"I Know What 'Nothing' Means, and Keep on Playing"
Why I return to Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays in work and life
If you were to ask me which writer has the ability to wrench my still-beating heart out of my chest, pulpy bits and all, the mess of me in her hands, I’d say Joan Didion. Not because she’s emotional—quite the opposite—it’s her coldness that beguiles me. Reading her is a bit like walking on knives. At first, you’re startled by the sheer pain of the prose, the abundance of white space, her fixation on mother/daughter relationships, but soon the pain dulls to a persistent ache and there comes a point where the pain feels normal. The nihilism is blunt and welcoming. There exists no artifice in Didion’s world. Characters are presented as who they are rather than what the world wants them to be.
Writers are desperate to fill the silences, the white spaces, while Didion reveals in a bleak, blank canvas. Often, nothingness fills volumes. Contains multitudes.
I first encountered Didion as a graduate student at Columbia in my early 20s and I first read Play it as it Lays in the midst of a two-year cocaine addiction. My behavior is obsessive, so I spent months devouring everything she wrote, watched every film adaptation and scripts written for the screen (Al Pacino in Panic in Needle Park is magnificent, his performance kinetic, btw). By the time I was 30, I’d read everything she committed to paper ten times over.
And while her stories remained and A Book of Common Prayer continues to be one of my favorites, it’s Play it as it Lays that I returned to with a frequency that bordered on disturbing. And it wasn’t until I was diagnosed with clinical depression the year I turned 40 that the book (and particularly the film adaptation) held an entirely different meaning for me. The white space became for me the totality of all colors, all the noise and mess and wreck one could fit in a sentence, much less a book or a film. Whereas black in the color spectrum is defined by the absence light, hence devoid of all color, white is all of it. And the white spaces resembled what depression felt like—a body overwhelmed by so much beyond what is possible for a human to bear. The nothingness of white space is actually the sum total of everything.
How is it possible to swallow and contain all colors at once?
Now, this isn’t a review of the book or film (btw, this take on the adaptation is excellent), this is about the importance of returning to a work you love at varying points in your life and understanding how a work’s meaning shifts, mutates, and changes. Years ago, I loved Madame Bovary, but over time I’d begun to hate it and love it all over it again. This is not an assault on Flaubert’s talent, it’s more like time allowed me to apply nuance and complexity. Think of it as a painting where an artists applies layers to the canvas. As the layers are applied, you see the work differently from its origin. I went from empathizing with Emma Bovary to thinking her selfish to realizing those two truths can co-exist. She can be a selfish narcissist attempting to preserve her life and agency at the same time.
As I’ve gotten older, I’m desperate to write with a leanness my younger baroque self would abhor. How can I say more with fewer words? How can those words contain music and meaning? And then I thought again of Didion and white space and how I can apply that to my work but also my life.
And that’s a difficult proposition in a world that constantly rewards the cult of more. You’re not relevant if you don’t keep producing. You’re not worthy if you don’t have more. You’re not successful if you don’t have more.
I am not a high-volume writer. I don’t churn. I tire easily. I no longer have an interest in arguing with people with the ferocity I had in my thirties. I’m no longer a fan of social media and its cycle of production and destruction. I’ve accepted my irrelevancy. I realize, without emotion, the world does not care. Or, it cares when it’s publicly convenient. It cares when it’s advantageous. It cares when currency can be acquired or gained.
Convention says we have to uphold the hopeful and the positive at all costs. Protect the innocent, we often proclaim in memes and the use of excessive exclamation points. Convention says we have to keep blaring light into the relentless darkness that is our waking hours. The darkness of poverty, injustice, hate. But I see it differently. The world is drowning in color, in light, so why not see it from within the dark. Why not sit comfortably in discomfort? Why not see and vivisect the white space for what it is? Why not accept a certain level of bleakness is essential in our survival.
A friend recently told me I was too sad. I sat with that statement for a while, mulling it over, and I came to the conclusion that what I feel isn’t about sadness. It’s about seeing the white space—all that fucking color for what it is—and feeling subsumed by it. It’s about everyone else fleeing only for the light because they don’t want to deal with the darkness. And anyone who stands in that darkness is weird, unacceptable. A massive bummer.
Last week, I chatted with an artist friend, Krista, who is lovely and amazing and her art creates so much joy in the world it can make you fucking weep. So, I did the thing I normally don’t do, which was be honest when she asked me how I am. To then tell her what it feels like to see the white spaces and exist in a world content with the erasure of them. And it was a beautiful thing to witness her sit calmly through my discomfort, allowing the silences and white space to peacefully exist. Allowing both to breathe. To bear witness, to not erase or change topics or make everything sweet and serene—but to say she accepts all sides of me. She is that rare person who sees and understands all colors and the absence of them.
And that gave me hope. Because as Maria says in PIAIL,
“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
You talk of your irrelevancy, say the world doesn't care... Well, *I* care! Your writing is up there with the best I've discovered in a long while! I'm so glad I found you. On a more personal level, I resonate with your stories of cutting ties with your mother, and writing at a glacial pace because we simply have to carry on creating, stringing words together in the hope of making some sense of any of this. I hope you carry on with your personal essays (despite your Medium promises to stop), because I think they are sublime. 🤍
"And it was a beautiful thing to witness her sit calmly through my discomfort, allowing the silences and white space to peacefully exist." This is the meaning of life and friendship. This piece really resonated with me!