Things Fall Apart

[dedalus_1947]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(W.B. Yeats)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sixties lately. You know, the decade that was ushered in so brightly with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1961, ended with the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, and was then sealed with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. Strangely enough, I wasn’t prompted into these thoughts by music, which is my usual trigger to thoughts of the 60’s, but by a writer – Joan Didion – and our current political state.

I discovered the writings of Joan Didion years ago, when I was searching for essayists to copy. Her style appealed to me. Her essays were thoughtful, elegant, and personal. She was part of the new wave of journalists who inserted themselves into the narrative of the stories they were telling, without actually participating in them. They were dispassionate observers or witnesses to the people and events they were describing, never quite revealing their own sentiments, or at least masking them so well that they were hard to decipher. That was the type of writer I wanted to be – so I read her essays from time to time, and her two-bestselling memoirs on death – The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. However, it wasn’t until I rediscovered her works on Audible (an online provider of spoken audio books, information, and educational programming on the Internet) that I began listening to her works anew, and hearing her collections as a whole, to discover their unifying theme.

After listening to her first two collections in sequence, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album, (the former published in 1968 and the later in 1979) I was actually startled by the way Didion described the 1960’s of my youth. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the 60’s for a long time. I thought the decade long gone and without much merit outside its music. Sure, they encapsulated the ten important years of my academic education, but I considered that time dead and over, with my 50^th high school reunion acting as its final memorial. However I was not prepared for Didion’s perspective on the 60’s and the way she saw that era as a type of Armageddon, signaling the disintegration and end of the American Dream she had envisioned in college. In those two books she was chronicling the Sixties in a uniquely masterful manner. She eschewed the campy, sarcastic style of Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction books on the psychedelic adventures of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, and their bank of Merry Pranksters who travelled across California and the country hosting LSD “acid test” parties in his The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Instead, Didion stands seemingly aloof from the stories she is telling of hippies and the drug culture of Haight-Ashbury, Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-violence, the wedding chapels of Las Vegas, the Black Panthers of San Francisco, and the Manson Murders. In a subtle, nuanced fashion, she is in fact describing the deterioration and crumbling of the American Dream, and its optimistic trust in The West.

In 1968, Didion began her first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with a poetic epigram from W.B. Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds,
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Then she proceeded to say: “This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern. ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time I spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that all things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder…”

This idea of  “coming to terms with disorder” resonated to me while listening to (and later reading) Didion’s unsettling descriptions of the 1960’s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album. I found myself relating to the books on two levels. First, there was real surprise at her feelings that the 60’s were a manifestation of the revolutionary destruction of the American Dream (with its idealization of The West) and the undermining of the American Way of Life. It was a perspective I’d forgotten about because, as a participant of the 60’s, I never took it seriously  – considering it the old-fashioned thinking of my parents, and mere evidence of our generation gap. Second, and more importantly, I now began to see how her reactions to the 60’s seemed to mirror my own responses to the current decade we find ourselves in – the 2010’s (the “teens” of the 21^st Century. You see, ever since the inauguration of President Obama on January 20, 2009, I believe I’ve seen things falling apart, because the center wasn’t holding; and I’ve seen “anarchy loosed upon the world” with the election of Donald Trump, and watched innocence drowned. I’ve witnessed how the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. These two reactions constitute the body of this essay.

I believe that Didion’s nuanced stories of the Sixties and Seventies very much reflected the sentiments of the generation of my parents and the children born during WWII – my older aunts and uncles and Kathy’s older siblings. Like Didion, these were Californians born in the early and mid 1940’s and raised in the Fifties. They shared the values and aspirations of their Depression-era parents who came to California looking to build and not destroy. These were generations looking to build on the social and economic progress of their own parents, and saw the achievements and affluence of America as a continued strengthening of its democratic ideals and values. Order, tradition, manners, and decorum were essential, and went hand-in-hand with trust in our American System of democracy and Capitalism. It was a conservative California that nurtured and cared for them, but one that also believed that a quality public education and the new California University system was essential in building foundations to insure its continuity. All these foundations began cracking and crumbling in the 1960’s with the disorder of the Civil Rights Movement, the violence of the Anti-War Movements, and the unsettling music of Rock and Roll. And even though I lived through the same times that Didion described, I somehow missed, or misunderstood, her perspective on it.

The first eight essays in Slouching were titled “Lifestyles in the Golden Land”. Taken separately they told acerbic stories of California in the early Sixties and how they reflected a weakening in the fiber of traditional American life, and a slow moral and cultural disintegration. One recounted the story of Lucille Maxwell Miller, a wife who moved to San Bernardino with her dentist husband only to become disenchanted with that modern Southern California lifestyle and murdered him for the insurance money and the hope of trading up for a better marriage. Three more described the absurd political naïveté of socialist and liberal causes and organizations developing in California, centering on Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-violence in the Carmel Valley, Michael Laski and the Communist Party of the USA, and the Liberal “think tank” called the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Another piece was on Las Vegas, and how it was “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies room attendants”. A place where “there is no time, no night and no day, no past and no future.” Essays on John Wayne and Howard Hughes presented interesting contrasts. The first was idyllic, presenting Wayne as a symbol of the old western concept of the heroic cowboy facing the onslaught of cities and industrialization, but being brought down by the ravages of cancer. It was titled, “John Wayne: A Love Song”, and it ended with Didion wanting him to “take me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow”. Howard Hughes, however, was painted as a different type of western man. He was the bizarre, rich, and antisocial personality who sold airline companies, bought casinos in Las Vegas, and hid from sight. Yet “that we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific…” The last essay was the darkest and most disturbing. In a detached and emotionless manner Didion describes the contemporary wasteland of Haight-Ashbury in Sixties, “where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies’.”

