Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  I’d send you my Anna Kavan except I sent it to this Indian (Craig Strete) who is starving for books and stealing the Celina library blind. She’s Popular Library pbk. It’s pretty strange.

  Have marked on a card GET Carol Emshwiller’s JOY IN OUR CAUSE. Thanks. […]

  (All much better here, British Columbia & not hearing the name of Richard Milhous Nixon did me infinite good.)

  Love from your advice-prone

  Tip

  ***

  22 Oct 74

  Dear Joanna:

  Back again after another emergency trip to Ghastly Scene of Interminably Perishing Aged Ma, of which we will say no more. I’m afraid you’ll find that my friendship is something like being friends with somebody sinking for the 34th time in the entropic flood, I flounder up, throw flowers & kisses wildly—only to submerge again with only bubbles to mark the site of dismal private dramas.

  That sentence needs editing. Oh well, perhaps you get what I mean. The problem of being full of enthusiastic philosophical agreements whilst stuck in the dentist’s chair with no novocaine.

  […] I hope I get time to write Chip Delany before the Silence strikes. If not, then on revival. But must do it right, I feel my old timidity about him. So goddamned good. And so unmistakably self-possessed. A been-through-fire type.

  It’s odd, at my nearly-60 age—I feel everybody else, I mean everybody who counts—has Been Through Experience, has lived, while I have only, what, fumbled through unsuccessful apprenticeship, got ready to begin to start, and stand eagerly upon the brink of figuring out How to Live—just as hook from shadows is snaking out to yank me off scene.

  (I also have moments of believing I am transparent, something that did not jell. Everyone else seems to have so much density, self-organisation. Personality. If asked who they are, they know. I asked myself that the other day—could I write an autobiography just for my own amusement, OK, who you? And all that formed in my throat was, uh, uh, well, I guess just the something peering out from this totally random manifestation. Something small peering out. And incurably young, not perhaps in the best sense.)

  And then I find I intimidate the occasional fool. Wonders never cease. Who, me?

  Thanks about the Bowling Green U. idea. Having your goddam letters now puts a responsibility on me. Do you realise that, you maniac?

  About Phil Dick’s books. UBIK and OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8 are pretty damn good. There’s another with some weird philosophy which I can’t recall now, will look up … I’m afraid the Great Chipmunk has gotten to him, too, Joanna, I really am afraid.

  About his house being ransacked, while everything is possible, I would apply Occam’s razor here and suspect a more casual ransacker rather than gov’t. In this case. You saw what dreadful problems those clowns had getting a CIA reject to ransack Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; the incompetence of government should never be underestimated.

  About the either-or roles for women. Jesus, I read that with aching heart. Prescription for self-mutilation … the life of the very intelligent is in any case a drunkard’s walk, but that’s cold comfort. I hate to say this, but one of the most sexually sane woman friends I have had was—is—an almost complete homo. (Some disastrous early marriage attempt, soon over.) I begin to wonder if female sexuality isn’t a biological accident, a nightmarish side-product of your inherent masculinity. (All women’s, I mean.) Maybe there are only 2 sexes, men and mothers. (Oh, and two asexual sexes, children and the old.)

  Oh—I note that Jeff Smith is trying to get his Women in sf thing off the ground. A worthy commotion, I guess. My contrib, due to the hand business, is going to have to consist of a solo input from left field, I’ll just scribble down some thoughts that’ll probably offend everybody. And then sit back trying to figure out how to blow my nose & reading what you all say.

  Would like to see the George story very much. But time brings all things.

  So you are a desert type. My, my. The one experience I had of being drastically short of water traumatised me. I am a vapor type. The misty plains of Stonehenge and plenty of moisture in the woad please.

