Longer Views

Appendix Shadows

1. Today’s technology is tomorrow’s handicraft.

2. Lines I particularly liked from Knotly’s poem in the current Paris Review: “for every one must run a race/in the body’s own running place” and: “Everything I have has an earwig in it/which will make light of sacred things.”

3. Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker — that constant flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and flicker is all there is. (Where do sf writers get their crazy ideas? From watching all there is very carefully.)

4. The preceding notes, this one, and the ones following are picked, somewhat at random, from my last two years’ journals (1973–1974), in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.

5. Critical language presents us a problem: The critic “analyzes” a work to “reveal” its “internal form.” Recent structuralist critics are trying to “discover the underlying, mythic structures” of given works or cultures. There is the implication that what the critic comes up with is somehow more basic than the thing under study — we are all, of course, too sophisticated to be fooled into thinking what the critic produces is more important.

Still, however, we feel the critical find should be more intense, more solid, more foundational than the work. After all, though novels are fiction, the books of criticism about them are not…

An obvious visual image for the critical process is a surgeon, carefully dissecting a body, removing the skeleton from it, and presenting the bones to our view — so that we will have a more schematic idea of how the fleshed organism articulates.

All this, however, is the result of a category-mistake of the sort Ryle describes in The Concept of Mind (p. 17ff.).

A slightly better image, as a basic model of the critical process, will, perhaps, explode it:

The critic sits at a certain distance from the work, views it from a particular side, and builds a more or less schematic model of the work as it strikes her or him (just as I am making this model of what the critic does), emphasizing certain elements, suppressing certain others, attaching little historical notes to his model here and there on where she thinks this or that form in the original work might have come from, adding little ethical notes on what he suspects is its proper usage, all according to the particular critical use the model is intended for. If the critic’s model is interesting enough, there is nothing to stop us from considering it a work of art in itself, as we do with Pater or Taine, with Barthes or Derrida, Felman or Johnson. A critic may, indeed, add something to the work. But the critic does not remove anything from the work.

Works of literature, painting, and sculpture simply do not have informative insides. There is no skeleton to be removed. They are all surface-that-endures-through-history. A piece of sculpture has a physical inside, but drilling a hole three inches into the Venus de Milo will give you no aesthetic insight into it. (Note, however: This paragraph does not hold true [at least in the same way] for theatrical works, orchestral music, film, or much electronic art. For an sf story: Postulate a world and a culture which has an art all of which does have informative insides — great cloth sculptures, for example, held up from within by hidden pipe- shapes, electronic art run by hidden circuitry. The critic, as criminal, hires herself to other social criminals who wish to understand the art; they break into museums, dismantle the art objects, and remove the insides for inspection. The works are reassembled… clumsily. Later, an artist passing by notices something is wrong and cries out to a guard: “Look, look! A critic has been at my work! Can’t you see…?” Theme of the story: If to understand the work is physically to destroy or injure it, are the critics [and the people who wish to understand art] heroes or villains? Are the artists, who make works that can only be understood by dismantling them, charlatans? Consider also, since my view is that this is just how so many people do misinterpret criticism today, will my context be understood? Is there any way that I can make clear in the story that what I am presenting is not how criticism works; rather, I am poking fun at the general misapprehension? I am not in the least interested in writing a simpleminded, “damning” satire of Modern Criticism. Will have to rethink seriously incidents as first listed if I want the story’s point to be the subtle one. Can such a point be dramatized in sf story…?)

Basically, however, the critic is part of the work’s audience. The critic responds to it, selects among those responses and, using them, makes, selectively, a model of the work that may, hopefully, guide, helpfully, the responses of the critic’s own audience when they come to the work being modeled.

When a critic, talking about critical work, suggests she is doing more than this, at best she is indulging in metaphor; at worst, he is practicing, whether wittingly or no, more of that pernicious mystification that has brought us to our present impasse.

(Happy with the idea; but still uncomfortable with it as a story template — because, as a template, it seems to be saying exactly the opposite of what I want to! Is this, perhaps, a problem basic to sf: That you can only use it to reinforce commonly accepted prejudices; and that to use it for a discussion of anything at a more complex resolution simply can’t be done at the literary distance sf affords? From Cassirer to Kirk, critics have leveled just this accusation at mythology. If it’s true of sf as well, perhaps sf is, inchoately, an immature form…? Well, there: The ugly suggestion has been made.

(Do I agree?

(No, I don’t. But I think it is certainly an inherent tendency of the medium. To fight it, and triumph over it, I must specifically: go into the world — the object — I have set up far more thoroughly than I have before, and treat it autonomously rather than as merely a model of a prejudiciary situation — a purely subject manifestation. I must explore it as an extensive, coherent reality — not as an intensive reflection of the real world where the most conservative ideas will drain all life out of the invention.

(What does my culture look like, for instance, once I leave the museum? Given its basic aesthetic outlook, what would its architecture look like? How would the museum itself look, from the inside? From the outside? What would the building where the artist lived look like? And where the critic lived? What would be their relative social positions? What would be the emblems of those positions? How would such emblems differ from the emblems of social positions in our world? What would it smell like to walk through their streets? Given their art, what of their concept of science? Is it the opposite of their concept of art? Or is it an extension of it? Are the informative insides of the scientific works as mystified as the insides of art works? Or are they made blatantly public? Or are they mystified even more than the art? What are the problems that critics of science have in this world? Or critics of politics? Would these critics be the same people?

(As I begin to treat my original conceit as a coherent, antonomous world, instead of just a statement about our world, I begin to generate a template complicated enough and rich enough actually to make a statement about our world that is something more than simple- minded. I can now start to ask myself questions like: In this world, what are the psychological traits of someone who would become a critic? An artist? A scientist? Etc. But it is only when the template becomes at least that complex that sf becomes mature.)

6. Moorcocks coming over here for dinner tonight with John Sims: Cream of Leek soup, Roast Beef, Fried Eggplant, Rice (possibly a risotto with almonds? How many stuffed mushrooms are left over from the Landrys yesterday? And will they do, reheated, for starters?); an American Salad (get some Avocado, Bacon, Butter-lettuce, Chicory, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Carrots, Celery, Mustard, Lemons); to follow: Baked Bananas flamed in brandy. (Don’t use the mushrooms: John doesn’t like them!)

7. For Sturgeon essay: The material of fiction is the texture of experience.

8. Re Dhalgren… I think Marilyn is depressingly right about the psychiatric session with Madame Brown and the Calkins interview… which means more work; and after I’ve just rewritten the whole last chapter! With Calkins, the historical must be made manifest. With Madame Brown, she must realize that the dream is not a dream, otherwise she comes off just too stupid. It is so hard to control the outside view of my material, when I am standing on the inside. It’s like clutching a balloon to shape from within.

Friday night and to the Moorcocks for dinner with Emma Tennent.

9. Got a letter from R. E. Geis today, asking to reprint my Letter to a Critic from The Little Magazine in The Alien Critic. Am very dubious. First of all, some of the facts, as John Brunner so succinctly pointed out over the phone a fortnight back, are just wrong. More to the point, the section on science-fiction publishing isn’t really a description of the current sf publishing scene at all. Rather, it’s a memoir of what the publishing situation was like in that odd period between 1967 and 1971. Odd, too, how quickly the bright truths of twenty-six (by which age the bulk of my notoriously unbulky sf oeuvre was already in print) seem, six years later, rather dated. What to do? Get ever so slightly looped and write a polite letter?

Or take a walk up Regents’ Canal and go browse in Compendium Book Store? Sounds better.

10. What a tiny part of our lives we use in picturing our pasts. Walked to the Turkish take-away place this evening with John Witton-Doris: consider the number of incidents he recalls from our months in Greece together, nine years ago, involving me, that I can barely remember! Biography, as it approaches completeness, must be the final fiction.

11. Alcohol is the opium of the people.

12. Science fiction through the late sixties seemed to be, scientifically, interested in mathematics segueing into electronics; psychiatry, in all its oversimplified clumsiness, has been an sf mainstay from The Roads Must Roll, through Baby is Three, to The Dream Master.

Science fiction from the past few years seems to be interested in mathematics segueing into contemporary linguistics/philosophy (e.g., Watson’s The Embedding); biology — particularly genetics — has replaced physics as the science of greatest concern [Cf. the ‘clone’ stories over the past few years, from Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The Clone, through McIntyre’s The Cage (and Ms. McIntyre is a trained geneticist; where do we get all this about people interested in science not getting into science fiction anymore!?!), to Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus]; and anthropology (reflected even in books like Effinger’s What Entropy Means to Me and Toomey’s A World of Trouble) seems to be replacing psychiatry as a prime concern.

I think I approve.

13. “You science-fiction writers always criticize each other in print as if the person you were criticizing were reading over your shoulder,” someone said to me at the Bristol Con last week — meaning, I’m afraid, that the majority of criticism that originates within the field has either a “let-me-pat-your-back-so-you-can-pat-mine” air, or, even more frequently, a sort of catty, wheedling tone implying much more is being criticized than the work nominally under discussion.

No, the sf community is not large

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent just over a decade making my living within it, but I feel all criticism should be written as if the author being criticized were — not reading over your shoulder — but written as though you could stand face to face with her and read it out loud, without embarrassment.

I think this should hold whether you are trying to fix the most rarefied of metaphysical imports in some Shakespearean tragedy, or writing a two-hundred word review of the latest thriller. Wheedling or flattery have nothing to do with it.

Among the many informations we try to get from any critical model is the original maker’s (the artist’s) view of the original work modeled. If the critics do not include, in this model, an overt assessment of it, we construct it from hints, suggestions, and whatever. But we are at three removes from the author: and the critic is at two (as the critic is one from the work): In deference to that distance, I feel the critics must make such assessments humbly. They can always be wrong.

But only after they, and we, have made them (wrong or right), can we follow the critics’ exploration of the work’s method, success, or relevance. The critic can only judge these things by his own responses; in a very real way, the only thing the critic is ever really criticizing — and this must be done humbly if it is to be done at all — is the response of his own critical instrument.

All criticism is personal.

The best is rigorously so.

14. Yesterday, Joyce Carol Oates sent Marilyn a copy of her new book of poems Angel Fire (with a letter apologizing for taking so long to answer Marilyn’s last letter etc., and dense with North American weather). This morning, in Compendium, I saw the new Oates book on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, The Hostile Sun, picked it up, took it (in its bright yellow covers) home, and have, minutes ago, just finished it.

After going through three novels, a handful of essays, and a few crunches into the Collected Poems (and most recently, the Frank Kermode book on), Lawrence has tended to be for me a clumsy, if impassioned, writer purveying a message I find almost totally heinous. The most generous thing I could say for him till now was, with Kenneth Rexroth, “His enemies are my enemies,” but even here I always found myself wondering, wouldn’t he do better on their side than on mine? Lawrence-the-outspoken-sexual-revolutionary has always struck me a bit like those politicians who, in their support of the War in Vietnam, eventually went so far as to use words like “hell” and “damn” in their speeches — then quickly looked at their fellow party members who dared disapprove of their “too strong” language and labeled them conservatives. Though Lawrence’s novels sometimes refer to sexual mechanics, his overall concept of sex seems institutionally rigid: Everyone must fulfill his or her role, as assigned by Divine Law. The heroes of his novels go about brow-beating everyone who happens to stray from his (usually her) divinely ordained role, back into it. For, after all, it is Divine Law. And anyone who still strays, after having been told that, must be sick unto damnation. I wonder if Lawrence was aware that his real critics simply found him, in his ideas (rather than in the “strength” of his language, or the “explicitness” of the scenes he used to dramatize his points), an absolute prig?

At any rate, The Hostile Sun offers me a guide to the Collected Poems (the volume Joyce gave Marilyn as a going-away present; she must have been working on the essay then) that may just get me into them in a way that I can get something out. The book makes the idea of Lawrence-the-Poet interesting to me and offers me some way of divorcing it from Lawrence-the-Prophet — whom I find a pernicious bore. Oates points out his strengths in the poems (the overall intensity of vision; his aesthetic of unrectified feeling) and warns what not to look for (the single, well-crafted poem; a certain type of aesthetic intelligence). Since there are half a dozen poets whom I enjoy in just this way, from James Thomson and Walt Whitman to Paul Blackburn and Philip Whalen, I suspect I will go back to Lawrence’s poems better prepared.

It is nice to be reminded that criticism, well done, can open up areas previously closed.

15. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read one H. G. Wells “romance of the future” from cover to cover. I once read three quarters of Food of the Gods, and I have read the first fifty/one hundred pages of perhaps half a dozen more.

When I was thirteen, somebody gave me Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a book that “you’ll simply love.” At page two hundred I balked. I never have finished it! I did a little better with From the Earth to the Moon, but I still didn’t reach the end.

By the time I was fifteen, however, in my own personal hierarchy, Wells and Verne were synonymous with the crashingly dull. Also, I had gotten their names mixed up with something called Victorian Literature (which, when I was fifteen, somehow included Jane Austen!), and I decided that it was probably all equally boring.

I was eighteen before I began to correct this impression (with, of all things, Eliot’s Adam Bede); fortunately somebody had already forced me — marvelous experience that it was — into Jane Austen by assuring me that her first three books were written before Victoria was even a sparkle in the Duke of Kent’s eye. Then the hordes: Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy. But I have never quite forgiven Wells and Verne for, even so briefly, prejudicing me against the “serious” literature written by their contemporaries and precursors who just happened to have overlapped, to whatever extent, the reign of that same, diminutive monarch.

16. When I was a child, I used to play the violin. At fourteen I developed a not wholly innocent passion for a boy of fifteen who was something of a violin prodigy: He had already been soloist with several small but professional orchestras, and he was talked about muchly in my several circles of friends. I wrote a violin concerto for him — it took me four months. Its three movements ran about half an hour. I supplied (I thought then) a marvelous cadenza. The themes, if I recall, were all serial, but their development was tonal. I orchestrated it for a full, seventy-five piece orchestra — but by the time I had finished, he had moved to upstate New York.

And I had been afraid to tell him what I was doing until it was completed.

Months later, I ran into him in the Museum of Modern Art (he was in the city visiting an aunt) and, excitedly, I told him about my piece, over cokes and English muffins in a coffee shop a few blocks away. He was a little overwhelmed, if not bewildered, but said, “Thanks,” and “Gosh!” and “Wow!” a lot. We talked about getting together again. He was first chair violinist with the All State Youth Orchestra that year and a favorite with the conductor. We talked about a possible performance or, at least, getting some of his adult friends to look at it. Then he had to catch a train.

I never saw him again.

He never saw the concerto.

At fifteen I gave up the violin — and have had a slight distrust of the passions ever since.

I notice that I often tend to talk (and think) about my childhood just as though music had no part in it — whereas, in reality, I must have spent more hours at it from eight to twice eight than at anything else. And between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, I probably made as much money as a basket musician in Greenwich Village coffee houses as I did from my first four sf novels, written over the same time. (And how interesting that the ages from nineteen to twenty-two are suddenly part of my childhood!)

17. A dozen poets whose work I have enormously enjoyed in the last couple of years: Michael Dennis Browne, Alice Knotly, Robert Allen, John Oliver Simon, Philip Levine, Robert Peterson, Judith Johnson Sherwin, Ted Berrigan, Robert Morgan, Ann Waldman, Richard Howard, and J. H. Pryne.

(I am leaving out Marilyn Hacker and Tom Disch; I know them and their work too well!)

How many of the dozen named have I actually met? Six. Interesting that one, whom I’ve never met at all, felt it necessary to tell a complete stranger, who only accidentally met me six months later, that he was quite a good friend of mine when I lived in San Francisco![37]

18. Down to give a lecture on sf at the University of Kent. In the discussion period after my talk, someone brought up Theodore Sturgeon. I asked the assembly what they particularly liked about his work. From one side of the room, someone shouted, “His aliens!” and from the other side, simultaneously someone else: “His people!” Everyone laughed. Consider this incident for the Sturgeon essay.

19. Marilyn, from the other room (where she is reading the Jonathan Raban book The Sociology of the Poem and, apparently, has just come to another horrendous misreading [where he goes on about Pickard’s poem “Rape” (he doesn’t apparently remember the title and refers only to a few lines of it) as expressing good will (!) and fellowship (!!) between the young men in the pub and the old woman (whom he, not Pickard, calls a prostitute)]: “Poetry should be as well written as prose — and at least as carefully read!”

