Feeling inspired by a recent great blog post by The Domesticated Bohemian I've spent the last day or so trawling through my own memories of the profound significance that books have had on my own life.
Certain conjunctions or synchronicity's between a particular book I was reading at the time and a real world event most immediately spring to mind.
For example,I recall riding in a car with my sister and brother-in-law to visit my (almost 90 year-old) gran who was in hospital with pneumonia about ten years ago.
There was a feeling in the air, even though nothing was said, that this could be the last time we see her. I was reading Dostoevsky's 'House of the dead' at the time - I know, something of a portent! When we finally stepped blinking into the brightly lit hospital ward after the long dark car journey, my uncle greeted us with tears in his eyes: she had just died about twenty minutes before.
The impact that Dostoevsky's tale of the gulag was impressing on me at that time, coupled with the experience of my Gran's death have been inextricably entwined over the years, so that now, whenever I recall that specific bereavement or hear or read something or other about Dostoevsky, I find that I'm caught by an auto-cascade of imagination and memory - the nocturnal car journey to the hospital, my Gran's serene face in death, and the bleak 'prison diary' of the old Russian writer, and last but not least - the olive green cover with an old oil painting reproduction of some Dickensian looking characters lost in their existential trauma.
Another extreme association between a book and one of the more darker moments of my life occurred when my mum was first diagnosed with cancer around six years ago (apologies for the bleakness - but it does get a bit lighter in a minute honest- well sort of.)
I remember going to the hospital with her for the results of a biopsy; it was freezing cold day and we'd been told that, yes there was a malignant tumour in her bowel, but with treatment (chemotherapy and a colostomy that could be reversed after 6 months or so), her prospects for full remission were reasonably good. We had a pot of tea and a cigarette together in a little cafe in town later.
Our too fast, nervous, freakishly optimistic conversation hid the sizzling hysteria that lay just below the surface - and we both knew it of course.
"At least they caught it early"
"Yeah that's the important thing, so lucky really"
"Yeah, thank god eh, doesn't bear thinking about"
"Its all positive when you think about it"
"Yeah, quick op and finished, over and done with"
We could both see the fear and sadness in each others eyes, but were ferociously determined to remain upbeat. It was that or go insane.
A couple of days before, I'd started reading Niall Griffiths' Novel 'Grits'. Set in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth; it is a dark, many-voiced tale of outsiders, junkies, the alienated, the lonely and the lost. Through the technique of using multiple first-person narratives, Griffiths exposes the secret fears, guilt, neuroses and often bizarre and contradictory hopes and dreams that saturate the psyches of those many would call the 'underclass' (I loathe that word.)
Also, the book had a further resonance for me: that coastline was the site of many family caravan holidays in my youth.
In our society, being diagnosed with the big 'C' is about being de-classed, de-skilled, pushed to the side, hushed up, labelled as 'unclean', stained, a burden - all those unspoken, but inherent implications that cloud the air of the ill person like a malignant white noise.
You become a Chemo-junky, A 'user', your hair falls out, you lose weight, you can't hold down a job, you need people to care for you, you become incontinent and mentally 'disturbed'.
Griffiths' characters consoled me at that point in my life (as his characters continue to do in all his books.)
Their sense of anger, day-to-day isolation and de-realisation from the mainstream of what passes for 'normal' life, helped me to understand and appreciate how my mother must have felt in the cold, dark outer-space that her diagnosis had ejected her into.
My mum had her operation and the chemo, but they never managed to totally kill the cancer, and it inevitably spread and killed her a couple of years later.
Literature did its bit though, once again, to keep me sane and enable me to help her as best I could - by being strong and sensitive at the same time.
Unsurprisingly I suppose, I cannot remember what I was reading during the last horrible months of her life, or what I was reading when she died - and I WAS reading something, I need it like oxygen - but I guess that the physical and mental fatigue had by then washed away my imaginative capabilities for a while.
Another really powerful conjunction of literature and life for me was being literally half-way through Don Delillo's ‘Mao II’ when a a couple of planes flew into the World Trade Center in September 2001.
Like most people on the planet at that time, I was transfixed by the unfolding of events of that day: the constantly recycled video of each plane hitting its tower, the ball of orange flame and black smoke, the terrified, running dust-coated figures, the jumpers spiralling out of the blue like discarded bus tickets.
