I took the dog out for his evening walk around 9:40. We went around the house and down the hill toward the storm runoff that leads to the creek and our neighborhood park. The sky wasn't yet fully dark: more of a lavender grey against which the tops of the old, tall trees were silhouetted in black. The slope behind our next door neighbor's house, with its carefully trimmed lawn, glittered with fireflies, which would shine on for a second here and there, left, right, low to the ground or six feet above it, then shine off, unpredictably. There, between the trees, it was almost totally dark, but I could vaguely see a stain down the slope, which resolved (though without losing any of its vagueness) into a stag. I was startled by it for a second, the time to make out what that black void was among the glittering fireflies, before I more intuited than saw it turn and run away.

Such brief moments of beauty can appear in our lives unprepared, unexpected, with no connection to any other moments before or after; this can make them heartbreakingly perfect but also useless, unprocessable.

(It is impossible to convey in words the precise quality of that scene: a verbal description at best relates to the thing described as a transcription of a jazz solo might relate to having heard it in person. But ideally it can become the score based on which the readers play their own music. Is it relevant to add that I was listening, on headphones, to L.T.J. Bukem's "Coolin' Out" -- not the most poetically resonant track, granted; "Devil's Theme," which kicked in a few minutes later, would have been more aesthetically right -- or that we are during COVID?)

Here are two photos I took minutes later, as we walked, on the street now, back from the park:

Kirby's Wilderness of Building

[Note:  this article was written for the catalog of the 2015 exhibition, Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby, curated by Charles Hatfield and Ben Saunders at the art gallery of California State University, Northridge. That catalog is now out of print.  I am reposting the article here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby's birth.]

Outer space is much too close.  Or rather (since space extends everywhere), its furniture, its stage props are.  Past a great spinning wheel, the technological purpose of which is hard to fathom—it looks partly like a state-of-the-art waterwheel ferrying, ensconced in each of its compartments, a sphere of some kind (a planetoid, perhaps?), partly like an arcing array of electronic circuits—rough-hewn asteroids hurtle by.  They are so near that the imagination boggles at why gravity doesn’t bring them crashing in.  Or, perhaps, it will?  That seems unlikely, however:  down on the glistening terrace of a municipal building designed in retro style (it rather recalls Earth visions of modernist architecture from the 1950s or ‘60s, and we’re in the future, aren’t we?) the inhabitants of the city stroll about unconcerned.

An exchange with Brian Aldiss

I have just learned that Brian Aldiss passed away two days ago, at the age of 92.  I will not recap here his achievements, or wax enthusiastically about his books, though I could, at length.  As a brief memorial, I will post excerpts from an email correspondence I had with him between April and June 2015.  His generosity in answering questions from a reader was exemplary.  Since these were answers to a scholarly inquiry, I feel that their publication here, as an interview of sorts, is appropriate. 

An Apocryphal Canto

Teaching Dante in Core this semester, I decided we'd all had enough with expository papers, so I'm having my students add their own extra circles to Hell. Once they're written, I plan to collect them under the title Hell's Hidden Rooms: The Apocryphal Cantos (though my students prefer Schwartz's Inferno). Here's one I composed as a pilot.

The Eighth Circle, Twelfth Pouch. The Pedants, who cannot keep from spitting into their cups.

  Pushing open the gate that led from the room                      

where unhappy souls had been kept awake                            

by endless paperwork, pointless tasks, gloom,                       

  (having asked for bread, we were given cake             

made from cornstarch and ketchup; wanting sun,                   

we were told to sit still and consume more cake),                 

  my vision opened out to a coffered hall, not outdone         

by the one by the man of Urbino. Sitting, standing,                

conversing, witty, women and men, every one             

  making noises – their discourse – resounding                      

from some kind of horn: oboes, trumpet,                                  

a shawm, clarinets, bassoons, french horns rounding,          

  trombones, a tuba (sometimes they’d thump it),                  

recorders and piccoli and a great flute,                         

every one poking from – where? Not the rump, it                    

  wasn’t like Barbariccia! Alas, if by their fruits                       

ye shall know them, then know that it was – the navel.        

