Atlantis: Three Tales

by Samuel R. Delany

  Through the cables, the dark, flat, and—yes—dead green spread behind the tug. Ripples crawled to the wake’s rim, like silver beetles, to quiver and glitter at, though unable to cross, the widening borders.

  “The river’s very beautiful,” Sam said, because beauty was the aspect of nature and poetry it seemed safest to speak of.

  “Oh, not for Sam the poet. If anything, for him it was terrifying. He was to die, looking out at it, from a window of the Manhattan Hospital for the Destitute, up on Ward’s Island. They keep the dying there—and the insane. It’s only an island away from Brother’s, where the General Slocum beached after it burned up a thousand krauts and drenched them till they drowned, back in ’aught-four—makes you wonder what we needed a war for. It was the dust and the airless walls of his brother Adolf’s leather shop where he worked that first seated in the floor of Sam’s breath that terrible, spiritual, stinking illness—have you ever visited anyone dying of TB? They do stink, you know? Here in the city, you learn to recognize the stench—if you hang out in the slums. Nobody ever talks about that, but—Lord!—they smell. The lungs bleed and die and rot in their chests; and their breath and their bodies erupt with the putrefaction of it—in a way it’s a purification too, I suppose. But before he was nineteen, Sam had already learned the rustle of nurses around his bed, like the husks of summer locusts. All the nuns—and he’d been reading Poe, the ghoul-haunted woodlands, that sort of stuff—once made our rogue tanton bolt St. Anthony’s at Woodhaven, in terror for his life. That’s where they first packed him off to die. For a while after that he stayed in New Jersey—Paterson—with Morris, another brother. But a few months later, he was back in another hospital—Sea View this time, on Staten Island.” Without closing his eyes, again the man recited: “‘And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud / Like brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed / From the rays of the morning sun / Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon.’ But that was written some years before, when he was well—walking across the bridge here with Daniel. Still: ‘loud, brilliant white demons . . .’? He had a very excitable poetic apprehension—like any true poet would want to or—really—must have. Don’t you think?”

  By now Sam was feeling somewhat sulky there’d been no praise of his own eccentric bit of electrical information. He was not about to condone all this biography. “It doesn’t sound all that good of a poem.”

  “Well, in a way, it’s not. But it’s what poetry—real poetry—is made of: ‘ . . . The dripling tide that dripples, re-ripples . . .’ Really, for any word-lover, that’s quite wonderful! Words must create and tear down whole visions, cities, worlds!” (Sam was not sure if he was saying Sam—the other Sam—did this or didn’t.) “And then, Sam was only a child when he died—twenty-three. I’m twenty-four now. A year older than Sammy. But I suppose he was too young, or too uneducated—too unformed to make real poems. But then, Keats, Rimbaud—all that material: you can feel its sheer verbal excitement, can’t you?” He chuckled, as if to himself. “Twenty-four? In a moment I’ll sneeze—and be older than Keats!”

  Sam looked at the face now looking past his; at first he’d put it at Hubert’s age. But there was a dissoluteness to it—the skin was not as clear as it might be, the eyes were not as bright as they should be; and, of course, just the way he spoke—that made the man seem older than twenty-four. Sam asked: “Don’t poems have to make sense, besides just sounding nice?” A teacher down in Raleigh had once explained to them why Edgar Poe was not really a good poet, even after they’d all applauded her recitation of “The Bells.” Apparently Poe had not been a very good man—and people who were not good men, while they could write fun poems, simply couldn’t write great ones.

