in praise of Joan Didion (book rant in five parts)

part 1

There is a poem by W.B. Yeats, written after the First World Ward, entitled "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

part 2

There is a mural in San Francisco, painted after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, that quotes the third and fourth lines of Yeats' poem:

part 3

There is a book written by Joan Didion, published in 1968, whose title essay alludes to the final line of Yeats' poem:

part 4

Six weeks ago I came across a collection of Yeats' poetry while rummaging through a yard sale in Boulder. At the same moment, a copy of Didion's book was lodged somewhere underneath the passenger seat of a black 2003 Jeep Liberty. The co-habitation of literary texts has long been a concern to me; one never knows which author's ideas will be impregnated by those of the other. In the most severe instances, such as those involving Jacques Lacan, one might even be impregnated by the Other.

But this is beside point.

The point is that I finished reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem two days ago, and it is easily one of the most satisfying, and well-timed, literary experiences I've had since I first read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment sometime in the late 1990s. Here's why:

Exhibit A

In the introduction to her book, Didion writes:

"I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain." (xv-xvi)

Anyone who has ever performed the role of amateur chemist can appreciate how difficult it is to maintain the delicate balance of ups and downs, and I suppose this tendency is as at least as old as the story of Goldilocks and her quest to find a chair and bed and porridge that's "just right." The current fad of mixing Red Bull and vodka epitomizes this sentiment, and Didion's confession simultaneously highlights both the futility of this effort as well as the logic that underlies it.

Exhibit B

In the book's opening essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Didion writes:

"The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past." (4)

My predilection with memory and forgetting is well-documented, both in this venue and in my academic pursuits. Although expressing a cliché at its core ("Those who forget the past..."), this sentence neatly illustrates why this matters: how can one envision the future without a firm grasp on what happened in the past?

Memory, in spite of its innumerable failures and inevitable fallacies, provides us with our only yardstick against which we can measure our hopes, dreams, and ambitions. This is one of my most persistent critiques of the metaphysical teachings I've encountered over the past five years or so: the notion of enlightenment or freedom or moksha is meaningless unless one maintains a connection to that which is unenlightened. One requires the other for all sense-making, or at least for the ability to communicate it (which would seem to be the only reason to talk about it all).

Exhibit C

Cliché notwithstanding, Didion moves far beyond the realm of dimestore sophism. What struck me most about her essays was their ability to use specific circumstances (oftentimes geography) as means to illustrate much larger historical or cultural conditions:

"Who could fail to read the sermon in the stones of Newport? Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadows of their migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children?" (213)

First of all, rarely has there been a turn of phrase so adept as "migranous women" when it comes to demonstrating the Victorian hangover America experienced well into the Twentieth Century. It highlights the intersection of class, gender, and oppression by pointing out the connection between bourgeois discontent and sexual frustration, while simultaneously engaging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek neologism.

More importantly though, the passage illustrates how the physical space of our nation comes to bear the scars of our societal neuroses. I visited these very mansions when I was about 20 years old, and it was a strange sight indeed. Thirty years had passed since Didion first wrote "The Seacoast of Despair," but the same sense of desperation remained. Who were these men of great fortune, who built these great monuments to their wealth, only to leave them empty where the crumbling Dream of America meets the sea?

Exhibit D

Didon's eye is just as well-trained on people as it is on places. This excerpt, taken from the title essay, was written after the author spent some time in San Francisco, in the months of 1967 that would come to be known as "the Summer of Love":

"Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were the children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are the children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb." (122-123)

As far as I can tell, one of the things that makes "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" such a remarkable essay is that it captured the Haight-Ashbury scene at the precise moment when it became apparent that its zenith and nadir might, in fact, be indistinguishable. I do not know if this was the critical interpretation of the piece at the time, but like all Gen-Xers, I grew up with the seemingly irreconcilable knowledge that my parents' generation embodied both the romantically absurd optimism of the Sixties as well as the opportunistically fearful cynicism of the Eighties.

Didion's genius is that she recognizes the Flower Generation not as a cause of progressive cultural change, but rather as a symptom of a larger societal breakdown. At the same time, there is not the slightest twinge of nostalgia in her writing. She does not idealize the past; she sees that the past was already always flawed, that the inequities in the system were structural and therefore beyond remediation. The hippies must therefore be understood not as addressing these inadequacies, but instead as the frayed ends in an unraveling social fabric. This unraveling is what the narrator of Sans soleil calls "the great wound of history."

Exhibit E

I could go on with these examples. I could tell you, for example, how Didion's description of Sacramento in "Notes from a Native Daughter" matched my own experience, mere weeks ago, of California's Central Valley:

"California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension..." (172)

I could also relate the déjà vu I felt while reading "Goodbye to All That," which is Didion's farewell to New York and so closely it matches my own:

"It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends..." (255)

But instead of dwelling on these things, I want to close with a passage from "On Keeping a Notebook":

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all these scores. The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself." (132)

I once had professor (the chair of my thesis committee actually) who decried the whole enterprise of blogging as pretentious and "self-absorbed." This edict, uttered more than two years ago, has stayed with me through literally hundreds of posts to this very venue. The title description in the sidebar "Throwing Art Into the Void" is even an attempt to address this criticism, which is as valid as it is disquieting.

For me, the beauty of the blog medium – and by this I mean the thematically dispersed, largely anonymous, largely unread, entirely unmonetized blog medium – is that it allows one to walk along the borders of self-expression (with its concomitant dangers of narcissism and egoism) and self-dissolution (with its concomitant dangers of futility and nihilism). These posts, like sand sculptures, are destined to be washed away by the ocean of information each of us encounters every day. There is no reason to write the things I do, and yet I feel drawn to do so.

This is the "compulsion" of which Didion writes, and her analysis as to the motivations – memorialization and justification – are entirely accurate. If one writes, which is to say if one writes honestly, then one writes because he or she cannot not write. My own experiments with truth (to borrow a phrase from Gandhi) have taught me that the whole idea of a permanent self is little more than an outgrowth of our need to reconstruct the past, our dependence on memory, our utter inability to either remember or forget completely.

Writing is nothing more than a means to this end.

part 5

There is a poem by W.B. Yeats, entitled "Ode to Melancholy," that begins:

No, no! go not to Lethe...