A, B, C

Afterword

Something happens when a writer’s readership grows substantially larger than the dozen odd members of a university workshop or even a full auditorium of listeners at a college or a library reading. Approximately every seven or eight years, with each book of fiction and nonfiction I’ve written (though not every essay collection), I’ve cycled through the experiences I’m about to discuss.

I will meet a new person, sometimes a young woman who has just published her first book and with whom I’m giving a reading, or an editor who has recently joined a publishing house to whom my own editor is introducing me in an office hallway, or a stranger who has recognized me a moment after I have stepped from the door of Barnes & Noble onto Union Square North. Over fifty years these people have been male, female, black, white, Asian, Native American, Dominican, Inuit, African, southern or northern European, Haitian, Jamaican, Martinican, half a dozen sorts of Latino and Latina; they have been gay; they have been straight; they have been transgendered or cis-gendered; they come from New York or San Francisco, Boston or L.A., from Peoria or Salt Lake City, and many places between; they have been Jewish, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, disabled, or temporarily abled. Sometimes it’s a teacher at a university or a high school where I’m giving a talk, sometimes it’s a student — though once, as I was walking down Eighty-second Street, leaning on my cane, a city sanitation worker in a green T-shirt, who, recognizing me from a picture in a recent Entertainment Weekly article, leaped from the back of his groaning truck, ran up and gripped my shoulder with an oily orange rubber glove, to tell me what I will tell in its time, and, six months ago, when I was returning to New York from a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, it was the uniformed fellow at the curbside baggage stand outside the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare, who, after I’d gone inside to wait for a wheelchair (arthritis makes getting around airports on my own all but impossible these days), ran in after me, stood in front of me, and declared: “Samuel R. Delany…? The writer guy? I’m right, aren’t I? Hey, my absolutely favorite book of yours is…”

That’s what so many of them want to tell me.

This one or that one will name Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, my most recent novel, or my very first, which you have in this book, or my tenth, or my fifth, or my fifteenth, or my book of science fiction and fantasy stories, Aye, and Gomorrah, or my book of naturalistic novellas, Atlantis, Three Tales, or one of my contemporary novels, Dark Reflections, or The Mad Man, or a science-fiction novel like Nova or Trouble on Triton. It can be a nonfiction work. The book named can be an award winner or a one-time bestseller or something published by an independent publisher that not two thousand people have read. It can be my twentieth, from a press out of Normal, Illinois, and Tallahassee, Florida, specializing in avant-garde fiction. It can be my 1,200-plus-page fantasy series in four volumes, Return to Nevèrÿon, or a ninety-page novella once sold as a stand-alone paperback, such as Empire Star.

And it can be — and has been, repeatedly, over fifty years as well as at least once over the last seven or eight — each of the novels here.

It pleases me to think there might be a connection between that experience and the way I write. Do I know there is? No, I can’t know. No writer can. (So we decide — or hope — it’s because we’re quite smart…as we take a wrong turn, lose a laptop, drop and step on our reading glasses, or inadvertently call a business acquaintance the name of someone she or he despises, who, the moment we met, came to mind — or something else stupid.) Because such indications of popularity, however poorly they correlate with quality, hinge on reception rather than creation, they suggest — even if it’s never a sure thing — a reason to gamble on reprinting.

The forty-five-odd experiences over the more than fifty years from which I’ve culled these instances might seem a lot, because I’ve crammed more than half of them into not a page and a half, with a number doing double, even triple, duty — the woman outside of Barnes & Noble, the most recent one to mention The Jewels of Aptor, was a Mormon here in the city with her brother (who’d never heard of me); the last young man who liked The Ballad of Beta-2 was a student and an African Muslim (in a motorized wheelchair). Sometimes three or four such encounters have happened in a year. Some years have gone by, though, with no such encounters at all. Were you waiting for the next one, you’d be more frustrated than not.

Here’s something that better suggests how little public attention that is: only three times in fifty years have I seen someone reading a book of mine in public. Once, while I was sitting on an IRT subway car in 1964 or ’65, I saw a woman across from me reading the second volume of my Fall of the Towers trilogy. Once, when Marilyn and I were returning from London a week before Christmas in 1974, coming through Kennedy Airport we saw a book rack full of just-released Dhalgrens and, minutes later, a sailor in unseasonal whites relaxing at his flight gate reading a copy. (With his knees wide in a tubular chair that they used in airports back then — he must have been flying back to somewhere in the Caribbean or Central or South America — as we walked by with our daughter in a stroller.) Finally, on a Philadelphia bus, three years ago, I saw someone, certainly a student at Temple where I teach, reading a trade paperback of Atlantis, Three Tales, a week after the publishers had released a new printing.

Three times in fifty years.

It doesn’t seem so many now, does it?

Not just Aptor and Beta-2, but all three books here had a run of almost two decades in bookstores — and that was in a book environment where the average life of a new volume on the store shelf was under three weeks. That interests editors and marketing folk, trying to anticipate how this book will do. I’m interested in that peripherally, of course — but not centrally. “No man but a blockhead,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson, the poet, scholar, and writer who put together the first comprehensive English language dictionary, “ever wrote, except for money.” A surprising number of writers since Dr. Johnson who have pursued the life of writing, however, have been blockheads — many of them good writers too. You have to think about too many other things while you’re writing that drive such considerations from the mind, so that dwelling on money is distracting, intimidating, and generally counterproductive. Also, the number of people who, if they were not calling me, personally, a blockhead for wanting to write at all, thought I was nuts, strange, or patently out of my mind for doing it (and it was never a munificent living) seemed at the time innumerable — starting with my dad. When I won a prize in high school or a scholarship, he was proud. And when his best friend, our downstairs neighbor, who wrote and published children’s books for black kids like myself but made his living editing immense economics textbooks he called “doorstoppers,” read some of the work I’d written at sixteen or seventeen and told my father I would probably be in print before I was voting age (back when that was twenty-one and the drinking age was eighteen; since then, they’ve reversed). Dad even paid the sixty-seven dollars to have my third novel — the one that got me the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship I mentioned in my foreword — retyped by a professional typist in Queens.

It never appeared.

