Update from the Cloister

See enough and write it down

Joan Didion

Can I tell you who Sophie is and how I know? Can I tell you that she looks directly at me, her eyes dark pools her life behind them something vast even as it is cloistered? She loves the way trees blow in the wind the feel of beads slipping through her fingers like water and water, the ebb and flow of ocean tide. These days, even as she struggles to move, her left leg dragging, her eyes are as piercing as they've ever been. What is that?

Here's the plan: Wean the Onfi. She is over-medicated with it, the drug that I suspect is the culprit in her decline. Order The Ashton Manual (thank you Christy!) Play with the CBD oil and add in a bit of THC.  Be grateful for the grace of friends, for mindfulness meditation, for love and resilience and the strength of the heart. 

Onfi needs another name, a moniker of dread and dependency. I took away a small bit nearly two weeks ago, and this weekend was an extraordinary one. Sophie ate well, swallowed well, reached for her cup and drank well. She walked down the street with me and always her gaze -- her clear and resolute gaze. No seizures.

Hedgebrook, Day Five

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. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Black Magical Thinking

Pieta
William Blake

Joan Didion, in her formidable memoir The Year of Magical Thinking describes the way she thought in the year after her husband's sudden death as I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. Didion, of course, was grieving for her husband, and her magical thinking, although not entirely conscious, was that she could actually bring him back. Today was the second day of Sophie having quite a few seizures, certainly far more than the few to none that she'd had in the previous two weeks. I heard her thump onto the floor in her room just a few moments ago, and when I stood up and ran to her bedroom, I knew that she was probably seizing, had probably stood up from her bed and then gone down like a tree, felled. I picked her up off the floor and comforted her, changed her diaper for the fifth time and pulled the covers over her. I felt bitter and not a little angry, wondered if she'd eaten anything off or whether she was having an allergic reaction to something or other. I went over the day -- the last two days -- and wondered if she was having a delayed reaction to the cold she'd been struggling with for a week. I even, for a moment, thought that she might be reacting to me. Don't assure me that this is not so. There have probably been hundreds of times in the last near-twenty years that I've thought it -- wondered if the core, the reason for Sophie's seizures lay in me, in my literal cells. It occurs to me that this is a sort of magical thinking -- a black magical thinking, the subversion of magical thinking. The power to reverse the narrative is beyond my grasp, and if I don't stop grasping, trying to figure out why, why, why, the outcome won't be changed. 

This black magical thinking is childlike, near primitive, actually, and definitely urgent and constant. 

Joan Didion

photo credit: Gary Leonard

I didn't have a clear view of Joan Didion on Wednesday night when I went downtown to hear her at the historic Vibiana Theater. I had bought my ticket for $20 several months ago, before the publication of Didion's latest memoir Blue Nights, and it was general seating. The room was cavernous, a former church, I think, built in the late 1800s. About six hundred people sat in folding chairs in the grand room; a woman lurched over me to a saved seat about five minutes into the program. She apologized profusely and made a big production of sighing and sitting down. Didion was about the frailest speck of a woman I've seen in a long time, wrapped in a soft pale purple shawl, her long fingers constantly in motion as she spoke and read from her essays and books. The woman next to me literally typed and texted into her iPhone THE ENTIRE HOUR that Didion spoke. As you know, I've been in a mood of late, and I was unable to tune the woman and her phone out. Rather, I was constantly mindful of her and her texting, which completely detracted from the iconic writer, and I spent more time debating whether I should say something to the texting woman than I did listening to Didion. As my son Oliver said tonight when he lost in the second heat of the Raingutter Regatta at his Cub Scout meeting, EPIC FAIL.

I've read nearly all of Joan Didion's writing and admire her writing immensely although I've never felt particularly connected to her writing emotionally. Does that make sense? 

The first thing she read Wednesday night (and before I became completely and utterly distracted by THE TEXTER) was her famous opening line from The White Album:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The White Album was published over two decades ago, and lays bare in the driest of tones and most beautiful language the culture of California in the sixties and seventies, yet that line rang through the crowded church as true as it ever had. Didion's two latest books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights chronicle the respective deaths of her husband and her only daughter. It was difficult to imagine what stories Didion must have created in order to live through those deaths.

I thought, a bit, of those of us here, in blogworld, who write our stories in order to live, who craft with words in attempts, somewhat vain, to make sense of what will probably never make sense. I'm not sure why there's comfort in the crafting, but there is. Didion also stated that she always writes for an audience and never for herself, that the relationship between writer and reader is as intense as that between the actor and the audience in a theater. 

I'm still thinking of these things, two days later, and despite the fact that THE TEXTER (or my inability to ignore her) prevented me from really hearing much of Didion's talk, there was something in those few words that I did hear that will resonate for a very long time.