Catalyst; The Brooklyn Bridge - the best bit from MA Thesis on Samuel R Delany "Mirror, Prism, Lens"
... after glimpse, the stays and struts of the Brooklyn Bridge rise out of the sea of Delany’s oeuvre, water glistening and tessellating off the masonry. Now a ruin on Rhys, now a dry span over the Hudson valley, now a Bridge of Lost Desire, there a retreat from a flaming Bellona, here the scene for many illuminating conversations as the evening sun strikes New York City, the location of a career in balance. The motif of the Brooklyn Bridge endures as a bridge to the future. The reader remembers Hart Crane’s cry, “All life is a bridge, I told him. Even the whole world.” (AM 96) Delany is always crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, spanning gaps, exploring the marginal areas in the shadow of bridges, on bridges. As the motif of the Bridge appears again, and again, and again, throughout Delany’s oeuvre, taking the foreground, or away in the background, the Bridge exists as a metaphor, a physical symbol for the reconciliation of difference, for connecting communities and ideas. The Brooklyn Bridge was built with hope, with the most futuristic technologies of the time, and yet endures, the most solidly constructed bridge to New York City.
The Brooklyn Bridge profoundly altered a career, after meeting Auden, a walk on the Bridge engenders a career in science fiction after the publication at nineteen, of The Jewels of Aptor. The bridge is a location of truce, a literal bridging of Delany’s relationship with the poet, Marilyn Hacker. They’d have conversations about literature to bridge their differences, the difficulties of communicating their feelings about their relationship. One such conversation was:
This is the same evening that plots out the shape of The Fall of the Towers, Delany’s next project after the experience of publishing The Jewels of Aptor at Ace. The interlocking weave of ideas, like Delany and Marilyn’s fingers, the structural mesh of the cables holding the span high above the Hudson, span the thirty years of Delany’s oeuvre that covers selection of stories, novellas, novels and tales. Quest, myth, identity, memory, and transgression are the powerful themes that surge and swell with the ebb and flow of the tide beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Each theme intertwines with one another, until it is difficult to unpick the tapestry. The Bridge of Delany’s humanist perspective unites each theme; his desire to create a way of living, a movement towards becoming a mature, integrated person, free of prejudice and filled with joy in the diversity of life.
To understand the present, one must know the past, and the past helps to understand the future. And to know the past, is to understand the powerful symmetry of the Brooklyn Bridge. Horace Gregory frames Atlantis: Model 1924 with this image from Far Beyond Our Consciousness, “He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.” (AM 57) From the past to Atlantis, Atlantis as a holy grail, the goal of Delany’s quest. Part of that quest is to free the reader from their assumptions, preconceptions, and open up consciousness to new possibilities. The journey of this quest involves a search for identity, remembering identity, constructing identity in a subliminal quest to bridge differences within communities, within selves, to reveal the commonality of the human creature in all its lotus-petaled forms:
In the process of remembrance, memory defines identity, as society transgresses the limits of identity, as identity turns back in on itself, reflecting on the past, considering the future, intruding upon the present, as Delany’s journal entries intrude upon his work. Life is inseparable from the project, his diary frames and shapes his writing. Delany’s writing shapes and defines the path of his life, creates new mythologies, and forms frameworks for identity, for interacting with the world. Identity is formed against the constant threat of continuity, against the threat of Kidd’s Dhalgren, the underbed of society. Kidd’s loss of identity is not something to fear, his fractured, fragmented identity is real, and Kidd copes fluidly with his situation, with the confusing changes in his reality. He projects his reality upon his surrounds and the tumultuous changes, strangeness, is reflected in Dhalgren. Memory infects The Einstein Intersection, through the remembrance and denial of the myths of the past, and the creation new myth in the intersection between Godel’s infinite theorem and Einstein’s relativist manifestations of reality.
Memory creates identity, memory projects continutity. One wakes up in the morning, and remembers life the day before. Although the reader is trapped in a temporal loop where the future is unknown, the past is there to stand on, to push forward from. Empire Star’s characters are guided by their future selves. Through a trick of time-continuity by travelling through the interstellar nexus at Empire star, they travel into the future and into the past, and shape and guide each other’s future experiences, so that all the characters die at the beginning, but their end is their beginning. The characters are transformed like the progression from larvae to crystalis to butterfly and the return. Memory serves to structure and create the continuity of life.
