Moon Tea and Whiteface (IV)

Part Two: April 2018

I wrote all the above, in rough, soon after Wiscon 38. Before leaving the convention I had mentioned to Timmi Duchamp my perception that the event had been for me a journey. She replied that it sounded like something she might like for The Wiscon Chronicles. Afterwards, then, I began delving into my thoughts, only to abandon them — there, at that paragraph above this one, when I reached that crux question. At that point in the essay, knowing it had moved far beyond the word-limits for the Chronicles, I wondered what worth there might be for me to go on writing any farther. I felt I might have thousands of words yet to go.

Too, by June seventh — that last day when I was writing — I was feeling already the weakening grasp of the soul awakening from a thinning dream, with conscious perceptions hardening to the factual day. What had I seen and where had I gone? Was I, any more, the one to say?

In a week may seem too short a time to lose one's grip upon what an event had been, or upon who it was, who rode a cobbled-together raft on currents stirred by happenings. Yet such losses occur instantly. Just before or just after talking with Timmi about the journey — not the one undertaken but the one that had happened without being undertaken — I talked with Sherry Thomas about an insight that had arrived during the convention. The verbal music that I conjured at that moment, accidentally, led me to a further place that I had not realized I had reached. The thought rose in me that I should rush aside to write this down, that I might find my way back to that further place. Something in me knows when a new thought is fleeting. Whether I have access still to that further place will remain forever unknown to me, however: for I remained rooted to the social moment, not the personal one. I left behind that journey of many steps and many possible ends, with the brightest end having revealed itself obliquely only to take itself away.

Yet many things, in the second week in June, combined to take me away from seeking through memories and notes to redraw a map I had failed to draw when the moment was right. Summer developments in garden and daily life called; and that difficult shrugging-off of the ghost that overhung the long gestation and execution and aftermath of the C.M. Kornbluth effort remained for me to finish — unless it remained for me to I simply accept that particular haunting as mine.

It may be, too, that I held too much to that Wiscon for its factual aspects, and so remained too near it, for all that it already felt far away.

Whether or not distance needed to fall between me and what I had experienced, the distance fell.

##

In 2014 at Wiscon I did set out with a programme in mind: to find new writers to whom to listen. Not having read Hiromi Goto I planned to attend her events. Her guest-of-honor reading unfortunately fell against the panel on reconciliation, which, as I noted, called to me with a nearly imperative tone. Jemisin's calm and thoughtful approach to her subject, and to her audience, as it happened, altered my programme: for afterwards I found that the programming offered little of Goto, and ample of Jemisin, whose voice I did wish to hear more. Given that I was also spending time way from events — editing my story, reading passages aloud to myself, retyping pages on an old typewriter — the experience turned out oddly skewed, and perhaps spare.

I attended a panel featuring Goto on a "cultural grammar of experience," the panel description having led me think it would focus to some degree on her, her works, and the Japanese experience; and I listened with some regret to a discussion moving elsewhere than that. Goto, after a time in which other panelists spoke sometimes vehemently, said a few quiet words. An irony played into my later attending a panel called "Not All Aliens are Japanese" — a Jemisin panel, not a Goto one. I enjoyed it — Eleanor Arnason being in particularly fine form — although I felt unclear about why the panel had the title it did.

In looking back, however, I saw that in the program description appeared this: "#EndJapaneseElves." I supposed then that the panel's title had something to do with Anime, about which I know nothing. With that thought, in that week after Wiscon, when I was pondering the lack of Japanese-related content at a convention that in part was honoring a Japanese-Canadian writer, I noticed finally that the program guide did list Anime-related topics — which I suppose means Japanese-ness to many. It means anything but, to me.

I find now in my typewritten journal entry just after the convention these words: "I have been thinking while typing these thoughts of the tendency of Japanese to be self-effacing and how it reflects something exterior to the Japanese themselves: for this programming essentially holds up Japanese experience and effaces it."

How much does this matter? Little, perhaps. Goto herself may have felt comfortable in not being drawn into discussions about Japanese-related experience. The appearance of effacement merges back into self-effacement. And my taking interest in outwardly Japanese-related matters was the Sun tea I sought, not the Moon I found.

The panel on reconciliation had so diverted me from my programme, in any case, that the Afrofuturism panel then called me to attend it — in unconscious whiteface. There I heard that reference to the "one-drop rule," which, it seemed apparent, related to one's participating in or claiming a heritage.

For me, at least, the "rule" would seem to offer a red-light, green-light game. At one moment I might be a "white" man, having that drop of white blood; the next, a "colored" man, having that other drop. Given blood transfusions and retrovirus gene-splicings one might think it inevitable that all people would end up both the default and the option, at once, or in alternation. Anyone might take a bow on a stage and be unsure whether one did so in whiteface or blackface; we might set out to wear the one and end up in the other; or you might wear the one while the audience saw the other. And I could always call myself one thing, whenever I looked the other.

