books

Queer
Queer Lit
British Literature

Books like A Voice Through a Cloud

A Voice Through a Cloud

2004Denton Welch

4.9/5

I heard a voice through a great cloud of agony and sickness. The voice was asking questions. It seemed to be opening and closing like a concertina. The words were loud, as the swelling notes of an organ, then they melted to the tiniest wiry tinkle of water in a glass.Everyone dies alone. The cyclone of the witch of hell hath no fury opens sulks and pouts. A why doesn't my bike freedom fly like this all of the time young man with things he wanted to do, to live, under towed to her house of it's all a bitch, which bitch, mother nature's sister too, and it is so fucking horrible. The take us all down with it orbit of it's just not fair, this isn't happening. Anyone would die alone in that hospital, the system, the machine. Smells like that young man with the promise isn't coming back to bedside. Every day a little bit more. The weight of pity sits on your chest, the impatience of the nurses steals your breath like one of those fairy tale cats, doctors grin nightmares. The masks or are they shadows playing tricks grins. The kinds that make my tummy do that flip I hate. The nights are long enough to make you forget. Wake up and remember and the remembering is amputated from what memories were before and the same memories are after. He was dying when he wrote A Voice Through A Cloud. I feel like he saved my life when he could save his own. I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it. There is always something wrong with writing. So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words.Don't you believe this. Denton Welch is the perfect writer. Every time I had ever wanted to be talked to like I and everyone was a real person. Whenever I say that this is what I mean. How he has this way of wanting. The way he has of being still under the screwed up face of today to the bleeding you do underneath. When he is afraid the doctor didn't mean it when he suggested that he might get to escape the awful institution, come live with him. Don't be disrupted, be accepted. When he just wishes he would ask again so he could believe he had really meant it. When he immediately starts to care about everything he never cared about when he thinks he's going to get to leave the awful hospital he demanded to leave. He knows he's doing it and it is this wonderful way of being outside yourself and inside. I just wish I was still reading this book. I felt so warm and okay because whatever he wrote I got to be. Inside. It gives me this feeling that is going to spite all of the heaviness when he... I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.I stared at all the types, and a terrible feeling of loneliness swept over me; this in spite of my special wish to be alone that night. I felt that everyone was cut off from me, that it would always be so, and that nothing I could do would ever make any difference. I turned away from the people hating them passionately, yet longing to be taken into their bosoms.I know. I don't know what to do about feeling like this. I would read Denton Welch describing the man in his hospital who stares sadly at Welch's locker for his tasty (I'll take his word for it) foodstuffs. He no longer allows him to mooch off him once his weight is too much for him to bear. The sinister nurse who abuses in the night. In the morning he's smiles and Welch's introspective shame and questions. I can't get enough of the brother's friends who shower him with their strange mercies. I want all of it. It's horrible when he's forcing himself to walk again. When I say horrible I mean that every word of this book is glorious. If you could be hugged and know at the end that it was all worth it that is seeing through his eyes. (But better than that. How do you say that you felt despairing of being ugly old you forever and it wasn't like that when you read this one book?) I never wanted anything more than I want a Denton Welch in my head to see instead of me. It's so hard to keep doing this. I fixed my eyes on them and experienced the utter silence of the house. To be awake in the sleeping house gave me power. It was right that I should watch. I was no longer part of the nursing home; it seemed incongruous that I should still be there.I distrusted it, not because I thought it false, but because I felt it pleased me too much and so falsified my judgement. I told myself that it was a trick of his and that he knew it pleased, just as a child sometimes knows that its childishness is endearing. I waited for him to overdo the smile and repel me. But he never did, or if he did I embraced the extravagance wholeheartedly.I'm always going to need this. I know this. I was in the state to make it human. He's perfect. I can't tell you how horrible wonderful and like dying it is to not be able to breathe when everything is this beautiful. It's like removing every stone in your body and you gotta grow everything all back together again. The heavy pulling out in your gut by brick. I don't know of anything more beautiful than when he's in his head. It was made more believable to me when he has to stop doing it because of their voices through the air, the dream, the breaking, the doubt and the hope. Damn damn damn. I am not doing this right. I don't know how anyone couldn't like Denton Welch. When he's alone with himself and his visitors look unbelievably beautiful walking away. Don't leave me. p.s. He even knew about the stone lions. He draws a stone lion when he's in hospital. I wasn't alive yet when he wrote this and this year when dealing with my stupid back problems (so awful) I was fixated on stone lions. He even knew about that. (I had this feeling that my body acting without me could be frozen. Stiff cemented snarling. You were here.) Denton Welch had powers.

Filter by:

Cross-category suggestions

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by: