How do you view a city? When you close your eyes and think about your three favorite cities, one after the other, what do you see?
Now, if you do the same thing and think about the history of those cities, what do you see?
It's fascinating sometimes to look at what's really going on in our mind when we think about a certain thing. Cities came to mind after I found a piece about New York in my Facebook feed today -- the city I once thought was my dream city. Why? Mainly because it had TISCH School of the Arts, but also because it had West Side Story and Jimmy Dean and Marlon Brando's Actor's Studio in the '50s. It had a history of passionate immigrants. It had O'Henry's stories to make it come alive. It was the home of Tennessee Williams. It had dance studios and a ballet. And it had ice skating in Central Park in winter. I had some glorified romantic ideas about this. I always wanted to go Christmas shopping in New York.
I did get into TISCH, but I couldn't pay the fees, so I never went to New York until after I had found L.A. And by that stage I knew where home was. I liked palm trees and sunshine. I liked the hills and the ocean. I liked a crazy community of health freaks, filmmakers, entrepreneurs and spiritual free thinkers. I liked the City of Angels.
When I think of the history of L.A. I think about the history of the movies. When I think about the history of London, I think of Shakespeare. When I think of the history of Italy I think of Florence, the Medicis and Leonardo Da Vinci. I think of perfume and painting and weird ideas about medicine, some corrected by Da Vinci, but not put in practice until much later. When I think about the history of France I think of romanticism, then the French Revolution and the thinkers of the time. I think of Voltaire and Rosseau. I think of Robespierre. I think of Marat and a bathtub. But all those names become a blur. I may give a passing thought to Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Marie Antoinette. Then I think about the Belle Epoque. I think about Haussmann. I think about the Moulin Rouge and Toulouse Lautrec. I think about Degas and the ballet. I think about Rimbaud. I think about French cinema and homemade food. I think rustic. I think real.
When I think about history I think about thoughts that captured me, like the thoughts that were discussed in the salons of Paris, and I think about art and the artists that inspired me. War, politics, kings and queens... most of it didn't enter my heart, save maybe John Locke and the aforementioned French Revolution. And as all this information was gathered throughout the years I can't even remember most of what the thinkers said and did, I just remember my enthrallment. The essence of some idea I liked.
Sure, I remember some of the modern European history I studied in high school, like the causes of the great wars and Russian history... Rasputin, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and his affair with Frida Kahlo. It's just I was more interested in Kahlo. I enjoyed understanding the disputes and misunderstandings that led to the wars. To get an overview. To see how life has unfolded and what we can learn from it. To debate different points of view. But what enters your heart is a different story entirely.
Now, if you close your eyes and think of something else, like summer, or mother, you will find the thoughts you associate with that. In drama school (The Kogan Academy of Dramatic Arts) we called it complexes. The thoughts activated when thinking about something. The thoughts we don't even realize we are thinking; we just have an impression. We like, or dislike, a city. We feel comfortable, or uncomfortable, saying a word, or mentioning a person. Underneath it all, underneath those feelings, is your subconscious; the rivers under the earth as Thornton Wilder called it. Your gathered thoughts and impressions which lead to your emotions. As actors we broke down characters into these thoughts; these generalized impressions of men, women, money, self, sex, life, relationship with key people in our lives and so forth. We focused on the key thought complexes, but we have a complex surrounding everything from what we think of fridges to mountains. And our consciousness is a super complex of complexes.
This just came to mind as I realized what my key thoughts are surrounding the history of cities. The artists and the thinkers. To others this might be unimportant. To them it's about the strikes and the political upheaval and progress. The plagues and the scientists.
Maybe we should all stop sometimes and ponder what we're really thinking. What our naked thoughts are. The ones beneath our general impressions. It might help us find our wounds and our passions and the paths we need to move forward.
One of my photos from Paris. A city I have had a love affair with since I was 19.