20. In the context of 1948—a vacuum tube technology where most adding machines were mechanical — Gilbert Ryle was probably right in denying the existence of mental occurrences as material events with the nature of mechanical entities, separable from the brain. In the context of 1973—where we have a solid-state technology and electronic computers — we have to rethink: the empirical evidence of neurology, electronics, and cybernetics all point to a revitalization of the concept of mental occurrences as brain processes. A perfectly serious argument seems to be occurring today in philosophy over whether mental occurrences are nonmaterial events that just happen to happen simultaneously with certain brain processes (or are even set off by the brain processes, but are different from the processes themselves), or whether the brain processes are, indeed, the mental occurrences themselves.

Two things make such an argument seem ridiculous to me — one empirical, the other logical.

First, it seems as silly to say that the brain contains no model of what the eye sees (which arguers on one side of this argument maintain) as it is to say that the circuitry in a TV camera (that has been turned on) contains no model of what is in front of the image orthicon tube at its proper focal distance. The point is: Anyone who has tried to design a television (or even a radio) circuit from scratch has some idea of just how great the complexity of that model must be: It is practically all process, composed of a series of precisely ordered wave fronts that peak in precise patterns, hundreds-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-times per second, all shunted around, amplified, distorted, and superimposed on one another, in a precise pattern, at close to the speed of light. The philosophers who hold this view, I’m afraid, are simply revealing their inability to conceive even this complexity, empirically demonstrable for processes far simpler than the simplest brain process.

To take another side of the argument (and it has many more than two) is to get lost in one of the numerous logical contradictions of ordinary speech, which allows us to call “a process” a thing and “an object” a thing too. The internal logical structure of one is distinct from the internal logical structure of the other. All processes are nonmaterial, whether they be brain-processes or the process of raising my hand off the table. At the same time, all processes need material to define them. (If I raise a glass off the table, aren’t I doing the same “thing” as raising my hand off the table…? O course I’m not. Which is to say, I am doing the same “thing” [i.e., indulging the same process] only in so far as I am observing the two events at the same degree of empirical resolution. If I want to, I can observe the raising of two more or less identical glasses from the same spot on the table [or even the same glass] at different times, at such a high degree of empirical resolution that their processes can be uniquely differentiated, having to do with drying times of films of water, molecular change and interchange between the table and the glass, etc. And that, alas, exhausts the tale.) Similarly, all material can be defined by process, the most basic of which, for a static object, is simply the process of duration; as it changes (or as I observe it at a higher degree of empirical resolution, so that I become aware of changes in it) we can bring in other processes as well. In this way, all material can be defined by the process (infinitely analyzable into smaller processes) it is undergoing. But the basic terms that are thrown around in this argument — “material event” and “nonmaterial event”—both have an element of self-contradiction (i.e., if “a brain process” can be called “a material event,” then, as the brain is the material, the event must be the process, which implies something like a “material process”… which is nonsense of the same order as “a green smell”) that, it would seem to me, renders them both useless for any serious, logical discussion.

To stand for three hours and watch Vikki Sperling map the image from the retina of the eye of the salamander off the visual tectum of the exposed salamander brain (doubled there, one inverted left-right, and a weaker one right-left) with her gold-filled microelectrodes on their adjustable stands, silences a good deal of the argument in my own head. The behaviorists, with their pretransistor view of the world, say: “But you can’t locate mental occurrences!” We can not only locate them, we can measure them, map them, record them, reproduce them, cut them out, and put them in backwards!

21. A “word” has a “meaning” in the sense that a train has a track; not in the sense that a train has a passenger. Still, word and meaning in most people’s minds, even most philosophers’ apparently, are the same sort of category-mistake that Ryle tried to show existed in the Cartesian separation between body and mind.

Words mean.

But meaning is the interaction of the process into which the eardrum/aural-nerve translates the air vibrations that are the word, with the chemoelectric process that is the interpretative context of the brain. Meaning may be something else as well — as mental occurrences may involve something in addition to as well as brain-processes. But I am sure that they are at least this, which is why empirical exploration strikes me as the only practical way to get seriously further in either discussion.

22. Many scientists and mathematicians fool themselves into thinking there is something eternal about, say, a mathematical proof.

At Marilyn’s bookstall, yesterday, I was browsing in a seventeenth century Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements. Things Euclid took as proofs would horrify — if not bewilder — a modern university senior in math. Euclid’s personal idea of mathematical rigor is entirely different from ours. Fashions in proofs change only a little more slowly than fashions in dress. What is considered to require a proof today is considered self-evident tomorrow. What was considered self-evident yesterday, today is the subject of a three-hundred-page exegesis whose final conclusion is that it just cannot be rigorously established at all!

A mathematician will tell you that a set of proofs, all from one mathematician, may, for example, generate information about the author’s personality. I will certainly agree with anyone who says that such information is probably not terribly important to the proofs’ substance. But anyone who says the information is not there is simply blind.

Even mathematics has its subjective side. And, as extremes come around to touch, one argument gaining popularity now is that something as abstract as “mathematical logic” may turn out to be what, after all, subjectivity actually is.

23. Art conveys possibilities of information to society, i.e., the possible forms information may take. The value of art is in its richness of form. (Cf. Charles Olson’s advice to writers that, without necessarily imitating reality in their fiction, they should keep their fiction “up to” the real.) The relation of art to the world is the aesthetic field of a given culture, i.e., in different cultures art relates to the world in very different ways.

24. Thoughts on my last sixteen years with Marilyn: living with an extra-, ordinarily talented and temperamental poet is certainly the best thing that could happen to a prose writer. I wonder, however, if it works the other way around…? When we fall asleep, like teaspoons, the baby (due in two months) tramples me in the small of my back. But they seem such definitely nonhostile kicks. You can tell it’s just exercise. This evening, for practically a minute and a half, it kicked at almost regular, seven-second intervals, till Marilyn got up from the armchair (a little worried). Well, considering its daddy, it ought to have a good sense of rhythm. (I say living with a talented and temperamental poet is good for a prose writer; but I suspect living with a talented and temperamental poet who happens to possess a rather acute business sense helps too…) [Note: Our obstetrician, Mrs. Ransom, says that when the baby presses against an artery in the womb, often a highly regular spasming of part of the uterine wall can occur, easily confusable with the baby’s kicking. Nothing to worry about. But we do not have a budding Ruby Keeler or Bill Robinson in our midst. Just a pressed artery in some positions.]

25. I suspect the logical atomism of both Russell and Wittgenstein would have been impossible without the visual atomization the Impressionists had already subjected the world to on canvas (and that the Cubists were subjecting it to concurrently with Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work). In fact, what is basically wrong with Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of language” is that it rests on an aesthetically simpleminded concept of the way in which a picture relates to what it is a picture of. The twenty-seven-year-old Wittgenstein simply held an amazingly naive view (or, more generously, an extreme nineteenth-century-derived view) of the way in which a picture is a model of a situation. The mistake at Tractatus 2.261 is heartrending:

There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all.

If for must be and identical he had substituted is obviously and similar — and then taken up the monumental task of running these words down to their propositional atomization — he would have solved the problem of the modular calculus (i.e., the critical problem).

The point is: There is nothing identical in a picture and what it depicts. There is nothing identical in the model and what it is a model of. Nothing, nothing at all! They share not one atom in common! They need not share one measurement! Only the perceptive context imposes commonality on them, for a variety of learned and physiological reasons. (G. Spencer-Brown’s elegant, elegant argument wobbles, ultimately, on the same pivot point.) There are only identical processes some thing else can undergo in response to both — emblematic of their relation. And, presumably, different processes as well — emblem that the two (original and depiction) are distinct and, possibly, hierarchical.

For A to be recognized as a model of B, first a set of internal relations, as A relates to itself, must be read from A, then processed in some way probably similar to a mathematical integration; then another set of internal relations must be read from B (some of the relations may be similar to those read from A; but they need not be) and then integrated (by a similar process; or by a very different one), and the two results compared; if I find the results congruent, then I recognize A as a model of B in the context of the joint integrative process that produced the congruent results. But information about A may come to me via photograph, while I may have to gather information about B, blindfolded, with just my hands, from miniature plastic sculptures. Even so, if I have developed the proper interpretative context, I may well be able to recognize that, say, some small, plastic object B is a model of the photographed object A (checkable against a sight model when the blindfold is removed), while other small plastic objects C, D, and E are not — in terms either of the context I’ve developed, or in terms of the more usual sight context — models of A.

26. About every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different statements can be made. For every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different models can be made.

27. On one side of a paper write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is true.” Now turn the paper over and write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is false.” Now put down your pencil; and turn the paper over several more times, considering the truth and falsity of the statements you have written — till you perceive the paradox.

The young Bertrand Russell noted that the whole of the Principia Mathematica remained shaky because of it; he came up with one resolution that, later, as an older man, he repudiated. Karl Popper has, somewhere, a proof that it cannot be resolved at all.

It can.

But to follow the resolution, fold up the paper and put it in the breast pocket of your Pendleton, as I did on the train platform in South Bernham one May, and come along with me.

Vanessa Harpington had gone off painting in North Africa, but had sweetly left the keys to her country home circulating among various of her Camden Town friends. So I’d come down to pass that summer in a fine old English house with my friend Alfred, himself the long-haired nephew and namesake of a rather infamous Polish Count K.

One rainy afternoon, I was in the sitting room, with a sketch pad, making a drawing of the scene outside the window — rain splashing through the leaves of one of the small sycamores in the yard — when Alfred, smoking a meerschaum carved into a likeness of A. E. Van Vogt, wandered in, looked at my drawing, looked out the window, looked at my drawing again, and nodded. After a moment’s silence, he said: “Would you say you are making a model of the situation outside the window?”

“I suppose you could call it that,” I said, sketching a line in for the drapery’s edge.

“Would you say that it models the fact that it is raining?”

“Well, all those slanted lines are supposed to be raindrops. And the runnels of water on the windows there…” I looked up.

Alfred had stepped forward. The streaming pane silhouetted his hawkish features. He took another pull on his pipe and, expelling small puffs of smoke, intoned: “Truth… Falsity… Model… Reality…” and glanced back.

“I beg your pardon?” I said. There was a sweetish aroma in with the tobacco.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” Alfred said, “that logically speaking, ‘true’ and ‘false’ can only be applied to statements about the real; but that it is nonsense to apply either one directly to the real? I mean — ” He took his pipe and pointed with the stem toward the window; his long hair swung — “if, in here, in the sitting room, you were to make the statement, ‘It is raining outside,’ or some other model of the situation you perceive through the glass — ”

“Like a drawing?”

“—or a sculpture, or a photograph; or a flashing light that, by arrangement, we had both agreed to interpret as, ‘It is raining outside,’ or some abstract mark on a piece of paper, or an arbitrary set of musical notes that we had some such similar agreement — ”

“A sign — ” I said. “An image, a symbol — ”

“I said a model. Do accept my terminology.” The partially silhouetted head cocked. “I’m only trying to save you pages and pages of semiological hair-splitting. Now: As I was saying, suppose I chose to model the situation outside with the statement, ‘It is raining outside,’ rather than the way you are, with a pencil and paper, then you might have come along, observed my model — or, in this case, heard what I said — observed the garden through the window, and commented: ‘That is a true statement.’ Or, if you will, ‘That is a true model.’—”

“I think that’s a rather limited way to look at, say, well any aesthetic model.”

“So do I! So do I!” said Alfred. “But if we had agreed that we were going to use the model in that way, for the purely limited purpose of obtaining information about a limited aspect of reality — say, whether it was or was not raining — then we could.”

“Okay. If we agreed first.”

“But, by the same token, you can see that it would be perfectly ridiculous for you to come along, point out the window and say, ‘The outside is true,’ or ‘The rain is true,’ or even ‘The rain outside is true’.”

“Oh, I could say it. But I do get your point. If I did, I wouldn’t be using ‘true’ in any truly logical way; I’d be using it metaphorically; aesthetically if you will; as a sort of general intensifier.”

“Precisely. Do you see, then, what allows one to put ‘true’ or ‘false’ on a model, such as my statement on your picture?”

“I suppose,” I said, squinting at my paper and considering asking Alfred to step just a little aside beside he was blocking a doffing sycamore branch, “It’s because I’ve been working very hard to get it to look like what… I’m modeling — Alfred, do you think you might move to the left there just a bit — ”

“Oh, really!” Alfred stepped directly in front of the window and jabbed his pipe stem at me. “All Vanessa’s oak paneling, these leather bindings and dusty hangings, seem to have addled your brain. A statement doesn’t look like the thing it models! When I say ‘It is raining,’ neither the ‘it’ nor the ‘is’ refers to anything real in the situation. And the position of the pointer on that barometer dial over there — just as good a model of what’s going on outside as any of the others we’ve mentioned — has no internal structure similar to the situation it’s modeling at all (though it’s attached to something that has an internal structure dependent on it; but that’s a different story)! No, some structural similarity may explain why you choose to use a particular thing for a model, but it is the use you are putting it to — the context you are putting it into, if you will — that, alone, allows you to call it ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Truth and falsity, the potential for being true or false, are not manifestations of the internal structure of the thing that is, potentially, to be so labeled. They are, rather, qualities ascribable to a given thing when, in a particular context, it is functioning in a particular way, i.e., modeling some situation truly (however we choose to interpret that) or modeling it falsely (however we choose, given a particular, modular context, to interpret that)…”

“Alfred,” I said, laying my pencil across my pad and leaning back in the leather wingchair, “I know you really are trying to save me pages of semiological hair-splitting, but you are also standing in my way — interfering, if you will, with the modular context I have been trying to establish between the rain and my drawing pad. Could you be a pal and see if you can get us some coffee…?”

As English summers will, that one soon ended.

As happens, a year later an Italian summer replaced it. I was spending a sunny week in a villa outside Florence. The news came from my hostess, one morning over coffee in the garden, that we were to be joined shortly by — of all people! I had thought he was somewhere in Nepal; indeed, I hadn’t thought of him for six months! And who, sure enough, should come striding across the grass ten minutes later, in rather worn-out sneakers, his bald spot not noticeably larger but his shoulder-length hair definitely longer, thumbs tucked under his knapsack straps, and a Persian vest over an out-at-the-elbow American workshirt, from the pocket of which stuck the stem of what, from the bulge at the pocket’s base, I recognized as his Van Vogtian meerschaum — Alfred!

He came across the lawn, grinning hawkishly, and said: “Do you know what you left behind in England and I have carried all the way to India and back?”

“What…?” I asked, quite surprised at his introduction and charmed by this dispensing with phatic chatter.

“Your sketch pad! Hello, Vanessa…” to our hostess, and gave her a large hug. The high, aluminum rack of his backpack swayed above his shoulders.

To explain what happened that afternoon, I might mention explicitly several things implicit already about both Alfred and Vanessa. She, for instance, is very generous, a far more talented painter than I, and has several easels in her studio — the converted top floor of the villa. And Alfred, as I’m sure you’ve realized, has a rather strange mind at the best of times, which also entails a rather strange sense of humor.

At any rate, some hours later, I was walking through the white dining room, with its sparse brass and wood decoration, when I noticed, through the open iron casement, out in the sunlit Italian garden, one of Vanessa’s easels set up a few yards from the window; and set up on the easel was my sketch pad, with my drawing of last year’s rain-battered, English sycamore.

While I looked at it, Alfred came climbing in over the windowsill, dropped to the floor, spilling a few cinders onto the waxed floorboards, and, kicking at them, gave me a great grin: “There,” he said, “Go on! Make a true statement — an accurate verbal model of the situation outside the window! Quick!”

“Well,” I said, smiling and a bit puzzled, “it seems that there’s…” I paused, about to say ‘my picture outside,’ but I remembered our colloquy back in rainy Britain: “… that there’s my model outside!”

“Just what I was hoping you would say,” Alfred said. “It saves even more pages of semiological hair-splitting!”

“And,” I said, encouraged by this, “the model outside is true, too! Alfred, what have you been doing in India?”

“Amazing amounts of shit,” Alfred said warmly. “Do you know, Plato was right, after all — at least about method. As far as semiological hairsplitting is concerned, we just dispensed with practically a chapter and a half! A dialogue that you can make up as you go along really is the only way to get anything done in philosophy.”