From what seemed a Babel of indiscriminate toots               

  with time there emerged a symphonic fable              

of pride injured, pain at imagined slights                                

decisions made round wooden tables                          

  people’s blindness to extraspeluncular lights.                     

Such sweetness emerged from the conduits umbilical          

and such grace I perceived in their execution of rites

  that I did not notice, at first, their odd habits prandial.      

They seemed to be drinking moonlight, some spirit              

of truth, of wisdom mythico-mystical;                            

 yet each time they quaffed, with slyness implicit                  

their mouths left behind a slight drop, a thin trail,                

a small mucous swirl in the cup, or they’d lick it.                    

  Then, taking a mighty pull, they’d offer the ale                     

to their partner in tippling and tooting, who                            

did the same. In the end – so I thought, and I paled –           

  it must all be one swill; yes, the whole happy crew             

was supping from one keg of beer, not having realized        

its leaven was human. So tasty the brew                                  

  seemed to them that they fed it to smaller-sized                 

tooters, with less fulsome navels from which             

tiny woodwinds and brass had only begun to arise;              

  trying the mug on for size, these soon felt the itch               

to dribble along with the rest. Whereupon,                             

from his flute, one found his pitch                                             

  and declared in doggerel, getting his rhyme on:                   

“To the minnows, I shine like the Ichthus                                  

Heliodiplodokus – Pound’s very paragon                           

  of a poem, by which Louis Agassiz hoped to focus                

the finishing graduate. ‘Here’s a sunfish – look!                    

Please, no more hocus-pocus!                                         

  You cannot possibly make a book                                            

from five book reviews and two                                      

articles. Even allowing you cook                                     

  your data, and stew                                                                     

with a jigger of new theoretical wine,                           

you will still smell vinegar in the brew –                                  

  even packaged by Princeton, it’s brine.’”                                 

Next another strode up with an instrument                              

stuck out from her belly that shimmered in kind;                    

  I could not tell from its strange integument               

was it an oboe, euphonium, drum, an aeolian chime?          

Every moment, it altered its temperament,                               

  not to mention its key and its rhyme.                           

The cup she offered looked sweet, but the backwash           

was bitter. “I can take you to Cocytus for a good time –         

  I got friends there – we can picnic, pack a brioche – “          

But my Master said: “Bite that brioche, and Proserpina         

will pity you. Find something better to nosh.”             

  The last soul I saw wore a concertina                         

that pushed and was pulled without help from the hands;  

his chin in the air, he spat not just in vina,                                

  but everywhere, really – quite into the stands.                      

O wonder! The arcs his drool made formed a mass                

In the air; the product, a castle of strands                                

  that hovered an instant, then slid back into his glass.

Tinsel and the Torture-Net Artifice

I

The photographs that follow are patently not “authentic,” nor indeed are they photographs.  Both are fictional devices set in place to give the fiction itself the veneer of authenticity.  As far as characterization is concerned, the villains are pantomime cut-outs, and the hero’s only attributes are strength, good looks, compassion, and moral principles that prompt him to take a stand against injustice.  That is as complicated as it gets.  The hero, pitted against ever more morally corrupt antagonists and placed in ever more tangled and ambiguous situations, remains impossibly strong.  You know the type:  you might even, in your more honest moments, detect a strain of it in yourself.  He delights in “doubling.”  The medium can turn things into language and language into a thing.  Mirages, hollow signs of the heat-glow, are taken for objects and people; objects and people are taken for mirages.  The casting and consuming of voices are sometimes done by mouths and ears alone, but mostly they are done through technology.   He has no past, no sexual identity, no complexities.  Their real content may still remain invisible, hiding in the light. 

II

The argument may seem stunningly naïve.  Things are never that neat and tidy.  Politics is present, but it is treated with disdain.  What could they have to tell him about the revolution anyway?  All it has meant for them is a change of name on the placard beside their hovels and of the uniform worn by the police who swing their truncheon at them.  Friendship may bring about emotional awakening and cultural enlightenment, but politically it brings cynicism.  The authority may be grounded in the divine, but it is established and consolidated through technology.  Terrified at first, he eventually digs up the floorboards and finds a record player.  The holy world of spirits collapses once we see the mechanisms at work behind it.  But overall these are rearguard actions in a larger losing battle.  The enforcers of the prohibition law get drunk.  Blood falls from the animals not as a libation, but rather “to be made into I don’t know what—food, drugs, jewels, explosives.”  Sometimes the interruptions are innocuous; sometimes they are not.  Full and empty spectacle make move and counter-move against one another, but the empty wins out in the long run.  Too right. 

