to the north, lies the city.
The people have always lived: (a) on an island in the middle of the river or (b) on the outskirts of the city.
Skipping breakfast, they come out into the street, unlock cars and drive away.
These days it is said that the eye is the most spiritual of all the senses and touch the most primitive.
The people don’t know whether the sea will cover their land or whether it will be the air (as they know it) that will disappear first.
Someone said the beaches don’t smell like beaches anymore. That is possible.
We were the people in those days.
These were our ways.
This was our mass transit system, our means for the disposal of solid wastes, our endangered species, our Stravinsky, our abortion laws, our telephone company. We had lived this way ourselves, sending our sludge to the sea, listening to music, paying bills, tolls, fines and taxes. We were crossing the oceans in less than eight hours.
Our mothers noticed that between the ages of five and twelve the penis hardly grows at all.
We miss the summer.
Instead of sunsets, we have the North Star.
Centuries passed. We didn’t notice them except in our history books.
We have eaten the passenger pigeons.
Also the lobsters are almost gone.
Places vanish.
San Francisco might as well be just a name.
We’ve tried, but it seems we have lost the knack of miracles. We distinctly remember a pillar of fire or a fire ball on the mountain, but we were so small at the time we wonder if we only dreamed it.
Across many miles of marshes from the west came the stranger, having already asked us if we had once been the people, having asked us about the activities (cultural, political and educational) that went on in the city. He was dressed like one of us in a transparent shirt and fashionable tight pants even though he wasn’t one of us.
“Have you indicated” (he had indicated) “the city and province of your birth in the proper place on the proper form?”
“Are you familiar with some of our newer forms of behavior, especially as regards sex, love and marriage?”
“You may have already won ten thousand dollars in cash prizes and other surprises.”
Across many miles of marshes came another stranger out of the west, this time a woman, having filled out the proper forms, etc., and wearing a transparent shirt.
Art is thought of as life, or almost, and life as art, so the strangers play themselves.
Under their gaze we turn away our eyes.
We read odd things in our newspapers.
Our birds are dying.
Ceremonially we planted a small tree.
We have neither elephant-nor dog-headed gods, but we have chemicals that can eliminate odors twenty-four hours a day.
As luck would have it, we come across as civilized.
The city commissioner said that our women might be: muse, goddess, earth mother or whore, nothing less nor nothing more.
We have lived through all this before.
There are still places to go for a quick abortion. There are still lotteries. There are still enemies of the people. Some women still have babies, others still go to psychologists. They are the mystics. Some of us have regained consciousness on the brink of disaster and expressed our views.
In another era we might have said that one stranger had the head of an elephant and the other the head of a dog, but by now we know better. We are not deceived by appearances and we have learned to live with our doubts, so that if one has the head of an elephant (which might be true) and the other, etc., we do not notice it.
Our city commissioner said that a woman might become president of the country, but not president of the company (as General Motors).
We have heard about a great sage who grew an orange tree from the palm of his hand but we have not believed it (or we have felt there was certainly some entirely different explanation).
We have heard about angels of destruction and horses that count to ten, people with lion bodies and heads of men. We have not believed them.
But some things we have seen with our own eyes or at least on TV, such as a pole vaulter who jumped eighteen feet, and then one of us has held his breath for six minutes, twenty-nine and eight-tenths seconds. There was one of us buried for thirty-one days with his food passed down to him through a three-inch tube, and even here in our own country some of us have burned ourselves alive in protest of something.
Questions For A Third Stranger
Have you indicated the type of disaster at the top of the page? Have you mentioned the time at which it will take place and the exact point where it will occur? Have you shown the dimensions of the disaster? The extent and type of damage? Have you described the physical and mental anguish?
Civilization has meant a lot to us.
However, we have had a pretty good society, a pretty good cultural situation for a long time now. We have had some people with a lot of good ideas. We have had instances of selflessness. In general, we have tried to accept the lesser of two evils. Also we have had a lot of very nice animals, plants and insects, crickets, for instance, cicadas, whales, zinnias, pelicans, baboons, marigolds, grizzly bears, bobcats, ferrets, sparrows, daddy-longlegs, and so forth for quite some time now. Also some of us have already lived to the age of seventy-five or eighty. Others can boast that they have changed the entire course of human existence.
We form car pools, write letters, make out legal documents and write case histories. Some of us have had horoscopes drawn up and our handwriting analyzed.
We still do not believe in angels of destruction.
We have given the best years of our lives to the outskirts of the city.
Patiently we’re waiting for a third stranger.
Are we in danger?
Bad Moon Rising, Harper & Row, 1973
The Childhood of the Human Hero*
A LITTLE bit of you in him and a little bit of me and a little bit of him in you and I see a bit of my youngest brother. He’s coming in, going out, coming in, going out, and it’s another world outside which might be inner space which is outer space to him. “Captain, your ship is approaching a doomed planet at twice the speed of light.”
He wants to order a pair of handcuffs at $2.95.
A book on ventriloquism at ninety-eight cents.
