Dick's Broken-Backed Novels

I've read nothing like a majority of Philip K. Dick's novels, but I have read quite a few. Most recently I read We Can Build You, about which more below; it's among the prizes I bore away from the Cool Book Sale I described a few weeks ago. (The dear old ladies are selling those books by the box now. It's criminal, I tell you!) I started reading Dick in college after seeing Blade Runner for the first time. Naturally I began with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but since then have read a pretty good selection of his work from different phases of his career.

Probably my least favorite Dick novels are the ones with his trademarked what-the-hell-is-going-on-oh-that's-what's-going-on plotline. These include Ubik and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Even these have their moments, though, like the subtle dig against the protagonist at the end of the latter.

It's quite interesting, really, if you think about it. (In fact, I'm having a little epiphany right now as I'm writing.) In a nutshell, international celebrity Jason Taverner wakes up to find himself utterly unknown and without papers of identification. It's as though he'd never existed. After various adventures he throws himself on the mercy of Mary Anne Dominic, a potter. She's so introverted and unworldly that you get the impression she wouldn't have known who Taverner was even when he was famous.

This is where it gets interesting. Taverner thinks her pottery is nice in an offhand sort of way, but through carelessness breaks one of her beloved pieces. Afterward (or maybe it's before, I can't remember) they go to a café, where they hear one of Taverner's records on the jukebox. People begin to recognize him, and everything is back to normal. Eventually everything is cleared up in typical Dickian fashion, i.e., through drug use. But the epilogue is where the dig is; for we find that Taverner has lived out the rest of his rather frivolous life like any A-list celebrity, in pointless dissipation, while Mary Anne's simple yet beautiful work continues to quietly inspire. Do you see? Taverner returned to reality only after making contact with Mary Anne, whom he plainly saw as a nobody and whose work he took for granted; then it's Mary Anne who's revealed to have lived the true life.

And that's what makes Dick great, in my opinion: his humaneness. It's always people that he cares about, not things; beauty, and not power. This sets him apart from a great many science fiction writers. His most unsympathetic characters are handled with a profound compassion. This is attributable, I suppose, to the suffering and existential bewilderment Dick himself underwent throughout his own life.

Schizophrenia runs in my family. My uncle, who's severely paranoid schizophrenic, lived with my grandparents up until their death; he was (on the surface) a silent, morose man with an enormous brown beard who spoke only in monosyllables, but sometimes he'd lock himself in his bedroom and guffaw and chat about crazy things with the voices in his head. I remember listening to him late at night. He's in an institution now, and isn't the first in the family to have been institutionalized. There are various other quirks and hang-ups that crop up here and there. I myself have of course been diagnosed with an autism disorder, and have at times lived on the verge of homelessness.

So, it's something I have a bit of experience with. Dick's novels are often gripped with a terrifying paranoia that stemmed in part from his LSD use but more, I suspect, from his disorder, for which drug abuse was probably only a desperate remedy, as it was for my uncle. But, miraculously, he was able to turn it to good effect, and the people in his stories are real people, not figments or delusions.

Some of the novels in which he tried to handle themes of mental illness ended up not being wholly successful. Perhaps this is because a what-the-hell-is-going-on story has to have a stable backdrop of reality in order to arrive at a satisfying resolution. When the characters are deluded it's anyone's guess what the real story is. This would apply to V.A.L.I.S. and We Can Build You, both of which have a kind of broken-backed structure; but they're quite memorable, and a more "successful" attempt, The Clans of Alphane Moon, strikes me as rather trite.

V.A.L.I.S. is largely autobiographical; it amuses me that the Library of America copy I have on my shelf is entitled V.A.L.I.S. and Later Novels, as if the editors weren't entirely certain how to classify it. It's narrated in third person by the protagonist, Horselover Fat, which is of course a cryptogram for Philip Dick. The first half is a fairly realistic account of Dick's mental illness, drug use, and various theophanies; the second, a typically Dickian sci-fi story, is quite different in tone, and ends without a clear resolution. That's not doing the book justice, I know, but what I'm pointing out is the visible seam in the middle, where we go from schizophrenia to sci-fi. I'll discuss the work itself in a later post.

We Can Build You, a much earlier work, has this same seam, but it goes in the opposite direction, from sci-fi to schizophrenia. I read it, as I do most of Dick's books, in a single day, and the ending both disappointed me—because the main plot of the book had been abruptly and completely abandoned— and filled me with a very real, poignant sorrow. It is, from many points of view, a failed novel, but it's one that I think I'll go back to long before I re-read Ubik…

The Claw of the Conciliator

This is a continuation of my previous post on Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I was commenting on objections to the book, and had just suggested a parallel with the Grail cycle, with the Claw of the Conciliator as the "grail" that moves the plot along.

It's interesting, by the bye, that the Claw only performs "natural" miracles. It cures diseases, heals wounds, and raises the dead, but has little or no effect on the artificially enhanced beauty of Jolenta and the like. The miracle that most stands out to me is the changing of water into wine at the inn in Saltus. It is, of course, an echo of Christ's first miracle at Cana. In The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson, speaking of the attitude of the medievals toward such phenomena, has this to say:

In a way everything is a miracle. At the marriage of Cana Jesus made water into wine and everybody was astounded; but rain becomes wine in our vines every day, and we take it all as a matter of course. Nevertheless, it is God Who creates the rain and the vine and the wine; but He does it regularly, and we get so accustomed to it that we cease to wonder. Again, He speaks, and one rises from the dead and the whole countryside flock to see; but men are born every day in the usual manner and we enter the birth in the civil register as if it were the most natural thing in the world… Miraculous phenomena are not necessarily more admirable in themselves than the daily spectacle of nature; the government of the world, at once as a whole and in all its least details, is a much more wonderful thing than the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves.

