After being split between days of work – teaching, students, paperwork – and nights of reading and thinking about my glorious future as a Jungian analyst, I grabbed a book off the shelf to read in between things: Thomas Disch's story collection Getting Into Death.
This is of course the same brilliant Tom Disch who died so darkly last summer; who, after his lover died, was threatened with eviction from his New York apartment, and committed suicide. A smart, bitter, cruelly resentful old man – as you can see from his blog – who finally could see no future for himself.
And, as has happened to me before, I was drawn unwilling but fascinated into his brilliantly, even beautifully mordant world: he is such a fine and excellent writer, yet so poisonously unhappy, so precise in his dismissal of – well, everything. The intelligent, dying heroine of the title story, who is so jaded, yet interested in every sordid detail of her own impending final heart attack and her hospital visitors' failed lives; the pathetic hopes of the sub-sub-famous art world of The Joycelin Schrager Story; the sheer malevolence, the downward spiral, of Istanbul in The Asian Shore – these people are all so exceptionally beautifully destroyed...
All of which, of course, gives the lie to any of my hopes of change and meaning in my own life.
Some books are distinctly dangerous to take off the shelves....
Sounds like he was enjoying his pain. I think the first step is to feel it, look into it but not become it. Of course if one can't find the meaning in emptiness or the spaciousness that it offers then it's the same old same old - back with the story. Which is in no way to to belittle just how awful it can be.
Posted by: Dave Robinson | March 06, 2009 at 04:51 PM