And as with Sun tea and Moon, we might feel hard-pressed to the tell the difference.

Yet with Moon tea, although I never know what it will be, I do know what it is — whereas with whiteface or Japaneseface it seems I never can know. By nature I can only assume them, or wear them, but never be what they represent.

In never-so-being lies the not-knowing.

##

How does reconciliation fit the one-drop perspective? The latter seems too much a trick and a game, except when it provides a grounding fact to help explain one's own feelings about one's identity. If it does have any grounding effect, then it seems unfortunate that it so easily leads to thoughts so facile and flip as those I wrote a few paragraphs ago. Does not the thought that one might alternate between states of self-identity seem contrary to the nature of identity? If we undertake a journey do we not seek to find who we are, even if the journey's outward purpose may be to see and experience that which lies outside us — and to seek that which was beyond the reach of who we were? For is not our own identity at the heart of this matter? Can we reconcile ourselves to others, or others reconcile themselves to us, if neither we nor they know who we are — if our identity may be switched on and off at will?

Yet identity provides the base not only for action, for involvement in the world, but also for identification — for putting ourselves in another's shoes, another's geta or zori; and also for imagining our taking the journey that others have taken, through gates we cannot pass. Identification may be a reflex born of identity — a reflex that takes us outside ourselves — outside our self-identity — only then to swing us back to self-identity, enriched with the iota of changed perspective that alters the thought-continuum within which we exist.

From that perspective, the one-drop concept proves provocative. For can I partake of your journey — can I understand it — without the one drop of you within me? Can you follow me to this point without one drop of me, in you? I will never be that one drop of you. You will never be that one drop of me. Even so the thought-currents, the continua, begin to touch or merge or overlap; they alter, transform, and redirect themselves; and when they do, any such changes as do occur neither of us could have planned.

In other words it lies within our powers to do what is firmly outside our beings — to alter the world, simply through our having identity. If we need to put any face on this power then let it be the face of identity; if we must use the word default let us relegate it to some spiritless electronic program; if we are to think in terms of the genetic drop of enrichment or contamination then let us think of those streams, those currents, born in and borne upon, within and around, the souls that we believe to be ours — those streams and currents for which a single drop sometimes serves, in representing us — and sometimes serves, too, in the encounter, to divert an entire stream.

And as I write these words I do better realize the nature of that woman-character in that story of mine: for she is one apt to find herself drinking Moon tea.

Having turned to that now-years-ago Wiscon and its long-abandoned trail of memory and dream, maybe I should turn again to the story. "The Gate to Elfland," I called it, then. I have had another title in mind for it, for a year or so. "The birds have less to say for themselves, in the wood-world's torn despair," Robert Frost said a hundred years before the Wiscon of which I speak, "than now these numberless years the elves, although they are no less there." These lines nestle among the poems I keep in mind, these days. The unseen elf, the industrial evocations, the automobiles: these are whitenesses in that tale that I read aloud ... in whiteface. And into those places, those whitenesses, in my writing, I had thought sunlight fell. Should I see where moonlight fell, instead? Or where, unknowingly, I might have prevented its falling? I may need to look.

The End

President Koom-Posh

I have written several blog entries this year that I have held off posting for various reasons, good or otherwise. Yet now I have sent in a blog entry to Aqueduct (aqueductpress.blogspot.com) — another "Readings" installment that should appear sometime this season. That essay had room for a few but not all thoughts that were coming to mind.

So here I follow a few unvoiced strands.

Aqueduct's L. Timmel Duchamp has told me that she is "becoming an apostle of slow thinking." My sporadic blogging arises from a similar inclination, which has realized itself in my policy to post here only what I have drafted first in handwriting, usually in pencil. I still do some writing on typewriter and computer keyboard. Yet blog entries I want to redraft minimally, if possible.

My typing speed results, too often, in that which haste produces: words parading as Thought. While I acknowledge the demands of expediency, I believe a writer must nurture the writing process at every turn. That means nurturing thought, as opposed to hastening words. Writing as a process yields thought. Hastened words only reflect thoughts; and since they must reflect expedience, as well, they tend to reflect those thoughts incompletely or inaccurately.

This has become a pressing issue, to my mind, with the rise to power by Koom-Posh. Bulwer Lytton coined this term for "government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow."

Andrew Jackson I suspect could have been called President Koom-Posh, had the term then existed. However quick and canny a man he was, his making cronyism into a political institution points to hollowness. Expediency, prior to his becoming president, seems to have ruled him; and, afterwards, its demands, rather than those of the presidency, continued to rule.

