thanks, josh
& to jd heading out
& to jd heading out
Friday, June 21, 2013
SNAKE CHARMER ~
Almost three weeks ago, Sweetheart walked upstairs in our farmhouse and I heard one of those screams Hollywood films love to have in the can. Nothing forced, nothing acted — a full-fledged, let-go, high & mighty scream. I could only wonder downstairs. I asked up the old New England stairwell and was told a snake was in the bedroom, stretched across the white wool rug, comfortable as can be, four-feet long. No one wants a snake in their bedroom. Kokomo our cat was in residence five feet away, perched, just studying. Sorry to say during our action to remove the snake, the snake got away. And we didn't know where.
We figured it must have gone back the way it came in. Back to the big woodshed where it belongs. Back into the stacks of oak, maple and especially yellow birch firewood where it likes to hang out all summer and shed its skin against the rough bark. I find the skins up there all the time. One week, two weeks, by that time we were convinced the snake was gone. We forgot about him.
Guess what? The snake was in the bedroom last night.
I came up at midnight, saw Kokomo on the end of our bed looking across to where he usually sleeps on the window bed (the one I built last year, he loves it). I had a dim night-light on in the room and came within one inch of putting my hand right down on the snake. It was on the bookcase with built in table-shelf I built for placing things. I was picking up a book, and did, to take to bed when I caught a shape in the corner of my eye and asked myself what is that? : a ribbon, a piece of Sweetheart's sewing fabric, a long bootlace? Then I came to the head and those two steady eyes. And whispered, "What da fuck...?!"
I looked at Kokomo, who looked at me, and we both said with no words, "Now what?" It's midnight. Sweetheart's fast asleep. We can't wake her up and make things worse. She'll never go back to sleep if the snake gets away.
The snake is curled like a master in-and-around-and-over-and-with all the stuff on the open shelf. It's a masterpiece of snake positioning.
I can't shoot it, don't want to shoot it, may shoot it. I have rat-shot in the corner and my .22 rifle.
I turn a flashlight onto the snake. It isn't bothered. Kokomo sees I'm heading into action so he jumps off the bed and onto the window bed and is a foot from the snake. The snake doesn't care. Kokomo comes around the open shutter window and gets inches from the snake. No movement. Kokomo does the pre-cat pounce by flexing his back legs and practicing a paw movement like Ray Allen does on the foul line with one of his arms playing for the Miami Heat. He throws 98% foul shots because of this flexing and positioning. Snake doesn't care. Kokomo then pounces with his paw, misses a clean strike, and the snake now snake-like veers back. It's suddenly half the size, coiling backwards. . .I watch it coil away and around all the shape and frame of the shelf and head to a glass lamp shade which I'd love and die for Sweetheart to see a snake at work slimming its way over a pretty glass lamp shade, and the lamp is on and warm and the snake takes its time moving over and around the lamp, coiling, down to a small fixed window it tries to climb up onto all four small panes to get away and there is no entry.
The snake doesn't like this. The snake wants to be away. Kokomo is transfixed and watching.
I can see the snake is moving toward the 150 big collection of poetry books, mainly hardcovers, I brought up over the spring after I built a new hefty bookshelf for all the volumes, to be in this special place: the snake is slowly thinking of lifting itself up onto the books, and they're placed by some prominence and also size.
These are the large size books it's heading to: The Book of the Blues, Olson, Frank O'Hara, Henri Michaux, a bunch of their full collections, and at the end is a very large John Cage. He hasn't started climbing yet. Kokomo is now on the ground and stretching up and wondering how he can get up there and get the snake. He's an exceptional mouser for a boy. Sweetheart is restless but not awake. Pretty in her white top and yellow pants, sandy hair all comfy.
I go downstairs and first get on my big rubber boots. I'm barefoot and don't want a milk snake falling onto my bare feet. I don't mind snakes but I want to feel them in my hands only if I have to feel them. While pulling on my boots downstairs I'm trusting Kokomo and the snake are keeping one another transfixed as to where the other is and the snake hasn't climbed onto the books yet. I'm in the kitchen. I remember tongs we use to pull canning jars out of boiling water and think to get that tool for some service, like grabbing a snake.
I rush back upstairs. 12:20 AM.
Sweetheart is now awake because I've opened the door out to the porch before leaving. We're making ready for Lift Off. The snake is now onto Olson, winding and grinding, going slow, over O'Hara, about 12 books here, heading to the tall John Cage volume. When he gets to Ginsberg, Rimbaud and Frost it's over, he'll drop in behind those books and be lost to snake heaven. He'll be in the room again and again.
I grab the sucker near enough at the back of the head. He wraps himself immediately up around the tongs. Sweetheart has said with drama, "Oh, Jesus", hating snakes in her house. Yard okay, garden fine, woodpile of course. Near the bed and barefeet and snoozing, forget it charlie.
I laugh and show her the snake, the tongs, as I likewise move across the room onto the porch, rush river big sound darkness from all the rain this week and complete stillness otherwise and that lush dark as I throw tongs, snake and clear the room. For now.
Kokomo's not quite convinced.
He didn't see me grab, pull and take then leave with the snake. He knows something has happened but he isn't convinced the snake isn't there, and I trust his instincts enough to believe, well, maybe another snake is around. He keeps prowling, snooping, looking, stretching high on hind legs looking and I'm looking with my hunting companion and I guess we'll just have to wait.
"Olly Olly Am Free" is what we used to say at the top of our singing lungs as kids when we played the game kick-the-can. We'll watch and wait to see if snakes play this game.
Almost three weeks ago, Sweetheart walked upstairs in our farmhouse and I heard one of those screams Hollywood films love to have in the can. Nothing forced, nothing acted — a full-fledged, let-go, high & mighty scream. I could only wonder downstairs. I asked up the old New England stairwell and was told a snake was in the bedroom, stretched across the white wool rug, comfortable as can be, four-feet long. No one wants a snake in their bedroom. Kokomo our cat was in residence five feet away, perched, just studying. Sorry to say during our action to remove the snake, the snake got away. And we didn't know where.
We figured it must have gone back the way it came in. Back to the big woodshed where it belongs. Back into the stacks of oak, maple and especially yellow birch firewood where it likes to hang out all summer and shed its skin against the rough bark. I find the skins up there all the time. One week, two weeks, by that time we were convinced the snake was gone. We forgot about him.
Guess what? The snake was in the bedroom last night.
I came up at midnight, saw Kokomo on the end of our bed looking across to where he usually sleeps on the window bed (the one I built last year, he loves it). I had a dim night-light on in the room and came within one inch of putting my hand right down on the snake. It was on the bookcase with built in table-shelf I built for placing things. I was picking up a book, and did, to take to bed when I caught a shape in the corner of my eye and asked myself what is that? : a ribbon, a piece of Sweetheart's sewing fabric, a long bootlace? Then I came to the head and those two steady eyes. And whispered, "What da fuck...?!"
I looked at Kokomo, who looked at me, and we both said with no words, "Now what?" It's midnight. Sweetheart's fast asleep. We can't wake her up and make things worse. She'll never go back to sleep if the snake gets away.
The snake is curled like a master in-and-around-and-over-and-with all the stuff on the open shelf. It's a masterpiece of snake positioning.
I can't shoot it, don't want to shoot it, may shoot it. I have rat-shot in the corner and my .22 rifle.
I turn a flashlight onto the snake. It isn't bothered. Kokomo sees I'm heading into action so he jumps off the bed and onto the window bed and is a foot from the snake. The snake doesn't care. Kokomo comes around the open shutter window and gets inches from the snake. No movement. Kokomo does the pre-cat pounce by flexing his back legs and practicing a paw movement like Ray Allen does on the foul line with one of his arms playing for the Miami Heat. He throws 98% foul shots because of this flexing and positioning. Snake doesn't care. Kokomo then pounces with his paw, misses a clean strike, and the snake now snake-like veers back. It's suddenly half the size, coiling backwards. . .I watch it coil away and around all the shape and frame of the shelf and head to a glass lamp shade which I'd love and die for Sweetheart to see a snake at work slimming its way over a pretty glass lamp shade, and the lamp is on and warm and the snake takes its time moving over and around the lamp, coiling, down to a small fixed window it tries to climb up onto all four small panes to get away and there is no entry.
The snake doesn't like this. The snake wants to be away. Kokomo is transfixed and watching.
I can see the snake is moving toward the 150 big collection of poetry books, mainly hardcovers, I brought up over the spring after I built a new hefty bookshelf for all the volumes, to be in this special place: the snake is slowly thinking of lifting itself up onto the books, and they're placed by some prominence and also size.
These are the large size books it's heading to: The Book of the Blues, Olson, Frank O'Hara, Henri Michaux, a bunch of their full collections, and at the end is a very large John Cage. He hasn't started climbing yet. Kokomo is now on the ground and stretching up and wondering how he can get up there and get the snake. He's an exceptional mouser for a boy. Sweetheart is restless but not awake. Pretty in her white top and yellow pants, sandy hair all comfy.
I go downstairs and first get on my big rubber boots. I'm barefoot and don't want a milk snake falling onto my bare feet. I don't mind snakes but I want to feel them in my hands only if I have to feel them. While pulling on my boots downstairs I'm trusting Kokomo and the snake are keeping one another transfixed as to where the other is and the snake hasn't climbed onto the books yet. I'm in the kitchen. I remember tongs we use to pull canning jars out of boiling water and think to get that tool for some service, like grabbing a snake.
I rush back upstairs. 12:20 AM.
Sweetheart is now awake because I've opened the door out to the porch before leaving. We're making ready for Lift Off. The snake is now onto Olson, winding and grinding, going slow, over O'Hara, about 12 books here, heading to the tall John Cage volume. When he gets to Ginsberg, Rimbaud and Frost it's over, he'll drop in behind those books and be lost to snake heaven. He'll be in the room again and again.
I grab the sucker near enough at the back of the head. He wraps himself immediately up around the tongs. Sweetheart has said with drama, "Oh, Jesus", hating snakes in her house. Yard okay, garden fine, woodpile of course. Near the bed and barefeet and snoozing, forget it charlie.
I laugh and show her the snake, the tongs, as I likewise move across the room onto the porch, rush river big sound darkness from all the rain this week and complete stillness otherwise and that lush dark as I throw tongs, snake and clear the room. For now.
Kokomo's not quite convinced.
He didn't see me grab, pull and take then leave with the snake. He knows something has happened but he isn't convinced the snake isn't there, and I trust his instincts enough to believe, well, maybe another snake is around. He keeps prowling, snooping, looking, stretching high on hind legs looking and I'm looking with my hunting companion and I guess we'll just have to wait.
"Olly Olly Am Free" is what we used to say at the top of our singing lungs as kids when we played the game kick-the-can. We'll watch and wait to see if snakes play this game.
next day photo by Susan Arnold
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
ART OF THE RURAL ~
Borrowing this title from our friend Matthew Fluharty and his blog* on all things backcountry, folklore and hand-to-hand connection. Matthew was there from the beginning with my Hurricane Irene postings on the Birdhouse, and the subsequent events and serious trials with some neighbors and individuals and even town officials in our community. Nowhere is it ever automatic harmony — harmony takes work, honing, consideration, communication, sincerity and sweat. Not always doing what you want to to do, but learning what is best to do.
For those following us along the ups & downs the past few years I trust most understand this isn't solely a personal grievance or hardship on our end. We've had definite trouble with the abuse from some people, but the exposure via the Birdhouse has been to showcase how a community can fail, where it needn't. Where individuals, who are otherwise abiding, can become difficult, cruel and a threat. Where town officials, who often know better, can be led down a gnarled pathway by peer pressure and prejudice. All of this leading to dire consequences. Many may give up, turn to anger, fester a grudge and heighten hostility, even gear up a witch hunt mentality, spread lies and inaccuracies, and it all contributes to a backcountry lush & greenery, clear springs & brooks, becoming no more than deadwood & mudholes.
Exposure is good in the long run. Exposure is sunlight. It's a rooster crowing. It's birdsong, grain of the wood, moonlight after too much darkness. It's nothing to be afraid of.
After Hurricane Irene we had three separate incidents with neighbors who all acted with abuse onto our land and to ourselves as landowners. It was entirely wrong on their part and in fact so wrong it startled us that people could be this wrong and not admit to their mistake. I have written enough about how some neighbors can admit to their mistake and own up, and they have; we have. So it's possible. But I'm convinced the backcountry is now in serious trouble by the lack of proper stewardship and decency on a personal level one to another. You can have all the cleanup jamborees and concentration on the environment and protecting plant life you want, but if people lose touch with the good manners one to another, which is the genesis of a healthy environment, it's all lost.
How you treat yourself, your neighbor, your possessions, your homestead, your animals, your attitude, your mind, all contributes to what will happen to our earth. Global warming to the environment is secondary and a direct contribution from the global warming between ourselves.
Grandma was right — "One bad egg can spoil the lot."
So you have a few ugly-minded neighbors wanting to spoil, they will spoil, and peer pressure and prejudice is just itching to get activated. In our case some bad neighbors, gummy already with grudges, got the ball rolling and unfortunately for the town spoke to an unqualified employee who passed along ugly mistruths, which only stormed the wrath of the ugly ones ten-fold. Qualified town officials should have jumped onto this repair immediately, but they didn't. In the meantime the fire spread within the community. The unqualified one was fired but so what. He was actually a likable fellow, our son's age and we knew him through years at the local school, but he shared damaging misinformation that he later admitted wasn't even about us but another couple, and by then the snowball hurdling downhill is bigger & bigger. No one is taking responsibility. We try individually, we try through lawmakers, we try through the town, we try with open letters, and we garner deep support from a world community, and cops that have to address broken laws, but nothing comes as it should and must from the heart of the countryside, right where we live, right where the problem is, right who the problem is with. And this is the problem. It isn't complicated. It's right before us. It is us.
