This is saved in my computer as “SkippityDooDahIFeelLikeAFuckingGenius.”
I was a little too proud of this one. An assignment from last year. Analysis of Joan Didion’s “The Santa Ana”
In her essay “The Santa Ana,” Joan Didion describes its eponymous natural phenomenon. The Santa Ana, a hot dry wind, drives Southern Californians to profound psychological disruption, resulting in behavioral extremes on a massive scale for twenty days out of the year. Didion stresses the connection of humans to nature by describing the wind’s “deeply mechanistic” effect on them. She punctuates the piece with mention of other natural disasters, creating intriguing parallels with ancient philosophy.
In roughly 450 BC, the pluralist Empedocles, the latest in a series of philosophers to introduce a theory of archae -the substance from which all things originate, postulated that four elements -Earth, Water, Fire, and Air composed everything in existence, and that two forces influenced those elements -attraction and strife. His ideas found wide acceptance for years and influenced many successive generations of philosophers including that cornerstone of Western thinking Aristotle.
Southern California, straddles an epicenter (quite literally, an epicenter), of natural disaster. While the essay always returns to its overarching focus -the Santa Ana, it touches upon many other regional happenings. The land there regularly undergoes seismic indigestion. In the days preceding the Santa Ana, Didion describes the sallow sky as “earthquake weather.” She mentions the California rainy season which ravages the hillsides with floods. She reports raging fires that swallow forests and towns alike. She, of course, begins and ends with the xeric wind that whips up these fires, the Santa Ana. In these catastrophic examples, she reveals each of the four classical elements in a state of upset.
Empedoclean Philosophy would have it that these elements in a mixture of some proportion make up a person. Therefore, when forces disrupt these elements, they disrupt people. When strife prevails in physical nature, it prevails also in human nature. When the Santa Ana rolls around to stir up both sandstorms and the Southern Californian Psyche, the characteristic violence and insanity unfailingly occur.
By offering a spectrum of Southern Californian natural disasters, Didion subtly resonates with Empedoclean ideas, more effectively illustrating the puzzlingly deep human reaction to the Santa Ana. Whether or not one subscribes to Empedocles’s philosophy, the body count left indirectly in the Santa Ana’s wake naturally makes sense with consideration of its locale- a cradle of calamitous seasonal changes and year-round cataclysms.
