Military men on leisure stand talking under the palm trees, standing erect and rigid like camouflaged storks or herons.
Some people I pass smile, either courageously or naively depending on what they know, their faces lighted by the silver-grey November light, while others gaze into space or at the ground, acts of communication lost and unreceived.
I pass a smell of rotting ocean, then a smell of lemon freshener, and finally the salty, oily smell of the Long Beach harbor.
Feral cats comb the hills for food, while the homeless remain wrapped in their sleeping bags on the grass or behind concrete barriers. High above, a group of seagulls chases away a large hawk.
Men fish on the piers, chasing off hungry seagulls. A bundled up man with white headphones sits with a flock of pigeons, feeding them bread or seed. A lone paramedic walks the harbor on his break, looking out at the ships and the sea cranes towering out over the flat silver waters.
Bulldozers trawl, scrape, and groom the beach sands, leaving neat smooth lines of pressed sand behind them.
Far out, looking over the city nestled in black clouds, I feel no connection. It is alien, menacing, and dead, but this is ok. Like looking over a carrion, one is filled with revulsion and then a sadness, which melts into a resigned respect for the nature of things. I find myself orbiting the alien city with a cold detachment, bound by a thin thread of memory which connects me to my home, a small community of warmth connected by other thin threads to other communities of warmth, all of them embedded in an increasingly cold, atomizing human expanse suspended in space.
I've thought about it for some time without fully grasping it, but now I think this is what what makes the recent film Gravity so resonant and pertinent. The film expresses beyond any sort of narrative or ideology a pervasive existential feeling of terror. Upon the lead character finding her constructed life supports disintegrating - which lie suspended high above this cold, indifferent abyss - she experiences a horror of radical separation, of parting from and drifting from the familiar warmth of her peers, a horror which animates her desperate struggle to climb her way back up the thin threads that keep her from spiraling out into dead space, ultimately to disintegration.
Her journey is a devolution of sorts, as she rides the old machines to safety while ultimately discarding them as she fights to rejoin the earth, eventually to begin anew.
It is an exaggerated sense of emergency certainly, but it captures this general pervasive existential feeling quite nicely, I think, at least in terms of how I experience it, and presumably many others, including the creators of said film.I certainly don't feel terror or a sense of emergency, more like a spacey sense of peace, but then these are simply different varieties of moods that can arise in response to this greater process.
