2. Letter to Tom Whitmore, (Toronto, 7 December 1983). Lately, while standing in the entry-hall downstairs, putting on or taking off my three layers of sweaters and two layers of socks (wool on the outside), scrunching my watch-cap down over my ears, wrapping my head and neck in a large muffler, buttoning my coat, and putting on my gloves, I have been having Philosophic Thoughts. Like: "I know why people live in Toronto. It's too much trouble with the Immigration people to move south, and the weather is worse everywhere else in Canada except in Vancouver, where there are no jobs. But why do people live in Buffalo?" There's a sort of running joke around here, perpetuated by the editorial cartoonist for a local paper. In most of his cartoons, somewhere in the background or off in a corner there'll be something like a small biplane trailing a banner that says "Mild, isn't it?" I think the basic idea is that that's the best you can say about the weather here. A real crackup joke. Actually, the other day Patrick was unobtrusively listening in on a couple of guys in line at the bank. One of them had grown up in Yellowknife, and the other had just returned from a business trip to Manitoba. They were talking about how hard Toronto weather is to take, even though it's considerably more temperate than, say, Yellowknife. "Yeah," said one of them, "it gets pretty damn cold in Manitoba, too, but it's a dry cold."
3. Letter of comment to Ted White's Egoscan, (Toronto, 20 January 1984: The Iguanacon Rant}. I've been trying to think of a way to get around saying "I enjoyed reading about Constellation's financial disasters," but in all honesty I can't-- there's an unlooked-for luxury in sitting back and saying "Holy Moly. Forty thousand dollars. No! Sixty-nine thousand dollars! Criminently, that sure is a lot of money," while comfortably bearing in mind that I can in no way be held responsible. I get the titillation of all those figures with no guilt attached. Isn't that awful? I'm working up some compensatory guilt over it.
My other reaction is even worse. Now, watch my hands closely while I enjoy myself: I got into fandom in Phoenix, just in time to get sucked into the bidding and subsequent unfortunate production of the 36th Worldcon. After Iguanacon my constructive fanac was almost entirely on paper; still, in a fannish universe that contains you, plus Gary Farber and a few others I could name, discussions of worldcon-running are almost impossible to avoid. Do you know what I've had to listen to the whole time I've been in fandom? A bunch of old farts, some of them in their teens, sitting around and grousing about How We Did It When We Ran The Worldcon.
Well, hallelujah. Revenge. All that work I did in Phoenix, hot weather and dumb feuds and getting used like a Kleenex sometimes, is about to pay off:
"(Harrumph!) WHAT'S THAT?!!! You say that Constellation LOST MONEY? By God, this is too much! We would never have stood for it in my day, let me tell you! Why, I remember when I was just a mere tad of a fan, barely up from my neohood and working on Iguanacon (and people had the nerve to complain about the hot weather in Baltimore! Well, we could've shown them a thing or two), and we found out that the hotel contracts hadn't been signed six months before the convention was to start AND FURTHERMORE THE CONVENTION HAD NEVER BEEN INCORPORATED AT ALL! I tell you, that was the last straw. The committee sacked the Chairman! Yep, and sacked a whole bunch of other people too, before it was over. I was just a neo in those days, running more important folks around in my car and making bricks without straw and covering up for committee members when they had to go off for a spell of hysterics, but I'll never forget what it was like, not if I live to be a hundred. Ex-committee- members' heads rolling out of the meeting rooms in the Adams Hotel, bouncing down the hall carpeting and winding up in the foyer by the escalators--well, now, that was something! Great days! That committee would sack anybody. Why, I recall one time when half the committee got together and offered to sack themselves! They didn't, mind you; in the end they sacked somebody else instead, but then one person who'd watched the whole thing got so carried away by the glory of it all that he sacked himself too! Just like that. You youngsters wouldn't know what to make of that, eh? (wheeze, carry on.)
