From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanique. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.
(pg 26)
“All right.” Tak spoke gently and appeasingly. “Why don’t you take the rest of your clothes off?”
“Look, I’m awfully dirty, man—” He raised his eye. “I probably stink like hell. If you don’t want-”
“I know just what you stink like,” Tak said. “Go on.”
He took a breath, suddenly found it funny, lay back on the hard pallet, unhooked his belt, and closed his eyes.
He heard Tak grunt. One, then another boot, thumped the floor and fell over.
A moment later a warm hip pressed his. Palms and fingers pressed his stomach; the fingers spread. Tak slid his hands to the jeans’ waist, tugged.
Heels and shoulders pressed on the hard pad, he raised his buttocks.
Tak slid the jeans down, and—“Jesus Christ, man! What’s the matter with you—that stuff all over your dick!”
“What . . . huh?” He opened his eyes, propped his elbows under him, looked down at himself. “What do you . . . ?” Then he grinned. “Nothing’s the matter. What’s the matter with you?”
“You got dandruff in your crotch?”
“That’s not dandruff. I was with a woman. Just before I met you. Only I didn’t get a chance to wash.”
“Was she sick?”
“Naw. Didn’t you ever fuck a woman?”
Tak had a strange expression. “I’ll be honest: I can count the attempts on the fingers of one hand.” He narrowed his already thin mouth.
“If my God-damn feet don’t turn you off, that’s sure not going to hurt you!” He reached to brush off his rough groin hair. “It’s just like dried . . . come or something.” The chain glittered across it. “It happens with some women, when they’re very wet. It’s nothing wrong.” He stopped brushing, let himself back down on his elbows. “I bet it turns you on.”
Tak shook his head, then laughed.
“Go on,” he said.
(pg 49)
He went into the bathroom; probably laid out the same as the one he’d peed all over upstairs. Two candles on the back of the toilet tank put two flecks on each tile; and there was another candle up on the medicine cabinet.
He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the “Prologemena.”
The water rushed.
After a page he skipped, reading a line here, a verse paragraph further on. At some he laughed out loud.
He put down the book, shucked his clothing, leaned over the rim and lowered his chained, grimy ankle. Steam kissed the sole of his foot, then hot water licked it.
Sitting in the cooling tub, chain under his buttocks, he had scrubbed only a minute before the water was grey and covered with pale scalings.
Well, Lanya had said she wouldn’t mind.
He let that water out, and ran more over his feet, rubbing the gritty skin from his insteps. He’d known he was dirty, but the amount of filth in the water was amazing. He soaked and soaped his hair, rubbed his arms and chest with the bar till the chain tore it. He grounded the balled washrag beneath his jaw, and then lay back with his ears under water, to watch the isle of his belly shake to his heart beat, each curved hair a wet scale, like the shingled skin of some amphibian.
Sometime during all this, Madame Brown’s high laughter rolled into the hall; and a little on, her voice outside the door; “No! No, you can’t go in there, Muriel! Someone’s taking a bath.”
He let out the water, and lay back, exhausted and clean, occasionally wiping at the tubline of grit, wider than Loufer’s garrison. He pressed his back against porcelain. Water trapped there poured around his shoulders. He sat, wondering if one could will oneself dry. And, slowly, dried
He looked at his shoulder, peppered with pores, run with tiny lines he could imagine separated each cell, fuzzed with dark down. He brushed his mouth on his skin, licked the de-salted flesh, kissed it, kissed his arm, kissed the paler place where veins pushed across the bridge from bicep to forearm, realized what he was doing, with scowling laughter, but kissed himself again. He pushed to standing. Drops trickled the back of his legs. He was dizzy; the tiny flames wobbled in the tiles. He stepped out, heart knocking to the sudden effort.
He toweled roughly at his hair, gently at his genitals. Then, on his knees, he did a slightly better job washing away the hairs and grit and flaky stuff still on the bathtub bottom.
He picked up his pants, shook his head over them; well, they were all he had. He put them on, combed his moist hair back with his fingers, tucked in his shut, buckled on his sandal, and came out into the hall. Behind his ears was cool, and still wet.
(pg 138-139)
She picked up a rubber band from the desk and stretched her fingers inside it to slip it over his roll. The band pulled in the fingertips: he thought a moment of his orchid. With deliberation, as though she had reached a decision about him, she said, “The poor people in this city—and in Bellona that pretty well means the black people—have never had very much. Now they have even less.” She looked at him with an expression he recognized as a request for something he could not even name. “We have to give them—” she reached forward-“something.” The red rubber snapped on the tube. “We have to.” She folded her hands. “The other day when I saw you, I just assumed you were black. I suppose because you’re dark. Now I suspect you’re not. Even so, you’re still invited to come to our services.” She smiled brightly again. “Will you make an effort?”
“Oh. Yeah.” He doffed the poster: He’d realized before he probably would not come to a service. Now he resolved never to return at all. “Sure. What do I owe you for … this.” One hand, in his pocket, he fingered the crumpled bill.
“It’s free,” she said. “Like everything else.” He said, “Oh,” But his hand stayed on the moist note.
In the foyer he stepped around the dumpy black woman in the dark coat too heavy for the heat. She blinked at him suspiciously from under her black hat, pulled up her shopping bag, and continued toward the office door. Between what Nightmare had said earlier and what Reverend Taylor had just said, he found himself wondering, granted the handful he’d seen, just where all the black people in Bellona were. The poster under his arm, he hurried into the evening.
