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Thom Disch, R.I.P.: Ave atque Vale!

Discussion in 'Serious' started by Prestidigitweeze, 11 Feb 2009.

  1. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Until tonight, I had no idea that Thomas Disch -- perfect genre novelist, merciless satirist, accomplished poet, former editor of the Paris Review and one of the three greatest science fiction writers of the past thirty years -- had committed suicide on July 4, 2008. One more mentor-friend: by his hand, his end.

    Thom had a gift for dramatic structure, grim wit and startling thematic recaps; why, then, did he choose the Fourth of July to launch his last fireworks? He must have thought about the timing; he was always the consummate playwright past final curtain crawl.

    Thom was one of my first and best mentors in New York until his boyfriend forbade him to see a number of his writer friends out of misdirected jealousy. I've often wondered whether that contributed to his sense of isolation. Before that, the Thom I knew was both nondescript and glittering -- a personable paradox who looked like a broken-nosed Sargent Rock but spoke like Whistler topping Wilde; who wore plaid flannel shirts while gesticulating like a Victorian. Thom was the mentor who once turned to me and said, "Don't have heroes, only have peers. You'll find that to be axiomatic in New York." I did, and still do.

    Thom once told me he wanted a particular song by Mahler ("Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen") played at his funeral. Let's hope they played it in his honor! Ruckert's lyrics remain as true of Thom in his time as they were of Mahler in his.

    Even though I'm late in learning about this, Thom deserves more posts in his honor. And to those who haven't read him, I recommend the following: 334, Camp Concentration and On Wings of Song (the title's as ironic as Disch himself was in "real life").

    =======================================================

    Remembering Thomas M. Disch:

    http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/07/11/disch/print.html
     
    Last edited: 3 Mar 2009
  2. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Here are a few of the poems Thom posted as journal entries on his blog, Endzone. Provisional and lucid, they demonstrate his stylistic clarity, penchant for satire and command of form. They are also brutally sad.

    If I'd known Thom led such a starved emotional life, I'd have looked him up and taken him to dinner on July 4. That way, nothing could have happened to him because he wouldn't have been alone.

    (Here's what I imagine on far too many train rides: Going back in time to muster the right method for stopping some late friend from leaving the world. Throughout my corporeal tenure, I've known far too many gifted depressives. Here's the question I ask myself: If I'd paid attention, if I'd been persistent, if I'd listened more closely, might they still be alive? Was their loneliness in part the side-effect of others' self-absorption -- others like me?)

    One thing in particular upsets me about the circumstances of Thom's death: His late poetry shows clearly he was close to suicide. What's more, his poems were made public. Why didn't someone intervene?

    When Sylvia Plath was struggling with depression and writing Ariel, people hadn't been exposed to the work; after Ian Curtis hung himself, his band claimed his vocals were so unintelligible that no one realized the lyrics presaged his death.

    But Thom's suicidal impulse was right there on the web. It had been digested and discussed by fans for two years prior. Yet the only response to Thom's despair by fans and visitors was to quibble with his wording and offer pseudo-technical observations, as if he needed either. Nowhere on that site was any concern expressed for the person who'd been writing about suicide obsessively -- who sounded borderline in every sense.

    And once his demise became known, people went on commenting on his blog obliviously, never recognizing their part in his isolation, always tacking on painful cliches about "the tragedy."

    He chose to mourn birds over people as a species, and perhaps he was right. Now that Thom's gone, the thrush alone still sings of him correctly.

    ============================

    From Endzone:

    http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/

    Irony: an Example

    Once there was a hunter caught in a trap
    Who gnawed off his leg to escape.
    Too late, he realized it was no use.
    It was his head in the trapper's noose.

    ===========================

    Eminent Domain

    There are people with money planning to kill us.
    How can we help them at their task?
    You really shouldn't have to ask.
    Just send them what they want before they bill us,
    Then lie in the bulldozer's path
    So it can squash you flat.

    ===========================

    FAQ2

    Why do you think banks so often
    change their names? Why this perpetual urge
    to find a better acronym? Have they
    merged or been swallowed by some larger
    corporate entity? Are their Boards
    at a loss for more meaningful work?
    No, usually, as with lesser felons,
    it's a straightforward need
    to evade detection. A long string
    of aliases, stretching back through their crimes
    and shifting almost imperceptibly from state
    to state, lets them scam new generations
    of guileless fools who will forget
    that Federated Faith is actually
    ****ed-You-Again without the hyphens.
    But if you dare to point that out
    to the folks at Federated, the PR firm
    of Pussycat Trust will sue you
    for obscenity and hurt feelings.
    They want to hear you say
    how much, how very very much
    you hunger for their dirt
    and what a beautiful logo they have,
    they have, what a beautiful logo they have.