He elsewhere notes:

The true Christian feeling for nature is that which finds expression throughout the Psalms, and, above all, in the Canticle of the Three Children in the fiery furnace: Benedicite opera Domini Domino; laudate et superexultate eum in saecula. And after many centuries St. Francis of Assisi will echo that song in his Laudes and the Canticle of Brother Sun, wherein not only water, earth, and air, and stars, but the very death of the body itself, will receive their meed of praise and benediction. If anywhere the heart of man entered into fraternal communion with all that lives and breathes and has being, most assuredly it did so there; for this purely Christian soul it was altogether one and the same thing to love the works of God and to love God.

This is the very spirit that runs through BOTNS from beginning to end.

What struck me on the beach and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck for so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and indeed touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground. [The Citadel of the Autarch]

Here Severian echoes Moses before the burning bush—recognizing that every bush is a burning bush—and also Francis, the barefoot friar whose optimism was equaled only by his stern asceticism, as well as Augustine of Hippo, after whose Confessions his personal chronicle is perhaps modeled:

In loving you, what do I love? No physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiance of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine; no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can receive corporal embrace; yet I do love some kind of light, some kind of voice, some kind of fragrance, some kind of food, some kind of embrace, when I love my God, who is light, voice, fragrance, food, embrace to my inner man…

I questioned the physical world concerning my God, and it replied to me, "I am not he, but it is he that made me." I questioned the earth, and it said, "I am not he"; and all that was in it confessed likewise. I questioned the sea and the depths, and all living things that creep, and they replied, "We are not your God; look above us." I questioned the winds that blow, and the whole air and all its indwellers said, "Anaximenes is wrong; we are not God." I questioned the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: "Nor are we the God whom you seek," said they. And I said to all these things that surround the doors of my flesh, "Tell me about my God, that which you are not; tell me something of him." They cried out with a great voice, "It was he that made us." My questioning was the concentration of my mind, and their response was their beauty. [Augustine's Confessions, Book X, trans. Philip Burton]

After reading a number of bad reviews, I begin to wonder if the issue isn't partly a matter of prejudice. I'm reminded of C. N. Manlove's study (Modern Fantasy), which finds The Lord of the Rings and Perelandra to be unsuccessful, while books like Phantastes and Titus Groan are held up as successful. Never mind that the former are perennial favorites available in any bookstore, whereas the latter are hardly read anymore. The cause, he's forced to conclude (after some fairly tortuous criticism), is religion:

[O]nly unprejudiced realists can write fully imaginative fantasy; only those who know one world thoroughly can make another with the inner consistency of reality.

And only those who eschew dogma are unprejudiced realists who know the world, because dogma is prejudiced and unreal and ignorant. I'm not going to throw myself into that fray because I don't like writing about religion per se on this blog, but I will suggest that this attitude seems more likely to be an a priori opinion than a reasoned conclusion. The notion that Tolkien's fantasy is not "fully imaginative" when compared to Peake's is laughable. But to those who prefer the joy and the hope, the grief and the anguish of Middle Earth to the dreary pointlessness of Gormenghast Castle and the zero-dimensional caricatures that inhabit it, Manlove has this to say:

It is almost worth…the failings of The Lord of the Rings to have that one frail, beautiful vision of the vanished garden in Lothlórien. But the word is 'almost': one must leave to the cultists the readiness to dispense with [what makes a successful novel].

Indeed. You know, I find books like The Left Hand of Darkness and A Voyage to Arcturus and VALIS and The Worm Ouroboros and Mythago Wood and Hart's Hope every bit as enjoyable as (say) The Lord of the Rings or The Book of the New Sun. A writer reveals herself in her writing, whether she wants to or not; if she holds a belief, religious or otherwise, then that gets woven in there with the rest. But the end is not the communication of an idea or an opinion. The end of the novel (unless it is a failure, as Perelandra to some extent is) is a kind of beauty, and this beauty is the beauty of truth only secondarily. It can be entered into by anyone, but you have to submit to its rules and make yourself vulnerable for the moment. I admit that this is not always easy. But it has this tendency: it makes you more humane.

As far as Wolfe goes, it's clear that it really is his confessional status that bothers some people, and not the book itself, because its symbolism is as pagan as anything. For that matter, Tolkien's mythopoeic ouevre isn't as Catholic as is always made out—he departed from received dogma on at least one important point, and was taken to task for it—while Lewis' stories are strongly neoplatonist. These writers are being found wanting because of something extrinsic to their works.

We all have this tendency to get trapped in our little ghettos, me as much as anyone else; but insofar as I've limited my horizons to what I'm comfortable with, I've become less of a person. That's something I seem to have to discover again and again.

The Book of the New Sun

My wife and I read together a lot. It's amazing when I think about it what we've gotten through this way. Long works like The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, Emma, The Brothers Karamazov, David Copperfield, and The Worm Ouroboros; short works like Heart of Darkness, The Time Machine, The Big Sleep, The Man Who Was Thursday, and Our Man in Havanna. She used to teach elementary school, and we've read a lot of juvenile fiction, too, like the Curdie books, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Wind in the Willows, The Neverending Story, and Lang's fairy tale collections. As you can probably tell, our tastes differ somewhat. Sometimes we read nonfiction, although we often don't finish this, usually because of my short attention span. It's easier to come back to something after having laid it aside for awhile when you're reading on your own than when you're reading aloud with someone else.