Stay disciplined, work at it, don't lose faith, bypass anger, and results start to show. In the long run good people will show forth inch by inch, they do come. The law is a mighty paradox and not always lawful, not even close, but within it there are decent folk at work. Town officials always have a few deadbeats, it's a town after all, not a commonwealth and not a trained elective branch, it's a hodgepodge organic twist of fate made up of many who love their town and their homes and families and they're trying their best up against others who may be a mess and within a structure that wants to retain its pride. I'm sharing a letter below which shows some of that pride. After a few years of my wife and I tolerating some bad eggs in our neighborhood and the lies they spread, gained from a town official that our town finally had to admit existed. We're thankful the town came to their senses.
A year before that a Sheriff's department and court system leveled a judgment against another abusive neighboring family. Again, this isn't about loud music being played, or fussing with a border dispute; it's about abuse to private property and a way of life that wishes to abide quietly and together with a backwoods environment. It's about knowing a river system and woodlands and solace are there to be shared, one with another. None of the land is posted, and everyone is welcome, but welcomed in the spirit of respecting a serenity of what is naturally there, long before we got here. That should only take understanding, and wishing to communicate.
It isn't lost on us that every single thorny person hasn't communicated and refuses to; while every single person who has communicated has also helped moved things along.
Grandpa said, "A rolling stone gathers no moss."
Borrowing this title from our friend Matthew Fluharty and his blog* on all things backcountry, folklore and hand-to-hand connection. Matthew was there from the beginning with my Hurricane Irene postings on the Birdhouse, and the subsequent events and serious trials with some neighbors and individuals and even town officials in our community. Nowhere is it ever automatic harmony — harmony takes work, honing, consideration, communication, sincerity and sweat. Not always doing what you want to to do, but learning what is best to do.
For those following us along the ups & downs the past few years I trust most understand this isn't solely a personal grievance or hardship on our end. We've had definite trouble with the abuse from some people, but the exposure via the Birdhouse has been to showcase how a community can fail, where it needn't. Where individuals, who are otherwise abiding, can become difficult, cruel and a threat. Where town officials, who often know better, can be led down a gnarled pathway by peer pressure and prejudice. All of this leading to dire consequences. Many may give up, turn to anger, fester a grudge and heighten hostility, even gear up a witch hunt mentality, spread lies and inaccuracies, and it all contributes to a backcountry lush & greenery, clear springs & brooks, becoming no more than deadwood & mudholes.
Exposure is good in the long run. Exposure is sunlight. It's a rooster crowing. It's birdsong, grain of the wood, moonlight after too much darkness. It's nothing to be afraid of.
After Hurricane Irene we had three separate incidents with neighbors who all acted with abuse onto our land and to ourselves as landowners. It was entirely wrong on their part and in fact so wrong it startled us that people could be this wrong and not admit to their mistake. I have written enough about how some neighbors can admit to their mistake and own up, and they have; we have. So it's possible. But I'm convinced the backcountry is now in serious trouble by the lack of proper stewardship and decency on a personal level one to another. You can have all the cleanup jamborees and concentration on the environment and protecting plant life you want, but if people lose touch with the good manners one to another, which is the genesis of a healthy environment, it's all lost.
How you treat yourself, your neighbor, your possessions, your homestead, your animals, your attitude, your mind, all contributes to what will happen to our earth. Global warming to the environment is secondary and a direct contribution from the global warming between ourselves.
Grandma was right — "One bad egg can spoil the lot."
So you have a few ugly-minded neighbors wanting to spoil, they will spoil, and peer pressure and prejudice is just itching to get activated. In our case some bad neighbors, gummy already with grudges, got the ball rolling and unfortunately for the town spoke to an unqualified employee who passed along ugly mistruths, which only stormed the wrath of the ugly ones ten-fold. Qualified town officials should have jumped onto this repair immediately, but they didn't. In the meantime the fire spread within the community. The unqualified one was fired but so what. He was actually a likable fellow, our son's age and we knew him through years at the local school, but he shared damaging misinformation that he later admitted wasn't even about us but another couple, and by then the snowball hurdling downhill is bigger & bigger. No one is taking responsibility. We try individually, we try through lawmakers, we try through the town, we try with open letters, and we garner deep support from a world community, and cops that have to address broken laws, but nothing comes as it should and must from the heart of the countryside, right where we live, right where the problem is, right who the problem is with. And this is the problem. It isn't complicated. It's right before us. It is us.
Stay disciplined, work at it, don't lose faith, bypass anger, and results start to show. In the long run good people will show forth inch by inch, they do come. The law is a mighty paradox and not always lawful, not even close, but within it there are decent folk at work. Town officials always have a few deadbeats, it's a town after all, not a commonwealth and not a trained elective branch, it's a hodgepodge organic twist of fate made up of many who love their town and their homes and families and they're trying their best up against others who may be a mess and within a structure that wants to retain its pride. I'm sharing a letter below which shows some of that pride. After a few years of my wife and I tolerating some bad eggs in our neighborhood and the lies they spread, gained from a town official that our town finally had to admit existed. We're thankful the town came to their senses.
A year before that a Sheriff's department and court system leveled a judgment against another abusive neighboring family. Again, this isn't about loud music being played, or fussing with a border dispute; it's about abuse to private property and a way of life that wishes to abide quietly and together with a backwoods environment. It's about knowing a river system and woodlands and solace are there to be shared, one with another. None of the land is posted, and everyone is welcome, but welcomed in the spirit of respecting a serenity of what is naturally there, long before we got here. That should only take understanding, and wishing to communicate.
It isn't lost on us that every single thorny person hasn't communicated and refuses to; while every single person who has communicated has also helped moved things along.
Grandpa said, "A rolling stone gathers no moss."
Monday, June 17, 2013
HOMESTEADER ~
I am afraid all my friends think I am very forgetful and that you think
I am ungrateful as well, but I am going to plead not guilty. Right
after Christmas Mr. Stewart came down with la grippe and was so
miserable that it kept me busy trying to relieve him. Out here where we
can get no physician we have to dope ourselves, so that I had to be
housekeeper, nurse, doctor, and general overseer. That explains my long
silence.
And now I want to thank you for your kind thought in prolonging our Christmas. The magazines were much appreciated. They relieved some weary night-watches, and the box did Jerrine more good than the medicine I was having to give her for la grippe. She was content to stay in bed and enjoy the contents of her box.
When I read of the hard times among the Denver poor, I feel like urging them every one to get out and file on land. I am very enthusiastic about women homesteading. It really requires less strength and labor to raise plenty to satisfy a large family than it does to go out to wash, with the added satisfaction of knowing that their job will not be lost to them if they care to keep it. Even if improving the place does go slowly, it is that much done to stay done. Whatever is raised is the homesteader's own, and there is no house-rent to pay. This year Jerrine cut and dropped enough potatoes to raise a ton of fine potatoes. She wanted to try, so we let her, and you will remember that she is but six years old. We had a man to break the ground and cover the potatoes for her and the man irrigated them once. That was all that was done until digging time, when they were ploughed out and Jerrine picked them up. Any woman strong enough to go out by the day could have done every bit of the work and put in two or three times that much, and it would have been so much more pleasant than to work so hard in the city and then be on starvation rations in the winter.
To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.
Experimenting need cost the homesteader no more than the work, because by applying to the Department of Agriculture at Washington he can get enough of any seed and as many kinds as he wants to make a thorough trial, and it doesn't even cost postage. Also one can always get bulletins from there and from the Experiment Station of one's own State concerning any problem or as many problems as may come up. I would not, for anything, allow Mr. Stewart to do anything toward improving my place, for I want the fun and the experience myself. And I want to be able to speak from experience when I tell others what they can do. Theories are very beautiful, but facts are what must be had, and what I intend to give some time.
Here I am boring you to death with things that cannot interest you! You'd think I wanted you to homestead, wouldn't you? But I am only thinking of the troops of tired, worried women, sometimes even cold and hungry, scared to death of losing their places to work, who could have plenty to eat, who could have good fires by gathering the wood, and comfortable homes of their own, if they but had the courage and determination to get them.
I must stop right now before you get so tired you will not answer. With much love to you from Jerrine and myself, I am
Elinore Pruitt Stewart
1876-1933
THE JOYS OF HOMESTEADING ~ Chapter XX
January 23, 1913.
Dear Mrs. Coney,—
And now I want to thank you for your kind thought in prolonging our Christmas. The magazines were much appreciated. They relieved some weary night-watches, and the box did Jerrine more good than the medicine I was having to give her for la grippe. She was content to stay in bed and enjoy the contents of her box.
When I read of the hard times among the Denver poor, I feel like urging them every one to get out and file on land. I am very enthusiastic about women homesteading. It really requires less strength and labor to raise plenty to satisfy a large family than it does to go out to wash, with the added satisfaction of knowing that their job will not be lost to them if they care to keep it. Even if improving the place does go slowly, it is that much done to stay done. Whatever is raised is the homesteader's own, and there is no house-rent to pay. This year Jerrine cut and dropped enough potatoes to raise a ton of fine potatoes. She wanted to try, so we let her, and you will remember that she is but six years old. We had a man to break the ground and cover the potatoes for her and the man irrigated them once. That was all that was done until digging time, when they were ploughed out and Jerrine picked them up. Any woman strong enough to go out by the day could have done every bit of the work and put in two or three times that much, and it would have been so much more pleasant than to work so hard in the city and then be on starvation rations in the winter.
To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.
Experimenting need cost the homesteader no more than the work, because by applying to the Department of Agriculture at Washington he can get enough of any seed and as many kinds as he wants to make a thorough trial, and it doesn't even cost postage. Also one can always get bulletins from there and from the Experiment Station of one's own State concerning any problem or as many problems as may come up. I would not, for anything, allow Mr. Stewart to do anything toward improving my place, for I want the fun and the experience myself. And I want to be able to speak from experience when I tell others what they can do. Theories are very beautiful, but facts are what must be had, and what I intend to give some time.
Here I am boring you to death with things that cannot interest you! You'd think I wanted you to homestead, wouldn't you? But I am only thinking of the troops of tired, worried women, sometimes even cold and hungry, scared to death of losing their places to work, who could have plenty to eat, who could have good fires by gathering the wood, and comfortable homes of their own, if they but had the courage and determination to get them.
I must stop right now before you get so tired you will not answer. With much love to you from Jerrine and myself, I am
Yours affectionately,
Elinore Rupert Stewart.
In 1909 a widowed "washlady" traveled from Denver, Colorado to Burnt Fork, Wyoming with her ten year old daughter "Jerrine" to take on work as a housekeeper for a Scotch-American cattleman. Elinore Rupert Stewart soon learned that Wyoming had three seasons: "winter, July and August." She wrote twenty-six letters to a friend back in Colorado that were collected and published in 1914 as Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Written between April 1909 and November 1913, the letters showcase her arrival in Wyoming, the purchase and homesteading of her own plot of land as she continued to work for the rancher, her marriage to the man in 1910, and their life together even as she continued to work her own land. Though not intended originally for later publication, Stewart's missives are frontier portrait masterpieces in themselves. Those knowing the motion picture "Heartland" may recognize the inspiration of Stewart's life and writing in that film.
LETTERS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
Elinore Rupert Stewart.
In 1909 a widowed "washlady" traveled from Denver, Colorado to Burnt Fork, Wyoming with her ten year old daughter "Jerrine" to take on work as a housekeeper for a Scotch-American cattleman. Elinore Rupert Stewart soon learned that Wyoming had three seasons: "winter, July and August." She wrote twenty-six letters to a friend back in Colorado that were collected and published in 1914 as Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Written between April 1909 and November 1913, the letters showcase her arrival in Wyoming, the purchase and homesteading of her own plot of land as she continued to work for the rancher, her marriage to the man in 1910, and their life together even as she continued to work her own land. Though not intended originally for later publication, Stewart's missives are frontier portrait masterpieces in themselves. Those knowing the motion picture "Heartland" may recognize the inspiration of Stewart's life and writing in that film.
LETTERS
OF A WOMAN
HOMESTEADER
BY
Elinore Pruitt Stewart
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
EARTH ~
By Rebecca Solnit
One summer some years ago, on a peninsula jutting off another peninsula off the west coast of Iceland, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. The impeccable whiteness of their feathers, the sharpness of their scimitar wings, the fierceness of their cries, and the steepness of their dives were all enchanting.
Terns were once called sea swallows for their deeply forked tails and grace in the air, and in Latin, arctic terns were named sterna paradisaea by a pietist Danish cleric named Erik Pontoppidan, at the end of a turbulent career. It’s not clear why in 1763 he called the black-capped, white-feathered arctic terns sterna paradisaea: birds -- or terns -- of paradise. He could not have known about their extraordinary migration, back in the day when naturalists -- and Pontoppidan himself in his book on Norway -- thought swallows buried themselves in the mud in winter and hibernated, rather than imagining they and other birds flew far south to other climes.
Of all living things, arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses, like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless effort. The lives of angels must be like this.
The far north is an unearthly earth, where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. Everyone walks on water, which is a solid. In winter, you can build palaces out of it, or houses out of snow. Ice is blue. Snow insulates. Water crystallizes into floating mountains that destroy whatever collides with them. Many other things turn hard as rock in the cold. Nothing decays, and so time stops for the dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be treacherous.
Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and further north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses, and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year; and nearly every species but the reindeer and some of the summer birds is carnivorous. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn’t rise or rises for an hour or two a day. And at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.
Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The further north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days went from nearly 17 to 20 hours long, and by June there is no true darkness, no night. The sun dipped low around midnight or after and there were spectacular sunsets that melted into sunrises, because the sun never went entirely away.
That summer among the terns, I lived at latitude 65, about as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and one degree south of the Arctic Circle. If you go farther north, to, say, the town of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Arctic at latitude 78, which I later visited, the sun rises in late April and stays above the horizon until nearly the end of August, when sunset finally comes -- a few minutes before sunrise. There, winter is a night as long as that summer day, running from the end of October until the middle of February. The twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe, between the great day and the great night that each lasts 1,000 hours or more.
