Why SF needs fog
I went to a picnic today in Dolores Park, the two-block-square park in the mission with tennis courts, a barbecue area, and a playground. I learned that up on the hill was a "gay area," but the rest of the park seemed pretty mixed gay and straight anyway.
On a post in fluentinfag, I talk a bit about the thoughts on shirtlessness that I had in that park.
Here I want to talk about the role of fog in San Francisco.
Prior to the picnic, John and I drove down to Ranch 99 in Daly city to pick up some noodles and mushrooms for our dish. On the drive, I noticed that the hill south of us was particularly dramatic in the sunshine, the trees on top looking dark and lonely, being so sharply black on a glowing green slope. I had that same feeling of being overwhelmed that I had when I was in the foothills on the peninsula, looking out on the bay.
Is this sense of being overwhelmed the Kantian experience of the dynamically sublime?
Here is what Hannah Ginsborg on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say about the dynamically sublime:
Kant says that we consider nature as “dynamically sublime” when we consider it as “a power that has no dominion over us” (§28, 260). We have the feeling of the dynamically sublime when we experience nature as fearful while knowing ourselves to be in a position of safety and hence without in fact being afraid. In this situation “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion” (§28, 261-262). Kant’s examples include overhanging cliffs, thunder clouds, volcanoes and hurricanes (§28, 261).
Yet, in San Francisco and the foothills, nature does continue to exert an irresistible power over us, and reminds us of this power periodically with its minor quakes, avocado-destroying frosts, and unseasonably cold or warm weather (whatever "unseasonably" might mean in the Bay Area).
Fog allows me to contemplate small pieces of nature. Too enormous and sharply defined a piece and I am reminded of my own frailty. Nature through a mist of vapor here has its beauty diluted. At least, it no longer has the kind of bold beauty that says here you are in this wonderful place, but soon you will be gone, who knows when, and nature will remain.
In the park, we sat on a slope overlooking the city.
"You can see the East Bay from here," John noted.
Again I was overwhelmed.
I’m only happy in the fog.
John Carpenter followed up his cult classic horror film, Halloween, with an equally frightening, yet underrated, horror film called The Fog. Here is a summary of the film from IMDB:
“The centennial of the small town of Antonio Bay, California has finally arrived. However, the events of 100 years ago are about to come back to haunt the town, because a conspiracy of the town’s founders resulted in the deaths of several lepers in a shipwreck. The conspirators had planned to lure the lepers’ ship towards the rocks so that it would sink, and they could recover the cargo of gold and use it to pay for building the town. The sinister plot succeeded when a fog rolled in, blinding the crew, and forcing them to follow the false fire on shore. Now the ghosts of the Elizabeth Dane’s crew are back - and so is the fog that led them to their doom. Only now, it conceals and protects the ghosts of the crew, as they seek their revenge on the residents of Antonio Bay.”
Carpenter is one of my favorite directors and I rented The Fog for the second time when I began living in San Francisco 5 years ago. The film is an essay on those whose lives are deliberately sacrificed by those that accumulate wealth. Although Antonio Bay is not San Francisco Bay, it works all the same. I thought it was brilliant the way he used “Nature” (the fog) as the mediator both as a tool for the wealthy to secure their “natural” coastal town, as well as a tool for the dead to seek their redemption. Either way, the film recast’s Kant’s understanding of the sublime as an ideologic concept: ‘the sublime’ as a category is only possible when one has acquired a firm sense of detachment from history; and a detachment from those whose work enables the “natural” perspective that only something as modern as “leisure time” can create.
Comment by mordenti — March 12, 2007 @ 11:04 pm
Purely by coincidence, tonight I happened to rent the remake of The Fog that came out in 2005 from the library. of course, it wont have the spirit of the original, just the plot. But perhaps tomorrow as a companion piece to ming’s post, I’ll post on Why the USA needs The Fog?
Comment by mordenti — March 12, 2007 @ 11:14 pm