Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  And above all, I should never have advanced a view of sex which violates the great sacred totem of our time: the all-importance of copulation. My view of sex looks at the reproduction of the race, and really trivializes intercourse. How blasphemous can you get?

  Anyone silly enough to put down the central industry of our day, the Playboy scene, the D. H. Lawrence gospel, has to start with an hour of propitiatory dances and ritual purification.

  And of course I should never have used the word mother. (Maybe not male, either.) Mother seems to be the last dirty word. In trying ruminations on other people, Fve had reactions of—believe it—fear and rage. As if we were afraid to look at a behavior which accounts for our existence. Fear of stereotypes, maybe; and maybe justified, if blindness is ever justified. But the stop signals somehow do not stop me; I think there is something hidden there.

  Consider: If men alone had always raised infants, how monumental, how privileged a task it would be! We would have tons of conceptual literature on infant-father interaction, technical journals, research establishments devoted to it, a huge esoteric vocabulary. It would be as sacred as the stock exchange or football, and we would spend hours hearing of it.

  But because women do it, it is invisible and embarrassing.

  Look at the atmosphere that surrounds the small area of child-raising that men do: prep schools and college teaching. Think what a “professor” is! And he has perhaps taught a young person the names of some minerals or French poets.

  But the mother who taught the young person to speak at all—she has done nothing.

  Right?

  (I am reminded of the story of how it was discovered that black leopards are not inherently vicious. For as long as man kept them, zookeepers knew they were the most savage of all animals, hating man from birth. Then one day a N.Y. zookeeper’s wife took a new cub home and raised it normally. Abrupt end of one myth.)

  All of which boils down to saying that I, personally, want to go on looking at this behavior. And since there is nothing duller that a minority defending itself, let’s leave it at that.

  I gather you suspect me of paranoia, or at least an inaccurate grasp of the power balance between men and women and/or whites and blacks. Well, yes, I am paranoid. We’re all prisoners of our histories, and mine has included concentration camps on American soil; 50,000 Americans robbed of their land and possessions and caged in a desert behind barbed wire. The lesson of my time is, If it is inHuman, cruel, and unthinkable, it’ll happen.

  Of course I don’t believe it will… at least on my better days. And I would be very glad to live long enough to be proved wrong. Very happy.

  But as I mentioned to Joanna, I am the type of person who gets a twinge down the spine when I see the gun holstered on a cop’s square arse. And I can count guns. The opening scenes of Charnas’s novel Walk to the End of the World struck me as all too lifelike. In fact, I’ve seen it alive. So… here’s hoping.

  Let me end with a question that occurred to me:

  If men did not exist, would women have invented them?

  If women did not exist, I do believe men, alone, would have invented them or something very much like them. (I have changed my mind, by the way: Of course it is not women who are aliens. Men are.) And I wonder, in literature or life, would women alone have invented men?

  Would you?

  —February 11, 1975

  Good-bye, old, new, and ex-friends; it’s 5:00 a.m. and 85° F down here, the sand is blowing, the sea is pink, the pelicans are sailing—and I have to go kill cockroaches. Probably mother cockroaches, too.

  Seems to be symposium time again, assuming you want any more from me. I feel about as relevant as a cuckoo clock in eternity.

  But I did feel the good, hot, exciting relevance of all your letters, even those that diverge or disagree. Revolutions are not monodirec-tional streams, they are turbulent wave fronts full of Yes buts and squabbles over priorities, if not worse.

  I read the bundle at the same time that I was reading the winter issue of Aphra and Howe and Bass’s feminist poetry collection No More Masks. That’s worth getting, by the way, if you haven’t. I admit to a touch of disappointment that they didn’t find room for at least a line or two from some of the older forgotten women. Anybody else here an admirer of Anna Wickham (“My work has the incompetence of pain”)? There is a verse of hers that struck deep in my mind.

