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Before i left, my father gave me Joan Didion’s book on her homeland California. I began reading it on the plane to San Francisco now more than a month ago, continued some of it on the Greyhound bus to San Francisco two weeks ago, and finished it last week here in Santa Cruz. I’ve been reading it in an attempt to understand more of the soul of this place, and there seems to be a very similar impulse in Didion’s writing. Her starting point is the story of her ancestors moving west – a family history which parallels that of the United States. Going west, the belief in starting all over again. |
“Two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes, the cutting clear which was to have redeemed them all.” This was the crossing story as origin myth, the official history as I had learned it.
Didion revisits these pioneer myths and their American mystique – her writing moves slowly making their dark sides palpable, dissecting underlying notions of “clean cuts”, freedom, individualism and greed. More from book her later on, for now this thought about the break, the cut, and its promise of a new world:
From what exactely was “the break” or “the void” or “the cutting clean” to have redeemed them? From their Scotch-Irish genes? From the idealization that had alchemized the luckless of Wales and Scotland and Ireland into classless western yeomen? From the confusions that led both Jack London and The Valley of the New Moon‘s Saxon Brown to claim the special rights they believed due to them as “old American stock”? Or were they to have been redeemed from the break itself, the “cutting clean”, “the void”?