    ====================

    A Chip Off the Old Block

    My Daddy's suit cost a thousand dollars.
    His shirts are from London with stiff French collars.
    When I grow up I want to wear
    Suits that expensive and shirts as fair,
    And worry about the taxes I pay
    And make the doorman and the driver say
    Have a nice day, Sir. Have a nice day.

    ============================

    Malfunction

    A little while ago I thought
    the white electric alarm clock
    on the night table beside the bed
    was conking out, literally
    losing time, minutes or hours,
    but such was not the case.
    It wasn't properly plugged in.
    Now that it is, it does the job
    with unexceptionable dependability.
    Maybe it is the same with me.
    Some piece of neural wiring
    is frayed. I look at something
    and don't see what it is.
    I forget why I have gone to bed.
    I look at the white clock and cry.
    For no reason at all. And then I stop.

    =============================

    The Cold

    The summer went on so long
    but now the Cold is here again.
    Dusk comes earlier and dawn delays.
    One needs the heavier bedspread, then
    even a blanket. We are reduced to the condition
    of shivering cavemen wrapped in the pelts
    of the animals they've killed and eaten.
    At last winter declares its martial law
    and the Cold patrols the streets,
    killing whom it chooses among the indigent.
    Warmth is more important than food,
    dreams, more than sex. We huddle
    together, those the Cold permits
    such luxury, and escape into the vaunted dream
    of Death. As Hamlet asks, Who
    would fardels bear? Not when wooly blankets
    are available. And iron grates where the warm air
    rises all through the night, where
    a right arm is free to find a haven
    beneath a living, breathing torso.
    But is this, we must ask ourselves,
    any excuse for a life?

    ========================

    The Last Act

    While there's still honey to be had
    and gallons of gas at any price
    it would be nothing less than mad
    to do without. What'll you have?
    They won't ask twice. Get what you can,
    then get out of town. The ship's
    going down, its keel is cracked.

    ===========================

    The People You'll Meet in Prison

    That dirty old man lived in a filthy hovel
    with thirty-seven mangy cats.
    and when their poop was more than he or anyone could shovel
    he went to jail.

    That trendy young teen did a deed so obscene
    no newspaper could ever speak of it,
    and she boasted, "I love it! I love it!"
    so she went to jail.

    That middle-aged nun with her hair in a bun
    protested at nuclear plants
    by spraying red paint on the submarine's gun,
    and had to be put into jail.

    And if you inhale, or even possess, or just cough
    inappropriately, you too will be hauled off.
    But hell, we'll all go down some day
    cause there's always the devil to pay.
    So just do what it is you've got to do
    before you go to jail.

    =====================

    A Stack of Calendars

    The past is rippled into days
    striped with weeks
    mottled into months

    Each bygone year
    will bookend
    a million CVs

    But the future is one
    undifferentiated expanse
    an ocean poised

    to be sliced
    by the oars of men
    not yet enslaved

    =============

    An Experiment You Can Do Right in Your Own Home

    Sometimes the people we think we know
    Are somebody else entirely. This can be so
    Even of one's own family, both women and men.
    Look at them carefully. Then look again.
    Your mom's just like her photograph;
    She'll laugh the way she used to laugh:
    But it's not her. It's someone dressed
    To play her part like a TV actress.

    And it isn't just people; it can be things.
    If you go to the park and swing on the swings,
    You'll notice they're not quite the same.
    The difference is slight, it hasn't a name,
    But nothing is like it used to be here.
    So, kids, be careful -- don't look in the mirror.

    ============================

    Let's Be Realistic

    Right at the end the tortoise realized
    that he could never have got through
    to the world on the other side of the bars,
    the world that's ours, visible to
    a tortoise, yes, but inaccessible.
    He'd try to plow a path, he'd strain
    his neck, he'd think: I think I can,
    but the bars were his fate, he could never
    get past them, any more than a kid
    of the wrong class will ever be
    a member of society or sit on Boards
    and lord it over other tortoises.
    It's just not in the cards. Tortoises
    can never be anything but poor.

