The White Album by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page B

the wedding (my grandmother was an Episcopalian only by frontier chance; her siblings were Catholics but there was no Catholic priest around the year she needed christening), and I was struck dumb by Bishop Pike ’s position, which appeared to be that I had not only erred but had every moral right and obligation to erase this error by regarding my marriage as null, and any promises I had made as invalid . In other words the way to go was to forget it and start over .
    In the end I did not steal If You Marry Outside Your Faith, and over the years I came to believe that I had doubtless misread it . After considering its source I am no longer so sure . “Jim never cleaned up after himself,” a friend notes, recalling his habit of opening a shirt and letting the cardboards He where they fell, and this élan seems to have applied to more than his laundry . Here was a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and “judgmental” and generally threatened by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility . That there was an ambivalence and a speciousness about this moral frontiersmanship has not gone unnoticed, but in the rush to call the life “only human” I suspect we are overlooking its real interest, which is as social history . The man was a Michelin to his time and place . At the peak of his career James Albert Pike carried his peace cross (he had put away his pectoral cross for the duration of the Vietnam War, which outlived him) through every charlatanic thicket in American life, from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions to the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies to Spiritual Frontiers, which was at the time the Ford Foundation of the spirit racket . James Albert Pike was everywhere at the right time . He was in Geneva for Pacem in Terris . He was in Baltimore for the trial of the Catonsville Nine, although he had to be briefed on the issue in the car from the airport . He was in the right room at the right time to reach his son, Jim Jr . , an apparent suicide on Romilar, via séance . The man kept moving . If death was troubling then start over, and reinvent it as “The Other Side . ” If faith was troubling then leave the Church, and reinvent it as “The Foundation for Religious Transition . ”
    This sense that the world can be reinvented smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born . When the man who started out a winner was lying dead in the desert his brother-in-law joined the search party, and prayed for the assistance of God, Jim Jr . , and Edgar Cayce . I think I have never heard a more poignant trinity .
    1976
     

 

     
     

    Holy Water
     
     
    some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive . The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exac tly where that water is . The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exac tly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons . As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale . I know the data on water projects I will