The Old and New Man

Karen Edmisten quotes from Joan Didion's chilling essay"Slouching Towards Bethlehem":

"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, and who is going to make amends."

As William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Although Christ separates the lives of converts (and reverts) into two halves -- the earlier life without Him, and the new life in Him -- the old life cannot help but inform the new.  We are still who we were, even though we are, at the same time, completely transformed.  And even if we have amended our lives, it's probably a bad idea to forget what they once were.

Bringing It All Back Home

In response to my recent post on Joan Didion's essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Maclin Horton directed me to his conversion story, which was published in the National Catholic Register in 1981. In it, Maclin relates with eloquence and humility his own journey from the counterculture to the Catholic Church.

About the phenomenon of spring 1967, he says:

. . . it really seemed, for a month or two that spring, like a new world. The flowers were brighter, the new leaves greener, because a darkness had lifted. There were other people in the world who felt as I did. We were finding each other, and soon we would change the world or perhaps build another, where the strange haunting joy that seemed to hover near us would come to rest and be ours.


Soon, however, the utopian promise of the movement degenerated into hedonism and nihilism. Maclin says that at the time he followed "a hodgepodge of more or less pantheistic, vaguely Eastern religious beliefs," but observes that

[t]here is no essential distinction beween the One of Eastern contemplation and the Abyss of Western nightmare; the differece is that the Eastern mind attemps to respond to nothingness with a smile, while the Westerner wants to scream.


Of his gradual journey to Catholicism, he writes:

there was the puzzle of confrtonting smething which seemed wiser than anything around it and yet marred by strange superstitions such as transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope. And again there was the slow realization that things which appeared to be deformities were absolutely essential to the structure of the whole, and that things which appeared to be irrational were in fact the foundations of rationality, without which reason itself would wither and die.

Perceptively and provocatively, Maclin notes of his gneration:

It is a strange twist . . . which has made the term "conservative" applicable mainly to the partisans of industrial capitalism. Many of us -- the wandering religious fanatics, the agrarians and communitarians, the artists -- were part of a movement so conservative that there was no longer even a name for what we sought . . . We wanted a world in which fundamental realities -- spirit, earth, light, death -- would be visible in all their simplicity . . . . So we marched off to war and fought for the wrong side . . . But our army scattered in the night . . . Now I find myself at the gate of an old fortress, one of those we had attacked and which we had thought to be a place of darkness -- it had looked so grim in battle -- and I find it alive with light and music . . . . It proves to be the castle of the King . . . . sometimes I wonder why all the ex-hippies in the world aren't flocking to his service. . . . There is simply nowhere else to go.

Please read this wonderful essay. I wish that Maclin would turn it into a book, as he had originally planned to do; I want to read more.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

In reponse to the recent posts on this blog about the sexual revolution, Retired Waif suggested that I read Joan Didion's iconic essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (I had never read Didion, although the eponymous book and several others by her were in my childhood home; I found I didn't like her style, but I suppose that's mainly because it's been so widely imitated). The essay is every bit as chilling as the poem from which Didion took her title. Didion has gone to Haight-Ashbury in the spring of 1967 to cover the desultory youth movement there, which is mostly a loose coalition of drug-addled teenagers who have descended upon San Francisco in a vague attempt to shuck off the repressive strictures of home and school. Drugs are the fulcrum about which this coalition pivots, and there are famous scenes of a five-year-old on acid (she is a pupil in "High Kindergarten") and a three-year-old who starts a fire in a commune while trying to light an incense stick. Didion's preamble sounds eerily like our own times:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.

(There, however, the similarity to our times ends, for "in the cold late spring of 1967 . . . the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose.")

In a sort of reversal of the trajectory of, say, The Great Gatsby, in which the protagonists leave the innocent, golden West and become corrupted in the East, Didion's California is a hollow paradise, a place that lures the young with promises of redemption and fulfillment, of a return to innocence, of an exegesis of transcendental mysteries and a spiritual completeness, but delivers instead a total breakdown of morals and a drug-hazed anomie which barely cloaks the everpresent threat of violence. In light of this, it is jarring to note the fondness with which many baby boomers regard this time and place, which Didion describes as "the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum." She has harsh words for a society that, in the period after World War II, has atomized into self-sufficient nuclear families; it is not just in the inchoate youth rebellion in San Francisco that things have broken down, she suggests, but even in straight, mainstream American culture:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves . . . Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot . . . They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts.

I believe the anomie lived out by the generation of '67 is still very much with us; only now it's no longer on the fringes, but has sunk into the very marrow of our society.