The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Ed says: “In my first film I wanted to combine a dancer with moving animated paintings.” (He says that every time.) “In my second film I wanted to do pure abstractions, moving paintings that would arouse emotion in the viewers for no concrete reasons, abstract laughter, abstract tension. That sort of thing.”

  Anybody who’s had their finger pinched in a door so badly that it split like a squashed grape has some awareness of the agonies of creativity.

  Knowing this, I have always given him the best slice of roast beef, the butteriest piece of toast, the eggs with the yolks unbroken, the biggest apple.

  Ed says: “The camera is a remarkable invention which my parents said I should buy a radio instead of, so during my formative years I had a radio. I got my own movie camera at the age of thirty or thereabouts.”

  I, too, have had a childhood full of frustrations.

  “Where do you get all your good ideas?”

  “Uh… ah… well… ww… uh…”

  “To what do you owe…”

  “Who me?”

  “… the cosmic quality of your movies?”

  Interview

  Me: Uh… the questions are… uh… serious and some are sort of not and some are just asking questions and some are… I really mean for real answers

  Ed: So I should give you straight answers all the time, right?

  Me: Well, yeah.

  Ed:… or whatever I feel like.

  Me: Well, however you feel. It doesn’t really matter.

  Ed: It’s as I’m slowly getting plastered.

  Me: What I mean is that it’s not a… a serious… even the serious ones don’t have to be serious… like that. You know what I mean. Uh… it’s not that kind of a story.

  Ed: Material for you, yeah.

  Me: It’s just… yeah… I’ll use it or I won’t, whatever it is. Some of the things are supposed to be just… uh… a serious question as though I were really interviewing you about art or something like that.

  Ed: Right.

  Me: So… and if it… Tell you what, if the answer goes on and there seems to be enough, I’ll stop you.

  Ed: Good.

  Me: Even when you’re not through.

  Ed: Good. You know me, especially after a couple of drinks.

  Me: Uh… because sometimes it’s just… I just want uh… like a little answer.

  Ed: Right.

  Me:… or something like that. So we’ll just begin. Well, these are kind of mixed up but I can straighten them out later. Urn… O.K. Now what’s the thing about yourself that you like the least? Have you ever thought of that?

  Ed: Of course I have.

  Me: Well, I never heard about it.

  Ed: All right.

  Me: Don’t get mad. What is the thing about yourself you like least?

  Ed: Well, all right… Uh… It’s my fearfulness, though that probably will surprise some people, and maybe making films is a way of coping with things in an indirect way and yet… well, film making’s scary, too. Actually the frightful thing about it is that you have to be aggressive and you have to be someone who takes a masculine role and… well, I’m fearful of it because you’ve got to perform, which I suppose it’s the old proving yourself thing and you constantly have to do it over and over and that’s a terrible drag. Film making is a little bit like sex in those terms…. Oh, of course it can also be just pure joy… just an easy thing, too.

  Me: Sex is a fearful thing, too?

  Ed: Oh, yeah, in those terms.

  Me: Well, is it even fearful with someone that you know, like me? I guess it is.

  Ed: Well, yeah, we’ve had enough conflicts in those terms.

  Me: Do you feel fearful a lot?… All the time?

  Ed: I’m not conscious of it like that, but I… I, at one time, was thinking that the major governing factor almost… this is probably stupid psychology… was fear. People behave as they do because they’re afraid to act otherwise.

  Me: Well, I think you’re right, in a sense, because, just having read a little of that Grotowski book, you get the sense that what he’s doing is undoing… uh… the masks…

  Ed: Well, basically, I think that a lot of the behavior patterns we have are designed to protect us and… but when I say that what I, in a way, fear most is my own fearfulness, that’s probably not true, except it’s the one thing that I feel if I could just not be afraid in lots of ways, I could do everything.

  Me: Maybe people think they’d dance and sing and make speeches if they weren’t afraid but maybe they’d really just feel perfectly comfortable to sit quietly in a corner…

  Ed:… and you face your fears frequently. In other words, when I make a movie, the reason I have a hard time is that it’s so damn difficult to organize things and make sure that I’m not making mistakes. Lots of people think of me as very calm… urn, externally… and very easygoing. Actually when I’m shooting there’s a tremendous amount of anxiety because even though I’m also regarded as someone who is very competent with equipment and so forth, I constantly have a feeling as though I don’t know what the hell’s happening behind this piece of machinery and… and I hope that it’s going to come out right. So, obviously, the way we overcome fear usually is by going through and doing things we fear most.

  Me: Well, you’re probably doing it for a lot of reasons… maybe a lot of other reasons, too. Well, why are you doing it?

  Ed: Doing what?

  Me: Making movies?

  Ed: Well, now, you see, the thing is… it gets down to one of these… uh… another aspect of… but I think the artist really… they like to play God. It’s the opposite of being fearful. You are running things. You have control. It’s the other side of the coin. I suppose it’s all out of the same mix.

  Me: Well, it’s funny, though, like with Branches you got this big mishmash of material… that you’d think a person would be panic-stricken to have because it was so out of control in a certain way, but maybe it never seemed that way to you.