This summer we've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which is appropriate as he recently received the SWFA Grand Master award. I've read it before; this is her first time. It's a good book to read aloud because of its formal voice and attention to language. I suppose that's why we tend to go through a lot of nineteenth-century literature together—choppy dialogue and stylistic experimentation don't lend themselves to vocalization. Actually, in order to really appreciate beautiful writing, I find that I have to read it aloud; my pace makes me miss a lot otherwise. Conversely, bad writing becomes painfully apparent this way.

BOTNS is one of those books that divide people. Some think it's one of the great novels of modern times; others just don't get it. Unsurprisingly, it garners more stars on Goodreads than Moby-Dick, and the reviews are really rather similar. People who don't like it find the plot too meandering, the action too halting, the ruminations too digressive; people who like it have a hard time giving a single, coherent reason. Everyone who reads Moby-Dick and hates it takes great pains to make it clear that they get it—understand the symbolism and allusions and so forth—only that it doesn't impress them. But "getting" a book in the sense that you know all the stuff the endnotes would tell you isn't really getting it at all. There's a landscape here, and you have to live in it. You have to have come to love the cadences of the King James Bible, been daunted by the cruelty of the Old Testament, set yourself up against Nature in hate and fear, looked into the maw of a universe without God, been swayed by the music of Pantheism. It isn't a story, for God's sake. It's a monument. Much the same can be said of BOTNS.

So, first let me offer some faltering explanations of why I like the book. After that I'll discuss a few objections.

To begin with, I've written elsewhere about how much I admire the vocabulary. It's eminently suited to the story, which takes place in a Dying Earth so far in the future that the only productive mining is in the "hills" of heaped remnants of previous civilizations, the great city is a world unto itself tapering into ruins at its extremities, and exposed strata in the mountains consist of layers of million-year-old human artifacts. Wolfe has a way, too, through careful word choice and image-painting, of making you think you understand something—the nature of a building or a person, perhaps—and then dashing it to pieces by the narrator's casual mention of some minor detail. For example, you realize only gradually that the Citadel in which the story begins is in reality a collection of ancient space crafts. The vertigo of "time's abyss" (as The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has it) occurs too many times to count.

The structure of the book is that of a traveler's tale. Such stories bore some people to tears, but I find them profoundly enjoyable when done well. This one is done well. Its cast of disappearing, reappearing characters reminds me, oddly enough, of the anime cartoon Belle and Sebastian, which I watched on TV when I was in kindergarten but haven't seen since. It also contains numerous tales-with-the-tale, much like Moby-Dick, something that, again, isn't to everyone's taste, but is to mine. A couple of the stories are far-future retellings of current tales (Theseus and the Minotaur, Mowgli's Brothers). It is, in general, as profoundly erudite a piece of speculative fiction as you will ever find.

Objections to BOTNS fall into several categories. Some people take offense at the fact that the book doesn't spell everything out. Some reviewers have concluded that BOTNS is little more than an immense puzzle for the reader to solve. Admittedly, the book does contain many puzzles. Personally, from a stylistic point of view, I appreciate it that Wolfe didn't clog his story with infodumps. I mean, the infodumps (and, in the later volumes, the synopses) are there, but you have to put them together yourself. It's really rather artfully done. It's as it would be if Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings by taking Frodo from his front step to Rivendell, with no "Shadow of the Past" or Council of Elrond, ending with his acceptance of the quest for Mount Doom. No appendices, no backstory: the history of the One Ring—including Frodo's destiny—is to be pieced together by the attentive reader from an assortment of hints and allusions. They are, of course, vastly different works, but have this in common: verisimilitude. LOTR purports to be a version of the Red Book of Westmarch, a chronicle, while BOTNS is presented as Severian's confessions.

Other people get angry about the treatment of women in Wolfe's Urth, as if this is his coda for how he thinks women ought to be treated. One reviewer lists all the rights women in Urth fail to enjoy as though they are Wolfe's crimes against humanity, ending with a heartfelt "f*** you." It's strange. Would they feel the same way about a historically accurate novel set in (say) Imperial China? I mean, setting a story in a milieu in which women (and people in general) don't enjoy basic rights and privileges doesn't make the author an apologist for it.

Of course, some authors might be accused of taking a little too much pleasure in the mistreatment of female characters. John Norman comes to mind. I personally can't bring myself to read Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane because of the rape scene at the beginning. But I don't get same feeling from BOTNS. Severian certainly beds a lot of women, and some people argue that that's chauvinism right there, in that the author is making all the women want the protagonist. However, he also makes monstrous undines and masked hierodules want the protagonist. So, perhaps it serves a thematic purpose.

And what might that purpose be? Given that Severian's predecessor is an impotent androgyne, and that Urth is dying of exhaustion and sterility, perhaps his prodigious virility and attractiveness signify his role as the one who is to bring the New Sun. Actually, the book practically says as much in one of the final chapters:

If I am he who is to renew the youth of the sun with the White Fountain of which I have been told, may it not be that I have been given, almost unconsciously (if that expression may be used), the attributes of life and light that will belong to the new sun?