Long ago, I had read about the white nights of St. Petersburg in Russia, at only 59 degrees north, and I had once spent a couple of weeks in the Canadian wilderness at that latitude near midsummer, when night was just a blush of darkness that generally began and ended while I was asleep in my tent. I had always wanted to see the white nights farther north, but actually living through them was a little disorienting.
In Praise of Darkness
Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn’t matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis.
The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. In darkness dreams awaken and dreamers merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next.
Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born. But darkness is a pejorative in English, and the term has often carried emotional, moral, and religious overtones as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and white knights. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.
When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the Arctic’s biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day, light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land.
Journey to the Center
There was only one dark place left in Iceland that summer, or so it seemed to me, and I went there again and again. Elín Hansdóttir, a young artist who had been instrumental in the chain of coincidences that brought me to Iceland, had made a labyrinth titled Path. In a big room in Iceland’s National Gallery, with the help of two meticulous carpenters, she built a zigzag route of Sheetrock that gave off that material’s dusty clean aroma. One person at a time entered Path, and a pair of watchers in the outer gallery monitored entries and exits and occasionally went in for a rescue, like lifeguards.
When you stepped in from the daylight and the door closed behind you, the space seemed to be absolutely dark and then your eyes adjusted to the faint, faint light. You could move forward when you were blind or wait until you could see, but placing a hand on one side of the walls helped you travel too. The path turned at sharp angles, so that you knew that you were being turned around and around, and you lost track of the distance that you were going.
The light that leaked through the intentional, careful cracks in the walls and ceiling was faintly lavender blue -- it came from fluorescent tubes -- and it streamed across the space in strange ways. It was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard pale surfaces.
Your expectations reversed, you moved deeper into the labyrinth, knowing now that you did not know what was solid, what was space you could occupy, but would have to test it, over and over. Path was a space in which you perfected the art of not knowing where you were, of finding out one literal step at a time. Did the path fork? Or was there only one route? How far did it go? Was the way out the same as the way in? All this would have to be found with the hands, eyes, and feet as you traveled.
At the end, the walls began to press together and it was as dark as it had been at that first moment you stepped in and closed the door behind yourself. And then you could go no farther. It seemed as though it ought to feel claustrophobic, but I found in it an embrace of darkness, a destination, a handmade night. There and back again took me 10 or 15 minutes by the clock, but the time inside had no such quantifiable measure. It was time apart, symbolic time, a slow journey to the heart of the unknown and the unknowable. I kept coming back all summer, seven times in all, once for so long the attendants grew concerned. I felt at home there, more myself than anywhere else in Iceland, somehow. Jules Verne’s novel about Iceland was called Journey to the Center of the Earth, and this felt like such a journey, or such a center.
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.
The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.
Paths, Empaths, Journeys Into and Toward, By Touch and By Ear
If Path was a book, it was about not knowing, about being lost, and about darkness, the darkness of the deep interior, a book you read with your feet. Anatomists long ago named the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance, the labyrinth. The name suggests that if the labyrinth is the passage through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter labyrinths as though we were sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what? To be a sound traveling toward the mind -- is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread?
Who hears you? We live inside each other’s thoughts and works. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange. The tragedy of the imprisoned, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized is to be silenced in this great ongoing conversation, this symphony that is another way to describe the world.
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.
Kindness, compassion, generosity, are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt -- maybe they get insulted or they’re just very tired -- and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don’t witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.
It’s easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you -- your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations -- films, printed stories, second-hand accounts -- you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.
This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfuhlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.
The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.
Few if any of us will travel like arctic terns in endless light, but in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175711/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_the_art_of_not_knowing_where_you_are/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=55621fb2d5-TD_Solnit6_13_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-55621fb2d5-308804857#more
Rebecca Solnit has been writing for TomDispatch for a decade, mostly on non-electoral politics, uprisings, and insurrections, and she is the author of 14 books, including The Faraway Nearby (Viking), published today and from which this essay is adapted.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. Copyright Rebecca Solnit 2013
Ellidaey Island (Elliðaey), Iceland
The Far North of Experience
In Praise of Darkness (and Light)
One summer some years ago, on a peninsula jutting off another peninsula off the west coast of Iceland, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. The impeccable whiteness of their feathers, the sharpness of their scimitar wings, the fierceness of their cries, and the steepness of their dives were all enchanting.
Terns were once called sea swallows for their deeply forked tails and grace in the air, and in Latin, arctic terns were named sterna paradisaea by a pietist Danish cleric named Erik Pontoppidan, at the end of a turbulent career. It’s not clear why in 1763 he called the black-capped, white-feathered arctic terns sterna paradisaea: birds -- or terns -- of paradise. He could not have known about their extraordinary migration, back in the day when naturalists -- and Pontoppidan himself in his book on Norway -- thought swallows buried themselves in the mud in winter and hibernated, rather than imagining they and other birds flew far south to other climes.
Of all living things, arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses, like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless effort. The lives of angels must be like this.
The far north is an unearthly earth, where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. Everyone walks on water, which is a solid. In winter, you can build palaces out of it, or houses out of snow. Ice is blue. Snow insulates. Water crystallizes into floating mountains that destroy whatever collides with them. Many other things turn hard as rock in the cold. Nothing decays, and so time stops for the dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be treacherous.
Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and further north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses, and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year; and nearly every species but the reindeer and some of the summer birds is carnivorous. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn’t rise or rises for an hour or two a day. And at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.
Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The further north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days went from nearly 17 to 20 hours long, and by June there is no true darkness, no night. The sun dipped low around midnight or after and there were spectacular sunsets that melted into sunrises, because the sun never went entirely away.
That summer among the terns, I lived at latitude 65, about as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and one degree south of the Arctic Circle. If you go farther north, to, say, the town of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Arctic at latitude 78, which I later visited, the sun rises in late April and stays above the horizon until nearly the end of August, when sunset finally comes -- a few minutes before sunrise. There, winter is a night as long as that summer day, running from the end of October until the middle of February. The twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe, between the great day and the great night that each lasts 1,000 hours or more.
Long ago, I had read about the white nights of St. Petersburg in Russia, at only 59 degrees north, and I had once spent a couple of weeks in the Canadian wilderness at that latitude near midsummer, when night was just a blush of darkness that generally began and ended while I was asleep in my tent. I had always wanted to see the white nights farther north, but actually living through them was a little disorienting.
In Praise of Darkness
Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn’t matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis.
The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. In darkness dreams awaken and dreamers merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next.
Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born. But darkness is a pejorative in English, and the term has often carried emotional, moral, and religious overtones as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and white knights. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.
When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the Arctic’s biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day, light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land.
Journey to the Center
There was only one dark place left in Iceland that summer, or so it seemed to me, and I went there again and again. Elín Hansdóttir, a young artist who had been instrumental in the chain of coincidences that brought me to Iceland, had made a labyrinth titled Path. In a big room in Iceland’s National Gallery, with the help of two meticulous carpenters, she built a zigzag route of Sheetrock that gave off that material’s dusty clean aroma. One person at a time entered Path, and a pair of watchers in the outer gallery monitored entries and exits and occasionally went in for a rescue, like lifeguards.
When you stepped in from the daylight and the door closed behind you, the space seemed to be absolutely dark and then your eyes adjusted to the faint, faint light. You could move forward when you were blind or wait until you could see, but placing a hand on one side of the walls helped you travel too. The path turned at sharp angles, so that you knew that you were being turned around and around, and you lost track of the distance that you were going.
The light that leaked through the intentional, careful cracks in the walls and ceiling was faintly lavender blue -- it came from fluorescent tubes -- and it streamed across the space in strange ways. It was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard pale surfaces.
Your expectations reversed, you moved deeper into the labyrinth, knowing now that you did not know what was solid, what was space you could occupy, but would have to test it, over and over. Path was a space in which you perfected the art of not knowing where you were, of finding out one literal step at a time. Did the path fork? Or was there only one route? How far did it go? Was the way out the same as the way in? All this would have to be found with the hands, eyes, and feet as you traveled.
At the end, the walls began to press together and it was as dark as it had been at that first moment you stepped in and closed the door behind yourself. And then you could go no farther. It seemed as though it ought to feel claustrophobic, but I found in it an embrace of darkness, a destination, a handmade night. There and back again took me 10 or 15 minutes by the clock, but the time inside had no such quantifiable measure. It was time apart, symbolic time, a slow journey to the heart of the unknown and the unknowable. I kept coming back all summer, seven times in all, once for so long the attendants grew concerned. I felt at home there, more myself than anywhere else in Iceland, somehow. Jules Verne’s novel about Iceland was called Journey to the Center of the Earth, and this felt like such a journey, or such a center.
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.
The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.
Paths, Empaths, Journeys Into and Toward, By Touch and By Ear
If Path was a book, it was about not knowing, about being lost, and about darkness, the darkness of the deep interior, a book you read with your feet. Anatomists long ago named the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance, the labyrinth. The name suggests that if the labyrinth is the passage through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter labyrinths as though we were sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what? To be a sound traveling toward the mind -- is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread?
Who hears you? We live inside each other’s thoughts and works. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange. The tragedy of the imprisoned, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized is to be silenced in this great ongoing conversation, this symphony that is another way to describe the world.
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.
Kindness, compassion, generosity, are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt -- maybe they get insulted or they’re just very tired -- and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don’t witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.
It’s easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you -- your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations -- films, printed stories, second-hand accounts -- you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.
This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfuhlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.
The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.
Few if any of us will travel like arctic terns in endless light, but in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit.
the island:
Friday, June 14, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
SAMUEL R. DELANY ~
The first time I interview Samuel Delany, we meet in a diner near his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. It is a classic greasy spoon that serves strong coffee and breakfast all day. We sit near the window, and Delany, who is a serious morning person, presides over the city as it wakes. Dressed in what is often his uniform—black jeans and a black button-down shirt, ear pierced with multiple rings—he looks imperial. His beard, dramatically long and starkly white, is his most distinctive feature. “You are famous, I can just tell, I know you from somewhere,” a stranger tells him in the 2007 documentary Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. Such intrusions are common, because Delany, whose work has been described as limitless, has lived a life that flouts the conventional. He is a gay man who was married to a woman for twelve years; he is a black man who, because of his light complexion, is regularly asked to identify his ethnicity. Yet he seems hardly bothered by such attempts to figure him out. Instead, he laughs, and more often than not it is a quiet chuckle expressed mostly in his eyes.
Delany was born on April 1, 1942, in Harlem, by then the cultural epicenter of black America. His father, who had come to New York from Raleigh, North Carolina, ran Levy and Delany, a funeral home to which Langston Hughes refers in his stories about the neighborhood. Delany grew up above his father’s business. During the day he attended Dalton, an elite and primarily white prep school on the Upper East Side; at home, his mother, a senior clerk at the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch, on 125th Street, nurtured his exceptional intelligence and kaleidoscopic interests. He sang in the choir at St. Philip’s, Harlem’s black Episcopalian church, composed atonal music, played multiple instruments, and choreographed dances at the General Grant Community Center. In 1956, he earned a spot at the Bronx High School of Science, where he would meet his future wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker.
In the early sixties, the newly married couple settled in the East Village. There, Delany wrote his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. He was nineteen. Over the next six years, he published eight more science-fiction novels, among them the Nebula Award winners Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967). Even then, his exploration of issues of sexuality, ethnicity, and gender—like the polyamorous love between three spacecraft navigators in Babel-17, or alien colonization and the relationship between the marginalized and history in The Einstein Intersection—distinguished him from other authors working in the genre. Even when set in fantastic worlds, like the Star-Pit, a city that squats at the galaxy’s edge, or Nevèrÿon, an ancient, dragon-filled land whose inhabitants are just learning to write, Delany’s work mirrors the generational shifts and concerns of his times.
In 1971, he completed a draft of a book he had been reworking for years. Dhalgren, his story of the Kid, a schizoid, amnesiac wanderer, takes place in Bellona, a shell of a city in the American Midwest isolated from the rest of the world and populated by warring gangs and holographic beasts. When Delany, Hacker, and their one-year-old daughter flew back to the States just before Christmas Eve in 1974, they saw copies of Dhalgren filling book racks at Kennedy Airport even before they reached customs. Over the next decade, the novel sold more than a million copies and was called a masterpiece by some critics. William Gibson famously described it as “a riddle that was never meant to be solved.”
When we talk, Delany still seems humbled by that novel’s success, yet he mentions more than once that it did not change his life in any real way: he still struggled to publish his more controversial works. One of these was “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” from the Return to Nevèrÿon series, four volumes comprising eleven interlocking pieces. Written in 1984, it was the first work of fiction about aids published by a major publisher, Bantam. During the mid-eighties, Dalton Books, then the largest bookseller in America, refused to stock his books or those of other science-fiction and fantasy authors who dealt with gay content, since novels in those genres are often read by high-school students. As a result, Bantam backed out of publishing the fourth book in the series, and much of his older work wasn’t reprinted. Delany, however, turned to small presses and academic publishers, and to date he has nearly forty books in print.
Over the course of almost a year, I met with Delany eight times. We never returned to the diner; as we finished that first interview, the waitress informed us they would be closing forever that afternoon. We conducted one of our longest interviews in a café-bar in Philadelphia called Woody’s, where the walls are painted bordello red. Young men milled about in leather vests, and someone kindly picked up our bill. I had been reading Octavia Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession,” in which she mentions that when she started out as a writer of science fiction, Samuel Delany was perhaps the only black author writing in the genre. “What good is science fiction to black people?” Butler asks. “What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?”
I pose these questions to Delany, and he responds excitedly: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
—Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
(Additional questions posed by Jenny Davidson.)