  “Oh, do they, now? But there’re many interesting ways to seem not to be making sense while you’re actually making very good sense indeed—using myths, symbols, poetic associations and rhetorical gestures. I never wrote my mother about Sam—just as I never wrote her about Jean’s scooting off with Margy. I haven’t written her about Emil yet, either—but I’ll have to do that, soon. I wonder if I’ll write her about you? Grace proffers the truth in a regular Sunday Delivery, and I send her back lies—of omission mostly. (Can you imagine, telling her about some wild afternoon I had at Sand Street, skulking down behind the piled-up planks and plates beside the Yard?) So I just assume they can be corrected later. I dare say it’s all quite incoherent to you. But it’s leading up to something—a bigger truth. I just have to get my gumption up to it. At any rate—” he chuckled—“Sam was not only a poet. He drew pictures. He played the piano beautifully, as I said—at least that’s what my friend who’d known him told me. You see, it was a poetic sensibility in embryo, struggling to express itself in all the arts. Do you play an instrument?”

  “The cornet.” Playing the cornet, Sam had always figured, was like knowing about electricity in Hartford and the number of stories in the Woolworth Building. Or maybe a couple of magic tricks.

  “Well, then, you see?” the man said. “You and little Sammy Greenberg are very much alike!”

  “He was a jewboy!” Sam exclaimed—because till then, for all he’d been trying to withhold, he’d really begun to identify with his strange namesake who had once walked across the bridge and had seen, as had he, the water dripple, re-ripple . . .

  “Yes, he was, my young, high-yellow, towering little whippersnapper!” The man laughed.

  Once more Sam started, because, though he knew the term—high-yellow—, nobody had ever actually called him that before. (He’d been called “nigger” by both coloreds and whites and knew what to do when it happened. But this was a new insult, though it was given so jokingly, he wondered if it was worth taking offense.) Sam put his hands on his thighs again, then put them back on the bench, to arch his fingertips against the wood, catching his nails in weathered grain. Was this man, Sam wondered a moment, Jewish? Wasn’t there something Semitic in his features? Sam asked: “Do you write poems, too?”

  “Me?” The young man brought one hand back, the slender fingers splayed wide against the sweater he wore under his corduroy jacket. “Do I write poems? Me?” He took a breath. “I’m in advertising, actually. Ah, but I should be writing poems. I will be writing poems. Have I ever written poems?” He scowled, shook his head. “Perhaps I’ve written poems. Once I found a beautiful American word: ‘findrinny.’ But no American writer ever wrote it down save Melville. And since it never made it from Moby-Dick into any dictionary (I’ve looked in half a dozen), I’ve finally settled on ‘spindrift.’ Go look it up! It’s equally lovely in the lilt and lay of what it means. Believe me, if I wrote a real poem, everyone would be talking about it—writing about it. When I write a poem—find its lymph and sinew, fix a poem that speaks with a tongue more mine than any you’ll ever actually hear me talking with—you’ll know it! Boni and Liveright did Cane last year, Beyond the Pleasure Principle this year; I just wonder when they’ll get to me. I can promise you—Crane,” he said suddenly, sat forward, and scowled. “Isn’t that endlessly ironic?” He shook his head. “Crane—that’s whom they’re all mad about now. Someone showed me the manuscript. And, dammit, some of them are actually good! They’re planning to get endorsements from Benêt and Nunnally Johnson—he lives in Brooklyn, too.”

  “A poet? Named Crane?” Sam asked.

  The man nodded, glancing over. “Nathalia Crane. She lives in Flat-bush, out where it builds up again and Brooklyn starts to look at least like a town; and she’s in love with the janitor’s boy—some snub-nosed freckle-cheeked mick named Jones.”

  “In the heart of Brooklyn?” Sam said.

