freedom from economic slavery – man no longer locked into the capitalist contract, duty bound to produce and to consume. From the contaminated wasteland of industry would rise a reinterpretation of the green world, a land that Crane referred to as “Merrie England.” The phrase appears in miniscule script on a scroll in the lower right-hand corner of Crane’s 1895 woodcut, “A Garland for May Day.” May, the female embodiment of the triumph of labor, is dressed in peasant garb and walks barefoot upon fertile fields; a re-grafting of medieval pastoral, efficiently stripped of the feudal system and culled of every last warmongering lion.
Where is this this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Merrie England? Perhaps in Pasadena which, it should be noted, is technically a separate city to Los Angeles (the transition between municipal districts made known primarily by the removal of the right to turn right at a red light). The promise that the wilderness shall blossom holds the receiver in the forever future tense, suspended in the faith-zone of the eternal not-yet.
To live contained within these words – the wallpaper proclaims – is to exist in a halfway house to heaven on earth. For as long as the letters stick, as long as the paper does not peel, there is the possibility of absorbing the prophecy and carrying it forward into the outside world.
And yet – the effect of the frieze is not so much elevation as compression. There is something anxiety-inducing about being immersed in its message; the wrap-around form and the density of the briars press inward like library stacks closing. In its insistence, the ROSE risks slipping its meaning – becomes a rose, is a rose, is a rose, and finally subsides to lion-language.
If a lion could speak, we would be unable to understand him. I poached this phrase from a philosopher, but it doesn’t take an education in logic and linguistics to attain such gnostic knowledge. The un-cut continuum of the scroll opens space for doubt; the emphatic repetition and overlaid appliqué of the words draw attention to the wallpaper as – paper – and yet it is also trompe l’oeil, the dimensionality of the folds – of the scroll – tangling the neural networks of the brain – the medium shifting register to tapestry, to film strip, to stop-motion, to panoramic pageant with subtitles – each incarnation tinted with the opalescence of dream and psychedelia that is the particular palette of Isaiah in California.
There is no melody of prophecy without the hum of oblivion. In being wrapped within, the foregrounding of messaging only sinks to background, sense yielding to sound, to pure pattern, as untranslatable as a dense thicket of briars designed to keep growing after you’ve left the room.
This is the curse of immersion: to be submerged, sunk inside – is to become accustomed to not-noticing. It is only when the qualia of immersion are brought to the surface that we become aware of our element. The forest for the trees, the water that we breathe.
It’s a phenomenon leveraged by immersive environments staged for entertainment – from the cityscapes of 19th century panorama paintings, to the VAN GOGH! etc artist amplifications favored by museum marketers, to the AR applications that conjure rare beasts and restaurant recommendations into otherwise uninspired surroundings. These experiences offer us an escape into intensified presence – a renewed awareness of what it feels like to be a body as receiver, a medium for a superflux of sensate information. It is fun to feel the swirls of a starry night revolve around you, and to walk beneath the heavy heads of huge drooping sunflowers. It is enlivening to survey your city as a spin in 360°, instead of being down there, on the grey pavings, with the gum under your feet.
Immersion, these technologies tell us, is all we have ever wanted – ever since being wrenched from our amniotic habitat, and then again – this morning – when some malevolent motivation forced us out of bed. Expulsion is the premise for re-entry into wonder, but the fee at the door only holds for as long as we believe ourselves dissociated, beings made for not-noticing.
What would happen if we recalled that we exist as immersion? Born umbilical, strung within this tensile, flexing net we call reality. That we live in panorama; for as long as we can see and spin. And yet, forgetfulness is the source of human survival. It is our evolutionary duty to normalize the extraordinary and gloss over glittery mysteries, applying open awareness only to the degree that it might enable us to evade any last remaining lions.
This is why the going price for immersion remains stable. And then, the final twist of the knife – that on entering spaces framed as immersion, zones in which we become self-conscious of experience, we are set at one remove – no longer immersed. We have been plucked out of the picture. Until we remember that the only way back is through forgetfulness.
Prophecy operates by the same mechanisms of revelation and assimilation. It is the prophet’s lot to articulate a truth – but always to speak obliquely, so that we might receive that truth as our own. Credibility depends on resonance; an apprehension of the message already inscribed within us (whether or not the words were first planted by the prophet), and it is the proof of wisdom to be passed over as truism. Articulation becomes an applied art, always in excess of what needs to be said. Thus, in being written and repeated, and around and around the room, Isaiah’s prophecy is pre-scripted for an amnesiac unscrolling – a homily-mnemonic that recedes as it is read.
If only we could remain attentive to the wrap and reality of wonder, instead of allowing ecstasy to slip the net again. But this is the rhythm of perception, the dynamic rising to the surface and sinking again to background, which describes what it feels like to be alive. The eye is designed like a panorama rotunda: the strategic pinpointing of a distant tower to create depth of field, and the softening fall-out of focus shaped by the curvature. What our attention alights upon, blossoms. But there is no attention without distraction, no knowledge without not-noticing. For this reason, we will always be blessed with the potential to re-know the rose. Always and again, the ever-present possibility, expectant and forgetting.
And so, I cannot remember what new guest, or small dog, or opening gambit, or offered snack prompted my attention to stray from the scroll and to spend the rest of the evening oscillating between half-seen stimuli; the Japanese painting of the crane in the stairwell, the red-white-and blue strata of the rice krispie squares, the flaking faces of colonial-era portraits, and how to find the right flavor of seltzer in the already melting ice of the cooler.
And then, as darkness fell, attention following back along the peacock path, now monochrome, to the bridge over the Arroyo where the guests will gather to watch the fireworks. Someone mentions that archers practice there, down in the parched earth between the banks of the riverbed. Arrows imagined – briefly – until sight responds to sound and eyes are raised to the sky, attention switching north-south, either side of the bridge, and the show arches over our heads like a painted firmament.
Later, driving home, flowing forward along the concrete channel of another dry arroyo, fireworks east and west of the 110, up ahead over the skyscrapers of Downtown, and reflected in my rear-view mirror. The exit to Olympic. Then, waiting for the turn to my street between Covered California and Iglesia Roca Fuerte, watching firecrackers explode on the sidewalk and feeling the hit and scatter of burning remnants against the roof of my car.
Parked between two pillars in the narrow garage, and now walking into the courtyard of my motel-style apartment; around the illuminated dolphin-blue pool, keys opening the metal grille of the double front door. Inside, darkness and the sonic ricochet of every backyard bottle rocket. Twisting the switch of each lamp sequentially, then proceeding inward to the boudoir between the bedroom and bathroom, a waiting space for 30’s starlets not yet qualified for Hollywood. The building shudders, the light flickers. Momentarily reflected in the three-way mirror; all of us together, in our impossible independence.
And at last, entirely alone. Entering the walk-in-wardrobe for another unconscious undressing, the walls papered with post-it notes – reminders, intentions, predictions – some still recent and readable, others fallen like layers of petals to the floor.