Before he let go of my shoulder, though, he held me long enough to say that They Fly at Çiron — which had just come out in paperback — was his second favorite work of mine: a possibility for a similarity, or even for a partial congruence having arisen from his encounter with the text in his mind and from the very different encounter with it in mine, but no certainty, no identity.
I smiled. “Why, thank you for taking the time to tell me — about both. That’s very nice of you.”
Glancing at the glove, he dropped his hand back to his side. “Oh, sure. Any time, I guess. You’re welcome. I’m glad it’s okay…” He told me about the magazine in which, two weeks before, he’d seen my picture and read its few paragraphs about me. He was a black American man like myself, which meant we’d shared many experiences and much cultural history. He was a black American man like myself, which meant his world and his upbringing were unique, as were mine. (For all our human species’ similarities, if we look carefully enough, uniqueness — fingerprints, retinal patterns, the synaptic links in our three billion brain cells, genetic variations in both essential and nonessential genetic material that reflect the different specificity each of us inhabits and our ancestors inhabited [i.e., it didn’t kill us in that particular landscape before we could pass it on], even if we live in houses next to one another, or in the same house in the same family — is our most widely shared trait.{16}) Did that have anything to do with his stopping me? Possibly. In the twenty-five seconds we spoke, the next thing he let me know was how much he liked Octavia Butler’s work. “Kindred…? Those stories in Blood Child?” he asked. “Patternmaster …?”
I nodded, smiling.
“Did you ever meet her?”
“She was a student of mine, many years ago,” I told him.
“Oh, wow,” he declared. “That’s amazing! She was?”
“That’s right. She was discovered by a white Jewish writer, Harlan Ellison, who was running a special program in Los Angeles, and encouraged her to come to the place where I and a number of other SF writers were teaching.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well — ” I laughed — “now you do.”
For a moment he frowned. “Hey, I like his work too.” Then his frown relaxed into a smile.
“So do I.” I didn’t mention how many other SF writers I’d taught over the years — or had Harlan or any of the other writers and editors who had taught at Clarion, including Butler herself several times.
The article had mentioned that I was black — and gay. It hadn’t mentioned that my wife and I, though divorced, had raised a daughter. (Or that, for several important years, not only my partner but my mother, my ex-wife and her partner, and forty other gay men and their children had been a part of that raising.) I was wondering if he had a family — when he added, “Great meeting you. Hey, I gotta get back to work.”
I called, “Thanks again. So long…!” while he loped off past the blue plastic recycling tubs that had already been emptied, to follow the once-white Isuzu refuse collection truck up the street, on which, above and outside the hopper, someone had wired a big, stuffed, grubby bear.
If you enjoyed Çiron too I am happy. My apologies, if you didn’t. But maybe the extension of this anecdote — here — will suggest a further explanation for the sanitation worker’s reaction, not so different from why Professor Clareson enjoyed Beta-2.
Initially, at the conclusion of this afterword, I’d planned to revert to our A, B, Cs, and to discuss how what started, after all, as a random collection of signs for sounds, developed into such a powerful ordering tool, beginning with the fact that, at our opening, we didn’t alphabetize the titles of the books, but only the first letter of the final proper noun in each.
Older alphabets, such as Hebrew and Greek, begin, in effect, “A, B, G: aleph, beth, gamil…alpha, beta, gamma…”; which suggest a great deal about the history of written language, because so many of those alphabets from that relatively small arc of the world share so many sequences with one another, which means contact between the cultures: the Arabic abjad has several orders, two of which begin a, b, d, (abjad, hawwaz, ḥuṭṭī) and two of which begin a, b, t. (We would have neither algebra — which is a Arabic word — nor the use of the Hindu zero, nor the names of so many of our stars, without the Arabic language and its cultural flowering through the centuries, in poetry, science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.) Other writing systems, which developed in different places — China and India, Korea and Malaysia, Central and South America — are as rich and as creative as any of the “classic six” (up through much of the nineteenth century, these included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, along with Sanskrit and Aramaic), but work differently, sometimes at very fundamental levels. My first idea was to go on with what an alphabetic ordering could accomplish and what it couldn’t.{17} As I began drafting it, however, I got caught up in still another meditation on “social” evolution, an idea I distrust as much as I believe in what we call Darwinian evolution, a distrust for which the huge collapse of the time frame in “social” evolution is only one bit of the evidence against it — that is to say, reduces it to a misleading and highly abusable metaphor instead of an efficient explanation of another effect, another illusion, which often contravenes what biological evolution itself so overwhelmingly suggests. But that seemed a bit off topic for where I wanted this consideration to go.
I decided, therefore, to go back instead to some advice I’d encountered by the time, in Amherst, I settled down to do the work — the rewriting — on They Fly at Çiron. (I’d dedicated Çiron to my current life-partner, Dennis, and, after twenty-five years together, I include him in the dedication to this omnibus as well.) The advice was helpful — to me; very helpful. But, like any writerly advice, it didn’t replace the work. If I’d only applied it to the textural surface rather than to the fundamental narrative logic, it would have resulted in more confusion (and perhaps it did), whether I was writing fiction or nonfiction. It had to be a guide for where — and the way — to do the work, which, throughout, habit demanded I do as nonhabitually as I could. It also suggests why, today, this version of Çiron is three times as long as the text I salvaged from the old manuscript I’d carried with me from New York to Amherst, and why it has six characters who weren’t in the first version at all.
The 1925 Nobel Prize — winning Irish (though he lived much of his life in England) playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw was a great favorite of an astonishing American writer, Joanna Russ, whom I was privileged to have as a friend from the middle sixties until her death in 2011. (Though we met only six or seven times, our letters back and forth starting in 1967 fill cartons.) She was an enthusiast both of Shaw’s plays and of his criticism, musical and dramatic. From adolescence on I’d enjoyed Shaw’s theater, but Russ was the first to remind me of his other pieces,{18} some of which I had been lucky enough to have read before on my own, so that I could reread them in the twin illuminations of her knowledge and enthusiasm.