by Nisi Shawl
{But this is not at all unusual} the social nuance agent assured Fift.
Just above them was the glistening underside of Sisterine habitation, docking-spires and garden-globes and flow-sluices arcing away. In front of them was the edge of Foo. Their neighborhood, Slow-as-Molasses, was at the end of one spoke of Foo’s great, slowly rotating wheel—and beyond it, this time of year, was a great empty vault of air…and then fluffy Ozinth and the below-and-beyond strewn with glittering bauble-habitations…and beyond that, habitation after habitation, bright and dim, smooth and spiky, shifting and still, all stretching away toward the curve of Fullbelly’s ceiling.
There are a trillion people in the world, Fift thought. And only ten in our house. And if Father Miskisk breaks the pledge, we’ll be only nine, and that’s not enough. Her legs, under the new white shift, felt cold and rubbery.
They came to the edge of the neighborhood, the main slideway to the center of Foo.
“All right, little cubblehedge,” Squell said, dropping down on one knee to hug Fift. “Time for Frill and I to turn back. You are in our hearts.”
Frill rubbed Fift’s scalp one more time. “Knock ‘em on their backs, little one!” He grinned, and slapped his knife-belt. “Metaphorically.”
Fift looked up into his face and took a deep breath. The outcome affects our whole cohort. “Father Frill, what if I don’t do well? What will happen?”
Frill and Squell’s faces went a little stiff, and even Grobbard blinked. Fift realized then—they weren’t in the apartment anymore, they weren’t just on the house feed. Everyone in the world could see and hear them now, if they wanted to.
But Frill smiled then, and crouched down next to Fift, in a tinkling of bells. “Then we’ll manage, Fift,” he said. “We’re a strong cohort and we’ll triumph. You have a Mother and Father to hold you safe at the center, and Fathers enough to range around you, to protect and enliven…”
{Will you hurry up?} sent Smistria, from back at the apartment, to all of them. {Fift will be late!}
Frill rolled his eyes, and grinned a crooked grin. “Goodbye,” he said, and “Goodbye,” Squell said, and Fift took Grobbard’s hand and stepped onto the slideway.
{Father Miskisk} Fift sent, but she didn’t know what else to send. {Father Miskisk…I’ll do my best!}
If she did well enough, maybe Father Miskisk would stay.
The slideway whooshed them off, towards the center of Foo, where they could transfer to another spoke; toward the wooden floor, and the spoons, and the First Gate of Logic, and white gowns and responsibility, and no more zooming. Fift held tight to Grobbard’s hand, and waited, hoping, for Father Miskisk to reply.
The Master of the Milford Altarpiece
Thomas M. Disch
What blacks and whites, what greys and purplish browns!
BERNARD BERENSON
Often enough Rubens may have quietly taken stock of all previous Italian art at this time, especially of the Venetian school, the knowledge of which had had so little influence on other northern artists. Though scarcely one immediate reminiscence of Titian can be discovered in Rubens’s later work, whether of objects or of single forms, he had learned to see with Titian’s eyes. He found the whole mass of Tintoretto’s work intact, and much of it still free of the later blackening of the shadows which makes it impossible for us to enjoy him, but he may well have been repelled by the touch of untruthfulness and lack of reticence in him, and by the crudity of a number of his compositions. It is obvious that his deepest kinship by far was with Paolo Veronese; here two minds converged, and there have been pictures which might be attributed to either, for instance, a small, but rich Adoration of the Magi which the present writer saw in early, uncritical years and has never been able to forget.
JACOB BURCKHARDT
I.
I can hear him, in the next room but one, typing away. An answer to Pamela’s special delivery letter perhaps? Or lists of money-making projects. Possibly even a story, or a revised outline for Popcorn, in which he will refute the errors of our age.
Wishing to know his age, I went into the communicating room.
“Jim?” I called out. “Jim?” Not in his office. I called downstairs. No reply. I returned here, to this desk, this typewriter. Now there are noises: his voice, the slow expository tone that he reserves for Dylan.
