Thomas M. Disch: On Wings of Song (1979)
Exceptional competence can lead to celebrity
On a par with a movie star's, but do you
Honestly believe most aspirants aspire so far?
They do it for love. They do it because
At some point in their green youth
They were pierced, like apples of bull's-eyes,
By the everlasting dart. Of art?
Goodness no. Haven't you been listening?
- Tom Disch, “Ars Poetica”
In the near future a device is invented which allows one to leave one’s body and fly around as an incorporeal spirit, colloquially referred to as a “fairy”. It’s not a simulation - you’re really flying, while your body stays where you left it, strapped into the machine. You can reassume your body by flying back to it but many never do, either because they have chosen the exquisite life of a fairy or because they have been caught in one of the “fairy traps” which the privacy-concerned set up around themselves. (Fairies are invisible, except to other fairies.) If your body dies while you’re flying you live on, apparently forever, as a fairy, so that flying is, among so much else, a method of immortality. Those fairies who tire of merely exploring the world with sublime clarity can shoot off into space, or they can join with others in a kind of global oversoul encompassing the planet.
Flight is generally regarded as a blissful experience (even being caught in a fairy trap is blissful) and the ability to fly is widely coveted, at least among those who do not regard the whole business as immoral. But there’s a catch: not everyone can achieve flight. In order to take off out of your body you have to sing a song, and you have to sing it well. Without such a performance by the user the machine is useless. But technically singing well isn’t enough, and nor is singing with sincerity. There’s a trick or knack to it which involves both technique and authenticity but is greater than the sum of those parts, and many people simply cannot take off, however many times they plug in and vocalise.
Flight, or the release to flight, took place at the moment when the two discrete hemispheres of the brain stood in perfect equipoise, stood and were sustained. For the brain was a natural gnostic, split into those very dichotomies of semantic sense and linguistically unmediated perception, of words and music, that were the dichotomies of song. This was why, though the attempt had been made so often, no other musicians, but only singers, could strike that delicate balance in the tissues of the mind.
Daniel Weinreb, the protagonist of On Wings of Song, knows all this because he has made himself an expert on the theory of flying. He’s done this because he can’t achieve flight himself, despite his singing lessons and therapy sessions, his immersion in the world of bel canto (which is popular in Disch’s future America), and his own attempts at composition. No song results in lift-off when he’s the singer, however truly expressive. Genuine expression, if not entirely beside the point, is not nearly sufficient.
The sly point, or one of them, of Disch’s allegory is that regardless of what the phenomenon of flight does or doesn't prove about the nature of the mind or soul, it proves once and for all that art is not subjective. You have to learn how to do it, but even still you might not have the natural talent, and nobody’s subjective positive assessment of your performance will get you an inch off the ground. Daniel’s inability to fly has nothing to do with indifference to music or to a lack of work and dedication, but results from some lack in himself, "some knot in the wood of his soul that no expense of energy could smooth away." Disch creates a darkly comic world in which disappointed artists have objective proof that they don’t have the right stuff. It’s a bracing read for the creatively ambitious, but there is encouragement as well, since Disch’s allegory also insists there is such thing as the right stuff, the real thing. Disch literalises the transcendent possibilities of aesthetic experience, and the resulting irony is wonderfully particoloured.
Mrs. Schiff, Daniel's eccentric New York landlady (who will become his collaborator on the hyper-kitsch and hyper-successful Broadway musical Honeybunny Time) has a theory about why he cannot "fly":
Your problem is that you have a Faustian soul. It is a larger soul, perhaps, than belongs to many who, for all that, can fly with the greatest ease. Who ever supposed size was a mark of quality, eh? [...] A great singer sings the way a bird warbles. One doesn't need a large soul to warble, only a throat.
The context of real flight and the unevenness with which the gift for it is distributed gives such aesthetic debates an ironic piquancy. It is so much hot air to denounce an artist whose performances allow him to literally soar over the world, and which give him the literal option of immortality. Conversations about the art of song are analogous to theological debates among believers: your soul is at stake. This is a joke at the expense of those of us who feel that art is of absolutely vital importance for human beings, but it’s also a clarifying allegory of how important art can be. Disch is nothing if not ambivalent.
