Look at this. Just look at it. The land splitting open like a wound that never wants to heal, and right there in the gash… calla lilies. White as surrender flags in a war none of us are winning. That’s the whole damn joke, isn’t it? You go looking for the void, you walk down into the throat of something ancient and indifferent, and it hands you flowers.
Big Sur doesn’t care about my feelings. It never did. Henry Miller knew this. Kerouac found out the hard way, weeping into his jug wine in a cabin under the Bixby Bridge while the Pacific shrugged outside. The ocean here isn’t postcard blue. It’s gunmetal. It’s the sound of something enormous turning over in its sleep, and if you’re standing too close when it exhales, well, that’s on you.
What I’ve given you here is the architecture of the thing. Two hills pressing in like bouncers at a door you’re not sure you even want to walk through. The sky doing that thing the sky does in Big Sur, not threatening, exactly, but making it abundantly clear that I am a temporary arrangement of matter and it is not. And those lilies… Glowing like they’ve got their own private arrangement with whatever runs this show. They don’t need sunlight. They don’t need me to admire them. They just stand there, absurdly alive, in all that darkness.