[If you would like to read some inaugural remarks on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, skip the first two paragraphs in which I explain why they're only inaugural. You may also wish to read John Leonard's review of it in The New York Review of Books.]
My followup to this post on Foucault's still in the works. In it I'll tie up a few of the criticisms commenters at Long Sunday level, but it proceeds slowly—more slowly even than this damn chapter—and I am a very tired boy. Also in the works: a sustained account of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. So far I've bleated and pointed in the opposite direction. Now I'll talk it head on. Not now now, mind you, because sustained analysis isn't possible when you're as tired as I am. How tired am I? Polite of you to ask:
Of the past seventy-two hours a grand total of four of them have been spent asleep. Why? That's the funny thing about it: I thought I didn't know why, and it only occurs to me now that I do know why, only I've been so tired I couldn't remember. Since the Big Scary Monster of last year I've been on thyroid hormone replacement therapy, i.e. small doses of levothyroxine every morning. Whenever they change my dosage, I have insomnia. Last Friday they upped my dosage but somehow this slipped my mind. So instead calmly understanding that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep as easily as I typically do, I had one of those insomnia-induced panic attacks, complete with tossing, turning, the choking-back-tears-of-frustration, &c. So tired was I on Saturday that I even though I took my levothyroxine that morning, it still didn't occur to me as I stared sleeplessly at the ceiling Saturday night that my insomnia had a specific and familiar somatic origin. It didn't occur to me until this afternoon. As in Tuesday "after two more sleepless nights" afternoon.
So today a couple of scattered thoughts—call it "lucid dreaming" posting—which I'll collect with some presently even more scattered later in the week. The first concerns Didion's implicit contention that John Dunne's "sudden" death could have been prepared for had she seen the signs. Two nights before his death, for example, Didion recalls
John asked me if I was aware how many characters died in the novel he had just sent to press, Nothing Lost. He had been sitting in his office making a list of them .... Some months after he died I picked up a legal pad on his desk to make a note. On the legal pad, in very faint pencil, his handwriting, was the list.
Why was the pencil so faint, I wondered.
Why would he use a pencil that barely left a mark.
When did he begin seeing himself as dead?
She catalogs all the behaviors which would have had symbolic meaning had she the perspicacity to notice them at the time. As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that the act of reading The Year of Magical Thinking constitutes one such symbol. All who die after having purchased it before before finishing it, having finished only half of it, or even having finished it—all would leave their act of reading behind as a symbol their families should have, but failed, to notice. Because by Didion's logic, each of these acts—purchasing, half-finishing, finishing—will be later be invested with unbearable meaning. Thinking about purchasing Didion's book would be sufficient. Even reading another book or essay or thinking about reading another book or essay by Didion would be sufficient.
My other inaugural thought concerns this sentence:
This attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about luck, about good fortune and bad, marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
The "fixed idea," the calcified thought, the one which refuses to change no matter the shape of the world, is the centerpiece of Didion's attack on the Bush Administration in "Fixed Opinions." (The essay would later be published as Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11 by the NYR Press.) In the essay, she defines a "fixed opinion" as follows:
We have come in this country to tolerate many such fixed opinions, or
national pieties, each with its own baffles of invective and counterinvective, of euphemism and downright misstatement, its own
screen that slides into place whenever actual discussion threatens to
surface. We have for example allowed American biological research to
fall behind that in countries where stem cell programs are not confused
with "cloning" and "abortion on demand," countries in other words where
rationality is not held hostage to the posturing of the political
process.
Unlike the Administration's "fixed ideas" about the meaning of 11 September 2001, Didion's idea of death alters as she comes to terms with it. Instead of petrifying it becomes ever more malleable. To elevate Didion's mind above those who spout "baffles of invective" designed to derail "unacceptable" questions is to point to the sky and declare it up. There's no need to do it. Which is why in what follows I'll write something far less suggestive and far more solid. In the meantime, I present the following random facts:
- Had there been a word of the day today, it would have been "umbethink," because it means something between "remember" and "think," suggesting the interwoven nature of past and present thought in the moment of thinking. As in this OED citation: "Let me unbethink myself a little." (This, obviously, is an example of that beast Stephen calls "pot logic.")
- This is the best Wikipedia page ever. It will enable me to be more pompous than you've ever thought possible. Now instead of saying "no offense," I'll throw out an "absit injuria verbis." When I want to describe my theoretical approach, I'll shout "AD FONTES!" ("TO THE SOURCES!") in my best to-The-Batmobile voice. For now, however, I conclude this grab-bag with the final phrase of so many Roman comedies: "Acta est fabula. Plaudit!"
and consider Gervais a god among men . . . because His is The Only Way to deprive 'em of all dignity. Only it takes a surer hand or steadier set of fingers to pull it off. 
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