I looked out at my picture again. “Then it is my model. And my model is true.”

“Your first statement is true.” Alfred’s smile became warmer still. ‘Your second is nonsense — no, don’t look so crestfallen. Just listen a moment: whether your model is a statement, a drawing, or even a thought, it is still a thing like any other thing: that is, it has its particular internal structure, and its various elements are undergoing their various processes, be that merely the process of enduring. Now you may have chosen any aspect of this thing — part of its material, part of its structure, or part of its process — to do the bulk of the modeling for you, while it was in the modular context. And, yes, outside that context, the model is still the same thing. But it is outside the context. Therefore, pointing out this window at that picture and calling it, or any part of it — material, structure, or process — ‘true’ or ‘false’ is just as nonsensical now as it would have been for you, back in that abysmal May we spent in South Bernham, to point out the window and call some thing out there ‘true’ or ‘false’… the rain, the shape of the drops, or the falling. A fine distinction has to be made. Whether the model functions as true or functions as false within the context may have something to do with the internal structure of the model. But whether the model functions (as true or false) has to do with the structure of the context. If you would like to, look at it this way: ‘true’ and ‘false’ merely model two mutually exclusive ways a given model (which is a thing) may function in a given context, depending on other things, which may, in different contextual positions, function as models. But the meaningfulness of the ascription of true or false is dependent on the context, not the thing.” Alfred took another draw on his pipe, found it was out, and frowned. “Um… now why don’t you take out that piece of paper you have folded up in the breast pocket of your Pendleton and look at it again — excuse me, I could have suggested you take it out of your wallet and avoided the implication that you hadn’t washed your shirt since last summer, but now I am just trying to save you pages of semiological elaboration.”

Feeling a bit strange, I fingered into my breast pocket, found the paper I had so summarily folded up a summer before, and unfolded it, while Alfred went on: “Think of it in this wise: if something is in the proper, logical position, it may be called true or false. If it moves out of that position, though it is still the same thing, you can’t call it true or false.”

And, creased through horizontally, I read:

The statement on the other side of this paper is true.

“Alfred — ” I frowned — “if there is a statement on the other side of this paper (and, unless my memory plays tricks, there is) and it is meaningful to call that statement true or false — now I’m only letting the internal structure of this statement suggest a line of reasoning, I’m not accepting from it any information about its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’, ‘meaningfulness’ or ‘meaninglessness’—that means (does it not?) that it is in the proper position in the modular context to do some modeling.”

“Even as you or I, when we stand at the window looking at what’s outside.”

“And if that statement refers to what’s on this side of the paper (and memory assures me that it does), then they are in the same context, which means they cannot both occupy the same position in it at the same time.”

“Have you ever tried to stand out in the garden and inside the sitting room all at once? It is a bit difficult.”

“So if that is the case, then this statement has to be considered just as a… thing, like rain, or a sycamore, or a garden…”

“Or a sketch of a garden. Or a statement. Or a thought. They are things too.”

“But I recall distinctly. Alfred: The statement on the other side of the paper calls this statement — this thing! — false!”

“Wouldn’t really matter if it called it true, would it — ”

“Of course it wouldn’t! In the context I just outlined, I could no more call this… thing — ” I waved the statement — “‘true’ than I could call — ” I looked out the window at the easel with my sketch — “that thing true!”

“Though that does not reflect on its potential for truth if placed in another contextual position. If, for example, the statement on the other side of the paper read: ‘Your picture is in the garden,’ then it would be perfectly fine. Actually, it can work quite serially; what we’re really establishing is simply the unidirectionality of the modular context from the real. But then, all that semiological hair-splitting… Better turn over the paper and see if your memory isn’t playing tricks on you.”

Hastily I did. And read:

The statement on the other side of this paper is false.

“Yes,” I said, “there is a statement on this side, and it does attribute truth-or-falsity to the statement on the other. Which is nonsensical. It’s standing inside the sitting room in Bernham looking out the window and calling the rain ‘true.’”

“You never really did that,” Alfred said. “We just made a model of it that we judged nonsensical — useless in a particular sort of way. Keep looking at the side of the paper you’re looking at now — that is: Set up the context in the other direction.”

I did until I had:

“It’s the same situation. If I let the other statement occupy the modeling position and this occupy the position of the modeled thing, then the fact that the other statement attributes truth or falsity to what’s on this side means it’s nonsensical too.”

Alfred nodded. “It’s like having, on either side of your paper: ‘The thing on the other side of this paper is true (or false); the thing on the other side of this paper is false (or true).’ Which is an empty situation, in the same way that if you and, say, Vanessa, both had drawing pads and pencils and were sitting where you could see each other’s paper, and I gave you the instructions: ‘Both of you draw only what the other is drawing.’ You’d both end up with empty pictures.”

“Speaking of Vanessa,” I said, “let us go see what she is doing. She is a better artist than I am, which I suspect means that on some level, she has established a more interesting modular context with reality than I have. Perhaps she will take a break from her work and have some coffee with us.”

“Splendid,” said Alfred. “Oh, you asked me what I was doing in India? Well, while I was there, I got hold of some…” But that is another story too.

28. Language suggests that “truth” (or “falsity”) may be an attribute of sentences much as “redness” may be an attribute of apples. The primary language model is the adjective “true,” the secondary one a noun, “truth,” derived from the adjective. This is not the place to begin the argument against the whole concept of attributes. (It goes back to Leibniz’s inseparable subject/verbs for true predicates; Quine has demonstrated how well we can get along in formal logic without attributes, as well as without the whole concept of propositions.) But I maintain that, subsumed under the noun “truth,” is a directed binary relation, running from the real to the uttered, by way of the mind. The problems we have concerning “truth” (such as the paradox in section 27) are problems that arise from having to model a directed binary relationship without a transitive verb.

It is as if, in those situations in which we now say “The hammer strikes the nail” and “The hammer misses the nail,” we were constrained by the language only to speak of “strike nails” and “miss nails,” and to discuss “strikeness” and “missness” as attributes a given nail might or might not possess, depending on the situation, at the same time seldom allowing a mention of the hammer and never the moment of impact.

What “truth” subsumes (as well as an adjective-derived noun can) is a process through which apprehension of some area of the real (either through the senses, or through the memory, or the reality of internal sensation — again, this is not the place to discuss their accuracy) generates a descriptive utterance. This process is rendered highly complex by the existence of choice and imagination and is totally entangled in what Quine and Ullian have called “the web of belief”: confronted with the real, the speaker may choose not to speak at all, or to speak of something else, or she may be mistaken (at any number of levels), or he may generate a description in a mode to which “truth” or “falsity” are simply not applicable (it may be in G. Spencer-Brown’s “imaginary” mode). But when the speaker does generate an utterance of the sort we wish to consider, the overall process structure is still binary, and directed from reality to the sentence.

When I look out the window and say “It is raining outside,” what I perceive outside the window is controlling my utterance in a way the internal apprehension of which is my apprehension of the statement’s “truth” or “falsity.” My utterance does not affect — save possibly in the realms of Heisenberg — whatever (rain or shine) is outside the window.

People have suggested that the problem of paradox sentences is that they are self-descriptive. Yes, but the emphasis should be on descriptive, not self.

“This sentence contains six words” is just as self-descriptive as “This sentence is false.” But the first sentence is not paradoxical; it is simply wrong. (It contains five words.) The second sentence is paradoxical because part of the description (specifically “This sentence…”) covers two things (both the sentence “This sentence is false” and the sentence that it suggests as an equivalent translation, “This sentence is true”) and does not at all refer to the relation between them. The only predicate that is visible in “This sentence is…” suggests they relate in a way they do not: “This sentence ‘This sentence is true’ is the sentence ‘This sentence is false.’” And, obviously, it isn’t. But the same situation exists in Grelling’s paradox, the paradox of the Spanish barber, as well as the set-of-all-normal-sets paradox — indeed, in all antinomies.

The real generates an utterance via a process that allows us to recognize it as “true” or “false.”

If we introduce verbs into the language to stand for the specific generative processes, we fill a much stumbled-over gap. By recovering what is on both sides of the interface, and the direction the relation between them runs, we clarify much that was confused because unstated. Let us coin “generyte” and “misgeneryte,” and let us make clear that these processes are specifically mental and of the particular neurocybernetic nature that produce the utterances which, through a host of overdeter- mined and partially determined reasons, we have been recognizing as “true” and “false.” If we introduce these verbs into our paradox, it stands revealed simply as two incorrect statements.

On one side of the paper instead of “The sentence on the other side of this paper is true,” we write:

“What is on this side of the paper generytes the sentence on the other side.”

And on the other side instead of “The sentence on the other side of this paper is false,” we write:

“What is on this side of the paper misgenerytes the sentence on the other side.”

Looking at either sentence, then turning the paper over to see if it does what it claims, we can simply respond, for both cases: “No, it does not.” One (among many) properties that lets us recognize a generyted (or misgeneryted) sentence is that it is in the form of a description of whatever generyted (or misgeneryted) it; neither sentence is in that form.[38]

A last comment on all this:

The whole problem of relating mathematics to logic is basically the problem of how, logically, to get from conjunctions like “1 + 1 = 2 and 1 +? 1 ≠ 3,” which is the sort of thing we can describe in mathematics, to the self-evident (yet all but unprovable) logical implication: “1 + 1 = 2 therefore 1 + 1 ≠3,” which is the process that propels us through all mathematical proofs.

Now consider the following sentences, one a conjunction, one an implication:

“This sentence contains ten words and it misgenerytes itself.”

“If this sentence contains ten words, then it misgenerytes itself.”

About the first sentence we can certainly say: “That sentence contains nine words, therefore it misgenerytes itself.” If that self-evident there-fore can be considered an implication, and assumed equivalent to (“to have the same truth values as” in our outmoded parlance) the implication of the second sentence, then, working from the side of language, we have, self-evidently, bridged the logical gap into mathematics!

Before making such an assumption, however, count the words in the second sentence…

29. Vanessa Harpington (during a period when she [not I] thought her work was going badly), shortly after Alfred’s departure for Rumania:

“What use is love?

“It assures neither kindness, compassion, nor intelligence between the people who feel it for one another.

“The best you can say is that when good people love, they behave well… sometimes.

“When bad people love, they behave appallingly.

“I wonder what the brilliant Alfred will have to say about a paradox like that!’

“First of all, Vanessa,” I reminded her as we walked the cobbled streets, with the Arno, dull silver, down every block, through the Italian summer, “you simply cannot take such abstract problems so seriously. Remember, you and Alfred are both fictions: neither of you exists. The closest I’ve ever been to passing a summer in an English country house was a weekend at John and Margery Brunner’s in Somerset, and though I spent a few weeks in Venice once, I’ve never stayed in an Italian villa in my life! I’ve never even been in Florence — ”

“Oh, really,” Vanessa said. “You just don’t understand at all!” and, for the rest of the walk back, stayed a step or two ahead of me, arms folded and looking mostly somewhere else, though we did eventually talk — about other things.

30. Finished reading Gombrich’s Art and Illusion yesterday. The oversized paperback seems to be losing most of its pages. A thought: When I hold up my hand in front of my face, what I see is my hand, in focus, and, behind it, a slightly unfocussed, double image of the rest of the room, those images further away blurrier and slightly further apart. (Actually, parts of the double image keep suppressing other parts, and then the suppression pattern changes.) How odd that in the search for more and more striking illusions of reality, no artist has ever tried to paint this.

One reason, I suspect, is that art has never really been interested in painting What You See; from the most abstract to the most representational, art is interested in purveying the concept of What Is There. Representationalists have, from time to time, used a limited number of tricks of the eye to emphasize (by making their paintings look more like what you see) that the subject is there. Abstractionists use the reality of paint, brush stroke, and material for the same end.

31. A common argument between philosophers often runs like this:

A. I have a problem within this particular context.

B. I have a context within which I can solve your particular problem.

A. But I want a solution within my context!

B. But I can translate your context, in all particulars that interest me, into my context.

A. But you can’t translate my problem into your context so that it is still a problem and then produce a solution for it that will fit mine! Is there any way you can prove that, within my context, my problem is insoluble?

B. I’m not interested in proving your problem insoluble! I’m interested in solving it! And I have!

A. If you are interested in proving my old problem insoluble, then I am not interested in your new context! It doesn’t relate to my problem!

32. The greatest distress to me of Structural Anthropology is its sexism. The primary descriptive model, “Society operates by the exchange of women,” as a purely descriptive model, has the value of any other: There are certainly contexts in which it is useful. The same can be said of such other famous descriptive models as: “Jews are responsible for the financial evils of Europe,” or “Blacks are lazy and shiftless but have a good sense of rhythm.” It is the nature of descriptions that, as long as they model some fraction of the reality, however minute (even to the fact that persons A and B have agreed to use model p as a description of situation s [which is the case with individual words]) they can be called useful. But pure descriptive usefulness is not in the least contingent on how much the internal structure of the description reflects the way in which the fragment of reality it models relates to the rest of the case. Such descriptions that try to mirror these relations, to the extent that they succeed, can be called logical (functional) descriptions. But the very form of the absolute statement precludes its being a logical (functional) description. And when a description is of a small enough fragment of reality, and it reflects neither the internal workings of what it is describing nor the external workings, it can be said to be an emblem — or, if it is made up of a string of words, a slogan. And it is the slogan’s pretension to logical (functional) description that makes it so undesirable. When trying to establish a coherent system, such as a coherent anthropological discipline (as Lévi- Strauss is attemping), we want logical models that can also be used as part of a logical context. Such models as the ones above, as they pass into context, yield situation after situation where abuse is almost inevitable:

If a woman objects to being exchanged or refuses to be exchanged, for example, by the above model she can be described as opposing society’s workings. But if a man objects to or refuses to be exchanged, he can be described as objecting to being treated as a woman! And on and on and on ad (in the manner of context models) infinitum.

What makes this so sad is that the original descriptive use is completely subsumed by the double model: “Much of society works by the exchange of human beings,” and “In most cases, the human beings who do the exchanging are men and the human beings exchanged are women.” Without resorting to information theory (which tells us that the interplay between two limited descriptive models generates much more information about the context surrounding the elements of all of them than any one absolute statement of the same elements possibly can), I think most native English speakers hear the margin for self-criticism allowed. And I don’t see how the informative usefulness of this complex model is any less than that of the absolute statement.