Delillo's Mao II is a novel about the loss of individuality to mass events, the symbiotic power of the media and the crowd to spawn a third space; a space where the self ceases to exist and only the spectacle of the many has any emotional impact. Be it Diana's funeral, The Gulf War, Moonie Weddings, earthquakes and tsunami's, 'Live' Charity rock concerts, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the latest terrorist 'outrage'; - rolling TV news and the Web have desensitized us to such a degree, that our myth's are no longer generated via the artist, the poet or (especially) the novelist - the individual voice of the shamen has been lost to the High definition immediacy of the media channelled EVENT.
As Delilllo writes in the book, "The future belongs to the crowd".
The irony for me, is that the mass public event to top all mass public events, 911, was virtually predicted almost ten years earlier in 1991 by one individual tapping away on his word processor. The book is spooky in its similarities to the events surrounding 911, and the way that day was, and still is, mythologized via the media circus that was impossible to escape.
The twin towers appear very early on in the book, as the two main characters – a famous but elusive J.D. Salinger style novelist and a photographer – gaze out over their coffees at the New York skyline.
The photographer wants to complete a series of author pictures in an attempt to capture the ‘essence of the writer’ – that supposedly powerful single voice that is able to speak for a generation and change the world in the process. The author is cynical though, and believes that it is the terrorist who has now usurped the role and myth making power of the lonely, scribbling genius.
‘The Terrorist’, who always had an affinity with ‘The Writer’, can change the consciousness of a society in a much more dramatic and immediate way - with the help of the global media – by creating an iconic, real-time ‘spectacle’ that far surpasses the clunky, time intensive and very private narrative device of the author.
There’s a section in Mao II where the author is sitting in his London hotel room after flying in from the States, and remarks to himself how lax British customs are as he scrutinizes a little hunting knife (a sentimental keepsake) that he unwittingly brought over with him, and remained undetected by airport security. Very sobering stuff to read at that time as it became apparent as to how the 911 ‘bombers’ had used ‘craft knives’ to rest control of the planes from pilots and passengers.
As Delillo foretold, a decade before the event, the terrorist became the new mythmaker on that day in September. To watch the event at home on the TV, or wherever was to forget the ego-centred self for a while and dissolve into a pure horrified spectator, a member of the crowd, both in New York and around the world.
Try reading Delillo's 'White Noise' too, another great novel.
The profound synchronicity of witnessing 911 as it happened via the TV coverage along with millions of others, and reading Delillo’s brilliant thesis, convinced me once and for all, how we must really listen and re-read our greatest authors, our Shamen, because those loners locked away with their typewriters and word processors channel the future for us as well as the past.
The novelist is still as important today as ever. Even if they cannot offer us inspiration they will always provide consolation.
When I’m skint, lonely and feeling angry at the world, I’ll dip into Bukowski’s ‘Last Night of the Earth’ poems or ‘Ham on Rye’; Beckett’s ‘The Malloy Trilogy’, Henry Miller and Orwell, Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, Raoul Vainegem and Penny Rimbaud.
When I want to look at my everyday world more objectively, like an anthropologist witnessing the oddness of an alien culture, I’ll read Iain Sinclair’s Psychogeographical journeys through the urban jungle; learning from him how to read the graffiti on the bus shelter walls, the unique history, architecture and custom’s pertaining to place, the invisible ley-lines of energy that constitute meaning and significance to a locale…and my locale too if I care to look a little deeper.
When I require a little ‘heads up’ at the profound strangeness and wonderful weirdness of being conscious at all in this vast cosmos of the mind blowingly large and unfathomably small ; of matter as energy, Black Holes, time-warps and parallel universes - I read Paul Davies, Kip Thorne, David Deutsche, Danah Zohar and David Bohm.
When my soul starts to cry out for the great myths that structure our psyches, I grab for Patrick Harpur, Carl Jung, James Hillman – and even a bit of Colin Wilson can educate and illuminate at these times.
Three books that I will never sell and have always stayed close to my heart are: ‘The William Burroughs Reader’ Edited by James Grauerholz; Roland Barthes’ little book of essays on the semiotic myths that underlie popular culture called ‘Mythologies’, and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ – a brilliantly dark and personal interpretation of one man’s coming to terms with the horror of war…god bless Kilgore Trout.
Of all the literary shamen, I think Burroughs is the Great Magus and truth teller of our times. He should be read and re-read by every one.
Maybe one day, his beautifully rich musings on the ‘societies of control’, escaping the ‘Reality Studio’, intentional ‘Pirate communities’ and the ‘animistic universe’ will be on every school syllabus.
Remember: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”.
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