Thirst

I have been reading Judith Freeman’s excellent book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon, 2007). I was struck by her assertion about the cultural significance fast food took on in Los Angeles. She argues that the rise of fast food in L.A. was, in part, due to the idleness and loneliness of the (older) population. In the following passage, she is talking about Clifton’s Sliver Spoon, a once famous cafeteria (now closed) located not far from the Bank of Italy building on South Olive Street where Chandler worked in the offices of the Dabney Oil Syndicate from 1923-1932. She writes:

In cafeterias like Clifton’s, fast food, cheap food, food you selected yourself and put on a tray and pushed along a metal railing, became inextricably wed not to mere nourishment but to the possibility  of escaping a haunting emptiness for a while. The popularity of the cafeteria in L.A. was primarily due to the loneliness of the people. It was a friendlier type of eating place than a normal restaurant. . . . This was the true lure of fast food, and perhaps it helps explain why it has assumed such an important place in American culture. Fast food is about estrangement and existential ennui, about loneliness, and boredom, and absence, and an arresting of traditional patterns of family life and social context. Who cares if the meal is inferior? If it gets you out in the world. (80)

As I read this passage, I couldn’t help but think of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), also a story of isolation, existential loneliness, and the nothingness or “nada” of contemporary existence. Hemingway, too, associates the café or cafeteria with a person’s need for companionship. Yet he pursues the issue in a different way. In Hemingway’s story, an old man likes to sit late into the night in a café—the clean, well-lighted place—and drink brandy, often leaving the place when he’s very drunk. Why does the old man find comfort in the café? Why does the old man drink to excess? The older waiter at the café seems to understand the old man’s despair (“Our nada who art in nada”). Of course, Hemingway’s story is set in Spain, not Los Angeles, and it draws on Hemingway’s memories of his life after he returned home from the war. Colloquially, to “drink” means to consume alcohol, but “drink” also implies “thirst.” In contrast, “hunger” implies something else. Hunger, or appetite, is to sexual fulfillment what thirst is to spiritual fulfillment; both terms are used as figurations of human longing and desire: “sexual appetite” and “spiritual thirst.” Hunger and appetite, drink and thirst are tropes that function in different ways, suggesting different desires. In The Little Sister (1949), Chandler associates fast food restaurants with restlessness: “They have to get the car out and go somewhere,” he writes. Is loneliness alleviated by being around other people? Restlessness leads to hunger, while thirst leads to solitary reflection. The old man in Hemingway’s story thirsts; he doesn’t hunger.

A Few Songs To Drink To Late At Night in a Sad Café:

John Anderson – Straight Tequila Night

Jimmy Buffett – Margaritaville

Johnny Cash – Sunday Morning Coming Down

Kenny Chesney – Hemingway’s Whiskey

Neil Diamond – Red Red Wine

The Eagles – Tequila Sunrise

Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Raymond Chandler Evening

Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

Tommy James – Sweet Cherry Wine

George Jones – Tennessee Whiskey

Don McLean – American Pie

Willie Nelson – Drinking Champagne

Jimmie Rodgers – Kisses Sweeter Than Wine

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Summer Wine

Steely Dan – Deacon Blues

George Strait – Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind

Tom Waits - Warm Beer Cold Women

Bob Wills – Bubbles in my Beer

Restless Wind

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.” A famous, oft-quoted passage from Raymond Chandler’s short story “Red Wind” (Dime Detective Magazine January, 1938), the Santa Ana winds typically portend the arrival of autumn in southern California. By describing the winds as “red,” Chandler invokes blood (as in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, 1929), violence, and, inevitably I suppose, passion. But “red” can also refer to the atmosphere: the ambient temperature, in this case, hot. In her essay, “The Santa Ana,” published in August, 1967, Joan Didion cites the above passage by Chandler, choosing to elaborate on wind as “atmosphere,” or “mood,” rather than just air in motion:

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

The Santa Ana wind is an inexorable force, unstoppable, merciless, disturbing the atmosphere and consequently the environment, impacting human behavior as well as health and well-being. Both Chandler and Didion resort to mythological thinking (“folk wisdom”) to understand the Santa Ana wind. It is an evil wind, a wind-spirit sent by an illness-causing demon, one of those ancient, malevolent winds that were believed to bring sickness and death. We humans are at its mercy. “[T]he violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” Wind is at the root of all illness and misfortune, capable even of precipitating existential dread. Of the Anemoi, the four wind gods of Greek mythology, Notus (South Wind) would send a wind that rose after midsummer, a scorching wind that would burn the crops and choke men with dust. (Other of the Anemoi were a bit more congenial.)

The wind of song is seldom if ever just air in motion, but Romantically conceived, Romantic in its Coleridgian form: “we receive but what we give,/And in our life alone does Nature live” (Dejection: An Ode). The wind is a positive or negative force based on what we attribute to it. And, alas, when asked a question, the restless wind never answers:

And would we aught behold, of higher worth,

Than that inanimate cold world allowed

To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the Earth—

And from the soul itself must there be sent

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

A Few Songs About the Ever-Changing Wind:

John Anderson – Seminole Wind

The Association – Windy

Billy Bragg & Wilco – Black Wind Blowing

Patsy Cline – The Wayward Wind

King Crimson – I Talk to the Wind

Christopher Cross – Ride Like the Wind

Donovan – Catch the Wind

Steve Goodman – Santa Ana Winds

Jimi Hendrix – The Wind Cries Mary

Elton John – Candle in the Wind

Kansas – Dust in the Wind

The Kingston Trio – They Call the Wind Maria

McCoy Tyner – Fly With the Wind

Peter, Paul & Mary – Blowin’ in the Wind

Chris Rea – Windy Town

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Against the Wind

Rod Stewart – Mandolin Wind

Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention – Any Way the Wind Blows

Warren Zevon – Hasten Down the Wind