But if I thought anthropological sexism were merely a manifestation of a single, clumsily thought-out descriptive model, I would not be as distressed as I am. It appears again and again; the profusion alone suggests that it is inherent in the context. Three more examples:

In Lévi-Strauss’s most exemplary short piece, La Geste d’ Asdiwal (his analysis of a myth that has a range of male and female characters), we find statements like: “… the women [in this myth] are more profitably seen as natural forces…” (More profitably than what? Than as human beings? And who is this profitable to? But let us continue.) The myth, in its several versions collated in the forty-odd-page essay, begins with a mother and daughter, whose husbands have died in the current famine, traveling from their respective villages, till they meet, midway along a river. They have only a rotten berry between them to eat. A magic bird appears, turns into a man, marries the daughter, provides food for the two women, and the daughter and her supernatural husband have a child, Asdiwal, the hero of the myth. Some time later in the myth, Asdiwal, as an adult, meets a magic bear on a mountain who turns into a woman and reveals she is the daughter of the sun. After Asdiwal passes a series of tests set by the bear-woman’s supernatural father, the bear-woman marries Asdiwal and they live for a while, happily, in the sky. Later they return to earth, to Asdiwal’s own village, where Asdiwal commits adultery with a woman of his people. The bear-woman leaves him over this and returns to her father. Asdiwal marries another woman of his village, and the myth continues through a series of adventures involving several other female figures, some human, some not, their brothers (who tend to come in groups of five), the king of the seals, Asdiwal’s own son by a mortal woman, and finally ends when Asdiwal, in a magic situation on top of a mountain, calls down to his second wife to sacrifice some animal fat, and she, misunderstanding his instructions, eats it; as a result, Asdiwal is turned to stone. I do not claim, in so short a synopsis, to have covered all the salient points of the myth in all its variations; for what it’s worth, neither does Lévi-Strauss. There is a whole branch of the myth devoted to Asdiwal’s son’s adventures, which has many parallels with his father’s story. Still, I cannot see what, in the myth, or in the Timshian culture which produced it, suggests the interpretation “… all the women…” in the tale are natural forces. The bird-man, the bear-woman, her father the sun, as well as various seal-men and mouse-women, may well represent natural forces. But to restrict this unilaterally to the women seems to be nothing but a projection of part of our own society’s rather warped sexist context. I have no idea if the society of the Timshian Indians who produced this myth is as sexist as modern Western society, less sexist, or more so. I might have made an educated guess from the myth itself. But even Malinowski’s original reports, taken several times over several years, here and there resort to synopsis, at noticeably more places where women are the agents of the action than where men are. And I can certainly get no idea from the final critical model Lévi-Strauss constructs: a binary grid of repeated, symmetrical patterns, high/low, upstream/dow- stream, mountain/water, etc. By dissolving any possibility of male/female symmetiicality with the asymmetrical men = human/women = forces, he makes it impossible to judge (nor does he try to judge in his final model) any such symmetricalities that do exist in the myth — i.e., I think everyone, from the parts recounted, can see a symmetricality between Asdiwal’s mother’s marriage with the bird-man who brings plenty and Asdiwal’s with the bear-woman who brings good times in the sky. Just how important this symmetricality is in terms of Timshian society, I have no way of knowing. My point is, neither does Lévi-Strauss — if he is going to impose the artificial asymmetricalities of our culture on others. Lévi-Strauss’s avowed point in the essay is merely to show that there is some order in the myth; and this he succeeds in. But has anyone ever seriously maintained that any society has produced myths with no order at all? And it is implicit in his approach to show as much order as possible in the myth and then show how it reflects or is reflected by, and lent meaning and value by (and lends meaning and value to), the social context it exists in. There are certainly plenty of asymmetrical elements in both situations (as there are in all of the elements that he pairs as symmetrical), i.e., one marriage produces a child, the other doesn’t; one involves inlaws, the other doesn’t. But Lévi-Strauss’s sexist context puts the whole topic beyond discussion.

Another example: During Lévi-Strauss’s conversations with Char- bonnier, Charbonnier asks Lévi-Strauss if sometimes an anthropologist does not identify so much that he biases his observations in ways not even he is aware of. Lévi-Strauss counters with an anecdote of a United States anthropologist who recounted to Lévi-Strauss that he felt much more at home working with one Amerind tribe than another. In one tribe, this man reported, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband cuts off her nose. In the other, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband goes to sit in the central square, bemoans his fate loudly to all who pass by, calls down imprecations from the gods to destroy the world that has brought things to this dreadful impasse, then curses the gods themselves for having allowed the world to become such a terrible place. He then gets up and returns to his wife, presumably much relieved, and life continues on. The second tribe, the American said, filled him with a sense of revulsion: Trying to “destroy the world, or the whole universe, for a personal injury” struck him as, somehow, “immoral.” He preferred working with the former tribe because their responses somehow seemed much “more human.” Now I have no idea whether either tribe was particularly sexist or not. Presumably if the women of the first tribe cut off the noses of their unfaithful husbands, whereas we might call them violent, we could not call them sexist. I do know enough of the social context of America to be sure that if this were the case, our United States anthropologist would have felt nowhere as “at home” with them as he did. And in terms of any of the tribes involved, including my own U.S. of A., I don’t think I would trust this man to give an objective report on sexuality, sexual politics, morality, or humanity, as conceived subjectively, in terms of their own culture, by any of the three. In the context of the conversation, however, Lévi-Strauss uses the anecdote to point out, as politely as possible, that Charbonnier’s question is mildly impertinent and that somehow this man is more equipped to be objective about the tribe he identifies with most than anyone else.

Somewhere, in the sciences, especially the human ones, we have to commit ourselves to objectivity. And, especially in the human ones, objectivity cannot be the same as disinterest. It must be a whole galaxy of attractions and repulsions, approvals and disapprovals, curiosities and disinterests, deployed in a context of self-critical checks and balances which, itself, must constantly be criticized as an abstract form capable of holding all these elements, and as specific elemental configurations. (Indeed, “objectivity” may well be the wrong word for it.) One of my commitments is that self-critical models are desirable things. I would even submit that cultures, be they Amerind or European or African or Indian or Chinese, are civilized to the extent that they possess them. Now “civilization” is only a small part of “culture.” Culture, in all its variety, is a desirable thing because, among other things, it provides a variety of material from which self-critical models can be made. Lévi-Strauss himself has pointed out that one purpose of anthropology is to provide a model with which to criticize our own culture. But an anthropological model that only provides a way of seeing how other cultures are structurally similar to ours but literally erases all evidence pertaining to their differences, doesn’t, in the long run, strike me as anthropologically very useful.

If other cultures are to teach us anything, and we are not merely to use them as Existential Others that, willy nilly, only prove our own prejudices either about them or ourselves, interpretative models that erase data about their real differences from us must be shunned.

My third example:

Some months ago, Edmund Leach, one of the major commentators on Lévi-Strauss, who has criticized many of Lévi-Strauss’s findings and has also praised many of his methods, spent a lecture urging the rein-stitution of segregation between the sexes in Western universities. He proposed doing it in a humane way: “Women might be restricted to the study of medicine and architecture. Men would not be allowed to study these.” Man’s providence, apparently, is to be everything else. He claimed to be aware that such segregation in the past had had its exploitative side. But he felt we should seriously look at primitive cultures with strict separation of the sexes in work and play for models of a reasonable solution to contemporary stresses.

My response to something like this is violent, unreasonable, and I stick by it: Then, for sanity’s sake, restrict the study of anthropology to women too. It just might prevent such loathesome drivel!

Reasonably, all I can say is that modern anthropology takes place in such a pervading context of sexism that even minds as demonstrably brilliant as Lévi-Strauss’s and Edmund Leach’s have not escaped it. And that is a tragic indictment.

33. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read a whole novel by Philip K. Dick. And I have only been able to read three short stories by Brian Aldiss (and one I didn’t read; I listened to) end to end. (I did read most of Report on Probability A.) On several separate occasions, I have bought some dozen books by each of them, piled them on my desk, and sat down with the prime intent of familiarizing myself with a substantial portion of their oeuvres.

It would be silly to offer this as the vaguest criticism of either Dick or Aldiss. It’s merely an indication of idiosyncracies in my own interpretative context as far as reading goes.

At any rate, the prospect of Dick’s and Aldiss’s work is pleasant to contemplate. It is something I will simply have to grow into, as I grew into Stendahl and Auden, John Buscema and Joe Kubert, Robert Bresson and Stan Brackhage.

I’m making this note at a solitary lunch in a Camden Town Green Restaurant. From the cassette recorder on the counter, Marinella, echoed by the chorus, asks plaintively again and again: “Pou paome? Pou paome?” Interesting that the question of our times emerges in so many languages, in so many media.

34. In the Glotolog foothills resides a highly refined culture much given to philosophical speculation.

Some facts about its language:

is the written sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “a light source.”

is the sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “rain.”

is the sign for a word that translates, very roughly, as “I see.” , , are roughly [and respectively], “you see,” “he sees,” and “she sees.”) But I must repeat “roughly” so frequently because there are no real verbs in the Glotolog language in the English sense.

The relationship that various forms of have to other Glotolog terms is modificational. In traditional Glotolog grammars (which are all written, traditionally, in English — in much the same way that traditional Latin grammars were written in Greek) they are called adjectives. “ ” is a common (and grammatically correct) Glotolog sentence — given the weather, it is one of the most common Glotolog sentences, especially in the north. It would be used in just about any situation where an English speaker would say, “It’s raining,” although there are some marked differences. “ ” would also be used when you mean, literally, “I see the rain.” This is perhaps the place to make the point (made so clearly in chapter three of most standard Glotolog grammars), always takes , and usually the is placed before it. The logic here is very simple: You can’t see anything without a light source, and in Glotolog this situation is mirrored in the words; without a is simply considered grammatically incorrect. (, however, does not take , but that is another subject.) Obvious here, and borne out by dictionaries, Glotolog grammar assigns two distinct meanings to (but not, however, to , or ): both “I see” and “There is…” (i.e., “It might be seen by me…”). Although this double meaning is the source of many traditional children’s jokes (heard often during the winter when the clouds blot the sun), in practice it presents little confusion. If I were to come into a Glotolog monastery, with the oil lamps in the windowless foreroom gleaming on “… my traditional okapi jerkin where the raindrops still stand high” (my translation from a traditional Glotolog poem; alas, it doesn’t really work in English) and say, stamping my Italian imported boots (the Glotologs are mad for foreign imports and often put them to bizarre uses; I have seen red plastic garbage pails used as hanging flower planters in even the strictest religious retreats — though the Glotolog’s own painted ceramic ones seem, to my foreign tastes, so much prettier) “ ,” it would be obvious to all (even to those frequent, aging, Glotologian religious mystics who have forgotten all their formal grammar — if, indeed, they ever studied it; formal language training is an old discipline among the Glotolog, but it is a widespread one only in recent years, well after the formal education of these venerable ancients was long since past) that I am speaking in what is called, by the grammars, the assumptive voice. The logic here is that the words, when used in the assumptive voice, are to be taken in the sense: “It is assumed that if [i.e., that if there were a light source and if I were there, seeing by it], then it would reflect off and I would see it… even though I am now inside the monastery and, since my entrance, the world may have fallen into total and unexpected night. In other worlds, the use of as “there is…” is not quite the same as in English. You use for “I see…” only when what there is is within sight. Otherwise, though you actually say the same word, i.e., , you are using the assumptive voice. In old Glotolog texts, the assumptive voice was actually indicated by what is called, in that final appendix to most standard Glotolog grammars on outmoded traditions, a metaphoric dot, which was placed over the and the . When speaking in the assumptive voice, and were said to be in the metaphoric mood. No dot, however, in a sentence like “ ” would be placed over . The logic here is that, in the assumptive voice, one of the things assumed is that the rain, at any rate, is real.

It is interesting: Many native Glotolog speakers, when given transcripts of ancient manuscripts on which the dots have been left out (due to the customs of modern Glotolog printing), can still often place the date of composition from the manner in which sentences like “ ” are used, whether in the indicative (“There are…”), the literal (“I see…”), or the assumptive (“Somewhere out of sight it is…”) voice. Apparently once the metaphoric dot fell out as archaic usage, the indicative and the assumptive were used much more informally.

Because of the tendency to use English analytic terms in Glotolog, many Glotolog terms are practically identical to their English equivalents (though, as we have seen, the grammar and the logical form of the language are quite different from those of English), so that a native speaker of one has little difficulty getting the sense of many Glotolog pronouncements, especially those having to do with logic and sensation.

Here is a list of words that are the same in both languages (that is, they are employed in the same situations):

if

can be called

at night

true

I feel

false

this/that

though

on my body

real

Also, logical questions are posed in Glotolog by putting the word “is” before, and a question mark after, the clause to be made interrogative. The fact that the semantics and logical form of the language are different from ours only presents problems in particular cases.

(To summarize those differences: Glotolog has no true predicates [“I feel,” as well as “can be called true,” for example, are the same part of speech as “”]; in fact, Glotolog has no true subjects either. It has only objects, the observer of which is expressed as a description of the object, as is the medium by which the object is perceived; sometimes these descriptions are taken as real; at other times they are taken as virtual. And it should be fairly evident even from this inadequate description of the language — even without exposure to their complex religion, science, poetry, and politics — that this template still gives them a method for modeling the world as powerful as our own equally interesting [and equally arbitrary] subject/predicate template.)

One of the most famous of such problems is the question put by one of the greatest Glotolog philosophers:

“If, at night, can be called true, though I feel on my body, is this real?”

The sense of this, along with the answer, seems self-evident to any English speaker; at the same time, to most of us, it is a mystery why this should be a great philosophical question. The answer lies in the logical form of the language as it has been outlined; but for those of you who do not wish to untangle it further, some of its philosophical significance for the Glotologs can be suggested by mentioning that it has caused among those perspicacious people practically as much philosophical speculation as the equally famous question by the equally famous Bishop Berkeley, about the sound of the unattended tree falling in the deserted forest, and for many of the same reasons — though the good Bishop’s query, perfectly comprehensible as to sense by the native Glotolog speaker thanks to the shared terms, seems patently trivial and obvious to them!

A final note to this problem: In recent years, three very controversial solutions have been offered to this classical problem in Glotolog philosophy, all from one young philosophy student resident in one of the southern monasteries (it rains much less in the south, which has caused some of the northern sages to suggest this upstart cannot truly comprehend the nature of this essentially northern metaphysical dilemma), all three of which involve the reintroduction of the metaphoric dot, placed not in its traditional position over the or the , or even over the , but rather over the words “real,” “true,” or the question mark — depending on the solution considered.

More conservative philosophers have simply gone “Humph!” (another utterance common in both Glotolog and English) at these suggestions, claiming that it is simply un-Glotologian to use the metaphoric dot over imported words. The dot is, and it says so in the grammars, reserved for native Glotolog terms. As one of the wittier, older scholars has put it (I translate freely): “In Glotolog, English terms have never had to bear up under this mark; they may, simply, collapse beneath its considerable weight.” The more radical youth of the country, however, have been discussing, with considerable interest, this brilliant young woman’s proposals.

35. Science fiction interests me as it models, by contextual extension, the ontology suggested among these notes. As it gets away from that ontology, I often find it appalling in the callousness and grossness of what it has to say of the world. (Like Wittgenstein, when I write these notes on science fiction I am “making propaganda for one kind of thinking over another.”) Does that differ any from saying that I like science fiction that suggests to me the world is the way I already think it is? Alas, not much — which is probably why even some of the most appalling, callous, and gross science fiction is, occasionally, as interesting as it is.

One difference between a philosopher and a fiction writer is that a fiction writer may purposely use a verbal ambiguity to make two (or more) statements using the same words; she may even intend all these statements to be taken as metaphoric models of each other. But she is still unlikely, except by accident, to call them the same statement. A philosopher, on the other hand, may accidentally use a verbal ambiguity, but once he uses it, he is committed to maintaining that all its meanings are one. And, usually, it takes a creative artist to bring home to us, when the philosophy has exhausted us, that everything in the universe is somewhat like everything else, no matter how different any two appear; likewise, everything is somewhat different from everything else, no matter how similar any two appear. And these two glorious analytical redundancies form the ordinate and abscissa of the whole determinately indeterminant schema.

36. Omitted pages from an sf novel:

“You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening — about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth- century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an sf reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”

“Sf?” Bron leaned against the bar.

“‘Scientification?’ ‘Sci-fi?’ ‘Speculative fiction?’ ‘Science fiction?’ ‘Sf?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”

“Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about —?”

“That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”

“It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”

Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic…”

Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.

“What I mean — ” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder — ”is that my explanation would have been nonsense two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The épistèmé has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in — ”

“What’s an épistèmé?” Bron asked.

“To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverage.”

“You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie shows and ice-operas — always in the intellectual forefront. Never in arrears.”

“An épistèmé is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole — ”

“Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Épistèmé, costarring with Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.

“Ah,” Sam said (was Sam drunk too…?), “but the épistèmé was always the secondary hero of the sf novel — in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.

37. Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

38. Text and textus in science fiction? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. Thus all the uses of the words “web,” “weave,” “net,” “matrix,” and more, by this circular “etymology” become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the sixties, which produced the present “paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science- fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars — sf, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientification — goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the twenties.

Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy[39] of associating an abstract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: And the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image:

Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one of the earth’s great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far building edge, who watches the chrome-ended, rubber-coated, four-inch “suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black- helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.

Later, the child brings this name to a group of children — who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists — indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.

The group persists — persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But why is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason — so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”

Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path-of-least-resistance, hooked up in an easily sayable/thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before this text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy — had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer is a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional description — satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult épistèmé,[40] which both generates the functional discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querent and explicator, which is where the textus lies embedded) becomes a part.

Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:

Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo) — that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it — in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture — is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

In other cases, such as these sentences from Bester’s The Stars My Destination, “The cold was the taste of lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin… Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molton metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident is explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PryE explosion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”

In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying rhetorical emblems of scientific discourse — is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.

This is the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsback to name his new pulp genre. He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science something about the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the sf genre.

The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer’s primary function: to put out fires.