He wants a realistic plastic plucked chicken, $5.99.
A pair of sunglasses with one-way-mirror lenses.
A “patented 3D hypno-coin” that comes free with twenty-five lessons in hypnotism.
And one hundred stick-on stamps of the scariest movie monster.
Mild-mannered boy wonder looks like any other average boy, but there’s a trick to it. There’s more than meets the eye and good deeds are being done every day in spite of appearances.
He has a secret identity .
Going into orbit around one hot world too many, he breaks pencils with a flick of the fingers of one hand and doesn’t know he’s doing it. He straightens paper clips trying to remember that France has a population of 51,400,000; that the major cities are: Paris, Lille, Bordeaux, Marseilles; highest point, Mont Blanc, 15,781 feet; principal language, French.
He’s the one with the new boots, just the kind he’s always wanted; wide belt, black turtleneck sweater. Next year his hair will be even longer because that’s the only way you can tell the kids in the Common Concern Club from the Young Americans for Freedom.
When he grows a mustache (this much later) it’ll be the long yellow/brown kind that curls up at the ends and he’ll be smiling.
Say, did you know there’s a new method that can give you powerful muscles you’ll be proud to show your friends in just ten minutes a day? “Carry your great strength with prudence and humility,” I say, but you’ve broken another ballpoint pen writing the answer to the problem of farmer Brown who plows half an acre in twenty minutes and farmer Jones who has plowed thirty-two
acres in seventy-six hours.
He’s coming in, going out, coming in, going out. It’s another world entirely outside and that waltz is really the original motion picture sound track from 2001.
I know you. I was almost a boy once myself, mother though I have become, and I know it might as well be… maybe ought to be Chichen Itza instead of Betelgeuse or someplace with a lot of moons. You’ll lose all that, you know, Captain, next year or the year after, but there will be greater losses, and that sonic blast was just a stalling tactic to keep you busy while they roll out this monstrous world. You have yet to face the bureaucratic creatures that crawl through rocks and can hold you helplessly imprisoned in megaliths even though you may be in telepathic contact with the big-brained friends of this universe. There are things you’d never suspect out here in reality land and your night terrors are nothing compared to them. You won’t recognize him. I mean that man with the yellow/brown mustache coming in for a landing on some different planet farther in the future than you ever thought possible. He’s of the next century, you know, and will be at his peak by 2001. Did you realize that yesterday when you asked me, ‘What does ‘existential’ mean?” and I couldn’t answer so you knew? “Forget it,” you said and I can’t forget it, because without your existential superself you will certainly perish in wars of the future out among the satellites, overcome by cosmic thought patterns too convoluted for the human brain to contemplate, or, if not that, torn apart by humanoids in the death throes of their own identity crises, or exploded by technological advances available not only to the future, but known already to the present, and, if not one or more of the above, inevitably coarsened by Earthlings of your own kind. I can’t save you, because even though thunder sends the cats under the bed and still brings you into my room, where there can be no ghosts, no tigers, and monsters still shrivel up and die when I turn on the lights, my powers are fading. But I’m not, repeat, not waiting for you to grow up, because that’s another thing entirely.
“What’s the size of a shark’s brain?”
“What’s the capital of Colorado?”
“What’s the longest book ever written?”
“What’s green and warty and lives at the bottom of the sea?”
For Mother, on Mother’s day, draw spaceships.
Learn it, dummy. 8 x 7, 8 x 8. “You’re making me hate arithmetic,” he says. Odd numbers, even numbers, two by two down school’s light-green halls and he’s been at it seven years. Even when there’s a death, you know, we all go on more or less as though nothing had happened. Go back to those same old circumferences of circles, parallel lines down the middle of, and follow instructions. I’m telling you, you can do as you wish, see the dead laid out on display the old-fashioned way with a hundred and fifty-dollar blanket of roses just as Grandma wanted it, or not. It’s up to you. But don’t come to me after five o’clock because there’s no changing your mind. There’s a death deadline, but it’s not what you think, falling down and losing your memory, getting up and falling down again, the sudden zap, zap, zap of ray guns. You’ve lost some of your best men, but you’re miraculously safe. Captain, you’re always so miraculously safe except in the dark.
Slide inner front sprocket wheel (#17) over sprocket shaft, then place wheel retainer (#13) over end of shaft. Apply a drop of cement to end of shaft adhering retainer to shaft. Then cement outer front sprocket wheel (#18) to inner sprocket wheel by applying cement at notch on outer wheel.
“Look, Ma. Look, Ma.”
(Don’t bother me now.)
“Look, Ma, drop these seemingly innocent pellets into a glass of water and magically a worm will appear.”
By 2001 111 be dead.
No more “Look, Ma.”
Inferno, mad inventor of instruments of torture and destruction, all your tricks are useless. They can’t make him tell where his mother is hidden.