Fairies can see each other, and so an inevitable experiment has been carried out: fairies have hung around the dying, hoping to see their souls leave their bodies. No soul has been spotted emanating from a fresh corpse, and this is a cause of annoyance to traditional religious believers, who depend on the reality of the soul for their accommodation with the world. For traditional religion the reality of fairies is a threat to its cosmology, in which the fate of a human spirit rests in its relationship with God rather than with bel canto. Disch's hatred of institutional Christianity feels like a highly personal vendetta, but this is understandable for a gay man raised Catholic in the mid-twentieth century Bible Belt. But there are religious longings in his work, including a surprisingly well-developed post-modern theology attributed to Jack Van Dyke, whose book The Product is God Daniel reads.
The Most High is perfectly willing to be understood as an illusion since our doubts only make our trust in Him that much more savory on His tongue. He is, we must remember, the King of Kings, and shares the general kinky taste of kings for displays of their subjects' abasement.
Van Dyke’s slick paradoxes promote an ironic Christianity to an exhausted America, and the young Daniel intuits this, but is so desperate for spiritual escape from his circumstances that he devours the book and is devastated when it goes missing. The theological knockabout is amusing, but behind the cultural murk and waste Disch insinuates a spark of the divine. He is a tremendously slippery writer.
Ambivalence is the key note. Disch is perhaps a Romantic sceptic in the school of Percy Shelley and Thomas Hardy, unable to evade a pessimistic view of human affairs but equally unable to evade intimations of transcendence. He is impatient with everything which is not the true sublime, which makes him impatient with almost everything. As John Clute put it in his obituary for Disch, “To him everything that humans did about things that mattered – from God to sex, from the Pope to the sestina – was ultimately silly.” What we do is silly, what we do it about is not; that is the tension that Disch turns into grand, dark comedy.
Daniel Weinreb, in prison at Spirit Lake, Iowa while still a teenager, has faith, but not Christian faith, despite his cleaving to The Product is God. "Belief had come to him and burned inside him. [...] His faith was simple. All faiths are. He would fly. He would learn to sing, and by singing he would fly." The joke here is that this apparent send-up of the Religion of Art is no such thing, because flying in Daniel's world is simply a reality, and song is how you do it. Daniel's faith is perhaps more like an entrepreneur's faith that he will retire at 35, but it is nevertheless clearly contaminated by idealism. In America, Disch seems to suggest, we can't be sure that personal ambition and artistic idealism can be disentangled. On one hand, high aesthetic and spiritual experience is contaminated with mere ego and mere market forces. On the other, wouldn’t it be a better world if (as many Americans since Emerson have believed in one way or another) the individual’s vaunting ambition could itself be a kind of spiritual transcendence? Disch is ambivalent here too.
Like many sensitive young people, Daniel gets while very young the idea that there is a transcendent possibility hidden within art, specifically music, even before he really understands what flying is. When his teacher plays him a recording of Mozart it is his first experience of classical music, and he doesn't get it. He can't square what he's hearing with "song," which he has some experience of in the form of simple sing-along numbers. He wants the exotic record to be a revelation, and is baffled and disappointed. "That couldn't be all there is to it," he thinks on his walk home after his encounter with Mozart. "It just could not. She was hiding something. There was a secret." His confidence here is recognisable from idealistic youngsters in our world, but in the world of On Wings of Song it is also backed up by the reality of flight.
Daniel imagines that absent family are invisibly watching him in fairy form. First, as a child, he imagines that his mother is hovering over him; she had abandoned him very early to live in New York city and learn to fly, but she fails to lift off and subsequently returns to her family. Later he imagines the same thing of his wife Boa, who stays in flight for fifteen years, though it turns out that she has spent most of this time in a fairy trap. The passage of information between the two realms is one-way, leaving Daniel free to imagine, since he cannot know. He gains, at least, the sense of an angelic presence.