As the “function” of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms — ”function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it cannot be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infinitive-with-noun — no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic enterprise, the mundane-fictional, the cinematic, the musical, or the critical. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional description:

The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of sf notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences — or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction are primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional sf frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the futureviews-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms another. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations — the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to sf not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a textus within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmatically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through a hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a two-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is non-caucasian. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on repressed homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war — short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: They do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has dissolved. The book as text — as object in the hand and under the eye — became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and rhetoric collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only sf can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the sf textus that is, itself, embedded in the whole language — and language-like — textus of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.

I feel the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmatic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparent “simplemindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conversational” textus with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, meet for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure to the best works, fall away by the same process in which the best works charge the textus — the web of possibilities — with contour.

The web of possibilities is not simple — for abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their clichés, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: The map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given sf text; as the reading of a given sf text recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.

In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the textus in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those onomastic metonyms. The textus does not define; it is, however, slightly, recontoured with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that textus which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore- or rear- steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.

It may even find her an engineer, writing a text on why, from now on, Red Squealers had best be painted blue, or a bell replace that annoying siren — the awe and delight, caught pure in the web, charging each of her utterances (from words about, to blueprints of, to the new, blue, bonging object itself) with conviction, authenticity, and right.

39. Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts), with the possible exception of science fiction.

40. Omitted pages from an sf novel:

Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane mine, and Lux — whose major claim was that it bore the same name as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’ “captured moons”—the under- six-hundred-kilometer-diameter hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Nereid, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mars’s — though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, and seas of methane and ammonia sludge. Its bizarre lifeforms (the only other life in the Solar System) combined the most unsettling aspects of a very large virus, a very small lichen, and a slime mold. Some varieties, in their most organized modes, would form structures like blue coral bushes with, for upwards of an hour at a time, the intelligence of an advanced octopus. An entire subgenre of ice-operas had grown up about the Titan landscape. Bron despised them. (And their fans.) For one thing, the Main Character of these affairs was always a man. Similarly, the One Trapped in the Blue, Coral-like Tentacles was always a woman (Lust Interest of the Main Character). This meant that the traditional ice-opera Masturbation Scene (in which the Main Character Masturbates while Thinking of the Lust Interest) was always, for Bron, a Bit of a Drag. And who wanted to watch another shindo expert pull up another ice-spar and beat her way out of another blue-coral bush, anyway? (There were other, experimental ice-operas around today in which the Main Character, identified by a small “MC” on the shoulder, was only on for five minutes out of the whole five-hour extravaganza, Masturbation Scene and all — an influence from the indigenously Martian Annie-show — while the rest was devoted to an incredible interlocking matrix of Minor Characters’ adventures.) And the women who went to them tended to be strange — though a lot of very intelligent people, including Lawrence, swore Titan-opera was the only really select artform left to the culture. Real ice-opera — better-made, truer-to-life and with more to say about it via a whole vocabulary of real and surreal conventions, including the three formal tropes of classical abstraction, which the classical ice-opera began with, ended with, and had to display once gratuitously in the middle — left Lawrence and his ilk (the ones who didn’t go into ego-booster booths) yawning in the lobby.

41. The structure of history tends to be determined by who said what. The texture of life is determined by who is listening.

42. Though few science-fiction writers enjoy admitting it, much science fiction, especially of the nuts-and-bolts variety, reflects the major failure of the scientific context in which most technology presently occurs: the failure, in a world where specialization is a highly productive and valued commodity, to integrate its specialized products in any ecologically reasonable way — painfully understandable in a world that is terrified of any social synthesis, between black and white, male and female, rich and poor, verbal and nonverbal, educated and uneducated, underprivileged and privileged, subject and object. Such syntheses, if they occur, will virtually destroy the categories and leave all the elements that now fill them radically revalued in ways it is impossible to more than imagine until such destruction is well underway. Many of the privileged as well as the underprivileged fear the blanket destruction of the products of technology, were such a radical value shift to happen. Even so, both privileged and nonprivileged thinkers are questioning our culture’s context, scientific and otherwise, to an extent that makes trivial, by comparison, the blanket dismissal of all things with dials that glitter (or with latinate names in small print at the bottom of the labels) that the urban advocates of back-to-the-soil humanism sometimes claim to indulge. Within the city, because of the overdetermined context, even to attempt such a dismissal is simply to doom oneself to getting one’s technology in grubbier packages, containing less-efficient brands of it, and with the labels ripped off so that you can be sure what’s inside. Those who actually go back to the soil are another case: The people on the rural communes I have visited — in Washington with Pat Muir, and those in California around Muir Woods (coincidentally named after Pat’s grandfather) — were concerned with exploring a folk technology, a very different process from “dismissal.” And the radio-phonograph (solid-state circuitry) and the paperback book (computerized typesetting), just for examples, were integral parts of the exploration.

That science fiction is the most popular literature in such places doesn’t surprise.

What other literature could make sense of, or put in perspective, a landscape where there is a hand-loom, a tape-recorder, a fresh butter churn, ampicillin forty minutes away on a Honda 750, and both men and women pushing a mule-drawn plow, cooking, wearing clothes when clothes answer either a functional necessity (boots, work-gloves…) or an aesthetic appetite (hand-dyed smocks, bearded vests…) and going naked when neither necessity nor appetite is present; or where thousands of such people will gather, in a field three hundred miles from where they live, to hear music from musicians who have come a thousand miles to play it for them?

What the urban humanist refuses to realize (and what the rural humanist often has no way of realizing) is that our culture’s scientific context, which has given us the plow, the tape-recorder, insecticides, the butter-churn, and the bomb, is currently under an internal and informed onslaught as radical as our social context is suffering before the evidence of Women’s Liberation, Gay Activism, Radical Psychiatry, or Black Power.

Much science fiction inadvertently reflects the context’s failure.

The best science fiction explores the attack.

43. The philosophically cherished predicates of all the sensory verbs in the Indo-European languages are, today, empirically empty verbal conventions — like the “it” in “it is raining.” The very form “I see the table” suggests that, in the situation “I” would commonly model with those words, “I” am doing something to the table, by “seeing” it, in some sense similar to what “I” would be doing to it in the situation “I” would commonly model by the words “I set the table.” Empirically, however, we know that (other than at the most minute, Heisenbergian level), in the situation we use “I see the table” to model, the table is — demonstrably! — doing far more to “I” than “I” am doing to it. (Moreover, though words like “I” and “see” were used to arrive at the demonstration, the demonstration itself could be performed effectively for a deaf-mute who had learned only the nonverbal indicators, such as pointing, miming of motion and direction, picture recognition, etc. The reading of various sense data as the persistence of matter and coherence and direction of motion, which is basically what is needed to apprehend such a demonstration, seems to be [by recent experiments on babies only a few hours old] not only preverbal but programmed in the human brain at birth, i.e., not learned.) A language is conceivable that would reflect this, where the usual model of this situation would be a group of verbal particles that literally translated: “Light reflects from table then excites my eyes.” Equally conceivable, in this language, the words “I see the table” might be considered, if translated from ours literally, first, as ungrammatical, and, second, as self-contradictory as “the rock falls up” (or “the table sees me”) appears in ours. By extension, all predicates in the form “The subject senses…” (rather than “The object excites…”) are as empty of internal coherence against an empirical context as “The color of the number seven is D-flat.” (Among poets, an intuitive realization of the hopeless inadequacy of linguistic expressions in the form “I sense…” accounts for much of the “difficulty” in the poetry of the last twenty-five years — a very different sort of difficulty from the labored erudition of the poetry of the thirty years previous.) As models for a situation, neither the “I see…” model nor the “light reflects…” model is more logical; but that is only because logic lies elsewhere. One model is simply, empirically, more reasonable. Empirical evidence has shown that the implied arrows “inside” these words simply do not reflect what is the case. A good bit of philosophical wrangling simply tries to maintain that because these arrows were once considered to be there, they must still model something.

There was a time when people thought electricity flowed from the positive to the negative pole of a battery. The best one can say is that there were many situations in which the current’s direction didn’t matter. And many others in which it did. Trying to maintain the meaningful direction of sense predicates is like maintaining that in those situations in which it doesn’t matter which way the current flows, somehow it is actually flowing backwards.

44. Galaxy of events over the past few months: the telegram announcing Marilyn’s collection of poems Presentation Piece had won the Lamont Poetry Selection for the year; the terribly complimentary statement by Richard Howard, which will go on the book’s back cover; a glowing review by the Kirkus Service that is so muddle-headed, one would have almost preferred no review at all!

45. Various deaf-mute friends I have had over the years, and the contingent necessity of learning sign language, have given me as much insight into spoken and written language as oral storytelling once gave me into written stories: Hand-signs, spoken words, and written words produce incredibly different contextual responses, though they model the same object or process. The deaf-and-dumb sign language progresses, among ordinary deaf mute signers, at between three and five hundred words a minute (cf. ordinary reading speeds), and the learner who comes from the world of hearing and speaking is frequently driven quite mad by the absence of concept words and connectives. (Logicians take note: Both “and” and “or” are practically missing from demotic sign language; though the sign for “and” exists, “or” must be spelled out by alphabetic signs, which usually indicates an infrequently used word.)

Lanky and affable Horace would occasionally leave me notes under my room door (on the ninth floor of the Albert) written with “English” words, all using their more or less proper dictionary meaning, but related to one another in ways that would leave your average English speaker bewildered.

There is a sign for “freeze”—a small, backwards clutch, with the palms of the hands down.

There is a sign for “you”—pointing to the “listener” with the forefinger.

As in English, “freeze” has many metaphorical extensions: “to stop moving,”“to treat someone in a cold manner,” etc. The two signs, mimed consecutively — ”freeze you”—can mean:

“You have a cold personality.”

“You are frozen.”

“Are you frozen?”

“Stop moving.”

“You just stopped moving, didn’t you!” (in the sense of“ You jumped!”)

This last is a particularly interesting case: the signed phrase could also be translated “You flinched!” The speaker who says, “You jumped!” models the beginning of the motion; the deaf-mute who signs, “Freeze you” is modeling the end of the same motion. In both cases, the partial model (or synecdoche) stands for the whole action of “flinching.”

Another meaning of “Freeze you” is: “Please put some water in the ice tray and put it in the ice box so we can have some ice cubes.”

Distinction among meanings, in actual signing, is a matter of — what shall I call it? — muscular and gestural inflection in the arms, face, and the rest of the body. And, of course, the situation.

I remember getting the note: “Come down freeze you whiskey have want, chess.” I suspect this would be baffling without some knowledge of the sign language context, though the words “mean” pretty much the same as they do in English. One informal translation of this note into written English would be: “Come downstairs and play chess with me. You bring the ice cubes. I have some whiskey — if you want?” And an equally good translation: “Do you want to come down, bring some ice cubes, have a drink, and play chess?” And another: “Why not come on down? You make ice cubes up there; bring them. I have some whiskey. It’s all for a chess game.”

But it would be a great mistake to try and “transform” the original into any of my English translations, either by some Chomskyan method, or by filling in suspected ellipses, understood subjects, and the like:

“… have want…” is a single verb phrase, for example, whose translation I could spend pages on. It has at least three modulating duals (in our language context, at any rate) so that its translation tends to be some arrangement from the matrix: moving both backwards and forwards, and up or down. It is regularly interrogative. (So a written question mark, in the deaf-and-dumb language, when you use “have want” is superfluous. The phrase “have need” works by a similar matrix and is regularly imperative. The equally frequent “want need,” however, works through an entirely different matrix.) It may have several “direct objects,” each requiring a different path through the matrix to make “sense” in our language. A literal translation of Horace’s sentence, up to the comma, might read: “If you want to come down, I will have you down; if you have frozen (made) some (ice cubes), I will want some (that you have frozen); if you want whiskey, I have some whiskey…” And “chess” at the sentence’s end is something like a noun absolute in Latin, the topic of the whole sentence, casting back its resonances on all that has gone before.

46. In the same language in which we still say “I see…,” only fifty years before Russell’s theory of “singular description,” in America one person could meaningfully refer to another as “my slave…“at which point the other person was constrained by the language to refer to the first as “my master…”—as if the bond of possession were somehow mutual and reciprocal.

Rebellion begins when the slave realizes that in no sense whatsoever is the master “hers/his.” The slave cannot sell the master, give the master away, or keep the master should the master wish to go. This realization is the knowledge that the situation, which includes the language, exploits the slave and furthers the exploitation.

47. Possible insight into the “Cocktail Party Effect”: Last evening, with David Warren at Professor Fodor’s lecture on the mental representation of sentences, at the London School of Economics, I had a chance to observe the Cocktail Party Effect at work. David and I were sitting on the ground floor of the Old Theatre, near the door. Outside, a mass of students was gathering, presumably for the next event in the auditorium. The general rumble of their voices finally grew loud enough to make a dozen people around us look back towards the exit with consternation.

Professor Fodor’s delivery, while audible, was certainly not loud; and he wandered over the stage, to the blackboard, to the apron, to the podium, so that only part of the time was he near enough to the microphone for his voice to carry.

The sound outside was definitely interfering with our hearing his lecture, and we all had to strain…

The next time I was aware of the crowd noise outside, I realized that if I kept my aural concentration fixed on Fodor’s words, the crowd noise would begin to undergo a definite pulsing (I estimated the frequency to be between two pulses per second and three pulses in two seconds) while the professor’s voice stayed more or less clear through the peaks and troughs. If, however, I listened consciously to the crowd, the pulsing ceased and the Professor’s words became practically unintelligible, lost in the rush of sound.

Is this how the “Cocktail Party Effect,” or some aspect of it, works?

48. R. E. Geis in The Alien Critic defending himself against Joanna Russ’s and Vonda McIntyre’s accusations of sexism, cites a string of incorrect facts, half-facts, and facts implying a nonexistent context, beginning with the statement:

I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.

The form of the sentence itself implies that “making” a “sexist decision” or, for that matter, making an antisexist decision, is a case of putting energy into an otherwise neutral social contextual system.

The social context is not neutral. It is overwhelmingly sexist.

Studies have been done as far back as the fifties which show, in America, almost cross-culturally, male infants receive an average of slightly over 100 percent more physical contact with their parents during the first year of life than female infants! Tomes have been written on the effect of physical contact in this period on later physical strength and psychological autonomy. This alone renders the word “naturally,” in a statement like “men are naturally stronger than women,” a farce! Yet, despite how many thousands of years (probably no more than six and possibly a good deal less — another point to bear in mind) of this sort of Lamarckian pressure, when a large number of skeletons from modern cadavers, whose sexes were known and coded, were then given to various doctors, anthropologists, and archeologists to sort into male and female, the results were random! There is no way to identify the sex of a skeleton, from distinctions in size, pelvic width, shoulder width, skull size, leg length — these are all empirically nonsupported myths. Yet anthropology books are being published today with pictures captioned: “Armbone of a woman, c. eight thousand B.C.” or “Jawbone of a male, c. five thousand B.C.” Studies in the comparative heights of men and women have disclosed that, if you say you are doing a study in the comparative heights of men and women, and ask for volunteers, men average some two inches taller than women — whereas, if you say you are doing an intelligence test to compare university students with nonuniversity students, and, just incidentally, take the height of your volunteers, men average a mere three-eighths of an inch taller than women! Other, even more random samplings which have tried to obliterate all sexually associated bias, seem to indicate that the range of height of men tends to be larger — as a man, you have a greater chance of being either very tall or very short — but that the average height is the same. (Of course women are shorter than men: just stand on any street corner and look at the couples walking by. Next time you stand on any street corner, take pairs of couples and contrast the height of the woman from couple A with the man from couple B. I did this on a London street corner for two hours a few weeks back: taken as couples, it would appear that in 94 percent, men are taller than women. Taken by cross-couples, the figure goes down to 72 percent. The final twenty-two percent is more likely governed by the sad fact that, in Western society, tall women and short men often try to avoid being seen in public, especially with the opposite sex.) A male in our society receives his exaggerated social valuation with the application of the pronoun “he” before he can even smile over it. A female receives her concomitant devaluation with the pronoun “she” well before she can protest.

