LAST NIGHT I am sitting at the memorial of General Ulysses S. Grant. Well, the park behind it. It is Ferra’s birthday, but the sun has set and only a few of us remain, with the last of the wine bottles. The ratio of people bringing alcohol to food was woefully imbalanced, but the feeling of hunger was more than that. Something kept us glued to this little patch of grass, talking about nothing too-important at all. I am trying to enact a new rule for myself, which I have learned too late in my time trying to assimilate here: always stay late, stay until the aftermath pizza, the fire escape cigarette, the second party that sounded fun when your chemical balance was different but now is not… Anyways. Lula is describing a man she sees playing the saxophone in Central Park. “He was playing across the lake from where I was sitting, sobbing the other day –”
“Oh no, why?” I interject.
Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.
“Oh… I…” She seems surprised to remember she even mentioned it. But she doesn't explain. “Just having a really bad go of it/. Anyways,” And she continues, but she mentions the sobbing again, again in passing, and I think this is how we are learning to be – needing to release some very deep need for comfort by taking the half-comfort of merely saying it aloud, having the “what” be heard by some other human, too embarrassed to ask for more.
When they say New York feels like a vacuum, it is by this osmosis: the spontaneous net movement or diffusion of something soluble - a pain - through the membrane of you, kept permeable by the ability to move anywhere, hide anywhere. Osmosis means your openness is always attempting to be filled by the high-potentiality of bodies everywhere, of the saxophone players noise, the smell of ducks, the mindless Halal cart-lunch, in the direction that tends to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides.
And when you are in your room alone , but you cannot sleep without the window open, you understand this. Come in, East Harlem, East River, sky, sunset, sunrise, the sound of the ambulances pulling in and out of the hospital which was comforting in the beginning. You must sleep with the window open so that your solitude does not become a vacuum, but asks every thought and feeling to fly in through the 9th story and permeate you.
***
Before Joan Didion died, her sunglasses sold for $2,500; after she died, another pair went to Sotheby’s for $27,000. They sold the blank notebooks she never wrote in for $9,000, a set of stained kitchen pans for $10,500. The Times wrote an article titled “Joan Didion's Life in Objects”, full of neat white images of faded objects on clean backgrounds. The sense of elegance, importance that the archivist's white background creates – the tragic glamor it makes out of a slightly faded, yellowing page against a type of shadowless white which does not exist in nature.
Her broken desk clock sold for $35,000.
While she was alive, “Run, River” about a fictional family in Sacramento, was a good novel, “Where I Was From”, an archival nonfiction novel of the real journey, is less interesting (and less beloved). Her talent was in telling something of herself beyond an archive, and yet:
“’Everything in the sale helps to paint the picture of how she lived in her private space,’ said Lisa Thomas, the director of the auction house’s fine arts department.”
What right do we have to her private space? What do her dinner party guest lists tell us about her mind? And why does the New York Times use a photo of her and her husband as the cover image, describing her as having “transcended literary fame” to become “a symbol of bicoastal chic”? Is that the ascension she was after?
The New York Public library acquired her papers. The archive, which totals 240 linear feet of material, spans the whole of her life, starting with a hospital record showing her mother’s thumbprint. Then research for her famous essays. But they won’t be processed until 2025.
In September I went to Joan’s memorial. I had just moved here, just transferred, and the October joy abounded. That day, some of the greatest minds among the living gave testimonies to what Joan really was – among many things, a great friend, but also, an authoritative voice. A famous actress repeats 5 things Joan taught her to live by – the final, “Write it again”.
Many things have changed since then. But to write it again – she was telling this friend to basically start over with the manuscript – has stayed. A year is over; one transformation occurs, another perhaps yet to come; write it again. A year has passed, has this story materialized? Write it again. Has this narrative made sense? Is it, as Barthes would define much to my chagrin, a series of supplementary events glued together with something permeable for time to blow through it? Or has every misstep, every failure, been somehow constitutive of a narrative I will understand in the future, hopefully before they sell off my things.]
I remember being upset when I heard they were selling Joan’s things. She was many things – a frontierswoman, an incisive diagnostic of American psychiatric disorders, a political champion of the Haight-Ashbury girl in the gingham dress more than the man in the suit. How quickly this woman became an object of a museum, something to possess and study and covet, after a life spent cultivating, above all else, an authoritative voice.
The artists who have always attracted me are portraitists, often of themselves in one way or another. And while portraits of her – amateur acrylic paintings and original photo prints standing near designer cars – sold for thousands, it is the portrait she made of herself, splashed against the background of an archive she did not control, which interests me more. Within its interminable digital vault, The New York Times holds a 1977 edition of the Book Review.
Not just the pages of the newspaper, but its future as a piece of cultural material. Amidst her words – forcefully displacing them – are the lines of ad-copy and images which forcefully attempt to negate their authority, their meaning. She speaks of politics, religion, disorder – ads for WOMENS PRODUCTS and WOMENS BOOKS destabilize her authority.
My generation has grown up in the shadow of this tension. We are all self-archivists. We are all audience members hoping to be satisfied by a performance we have put on.
I am concerned by this instinct within myself, to constantly capture, to record, maybe in an attempt to control or cement that which it is simply impossible to. And further, that it is this self-feeding process of repetition, of representation as a means to memory and the re-captured of “loved” experience which devalues the “lived” part exactly – when we experience in order to capture as opposed to live, experience, and happen to capture (i hear the ontological naivety in this sentence, but bear with me : I remember being a little girl who swam in rivers and did not video tape things.)