Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"Artists can," I said. "Some very good emperors have been the patrons of some very good poets. But a lot more good poets seem to have gotten by without patronage from any emperors at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Okay: a poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they're a part of life. He's got to be a person who knows what he's doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing — the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they're interesting. But I don't want them."

"Are you lying? — 'again,' as you put it. Are you fudging? — which is how I'd put it."

"I'm fudging," I said. "But then… I'm also writing."

"You are? What a surprise after all that! Now I've certainly read enough dreadful things by men and women who once wrote a work worth reading to know that the habit of putting words on paper must be tenacious as the devil — But you're making it very difficult for me to maintain my promised objectivity. You must have realized, if only from my euphuistic journalese, I harbor all sorts of literary theories — a failing I share with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill (not to mention Nero and Henry the Eighth): Now I want to read your poems from sheer desire to help! But that's just the point where politics, having convinced itself its motives are purely benevolent, should keep its hands off, off, off! Why are you dissatisfied?"

I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and wondered how much of him I was losing behind the stonework. "What I write," I said, "doesn't seem to be … true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order." I meshed my fingers, which were cool, and locked them across my stomach, which was hot. "I haven't been given enough tools. I'm a crazy man. I haven't been given enough life. I'm a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it… When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who… When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one of them jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me — what in me can order gets exhausted before it all."

"You're sure you're not simply telling me — Oh, I wish I could see you! — or avoiding telling me, that the responsibilities of being a big, bad scorpion are getting in the way of your work?"

"No," I said. "More likely the opposite. In the nest, I've finally got enough people to keep me warm at night. And I can feel safe as anyone in the city. Any scorpions who think about my writing at all are simply dazzled by the object — the book you were nice enough to have it made into. A few of them even blush when descriptions of them show up in it. That leaves what actually goes on between the first line and the last entirely to me. The scorpions caught me without a fight. My mind is a magnet and they're filings in a field I've made — No, they're the magnets. I'm the filing, in a stable position now."

"You're too content to write?"

"You," I said, "are a politician; and you're just not going to understand."

"At least you're giving me a little more support in my resolve not to read your work. Well, you say you're still writing. Regardless of any personal preface you might make, even this one, I'm just as interested in your second book as I was in your first."

"I don't know if I'm about to waste any time trying to get it to you."

"If I must arrange to have it hijacked, ink still moist, from beneath the very shadow of your dark quill, I suppose that's what I'll have to do. Let's see, shall we?"

"I've got other things to do." For the first time, I was really angry at his affectation.

"Tell me about them," he said, in a voice so natural, but following so naturally from the archness, my anger was defeated.

"I… I want you to tell me something," I said.

"If I can."

"Is the Father, here at the monastery," I asked, "a good man?"

"Yes. He's very good man."

"But for me to accept that, you see," I said, "I have to know I can accept your definition of good. It probably isn't the same as mine … I don't even know if I have one!"

"Again, I wish I were allowed to see you. Your voice sounds as though you might be upset about something." (Which I hadn't realized; I didn't feel upset.) "I'm not oblivious to your efforts to keep our talk at a level of honesty I might find tedious if I didn't have the respect for truth a man forced to tell a great many lies for the most commendable reasons must. I'm not very satisfied with myself, Kid. In the past months, a dozen separate situations have propelled me to the single realization that, to be a good governor, if it is not absolutely necessary to be a good man, it is certainly of inestimable help. Bellona is an eccentric city that fosters eccentric ways. But the reason I'm here, of all eccentric places in this most eccentric place, is because I really want to—"

Dust or something blew into my mouth, got down my throat; I cleared it, thinking: Christ, I hope he doesn't decide my voice is breaking with emotion!

"— to remedy a little of that dissatisfaction. If he is not a good man, the Father is certainly a generous one. He is allowing me to stay here… Of course there's always an odd relation between the head of the state and the head of the state-approved religion. After all, I helped set up this place. Same way I helped set up Teddy's. Of course in this case, the biggest — if easiest — job, given my position with the Times, was making sure there was no publicity. In your present mood, you can probably appreciate that. But, no, my relation to the Father is not that of commoner to priest. On my side, at any rate, it is duplicitous, fraught with doubt. If I didn't doubt, I wouldn't be here now. I'm afraid the politics works through the spiritual like rot. The good governor at least wants it to be the best rot possible."

"Is the Father a good man?" I asked again and tried not to sound at all like I was upset. (Maybe that backfired?)

"Has it occurred to you, my young Diogenes, that if you polished up the chimney of your own lamp, you'd be a little more likely to find this mysterious and miraculous Other you are searching out? Why does it concern you so?"

"So I can live here," I said, "in Bellona."

"You're afraid that for want of one good man the city shall be struck down? You better look back across the train-tracks, boy. Apocolypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes. That simply isn't our problem any more. If you wanted out, you should have thought about it a long time back. Oh, you're very high-minded — and so, at times, am I. Well, as the head of the state religion, the Father does a pretty good job; good enough so that those doing not quite so well would do a bit better not to question — especially if that's all we can get."

"What do you think about the religion of the people?" I asked.

"How do you mean?"

"You know. Reverend Amy's church; George; June; that whole business."

"Does anyone take that seriously?"

"For a governor," I said, "you're pretty out of touch with what the people are into, aren't you? You've seen the things that have shown up in this sky. There're posters of him out all over town. You published the interview, and the pictures that made them gods."