A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  With the sound-making/sound-gathering system we communicate within our species. With it we communicate between species. With it we “receive communication” from plants—think of all the information different sounds, such as wind in the leaves, can bring us under different conditions (i.e., evokes in us)—as well as from the entire inanimate world: falling rocks, breaking waves, thunder, and trees cracking and crashing to the forest floor. But in all cases, the meanings of those sounds and their attendant contexts must be built up in the mind of the hearer (or wired in by evolution: some of us animals are wired to wire ourselves that way upon the encounter with certain “experiences” or “linguistic signifieds,” such as learning to walk upright or learning to speak) through experiences for any subsequent interpretation to take place, whether curiosity or fear, recognition, prediction, or negotiation (“I don’t want to get wet. Let’s go inside. Listen to that…” “I am listening. Hey, we can make it to Margaret’s before it really comes down…”) is the function. But mammals in general and primates in particular—as well as whales, dolphins, and octopods—seem to have a knack for learning.*8 Because, until recently, there has been no pressing need to understand the complex mechanics behind some of evolution’s effects, that’s why many of us don’t—though we are capable of learning and, with the help of writing, remembering. There is also an educational, stabilizing superstructure, however, where intervention can reasonably occur, and where it is possible to stabilize necessary discourses with the help of beneficent technologies—if you allow cultures to learn in their own way. But this must be both an active and a passive process. This is not cultural relativism (which always moves toward an initially passive approach that ignores learning and eventually tends toward a dominant destructive approach to behavior, which is sometimes confused with learning), but is rather cultural respect (which acknowledges that learning/teaching is always an intervention in the elements that comprise culture, during which both sides must learn if there is to be beneficent change). There is a difference between dialogue-and-respect and imposition-and-domination. And if many more of us don’t start to understand those process-effects and their imperfections as well as their successes, soon, directly or indirectly, we’ll kill each other and ourselves off. It’s that simple.*9) The fact that so many creatures—from mice (who squeak) to mastodons (who trumpeted), bats to beavers, giraffes (who mostly listen but sometimes mew) to gerbils (who chitter), pigeons (who coo) to primates (who grunt, growl, or talk)—share an auditory form of data emission and reception (i.e., hearing and making more or less informative noises; though we all do different things with them) attests to its efficacy for multiple tasks at every level of development as well as to our genetic connectedness over the last 250 million years since the early Triassic and before, and the incredibly intricate road to language that a purely synchronic linguistics system is inadequate to untangle without a great deal more extension into semiotics, animal and human, and their evolutionary history, much of which is lost.

  Given that we have separate brains, that we can “communicate” as well as we can is quite amazing—but don’t let your amazement make you forget that “communication” begins as a metaphor for an effect (a door that opens directly from one room to another, a hall that leads from one place in a building to another) but is thus neither a complete nor an accurate description of many things that occur with sound-making and sound-gathering. The fact that so many different creatures have eyes, ears, and kinesthetic reception systems speaks of the efficacy of these effects as well as the genetic relationships among us since before they and their precursors—from gills, extraneous jaw bones, and light sensitive spots on algae and the forerunners of nerves themselves—evolved over millions of generations. That is an index of their usefulness in this landscape. Bear that in mind, and you may start to perceive how complex the process is and why language is only the effect that something has passed from person to person, creature to creature, from landscape to creature, whether from speech or in writing or by touch or through any sound—or perceptible signs.*10

  It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “We must treat other people as if they exist, because perhaps they do”—though we’ve gotten a lot more biological and neurological evidence that they do.*11 Because of this, the force behind that “perhaps” has strengthened to a strong “probably,” though in theory we haven’t gotten much further. The similarities and differences from which—neurologically speaking—we learn to interpret the world, unto birth and death, comfort and discomfort, safety and danger, pleasure and pain, and the existence of other people and other creatures and other minds and—whatever ours is—other sexualities and orientations and the worldscapes we share, are all still effects, even as they form our only access to the life, the world, the multiverse they create for us. But they would appear to be extremely useful effects for keeping us alive and functioning in our nanosection of a nanosection of that multiverse—that is, if what many of us take to be failures of tolerance among the general deployments and our own employments of these effects of difference don’t lead to our destruction.