Again, time is spoken of as a tapestry woven from many threads, and Severian's particular course seemingly leads to a planet inhabited by green men who live by drinking in the rays of the sun. He aids a green man sent back to his own time and is aided by him in turn. As is well known, the Green Man is a personification of fertility.

Severian is, in fact, a Grail Knight, in the sense of From Ritual to Romance and The Waste Land. Remember that the "grail" of Wolfram von Eschenbach's version is a mysterious stone, not unlike the miracle-performing Claw of the Conciliator carried by Severian through most of the story.

Well, this is getting to be a long post, so I'll continue in another.

The Stars My Destination

One of the spoils of my book-sale conquest a couple weeks ago was The Demolished Man (1953) by Alfred Bester. I'd read The Stars My Destination (1956) some time ago and liked it a lot, so this new one was the first I read of the bunch. It caused me to revisit TSMD. After A. E. van Vogt, I'd now say Bester is my favorite of the Golden Age writers.

It's quite surprising how contemporary these two books feel. They've been hailed as precursors of cyberpunk; in fact, they're merely early entries in the subgenre. Neuromancer (1984) certainly goes beyond them, but I don't see anything significantly new about it apart from the idea of cyberspace. TSMD has a high-tech underworld, super-powerful corporations, criminals with cybernetic enhancements, and all the rest. I don't say this to diminish Neuromancer in any way, as originality is, I think, overrated.

Both novels (TSMD and TDM) abound in delightful invention and colorful detail passed over quickly. I think, for instance, of the neo-savage Scientific People in their cobbled-together space habitat; the underground Shanghai "hospital" for people addicted to illegal diseases; the Gilt Corpse, a notorious socialite with a surgically enhanced, "pneumatic" body; a commercial jingle so persistent it allows a murderer to keep his mind from being read by the police while he has it going around his head; the Coop, a former ceramics factory bombed into a rainbow-colored labyrinth during the last war and serving to house a brothel and psychic act. The novels jump from one thing to the next and are truly a pleasure to read just for that. It isn't a surprise that Bester seemingly wrote himself out so quickly, for any one of the ideas he touches on so lightly might have served as the conceit for an entire novel in the hands of a lesser author.

The esper world of TDM is, to me, a terrifying one, a world in which crime has been eliminated because the police can read minds. Bester doesn't really comment on whether this is good or bad, which I appreciate. My own opinion is that enhanced safety is generally accompanied by diminishing freedom, and that it is possible to trade away so much freedom that the safety is not worth having. Does that have a contemporary application? Hm, no comment. Except to say that I recently read an article discussing advances made in brain-mapping and the possibility that answers to questions posed by (say) law enforcement officers might one day be scanned directly out of the perp's head. Does the right not to testify against oneself include keeping one's own mind from being read? I hope I'm dead before the SCOTUS attempts to answer that question.

TDM is, they say, explicable only in light of Freudian psychology. I didn't find this to be so myself. Certainly Freudian psychology lends the plot cohesion, but I don't find that I have to suspend my disbelief in it in order to enjoy the book. Attention is generally drawn to the Oedipal urges of the protagonist, but the "Electra complex" that develops in the young Barbara (who is mentally regressed to infancy and raised by a police prefect—whom she refers to as "Daddy"—and his love interest, ultimately coming to maturity and stealing the heart of the former from the latter) is, shall we say, slightly more unsettling. It reminds me of the strange, immature kinkiness one finds in many of van Vogt's novels.

Weird and immature or not, there's nothing of the sort in TSMD. Its original title (in the UK) was Tiger! Tiger!, and the epigram to the first part is a verse from Blake's poem:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This serves as a description of the protagonist, Gulliver Foyle, whose impetuous, comet-like course in pursuit of revenge defines the novel. He's an Everyman, a type of the human race, rising from apathy and savagery to enlightenment only to discover what a chimera he is, and how unworthy and pointless his mission. But also to find the stars within his reach.

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation

Deep space is my dwelling place

The stars my destination

The basic conceit of the book is a world transformed by the advent of jaunting—personal teleportation—which allows a person to instantaneously move to a distant location simply by willing it. The difficulty is that the jaunter has to have seen the location previously. This permits the rich and the powerful to keep their hold on society; as the novel says, the limitations on jaunting give the Grand Tour a whole new significance. Also, jaunting through space is seemingly impossible.

The secret of the space-jaunte is revealed in the end and is, appropriately, rather metaphysical. In order to jaunte, one needn't have seen the place of desire; it's necessary only to have faith that the place exists. This is, I think, a beautiful exploration of a purely natural faith or (to be more accurate, in my opinion) hope. The ancients averred that hope could degenerate into one of two opposite vices: the infantility of presumption and the senility of despair. TSMD is a tale of the middle course being laid open to man, and no more.

It closes on an ambiguous but optimistic note, with Foyle distributing PyrE, an agent of mass destruction, to the great unwashed to do with as they will, then going on a jaunte through the furnace-places of the cosmos. The last paragraphs find him curled up like a fetus in the hold of an outer-space cargo cult, dreaming divine dreams, a sleeping giant whose awakening will bring enlightenment to humanity.

After his brief science fiction career in the fifties and sixties Bester went on to edit a travel magazine. He eventually returned to what made him famous, with mixed results. I haven't read his later novels, but the reviews paint them as violent, joyless, and misanthropic. He gained the reputation of being a mean drunk in his last years, died right before receiving his SFWA Grand Master award, and left his estate to his bartender.

