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GODBODY
June 13, 1992
Lying naked in the sun
in the one small private spot
on the roof of our house,
I finish reading _Godbody_,
Theodore Sturgeon's last novel.
As I'm reading, I note resemblences
to other things Sturgeon has
written, that I read when I was
younger. This detail about
Lieben-tote, that was used in
another story. The basic idea is
fairly similar to "The Skills of ONE_GESTALT
Xanadu". The loving, sympathetic
focus on the psychologically
maimed, that's a recurrent theme, too.
Also, as I'm reading, I step outside
the story and take a more
unsympathetic eye than I once might
have. All of these people converted
into nicey-nice moonie-types at the
mere physical contact of the pivotal
character. Doesn't this "We can all
be one" stuff trivilize the real
challenge of living in the world: to
maintain our freedom to be ourselves
when we are most definitely _not_
one.
There's a hard won realization
that we can't expect unification,
that one of the few things we have
in common is the need to defend
ourselves from the forces of That is, to
unification. defend the
right to be free.
Take something more specific: all
this glorification of nudity.
Sturgeon tries to make it a "A naked person can lie to
transcendent condition, something another naked person. But
magical. Is there anything really it ain't easy."
that special about it? Wouldn't it
be an empty symbol without the
forces of prudery to charge it with
meaning?
But isn't this true of everything?
What thing can hold on to what it
symbolizes under the glare of the
unsympathetic eye?
Does the cynical eye see the
unsavory truth underlying the
surface, or does it create it?
"What is needed is a gentler curiosity." GOODMAN
When I take on someone on
the net, sometimes it seems like
things get away from me. I start
out intending to get at the truth
of things, to try to apply some
insight and express what I find in
a tight, entertaining way. But
instead it comes out sarcastic and
negative, and whatever I was trying
to say gets lost in the hassles of
dealing with people wriggling on
the hook, complaining about things
that are irrelevant, trying to come
up with a snarl, a shot, a way to strike
back. Once it gets to this
level, any hope of proceeding to
something like an understanding is
long gone.
And this is not There was some magic in this
only a problem chain of thought, but
with the net. I feel like I'm losing it...
Sturgeon himself, was a master
of the sense of magic...
Like in _Silken Swift_, where
unicorns are not just
horses with horns, but a special
thing. Or _A Touch of Strange_
with mermaids that are both more
down to earth, and yet more
spiritually uplifting than any
cutesified Disney creation...
STURGEON
From Paul Goodman's GOODMAN
_Five Years: Thoughts During a
Useless Time_
It is an annoying style in argument to listen
intently until you catch the crux and then cut him
off, saying, "Yah! I see your point, but it's
besides the point. The point is this-- " Most
often you have grasped the point correctly--
sometimes not-- but your opponent is annoyed at
being interrupted, and it doesn't help if you have
caught his point correctly on the fly.
Nevertheless, though annoying, this style is
necessary, for if you hold your water you cannot
keep paying attention: you can't pay attention to
what is beside the point, or to a point once you
have grasped the point. You become bored and
surly. This is therefore a bad dilemma. Here is
a possible solution: Attend to the _speaker_ even
after you have got the point, he does hold and
advance and expand (!) this point. Listen to the
tone of his voice, his syntax, the wrinkles on his
brow and mouth. Intuit, while you are waiting,
his psychosexual nature and the incidents of his
childhood. And when it comes again your turn to
speak, you will have become concerned with _this_
complex object; and it is to this, rather than to
the original point of argument, that you will now
address yourself. Thus you will have acquired a
style of argument that is still more annoying.
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