III

He seems drawn to these places like a dowser’s stick to subterranean water.  Even spaces not designed for burial turn into tombs when he steps into them.  At best this relationship is fraught; at worst it goes disastrously wrong.  In whose name?  Whose legacy demands this?  The secret, once more, has been disguised in a name and transplanted across the world to throw its pursuers off the fact that it was right at home the whole time.  This is the pattern set by the crypt, pulsed out in its coded broadcasts.  To keep it safe he buries it inside his crypt and carries it around for all his life, showing and hiding it, saying it without saying it.  Radio messages shuttle back and forth:  from rocket to moon-surface to ground control and back again.  Here, too, time zones are overlaid.  Here, too, the sun is intensely scrutinized.  Here, too, is abandonment.  We should learn something from this.  What?  Who knows where the signals will end up, or what they will end up meaning?

IV

Let’s believe this for now.   It is as though language, like the microphone, were shying away from the message it is carrying.  The relations here are complex, to say the least.  Those who can discern the rhythms can step into them and operate in their blind spots.  In his zone of near-silence, he injects language into a flower.   It is constructed with a rocket scientist’s skill for routing, plotting elliptical paths of departure and return.  It stacks up layers of meaning like so many pancakes, toy bricks, sheets of acetate.  And yet, as they were last time, they will be disappointed.  The event field is unconsummated; and language fails to deliver.  The voice that carries the secret remains inaudible even as it is amplified.  It may terrorize the heroes, burn their ears, but it stops short of destroying their world by naming the event as event.  The scene is ridiculous and totally implausible.  This stage set sacrifices him on its hollow altar, leaving him trapped inside an empty, perforated drum.  Naming him, her voice removes his name.  Perhaps she is not wrong.

V

Let’s start where we left off:  he is killed.  What happens next?  What became of the original we do not find out.  The home he returns to was not the home he left.  These gifts are all poisoned, booby-trapped.  He may get away with it, but its specter will haunt his line for generations.  Their departures and returns follow the path of time.  It is in his blood.  He must sweat it, because even animals pick it up.  While doing this, he is hit by a car.  “My good deed for the day,” he tells himself.  They decline, but he insists.  The volcano eventually erupts, blowing into the sky a column of smoke more than thirty thousand feet high.  Their memories of it have been absolutely wiped, erased.  Where is this new detour through secrets and sunflowers leading us?  My artifice is as good as nature.  My artifice is better than nature, he is saying now.  For him, everything is a copy.  What lies at its core? 

VI

This process is dark, sometimes shocking, in many respects catastrophic.  It is certainly sad.  When there is duplication, comedy results.  A person being manipulated like an automaton by another person is funny.  Repetition takes place in the field of time.  Here, though, the fall has become more than simply a pratfall.  Time and again he turns his head to tell people to look where they are going and then crashes into whatever is in his path.  That he is always falling, relapsing, messing up, is a sign of his awkward relationship not only with the material world but also with the divine one.  Gravity, like repetition, opens up the dimension of time.  In comedy this option is removed.  An awareness of one’s own fakeness can have disastrous consequences.  The meeting was never going to happen.  Eventually, it gets played out in the field of art, the most self-conscious of all environments.  To turn water into wine would be a miracle.  Some peace and quiet to smoke his pipe would be nice.

VII

Even when parchments have been overlaid and treasure unearthed, significant portions of it remain uncovered.  It divides into three parts which circulate through time and space.  This is more than simply an extended plot device, of course.  “Tomorrow I shall be famous!” he cries.  What about his other descendants?  He had three sons.  This is extremely dubious practice, to say the least.  All literature is pirated.  Every act of reading is its own kind of remaking of a work.  The second scene moves at a quicker pace. 

(after Tom McCarthy)