The Make Up Test

"I cannot praise a cloistered virtue," is a John Milton quote that's gained some currency lately. It's from Areopagitica, Milton's pamphlet criticising the English government's policy of licensed publishing, and, more broadly speaking, it's about free speech. Milton's point was that, if a person is never exposed to a diversity of ideas, you can't really know if they have the capacity to discern good ideas from bad, begging the question of whether or not their supposed virtue is legitimate. But I thought of the quote yesterday when reading Harlan Ellison's 1966 story "Delusion for a Dragon Slayer". The concept for this story is that, when people die, if they haven't ever truly been tested in their lives, a new world is created just to give them the opportunity. The story follows Griffin, a dull, ordinary, modern man who's killed suddenly due to a freak chain of circumstances. Suddenly he finds himself transformed into a muscular, classical hero, captaining a galley on a mythic quest.

Ellison finds a voice for this story that is a perfect blend of his confrontational/conversational and prettily poetic. I particularly liked the scene where Griffin finds himself in that classic, truly rare, scenario of rescuing a damsel in distress. Ellison's description of just what the very sight of Griffin's ideal woman does to him simultaneous pokes gentle fun at and honours the most fundamental human needs for sex, love, and validation. It's a great story and it's included in the collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Myths in the Future

"World of the Myth", a 1964 story by Harlan Ellison, begins as you might expect a story with that title to go, with a lovely description of dragon's breath and fire from the sky. But then it turns out to be a spaceship, crashing on an alien world. And the tale is about three space travellers, two men and a woman, with a very ugly relationship between the three of them. The title turns out to be quite appropriate, though, when they encounter a swarm of ant-like aliens who show them images that distill their essential natures in this fascinating story.

The three are Cornfeld, Iris, and Rennert. The story is told from Cornfeld's perspective, a somewhat meek man described as having long hair as part of a subtext that portrays him as emasculated. Rennert, by contrast, is an aggressive prick whom Cornfeld believes raped Iris. After Cornfeld pulls Iris from the wrecked ship, she wakes up pleading ambiguously for Rennert to stop what he's doing, though Rennert isn't present in the scene. The story never has Iris herself directly claiming Rennert raped her, though, and it remains ambiguous as to whether he actually did rape her or if Cornfeld just sees it that way because of how he resents Iris for being attracted to Rennert.

The ambiguities of perspective are always a complicating aspect of these kinds of things--except, in this story, the alien ants are supposed to do the extraordinary job of removing that ambiguity by reading and rendering--as apparitions--the true nature of the viewer. But even then there's ambiguity because Rennert's vision of devils might mean he's fundamentally rotten or it might mean his instincts run contrary to prevailing mores--and those two things are not the same.

But so are myths open to interpretation, even as they convey truth better than anything.

Ghosts and Fossils

Here are some fossils I saw in a science building at San Diego State University to-day. A Phorusrhacos skull and a little Archaeopteryx. Along with the strange feeling of seeing physical evidence of a creature long extinct, seeing fossils up close makes me think about how incredible it is that these things exist at all, imagining these shapes in soil and stone over such a long, long period. Shapes that have significance to us because of how we think about life and death but are just more stuff as far as all the dirt and rocks are concerned. There's no motivation to preserve these shapes for millions of years, and yet they're preserved.

I felt like reading a short story to-day so I grabbed a collection by Harlan Ellison before I left the apartment this morning. On the trolley I read a story from 1972 called "On the Downhill Side", the first story in the collection, about a couple of ghosts in New Orleans. It kind of reminds me of the first story in another collection I often pick up when I'm randomly in the mood for short stories, "White Nights" by Dostoevksy, also about two lost souls, also a man and woman, who meet by chance in the street and who talk about relationships. But Ellison's story has a unicorn and some kind of demoniac fog entities with firefly eyes. It's also about people with some kind of mixture of personality and luck who are kept perpetually alone.

Usually when people talk about great Science Fiction authors they talk about concepts, the ideas that prompt the stories--the outer space locations, the manifestation of AI, etc. But with Ellison, as with other greats, its plain and simple great writing that makes those ideas take hold. "Lizette and I were the two sides of the same coin; devalued and impossible to spend," the narrator says at one point. These imagery ideas come up in Ellison so quickly and sometimes they're figurative, sometimes they seem figurative at first and then turn out to be literal, sometimes they exist in some borderline place. The story places grave significance on the potential of a relationship between its leads--the unicorn and the woman's virginity give the story clear sexual overtones that are plainly vulgar and wistfully operatic. I would love to see this story filmed with a heavy metal soundtrack.