"No, and they don't make treasurers like they used to, either. All bank-clerk types now, mealymouthing on about decentralized spending authority, whatever that is. I'm sure we didn't know about it at Iggy and we didn't need to; our treasurers were made of sturdier stuff, all three sets of 'em. Our first lot took most of the money and hid it and told the Chairman that there wasn't any. That was so that at the convention, when the Chairman came crying to them saying 'We're going to have to shut down the Worldcon, 'cause we don't have another quarter for the parking meter next to Harlan's RV', they could bring out their mattress full of greenbacks and save the day and all the committee members would fall on each others' necks in tears of gratitude and joy like the end of a stage play. Really something, eh? Got sacked for it, I think. Or maybe burnt up by a cigarette lighter; I forget. Our second treasurer didn't even keep a ledger. Didn't need to--she had all the check-stubs and loose receipts in a shoebox under her bed so if anyone tried to heist 'em during the night her crazy militarist husband could roll out of bed and squash the burglar like a bug. She got sacked too, glory glory! Our third treasurer only stopped working long enough to have a baby, like those Chinee women you hear about who take fifteen minutes off to deliver the brat and then go back to hoeing weeds, then she waltzed right back in and set the whole treasury in order. (harrumph, wheeze, wave cane.)
"And that ain't the half of it, but I'm done talking; there's some as worked on that convention as have families still living who'd recognize the people I'm talking about and maybe feel hurt. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and you'd know what I mean if you'd got a half-decent education instead of the pap they're dishing out in school these days.
''All I've got to say is this (lean forward on cane, glare out of rheumy eyes, chew wetly on mustache): EVEN IGUANACON MADE MONEY! Lots of it! Twenty-five thousand smackers, and we gave it all away! And when I think back on all the dunderheaded mistakes, the lollygagging around and in- Competence! of some of the Iggy committee--when I think back on a convention that DESERVED the wrath of God so's to make the Johnstown Flood look like a Tennessee birdwalk--and then hear that Constellation LOST money--well! I can't help thinking some of those folks must be a pretty. sorry. lot. Yep. (thump cane on floor for emphasis.)"
*Sigh.* I've been waiting to do that for years.
[N.B.: The statements quoted above do not at any point refer to the actual Constellation committee, nor do they reflect the views of the management. Unfortunately, at the time of the interview Ms. Walters's subject had already lapsed into complete senility. Also: Constellation merely spent money. Iguanacon spent people.]
4. Unfinished letter (New York, c. 1984): Take the "A" Train. We're in New York now, living a few blocks from the l90th street "A" train stop. I want someone to do a new musical arrangement for "Take the 'A' Train." It would be played at half the normal speed, and partway through the band suddenly stops and just sits there for fifteen minutes while the conductor cups his hands around a microphone and makes muffled announcements in Mandarin Chinese and the audience groans in unison. Then the band would play a few more bars and stop again, while the conductor announces that everyone sitting to the right of the center aisle must go find a seat on the left side and vice versa. Any member of the audience not complying with this will be forcibly seized and carried out, to be later deposited in Far Rockaway. And all that jazz.
5. Letter to John Jarrold (New York, 10 November 1985). ...Enclosed is the somewhat overdue article for your illustrious zine. I tried to get it to you later, but was hampered by the fact that the piece was finished two years ago. But I did make the effort, I promise; I ran it through the typer several times to smooth out the glitchy bits of language you only notice when you're actually typing it letter by letter (the word processor has done vast damage to the cause of English prose, and I want one). For a while there I thought I'd got hold of a really promising-looking delay--a large expository excrescence that started forming about seven-eighths of the way down the first page--but Patrick firmly pointed out that it was a fanarticulate cuckoo-chick prompted by several pages of comments I wrote last week on some 23-year-old secret apa mailings borrowed from Moshe Feder's collection. He then told me that if I surgically removed the expository lump I could transplant it to those earlier pages of APEX comments and perform recombinant DNA redraftings. When it grows up it will either be a very weird article, or a very weird letter to a Ted White buried twenty years in the past. Ought to surprise Ted, at any rate.
After this successful ploy, Patrick pointed out that all I needed to do on the piece for Prevert was type out a fair copy. In a moment of weakness I succumbed, and so you have it. It makes me feel . . . oh, reminiscent, and nostalgic, sort of, about the other time a faneditor to whom I was not married succeeded in prying a finished article out of me. That was back in the summer of '82, when John D. Berry got me to write "Apocalypse Now and Then" for Wing Window. If I close my eyes and concentrate on the dear dead past, I can still hear him saying, " No, Teresa, you can not have it back for one more rewrite!"
