Notes Toward a More Coherent Essay, Someday, Maybe (Part 1, on the Fourth)

You know, writing something that is worth reading takes a long time. Maybe not for you, but for me I need at least a month to clear a comma from a lengthy prepositional phrase. I don’t want to just throw words out into the pixelverse. I want to write something that someone else might understand and maybe even appreciate.

In the meantime, I’ll scribble out this or scrawl out that – writing replies or replying to someone else’s queries. Some of these things echo what I’d like to say if I had the time to sit around and do what writers are supposed to do – and nothing else.

For example.

A writer friend for many years is getting back into the harness, sold a nonfiction piece and a short story to one of the pro-zines recently, has been asking me for advice – on particular stories and the field in general. He also read one of my recent book review columns for Galaxy’s Edge magazine (Am I a book reviewer? I am now. That doesn’t mean I’m a book critic or a scholar or a literary essayist. Circumstance has so far spared me from those fates). But he decided, since I was there and convenient to ask: “Is there something missing in my apprehension, something that will block my progress as a writer, if I simply cannot fathom some of the works of the so-called greats in the literary sf field?” He continues, I am willing to give PK Dick another try. But honestly, I have tried Le Guin, Delaney, Russ, others, and in each case I cannot go more than a few pages before putting the book aside, confused and irritated.”

He went on to describe a recent encounter with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where he got halfway through before giving up “in despair.” He liked the TV adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven, though, and thought maybe he should try again with that.

I replied that maybe he should. I think The Lathe of Heaven is still a favorite of mine (except on those days when The Left Hand of Darkness takes over). I also admitted that at times I find The Dispossessed a little too ponderous for me, but let’s not pursue that any further now, since I know many who consider it a masterpiece and love it dearly. It’s a great book no matter how I might stumble through it. The fault is all mine.

But my friend asked an honest question, so I tried to answer as honestly as I could:

That there’s so many books in the field of science fiction that we don’t want to read is part of the beauty of the form. Authors can write in so many ways, incorporate so many styles and techniques, and it’s still science fiction. To speak briefly of other “difficult” writers, I don’t think any other literary category, except perhaps fantasy (however one defines the boundaries of that field), contains the equivalent of Delany’s Dhalgren, or Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, or Lafferty’s Past Master, or Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise. Etc., etc., etc.

Science fiction is a coat of many colors, but we don’t have to like every shade of them.

Sf has had its crews of cultural movers and shakers over the years. … I try not to judge books by critics. A book review is a creative response to a book by one person. Often, I'll like a book lauded by a reviewer – but not for the same reasons.

Reviews and awards, at times, are a way for a culture to, consciously or unconsciously, try to impose a uniformity upon literature. Some might see it as “quality control,” and that’s fine. I’ve nothing against quality control (depending upon the qualities being, or not being, controlled), But in general, I don’t think much of uniformity – and neither does literature (in the widest sense of the term, without the capital L). Literature, in the widest sense, is bigger than that. It’s bigger than everything – almost. If we can read what we love and love what we read, the literary world would be a whole lot better off.

And any time I feel like I’m being forced to read a book – either in school, by compulsion, or through the influence of peers and “betters,” it distracts from any enjoyment I may receive from the task, if enjoyment is to be found there at all.

I want to meet the book on its own terms, and not the terms as defined by its supporters or detractors. Exceptions granted. But the whole notion of having books shoved into my face doesn’t help me figure out what I do or do not enjoy or what I value in my reading.

So, I wouldn't worry too much about what one “should” read in the field over what one wants to read.

If any of those highly-touted books keep calling to you, you’ll get to them, when the time is right. And if you don’t care for them, the “Lit Police” can’t take you away. They have no tin badges. They have no authority. Reading should be an exploration and an adventure, but it should probably contain equal measures of the familiar and the uncharted.

The best thing about books is that you can open them and go nearly anywhere.

The second best thing about books is that you can also close them and put them back on the shelf, whispering, “Not this one. Not now. Maybe not ever.” If reading can’t be an exercise in freedom, what’s the bloody point?

So there.

And … Speaking of freedom, have a wonderful Fourth.