    ========================

    Lear's Guide to the Flowers of the Hearth

    You men who have daughters, alive
    or, as it chances, slain
    upon the field of battle, always
    keep a spray of blossoms close at hand
    that you may place upon the dear one's
    grave or pyre. Here's a favorite:
    Love's-a-Liar. And here's another:
    Dagon's Mother (smells of blood).
    Or how about these little violets
    we sow on the plots of violated virgins
    and water with our tears? For years
    I've wept for my own little Chuck
    and seen my beard grow grey (hey,
    lackaday!) See how they bloom now!
    For it is April and everything is gay.

    ==========================

    The Whale in the Living Room

    Sugar is white and so is snow,
    and clouds are white as well.
    Everything in heaven is white,
    but nothing is white in hell.

    So when you die, wear something white
    and everyone will think
    it couldn't possibly be you
    who's raising such a stink.

    =======================

    Eight Great Tragedies

    Fifty years ago this paperback cost fifty cents.
    The pages are brittle, but the margins bear
    no notes. I suspect no one has ever read it
    and it existed only to be shifted from shelf
    to shelf, sometimes in an upright position,
    sometimes lying flat. Dust collected
    on the glossy cover, slowly bonding to the cellophane.
    All that is published is published in vain.

    =======================

    Toccata 10

    Every so often a face appears
    in the paper, the handsome face
    of a nameless man waiting to kill
    some other man whose blood will spill
    into the street unphotographed,
    his name unknown, a loser
    in all the categories of loss. Forget him.
    Let's admire the face on page one,
    his wrinkled brow, both eyes intent
    on something just to the left
    of the camera, and in the background,
    orange on black, the blaze of war--
    a bursting shell, a burning house,
    who knows, but very well composed.
    I think we'd all prefer to be
    anywhere else but here, but neither
    the photographer nor the man he shot
    have had that choice. Was he on our side
    or theirs? The caption didn't say
    but I'll omnisciently reveal that he
    and his photographer are both dead today.

    =================

    Toccata 12

    You'll wait here in this waiting room
    forever. That may seem a long time now,
    but as the hours go by you will not notice
    or you will not care. People experience
    prison in much the same way. Today
    is just a yesterday and then it's two.
    Hello, my name is Tom, and who are you?
    The windows do not show the sky,
    the menu never varies, and as for service
    you can wait for the waiter forever.
    Yet there are pleasures if you pay
    attention: aromas drift out of
    the kitchen and each sniff is a meal
    you can imagine. Think of the other things
    you waited for that never came,
    the promised checks, the lies and alibis
    you were gullible enough to have
    believed. ******** all of it. Isn't it
    better to be here, beyond desire's reach
    in a room like this, so bland and comfortless,
    where you can sit unnoticed,
    knowing there is nothing you can do?

    ==================

    The Great Lull

    For that whole week nothing happened.
    Nothing to speak of. People
    did the things they usually do:
    brushed their teeth and killed each other
    in far-off lands. Some family disputes
    ended tragically, but the victims
    were not celebreties. No government official
    denied allegations. Market prices
    were still as the ocean
    in Coleridge's great poem.
    If you gazed into the cloudless skies
    on any night of that week, you would see
    no comet portending the horrors about to befall
    all of us. You would feel only the gentle breeze
    ruffling your hair like a lover's fingers
    and breathe airs redolent
    of the gardens of old Persia.

    ================

    The Man at the End of the Bar

    Like the rueful songs in Shakespeare's comedies
    or the shorter words in dictionaries,
    Ben seemed to have been around forever.
    You would know by the way he'd nod
    and turn away when you smiled in his direction
    he was embarrassed by his teeth. You would say
    "Nice day" and leave it at that so he could agree
    with a genial squinch of his eyes.
    He wasn't so old he couldn't still work
    for the roofer down the road. Some said
    they could remember when he had a wife,
    but where was the woman who might have been
    the wife of a guy like that? A woman willing
    to be known to have kissed Ben Eiler's lips?
    He never seemed to lift his glass or look
    at the tv, indifferent as the bar's old cat
    to whatever went on in that square of brightness
    and constant commotion. The bar itself
    was a kind of ocean, with ebbs and flows
    and shifting lights from the traffic passing by,
    and Ben just sat there in that one spot
    like a post where you might moor a boat,
    and then one night he wasn't there.