The purpose of Delany’s textual diversions is to rupture the linear continuity of the text. The rupture of the journal, authorial observations, and commentary split the text into two. The split column tactic, is a reference back to double consciousness. Lewy’s journal is in code, and so is the split in the text. Lewy shows his journal to his brothers, “ when John opened the cover it was in code – two columns, one barely comprehensible, the other complete nonsense. ‘You don’t want none of them jewboys to get hold of this,’ John said. ‘They could figure it out on you.’ ” (AM 8) and returning to the journal, John repeats, “ ‘They could figure it out on you.’ But, chuckling, Lewy wandered away, barefoot over fallen blossoms, as if codes and journals and secrets and cyphers had ceased to interest him as he searched the spring night.’” (AM 16) . . . The cypher of the split column of the effaced journal . . . Dhalgren’sAnathemata: a plague journal effaced with the authoral influence, elimination, statements of transcription: “The falsification of this journal . . . What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.” (D 734) These fragments of a thesis, consciousness bridging the gaps in between, produce a false picture, or a real picture, but with the potential of becoming whole deeply buried in the riverbed of the reader’s consciousness. How do the tiles of the mosaic fall together? Stand back a little bit more.
These prismatic filters of the split narrative, a “double narrative, in its parallel columns” (MW 67) accentuating, supposing inter-relations, yet they are resolutely separate. A fragment of self-conscious purity, framing devices which highlight and accentuate the underlying themes. It is the play of light in the mirror of the text, projected through the lens of experience, focused by the prism of consciousness: “motes cycloned in the slanting illumination where I had been. And the motes stilled.” (EI 23) With the rainbow magic of a sheen of oil floating on water, cultures, genders, differences are recognised and bridged, even as they are transgressed, redefined. Each split column, the different narratives, they are bridged in the reader’s mind, united by understanding. Delany allows the margins to intrude on his work, through anecdote, through experience, splitting the text to accommodate new perspectives. Delany writes with the hope that his vision may be actualized, and the first thing that must be done is to have the thought that it is possible, that his hopes will be realized, and if we begin there, it will happen. Listen to the marionetteer:
The marginal is made, through the expression of Delany's oeuvre, as magical as a dimension of a multifaceted prism which includes all possibilities in glimpse . . .
“the Brooklyn Bridge represents and incorporates many of the socio-cultural elements of the age that produced it, elements that have helped create our own technological age.”
The Brooklyn Bridge profoundly altered a career, after meeting Auden, a walk on the Bridge engenders a career in science fiction after the publication at nineteen, of The Jewels of Aptor. The bridge is a location of truce, a literal bridging of Delany’s relationship with the poet, Marilyn Hacker. They’d have conversations about literature to bridge their differences, the difficulties of communicating their feelings about their relationship. One such conversation was:
Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more, fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above, was that for a novel, SF or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to involve a woman as active as the man. (MW 173)
This is the same evening that plots out the shape of The Fall of the Towers, Delany’s next project after the experience of publishing The Jewels of Aptor at Ace. The interlocking weave of ideas, like Delany and Marilyn’s fingers, the structural mesh of the cables holding the span high above the Hudson, span the thirty years of Delany’s oeuvre that covers selection of stories, novellas, novels and tales. Quest, myth, identity, memory, and transgression are the powerful themes that surge and swell with the ebb and flow of the tide beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Each theme intertwines with one another, until it is difficult to unpick the tapestry. The Bridge of Delany’s humanist perspective unites each theme; his desire to create a way of living, a movement towards becoming a mature, integrated person, free of prejudice and filled with joy in the diversity of life.
imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones – just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue. (AM 66)
To understand the present, one must know the past, and the past helps to understand the future. And to know the past, is to understand the powerful symmetry of the Brooklyn Bridge. Horace Gregory frames Atlantis: Model 1924 with this image from Far Beyond Our Consciousness, “He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.” (AM 57) From the past to Atlantis, Atlantis as a holy grail, the goal of Delany’s quest. Part of that quest is to free the reader from their assumptions, preconceptions, and open up consciousness to new possibilities. The journey of this quest involves a search for identity, remembering identity, constructing identity in a subliminal quest to bridge differences within communities, within selves, to reveal the commonality of the human creature in all its lotus-petaled forms:
part of what, from my marginal position, I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race – whether white or black.