Mom had a more liberal attitude. She wanted me to do whatever would make me happy, and from childhood on she encouraged me in all my enthusiasms. Clearly, though, she shared Dad’s misgivings. Except for intermittent lapses in which he tolerated my career choices — which were most appreciated and probably the only reason Dad and I had any positive relationship at all — generally my father argued and raged about those enthusiasms. My mother mulled over them and looked glum. They had lived through the Great Depression. Like many parents in the 1950s, they were concerned about security and their children’s livelihood. They had seen many disasters themselves. We, who were too young to remember those disasters firsthand, however, felt the manifestations of their fears were the harshest parental oppression. I wish I could say eventually I learned they were right, as they kept telling me I would. (“Just wait. You’ll see…”) In truth, however, they weren’t. Some things were much worse. Some things were far better. Many were different. The world had changed — including the speed of its changing.

Novel writers, short-story writers, science-fiction writers, and many writers from the “unmarked” category, which bears the genre mark “literary,” have told me they cannot read their past or early work. When they try, many say, they feel something akin to pain.

That’s not me, however.

Possibly it has to do with how I write — though I can’t be sure.

I’m dyslexic — severely so. Therefore, to put together a manuscript that’s readable, much less printable (by my own standards), I must read it and correct it and reread it and correct it again and reread it again; not three or four times, but twenty-five, thirty-five…some sections I must read forty-five times or more. (Now you know one reason so many people — not just my parents, but teachers and friends — thought I was nuts for wanting to write at all. Clearly I was so bad at the basics and everyone around me was better.) It’s the first five or so readings, however, I find painful. Between them, someone who is not dyslexic has to read it too and mark those places, usually with underlining, where the words are out of order and often incomprehensible or even missing, where I’ve spelled words so badly you can’t tell what they are, or where I’ve dropped other words and phrases that must be there for the sentences to make sense.

I’m a grammar fanatic. I have been since I was in the sixth grade — probably to compensate for the other things I did and still do so poorly. Mistakes slip through even now; now and again other readers catch them, for which I am always grateful. (You may find some among these pages.) I couldn’t — and I still can’t — spell some simple words correctly three times in a row. But I was the best in my fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade English classes at diagramming sentences on the blackboard (in those days when blackboards were black, not green) or on tests. (“If you can do that, I don’t understand why you can never remember how to spell ‘orange.’ It doesn’t make sense,” my seventh-grade English teacher would say. It didn’t make sense to me, either. But her sincerity, concern, and honesty made me love her at the same time that it made me feel I was profoundly and irrevocably flawed.) Still, it’s why today I’m comfortable using both formal grammar and informal grammar at all colloquial levels. Point out the errors you find, and I can usually tell you why they’re errors and often the formal names these errors have or once had and how to correct or improve them. But these are what my dyslexia initially prevents me from seeing. (Today we know it’s neurological. Back then we didn’t.) In the course of my rereadings, however, phrases, words, or sections that to me are painful — for stylistic and content reasons that become one as the hand falls from the keyboard, from the page, and the ear and the eye take over to judge or to approve or, more frequently, to find fault with what I’ve put down — I excise or clarify so that, over time, the manuscript moves closer and closer to something I can enjoy. That’s how I wrote my earliest books, the ones here; that’s how I write them today. That’s how I build a text I’d like to read: by way of retardations, excisions, expansions, compressions, simplifications, and rewordings, along with numberless additions and plain corrections. Each layer is the trace of a different “self” as much mine as the self who tries to impose the effect of a controlled voice by suppressing one or enhancing another — to form a text I hope will fall within sight of my notion of the way a “good writer” writes, even though I am not one “naturally.”

The only way I can get a text to feel (to me) that it is one my true thoughts might inhabit is through layers of revision.^{4}If I try to express anything directly that I believe deeply and intensely without a fair amount of thought beforehand and during a many-layered process afterwards, what comes out is banal, overwrought, and riddled with errors in which clichés and imprecisions mock anything one might call intention.

Another way of saying the same thing is that the unexamined “I” in an unexamined “world” is boring.

I’m much too much like everyone else — because, presumably, the world has made me so: more venal than I would like to appear or admit, shy, deluded by clichés and commonplaces, eager to be liked, and for accomplishments, intellectual or social, that most of the time I feel I do not possess.

Possibly this is also why, ten or fifteen years after a book of mine has appeared, when I pick it up and again start reading, I find sentences that strike me as pleasant, scenes that seem well-orchestrated, passages that appear to project their ideas with clarity, or an observation on the world that registers as true for its time and that goes some way toward delineating, if not re-creating, my feelings, or other passages whose grammar and logic convince me they are the utterances of a single mind rather than the dozen deeply flawed selves I had to be shattered into by the world to live in it, much less to write about it. (Is it the layers of correction or the illusion of unity that does the pleasing? I can hope. But I can never know. They are the same thing seen from different sides: an effect and what creates it.) If they please, they please to the extent I have forgotten how the disjunctive cataclysm that I am wrote them — though also I know that so much rereading can, as easily as it might produce excellence, fix the mistakes in a text in our mind so deeply that when we come back to it years on, we skim errors in expression and thought without seeing them because unconsciously they are so familiar.