  “If Brooklyn can be said to have a heart. I wonder why, no matter how hard I try to get away, I always end up working with sweets—Dad makes chocolates, you see. Well, I’ve lived off them long enough. Personally, I think Brooklyn, once you leave the Heights, is a heartless place. For heart, you go downtown into the Village. Really, the irony’s just beyond me. She’s supposed to be ten—or was, a couple o
f years ago. They go on about her like she was Hilda Conkling or Helen Adam. And they actually gave me the thing for review! I mean, I told them—under no circumstances would I! Could you think of anything more absurd—me reviewing that? If I liked it, people would think I was joking. If I hated it, they’d think I was simply being malicious. They thought it would be fun. No—I said; I certainly wouldn’t be trapped into that one. Poetry’s more serious than—” Again he broke off and turned, to regard Sam with a fixity that, as the silence grew, grew uncomfortable with it. “I mean, any poem worth its majority must pell-mell through its stages of love, meditation, evocation, and beauty. It’s got to hie through tragedy, war, recapitulation, ecstasy, and final declaration. But sometimes I think she’s got more of the Great War in her poems than I do. I wonder if that makes the geeky girl a better poet? No, I’m not going to be able to take these engineering specifications, instruction manuals, and giant architectural catalogs much longer—Lord, they’re real doorstoppers! Soon, I’m going to leave that job—the only question is, at my behest or theirs?”

  “You’re quitting your—?”

  “Nobody can write poems and have a job at the same time. It’s impossible!”

  “You don’t think so?” He wondered if he should mention that Clarice worked as a secretary to the principal in the school where Hubert taught—and seemed to turn out her share.

  “Do you think I should quit my job because they—not the people I work for, but the people I sometimes write for—asked me to review that silly little girl’s silly little book? Of poems?” He crossed his arms severely, hunched his shoulders as if it had suddenly grown chill. “And, of course, they’re not silly. Really. They’re quite good—a handful of them. But they’re not as good as poems I wrote when I was that age. (But doesn’t every poet feel like that?) And they’re certainly not as good as the poems I could write now!” He rocked a few times on the bench, then declared: “Now who do you think it was who wrote,

  “Here’s Crane with a seagull and Lola the Drudge,

  With one pound of visions and one of Pa’s fudge.

  “Do you think there’s that much fudge—and does anybody ever really notice? Fidge, perhaps? Well, Lowell did in Poe . . .” He rocked a few more times, then began, softly, intensely, voiced, yes, but quiet as a whisper:

  “And midway on that structure I would stand

  One moment, not as diver, but with arms

  That open to project a disk’s resilience

  Winding the sun and planets in its face.

  Water should not stem that disk, nor weigh

  What holds its speed in vantage of all things

  That tarnish, creep, or wane; and in like laughter,

  Mobile yet posited beyond even that time

  The Pyramids shall falter, slough into sand,—

  And smooth and fierce above the claim of wings,

  And figured in that radiant field that rings

  The Universe:—I’d have us hold one consonance

  Kinetic to its poised and deathless dance.”

  He broke off, turning aside, then added: “No, wait a minute. What about this.” Now the voice was louder:

  “To be, Great Bridge, in vision bound of thee,

  So widely belted, straight and banner-wound,

  Multi-colored, river-harboured and upbourne

  Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins,—

  With white escarpments swinging into light,

  Sustained in tears the cities are endowed

  And justified, conclamant with the fields

  Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

  “And steady as the gaze incorporate

  Of flesh affords, we turn, surmounting all

  In keenest transience to that sear arch-head,—

  Expansive center, purest moment and electron

  That guards like eyes that must always look down

  Through blinding cables to the ecstasy

  That crashes manifoldly on us when we hear

  The looms, the wheels, the whistles in concord

  Teathered and antiphonal to a dawn

  Whose feet are shuttles, silvery with speed

  To tread upon and weave our answering world,

  Recreate and resonantly risen in this dome.”

  Again the man sat back, relaxed his arms. “All right—tell me: is that the greatest—” he growled greatest in mock exaggeration—“poem you’ve ever heard? Or is it?”

  Sam looked up, where arch ran into arch, along great cables. “What’s it about?” he asked, looking back. “The bridge?”

  “It’s called . . .‘Finale’!” The man seemed, now, absolutely delighted, eyes bright behind his lenses.

  “I get the parts about . . . the bridge, I think. But what’s the dome?”

