All my life, I loved to read as much as possible. Stephen King was the first author who grabbed my full attention. I could hear his voice in my head as I read. I could see what he described. I could enter this alternate reality fully and forget about the life I was living at the time.
I found many authors who could cast this kind of spell over me and for decades, reading was one of the great pleasures and enriching activities in my life.
But time takes away everything bit by bit each day. It is an inevitable downward spiral into a state of complete loss. This process became vaguely apparent to me in my mid 20s when, for the first time, I could sense sensations in the body which I knew were going to be with me and continue to develop in a corrosive fashion. Of course, in the beginning those sensations–chronic knee pain, sleep problems, mental disturbances, and the way self-doubt creeps in as goals seem to become more difficult, even impossible. You can sense time slipping away reducing your future options increasingly and putting more pressure on the psyche to meet those goals. And when it becomes evident that some goals are just not going to pan out, not matter what you do, that’s when life falls inexorably into a darker and darker sort of death spiral that becomes more difficult to cope with naturally.
Some thinkers say, you are what you think about, and that is a notion with some truth to it. But, at the same time, this is not a solipsistic universe in which all that is real is just what I think. That, to me, is a naive, albeit useful fiction. I know I am better off lying to myself, hypnotizing myself with the version of reality I desire, but I am just not wired for that, or at least, not anymore. Now life is a kind of fascination, at best, with the inevitable dissipation of everything. Relationships fall apart. Everything that once gave life meaning loses its meaning. It all feels either redundant, pointless, or just desperation. I feel like a wolf in a bear trap in the middle of nowhere. But I am smarter than a wolf. I can tell when I am not going to get out of the trap unless, through some good luck, a ‘miracle’ (if you want to use such terminology) occurs. But I know it will not. Having hope that I can get free is not going to change the unavoidable outcome. A wolf is too dumb to “know” this though. As a human being, I am too self-aware to simply focus on the moment alone.
I suppose I would be hypocritical if I did not concede that despite my pessimism, a part of me still believes that the only real hope in life lay in becoming so fully immersed in the moment that the moment is eternity and eternity is in a moment. But getting there, ironically, is the simplest, easiest yet most complicated and demanding thing in the world. Why?
For one, my mind is an endless stream of thoughts about everything. And how sick I get of thinking. I used to love thinking. It was going somewhere, there was some real point to it, there was some conclusion I would reach. But now, I tire of it. It all seems completely pointless, and even repulsive, like it only brings more harm upon me and leads invariably to even more, yet I keep doing it. I extend the wolf analogy; it is like a wolf licking a bloody blade to death. My instincts egg me on, but it only brings the opposite of what I desire, and I desire to be free, to be in the moment, to just forget about everything else but now, and not to be continuously pulled back into more of the same.
I started reading “The Shining” a few days ago. I was disillusioned with reading. I had read 1 and 3/4s Raymond Feist’s “The Firemane Saga”. Before it, I had enjoyed reading the entire Ryan Cahill Broke and the Bound series. Before Feist, I had finished all but the last novella of The Bound and the Broken. In terms of fantasy, before that, I had read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Hobbit, and several other books by Tolkien.
It was a steady progression downwards though. By the second book of Feist’s saga, I was done. It was OK I guess, but just lacked, I do not know, magic and mythology. It was more like a grimdark fantasy with a dash of low-key magic. The main issue was that it all just seemed to go nowhere. I hate dropping a book like I did, but I decided it was time to read King again. It had been years since I had read him. I remember, as I mentioned earlier, loving his work in my teens and twenties. His work, as I said, is what really got me into reading fiction for pleasure in the first place.
Reading The Shining has its pros and cons. I fear it cannot even pull me out of the problems of my life. I find as I read, my mind wanders back to problems I am having in my life. I cannot fully engage with it and just forget about everything else for a while, as I used to be able to. I will finish it though, but I also find it hard to get into supernatural themes anymore. In decades ago, a part of me thought there might be something to the supernatural, the occult, the spiritual–some sort of mysterious intuition that might be experienced despite myself. Fortunately, I can always fall back on the psychological model of a ghost story like the Shining. But I cannot enjoy ghost stories like I used to. At best, I hope to go deeply into the problems Jack has and find my own sense of redemption, or worse, increased dissolution. There is a part of me that just wants to get i all over already. I spend so much energy trying to avoid the downward spiral I am in that eventually; I just want to let go and surrender to it finally. Either I will come out on the other side stronger, or I will be free of all this pointless struggle finally. Both options seem appealing to me.
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Jack Torrance goes into the Overlook Ballroom and relapses with the help of a ghost bartender after Wendy locks him out of the room because she thinks Jack tried to strangle Danny. The ghost in 217 had strangled him. Jack’s descent into madness comes, in the book, from resenting the judgement of his wife dating back to an earlier time when he broke Danny’s arm out of anger. He was drunk at the time. He felt endless guilt over it. But since then, he stopped drinking, and he did not harm Danny. So, when Wendy accuses him of this, it enrages him and leads him to relapse.
