Salon.com > Greg Bottoms

Nostalgia for ghosts

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

As a small boy, I suffered from extreme fevers. They came like phantoms, burning through me, blurring my vision. They covered me in cold sweat, ridding me of food and liquid and waste until I was aware -- without the reserves of language or the ability to name my fears and feelings -- of a new kind of existence, an emptiness and lightness of body.

The fevers always began accompanied by fear and anxiety -- the same dread that animates dreams of falling -- at times so forceful that I thought I would suffocate, dying on an old, worn-out couch or on the cold bathroom tile. Once my temperature settled, though, topping out at 103 or 104 degrees, there was a sickly ease holding me, as if I'd stepped into another world.

High temperatures came first from the croup: deep, painful coughs like lightning strikes at the solar plexus, threatening to split me in half. Later there were middle-ear infections: buzzings in my head, the outside world muffled through antihistamines and painkillers. Then came bronchitis: a tightening in the chest, a lack of oxygen, mucus rising like an organic sludge from the bottom of my lungs until every sound from me came wrapped in a bubbling wetness.

Evan S. Connell

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 19:41:00 +0000

I knew a guy who lost his mind reading Evan S. Connell. This happened in graduate school. I was 23. He was maybe 25. I wanted to be a poet. He wanted to be, I don't know, Claude Levi-Strauss, Lyotard, Baudrillard. We had nothing in common; his using literature to make leaps into pseudo-science and psuedo-philosophy seemed all wrong to me. He often laughed at my mushy-gushy "free-verse-ness," as he called it. And yet we liked each other, talked endlessly, late into the night, arguing, laughing, taking opposite, rigid stances on everything, then insisting on paying for the next round with our paltry fellowship cash.

The last conversation I had with him was about Connell's underground classic, "Diary of a Rapist," which I had not read. On the bar table between us was a dog-eared Ecco Press paperback copy. He had written all through it. The semester seminar he was taking, if I remember correctly, was "Lacan and the Problem of Language." He took these seminars seriously. Tonight he was on edge, more so than usual, giving me the dark summary of the novel. But then, without taking a breath, he was talking about his dreams and lowered sex drive, his loss of juissance, and a lack of signification and some sort of inability to ever achieve a solid cognitive structure that could incorporate a master signifier, a first cause, that was not God.

Can gays and lesbians go to heaven?

Thu, 13 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I recently went to the X-treme Spiritual Awakening Tour 2000 Prophecy Seminar to see what it took for gays to get saved before the Rapture. The event was sponsored by the Northwest Evangelical Institute of Portland, Ore., and is currently touring the United States until, ostensibly, the End of Days (exact date not available at press time).

It came to Expoland, just a few miles from my home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a place that usually hosts county fairs, livestock auctions, Mennonite quilting shows, doughnut fries and barbecue fund-raisers in a building that is, essentially, a huge white-painted warehouse with exposed steel beams, a stage at one end and an invisible but incessantly droning heating system. Forty to 50 people were scattered among the 300 available seats when I sat down in the back.

The Rapture, to be totally clear at the outset, is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, a time at the end of history when true believers' spirits will be "exalted to a knowledge of divine things." This may sound like a good thing, Jesus being about love and hope and forgiveness in the four Gospels (which I happen to have read several times myself), but evidently, it is not.

God, glass, LSD

Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that. He was 14, on LSD, shouting for help in the darkness of his room in our new suburban home. I was 10. I stood watching from his doorway, still, eyes cinched up tight as seams, trying to make out his writhing shape. I saw for myself. I didn't see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced. I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face. It was in the window, a part of the night, shimmering over our neighborhood of new construction sites -- clear plastic stapled to boards and waving in the night breeze, tire-tracked mud, portable toilets.

God in the lives of men is nothing new. It's a story that unfurls backward through the history of thought, meaning, reason. I've spent a lot of time tracing it, reading it over and over, in a hundred different ways. Characters change. Theres a new setting, a twist in this plot that wasn't in that one. But it is an old, old story, as old as Story itself. I compare my brother with other narratives involving God. He, She, It is the common language between us. That's how I place Michael, make sense of him, re-imagine him -- alongside saints and martyrs, lunatics and heretics, those who have fallen, shaken and supplicant, pleading, palms aimed heavenward, at the thought of God, His voice, the sweet, terrible whisper in their ear.

“Breakfast With Scot” by Michael Downing

Tue, 16 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"Having a child, I soon learned, is like having an open wound. People ask you about it. They give you advice and secret remedies. Friends tell you to ignore it for a while and see if it doesn't heal itself. Everyone assures you that it won't kill you. And then they show you their scars." So writes Michael Downing in his funny and affecting fourth novel, "Breakfast With Scot," about a Cambridge, Mass., gay couple who inherit an 11-year-old boy.

Downing has constructed a light-as-air divertimento out of short, quirky episodes that move briskly toward (usually funny) punch lines about gender, sexuality, child-rearing, American families, etc. The plot turns on a drunken promise. Ed, the book's narrator, an editor at an obscure art magazine, and his live-in lover of many years, Sam, a New Age chiropractor, are having dinner with Sam's brother, Billy, and Billy's girlfriend, Julie; at one point the straight couple slur that should anything ever happen to them, Sam and Ed have to care for their son, Scot. Equally drunk, Sam and Ed agree, because, well, it would be rude, even hurtful, to say no.

“Where the Roots Reach for Water” and “In the Jaws of the Black Dogs”

Thu, 09 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Henry Miller noted that there are two kinds of writers: those who write the Truth and those who don't; simple as that. Memoir is tricky, though. A factually accurate spilling of the guts has very little to do with the kind of artistic truth to which Miller -- himself a depressed autobiographical writer -- was referring. But two new books on depression by two vastly different writers prove that the memoir, despite its increasingly shaky reputation in this decade, may yet be our most malleable and dynamic form.

Jeffery Smith's "Where the Roots Reach for Water" is part autobiography of depression and part cultural investigation into what, exactly, depression is. Smith pondered drowning himself in a Montana river when his cocktail of medications sent him spiraling even further out of control than the depression they were meant to treat had; after that event, he embarked on an intellectual journey in search of the true face of melancholia (his word for depression). The result is, like Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," a compendium of one writer's reading and thinking on the subject -- essentially, a highly aestheticized commonplace book. What makes it singular is the intellectual and moral seriousness with which he thinks and writes about his illness while in the grip of it. And his control of structure and pacing is splendid.