Hypatia and the Burning Library (pt. ii)

(I’m breaking this in two, and then we’re done. Part i was back there. )

Buy it here

NPR has an 8 minute piece called “Remembering Science Fiction Writer Thomas Disch” –  a 1988 interview, rebroadcast yesterday on Fresh Air.

Thomas Disch was “writing again.” He had three books coming out, and he was doing radio and podcast interviews to promote the Tachyon Press book The Word of God. But I have not seen anyone note something that I’ve personally lived through after four books, and through some longer form screenplays. I’ve talked to other writers about it, and there’s no doubt that it’s real:

When you finish a book, there is a powerful let-down. A ‘depression’ that is organically akin to post-partum depression in new mothers. (A phenomenon I’ve personally witnessed more than a few times). The act of creation leaves you drained. Exhausted. You have been spending your waking days “dreaming” the extraordinarily complex process of creating a novel, or other long-form piece, and when you are done, there is nothing.

Literally, nothing. The publisher (if you’re sending if off) won’t get around to reading it for awhile. And it won’t be published (usually) for about nine months. And you have to let go of the dream (the book is ended) and try to return to “reality” with nothing to show for your long inner odyssey.

Someone once said that writing is the most accessible of the plastic arts. No one would take one piano lesson and attempt to book Carnagie Hall. No one would buy a paint by numbers kit and try to get it hung in the Guggenheim, but ANYONE who pecks on a typewriter will think that they can write The Great American Novel.

Because we are so inured and immersed in language, we do not appreciate the difficulty and skill of the writer’s art, because we all use words too. And, in that classic bit of Republican-think that equates fraternity hazing with blatant torture, we all fall prey to the false equivalence of writing words on paper and an author writing words on paper.

Trust me, it’s the difference between painting your room and painting the Sistine Chapel.

It’s the difference between lightning and lightning bug.

And the writer’s “equipment” is not an easel and canvas, nor is it string and horn. It is his emotional body, and torpedoes to THAT equipment ofttimes render a writer just as useless as torpedoes to a freighter render the ship useless.

Tom Disch had been living in a life raft at least since 2004 when his long-term partner died and the torpedoes started coming fast and furious. Do you know what an act of courage it took him to damn those torpedoes and ramrod full speed ahead ANYWAY?

And Tom Disch had just finished THREE books, in a final manic burst of his talent.

The desolate emptiness of THAT post-partum depression — added to everything else — must have been one juggernaut of a bitch. And yet, Disch wrote prolifically and brilliantly at the end.

Perhaps his gallows-humor jape in The Word of God was too difficult for mere radio hosts — and seemingly, the “humor” element was too easily scared away — but there is no excuse for what follows. I present it, not to bash The Radio Happy Hour specifically, but as emblematic of a horrible symptom of The Zeitgeist That Killed Tom Disch.

And I present it because, having no one else to blame, reaming these clots seems a fitting way of firing back at That What Done Did Him In.

And Now, Dr. Blogstein and that Radio Interview.

The problem with the zeitgeist is that not only has the subphylum of morons been expanded far beyond its natural forage, but it’s that the imbeciles are so damned PROUD of it. I don’t mind The Radio Happy Hour being do damnedably stupid. What I do mind is how PROUD they are of it.

OK: we know who Tom Disch was. We know his circumstances. We know of his extreme depression and his futile efforts to keep his head above water amidst a cascading clusterfuck of horrors and indignities heaped upon him. And, finally, we understand why he took his life. Let’s look at what was happening 48 hours prior to his demise.

Let’s walk through that interview:

The salient interchange that you should hear first comes at 16:37

DR. BLOGSTEIN: You assume that he is normal, he is obviously not (crosstalk) although I’m kind of  intrigued to hear what a raving lunatic would write in a book. I may get it just for that.

WOMAN (’DANGEROUS’): You didn’t get a free copy?

VINNIE: You BOOKED him and you didn’t have him send you a copy?

DR. BLOGSTEIN: No. Please I’m gonna ask God for a copy of a book?

DANGEROUS: Why not? shit.

DR. BLOGSTEIN: Ah. Whatever. All right …

VINNIE: (INAUDIBLE) wants to know where the Scientolgists are when you need them. (CACKLES)

DR. BLOGSTEIN: Uh right. Vinnie is getting some good stuff from the chat room today. Thank you. All right we have Talia .. uh .. uh Coles coming up. I am sorry everybody to put you through that.