  “Ah, that’s Sam’s ‘starry splendor dome’—from a poem he wrote, called ‘Words.’ ‘One sad scrutiny from my warm inner self / That age hath—but the pleasure of its own / And that which rises from my inner tomb / Is but the haste of the starry splendor dome / O though, the deep hath fear of thee . . . .’ It goes on like that—and ends: ‘ . . . Another morning must I wake to see— / That lovely pain, O that conquering script / cannot banish me.’ Conquering script—I like that idea: that the pen is mightier; that writing conquers.” His eyes had gone up to tangle in the harp of slant and vertical cables, rising toward the beige-stone doubled groin. “Yes, I think I’ll use it, make that one mine—too.”

  “Can you do that?” Sam asked. “If you write your own poems, can you just take words and phrases from someone else’s?”

  The man looked down. “Did you ever see a poem by a man named Eliot—read it in The Dial a couple of Novembers back? No, you probably didn’t. But his poem is nothing but words and phrases borrowed from other writers: Shakespeare, Webster, Wagner—all sorts of people.”

  “Taking other people’s poems,” Sam said, “that doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “Then I’ll link Sam’s words to words of mine, engulf them, digest and transform them, make them words of my own. Really, it’s all right. You said you grew up on a college campus?” Leaning forward, his face became a bit wolfish. “The word is . . .‘allusion’!”

  “I grew up there,” Sam said. “But I didn’t go to school there.”

  “I see. But look what I’ve managed to call up! Go on—take a look there, now.” The man nodded toward Manhattan. “What’s that city, do you think?”

  Sam turned, about to say . . . But the city had changed, astonishingly, while they’d been sitting. The sunlight, in lowering, had smelted its copper among the towers, to splash the windows of the southernmost skyscrapers, there the Pulitzer, in the distance the Fuller, there the Woolworth Building itself.

  “Risen from the sea, just off the Pillars of Hercules—that’s Atlantis, boy—a truly wonder-filled city, far more so than any you’ve ever visited yet, or certainly ever lived in.” Behind Sam the man lowered his voice: “I’m a kind of magician who makes things appear and disappear. But not just doves and handkerchiefs and coins. I’m one of O’Shaunessey’s movers and shakers, an archaeologist of evening. I call up from the impassive earth the whole of the world around you, Sam—stalking the wild nauga and bringing it all down to words, paired phalluses, bridge between man and man. I create and crumble worlds, cities, visions! No, friend! It is Atlantis that I sing. And poets have been singing it since Homer, son; still, it’s amazing what, at any moment, might be flung up by the sea. So: ecce Atlantis Irrefragable, corymbulous of towers, each tower a gnomon on the gold afternoon, flinging around it its metric shadow! And you should see it by moonlight—! They speak a wonder-filled language there, Sam: not like any tongue you’ve ever heard. My pop—C. A.—thinks poetry should be a pleasure taken up in the evening—but not so in Atlantis! No! There, Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi makes as lucid sense as mene, mene tekel upharsin or Mon sa me el kirimoor—nor is it anywhere near as dire as Daniel. But we need Asia’s, Africa�
��s fables! In Atlantis, when I stand on the corner and howl my verses, no one looks at me and asks, ‘Whadja say?’ Because mine’s the tongue they speak there. In Atlantis I’ll get back my filched Ulysses with the proper apology. I tell you, all twenty of those dead workers are up and dancing there with savage sea-girls, living high and healthy in garden-city splendor, their drinking late into the dawn putting out Liberty’s light each morning. And the niggers and the jewboys, the wops and the krauts say hey, hi, and howdy—and quote Shakespeare and Adelaide Crapsey all evening to each other. And even if I were to pull a Steve Brodie this moment from the brink of the trolley lane there—watchman, what of the track?—, as long as that city’s up, the river would float me, singing on my back, straight into its docks at a Sutton gone royal, no longer a dead end, and I’d walk its avenues in every sort of splendor. You say you saw the empty boat of our dark friend a-dribble over his gunwale? Well, if it was empty, it’s because he’s found safe harbor there. And he’s happy, happy—oh, he’s happy, Sam, as only a naked stallion (may St. Titus protect your foreskin in these heathen lands) prancing in the city can be!”