Lost in a Maze

One movie that I like a lot, that I'm a bit ashamed of liking, is Labyrinth. I watched it many times growing up, renting it over and over again from the tiny Videoland huddled in the front part of the warehouse down the street. I guess I always had a thing for Jennifer Connelly. I also actually still think David Bowie's a pretty good actor; he played an excellent Andy Warhol in Basquiat.

Part of what makes it a good movie, despite its goofiness (and David Bowie's pants), is its poignant message, some of which goes unstressed. The protagonist, Sarah, having faced a personal tragedy—some barely-glimpsed newspaper clippings reveal her mother to have been an actress, possibly dead(?)—, has retreated into a fantasy world, constructing an elaborate environment (her bedroom) over which she has complete control. Each item is beloved, each in its proper place, and her foray into the labyrinth is in reality a foray into the maze of her own mind. With muppets.

This theme becomes clear when she awakens from the stupor induced by a poisoned fruit to find herself in a vast, nighted junkyard. She's accosted by a creepy old woman-muppet with an enormous pack, a little goblin who reminds me strongly of certain second-hand dealers I've met. Sarah goes through a door into a perfect replica of her bedroom, with all her beloved things in their places. She shuts the door, shutting out the world, and everything is as it should be. Except that soon the old woman bursts in and begins burying her under a pile of stuffed animals and knicknacks. Sarah, entranced at first, rejects it all in the end. The room falls to pieces and caves in, and she climbs out to be reunited with her friends.

That old woman is for me the embodiment of the spirit of hoarding. I've been thinking about it a lot. We just passed the third anniversary of my grandmother's death, who was almost literally smothered by mountains of junk and decay. I lit a votive candle in church for her. That's what people of my bent do when someone we love dies, especially if they were in a bad way.

About fifteen years ago I watched Grampa die. He'd had a stroke but was recovering, when a nurse accidentally put his feeding tube into his lung. And that was that. Watching his brain-dead body gasp for air after we unplugged him was like watching a machine wind down, and when his heart finally stopped his mouth was frozen in a permanent snarl. After that I dreamed about him every few weeks or so. He would come among us again, but I'd know that something was wrong; in the end I'd always remember that he was supposed to be dead.

When I told my father about the "visitation," he advised me to light a candle while I slept. Granny's brother—the alcoholic air-traffic controller after whom I was named—had haunted Grampa in the same way, it seems, and lighting a candle had done the trick. (My grandparents were both from Puerto Rico, and were what we of the anglosphere would call "superstitious.") I never did "light a candle," and the haunting never stopped, either, although it became less frequent with time. In hindsight I suppose the practice comes from the custom of praying for souls in purgatory. So it could be said that I light candles for both my grandparents now.

They were troubled people with a lot of secrets. Some of the secrets came out when Granny died, but probably not all. I won't reveal them. Let what the dead saw fit to bury remain buried. They'd lived in an atmosphere of mutual animosity, but Grampa was Granny's mainstay, too. She was both strong and weak. When the decision was made to let him die she refused to leave the waiting room. The rest of the family had no patience for her, but I remained behind. "Fifty years down the tubes," she kept saying. I told her how wrong she was, and how she'd always regret not having been by his side at his death, and in the end she consented to go, holding my hand all the way like a child. In his room she clasped his hand and wept, whispering mi Dios, mi Dios as his body heaved and groaned. I was nineteen at the time.

It was then that things began coming apart at the seams.

My grandmother, in the sixties.

She'd always had the propensity, I suppose. She lived in a small, sunless house cluttered with exotic bric-a-brac picked up on their travels, with bars and heavy curtains over the windows, and an iron-wrought gate covered with ivy before the front door, and an overgrown, labyrinthine backyard, and about eight yapping dogs that did their thing on newspaper under the dining room table, and cages with the injured birds she took in. She never got rid of anything. One of the bedrooms upstairs had remained exactly the same as when my aunt had lived in it as a girl. Actually, I was twenty-seven or so when I was suffered to go up the stairs for the first time in my life, to use the toilet; and I'd grown up about mile down the road, so it wasn't like I hadn't been there much. Grampa's bedroom, also upstairs, hadn't been altered after his death, either. I should have known that her not letting me into the downstairs bathroom, which lay beyond her bedroom, was a bad sign, but I didn't. Her house was like her mind. There were parts locked away and left alone. The thing is, when you leave something alone, it doesn't just remain the same. Entropy sets in. It begins to decay.

We remained close after Grampa's death. She told me she considered me her spiritual advisor. Sometimes she would confide in me, telling me about how she could feel Grampa's presence in the house, speaking to her. That it might have been dementia didn't occur to me, for her mind was quite sharp in other ways, and she'd always been given to paranoid fancies.

Without Grampa there to check her, the mountains of junk began to grow. During the last year or two of her life you couldn't really get past the living room. She lived in it, watching TV on one of those little sets they used to sell, and sleeping on the couch at night. You could hardly move around even there. A distinct odor of death and decay pervaded the house, and there was always a telltale rustling. I tried to ignore it. Of course we all knew she had a problem, though we didn't realize the extent of it. My parents tried to get her to let them clean the place for her, attempts which were met (finally) with open hostility. To me she admitted that she needed help, but was terrified of the immensity of the task. I ought to have done more, I think. With my place in her life, I might have been able to start cleaning for her. She would have trusted me. But I was wrapped up in my own affairs, with a new baby and a fresh doctorate. Then again, maybe she was too far gone even for my help. Maybe she would have just cut me off as she had my parents.