Neither the writer’s pleasure nor pain justifies returning a work to print, however; nor is either a reason for letting a text languish. (Sometimes a work is about something no longer of current or compelling interest, but that’s another tale.) All language is habit, as I remind my writing students regularly, speaking or writing. You learn to write badly, to overwrite, or to write dull, banal stories much the way you learn to write well — as well as a given epoch sees it. (Lacking a National Academy, of the sort France, Italy, and Spain have had for centuries, America finds the surface criteria changing radically every twenty or thirty years.^{5}) I do believe, however, that the amount and quality of mentation that go into the fictions I find interesting are different from the amount and quality that go into the ones I find thin. Only hard-won habits can fix the difference within us — if we’re lucky. And no one can be sure it has — ever. As well, I believe the writer must look at the minute places where her or his relationship to the world is different from most, for me personally to find that relationship of interest. (Often I’ve wished I had broader tastes.) To find what deeply engages us, within a field of our apparent differences we must interrogate, our similarities for the sake of potential and possibilities, either good or bad. That can mean, for the same ends, the writer is trying to dramatize a feeling of difference within that field of similarities, so that often the writer has a sense of having undertaken a more difficult analytical dance than anticipated. The writer signals both differences and similarities by additions to the text, by organization of the textual elements, or by absences in the text, vis-à-vis the average productions of that day or era — and, as much as they are frowned on today, by direct statements of emotions, most effective when they are used indirectly. How to distinguish between which texts are better and which texts are worse is, ultimately and finally, anyone’s guess, and the shifts in criteria, decade after decade, century after century, even place to place in what we always assume is a more unified culture than it ever is or could possibly be, and the general attitudes toward following the various paths of least resistance that mark out the cliché, the cluttered, or the thin, don’t make it easier. Those shifts in criteria, however, all indicate traces of a struggle with those problems, though not necessarily in a manner that either you or I might feel was successful. That’s why it’s worth it for us to accustom ourselves to the way things were written a generation or two, a century or two, a millennium or two before us, in India or Italy, in China or Czechoslovakia, in Timbuktu or Teheran, Portugal or Japan, Leningrad or Moscow, Brazil, New Orleans, Mexico City, Argentina, or Chicago — which is to say, the ways of reading that the texts were written for, in various places at various times — for the pleasure of the game, if only because of what, here and there, we can learn about how they made the game pleasurable and use it for our own profit, if it still works today. It’s the concert of all these that justify republication, a decision from which, for the reasons outlined here (mostly in dependent qualifying clauses, or even parentheses) the author, if still living, is always excluded. Only someone else who has managed to educate him- or herself to read the texts of the past, even from only forty or fifty years ago, and is sensitive to the problems and concerns of the present, can make the call — and finally for pretty personal reasons — as to whether or not a text merits republishing. We all hope — readers and writers both — we will be lucky enough to have such editors.

When The Jewels of Aptor came back from copyediting, Don Wollheim asked me to cut 720 lines — about 10 percent of the book.

Standing at the far side of his desk, I must have looked surprised.

“Huh?” I asked. “Yeah, sure. But why? Was there some particular place you thought it was too…loose?”

“Oh, no,” Don said. “But it has to fit into a hundred forty-six pages. It casts off at seven hundred twenty lines too long.” He would do it for me, if I wanted —

“Oh, no!” I said. “No….That’s all right. I’ll do it!” I reached across the desk for the manuscript in its red rubber band.

Completed when I was nineteen, contracted for not quite a month after my twentieth birthday (since the copyright laws changed in 1976, the phrase has become “in contract”), and cut down by fifteen pages a few weeks later, the first edition of The Jewels of Aptor was published that winter — where I pick up the story:

In 1966, an editor a few years older than I, Terry Carr, joined the staff at Ace Books, the U.S. publisher of all the books I had written up till then except Nova. I have written before, as have many before me, that the history of post — World War I science fiction is the history of its editors: Hugo Gernsback, F. Olin Tremaine, Raymond Palmer, J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher, Howard Browne, Ian and Betty Ballantine, John W. Campbell, H. L. Gold, on through Avram Davidson, Cele Goldsmith, Don Wollheim, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Michael Moorcock, Larry Ashmead, David Hartwell, Judy Lynn and Lester Del Ray, Betsey Wollheim, Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Betsy Mitchell, L. Timmel Duchamp, Steve Berman, Kelly Link, and Warren Lapine. (In this incomplete list, many were writers as well — Campbell, Davidson, Pohl, Knight, Moorcock, Ellison, Duchamp, and Link are significant writers, whose fiction remains influential for any real understanding of our genre’s development — though their editorial force and direction is central to their careers.) Carr is among those editors. He edited the first novels of William Gibson, Joanna Russ, and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and a dozen other memorable titles for his Ace Science Fiction Specials series.

In 1967 Carr did for me one of the most generous things an editor can do. “Chip, I was just rereading your first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. I enjoyed it. Don told me we cut it for length, though. I was thinking of doing a new edition. Do you have an uncut copy? I’d like to take a look.”

“Actually,” I said, “I do…”

In the top drawer of a file cabinet in the kitchen of the fourth-floor apartment where we had lived for a couple of years on Seventh Street, I’d left an uncut carbon copy. The apartment had been more or less inherited by a woman I’d known in Athens during my first, six-month European jaunt. Later I’d brought it up to my mother’s Morningside Heights (aka Harlem Heights) apartment, where it stayed in an orange crate full of manuscripts and journals in a back closet — and left all the other papers, manuscripts, contracts, and correspondence in the Seventh Street kitchen filing cabinet.

I came up to get it.

As Mom and I walked down the hall to what had been my bedroom when I’d lived there, and was now my grandmother’s room, my mother asked: “When are you going to take the whole thing?” Over the years I’d transferred the most important papers and my growing stack of journal notebooks to my mother’s bedroom closet.

“Soon,” I told her. “I’ll take it soon.”

“Well, please do.”

And I carried the uncut Jewels of Aptor back on the subway down to where I now lived, farther along Sixth Street. At home I read it through: I crossed out the odd word or phrase and moved a few more subjects up against their verbs. (Full disclosure: and I have done similar reading once more, here, for the same end.) My personal sense is that this was no sort of rewrite. There was no revising of incident, characters, setting, or structure. Pages went by without an emendation. I wouldn’t call it “editing,” so much as “copyediting.” As I remember, no more than six pages were corrected so heavily (more than five corrections on a sheet) that I put them through the typewriter once more. (This was before there were copy centers or home computers or word processors; even Xerox machines were rare.) The rest were done by hand on that “onionskin” copy, typed with carbon paper. I finished the final work two days later and took it in to Terry Carr that afternoon.

Some time on, I was able to oblige Mom: a letter came from the Curator of Special Collections at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, Dr. Howard Gotlieb. He asked if I would let his library house my papers. “Thank you,” I told him when I phoned back. “I’d be happy to.” Dr. Gotlieb and his staff sent a station wagon from Boston to get them from the places around Harlem and Alphabet City where they’d been stored (such as my mother’s bedroom closet).

Mom and I stood back while two graduate students in slacks and sports jackets carried the very full crate — yes, made of wooden slats in which oranges had been shipped from Florida, with a dark blue, white, and orange paper label pasted onto each end — to the apartment door and out into the echoing co-op hallway with its florescent lights, to take it down to the car parked on Amsterdam Avenue.