By Samuel Delany’s request, this interview is dedicated to Joanna Russ, 1937–2011.
In the same years, I found the Signet paperback of Radiguet’s Devil in the Flesh and, a few months after that, the much superior Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, translated as Count d’Orgel in the first trade paperback from Grove Press, with Cocteau’s deliciously suggestive “introduction” about its tragic young author, salted with such dicta as “Which family doesn’t have its own child prodigy? They have invented the word. Of course, child prodigies exist, just as there are extraordinary men. But they are rarely the same. Age means nothing. What astounds me is Rimbaud’s work, not the age at which he wrote it. All great poets have written by seventeen. The greatest are the ones who manage to make us forget it.”
Now that was something to think about—and clearly it had been said about someone who had not expected to die at twenty of typhoid from eating bad oysters.
Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that’s how people perceive me, they have to say I’m prolific. But I don’t find that either complimentary or accurate.
Not a full decade on, when I was twenty-seven, Stonewall happened. Many of the political conclusions that became generalized with Stonewall—such as coming out of the closet to end the nightmare of gay blackmail—I’d arrived at in theory at eighteen or nineteen. But I didn’t start acting on them until I moved to San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1968.
In Harlem, though, there was jazz culture. We lived right down Seventh Avenue from Small’s Paradise, which I never went to, because I was a kid, but I knew it was there. Or the Red Rooster. They were places my parents and their friends went. I knew the Lafayette Theatre had once been right across the street from where I lived, but it wasn’t now. Orson Welles had directed plays at the old Lafayette. My mother told me how she’d gone there to see the black actor Canada Lee in Welles’s all-black production of Macbeth, when she was a young woman. Harlemites called it Blackbeth, so that’s what I grew up thinking was its actual title, till I saw some posters for it on display at the Museum of the City of New York.
My childhood was massively and miserably contradictory. I’d been singled out as a smart child almost from infancy. Back in 1947, when I was five, I’d spent six weeks with my mother at the Vassar Summer Institute for the Gifted. The institute was very near our summer home in Hopewell Junction, New York, and my father would drive out to visit us on the Vassar campus on odd weekends. My mother had a sense that I was a really bright kid, and I thrived on the institute’s music, drama, and science programs.
Yet from ages eight to sixteen, I had to go twice a week to special tutors and psychologists who tried to help me with my appalling spelling and often incomprehensible writing. The psychotherapy continued till I was twenty-three. There was this bewildering contradiction between my clear intelligence and my extreme dyslexia. And nobody understood why. The fact that I was a black kid from Harlem in a private school full of white kids added its own tangle to the general confusion. In Jill Lauren’s book on dyslexia and learning disabilities, Succeeding with Learning Disabilities, I’m used as a case study, along with my daughter, who’s inherited it.
What’s wrong with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it fails to take into account the whole economy of discourse, which is a linguistic level that accomplishes lots of the soft-edge conceptual contouring around ideas, whether we have available a one- or two-word name for it or only a set of informal many-word descriptions that are not completely fixed. Aphra Behn clearly describes the “numb fish” and its calamitous effects on other fish, animals, and human beings, so that we all recognize it as what we call the “electric eel” today. But she did it in the mid-seventeenth century, well before anyone had thought of electricity or Franklin had sent his kite up into the lightning storm. Thus falls the Sapir-Whorf.
Discourse is a pretty forceful process, perhaps the most forceful of the superstructural processes available. It’s what generates the values and suggestions around a concept, even if the concept has no name, or hasn’t the name it will eventually have. It determines the way a concept is used and the ways that are considered mistaken. The following may be a bit too glib, but I think it’s reasonable to say that if language is what allows us to think things, then discourse is what controls the way we think about things. And the second—discourse—has primacy.
For a couple of years in my early twenties, I was a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf, though I had never encountered the term, or even read a description of it, which begins to hint at what’s wrong with it as a theory. I even wrote a novel that hinged on the concept—Babel-17.
Perhaps the largest problem the lack of a single term imposes is that it becomes difficult to individuate the idea. Where does it begin and where does it end in terms of what it refers to out in the real world? The more complex verbal support there is for a concept, the easier it is to critique.
If I’d had the term Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it might have been easier for me to realize that it was just incorrect—in the same way that when, at twenty-one, I first encountered the word dyslexia, I was able to realize I wasn’t the only one with these problems, that it was a condition rather than an individual and personal failure on my part, and the stories I’d read about writers such as Yeats, who didn’t learn to read until he was sixteen, or Flaubert, who was so backward in his reading and writing that he was known as l’idiot de la famille, now made much more sense. The realization of the flaws in the Sapir-Whorf, in that they caused me to begin considering the more complex linguistic mechanisms of discourse, you might say gave me my lifetime project.
When I was thirteen, I read War and Peace—the first two hundred pages over two or three days, then I stayed up for thirty-six hours straight to read the rest, with my father coming in every few hours during the night to tell me to put the light out and go to sleep. Interruptions aside, it was a wonderful experience—though I slept all Sunday. That’s the point I decided novels were where it was at.
I read whatever books were lying around—Freddy the Pig and William Faulkner, Raintree County and Mandingo and Frank Yerby and Studs Lonigan and God’s Little Acre and the Alexandria Quartet. I tackled Dylan Thomas and The Waste Land before I left the eighth grade and probably every popular-science book George Gamow published. My downstairs neighbor, who was a writer of young-adult novels, in a moment of who-knows-what excitement, enthused to me one afternoon about Colette’s Chéri and The Last of Chéri and Chester Himes, whom he had known personally. By then, I had a library card, so I read them.
The novels that made me want to write them were Huckleberry Finn—my father read it to me one winter, a couple of chapters a night, after I was in bed, one of few truly pleasant memories I have of the man—and A High Wind in Jamaica and Great Expectations. And Pale Fire, a novel that reinspired me to want to make more such books in the world. The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, and My Mortal Enemy, along with all of Cather’s stories and nonfiction writing. La Princesse de Clèves, Madame de La Fayette’s wonderful seventeenth-century psychological study on which Radiguet modeled his Count d’Orgel, or Sentimental Education, or Lost Illusions, or Mrs. Dalloway or The Waves or The Years. They are all books that have made me—and, oh yes, others—want to write still other books.
The dyslexia didn’t much hamper my reading. What it affected was my writing. I couldn’t spell anything! In an early short story I wrote, a woman who works in a five-and-ten at one point exclaims, “Customers! Customers! Customers!” All three were spelled differently—and all three wrong. I could not spell the word paper three times right in a row!
I had already tried to write a novel, something called Lost Stars. It was about a very lonely young man named Erik Torrent who wandered around the city, looking at things. I started it when I was thirteen and finished it when I was fourteen. It had about everything wrong with it such a narrative could have. People were very nice about not telling me that. I suspect they were just impressed I’d filled out that many pages with words.
One exception was music. Science had a wonderful music-appreciation course, in which I learned all about the Second Viennese School. It changed my life. We listened to a part of Berg’s opera Wozzeck and, after we listened to Webern’s Passacaglia, heard the story of his death, how Webern had been shot by an American soldier when he went out on his front steps for a cigarette after curfew. Webern and Berg have been among my favorite composers ever since. A lot of the students, when our music teacher played the last three scenes of Wozzeck, began to snicker and asked, “What is that? That’s just noise! What kind of music is that?” But I was knocked out by its expressivity. All I could think was, Wow! Our music teacher explained the twelve-tone system to us, and I went home and started composing a twelve-tone piece that afternoon.
It took me a while to realize that if a teacher had taken me aside and said, “Come on, Chip, sit down, let’s talk, this is how you have to do this,” probably I would have learned how to negotiate it. But nobody did.
Any book you have to work yourself up to read. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas, which I’ve now read four or five times and taught twice, and Plato and Platonism, which I also teach. It took me two years to get into the first. I devoured the second over two evenings. When such books influence you, if that’s the proper word for what I’m describing, it’s what you imagine they do that they don’t do that you yourself then try to effect in your own work—that, to me, is what’s important. What these books actually accomplish is very important, of course! But the whole set of things they might have accomplished expands your own palette of aesthetic possibilities in the ways that, should you undertake them, will be your offering on the altar of originality.
Before I read Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror books and stories, I really thought they would be the Nevèrÿon tales, or at least something like them. But I discovered that, rich and colorful as they were, they weren’t. So I had to write them myself.
And Uncle Hubert, who was a twenty-three-year-old law student at NYU at the time, turned to him and said, “You are a real country nigger, ain’t you?”
When my father told me this, it was just a funny story. But he was so disappointed at not seeing the skyscrapers right away, I decided, thirty-five years after his death, to include the anecdote in “Atlantis: Model 1924.” Family stories provided most of the proairetic material for the tale.
Because Dad wanted to see the skyscrapers, someone told him he should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Back then, of course, Brooklyn was nowhere near as built-up as it is today, and as he got to the other side, he saw a big cornfield—where Borough Hall is now—an immense cornfield stretching off into the distance. His first thought was, They told me Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York City. But coming off the bridge here is like walking right back into North Carolina!
In 1993, when Dad was dead and I started to write my story, I realized that was the same time—year and season—that Hart Crane had moved into his new home at 110 Columbia Heights, in Brooklyn. The first thing Crane did was start writing the poem “Atlantis,” which became the final section of his poetic sequence The Bridge. There’s a reference in it to corn and another to fields. It struck me, That’s got to be the same cornfield my dad saw. It’s got to be!
When Crane looked from his window, he must have seen the same corn my dad saw when he crossed the bridge. So that’s what gave me the idea—and the title. Why, I thought, don’t I write a story about the two of them meeting each other on the bridge?
Even before the autobiographical impulse, what started “Atlantis” is the idea that the paradigmatic works of our time were The Waste Land, The Cantos, and Ulysses. A vast intellectual armamentarium is presumed to stand behind each one, an armamentarium of cultural references and literary allusions. They’re drenched in intertextual references, to the point where you wonder, Could a writer do all the things that Joyce and Pound and Eliot are presumed to have done in these works? Is this really possible, or is this all critical hype? So I thought, Well, let me try it on my own.
I went and got as many books on Hart Crane as I could. I invaded the library at UMass, where I was teaching. I wrote down hundreds of phrases I wanted to work into the story. There are so many references to other texts, I can’t remember them all! In my story, Crane cries, “Any dull seamy era can throw up an Atlantis.” Well, “any dull seamy era” is an anagram for Samuel Ray Delany—and, yes, the other thing I had in mind was “Vivian Darkbloom,” Quilty’s biographer in Lolita and an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov. Nabat and Kalit and the lines just before them are the code words and phrases the terrorists use to gain admittance in Oscar Wilde’s early play Vera, or the Nihilists. The tale is filled with references to all sorts of obscurities, most of them things Crane might have known. The subway signs on the subway cars, for Naugahyde and Sloan’s Liniment? Well, when Crane worked for Sweet’s Catalogue Service, those were among the accounts he had to write. The subway car Sam and Hubert ride uptown in is, in effect, Crane’s own world . . . except for the Coca-Cola sign.
The next question is, of course, Why would he have done it? These are very conservative, backward-looking literary experiments, you see. They are experiments that start with a hypothesis, and the text is used as a way of working out a task, to see what the result is. Other than trying to weave the work, in a practically magical way, into the rest of the culture, I don’t know why. The only reason I can think of is because he wanted to see if he could.
To assume that “putting all your talent into the service of a single idea” necessarily involves something fundamentally different from concentrating on the precision, energy, and ekphrastic force of the single sentence is to commit one of those logical slips Orwell described so well in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” the one he calls “operators” or “verbal false limbs,” assuming there are differences and oppositions where there are really developments and continuities. It’s just a way of starting to talk about the larger project, the bigger picture—and critics are always slipping into the false notion that there’s a conflict between the bigger picture and the details that compose it, when there isn’t. That’s one of the ways they mystify the artistic process. Sometimes these are honest mistakes. More often, however, they are symptoms of lazy reading and lack of thought about what the writer is actually saying.
Later on, when I was about twenty-four, I read Bester’s book again and realized, while it was very good, it wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever read. But because of its overall color and energy, Tiger! Tiger! projects a sense that, just over the novel’s horizon, someone is thinking seriously about important modernist questions. What is the relation of the ordinary working man to the privileged man at the pinnacle of culture? What causes modern warfare today? What is the relationship between economics and war? Bester was very definitely a leftist writer, with a sense that economics was behind all wars. For him, wars were the playing out of economic-cum-industrial conflicts.
Still later I found out that Bester himself had been reading and rereading Ulysses for a year and discussing it weekly with two close friends. You could easily say that Tiger! Tiger! was his attempt at a book for bright fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, with some of Ulysses’s textual playfulness. I wanted to see whether I could write something that would be as interesting for a twenty-five-year-old as this had been for me at fifteen. I’ll never know whether I succeeded.
Today, I watch seminar rooms full of graduate students misread both Bester and Conrad, because they no longer have to wonder about the possibility of such illegal elements occurring in the story and the compensating possibility of suggestion as a writerly strategy for representing both sex and violence. In Tiger! Tiger! the demonic antihero, Gully Foyle, invades Robin’s exploded apartment and stalks across her living room to where she cowers away from him on the couch. There is a line of white space ...
At fifteen I knew perfectly well Gully went on to rape her. Many of my students, however, miss it. As readers who’ve learned to read with texts written largely after 1968, they’re unfamiliar with that order of narrative suggestion. Writers aren’t constrained by law to use it today and many young readers, under thirty-five, have forgotten how to read it.
My students reach the climax of Heart of Darkness, when the pilgrims stand at the steamer’s rail, firing their rifles at the natives on the shore, fifteen or twenty feet away, “for some sport,” while an appalled Marlow blows the boat’s horn to frighten the Africans off. Some of the natives throw themselves on the ground, but among them stands Kurtz’s black mistress, her arms raised toward the boat that carries Kurtz away. From his bed in the wheelhouse, sickly Kurtz watches through the window—which Conrad has made clear has been left open. At the boat rail, the white men go on firing, and with a line of white space, the scene ends ...