The other day I came across comments stating that the presidency requires "exclusive fealty" to the constitution. "Fealty" as a word has links to fidelity; and this suggests that in thinking about a person who lacks such fealty, one might use "infidelity" as an attribute, or "infidel," as a label. The current president-elect Comb-Over, or Koom-Over, or Posh-Over, has indicated he wishes to continue his businesses while part-time president; and business cronies will dominate his administration. His fealty lies with another lord than the Constitution. Perhaps we might call him His Expediency.

Our eclectic, mannerist Age of the Masses has its deepest shallow roots in the Modern century, roughly the 1860s to 1950s. Van Wyck Brooks, in writing about the later 1800s, noted alterations to the American Fabric then being made — such as the conscious discarding of the traditional writings that had offered bedrock, on which her founders could build the United States.

I find what Brooks said about the Classics telling. They "kept alive great patterns of behavior ... The close association of intimate studies had made the patterns real, and the patterns had made great writers as they made great statesmen. They appealed to the instinct of emulation, an instinct that in later days followed the patterns set by industrial leaders, by bankers and by millionaires whose only idea was the will to power and who ruled by the blind force of money."

New Essay in Cascadia Subduction Zone

In October an essay of mine appeared that I have been meaning to call to readers' attentions. For me, the topic has importance.

It had disappointed me that after its publication C.M. Kornbluth failed to spur some feminist critic to begin the process of rescuing Cyril Kornbluth from the ill usage he has at times suffered from feminists. In the book I present ample evidence showing that Cyril exhibited a sexually egalitarian attitude; and I show how his writing suffered alterations that reflected poorly on him.

I also presented evidence showing where to place blame for these alterations. Frederik Pohl admitted to them, by and large. To my eyes the changes reflected so chauvinistic an attitude that as a critic I saw no alternative: my observations belonged in my book. I was writing cultural criticism, which combines biography, history and criticism; and to leave out my literary evaluations would have amounted to undermining my own structure.

Thanks to encouragement from Hal Davis to break my silence, and the agreeability of the Wiscon programming committee, I gave a talk in Madison in the spring offering my perspective. (And thanks to Mary Rickert, among others, for taking it in.) I had labored——even at the convention itself, banging away at an old manual typewriter——at shaping my talk to work as an oral presentation: so when Timmi Duchamp expressed interest in publishing it in Cascadia Subduction Zone, she presented me with many questions and suggestions. I ended up re-envisioning it, not just rewriting it, for publication, and truthfully made some important adjustments, and introduced as well one new discovery. As a consequence this published version overshadows the spoken one.

This essay discusses, among other matters, "visibly invisible collaboration," Judith Merril, Mary Byers-Kornbluth, George Barr McCutcheon, and structural feminism in Graustarkian novels. It describes some among Pohl's changes to Kornbluth texts, although without repeating analyses made in CMK, such as the examination of "Trouble in Time." It also discusses a situation that I had somewhat suspected before and confirmed after publication of my book——that the reputation of a novel I consider second-rate, The Space Merchants, rose as high as it did because readers thought it was the same book as the longer and quite Kornbluthian Gravy Planet. (As you might imagine, I deeply rue the fact that the Library of America republished, and in a sense canonized, The Space Merchants.) The new discovery I mention above, by the way, related to Joanna Russ and that worse-than-lackluster Pohl and Kornbluth production, Search the Sky.

My title: "Seeing C.M. Kornbluth as Gender-Egalitarian (For Those Who Have Seen Him as Anything But)." The magazine: The Cascadia Subduction Zone (www.thecsz.com), October 2013, 3:4. My thanks to Hal, Susan Groppi, Mary, Timmi, and Lew Gilchrist.

Cheers ...

A Life Uncelebrated, a Death Unannounced: Mary Kornbluth, 1920-2007

Martha entered the study last night to relay news she knew I had yet to hear.

I had been working on revisions since early that morning on an essay for Cascadia Subduction Zone, since editor L. Timmel Duchamp had granted me a day's extension beyond my Sunday deadline. My essay offered reasons to think Cyril Kornbluth possessed a gender-egalitarian attitude; and it suggested why feminists have tended to see him as the last writer to turn to in seeking signs of this attitude.

At about 9:30 p.m., in an extremely weary state of mind, I was about to go on-line. I was sending in an essay that included observations about Cyril's wife Mary, and about a living writer who clearly had helped shape prevailing opinions about Cyril.

Martha walked into my study to tell me that this writer no longer ranked among the living.

