In Los Angeles, summer comes not with a rush of waking vigor but as a post-mortem to spring. In June, the city is covered by morning fog, extruded by the ocean in the maw of night. Running against our conventional belief in the fixed palette of the sky, which maintains an interminably robin’s-egg disposition for most of the year, June—that particular state of June endemic to Los Angeles, when car wash lots from the sea to the valley fall eerily silent—casts an unfamiliar fugue over the city: melancholy-lite.

The sun makes a belated, partial appearance by late afternoon, like a mottled blotch floating in an understirred fondue pot. Its weak light shows Los Angeles as a civic tectonic expanding without discipline, often directly against normative writs of social planning. This is a city precisely built for the vector of a car. Dead ends, deadly neighborhoods, and the deathly shallow rich constitute the spiritual radius of Los Angeles, a gargantuan, disordered spill buttressed by the DDT-laced waters of the South Bay, the Angeles Crest mountains to the north, the overpriced, bulging disk of beach communities to the west, and the pothole-like, misshaped terminus of San Gabriel Valley in the east. These four imaginary corners spin on the semi-central axis of Hollywood, though it is hard to determine where this phantasm ends, or begins, if you’re actually in the city.

In-between neighborhoods exist more in name than as actual communities; no one knows just where exactly anyone else lives except in accordance with an over there by or an I think, or through data gleaned by telemetry: more safe / less dangerous geographical distinctions generated by the paranoid blasts of the local news. For all its natural riches (and industrious Angelenos attempt to parlay this into higher land values), the fact that cars are the dominant shapers of psychology in Los Angeles exemplifies the city’s continued, subliminal contempt for nature.

The Los Angeles sublime is this: its chaparral-covered hills and mountains exploding in a fiery maelstrom every year or two, threatening heinously large homes by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We can easily drive away from this in a cavalcade of inefficient hybrid vehicles, but, once safe somewhere, a glass of Syrah in hand, an instinctive routine is triggered: we giddily wait for our crackpot, our fecund loner, that restless, night-meandering Los Angeles untermensch most likely eating at a Circle-K right now, to start another fire far enough away from the first to finally, fatally overtax our beleaguered firemen. He restores our faith in the fait accompli. Granted, if we kept a scorecard, and if the past few fire seasons are any indication, he has a fairly admirable record against us. Et tu, Haussmann?

During an otherwise unexceptional reading in West Hollywood, a writer said that this mythical arsonist “paints” a religious experience – like Fra Angelico – when he sets the mountains on fire. But nothing in his paintings or his write-up in the Lives of the Artists has lead me to believe that he destroyed property for divine gain, let alone reverie. Eschatology has no place in Los Angeles. Making religious deontics the crux of Los Angelean spirituality is just as specious as, in the example that a social theorist once ruefully flung at me, Christ showing up in Los Angeles and trying to save the souls of starving actors. “Nobody will follow him, not when these people straight from a bus all want to be something else, apart from themselves,” he said, “and I don’t know why anybody would follow him any way, and for what for? That hippie.”

Along this line, I visited an old friend who vowed an authentic disinterest in nearly everything in life, with a sort of Swiftian malaise. “I don’t give a fuck about giving a single fuck about this,” he affirmed, and once told me that whenever a stripper asked him where he was from, he’d tell her “Compton Hills.” He, too, was something else – a non-actor. On my final day working at Cedars-Sinai, he told me in no uncertain terms what it meant to give a Mont Blanc pen to someone in South Central Los Angeles.

It is a thoroughly undiscoverable city, in the end, possessed of the untenable phenomenologies that mesmerized the philosopher Henry Sidgwick over a century ago. Personalities and geographies shift without anyone noticing. The metaphysical vagaries of the city would be a lodestone for the philosopher, who held the post of Knightsbridge professor at Cambridge during the late Victorian era and turned the department into a front for his Society for Psychical Research. Holed up in his office, tracking down signs of phenomena beyond our ken, how often must he have sat listening to gypsies and cottage maidens convinced of their ability to perceive what others couldn’t; how often must he have been disappointed. Debunking spiritualist creeds, or conversely proving them, would be a full-time affair in Los Angeles, much of it involving needless hellos and goodbyes.

For example, I visited an Armenian psychic in an over-bright Reseda strip mall in hopes of making contact with a departed friend, possibly even finding out how he’s doing. In the psychic’s waiting room, remarkably like that of a dentist’s office but for its sibylline, red-velour walls, I sat with a severe-looking Russian who rested his tuba case between us. After offering him a cigarette, we talked haltingly of state orchestras, and then I asked him about his instrument. After a torturous pause, he said “In Rossha, play b-flat tuba only” and blew his lung’s contents in my face. I could hear him say da,… da! in rising increments when he was called into the psychic’s chamber. Their séance was taking too long, so I gave up waiting and hurried back to my car. There was an opening in Downtown I had to go to.

Finding my way through the cramped space, I fell upon a coupled drawing by a gifted young artist, Eduardo Consuegra, showing an impossible square gliding in multiple dimensions across separate pieces of quadrille paper. Whether it was the interminable crush of the crowd, or the stifling heat of the room, causing everyone’s conversations to sound like a code of ghosts, this particular work felt like an emblem of Los Angeles: a form, a figment, or a general fuck you to the Poincaré conjecture, the work somehow encapsulated a city whose gentle inability to understand itself can now and then expose something truthful. Buoyed, I went to mid-Wilshire to see Chris Burden’s installation of 202 lightposts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in full nocturnal illumination. It is the city’s new night-haunt, where you can go for no reason except to see beautiful shadows of ugly things. Amidst the Japanese tourists, graphic designers, and moths in hymenopteran captivity, there was a Portuguese woman singing a strain of fado to no one in particular – not least to me. She didn’t even ask for change. Now that’s entertainment.