Joan Didion is as relevant as ever...
I’ve had to struggle all my life against my own misapprehensions, my own false ideas, my own distorted perceptions. I’ve had to work very hard, make myself unhappy, give up ideas that made me comfortable, trying to apprehend social reality. I’ve spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I’m not. You may not be afflicted with my misapprehensions, and I may not be afflicted with yours, but none of this starts “tabula rasa.” We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what's really going on.
"We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle
to see what’s really going on."
That’s the human condition, providing the human is awake and living in the world which, by the way, is not as automatic as you might think, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Some of you are going to spend the whole rest of your life in culture shock, and what I’m saying today is that I think all of you should.
I’m talking about trying not to be crippled by ideas; I’m talking about looking out, about looking out at the world and trying to see it straight, about making that effort to look out for the whole rest of your life.
....I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you.
Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.” Probably an undercover. In fact, it meant nothing except that I had grown up around farms and I had known children who got tuberculosis and brucellosis from drinking raw milk.
But this was a period in which everything was understood to have some moral freight, some meaning beyond itself. And in fact, nothing did; that was the peculiarity of the decade.
In a way it was very touching, this whole society so starved for meaning that it made totems out of meaningless artifacts. The whole country was like a cargo cult. But it was also very destructive. Because nothing meant what it was supposed to mean.
Of course, we’ve always lived by symbols – the human experience is symbolic. But never in my lifetime have the images of things gotten radically separated from the reality of things. You notice this particularly about language during the ‘60s.
A lot of this came out of Vietnam. Words were used peculiarly. Meanings became obscure. We heard interdiction for bombing. Armed reconnaissance for flying low in bombing. Tactical redeployment for retreat. Incursion for invasion. Termination with extreme prejudice for killing.
But it wasn’t only the government which was using language that way. I was cleaning out a file drawer the other day looking at some old notes, and I think I spent that whole decade listening to people who used language for some purpose other than communication. Black Panthers and police talked the same way. Pentacostals and Maoists talked the same way.
I spent an hour studying a sentence I’d copied down from a book by a Brazilian guerilla. Now here is the sentence: “The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary.”
I don’t know that that means. I can track the sentence – the sentence parses but it has no meaning at all. It’s like broken home, it’s like culture at the crossroads, it’s like ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. It is devoid of meaning.
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/10/joan-didions-lost-commencement-address-revealed
