NO SAINTS IN L.A.

Looking forward to my first piece of Joan Didion. A collection of essays and stories titled We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. My interest inspired in no small part by blogger and Jezebel writer Jenna Sauers, the more I read about Joan the more interested I am – a radical and intrepid author – and Didion has written a prolific collection about California. The visceral Los Angeles stage interpreted thus:

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness. Conventional information is missing. Context clues are missing. In Culver City as in Echo Park as in East Los Angeles, there are the same pastel bungalows. There are the same leggy poinsettia and the same trees of pink and yellow hibiscus. There are the same laundromats, body shops, strip shopping malls, the same travel agencies offering bargain fares…Such tranced hours are, for many people who live in Los Angeles, the dead center of being there, but there is nothing in them to encourage the normal impulse toward “recognition,” or narrative connection…When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York, in 1964, I found this absence of narrative a deprivation. At the end of two years I realized (quite suddenly, alone one morning in the car) that I had come to find narrative sentimental. This remains a radical difference between the two cities, and also between the ways in which the residents of those cities view each other.”

Her explicit perception is a consciousness I could not put my finger on when I first moved here, but no words describe the cities anthropology more so than Didions’.

The book in my hands. It’s scent, like a book that sat on the back shelf of a bookstore with infrequent visitors and layers of dust, is intoxicating. I wonder if the digital front on publishing will ever take this small vagary away from me. Years from now when the Kindle has taken over and e-readers usher literature through media fingered on celluloid pages, I imagine myself defensively cloistered in a pungent, swollen library; books piled, myself high on their sapid breath. Woefully relinquished to the pursuit of knowledge in archaic form, hours and days and nights later, I would untuck myself from solitude and again join the world with cynicism and a penchant for spouting end of the world triumphs. So I read now, keeping Amazon.com and Los Angeles libraries live with late fees and endless ordering.

One of her most famous essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, takes the title from a poem by 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 horu come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I am reminded of a poem I once wrote during my first year here, feeling beaten and bruised and utterly shaken by the experience:

Dawn licks the serrated edges of the city, threatens to douse the night in lurid illumination. The darkness quivers, and I stir from sleep.

It is the City Of Angels, but only devils brood here. They draw new blood everyday. The dark heart of Los Angeles is seeded by baneful demons. I was an angel once, but the devils breathe smoky strife. Their noxious breath infects the plumbing and pollutes the air. I am here; never immune. The infection spreads from one person to the next. As each betrays the other, our dystopia threads the angst that frisks our bodies, setting in, a virile mix. Love is lost. Another empty vessel emerges into day from the depths of unrequited love.

We are here; Stripped bare, beaten up, hearts set firmly in ice. We drive in heated traffic, scratching at the walls that surround us, at our isolated existence. Anger sets in. It burrows deep into our flesh impregnating our bodies with rueful disdain. LA promised. We were moths to the flame, we never had a chance. I am a remnant, left in the fire to burn to ash. Not knowing what to make of the evil devices against us, we hide in protective crevices, which avail nothing. We are bloodied by the dawn.

A good or bad poem this may be, but the motive is not to compare myself to W.B. Yeats; only I feel the same sentient mood and echos of Didion; that L.A., in all its hyperbole and glittering offerings, is at the end of it all a hothouse of empty hours and wagging tongues.

Tags: Joan Didion