But the fantastic imagery doesn't merely express the physical urge, it ties it to a broader human need and the torment in the ambiguity of cause in relationships, the constant nagging thoughts about whether one pushed too hard or not hard enough. A fitting state of mind for the two ghosts who are the story's subject; what more appropriate state of mind to reflect the doom of eternally wandering a city alone?

A Troublemaker Departs

I first started reading Harlan Ellison almost twenty years ago. The great, renowned Science Fiction writer who passed away on Thursday night was for me a gateway between two different kinds of storytelling. I was a Trekkie when I was a kid, I guess I still am, more or less, though I got a C in Star Trek class in college. I know I saw "City on the Edge of Forever" when I was little so that would've been my first exposure to Ellison's work. By my senior year in high school, I was straying from the Apollonian, concept oriented world of Science Fiction like Star Trek with the feeling that there was a bigger world to be found in fiction that focused on emotional experience. I started watching a greater diversity of movies and reading a greater diversity of books. I became obsessed with the Beats who, aside from some of the imagery and ideas of William S. Burroughs, were about as far from the Sci-Fi I read as a kid as you could get. But thankfully I discovered Harlan Ellison and this illusory paradigm was broken down for me.

I have a distinct memory of sitting outside of an astronomy class on a little grassy plot almost twenty years ago and reading "Broken Glass", a story included in Ellison's Angry Candy collection. It was a kind of blend of volatile psychological writing and Sci-Fi concept I hadn't encountered before, the first person experience of a young woman on a bus who discovers someone is invading her daydream. It's not even one of his best or one of his best known stories but his attention to conveying the sense of the experience, something that might've been considered a waste of space by other writers more focused on communicating concept, was the kind of thing I thought I'd have to look outside of Sci-Fi for.

I followed this by exploring his older work and not only did he elevate Sci-Fi for me but he was part of a re-evaluation of many of my old favourites I'd lost interest in, discovering knew ways in which the stories impacted me or realising ways in which they'd impacted me all along but I'd failed to appreciate.

Many of his obituaries are talking about the trouble behind the scenes in "City on the Edge of Forever". I don't blame Ellison for disliking the way it's filmed--it has too many close-ups and too many broad musical stings. But having the episode brought to mind yesterday was strangely appropriate. All day I'd been thinking about the debate about civility in political discourse. Generally I'm a proponent of civility and I've been alarmed by how much hyperbole there has been in writing from all sides of the political spectrum. I see the usual Star Wars memes, people painting their opponents as Jabba the Hutt or Darth Vader. Peter Herman, professor at San Diego State University who I'm friends with on facebook, posted articles from the 30s where columnists urged Jews to be more civil to the Nazis. The similarity to "City on the Edge of Forever" immediately struck me--Edith Keeler, the character played by Joan Collins, whose urging of pacifism results in a victory for the Axis powers in the alternate timeline, almost seems like one of those columnists.

What struck me, though, was the emotional experience of uncertainty, the feeling that drastic action must be taken, without knowledge of which is the proper action, and arguments for both on either side. After all, eschewing civility also led to internment camps for Japanese American citizens during the second World War. There's always another side of the coin. Personally, the civility I'd advocate is not towards Nazis but rather more thought put into deciding who's a Nazi and who isn't. We can laugh at Bradley Whitford saying he voted for Obama in Get Out but should we really think of the people who voted for both Obama and for Trump as murderers because they can't or won't understand the implications of Trump's rhetoric and ideas? Is it better to bully them or to look for a way to enlighten them? Do enough people have the strength Kirk had, knowing the ambiguities--having a strong feeling that what he was doing was wrong but knowing what he was doing was right? In her essay about the MeToo movement, Margaret Atwood suggested maybe this isn't the time for writers like her who focus on the nuances of human nature and psychology. Do we need a propaganda machine dehumanising others so the average, uneducated citizen doesn't have to think about these choices? Do we need a Ticktockman?

At the beginning of "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", Ellison quotes from Thoreau:

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

And this is why one tends to prefer the Harlequin in the story over the Ticktockman. But as Ellison points out in the introduction to the story where it's included in the collection Troublemakers, "The lesson here is one that will get you clobbered if you follow it. Run your life at your own pace, not that of the Man."