In the movie, she interrupts his work on the play he is writing, and this sets him off becoming the demoniac version of Jack. In the book, he hears his dead father who used to drink and abuse his mother, telling him over the CB to punish his family. He smashed the CB as a result. Wendy finds him. He thinks he was sleepwalking in a dream. But this behavior is what leads to Wendy believing he had strangled Danny.
In the movie, his father is not mentioned. Instead, some other ghost calmly and politely encourages him to punish his family, but that ghost is not his fat, drunken nurse. It is some hotel guest with mysterious origins encouraging him to go deeper into his unjustified anger and temper and feelings that he has not been respected.
At the bar, his relapse is all completely imaginary, and he does not drink whiskey, he drinks Martinis. The movie made it all look like some ghostly pasts come to life for Jack. In the book he is clearly imagining his relapse. Eventually Wendy finds Jack there. By then Danny has explained to her that it was not Jack, but it was the dead ghost woman in 217.
In the movie when Jack goes to check room 217, he finds a beautiful and voluptuous nude woman in the bathtub instead of the living corpse Danny found. As they start to make out, she transforms into the corpse, terrifying Jack. In the book, he merely smells some sort of attractive soap fragrance which suggests later in the book he will find the same sort of creature depicted in the movie, but he does not find any woman in 217, at least not yet. I would be surprised if King left it at the suggestion of an attractive woman. He takes his time with the downward spiral in the book going from extreme terror to periods of normalcy.
I can relate to Jack in the book more than the movie even though I love the movie. In the book, you learn more about his struggles with his anger, gainful employment, his struggles with his friends and benefactors. He is just a troubled ex-alcoholic who has made some serious mistakes and harmed his kid, but who is trying to reclaim his life with a job his rich friend Al got him.
I feel that way sometimes too. Like I wish some benefactor would hook me up with a respectable job to reclaim my life, and to also have time to work on the things I love to do with little distraction. Funny how in that regard, Jack has it better than me. He even still has a libido too. Despite all Jack’s flaws, he does not seem as afflicted or negative about life for much of the time. He is capable. He can teach, he is a published author, but the good old days are gone, and his hope of redemption at the Overlook is just another step down into the abyss he is fated to fall into and that is how my life seems too.
Sure, I may not become an enraged lunatic trying to kill everyone, although King does an excellent job of humanizing how a person can become so nihilistically angry and destructive. Often when people who are not afflicted in life consider such people, they cannot imagine how someone could stoop to that level. This is one reason horror fiction strikes me as a critical genre. It helps us confront realities we try to hide from ourselves. Doing so can lead to us unconsciously acting it out or becoming superficial in our understanding of the self. Not to say we should constantly immerse ourselves in horror fiction, although I have! It makes me feel better knowing someone else out there understand how terrible the mind and life can become and how it might happen, and why.
Despite how engaged I feel with The Shining though, even it seems to fade away as I am reading it and, in its place, memories of my own life take over, and usually all just memories which I am tortured over, or that represent problems that will not go away, that I feel powerless over. I ruminate about it trying to think of every direction it might go, and which options I might take in dealing with it, including dangerous options that could land me in jail or that would lead me to go on the run — again.
Back in my 20s I was on the run for about a year. I made the mistake of crossing the Canadian border with a tiny amount of marijuana in my cigarette case. Weird that they singled me out and looked there. The woman I was with at the time help engineer it because she decided I ought not to run anymore and that she could not continue with a wanted man like me. Or was it just bad luck, and I am being paranoid and accusatory? Who knows? I stopped talking to her that day because she pretended not to know anything about me when I got arrested. I understand why. She had to think about her kids. No point in going down with me, right? It still hurt though. I needed to feel she would go down with me to assure me that our “love” was real, or something.
But its events like what I just mentioned, that will intrude on my consciousness as I am trying to focus on reading The Shining, as if, I should not be doing anything but working to pull myself out of the hole I am in. Indeed, I am the deepest hole I have been in since I got arrested in my 20. For 20 years, despite many setbacks, everything was going my way, at least in terms of financial stability anyway. It was never perfect, and there were serious downtimes. But none of it compares to where I am now. More in debt than ever. More of the wrong type of debt too. And simply not enough income to really save myself. I would not be surprised if I got subpoenaed by the Attorney General at some point.
I try to apply for jobs, I go to interviews, they seem to go well, I send a thank you note, I never hear from them. Every employer pulls you credit score nowadays? I do not worry about background checks, but my credit is so shot, I cannot even get car insurance.
Yes, it is these sorts of concerns which invade my private moments and so I find myself driven to find something, anything, that once could fully grab my attention to the point at which I would forget about everything else for a while. But now it is just this incessant worry, anxiety, and insurmountable work ahead of me, and projects which never seem to end, that are always rife with a dozen trivial issues that hold the whole thing up leading me to work my ass off for nothing, with no end in sight.