[MD] Absolutely Californian

[John Carl]

Some guy said once:

Even the idea of “order” is just another abstraction, one that makes sense
only as a choice among other possible abstractions and whose significance
depends on our ability to discriminate finely among them. Having arrived at
the general idea of order, as Stevens does in “The Idea of Order at Key
West,” the only thing to do is to begin making a concrete, living, relevant
image of order – to initiate the process of relating events so as to arrange
them into a coherent whole by deciding anew what matters, what doesn’t, and
why.

Royce’s concept of the Absolute as an infinitely self-duplicating object is
also, it
turns out, an anticipation of what we might think of as California’s
affinity with the
Absolute.

If the essence of the Absolute is that it is the infinite (or from our
finite point
of view, endless) production of parts of itself that represent (or map) the
whole, then
Hollywood would seem to have shared what I take to be Royce’s premonition
that
German Idealism expresses the basic premises of the Golden State.

Thus, Paramount Studios designed a map of the state that shows how various
parts of it represent the most remote locations, from the Red Sea to the
South Sea Islands – that, indeed, shows how California itself can be
imagined as, or even more to the point – perhaps it comes to the same thing
– can be desired as a text that aspires to embrace the narratives of the
world.