Year after year, more than half my students fail to realize that the white men have just killed the black woman Kurtz has been sleeping with for several years. Or that Kurtz, too weak to intervene, has had to lie there and watch them do it.
When you ask, later, the significance of Kurtz’s final words, as he looks out through this same window, “The horror! The horror!,” it never occurs to them that it might refer to the fact that he has watched his fellow Europeans murder in cold blood the woman he has lived with. Suggestion for them is not an option. Earlier generations of readers, however, did not have these interpretive problems.
“If he raped her, why didn’t the writer say so?” “If they shot her, why didn’t Conrad show her fall dead?” my graduate students ask. It makes me wonder what other techniques for conveying the unspoken and the unspeakable we have forgotten how to read over four or five thousand years of “literacy.”
Another canonical work that lists toward the incomprehensible for the modern reader under the weight of modernist criticism is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Whatever you say about the story’s all but infinite higher meanings, just at the level of plot, The Metamorphosis is an allegorical tale about a family, one of whose members, presumably the one who’s responsible for bringing in most of the money, is suddenly stricken by a catastrophe, a debilitating disease that—overnight—renders him homebound and largely unrecognizable as the person he once was and tells what the experience might be from the point of view of the person to whom it happens.
This was a fairly common experience for families before World War II, and it still is. Kafka himself was such a person. His tuberculosis rendered him such a person in his own family, and it struck me as a chillingly accurate picture of the whole process of the transformation that occurred when my own mother was felled with a major stroke that, in an instant, rendered her wheelchair-bound, paralyzed on one side, and without language for the last eight years of her life.
The way the remaining family both recognizes and does not recognize the new and wholly dependent creature as the person he or she once was, and the way the invalid has to be treated—physically and emotionally—as a kind of insect . . . well, it’s a hugely cruel story, even as it details how love for the person metamorphoses, under pressure of the transformative situation, into annoyance and a feeling of entrapment. The title refers to the family’s transformation as much as it does to Gregor’s. When the invalid finally dies—as my mother did, almost a decade on—Kafka explains how at last there is a feeling of freedom and even rebirth.
When we were coming back from the cemetery after my mother’s funeral, my sister, who truly loved my mother—as, indeed, did I—said to me, “Chip, that is the end of eight awful, awful years,” and a breeze blew momentarily through the trees. I had to answer, “Yes, it is.” And I remembered Gregor’s sister, in the last sentences of Kafka’s tale. It’s a portrait of the human processes which constitute that awfulness.
I’d never argue that the historical resonances that so many analysts see in the tale are not there, but I point out that what I have described as the events of the story and their general significance is how those historical suggestions manifest themselves. How we treat our invalids—our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members—does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally. But until we can respond to the story as an allegory on that level, those historical suggestions are just not anchored. The commonplace reading, under the supernatural event Kafka has given us, is what keeps the meaning-generating mechanism of the tale functioning.
Arnold Hawley is married for not quite twenty-four hours before that relationship falls catastrophically to pieces. For the rest of his life, he lives alone. Since I was a teenager I’ve always been partnered with someone. Maybe four years in my life—from ’75 to ’79, when I was taking care of my daughter—I lived as a single man. But Dennis and I have been together for twenty-one, going on twenty-two, years. I’ve seen him through a serious drinking problem and his recent half-dozen years of sobriety. He’s seen me through prostate cancer and a few other medical emergencies. I’ve always lived in open relationships and generally had lots of sex. I’ve been quite lucky, with some small public reputation.
Arnold is an adjunct university instructor and a poet. I’ve been a full professor since I started full-time university teaching in ’88, and I’m a prose writer. Really, my life has been the opposite of Arnold’s. Certainly when I conceived Arnold’s story, I wanted to write about somebody who was as close to my opposite as possible. The only way I could have made him any more different from me was to make him white—and perhaps a woman. But I really wanted to write about another black gay male writer, a different black gay male writer from myself.
Much of Heavenly Breakfast deals with the day-to-day minutiae of minor drug sales. As much or more deals with sex, much of it polymorphous. Since much of that was illegal, as a matter of course I changed the names. Besides, as I made clear in the introduction, I had not kept characters strictly apart. There’d been a fair amount of fictive mixing and amalgamating.
I was a little surprised, then, when I ran into a woman who had been a character in the narrative and who, as we stood on the corner of Sixth Street, somewhere in Alphabet City, told me how much she’d enjoyed the book. Then, after a moment’s pensive silence, she added, “I wished you’d used my real name. That way I could prove to some of the people I know now that we really did things like that.”
Not long after that, I ran into Eeyore, called Grendel in the first edition. He was still selling pot off this bench or that in Tompkins Square Park. “Hey, man—that was a really cool book you wrote.”
“You read it?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. But how come you called me Grendel? Nobody believes it was me.” He, too, grew pensive. “You know, I ain’t done a lot to be famous for. About the only thing anybody could know about me who ain’t one of my customers is being in your book. It would be nice if I could point to that and say, Hey, that’s me. People who read it would see my name and know.” So when I next got the chance to change it, I did.
And I’d think, This is going to be it! They’ll give me a lecture hall and some graduate students and turn me loose. I’ll be able to do some real thinking and some significant teaching for them. Then I’d get there and discover that maybe three people had read any of my scholarly nonfiction, and while they had talked it up a great deal to the others on the faculty, what the school wanted me to do was take a class of freshmen and sophomores and introduce them to American science fiction—which, of course, was Asimov and Heinlein and Bradbury and maybe Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. “You’re teaching that, aren’t you? We had a graduate student here nine years ago who begged us to let him teach a class in science fiction, and when we finally did, that’s what he taught. So I guess that’s an important book, right?”
They were sure that’s what it was all about, because fifteen or twenty years ago perhaps they’d actually read some. Their views of SF basically came from some monumentally uninformed articles on the genre that would appear every ten years in Harper’s or even, slightly less so, The New Yorker.
Or they’d want a creative-writing course for undergraduates. Most were surprised—and, I could tell, resentful—when I’d explain, “These are all moderately interesting, middlebrow texts. I have nothing against any of them, not to mention Philip Dick, another entirely middlebrow writer. But none is rich enough to support the kind of reading I want to do with my class.” A few times I got to sit down and argue my way through to something a little more interesting. Repeatedly I got Sturgeon and Bester, Zelazny, Russ, and Disch on my reading lists—and not just single stories by them, but two and three books by each. Eventually, though, I learned that the kind of teaching I wanted to do just wasn’t supported in this country. Even in France, Foucault complained repeatedly that there was never really time for post-lecture discussion.
Once I was invited to give a lecture at MIT. David Halperin invited me, and I warned him it would be a three-hour talk, with only a ten-minute break in the middle. He must have thought I was crazy. Still, he said yes. I delivered it to a jam-packed lecture hall, with students sitting up and down the aisles. It went over very well. From the student response afterward, I got a sense it was the kind of thing they were hungry for.
But I’m seventy, now, not fifty, and arthritis prevents me from standing for more than twenty minutes at a go. Were I offered that sort of lecture venue today, I’d have to turn it down. Even my public readings at universities these days have to be done seated. But that was back when I was thinking seriously about teaching.
My book The American Shore, an analysis of Thomas Disch’s brilliant and exemplary short SF story “Angouleme,” was an attempt to provide something I felt could stand up to the new approaches to reading that were burgeoning all around me back then. In at least three classes, Shore provided me with my own theoretical textbook, before I made the transition, in ’88, to professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Shore and About Writing are my two stabs at creating textbooks for my own students.
Frequently, those discursive models are in conflict with simpler discourses. When that happens, for some people it will be as interesting and as exciting as a good chess game. Others will not pay that much attention to the discursive conflicts. For them it’s not so interesting. But, as I did, listening to the students after my MIT lecture and reading what some of them went on to write me about the experience, I have the impression that a certain number were hungry for the kind of experience they had there and took from it something I can recognize as what I’d wanted to give. It’s not a message, but an experience of seeing the world and the topics it comprises at a certain level of complexity, of potentiality, of relationship—a complexity and relationship that intricately entails, even as it empowers, the pursuit of beauty and joy.
The Paris Review Interview
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
The first time I interview Samuel Delany, we meet in a diner near his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. It is a classic greasy spoon that serves strong coffee and breakfast all day. We sit near the window, and Delany, who is a serious morning person, presides over the city as it wakes. Dressed in what is often his uniform—black jeans and a black button-down shirt, ear pierced with multiple rings—he looks imperial. His beard, dramatically long and starkly white, is his most distinctive feature. “You are famous, I can just tell, I know you from somewhere,” a stranger tells him in the 2007 documentary Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. Such intrusions are common, because Delany, whose work has been described as limitless, has lived a life that flouts the conventional. He is a gay man who was married to a woman for twelve years; he is a black man who, because of his light complexion, is regularly asked to identify his ethnicity. Yet he seems hardly bothered by such attempts to figure him out. Instead, he laughs, and more often than not it is a quiet chuckle expressed mostly in his eyes.
Delany was born on April 1, 1942, in Harlem, by then the cultural epicenter of black America. His father, who had come to New York from Raleigh, North Carolina, ran Levy and Delany, a funeral home to which Langston Hughes refers in his stories about the neighborhood. Delany grew up above his father’s business. During the day he attended Dalton, an elite and primarily white prep school on the Upper East Side; at home, his mother, a senior clerk at the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch, on 125th Street, nurtured his exceptional intelligence and kaleidoscopic interests. He sang in the choir at St. Philip’s, Harlem’s black Episcopalian church, composed atonal music, played multiple instruments, and choreographed dances at the General Grant Community Center. In 1956, he earned a spot at the Bronx High School of Science, where he would meet his future wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker.
In the early sixties, the newly married couple settled in the East Village. There, Delany wrote his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. He was nineteen. Over the next six years, he published eight more science-fiction novels, among them the Nebula Award winners Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967). Even then, his exploration of issues of sexuality, ethnicity, and gender—like the polyamorous love between three spacecraft navigators in Babel-17, or alien colonization and the relationship between the marginalized and history in The Einstein Intersection—distinguished him from other authors working in the genre. Even when set in fantastic worlds, like the Star-Pit, a city that squats at the galaxy’s edge, or Nevèrÿon, an ancient, dragon-filled land whose inhabitants are just learning to write, Delany’s work mirrors the generational shifts and concerns of his times.
In 1971, he completed a draft of a book he had been reworking for years. Dhalgren, his story of the Kid, a schizoid, amnesiac wanderer, takes place in Bellona, a shell of a city in the American Midwest isolated from the rest of the world and populated by warring gangs and holographic beasts. When Delany, Hacker, and their one-year-old daughter flew back to the States just before Christmas Eve in 1974, they saw copies of Dhalgren filling book racks at Kennedy Airport even before they reached customs. Over the next decade, the novel sold more than a million copies and was called a masterpiece by some critics. William Gibson famously described it as “a riddle that was never meant to be solved.”
When we talk, Delany still seems humbled by that novel’s success, yet he mentions more than once that it did not change his life in any real way: he still struggled to publish his more controversial works. One of these was “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” from the Return to Nevèrÿon series, four volumes comprising eleven interlocking pieces. Written in 1984, it was the first work of fiction about aids published by a major publisher, Bantam. During the mid-eighties, Dalton Books, then the largest bookseller in America, refused to stock his books or those of other science-fiction and fantasy authors who dealt with gay content, since novels in those genres are often read by high-school students. As a result, Bantam backed out of publishing the fourth book in the series, and much of his older work wasn’t reprinted. Delany, however, turned to small presses and academic publishers, and to date he has nearly forty books in print.
Over the course of almost a year, I met with Delany eight times. We never returned to the diner; as we finished that first interview, the waitress informed us they would be closing forever that afternoon. We conducted one of our longest interviews in a café-bar in Philadelphia called Woody’s, where the walls are painted bordello red. Young men milled about in leather vests, and someone kindly picked up our bill. I had been reading Octavia Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession,” in which she mentions that when she started out as a writer of science fiction, Samuel Delany was perhaps the only black author writing in the genre. “What good is science fiction to black people?” Butler asks. “What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?”
I pose these questions to Delany, and he responds excitedly: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
—Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
(Additional questions posed by Jenny Davidson.)
By Samuel Delany’s request, this interview is dedicated to Joanna Russ, 1937–2011.
~
INTERVIEWER
Between the time you were nineteen and your twenty-second birthday,
you wrote and sold five novels, and another four by the time you were
twenty-six, plus a volume of short stories. Fifty years later,
considerably more than half that work is still in print. Was being a
prodigy important to you?
DELANY
As a child I’d run into Wilde’s witticism “The only true talent is
precociousness.” I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
And I discovered Rimbaud. The notion of somebody just a year or two
older than I was, who wrote poetry people were reading a hundred, a
hundred fifty years later and who had written the greatest poem in the
French language, or at least the most famous one, “Le Bateau Ivre,”
when he was just sixteen—that was enough to set my imagination soaring.
At eighteen I translated it.In the same years, I found the Signet paperback of Radiguet’s Devil in the Flesh and, a few months after that, the much superior Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, translated as Count d’Orgel in the first trade paperback from Grove Press, with Cocteau’s deliciously suggestive “introduction” about its tragic young author, salted with such dicta as “Which family doesn’t have its own child prodigy? They have invented the word. Of course, child prodigies exist, just as there are extraordinary men. But they are rarely the same. Age means nothing. What astounds me is Rimbaud’s work, not the age at which he wrote it. All great poets have written by seventeen. The greatest are the ones who manage to make us forget it.”
Now that was something to think about—and clearly it had been said about someone who had not expected to die at twenty of typhoid from eating bad oysters.
INTERVIEWER
What was your daily routine like in those days?
