Things Fall Apart

All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.

“Once, in a dry season…” are the immortal words to measure one’s worth, I suppose, if a person were bold and honest with oneself about his or her worth in a culture where, how dare you, judge someone’s worth as a human against a standard of humanity. Because it’s all tolerance and inclusion and boundaries (theirs, not yours). So tolerant in fact that society is forced to tolerate the psychosis of delusion rather than any semblance of what we count as reality. Tolerate everything except disagreement and the freedom to express such disagreement.

But I’ve gone off-tilt.

Joan Didion wrote the following opening lines in Vogue magazine, 1961, back when Vogue could be taken seriously, along with other periodicals that washed over popular culture with Rock & Roll and set the tone for a generation (at least) that became enamored with New Journalism and narrative fiction and the stories that defined an America at the crossroads of exploding influence, affluence, and internal subversion. “Sock it to me!” as Dick Nixon would say.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Once, in a dry season, I broke.

I’d gone off-tilt, and then I broke. I was going home from work with my daughter in the backseat. Along the highway, there’s a stretch of hill, and when you get to the top, there’s a brief moment when you can see the broad sky touch the horizon and its endless fade of clouds and sunset.

I was suddenly alone and aware that I was told the world was too big and I was small. And like a child, I believed it. But I know now the world is too small. And we are given gifts of dreams that should lift a man to the heavens. Instead, like children, we resent smallness and continue believing the smallness because it is easy. If you don’t deny it, you become it.

Describing how his American novel, The Adventures of Augie March came to being, writer Saul Bellow recalled the novel’s language came to his mind so swiftly, “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.” Imagine being so richly endowed with a singular vision that one just had to be there to act as the mimeograph for such a treasure.

Joan Didion (1934-2021) American writer and journalist.

I’m not comparing myself to Bellow or Didion. What blasphemy. But it is a pinhole bit of light shed on a dark mind that allows one to see. And isn’t it true that when you’ve been plunged into the dark for so long, the smallest tinge of light might as well be the searing rays of the sun? The effect is the same.

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

“A man’s character is his fate…” And here is Didion, again from the Vogue piece:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.

Didion’s great gift was in her impeccable diagnosis of social unraveling. She didn’t assuage the tearing of social fabric or do that neat trick that is so common today of pundits who vomit opinions on things no one asked them for just because they have access to a friendly editor who needs more “traffic” for their publication. Or the influencer who denounces the cultural depravity by…engaging and validating the cultural depravity. Nice racket if you can manage the soul- and principle-sucking nature of it. And it’s given us all the whiplash ADHD click-bait, flashbulb “media environment” of story first, correction later. I’ve lost track of all the wars-within-wars: The mommy wars, the woke, race, trans, anti-trans wars, DEI, CRT, ICE, DOGE, PBS, IRS, LGBT+QRSTUV(?), RETVRN…Hey, I just want my MTV!

But one gets the feeling they have no particular loyalty to an American ideal or to the common American condition that has kept this nation as a shield against earthly evils even as we’ve battled our internal ones. So, Bellow was right in his adroit inclusion of Heraclitus and could further: A nation’s character is its fate.

There is now a steady drone from all sorts of sides and angles that we’re powerless in the face of a firehose blast of experts, high-minded opinionates, analyses, and global boogeymen. No artists daring to stand in the line of fire for fear of a damaged ego, reputation, betraying this side or that, or finding themselves standing on the wrong side of the gate. This literary scene — as ridiculous sounding as it is to write — that used to be concentric circles moving in tandem around an honest reflection of society in a certain time and place. It’s devolved into a mob of angsty, bitter schoolgirls jingling the gate keys of the local hangout and crybaby boys who keep threatening and daring each other to storm the gates but don’t have the guts to go find their own little clubhouse. Raise Hemingway’s torch a little higher, boys, it’s getting dim in here!

The trouble with the arts and culture and politics (and not just that they’re inextricably tangled, morphed into one humorless, scornful, angry blob) is that everything has lost meaning and we, in turn, have lost meaning. We’ve lost the way. We tied ourselves to symbols and meaningless words that do nothing for our souls or examining our place in our time as the world changes around us and we have to accept that we must change with the tidal wave that is coming or else. We are small in a big world. Everything is the Armageddon tidal wave and nothing is.

Armageddon!

“So and so is destroying this country!” — the battle cry of an army of cowards. We’re divided into two sides that want to draft every man, woman, and child into the war. Every piece of clothing is part of the uniform. The car you drive, the school you attend, what you eat, drink, and the words you use or do not use all are symbols of a particular tribe, and none of it is of the brand U.S.A., although both sides claim to be the genuine article.

One of Didion’s greatest lessons didn’t come from something she formally wrote; it was a commencement address she gave to the University of California Riverside graduating class of 1975. An excerpt:

For one thing, most of you grew up on that darkling plain we call the ‘60s. Which seems, as we look back on it, a decade during which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; where everybody operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened. In the ‘60s one either believed that America was being greened or that America was being morally defoliated. You either believed that this was the dawning of the age of Aquarius or you believed that we were on the eve of destruction.

I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you.

Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.” Probably an undercover. In fact, it meant nothing except that I had grown up around farms and I had known children who got tuberculosis and brucellosis from drinking raw milk.

But this was a period in which everything was understood to have some moral freight, some meaning beyond itself. And in fact, nothing did; that was the peculiarity of the decade.

In 1975 there was still a normal; there were common and unwritten cultural rules; the semblance of a social contract. A code. Adults still had a working memory of Gene Autry, knew who shot Liberty Valance, and wondered at space travel and its essence as the possibility of Mankind. Things like decency, character, and self-respect weren’t problematic or cause for cancellation.

There was a center to hold.

So to hell with all that. I refuse to participate in the hysteria.

Maybe it wasn’t the shattering of a pretty looking glass but the breaking of an invisible barrier separating me from the world I could create and a realization of the importance of self-respect, character, and toughness. A collapse of a narrative built on nostalgia's unsound foundation. Because driving home, on that hill with the world and the sky below me, I saw the past meet the future. It belongs to everyone. It’s not a gold bar to be wagered for votes, clicks, or misty sentimentality for a time that never existed.

Refuse to participate in the hysteria…

I realized that I wasn’t broken because I couldn’t recreate the past for my kids and my family. I had to be broken to see that it is my choice how I live in the world.

So, to hell with all that. I refuse to participate in the hysteria. My kids won’t live as if it’s 1950 or 1980, but they don’t have to be forced into the hysteria of the 2020s and beyond. I choose. And eventually they will choose. But no one else will make that choice for me or make me small in a world where we were meant to be big and dream big.

Didion’s closing remarks:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could only tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children.

And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

This is Part I. I have a couple of things I want to share about how I’m living in the world, apart from it, or at least the hysteria of it. I appreciate any and all feedback regarding this post or what you, as readers and fellow journeymen, are doing — or not! — to be sane in an insane world. And I do think this is so far beyond politics; this isn’t my purpose or message, but rather an observation on how and why we are choosing to spend our time and energy. Maybe I’m too far gone off-tilt! Either way, I genuinely thank you for your continued support and encouragement.

Sincerely, Jenna