For those who dare! SURPRISE PACKAGE. Only fifty cents. Are you willing to take a chance on a secret? Listen then: the mother has both breasts and penis sometimes. She has to. There’s no other solution to some of those knotty little problems of sexual identification; face them every day and see who wears the blue jeans. (Everybody does.) We won’t tell you what you get, but because you’re willing to gamble we’ll give you much more than your money’s worth. Satisfaction guaranteed. Are you willing to face the real green slime? Well, let’s get this straightened out once and for all. Maybe the penis is just a realistic skin-colored spooky hand with red fingernails and big knuckles (ninety-eight cents). Imagine it poking out of your car door at sixty miles an hour, or out of a suitcase on the train. Imagine it on the piano keys, on the window ledge, peeking out of a grocery bag, opening a door. Comes with special adhesive. Sticks anywhere. Can be reused over and over and over and over.
What’s green and squashed and lies in the gutter? That’s a girl scout run over by a truck.
There are still some wishes left and crazy laughter and a secret handshake. But after a while you face life at your own risk.
When, in the course of human events, evidence comes to light of evil forces overpowering the good, give that boy three impossible tasks to do to restore the world to its proper place among the respectable planets. Steadfast and true. Honorable unto the death, of course. Helper of the helpless. Kind to animals. Honesty his best policy. Oh, incorruptible boy, I see the faint new moon float past your head one mid-afternoon. The clouds hardly moving and you blasting off into one of those lazy Sundays with an Estes rocket. “Gentlemen, we’re limping back to Aldebaran. We’ve slipped out of space warp and into real time. We’re lost in an out-of-the-way section of deep space and who knows what evil lurks among the stars?…”
Back here we’re waiting for all systems to be go, for all men to be safe and accounted for and in real time and serving a different purpose. It’s another world going on outside and might be airless. Suit up, men, preferably in silver, then gasping (gasp, gasp), falling down. “Look, Ma, honorable unto the death.”
What’s green and squashed and lies in the gutter? Well, there’s a war on and it’s this world now and it could be you with your new yellow/brown mustache.
But that boy doesn’t belong on this planet at all. Someday his real father and mother will come down to claim him and take him back where he belongs. He’ll be homesick for his former Earth family for a while, but after a week or so it’ll be all right. The new life will be hard, but rewarding. He will accompany his new father in a ship, preferably all in silver, and go from planet to planet doing one good deed every day, 365 good deeds every Earth year.
That last blast-off almost poked a hole right through the ceiling.
“I wouldn’t do that in here again if I….”
Beaming down while the cosmic energy still burns within him, shouts, “Wait, I know just what you’re going to say and I don’t want to hear it.”
(But maybe it’s just one of those imitation bullet holes at nine for fifty cents. )
Husband, ours is indeed an admirable boy, but don’t expose his secret identity: “seven toes to each foot and to either hand as many fingers; his eyes, bright with seven pupils. On each cheek he has four moles, a blue, a red, a green, a purple. Between one ear and the other, long yellow tresses that are as yellow as the wax of bees…”°
*The title is quoted from Joseph Campbell.
°From the Book of Leinster, translated by Eleanor Hull, quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Showcase, Harper & Row, 1973
Autobiography
WHEN Gertrude Stein came to Ann Arbor, my mother said that all she said was, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
When Dylan Thomas came to Ann Arbor, my father said that he was a terrible man. And that was how I was brought up.
June 1973. My mother is still alive.
I love mountains and forests, but I live near the sea in a very flat place. I like solitude. I live in crowds.
One day Menlo came to work with Ed to learn about films a
nd he was very nice and the next day Joan came. She came to work, too, but she brought her guitar and sang songs all afternoon and nobody got any work done but that didn’t matter except that Ron came the next day and played on Sue’s guitar (he wasn’t as good as Joan but he draws better than she does) and nobody got any work done that day, either. Bob and Emery and Caroline came and danced naked in the living room for Ed to take pictures of them. The black paper cyc made smudges on the wall and they’re still there. We ate on the floor because the table was full of piles of things, and I thought to myself that I wasn’t going to get anything done this week except feed people (that turned out to be true) and I also thought about not getting anything done this summer because of taking a trip out West. I complained about it nicely when people were here and angrily when all the people left. Then Nam June called up about midnight and I was glad we hadn’t started to make love. Ed got up at six to go off somewhere. I was asleep but I think he kissed me good-bye.
Most of my life is spent not writing.
I was ten. I was thirteen, eighteen, twenty-one. (That last was the year I cut my hair off and suddenly everyone noticed me.) I was twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-five, etc. Even my youngest brother must be thirty-five or so by now.
When I was ten I still wet my bed.
When I was two Charley was born and got the room next to Mother’s with the big bay window. Charley got my white bed, too. Charley is my favorite brother. He is growing older and has left his second wife. He is the most romantic of my brothers, but the least happy. We went to see him in Binghamton not long ago, but we didn’t go on up to Ithaca at that time.
They told me I had a vagina instead of a penis like Charley. They showed me a picture and told me where it was and I looked, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t tell them.
Mother put me on her lap and sang, “Baby’s boat’s a silver moon, sailing in the sky.”
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 31