6. Postcard to Avedon Carol (New York, 22 July 1986). Am readjusting medications: strange dreams and times, unloading 2+ years' backlogged waterlogged REMsleep. Down at the bottom of the river my ears mix hot Broadway night and our stereo with old agendas. Tires on pavement make it rain. Albums on the stereo make Patrick wander into dreams playing his guitar. Swimming up toward the surface I think (-- must stop this--), grab pill bottle off my desk. My head breaks the surface of the water: I'm lying on the sofa, and when I close my hand the tangible bottle in it vanishes. (-- Ah.--) Dive again. Limited process I hope, I think the ache in my bones was old backed-up stagnant sleep. Now it runs again, so for a while I go bobbing down the stream like a cork (-- whee--).
7. Unfinished letter to Avedon Carol (, 29 July 1986). . . . Last Saturday morning I staggered out into the living room, where Tom and Patrick told me there hadn't been anything in the mail except a bank statement. Then Patrick shouted, "No! I lied! Your Cylert arrived!", and tossed it into my lap. I took one of the pills. Half an hour later I suddenly sat up straight and sort of involuntarily said, "Deo gratias!" The lights came back on again inside my head. . . . I believe you've gotten a postcard I wrote you during this current period of adjusting from one drug to another, when several backed-up freight trains of REM sleep came barreling through. Patrick and Tom and Gary have all been picked up by me and waltzed 'round the room several times, and have bemusedly agreed that yes, I do seem to be feeling better, for now at least. Tom and Patrick have been particularly patient with the New Weird Symptom. This time it's been attacks of mild cataplexy in the evenings, inexplicably combined with giggles plus a tendency to hatch strange ideas and schemes which so far they've managed to talk me out of. I have my little fit of hilarity for about an hour, and roll about on the sofa, laughing and making oracular pronouncements, eventually winding up limply giggling on the floor. Then one of them hauls me back up onto the sofa and puts on another record "for me to listen to," which I think means "to distract me while they go about whatever they'd been doing." Sterling fellows, both of them.
8. Letter to Dave Langford (New York, 12 August 1986): New York Life. Thanks for the latest Ansible. ( . . . Excuse me--in the midst of typing that last line a couple in the building across the street undressed and got into bed. Interesting to watch someone else's habitual sequence on that, and the wild flailings-about when the man couldn't get one arm out of his shirtsleeve were particularly amusing; but they should probably cultivate the habit of turning the light out and then disrobing . . . We now return you to our regularly-scheduled letter. . . )
. . . Patrick's just wandered in and accused me of contributory negligence in the household's dietary deficiency of banana cream pie. Seems he'd been opening and shutting cupboards and drawers in the kitchen, hoping subconsciously that some hitherto-unaccountably-ignored Perfect Nosh would turn up. Closure was effected on the issue, and Patrick will be back from the bodega across the street with the pint of ice cream any minute now.
Where was I? Yes. No! Further adventures. From Broadway came floating up the metallic rattle of the bodega closing its shutters. I stuck my head out: would Patrick manage to nip in at the last moment and get the ice cream? In fact he emerged from it just at that moment, I cheered, he saw me, we waved at each other victoriously, he'll come in the door any second now. New York can be a very interesting place, and if you have a window facing high over Broadway you don't need a television set.
Yr. correspondent is now back again with a dish of vanilla and strawberry ice cream; Patrick achieved a pint of both. He is a hero.
. . . It's after midnight here; time to wrap this up and go to bed. In front of the apartment building across the street a couple of drunks are yelling at each other in Spanish, while upstairs the couple still have their lights on but are now sitting motionless in separate rooms. The tenants above them appear to have a jack-o-lantern which they move back and forth from time to time. Maybe life in New York is an endless succession of the middle two or three manuscript pages of short stories, other pages lost, and author unknown.
9. Postcard to Michael Ashley (New York, 19 August 1986). Deeply regret necessity of informing you that as nearly as I can make out, your assorted statements regarding aesthetic theory, the identity of terror and exhilaration, the desirability of dangerous, threatening, or overwhelming experiences, and the need to constantly re-assert creative perceptions in opposition to established social structures, place you dead center in the traditions of late-eighteenth-century, early-nineteenth-century Romanticism. Give my regards to the Sublime.