While getting ready for sending things up to Boston, I’d learned that the conscientious super’s wife had had the wooden file cabinet, with its four drawers still stuffed with papers, manuscripts, and letters, moved to the building’s cellar only days after I’d removed The Jewels of Aptor carbon. A few months later, the building had been demolished. Everything in the basement had been buried beneath brick, glass, shattered beams, and plaster, to be steam-shoveled into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill, while a new building went up in its place on the north side of Seventh Street. The paper trail of my life till then — contracts, correspondence, completed manuscripts of both novels and stories, along with countless false starts on countless stories and other projects — today is ripped, scattered, soaked, and soiled beneath the mud of the Jersey flats.

Certainly I felt Aptor read better with the text intact. But I had been prepared for Terry to say he thought the cut version more commercial and that he’d stick with it. When he called me into the office, and I asked him what his verdict was, however, he told me, “It certainly makes more sense, now. And it doesn’t lurch quite the way the cut version did a few times. Yes, we’re going to do it.”

That is the version Ace republished in 1968, which has generally been in print since. Regardless of what it says on the back of whatever paper or hardcover edition, it has not been “expanded,” except to restore the missing pages and paragraphs, nor has it been “completely revised” or “updated,” other than to return to the initial version, along with one more read-through to make sure it was as close as I could get it to what I’d first wanted. Those mass-market claims on the paperback are Ace’s concession to what, at the time, Wollheim felt fans would like to hear, however misleading. But even the actual changes I inserted are no more than any conscientious copy editor might have suggested, the majority of which — the vast majority — were spelling and typing corrections that had slipped through because of my dyslexia.

It’s what appears here.

Over the years, Dr. Gotlieb and I exchanged notes between the Mugar and New York, between the Mugar and San Francisco, between the Mugar and New York again. Regularly Boston University’s Special Collections Archive sent me birthday cards, Christmas cards, update announcements on its other holdings from other writers — and every year or two I would FedEx cartons of my journals and manuscripts and hand-corrected galleys to Boston. Since Elizabethan days publishers have called these “foul papers” or “foul matter” and were happy to be shut of them. In any publishers’ storage spaces it accumulates faster than clothes-hangers breed in clothes closets.

I didn’t meet Dr. Gotlieb or see the collection in person, however, until a 1982 visit. Elderly, genial, and eccentric, he was a white-haired library science scholar, at home in his office and among the extraordinary things he had gathered about him over the years for Special Collections (today the Howard Gotlieb Memorial Archive) at Boston University. While I was there, I broke down and asked him why, fourteen years before, he had decided to collect me. He said, “I used to pick your books up from the newsstands, read them, and I liked them — as well, I had a dream of making the collection here a portrait of the twentieth century for future scholars: you were part of the second half of the twentieth century. So why not?” That’s how my papers joined the papers of Samuel Beckett, L. Sprague de Camp, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dan Rather, Philip Roth (Roth’s mailbox from one country house or another sat on a side shelf in Dr. Gotlieb’s office), Isaac Asimov, and Bette Davis — whom Dr. Gotlieb also liked.

Talk about luck.

During 1999 and 2000, I taught at the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Henry Morrison had been my agent since I was twenty-three, and by then was also a film producer. At a New York lunch he told me: “As far as I can see, Chip, this is the worst time to be a writer — a regularly selling writer with a market — in the history of the United States. And I mean back to Charles Brockden Brown. I don’t see how you guys do it anymore.”

To which the answer is, most of us don’t. That’s why, today, so many of us teach. I would like to be able to say to the young, “You think you have it rough? Well, when I was your age…” But I can’t. Today’s young folks, especially in the arts, have a much harder time than those of us — who now have some sort of track record and, possibly, tenure — did fifty years ago when we started. I wish it were otherwise. It would be healthier for the entire country.

From January 1969 through ’70 and again in 1972 and part of ’73, I lived in San Francisco. By late ’70 I was staying on Oak Street, in something of a commune. The building was a medium-sized Victorian, painted gray on the outside. To the right of the building was an alley less than three feet wide, halfway down which sat a baby stroller missing a wheel. You had to climb over it or really squeeze by to get to the back. From the broad kitchen windows, out over a green board fence, you could see behind us the yard and rear balconies of the San Francisco Buddhist Center. A counterculture artist who’d owned the place ten years earlier had painted the inside walls and ceilings along the halls and in the major bedrooms with pastoral murals.

But not in mine.

Mine was just over the size of the small downstairs bathroom and at the very front of the house. Probably at one time it had been used for storage or as a maid’s quarters.

In that year’s foggy West Coast winter, the Modern Language Association was holding its sprawling annual academic meeting in the Bay Area. One Professor Thomas Clareson had invited me to address the Continuing Symposium on Science Fiction that year — the second oldest of the two continuing symposia in the organization. (Once I’d asked Professor Clareson what the oldest continuing symposium in the MLA was. He’d said, “Oh, it’s something like Shifts in the Umlaut through Two Hundred Fifty Years of Upper High German…or some such.” I assumed he was joking.) The night before I had been out drinking with a handful of science-fiction scholars, including Clareson, who was to moderate the next day’s panel on which I was to give my talk. It was my second MLA appearance in three years, though at the time I was neither a teacher nor a member. (You could do that then, but you haven’t been able to for the last decade or so.) Apparently he had been keeping track of what I was drinking — I hadn’t — and he had driven me home afterwards. He’d figured, correctly, that I might need some…support getting to my event by one o’clock the next day.

At ten I had opened an eye, squinted at the sun coming through the curtain, and thought, “Oh, Christ…no, I’m going to blow this off. Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do…” and I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep. Stuck in my notebook, on the desk wedged beside the head of my army-style cot, was the typescript of my talk.^{6}

In about an hour, though, the doorbell rasped. Loud knocks, now. The bell rasped again. Someone else in the house answered and, soon, called through my closed door: “Chip! Someone’s here to see you…!”

I had no idea who it might be. But in that haze where you are too wiped not to respond, I sat up, pulled on some jeans, stepped to my room door and opened it.

Looking fresh in a gray suit, a pale blue tie, and a paler blue shirt, Professor Clareson — far more experienced in such matters than I — said, “Morning, Chip. Into the shower with you. Come on, get your clothes on. We’ll pour some coffee into you. You’ll feel a whole lot better!”

I said, “Unnnnnnn…” and then, “Tom, hey…thanks. But I don’t think I can do this, today — ”

“Yes, you can,” he said from behind silver-rimmed granny glasses. “It’s eleven. You don’t have to talk till one. Hot shower, then cold, then warm again…” White hair receded from the front of his skull. (I thought of Death…) “Come on,” he repeated.

