Thomas Disch
A fieldworker reflects:
It was the times in between that were so weirdly wonderful, times of an idleness as plain and pure as the shaking of leaves in a tree. Times between reveille and being hustled into the trucks, or times you waited for a truck to come and take you back. Times that a sudden storm would cancel out the day’s appointed baling and you could wait among the silences of the ceasing rain, in the glow of the late, returning light.
At such times consciousness became something more than just a haphazard string of thoughts about this, that, and the other. You knew yourself to be alive with a vividness so real and personal it was like God’s gloved hand wrapping itself around your spine and squeezing.
The passage is by the great and subversive science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch, and Open Letters mourns his death this week at the age of 68. Over the course of a life that began in Iowa in 1940 and a career that began in freelancing in 1964, Disch provided exactly that spine-squeezing sensation to legions of readers and a small, select coterie of friends – including some of the greatest names in 20th century science fiction, who routinely praised Disch as one of the best of their ranks.
Disch’s productivity was both protean (he took great glee in writing under pseudonyms, only some of which are ever likely to come to light) and prodigious (not infrequently, friends received original, typed short stories as birthday presents, with themselves as characters in not always flattering predicaments), and with practice he gained a mastery of many forms – short stories, novels, plays, poetry, and even one successful childrens book, The Brave Little Toaster (the ironic subtext of which is not exactly hiding under a bushel).
At one point in On Wings of Song, a character who’s experienced the plot’s central state of bliss describes its limitations:
It seems, at the time, the only reality. But there’s something beyond even that. What I describe is the view from the threshold, as it were. I knew that, but I didn’t take the next step. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned. That’s quite certain. Something always held me back. The present delight. But not just that. That other gravity: of the earth and its fields, of my body. This body.
Now that he’s crossed the threshold, it’s too late to thank him to his face, but nevertheless: Disch, you added greatly to our present delight, and you’ll be remembered for it, and for all your great works. Science fiction is lessened, now that you’re away.
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