Her body was a wreck. She was diabetic, took about thirty different medications, lived on bottled oxygen, and had legs that were swollen into thick clubs that wept tears of blood. When the hallucinations started my father and aunt had her committed to the psychiatric ward of a hospital downtown. There was nothing else to do. I visited her there often. If dementia was truly her problem, its onset had accelerated. She would go into strange fugues and talk about how the hospital was built on a cemetery and how "creepy things" would come out of holes in the wall for her. Eventually she was moved to a nursing home, and there died after a matter of weeks. During her last days she spoke often of suicide.

The clean-up started once she'd been committed, and continued well after her death. It was one of the most horrific experiences of my life. Working our way into the kitchen, we discovered that she'd been relieving herself in a bucket on the floor. The cockroaches had colonized virtually every nook and cranny in the house. Nothing was free from their excrement and egg cases. After we bombed the place I found about twenty of them soaking in a coffee pot like shrimps in a boiler. The sink was full of dishes that hadn't been washed in years. When I mined out a corner down near the cabinets I came across rat nests and skeletons. There were piles upon piles of unopened mail-order merchandise: appliances, and clothes, and sheets for the big four-poster bed that she hadn't even seen in who knows how long.

It took months to clean the place out. I helped my parents as much as I could. My father hauled tons—literally, tons—of junk to the dump in a big flatbed trailer. And then they discovered the storage room, which hadn't been opened since well before my grandfather's death. My father calculates that my grandparents spent something like twenty-five thousand dollars on it over the years, for a pile of shit they'd forgotten they even had.

Granny's hoarding was something grown wildly out of control, out of a natural agoraphobia, a habitual desire to control her surroundings, and (I suppose) an irrational fear of the regret of loss. She and I were alike in many ways, and sometimes I see a similar propensity in myself. What if one day it's me who gets lost in the labyrinth?

For Granny, all I can do now is light a candle. I suppose that writing this is a way of lighting a candle, too. I love her, and I miss her, and I hope she is happy.

Sci-Fi in the Hinterlands: A Tribute

I am, as long-time readers of this blog will know, a used-book aficionado. I also have a fondness for classic science fiction.

Recently, the town in which I live was part of the Hotter 'n Hell Hunnerd Mile Yard Sale, or some such thing, with all and sundry lining the highway from Point A to Point B and trying to sell junk. As part of this, the worthy ladies who support the county library were holding a "Cool Book Sale." You see, they always have this little room in the lobby where they sell used books for a dollar or two, right beside the maize exhibit, but I never find anything good, not being interested in coffee-stained copies of Going Rogue or the Left Behind series. So, I figured, I'll go to this little sale they're having and poke around, because, you know, I have family in town and want to go hide out somewhere, but surely I won't find anything.

Was I ever wrong!

It was just this big room filled with big tables filled with stacks of old hardcovers. For fifty cents apiece, no matter what. First edition of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key? Fifty cents. First edition of A. E. van Vogt's Empire of the Atom, cover and all, in perfect condition, from a run of 2,000 copies by a small press that went out of business immediately thereafter? Fifty cents. I got an excellent old Modern Library copy of Plutarch's Lives, and a collection of C. L. Moore's best pulp stories, and a flawless Everyman's Gawain and the Green Knight, and Dorothy Day's autobiography, and a book on Thomist existentialism by Jacques Maritain, and, well, other things.

And then there were these tables filled with old paperbacks. They had plastic grocery sacks: fill one for a dollar. There's just something wrong with me, I think, but I genuinely enjoy certain books more when they sport simple, non-glossy covers with crude artwork and lots of exclamation points. Well, I now have enough to last me through, oh, the rest of the year. A. E. van Vogt! Alfred Bester! Poul Anderson! Damon Knight! James Blish! Robert Heinlein! E. E. "Doc" Smith! They had stacks of 'em, and they were begging me to take as many as I could carry! Which I did. Twice.

In all I spent eight dollars and twenty-five cents. Eight dollars and twenty-five cents! It was like one of my bizarre bookstore dreams. I mean, here's this perfect and rather rare first-edition copy of a classic science fiction novel, and I only paid fifty cents for it. Actually, I feel kind of bad about it, and am tempted to see what I can get for it on Amazon, so I can donate the money back. I'm not sure if I feel that energetic, though; maybe I'll just sit on it for a few years and see if the price varies. Right now it would bring in anywhere from sixty to a hundred and fifty dollars. It's a shame that the library people can't wrap their minds around doing something more with these books, but hardly surprising. People around here simply don't use computers much. I would try to get involved, but I don't know. The guy spearheading the disc-golf course project is already making enough waves as it is…

I think most of the novels came from the same person, probably through an estate sale or a donation by family members. The Hammett novel has a name in the front, dated 1944, and the same name appears in many of the paperbacks. He served in the Marine Corps and apparently had much the same taste in science fiction as I do. Based on what I heard the old ladies saying while I was crawling around on my hands and knees under the tables, pawing madly through boxes like Gollum looking for his Precious, a lot of the paperbacks came from the drugstore right off the town square. They dated into the seventies at least.

So here we have this native son, a marine and possibly a veteran—I would guess World War II or Korea, given the spread of dates—who, during his mature years, would frequent the town drugstore to see what new science fiction they had on the rotating rack. But some of the paperbacks plainly came from second-hand dealers in other parts of the country, so maybe he sought out the writers he really wanted, too. And what he wanted was the greats. None of that Asimov stuff.