    ==================

    Song

    Sweetheart Phyllis over here
    I've something I want you to see
    Phyllis listen it's me
    Look at this photograph
    Those are the kind of swimsuits
    We all used to wear
    And that's a lake someplace
    I can't say exactly and that's me
    With an old friend of mine
    When would that be
    Phyllis is there another blanket
    Phyllis please I'm in Ward D

    ==============

    A Thrush Remembered

    The birds' songs have the holiness
    gone from the bells.
    --Edward Thomas

    It is the birds much more than us
    I'll mourn when the biosphere
    has been scraped down to a sphere
    with no bio attached. While they persisted
    at their age-old tasks of song and flight
    and nest-feathering fuss, we were busy
    sawing off the limb on which we perched.
    We deserve what we get, but the poor birds,
    once the remaining few have gotten through
    their last winter, won't have anything
    to do but migrate to some new
    desolation and look for a non-existent
    mate with the appropriate markings.
    Poor things. For all they've got wings
    theirs is not a lot to envy.
    At the upper levels of abandoned cities
    there may still be unbroken windowpanes
    they can dash themselves against.
    Charlie worried that when he was dead
    I wouldn't look after the chickadees,
    and so it's been. I haven't seen
    a single chickadee for over a year
    nor heard a woodpecker.
    Les lauriers sont coupe, as they say,
    and je suis desolee, or I would be
    if I were French. I'm not. I am
    an American, it pains me to say,
    one of those wretches who helped
    destroy the world and all
    the little birds that lived here long ago.

    ======================

    Tears the Bullet Wept

    We know that bullets sing.
    Bret Harte transcribed their song.
    But give them this: they weep as well,
    And theirs are the most precious souvenirs
    That venders hawk on the streets of hell.

    What is so tragic as the lethal blast
    Of thunderbolt or .38
    That turns what had been present
    Into past? There he stood
    And here he lies at last.
    Will you not shed a single tear
    For any such? Is that too much to ask?

    Here is a tear. Weigh it,
    Please, Sir, on your scale--
    And I will tell you the whole tale.
    But only when your job is done.
    Kill all the rest first. I will wait.

    ====================

    Dusty Shelves

    When Time gets stuck and won't go by,
    There's nothing to be done but die.
    All music's stale and books a bore.
    You've spilled your life across the floor.
    Now you can only watch it dry.
    You've had your share. You'll get no more.

    ====================
     
    Last edited: 3 Mar 2009
  3. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    It is always sad when someone takes their life, and particularly so when he was such a gifted person. But sometimes it is pretty hard to save people from themselves. Suicide does not always come out of the blue; often it is the end result of a long history of self-destructive behaviour that loved ones around that person have found themselves desparingly unable to change. At the end, they just give up.

    Just saying: we don't know the whole story.

    As for his writing: is publicly declaring your feelings to the general public really the best way to go? When you're standing on the ledge, there will be as many people urging you on to jump as there will be those calling 911. Others may think it is attention seeking or performance art. Thom Disch was a writer doing what good writers do: write evocative prose and poetry that makes people think and feel. It is not meant to be a personal cry for help, so that is not how it will be seen. Like Bret Easton Ellis is not really expected to be a psychopath just because he wrote about one. Like I'm not expected to talk to people because it makes me feel better. If Thom felt that despairing, there were other, more obvious ways of getting the attention he needed.

    I deal with suicidal people professionally. I'm pleased to say that against the statistical trend I haven't lost anyone yet (although it has come very close more than once), but believe me when I say that there are no rescue fantasies involved.
     
  4. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    And that would be true of the truest borderline. But Thom wasn't Richard Corey; he wasn't the waving/drowning character in a Stevie Smith poem. Thom was a brilliant and lonely man whose accomplishments in life (three of the best science fiction books to appear in four decades) often met with an odd mix of accolades and indifference. Most people I know would consider their lives full if they'd gathered Thom's awards; had won the respect of the community for which they wrote; had excelled in nearly every genre. Man writes science fiction novel, wins awards; writes trilogy of horror novels, ditto; confects double-edged children's book, receives raves and sales until Disney makes a film out of it without ever jeopordizing said man's rep for writing Limericks of Innocence and Experience.

    Disch suffered from the plight of Orson Welles: precocity, success and attention were followed by chastisement and aversion. People who now claim he was a latter-day Thomas Beddoes -- a suicide waiting for the right excuse to abandon his precipice -- have no idea what had happened to him late in life: His partner, dead after a slow demise; his career, shipwrecked by illiteracy and the grotesque hijacking of the publishing industry by business school hacks who ignore all books but bland celebutante megaphones; his health, destroyed on two humiliating fronts; his house, flooded; and, finally, his apartment about to be seized, so that he was looking at homelessness, crippling illness and friendless solitude at 68 years old. That isn't the case of a man who'd have killed himself no matter what. Disch had been demoralized by a series of terrible events, which means his depression was conditional, which means he could have been spared.

