Without Lifting A Finger

City of Angels, I thought, amused. I got my fire-engine-red Geo out of the garage—a test of courage and skill every time, though I tried to make sure that no one could tell by looking—and drove to Twenty-sixth Street again. Brecht’s cube-shaped house, where he had had long discussions with Adorno and Eisler and Laughton and reflected on the insoluble ethical problems of the Galileo play, was now occupied by a man I sometimes saw on his front lawn and who definitely did not know who had lived there before him. How many times would Brecht have left this house to drive downtown? Or to visit the Feuchtwangers at Villa Aurora, high above the Pacific cliffs at Paseo Miramar, which my Geo brought me to as well? Where once, years before, on an unforgettable afternoon, Marta Feuchtwanger had shown you and G. her husband’s library and where there were now contractors in clouds of stone dust busy in the emptied rooms. Where Brecht could discuss political and literary problems, and agree about

I paged through books in search of relief. I found Brecht’s lines about the city I was living in myself: Reflecting, so I hear, on hell  My brother Shelley found it to be a place  Much like the city of London. I  Who live not in London but in Los Angeles  Find, reflecting on hell, that it must be  Even more like Los Angeles.

I called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization brings forth monsters? Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives. I don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters? A storm is blowing from paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster. But he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, I said. No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it: he’s blind. Blind to history, I said. Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame. Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out of th

I've been lazy. Busy. But I have snapped a few pics. *