  Yeah, about Ursula. It is my theory that the “contentment” masks something not yet born. She has been at a “contented” stage. There is something about mothers, you know. One of the faces of Eve. There are so many ways of being female. And it is something about how to deal with pain; she puts it “inside the song,” as Tolkien does. Is this admirable or a cop-out? I don’t know. I know that something in THE LATHE jumped out clear at me … I worry about the load of sociology she carries, too. It may take some time before the real U.K.L.G. stands up. But in LATHE it signalled.

  I confess she affects me deeply. She radiates something. Maybe not an ultimate solution, but … something … maybe it appeals to my Victorian background, in which crises were handled in the third person. Some kind of invincible non-immediacy—no, I’m babbling. But here’s a thought. You know, it can take a sort of courage to admit one is happy, I mean, it’s an ignoble situation in the world today. That “contentedness” is a kind of confession, maybe. I think she is happy at times, not even “determinedly” happy … Do I make any sense? Happy even in face of knowing that the grey sea will roll over all.

  There are so many ways of being human.

  I was fascinated by your comments on Justine & porno and taboos and will go lavishly into it all at length except that life has come ringing & knocking & been thrown out twice but will not stay thrown. (Mostly doctors’ offices scheduling pre-operation exams of unbelievable complexity. Christ I wish they’d just take the damn hand and start chopping, who cares what my EKG is.) But general tone is agreement. Nobody seems to share my taboos, which are mainly I suppose ethical and aesthetic. I’m really a fearfully conventional Bertrand Russell–type old liberal ethical atheist, with an odd eye out for fact. Let’s not be beastly.

  And you should guess what I look at on TV, really, where’s your writer’s smeller. What does a character like me watch? Why, Public TV, of course. Masterpiece thee-ayter. THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE. BBC products. Occasional glances at old Mission Impossible reruns. A little—very little—Archie Bunker, mainly because I once went to school in Bunker territory & they have some of the syndrome very sharp. HEIMSKRINGLA—did you catch that? Electronic compositions, a bit muddled. Sometimes a Jap. monster sf show. And—beat me, spit on me—I wuvved STAR TREK.

  OK, I go, I go—

  Love,

  Tip

  P.S. Novella—oh, hell, my left hand CANNOT! New murderous novella sounds good. What title?

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22101

  S.F.W.A.

  5 Mar 75

  Dearest Joanna,

  […] This is jerky, because I just got back, delayed en route by a tooth blow-up (damn thing was under a lot of bridge-work). And found the usual body-bag full of mail, really frightening. But I wanted to write you quick just apologies and appreciation. You have such a beautiful mind, Joanna. The effect of a kind of calmly towering lucidity, sounds rather like an unearthly light-house, but maybe you know what I mean. The dervish phenomenon is real, too, I think you get gripped by a kind of frenzy. It makes your output almost unintelligible to the non-genius reader—in fact for a bit I was actually worried that you were on speed. (I’ve been hooked on Dex a couple of times since the Army dumped it on me in 1944, and it’s the sweet trap of all traps for writers. Wow.) The thing about your mind is that you are so quick. So almost intolerably quick. There is this multi-faceted torrent effect, which must be what your inner life is like to yourself. You must spend an awful lot of time editing yourself and reducing the flow for purposes of linear communication with the clods outside.

  But the effect, as in your letter of 16 Dec, is worth it. I have sadly learned in my gabbling life that it is worth taking the time to get the poor oaf reader firmly by the hand before hustling him off in all directions … Not that you would know it by my letters to
you, I fear you evoke a kind of answering frenzy too, a wistful one up to now. You have no idea how helpless I felt being unable to write a word, and unable to tug at your arm!

  Anyway, signing off with a real question. In your letter you advised me to look at the sexes “as an existentialist—that is, as human choices to be made in specific situations.”