In the process of remembrance, memory defines identity, as society transgresses the limits of identity, as identity turns back in on itself, reflecting on the past, considering the future, intruding upon the present, as Delany’s journal entries intrude upon his work. Life is inseparable from the project, his diary frames and shapes his writing. Delany’s writing shapes and defines the path of his life, creates new mythologies, and forms frameworks for identity, for interacting with the world. Identity is formed against the constant threat of continuity, against the threat of Kidd’s Dhalgren, the underbed of society. Kidd’s loss of identity is not something to fear, his fractured, fragmented identity is real, and Kidd copes fluidly with his situation, with the confusing changes in his reality. He projects his reality upon his surrounds and the tumultuous changes, strangeness, is reflected in Dhalgren. Memory infects The Einstein Intersection, through the remembrance and denial of the myths of the past, and the creation new myth in the intersection between Godel’s infinite theorem and Einstein’s relativist manifestations of reality.
Memory creates identity, memory projects continutity. One wakes up in the morning, and remembers life the day before. Although the reader is trapped in a temporal loop where the future is unknown, the past is there to stand on, to push forward from. Empire Star’s characters are guided by their future selves. Through a trick of time-continuity by travelling through the interstellar nexus at Empire star, they travel into the future and into the past, and shape and guide each other’s future experiences, so that all the characters die at the beginning, but their end is their beginning. The characters are transformed like the progression from larvae to crystalis to butterfly and the return. Memory serves to structure and create the continuity of life.
The purpose of Delany’s textual diversions is to rupture the linear continuity of the text. The rupture of the journal, authorial observations, and commentary split the text into two. The split column tactic, is a reference back to double consciousness. Lewy’s journal is in code, and so is the split in the text. Lewy shows his journal to his brothers, “ when John opened the cover it was in code – two columns, one barely comprehensible, the other complete nonsense. ‘You don’t want none of them jewboys to get hold of this,’ John said. ‘They could figure it out on you.’ ” (AM 8) and returning to the journal, John repeats, “ ‘They could figure it out on you.’ But, chuckling, Lewy wandered away, barefoot over fallen blossoms, as if codes and journals and secrets and cyphers had ceased to interest him as he searched the spring night.’” (AM 16) . . . The cypher of the split column of the effaced journal . . . Dhalgren’sAnathemata: a plague journal effaced with the authoral influence, elimination, statements of transcription: “The falsification of this journal . . . What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.” (D 734) These fragments of a thesis, consciousness bridging the gaps in between, produce a false picture, or a real picture, but with the potential of becoming whole deeply buried in the riverbed of the reader’s consciousness. How do the tiles of the mosaic fall together? Stand back a little bit more.
The double narrative, in its parallel columns . . . With the two (or more . . .) tales printed as they are, consecutively and not parallel at all, a romantic code hierarchizes them: the second account – full of guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge – displaces the first – overt, positive, rich, and social – at once discrediting it and at the same time presumably revealing its truth.
Yet reread closely.
Nothing in the first is in any way explained by the second, so that this “truth” that the second is presumed to provide is mostly an expectation, a convention, a trope – rather than a real explanatory force.
But if it is the split – the spaces between the columns (one resplendent and lucid with the writings of legitimacy, the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate, and even a third aglitter with ironic alterities) – that consistutes the subject, it is only after the Romantic inflation of the private into the subjective that such a split can even be located. That locus, that margin, that split itself first allows then demands the appropriateion of language – now spoken, now written – in both directions, over the gap. (MW 67-9)
These prismatic filters of the split narrative, a “double narrative, in its parallel columns” (MW 67) accentuating, supposing inter-relations, yet they are resolutely separate. A fragment of self-conscious purity, framing devices which highlight and accentuate the underlying themes. It is the play of light in the mirror of the text, projected through the lens of experience, focused by the prism of consciousness: “motes cycloned in the slanting illumination where I had been. And the motes stilled.” (EI 23) With the rainbow magic of a sheen of oil floating on water, cultures, genders, differences are recognised and bridged, even as they are transgressed, redefined. Each split column, the different narratives, they are bridged in the reader’s mind, united by understanding. Delany allows the margins to intrude on his work, through anecdote, through experience, splitting the text to accommodate new perspectives. Delany writes with the hope that his vision may be actualized, and the first thing that must be done is to have the thought that it is possible, that his hopes will be realized, and if we begin there, it will happen. Listen to the marionetteer:
He / is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesistate, Sentimentiality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation (AM 71)
The marginal is made, through the expression of Delany's oeuvre, as magical as a dimension of a multifaceted prism which includes all possibilities in glimpse . . .
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11:19 AM
