The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (10 page)

The mixture is very strange and not horrible at all; the bull and the man are each there, blended but uncontaminated, with their own nature and their own beauty.

When human and animal can mix so completely, they are, by implication, the same. An identity has been asserted.

In Norstrilia, the eponymous setting of Smith’s one novel, an immortality drug, stroon, or the santaclara drug, is made from the exudations of enormous, sick sheep. The countryside is dotted with these sheep, big as airplane hangars, immobile, diseased. By their endless dying they furnish untold wealth and eternal life to their human owners.

Animal sacrifice is a very widespread human custom. The little dead mouse, the dying sheep of Norstrilia, may be seen as animal sacrifices to ensure human welfare. But the Underpeople’s suffering and their sacrifice in the person of D’joan extend and enlarge the theme. It is unmistakably a human sacrifice—also a fairly widespread human custom. D’joan’s life points to Joan of Arc, of course, and behind that, to the humiliation and death of Jesus.

The “Old Strong Religion,” one of Smith’s fine phrases, is mentioned in several stories, but he never does much with it. In a way it would seem more appropriate if the Old Strong Religion were, not Christianity as it evidently is, but Buddhism. The Compassionate Buddha can be incarnate as any creature, as a mother tiger, as a little jackal, as a bird, as a mouse. Smith does not share the Judeo-Christian exclusive focus on one species, the exclusion from sacredness of everything but the human. His stories say that the death of an animal counts the same, weighs the same, as the death of a human. That animal and
human are equally sacred. That salvation can lie in the death of a dog, as in the death of a god.

This is pretty subversive stuff. Smith’s attitude towards authority is complex. He loves to tell us about people who are immensely powerful and supernally rich—the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality, the Misters and Owners of Norstrilia, such as the boy who bought Old Earth. Linebarger’s familiarity with the corridors of power must have fed this fascination, and also fueled Smith’s visions of people in power who learn to be worthy of their power, who become just, compassionate, and wise. Their wisdom leads them to subvert their own orderly, static, perfect society, to reinvent freedom, ordaining the Rediscovery of Man, when “everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.”

But wisdom, compassion, and justice fail them when it comes to the Underpeople. Here they still have something to learn. Here the Judeo-Christian division still obtains. The Underpeople are nonpeople, they have no rights, no souls, they are things that exist to serve Man. Like any machine or slave, if useless or rebellious they are to be destroyed. At this point, in this division, lies the ethical crux of Smith’s strongest stories.

“Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” serves well to illustrate the themes. In a corridor under the earth (the twelve-mile-high Earthport and the deep underground are recurrent, contrasted loci) the narrator Paul and his Virginia are threatened by a monstrous, Dr. Moreauish, drunken version of the bull-man. They are saved from it by a woman, who tells them, “Come no closer. I am a cat.” When Paul thanks her and asks her name, she says, “Does it matter? I’m not a person.”

Paul has reacted to her as to a beautiful woman, but Virginia feels “dirtied” by even this contact with an Underperson. At the end, high on the ruined boulevard in the sky, C’mell tries again to save them both. Virginia, horrified that a cat-girl might actually touch her, tries to avoid her and falls to her death. Only Paul, who saw her as human,
can be saved. And the reason she wanted to save them was that Paul—unthinkingly, instinctively—had stopped another man from crushing the eggs of some birds.

You saved them. You saved their young, when the red-topped man was killing them all. All of us have been worried about what you true people would do to us when you were free. We found out. Some of you are bad and kill other kinds of life. Others of you are good and protect life.

Thought I, is that all there is to
good
and
bad?

There is, of course, much more to the story, a marvelously complex one; but at the heart of it is this motif, a familiar one from our secular mythology, our folktales. The girl who saves the ant from the spider’s web is saved in turn by the ants, who do her impossible task for her; the prince who sneers at the wolf in the trap is lost in the forest, but the prince who frees the wolf inherits the kingdom. The theme is pagan, entering Christianity only with St. Francis. It is a profound element of Buddhism, Jainism, and other Asian religions; and the sense of the interdependence of human and animal is fundamental to the native religions of North America.

Smith was touching a deep chord here, one that is not often struck in realistic fiction. Science fiction is specifically suited to this theme, since its central subject is the interaction of the human with the nonhuman, the known/self with the unknown/other. The durable and mysterious power of Cordwainer Smith’s stories is not a matter only of their exuberant language and brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery; there is a deep ground to them, a moral ground, lying in his persuasive conviction of the responsibility of one being for another. “Thought I, is that all there is to
good
and
bad?
”

Note: Cordwainer Smith’s works, published in paperback, are at any given moment mostly out of print. Among them are the story collections
You Will Never Be the Same, Space Lords, Stardreamer
, and various combinations of pieces of what never quite became a finished novel, published under the titles
The Planet Buyer, Quest of the Three Worlds
, and
Norstrilia.

STRESS-RHYTHM IN POETRY AND PROSE

This investigation and discussion grew out of a workshop on rhythm in language I gave in 1995. It leads to the next essay, on rhythm in Tolkien’s work.

G
ETTING
THE
B
EAT

RHYTHM
Phys., Physiol., etc
., movement with regular succession of strong and weak elements; regularly recurring sequence of events.—
In literature
, metrical movement determined by various relations of long and short or accented and unaccented syllables; measured flow of words and phrases in verse or prose.
In music
, periodical accent and the duration of notes.
In fine arts
, harmonious correlation of parts; regular succession of opposites. (
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
)

Movement is the first word. Rhythm is a mode of time.