  Ed: Well, now, that’s another thing about the way I make a movie. I like to not have control….

  Me: You like to find the control.

  Ed: Yeah, and I like to have the excitement of going out into uncharted territory and seeing if I can get through it and it’s fearful and it’s exhilarating at the same time.

  Me: It must be very satisfying, like with Branches, where you didn’t know what was going to happen…

  Ed: Right.

  Me:… to feel that you came out with something formed.

  Ed: But I don’t mind entering a film project feeling that it can go bust. I like the idea of… and I’ve insisted on it in my own personal work… of not having it completely locked down in advance… have it be open-ended enough so that I really don’t know what the final form is going to be and I can just explore the adventure of making it.

  Me: That’s how I’m doing this story…. Well, O.K. I’ll cut a lot of this out but this ought to be enough.

  So…

  Thank you, Ed.

  Thank you for sex.

  And thanks again for a lot of little things you do and sitting talking together over a hamburger and coffee.

  And thank you for a male body and a penis, a male voice, a nice male hand, and male shirts, male underwear, socks, pants and T-shirts, also beards, hairy legs, things like that.

  Thanks a lot.

  “Hey, there, eager poets of all ages…”

  I would like to thank them, too. I would like to thank the poets. I would especially like to thank poets such as Ron Padgett and Tom Disch and Frank O’Hara and George Quasha and Jerome Rothenberg, but most of all Ed, without whom this could not have been written.

  Joy In Our Cause, Harper & Row, 1974

  To the Association

  TO THE ASSOCIATION of astronomers the Sixteenth of November is a person who has invented all the hours, one to twelve. I find him of a different sort, with meanings I have to look up in books: Xiuhtecuhtli or Chalchihuitlicue or Ixbalanque or Tezcatlipoca.


  I’m waiting on the banks of a river to find out more about these people who measure distances in hats.

  However, the old Indian that I know of lives at the zoo (he has a Jewish nose, but Chinese eyes) and my little brother wrote down his language in õ ∂ and other symbols in exchange for a few string tricks. I don’t yet know (personally) any other American Indians, but I belong to a committee that wants to find out more.

  The Sixteenth of November, that inventor of hours, lives with the last of a certain kind of sparrow and he remembers how to chip obsidian and knows how the world began and what sort of ritual started it off. The association of astronomers has calculated his birth date and made plans to care for his simple needs. They have received a small grant from an educational foundation.

  “I invented the hours of the day,” he said, “and arranged them in their proper order.”

  The old man was seeking status of some sort.

  “I am the eleventh month out of a possible thirteen.

  “Six o’clock is the first hour,” he told us, but we all knew that.

  We rewarded him for effort.

  “Try again,” we said.

  (We studied his kind of art and incorporated it into our own.)

  My little brother had shoes made for him by this old Indian and he learned a song about a tree, but he has forgotten it. “Tell me about your old Indian,” I asked him once, but there wasn’t much to say. Everyone had their own Indian at that place in Oklahoma. All the young men had old Indians to study. He learned a lot of string tricks. He remembers one or two of them.

  “What is the meaning of these tricks with handmade strings?”

  Once all the women lived underground in a different place. Then they came up and lived in huts in the forest, but they were homesick for the tunnels and chambers of their former life. They lost confidence in themselves regardless of race, age or class because of the uncertainty and unfamiliarity of the new place and they feared, above all, the trees. It seemed to them that the trees could assume the shapes of men in the darkness. Possibly, at that time, the hours had not yet been invented.

  “Give us time,” the women said, “to rehearse for life in this country and time also for our monthly celebrations of menstrual blood and to dance with our queen.”

  The Sixteenth of November gave them hours but still they had no confidence in themselves and no time for the celebrations of the menstrual and this was important to them.

  “The old man is seeking status for himself,” they said, and laughed and turned away without confidence. “After all, he is only the eleventh month out of a possible thirteen.”

  But he was not angry with them because he understood how hard it was to come up out of the ground and live in a different place entirely and to be afraid of the trees which were all about them and he heard them going about calling the trees a necessary evil and everyone saying, “Give up your old way of life for new pleasures of a different sort,” and he felt that the women did not need consecutive days, so he thought that he would not tell the women about them. None of the women ever heard about the consecutive days then and never had any time for their celebrations though there was no anger in not telling them about it. After a while the women found out about the days from their lovers but it didn’t make any difference in their confidence. Even though they could calculate the time of the next menstrual and mark it with an X on that day, they still had no self-confidence.

  On the sixteenth of November they held the world conference on improvements in rice, lentils and beans. The old man didn’t attend. Perhaps he was already dead.

  I feel sad.

  I think I might tell the astronomers about other hours they never heard of and places where the days come in groups of three.

  Well, that’s all right because even in those places the children lose their baby teeth and bring them, one by one, to their mothers. The new teeth are the teeth of reasoning, including the judgment of distance, time and volume, and if the new teeth should, at some later date, fall out, that would be the time of the loss of time and understanding.