Again: The system is not neutral. For every situation, verbal or nonverbal, that even approaches the sexual, the easy way to describe it, the comfortable way to respond to it, the normal way to act in it, the way that will draw the least attention to yourself — if you are male — is the sexist way. The same goes for women, with the difference that you are not quite so comfortable. Sexism is not primarily an active hostility in men towards women. It is a set of unquestioned social habits. Men become hostile when these habits are questioned as people become hostile when anything they are comfortable doing is suddenly branded as pernicious. (“But I didn’t intend to hurt anyone; I was just doing what I always…”)

A good many women have decided, finally, that the pain that accrues to them from everyone else’s acceptance of the “acceptable” way is just not worth the reward of invisibility.

“I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.”

There are no sexist decisions to be made.

There are antisexist decisions to be made. And they require tremendous energy and self-scrutiny, as well as moral stamina in the face of the basic embarrassment campaign which is the tactic of those assured of their politically superior position. (“Don’t you think you’re being rather silly offering your pain as evidence that something I do so automatically and easily is wrong? Why, I bet it doesn’t hurt half as much as you say. Perhaps it only hurts because you’re struggling…?” This sort of political mystification, turning the logical arrows around inside verbal structures to render them empirically empty, and therefore useless [“It hurts because you don’t like it” rather than “You don’t like it because it hurts.”] is just another version of the “my slave/my master” game.)

There are no sexist decisions to be made: they were all made a long time ago!

49. The mistake we make as adolescent readers is to assume a story is exciting because of its strange happenings and exotic surfaces, when actually a story is exciting exactly to the extent that its structure is familiar. “Plot twists” and “gimmicks” aside (which, like “wisecracks,” only distract our conscious mind from the structure so that we can respond subconsciously to its familiarity with that ever sought-for “gut response”), excitement in reading invariably comes from the anticipation of (and the anticipation rewarded by) the inevitable/expected.

This inevitability — without which there simply is no reader gut- participation — is also what holds fiction to all the political cliches of sexism, racism, and classism that mar it as an art. To write fiction without such structural inevitabilities, however (as practically every artist has discovered), is to write fiction without an audience.

Does science fiction offer any way out of this dilemma?

The hope that it might probably accounts for a good deal of the rapprochement between science fiction and the avant garde that occurred during the middle and late sixties.

50. The equivocation of the genitive (children, ideas, art, and excrement) and the associative (spouses, lovers, friends, colleagues, co-patrials, and country) with the possessive (contracted objects) is the first, great, logi- cally-empty verbal structure that exists entirely for political exploitation.

51. Meaning is a routed-wave phenomenon.

I intend this in the sense one might intend the statement: “Painting is a colored-oil-paints spread-on-canvas phenomenon.” Just as there are many things besides oil paints on canvas that may fill, more or less well, the several uses we could reasonably ask of a painting — from tempera on masonite to colored sand spilled carefully on sun-baked ground, in one direction; or etchings, photographs, or computer reductions, in another; or patterns observed on a rock, a natural setting, or a found object, in still another — there may be other things that can fill, more or less well, the several tasks we might reasonably ask “meaning” to perform. But my statement still stands as a parametric model of what I think meaning to be. The extent to which any of my remarks contravene this model is the extent to which they should be taken as metaphoric.

52. Language in general, poetry in particular, and mathematics, are all tools to fix meaning (in their different ways) by establishing central parameters, not circumscribing perimeters. Accuracy in all of them is achieved by cross-description, not absolute statement.

Even 2 + 3 = 5 is better considered as a mathematical stanza than a single mathematical sentence. It models a set of several interlocked sentences; and the context interlocking them is what “contains” the meaning we might model by saying “2 + 3 = 5 is right, whereas 2 + 3 = 4 is wrong by lack of 1.”

53. A language-function can be described as consisting of (one) a generative field (capable of generating a set of signals), (two) the signals so generated, and (three) an interpretive field (a field capable of responding to those signals) into which the signals fall.

Examples of language-functions: mathematics, art, expressive gesture, myth.

One of the most important language-functions is, of course, speech.

In most multiple speaker/hearer situations, there are usually multiple language-functions occurring: A talking to B… B talking to A… C listening to what A and B say, etc. (In Art, on the other hand, there is usually one only: artist to audience. The language-function that goes from audience to artist is, of course, criticism.)

The language itself is the way, within a single speaker/hearer, an interpretive field is connected to a generative field.

54. The trouble with most cybernetic models of language (those models that start off with “sound waves hitting the ear”) is that they try to express language only in terms of an interpretive field. To the extent that they posit a generative field at all, they simply see it as an inverse of the interpretive field.

In ordinary human speech, the interface of the interpretive field with the world is the ear — an incredibly sensitive microphone that, in its flexibility and versatility, still has not been matched by technology. The interface of the generative field with the world is two wet sacks of air and several guiding strips of muscle, laid out in various ways along the air track, and a variable-shaped resonance box with a variable opening: the lungs/throat/mouth complex. This complex can produce a great many sounds, and in extremely rapid succession. But it can produce nothing like the range of sounds the ear can detect.

Language, whatever it is, in circuitry terms has to lie between these two interfaces, the ear and the mouth.

Most cybernetic models, to the extent that they approach the problem at all, see language as a circuit to get us from a sensitive microphone to an equally sensitive loudspeaker. A sensitive loudspeaker just isn’t in the picture. And I suspect if it were, language as we know it would not exist, or at least be very different.

Try and envision circuitry for the following language tasks:

We have a sensitive microphone at one end of a box. At the other, we have a mechanically operable squeeze-box/vocal-chord/palate/tongue/teeth/lip arrangement. We want to fill up the box with circuitry that will accomplish the following: Among a welter of sounds — bird songs, air in leaves, footsteps, traffic noise — one is a simple, oral, human utterance. The circuitry must be able to pick out the human utterance, store it, analyze it (in terms of breath duration, breath intensity, and the various stops that have been imposed on a stream of air by vocal chords, tongue, palate, teeth, lips) and then, after a given time, reproduce this utterance through its own squeeze-box mechanism.

This circuitry task is both much simpler and much more complicated than getting a sound out of a loudspeaker. Once we have such a circuit, however, well before we get to any “logic,” “syntax,” or “semantic” circuits, we are more than halfway to having a language circuit.

Consider:

We now want to modify this circuit so that it will perform the following task as well:

Presented with a human utterance, part of which is blurred — either by other sounds or because the utterer said it unclearly — our circuit must now be able to give back the utterance correctly, using phonic overdeterminism to make the correction: Letting X stand for the blurred phoneme, if the utterance is

The pillow lay at the foot of the Xed

or

She stood at the head of the Xairs

our circuitry should be able to reproduce the most likely phoneme in place of the blur, X.

I think most of us will agree, if we had the first circuit, getting to the second circuit would be basically a matter of adding a much greater storage capacity, connected up in a fairly simple (i.e., regular) manner with the circuit as it already existed.

Let us modify our circuit still more:

We present an utterance with a blurred phoneme that can resolve in two (or more) ways:

“Listen to the Xerds.” (Though I am not writing this out in phonetic notation, nevertheless, it is assumed that the phonic component of the written utterance is what is being dealt with.)

Now in this situation, our very sensitive microphone is still receiving other sounds as well. The circuitry should be such that, if it is receiving, at the same time as the utterance, or has received fairly recently, some sound such as cheeping or twittering (or the sounds of pencils and rattling paper) it will resolve the blurred statement into “listen to the birds” (or, respectively, “listen to the words”) — and if the accompanying sound is a dank, gentle plashing… Again, this is still just a matter of more storage space to allow wider recognition/association patterns.[41]

The next circuitry recomplication we want is to have our circuit such that, when presented with a human utterance, ambiguous or not, it can come back with a recognizable paraphrase. To do this, we might well have to have not only a sensitive microphone, but a sensitive camera and a sensitive micro-olfact and micro-tact as well, as well as ways of sorting, storing, and associating the material they collect. Basically, however, it is still, as far as the specific language circuitry is concerned, a matter of greater storage capacity, needed to allow greater associational range.

I think that most people would agree, at this point, that if we had a circuit that could do all these tasks, even within a fairly limited vocabulary, though we might not have a circuit that could be said to know the language, we would certainly have one that could be said to know a lot about it.

One reason to favor the above as a model of language is that, given the initial circuit, the more complicated versions could, conceivably, evolve by ordinary, natural-selection and mutation processes. Each new step is still basically just a matter of adding lots of very similar or identical components, connected up in very similar ways. Consider also: Complex as it is, that initial circuitry must exist, in some form or another, in every animal that recognizes and utters a mating call (or warning) to or from its own species, among the welter, confusion, and variety of wild forest sounds.

The usual cybernetic model for language interpretation:

where each box must be a different kind of circuit, the first four (and, arguably, all six) probably different for each language strikes me as a pretty hard thing to “grow” by ordinary evolutionary means, or to program on a tabula rasa neural net.

The circuitry I suggest would all be a matter of phonic recognition, phonic storage, and phonic association (short of the storage and associational employment of other sensory information). A great deal of recognition/storage/association would have to be done by the circuitry to achieve language. But nothing else would have to be done, other than what was covered in our original utterance-reproduction circuit.

Not only would the linguistic bugaboo “semantics” disappear (as experiments indicate that it may have already) but so would morphology; and syntax and phonic analysis would simply absorb one another, so to speak.

Would this really be so confusing?

I think not. It is only a rather limited view of grammar that initially causes it to appear so.

Think of grammar solely as the phonic redundancies that serve to transform a heard utterance from the interpretive field, through the range of associations in the hearer/speaker’s memory that includes “his language,” into the hearer/speaker’s generative field as an utterance.

In the qui, quae, quo of Latin, for instance, I’m sure the Roman brain (if not the Roman grammarian) considered the redundancy of the initial “qu” sound as grammatically significant (in my sense of “grammar”), as it considered significant, say, the phonic redundancy between the “ae” at the end of “quae” and the “ae” at the end of “pullae.” (We must get rid of the notion of grammar as something that applies only to the ends of the words!) In English, the initial sound of the, this, that, these, those, and there are all grammatically redundant in a similar way. (The “th” sound indicates, as it were, “indication”; the initial “qu” sound, in Latin, indicates “relation,” just as the terminal “ae” sound indicates, in that language, “more than one female.”[42]) What one can finally say of this “grammar” is: When a phonic redundancy does relate to the way that a sound is employed in conjunction with other sounds/meanings, then that phonic element of the grammar is regular. When a phonic redundancy does not so relate, that element is irregular. (The terminal “s” sound on “these” and “those” is redundant with the terminal “s” of loaves, horses, sleighs — it indicates plurality, and is therefore regular with those words. The terminal “s” on “this” is irregular with them. The terminal “s” at the end of “is,” “wants,” “has,” and “loves” all imply singularity. Should the terminal “s” on “this” be considered regular with these others? I suspect in many people’s version of English it is.) For all we know, in the ordinary English hearer/speaker’s brain, “cream,” “loam,” “foam,” and “spume” are all associated, by that final “m” sound, with the concept of “matter difficult to individuate”—in other words, the “m” is a grammatically regular structure of that particular word group. Such associations with this particular terminal “m” may explain why most people seldom use “ham” in the plural — though nothing empirically or traditionally grammatical prevents it. They may also explain why “cream,” when pluralized, in most people’s minds immediately assumes a different viscosity (i.e., referentially, becomes a different word; what the dictionary indicates by a “second meaning”). I suspect that, in a very real sense, poets are most in touch with the true “deep grammar” of the language. Etymology explains some of the sound-redundancy/meaning-associations that are historical. Others that are accidental, however, may be no less meaningful.

All speech begins as a response to other speech. (As a child you eventually speak through being spoken to.) Eventually this recomplicates into a response to speech-and-other-stimuli. Eventually, when both speech and other stimuli are stored in memory and reassociated there, this recomplication becomes so complex that it is far more useful to consider certain utterances autonomous — the first utterance in the morning concerning a dream in the night, for example. But even this can be seen as a response to speech-and-other-than-speech, in which the threads of cause, effect, and delay have simply become too intertwined and tangled to follow.

55. Quine inveighs against propositions, as part of logic, on the justifiable grounds that they cannot be individuated. But since propositions, if they are anything, are particular meanings of sentences, the impossibility of individuating them is only part of a larger problem: the impossibility of individuating meanings in general. What the logician who says (as Quine does at the beginning of at least two books) “To deny the Taj Majal is white is to affirm that it is not white” (in the sense of “nonwhite”) is really saying, is:

“Even if meanings cannot be individuated, let us, for the duration of the argument, treat them as if they can be. Let us assume that there is some volume of meaning-space that can be called white and be bounded. Therefore, every point in meaning-space, indeed, every volume in meaning-space, can be said to either lie inside this boundary, and be called ‘white,’ or outside this boundary, and be called ‘nonwhite,’ or, for the volumes that lie partially inside and partially outside, we can say that some aspect of them is white.”

The problem is that, similar to the color itself, the part of meaning-space that can be called “white” fades, on one side and another, into every other possible color. And somehow, packed into this same meaning-space, but at positions distinctly outside this boundary around white, or any other color for that matter, we must also pack “freedom,” “death,” “grief,” “the four-color-map problem,” “the current King of France,” “Pegasus,” “Hitler’s daughter,” “the entire Second World War and all its causes,” as well as “the author of Waverly”—all in the sense, naturally, of “nonwhite.”

Starting with just the colors: In what sort of space could you pack all possible colors so that each one was adjacent to every other one, which would allow the proper fading (and bounding[43]) to occur? It is not as hard as it looks. Besides the ordinary three coordinates for volume, if you had two more ordinates, both for color, I suspect it could be rather easily accomplished. You might even do it with only two spatial and two color axes. Four coordinates, at any rate, is certainly the minimum number you need. Conceivably, getting the entire Second World War and all its causes in might require a few more.

56. One of the great difficulties of formal grammars is that they are all grammars of written language, including the attempts at “transformational” grammars (Syntactic Structures: “… we will not consider, for our purposes, vocal inflections…”). For insight into how verbal signals will produce information once they fall into an interpretive field, it is a good idea to return to the mechanics of those signals’ generation.

Speech signals, or sentences, are formed from two simultaneous information (or signal) streams: Speech is an interface of these two streams.

The voiced breath-line is a perfectly coherent information stream, all by itself. It varies in pitch and volume and shrillness. It is perfectly possible (as I have done and watched done in some encounter groups) for two or more people to have an astonishingly satisfying conversation, consisting of recognizable questions, answers, assurances, hesitations, pooh-poohings, affirmations, scepticisms, and insistences — a whole range of emotional information, as well as the range Quine refers to as “propositional attitudes”—purely with a series of unstopped, voiced breaths. (Consider the information communicated by the sudden devoicing of all the phonemes in an utterance, i.e., whispering.)

The various stops and momentary devoicings imposed by the tongue, teeth, lips, and vocal chords on top of this breath-line is another coherent information string that, interfaced with the breath-line information, produces “speech.” But by and large this second string is the only part that is ever written down. This is the only part that any “grammar” we have had till now deals with. But it is arguable that this information-string, when taken without the breath-line, is as vastly impoverished as the breath-line eventually seems, after ten or fifteen minutes, when taken by itself.

The way written speech gets by is by positing a “standard breath-line,” the most common breath-line employed with a given set of vowels and stops. (The only breath-line indicators we have are the six ordinary marks of punctuation, plus quotation marks [which mean, literally, pay closer attention to the breath-line for the enclosed stretch of words], plus dashes, ellipses, and italic type. One thing that makes writing in general, and poetry in particular, an art is the implying of nonstandard breath-lines by the strong association of vocal sounds — pace Charles Olson.) But since the vast majority of writing uses only this standard breath-line (and all writing uses an artificial one), producing a grammar of a spoken language from written examples is rather like trying to produce a formal grammar of, say, Latin when the only available texts have had all the ablative endings, dative endings, accusative- plural endings, and second-person-singular verb endings in future, imperfect, and preterite whited out; and you have agreed, for your purpose, not to consider them anyway.

What is fascinating about language is not that it criticizes, as well as contributes to, the growth of the empirical world, but that it can criticize its relation to that world, treating itself, for the duration, empirically. The same self-reflective property is what writers use to make beautiful, resonant verbal objects, however referential or abstract. But by the same argument, it is the writers’ responsibility to utilize this reflective property to show, again and again, that easy language — whether it is the short, punchy banality or the rolling jargonistic period — lies.