Like time, rhythm can be imagined as linear, events seen as beads strung along a line of intervals, or cyclical: the line becomes a circle, a necklace of beads. Or if the event is singular, the interval can be seen as a circle always coming round to it again: for instance, year as interval, birthday as event. . . .

Identical intervals make a regular rhythm. The more irregular the
intervals are, the more alike the events have to be for any rhythm to be recognised.

Rhythm is a physical, material, bodily thing: the drumstick hitting the drumhead, the dancer’s pounding feet. Rhythm is a spiritual thing: the drummer’s ecstasy, the dancer’s joy.

Beginning to consider the rhythms of writing, my mind wandered about among the world’s beats: the clock, the heart, the interval between the last meal and the next meal, the alternation of day and night. Trying to understand how and why writing is rhythmical, I thought about mechanical, biological, social, and cosmic rhythms; about the interplay of bodily rhythms with social regularities; about the relation of rhythm and order, rhythm and chaos.

One way to start thinking about such things is to try to listen to your own body’s beat.

Many kinds of meditation begin, and some go on, by concentrating your awareness on breathing, nothing but breathing. You sit and you pay attention, full attention, constant attention, to your breath as it goes in your nostrils and comes out. When your attention wanders, you gently bring it back to your nose and the sensation of breathing. In . . . out . . . in . . . out . . . To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose and nothing else, this sounds really stupid. If you haven’t tried it, try it. It is really stupid. Nothing your intellect can do can help you do it. This must be why so many people for so long have used it as a way towards wisdom.

Rhythm is pulsation. So is life. If they want to know if you’re still alive, they feel for your pulse, no? Find your pulse where you can feel it easily and attend to it, its evenness and irregularities. Heartbeat changes a lot, it’s seldom metronomically even for long.

And also, attend to the interval
between
beats, thinking of the pulse as a boundary between intervals. Event and interval, like figure and ground, can be reversed.

Walking is a lovely beat. Just walking. Runners like a fast pounding beat, a high stress-rate. That’s fine. But it’s also pleasant to walk,
just walk, in awareness of the steady, subtle, ever-changing rhythms of walking.

T’ai chi walking is interestingly rhythmical. I learned to do it thus: You’re barefoot. You stand still for a while. On an inbreath, lift one foot and move it forward. Set it down as you breathe out. The other foot will naturally begin to rise, but its full rise and movement forward must wait for the inbreath. It comes softly down on the outbreath. Meanwhile, the first foot is ready for the inbreath. . . . You aren’t going to get very far, walking this way. I used to fall over quite a lot when I first tried it. To keep your balance it helps to set the whole foot down at once, lightly, not striking down heel first, and to be aware of the touch of foot on ground and the touch of ground on foot. This is
very
low stress-rate walking. It’s a form of meditation, because you can’t think about anything else while doing it.

Meditation
is a word often used to mean “thinking” but as I understand it, it means
not
thinking, which is much harder than one would think. In any case, all the meditative practices I know offer an immediate awareness of bodily and other rhythms.

R
HYTHM
IN
L
ANGUAGE
: S
TRESS

I apologise for the didactic tone of this section. The subject of language rhythms has a technical vocabulary, and as with all such jargons, some words need explaining. The technical word for the beat in language (spoken or written) is
stress
. There are unstressed languages, but English is a language that uses stress.

ENGlish is a LANGuage that Uses STRESS.

Some syllables get said harder than others. That’s “stress.”

Every English word spoken by itself has at least one stressed syllable, even if it only has one: (WHEN?) Many words, however, when used in sentences, receive no stress: the, of, in, a, when . . . (when USED in SENtences). In normal speech, a stress occurs every few syllables.

(Note: Most of us discovered as children that if you repeat any
word aloud, such as the word
syllable
—
syllable syllable syllable syllable syllable
—or even your own name, it will begin to sound funny and then become meaningless, having been reduced by repetition to pure sound and rhythm, which is all it “really” is. This is important.)

Poetry and prose differ in the
frequency
and the
regularity
of stresses.

Frequency:
In poetry, there is often only one unstressed syllable between stressed ones, and seldom more than two (thus: TUM ta TUM, or TUM ta ta TUM, but seldom TUM ta ta ta TUM). Prose often has three or even four unstressed syllables between stressed ones.

In other words, in poetry the intervals are shorter; or, in other other words, in prose the intervals are longer.

If you say more than four unstressed syllables in a row you are likely to find yourself mumbling. That’s what mumbling is.

SYLLables in a ROW—that’s four. SYLLables in an unexPECted ROW—that’s six, and it is so mumbly that in reading it aloud we’re likely to put in a substress, perhaps on the “un” of “unexpected,” to give it a bit of a beat so that it’s easier to say.

Both as readers and as speakers, we want the stresses to occur fairly often, we resist long intervals. We don’t really like mumbling.

Regularity:
A regularly repeated pattern of stress/unstress, a regular beat, in language, is called
meter
. Meter belongs to poetry. To poetry alone.

Within the realm of poetry, free verse does not have meter. But the stress-count of free verse is high, and it sneaks in a lot of semiregular, sort-of-metrical patterns.