A Dream of Noise

For some days my shirt pocket has been holding, near my heart, a dream of un-dreamlike immediacy and almost palpable reality.

In it, the incompetence and brash blunderings, verbal and otherwise, of a certain world leader make a saint of him. Through his actions and inactions he forces his country into a corner where the practices and processes falter that have primarily a monetary reason for being. Of the space it occupied before, no more than this corner remains to his country. Only through dedication to individual well-being on a universal basis may it again enjoy freedom of the whole room. Capitalism staggers, if not quite collapses. A socialist remedy offers the sole recourse. The solution to the country's ills requires cooperation, mutual regard, and thoughtfulness.

Meanwhile the roads are emptying. We hear "the busy hum of men" — that hum which drew Milton's youthful thoughts toward the city and away from rustic ways and pleasures — die down to something un-busy, if a hum at all. We find ourselves swept up, too, in helping meet the Paris Accord. Up till now, emissions-reduction guidelines have generated much hot air and heated reaction, contrary to their aim. Cooler exhalations emerge. Not only have we shown ourselves that human health towers over the putatively all-powerful deity of The Economy, but we find that the quieting of the busy hum puts us in the corner of what we call Nature, or the Earth.

Our corner seems not so small, suddenly; and that old room, the one from which our country is in retreat, less large.

Absurd, you say? Dreams are. And which would we rather have? A lamed Hephaestus named The Economy, or a Nature in the process of being murdered? Do we not hope to hear that shout across the waves from a far island: "Oh — I was wrong! Pan is not quite dead!"

Besides the staggering Economy and a more freely breathing Nature, those among us who regularly attend the church of Poetry are learning that a revered spirit, that of Silence, has not forsaken the human world. With what pleasure, the other morning, I stepped out to check our bird feeders and heard chickadees, finches, and, in the distance, crows — but not a motor, even though a state highway cuts through our village not a block away, and another, larger one transects it but a mile from here.

Single-handedly for his country, through ill-meaning impatience and self-interested blindness, this world leader has subdued the malignant deity that propped him up, has abruptly lowered fossil-fuel emissions, and here and there, now and then, has restored the Sabbath stillness that has gone missing from even the Sabbath. Seeing this man-child of tantrums wearing this new halo of wholesome achievement, we may feel the urge to raise him to sainthood — even though he has proven himself not quite the material for presidency.

How strange it has seemed to me that this last should still have needed proving. But much has seemed strange, and worse than strange, even before this time of calamity and fatality.

Weekday mornings, in our village, we listen in vain for Silence. The local bank has been building a new, large facility near here, which as yet is but a steel skeleton with walls and a few window-openings. The construction crew still appears early for work, running potent equipment and driving outsized vehicles over what peace and quiet might lie in their path — as such vehicles do, without asking permission from nearby ears.

In my mind, dare I say, I see shambling members of a dying race toiling in the lifeless shell of a temple to money earned from money.

We never will leave our noise behind us, though — except by going extinct. We never will leave it because it is a part of us — a part that has been stolen, disfigured, and amplified by motors and automatic tools, and rendered so malignantly overpowering that it dominates some arts. Reading Keats, though, teaches us that "gently whisp'ring noise" may mark a realm where gathered souls may find fulfillment. "Noise" appears in his sonnet "To My Brothers" not as an awkward rhyme that Keats forced into place, but as a fitting word. "Noise," in his time, applied to a spectrum of sounds.

May we find it in us to re-create a vanished world, and to restore that driven-away, whispering end to the spectrum — now that restoring it has been shown humanly possible.

Elsewhere . . . the life of the sea returns to Venice, and blue to the sky of China. Perhaps in those places as here, the life of the soul threatens a return, to meliorate an increasingly uncivil civilization. Silence opens the door for such a return.

I personally would rather not see a blathering blusterer ascend to sainthood — so well-suited does he seem to descent. I have in mind, however, Emerson's conception of a force that he called Fate, that goes masked in many guises.

"If Fate is ore and quarry," he says, "if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means, — we are reconciled."

May we all so be, if and when we see the good in the making.

Thoughts Written after Frederik Pohl's Death

(I wrote the following on September 2, 2013. I chose not to post them in my blog at the time. Whatever my opinions of Pohl as a man or a writer, I feel respect and affection for certain members of his extended family——in one case deceased, and in another, living. A long moment of quiet——even if after two years of quiet already, on my part——seemed appropriate.)

The news of Frederik Pohl's death has felt strange, settling in: for I have known it would happen soon——whatever "soon" may be. I have been out of touch with news of Pohl's condition; but the thought kept reappearing in my mind, in recent months, that I should prepare myself with some short essay about him, against the eventuality. Not that I did——perhaps because that same notion had been intruding on my thoughts, now and then, for years.

At the point in writing C.M. Kornbluth when I was ready to speak to Fred, and to see whether or not he would turn me down a second time for an interview about Cyril, I called his house and learned that he was in the hospital, due not to illness but frailty. The family feared death might well come for him. I would have been acting rudely, had I kept calling to see if he had come home: for what frail man would want to answer tough questions about events of half a century past? I left that phone number unused, afterwards. My book focused on Cyril, after all; and I doubted Fred remembered anything that he had not put down in print already that he would feel willing to share with me. I knew in addition that his memory, even before this hospitalization, was unreliable.

The questions being left unasked will remain so, of course. Pohl's comments on matters concerning events in the 1930a, 1940s and 1950s, however, will continue to reverberate——for he has left us correspondence from these times——the archived correspondence that allowed me to write about matters that beforehand I had feared would find no place in my study. As the book's few readers know, it rests upon a sturdy backbone of documentation.