10. Letter to Ted White (New York, 2 November 1986): Secrets. . . . For you, fandom is a place where the 1964 Pacificon feud is a piece of known history. For me, coming into fandom in the mid-1970s, it was like growing up in a city that has been visited in the past by some awful disaster, and the ruins are there but nobody talks about what happened. Or like being a kid in a family that has some nasty unmentionable secret; of course you know it's there, and its troublesome ghost turns up at too many banquets. I hate that feeling--knowing there's something significant but unmentionable--because I've never been able to ignore it, not even as a child: The weird twist in language when it's veering around a still-radioactive zone. The off-tempo pacing of a sentence that's had clauses and referents chopped out--like a badly-edited tape, little clicks and thumps and bits of dead air that shouldn't be
there. That childhood sense of being sick to my stomach, thinking how people close to me look when they're simultaneously not telling me something and reassuring me that really, it's nothing, I shouldn't worry about it. I can tell myself, well, maybe it really isn't anything worth worrying about; but there's a little kid somewhere inside me whispering, "Why keep something a secret that isn't important?"
11. Unfinished letter (New York, 18 November 1986): Revisions of the End of the World. . . . Someday I think I'll have stationery printed up with little check-off boxes for my boilerplate paragraphs. There'll be one for "I'm sorry this has taken so long," and one for "I'm sorry to be running on at this length," and one for "honestly, I don't expect anyone to reply to my correspondence promptly or at commensurate length," and probably a couple for "we've had a series of small ambushes and disasters lately" and "I forget whether I've told you all this before." I understand that if I had one of those nifty programmable word processors I could set it up so that all I'd have to do would be to punch in a code number and it would automatically print out, "I've just realized I'm falling asleep at the typewriter here, so I'll pick this all up later and in the meantime please disregard the preceding three paragraphs." A relief to all concerned, no doubt.
. . . Actually, at the moment things aren't half bad. I even got some of my mending-backlog dealt with, a sure sign of something or other. Oh, and Lucy phoned a couple of weeks ago to say that she'd lost her job and cut off most of her hair and might be visiting New York, but I'm not altogether clear on the manifold implications and relationships of these revelations. Avedon's most lasting contribution to fandom may have been the line "Life is too complex."
Patrick and I were both home with a virus this morning, and while we were sitting around, feebly breakfasting on coffee, aspirin, and vitamins, I told him about last night's fever-dreams. It was the End of the World, I gather, and the bit in the Bible about lost things being found again turned out to mean that everyone's lost cats all came back at once, en masse. I ran into a wandering troupe of millenarian evangelicals who announced that they were all One In The Spirit, and when I figured out they meant they were all a Group Mind they grinned at me with wicked good cheer. I drank a beaker full of some awful grape-flavored stuff that was supposed to make me a part of their group mind, but all it did was make my molars shatter and fall out. I wandered further and wound up back in Phoenix, which was full of Ranters and Levellers, in particular one nice elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ranter, parents of TV newsman Dan Ranter. I went out onto the edge of the desert and watched the sky split open, all full of thickly-clustered gold stars inside like Christmas lights, and then God appeared except she was the Snake Mother, naked and smiling, with snakes curling around her arms, though aside from that she looked just like the lady on Ivory Soap boxes. I woke up just as I was thinking, This is going to be a better End of the World than I thought. Patrick said he'd recognize it anywhere as one of my dreams: the usual amalgam of family, religion, fandom, bizarre medicine, dental calamity, and social panic--I just realized that I left out the part about finding that I'd gotten onto an elevated subway car in Toronto with Patrick and Tom but without any clothes on: a standard motif--plus bad puns and some hairy pseudo-Jungian imagery gleaned from a childhood's unsupervised reading. We agreed that it was on the whole unremarkable, and that life had been like that lately. We had another cup of coffee.
12. Postcard to Linda Pickersgill (New York, November 1986): Losing It. . . . I haven't finished writing to you in time and my tolerance for the latest prescription ran out so suddenly it was like walking face-first into a wall. I am . . . um, I've gotten part-way through some four separate letters, lost pages, lost track, can't remember what I'm doing. My room is suddenly full of vast amounts of indecipherable paper. I go looking for one thing, find others dating anywhere from 1982 to last week; why some lots are grouped with others no longer makes any obvious sense. I know there was some logic to it all, once. If this sounds like mild panic, there's a reason. . . . I know I'm in here somewhere and you're out there somewhere, but . . . but . . . er . . . shit. Lost it again. Look, if this sounds like the drivelings of some drunken idiot, could you charitably burn it and forget I wrote it?