Delany, Samuel. Dhalgren. Vintage; 12th Edition, 2001.
SAMUEL R. DELANY: I suspect Greg is writing there about my early work—up through, say, Nova [1968]. But if you line all my books together on the shelf, though that period (from ‘62, when at twenty I started publishing, to ‘68, when I sat back and decided to figure out what I was really doing here) contains a lot of titles, in number of pages the early period is only about a third of my production or less. He says, you note, that it used to bug him. I wonder how much he’s bugged by it now?
Now part of what, from my marginal position, I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race—whether white or black.
…
SAMUEL R. DELANY: (previous paragraph omitted)
The images of technology that say “SF” to most people come from a period in which we had a very different relationship with our technology from the one we have today. The period from the twenties through the sixties that supplies most of those SF images was a time when there was always a bright sixteen- or seventeen-yearold around who could fix your broken radio—and later, your broken television. He’d been building his own crystal radios and winding his own coils since he was nine; he had his tube tester and his ampmeter, and he’d go poking around in the back, find the dead tube, locate the blown resister or condenser, take it out, get another one for fifty cents or five dollars, and replace it for you with a little spit and his own soldering iron. And, yes, he was about 85 percent white.
The black boxes of modern street technology (or the white boxes of computer technology—not an accidental distinction, I’m sure) put us in a very different relationship with the inner workings, however. The kids who were the budding electronics repairmen are, today, the computer hackers. And if you are having a software problem, yes, often they can help you. But when the hardware goes—when one of those chips gets a crack or a scratch—they’re just as lost as anybody else. And that means, at the material level, our technology is becoming more and more like magic—with a class of people who know the incredibly complex spells and incantations needed to get the stuff to work, but almost none of whom can get in there and fix it.
MARK DERY: And for that reason isn’t its stamp legible in cyberpunk, whose politics seem more libertarian than left?
SAMUEL R. DELANY: Again, I’d say that locating SF in its traditions might be helpful here. There’s a certain rhetorical process that happens whenever a political argument is reduced to a dialogue: you see it in Plato. You see it in Ayn Rand. You see it in Heinlein—I’ve seen it happen in my own Nevèrÿon series.
Real political arguments go on for hours—forever—and are filled with a lot of ums and ahs, general backtracking, and people going over the same terrain again and again, trying to figure out what they actually think. That’s the real process of political discussion. In a novel, however, you haven’t got time to layout the whole thing, or to portray the terribly slow way people are moved, micro step by microstep, from one position to another in the course of days, weeks, years of such arguments. On paper, you concentrate on those rare moments in political discussions when two people who know exactly what their own positions are present them in such a way that one, in response to a single, well-formed argument from an opponent, changes her or his mind.
I am not a libertarian. I’m quick to say that I’m a Marxist—or, at any rate, a Marxian. I remember how distressed I was, some years ago, when I found that some of my Nevèrÿon stories and novels. in which there were a couple of ironic arguments about economics, had been taken up—briefly—by the libertarians. Indeed, if I have a major criticism of libertarianism, as I understand it, it seems to be their belief in the fiction of precisely that sort of political argument (which leaves everybody in a general consensus at the end—ha!) that has only a literary existence. What’s really wrong with the libertarians is how intellectually clean they want their politics to be.
MARK DERY: What do you, as a gay SF author, make of K/S, or “slash,” fanzines, in which female fans spin soft-core fantasies from the homoerotic subtext in Star Trek narratives?
SAMUEL R. DELANY: I haven’t looked at any “K/S” fanzines for seven or eight years, at this point. Pretty much like everyone else, what I was struck with at the time, however, was the extraordinarily high quality of the writing in all this amateur porn—and not all of it “softcore” by a long shot! And the sheer amount of the stuff is impressive. (I confess, I’ve never heard it called “slash” before—but that may be a change from the last half-dozen years.) If the production level has kept up since the few hundred pages of it I saw some years ago, by this time, there must be more than enough to fill a good-sized barn with the stuff!
As a gay man, I confess: the several hundred pages that I went through, for me, hard-core or soft-, were without erotic interest—just as, I suspect, most straight men’s lesbian fantasies are not the sort that excite practicing lesbians. In general, the stuff was just too antiseptic.
Still, the “K/S” material confirmed something that I already knew from my own life: that there are just as many heterosexual women who are turned on by the idea of men having sex with one another as there are heterosexual men who are turned on by the idea of women having sex with one another—that the engines of desire are far more complex than we usually give them credit for; and that if lesbians and gay men didn’t exist, heterosexual men and women would have had to invent them—because they constantly do
Delany, Samuel. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. 1993,
- Dhalgren was originally published in 1975 and the interview was published 1994. Almost 20 years of thinking about things.
- There is a lot of dirt (or dirty things, dirty acts, things that could be deemed ‘dirty’). Vulgar even.
- The Richards (or maybe just Mr and Mrs) are not totally disconnected from Bellona, but maybe they want to be.
- Sanity is questioned in Dhalgren but not in a Lovecraft fatally lost his shit way. Vastly different epistemologies coexist and contest each other. Would a sane (white) person willingly live in Bellona? Is this a question of desire or means?
- everyone is suckin and fuckin