it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in

Because it's all poetry.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

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November 13th, 2011
They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon the mastery of one’s language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Joan Didion, from the essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1967), in which she reported on the young people moving en masse to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco,  to drop out and ‘turn on’. It seems to me Didion, in her own haughty manner, is saying (almost) the same thing as Carver was saying here (“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones”). I often find myself in arguments about the precision of language, flinching at the misuse of ‘adorn’, or marvelling over the origins of ‘oubliette’. Absolutely, there can be energy and a certain wryness to misusing words, or to being deliberately vague (I like using ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ and even ‘shit’ to gloss over things/stuff/shit), but that’s different from the fogginess or laziness that Didion notices here.

Much of what Didion experienced in the District can be found in the gobsmacking (I mean that precisely) near-ending, where Didion is introduced to a five-year-old girl:

The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

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