Saint Joan

But these are not the old ways; these are the new. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.” A pentatonic, a dissonance, the monster is a collection of tones that barely tolerate one another. The mask. The mask. With the music comes the mask and the eyes, the eyes. He wants to hear the eyes. He hears the vibration of the scar, the frequency at which this unstrung cello vibrates. Resonant, sonorous, the scar seeks its bow, camel hair against unwilling flesh, untuned sorrow. You see the blood, the blood and the pool, cerulean blue with clouds of crimson. Two days, five seizures. A dream a delusion a fantasy of jackboots, of handcuffs and rubber bands and shreds of cotton, a choir of nurses a chorale of police. This is my aria, or is it a solo. How can I perform with my wrists tied to the bed when I wake on the floor of the airport, Leo’s rainbow beside me, six fireman bending over me, a leash and a dog and the gendarmerie, my audience. Do you know where you are? You don’t know what happened? You don’t need to know what happened? Stigmata present. A present of stigmata. More things about which I am not permitted to speak. But this is what it feels like: There are spasms in my teeth. My legs twitch, my jaw locks. I fall to the ground and no one can tell if I am alive. Slowly, slowly the face of a young woman comes into focus. She is an emissary from the gendarme. I do not trust her, I do not believe in her. The brave men stand back while she clears their path. The brave men are afraid of me and this is before the stigmata; this is before the thumbprint of the beast. And then you wake up and it’s America. You wake up outside in America. Gotta get up gotta get up before the morning comes. Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me. Make it easy for me just a little while. Monday, Nebraska. Freight. The Train. Boxcar Willie and the Banshees. The Irish dragged the banshees here to terrify the Sioux. They succeeded only in scaring themselves, their children, and their animals. The Indians did not know the language of the banshees, but it did not matter. They had their own evening wraiths, and the banshees had no interest in their affairs. For the Indians, the living dead were of greater concern. The whiteness of the shroud, of the grave, is nowhere near as forbidding as the whiteness of the skin, of the teeth and the litany of lies that spill from their mouths, as if even the most casual untruth cannot bear to share space with the radiance of the spirit. The monster hears the story in the wailing of the train. It cannot it will not restrain itself. The monster is compelled to ride the train as freight, but it cannot plug up its ears. Whoever made him did not know what he was doing, and he hears every sound, smells every smell, but he is not allowed to see. And somehow he knows there is much to see. He can hear the scar, he can feel its vibration. Somehow he knows it is a map. How he knows this, he does not know. But he knows that he is the progeny of a demented cartographer. The rock, the river, and the tree are less inviting than he had hoped. He has come from France. He has crossed the Arctic circle. He has seen the ice of Lapland. There were no tiny men. There were no magical deer. The world begins to take some kind of shape. The monster is learning not to fear the wrath of saline, the injunction not to look back. What he will do with this knowledge remains to be seen. Looking back, what will he see? What is there to be seen? He knows that he is being followed. He has heard the footsteps of his pursuer; he has come to know his stride. What is it that he wants? What does the pursuer want? The map, the scar, the record of where the monster has been. The prophecy of what yet may come. I am at the river and I feel nothing. Despite its majesty, it is nothing but a hollow, the shape of something lost, of an attachment undone. I had assumed coming back here would awaken something else, something other than the creature. But now, there is only the echo of the sadness once carried along by the current, once breaking around these islands, breaking upon these banks. Now littered with boutique contrivances, bordered by a concrete path wandered by dim-witted eccentrics, the river has been robbed of its voice, its sorrow. Even in the dying light, the embers of fall now lit in the trees of the islands. If it sings, I cannot hear it. This is alarming but not without precedent. The first time I saw the Nile I found it underwhelming too. The Nile, when I met it, seemed a collector of stories. The Mississippi set its stories to music and invited all to dance. Only on subsequent trips to Egypt did the Nile begin to open up. Frozen, the colossus of lions at the base of the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, forever braced in preparation for the kill, they started to speak to me. They started to roar. Perhaps this is why I cannot hear the Mississippi. Perhaps Yemanja is upset. Perhaps I need to go to the Amazon. A new water, a new baptism. I will wash away my collection of sins by casting them upon the water. You do not know what disaster will come upon the land. Of the five, I remember only the first. This is the only one during which I did not pass out. There have been others, but I do not remember them either, except in retrospect, as reconstructions. With the first in Paris, I feel my jaw come unhinged, I feel it move through my neck and my head and remember knowing that I was never going to be okay again. I remember the contortions in my face, my visage taking the appearance of a terracotta satyr bellowing throughout some antique drama. This too is Hamlet: a play within a play within a play. No hay banda. Es una grabacion. It is a tape recording. Llorando. Llorando. The puzzle box and the key. Dora and the jewels. Speech is of course forbidden, but you have no idea how difficult it is to write these things down. Once written they are indelible. Speech might be recorded but somehow