A Night’s Work

Several friends have been writing about dreams and dreaming recently. So here’s this…

I rarely write about dreams, though dreams are an important part of my life.

Not that I remember them very well. Usually, I wake up knowing I’ve had one, but unless I’m diligent enough to scribble down a few of the details, it’s gone by dawn. All I remember is that I had one, but little else.

Still, dreams are important to me. Some of my earliest memories are dreams – scary, unsettling, mind-bending stuff (yes, my dreams were so weird I never quite understood the allure of hallucinogens). To this day, if I wake up from a dream, even if I remember not one detail, I can still feel the emotional stir the dream generated in my consciousness. It’s like an earthquake I didn’t witness, but all around me are the overturned chairs and tables, I see the cracks in the walls and the paintings slipped from their hooks.

So it surprised me one night a few weeks ago when I awoke from a dream, remembering a number of details, and – not only that, but staying up two and a half hours afterward, running through those few details again and again.

Two and a half hours.

I dreamed I was in a big place, several rooms, each room filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – hundreds and hundreds of old books in old bindings. I could see the loose threads on the corners of some of the old covers. They were all sorts of books: big, small, oversized, paperbacks, bound magazines and journals, albums, notebooks. It looked like stuff you would find in a library or a second hand bookstore – except it was mine. I knew it was all mine. Most of it was old. I opened a few volumes and flipped through the pages. News magazines. Histories. Fashion magazines with spreads of beautiful women dressed in the top haute couture of fifty years ago.

I was there with a friend – a person I’ve known for over forty years. I haven’t seen him in ages, but we keep in touch. He was going through some of the stuff too, but he seemed more curious, intellectually intrigued, as compared to me, who looked at all these volumes, thinking, “This is mine. All this stuff! How did I manage to acquire all this stuff?”

I awoke. I didn’t sit up, but turned my head and stared at the luminous digital clock next to my bed. Three-fifteen a.m. or thereabouts. I kept thinking about the shelves and shelves of old volumes. At first, I was obsessed with the amount, and that so many of those books were things I hadn’t looked at in years – things I didn’t need in years. It was old stuff. Stuff that should be gotten rid of.

I couldn’t imagine just throwing it all away. I have a deep aversion to throwing away books. You may suffer from the same. I remember, when I was a grade-schooler, the kids next door went to a Catholic school, where they had to buy their textbooks, and at the end of every year they threw their texts into a garbage can and set them on fire. I was young, but I’d already read my World War II history, and the years that led up to it. I had read and seen pictures of the Nazis burning books at the Reichstag. I knew what book burning meant, and it has stayed with me all these days.

So I stared into the dark, thinking of ways that I might ease myself of the burden of all the old stuff I still had – not as much stuff as in the dream, but I have shelves, and boxes – lots and lots of boxes – that I no longer needed, or wanted, and should probably get rid of. Were there stores that still sold old magazines, like the places I went to in my youth? Would they take on more? ABC Magazine Service: “Four floors of magazines!” How about eBay? Could I sell this stuff on my web page? I didn’t have an up-to-date web page. Well, then I’d need to create a new website, with a page devoted to selling old stuff. Call it “The Hobo’s Dungeon” …

Three-thirty a.m.

Three-forty-five a.m.

Four-twenty-five a.m.

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me: THE DREAM IS NOT ABOUT THE BOOKS!

Not the books themselves, but what the books represent.

What do they represent?

It wasn’t the physical “stuff” I needed to get rid of (though my old stacks of The New Republic and the Saturday Evening Post wouldn’t be missed anytime soon). It was the “stuff” inside me.

What stuff inside me?

Four-thirty a.m.

Before I had gone to bed, I was thinking. I was remembering how much of my early life was spent with books, and comic books, and any sort of reading matter I could find, including the proverbial matchbooks and road maps. You probably did the same thing.

Reading is a means to fill a hunger for learning – an overwhelming desire to know things. To know the world – the whole damn cosmos. But there’s another reason to read. We read to fill a hole. The hole is a great emptiness that threatens to devour our souls. The emptiness is loneliness.

We read because we are lonely.