  I have to thank God I’m a woman,

  For in these ordered days a woman only

  Is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

  That’s worth a lot of ranting about beautiful urns. And I may say she isn’t as irrelevant to our topic here as I am. Her poem that begins

  “Up the crag/In the screaming wind/Naked and bleeding/I fought blind”—ends when “In the house of my love/I found a pen” It’s called “Weapons.”

  For how many of us, me in my way, you in yours, are not our pens the weapons with which we can do something—a tiny something—about wrongs? Even if only to name them?

  To our muttons.

  Of the letters, the two which spoke most immediately to me were Kate’s and Suzy’s—because they spoke so clearly of what are my own fears of the abuse of power and death. (Kate, how guilty are you going to make me feel? You’re deep in all those things I quit even dabbling at when I had my recent bout of illness. Someday I want to ask you more about AIM; Craig Strete has given me, and, I suspect, Joanna, some slightly devastating insights. Probably like everything, biased. He’s very, well, young.)

  But Suzy. Dear lady, your essay on the death-relatedness of women was excruciatingly interesting. But—if you will forgive a stranger—may I seize your arm, gaze into your eyes and plead with you to cast that thought from you with all your power?

  It’s not that it’s totally untrue; we can find Death in almost anything, in fall, in drought, in animals, in our hearts, in the physical processes of our bodies, female or male. (Believe me.) Maybe what you say has appealed to the mythic terrors in some people in some places. But it is not a thought you should dwell on—forgive me again. Because to me it rang a terrifying bell. I have heard that same reasonable, intellectually excited tone in the writings of some few highly intellectualized Jewish writers who thought they could see why non-Jews could hate them, why they were peculiarly persecutable. Hateful. Exterminable—appropriate for extermination. Yes.

  This took place during World War II, so you may have missed it. But those, Suzy, were men. You must realize that 99 percent of what you’re dealing with here is far more easily explained as the self-hatred of the oppressed. It is a deeply pernicious thing, preventing friendship and solidarity. I have had a close look at it in some older women—my mother would vote for Midge Dector—and it wrings the heart. It has nothing to do with deathliness. In fact, I’ve known something of the same feeling in the wretched soldiers, the Tommies of Colonial Empire, who felt they merited, were suited for, death. Men felt this about themselves.

  Of course I realize you are saying that it is only a belief, that bodily processes can scare both men and women into feelings that are deathly. And you are (to me) quite right in pointing out that the fear of death is a great unacknowledged participant at our mental table. But—

  Maybe because I have just myself emerged from a bout of depression, Suzy, forgive my alarm. But I wish and hope that you would be very careful of this thought, and hold it at arm’s length if you must hold it. Like a savage snake.

  And there is the other side of the coin, the well-known life-giving aspect of female processes. I won’t go on about this because I myself have some doubts about the Great Mother business, but you can’t deny that the overall suggestion is at least as much life-promoting as deathly. Maybe the fact of birth itself is deathly—“My replacement has been born”—but I suspect the general feeling is more on the order of satisfaction in increase of life. My flocks, my herds, my children.

  By the way, maybe a final word here on my excursion into trying to redefine the sexes so as t
o lump men and women into more inclusive categories. I am not, by the way, trying to “defend” motherhood as Chip says—except in the general sense that nurturant men and women are a bit less likely to blow up the world. But they may just as easily overproduce young and end us their own way. To me, each of my “sexes”—males and mothers—have their own pathology. What I was trying to ask, maybe buried in my own verbiage, was this:

  Why are children raised? Or,

  What is the personal, immediate, reward? Or,

  What motive urges us and ensures that it will be carried out?

  Every Human activity has some rewarding aspect, some goal, some good-feeling prize for which we do it. Eating satisfies, fucking feels good, walking out of the sun saves us from frying. But what is the orgasmic or homeostatic goal of mothering? In short, why does that rhesus or chimp or opossum—male or female—lug that youngster around? Why?

  Are we, for God’s sake, to fall back on that taboo of taboos, “maternal instinct”? Come on, I had hoped somebody would turn their jumbo brain to this problem and enlighten me.

  But nobody did. Oh well.