And, of course, you can judge a book by its title right? Here’s a review from John Clute (And there is a good ‘final’ interview transcript by Fàbio Fernandes at Post-Weird Thoughts) at Sci Fi Weekly, that might have helped this disaster called The Radio Happy Hour:

… in its 175 pages The Word of God constructs a more complex relationship between the reader and what is read, between the implied author and the real author and the implied reader and the real person with tired eyes staying awake and laughing hard, between reportage and fictionality, between text and pretext, than any book I can remember encountering.

and then this:

The reader who knows the man almost certainly knows two men at least: Thomas M. Disch (an embittered SF writer of great gifts and energy who is hardly published in 2008 ) and Tom Disch (a highly respected poet who who (sic) has been climaxing his long career with a vast surge of work—hundreds of poems to date—conceived since the death of his partner, Charles Naylor, in September 2005, a death prefigured in passages of The Word of God, which is set—those parts of the book which can be described as being “set”—over the preceding months).

But the slagfest wasn’t wired for something that tough. Nothing more complex than you’d find in a Bazooka Bubble Gum cartoon. Nothin’ intelleck’chool. Nope. Just make fun of the title.

The Radio Happy Hour interview begins with a juvenile, kind of snarky “Oooh, we’re gonna talk to GOD!” etcetera. It’s riffing on the part of a clueless host, sure that Disch wants to come on to push some lunatic freak-show, and it gets worse from there. Knowing who Disch is, we note that Blogstein seems to think he’s interviewing Wild Man Fischer (who was, sadly, institutionalized). But at 12:38, Blogstein goes completely off the rails, and beyond any bounds of civility, no matter WHO his subject might have been:

DR. BLOGSTEIN: Well God, God, I gotta say. You know an, an everyone in the audience and Vinnie and Dangerous may think I’m nuts by this, but I have the feeling that I know what you just said and the story you just told, uh uh, rolled  over people’s heads and made them glaze over a little bit, but I guarantee — and I do have this feeling that if when you listen to this story a second time, you’re going to get a message … because I truly believe that …

VINNIE: (Guffawing) I know what message I’m gonna get …

DR. BLOGSTEIN: No! …

VINNIE: Why’d I play it a second time. (Chortles)

DR. BLOGSTEIN: No, (LAUGHTER)  because I really think that there was a gonna be a nugget in there that that was that is gonna be helpful to all of us.  I just know that I didn’t get the nugget the first time around. Right God?

DISCH: (Long pause) Well …

DR. BLOGSTEIN: I was, I was throwin’ you a BONE, my man.

DISCH: Yes, yes (cross chortling by Dangerous and Vinnie) I know. I was just back in St. Paul’s cathedral, thinking about that poor asshole.

VARIOUS: NOW, NOW! God! (Exhalations of disapproval. Evidently it’s OK for THEM to act like assholes, but it isn’t OK for Disch to say “asshole.” Urgh.)

VINNIE: Is that any way to talk about one of your children? (etc.)

(Pearls having been cast before swine, the listener will undoubtedly understand the story that Disch was trying to tell.)

DISCH: I don’t think that’s disrespectful, I think it’s part of ordinary human humility … uh

VINNIE: But … but you’re not God.

DISCH: We’re all assholes.

DR. BLOGSTEIN: Yes. Yes, we are. Vinnie! Vinnie! Stop arguing with God. Uh, God, thank you for joining us. Word of God

DISCH: (Is that all there is? Crosstalk) What?

DR. BLOGSTEIN: and God aka Thomas M. Disch. DEESH? How do we say your human name?

DISCH: (Astonished) Is that all there is? We’re over?

DR. BLOGSTEIN: That’s all there is. That’s it. That’s it. It’s all we got, my man!

DISCH: Well, piss on your shoes.

(EXEUNT DISCH. GENERAL ASSHOLISH CROSS-TALK, etc. follow). Then, the revelation that Dr. Blogstein had no idea who Disch was, or what he had written. It must be heard to be believed.