He is twenty-three. He will be twenty-four in December. For his age he is fantastically successful. I envy his success, though it isn’t a personal thing—I can envy almost anyone’s. I need constant reassurance. I crave your admiration. Is candor admirable? Is reticence even more admirable. I want to read this to someone.
Chip said, on the phone last night, that Algis Budrys called him the world’s greatest science-fiction writer. I certainly did envy that. Jane said afterward that Chip is coming up here at the end of the week, possibly with Burt. (Burt?) Marilyn is still in San Francisco. I feel resentful.
I don’t think that I am alone in being obsessed with the idea of success. We all are. But though we may envy the success of our friends, we also require it. What kind of success would we be if our friends were failures?
This isn’t the story. This is only the frame.
◊
Pieter Saenredam
Pieter Jansz. Saenredam; painter of church interiors and topographical views.
Born in Assendelft 9 June, 1597, son of the engraver Jan Saenredam. He went as a child to Haarlem and became a pupil in May 1612 of Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, in whose studio he remained until 1622. In 1623 he entered the painters’ guild at Haarlem and spent most of his life there. He was buried at Haarlem, 31 May, 1665.
He was in contact with the architects Jacob van Campen and Salomon de Bray, and perhaps also Bartholomeus van Bassen. He was one of the first architectural painters to reproduce buildings with fidelity (that is to say, in his drawings; in his pictures, accuracy is often modified for compositional reasons).
In his bedroom, which also served him as a studio, the curtains were always drawn. The cats performed ovals and sine curves in the bedclothes, a gray cat, a calico cat. Most of the furniture has been removed. The remaining pieces are placed against the wall.
The pleasures of iconoclasm. Destruction as a precondition of creation. Our burning faith.
The same painting over and over again. The high vaults and long recessions. The bare walls. The slanting light. Bereft of figures. (Those we see now have, for the most part, been added by other hands.) Nude. White.
He opened his present. Each box contained a smaller box. The last box contained a tin of Mixture No. 79, burley and Virginia. From that young scapegrace, Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638).
It was an exciting time to live in. Traditions were crumbling. Fortunes were made and destroyed in a day.
The columns in the foreground have been made to appear much wider and taller, and the arches borne by them have been suppressed.
◊
His first letter:
RFD 3
Iowa City, Iowa
May 66
Dear Mr. Disch—
Twenty minutes ago I finished The Genocides. And should have finished it days ago,but I kept drawing it out, going back over things, taking it a few pages at a time: because I didn’t want it to be over with, sure but mainly because I felt there was so much to take in—the structure, the pitch and tone of the narrative, the interflow of situations—and I wanted to give myself every chance I could ….
From a letter two months later:
… I am touched, Tom, by your extremely kind offer. To show my things to Moorcock. If they were only good stories, I’d take you up on it in a minute. But they’re not, and I know it, which makes things different, almost embarrassing. But I may still put you in the compromising position, after thinking it over a while. I could use the sale (money, ego-boost, a beginning), and some of ‘em aren’t really that bad … and so on. But for now: I thank you very much. No way of expressing my gratitude—not only for the offer, but for your
proffered friendship as well, your demonstrated openness ….
And this, when I had asked him for a self-portrait:
His Whilom. Born in Helena, Arkansas. Parents uneducated. Spoiled because was so hard to conceive him, wrecked mother’s health to bear him against the advice of doctors. One brother, seven year older; philosopher, PhD, teacher. Spent his youth on banks of Twain’s Mississippi and in Confederate woods banking his small town. Became interested in conjuring when about twelve, an interest which persists. During high school edited some small magic mags, composed and formed chamber groups, took music lessons (against his parents’ wishes, who thought playing in the band was enough, and regardless of their lack of funds), had few friends. Spent summer between 11th and 12th grade doing independent research under guide of National Science Foundation, it being his ambition at that time to become a biochemist. Was oppressed that summer by the routine boredom of checks and balances, began to write poetry under the inspiration of cummings. In his 12th school year, wrote plays, directed plays, acted in plays, won dramatic prizes, became very depressed about not having the money to go to Princeton, became a dandy and discovered girls. Decided he was a poet.