  Now here is where I am intimidated. The word “existential” is still, despite all effort, an empty word to me. Can you explain more? Can you tell me what to read—I know you are busy, it is unfair to ask this. But as it stands, it does not clarify for me. Your example is to look at it as Success vs. Babies. How does that apply to raccoons? How does it apply to Mme Curie? I simply don’t know … Am I being very stupid? Do you mean simply that there are two patterns, success and babies—or that looking at them as choices is better than patterns? How does that explain, say, the Canadian commandoes who in the midst of their raid on Dieppe found themselves so horny they dashed into a whorehouse—with the Germans about to exterminate them? (It may be this anecdote is euphuised, it may have been rape or a casual encounter, but fuck they did.) This is to me a type of behavior which is very physical, having to do with congruent neural pathways, adrenaline, etc. It could have been done by a woman, but it is no part of Mother … Is it?

  Next I want to look at the differences between Mother and Male in terms of speech. Verbal ability. I persist that Mother lies at the origin of our most prized possession & ability, you know: speech itself. The “male” attitude toward speech in every society I’ve seen is constipated, difficult, sacred—actually frightened. Whereas Mother is a verbal virtuoso. (And accordingly hated by “males.”) And it is interesting that male-type “art” speech has become known as the “majesty of language” or some such nonsense.

  Wonderful about the sex of god, the Lewis bit. I have all your letters very carefully in a notebook, you know. Someday maybe you would like me to Xerox them for you, because in your effort to educate me you may have written several essays you could use?

  One thing you and Sam Delany have in common is that both of you have in some sense nearly migrated into literature, transmogrified yourselves into art forms. A degree of that sense one has about people like Borges, that he is totally transmuted into another continuum, so that every event is handled in the terms of his Riemannian literary space. I admire this, though cannot do it. (Perhaps, will not.) But it is beautiful.

  And the other thing you and D. have in common is that neither of you know your own strengths. You are both still like Alice before she realized everybody else was only playing cards. Remember? She took them all seriously and strove with all her strength. And then suddenly stood up and turned the jury-box over. “Why you’re only a pack of cards!” So you both hit hard enough to stun brontosaurs. And we all fall dead!

  Now adieu + love

  Tip

  How are the eyes?? Really: worry, worry.♡

  ***

  James Tiptree Jr.

  P.O. Box 315

  McLean VA. 22101

  S.F.W.A.

  15 Mar 75

  Dear Joanna—

  You are a brave and gallant and friendly person; I had not expected letters, and most especially not such a careful and good explanatory one. I do, abashedly, realise what a distraction this has been for you. Please recall that in my very first letter I asked you NOT to reply at the cost of your writing time and energy. This, I hope, still goes. I am not one of those who are easily offended by serious things (pompous). You can walk back in after a ten-year silence and start out, “As I was saying—”

  And I hope you do.

  However, I’ll take the occasion to go on a bit, because both you and Delany—who comes across very nice in his letter, no problem—you have both mistaken me very profoundly. Maybe I can explain a bit of it, but I rather despair. As we learned during the McCarthy period, it takes one sentence to accuse and a page or a book to get the accusation off your back.

  First, let’s tidy up a couple of loose ends. I have read nearly everything you recommend, in some cases long ago. My de Beauvoir is 1953 and dog-eared. It was not, to me, a revelation; I preferred Woolf, better Mary Wollstonecraft, whom I came to by way of Mills. Not that de Beauvoir is not very good, but SS was to me tainted with that peculiar slavishness of spirit so deeply stamped into French women. She got rid of most of it in THE COMING OF AGE.

  Slater I have enjoyed, although the revelatory quality tends a little toward the pompous. There is a bad thing about being nearly sixty; so many bright young voices seem to be earnestly rediscovering the wheel. But that is, too, unfair.

  I have most of the feminist works on your list, but not THE GLORY OF HERA. (I wonder if Robert Graves will substitute, at least temporarily.) It makes me very happy to hear some sense and good, sound revolution being talked at last, after the decades of Lundberg’s MODERN WOMAN: THE LOST SEX, Babette Deutsch, and the rest of the dreary crowd devoted to making women comfy with someone’s foot on their necks.