Our marine apparently wasn't much of a fantasy reader, alas. There were some sword-and-sorcery items (Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, &c.) but no out-and-out fantasy. My abiding dream is to find an old hardcover copy of The Worm Ouroboros for really cheap. It seems that I must continue to wait.

So, to conclude: Sir, I salute you for your service to our country, your loyalty to our town, and your enlightened and wholly anomalous taste in fine literature. Your collection will (partly) be in good hands. Requiescat in pace.

Mysterious Mechanical Monsters!

And now for something completely different. I enjoyed culling the pictures for my last Superman post so much, I thought I'd do it again. If you've seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, you'll recognize the robots in this cartoon.

All Real Living is Meeting

Masters of the interior life teach that it's inadvisable to dwell on one's own mystical experiences, and especially to speak about them with others. As John of the Cross has it: The Bride says in her heart, my secret for myself. Part of the danger is that we come to regard them as a species of personal property or, worse, as spiritual cosmetics; still more dangerous is the fact that true contact with the divine takes place, not on the plane of concept or feeling or experience, interior or exterior, but on the plane of relation. To speak of experience is to savor the peel and throw away the meat.

O secrecy without a secret! O accumulation of information!

So I will not attempt to quantify my own experiences (insofar as I've had any). But any writer's mystical and metaphysical outlook inevitably colors his writing; my own has been profoundly affected by I and Thou (1923), the slim but rich volume by the great Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber begins by asserting that man's twofold attitude toward the world accords with the two "primary words" that can be spoken by man.

     Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
     Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
     Primary words are spoken from the being.

The two words, he says, are compound words. Each involves the I; when I speak a primary word, I enter it and take my stand in it. Any use of the word I is really a use of one or another of these words.

     The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
     The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

He goes on to say:

     The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
     The primary word I-It is never spoken with the whole being.

To speak I-Thou is to be in mutual relation. To speak I-It is to objectify. Think of talking to a person you love, of looking them in the eyes and addressing them as You, and how different this is from talking about someone not present as He or She. The thing is, you can use the word You and still mean It; there are people out there—narcissists and flatterers and manipulators, objectifiers and personifiers and conceptualizers—who are incapable of speaking in any other way. Such people never really live; the present is to them not the realm of eternal being, but the infinitesimal endpoint of the past.

The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring. The object is not duration, but cessation, suspension, a breaking off and cutting clear and hardening, absence of relation and of present being.
     True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past.

Our relation with other men stands in the middle place. Below it is our relation with the world of nature; above it is our relation with the divine. Our address of I-Thou to (say) a tree may be somewhat mysterious, and take place on a dark, subliminal level, but it is real for all that. The I-It analyzes the tree according to utility, or form and color, or chemical composition, or what have you; the I-Thou sees it as it is in itself.

It can…also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. […]
     The tree will have a consciousness then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

When we speak Thou on any plane, says Buber, we address the eternal Thou. But there is an attempt to evade this dichotomy between the past and the present, It and Thou, object and subject, by appealing to a world of ideas, by raising up a conceptual structure and dwelling in it as a bulwark against the onset of nothingness.

But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved. Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them; they wander amongst us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied; but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible.

When we erect such a framework and dwell in it, we barricade ourselves from relation with nature, with man, with god. Yet how frequently do men try to scale the divine heights by such means! There will come a time—in the afterlife, if not sooner—when doctrines and confessional differences will fade in significance. For there are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the divine, and the dividing line cuts right across the world of ideas, confessional boundaries, and the human heart. It isn't the division between polytheism and monotheism, but between what I (for lack of better words and at the risk of being misunderstood) will label the pagan and the mystic. It is possible to be a pagan and yet believe in one god; it is possible to be a mystic and believe in many gods. Every person is at least part pagan. A pagan is someone who speaks only I-It. To him the gods are objects to be acted upon; to him a tree is nothing unless it be fictively personified, or conceptualized, or dissected and analyzed.

[W]ithout It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man. 

Think of the old atheists' myth about the ebbing of belief. In the beginning, the legend goes, man believed that spirits inhabited trees and springs and other such things. As his familiarity with the world in which he found himself grew, he moved the divine agencies to the relatively inaccessible mountaintops. Further exploration forced him to relegate the gods to the distant heavens. And now, enlightened by precise astronomical observations, man has to locate god in the realm of abstraction.

Whatever the historical merits of this myth—asserted by some people with the ardent faith of the fundamentalist—I would counter it with a myth of my own construction. I would say that the peopling of hill and dale with rational spirits represents an attempt to deal with a fall. (Perhaps this is the source of the myth of the Fall, as hinted by Buber.) Man, alienated from the life of things, sought to regain his place by superimposing fictive animating agencies on the world of nature. No longer able to address the tree as Thou, at least on a subliminal level, he created the dryad. The impatient atheist is indeed fighting against one front when he denounces dryads and intelligent design. He is fighting paganism. But a pagan is really only a dishonest atheist; and there are atheists who, without realizing it, are mystics.

I've written a number of posts about how my perception of nature became warped when I was a teenager, due in part, perhaps, to my cognitive disability. At the time, I sought desperately to people my increasingly empty and meaningless world with minor gods. With all the data-acquisition-lust of my autistic mind, I pored over books about nature deities, demigods, elementals, fairies, and the like, collating and cataloging. I actually sought such beings in the woods and rivers. I sculpted goddesses from clay; I began the construction of a pagan shrine in the backyard, never to be completed. (My parents finished the garden after I went to college, but without the statue that was to have crowned it.) My point here is that my alienation from the world of nature went hand in hand with my retreat into paganism.