  The astronomers know this by now. Some of them have already lived through the complete cycle and are coming to a very long time where they sit with the sun on their laps. All the women in their lives are dead and they are getting their own cups of tea. (They are giving their cast-off clothes to the Indians.)

  We would rather not disturb them now, but we want to know a few things that they might have remembered, so another meeting of the astronomers has been scheduled in a different month. It’s official. I mark an X on that day.

  A person has many meanings but a man of the hour has only one. The astronomers have found that the same is true, in a way, for the sky. They are tired of counting the stars and of their distances. They would like to know things as the bees know them, by doing a little dance in a figure eight, and they would like to see in a circle like a fish.

  My committee on the Indians is going to meet with their committee, not so much to think about the stars as the clouds, which we can all understand together. I hold hands with the oldest astronomer of all and we think about dancing in a figure eight but we don’t do it. “The bees dance infinity,” he says, “did you know that?” and at last I understand everything.

  It’s been a profitable three days. In the time to knit a fairly long scarf, I have learned about the universe.

  Joy In Our Cause, Harper & Row, 1974

  Destinations, Premonitions and

  the Nature of Anxiety

  FATHERS as teachers.

  Fathers as a good example.

  Fathers as examples too good to be ignored.

  Robust fathers of medium height.

  Generations of them. Dead men, pleased, on occasion, with their sons and sons’ sons, but sometimes a funny little look around the corners of the mouth which, when viewed from the side, might seem as enigmatic as ever.

  How to teach the children? they are asking. How influence? Write a little Clavierbüchlein kind of thing. The How To book of life for ten-year-olds. But some sons die young.

  Fathers (as Johann Sebastian Bach did) (1685-1750) mark out the family tree in sons born to sons.

  Fathers let the wives name the daughters. They name the sons themselves.

  Whether fathers as teachers, whether fathers as a good example, robust fathers wearing glasses, fathers as distractions and distortions, etc., etc., are they to be denied and forgotten at the height of their own careers (or in spite of them)? I, then, one of a long, long line already, will be the father of nobody.

  I must have misunderstood something he said.

  I don’t mind starting from New York City and only getting halfway, passed by thousands of cars newer than this one, having to stop and hitchhike the rest of the way or anything like that. I have this, as they said about me, “profound and incurable melancholy.” Also cars run out of gas when I’m around. My friends run out of money. They misplace things, waste time. Pianists slam their fingers in doors. Soccer players break their toes. Trapeze artists lose their balance stepping off curbs. Actors stutter. But once I was voted “most likely to succeed.”

  And I don’t mind being the eldest son of twenty children except if I have to be the best-loved and most talented and if my father votes me “most likely to succeed” and writes a Clavierbüchlein just for me.

  I have thoughts of sons that die young or never are born, sons with eyes like my father’s (blue, gray or brown), of a piercing and cruel innocence, single-minded eyes. Their melancholy is not incurable.

  Bach, Bach,

  Head like a rock.

  If he’s harmonizing,

  Make him stop.

  I’m passed by a station wagon with a baby in a playpen.

  I’m passed by a man and lady arguing with gestures.

  I’m passed by an old man with long hair in a ‘61 Ford. I can see he’s one of us and I give him the sign.

  I’m almost out of gas at the first Howard Johnson’s.

 
; First Howard Johnson’s

  Clam chowder, hot dogs, ice cream cones and coffee.

  Has Tom O’Horgan ever eaten in Howard Johnson’s? Has Bob Rauschenberg? Jerome Rothenberg? Nikolais? Grotowski? Or do they bring their own sandwiches of homemade brown bread and Camembert?

  How many lady research scientists eat at Howard Johnson’s on the way to some yearly meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies? How many young musicians on the way to concerts at small colleges?

  However, nobody here seems to notice how I look like Johann Sebastian.

  “Pardon me, sir, but I’m the oldest son of that man who tempered the clavier by raising the thirds and lowering the sevenths and I’m on my way to Toronto to avoid the draft and I’ve run out of gas and I haven’t any money.”

  What My Mother Said About My Father

  “Take off your powdered wig, etc., Sebastian. Don’t leave me here weeping in the back parlor knitting another baby’s hat. “One of these days I’ll get sick when you’re away and die before you get back.” This is true. It happened.

  What My Mother Said About Me

  “I don’t want to be the mother of a man who doesn’t understand women.”

  What My Stepmother Said About My Father

  “Sebastian, I love your bright blue, gray or brown eyes though you will go blind. I love the mystery of the second movement of the concerto for four harpsichords. When I hear you and your sons playing it I faint with pleasure and I feel like making love to you. Take off your knee breeches, your stockings, your buckled shoes, your Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) costume, in other words. Let’s go to bed early. Come and let me put my legs around your neck.”

  (“When Bach takes possession of a certain rhythm, he does not let go …” says Wanda Landowska. Also, “Bach delights in multiple combinations of inversions.”)

  “But I can’t help wondering sometimes if there isn’t some other way of being feminine than this even in these times.”

  I’m passed by a car full of nuns.