'Number Them All and Remember Them'

Tom Disch writes in the only novel marketed as science fiction I have ever found readable (that is, rereadable), Camp Concentration (1968): 

“The Muse descends—characteristically assuming the mortal guise of an attack of diarrhea, abetted by headache. Auden observes somewhere (in the ‘Letter to Lord Byron’?) how often a poet’s finer flights are due/rumpty-tumpty-tumpty to the flu.”

 

The writer of this journal entry is Louis Sacchetti, a poet and conscientious objector. He is held in a military prison and being injected with a form of syphilis meant to accelerate the intelligence of prisoners. The goal is to use the disease-boosted geniuses as weapons while slowly killing them. True to 1968, the president of the United States is Robert McNamara. Most of this information is delivered obliquely, sometimes unintentionally, by way of Sacchetti’s journal. Despite the unlikely premise, Disch writes with a minimum of melodrama. His prose is witty, precise and allusive. The reference to Auden’s poem is correct. In the ninth stanza of “Letter to Lord Byron,” he writes:

 

“Professor Housman was I think the first

    To say in print how very stimulating

The little ills by which mankind is cursed,

    The colds, the aches, the pains are to creating;

    Indeed one hardly goes too far in stating

That many a flawless lyric may be due

Not to a lover’s broken heart, but ’flu.”

 

He even makes fun of Auden’s concluding rhyme. There’s a subtle linkage buried here: Disch, like Auden and Housman, was gay. I missed that when I first read the novel more than half a century ago. Today, Disch – born February 2, 1940 -- would have been eighty-two years old. The loss is ours. He would have made a grand old man – irascible, enormously funny, a dedicated enemy of cant. He took no sides in politics, never played favorites. A death-obsessed poet, Disch took his own life on July 4, 2008. That fact still stuns me, just as his vehement anti-religion stance still bores and offends me. Among poets, his closest kin is probably Turner Cassity, who was also erudite, non-confessional, formally gifted, very funny and gay. For sad amusement, read Disch’s website, Endzone, with a final entry made two days before his death. See the prose entry for April 22, 2008, for a taste of Dischian whimsy shaded with melancholy. He titles it “Leaves of Our Time”:

 

“Leaves blown across the lawns of foreclosed homes; leaves on forest floors, moldering delectably; leaves pressed between the pages of a book, which so have learned, a little, to think; leaves still shocked by the summer’s departure, still clinging to their high aeries and in denial; leaves that had promised themselves to take up yoga or ballroom dancing when they had the chance, and now they have the chance; leaves that fell young, half-eaten by caterpillars, and vain about the holes they have to show for that ordeal; leaves in Missouri so unlike the leaves in Illinois but not ashamed; leaves that were never seen by any human, having been hidden, as though in a harem, by other leaves; leaves gathered in the burrows of chipmunks and witness to their love; leaves dissolving into mulch by the margin of the road. Number them all and remember them.”

 

There’s something playfully prayer-like about that passage. Disch was a master of the list and catalogue, a man of perfervid appetites. He reveled in the world’s bounty. In “The Dot on the i,” the first poem in his last book, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007), Disch refers to the realm he has entered as “the democracy of dust.” The poem is at once mordant and exalting:

 

“When it comes to the sense

Of beauty we are all Pythagoreans,

Transfixed upon the ineffable and inexplicable

Significance of a number; for instance

(Or especially?), i, the square root of minus-one.”