The Gold Coast

51

Back at work in the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company, back at work in his night classes, Jim finds he cannot keep Sheila Mayer and her jigsaw puzzles from his mind. Now it’s the principal element of the uneasiness that oppresses him. And he can’t escape it.

Hana is still working hard, she has no time. Hana is working, he is not.

Finally, impelled to it, he sits at his computer and stares at the screen. He’s got to work, to really work, he’s got to. Tonight it’s as much an escape from his life, from his uneasiness, as anything else. But any motive will do at this point.

He thinks about his poetry. He considers the poetry of his time. The thing is, he doesn’t like the poetry of his time. Flashy, deliberately ignorant, concerned only with surfaces, with the look, the great California image, reflected in mirrors a million times.… It’s postmodernism, the tired end of postmodernism, which makes utterly useless all his culturevulturing, because for postmodernism there is no past. Any mall zombie can write postmodern literature, and in fact as far as Jim can tell from the video interviews, that’s who is writing it. No, no, no. He refuses. He can’t do that anymore.

And yet this is his time, his moment; what else can he write about but now? He lives in a postmodern world, there is no way out of that.

Two of the writers most important to Jim wrote about this matter of one’s subject. Albert Camus, and then Athol Fugard, echoing Camus—both said that it was one’s job to be a witness to one’s times. That was the writer’s crucial, central function. Camus and the Second World War, then the subjugation of Algeria—Fugard and apartheid in South Africa: they lived in miserable times, in some ways, but by God it gave them something to write about! They had something to witness!

While Jim—Jim lives in the richest country of all time, what’s happening man, nothing’s happening man.… Jack-in-the-Box is faster than McDonald’s!

My Lord, what a place to have to be a witness to.

But how did it get this way?

Hmm. Jim mulls that over. It isn’t really clear, yet; but something in that question seems to suggest a possible avenue of action for him. An approach.

But that brings up a second problem: it’s all been done before.

It’s like when his English teacher at Cal State Fullerton told the class to go out and write a poem about autumn. Great, Jim thought at the time. First of all, we live in Orange County—what is autumn to us? Football season. Wetsuits for surfing. Like that. He’s read that Brahms’s Third Symphony is autumnal, he’s read that the rhythms of the Book of Psalms are autumnal—okay, so what’s autumn? Brahms’s Third Symphony! The Book of Psalms! That’s the kind of circles you run in, when the natural world is gone. Okay, take those fragments and try to make something of it.

I listen to Brahms

And watch the Rams

I read from Psalms

We are only lambs

Putting on our wetsuits

To surf the autumn waves.

Hey, pretty good! But then the professor gets out “To Autumn” by John Keats, and reads it aloud. Oh. Well. Take your poem and eat it. In fact scratch that topic entirely, it’s been done before to perfection. Well fine! Ain’t no such topic in OC anyway!

The trouble is that if you start that process you quickly find that every topic in the world goes out the window the same way. It’s either been covered to the max by the great writers of the past, or else it doesn’t exist in OC. Usually both.

Be a witness to what you see. Be a witness to the life you live. To the lives we live.

And why, why, why? How did it get this way?

Back to that again. All right. Make that the orientation point, Jim thinks, the organizing principle, the Newport Freeway of your writing method. He thinks of In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams. Williams’s book is a collection of prose meditations on various figures of American history, explaining it all with that fine poet’s eye and tongue. Of course Jim can’t duplicate that book: he doesn’t have any more writing ability than Williams had in his little fingernail. Every time WCW cut his fingernails, Jim thinks, he lopped off ten times more talent than I will ever have, and wrapped it in newspaper and tossed it in the wastebasket. He giggles at the thought. Somehow it makes him feel freer.

Duplication isn’t the problem, anyway. It’s OC Jim is concerned with, Orange County, the ultimate expression of the American Dream. And there aren’t any great individuals in OC’s history, that’s part of what OC means, what it is. So he couldn’t follow Williams’s program even if he wanted to.

But it gives him a clue. Collectively they made this place. And so it has a history. And tracing this history might help to explain it, which is more important to Jim, now, than just witnessing. How it got to its present state: “The Sleepwalkers and How We Came to Be.” He laughs again.

If he did something like that, if he made that his orienting point, then all his books, his culturevulturing, his obsession with the past—all that could be put to use. He recalls Walter Jackson Bate’s beautiful biography of Samuel Johnson, the point in it where Bate speaks of Johnson’s ultimate test for literature, the most important question: Can it be turned to use? When you read a book, and go back out into the world: can it be turned to use?

How did it get this way?

Well, it’s a starting point. A Newport Freeway. You can get anywhere from the Newport Freeway.…