I took a breath, looked around, and grasped a fistful of clothing. Tom walked with me along the hall’s gray runner while, on the walls, oversized shepherdesses loped among blue and pink sheep and, with halos neon bright around their naked bodies, male angels did not look down at me. Clouds and eagles — and one angel who was also a skeleton, refugee from some Dia de Los Muertos celebration — drifted over the ceiling. Tom pulled a wicker-backed chair in front of some large shepherd’s knee and settled on it, slowly, glancing down at both sides. I think he was wondering if it would hold. “I’ll wait….” It did. “If you really feel sick, give a yell. I’ll help, if you need me.” He smiled up at me. “You’ll be okay.”

“Okay…?” I repeated, queasy, between questioning, confirmation, and the entire conceptual impossibility. I went inside — white tile to the waist, a few pieces cracked or missing, dark blue walls for the rest — and pulled the door closed. A cat box sat under the sink. Kitty litter scattered the linoleum, and a blue plastic toy lay on the shower’s zinc floor.

There five weeks, it belonged to the kid who belonged to the stroller in the alley. But the people whose kid it was weren’t there that month.

I dropped my jeans, tried to kick them off — one pants leg wouldn’t come away from my foot till I sat on the loose commode ring (it had no cover), leaned forward and pulled my cuff down over my heel. Standing again, I stepped into the stall, moved the plastic curtain forward along its rod (it had torn free from two of the odd-shaped metal wires), and — stepping toward the back — reached forward and turned the knobs that looked more as if they were for two outside garden hoses than for an inside shower stall. Between my forearms, water fell.

When it reached reasonable warmth, I moved forward and, for a minute or so, turned one way and another, under the heated flush. A soap bar lay in a metal dish edged with rust and bolted to the blue. I slid the bar free — soft at one side — and soaped chest, underarms, groin, and butt, while warm water beat away the foam. Then, a knob in each hand, with a quick twist I made the water cold —

“Oh, Christ…!” shouted a committed atheist. (In foxholes and in cold showers…)

Outside, Tom chuckled.

Taking a breath, I held it and made myself stand there for a count of three, four, five — then sharply turned up the hot and turned down the cold. It took three long seconds for the warm water to creep up the pipe and spew from the showerhead.

Again I began to breathe.

Out in the bathroom once more, I turned for my towel, among four others filling the rack. My glance crossed the mirror, and, remembering I had a beard, I was glad again I didn’t have to shave. But I wondered — for the first time in years — if I’d look foolish speaking in public with bushy black whiskers.

When I was again sitting on the commode and my legs were dry, I pulled on my dress slacks. Outside the closed door, Professor Clareson went on, “You know, Chip, I was thinking this morning. My favorite book of yours has always been The Ballad of Beta-2. I must have read it four, even five times since it came out — but I keep returning to it. The reason, it occurs to me, is because it’s about learning.”

Inside, I thought: I hope I’ve learned not to do this again….

I stood once more, stepped over and got the blue toy from the stall, turned, and put it on the bathroom shelf where I noticed my aerosol deodorant. I’d thought I’d left it in my room and would have to go back for it —

“You’ve told me about your dyslexia. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Though there’s nothing about that in the book. Still, it’s about learning — yes. But I mean a particular kind of learning, one I have so much trouble as a teacher getting my students to do: getting them to understand texts that don’t make a lot of sense unless they also acquire some historical knowledge that clarifies what was really going on, why it was important, even to the point of what actual phrases mean — in Charles Reade, in Spenser, in Milton, and in Melville. Your book deals with a problem very close to me. And it deals with it interestingly — at least each time I reread it, I find it so. And each time in a new way.”

While I finished drying, I told myself I’d take the toy to the kitchen and put it in the parents’ mail cubby next time I went in, then started for the door to get my deodorant from my room — with my hand on the knob, I remembered it was on the bathroom shelf, turned back, got it.

And knocked the toy — it was a blue airplane — onto the floor. I sighed, left it, took the aerosol can and sprayed under one arm and the other. (The antiaerosol campaign to help preserve the ozone layer and retard the greenhouse effect was a few years off.) It was cool — cold even, but not as cold as the cold water. I put the deodorant can back on the shelf. At least that stayed there.

After pulling my T-shirt down over my head, I shrugged into the dress shirt I’d carried in, buttoned it — incorrectly, I realized — unbuttoned it, breathed three times, sat again and rebuttoned it. Looking around, I realized I had left my socks in my room.

Standing, opening the door, jeans hanging from one fist, I stepped out barefoot into the hall.

Still in his wicker-back, Tom smiled.

I said, “Well, thank you — for telling me.” It was at least three minutes since he had stopped talking, and I felt foolish.

The full version is, Oh, why thank you so much for taking the time to tell me. That’s very nice of you. Before (and since) I’ve used it in such situations. That morning, however, I hadn’t made it all the way through, and had waited too long — and was wondering if the hungover version had only been confusing. Or if I’d sounded very foolish. In that state, though, every other thing you do is infected with foolishness, and you spend a lot of time wondering how and why nothing you say or do feels right.

Feeling foolish, I walked to my room, glancing at smiling Tom — who got up and followed. Inside, putting my jeans over a chair back and sitting on the iron stead’s mattress edge, I got my socks, shoes, and sport jacket on, reached over, and picked up my notebook and my talk.

We went out and down the steps to the door. I felt foolish because I went out first then realized I hadn’t let the older Tom step from the house before me. I mistook the car he indicated and felt foolish as I walked on to the one, in a moment, I realized was his. Tom drove us to breakfast, and I sat — foolishly — on the front seat beside him, fixated on the fact that my attempt to thank him for his compliment had been so inept.

I was quiet, but my mind kept running on, obsessively, unstoppably, uncomfortably: nobody had suggested I say it, you understand. Rather, after several encounters with people who had complimented me without warning — with the result that I’d felt awkward and clearly they’d felt awkward too — I’d sat down, a few years back, and decided, since probably I’d be in the situation from time to time, that I’d better put together a response that let people know I hadn’t been annoyed and that acknowledged their good intentions. “Why, thank you so much for taking the time…” is what I’d come up with; if I responded with that, both of us would feel a little better and neither of us would leave the encounter feeling…well, like a fool. I sat beside Tom, mumbling it over and over without moving my lips and wondered if I should say it out loud again, properly this time — but I was sure, if I did, it would sound…foolish. (The next time it happened, months later, it worked perfectly well.) At that point, however, the most foolish thing since I’d waked seemed Tom’s preference for Beta-2. (Was I becoming a writer who couldn’t bear his previous work…?) I hadn’t felt this way yesterday.