  I have always bought novels and poetry by women, too; I bet you never heard of an extraordinary person, a steel-worker, called Elma K. Lobaugh who in 1946 wrote a thing called THE DEVIL IS LONELINESS to a reception of resounding silence.

  Now of course it is perfectly possible to read all these things, and say all the things I do, and still be totally wrong-headed. We’ve all met that. If that is the case, I’ll never know it—idiots don’t know they’re idiots—oops, there I go eliding and you will come back at me to say yes, idiots do, which is true. I meant “fools.” Nor do the senile know they’re senile, which is the only bright aspect I have discerned in my future.

  And it may be, as Delany said, that age has got into my computer and all is lost. Age does that. If so, all we can say is I love you, Goodbye. I do resist the implication a bit—one tends to—because what I see age as having done to or for me is a little different.

  You see, I grew up believing very much what I think you believe in an age when it was very unfashionable to believe it. For fifty years I plugged along at the Biology is NOT Destiny line; the total difference between humanity and animals, the reality of human free choice, was deep in my soul. Is, in fact. The mutability of humanity by its culture, the tricks you so well describe in your letter that training and expectations play. You and I would have got on perfectly even ten years ago, when I was finishing a doctorate in one of the softer sciences. I mention this because (a) yes, I have read all the basic stuff you have, e.g., I know the fallacies of cultural evolutionism as you do. And (b) you may have taken for granted that my education took place when Yerkes was writing his twaddle about chimpanzees. (That was a marvellous and much-needed send-up of Yerkes by Herschberger. It is a pity few researchers of the currently active generation will read it. Let us hope there are some apes left when people with better educations come to look at them.) So I mention, diffidently, that my transition from sophomore to the kind of doctorship which does no one any good took place in the midsixties. (As to my research, no one has ever heard of it, although for some reason I seem to have a small following behind the, uh, Iron Curtain. It dealt with perception.)

  So maybe by being such a late-comer to so much I have staved off the ravages of age in one or two directions for a little while. But what I want to get at here is that the suggestions I put out in the symposium are in a sense foreign, tentative steps for me. This is a secondary level; I am going against my own deepest dogma. Maybe if I had explained that, you might have understood the extreme trepidation with which I put it forth. But I don’t think you would have, on second thought, especially if you read it as carelessly as you seem to have.

  I don’t blame you one bit for this—my god, you are a writer and terribly overworked, and if someone puts out an odd and peculiar-smelling document which can be dismissed with a casual swipe at a stereotype, why not?

  But you have stereotyped me unjustly, you know. You are as rigid in your ways as I in mine, and scant blame to us. One of the hard necessities of life i
s knowing What Not To Pay Attention To.

  But it confuses me to have one item treated as you did—you with your subtle, sarcastic fire of thought. Of course that offer of the dreadful bracelet was symbolic. (Among other things, it has been given to a museum which financed my folks’ early work in Africa.) What I wanted to convey by that was a reminder of the power-distribution in the great expanse of the world and time.

  Now here we come: You (and Delany) took that as a “threat.” Well, again I can’t blame you. You were more acute, you saw me as simply paranoid, which I probably am. There are a lot of motives from which people yell, “Look out!” Some are simply nutty, like Chicken Little. Some are from self-aggrandisement, like the boy who cries, “Wolf! Wolf!” Some are because they’ve seen it happen again and again until they are stuck in the groove. Perhaps that is me. I did have a rather brutish early experience; the first dead people I ever saw had been crucified—not on large impressive posts but on nasty little saplings. And they had been tortured first. Their crime was witchcraft—it was an orderly process of that society, but it struck me rough. I also spent an evening as a child about a hundred feet from where a man was being prolongedly killed and then cooked and eaten. That was all right too, he was accused of thievery. But it wasn’t restful. He made dreadful noises. And then I got to see the real bad stuff—the death-camps the Belgians ran. Life expectancy, two months. Crime, non-payment of arbitrary taxes. In short, I was early impressed with the idea that “orderly” societies can wreak considerable ravage on the deviant individual.