It was very windy today. The ocean churned and crashed into the cliffs below and there was great energy in the clouds in the distance, a sense of movement and exertion, as if they were trailing smoke from explosions far off. To behold the landscape was to experience an overwhelming sense of movement and urgency. Trees swayed with leaves clustered at the top of their trunks like shimmering green bolts of lightning as they quivered and caught the light. Water caught everywhere on the rocks below rippled in the wind, sending glittering patterns of light off their surface.
Most coastlines are quite beautiful. The distinguishing charms of the West Coast of Santa Cruz are most certainly the rock formations. Fascinating patterns crop up all along the cliffs due to varying rock materials and their position in relation to the oscillating tides. Strange, jagged, geometric patterns become cut into the rock by the surging waters, patterns which seem chaotic but give off a vaguely ordered sense of beauty, following a logic of their own. Some regions of rock remain dry and bleached by the sun, while others darken with moisture and moss, the moss a brilliant electric green that asserts itself on the rock like a beautiful, nationalistic ecosystem celebrating its existence.
Some rock flowed jaggedly like a frozen river, progressing at a crawl as the tide rises and pulls more material down with it, pools cutting in and collecting in basins as rock dissolves underneath and is carried out.
Some clusters of rock give off the impression of physical violence and perpetual motion and energy, especially where the waters constantly slam into the cliffs with force. They look scarred and weathered, yet jut out over the ocean as if with pride.
Others project an elegant air of peace. They're astonishingly smooth with deep dark color and smooth, rounded basins, with various patterns of moss growing where it can.
A strange world of unlimited complexity, this world of ours. Solids, liquids, gases, all interacting through various forces and shaping one another. It makes me think of this strange culture we find ourselves in now, full of atomized people orbiting in increasingly inert structures, obsessed with property and objects. I wonder if peace and violence themselves are properties of deep, historical tectonic movements, each of us consisting of slightly different material and existing in slightly different contexts like the varying types of rock, ultimately formed out of infinitely long causal chains that extend deep into cosmic history.
Why capitalism? Why empire? Why decline, I wonder? All the people I pass with closed faces, glancing over quickly to asses me or not looking at all, most of them interacting in small, tight clusters and employing the same caution with contact with everyone else. All these particular individuals, disconnecting from the greater social webs that hang like potentials over our heads somewhere, all busy in their own heads projecting their thoughts onto the world, trickling over these walking paths along the edge of the coast.
So this is what it is to experience as a human being. And within a social formation. This great formation that had to inevitably bubble up over tumults of thousands of years of vying empires.
The wealthy neighborhoods above the cliff sit there as part of the city of Santa Cruz, an ecosystem of its own, embedded within ecosystems within ecosystems, each acting slightly different but in concert. The city, where the administrative power is concentrated, seeks to retain certain elements while keeping others running through, establishing a social environment through law.
Signs warn sternly not to sleep in one's car. The homeless for the most part are passed through as if they were toxins within urine, while the wealth builds up on the coast and is retained like fat.
Yes an organism, but as an organism fundamentally antagonistic to the environment it is housed in; it must eventually be dissolved.
I wonder what it would be like if everyone managed to share the land, if everyday there were various festivities on the cliffs and on the beaches full of spontaneous expression. To walk the coasts in this social context feels strange. I am filled with awe for the great natural beauty but feel like a transgressor, slinking temporarily along someone else's property, only seen as harmless because I will soon be gone. I feel alienated and apart from the land. The land itself full of these walking, gingerly people, all seemingly conscious (however vaguely) of their precarious positions in social time and space. More of us should be aware of the incredibly limited nature of social phenomena that are allowed to happen on these cliffs.
Yes, indeed. Maybe for the vast proportion of the human population, alienation is a natural property of experience. Or maybe it is an unnatural experience, or at least subjectively discordant due to its conflicting relation with nature, a temporary wrinkle in history's fabrics.
Well, here's to harmony and the ongoing proliferation of collective and creative consciousness. Not to mention the rapture invoked upon contemplating bare nature.
