I've been writing this in my head for several days now and you're just coming in at the end of the conversation so I don't expect you to understand much or any of what I'm saying and to tell you the truth it really doesn't matter to me whether you do or not. Who reads the shit people write online anyway? They look at the pictures. In the picture above, that's my teacup on the table, the lower right side of my computer, and, in the background, my husband's calf as he sits in front of his own computer. I'm sitting at the kitchen table, after breakfast, writing this.
I'd been reading Oblomov, closing in on the end of it, when I came upon Jesus' Son in the library—in the Midwood Branch, to be exact—and it was just such a cute little size, about as big as a postcard. I'd heard of Denis Johnson, of course, but had never read him. By reputation he writes books about down-and-out people, violent people, drug addicts, alcoholics and other varieties of deadbeat and riffraff and while I've never been any of these kind of people I've read enough books about them that I feel I could write my own fairly credible account of being a whore or a drug addict or an alcoholic or a thief. Jesus's Son is an early collection of Johnson's short stories and it's supposedly now a modern classic of its type and since this edition is so small and cute that I could fit it in my pocketbook and carry it around with me everywhere I decided why not, let's put the last 100 pages of Oblomov on hold and give Denis Johnson his day in court.
In the last paragraph of the last story in "Jesus' Son," a story called "Beverly Home," which is set mainly in a care facility for the severely handicapped where the narrator, a recovering addict, works, Johnson writes, "All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."
That's the uptick of hope, such as hope is for Johnson, a tiny little splinter of light in the obsidian wall of impenetrable eternal darkness towards which we're all speeding at the speed, ironically, of light. That there is a place, maybe no larger than a closet or a trunk, a bed or a bus seat where we can feel safe, where we can belong, at least temporarily, that's what Johnson offers by way of consolation. Otherwise there isn't much hope at all in Johnson's universe, no eternal salvation, no resurrection, hardly even any love. There's just occasional shelter from the storm.
What saves Johnson's stories from being just another chronicle in the now familiar genre of the drug-addled, the booze-demented, the violence-prone, the sex-obsessed is the terse poetic beauty of his prose. Somewhere I read that he studied with Raymond Carver and you can see some traces of that tutelage, but whereas Carver's prose seems exhausted, the speech of a man writing telegraph dispatches from the scaffold, Johnson still has some fire left in him. He may be down for the count, but he's still cracking quips from the canvas. He hasn't lost his sense of irony, the solipsistic comfort of black humor as he lies bleeding in the gutter.
Most of these stories start off somewhere, go somewhere else, and end up no place at all. If this sounds nihilistic, it is. But it's also rigorous, uncompromising honesty. Because that's essentially what nihilism is: Life without the illusions that life has a meaning. I can understand why people believe so fervently in religion: it gives them some sense of continuity beyond this life, some justification for the suffering, for the fact that the monster gets us all at the end of the movie. Without this justification, what point is there for bringing more children into the world? What—we have more children to ensure our continuity? What kind of selfish lunacy is that? Are we really just vehicles for perpetuating our DNA, for making more beings to make more beings, all of whom die, until the earth crashes into the sun, each generation produced in order to bury the previous? I can see how that kind of vision of life is enough to drive anyone to religious fundamentalism; by comparison, believing in God and heaven almost makes sense, if only as a prophylactic against insanity!
There is no Jesus's Son in Jesus' Son, by the way. There isn't even a story called "Jesus' Son."
Much earlier in Jesus' Son, towards the end of the very first story, in fact, staring down at the dying victim of a car crash he narrowly survived, the narrator says, "I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real." It's as if we each live in a parallel universe. We can see those living in the worlds beside us. We can call over. We can hear and make ourselves heard. But we cannot make ourselves understood. We can not understand.
Listen, there's nothing you can do with you life that's really worthwhile, except maybe help others suffer a little else. It all ends in a beetle-infested box of bones and dust no matter what you do or don't do. The upside is that by the same token there isn't anything you can do with your life that isn't worthwhile either, except maybe make others suffer a little more.
If life really is a "gift," as the pollyannas are fond of saying, then it's freely given to us to do whatever we want with it, even waste it. Especially waste it. In fact, wasting life may be the best use you can put to life. Because a gift, by its nature, cannot be wasted. It's something extra, frivolous, unnecessary. It's not placed under the sign of necessity. It isn't meant to be put to good use. It's not meant to be put to "use" at all. You might say that life is given us as a gift specifically to waste.
The first big mistake is taking life too seriously; the second is behaving as if it's going to last forever, that it's something we can preserve or hold onto, that it's something that belongs to us, that it's something we can save. To be honest, I wish my mother had smothered me with a pillow in the crib. But that's water under the bridge. Nowadays, if my husband were to come up behind me with a handgun and shoot me in the back of the left ear I'd be ambivalent at worse, and, on the whole, grateful. When he tells me he's made provisions for me in case something happens to him, I tell him the best thing he could do for me is to procure me a cyanide capsule in the event he should die. That would be the greatest gift of all, and I mean it, inasmuch as the human body hasn't been engineered with a built-in "kill-switch," a terrible design flaw as I see it, whether we were created by God or not. I've often had the fantasy that we could each employ a personal assassin, a kind of dark guardian angel who would watch over us and who we would entrust, by prior agreement, the task of taking us out swiftly and painlessly the moment when our lives begin their rapid and irrevocable final decline. Nothing is more depressing than watching old people drained of all energy and enthusiasm for life who've lived on decades beyond their prime, left with nothing but sadness and regret, who've lived long enough to see the pointless end of everything. I would like my dead body to be used by a necrophiliac, then consumed by someone with a fetish for devouring human flesh—that would give death a germ of acceptability, even meaning, in my view. When I tell people this they think I'm kidding or trying to be shocking, but I'm not. It seldom comes up in conversation, though.
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| Underground parking garage |
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