Could all this be chemical…?

Then we were walking into a San Francisco breakfast place, with loud construction for the new BART line outside, and aluminum doors and mirrored walls inside, on the way to the MLA convention hotel, to join Tom’s wife, Alice. She had dark hair and sat smiling in one of the booths.

I ate some toast and bacon (I wasn’t up to eggs) and drank some black coffee — and was surprised I could.

We got to the MLA hotel twenty minutes before my talk.

Among the anecdotes above, whether someone is talking about a book in detail or just running up and saying, “Hey, I really liked…” and running off again, I have not been recounting all this to speak about either popularity or quality.

Because I’m not talking about popularity, that’s why, except in one case — to come — I give only one example per person. (That’s also why I’m not giving numbers, of people or of books.) Of course it happens with some books more than with others. Those mentioned more often are ones that have been better advertised — though not always — by whatever method — or have simply been more available; and we all know what a meaningless indicator advertising or hearsay is for quality.

Well, then, what am I talking about?

A lesson comes with someone running up to you, taking the time and putting out the energy to cross the natural barrier that exists between strangers (and though I’d known Clareson a couple of years, I’d only met him in person four times), telling you she or he liked something you wrote. The lesson is not entirely about politeness — or kindness, either. The lesson occurs, yes, when someone tells you why he or she likes a particular work, and — through the fog of your own current concerns (we always have them even if we’re not hungover) — it even makes a kind of sense. It also occurs when you encounter a full-fledged academic paper that seems preternaturally astute (or completely wrongheaded).

It occurred fourteen years later too on an afternoon when I was at a theater in New York City for the matinee of a musical. I was stouter. My beard was bushier — and largely gray.

And I had a ten-year-old daughter, whom I’d brought with me. (With a music teacher at Columbia and a Chase bank vice president, I’d helped found a gay father’s group, which met monthly and now had more than forty members — though, at this point, it has little to do with the tale, in parentheses it will play it part. Marilyn and I had separated for good nine years earlier, though we’d arranged for joint custody.) Just that week a well-known rock musician had taken over the lead in the show, and at that matinee the rest of his band had come to sit in the front orchestra seats to see their lead singer’s first performance that afternoon. During intermission, a third of the audience had moved to the balcony rail to gaze down at them, and, once we stood up, from our own seats in the balcony’s rear, both my daughter and I could see that downstairs, another third in the theater’s orchestra had moved to the front to crowd around the young men, who were being friendly and behaving as if they were old hands at this; but there was no leaving the theater for them to get a breath of air outside, as my daughter and I were getting ready to do.

My daughter attended a school where, if there were not a lot of celebrities, there were a few celebrities’ children. As she looked down, she commented: “They’re not even letting them leave. That doesn’t seem very nice.”

“Probably,” I said, “they’re tourists, and they haven’t seen a lot of famous people before.”

My supremely cool New York ten-year-old turned away, and we went to the orange stairway and down to street level, to stretch and get a breath before the bell rang, the lights under the marquee blinked (a custom discontinued in Broadway theaters how many years ago?), and we returned to our balcony seats for the second act.

Occasionally I’ve written about how rarely our lives actually conform to the structure of stories that writers have been using for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But, sometimes, they do. A reason I remember that day is because, through coincidence and propinquity, things approached one.

After the show, while we were standing out on Eighth Avenue at the bus stop, the bus pulled up, the door folded back, and two teenage boys got off as I was getting ready to guide my ten-year-old on, to take her home. (My sister had given us the tickets; back at the apartment, my partner — and Iva’s co-dad since she was three — had said he’d make spaghetti, Iva’s favorite, that evening.)

One of the young men frowned at me:

“You’re Samuel Delany, aren’t you? You wrote that book I really liked. What was it, again…?” The young man’s friend had read it too and supplied the title.

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

They smiled — and walked off.

My daughter and I got on. We went to the rear of the bus and sat as it started. Then my daughter pushed her ponytail back from her shoulder. “Dad, are you famous?”

I smiled. “Fortunately, no. The band at the theater today is famous. But things like people recognizing me in the street who’ve read something of mine only happens once, maybe twice a year — occasionally two or three times in a week, the way it did right after I was on the Charlie Rose Show, or when that newspaper article came out in the Times. Now, though, it’s right where I can enjoy it. Too much more, however, and it would get really annoying.”

“Oh,” she said.

And that’s the single time in my life — and my daughter’s — where I was able to make such a point, with comparative examples coming within an hour.

Forty-four years after Tom Clareson helped me through a hangover, and thirty years after I took my daughter to the theater matinee, the point is still true.

The lesson, then, is this: there exists a possibility of something happening when someone reads a book that is important enough for the person to respond to the writer who wrote it in that manner. And it doesn’t happen because of direct communication from person to person any more than sunrise occurred this morning because the sun lifted itself from behind the horizon into the dawn sky.

A possibility. Not a certainty. (There are too many other reasons for running up to speak when you see someone you recognize in public.) The lesson is about possibility and potentiality, not about a probability for communication to have gotten through. It is no more — but no less — than that.

In no way is it any confirmation about communication, even when in practical terms you’d be willing to bet on it. That’s because we know that communication doesn’t actually “get through,” any more than the sun actually “rises” in the morning or the moon actually “sets” in the nighttime (or daytime): that’s simply how it feels, not how it works. Sunrise, moon-down, and language-as-direct-communication — all are effects of something more complex: a spinning planet among other spinning planets in their elliptical orbits about a stellar bole of violently fusioning hydrogen millions of miles away that is releasing immense energy and light — which is drenched in information about what created it as well as everything it deflects from in passing. That light spews its information through the multiverse at 186,200 miles per second to tell of the workings of other planets, other stars and their planets, the workings of other galaxies of stars or the workings of other minds a few years, decades, centuries, a few thousand miles behind the pages of a book, behind a Nook or a Kindle or an iPad screen, till it passes too close to a gravitational force too large for it to escape and falls into it — while its stellar source millions of light-years away goes on creating the heavier elements — and singing about them in its light waves. As we careen through the great spaces along our own galaxy’s swirling edge, our own sun takes its planets and their satellites, its belt of asteroids, its Oort Cloud, and its comets along with it (which is why so much of the turning moves more or less in the same direction), while our galaxy itself moves along the gravitational currents flung out by billions of galaxies in a veritable net throughout the multiverse,^{7} much of whose material is dark matter that light (I use the term loosely for all electromagnetic waves) doesn’t seem to tell us about directly, but only by its absences.