Daniel has several moments of vision while still very young. Each of them is charged with ambivalence, since they are founded on Daniel’s ignorance and inexperience, and yet they provide him with moments of spiritual knowledge which sustain him in later years.
He stopped pedalling, overcome by the sense that he was an incredibly important person. The future, which usually he never gave much thought to, became as intensely real as the sky overhead, which was sliced in two neat pieces by the vapor trail of a jet. The feeling became so powerful it almost got frightening. He knew, with an absoluteness of knowing that he would never doubt for many years, that someday the whole world would know who he was and honor him. How and why remained a mystery.
Daniel's sense of this hidden, significant self is linked to his sense of the sublime importance of song and flight, and presumably this gnostic attitude is part of why Harold Bloom picked On Wings of Song for his infamous Western Canon list. (Mostly I think it was included because it is excellent.) Bloom's theory is that poets in general and American poets in particular are almost all gnostics of one kind or another, that "gnosticism is the natural religion of poets." During Daniel’s vision of poetic election, the sky is split down the middle like that “natural gnostic,” the human brain.
Disch and Bloom knew and approved of one-another, though I don't know when Disch first encountered Bloom's work. It is possible that Disch is in part satirising Bloom in this novel. Disch literalises Bloom’s theory: every true singer is freed from their corporeal fetters to become a pure spirit. That these spirits are actually still stuck in the finite, fallen world would be one point of the satire.
The satire is also clearly a self-satire. There are obvious autobiographical elements in the story (Daniel’s move from a repressive but peaceful Bible Belt to an exciting but debased New York city being the most obvious tell), and Disch was preoccupied throughout his career with the collision of high aesthetic ideals and the sordid circus of worldly existence. One of the most remarkable passages in the book is the description of the first time Gus sings, in the anonymous dark, to the rest of the prisoners. Gus is a mysterious and charismatic new prisoner who also turns out to be a reprobate, who responds to the fourteen-year-old Daniel’s request for singing lessons by demanding sex in exchange. But he is a divine singer nevertheless. His song
took hold of each soul so, levelling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovely knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song, so that they listened to each further swelling and subsiding as if it issued from the chorus of their mortal hearts, which the song had made articulate. Listening, they perished.
The song itself, note, is knowledge, or gnosis.
One of the deeper worries Disch presents in On Wings of Song is whether our desire for transcendence is a desire for something or whether it is merely a desire to escape what we have, the prison of finite existence. The games of chess Daniel plays in prison are in instance of this: it was "as if, contemplating the microcosm of the chessboard, they were escaping from Spirit Lake; as if the complex spaces of the board were truly another world, created by thought but as real as electrons." Perhaps Daniel's obsessive desire to fly is nothing more than a desire to escape from the prison of Iowa – and then, later, from the prison of NYC? The first time Daniel hears details about what it's like to fly is when his fellow-prisoner Barbara describes her only experience of it. She says that flying is "Will power, in the most literal sense [...] It was as though you could drive a car by just looking at the road ahead of you." Daniel's response is to close his eyes "to savor the idea of a freedom so perfect and entire." Is freedom a positive value here, or simply the ability to escape suffering – or some combination of the two? Disch is sceptical, but somehow seems to maintain the will to believe.
Flight is also an erotic allegory. The point, in singing or sex, is ecstasy, a loss of selfhood which is somehow also a finding of selfhood. This means that Daniel's inability to fly, of which he is ashamed, is allegorically impotence. We learn that it may or may not be the case that castrati (for the practice of castrating young boys to give them angelic singing voices as adults has been revived in this decadent future) cannot fly. "Some claimed that though they were able to fly, they had no wish to, that song itself was glory enough, but this was generally thought to be a face-saving imposture." Disch's symbols are multivalent, always in movement as you contemplate them, and the castrati complicate the allegory of flight, if flight represents both the heights of artistic experience and also an erotic experience for the absence of which art might be a consolation.
