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 ...?”

The joys of the sullen

Seeing this message every morning on the way to the High Line eventually made me curious enough to look up the Brooklyn-based artist Elbow-Toe and to follow his Twitter feed. 

Pond at dusk

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is mobbed during the Cherry Blossom Festival, but it is beautiful—and much more peaceful—the rest of the year.

During the winter the garden closes at 4:30, but yesterday I spent the last couple of hours there. This photo captures the mood, though it’s one I took a couple of years ago. Many more can be seen at Flickr. 

Slender plumes of soldiers

Cardinal flowers are in bloom in the native-plants section of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Thoreau wrote about this flower a number of times in the Journal. Like the autumn leaves of the sumac, the fiery blossoms roused military associations in his mind. (The photo is from the US Forest Service, as my own turned out blurry.)

August 27, 1856
The cardinals in the ditch make a splendid show now, though they would have been much fresher and finer a week ago. They nearly fill the ditch for thirty-five rods perfectly straight, about three feet high. I count at random ten in one square foot, and as they are two feet wide by thirty-five rods, there are four or five thousand at least, and maybe more. They look like slender plumes of soldiers advancing in a dense troop, and a few white (or rather pale-pink) ones are mingled with the scarlet. That is the most splendid show of cardinal-flowers I ever saw.

In the late 1970s, the naturalists Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale took a series of canoe trips down the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, the two streams that join to create the Concord River at Egg Rock in Thoreau’s hometown. They noted that the polygala Thoreau once found in a local peat bog was now rare, and that the pretty but aggressive purple loosestrife, a European import, had largely displaced the bright reds of the cardinal flower.

Yet it may be that there are natural fluctuations in the numbers of the cardinal flower.

August 16, 1858
I am surprised to find that where of late years there have been so many cardinal-flowers, there are now very few. So much does a plant fluctuate from season to season. Here I found nearly white ones once. Channing tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white. As in a large number of cardinal-flowers you may find a white one, so in a large flock of bobolinks, also, it seems, you may find a white one.

The Felix Unger of cats

Our cat Dudley is a rescue cat. He spent the first several months of his life struggling to survive on the streets of New York, and when his mother and siblings were rescued, he was the last of his litter to be adopted. (Hard to understand, because he’s a charming little guy.)

Perhaps as a result, Dudley has a strong need to control his environment. He has firm beliefs about the proper time to be fed, and when I come home from work he is sure to remind Jenn so she can greet me at the door.

Early in his stay with us, he set up what we refer to as his apartment, between the wall and the head of the bed. There he can retreat, sheltered by a pillow, when he needs some personal space. To furnish the place, he borrowed some items, including my watch, some pens, and Jenn’s MP3 player. Extra pens he would stow under the rug in the living room, neatly lined up.

Now that he’s more comfortable, Dudley has become less of a kleptomaniac. But his controlling tendencies are still obvious from the way he handles his toys. In the corner of the bedroom behind the footlockers, just behind his perch, Dudley has arranged three of his balls in perfect alignment and in order of size.