"But he went from literary lion to pariah in less than a year. His immediate crime was too much party-going, too much name-dropping, too much publicity, but his subsequent, much worse, crime was writing too many books - 110 at the latest count - on subjects ranging from serial killers to alien abductions to The Lost City of Atlantis. The critics at first attacked him then ignored him - he has not had a serious review for years. But now, at 73, he has written an autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose, of considerable charm. It is jaw-droppingly - one might say cringe-makingly - honest and often unintentionally hilarious."
Project me forward in time several decades and I just might be something like British author Colin Wilson. I've never read Wilson's most famous book, "The Outsider," but I read "Alien Dawn" (an omnivorous look at paranormal phenomena) and loved it.
Unlike Wilson, I'm not a panty fetishist (although, coincidentally, I frequent a blog devoted, in part, to all things sock-related . . .) but socially we fit the same profile. Outwardly, I was never exactly the pariah depicted by Wilson. I actually enjoyed grade school. And I survived high-school pretty much unharmed; nevertheless, I found myself identifying with Edward Scissorhands.
College was a Kafka-esque fever-dream. I didn't fit in; with few exceptions, I didn't like anyone (up to and including myself). I never dated, never precisely hit it off as I had expected; I certainly didn't meet the girl of my dreams. Quite the opposite: I was bullied, made fun of by complete strangers. I was in a small town and the reasoning seemed to be that if you weren't seen in the constant presence of others then something was "different" about you and that difference was almost certainly being gay, which I emphatically wasn't.
I've been in an almost Pynchon-like cocoon ever since -- but I haven't realized it until fairly recently. No, that's a lie: I've sensed it in my bones for years. I feel like a science fiction alien whose intellect has caused one side of his brain to inflate into a gnarled, imposing mass, leaving the emotional half withered and flaccid.
Quite truthfully, I feel more mechanical than mammalian most of the time. It's a sense of imprisonment coupled with a genuinely eager desire to expand that swollen hemisphere of my brain to the breaking point, a game of cerebral "chicken." Please -- let me be anything but merely human.
And yet the deprived hemisphere isn't quite dead. I feel a vague synaptical stirring.
No comments:
Post a Comment