13. Unfinished letter to Greg Pickersgill (New York, , 21 December 1986): Losing It Reconsidered. So what's new. Not much (your riff). My faculties are slipping again, which isn't too bad in its way unless I think about it, or try to do something complicated and entirely lose track of the work halfway through then get frustrated and Lose It completely. As usual, the more I have to say the less I'm able to coherently say it. Can't find the end of the string in the tangle.
As I think I recall I was trying to explain to Patrick a while back, maybe this morning, I'm cooking up a new model of how memory works. I take as my text the different ways I've lost mine . . . The anticataplectic drugs they tried me on a few years back caused some temporary--and I believe some permanent--memory loss, starting with single nouns and working onwards from there. It felt like a brick missing from a wall, or a dental cavity big enough for my tongue to find: empty space where something known had previously been. So, first theory: memories is bricks. Very rudimentary.
Now I'm starting to think that the larger structures of memory are more like a matrix with little factoids embedded in it, each having branching connections to other factoids nearby. I found that when I lost a word I could circle around the gap and pick up adjacent, related information. Like when I lost "mercenary" I poked about and came up with a contemporary line drawing of a Renaissance mercenary (next adjacent field after that being a technical discussion of slashed-and-puffed tailoring, useless at the moment); the word "condottieri" (leading into a tangle of information on the careers of Sir John Hawkwood and Enguerrand de Coucy, all mentally tagged "see Tuchman, passim"); and the definition, "one who soldiers for pay" (thence to the synonym "soldier of fortune," and to Soldier of Fortune magazine): clues enough for Patrick to supply me with the missing word.
Anyway, in the year and a half since my supply of gamma hydroxybutyrate got cut off (long slow deterioration, but at this point even Patrick admits it's getting worse, and he'd had his heels dug in on that issue) my memory loss has been a loss of matrix-access. Things aren't exactly gone, no telltale holes in the wall, but I can't find my way to the brick wanted. I have an inchoate sense that it's all there somewhere, and at moments (like when I finally got hold of some Cylert again) it all comes back, present and accounted for and standing in orderly ranks. On reflection I've decided to find this reassuring, on the grounds that perhaps someday there'll be a means by which I can be in this condition most of the time, and then (like Judgment Day) all lost things will be found again, and I'll arise resurrected and singing hymns of praise.
More precisely, access isn't impossible, just slow and chancy. If I can find one memory-cue in approximately the right neighborhood, after a while the slow-motion hunt finds the pathways branching off from that point, and more memories and connections turn up in a gradually spreading pattern. When I'm editing a chapter of litcrit excerpts at work I stack up all my xeroxed essays and settle down for a single marathon choose-compile-and-edit session. If I'm not seriously interrupted during this process, the whole complex mass of relevant bits, parts, tasks, decisions, asnd sequential steps will show up and hang around for the duration, cued by each other, held together by their logical interconnection.
It's not an overwhelmingly useful model--it doesn't help--but it might give you a larger context for the glitches in my writing and thinking you've already met piecemeal, like my inability to explain anything without explaining everything else connected with it. The vast loose wad of exposition that ensues is direly complemented by my digressiveness: too many opportunities to get off on the wrong track, more than enough time while writing it all down for the original point I was floundering towards to drop out of my head. This indiscriminate mental osmosis means that one wrong detour can lead me very far afield indeed, and next thing I know I'm going on about Barbara Tuchman again. (Did that with a letter to Ted last month; whole thing was eaten by the Battle of Verdun.)
To maintain my grasp of the original subject I have to hold the whole thing, with all its attendant matrix connections, entire in my head. Very daunting--the progress of writing feels like herding troops of mice over rough terrain. Little buggers keep popping in and out of sight, diving down holes, stopping to nibble something instead of advancing, and if I get too agitated they scatter in alarm.
It certainly feels that way right now. Do you apprehend that I'm having to carry forward this whole befuddled rodomontade merely in order to say what's been happening to me lately? Did I say that already? Um . . . yes. Sorry. You know, I think it's very likely that this complex file-juggling is just normal mentation, stuff you usually do so automatically that you never have to notice how it works, and this ocean of chaotic detail I experience is just my . . . peculiarly . . . slowed . . . down . . . neurology bringing it all too much to my attention, a sort of perceptual stop-motion photography. The window's walled up, so the wall is the view; might as well look at it.