I thought about the dream, about the rooms loaded with books. That enormous library – tiny in comparison to the ones imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, but big enough for me – was my loneliness. My emptiness – or my effort to fill that emptiness. It occurred to me that I could heave all those books into the abyss of my emptiness and they would disappear into the darkness without making a sound, so far away was the bottom of that pit.

The dream was “about” gauging the size of my loneliness, and my loneliness was too big to measure. That need to “get rid of all this” was, I suppose, my way of saying that the abyss couldn’t be filled, but it might, possibly, maybe, be left behind.

I’ll be sixty-two years old in a few months. I’ve done my share of wandering in the wilderness. I won’t bore you with autobiography. You can probably fill in the blanks with your own tales of solitude and agony.

We’re writers, yes? If you’re reading this you probably are, whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not. I sure as hell am not smart enough to distinguish between cause and effect or chicken and egg, but loneliness and writers are lifetime companions. We may write for the same reason we read. Maybe we are lonely because we are writers, or we are writers because we are lonely. I don’t know.

Five a.m.

So, why? Why am I dreaming this dream now? Couldn’t I have had this dream on any night in the last sixty-one years?

I don’t know. It may be that I have reached an age where I can leave behind the wormhole of loneliness. It won’t change. It won’t disappear as if by magic. It’s not as if by some psychotherapeutic realization I can walk away from the abyss. You can’t. You can pretend to forget, but pretending just brings you back to that old bottomless pit.

You move on. You take the loneliness with you because it comes with the territory, but you don’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or waste more time throwing more books down into it.

You can’t fill the wormhole, but if you’re lucky, you can grow enough to contain the wormhole within yourself, with a little room to spare to get your work done. Because you’re a writer, and writers always have work to do – even when they’re dreaming.

Five-thirty a.m.

I didn’t mention this before, but there was one more thing.

A song.

All through this time, during the dream and all through the two and a half hours I ruminated over that dream, there was a song in the back of my head. An instrumental. It sounded like a pop song from the sixties as played by a surf band. Or a surf instrumental played by a pop band.

I had never heard the song before. It was just there in my head. Created in the forge of my unconscious.

That’s happened to me before. I have a reasonably good ear for tunes, so I know when my mental jukebox dredges up an old number I forgot about decades ago. I can tell the difference between a song I remember and a song I’m hearing for the first time.

This song I heard for the first time. It was coming out of me. And it wasn’t too bad. Not a chart-busting hit, but not bad.

I suppose I could have run to the living room, taken out my guitar, tuned it up to sketch out the melody and chords (I’m lousy at reading and writing music on paper), but for some reason I let it go. Stupid, maybe. I mean, who doesn’t need a new song every now and then? And when the song comes into being without invitation or coercion or provocation – when it just comes out of your unconscious fully formed, why not take it?

Alas, I did not.

Maybe I had some hope that some time, since it was in my own head, it would come out again, and the next time maybe I would catch it and drag it up into my consciousness.

For the moment, though, the song had performed its function. The song, like the dream, was telling me what I needed to know.

I need a new song.

Books that stuck . . .

Recently, on Facebook, folks have been passing around a post about “books that have stuck with you,” or some such wording. I usually don’t respond to requests that require me to post my list then tag a bunch of friends. I don’t like to bother friends with stuff like that. Friends usually have enough to keep them busy. Most of my friends are writers, artists – people who have to keep busy to keep going. Also, a lot of these Facebook requests require to rate your “favorites,” or something you think is best, or better than something else. I don’t like ranking books or movies or songs – I keep things fluid in that regard.

But John Carl, I believe, tagged me in particular, and since part of the directions were that I don’t give the selections that much thought (“fifteen books in fifteen minutes”), I quickly came up with a list of books I remember and that have become part of my consciousness. The books are me and I am the books.

Even when you give something “little thought,” thoughts take a lot longer to play through. I listed the books, and the list generated discussion, and the discussion generated more discussion.

A book that has stayed – or “stuck” – with me. Did it mean a book I read in my youth, or just any book I’ve encountered over the years? Some of my earliest memories are of exploring books, going through the pages, whether I could read them or not. From age three on, I was poking around in books.

