On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, Jorn Barger wrote: > The NY Review of Books is starting to move online, and here: > > they offer the full text of a three-headed book review by Joan Didion, > of the Unabomber Manifesto (not rambling!), a biography of a > schizophrenic mathematician (John Nash), and David Gelernter's "Drawing > Life". > > She savages Gelernter unremittingly... What an interesting article that was. She's an excellent critic; just critiques other people's thinking without injecting her own. Something that is very disturbing in creative writers -- Joyce Carol Oates seems that way to me, at least did years ago when I read a lot of her books -- I mean that she created characters and I had no feeling that there was anything of herself in any of them, like they were ghosts dressed in personalities, like she is somebody who sees and sees and sees but never acts. But I'm going to revisit her writing and see if it seems different now. Joan Didion writes in these long, jigsaw-puzzlish sentences, forming a kind of portrait of the writing. I wonder if a creative writer could get away with writing that way, wriggling around one thought after another, making a wriggly pastiche of thoughts :) Gelernter seems not the techno-nerd that Kaczynski called him, but a compromised artist. His thought that computers should come in wood casings is a compromised-artist thought: decorate his compromise in the symbol of a tree, keeping his dreams with him but only in a dead state. A tiresome poseur, inflated by ego rather than large with passion. Although he's much less inspiring than Kaczynski, his ideas are smaller and he's dulled and wearied by self-fighting, he is perhaps a more meaningful object for fascination than Kaczynski: he is a reflection of our culture and the mirror we don't want to look into. Computers should be in plastic, in utilitarian gray or in flashy simple colors; then they're honest about the technological appeal to the parts of human nature that love flashiness and our propensity to extend ourselves with tools, which do not have sensuality. But can Gelernter be an artist, with the simple brutality and will to power to write articles entitled "Why slap Mothers bam Should whop Stay kick Home"? This is antiliterature; literature is speaking for silence while he speaks with the rote voice of power. She writes amusingly of Kaczynski. I don't think she is right when she calls his disjointed style lunacy. He didn't have an editor. He left editors and models for style. I don't mind the personal snarls: "it would be better to dump the whole stinking system" -- he was violently emotional, and a totally intellectual tract would be sublimely creepy, like the Nazis with scientific detachment creating and shipping skeletons. If you're going to bomb people, please do snarl at them; if you don't snarl you're like a Nazi, not speaking for silence but surrendering to emotional silence and spiritual death. While Gelernter has every right to be outraged by the shredding of his body by Kaczynski, I think part of his outrage is outraged ego and the outrage of someone who has shielded themselves with privilege and then discovered it wasn't an infallible shield. Not only the outrage of a hurt body. Often these violent crimes have that aspect: the strike from the gutter, the powerless and the discredited and the meaningless invading the lives of the privileged with violence. At least the violent crimes that get attention have that aspect, because those people who are outraged have the privilege to be heard and when they express outrage that their lives have been violated, it's with the full approval of others. But one wonders, is the basic lack, the real wound, the lack of empathy towards those skulking outside the walls of privilege, the way they are invisible and recognition as a person is accorded only to those dressed in privilege? Gelernter has no empathy with Kaczynski, wants only apologies and atonement, and doesn't see that there might be apologies and atonement due, by someone or many, towards Kaczynski as well. Kaczynski knows that surely, so his lack of remorse. And the crazy mathematician ... the way it is put, by her and (?) in the book, his schizophrenia was devoid of meaning, only bizarre associations. Was there nothing of the visionary and true in his schizophrenia? and if not, why would his bizarre thoughts appeal to him? perhaps, the creation of bizarre associations a desperate search for heart? and his recovery, the end of that search? the abandoning of "political" thought as unfruitful a sad surrender, done quietly and completely as only the very, very fragile can surrender? It reminds me of a woman I read of, who had surrendered almost her whole life to a boring clerical job. Almost, but not quite: at the tail end of her life she started to have vivid fantasies, with warm religious and sexual symbolism. Her therapist treated her for her madness by letting her spin out her fantasies in a darkened quiet room; after a while she was cured, so her therapist said, and went back to her boring clerical job, lived out her remaining years without incident, and died. This seemed excruciatingly sad to me, like letting a dying fish flop around on the beach, gasping in air for a while and then dead, without throwing it back into the water, like she didn't know where to find her real element, her strengthening reality. Schizophrenia as quixotic, something with a frail hold on existence making a bid to be real, a diffident and scattered something showing itself in these multitudes of associations, disguising itself shyly as meaninglessness, and in the end, easily driven away from reality, so the person becomes "sane" again. How do all these things connect? The claim on reality being a power struggle, I guess, and the strength to exist, for the outsider or the artist or the crazy person, depending on some nourishment, nourishment that Gelernter doesn't seem to have found, that I don't think the crazy mathematician found, that I think Kaczynski found somewhat -- a strengthening into violence, a first awakening into violence, the thoughts of someone who didn't manage to grow up but is quite real. But Kaczynski in his abandonment of compassion also maimed himself severely.