The picture tells you. You don't tell it.

Didion likewise connected her openness to experience to her refusal of received ideas. In an essay titled “Why I Write,” she traced her preference for the concrete over the abstract to her student days at the University of California, Berkeley. She could never stay focused on the intricacies of Marxist dialectics, or on any other great system of thought, she recalled. Instead her attention would inevitably turn to something like “a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.” If she meditates on these images for long enough, they reveal their own unique “grammar.” She insists on taking the word “grammar” literally:

All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. … The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.

With our master narratives, we attempt to impose order on our ever-shifting perceptions of an ever-shifting world (petals falling to the floor, snow falling in the Sierras). Didion wants to write in the exact opposite way: “Nota bene. [The picture] tells you. You don’t tell it.”

 Paul Gleason, The Picture in Her Mind.

De outras Joanas - 20

When the social structure starts to crack is when the dropouts and the delinquents and the crazies turn up.These are not people who don’t know the rules. These are people who can see, without understanding why, that the rules no longer make sense. But, once people like that are thrown out of the system, once they become druggies or panhandlers or abusers of all sorts, no one wants them back in. They get scape- goated. Individual moral failure is taken to be the problem. It can’t be the system. Part of wagon-train morality was leaving the weakest behind to freeze in the mountain passes. Survival, not caring, is what Didion thinks that ethos finally boiled down to—“careless self-interest and optimism,” the California mentality. California’s answer to the problem of broken people was to build more prisons to put them in.

- Louis Menaud, "Out of Bethlehem - The Radicalization of Joan Didion", na New Yorker desta semana.

A twin flame of mine - 4

Joan Didion, The Art of Non-Fiction N.º 1, daqui

“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”

A twin flame of mine - 2

Joan Didion por Annie Leibovitz, s/d

“The most important and hardest thing for any writer to learn is the discipline of sitting down and writing even when you have to spend three days writing bad stuff before the fourth day, when you write something better. If you’ve been away from what you’ve been working on even for a day and a half, you have to put in those three days of bad writing to get to the fourth, or you lose the thread, you lose the rhythm. When you are a young writer, those three days are so unpleasant that you tend to think, ‘I’ll go away until the mood strikes me.’ Well, you’re out of the mood because you’re not sitting there, because you haven’t had that period of trying to push through till the fourth day when the rhythm comes.” 

 Joan Didion