  VI.

  Now that we’ve had a romp through space and time, and a general ecological agape, which—since Poe obliged an audience of sixty with a talk taken from his then unpublished Eureka, A Prose Poem*12—we still expect certain sorts of imaginative writers to indulge in from time to time, I can tell the following without, I hope, its taking on more critical weight than it can bear: an anecdote that pleases me and makes me smile. For—largely—that’s what it is. (The indirect gesturing toward metaphysics is done with for the nonce. And, no, we can’t say anything about it directly, which is probably why it takes so long to suggest anything about it at all; and, no, we are still never outside it…)

  All three books of my Fall of the Towers trilogy sold.

  Every once in a while, even today, someone writes about them: “Hey, these are interesting—certainly better than I ever thought they would be….”

  I don’t make too much of it.

  Still, the trilogy was the favorite of a young man who wrote subtle and involving avant-garde fiction, published by a very respectable press, and also of a sharp young woman who wrote crafted and exciting science fiction—and, in his green T-shirt and his orange rubber glove, my neighborhood New York sanitation worker.

  Before he let go of my shoulder, though, he held me long enough to say that They Fly at Çiron—which had just come out in paperback—was his second favorite work of mine: a possibility for a similarity, or even for a partial congruence having arisen from his encounter with the text in his mind and from the very different encounter with it in mine, but no certainty, no identity.

  I smiled. “Why, thank you for taking the time to tell me—about both. That’s very nice of you.”

  Glancing at the glove, he dropped his hand back to his side. “Oh, sure. Any time, I guess. You’re welcome. I’m glad it’s okay…” He told me about the magazine in which, two weeks before, he’d seen my picture and read its few paragraphs about me. He was a black American man like myself, which meant we’d shared many experiences and much cultural history. He was a black American man like myself, which meant his world and his upbringing were unique, as were mine. (For all our human species’ similarities, if we look carefully enough, uniqueness—fingerprints, retinal patterns, the synaptic links in our three billion brain cells, genetic variations in both essential and nonessential genetic material that reflect the different specificity each of us inhabits and our ancestors inhabited [i.e., it didn’t kill us in that particular landscape before we could pass it on], even if we live in houses next to one another, or in the same house in the same family—is our most widely shared trait.*13) Did that have anything to do with his stopping me? Possibly. In the twenty-five seconds we spoke, the next thing he let me know was how much he liked Octavia Butler’s work. “Kindred…? Those stories in Blood Child?” he asked. “Patternmaster …?”

  I nodded, smiling.

  “Did
you ever meet her?”

  “She was a student of mine, many years ago,” I told him.

  “Oh, wow,” he declared. “That’s amazing! She was?”

  “That’s right. She was discovered by a white Jewish writer, Harlan Ellison, who was running a special program in Los Angeles, and encouraged her to come to the place where I and a number of other SF writers were teaching.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well—” I laughed—“now you do.”

  For a moment he frowned. “Hey, I like his work too.” Then his frown relaxed into a smile.

  “So do I.” I didn’t mention how many other SF writers I’d taught over the years—or had Harlan or any of the other writers and editors who had taught at Clarion, including Butler herself several times.

  The article had mentioned that I was black—and gay. It hadn’t mentioned that my wife and I, though divorced, had raised a daughter. (Or that, for several important years, not only my partner but my mother, my ex-wife and her partner, and forty other gay men and their children had been a part of that raising.) I was wondering if he had a family—when he added, “Great meeting you. Hey, I gotta get back to work.”

  I called, “Thanks again. So long…!” while he loped off past the blue plastic recycling tubs that had already been emptied, to follow the once-white Isuzu refuse collection truck up the street, on which, above and outside the hopper, someone had wired a big, stuffed, grubby bear.