Today I reopened a manila file folder and looked at these words:

"Can you keep this secret? Don't tell anybody. She died on June 1, not this year. She died at the age of 86, June 1 in 2007, and she did not want Fred to know about it. She did not want him to know. Then he would come out with these condescending remarks. Quite frankly, the way the country is going I don't think most people are fit to comment on the weather."

The speaker, in January 2009, was John Kornbluth. Son of Cyril Kornbluth.

Son, too, of Mary Kornbluth, about whom he was speaking.

Son, in other words, of C.M. Kornbluth.

John had proved quite difficult for me to track down, in 2009——as he wanted it to be. He and David regarded themselves as in hiding. Even though he was quite willing to speak to me, and to tell me what he knew, he wanted me not to let anyone know that I had contact with him.

I was not to quote him. I was not to cite him. I was not to let the world know whether or not Mary was alive.

Today I checked via the usual on-line means, and discovered that Mary's death date has quietly appeared here and there——no doubt thanks to genealogists and their indefatigable search engines. The information itself had to be out there, after all. It just took diligent research and an automatic fact-webbing spider or two.

I suspect, however, that Mary's death has never received formal announcement.

Consider this formal. The information reached me from the lips of the older of the two sons.

At one point I noted to John that my book would cause the question to be raised about whether Mary still lived or not——in which case it might be better to preemptively announce her death, and have some control over the situation. He grudgingly gave me permission to do so.

In my silence after book publication——which I may write more about——I ended up remaining silent about Mary, too, however.

This morning, after last night's news, I realized John would no longer feel even faintly grudging about the matter.

So I say this: Mary died six years ago, deeply mourned. "I would rather have gone myself than her dying," John said.

She died nearly unknown, although she had helped shape——literally had helped shape——stories that take a central place in that highly artistic, highly specialized, and highly accomplished field that was magazine science fiction in the 1950s.

How strange ... that I should have been spending the entire day writing and rewriting words about Mary Kornbluth——and about Frederik Pohl——on the very day the latter died.

Although I have lost contact with John——I hope because of his continuing sense of being in hiding, and not because of anything that has happened to him or to his brother David——I feel he would approve these words. He wanted his mother to be known. Not dragged through the mud, but known.

I will have a few more things to write about Mary. She deserves more remembrance than she has received. My book started the process. The essay for CSZ continues it.

Now that I feel free to attribute my source——who is her son——I will feel free to release a few, small, rather beautiful butterflies of knowledge into the world.

Mary, though gone, will live a bit more ... and perhaps even gain a level of appreciation that was never hers, during her life.

Cheers ...

By the Fly in the Web

At Timmi Duchamp's request last summer I wrote the essay that has reappeared, published, in my mailbox.

The good folks at Aqueduct have sent me the October issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. In its pages, Kiini Ibura Salaam rises to Timmi's request to write about being involved in various arts, with "Painting and Writing: My Yin and Yang," while I do likewise with "Line Improvisation: Notes by the Fly in the Web."

When I wrote my first short essay for Timmi last winter, I was responding to a last-minute, near-deadline request. I worked at the typewriter for the better part of a day, put the results through several revisions, and sent in my manuscript promptly. When much later I re-read that essay in published form, I reached the ending paragraphs thinking that the essay left off its narrative prematurely. It dropped its discussion too soon. I had hurried into the writing and then hurried out, though: so what else could I have expected? What was going missing, there at essay's end, however, I had no idea. The essay wanted to go somewhere farther -- somewhere it might have gone had I struggled at the task for a longer time.

With this second essay "Line Improvisation" I took the longer time, drafting the piece in pencil and allowing thoughts to arise at a more natural pace. While writing it I grew quickly aware of the fairly large scope my narrative was acquiring, however: so even while feeling more relaxed and expansive in my writing, I was pulling back, skipping over ideas and memories, and hurrying over parts of the story. While I had ample time, that ample time did end with a deadline; and in any case I feared I was making the piece too lengthy for CSZ, a slender magazine. Timmi fortunately expressed no worries about its 5,000-word length.

I sat with the Aqueduct magazine last night and read it cover to cover, absorbed in the present moment and not thinking back to those days of steady, slow writing back in July. So after the smooth flow of Salaam's essay my own essay surprised me -- with its hop-and-skip movements, and its occasional leaps between subjects ... between distant parts of a life. The lacunae between thoughts and sentences threatened to pull me, as reader, down into wordless emptinesses.

This morning I recall that when I sent the essay to Timmi I thought that my manuscript was akin to an outline of a larger narrative.

My two CSZ essays have strong memoir components -- as does the new, even longer essay I worked at in September-October.

I should say have labored at this new work, at least, when not scurrying around engaged in antiquing and Baraboo Sunday Market tasks. For CSZ? Probably not ...

Cheers ...