DELANY
At six-thirty or seven I’d get up, scramble Marilyn some eggs—she was
eighteen, I was nineteen; we’d been married that August—make toast and
coffee. She’d go out to work, and I’d start writing. I’d work all day,
with a couple of breaks for extracurricular sex in the local men’s rooms
and a stop at the supermarket for dinner makings. Right before five,
I’d start cooking again. In general, I believe I work a lot harder today
than I did then. Today I’m a five-o’clock-in-the-morning riser.
Although I do stare at the wall a lot.
INTERVIEWER
Stare at the wall?
DELANY
I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it
differently. My daughter, who recently graduated from medical school,
once told me, “Dad, I’ve never known anyone who works as hard as you.
You’re up at four, five o’clock in the morning, you work all day, then
you collapse. At nine o’clock, you’re in bed, then you’re up the next
morning at four to start all over again.”Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that’s how people perceive me, they have to say I’m prolific. But I don’t find that either complimentary or accurate.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?
DELANY
I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus
I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I
think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one
kind of writer or another. That’s about the closest I come to
categorizing myself as one or another kind of artist.
INTERVIEWER
When did you decide that sex was important to your work?
DELANY
For my work? Hell, for my life! Although I didn’t start taking
advantage of the public sex available to gay men till I was eighteen,
with a moderately successful trip to the New Amsterdam movie palace on
Forty-second Street. No lightning flashed. No bells clanged. But it was
useful to learn that it was available and could make me feel better
about small stretches of my life.Not a full decade on, when I was twenty-seven, Stonewall happened. Many of the political conclusions that became generalized with Stonewall—such as coming out of the closet to end the nightmare of gay blackmail—I’d arrived at in theory at eighteen or nineteen. But I didn’t start acting on them until I moved to San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1968.
INTERVIEWER
You describe learning, as a young teenager, that a sexual fantasy you
hadn’t yet written down could be eked out for a number of days or even
weeks, whereas putting it on the page—using what you call “the whole
narrative excess we think of as realism”—would make it briefly far more
exciting, but then leach it of all subsequent erotic charge. Do you
still feel that tug between the urge to put something into language and
the urge to fend off writing?
DELANY
I still feel that style is important for reading pleasure, and sex is
important for pleasure in life. Each appeases a different type of
desire. And while I find nothing shameful in taking direct erotic
pleasure from reading or writing, I don’t think they entail a necessary
relation. The processes you have me describing are contingent
psychological processes. Neither marks one end nor the other of any
necessary or even philosophical relationship. Do I still feel the tug
between the urge to put something into writing and the urge to fend it
off? Less so as I get older. I shall always be able to come up with new
fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as
long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I’m not going
to use them up. I assume the universe will go on providing me with many
more. The man I’ve lived quite happily with for twenty-two years
provides me with much of my sexual satisfaction, physical and
psychological. But, no, not all—thank Deus sive Natura, to borrow a
phrase from Spinoza. Nor do I provide all his. What an unachievable
responsibility!
INTERVIEWER
In your writing, you seem fascinated with cities and the contact they provide. Where does that come from?
DELANY
Doubtless from living in them. I was born in Manhattan. I grew up in
Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New
York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand
people lived in one city block. Probably that means it was more crowded
than Calcutta or Singapore or Yangon—places we think of as inhumanly
crowded today. The city gets you used to crowds, used to people relating
to one another in a certain way, like strong and weak interactions
between elementary particles. The strong interactions only come into
play when the particles are extremely close, less than the distance of a
single atomic nucleus. Those are the interactions readers want to see
in novels. At the same time, paradoxically, cities can be dreadfully
isolating places. The Italian poet Leopardi wrote in a letter to his
sister, Paulina, about Rome, that its spaces didn’t enclose people, they
fell between people and kept them apart.
INTERVIEWER
When you write about Harlem, you give it the allure and glamour of
the Jazz Age but also describe how rarefied and suffocating its
bourgeoisie could be.
DELANY
Wonderful as it could be, that world was proscribed in some very
strict ways. I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music,
but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it
wasn’t black. When I was a child, the Metropolitan Opera had no black
singers. I was twelve, when, at the start of 1955, Marian Anderson first
sang the part of the sorceress Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in
Maschera—the first black singer to be featured in an opera at the Met,
when it was down on Forty-sixth Street and Broadway.In Harlem, though, there was jazz culture. We lived right down Seventh Avenue from Small’s Paradise, which I never went to, because I was a kid, but I knew it was there. Or the Red Rooster. They were places my parents and their friends went. I knew the Lafayette Theatre had once been right across the street from where I lived, but it wasn’t now. Orson Welles had directed plays at the old Lafayette. My mother told me how she’d gone there to see the black actor Canada Lee in Welles’s all-black production of Macbeth, when she was a young woman. Harlemites called it Blackbeth, so that’s what I grew up thinking was its actual title, till I saw some posters for it on display at the Museum of the City of New York.
My childhood was massively and miserably contradictory. I’d been singled out as a smart child almost from infancy. Back in 1947, when I was five, I’d spent six weeks with my mother at the Vassar Summer Institute for the Gifted. The institute was very near our summer home in Hopewell Junction, New York, and my father would drive out to visit us on the Vassar campus on odd weekends. My mother had a sense that I was a really bright kid, and I thrived on the institute’s music, drama, and science programs.
Yet from ages eight to sixteen, I had to go twice a week to special tutors and psychologists who tried to help me with my appalling spelling and often incomprehensible writing. The psychotherapy continued till I was twenty-three. There was this bewildering contradiction between my clear intelligence and my extreme dyslexia. And nobody understood why. The fact that I was a black kid from Harlem in a private school full of white kids added its own tangle to the general confusion. In Jill Lauren’s book on dyslexia and learning disabilities, Succeeding with Learning Disabilities, I’m used as a case study, along with my daughter, who’s inherited it.
INTERVIEWER
You were an adult and a published writer when you first came upon the
word dyslexia and realized it described some of the difficulties you
experienced with writing. Did having or not having a word for it make a
great difference?
DELANY
To answer that in any detail, we would have to reanimate the whole
discussion over the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the notion that the lack of
the word in the language means it’s all but impossible to entertain the
concept, while a detailed vocabulary, such as the Inuits’ fifty-plus
words for fifty-plus different types of snow—powdered, crusty, hard,
soft, blown-into-ridges, et cetera—enables you to perform intellectual
feats of winter negotiations unthinkable to temperate-climate folks like
you and me.What’s wrong with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it fails to take into account the whole economy of discourse, which is a linguistic level that accomplishes lots of the soft-edge conceptual contouring around ideas, whether we have available a one- or two-word name for it or only a set of informal many-word descriptions that are not completely fixed. Aphra Behn clearly describes the “numb fish” and its calamitous effects on other fish, animals, and human beings, so that we all recognize it as what we call the “electric eel” today. But she did it in the mid-seventeenth century, well before anyone had thought of electricity or Franklin had sent his kite up into the lightning storm. Thus falls the Sapir-Whorf.
Discourse is a pretty forceful process, perhaps the most forceful of the superstructural processes available. It’s what generates the values and suggestions around a concept, even if the concept has no name, or hasn’t the name it will eventually have. It determines the way a concept is used and the ways that are considered mistaken. The following may be a bit too glib, but I think it’s reasonable to say that if language is what allows us to think things, then discourse is what controls the way we think about things. And the second—discourse—has primacy.
For a couple of years in my early twenties, I was a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf, though I had never encountered the term, or even read a description of it, which begins to hint at what’s wrong with it as a theory. I even wrote a novel that hinged on the concept—Babel-17.
Perhaps the largest problem the lack of a single term imposes is that it becomes difficult to individuate the idea. Where does it begin and where does it end in terms of what it refers to out in the real world? The more complex verbal support there is for a concept, the easier it is to critique.
If I’d had the term Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it might have been easier for me to realize that it was just incorrect—in the same way that when, at twenty-one, I first encountered the word dyslexia, I was able to realize I wasn’t the only one with these problems, that it was a condition rather than an individual and personal failure on my part, and the stories I’d read about writers such as Yeats, who didn’t learn to read until he was sixteen, or Flaubert, who was so backward in his reading and writing that he was known as l’idiot de la famille, now made much more sense. The realization of the flaws in the Sapir-Whorf, in that they caused me to begin considering the more complex linguistic mechanisms of discourse, you might say gave me my lifetime project.
INTERVIEWER
How did your dyslexia manifest itself?
DELANY
I had, and have, no visual ability to remember how words are put
together. I can recognize them when I see them. But unless they’re in
front of me, I can’t recall the vowels they contain. I have no command
over whether they contain single or double letters. The closest metaphor
I can come up with is that it’s like being able to recognize hundreds
of different faces but being incapable of producing any sort of likeness
of any of them with a pencil and paper. I know all the rules—“i before
e, except after c, or when sounded as ay as in neighbor or weigh”—and
still cannot put down the words correctly. At the same time, I read
omnivorously.When I was thirteen, I read War and Peace—the first two hundred pages over two or three days, then I stayed up for thirty-six hours straight to read the rest, with my father coming in every few hours during the night to tell me to put the light out and go to sleep. Interruptions aside, it was a wonderful experience—though I slept all Sunday. That’s the point I decided novels were where it was at.
I read whatever books were lying around—Freddy the Pig and William Faulkner, Raintree County and Mandingo and Frank Yerby and Studs Lonigan and God’s Little Acre and the Alexandria Quartet. I tackled Dylan Thomas and The Waste Land before I left the eighth grade and probably every popular-science book George Gamow published. My downstairs neighbor, who was a writer of young-adult novels, in a moment of who-knows-what excitement, enthused to me one afternoon about Colette’s Chéri and The Last of Chéri and Chester Himes, whom he had known personally. By then, I had a library card, so I read them.
The novels that made me want to write them were Huckleberry Finn—my father read it to me one winter, a couple of chapters a night, after I was in bed, one of few truly pleasant memories I have of the man—and A High Wind in Jamaica and Great Expectations. And Pale Fire, a novel that reinspired me to want to make more such books in the world. The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, and My Mortal Enemy, along with all of Cather’s stories and nonfiction writing. La Princesse de Clèves, Madame de La Fayette’s wonderful seventeenth-century psychological study on which Radiguet modeled his Count d’Orgel, or Sentimental Education, or Lost Illusions, or Mrs. Dalloway or The Waves or The Years. They are all books that have made me—and, oh yes, others—want to write still other books.
The dyslexia didn’t much hamper my reading. What it affected was my writing. I couldn’t spell anything! In an early short story I wrote, a woman who works in a five-and-ten at one point exclaims, “Customers! Customers! Customers!” All three were spelled differently—and all three wrong. I could not spell the word paper three times right in a row!
INTERVIEWER
But you were already serious about writing?
DELANY
I don’t think I was ever any more serious about writing than I was
when I was twelve and thirteen. Of course I wanted to do lots of other
things besides. I wanted to be a musician—that is, I wanted to be a
composer. I played the violin back then. I wrote a violin concerto, from
unrequited love for a young violinist, a prodigy my age who was playing
solo concerts, whom I had met at a kids’ party up in Croton-on-Hudson. I
choreographed dances, wrote stories, directed plays. It was all
terribly serious. At seventeen, for a winter, I took ballet lessons.
But, one after another, probably because I had a sense of the
seriousness of each, I realized you can’t do it all. Finally, writing
more or less drifted to the top.I had already tried to write a novel, something called Lost Stars. It was about a very lonely young man named Erik Torrent who wandered around the city, looking at things. I started it when I was thirteen and finished it when I was fourteen. It had about everything wrong with it such a narrative could have. People were very nice about not telling me that. I suspect they were just impressed I’d filled out that many pages with words.
INTERVIEWER
In my opinion, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy seems to have had a much
wider and more transformative influence than has generally been
acknowledged. That’s something else you read when you were thirteen. How
did it affect you?
DELANY
Well, certainly that’s an opinion we share. The first volume—with
malice aforethought on Ike’s part, I’m sure: the SF club he belonged to
when he was seventeen, the Futurians, was a hotbed of hyperintelligent
teenage Trotskyites—taught me what historical materialism was. By the
end of the third volume, I had a pretty dramatic picture of what’s wrong
with historical determinism, so that when I encountered Popper’s The
Poverty of Historicism, say, I’d seen the whole thing on the big screen,
as it were, in full color and with stereophonic sound. Why do you think
nobody’s ever made a film out of it? It would make Marxists—or, at any
rate small-m marxists—of every bright thirteen-year-old in the country.
Personally, I think that’s preferable to the demagoguery of Ayn Rand.
INTERVIEWER
When you write about high school at Bronx Science, it almost comes
wrapped in gold. The image you give of Dalton is very different from
this cornucopia of creativity in the West Bronx.
DELANY
Whatever its problems—and certainly it had them—Dalton was an
excellent school, as was the Bronx High School of Science. But one was a
small, private institution of no more than 350 students, while the
other was a sprawling city public school, spread out between two
buildings and catering to several thousand. I remember thinking, You
haven’t really learned one thing at Science that you didn’t already
learn back at Dalton. Science was an excellent school, but, with few
exceptions, what they were doing in effect was going over all the stuff
I’d already been exposed to.One exception was music. Science had a wonderful music-appreciation course, in which I learned all about the Second Viennese School. It changed my life. We listened to a part of Berg’s opera Wozzeck and, after we listened to Webern’s Passacaglia, heard the story of his death, how Webern had been shot by an American soldier when he went out on his front steps for a cigarette after curfew. Webern and Berg have been among my favorite composers ever since. A lot of the students, when our music teacher played the last three scenes of Wozzeck, began to snicker and asked, “What is that? That’s just noise! What kind of music is that?” But I was knocked out by its expressivity. All I could think was, Wow! Our music teacher explained the twelve-tone system to us, and I went home and started composing a twelve-tone piece that afternoon.
