A, B, C

After she started writing, Russ enrolled as a student at the Yale School of Drama. Among the things Shaw had written, in a letter to a younger friend, which Russ once passed on to me: when actors are told that they are taking too much time to say their lines, and because the play is too long they should speed up or even cut the lines, often the better advice is to slow things down even more. Frequently, what makes parts of it seem muddy, slow, or unnecessary is that the development is too compressed for the audience to follow. Expand it and make the articulations of that development sharper and clearer to the listeners. Then the play will give the effect of running more quickly and smoothly and what before were “slow” sections will now no longer drag.

That can apply not only to reading texts but to writing the texts themselves. (Not to mention prefaces, afterwords, and footnotes — or simply reading.)

In a world where cutting is seen as so much easier and the audience is far too overvalued — and simultaneously underestimated (the audience is, before all else, ourselves) — this is important advice. One of the things that make it important is how rarely you will hear it or anything like it these days — which is why I’ve ended with it. It’s one way — but only one — to guide the work I must always return to.

A good question with which to begin that kind of revision is: if I set aside, at least momentarily, what I hoped I was writing about when I first put all this down, what is this text in front of me actually about that interests me? How can I make that clearer, more comprehensible, and more dramatic to myself? Can I dramatize or clarify it without betraying it?

(And suppose I can’t…?)

In revising even this sketchy guide through what is finally a maze of mirrors, several times that’s been my question here.

If, like me, you are someone who reads the foreword and afterword before you tackle the texts between — and often I do, then go on to chuckle over how little they relate to what falls before or after, the world, the text — now, however abruptly, I will stop to let you go on to read the text, the world that contains them and of which for better or for worse, however briefly, they are a part. Who knows if there might or might not be something between these covers that, later, you’ll want to read again. Again, I cannot know. But I can hope. We can even think about how my or your hope inspires you, if we will also talk about why it guarantees nothing, either to the young or to the old, either to me or to you. But that’s one of the things books are for. That’s why they have margins — which, in a sense, is where forewords and afterwords (and footnotes) are written.

And when you encounter the flaws in the texts here (and you will), you can decide whether or not Shaw’s advice applies, or if they need more — or simply different — work.

August 2014

New York

Notes

1

Like thousands on thousands of young writers before and since, I figured the easy way to write a novel was to write a series of interconnected short stories. I’d even thought of it as an experiment — and I still think it could have been an interesting one. But it was an experimental idea that I’d used in place of doing the necessary imaginative work, rather than a formal idea I had brought to life through the work and the thinking that would have opened up and multiplied its resonances and meanings. It was an idea I had thrown away rather than utilized, because I’d hoped it would be interesting in itself, whatever its content. Forty years later I tried it again, with more success — I hope — in a novel called Dark Reflections. (It won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008.) But this reflects on something I find myself writing about even today: though the genre can suggest what you might need, it can never do the work for you — whether you are thinking of the text as science fiction, as literary, or as experimental; though, from time to time, all of us (writers and critics both) hope that it will.

2

Sometimes the uses of evolutionary developments seem obvious. Far more often, though, they are invisible and their uses not necessarily comprehended by the creatures — including humans — who possess them. (This is why the notion that sex is only for reproduction is, itself, an antievolutionary notion.) What are earlobes for? Well, they are blood collectors that help supply the ear with blood and keep the inner ear warm in very cold weather. That’s probably why they developed first in northern climates and why smaller earlobes developed nearer the equator. Well, then why don’t all northerners have large earlobes and all equatorial people have small ones? Because, over the last four hundred years, quite enough intermixing has occurred in both the north and south to rearrange the genetic distribution, which rearrangements can be considered a natural response to the interbreeding of peoples and the movement that goes along with it and is also a long-ago established evolutionary advantage of genetic reproduction itself, which allows such rearrangements in diploid genetic species for blending-inheritance aspects. (Haploid species — some stages of amoeba and paramecia — can mix genes through a process called syzygy, but that’s much rarer and takes even more time to develop anything evolutionary — although it does, some. A science-fiction writer who was most fascinated by that process — and one of the great short fiction writers of the middle of the last century — is Theodore Sturgeon. Read him. He’s wonderful.) Two evolutionary ideas to keep in mind: first, by the time anything develops evolutionarily, it always has many uses; and that includes earlobes, large and small. No matter how scientists talk about them, anyone who believes that any evolutionary development has only one use basically misunderstands how evolution works: because the development is slow and gradual, at each stage the development must be useful enough to give a large-scale statistical survival advantage to a group. Those uses change as the aspect develops but the older uses they met don’t necessarily go away. (Humans’ external ears are highly erogenous — whether individuals use that aspect or not.) If it isn’t useful at all, it breeds out eventually. Carrying around excess still isn’t an advantage — though sometimes it only looks excessive to us. Second, any aspect of us that is widespread and has been around for a long time almost certainly has some functional use(s), even if we have never stopped to consider what it might be. Humans had developed a circulatory system with veins, arteries, valves, and a complex heart multiple millions of years before the Egyptians in the sixteenth century BCE and with observations by Romans and Arabs over three thousand years contributed to William Harvey’s assembling a viable model of the whole human circulatory system (as well as discussing a few of its uses, but by no means all) in his 1628 publication, De Motu Cordis. And we are still discovering aspects of the circulatory system that have been in place since before we branched off the general evolutionary line along with the other great apes, many of which are common to all mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish. In many of their variant forms they do lots of things very well, and a staggering percentage of the greater “us” (almost all of us who aren’t plants or worms — and worms are the major planetary population, remember; though we share still other things with them, such as muscles and an alimentary canal) utilize them to interact with the cities, the caves, the rural areas in which they live or have lived, the prairies, the grasses and brambles and ferns, the seas, the seabeds and trenches and shallow reefs, the deserts, the hills, the tundra, the mountains, the jungles, and forests.