too many Daves

Think of air hockey, of that essentially frictionless surface, of the way the smacked puck glides, ricochets, glides, ricochets again, continues on and on. Now imagine many pucks sharing the essentially frictionless surface, ricocheting, gliding, inevitably colliding, propelling one another along novel trajectories.

I ask you to think of these pucks because I’m struggling to describe Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s new memoir. Blue Nights is a book of ricochets. Instead of pucks, there are memories — memories of the house at Portuguese Bend and the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica and a pink magnolia that could be seen from a sitting room and “Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two” and Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton dinner plates and ICUs and a daughter’s depths and shallows and “quicksilver changes” and the bright-red soles of the same daughter’s wedding shoes and the “suburbia house in Brentwood” and a deep-voiced bogeyman vowing “Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.”

A phrase Didion wrote in 1979’s The White Album seems newly important here. The phrase is in this sentence:

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.

The phrase I care about is “shifting phantasmagoria.” I love the phrase. But let’s switch it out. Let’s oafishly replace it with “pucks” and think about the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, about the ideas with which we he have learned to freeze the air-hockey pucks which are our actual experience.

Blue Nights could have been a book about using ideas to freeze the pucks of actual experience, about scrutinizing each puck in its turn, telling its story, and never ever mentioning it again. Instead, Blue Nights is the messy splendor of lots of pucks in motion, of ricochets, of collisions, of many unhappy returns.

Blue Nights has 35 chapters. Of those 35, I’ve finished 140.

35 + 35 + 35 + 35 = 140.

The whole book. Four times since Sunday. This is not something I planned to do, but it turned out to be something I couldn’t not do.

To be strictly accurate, I have never set eyes on Blue Nights; I listened to the unabridged audiobook four times. I mention this because: 1) You’re free to judge that I haven’t read Blue Nights even once; 2) Hearing Didion’s words, instead of seeing them, may explain why I disagree with those people — including Didion herself, it seems — who mourn that the rhythm and the music is finally gone from Didion’s sentences.

Before starting Blue Nights, I came across several reviews or blog posts — I didn’t keep the links — that accused Didion of writing a cold, remote book. Those claims left me especially unprepared for some of the more quietly potent passages about her daughter’s adoption, childhood, adulthood, and premature death. This passage, I can now say after four times, wrecks me every time: 

One day after she had asked me for a Magic Marker I found her marking off an empty box into “drawers,” or areas meant for specific of these “sundries.” The “drawers” she designated were these: “Cash,” “Passport,” “My IRA,” “Jewelry,” and, finally—I find myself hardly able to tell you this—“Little Toys.”

Again, the careful printing.

The printing alone I cannot forget.

The printing alone breaks my heart.

Novelist John Banville concluded his thoughtful NYT review of Blue Nights like this:

Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

While it’s true that art can’t resurrect Didion’s daughter or Didion’s husband, I question this idea that “nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” Didion writes about a poem’s “sixteen lines that during the days and weeks immediately after John died spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling.” The poem was W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which ends like this:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Dismantle Blue Nights. Make stanzas of its paragraphs. What you find — what I find, at least — is a book that is itself a poem. A very long poem but a poem with rhythm, a poem with music, a poem of pangs, a poem of “how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here,” a poem about seizing the chance to love avidly, a poem I needed to hear four times, maybe five.