It would be fitting here to reprint Ed Champion’s luminously articulate comment, rebutting Dr. Blogstein’s snarks at the beginning (and continuing Dr. B’s snarky “defense” from here):

ed
9 July 2008 at 7:44 am

I don’t believe that Hart was attempting any specific correlation between the moronic interview at Dr. Blogstein and Disch’s suicide. But certainly Dr. Blogstein’s disgraceful interview reveals much about the predicament that he is writing about. It should be self-evident to any remotely intelligent reader that he is condemning the media atmosphere that writers, as a whole, must endure: smug journalists who haven’t read the book, who ask the same five questions, and treat the author without so much as a scintilla of respect. The only thing more ignoble than this regularity, which authors on the whole tolerate, are those abject promoters content to trivialize a great author’s death by leaving the flippant remark, “Was it something we said?” and then have the effrontery to get an “expert” attempting to probe into a ten-minute recording. Never mind that anyone with a remote understanding of psychotherapy knows that it is impossible to draw a conclusion about a person from a ten-minute conversation (over the phone, no less) and that psychotherapy, as a whole, takes hours upon hours. I would not be surprised in the slightest if “KB” was David Brown (aka Dr. Blogstein) himself or one of his cronies. For the above comment registers the same lack of reading comprehension apparent throughout his comment oeuvre.

‘Nuff said. (And thanks to Ed for that.)

But Thomas M. Disch’s most trenchant and incisive comment remains: “Piss on your shoes.”

Amen.

The Burning of the Librarian of Alexandria

And listening to that horrific interview, I could only recall another time when stupidity was actively encouraged as a tool of command and  control. And of the Librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria, who was killed even as the Library was soon burned, ending Hellenism in the Roman Empire.

Hypatia as painted by Raphael

I am, finally reminded of Hypatia of Alexandria, the last Pagan in an increasingly “Christian” Alexandria.

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.

– Christian historiographer Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, c. 439 AD

I had stumbled across the new/old Cosmos reruns they’re reanimating, and Carl Sagan told (again) the story of Hypatia’s martyrdom, a story that civilized men in all ages have remembered — as one of the most perfect exponents of reason, learning and science was dragged from her chariot by a mob of “Christians” (at the behest of her arch-enemy the Archbishop of Alexandria) and was FLAYED ALIVE. That means that her skin was cut from her living body using sharpened oyster shells (an ancient method of skinning) before they set the still-living Hypatia afire.

As a thousand years of darkness fell over Europe.

We stand again on the brink of such an age. The “creationism” versus “Darwin” argument is far more profound than merely arguing some theoretical point. As Tom Disch understood:

Monday, April 9th, 2007
4:49 pm
Apologia pro vita sua
Okay, Einstein, let me explain,
before I finish the job with my fists.
You say Evolution’s the way it all works.
It’s not like the concept is beyond me:
We’re all just miniature versions
of King Kong, swinging from the trees,
and God’s some kind of cosmic sneeze
from a billion trillion years ago.
So? Where’s that leave me?
In a shitty job with an albatross wife
and a make-believe heaven at the end of my life.
Exactly nowhere. You’ve got the money,
the mortgage, the prime ribs, the perks.
Your name’s on tv for something cooler
than a charge of rape. We are the apes,
and all that we ask is one day a week
when you kiss our ass and bow to our god
and deny Evolution and say it out loud.

2:50 pm
This Apocalypse (or What Global Warming?)
It seems to have been called down
on us just for the instruction
(and destruction) of those fundamentalists
who tried so hard to keep Evolution
out of the textbooks, who denied
the evidence of fossil seashells
on mountaintops and wanted to explain away
the antiquity of the Grand Canyon.
Now let them explain away this–
the withering of Kansas under the sun’s
merciless assault, the waterless arroyos
of what had been Wyoming ranchlands,
the Western hillsides made emblematic by fires
no rain would extinguish, each charred
heaven-pointing stump a rune
to be interpreted by one last generation
of unlettered fools whose priests cracked
open the skulls of the unborn,
searching for portents and, finding none,
ate their shriveled brains for snacks.

Listening to these boors, these yahoos, I was instantly reminded of Hypatia’s murderers, who, I am certain, were equally PROUD of their part in this horror movie of an execution, defending their faith.

Once again, unreason overwhelms learning, overwhelms scholarship, overwhelms science.

Dumbass über alles: The Geit of our Zeist.

And that is the zeitgeist that killed Tom Disch. Not some twerps who thought that they, in their quest to “be somebody” could act cute and stoopid, because celebrity is the coin of the realm in a moiety of idiots. But, rather, the sacred reverence that “celebrity” is held in, and the awe accorded it as a worthy goal of a civilization in flames. Disch tried to be literate and tell an intelligent story and was savaged and mocked for so doing.

Isn’t that an apt metaphor for what happened to his career and to the careers of many, many writers less talented, but no less in his shoes?

