Written by Sarah Chack
Art by Seven Descheneaux
I am eighteen the first time I read Joan Didion’s words and think that I understand them. Freshly graduated, I stand in the backyard of my aunt’s house; my cap and gown are thrown on haphazardly, my clothes smell like the inside of my suitcase, and I pose for poorly planned pictures. I wait out here, in the hot Long Island sun, for someone to tell me the step-by-step plan for the rest of my life. The feeling is surreal, as if life is passing me by on a train that I have just missed; it waves out the windows, saying a “so long” that is inaudible over the roar of the engine.
As the train gains speed I think that I have missed my chance to move forward; I will be stuck here at this empty station for all eternity with only the night’s darkness and my own thoughts. I take comfort in Didion’s words as the nothingness begins to pull itself onto the platform, as the inky oil laps against my shoes. She too knew what nothing looked like, that it festered forever.
A staple in literary circles, Joan Didion has written about, and critiqued, the world we live in; she carries the type of certainty only someone who is so uncertain can have, the kind of knowledge that comes from not knowing. Her works span from memoir to fiction to essay, all unabashedly taking up space on the shelves of bookstores everywhere; they have something to say and they will say it, whether you like it or not. They are powerful in this way.
And while she is known for many pieces, her works Play It As It Lays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem are some of her more famous ones. These works, I think, are the twin sisters of sadness and uncertainty, the very spine of all that we have come to know as Joan Didion’s writing. They sink us into a place where the Californian power grids converge, where we can feel the heat and electricity on our skin, where the smell of smoke fills our senses so entirely that we forget our own names.
Her words are wrapped in the vastness of the Nevada deserts, the hollow gas pumps that were once full of glowing Californian dreams, and the bleak reality of industrialization that swallows the natural world whole. I, for one, have never graced the hot ground of the West that Didion writes about, but I can feel it under my feet as if it were all I have ever known: scorching sand and dry air and a sickening sense of desperation. These, Didion writes, are part of “… the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread…,” and they are as integral to the West of the 60s as they are to the West of now.
She has a way of molding her experiences into something tangible for her readers, crafting her sentences so that they swirl off the page. I can smell the freshly turned-over dust and the raging, dry fires that she describes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem as the Santa Anas race across the ground in unknowable patterns. I can recall all those hours waiting in limbo until the storms passed and the skies were no longer jaundiced, until the world had settled and moved itself away from its tipping point once more. What was once a dream—a half-formed thought, the briefest image of the past—has become, all at once, tangible with her writing.
It feels, in recent years, as if we are always at the edge, as if we have been hurtling towards that tipping point at a million miles an hour in a car without any breaks. I can’t quite tell if things are far enough away that the car will lose momentum before the impact, or if it will hit the stone and shatter into a thousand microscopic shards. And, if we survive, traveling the desert post-crash reveals the very real possibility of turning over a stone only to find a rattlesnake. It curls its body into itself, tension radiating through its scales as it pounces; it has spent its whole life readying itself to strike.
Regardless of the end, looking out of the car windows at this moment will reveal a world that has been endlessly crumbling behind tinted glass; we see villas and golden hills where rubble and ruin resides. We seem content to stare in awe at the fires that have replaced our sunsets, at the oil that has seeped into our oceans, and at the ever-increasing jingling of our leaders’ pockets; reality and fiction have become interchangeable, synonyms for one another, and we have allowed ourselves to become comfortable within this haze. We think about “… driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world” and never coming back out. But then again, maybe this is how it’s always been.
Didion’s focus on the West—in both her essays and fiction—and its once shining frontier seems a rather intentional choice in this light; its desolate nature directly mimics the decay of the nation, its crumbling strength and weakened foundations. Violent and hostile, the Western landscape has always been a place of uncertainty, of survival and loss; it’s filled with freeway abortions and sycophants dying of thirst for a god that they cannot hear.
But when a country has built itself upon those conditions, it becomes hungry to fill an insatiable emptiness that resides within it. It will do anything to feel satiated, even for the briefest second: a parasite leeching off of its host until there is nothing left.
Didion herself knew this. She felt it in the 60s, and thought that that feeling was important enough to preserve for future generations, that it would still ring true. And she was right. Her generation was always waiting for some unnamable catastrophe, waiting for the other shoe to drop, filled with an inescapable sense of dread that clings to them like a child clings to its parent. The main character in Play It As It Lays, Maria, says as much, stating that “[she] no longer [believes] that…” the next event will be better than its predecessor.
In fact, Didion herself, like Maria, was a product of the world around her—the Donner Party, the rise of Hollywood, and the quickly disappearing past—and she writes that “… [her] own childhood
was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem—a collection of essays on everything from John Wayne to the Lucille Miller case—covers these topics; it encapsulates the disappearance of her childhood, and the slow disintegration of her future. Her generation kept hoping for clarity about an unknowable future, for a sense of assurance that there would be something left for them in a decade’s time.
But this generation hopes too; they want, with the strength of a dying man, a future that is not ash and dust and decay, even if it feels as if all evidence points to the opposite.
Perhaps Didion didn’t want to change the minds of those who had lived their lives, who had come to the end of the road and could only look back with regret. Perhaps she wanted to stir something within the hearts and minds of the young, of those who had not yet been weighed down by all of the world’s pressures; those who still hoped and wished and dreamed for something better. The image of a snake—twisting and turning and trying to find its way out of its own tangled body—comes to mind briefly.
And then, suddenly, I am twenty-one and about to graduate again, about to become a boat without an anchor once more. It feels more final this time: the last door to my childhood closing for good. It’s just me, and my cat, and the Burlington sun on my face as I hold the aching feeling of dread in one hand, Play It As It Lays in the other, and realize that I finally understand the words I was so sure I knew back then. They settle into my skin like the water droplets left over from my shower: separate, and then, all at once, a part of me. Like Didion, I know well what nothing looks like. But still, I keep on playing.