Chaos and disorder can be both interchangeably defined as a ‘state of total confusion, with no order.’ The acclaimed Sacramento-born writer, Joan Didion, did not see such terms as easily definable anomalies; and devoted her career to exploring their untamable nature.
Once, on a slow day, I typed in large letters across a word document the first line of a W.B. Yeats poem. I had been given the assignment a week previously, the I-beam vanishing and reappearing rhythmically near the timestamp at the corner of the screen - a blinking reminder of the limits I imposed on myself from a habit of leaving things until the last moment.
I had not received the mark I had hoped for. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply despised Yeats) Although, the end result can also be justified by the fact I had closed the laptop moments after opening a book I had bought weeks previously. Procrastination is the classic defeat. The book was Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
The title had been taken from a Yeats poem and only after I realised that I should finish, or in truth, begin the essay, did I realise I had read the whole thing - the deadline now passed. The irony of my reading a book with a Yeats quote on its cover instead of completing the Yeats task at hand is not lost on me.
I read the twenty essays in full, and became transfixed on Didion’s ability to write a universal truth in a single sentence from the smallest of scales to a devastating effect. These were stories about divorce in the San Bernardino Valley; about small towns and seemingly small lives and all-consuming cities where a life became small; about the barren open land of California and the darkest corners of our minds; about the escape that driving down the freeways of the Golden Coast offers despite what exists at the end of the road; about the claustrophobia of returning home, and the wrong people marrying each other; about the lost belief of new faces and learning the sobering lesson that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
The first page of Didion’s collection of essays is dedicated to her daughter, Quintana, before reciting the Yeats poem in full, the preface reads:
“This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there, [...] those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.”
This was my introduction. The writer’s words becoming surgically implanted in my own inner ear, reverberating until I purchased the entire top shelf of the non-fiction section in Hodges and Figgis. Each book spine with one word in bold: DIDION.
I had been repeatedly told that Didion’s The White Album was her best work and ought to be my next port of call. In this collection she was attempting to come to terms with chaos and disorder. The chaos ravaging her surroundings, and the disorder inside of her - in all of us.
To understand this book’s beginning, I will have to take you to the end.
I’d like to take you back to the night the 60’s ended - August 9, 1969, California. The 60’s died as the Manson Cult drove slowly up Cielo Drive and entered the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate; it died on a knife’s edge.
When the news spread like brushfire over Los Angeles that the actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and six others had been murdered by the Manson Cult, Didion was in the pool and she knew that any sense of liberation the 60’s brought or any illusion of order the world possibly possessed had ended.
I’d like to take you back to the night the 60s ended - August 9, 1969, California. It ended as the Manson Cult drove slowly up Cielo Drive and entered the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate; it died on a knife’s edge.
The essays I initially read that pulled me into Didion’s indomitable gravity had been replaced by stories intended to throw me out of orbit. Where Didion once wrote of driving down the Golden Coast, roof down, and cigarette lit, was then replaced with the image of a child on a living room floor licking her lips, the only thing off about her is that she was wearing white lipstick; five years old - on acid. Where I first read beautiful prose of Didion falling in and out of love with New York I then found myself reading a passage of Didion providing the recipe for the meal she was making for Linda Kasabian - one of the Manson cult members who had murdered Sharon Tate and the others - before her trial for murder.
The disorder around Didion found its way into her bones, took residence in her mind and relieved itself through the tip of her fountain pen. She implanted herself into the story, blurring the lines between personal and wider narrative. The disorder around her had found itself in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Didion was faced with the choice of whether or not to lie in it - to bring the disorder home and into her work.
Her darker work led me to ask - Is it possible to separate the disorder within from the chaos around us? Does internal turmoil mirror the disorder unfolding in our immediate surroundings? It was Yeats who asked in his poem, Among School Children: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” But it was Didion who decided they were one in the same - a begrudging snake eating its own tail.
I followed this endless loop of disorder and chaos around and around until I ended where I began, with the first book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and began to write this piece. The I-beam is still vanishing and reappearing rhythmically near the timestamp at the corner of the screen but I look at it now and see my own reflection of a pattern of Didion’s thoughts. Perhaps - in the same vein of thought as Didion - I wrote this to understand what I have read. Yet, in a similarly defeating way, a fully formed opinion has yet to form in my mind as to how to define her or her work. I am, however, soberly aware of the new found fact that anything I read next may well fall short in comparison.
Perhaps - in the same vein of thought as Didion - I wrote this to understand what I have read. Yet, in a similarly defeating way, a fully formed opinion has yet to form in my mind as to how to define her or her work beside the new found fact that anything I read next may well fall short in comparison.
I now find it a useful thing, in times of personal and external disorder, to read Didion - to find an eerie calm in the stories that do not attempt to harness or understand disorder but come to terms with the inevitable nature of its approach: gradual, and then sudden - never to be the same. The same can be said for one's condition after reading Joan Didion.