  But it is a mystery, if you compare it with any other animal activity. And nobody seems to care.

  What IVe been mulling over, partly in relation to men, is something about power. Authority. Dominance-submission structures, whether statewide or confined to a pair.

  But first, a word. Chip, and to some extent Joanna, seemed to think I was “threatening” when I said that our liberties are precarious, that our enemies have the power. Now, it’s true that when someone says “You’re gonna be buried,” it can be a covert threat. But the thing I left out, which let you think that, was that I see myself, very accurately, as one of the mob-ees. If the dark day arises when through war or famine or panic a nucleus of rednecks rises up and decides to subjugate everybody different, Tiptree will be right up there on the list, despite my WASP credentials. I have learned in a long life in organizations that I am a natural lynchee if I let down my guard an inch. I exude the same smell of subversion which those good ole boys can smell a mile away, like the way they used to hunt gays. It is something I shall never get rid of; one look at me and you just know I’m thinking something un-American. I myself don’t know what it is, all I know is that when the gang closes ranks, I’m out. And I’m afraid I know where the real power is, despite the brave words. All I feel I can do about it is to hope that Der Tag cometh not—and keep my ammunition in a dry place. (Paranoia, anyone?)

  Back in 1936 I saw a funny thing. In those days the main coast highway down California was a two-lane blacktop, which wound through a wide place in the woods called Los Gatos. (Yes.) Los Gatos consisted of a tarpaper whorehouse and a line of enormous lead slot machines, called the Wise Men. They were got up to caricature the Three Kings of Bethlehem. (Yes.) But the most impressive feature of Los Gatos was a huge wrought-iron sign stretching over the whole road, which said:

  THE GENTILE WHITE MAN IS THE KING OF THE EARTH.

  I never stopped to play the slot machines. Because I know this did not mean Me. Call me a wise man.

  Well, much has happened to Los Gatos and to kings, but how deep has it gone in the Human heart, and how far are we from 1936? All that far? My.

  Which brings me to kings. I’ve been reading a mess of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Wm. Morris, and T. H. White. And I find extraordinary the unspoken assumption that the greatest boon a people can achieve is—a king. The King Has Returned! Well, perhaps in the feudal state of things one can understand some of that. But I suspect it is a largely male contribution.

  It led me on to think how women are supposed to be more dependent, to slide easily into and adjust gratefully to domination. Well, to the extent that many women don’t care who decides what car he buys, and that some women are just plain younger and less experienced than the men they go out with, something like that might be visible sometimes. But who are the real dependents? Who insist on a captain, a boss, a Great Leader? Who have evolved lunatic systems of authoritarianism in every known activity except maybe solo farming? Who gratefully accept being beaten up and then faithfully follow the bully?

  Three guesses. And don’t say guppies.

  Joanna, your piece inviting me out of the talk is exactly how I feel. My own concept of what I at least was supposed to do was simply to learn and perhaps talk enough to get knocked down, after which I felt acutely that I should fade away, but didn’t know how to do. Without, you know, sounding like Gimme my wagon and I’ll go home mad. So I just burbled on, figuring that you could ignore me as well as I could. (After all, one possible use for a male participant is just to remind everybody of everything there is to be mad at. All the small exquisite vile-nesses I mean.)

  I have to end with a note that may amuse some of you.

  I thought of it while studying penile displays among the monkeys, and considering the activity known as “flashing” among Human males. The motive is an obscure and yet apparently potent one, which seems to have missed me or be buried deep. I kept wondering, what in hell is the threat value of a penile display? It’s the most extraordinary abstract behavior, isn’t it? And what is the magical value of the flasher’s unzip? And this came to me:

  A penis is an organ which is strong against the weak—and weak against the strong.

  In other words, those men who have difficulty with impotence when trying to make love to “strong” women—really have love confused with penile threat.

  I bet it’s more common than we think.

