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That multiplicity, thanks to evolution, is always both plural and limited (parsimonious). Their pluralities are the political urgencies, disasters, and satisfactions mentioned above, as they are inchoate to the wonders and distresses, the pains and pleasures, and the symbolic forces that exist only through intellect, from the workings of discourse to the square root of minus one, to the existence of stars, quarks, photons, quasars and pulsars, dark matter, dark energy, galaxies, gravity, and the multiverse they constitute.
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The larger point: I am as much the person who makes the mistake as I am the one who corrects it. I am as much the person who gets to the place in a sentence or a paragraph where I realize I am ignorant of a date or the name of a city where some historical event occurred as I am the person who, twenty minutes later, returns from the encyclopedia on the lower library shelf or turns from the computer screen after a ten-minute Google hunt to fill it in. Writing above a certain level requires, however, that you gain some understanding of both, not only within your “self” but out in the world. Perhaps this is what has given me a career-long fascination with people who cannot speak or write at all, as well as an equal fascination with poets (which etymologically means “makers” and more recently “makers of things from language”), though the “self” I present the world is neither one nor the other, thanks to the Other that is always there in me, the “I” that “I” am always struggling to overcome. This is the only way I can resolve the aporia (the contradiction; and aporia was Plato’s word after all) as to why Plato, who was such a fine writer in the Greek of his time, in his hypothetical and optative society so famously excluded the poets from his Republic. Plato wanted the poets who were there to be better than they were, that is, to choose the option to be more faithful to the idea of truth — which, when talking about an imagined world, is not quite the same as actually banishing them from the actual. I am not in the least suggesting, as some folks have, that Plato wrote science fictions. But I do. That helps me read him — as, doubtless, having written one novel himself (Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas [1885], a favorite of both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) and started another (Gaston de la tour), helped Walter Pater, seven years later, in his wonderful Plato and Platonism (1893), have the insights about the philosopher that he did. (Far closer to our day than to Plato’s, Pater noted that, had he been writing in ours, Plato could have been a great novelist.) The ten-volume set of Walter Pater’s complete works — which her father had not allowed in their library when he was alive — was among the first books Woolf bought with her inheritance on her father’s death. And, a favorite of all the young readers of the Oxford Aesthetic Movement of the previous twenty years (and one of the great forbidden books of its age), Marius is among the first books directly alluded to (by Buck Mulligan, on page eight of the Vintage International edition of Ulysses), through its subtitle. Usually such allusions are literary love — though they can also, sometimes, be literary hate. The unconscious, Freud suggested, uses no negatives. Strong emotion is strong emotion. To me, however, this one has the feel of an enthusiasm.
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Modernist experimental French writers in the twentieth century, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Genet, used largely the not quite four-thousand word vocabulary — with bits of added slang — that the seventeenth-century writers Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille used, three hundred years before. This is not the case with, say, American modernists such as Hemingway and Faulkner on the one hand and our seventeenth-century English writers John Donne and John Milton on the other. The difference between the two traditions, French and English, is an effect of the French National Academy in the one and the lack of the same in England, America, and Australia.
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“Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction”: initially I had written it in the Autumn of ’69 and delivered it to a group of enthusiastic science-fiction fans who met in a house in the beautiful Berkeley Hills. That meeting was hosted by a member of the family who made Tanqueray Gin — surely a resonance with what I will shortly write. At that year’s MLA, I read a version cut by half. The complete text was published in Quark/1 (Paperback Library, NYC, 1970), edited by Marilyn Hacker and myself. Today you can find it in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a revised edition of which is available from Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, 2010). For the record, that ’69 talk is among the last times I used the term “speculative fiction” before returning to the phrase, adequate for any critical use I have found myself in need of since: “science fiction.” As far as I can see, the basic meaning of “speculative fiction” is: “whatever science fiction I, the speaker, happen to approve of at ten o’clock Wednesday morning or at whatever moment I use the term,” which makes it a very slippery shifter and too vague to sustain a useful critical life in any analytical discussion. I have not used it, except more or less ironically, and then rarely, for forty-five years, though even today I run across people claiming it’s my “preferred term.” It’s not.
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With some eight thousand-plus others, our own turning galaxy arcs toward the Great Attractor in our supercluster of the galactic net, a cluster containing the Virgo galaxy cluster at the end of one peninsula of galaxies off the parent cluster, while ours is at the end of another, next to it. Till recently, we thought we were part of Virgo. But we’re not. Both our galaxy — the Milky Way — and the Virgo cluster are on short chains of galaxies that feed into the major supercluster (more like an unraveled ball of string than a swarm of bees), which is about a hundred times larger than astronomers thought even a few decades ago. Only this year have they started calling that larger structure Laniakea — Hawaiian for “Immeasurable Heaven.” Now it’s been measured and is currently among the biggest structures the descendants of our million-times great-grandmother (or great-aunt) “Lucy” and her many-times-grandson (or great-nephew), “Red Clay Man” (the meaning of the Hebrew name “Adam”; which tells not only what they thought he looked like but what they thought he was made of) have individuated, mapped, and named — though Lucy and Adam both probably saw fragments of it when they looked up at the naked night, as we can today. It’s about a hundred million light-years across. But, about that size, many more link to it, to make the gravity-enchained galactic net. Google Laniakea or Perseus-Pisces or the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster; or the Axis of Evil or the Bright Spot — all galaxy markers in our expanding map of the multiverse. All are impressive.
For all it doesn’t tell us about dark matter and dark energy, light carries an awesome amount of information throughout the multiverse, whether from the edges of the visible or from the leaf by my shoe sole at a puddle’s edge, information that links through evolution to why and how so many creatures — including most humans — have eyes.
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They burn up, melt, or both, and finally, with enough heat, defuse as plasma, and under increased radiation even their atoms may eventually shatter.
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