House of Sand and Fog
Do you remember the 2003 movie House of Sand and Fog staring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly? It is a tragic story of how people who believe their position in righteous and just lose sight of the risks that confront them and instead play for the win at all costs. In this case, Kingsley is doing what’s right for his family as he tries desperately to recoup from his downfall from the heights of the Iranian hierarchy into the ignominy of being another immigrant in California with big ambitions and too little money. He is working for the positioning of his daughter and son to give them better lives, the sort he had won and then lost through no fault of his own. In that quest he plays by the capitalistic rules and buys a house at auction, a house near the beach that has all the attendant pleasure of beach life but also all the shroud of fog that comes from the infamous marine layer that prevails along this coastline. Meanwhile, Connelly is hew own jumble of contradictions. She is a stunningly beautiful woman who has been abandoned by her husband and left to fend for herself in their once lovely and promising beach house that marks the arrival of success for a young West Coast family. For some convoluted administrative reason that is wrong-footed, the bank that holds the mortgage on her once happy home, decides that they will foreclose on the house and moves swiftly to evict her and auction the property to the highest bidder, which turns out to be the aggressive risk-taker Kingsley.
What ensues is a quasi-holy war between the two with Connelly aided by a local policeman who has understandable designs on the fair damsel in her state of distress. The policeman, played by Ron Eldard, does what should never be done, uses his position of authority to weigh in on the situation in what treads the fine line of cultural racism and bullying. The fervor of the two combatants are allowed to spiral out of control to the point of no return, where everyone gets hurt in the maelstrom and no one wins. It is the classic tale of Pyrrhic victory that occurs when emotions drive battle from the rational defense to the tragic Armageddon. And this all happens because someone has come to believe that persistence and passion are reasons enough to take the guardrails off and throw caution to the wind as a very intentional strategy of success at all costs.
The house is shrouded in fog throughout the story, so much so to presumably epitomize the uncertainty of righteousness. To me it makes me wonder whether the few moments of clarity and beauty of its views and venue are worth the foggiest of its more overwhelming existence. We are somehow left to assume on faith that it is all worth it even though we can’t see through the fog to verify that. The other part of the story is that all of our houses are only built on sand and we know what happens to sand when the first wave washes across it. The underpinnings flow out with the tide and the house collapses of its own weight and without so much as a care about the human passion which put it there on the dune and which fought to defend it at all costs. While the house in the movie does not wash away, we are all still reminded that materialism is a false prophet. And that whether you say we are all dust to dust or that we must live life above the plain of the dunes with the understanding that all that is of man is nothing more than an eyelash in time.
This Sunday morning I too am in a house of sand and fog. I am an immigrant to California and my once exalted status in life is considerably diminished. The fog is quite literally shrouding the house this morning, and while it shows promise of burning off as per usual, it is also heavier than normal today. I have come to appreciate fog for its humidity content in an area that runs very dry most of the year. I’m never quite sure how much water it leaves behind, but when I see drips going down windows and off the car, I feel safe in saying that the fog is a friend to the garden, whether its enough to avoid a day’s watering or not. The juxtapositioning of dry and coarse sand against moist and dripping fog is quite stark. I was thinking this morning about ordering a few yards of DG (decomposed granite) for my gardener to spread out along the lower pathways of the back hillside to better demarcate what is path and what is just dry ground. DG is a coarse material that is not quite silicate sand, but could pass for something very similar with a few extra pebbles mixed in. Unlike sand that seems smoothable and pliable, DG is something that compacts with the likes of almost an asphalt (without the sticky tar-based binder). It can be manipulated, but seems more likely to stay in place on a path rather than get shoved from one side or the other. Once put down, I think my DG sand will benefit the garden as well by keeping unwanted feet off the plantings. I have my own physical sand and fog to contemplate on my hilltop.
But the sand and fog of the movie are so much more in metaphor than anything I can describe vis-a-vis my garden. My sand and fog come in two flavors this morning. The first is my lingering dilemma of our trip to Spain and Portugal. I have described the uncertainty of that situation and anyone who has lived and suffered through the trials and tribulation of COVID for the past eighteen months knows of what I speak. There is nothing good about COVID other than getting past it. And the bad of COVID is unthinkably bad with large numbers of people gasping for breath and worrying about lingering health debilitation. But the worst of COVID must certainly be the uncertainty it drags one through like a ball and chain. There is the uncertainty of infecting yourself and playing Russian Roulette with your life. There is the extra bullet in the revolver shot into the air and landing in the head of some unknown innocent nearby or further away encountered in passing, adult or now child, as it may be. There is the wound that never completely heals and merely seeps continuously as a lifelong reminder of a short interval of indiscretion, intended or accidental…or worse yet, unattended by oversight. Uncertainty is the bitch of COVID and it is all about the fog of not knowing and the sand of false knowledge.
My other flavor of sand and fog is more personal. Human interaction is a great unknown at the best of times. You can’t live with people and you can’t live without them. Like Jennifer Connolly and Ben Kingsley, it is less about knowing you are righteous in your stand with people (we all have a degree of moral certitude and the conviction of our beliefs). Instead, it is about knowing how to discard that certitude in favor of a higher purpose. Righteous indignation comes cheap and heals fast, and the wounds of an absolute failure of humanity will leave a far greater scar on the soul that might never go away and lead to a tragic end from which there is no reconciliation. The hardest thing is to see that denigration to certitude on the shoulders of others, aimed squarely at you, and to turn the proverbial other cheek by ignoring it and accepting the blow as delivered. You hope that those around you that care about you recognize the greater good to which you have silently demurred, but there is, by necessity, no ability to wallow in that goodwill. The only salvation is one which takes it on the chin silently and stoically in the very private knowledge that you have done right by the world and that your house will see the fog lift a bit and the sand shift beneath it a tad less.