Then why don’t meanings move from me to you by means of the words that I say and that you hear — or that you read? Why do I say that’s just an effect too like the rising and setting of the sun, moon, and stars?

They don’t, for the same reason we need a lens — the one in your eye, the one in your camera, the water drop on a spider web — to retrieve the information from the light — something to focus the data and repress the noise, which may or may not be another sort of data that to us isn’t as useful or (such as heat when it grows too great) is harmful to organic systems that are largely liquid and ultimately destructive to all systems composed of solids.^{8}

Think about the electrical signals in the brain that are your thoughts and the electrical signals that make your tongue move and your larynx stretch or contract to utter sounds when you push air out over them, and the physical vibrations that go through the air and strike your own and others’ eardrums and the electrical signals that the minuscule hammer bone attached to the eardrum’s back that shakes as the eardrum vibrates, the tiny anvil bone and tiny stirrup bone transferring those shakings that, in turn shake the little hairs within the spiral of the cochlea, which transform those vibrations into the electromagnetic pulses that travel to the brain where other electrical impulses are created as sound (already a vast oversimplification) and are associated with the meanings of words, phrases, and much larger patterns of language already lodged in the mind/brain of the hearer, the reader — patterns that must already be there, or else we would say that the hearer does not know the language yet or understand it. (In the late 1920s and early ’30s, a Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky [1896–1934], observed that children tend to learn first to talk and only then to internalize their own speech as thinking, though it’s a continuous developmental process.) And because everyone learns his or her language under different circumstances, those patterns simply cannot be identical for any two of us. That they can adjust thoughts as far toward similarity as they do in many different brains is a result of the amazing intricacy of the learning materials and the stabilizing discursive structures that they are capable of forming.

Rarely do we get a new meaning from the rearrangement of old ones, helped on by language and the part of language (the signified) we call experience. Still, perceived experience is one of three ways we can “experience” linguistic signifieds; another is through memory and imagination — sexual and secular, practical and preposterous — and generally conscious thought; a third is through dreaming. (And all three relate. And all three are different. And none of this should be taken to contravene Derrida’s notion that the world is what language cuts it up into.) But the meanings understood by an other are always her or his own meanings, learned however she or he learned them, and never the speaker’s or the writer’s, though the effect is usually that they are the same — because we are mostly unaware of the stabilizing discursive circuits that we know so very little about, though we also learn those and learn them differently in different cultures.^{9}

Unconscious thought, Freud was convinced by a lot of research and study, is a mode of thinking we don’t experience directly as such. I am pretty sure he was right. (Whatever that level of brain activity is, I suspect it controls the discursive levels of language.) But without unconscious thought, we literally would not know what other people are talking about, even though we recognize the words whose meanings we have already internalized.

And, remember, every dolphin and whale and octopus and dog has some version of this problem and neurological solution; every pig, porpoise, penguin, or porcupine; every bird or four-legged animal or six-legged cricket that “receives” communication with its ears or an earlike structure, or emits communication by rubbing its legs together or whistling songs or clicking or crooning underwater or meowing or purring or barking or growling — that is to say every creature who has to negotiate sexual reproduction and/or attraction; every creature who, at a food source or a watering place, needs to communicate “move over” to a fellow with a push or a shove.^{10} Without something akin to discourse, they (and we) wouldn’t be able to tell if the other was attacking or wooing or warning, or if they should hold it till the morning walk or until they reach a public john or do it in the litter box, or if they want their offspring to suckle them or their owners to stroke them — whether it’s time to play or to eat or to get off the couch. (The great mid-twentieth-century actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane were famous for owning a pair of dogs named “Get-Off-the-Couch,” and “You-Too.”) In humans, discourse learning and management are probably among the main tasks of the unconscious mind. But that’s speculation.

In short, it’s not just humans who communicate indirectly. It’s all dogs, cats, bats, birds, and buffalos, as well as every creature that makes and hears sounds and sees movements that are meaningful; every creature that feels a touch or a lick or a bite from another.

With the sound-making/sound-gathering system we communicate within our species. With it we communicate between species. With it we “receive communication” from plants — think of all the information different sounds, such as wind in the leaves, can bring us under different conditions (i.e., evokes in us) — as well as from the entire inanimate world: falling rocks, breaking waves, thunder, and trees cracking and crashing to the forest floor. But in all cases, the meanings of those sounds and their attendant contexts must be built up in the mind of the hearer (or wired in by evolution: some of us animals are wired to wire ourselves that way upon the encounter with certain “experiences” or “linguistic signifieds,” such as learning to walk upright or learning to speak) through experiences for any subsequent interpretation to take place, whether curiosity or fear, recognition, prediction, or negotiation (“I don’t want to get wet. Let’s go inside. Listen to that…” “I am listening. Hey, we can make it to Margaret’s before it really comes down…”) is the function. But mammals in general and primates in particular — as well as whales, dolphins, and octopods — seem to have a knack for learning.^{11} Because, until recently, there has been no pressing need to understand the complex mechanics behind some of evolution’s effects, that’s why many of us don’t — though we are capable of learning and, with the help of writing, remembering. There is also an educational, stabilizing superstructure, however, where intervention can reasonably occur, and where it is possible to stabilize necessary discourses with the help of beneficent technologies — if you allow cultures to learn in their own way. But this must be both an active and a passive process. This is not cultural relativism (which always moves toward an initially passive approach that ignores learning and eventually tends toward a dominant destructive approach to behavior, which is sometimes confused with learning), but is rather cultural respect (which acknowledges that learning/teaching is always an intervention in the elements that comprise culture, during which both sides must learn if there is to be beneficent change). There is a difference between dialogue-and-respect and imposition-and-domination. And if many more of us don’t start to understand those process-effects and their imperfections as well as their successes, soon, directly or indirectly, we’ll kill each other and ourselves off. It’s that simple.^{12}) The fact that so many creatures — from mice (who squeak) to mastodons (who trumpeted), bats to beavers, giraffes (who mostly listen but sometimes mew) to gerbils (who chitter), pigeons (who coo) to primates (who grunt, growl, or talk) — share an auditory form of data emission and reception (i.e., hearing and making more or less informative noises; though we all do different things with them) attests to its efficacy for multiple tasks at every level of development as well as to our genetic connectedness over the last 250 million years since the early Triassic and before, and the incredibly intricate road to language that a purely synchronic linguistics system is inadequate to untangle without a great deal more extension into semiotics, animal and human, and their evolutionary history, much of which is lost.