Daniel's transactional and ambivalent relationship with the famous castrato singer Ernesto Rey is thus pregnant with meaning. They strike a deal in which Rey will pay for the Boa's upkeep (she has apparently abandoned her body in flight, and Daniel must keep it alive if she is ever to return) in exchange for Daniel's nominal sexual slavery – nominal because for the most part it involves Daniel wearing a chastity belt rather than actually doing anything sexual for the castrated Rey. Rey's desire is to be seen to be Daniel's master, and specifies that Daniel may not be seen with Rey's singing rivals. Daniel, who seems to discover his bisexuality when he moves to NYC, despises Rey at first, but develops a strange affection for him. The sexual energies of this novel are complex, and this is part of the point, since these complex and confusing energies are sublimed away in the incorporeal bliss of flight.
That Daniel becomes in essence a kind of prostitute extends the allegory. Only flight, it would seem, offers escape from the world of transaction, as Art is alleged to do in much aesthetic philosophy. In Disch’s world, neither love nor art is enough.
Sex, if it was not the soul's avenue into this world, and the flesh's out of it, was simply another means by which people gained advantage over each other. It was of the world, worldly. But what was left then that wasn't worldly, that didn't belong to Caesar? Flight, perhaps, though it seemed that dimension of grace would always be denied him. And (logic demanded) death.
Intriguingly, it is while Daniel is sexually frustrated by Rey's chastity belt, sitting in the park observing attractive strangers, that he has the crucial epiphany of the latter stages of the book. Seeing a fountain in the park, he suddenly interprets an earlier dream about a fountain.
The fountain was the fountain of art; of song; of singing; of a process that renews itself moment by moment; that is timeless and yet inhabits the rush and tumble of time, just as the fountain's trumpeting waters are endlessly conquering the same slim splendid space. It was what Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly.
We might see this as sublimation of his sexual desire into aesthetic experience, but then again the symbol here is a fountain’s “conquering” waters - sexual consummation may still be on his mind. We are invited to wonder whether we would want to escape from the itches of bodily life if we could.
At the end of the novel Daniel is on tour, singing to enthusiastic crowds across America, performing songs from the absurd but commercially triumphant Honeybunny Time as well as a variety of standards and new songs. He's a professional and a showman, and he concludes his performances by strapping himself into a fake flight machine (and resembling a crucified Christ as he does so) and, at the peak of his final number, going limp, pretending to have taken off. On this particular evening he is assassinated, shot through the brain. Presumably he leaves his fans, friends and family with the impression that he survived as a fairy, not realising that the flight machine is fake. It's a touching, bitter, beautiful final irony: his showmanship makes him a Christ-figure, with those who love him left believing that he has ascended to watch over them - but it was only a trick of art. It reflects on the immortality of the artist as well: we feel, or think we feel, the presence of the mighty dead, through the tricks of their art, and the tricks of our own hope.
Daniel learns to write poetry as part of his attempt to compose his own songs. When this project fails to give him wings, all that remains at first of his poetic creativity is dirty limericks written in public toilets, in what is clearly a deliberate self-debasement on Daniel's part. Eventually it helps him to success, almost by accident. Disch’s own ambitions for lyric seem to have been largely (and consciously) absorbed into his discursive and satirical impulses, and he struggled both for commercial and critical recognition all his writing life. He was aware of his own talent, and used it to turn his disappointments into art. He’ll get the traditional revenge of surviving his detractors: On Wings of Song is obviously a permanent novel.
He was a very good but probably not a permanent poet. Of the poems of his I’ve read one of my favourites is “Swimming,” a finely crafted sestina related to On Wings of Song and composed in the same period. It begins: “As much as singing swimming / is essentially beyond / me.” This is a self-effacing confession, and yet it implies the reality of a sublime possibility, since, yes, there is something “beyond / me.” The most moving part is the conclusion:
And beyond
that, is there a higher order, a breath
so light, a light so slow
to dawn, a gift so reluctant to bestow
itself, I can't imagine it – and so return
to my original idea of swimming?
Swimming as hope, as a path beyond
past incapacities, as turn-on. Each breath
a lurch towards that goal. But oh how slow.