INTERVIEWER
Did college not excite you in the same way? Why did you drop out?
DELANY
I wasn’t smart enough. By that I mean I lacked a particular kind of
organizational discipline or intelligence. I had the reading under my
belt. I had the analytical chops. I was a magpie for picking up facts
and dates. But to do well at college—there’s no way around it—you have
to be able to organize your time, which I could not do to save myself.
I’d get started on one thing, and twenty minutes later I’d be off on
another, in the midst of which I’d pick up some book on calculus or
archaeology or Galois theory and read the odd hundred pages about that. I
was intellectually all over the place. I was writing music, directing
plays, acting in them, singing in folk groups, choreographing dances,
and if I had a paper due next week, there was at most a one-out-of-five
chance I would finish it—some of which, yes, was the bad side of Dalton,
because they’d been fairly accepting of that sort of thing and had
often been willing to cut me some slack. But I didn’t have the
discipline. Still, not once did I ever think, Hey, I’m superior to all
of this! I never thought, I know more than these people. When I flunked
out, I flunked out miserably, spectacularly, and I was mortified. I
thought, The truth is out, I’m an idiot. Now everyone knows.It took me a while to realize that if a teacher had taken me aside and said, “Come on, Chip, sit down, let’s talk, this is how you have to do this,” probably I would have learned how to negotiate it. But nobody did.
INTERVIEWER
What would they have said?
DELANY
Well, when I started as a comparative-literature professor at the
University of Massachusetts, I wrote an essay explaining how you do
it—“How to Do Well in This Class”—and I still give it out to students
who are having problems of that sort. Basically it’s about what’s gained
by living your life in end-stopped time units, both for work and for
play. Some of the students I’ve given it to have found it helpful. I
wish I’d had it when I entered college.
INTERVIEWER
You have suggested that the writers who influence us “are not usually
the ones we read thoroughly and confront with our complete attention,
but rather the ill- and partially read writers we start on, often in
troubled awe, only to close the book after pages or chapters, when our
own imagination works up beyond the point where we can continue to
submit our fancies to theirs.” What were some of your “ill-read” books?
DELANY
Proust—until I finally got around to reading most of it in my
midtwenties. The Recognitions for the first thirty-some years of my
life—I had my first copy at fifteen—until, in ’75, I got snowed in at a
Buffalo motel and, over a couple days, lay on the bed and read the whole
thing. Early stabs at getting through Nightwood. Moby-Dick, once I
realized it was, intentionally on Melville’s part, a gay novel and that
at the end of Father Mapple’s sermon Melville swears to the reader to
tell us the absolute truth about the relation between male sailors—and
does. Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love—until I sat down
and read them through in preparation for a class I taught on them at the
University of Massachusetts—along with Lawrence’s great story “Odour of
Chrysanthemums.”Any book you have to work yourself up to read. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas, which I’ve now read four or five times and taught twice, and Plato and Platonism, which I also teach. It took me two years to get into the first. I devoured the second over two evenings. When such books influence you, if that’s the proper word for what I’m describing, it’s what you imagine they do that they don’t do that you yourself then try to effect in your own work—that, to me, is what’s important. What these books actually accomplish is very important, of course! But the whole set of things they might have accomplished expands your own palette of aesthetic possibilities in the ways that, should you undertake them, will be your offering on the altar of originality.
Before I read Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror books and stories, I really thought they would be the Nevèrÿon tales, or at least something like them. But I discovered that, rich and colorful as they were, they weren’t. So I had to write them myself.
INTERVIEWER
You open Atlantis: Three Tales with a very rich story about your father as a young man.
DELANY
When I was seventeen or eighteen, before I’d gotten married, my dad
had told me that the main reason he had come to New York from Raleigh
was to see the skyscrapers. He hadn’t turned eighteen yet. It was just
after Thanksgiving 1923. His older brother Hubert met him at Grand
Central Terminal. They didn’t even come out of the station. They went
immediately into the subway and got out at 125th and Eighth Avenue. My
father looked around, but there were only two-story buildings. He was
very disappointed, because he’d expected New York to be all skyscrapers.
He said to Uncle Hubert, “Shoot, this ain’t no different from Raleigh.
And there, at least, we got a building six stories high what got an
elevator.”And Uncle Hubert, who was a twenty-three-year-old law student at NYU at the time, turned to him and said, “You are a real country nigger, ain’t you?”
When my father told me this, it was just a funny story. But he was so disappointed at not seeing the skyscrapers right away, I decided, thirty-five years after his death, to include the anecdote in “Atlantis: Model 1924.” Family stories provided most of the proairetic material for the tale.
Because Dad wanted to see the skyscrapers, someone told him he should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Back then, of course, Brooklyn was nowhere near as built-up as it is today, and as he got to the other side, he saw a big cornfield—where Borough Hall is now—an immense cornfield stretching off into the distance. His first thought was, They told me Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York City. But coming off the bridge here is like walking right back into North Carolina!
In 1993, when Dad was dead and I started to write my story, I realized that was the same time—year and season—that Hart Crane had moved into his new home at 110 Columbia Heights, in Brooklyn. The first thing Crane did was start writing the poem “Atlantis,” which became the final section of his poetic sequence The Bridge. There’s a reference in it to corn and another to fields. It struck me, That’s got to be the same cornfield my dad saw. It’s got to be!
When Crane looked from his window, he must have seen the same corn my dad saw when he crossed the bridge. So that’s what gave me the idea—and the title. Why, I thought, don’t I write a story about the two of them meeting each other on the bridge?
INTERVIEWER
You wrote the novella “Atlantis: Model 1924” and your essay on Hart Crane at the same time?
DELANY
I wrote the novella first, then the essay. One led directly into the
other. That’s because I had all this extra information—specifically
textual—that didn’t go directly into the story, and I thought, I’ve got
to do something with it, since I read all those books.Even before the autobiographical impulse, what started “Atlantis” is the idea that the paradigmatic works of our time were The Waste Land, The Cantos, and Ulysses. A vast intellectual armamentarium is presumed to stand behind each one, an armamentarium of cultural references and literary allusions. They’re drenched in intertextual references, to the point where you wonder, Could a writer do all the things that Joyce and Pound and Eliot are presumed to have done in these works? Is this really possible, or is this all critical hype? So I thought, Well, let me try it on my own.
I went and got as many books on Hart Crane as I could. I invaded the library at UMass, where I was teaching. I wrote down hundreds of phrases I wanted to work into the story. There are so many references to other texts, I can’t remember them all! In my story, Crane cries, “Any dull seamy era can throw up an Atlantis.” Well, “any dull seamy era” is an anagram for Samuel Ray Delany—and, yes, the other thing I had in mind was “Vivian Darkbloom,” Quilty’s biographer in Lolita and an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov. Nabat and Kalit and the lines just before them are the code words and phrases the terrorists use to gain admittance in Oscar Wilde’s early play Vera, or the Nihilists. The tale is filled with references to all sorts of obscurities, most of them things Crane might have known. The subway signs on the subway cars, for Naugahyde and Sloan’s Liniment? Well, when Crane worked for Sweet’s Catalogue Service, those were among the accounts he had to write. The subway car Sam and Hubert ride uptown in is, in effect, Crane’s own world . . . except for the Coca-Cola sign.
INTERVIEWER
Now, you’ve said you don’t do research—
DELANY
“Atlantis: Model 1924” is the exception. There I read the weather
reports for every day the story covers and reflected it in the
narrative. That year saw a blizzard on my birthday, which is in the
story. I got hold of astrological ephemerides for the time and read
them. The references in the tale to the transit of Mercury and those
other astrological occurrences are accurate. I looked at street maps. I
knew the nights when the moon was full and when it was crescent. That
tale contains as much research as I could get into it.
INTERVIEWER
Was it fun to write?
DELANY
No, not at all. It was a game but it was tiring. And I was aware that
it wasn’t reaching after any end. But at least now, when somebody asks,
“I wonder if Joyce could have done all the things he’s supposed to have
done in Ulysses,” I can answer, “Yes, he could have. I know, because I
tried it myself. It’s possible.”The next question is, of course, Why would he have done it? These are very conservative, backward-looking literary experiments, you see. They are experiments that start with a hypothesis, and the text is used as a way of working out a task, to see what the result is. Other than trying to weave the work, in a practically magical way, into the rest of the culture, I don’t know why. The only reason I can think of is because he wanted to see if he could.
INTERVIEWER
You describe a moment of transition, around the age of twenty,
between conceiving of writing as the transcription of a sort of mental
movie to becoming a writer who felt the presence of blocks of language,
so that you were no longer just describing images and ideas but
creating a string of sentences and paragraphs with verbal particularity
and rhythm and so forth. Has that transition continued?
DELANY
Arrogant and self-flattering as it is, today I really like Lessing’s
description of genius from his wonderfully suggestive Laocoön—the
ability to put all your talent into the service of a single idea. That’s
usually what I’m trying for these days, rather than just describing a
movie in the mind—though I still lean a good deal on diegesis, that
movie in the mind.To assume that “putting all your talent into the service of a single idea” necessarily involves something fundamentally different from concentrating on the precision, energy, and ekphrastic force of the single sentence is to commit one of those logical slips Orwell described so well in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” the one he calls “operators” or “verbal false limbs,” assuming there are differences and oppositions where there are really developments and continuities. It’s just a way of starting to talk about the larger project, the bigger picture—and critics are always slipping into the false notion that there’s a conflict between the bigger picture and the details that compose it, when there isn’t. That’s one of the ways they mystify the artistic process. Sometimes these are honest mistakes. More often, however, they are symptoms of lazy reading and lack of thought about what the writer is actually saying.
INTERVIEWER
You—and, indeed, several other SF writers—have called Bester’s 1956
novel, Tiger! Tiger!, the greatest science-fiction novel from that
period. What so excites you about Bester?
DELANY
I picked up Tiger! first when I was fourteen or fifteen, in its
Galaxy serial publication, and thought it was the greatest thing I’d
ever read. Tiger! Tiger! is an extraordinarily colorful and inventive
novel. One whole chapter utilizes bizarre typography that sprawls all
over the pages. In the climactic chapter, the hero is in the basement of
a burning cathedral—St. Patrick’s, in New York—that’s collapsing all
around him, and the man experiences this through synesthesia, where he
hears smells and sees sounds and tastes what things feel like. It’s
Bester’s version of the end of Gaddis’s Recognitions. Besides the nods
to Gaddis—he was Bester’s Greenwich Village neighbor and published The
Recognitions the year before Tiger!—and Joyce, it’s also very much an
homage to Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens.”Later on, when I was about twenty-four, I read Bester’s book again and realized, while it was very good, it wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever read. But because of its overall color and energy, Tiger! Tiger! projects a sense that, just over the novel’s horizon, someone is thinking seriously about important modernist questions. What is the relation of the ordinary working man to the privileged man at the pinnacle of culture? What causes modern warfare today? What is the relationship between economics and war? Bester was very definitely a leftist writer, with a sense that economics was behind all wars. For him, wars were the playing out of economic-cum-industrial conflicts.
Still later I found out that Bester himself had been reading and rereading Ulysses for a year and discussing it weekly with two close friends. You could easily say that Tiger! Tiger! was his attempt at a book for bright fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, with some of Ulysses’s textual playfulness. I wanted to see whether I could write something that would be as interesting for a twenty-five-year-old as this had been for me at fifteen. I’ll never know whether I succeeded.
INTERVIEWER
In Nova, your reimagining of Tiger! Tiger!, Prince Red and Ruby Red have an almost incestuous relationship.
DELANY
Yes, they do. You have to remember the book was written before ’68,
the moment when innuendo ceased to be a legally necessary literary
technique.
INTERVIEWER
Did you intentionally want to make something the reader could only speculate about, rather than be certain of?
DELANY
Certainly as far as the incest goes. Suggestion is a literary strategy. But when, in 1968, works like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
were legal to publish and sell in this country, the age of innuendo and
the coyly placed line of white space, as the hero envelops the heroine
in his arms, ended. Fifteen years later, aids rendered them permanently
obsolete.Today, I watch seminar rooms full of graduate students misread both Bester and Conrad, because they no longer have to wonder about the possibility of such illegal elements occurring in the story and the compensating possibility of suggestion as a writerly strategy for representing both sex and violence. In Tiger! Tiger! the demonic antihero, Gully Foyle, invades Robin’s exploded apartment and stalks across her living room to where she cowers away from him on the couch. There is a line of white space ...
At fifteen I knew perfectly well Gully went on to rape her. Many of my students, however, miss it. As readers who’ve learned to read with texts written largely after 1968, they’re unfamiliar with that order of narrative suggestion. Writers aren’t constrained by law to use it today and many young readers, under thirty-five, have forgotten how to read it.
My students reach the climax of Heart of Darkness, when the pilgrims stand at the steamer’s rail, firing their rifles at the natives on the shore, fifteen or twenty feet away, “for some sport,” while an appalled Marlow blows the boat’s horn to frighten the Africans off. Some of the natives throw themselves on the ground, but among them stands Kurtz’s black mistress, her arms raised toward the boat that carries Kurtz away. From his bed in the wheelhouse, sickly Kurtz watches through the window—which Conrad has made clear has been left open. At the boat rail, the white men go on firing, and with a line of white space, the scene ends ...
Year after year, more than half my students fail to realize that the white men have just killed the black woman Kurtz has been sleeping with for several years. Or that Kurtz, too weak to intervene, has had to lie there and watch them do it.
When you ask, later, the significance of Kurtz’s final words, as he looks out through this same window, “The horror! The horror!,” it never occurs to them that it might refer to the fact that he has watched his fellow Europeans murder in cold blood the woman he has lived with. Suggestion for them is not an option. Earlier generations of readers, however, did not have these interpretive problems.