The Exterior Symbolic. Am tall, very thin with a beer belly and matchstick legs. A disorder of the lower back has left me slightly stooped and given me a strange, quite unique walk. Wear wire-frame glasses. Dress in either corduroy coat or black suit, with dark or figured or flowered shirt and black or figured tie. An angular, long face. Black curly hair that sticks out like straw and generally needs a cutting.
◊
Aedicule
The enclosing planes of walls, floor, ceiling. Subsidiary planes in tiers supported by the vertical members—posts, legs, brackets. A light bulb hangs from the ceiling. His room is characterized by rectilinearity. He unpacks his boxes and arranges the books on shelves, tacks prints to the walls, disposes of his clothing into drawers.
Without are trees, weeds, grasses, haystacks, cathedrals, crowds of people, rain, bumps, animals ground into meat, billboards, the glare, conversations, radiant energy, danger, hands, prices, mail, the same conversations.
The artist is obliged to structure these random elements into an order of his own making. He places the ground meat in the icebox, arranges the crowds of people into drawers. He carves a smaller church and places it in the larger church. Within this artificial structure, each figure, isolated in its own niche, appears transfigured. Certain similarities become apparent. More and more material is introduced. New shelves must be built. Boxes pile up below the steps. The sentences swell from short declarative statements into otiose candelabra. Wax drips onto the diapered floor. Styles conflict. Friends drop in for a chat and stay on for the whole weekend. At last there is nothing to be done but scrap the whole mess and start from scratch.
Whitewash. Sunlight slanting across bare walls. Drawn curtains. Vermeer’s eventless studio.
He paints a picture of the table and the chair. The floor. The walls. The ceiling. His wife comes in the door with a plate of doughnuts. Each doughnut has a name. He eats “Happiness.” His wife eats “Art.” The door opens. Their friend Pomposity has come for a visit.
II.
Yesterday, all told, he got three letters from Pamela. Passion that can express itself so abundantly, though it may forfeit our full sympathy, is a wonderful thing to behold. Given the occasion, how readily we all leap into our buskins! And if we are not given the occasion outright, we will find it somehow. Madame Bovary, c’est nous!
When every high utterance is suspect. We must rely on surfaces, learn to decode the semaphore of the gratuitous, quotidian event.
Oh, the semaphore of the gratuitous, quotidian event—that’s beautiful.
For a long while I pressed my head against my purring IBM Executive and tried to think of what constituted, in our lives here, a gratuitous event. There seemed far too much significance in almost anything I could remember of yesterday’s smallest occasions. I returned most often to:
Raking leaves. Not, conscientiously, into a basket for burning, but over the edge of the escarpment. Like sweeping dust under a rug. Jim came out on the porch to announce a phone call from my brother Gary. He has been readmitted to Canada with immigrant status. Then, back to my little chore. Jim said he hates to rake leaves. “Because it reminds you of poems in The New Yorker?” I asked. He laughed. No, because it reminds him of his childhood. Weeding the towering weeds in the back lawn, unmowed since mid-August. The two most spectacular weeds I tamped into a coffee can and set beside our other plants on the table in the bay of the library.
Strings of hot peppers, predominantly red, hanging unconvincingly on the pea-soup kitchen wall. Jane’s handicraft. Staring at them as I gossiped with Jim. About? Literature, probably, and our friends.
Judy bought a steak, and Jane made beef stroganoff and a Caesar salad, both exemplary. The flavor of the sauce, the croutons’ crunch.
Chess with Jim before dinner, with Jane after I’d washed the dishes.
Jane cut Jim’s hair. Dylan was skipping through the scattered curls, so I swept them up and put them in the garbage.
At what point was I happiest yesterday: as I raked leaves and washed dishes or when I was writing this story? At what point was Jane happiest? At what point was Jim happiest?
Was Jane happier than Jim? Was I happier than either? If not, were both, or only one, happier than me? Which?
I spend too much time lazing about indoors. I overeat. I smoke a package of cigarettes every day. I masturbate too often. I am not honest with myself. How, then, can I expect to be honest about others?
Happiness is not important.
