Slouching Towards Bethlehem

     

      Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of short journalistic stories with a glance into the innermost workings of an artist. When I was first introduced to this book (in my Writing About Places class), I was susceptible to viewing the world with wonder and now four years later, that mood has sprung on me again. People, places, things are remarkable. They have this incredibly long history. Even if they are brand new, there are years and years behind the making of any object. The world is really full of wonder and Joan Didion will help you realize that again and again.

     I used to love the perspective that my drawing classes used to give me. I would walk around examining the details of every thing my eyes rested on and it would just fill me with wonder and make me feel more intelligent for being able to notice the details. It makes you think of the whys. It makes you think of how great the world is. It just makes you think of the good in the world, which is always a helpful attitude.

     Joan Didion is similar to Virginia Woolf because reading them comes with moods, a particularly dreamy one where you just want to sit and think and write. With Joan it is a dreamy mood about the past. Like she states in "Notebooks," about keeping tidbits of other people's conversation, it always ends up being autobiographical. It ends up reminding you of your emotions, thoughts, what you where doing at the place, and why you were there.  It inspired me to write, to think about my past experiences at worthy stories that someone else would benefit from. It aggrandized my memories because she created that atmosphere with hers. Really, I wanted to write about all the places I had been, about where I grew up (am still growing up), about the essence of all the things I experienced. So, in my book this is a worthy inspiration to have around.

     With the otherworldly mood comes descriptions and insights into places I have never been. Places that seem insignificant until she wrote about them and then you begin to cherish all your experiences as something bigger and important to the world. She gets to the essence's core. She describes Hawaii (somewhere I have never really desired to go) with special attention to the past and with emphasis on how war permeates many aspects of the place.

     Of course, when discussing this book, one has to go over the Haight Asbury district during the 60's. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was not as penetrating as her other pieces. It was also my second time reading it, so some of the wonder had faded. Honestly, that is just not a time or movement I have much interest in. I never knew about that particular place full of the dejected rebels until my Writing About Place class that really opened my eyes to the wonder in the world and how absolutely interesting everyone is, even the ones with the same background as me (although, those were no where to be found in that class room full of eight very distinct people). She very much embodies the time this book was written, the late 60's. She doesn't just cover the stereotypical hippies, but many aspects of that life, especially that of the West.

     She writes accurate accounts about murderers like it is a fictional short story.

     Didion is able to pierce into the very motivation of the person she is studying. This gives her an omnipotent super power: the ability to understand a person. I mean truthfully understand why they act a certain way, without any meanness. No matter if it is a murderer or a communist, she is able to explain their motivations and reasons to where we all call relate. To where we have all been before.

      In one passage in "On Keeping a Notebook," Didion writes about how she remembers certain stories differently from the other people that were there, too. This is an ongoing realization that our minds re-remember events. Each time we pull up a memory from the brain shelf, we remember it again with whatever new perspective we are at in life. This is part of the beauty of realizing that we are fallible, that our minds are not perfect, that we can make up stories and who cares if they are not completely accurate, it's our memories, our reality. So, what if my mind is trying to suppress something bad or embarrasing, that memory has all ready been dealt with and I have all ready learned from it, so who needs it anymore, anyway? Right now, I am just going to enjoy who I am.

Quotes

"It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.."

"I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point."

"...there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and I imagine that I have suffered a small stoke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."

"...the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live."  These dreamers imagine such a life and such a way of living, that they become more like their dream in trying to achieve it than themselves. It is like the saying "fake it till you make it." If you do something long enough it become part of who you are without you realizing that your are changing to fit into a mold.

"...an assembly of the very peers — housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk — above whom Lucille Miller has wanted so badly to rise. That was the sine, more than the adultery, which tended to reinforce the one for which she was being tried [murder]."

"And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralysing ambiguities, he [John Wayne] suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital bed with the flowers and drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun."

"Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanter her to be and not to be."

"They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness."'

"...the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptible but fatally askew rainbow."

On a shot gun wedding in Vegas: "But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than 'convenience'; it is merchandising 'niceness,' the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it 'right."'

"Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes she their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together."

"See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write -- on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there..."

Since I just finished Crime and Punishment and the review is coming up next: "I had somehow thought myself as kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others."

"There is a common superstition that 'self-respect' is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all."

"Nonetheless, character -- the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life -- is the source from which self-respect springs."

"People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which Every day is a holiday because you're married to me. [that needs to be in italics] They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds."

A bit of advice I myself have used on numerous occasions to calm myself down: "It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag." All I have to do is remember the Cathy part and that calms me down. I haven't tried the paper bag, yet.

"To have the sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.."