A Bigger Splash

A Bigger Splash, 1967, David Hockney

Before moving to Los Angeles, I did not understand the allure of swimming in water the colour of blood. I did not know what it felt like to dive into a pool inlaid with glittery black granite or to perform steady lengths in a tiled cell of regal purple, watched only by embalmed, enlarged photographs of Elizabeth Taylor. I was not familiar with the sensation of drifting on a prawn-shaped inflatable beneath a lavender twilight sky, observing the crows circling, cawing, around the scrapped and sloughing edges of starlet palm trees.  

Those palm trees are due for blight any day now. The lush and calloused date palms planted by Franciscan missionaries, shade for strolling and sweating beneath heavy black cassocks. The tall ones, the skinny ones, a favourite of real estate speculators — vertical correlates to horizontal sprawl. That brand, that lifespan, has a shelf life of a century or so; graphed like stigmata in a sticky white hand.

They say they’re dying of fungal infection or old age. Or perhaps this is just another urban myth. In which case imagination may fill in the facts; hacking close to where the trunks are ringed with prurient rosemary bushes, watching them — palms, facts — crash to the sidewalk — already bedecked with abandoned mattresses — and let the moths pollinate afresh from those stumps, habitats for night lizards and darkling beetles.

I am told that black rats nest up at the top, where the dates bunch and gather. The seeds they bring up — those little harvesters — are the reason for the branching, new growths of other plantlife, blossoms exotic and propagated at high altitude. Those rats in their lofty bowers of bliss — I imagine them high and happy, like Melville’s Tashtego before he sank beneath the waves, hammer in hand. Better that of the pack that gather at the nadir of 7th street by MacArthur Park, topographic features of the scramble crossing, flattened in valiant attempt to navigate dining options, hesitating between pupusa or gyro, Langer’s pastrami or Chinese-food-yoghurt-drink. Echoes of Pentecostal megaphones muddle and match with a chorus of avian quacking, the geese that stink up the former pleasure garden; before the shudder of tyres, these are the final sounds in little hairy ears.

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This will not do. I cannot afford to dwell in those depths. I am English, not of here, and those of us who stay longer than a vacation — long enough to learn that walking is only for dogs and their owners — are all running from something.

Los Angeles is our furthest possible extension from the island while still holding to the rope of a shared language; thereby maintaining the right to converse and purchase with ease. And by the reverse-mechanics of free will — that magic trick of the mind — forward motion is always-also a backwards cause.

When I think of the land that I left, memory is encased by a thin layer of dream: walking through a field of mud in heavy wooden clogs and a long green coat. At each step sinking deeper, water driven upward by way of zig-zag capillaries, the xylem and phloem of herringbone tweed.

Here, exile is worn like a mantle, a technicolor membrane of shimmering sweat. Over in the Palisades, playing tennis on the sabbath and practicing scales like steps to the sea, the German and Austrian exiles complained of a sunny blue grave. Coddled by choice and the anxiety of peacetime, the English ailment is adjacent and different. Disinfected by sun and scoured clean by chlorine, we are trained to embrace the hedonic imperative: the anxious necessity to enjoy ourselves at all costs.

Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ strikes me as the most English of paintings. The clearest icon of aquatic absolution. What do you want from Los Angeles? I want Platonic geometry, baby. I want wipe-clean surfaces. I want a sky so flat you could fall straight through it without a flick of resistance. A submersion in self discovery, a frictionless freedom, the ideal alignment of matter and mind, sublimation of thought into being, a transparent channeling of a chosen role, an arc, an act, of perfect disappearance.

And in that disappearance, the discovery of a body: the force of physical presence proved by displacement of water. Still life painters learn that solidity is shaped by negative space, and the first lesson of the method — the performance of being-Californian — is to become acquainted with the body as the primary reality.

This is not natural-knowledge for the English. We who pride ourselves on a capacity to cancel and continue, favouring executive function over feeling, queasy at anything inner, heads top-heavy and hovering like the ghostly oranges — necks knotted with white hankerchiefs — that populate trees on Halloween.

 In time, with the firm guidance of pool parties and late night gyms, and the way that the evening air can be worn like a shawl and the sky, indigo at night — we learn the ropes and mechanisms that may tie us to this place. What is the body? A gymnasium  of switches and levers, a framework for grace, a device to be catapulted up into the sky.  And why else are we here but to play out the possibilities of physicality, to flutter, rub, and shimmy with all the sensate pleasures that an irrigated desert oasis can offer.

 Here. A location both specific and general, a pin and a planet, the present moment that is our portal to paradise. And the body, a poros, a pretzel of contradiction, both the key in the lock and the mechanism stopped.

 And yet - submersion is not our lot. Californians assume their right to freedom with ease, born to a narrative we must buy into. Theirs the instinct, ours the imperative; in the meantime it is possible to borrow the strategy of the tictac - to consume a character, to assimilate a script in the hope that role will eventually meld to self like a wetsuit wound or a shirt of Nessus. We try on scuffed sneakers for size, borrow phrases and inflections from surfers and stoners, practice acting – natural – knowing that anxiety is a symptom of the unsuccessful. The code is learnt slowly and not unconvincingly. But at the last, the finishing touch, we will never achieve the singularity and fluidity and emptiness of not noticing.

 Always, a slight separation is made apparent. The performance marred by a telltale sign; a holographic quality, some shimmer or aura or an aspect too-tangible like the skintag seam of a doll from a mold. And so we carry our role with us, never afforded the directness of those shaped to swim in the waters they’re in.

 Unless – we’re pushed. And perhaps that is the secret of the bigger splash – a loss of intention, a fall from an agenda. Los Angeles detached me from my subject matter, the contortions and dramaturgy of a mind ill at ease. The city stole and simplified my language. It cleansed me of the pleasures of interconnectedness and embeddedness, the kaleidoscope symptoms of everything-connected.

 For here there is only the shortest route home. To see, straightforward. To be motivated not by the eternal return and deferral of a riddling wound, but captured by the infinite imagination of the world as it is. A materials science of a sort – something reaching towards me from within me, inviting me to taste and to see. And why else to make, except to say – to communicate – this is what it felt like, what it feels like, to be alive. From across the world, from beneath the ground, scattered in air or dissolved in water – to add life to life.