it remains porous and inexact. Recording sound is not quite the same thing as manipulating surfaces, tracing the shape assigned a vibration. Speech is alluring, writing is conspicuous. Both are beautiful, but one moves with purpose. Jealous of each other, speech is forgiving; the written is cruel and demanding. While the breath will disperse, ink is indelible. Whatever form it takes, the written always leaves a trace. Writing things down is a way of keeping the wound open. On this business of place, a moment, a feeling, an interlude: “This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised….I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.” In “The White Album,” Joan Didion sorts through the texture of her experience, the emotional peculiarities of her life between 1966 and 1971. Immediately following her willful exile to New York, these are the first years after her return to California, to home. Yet, in these years she finds herself less a refugee restored to her rightful estate than a sojourner in a doubly uncanny place, the Sacramento of her youth supplanted by the eternal now of Los Angeles, a post-war Los Angeles pulled apart by concrete thoroughfares meant not for people but for machines, cameras, set dressing, dolly tracks, klieg lights, cars. The phoenix of Hollywood is about to be born, the New rising from the Old, and Didion is there, a somewhat unsteady bystander who just happened to wander into the scene of the egg and the hatching. Something is happening. Something is being born. The old rules no longer apply. Meyer is dead. Selznick is dead. Goldwyn and Warner are not dead but they might as well be. And without them, who was there to tell the story, who was there to tell us what the story should be. “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience.” A trick of the light, of reels and motors and threads of celluloid, still pictures come alive; the pictures are moving and we are still but the image comes alive, the light dances. That is cinema. That is Hollywood. There is sequence and flow and flow emerges from structure, the delicate work of splicing pictures into certain patterns, deliberately arranged so to advance a beautiful lie. The stories themselves of course are lies but we get lost in them anyway, captives bound with scraps of velvet. We know the ending before we begin, and most of the time it does not matter because this is what we want. But now we find the pages in the script have been shuffled. When the still pictures are scrambled, montage returns to its makers, to its visionaries, to Vertov and Eisenstein, to the recusal of cinema from the administration of time. Illness removes us from society and, as such, it removes us, inevitably, from time, and time is the miasma that cinema exhales. Didion returns, throughout her work, to the figure of montage as a way of conceptualizing illnesses, those symptoms that wind their way through the mind, the body, and the social. Illness is presented routinely as both metaphor and theme, a topic Didion will return to over and again as she searches for a language through which to understand her own mental and physical ailments, as well as the relationship between her illnesses and the world in which she finds herself cast adrift. “The White Album” is, above all, an account of the circumstances surrounding an event that Didion is careful not to characterize as a nervous breakdown, but that most certainly was, leading to her stay in a psychiatric hospital in Santa Monica sometime in the summer of 1968. The circumstances of that breakdown become part of a larger story about Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s, to Los Angeles and the counterculture, to California, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, J. Paul Getty, and Patty Hearst; to symptoms of a social disorder unprecedented in her American experience. Even disdainful of cant, Didion eschews the popular psychological euphemisms that still float through the blood of our necrotic culture, instead turning to the clinical language of the report compiled by her doctors upon her entrance to the hospital. She quotes the report at length. Her doctors, she reports, describe her as “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive,” exhibiting the tendencies of “a personality in process of disintegration.” Having entered the hospital complaining of “vertigo, nausea and a feeling she was going to pass out,” the doctors in Santa Monica put her on Elavil, a trycyclic antidepressant developed by Merck and approved by the FDA in 1961. She is instructed to take 20 milligrams, three times a day. Didion leaves no further account of her time in the psychiatric ward, nor does she describe any of the side effects associated with the long term use of Elavil, most of which I recognize in myself. Until it was decertified by the FDA in 2000, Elavil had been associated with a range of symptoms, from mild to severe, abnormal drowsiness and weight gain to tremors, spasms, and seizures, as well as fainting and “developing a mask-like face,” a condition in which one felt one’s features as frozen, the muscles shaping one’s countenance conspicuously immobilized. This inventory, and my now long-term reliance on antidepressants, does nothing to improve my opinion of psychopharmacology, or the equivalent forms of cognitive behavioral therapy with which its wares are often paired. Fluoxetine, branded in the US as Prozac, is associated with a similar raft of symptoms, from nausea and vomiting, stuffy nose and heartburn, to fainting, irregular heartbeat, and seizures. The correlation between the worst of my physical symptoms is striking. Still. The bipolar predates the medications, just as assuredly as Didion’s nausea and paranoia was present long before she entered the hospital in Santa Monica. In “The White Album,” Didion neglects to mention that 1966–the year she associates with the beginning of her deterioration–is the year her daughter was born. Let us begin again.