It stands because I based its structure upon fact.

At the time I was finishing CMK, knowing of Pohl's frailty, it did enter my mind that my book, which tells quite a different story from the ones he had told over the years, might affect him to the point of altering the balance between his health and his frailty. I felt it might be best if the book slipped quietly into the world, without my making the normal efforts at publicity that might help make it a success. Pohl, if indeed so frail, might never know the book existed. His protective family might shield him, should the news of publication came out sufficiently quietly.

Two other reasons urged me toward my avoiding publicity. The book's writing had put me into debt: so I had a purely practical reason, nearly a necessity, to avoid even convention appearances. Another reason, however, some might call irrational. To me it carried real weight, all the same. I had lived with it since the mid-1990s, when several senior writers advised me to tread with extreme care around Pohl. He exerted tremendous power within the field in which, at the time, I newly ranked as a professional. Many of my questions even at that time concerned Pohl's actions; and his looming presence made it seem impossible to ask those questions in public. In effect my wariness of Pohl silenced me——and the tensions surrounding those questions, and my being haunted by them, made it nearly impossible for me to continue pursuing the writing career that I had begun to establish. It amounted to madness, to allow such questions to overthrow my fiction career. Yet I did, and they did.

I have written of being at sea for many years——constantly achieving in minor ways, at this, at that——but at sea: and the derailment of my soul from its fiction-writing mode of expressing itself fell at the beginning of that long period. I was haunted. I was insane, even if in the quietest possible manner. One or the other, or both.

The warnings to me about Pohl had been meant genuinely; and in 2010 they proved of more relevance than my fears of causing apoplexy in a frail elder. Pohl, after a time, learned of my book——but grew incensed enough at it that, according to his blog, he never finished reading it. In an e-mail to me he raised the issue of a lawsuit. In his blog he began a campaign against me——effectively, so far as I could see. Quite a number of individuals leapt to his defense, with academics writing "reviews" for professional journals making odd assertions, such as the one that my book contains no literary criticism. Non-academics posted pathetically negative noises on Amazon, while fellow science fiction writers made comments at his blog site, including a surprisingly scatological one, in closing ranks with Pohl against me. Pohl himself used the words "forces of evil," linking this phrase to one of his postings about Mark Rich.

I took this in silence, by and large——even though I had faith that the integrity of my work stood effectively against Pohl's threat of lawsuit. A non-provocatory stance suited the situation, to my mind.

My silence did establish for me, however, a vivid picture of Pohl's power within the field. For no one, to my knowledge, stood up for me, in public, against him.

Some, however, stood up for the book.

Most importantly, the book itself continued standing.

Would I have given so willingly of myself, and so fully, to create it as an edifice, had I meant it to fall? I could remain silent; others would remain silent: yet what I built would continue as I built it.

After a time, Pohl, too, fell silent about the matter——at least in public.

Did his e-mailed threat of a lawsuit still ring in my mind?

Yes. It did.

For all these intervening months.

The night after his death's announcement, the memorial comments began. "Death of a giant." "Last of the greats." "I knew him when."

Many, many will have heartfelt, wonderful thoughts and memories to share, as is fitting and proper. Their Fred Pohl had passed away.

As for me, sometime that night I felt a lightening sensation——a shifting and lifting of a weight I had borne long enough to ignore and nearly forget about.

For a threat made against me was ceasing its constant pressure downwards upon my shoulders.

For my Fred Pohl, too, had passed away.

This Episode of Silence

Two years ago on this date began an unusual episode in my life — an episode that I marked largely by observing silence here and elsewhere on the Internet.

During this episode, one who wished to provoke me I left unanswered. This person's supporters then did what they could to discredit my March, 2010, book on Amazon; and they, too, I left unanswered. Amazon on its own pulled one supporter's comments, while leaving a few others there.

Since I was being demonized -- for such seemed the object of their efforts -- my book undoubtedly lost sales. Such is life. They made their attacks and I hope enjoyed their minor victories. For my part, I wrote my book not for the moment but for our time; and my book continues its existence just as our time does. What it said at time of publication it still says. Where it stood then, there it still stands.

A silence once set into place cannot be broken, in a real sense. Time passes; and when it passes it admits none of us back into its fold, and allows no alterations besides those of our thoughts and depictions.

All the same, I have it within my power to allow a different episode to begin. As perhaps I will.

Errors abound, in this brilliantly idiotic on-line world. Since I know more about the subject of my book than anyone else alive -- I say this not out of pride, but out of believing it to be the unfortunate truth -- I could mount a campaign to straighten matters, correct mistakes, point the way toward accuracy ...

Would such be possible? Would such be desirable? Is not part of the charm of this central edifice of our Age of the Masses, this over-arching monument to the Misinformation Age, the very fact of its nearly infinite potential for fallibility? As the Internet is, perhaps it must be. If ever it should suffer itself to be corrected, rebuilt and rehabilitated, to be spoon-fed the curative waters of Albion, to be given the therapeutic pocketbook-massages of the Holy Molar smiling televisionaries ... then likely the Internet would collapse in upon itself.

The world that I have changed, and that I believe I have changed for the better, is the world of the understanding. Some people now on Earth see some matters differently because of these efforts of mine -- just as I see some matters differently thanks to their efforts.

A tangled and intangible invisible world ... information-born, information-borne and information-bearing ... spotty, spontaneous, unpredictable ...

A fine place to be, this world of ours. I mean the world of the understanding.

I mean the world where I have not observed silence -- not at all, during this episode of silence.