Fabulous Terrors

It is curious that I am an acolyte of Doris Lessing on the basis of such slight familiarity as I have with her work. My first exposure, initiated by Jerry, motivated for me by sex as much as intellectual inquiry, was The Memoirs of a Survivor, and I suspect this title will remain a favorite, despite my intense desire to consume her speculative material, which one assumes is more comfortably categorized as science fiction. I will reread Memoirs as long as I live, but had a quite serious battle with an anxiety attack when I attempted this in the weeks following September 11th, and tossed the poor abused and yellowed and aged paperback against the back wall, which forms a slight alcove. This is the area in which I fell and nearly died after returning to this unit after the renovations, because it was a freak accident that wedged me, left me unable to free myself. The aging text survived the toss, has survived Jerry's class, as Jerry and I and indeed Ms. Lessing still survive, and in the study of this work I learned about Ms. Lessing's life and its possible savagery that imprinted on her so that she became the woman who blithely scares the living shit out of the rest of us.

I have been diffident about reading *everything,* as I am not sure it is necessary, nor do I want to quarrel with her legacy, as I can envision an argument with her middle brow and middle aged women, and their grounded, pragmatic objections, but I will hopefully read more, unless I wind up shivved in a homeless shelter due to my conflicts with public housing, an appropriate caution under which to mention that next came The Good Terrorist, then The Cleft. And then The Fifth Child came online and I chortled in glee, as I proudly assert that I want to read this "before." Before what? Before I became too influenced by "the best Shakespearean on the east coast." Which is now the Gulf coast I suppose (and maybe no longer the best?), but who am I to judge that, and I am sure less than one percent of you are following my obscure train of thought. Spell it out spastic? I am not in the mood today, as I am angry to that which my ambition finds itself sacrificed because I invest too much emotionally.

I read The Fifth Child in little more than two sittings, and felt that terror gnaw at me in my stomach, like Linda Blair's fuck buddy. I did mention to you in the past that I was courted as an extra for this franchise, did I not? But Lessing at her best is more terrifying than The Exorcist, and that is because of how she sees what she sees, and the sensibility, in the smartly educated, that she is right, and those of us that know it cannot warn the rest of you urgently enough to wake up, be more on your guard, and less self interested in the bloody conquest of your kitchen appliances over foodstuffs, your domesticated insistence on status culture; we're all going to hell one way or another, but we could slow that down, all of us, if we pay attention, if we listen, if we learn that the right choices are never easy. The Fifth Child enthralls, but for a student of Jerry's, disappoints. Reviewers who were baffled by the novel did not dwell on its family resemblance to Memoirs, with which it shares a great deal, though it is more localized to the dynamic and the schisms within the Lovatt family.

I do not know how Lessing mastered what her ambiguity portends. I can achieve the comparable in my poetry, and have, in my best work, but I could never do the same in prose, not with her force, a real mistress of horror, and I bestow that phrase as a crowning achievement, excelled by no other.