  If you enjoyed Çiron too I am happy. My apologies, if you didn’t. But maybe the extension of this anecdote—here—will suggest a further explanation for the sanitation worker’s reaction, not so different from why Professor Clareson enjoyed Beta-2.

  VII.

  Initially, at the conclusion of this afterword, I’d planned to revert to our A, B, Cs, and to discuss how what started, after all, as a random collection of signs for sounds, developed into such a powerful ordering tool, beginning with the fact that, at our opening, we didn’t alphabetize the titles of the books, but only the first letter of the final proper noun in each.

  Older alphabets, such as Hebrew and Greek, begin, in effect, “A, B, G: aleph, beth, gamil…alpha, beta, gamma…”; which suggest a great deal about the history of written language, because so many of those alphabets from that relatively small arc of the world share so many sequences with one another, which means contact between the cultures: the Arabic abjad has several orders, two of which begin a, b, d, (abjad, hawwaz, ḥuṭṭī) and two of which begin a, b, t. (We would have neither algebra—which is a Arabic word—nor the use of the Hindu zero, nor the names of so many of our stars, without the Arabic language and its cultural flowering through the centuries, in poetry, science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.) Other writing systems, which developed in different places—China and India, Korea and Malaysia, Central and South America—are as rich and as creative as any of the “classic six” (up through much of the nineteenth century, these included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, along with Sanskrit and Aramaic), but work differently, sometimes at very fundamental levels. My first idea was to go on with what an alphabetic ordering could accomplish and what it couldn’t.*14 As I began drafting it, however, I got caught up in still another meditation on “social” evolution, an idea I distrust as much as I believe in what we call Darwinian evolution, a distrust for which the huge collapse of the time frame in “social” evolution is only one bit of the evidence against it—that is to say, reduces it to a misleading and highly abusable metaphor instead of an efficient explanation of another effect, another illusion, which often contravenes what biological evolution itself so overwhelmingly suggests. But that seemed a bit off topic for where I wanted this consideration to go.

  I decided, therefore, to go back instead to some advice I’d encountered by the time, in Amherst, I settled down to do the work—the rewriting—on They Fly at Çiron. (I’d dedicated Çiron to my current life-partner, Dennis, and, after twenty-five years together, I include him in the dedication to this omnibus as well.) The advice was helpful—to me; very helpful. But, like any writerly advice, it didn’t replace the work. If I’d only applied it to the textural surface rather than to the fundamental narrative logic, it would have resulted in more confusion (and perhaps it did), whether I was writing fiction or nonfiction. It had to be a guide for where—and the way—to do the work, which, throughout, habit demanded I do as nonhabitually as I could. It also suggests why, today, this version of Çiron is three times as long as the text I salvaged from the old manuscript I’d carried with me from New York to Amherst, and why it has six characters who weren’t in the first version at all.

  The 1925 Nobel Prize–winning Irish (though he lived much of his life in England) playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw was a great favorite of an astonishing American writer, Joanna Russ, whom I was privileged to have as a friend from the middle sixties until her death in 2011. (Though we met only six or seven times, our letters back and forth starting in 1967 fill cartons.) She was an enthusiast both of Shaw’s plays and of his criticism, musical and dramatic. From adolescence on I’d enjoyed Shaw’s theater, but Russ was the first to remind me of his other pieces,*15 some of which I had been lucky enough to have read before on my own, so that I could reread them in the twin illuminations of her knowledge and enthusiasm.

  After she started writing, Russ enrolled as a student at the Yale School of Drama. Among the things Shaw had written, in a letter to a younger friend, which Russ once passed on to me: when actors are told that they are taking too much time to say their lines, and because the play is too long they should speed up or even cut the lines, often the better advice is to slow things down even more. Frequently, what makes parts of it seem muddy, slow, or unnecessary is that the development is too compressed for the audience to follow. Expand it and make the articulations of that development sharper and clearer to the listeners. Then the play will give the effect of running more quickly and smoothly and what before were “slow” sections will now no longer drag.