Given that we have separate brains, that we can “communicate” as well as we can is quite amazing — but don’t let your amazement make you forget that “communication” begins as a metaphor for an effect (a door that opens directly from one room to another, a hall that leads from one place in a building to another) but is thus neither a complete nor an accurate description of many things that occur with sound-making and sound-gathering. The fact that so many different creatures have eyes, ears, and kinesthetic reception systems speaks of the efficacy of these effects as well as the genetic relationships among us since before they and their precursors — from gills, extraneous jaw bones, and light sensitive spots on algae and the forerunners of nerves themselves — evolved over millions of generations. That is an index of their usefulness in this landscape. Bear that in mind, and you may start to perceive how complex the process is and why language is only the effect that something has passed from person to person, creature to creature, from landscape to creature, whether from speech or in writing or by touch or through any sound — or perceptible signs.^{13}

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “We must treat other people as if they exist, because perhaps they do”—though we’ve gotten a lot more biological and neurological evidence that they do.^{14} Because of this, the force behind that “perhaps” has strengthened to a strong “probably,” though in theory we haven’t gotten much further. The similarities and differences from which — neurologically speaking — we learn to interpret the world, unto birth and death, comfort and discomfort, safety and danger, pleasure and pain, and the existence of other people and other creatures and other minds and — whatever ours is — other sexualities and orientations and the worldscapes we share, are all still effects, even as they form our only access to the life, the world, the multiverse they create for us. But they would appear to be extremely useful effects for keeping us alive and functioning in our nanosection of a nanosection of that multiverse — that is, if what many of us take to be failures of tolerance among the general deployments and our own employments of these effects of difference don’t lead to our destruction.

Now that we’ve had a romp through space and time, and a general ecological agape, which — since Poe obliged an audience of sixty with a talk taken from his then unpublished Eureka, A Prose Poem^{15} — we still expect certain sorts of imaginative writers to indulge in from time to time, I can tell the following without, I hope, its taking on more critical weight than it can bear: an anecdote that pleases me and makes me smile. For — largely — that’s what it is. (The indirect gesturing toward metaphysics is done with for the nonce. And, no, we can’t say anything about it directly, which is probably why it takes so long to suggest anything about it at all; and, no, we are still never outside it…)

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

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

I don’t make too much of it.

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

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

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

Glancing at the glove, he dropped his hand back to his side. “Oh, sure. Any time, I guess. You’re welcome. I’m glad it’s okay…” He told me about the magazine in which, two weeks before, he’d seen my picture and read its few paragraphs about me. He was a black American man like myself, which meant we’d shared many experiences and much cultural history. He was a black American man like myself, which meant his world and his upbringing were unique, as were mine. (For all our human species’ similarities, if we look carefully enough, uniqueness — fingerprints, retinal patterns, the synaptic links in our three billion brain cells, genetic variations in both essential and nonessential genetic material that reflect the different specificity each of us inhabits and our ancestors inhabited [i.e., it didn’t kill us in that particular landscape before we could pass it on], even if we live in houses next to one another, or in the same house in the same family — is our most widely shared trait.^{16}) Did that have anything to do with his stopping me? Possibly. In the twenty-five seconds we spoke, the next thing he let me know was how much he liked Octavia Butler’s work. “Kindred…? Those stories in Blood Child?” he asked. “Patternmaster …?”

I nodded, smiling.

“Did you ever meet her?”

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

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

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

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well — ” I laughed — “now you do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Older alphabets, such as Hebrew and Greek, begin, in effect, “A, B, G: aleph, beth, gamil…alpha, beta, gamma…”; which suggest a great deal about the history of written language, because so many of those alphabets from that relatively small arc of the world share so many sequences with one another, which means contact between the cultures: the Arabic abjad has several orders, two of which begin a, b, d, (abjad, hawwaz, ḥuṭṭī) and two of which begin a, b, t. (We would have neither algebra — which is a Arabic word — nor the use of the Hindu zero, nor the names of so many of our stars, without the Arabic language and its cultural flowering through the centuries, in poetry, science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.) Other writing systems, which developed in different places — China and India, Korea and Malaysia, Central and South America — are as rich and as creative as any of the “classic six” (up through much of the nineteenth century, these included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, along with Sanskrit and Aramaic), but work differently, sometimes at very fundamental levels. My first idea was to go on with what an alphabetic ordering could accomplish and what it couldn’t.^{17} As I began drafting it, however, I got caught up in still another meditation on “social” evolution, an idea I distrust as much as I believe in what we call Darwinian evolution, a distrust for which the huge collapse of the time frame in “social” evolution is only one bit of the evidence against it — that is to say, reduces it to a misleading and highly abusable metaphor instead of an efficient explanation of another effect, another illusion, which often contravenes what biological evolution itself so overwhelmingly suggests. But that seemed a bit off topic for where I wanted this consideration to go.

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

The 1925 Nobel Prize — winning Irish (though he lived much of his life in England) playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw was a great favorite of an astonishing American writer, Joanna Russ, whom I was privileged to have as a friend from the middle sixties until her death in 2011. (Though we met only six or seven times, our letters back and forth starting in 1967 fill cartons.) She was an enthusiast both of Shaw’s plays and of his criticism, musical and dramatic. From adolescence on I’d enjoyed Shaw’s theater, but Russ was the first to remind me of his other pieces,^{18} some of which I had been lucky enough to have read before on my own, so that I could reread them in the twin illuminations of her knowledge and enthusiasm.

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

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

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

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

(And suppose I can’t…?)

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

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

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