    Even William Gibson, an extremely tolerant writer, once remarked in a letter that, when he met Disch, a pink neon triangle seemed to appear above the man's head flashing creepy ***. (To be fair, Gibson added he felt really guilty about that.) Harlan Ellison, a profoundly uninteresting writer compared to his 50s heroes, once challenged Disch to a fight merely for being insufficiently masculine. This was the homophobic geekboy climate in which Disch, one of the best in the field, achieved writer's-writer status.

    By writing a blog, Disch wasn't intending to obtrude on our notice his moral ulcers and scars. He began it because publishing books had become increasingly difficult -- especially the riffing sort. He kept a blog in order to have an outlet for his formidible output. That it became a site of symptoms was the side-effect of talent, not the other way around.

    My point is not that Disch's work would be seen as a mortal cry initially, but that anyone with a heart would have spotted it eventually. Disch himself would be quick to instill the idea that fictional voices, even apparently autobiographical ones, are complex; that art has its own concerns, its own trajectory, apart from the particulars and fate of the individual. I for one have always argued that there is more Shakespeare in Macbeth than the sonnets, and that James Ellroy, as good as he remains at conjuring voices, stopped writing believable fiction when he forged his own autobiography and became the Cosima Wagner of Alcoholics Anonymous.

    [Tangent omitted]

    The first thing any professional must do is abandon fantasies -- perhaps the very fantasies that once made a chosen profession attractive -- just as a professional fiction writer must focus on the compass of character and events. In the words of Lynn Tillman, "Once I write it, it's not mine." I know and agree for the most part. But this case is different.

    Here we have something unusual: A man who ordinarily wrote books and was paid to do so; who wasn't inclined to expose every uninteresting idea in his skull like a myspace diarist. We have a person who, under normal circumstances, would have had his most revealing poems published posthumously. But instead, they became part of a blog he was keeping anyway. They floated into public view but, like so much of the writing for which he was once celebrated, sank back into obscurity.

    It is not too much to ask that people pay attention to the tone of a writer. Long ago, when I was seventeen, my best friend called me long-distance in a state of mild alarm. He'd received a few letters from me that were peppered with morbid poems and self-loathing comments masquerading as witty modesty. Like Disch and Thomas Beddoes before him, I was writing from a place in which humor, fantasy, despair and self-destruction had become interchangeable.

    My friend saw this at once. He offered to pay for my ticket to visit him and his wife (also a friend). Above all, he urged me not to be seduced by black honey, not to become fascinated by the internal insects that often hive in old trauma.

    I've never forgotten his attempt to intervene because he was right. Everyone deserves to have friends like that. I do. Disch certainly did.
     
    Last edited: 3 Mar 2009
  5. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    He did, but unfortunately he did not have them. That a human being can end up in such destitution and isolation, despite --or perhaps even because-- being well-known through his work, is the real tragedy.

    It is important to feel some sense of outrage about that, but don't blame yourself, and don't blame anyone else who never knew the man but for his word in print.
     
    Last edited: 13 Feb 2009
  6. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    I've been too occupied with developments at work and home to give this thread the attention it deserves -- specifically, to edit my previous response to Nexxo. I need to omit the too-personal biography, meandering asides, undeserved blame and apparent self-justification. I'll try to attend to that later in the week, along with a delayed response to Nexxo's thoughtful response on my now-ancient thread about news and objectivity.

    What I meant to say here is this: The therapists in my family, too, would quibble with my emphasis on guilt. Quietly, I'd remind them that, just as despair is a stage of grieving, so regret can teach us ways to honor the departed. We vow to change -- to treat strangers as we ought to have treated our friends -- and that careful compassion becomes a way of paying our respects.

    Until said revision and response, I offer up a poem as famous as Shelley's elegy for Keats. It's a poem that most of you are likely to know already, but the sentimentalist in Thom would have been flattered to hear it quoted in his honor.

    "Dirge without Music,"
    by Edna Vincent Millay

    I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
    So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
    Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
    With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
    Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
    Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
    A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
    A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.
    The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
    They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
    Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
    More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
    Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,
    Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
    Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
    I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
     
    Last edited: 3 Mar 2009

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