  That can apply not only to reading texts but to writing the texts themselves. (Not to mention prefaces, afterwords, and footnotes—or simply reading.)

  In a world where cutting is seen as so much easier and the audience is far too overvalued—and simultaneously underestimated (the audience is, before all else, ourselves)—this is important advice. One of the things that make it important is how rarely you will hear it or anything like it these days—which is why I’ve ended with it. It’s one way—but only one—to guide the work I must always return to.

  A good question with which to begin that kind of revision is: if I set aside, at least momentarily, what I hoped I was writing about when I first put all this down, what is this text in front of me actually about that interests me? How can I make that clearer, more comprehensible, and more dramatic to myself? Can I dramatize or clarify it without betraying it?

  (And suppose I can’t…?)

  In revising even this sketchy guide through what is finally a maze of mirrors, several times that’s been my question here.

  If, like me, you are someone who reads the foreword and afterword before you tackle the texts between—and often I do, then go on to chuckle over how little they relate to what falls before or after, the world, the text—now, however abruptly, I will stop to let you go on to read the text, the world that contains them and of which for better or for worse, however briefly, they are a part. Who knows if there might or might not be something between these covers that, later, you’ll want to read again. Again, I cannot know. But I can hope. We can even think about how my or your hope inspires you, if we will also talk about why it guarantees nothing, either to the young or to the old, either to me or to you. But that’s one of the things books are for. That’s why they have margins—which, in a sense, is where forewords and afterwords (and footnotes) are written.

  And when you encounter the flaws in the texts here (and you will), you can decide whether or not Shaw’s advice applies, or if they need more—or si
mply different—work.

  August 2014

  New York

  * * *

  *1 The larger point: I am as much the person who makes the mistake as I am the one who corrects it. I am as much the person who gets to the place in a sentence or a paragraph where I realize I am ignorant of a date or the name of a city where some historical event occurred as I am the person who, twenty minutes later, returns from the encyclopedia on the lower library shelf or turns from the computer screen after a ten-minute Google hunt to fill it in. Writing above a certain level requires, however, that you gain some understanding of both, not only within your “self” but out in the world. Perhaps this is what has given me a career-long fascination with people who cannot speak or write at all, as well as an equal fascination with poets (which etymologically means “makers” and more recently “makers of things from language”), though the “self” I present the world is neither one nor the other, thanks to the Other that is always there in me, the “I” that “I” am always struggling to overcome. This is the only way I can resolve the aporia (the contradiction; and aporia was Plato’s word after all) as to why Plato, who was such a fine writer in the Greek of his time, in his hypothetical and optative society so famously excluded the poets from his Republic. Plato wanted the poets who were there to be better than they were, that is, to choose the option to be more faithful to the idea of truth—which, when talking about an imagined world, is not quite the same as actually banishing them from the actual. I am not in the least suggesting, as some folks have, that Plato wrote science fictions. But I do. That helps me read him—as, doubtless, having written one novel himself (Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas [1885], a favorite of both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) and started another (Gaston de la tour), helped Walter Pater, seven years later, in his wonderful Plato and Platonism (1893), have the insights about the philosopher that he did. (Far closer to our day than to Plato’s, Pater noted that, had he been writing in ours, Plato could have been a great novelist.) The ten-volume set of Walter Pater’s complete works—which her father had not allowed in their library when he was alive—was among the first books Woolf bought with her inheritance on her father’s death. And, a favorite of all the young readers of the Oxford Aesthetic Movement of the previous twenty years (and one of the great forbidden books of its age), Marius is among the first books directly alluded to (by Buck Mulligan, on page eight of the Vintage International edition of Ulysses), through its subtitle. Usually such allusions are literary love—though they can also, sometimes, be literary hate. The unconscious, Freud suggested, uses no negatives. Strong emotion is strong emotion. To me, however, this one has the feel of an enthusiasm.