◊
The Conversion of St. Paul
The acquisition of certain knowledge (as Augustine shows us) is possible, and men are bound to acknowledge this fact. The knowledge of God and of man is the end of all the aspirations of reason, and the purification of the heart is the condition of such knowledge.
The city is divided by schisms, as by innumerable rivers. His single room on Mississippi Avenue overlooks an endless genealogy of errors, sparrows, roofs. He has, by preference, few friends. He reads, each evening, of the great dispute over the nature of the Trinity. Demons in the form of moths tickle the bare soles of his feet. He fills his notebooks with theories, explanations, refutations, apologies—but nothing satisfies him. Of what solace is philosophy when each sequent hour reveals new portents of a sure and merited destruction, innumerable portents?
He cannot endure the strength of these emotions.
He writes:
To be happy, man must possess some absolute good: this is God. To possess God is to be wise. But none can possess God without the Son of God, who says of Himself, I am the truth. The truth namely is the knowledge-principle of the highest, all-embracing order, which, as absolutely true, produces the truth out of itself in a like essential way. A blessed life consists in knowing by whom we are led to the truth, in what we attain to the truth, and how we are united to the highest order.
That much seems to be clear.
Often (of this he did not write) the walls of the room warped. The old man from next door came and stared at him as he lay there in the bed. Crook-backed and dirty (a magician probably): the name “Sabellius” burnt into the gray flesh of his high forehead.
In the churches, the gilded sculptures of Heresy and Sedition. Plastic dissembling itself as trees, weeds, grasses; simulating entire parks. The seeming virtues of his friends were only splendid vices. Their faces were covered with giant worms.
He distinguished between the immediate and the reflective consciousness, which concludes itself in unity, by the most perfect form of the will, which is love. Does the Holy Ghost proceed from the communion of the Father and the Son?
Explain the hypostatis of Christ. Tell me you love me. Define your terms.
He fell on his back and saw, in the clouds, the eye of the whale. He saw the river burning and his friends destroyed.
An
d no one listens to him. No one. No one.
◊
An excerpt from his letter of Sept. ’66:
The large, looming discovery: Samuel R. Delany. I had read a few of his books and been quite impressed and assumed he had been writing for three hundred years and was roughly ten million years old. God, I should have known (and if I’d read the jacket notes would have) … by the time he was 22, he’d had four books published. The last three of these are a trilogy, and his best work. He’s about 24/25 now, with eight books. And he’s beginning to think about shorter work …. “Chip” has the strongest, most vital personality I’ve discovered in the sf clan. That young, and writing like that! (This is the larger part of my current depression—that he does it so much better than I.) Read his books and you drown in poetry.
And this, a letter to his wife:
Glad to hear that you and Tom are getting along so well and things are working out; also, of course, very glad to hear that you’re working. I’m really damned pleased that you like him so much. Tom is a fantastic influence on everyone he comes near. I find it difficult to be with him for more than a few minutes without having the urge to get right to work on something better than anything I’ve ever done before. I don’t know if I have mentioned it, but Tom is beyond doubt the only person I know to whom I’d apply words like “genius.” In ten years or so, he’s going to be quite, quite well-known and quite, quite respected. What is he, and what are you working on; and are you, and is he, serious about the poetry magazine? I hope so.
That radiant quality of mind is something he shares with Mike, with John Sladek, and with Pamela.
And then (though not chronologically):
I’m constantly amazed, Tom, at the similarity of our tastes, expression, and ambitions. If we were French poets, I’m certain we’d think it necessary to form a “school” about ourselves: arguing with the establishment and among ourselves, bitching at traditions, j’accusing all over the place, emitting manifestoes, issuing bulls, belching intent everywhere we walked, excreting doctrine and should-be’s, generating slogans, shouting what we collectively think, and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it all … I don’t think anyone has ever done that in sf, have they? Poetry, art, music, other writing reeks with such focused groups (I’m led to think of this by just having read a book on contemporary poetry, in which the movements of the projective-verse poets and deep-image poets were detailed; it sounded like so much fun, and everyone concerned got so much out of it, and you can’t argue that they wham-bang turned the tides of poetry).