There were lots of books whose titles I don’t remember – just picture books. If I don’t remember the titles, did they stick with me? Well…

My dad made a bookcase. A long one, with two shelves. Plenty of books on there, but with the exception of some Reader’s Digest omnibus collections of condensed books, some cookbooks and a ten- or eleven-volume thing that was a sort of children’s encyclopedia, I think it was called the “Childcraft Library,” the books were all in Polish. It didn’t matter much at the time, since I could read neither Polish nor English. I didn’t read so much as sense the presence of words. And I also sensed that there was something important about these things, these “books.” If they weren’t important, why would someone build a case to hold them?

There was book of illustrated bible stories. I think it came out from Golden Books. I remember in particular an illustration for the David and Goliath tale – a marvel to me for depicting a decapitated giant without resorting to blood and gore. The artist posed the body of Goliath in such a way that his body reclined over a downward turn in the terrain. Further back, David walked away, holding high Goliath’s head. His posture and expression seemed quite triumphant. I wondered over that picture for a long time and on many occasions. I think I wondered why he so triumphant, walking away with a head that was of no earthly good to him. I mean, why not just leave it there next to the body? Was he going to get some sort of prize for bringing the head back? Was he going to have it stuffed and hang it on his wall? I couldn’t guess. Bible stories were like that. They made no sense to me, and yet they were apparently very important to grownups and older kids. I think I was less interested in the stories themselves than in the fact that people found those stories so important. Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses – Moses had to be important; they had made a whole movie about him, and about the ten commandments. God split the sea in half, made pillars of fire, sent lightning down to smash golden idols. They didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but visually they were fascinating.

The most I could make out about God, though, was that “He” had a really bad temper.

Of the Polish books, I found out later that one impressive set of volumes – in uniform size and binding – were the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. My parents revered these works, but they never read them, not where I could see them. Of course, they read them when they were children, remembered them vividly, and both my parents could quote passages from Pan Tadeusz.

You might think I’d have learned more Polish from my parents, but I didn’t. I think my parents were sorely divided on the subject of teaching my brother and I Polish. On the one they, they wanted us to learn the language of our heritage. On the other, when they spoke in Polish they knew we wouldn’t understand them. They had their own language – the secret language of adults. In the end, I think, the most I learned of Polish were the basic Catholic prayers, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. My mother typed them out, in Polish, and taped them on the wall of our bedroom, just above the nightstand and below the crucifix that hung above it.

I do remember my dad reading to my brother and me a children’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I vividly remember his reading of the scene where Crusoe comes upon the footprint in the sand, his placing his foot within it and discovering that it did not fit his own foot, that there must be someone else occupying the island. At this time, I won’t place too much significance on my remembering that scene, although I can. It is fraught with significance. But I will say that it impressed me because of its vividness – words making a picture in my imagination – and because the scene illustrated a basic sort of deduction – reality could be tested and examined. I needed to test reality because my home life did not resemble the “normal” world I encountered by watching television, or observing the behavior of the other kids in the neighborhood. The world of home and the “normal” world did not match up. I just couldn’t figure it out.

Another bunch of books that have stayed with me: no, not comic books; that’s a whole other story. It was a stack of paperbound books that sat in the lower right corner of the bookcase. Not “shelved” – stacked. They weren’t like American paperbacks. They were what we call now “trade”-sized paperbacks. No illustrations on the cover; no blurbs. The paper was cheap and thin and smelled with a distinct “non-American” scent. The covers weren’t even made of paperboard, just a slightly heavier grade of paper. The covers, titles, texts – all in Polish.

They did, however, have pictures.

There were pictures of soldiers in uniforms. They were pictures of soldiers holding guns. There were pictures of big cannons, of bombers flying overhead, of demolished cities.

Pictures of war.

I understood war in terms of action and activity – shooting, fighting, bombing. Kinesis. Motion. It was fascinating.  Have to admit it was fascinating. I’d seen some war movies on TV and I think my folks took me to see Pork Chop Hill, Ski Troop Attack – a few other war movies. War was in the movies, and I don’t think it could really be avoided. War was reality, or so it seemed. My parents both lived through the Second War War. My father lived in Lublin during the occupation. Nearly all his friends had died by 1945. My grandfather served in the Polish Army and nearly ended up as one of the officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest – though I didn’t learn that last fact for years. My mother went to school in Scotland after she, her mother and her sister nearly circumnavigated Europe to escape the Nazis.

