Amen, Sister!

That is what my whole body is shouting over and over again as I turn the pages of Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion, a collection of essays written decades before I was born. I have so much work that I should be doing right now, but I cannot contain myself. In the last two days, I have already called my husband and both of my parents to make them listen to lines from these essays, so since I don't want to bother them anymore, I am loosing my enthusiasm for this writing on the internet.

I have never had any interest in reading collections of essays before, nor have I read anything of Didion's before, but this, as it turns out, is my very favorite kind of writing. It is the kind that makes me stop to write down sentences that I wish I had written and that I don't want to forget. It is the kind of writing that forces me to keep my phone nearby because I have to look up a word or a reference every page or two. I collect words like some people collect...I don't know. Coins? Spoons? Do people still collect spoons? Point is - I like a book that requires a dictionary because it expands my collection.

My Slouching Toward Bethlehem word collection so far (apologies to non-word nerds, read: most people):

desultory (adj): lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm
antimacassar (n): a cover to protect the back or arms of furnitre
rostrum (n): a raised platform on which a person stands to make a public speech
analysand (n): a person undergoing psychoanalysis
apocryphal (adj): of doubtful authenticity
cavil (n): a petty or unnecessary objection
Panglossian (adj): characterized by or given to extreme optimism, especially in the face of unrelieved hardship or adversity
aperçu (n): a discerning perception, an insight
donnée (n): a set of notions, facts, or conditions, that governs, and shapes, an act or way of life
anomie (n): social instability caused by erosion of standards and values
mendacious (adj): untruthful
atavisitc (adj): reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type
sybartic (adj): characterized by or loving luxury or sensuous pleasure

And I'm only on page 165.

On a related note, I knew I was going to write a blog on this when I read Didion's description of the rather lost children of the Haight who seemed determined to forgo the bourgeois language of "the man," relying on "groovy" to do the work of a hundred words. She won me over forever with the following, "As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language..." Preach it, Joan.

In addition to words that are mellifluous or whimsical, arcane or anomalous (see what I did there?), I also collect sentences. Sentences that make make me laugh or nod in recognition. Sentences that I wish I had written. Sentences that make me say, "Yes! That. That is exactly what I mean." Sentences that are just plain beautiful. I know a sentence is one I have to have if I feel an urgent need to read it aloud to whomever is closest. This is awkward when I am alone in public. In any event, this book is full of those kinds of sentences. This post is already too long, and I'm sure, too boring, so I'll share just a few of my favorites.

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. on a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends" (139).

"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect" (143).

"To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves" (144).

"It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag." (146-147).

As I was reading these essays, I realized that these are not the first of Ms. Didion's sentences in my collections. Two years ago, I excerpted a portion of the essay Los Angeles Notebook in which she beautifully describes the Santa Ana winds. Words. I just can't get enough. Obviously. Apologies for the lengthy book report!

Fall Again - Southern California Style

Today, I'm thankful for the Santa Ana winds. Instead of leaves of crimson and gold and unexpected frosts, San Diego prefers to signal the beginning of fall with dry desert winds, ten foot waves, and spectacular sunsets.

I'm also giving thanks for the fact that, from my classroom door, I can see the Pacific...

and Mexico.

{I don't have much of a zoom. Take my word for it, those little spots of light are for sure in Mexico.}

Since I have been on a quotation rampage of late and because a beautifully crafted sentence is always something to be grateful for, I will leave you with Joan Didion's perceptive and eloquent take on the Santa Anas. Writing like this, full of simple observations so clearly and perfectly articulated that I have to find someone to share them with, is why I love to read.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. 

 

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. 

"On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. 

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." 

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. 

A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. 

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break. 

 

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. 

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are. 

Puts a bit of a negative spin on the Santa Ana winds, but interesting nonetheless.