Early morning. Dark. Quiet hours. Usual spot in my room. Got the lamplight and candlelight supporting my vision. Fleetwood Mac’s song “Dreams” popped into my head after reading an excerpt of The White Album’s chapter, On the Road. Didion attempted an effort to recall her overwhelming schedule of interviews while on a press tour. She was promoting A Book of Common Prayer, her fourth book recently added to her repertoire. As her previously published work received a vast amount of admiration among viewers from local libraries to Vogue issues, and gradually accumulating a cult following, Didion received a re-occurred question from various journalists seeking guidance:
“Where are we heading?”
The kind of question people expect from messengers who communicate with the most thought provoking intellectuals.
Unable to answer this existentialist curiosity, Didion decides to seek answers from the local neighborhood. The Sacramento native goes on to reflect people’s opinionated thoughts - specifically while she roamed and rubbed shoulders with the city of New York and the civilians within this multi-layered conglomerate. I think Didion’s encounters with strangers remained attached to her consciousness like follicles to her scalp, for most likely the remainder of her montage of a trip — traveling to Connecticut, to Boston, to Washington (I don’t know if she was walking through D.C., or the state.) Texas, Chicago, and other cities with colorful personalities.
A moment in which I found pretty wholesome was how she brought her daughter along with her on this expedition, and they pretended where they would sleep whenever they touched down to different sets of pavements, different sets of scents, different sets of architecture, different sets of air, different sets of lighting, different sets of dialects. Searching for people’s reasons on why they move in their own personal philosophies, and who or what they choose not to follow. Exchanging anecdotes with migrants and natives whom they may never see again as they carve out their own paths to the unpredictable unknown. Well, I guess the unknown is sort of predictable, because we already know that we know nothing.
I admire Didion’s affinity for details and her quirky automatastic decisions of intentional documentation. At times, she seems to search for what she is trying to say, or trying to select pictorial references — from her essential items, what food she ate, who she accompanied with, and how she was feeling.
She literally documents what her body had to go through and society’s misconceptions to these uneasy struggles. I didn’t know she battled multiple sclerosis, nor did I know she suffered from migraines which were unfortunately hereditary from her father’s side, and her grandparents before her. I wonder if any of these essays or first drafts, or final drafts were crafted while she was boxing with her pain. She mentioned that she had to patiently learn how to deal with these difficult interruptions by walking with them and relax whenever they reappeared. Once she focused on the headaches, and acknowledged the occurrences, the pain would eventually fade away. She took medication while wrestling with this issue.
I respect how she regularly seems to take an internal approach to her internal conflicts juxtaposed to the outside world around her. One could analyze Didion’s habitual check-ins and possibly conclude that she refused to genuflect to the idea of being this prophet-able know-it-all type of figure who verged on the ladder of rawness.
Oftenly, we look forward to distractions, whether delightful or disastrous, where we gravitate towards settings that may have something to do with us on a physical level, or nothing to do with us at all. We develop temptations to evade our personal troublesome uncertainty. An uncertainty which we voluntarily neglect, rather than nurture. The option to rent the routine of praising or panning or worrying about anything other than us — out ratios our decision to take ownership to our centralized taboo struggles. Didion acknowledged this particular conflict in her Islands chapter right at the first couple of paragraphs about an underwhelming emergency in Hawaii, which unraveled into a fixated focus on her and her contemplative divorce with her husband at the time.
…a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.
The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.
- In the Islands - pgs. 133-134
Who is it to say that Didion wasn’t referencing “you” to herself as well? When she wrote these sentences down, was she talking to her past self or present person? Future person? Or did she keep her audience or a specific person in mind? Her husband in mind? Her husband edited this essay after all. What was his reaction like when he laid his eyes upon her honest dialogue? Were his eyes blurry or clear? Did his heart sink into a sea of remorse, or did he robotically proceed to tweak and tighten her clarification?
Didion’s curiosity dwells from settling into her adulthood during a pivotal period in American history where the times were a-changin.’ The hippies were figuring out their purpose, peace activists were voicing their disdain for the Vietnam War as their justifiable rage was violently perpetrated by duplicitous lawmakers and their puppet enforcers, women demanded a seat at the table of business occupied by chauvinist counterparts, Huey P. Newton becomes a martyr for the Black Power struggle, Nixon’s campaign was hotter than fish grease, the Beatles’s solidarity was on thin ice, the Manson murders moved way beyond water cooler small-talk, and the Silent Generation were cruising in grey Chevrolets across freshly-constructed highways of pessimism. Were parts of her research and her never-ending inquisitiveness a distraction from herself and her personal issues? Probably.