Which is to say, there was some talk about “the war” in the household. Not a lot of talk. But talk of the war could not be avoided.

So these pictures of the war fascinated me. Unlike what I saw in the movies, they were “real.” It wasn’t the sort of sharp, well-lighted, “pretty" photography that an American cinematographer could perform. They were black and white – and gray. Gray upon gray. Everything gray. The images were often grainy and muddy, the sun too bright, the shadows too deep. I was a kid, but I could sense the authenticity of these images.

Then I reached the last pages of the book.

These were photos taken in the concentration camps.

Remember, I wasn’t much older than four, and I was looking at photographs of bodies – human bodies, naked bodies, bodies so starved you could make out the ribs, the knobby joints of every limb, the skin tightened against every cheekbone, the eyes fallen into the hollow recesses of their skulls. Dead eyes, hollow mouths, twisted teeth, wide open nostrils.

Bodies stacked in brick niches next to what I later discovered were oven doors. Bodies piled on little carts, stacked high – higher than you could imagine a cart so rickety and primitive could bear.

I stared at those photographs as much as I stared at the ones of all the military hardware and the uniformed combatants “doing their jobs.”

I stared at them more. And when I stopped staring I could still see them.

To a four-year-old, war makes a sort of sense. Not a “good” sense. An insane, twisted sense – it’s still a sense. A bunch of guys on one side shoot a bunch of guys on the other side. The other guys shoot back. Somebody “wins,” the way you win a ball game, or a game of checkers. That’s what it seemed like. And World War Two “made sense” in that “we” were fighting some very, very bad guys. Even for a kid, there was no way to mistake Hitler for George Washington – no way to mistake David for Goliath.

But those photos from the camps –

I will not pretend to understand them. I will not pretend to have derived lessons from them. I can’t say that I felt that what happened, what the pictures documented, was evil, because the placing of meaning to words and images is a complicated thing, and I was just too young to comprehend anything so big.

All I knew was that it was awful, it was terrifying, and I was frightened.

It was out there. The war was over, clearly enough. We were living in Chicago, in America, and everything was “all right” now, wasn’t it?

At least that’s what my parents tried to tell me, when I asked them about the pictures.

Nevertheless, it was out there. Whatever made what I saw in those photos a reality could still be out there.

Could.

I knew nothing about history as history. The difference between what was, what is, and what will be was too much for a four-year-old imagination.

It’s probably too much for a fifty-eight-year-old imagination, still remembering the afternoon I came upon that stack of books, in my dad’s den, in the bottom right corner of the bookcase.

So that book, whose name I don’t remember, whose words I couldn’t read, but whose pictures I could see, and did see – that’s the book that has probably stayed with me the longest and has had the most profound effect on whoever it is I have turned out to be.

+                          +                          +

For the record, though, this is the first list I came up with:

1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
2. The Man With the Purple Eyes by Charlotte Zolotow
3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
10. Who? by Algis Budrys
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
13. A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren
14. Native Son by Richard Wright
15. Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

After some discussion, I added these (I was on a roll): What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin: The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow; The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy by Ernst Cassirer; The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; The Professor's House by Willa Cather; A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.

And after some more discussion, I added three more books from my misspent youth that have stayed with me: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan; Journey Beyond Tomorrow (aka The Journey of Joenes) by Robert Sheckley.

And yet three more: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina, which I read in one sitting and drove me nuts because I could not accept what the fictional character of Gnossos does at the end of the story; a book that wasn’t very good (by my standards, whatever they are) but that I also finished in one sitting: The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler; and I would be remiss not to mention Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, who had the courage almost forty years ago to say what some folks still find difficult to acknowledge today.

Poetry? Like comics, that’s a whole ’nother story that would fill another entry at least as long as this.

And you will notice not one inclusion of a book about (or by) dinosaurs. Again, dinosaurs deserve their own sweet, generous chapter. Ask me no more questions and I will tell you no lies.