“If he raped her, why didn’t the writer say so?” “If they shot her, why didn’t Conrad show her fall dead?” my graduate students ask. It makes me wonder what other techniques for conveying the unspoken and the unspeakable we have forgotten how to read over four or five thousand years of “literacy.”
Another canonical work that lists toward the incomprehensible for the modern reader under the weight of modernist criticism is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
INTERVIEWER
How do you mean?
DELANY
I’ve read interpretations that see the tale as Kafka’s prediction of
World War I or II, and it has to stand up beneath interpretative phrases
like “that great portrait of the sickness that was Europe.” I’ve even
heard one academic give a rather involuted explanation about how the
story depicts the encounter of a family with the inexplicable. Well,
that’s true, in the sense that a heart attack, a stroke, a crippling
accident is, itself, inexplicable. But that sort of
occurrence—schizophrenia or some mentally or physically crippling
disease—is still the tenor of Kafka’s metaphor.Whatever you say about the story’s all but infinite higher meanings, just at the level of plot, The Metamorphosis is an allegorical tale about a family, one of whose members, presumably the one who’s responsible for bringing in most of the money, is suddenly stricken by a catastrophe, a debilitating disease that—overnight—renders him homebound and largely unrecognizable as the person he once was and tells what the experience might be from the point of view of the person to whom it happens.
This was a fairly common experience for families before World War II, and it still is. Kafka himself was such a person. His tuberculosis rendered him such a person in his own family, and it struck me as a chillingly accurate picture of the whole process of the transformation that occurred when my own mother was felled with a major stroke that, in an instant, rendered her wheelchair-bound, paralyzed on one side, and without language for the last eight years of her life.
The way the remaining family both recognizes and does not recognize the new and wholly dependent creature as the person he or she once was, and the way the invalid has to be treated—physically and emotionally—as a kind of insect . . . well, it’s a hugely cruel story, even as it details how love for the person metamorphoses, under pressure of the transformative situation, into annoyance and a feeling of entrapment. The title refers to the family’s transformation as much as it does to Gregor’s. When the invalid finally dies—as my mother did, almost a decade on—Kafka explains how at last there is a feeling of freedom and even rebirth.
When we were coming back from the cemetery after my mother’s funeral, my sister, who truly loved my mother—as, indeed, did I—said to me, “Chip, that is the end of eight awful, awful years,” and a breeze blew momentarily through the trees. I had to answer, “Yes, it is.” And I remembered Gregor’s sister, in the last sentences of Kafka’s tale. It’s a portrait of the human processes which constitute that awfulness.
I’d never argue that the historical resonances that so many analysts see in the tale are not there, but I point out that what I have described as the events of the story and their general significance is how those historical suggestions manifest themselves. How we treat our invalids—our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members—does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally. But until we can respond to the story as an allegory on that level, those historical suggestions are just not anchored. The commonplace reading, under the supernatural event Kafka has given us, is what keeps the meaning-generating mechanism of the tale functioning.
INTERVIEWER
Like Birth of a Nation, Dhalgren tells the story of a black man who
is believed to be a sexual predator and whose act of transgression
becomes a fixture in the public conversation. Why were you interested in
unpacking that particular story?
DELANY
What can I tell you? Many black writers, from Richard Wright in Native Son, to Chester Himes in his novella A Case of Rape,
have tried their hand at it. The fact is, it is a many-layered process.
I wanted to give the several participants, the white woman and the
black man, the opportunity to speak where desire can freely articulate
itself, without the judicial pressure of capture or incarceration.
INTERVIEWER
Forty years ago, when you were traveling on the West Coast, you lost a
notebook with some forty-two pages of a late draft of Dhalgren. What
was it like to reconstruct the novel? Did the story change as a result?
DELANY
No. I plan things out pretty meticulously. It was simply three weeks
of hard, boring work, re-creating the lost pages. If the National
eighty-page spiral notebook had ever turned up in the back balcony of
the Empire theater on Market Street in San Francisco, where
inadvertently I’d left it, many of the paragraphs would be, I suspect,
all but word-for-word identical with the reconstructed version now in
the book.
INTERVIEWER
What led you to write Times Square Red, Times Square Blue?
DELANY
I had written an academic essay called “Street Talk/Straight Talk,”
and an editor at Out Magazine asked whether I would like to pursue the
topic for general readers. I wrote them a not terribly specific profile
piece that described the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second
Street, just before they started tearing things down. But the editor,
as I recounted in a preface to the book, said, “You’ve mentioned the
theaters. Let me see what goes on in them.” I asked, “Are you sure you
want me to do that?” and she answered, “Yes,” so I said, “All right.” I
tried for a representative range because I had thirty years of visits
to tap. The second essay, “Times Square Red,” is the theoretical
underside that supports the general observations in the first half,
“Times Square Blue.”
INTERVIEWER
In your 2007 novel, Dark Reflections, the protagonist is haunted by embarrassment over a gay pornographic novel he once wrote.
DELANY
Yes. As was common in the 1960s, a friend of the main character,
Arnold, gets a contract for a porn novel, which he actually hires Arnold
to write. During the sixties, pornographic publishers often turned to
young poets and writers who were not making any money to speak of and
got them to write sex novels. Some of the results were quite
astonishing. David Meltzer, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, Michael
Perkins, Marco Vassi, and Alexander Trocchi are some of the ones who
did. Others, like Arnold’s, were done anonymously.
INTERVIEWER
A number of critics have called the work autobiographical.
DELANY
Oh, the differences between me and Arnold Hawley could fill a book! In fact, they already have filled a book—The Mad Man—and a book three times the length of Dark Reflections.Arnold Hawley is married for not quite twenty-four hours before that relationship falls catastrophically to pieces. For the rest of his life, he lives alone. Since I was a teenager I’ve always been partnered with someone. Maybe four years in my life—from ’75 to ’79, when I was taking care of my daughter—I lived as a single man. But Dennis and I have been together for twenty-one, going on twenty-two, years. I’ve seen him through a serious drinking problem and his recent half-dozen years of sobriety. He’s seen me through prostate cancer and a few other medical emergencies. I’ve always lived in open relationships and generally had lots of sex. I’ve been quite lucky, with some small public reputation.
Arnold is an adjunct university instructor and a poet. I’ve been a full professor since I started full-time university teaching in ’88, and I’m a prose writer. Really, my life has been the opposite of Arnold’s. Certainly when I conceived Arnold’s story, I wanted to write about somebody who was as close to my opposite as possible. The only way I could have made him any more different from me was to make him white—and perhaps a woman. But I really wanted to write about another black gay male writer, a different black gay male writer from myself.
INTERVIEWER
In some of your real autobiographical writings, you’ve taken care not to name or identify others who appear in the text.
DELANY
Back in the mid-sixties, I lived for six months in a Lower East Side
commune, called Heavenly Breakfast, named after a rock group I was part
of, that lived and rehearsed there. I kept a journal at the time, and a
few years later, after he’d accepted a short story of mine, Theodore
Solotaroff, the editor of The New American Review, suggested I
next write a nonfiction article for him about commune life. I broke out
my old notebooks, and soon I had a ninety-five-page article on life in
and around Heavenly Breakfast. It took about a year to assemble, but by
the time I’d finished, New American Review had gone under. There was no
chance of its appearing there. I didn’t show it to anyone for a couple
of years after that. When I did, I had moved back to New York City. More
on a lark than anything else, I showed it to my editor at Bantam Books,
at that time a young woman named Karen. I was surprised when she
announced that she’d fallen in love with it and wanted to publish it.Much of Heavenly Breakfast deals with the day-to-day minutiae of minor drug sales. As much or more deals with sex, much of it polymorphous. Since much of that was illegal, as a matter of course I changed the names. Besides, as I made clear in the introduction, I had not kept characters strictly apart. There’d been a fair amount of fictive mixing and amalgamating.
I was a little surprised, then, when I ran into a woman who had been a character in the narrative and who, as we stood on the corner of Sixth Street, somewhere in Alphabet City, told me how much she’d enjoyed the book. Then, after a moment’s pensive silence, she added, “I wished you’d used my real name. That way I could prove to some of the people I know now that we really did things like that.”
Not long after that, I ran into Eeyore, called Grendel in the first edition. He was still selling pot off this bench or that in Tompkins Square Park. “Hey, man—that was a really cool book you wrote.”
“You read it?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. But how come you called me Grendel? Nobody believes it was me.” He, too, grew pensive. “You know, I ain’t done a lot to be famous for. About the only thing anybody could know about me who ain’t one of my customers is being in your book. It would be nice if I could point to that and say, Hey, that’s me. People who read it would see my name and know.” So when I next got the chance to change it, I did.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise every day?
DELANY
Pretty much so, except the days or the hours I devote to writing a
first draft. Eighty-five to ninety-five percent of my work is rewriting
and revision. Probably that started as a strategy to deal with the wages
of dyslexia. Now it’s habit, but it was a fortunate habit to acquire.
INTERVIEWER
Is it a difficult regimen?
DELANY
Finding time to work is the main problem. That’s why I want to
retire—so I can really get to work. One of my favorite quotes is from
Goethe—“As soon as a man does something admirable, the entire universe
conspires to see that he never does it again.” This is frighteningly
true. You write a decent book, and you’re hired as a creative-writing
teacher. The next thing you know you’re director of the program, which
basically means you get less time in class and more administration,
which nobody likes, so that you can hardly write anything anymore.
INTERVIEWER
Your teaching gets in the way of your writing?
DELANY
It doesn’t completely halt it, but it slows it way down!
INTERVIEWER
Is the teaching worth it?
DELANY
No. It’s not.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
DELANY
I’m not that good a teacher. I’m decent, maybe even better than
average, but I believe I’m an even better writer. The trade-off between
doing a job that you only do moderately well for one that you do very
well can’t be justified simply because the former pays the bills. When I
was thirty-five or forty, I envisioned myself doing a kind of ideal
version of the teaching that a Lacan or, yes, a Foucault did in their
French seminars. That was before I had a steady position as a professor
at UMass. I was going from research institute to research institute.
Here, I was senior fellow at the Center for 20th Century Studies at the
University of Wisconsin, then I was a senior fellow at the Society for
the Humanities at Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White House, then I was a
guest at the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan, next, the Institute for
the Humanities at the University of Michigan. The pay was usually
munificent.And I’d think, This is going to be it! They’ll give me a lecture hall and some graduate students and turn me loose. I’ll be able to do some real thinking and some significant teaching for them. Then I’d get there and discover that maybe three people had read any of my scholarly nonfiction, and while they had talked it up a great deal to the others on the faculty, what the school wanted me to do was take a class of freshmen and sophomores and introduce them to American science fiction—which, of course, was Asimov and Heinlein and Bradbury and maybe Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. “You’re teaching that, aren’t you? We had a graduate student here nine years ago who begged us to let him teach a class in science fiction, and when we finally did, that’s what he taught. So I guess that’s an important book, right?”
They were sure that’s what it was all about, because fifteen or twenty years ago perhaps they’d actually read some. Their views of SF basically came from some monumentally uninformed articles on the genre that would appear every ten years in Harper’s or even, slightly less so, The New Yorker.
Or they’d want a creative-writing course for undergraduates. Most were surprised—and, I could tell, resentful—when I’d explain, “These are all moderately interesting, middlebrow texts. I have nothing against any of them, not to mention Philip Dick, another entirely middlebrow writer. But none is rich enough to support the kind of reading I want to do with my class.” A few times I got to sit down and argue my way through to something a little more interesting. Repeatedly I got Sturgeon and Bester, Zelazny, Russ, and Disch on my reading lists—and not just single stories by them, but two and three books by each. Eventually, though, I learned that the kind of teaching I wanted to do just wasn’t supported in this country. Even in France, Foucault complained repeatedly that there was never really time for post-lecture discussion.
Once I was invited to give a lecture at MIT. David Halperin invited me, and I warned him it would be a three-hour talk, with only a ten-minute break in the middle. He must have thought I was crazy. Still, he said yes. I delivered it to a jam-packed lecture hall, with students sitting up and down the aisles. It went over very well. From the student response afterward, I got a sense it was the kind of thing they were hungry for.
But I’m seventy, now, not fifty, and arthritis prevents me from standing for more than twenty minutes at a go. Were I offered that sort of lecture venue today, I’d have to turn it down. Even my public readings at universities these days have to be done seated. But that was back when I was thinking seriously about teaching.
My book The American Shore, an analysis of Thomas Disch’s brilliant and exemplary short SF story “Angouleme,” was an attempt to provide something I felt could stand up to the new approaches to reading that were burgeoning all around me back then. In at least three classes, Shore provided me with my own theoretical textbook, before I made the transition, in ’88, to professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Shore and About Writing are my two stabs at creating textbooks for my own students.
INTERVIEWER
At Temple University, where you currently teach, you place a lot of importance on the individual sentence.
DELANY
Yes. It goes back to the notion that what happens in the mind of the
reader when the reader moves his or her eye from word to word on the
page—that’s what a story actually is. What the language calls up in your
mind can also make you think in a rich and vivid manner. How it makes
you think about what it evokes, including its place in the world—that’s
particularly important. And how it makes you think about it must be
supported by certain discourses. If those discursive models are rich
enough, they inculcate the sophisticated idea of discourse itself that
I’m striving for. For forty years, that has been and remains my project.Frequently, those discursive models are in conflict with simpler discourses. When that happens, for some people it will be as interesting and as exciting as a good chess game. Others will not pay that much attention to the discursive conflicts. For them it’s not so interesting. But, as I did, listening to the students after my MIT lecture and reading what some of them went on to write me about the experience, I have the impression that a certain number were hungry for the kind of experience they had there and took from it something I can recognize as what I’d wanted to give. It’s not a message, but an experience of seeing the world and the topics it comprises at a certain level of complexity, of potentiality, of relationship—a complexity and relationship that intricately entails, even as it empowers, the pursuit of beauty and joy.
Samuel R. Delany, photographed by Kyle Cassidy
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