At the time, I never saw the destructive, viral effects of the counterculture that Didion was describing from 1964 to 1967. Those were the middle years of the Sixties for me, when I was in high school and just smelling the early euphoric whiffs of teenage independence. The wondrous decade opened with President John Kennedy’s youthful promise of a New Frontier and continued through President Johnson’s Great Society. They were idyllic years for me, with the soundtracks of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan playing in the background. Idealism and change were in the air, and a belief that the adult attitudes, prejudices, and hang-ups of our parents were wrong and needed to be exposed, re-worked, or replaced. The Civil Rights Movement was the first clarion call for social change. Photos and newsreels of civil right marches, sit-ins, and boycotts pointed out the injustices of the times, and young people felt obliged to support, join, or participate. We had youth, idealism, and intelligence on our side, but what our post-war generation of “baby boomers” lacked was thoughtful and moral guides or models to follow. Change was an end in itself, and our motto seemed to be to distrust anyone over thirty. So there developed an attitude of being open, tolerant, and accepting of anything new, with rock and roll musicians leading the way: peace, Love, drugs, and sex. The sheer size and vocalness of our generation must have scared our parent’s generation to the core. We were a tidal wave about to crest and wash their civilization away.

In the White Album, Didion resumed her tales of the late 60’s and early 70’s in a much darker and brooding style as she described the social, political, and cultural chaos and disorder around her. Although she never explained the title of the book, the way she did in Slouching, readers saw an immediate connection to The Beatles’ White Album and Charles Manson, who usurped the title of their song Helter Skelter, and painted it on the refrigerator door in the LaBianca home after their murders. For him, “Helter Skelter” meant confusion and chaos, and a call to rise up and kill. The collection is divided into 5 chapters dealing with the Sixties, California stories, Women, her travels, and concluding with the Seventies. In the first and most critical chapter of the book, also titled “The White Album,” Didion began by diagnosing her own mental breakdown and explaining that such an event did not “seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968”. She then interwove a series of 15 vignettes anchored by two violent and senseless murders that occurred in and around the neighborhood where she lived in Hollywood: the murder of the silent screen star Ramon Novarro by two brothers, Paul and Thomas Ferguson, ages 22 and 17 on Laurel Canyon, and the Tate-LaBianca murders by Charles Manson and his followers, in Beverly Hills and Los Feliz. Sandwiched between these two killings were ominous and disturbing tales of the musician Jim Morrison of The Doors, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, leaders of the militant Black Panther Party, and the Student Strike and shutdown of San Francisco State College. She concluded the chapter with the thought that although many people in Los Angeles believed that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1968 when word of the Sharon Tate Polanski murders broke that day, she considered the Sixties over two years later, when her family left their home in Hollywood and moved to a house on the sea. There she later learned that Paul Ferguson, one of the murderers of Ramon Navarro, had won first prize in a PEN writing contest, saying that writing helped him “reflect on experience and see what it means”. She ended the chapter by adding: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on “Midnight Confessions” and on Ramon Navarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it all means”.

Although I enjoyed all the essays in the White Album, and I was knowledgeable of all the people and had lived through the events she described, I was at first surprised by Didion’s choices and omissions. There was no direct mention or exploration of assassinations, elections, or political conventions. Conspicuously absent were stories on the Vietnam War and the Anti-War movement. It slowly became obvious that Didion was not interested in reporting or describing the historical events of the time, but rather of telling personal stories of disturbing or confusing people, their words, and their actions, and, for the most part, letting the reader draw their own conclusions. She, who was recovering from a mental breakdown, explained “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.” I think that is what I am trying to do in this essay.

I have never mentioned Donald Trump in my blog, although I do admit using his picture with the caption “You’re Fired!” to illustrate an essay I wrote about dismissing a teacher. And ever since the inauguration of President Obama, I’ve avoided politics in my blog and on all social media outlets. But as I was reading these two collections by Joan Didion, I was struck by how much her reactions to the 60’s reflected the ones I was feeling during the 2010’s. From 2009 to the present, there has been one catastrophic event after another: the banking collapse and economic recession, the bitter and divisive partisanship in congress, the do-nothing attitude of the Federal Legislature, the growing racism and anti-immigration feeling in the nation, the election of Donald Trump, and the publication last week of a book and an anonymous op-ed piece in the New York Times describing a resistance movement within the White House to prevent our flawed, impetuous, and temperamental President from doing something dangerous or detrimental to the welfare of the nation. Even Didion’s mental health diagnosis seemed to mirror many of the same symptoms I was experiencing after watching the daily news on television, and reading The Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. I suppose all I can hope for is to learn the lesson that Joan Didion offered in her essays while living through the Sixties as a depressed and despondent adult, and was confronted “directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that all things fall apart… Perhaps we too need to come to terms with the disorder around us, and continue telling stories so that we can live through it.