When man fell, Our Father Who Art in Heaven became Jupiter; literally, the names mean much the same thing, but I speak in terms of connotations. Again, I'm not opposing monotheism to polytheism. Certainly the objectification of the divine lends itself to a multiplication of gods, which is always a movement of rationalization and conceptualization. But who could argue that the polytheist Socrates lived exclusively in the world of I-It?

I have some thoughts about how these two primary words, these two attitudes, play out in art, especially in the fantasy novel. Perhaps that would best be relegated to a second post. For the time being, you, my reader, who find yourself trapped in the world of objects, consider the following, as I have, and find hope and a path to life:

Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that "craning of the neck" in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.

A Common Thread

I like to link ideas. What do the following passages have in common? Do you see it?

"Chrysaor was joined in love to Callirrhoe, the daughter of glorious Ocean, and begot three-headed Geryones. […] And in a hollow cave she bare another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth. And there she has a cave deep down under a hollow rock far from the deathless gods and mortal men. There, then, did the gods appoint her a glorious house to dwell in: and she keeps guard in Arima beneath the earth, grim Echidna, a nymph who dies not nor grows old all her days. Men say that Typhaon the terrible, outrageous and lawless, was joined in love to her, the maid with glancing eyes. So she conceived and brought forth fierce offspring; first she bare Orthus the hound of Geryones, and then again she bare a second, a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, Cerberus who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong. And again she bore a third, the evil-minded Hydra of Lerna, whom the goddess, white-armed Hera nourished, being angry beyond measure with the mighty Heracles. […] She was the mother of Chimaera who breathed raging fire, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth a fearful blast of blazing fire. […] Echidna was subject in love to Orthus and brought forth the deadly Sphinx which destroyed the Cadmeans, and the Nemean lion, which Hera, the good wife of Zeus, brought up and made to haunt the hills of Nemea, a plague to men."

– Hesiod's Theogony

"Come, now, tell me, where hast thou proved thyself a seer? Why, when the Watcher was here who wove dark song, didst thou say nothing that could free this folk? Yet the riddle, at least, was not for the first comer to read; there was need of a seer's skill; and none such thou was found to have, either by help of birds, or as known from any god: no, I came, I, Oedipus the ignorant, and made her mute, when I had seized the answer by my wit, untaught of birds."

– Sophocles, Oedipus the King

"Then someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone."

"Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay."

"I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight."

— H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

"I stood in one of the embrasures of the Last Redoubt—that great Pyramid of grey metal which held the last millions of this world from the Powers of the Slayers."

"To the North-West I looked, and in the wide field of my glass, saw plain the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit, shine upwards against the underside of the vast chin of the North-West Watcher—The Watching Thing of the North-West… 'That which hath Watched from the Beginning, and until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity' came into my thoughts, as I looked through the glass…"

"[O]lden sciences […], disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, […] allowed to pass the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and Ab-human creatures, which are so wondrously cushioned from us at this normal present. And thus there had materialized, and in other cases developed, grotesque and horrible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to certain dreadful Forces to have power to affect the life of the human spirit. And this growing very dreadful, and the world full of lawlessness and degeneracy, there had banded together the sound millions, and built the Last Redoubt; there in the twilight of the world."

"And then, so it would seem, as that Eternal Night lengthened itself upon the world, the power of terror grew and strengthened. And fresh and greater monsters developed and bred out of all space and Outward Dimensions, attracted, even as it might be Infernal sharks, by that lonely and mighty hill of humanity, facing its end—so near to the Eternal, and yet so far deferred in the minds and to the senses of those humans. And thus hath it been ever."

— William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

"At length they came to the door upon the outer court, and they halted. Even from where they stood they felt the malice of the Watchers beating on them, black silent shapes on either side of the gate through which the glare of Mordor dimly showed. […]
     "Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. As if to do honour to his hardihood, and to grace with splendour his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning; but it remained steady and did not pass.
     "'Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!' Sam cried. For, why he did not know, his thought sprang back suddenly to the Elves in the Shire, and the song that drove away the Black Rider in the trees.
     "'Aiya elenion ancalima!' cried Frodo once again behind him.
     "The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness like the snapping of a cord, and Frodo and Sam stumbled forward. Then they ran. Through the gate and past the great seated figures with their glittering eyes."

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Infant of Krypton, Man of Steel

I wrote in my last post about having watched the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons. Some of them have astonishingly beautiful animation and should be seen by anyone interested in dieselpunk. Just for fun, I've culled some of the more striking images from the first cartoon ("Superman," or "The Mad Scientist"). Enjoy! (Or better yet, go watch some of the cartoons.)

"In the endless reaches of the universe, there once existed a planet known as Krypton, a planet that burned like a green star in the distant heavens. There, civilization was far advanced, and it brought forth a race of supermen, whose mental and physical powers were developed to the absolute peak of human perfection. But there came a day when giant quakes threatened to destroy Krypton forever. One of the planet's leading scientists, sensing the approach of doom, placed his infant son in a small rocket ship and sent it hurtling in the direction of Earth, just as Krypton exploded. The rocket sped through star-studded space, landing safely on Earth with its precious burden: Krypton's sole survivor."