The lie is not a property of easy words. It is a property of how the words are used, the context that generates, and the context that interprets.

57. I have the artist’s traditional distrust of separating facts too far from the landscape that generated them. (And I have the science-fiction writer’s delight over inserting new facts into unfamiliar landscapes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well…”)

Language, Myth, Science Fiction:

First contacts:

I did not have a happy childhood.

Nobody does.

I did, however, have a privileged one.

I discovered myths with a set of beautifully produced and illustrated books called My Book House, edited by Olive Burpré Miller and illustrated, for the most part, by Donald P. Crane. An older cousin of mine had owned them as a child. My aunt passed them on to me when her daughter went off to Vassar. The volumes bound in gray and mottled green dealt with history, starting with cavemen and working, lushly illustrated volume after lushly illustrated volume, through the Renaissance. Those bound in maroon and gold recounted, for children, great works of literature, fairy tales, and myths — Greek, Egyptian, Norse…

At five, I left kindergarten (the building, its bricks red as the Book House volumes, under a spray of city grime, is today a public school in the midst of a city housing project just above Columbia University) for a private, progressive, and extremely eccentric elementary school. I have one memory of my first day there, fragmented and incomplete:

Along one side of our room were tall, wide windows covered with wire grills. A window seat ran the length of the wall; the seat back went up and joined the wide windowsill — a squared grate, brown and painted, chipped here and there to the metal, through which you could see, checked with light, the dusty, iron radiators, and hear brass valves jiggle and hiss.

On that first morning, our teacher had to leave the shy dozen of us alone for some few minutes.

What occurs now, exactly, I’m not sure. But the memory clears when she comes rushing back, stops short and, fists clutching her blue smock (below which I can see the hem of her navy jumper), shrieks: “Stop it! Oh, my God! Stop it!”

One blond boy stood on the radiator grate, gripping the window grill, flattened against it, staring back at us, mouth wide and drooling, eyes closed and streaming.

We crowded the window seat, jeering and railing up at him: “Jump! Go ahead, jump!” I was holding the shoulder of the person in front of me, pressed forward by the person behind. “Jump!” I shouted, looked back at the teacher and laughed (you’ve seen how much fun five-year-olds have when they laugh), then shouted again: “Jump out! Jump out!” and could hear neither my own shouts nor my own laughter for the laughter and shouting of the other ten.

We were eight stories up.

The teacher yanked us, still jeering, one after another, away, lifted down the hysterical boy, and comforted him. His name was Robert. He was stocky, nervous, shrill. He had some slight motor difficulty. (I can still remember him, sitting at a green nursery table, holding his pencil in both hands to draw his letters, while the rest of us, who could, of course, hold our pencils in one, exchanged looks, glanced at him, glanced away, and giggled.) He was a stammerer, an appalling nail biter, very bright; and, by Christmas vacation, my best friend.

With occasional lapses, sometimes a few months long, Robert remained my best friend till we left for other schools after the eighth grade. Some of those lapses, however, I engineered quite blatantly — when I was tired of having the class odd-ball as constant companion. I would steal things from him, pencils, protractors, small toys — I remember pilfering a Donald Duck ring he had sent away for from a cereal box-top offer. With a small magnet (decaled to look like a tiny corn-flakes box), you could make the yellow plastic beak open and close, the blue plastic eye roll up and down. My parents caught me on that one, made me promise to return it, and tell him I’d stolen it. I did, quite convinced it would be the end of our friendship — apprehensive, but a bit relieved.

Robert took the ring back and stammered that it was all right if I had stolen it, because, after all (his expression was that of someone totally betrayed) I was his friend. That was when I realized he had no others.

During my attendance at Dalton, I lived one street from what, in the 1953 City Census, was declared the most populous tenement block in New York: It housed over eighteen thousand people, in buildings all under six stories. A block away, my sister and I had three floors and sixteen rooms, over my father’s Harlem funeral parlor, in which to lose ourselves from our parents and the maid. But the buildings on both sides of us were a cluster of tiny two- and three-room apartments, housing five, seven, sometimes over ten people each. The friends I played with in the afternoon in front of the iron gates of Mr. Lockely’s Hosiery and Housepaint Store to our left, or the sagging green vegetable boxes in front of the red-framed plate-glass window of Mr. Onley’s Groceries to our right, were the son of a widowed hospital orderly on welfare, the daughter and two sons of a frequently laid-off maintenance man who worked in the New York subway system, the two sons of a New York taxi driver, the niece of the woman who ran the funeral parlor at the corner of the same block.

And in the morning, my father — or, occasionally, one of his employees — would drive me, in my father’s very large, very black Cadillac, down to the ten-story, red and white brick building on Eighty-ninth Street off Park Avenue: I would line up with all the other children in the gray-tiled lobby, waiting to march around, next to the wall, and show my tongue to the school nurse, Miss Hedges, who, for the first years, in her white uniform with a gray sweater around her shoulders, would actually make an attempt to peer into each five-to-twelve-year-old mouth, but, as I grew older, simply stood, at last, in the corner by the gooseneck lamp as we filed by (perhaps one in five of us actually even bothered to look up) staring at a vague spot on the far wall, somewhere between the twenties- style, uplifting mural of Mothers Working in the Fields and the display cabinets where student sculpture was exhibited by our various art teachers. In class (ten students was considered the ideal number; should we somehow reach fourteen, Something Was Done to Relieve the Impossible Teaching Load), my friends were the son of a vice president of CBS Television, the daughter of a large New York publisher, the son of a small New York publisher, the grandson of the governor of the state, the son of the drama critic for Time magazine, the daughter of a psychiatrist and philanthropist, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist.

Black Harlem speech and white Park Avenue speech are very different things. I became aware of language as an intriguing and infinitely malleable modeling tool very early.

I always felt myself to be living in several worlds with rather tenuous connections between them, but I never remember it causing me much anxiety. (Of the, perhaps, ten blacks among the three-hundred-odd students in Dalton’s elementary school, five were my relatives.) Rather, it gave me a sense of modest (and sometimes not so modest) superiority.

A few years later, I was given still another world to play in. I spent summer at a new summer camp. I tell only one incident here from that pleasantest of summers in my life: One hot afternoon, I wandered into a neighboring tent where the older boys slept. On the foot of the nearest iron-frame bed lay a large, ragged-edged magazine, with a shiny cover gone matte with handling — I think its muddy, out-of-register colors showed a man and a woman on a hill, gazing in terrified astonishment at a round, metal thing swooping through the air. From the lettering on the cover, the lead story in this issue was something called — I picked it up and turned to the first page — The Man Who Sold the Moon. My first reaction was: “What an odd combination of words! What do they mean…?” While I was puzzling through the opening sentences, one of the bunk- seven twelve-year-olds came in and shooed me out. Back in my own tent, I returned to the book I was reading, Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein. And our twenty-three-year-old counsellor, Roy, was reading something called One, Two, Three… Infinity that I had said looked interesting and he had said I could read when he was finished.

Months later, back on Eighty-ninth Street, after consultation with Robert (and several practice tries from five, six, and then seven steps), I decided to leap down the entire flight between the sixth and seventh floor. At the head of the stairwell — the steps were a dark green that continued up the wall to shoulder level; there, light green took over and went on across the ceiling — sighting on the flaking, gold decalcomania on the far wall (“SIX,” half on dark green, half on light), I got ready, grinned at Robert below, who was leaning against the door and looking nervous, swung my arms back threw them forward, jumped — my foot slipped! I flailed out, suspended a moment, silent, in dead air, trajectory off!

The bottom newel post caught me in the belly, and I passed out — no more than a couple of seconds.

Robert had yanked open the door and was running for a teacher before I hit.

I should have ruptured myself. Apparently all I did, though, was knock all my air out and, temporarily and very slightly, atort my right spermatic. Because I’d gone unconscious, however, and people were wondering whether I’d hit my head, I spent the night in observation at the hospital.

In the patients’ lounge were several of those large-sized pulp magazines that I recognized as the type I’d seen (but never read) last summer at camp. I selected the one with the most interesting cover — girl, bikini, bubble-helmet, monster — and took it back to my bed and read my first two science-fiction stories.

One climaxed with a tremendous spaceship battle, the dénouement of which was someone figuring out that the death ray the enemy used was actually nothing more than light, slowed way down, so that its energy potential went way up. I don’t remember one character, or one situation besides the battle; I doubt if I would want to. But the idea, connected forever in my memory with a marvelous illustration (I’m sure it was by Virgil Finlay, though I’ve never run across the magazine again) of bubble-helmeted spacemen entering a chamber of looming vampire monsters, remains.

The other story I read that night leaves me with this recollection: Some Incredibly Ancient Aliens (in the lead illustration, they are all veined heads and bulging eyes) are explaining to someone (the hero? the villain?) that the brain is never used to full capacity by humans, but they, you see, have been using theirs, which are much larger than humans’ anyway, to full capacity now for centuries. And they are very tired.

And at school, a couple of weeks later, Robert mentioned to me that he had just read a wonderful book that I must take a look at: Rocketship Galileo. He had read it twice already. It was, he explained, probably one of the best books in the world. He even volunteered to get it out of the school library for me that afternoon (I had several books overdue and couldn’t take out any myself till they were returned), which he did…

Too much enthusiasm among my friends for something has often been a turn-off for me — often to my detriment. I still have not read Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, though Robert, after I finally returned the book to the library, unread, actually bought a copy and gave it to me.

That year’s history study was divided into one term of ancient Greek history and one term of Roman. The climax of the Greek term was a daylong Greek Festival which our class put on for the rest of the school. The morning of Festival Day, the whole school, in the auditorium, watched a play competition, where several short, original plays “on Greek themes” were performed, one of which was voted best by a board of teachers.

For that year’s Festival, I had written one of the plays (a comedy in which I took the part of Pericles — I believe he was having labor problems with the slaves over the construction of the Parthenon). It took second to a play by a girl who had muscular dystrophy, a speech impediment, and who used to cry all the time for no reason. Backstage in my toga, furiously jealous, I vigorously applauded the announcement of her triumph, among the rest of the clapping actors from the various play-companies, while she limped out on stage to receive her wreath of bay-leaves. Congratulating her, and the happy members of the cast of her play, I decided the Greek Festival was a waste.

I can only remember one dialogue exchange from my play. I hated it; another cast member had written it and insisted on inserting it, and I had finally acquiesced to keep peace. (Socrates: “How is the Parthenon coming along, Pericles?” Pericles [through gritted teeth]: “It’s all up but the columns.”) But I still have the opening of the prize-winning play by heart, with only that one morning’s viewing:

The curtains had opened and a chorus of Greek women in blue veils walked across the stage, growing light with dawn, reciting:

The women turned, walked back again — reciting what, I no longer recall. But I still remember that “attacked” as one of the most exciting words I had ever heard. Terminating the sentence with its clutch of harsh consonants, while all the other sounds fluttered behind it in memory, spoken by six ten-year-old girls at ordinary volume, it had — to me — the force of a shout.

Martha, who wore leg braces and walked funny and couldn’t talk properly and had rightfully won her prize over my glib, forgettable wise-cracks, had shown me for the first time that a single word, placed properly in a sentence, could give an effect at once inevitable, astonishing, and beautiful.

After a very un-Greek lunch in the third floor dining room, everyone went up to the tenth-floor gymnasium, where we held a junior Olympics. The boys had wrestling matches, discus throwing, high jumping, and broad jumping. The girls ran hurdle races, chariot races, and did jumping too. Then there was a final relay where boys and girls, in hiked-up togas, ran — their papier maché torches streaming crêpepaper fire — around and around the gym.

It was that dull.

In English that term we had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a good handful of traditional myths — most of which I was familiar with from My Book House. We even tackled one or two Greek plays in translation; and over one English period, Mrs. T, my favorite English teacher from my whole elementary school days, explained to us the etymology of “calligraphy,” “geology,” “optical,” “palindrome,” “obscene,” and “poet.”

In Math, to coordinate with our Greek unit, we devoted one day a week to Geometry. Using “only the tools Pythagoras accepted” (i.e., a compass and a straight edge), we went about discovering simple geometric relationships about the circle and various inscribed angles. We constructed a demonstration to show that the area of a circle, as the limit of the sum of its sectors cut ever smaller and placed alternately, approaches a parallelogram with a base of πr, and a height of r, to wit, an area of πr²And Robert gave me another book, which I did read this time, called The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell. Again, I remember neither plot nor characters. But I do recall that someone in it had invented a Very Powerful Mathematical Tool called “the multiple calculus,” about which author Campbell went on with ebullient enthusiasm. We had already been taught, on the other four days of the week, the basic manipulative algebraic skills, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing polynomials. At home, I stumbled through the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Infinitesimal Calculus (which went on about somebody named Newton as enthusiastically as Campbell had gone on about his mathematician); days later I went down to the High School Library on the school’s third floor, got out a book; got out another; and then three more. Then I bought a Baron’s Review of Trigonometry. And then I got some more books.

But the school term was over again.

At summer camp that year I was assigned to a tent at the bottom of the tent colony. My iron-frame bed, which I made up that first afternoon with sheets so starched they had to be peeled apart (and the inevitable olive drab army blanket), was next to the bed of a boy named Eugene. I didn’t like him. I don’t think anybody else in the tent did either. But he made friendly attempts at conversation — mostly about his father, who, you see, edited Galaxy: “Don’t you know what Galaxy is? It’s the science-fiction magazine! Don’t you like science fiction? Well, then what does your father do?”

“He’s an undertaker,” I said, having learned some time ago that if I said it with a steely enough voice (picked up from Channel Five reruns of Bela Lugosi films), it would shut just about anybody up, at least for a while.

Sometime in the next hour or so, Gene had a twenty-minute, hysterical crying jag and decided he wanted to go home — I don’t recall about what. I do remember thinking: This is ridiculous, I’ll never be able to put up with this next to me all summer!

I asked the counsellor if I could be assigned a bed next to someone — anyone — else. The counsellor said no.

Disappointed, I went back to my bed and was sitting on it, arranging my jeans, swimming trunks, and underwear in the wooden shelf wedged back under the sloping canvas roof, when another boy shouted: “Look out?

I dived forward onto the next bed, and rolled over to see Gene’s eight-inch hunting knife plunged through my army blanket, the two sheets and thin mattress, and heard it grate the springs. Gene, clutching the handle, stopped shaking with hysterical rage, pulled the knife free and looked about at the seven other boys in the tent, who all stared back. My blanket settled, with just the slightest wrinkle, and an inch-and-a-half slit, slightly off center.

Gene, frankly, looked as astonished as the rest of us.

Just then the counsellor (that year his name was Marty) backed up the tent steps, dragging his own trunk, and asked one of the boys to help him put it under his bed. Somebody went back to packing his shelf. Somebody else sat down on his own bed, creaking springs. Gene blinked a few times then put the knife in his top shelf, between his soap dish and his mess kit.

I left the tent, took a walk around the tent colony, watching, through the rolled-back tent flaps, the other campers unpack. Finally, I went into the creosoted bathroom shack, had diarrhea for fifteen minutes, at the end of which, with a red ball-point pen, I wrote something stupid and obscene on the wall beside something equally stupid and obscene.

In the same way I have no memory of what directly preceded our class harassment of Robert, I have no real memory of what precisely occurred just before Gene’s outburst. What had we done to him? Did I assist in it? Or do nothing to prevent it? Or did I instigate it? Conveniently, I have forgotten.

Sitting in the pine-planked stall, looking at the cracked cement flooring, I do remember thinking: If I am going to have to sleep next to this nut, I’d better make friends with him. Then I went back to my tent where Marty was asking for the choice of stories we wanted him to read us after lights-out. The vote was unanimous for Jack London.

Over the next week, occasionally I looked at the little tear in my blanket: but once the initial fear had gone, with the odd callousness of childhood, I set about making friends with Gene; there was nothing else to do.

Tuesday morning, after breakfast, Gene received in the mail, from his father, cover proofs for the two forthcoming issues of Galaxy (containing the last installment of Caves of Steel, and the first of Gladiators at Law), both covers by Emsh — Gene’s favorite sf illustrator. Perhaps a week after that, he received an advance copy of the first issue of the fantasy magazine Beyond. I borrowed it from him one afternoon and read Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World,” which, I decided, was the best story I had ever read.