This was the darkness that Hunter S. Thompson looked into and decided to follow the tunnel of the gun barrel out of. And that Tom Disch faced, making the same choice.

As a profession denied credit cards and health insurance, respect and a living wage, too old to learn a new profession and too desperate to afford next month’s rent, I predict that this means of exit may be much more of a trend than we think.

No man is an island, true. But each man dies alone.

And yet, I must scream what I ended my first novel (Christina’s Hideaway, Ace/Charter, ISBN-13: 978-0441105113 — you can purchase it for $240 here) with in 1983:

186 BLAKELY ST. JAMES

She had been driven, and her personal life all but disappeared for many years. She was synthesizing something, something that would in one fell stroke vindicate her father’s memory, make amends for the years she felt she had wasted in hatred, and heal broken lives.

She had been taken with the self-destructiveness of the creative person. Why were they invariably stalking the thin edge between madness and genius? Why did creativity suddenly dry up? Why were the best and brightest so often destroyed by the very things which had led to their ascendance in the first place? She had decided that her radical orator friend of so long ago had been wrong. If there was a hope for the world, it lay with the artists, the creators, the shamans. Where would the world be without its da Vincis, its Beethovens, its Lockes and Humes and Kants? Where would the race be without the seers and visionaries? She realized, too, that her unusual therapies and theories could not in themselves spark creativity. The essence of being a genius remained as elusive as it had been when she had begun her researches.

But she realized another thing, too. While she could not stimulate creativity in individuals, she could remove barriers to creativity in individuals in whom it had, for one reason or another, been stifled or cut off. She began by quietly helping a friend, an artist. Almost by accident, he had appeared at her door one night, fatally overdosed on pills unless she did something. She had taken him in and nursed him to physical health. But then she had gone farther and nursed him to health mentally. And in the process, she had found her vocation….

WHY have we no societal resources to devote to our best and brightest?

It has been established time and time again that both ends of the Bell Curve suffer from the same socialization problems: cut off from the Great Middle of the Bell. And yet, while we are happy to invest in programs, homes, special bathrooms, ramps, and the rest for our disabled and, yes, retarded, NO ONE has a moment to spare for the brilliant.

(We will throw truckloads of self-congratulatory charity at the disabled, but we will not invest in our equally ostracized brilliant? What the hell is wrong with us?)

If there were any investment that a society could make, it would be to simply wring a few more years of production out of our Tom Dischs, our Philip K. Dicks, our authors and our artists and our musicians, who NOW LIVE in a society that has turned them into Financial Untouchables, and, as with Tom Disch, lovers without survivorship benefits, to be evicted in old age from their homes because their dead partner, and not they themselves, had signed the lease.

Compared to the expense of one day’s misbegotten war in the Middle East, it would be such a cheap investment, and yet, churls like the New York Magazine commenter will always value the theoretical expense to their abstract wallet (rent control, therefore no compassion for him!) over the real suffering of real genius.

Our failure of decency is a fundamental betrayal of our very civilization. If it were just us that paid the price for that blindness, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, but it is, in fact, our children and our children’s children who will pay the price. Is there such a thing as generational Child Abuse? Hopefully not, because we would be adjudged guilty for stealing their culture, their resources, their health and saddling them with our debts.

Is it too much to ask that the publisher stop by occasionally and bring Chinese take-out? If that were the difference between a few more years and the Hemingway/Thompson/Disch exit strategy, is it really so much?

Requiescat in pace, Thomas M. Disch. The horror you escaped is the horror that we are left to live: the horror of Hypatia’s world, it seems, increasingly.

And “Piss on your shoes” seems the only fitting and proper response, at the end.

An epitaph, perhaps fitting, perhaps not by the poet Tom Disch:

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
12:59 am
Immortality
[Note: I think I'd like each line centered for this one, but don't know how to tell the computer here to do that. I will try my own indents.]

Prisoners live in a space more confined
Than these two rooms, in a pit designed
To destroy the mind
And, by slow degrees,
To diminish the body’s strength
Until at length
What’s left is the husk of a man–
Like the tusk of a mastadon
That by some freak of fate survives
Intact when other tusks crumble
Into the merest chicken bones.

So may I myself survive
In some ever-diminishing way
The loss of spouse, of space, career,
The witherings and warpings
Of Procrustean time
Until I have been whittled down
To one big crescent mass
Of ivory.

Amen.

Courage.

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