But on the contrary, she continuously magnetized herself back to her sanctuary of her pen and pad - or her typewriter - orchestrating her thoughts to her organized abstract syntax. She writes as if she is roaming in a maze, searching for checkpoints to drive her back to her cabin with candlelit lanterns and a welcome mat that got her initials on it. Or maybe, at times, she knew exactly what she wanted to write about off rip, no problems — plain unfiltered clarity. Or maybe, she was freestyling, and just wrote until she felt like she was done. Or she started to inscribe with a topic already in mind, but ended with a completely different theme once she exhausted her symphonic tangents. Her viewpoints tend to bounce from subject to subject. Not like a tennis ball repeatedly bouncing in a concentrated vertical motion before an ace-like serve, but rather a bouncy ball bought from an arcade or theme park and this ball is bounced around in an unfurnished four-cornered room in all types of sporadic directions like gnats in the the middle of a spring evening. Didion’s coded prose is noteworthy and compelling.
Her catalogue sounded obviously adventurous as much as her internal narration. She clearly appeared to be a social butterfly and a conversationalist but I believe she was a listener first. She craved stories from the outside, whether they derived from hearing a hot take from her doctors, activists, musicians, studio executives, her husband, her daughter, the delayed newspapers, the punctual news bulletins, her fascination of industrialized start-ups like the uprising sprawl of malls, or the advantages the upper class status take control of natural resources such as the transportation of water supply, or the 100 sacrifices for the sake of constructing the Hoover Dam, or the auras ascending form the eucalyptus surrounding her afternoon strolls. Despite her gatherings with her artistic and philanthropic contemporaries, how often did loneliness disturb Didion like her migraines? How often did she feel lifted by her associates, in the same manner as a gardener holding seeds before preparing them for burial?
Didion’s evaluation to this revolving planet in the heat of counterculture, along with her self-diagnosis to her personal reactions is an honest excavation to questions in which the reader can ask themselves,
“What am I searching for and why?”
“Am I going the wrong way?”
“How do I get back home?”
“Do the dark voices in my head outweigh my awareness of intuitive relatability?”
“Where are we heading?”
As a cynical observer, Didion’s criticisms and undertones of the greediness hidden beneath the politics of Hollywood and presidential elections, from an avant-garde journalistic perspective is one-of-a-kind. In addition to her wit, her sharp critique on the subject of criticism calls out consumers and faux progressives frolicking the savior complex bubble in the midst of these rebellious decades.
Didion’s descriptions were anti-gravitational puzzle pieces circulating the spaces of her memory, where each and every floating fragment of letters were clutched by the cranes of her nervous system, and were splashed with ink between the lines like an oil canvas painting, solidifying visual patterns for the mind’s eye. She was a virtuous student of simplicity, yet analytical and familiar to posh environments. While possessing pragmatic cadence, her words challenge the beneficiary of ego and the grassroots of “we.”
Why did I choose to play Fleetwood Mac? Because she briefly remembered that there was a promotion of the band on a neon sign at a station where she was granted an interview.
Never underestimate the little stories incubated by the littlest things.
Attached below is a short video provided by the Center of Sacramento History of Joan Didion interviewed and highlighted in early 1971. Also attached below is a link to Didion’s remarkable Why I Write essay, which was originally published for the New York Times in 1976. The video and the essay were both constructed during a period when The White Album was still in the process of cultivation.
Feel free to hit me up about any interpretations, reactions, questions, corrections, or any other thoughts.
**Book photo taken by me at my girlfriend’s apartment.
Long Beach, CA. - May 2024.
Ricky, I love your unique perspective and review of Joan Didion and The White Album, and even more so that it came from musings at 3:57am (often the time when creative inspiration strikes for me too) against a soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac! I'm so intrigued by the extract of the "underwhelming emergency" in Hawaii you highlighted as well, especially how our perception of a place is an evolving mirror of our inner landscape. The way you've contemplated her thought and creative process is so brilliantly textured, and it reminds me of every generation's ever-present need to cultivate the capacity for countercultural thought, analysis and movements. Thanks for sharing your reflections!