[LAF] FW: Dhalgren

[Joy Wood]

Some extracts from the 1974 sci-fi classic "Dhalgren" by Samuel R Delany: p300 (Lanya talking to Kid about the time she was consulting a psychiatrist and gave up art)
     "'But I realised something.  About art.  And psychiatry.  They're both self-perpetuating systems.  Like religion.  All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.  As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system.  They're all in a rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal batle.  Like all self-reinforcing systems.  At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups.  You know:  religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry.  Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religous experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe and render his portraits more accurately.  And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life.  At worst, they all try to destroy one another.  Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting.  I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon.  I just didn't want to get all wound up in any sytems at all.'"; p355 (Newboy is talking to Kid)
     "'...the roster of Nobel laureates...is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance:  lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced they had substantially advanced their languages.  Your Miss Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced...'"; [I googled Emily Dickinson:   http://www.bartleby.com/113/ ] p420 (Kid has got out of bed in the middle of the night, leaving his lovers Lanya and Denny still in bed.  He thinks)
     "I had a mother, I had a father.  Now I don't remember their names.  I don't remember mine.  In another room, two people are sleeping who are nearer to me by how many years and thousands of miles; for whom, in this terrifying light, I would almost admit love."; p440 (Kid is writing and thinking)
     "Actions are interesting to watch.  I learn about the actors.  Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve.  About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions.  Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness.  Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again."; p511 (Kid is talking to Lanya and Denny.  That morning, John and Milly from the park commune had been round with a delegation because, in a drunken episode, Dollar (from Kid's "nest") had murdered Wally (from the park commune).  Kid says to Lanya)
     "'You don't believe in capital punishment as long as there're mental hospitals, right?  With violent wards.  Well, we don't have any violent wards [they are living in an anarchical city].  We don't have any jails either.  I don't believe in capital punishment period!  I think if one person kills somebody else because he gets his rocks off, or he just wants to, that's . . . well, maybe not right.  But a bunch of people getting together and deciding to kill somebody else because it's anything from right to expedient, is wrong!'"    "'Lord,' Lanya said again.  'Donatien Alphonse Francois de---'" [ie, the Marquis de Sade] p531 (Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss and Chomsky get a mention.)
     "Philosophy, Anthropology, and Linguistics...Those particularly parametric works (the Tractatus, La Geste d'Asdiwal, Syntactic Structures - though all three men have written much longer works, work of this type must be very short; none of these is above 30 thousand words) do not discuss field of study; they drop careful, crystalline catalysts, which on any logical mind (as opposed to trained minds familiar with galleries of evidence and evalutions) perforce generate complicated and logical discussions of the subject using whatever evidence is at hand, limited only by the desire or ability to retain interest in the dialogue propagating in the inner ear." p609-610 Kamp (an astronaut) discusses LSD, sensory overload, information-deprivation, pattern recognition, his moon walk and the pressure to describe something in terms which others will understand when you KNOW the words can never describe it correctly. p694  (Three women are talking loudly when others are trying to sleep, and Tarzan objects to this):     "...'Look ladies, people are sleeping in the back room, huh?'  There are twelve tones of voice in which you can say that:  three of them would have gotten him an apology with muffled giggles.  He chose, at random, from the other nine." p702 (Kid's journal entries, this time about him and Lanya and Denny)
     "They crawled into bed beside me, and we talked till it grew light, Denny being the only one of us who doesn't realize how much easier that makes liking one another." p707-709  More clever stuff from Kamp, this time on "Megalithic Republics", too long to quote - go buy your own copy. p720 "...the difference is that they are sure that any social structures that arise grow out of patterns innate to The Sex Act - whatever that is; while we have seen, again and again, that the psychology, structures, and acoutrements that define any sex act are always internalized from social structures that already exist, that have been created, that can be changed.  All right:  Let me ask the terrible question:  Could it be that all those perfectly straight, content-with-their-sexual-orientation-in-the-world, exclusive-heterosexuals really are (in some ill-defined, psychological way that will ultimately garner a better world) more healthy than (gulp...!) us?  Let me answer:  No way!  The active ones (of whichever sex) are denser and crueler.  The passive ones (of whichever sex) are lazier and more self-satisfied.  In a society where they are on top, they cling like drowners to their active/passive, male/female, master/servant, self/other set-up not for pleasure, which would be reasonable, but because it allows them to commit or condone any lack of compassion among themselves, or with anyone else, and that (at least in this society, as they have set it up) is immoral, sick and evil..." The above excerpt makes me think of the article in the Guardian Comment Is Free column on Monday where you took on the trolls, Sarah.  You inspired me so much that I had a go, too, but came away feeling bad - they just ignore what we say and hone in on perhaps one point which could be pulled apart and then stomp it into the ground, all the time braying about their right to buy people for sex and the prostitute's liberal bedrock right to sell herself to them. p757  (Kid overhears Black Widow talking)
     "'It's not that men and women are identical; it's just that they are so near identical in all but the politcal abuses and privileges that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of 'innate' differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage." p770 (Madame Brown, talking to Kid ("I")):
     "'The point is, Kid, we still don't treat the mentally ill as though they were just sick.  We treat them as though they were some strange combination of unclean, depraved, and evil.  You know, the first mental hospitals in Europe were leprosaria, deserted all over the continent at the end of the middle ages...the insane had never been hospitalized before.  But when they were suddenly confined in these immense, empty buildings that, in some cases for hundreds of years, had held lepers, they took on as well the burden of three thousand years of superstition and fear connected with that unfortuante disease...Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord.  Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge.  But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents have lived theirs.  And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold.  Tell me, what would you say to the idea tht all your problems - the hallucinations, the depressions, even the moments of ecstasy - were biogenic?  That the lapses of memory are an RNA depletion in the lower cortex; that the sudden fears are adrenal disruptions caused by random pituitary spasms; that the unreality that plagues you is merely a pineal cyst, inhibiting the production of serotonin?'
     ...'That's sure as hell what it feels like,' I said.
     'Then, you differ from the businessmen, in that they are usually rather reluctant to give up any of the extrabiological significance of their symptoms.  The over-determined human mind would rather have everything relevant, even if the relevance is simple-minded.'"
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