  —April 16, 1975

  Quintana Roo: No Travelog This Trip

  No travelog this trip; I’m disgusted. In five years this place has changed from a quiet Mexican wilderness to a roadstop full of campers. Well, not quite, but they’re on the next ranch. Individually nice people most of them, but the impact is lousy. So this is now in the public domain, and the hell with it. Of course the Maya people are still here, still friendly and living their lives with equanimity; maybe all this is good for them in the long run. It’s just that I preferred the empty starlit nights to Coleman lanterns, stereos blasting out pop, beer bottles, yelling infants, and divers shooting up the reefs. A beautiful big sea turtle washed ashore, still living despite a cruel shaft in its throat… well, Maya dinners.

  I did have the chance to buy a marvelous little wet boat called a Royak from one Oregon man. Now I can go out diving somewhat more safely as befits my gray hairs. (You do not have to turn over in a Royak. That’s a Kayak.) And he played chess. And he also had a book you might like to mention, the best travel thing I ever saw. For freaks who are serious. The People’s Guide to Mexico, Franz, from John Muir Publications, PO Box 613, Santa Fe, NM 87501. ($4.35) It has stuff you will not find anywhere else, will save you $4.35 in the first day. Of course it’s got a few things I’d disagree with, but what doesn’t. It’s huge, too.

  Well, aside from the above complaints and items like that L’mus—remember the Maya puro?—is still making it with the redoubtable Gre-goria, in fact they are building a house together in Libre Union. And has two younger brothers working here now; one of them (fifteen) just damn near totaled the truck, after rising meteorically to mechanic and electrician. He’s still getting over the shock of finding out what can happen.

  Aren’t we all.

  —February 1, 1975

  Review of The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

  This was written for Universe SF Review, a tabloid-sized fanzine edited by Keith L. Justice and devoted almost exclusively to book reviews, and published in its fifth issue, September/October 1975.

  Every so often a writer produces a book like a basilisk’s egg, which contains within it a strangeness, a prefiguration, perhaps, of new and unsuspected form. Often this book goes quite unremarked: People find it puzzling or opaque. And if the author is at the same time producing a stream of admirable, innovative, and beautiful books in a more conventional vein, the baby basilisk may live eclipsed forever.

  Take The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le
Guin, which came out about the same time as her widely and justifiably acclaimed The Left Hand of Darkness. Lathe received a few perfunctory notices, after which it apparently disappeared from general view.

  But not from mine. Had Le Guin not written it I should have regarded her as admirable, innovative, etc., see above. But after first plowing into the first pulpy pages of the 1971 Amazing, in which Lathe came out, my toenails began to curl under and my spine hair stood up. These phenomena persisted to the very last line, where the Alien, watching like a sea creature from an aquarium, sees the hero and Heather disappearing into the mist.

  Several years later I am still trying to figure out what it is about Lathe that bowls me out to its deep green sea. Well, to begin with, there is the extraordinary effect of central events unrolling in an almost undersea ambience of quietness, mystery, and precision. (This theme is heralded in the delighting opening paragraph about apparently irrelevant jellyfish—which turns out to be anything but irrelevant.) The events of the book are entirely “unofficial”—no galactic landing teams, diplomats, governmentese. Not even an official world-saver. In fact, the one nominal world-saver is among the most frightening villains in recent memory. The world does get saved—I think—but by something nameless, so vulnerable, Human, and mysterious that it would be pompous to call it “love.” But it is entirely real.

  The plot is simple—up to a point. A quiet nice little guy finds himself either crazy or in possession of a frightening paranormal talent. He takes his problem to a psychologist, who, though somewhat boisterous, seems also to be a decent type full of good aims and urges and energy. He is Doctor Haber, the aforesaid villain, and the unrolling of his mon-strousness under the genial gabble is beautiful and horrible. (Dear God, the Habers I have met, the Haber in myself!) Haber is also—and this is important to the evaluation of Le Guin’s work—her first major full-scale, tape-recorded confrontation with a contemporary 1975 Human monster. Those who consider that Le Guin writes only the dialogues of fantasy should listen in on Doctor Haber.