an introduction…
“We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
I have been thinking about what is means to grow up in California…
To bathe in her quick rivers like a kind of baptism…
To be seasoned by the thick smoke of her wildfires…
In her essay “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Joan Didion compares The Valley to the biblical holy land, citing as one example her Sunday school work book which points to the types and diversity of its agricultural products. But these days, as fires rage seemingly endlessly, I most often hear California compared to Hell. And as we wake up to images of orange skies filled with smoke, it feels hard to argue. What is California now? It does not seem like the promised land Joan describes legendary pioneers making the long journey west to settle.
Standing on the edge of the California coast, perhaps on Land’s End at the tip of San Francisco, one becomes aware of a certain reality: you can’t go further west than this. Sitting there at Land’s End, looking out into the great nothing, you really do feel as if you have reached the end of something; the end of the world may well be it.
This place that was once considered a kind of Eden by the likes of Joan Didion and John Steinbeck, has begun to deteriorate. “PARADISE LOST,” headlines read, when the Camp Fire swallowed up a whole town.
Instead, California is a sort of mad house, a sort of oven… And the Sacramento Valley, which, as a child running barefoot through fields of clovers, I felt tenderly cradled in, is now more like Yeats’ rocking cradle which vexes us to nightmare…
yet also to dreams…
I am interested in how romantic and gothic experiences of our strange habitat have shaped our imaginations. The Mandarin is a literary magazine that has grown out of the landscapes of California: its rugged and sandy beaches, its verdant valleys, its forest waiting to catch fire. A heaven and a hell. What rich and strange creative products does land like that yield?
“In these uncertain times,” so many emails begin these days… yet in spite of all these banal and seemingly routine responses to a level of crises I have never experienced before, I have also found around and within me a renewal of imagination and creative potential. As Toni Morrison said, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
