The Word of God

Here we go again, Candour time. I've reviewed Thomas M. Disch before, and expect--Deo volente--to do so again. Just like last time, Disch's newest volume comes with a blurb from me. Because it was composed this time round without my having read the book--consistent with the sleight-of-hand metafictionality of The Word of God; Or, Holy Writ Rewritten as its author carefully explained it to me, in gleefully misleading detail--there is perhaps less one must be candid about this time. And I have already put it on record that I've known Disch for nearly half a century.

But there's another reason for mingling together a confession of personal knowledge and the short review to follow, where some attempt will be made--as is normal in the job of reviewing--to convey some sense of the readerly experience of encountering Disch's latest book; and it is this: 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.

The Word of God is matryoshka, but with no fixed relationship or repose obtaining between the innermost and the outermost doll: so it is more than simply matryoshka, it is as though the dolls were being shuffled like a deck of cards, with the outer doll governing the episteme until--presto chango--another doll eats it inside another doll eating the other doll. Central to all of this is a constant sleight-of-hand between real and not real, faster than the eye of reading. The book is a memoir and a novel at the same time; spoof and jeremiad; reportage and alternate-world fantasy; the confessional chrestomathy of a lonely man and the card sharpery of a devilish fine grinning God guy, all at the same time. It is a parable of the making of the work of art; it is the work of art. It is a closed fist and it is a naked open hand, which would shake yours: it says noli me tangere and it says touch me please. It is no one on this planet, it is Mr Disch. It is a beggar, it is Tom. All this.

It depends on who reads it.

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 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). These two versions of Disch are real enough, in a way: but both are rhetorical figures, presentations of self. But the reader who knows these versions of the man has at least these grounds to begin The Word of God with. The reader who does not know any Disch in the flesh has only the impurities of text to guide her. More intensely than almost any text I can think of, this means that readers in the personal know and ideal readers will be stepping into two different rivers, neither of which ever being the same river twice.

There is, all the same, all caveats understood, a thread of story to hold onto. We will not be able of course to access the whole of the dancing matryoshka hurricano within and without the text of The Word of God, but we can gain an occasional view of the storm, so let us go quickly.

On the wings of the divine

Tom Disch and/or Thomas M. Disch come to the understanding that he or they are divine. We will call them him. The slow but all-encompassing flash of awareness of godhood retrofits his entire life into a new story, whose details are precisely the same as those which have tagged the mortal writer, who is now nearing 65, in New York, with his dying partner, and a career that is not healthy.

We learn that much of Tom's previous work can now be understood as utterances to himself as god, and as utterances of the god. We are given examples--poems, aphorisms, stories. There is a beautiful poem called "The Moon on the Crest of the New-Fallen Snow," originally published in The Paris Review in 1995, and repeated here in full; the Moon itself, who is alive or not alive, speaks from its coign of vantage:

Pain

Has its place--and pity, too--but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.

We learn of Tom Disch himself, now that he is god (those who know the man may say he was always thus) that he now understands that "the kind of lustre I do cast at my best is like the moon's in [Clement] Moore's poem, a lustre of midday--even though in fact it's actually night." As a description of the cool unblinking gaze of the implied narrator of Thomas M. Disch's best books, from Camp Concentration (1968) and 334 (1972) through On Wings of Song (1979) on to The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994), this seems very nearly perfect. God, who is the artist who writes the books, knows exactly who that artist is. It is godly to know oneself. It is religion to pass it on.

But Tom is not much interested in creating a formal structure of reverence (though it would be good if his professional colleagues had a better understanding of the world he creates); he does, however, allow himself a moment or two of threatening hilarity:

No booze, no pot, no sex, no swine:
I have decreed them all taboo.
My words will be your only wine,
The thought of me your honeydew.
All other thoughts you will eschew.
You'll call yourself a Thomasite
And hymn my praise with loud yahoo.
A new religion starts tonight.

But it doesn't.

To hell and Minneapolis

After a short episode in which Jesus (one of Tom's Versions) goes down to earth to watch Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ, we segue back in time to Minneapolis in 1939, where a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be Thomas Mann in regal exile, decides he would like to sleep with a young woman who (as we learn) should be giving birth to Thomas M. Disch in about nine months. In hell, meanwhile, Philip K. Dick--whose belief that Thomas M. Disch was a Communist agent has been well documented, his 1974 letter to the FBI denouncing Tom now being a matter of public record--has been reverted into the body of a 12-year-old kid, and is given the task of manifesting himself on Earth and assassinating Mann before he can become Tom's father. Beyond stirring up the god-stakes, this event will cause FDR sufficient grief that he will miss beginning to win World War II for the good guys, and The Man in the High Castle (1962), which Dick is sufficiently demented to think describes a genuine Hitler Wins world, will come true.

Dick is thwarted by our god.

Meanwhile, Tom reprints the extremely moving "Ode on the Death of Philip K. Dick," which was first published in the Washington Post Book World in 1982. Meanwhile, Rebecca West lectures traitors on proper tactics in hell. Meanwhile, Joycelin Schrager (from several Thomas M. Disch published stories) has shacked up with the posthumous Philip K. Dick in the year 2000, from which coign they observe the hellish outcome of that year's presidential election. Meanwhile, Thoms M. Disch says (because he is in the position of god) insulting things about Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. He (who better) is violently rude about the hypocrisies of the faithful. He is scathing about creationism, anti-abortionists who kill people, Muslims looking for paradise as a reward for toppling great buildings and killing people. He is scathing about our mortal peril (he has a good perspective on that): "of course the snows will melt from Kilimanjaro, from the Alps and Andes and both the poles, and whales and penguins will become extinct, and so, in due course, will we."

But meanwhile. Meanwhile.

The stories and the poems and the diatribes and the jokes (some extremely funny) and the alternate-world fantasy in hell and Minneapolis continue to intertwine, weaving the book together and tearing it apart. The joining together is obvious, a wave of the god, a weaving of disparate anguishes and spoofs into one particoloured magic carpet, all threaded together by the Dick/Mann tale. The tearing apart is maybe less obvious, but perhaps inevitable: The Word of God is a jarring japery of incompossibles, a text which must be read so fast you don't fall through, caught in the eddies of all the gravities uttered here--so many kinds of material in one book, every bit of the book claim-jumping every other bit.

So when we reach the end of The Word of God we realize that the text only gains sufficient heft to exist precisely by dizzying us with speed, like some calliope on thin ice careening in the direction of the last word. The speedlines of this passage blur our eyes. It can only be a matter of time before we sink through the rotten ice into bad waters.

But hey (says god, or some writer at the end of his tether and ours), we know all that. We did not write our Book to say goodbye, or not quite. So--

if there is no immediate necessity ... if there are still groceries in the stores and fuel in the tank, if there are great old movies on DVD that one hasn't seen or has only a gossamer memory of, why then, why worry, what's the hurry, have another drink before you go.