The Motion of Light in Water

It’s not surprising that you can’t check Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water from the New York or Brooklyn public libraries. The subtitle, after all, is “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.” It practically says, “Steal me.” But it’s worth making the trip to the Schomburg Center to read it on the premises, or to get your own copy online. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs over the last couple of years, and this is one of the best.

If your main exposure to Delany came—as mine did—from the documentary The Polymath, you may have been left with the impression that Delany’s life has been completely dominated by anonymous sex, with the writing of a few books shoehorned in.

It’s true that the man has had an extraordinary amount of sex. In fact, despite being (primarily) gay, he has probably had more sex with women than most straight men have. But reading The Motion of Light in Water makes it clear that he cares about people more than sex—he recalls some of his many men in great detail years later, including their clothes and hair and hands (Delany is attracted to nail-biters) and the occasional slighting remarks that wounded him. And he cares about writing perhaps most of all.

Here and there in the book (sections 10, 38.11, 65.6, and 85, if you’re writing a paper), Delany uses the theme of light in water to express the difficulty of capturing all these aspects of existence. This is from section 65.6.

Consider two accounts of a life.

They seem as if they take place on different planets.

Yet the narrator, through all that surrounds them both, insists the parallel columns write of one person—even more, insists that the gap between them, the split, the flickering correlations between, as evanescent as light-shot water, as insubstantial as moonstruck cloud, are really all that constitutes the subject: not the content, if you will, but the relationships that can be drawn out of that content, and which finally that content can be analyzed down into.

Delany has been not only a writer but an actor and singer. One of the more amusing anecdotes in the book describes the night when Delany nearly ended up headlining a double bill with the then-unknown Bob Dylan. When the “breathless young man, in a denim jacket and on the fleshy side,” rushed in and seated himself onstage, Delany’s friend Billy, the club manager, explained he would have to wait his turn. A disagreement ensued.

“...well, then, don’t come back!” Billy said, at last, a little loudly, a little flustered.

And with his case, Dylan rushed out the door as breathlessly as he’d come in.

Shaking his head, Billy put his hands on his hips, looked at us, and really said, “Bob Dylan! Who does he think he is ...?”