Our tent counsellor, Marty, was a graduate physics student at City College, and a science-fiction reader himself.

I asked Gene if I could lend Marty the magazine; after much debate, Gene said yes. Marty read the story, said he liked it, but that it made its point by oversimplifying things.

As we walked down the path between the girls’ bunks and an old barn building, called for some reason (there were several apocryphal stories explaining why) Brooklyn College, I asked: “Why do you say it’s oversimplified?” Porgy’s adventures on a world where magic controls one half and science the other had seemed quite the most significant construct I had encountered since slow light or the multiple calculus.

“Well,” Marty explained, as a herd of boys and girls swarmed from the ping-pong tables, out the wide doors of Brooklyn College, to troop along the road as the dinner bell, down by the dining room, donged and danged, “if you define magic as all that is not science, and science as all that is not magic — well, for one thing, you come up with a situation where, if science exists, magic must too. And we know it doesn’t. It’s much more useful to consider science a refinement of magic — that’s what it is historically. As it gets refined, there’re just fewer and fewer contradictions: It just gets more and more effective.”

And that evening, after we were all in bed, Marty, sitting back on his own bed, with a flashlight propped against his shoulder, would read us To Build a Fire, or South of the Slot, or The Shadow and the Flash.

My best friend that year at summer camp was Karen, who, though she was odd, seemed more efficient at it than Gene. She never tried to kill me; and no one ever tried to kill her.

She used to fill endless terrariums with snakes she caught in the woods. Once, when we were working together putting up screens in the camp Nature House, I interrupted her explanation of how to tell which mushrooms were and which were not Deadly Amanita, to ask her if she liked science fiction. She said no, because there weren’t any girls in it — “Or, when there are, they never do anything”—which, for all the bikinis-and-bubble-helmets, I had to admit was about true.

And Gene was unhappy at camp and went home after the first month anyway.

Back at school, Greek and Roman history were replaced by a term of medieval European history, and then a term of combined Chinese and Indian history. Our history teacher that year, a Mrs. Ethel Muckerjee, a plump, New England woman of diminutive but impressive bearing (she was one of the handful of teachers we did not call by their first name), had spent many years in India and had been the wife of the late, Indian scholar, Dan Ghopal Muckerjee, who (so went the story we told each other in hushed tones) had committed suicide some years ago when he had discovered himself victim of fatal, lingering cancer, and whose English translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were, that term, our literature texts.

In class discussions, cross-legged on the vinyl floor (while, under the window seat, the radiators hissed and, occasionally, clunked), I would watch Mrs. Muckerjee, with her white hair, her gray tweeds, and her blocky-heeled shoes, lean forward in her chair and explain to the circle of us: “Now, recall the Iliad from last year. Do you see how, in the Mahabharata, the relationship of gods to men envisioned by Valmiki under his anthill is — ” and here, hands on her knees, her elbows would bend — “very different from the relation held by the blind Greek, Homer…”

That spring, the Old Vic production of Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates came to New York, with Michael Redgrave. The aunt of a school friend took us to the first Wednesday Matinee during our spring vacation. From the second row, I watched while a story whose plot I knew (just as I had been told that the audiences for the original Greek drama all knew the plots beforehand too) was used to say something that struck me, at the time, as completely new. The fascinating thing to me was that the inevitability of the story was part of what was being constantly discussed on stage.

In the same week, I heard a radio production of Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Bellac, and I found it enthralling. One of our assistant teachers recommended I read some of Anouilh’s charming dramatic representations of Greek myths; Sartre’s more weighty, if less elegant, retelling of the Orestia, The Flies, came about here; and then O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra and The Great God Brown.

During the term of Chinese and Indian history, we were also given a French class; our regular Natural Science teacher was taking a year off to devote himself to sculpture, and no replacement could be found. His works were on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, where my parents took me once to see them. Our art teacher (whose works were occasionally to be seen at the Whitney) used to say of his, while swinging her long arms back and forth against her gray apron: “Well, I don’t think they’re very good — too formal, too congested. But it has something…”

With a yellow pointer wielded in chalk-whitened fingers, Madame Geritsky, shorter than most of her pupils, made us memorize pages of French prose, which we had to recite alone and in unison, our u’s, r s, and Fs constantly corrected.

I was never a good language student: but I was a bold one. Years later, when I actually spent time in other countries, I found that, armed with the all-important sentences well memorized (“How do you say that in Greek/Italian/Turkish…”), I could pick up in weeks, or even days, at least temporarily, what took others months to acquire.

We reconstruct from memory a childhood that, as adults, we can bear. I think of mine as one in which I liked many people and was liked in return. If I was as happy as I remember, one reason is that I went to a school where athletic prowess and popularity were not necessarily synonymous. Among the three classes of ten to thirteen that formed our grade, there were only three boys I recall as particularly good at sports. And two of these used to vie for position as Class Bully. Everyone cordially despised them.

In gym, three mornings and three afternoons a week, we indulged in an amazingly sadistic game called “bombardment”: two teams hurled soccer balls at one another, taking prisoner anyone hit. Our gym teacher, named (I kid you not) Muscles, had several times pulled Arthur out for purposely hitting another player so hard with the ball he brought the boy to tears.

During one of my early lapses with Robert (was I seven? eight?), Arthur tried to pick a fight with me on the school roof. He was a head taller than everybody else in the class, possibly slightly older. As he was shoving me back into the wire fence at the roof’s edge, I said to myself: “This is silly!” So I announced to him that, indeed, it was silly of him to push me around: I was his friend. So he should stop. After the third time I said it, he looked perplexed and said, “Oh.” I straightened my clothes and suggested we play together. For the next two weeks I went regularly to his house in the afternoons, invited him, regularly, to mine, and spent inordinate amounts of time helping him with his arithmetic homework.

Finally, I got bored.

He was not bright; he was lonely; he was belligerent. Friendship with Robert did not cut me off from friendship with anyone else: Robert was just strange. Friendship with Arthur did: Arthur was actively antisocial. Because he was ill-practiced in keeping friendships going, it was extremely easy to maneuver my way out of it, by being otherwise occupied here, too busy there, all the while counting on the fact he valued me too much to protest. In another week, without any particular scenes, we were no longer even speaking.

Anywhere outside the gymnasium, Arthur was subjected to a needling harassment that certainly fed his belligerence and, in its way, was much more vicious than that first day’s attack on Robert. Robert’s attack lasted minutes. Arthur’s, practically without let-up, went on for years.

Arthur had committed some particularly annoying offense. A bunch of us got together and decided we must teach him a lesson. We agreed that, for the rest of the week, no one in the class would speak to him, or acknowledge he was there in any way. After a couple of hours, he hit a few people. They scooted out of the way, giggling. An hour after that, he was sitting on the hallway floor by the green book-box, leaning against it, sobbing. The teachers finally realized what we were doing and demanded we stop. So we did — while any teachers were around.

On the last day of this treatment (and there were others, dreamed up for him practically every month), Arthur managed to confront a bunch of us in the narrow, fenced-in enclosure in front of the school. He yelled at us angrily, then began to cry. We watched, mild embarrassment masked with mild approval, when, in the middle of his crying, Arthur suddenly pointed to me and exclaimed: “But you’re my friend! You’re my friend!”

Had it not been the last day, I would have stayed with my group. As it was, I spoke to him, left my friends, and went with him to the corner where he caught his bus home. I may even have explained to him why we’d done it. But I doubt, at this point, if he either understood or cared.

I think, however, this was where I began to realize that such cerebral punishments teach the offender nothing of the nature of annoyance, injury, or suffering he has inflicted: They teach only the strength of the group, and the group’s cruelty — the group’s oblivion to the annoyance, injury, and suffering it can inflict — the same, basic failing of the offender.

I didn’t consider Arthur my friend. After walking him to the corner, I made no other efforts to be friendly. As other harassments came up, I was just as likely to be party — except that I now stayed more in the background to avoid being called to witness. But in gym class, Arthur no longer hurled at me his bombardment ball.

At six and seven, Arthur was a bully. By eleven or twelve, he was class clown; last in his school work, still incredibly aggressive in sports, now, whenever there was any tension between him and any teacher or classmate, he would drop his books all over the floor, belch loudly, or give a shrill, pointless giggle. We, at any rate, laughed — and despised him nonetheless. Our harassments had been effective: He was no longer likely to hit you. Frankly, I’m not sure that his earlier reactions weren’t the more valid.

I am sure, however, that given another time, another place, another school, and children from families that had indulged different values, Arthur might have been the well-liked, admired student while I, an eccentric weakling of a different race, who lived half his life in another world, might have suffered all the harassment I so cavalierly helped in heaping on him.

Dalton prided itself in its progressiveness and courted an image of eccentricity. (The bizarre elementary school in Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame is supposedly Dalton.) The eccentricity went no further than the headmistress announcing to each class, at the beginning of each year, in a very guarded tone: “If you really have something worthwhile, creative, and constructive to do, then you may arrange to be excused from regular classes.” The announcement was made once and never repeated, though, in the Dalton brochures, this aspect of the school’s individualized approach to each student was made much of. To my knowledge, I was the only student from my year who ever got to wheedle his way out of some of the more arduous classes: I developed an incredibly complex art project that involved paintings, sculptures, and electric lights, and announced to my math teacher that I wanted special instruction in calculus, and wanted it now.

For several months, I got away with spending most of my school day between the art room and special math tutoring sessions.

I was doing practically no assigned work. My arithmetic had never been strong. And my parents, who were nowhere near as eccentrically progressive as the school, decided to send me to a tutor, during this time, three afternoons a week.

Amanda Kemp was a small, white-haired, black woman, who lived on the top floor of an apartment house on Edgecomb Avenue, in small, dark rooms that smelled of leaking gas.

With much good will and infinite patience, she tried to “interest” me in things that I had invested a good deal of emotional autonomy in remaining uninterested in — “Since,” she explained to my mother, after the first week, “actually teaching him is certainly no problem. He learns whatever he wants to learn all too quickly,” and she gave me a book of poems by Countee Cullen, which he had personally inscribed to her, years earlier, when they worked together in the city school system, its illustrations marvelously macabre, showing imaginary beasts of Jabber-wockian complexity, each described by an accompanying rhymed text.

The person in my math class who did get the constantly easy hundred was Priscilla. Sometime around here, I decided to write a science- fiction novel — announced my project to a group of friends in the coffee shop on the corner, where we all adjourned after school to indulge in an obligatory toasted English muffin and/or lemon coke. I actually wrote the opening chapter: twenty pages of single-spaced typing on lined, three-holed, loose-leaf paper. I brought it into school and, during one study period, asked Priscilla to read it and pass judgment.

During the next half hour I chewed through several pencil erasers, stripped the little brass edge out of my wooden ruler, and accomplished some half dozen more intense, small, and absorbing destructions.

Priscilla, finally, looked up. (We were sitting on the green stairs.)

“Did you like it?” I asked. “Did you understand it?”

“I don’t,” she said, a little dryly, “believe anyone could understand it with your spelling the way it is. Here, let me make you a list…”It was the beginning of a marvelous friendship (that, a year ago, reflowered just as warmly when I visited Wesleyan University where she is now a professor of Russian) which quickly came to include nightly hour-plus phone calls, made up mostly of ritual catch phrases (such as: “What has that got to do with the price of eggs in Afghanistan!”) which somehow, by the slightest variation of inflection, communicated the most profound and arcane ideas, or, conversely, reduced us to hysterical laughter, to the annoyance of both our parents at both our houses. Besides correcting my spelling, Priscilla also told me about a book she said was perfectly wonderful and I must read, called Titus Groan. For fourteen years, it suffered the fate of Rocketship Galileo. I only got around to reading it one evening over a weekend at Damon Knight’s sprawling Anchorage in Milford, Pennsylvania (Damon had just made some rather familiar sounding comments on the spellings in a manuscript I had given him to read); Priscilla had been right.

The last year of elementary school was drawing to a close. I had just been accepted at the Bronx High School of Science. I was sitting in the school’s smaller, upstairs library, reading More Than Human for the second time, when several students, Robert and Priscilla among them, came in to tell me that I had been elected Most Popular Person in the Class — a distinction which carried with it the dubious honor of making a small speech at graduation.

I was terribly pleased.

Like many children who get along easily with their peers, I was an incredibly vicious and self-centered child, a liar when it suited me and a thief when I could get away with it, who, with an astonishing lack of altruism, had learned some of the advantages of being nice to people nobody else wanted to be bothered with.

I think, sometimes, when we are trying to be the most honest, the fictionalizing process is at its strongest. Would Robert, Mrs. Mackerjee, Gene, Arthur, Marty, or Priscilla agree with any of what I have written here, or even recognize it? What do they remember that, perhaps, I have forgotten — either because it was too painful, too damning, or because it made no real impression at all?

Language, Myth, Science Fiction…

58. Browsing in Joe Kennedy’s Counter/Measures, I came across a poem by John Bricuth called Myth. Liked it muchly. It begins with an epigraph from Lévi-Strauss:

“Music and mythology confront man with virtual objects whose shadow alone is real…”

Then this from Quine’s Philosophy of Logic:

“The long and short of it is that propositions have been projected as shadows of sentences, if I may transpose a figure of Wittgenstein’s. At best they will give us nothing the sentence will not give. Their promise of more is mainly due to our uncritically assuming for them an individuation which matches no equivalence between sentences that we can see how to define. The shadows favoured wishful thinking.”

And from Spicer’s poem Language, in his discussion of the candle flame and the finger he has just blistered:

Just as “propositions” can be dismissed from logic on the formal side as a logical shadow in a field where we wish for light, on the informal side we can dismiss the movable predicate — x “walks” which can be moved to y “walks” and so on to the ith variable “… if and only if the ith thing in the sequence walks” (presumably true of x, y, and the others) [Philosophy of Logic, p. 40] — as an empirical shadow: It is a shadow of the empirical resolution at which we observe a given set of process phenomena that allows us to subsume them all under one word. If, for instance, all that can be referred to by “walks” is, like the word, a singular entity, then a very strange entity it is. Among other things, it is discontinuous in both time and space, since both x and y can perform it simultaneously in different locations and/or at different times! In the empirical world, however, spatial and temporal discontinuity is multiplicity of entities. And “a multiple entity” in our language at any rate is as silly a concept as “many rock.” (This, I suspect, is the practical side of Quine’s refusal to “quantify over predicates” [Philosophy of Logic, p. 28]. If we have a situation where every instance of predicate-with-every-variable can be empirically resolved into separate predicates (P), we have a situation where the existential quantifier (_EP), would always have the same value as the universal quantifier (P). If there is only one q, then everything you can say of “at least one q” you can say of “all q.” Similarly, the negation of one quantifier could always be taken as the other or empty, as one liked. This gets the formal logician into the same sort of trouble as the mathematician who allows himself to divide by zero in formal algebra.)

If we have a universe composed only of real, unique objects performing unique processes, how do we order them? (Are we stuck with G. Spencer-Brown’s suggestion from Laws of Form that “equals” must be taken to mean “is confused with”?) Or, more germane: Since we do perceive the universe as ordered, can we work back to such a universe of unique objects-and-processes without contradiction?

Language is miraculous not in its power to differentiate. Differentiation, when all is said and done, is carried on nonverbally by the reasonable cross-checking of the information of the other senses. The wonder is that language can respond to any number of different things in the same way: it can call ashtrays, actors, and accidents “entities”; it can call poems, paintings, and nesselrode pies “art”; it can call what three different men at three different times of day do when going down the street “walking”; it can call three entities that walk down the street at the same time “women”; it can call sentences, ideas, and blue-prints “models”; it can call freedom, death, the color white, and the Second-World-War-and-all-its-causes “volumes in multidimensional meaning space”; it can call causing pain, inflicting suffering, and perpetrating injustice “evil.” In this way language guides the senses to concentrate on various areas and aspects of the world for further examination and further differential cross-checking.

Things “obviously” similar are coherent areas of meaning-space only because of the shadow the senses throw over them. Those areas not so obviously coherent become so under the various shadows language can cast.

59. Science fiction is a way of casting a language-shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space that would otherwise be largely inaccessible.

60. Is it the tragedy of mind? Or is it what assures the mind’s development: Today’s seminal idea is tomorrow’s critical cliché.