I’m teaching Samuel Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction in the East Village to my undergraduate class (“Reading the Queer Renaissance”). This is only the second time I’ve read the book; the first was last summer, when I was developing the course. On that occasion, I was reading mostly for the plot, and for what Delany himself fetchingly and accurately explains as gossip value: “There’s a process politicians know well: a hand shaken is a vote secured….There is an analogous process in the arts, by which the great writer, once met, however fleetingly, ceases to be a passing, passive interest and becomes an active object of study” (169-170). I admit I really dug, especially, reading Delany’s version of Marilyn Hacker as a very young poet/wife/groupie-to-male-gaydom.

The second time around, my mind concentrated by the necessity to help the class make sense of this 570-page tome, I’m focusing much more on the ideas that Delany threads through his stories of writing, tricking, and trying to stay solvent and be a responsible though hardly monogamous husband. He is of course a terribly intellectual writer, if by that is meant simply one by whom ideas are “cathected” in the same way emotional objects are by most of us. And, this time around, the ideas I’m picking up on have largely to do with the question of how to tell a life, and in so doing account for the parallel streams of experience in which we imagine ourselves immersed: streams with names like “History,” “subjectivity,” “the psychological,” “the economic,” “the aesthetic.”

The image of the title, light moving in water, serves for Delany as an ethereally phallic metaphor for the interpenetration of forms of experience that are assumed to have a specific relationship to each other (for instance, following Foucault, Delany talks about how the subjectivity of desire is thought of as the “truth” of the public realm, its dark, hidden, potent double) even though the relationship tends to break down the moment one attempts firmly to establish it; this he demonstrates by relating the tale of two high school friendships, one with a couple of attractive, self-confident, popular boys, “students who glittered” (72), the other with a much more average student whose handshake produced a sexual response sufficiently intense to make the young Delany want to keep the (on the surface utterly asexual) connection with this boy separate from his more socially presentable ties. The friendships were parallel in that they were initiated at the same time and conducted in isolation from each other; after recounting them as consecutive, almost unrelated stories, Delany steps back to comment:

With the…tales printed as they are, consecutively and not parallel at all, a romantic code hierarchizes them: the second account—full of guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge—displaces the first—overt, positive, rich, and social—at once discrediting it and at the same time presumably revealing its truth.
Yet reread closely.
Nothing in the first is in any way explained by the second, so that this “truth” that the second is presumed to provide is mostly an expectation, a convention, a trope—rather than a real explanatory force. (72-73)

So then what is the actual relationship between the two realms of experience? The “motion of light in water” points to a vision not only of the ultimate theoretical reductio ad absurdum of the parallel columns but the possibility of a tangible, materially specific social dissolve, a moment in which the realm of “guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge” can relax almost completely, as when the young Delany realizes that the drag king who played master of ceremonies for the dazzling lineup of transvestites he’d seen in the “Jewel Box Review” at the Apollo Theater is none other than Mary, his summer camp counselor:

And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one, and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light. (104)

Through his periodic returns to the idea of parallel columns, Delany underscores an implicit parallel between the heritage of the closet, with its dramatically intense separations between what is known as “the private” and “the public,” and the operations of theory as an attempt to account for our individual and collective experience. This is very much a book about living in history, by an author anxious to locate the “historical” within the subjective—yet, time and again, Delany seems struck by the incommensurability of the levels of things that can and do happen almost simultaneously to any given person. Despite his optimistic vision of shimmering and shifting boundary lines, he is often drawn instead to map out more and more parallel columns, entertaining himself with an inner debate as to how best to dispose them in relation to each other, ending in the recognition that any ordering is perforce arbitrary. In describing his memories of the fall of 1962, he relates several incidents connected to the Cuban Missile Crisis—becoming panicked by a siren and a flash of light into thinking a nuclear bomb had exploded; hearing simultaneous radio and television coverage of the Cuban Ambassador’s speech to the U.N., the former continuing through a standing ovation for the diplomat, the latter truncated to elide that reception—and a visit to a sculptor friend’s studio, which ended in a game of attempting to arrange cardboard shapes into a pleasing design. Delany writes:

For a moment…consider [these incidents]…as objects to be arranged or rearranged on the stage called “October 1962.” Which orders are most pleasing? Which orders are not?
And why?
If the U.N. Council session preceded the false bomb scare, it certainly suggests a particular psychological progression—but, alas, there is no way to be sure it did….
And, of course, to bring the tale of the aesthetic demonstration to the fore by even this much is to assume for them all that the pleasure of their organization is, primarily, aesthetic.
To say, by the same token, that all three inhabit the same “historical” field—or even that they generate it—is to hypostatize “History” out of our very ignorance of the relations between the “experiences” that produced it. For “History” is what we create by the scratching, the annoyance, the irritation of writing, with its aspirations to logic and order, on memory’s uneasy and uncertain discontinuities. (252-253)

It’s characteristic of Delany’s writing, or this phase of it, at any rate, that he states matters in such a way as to suggest that his enterprise is largely aesthetically motivated. Yet what finally captures me is that the questions he’s asking are, in fact, the questions that the literature that “holds my interest” usually takes on in one way or another: beyond aridly aesthetic consideration, how might we “truly” tell the story of relations between these different levels, or columns, or categories, or whatever they ought to be called? “Truth,” of course, implying not the only way in which these things might legitimately be ordered, but rather an account that could begin, just barely begin to give us a purchase on the possibility of reordering those, yes, so largely unknown “relations between the ‘experiences’.”

Despite his honest or perhaps contrarian avowal of ignorance as to what produces a given historical result, Delany does attempt to grasp the feel of the shift that would become “the Sixties”; these are some of the best little epiphanies in the book, e.g. his account of attending one of the first “Happenings” (an event called Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts) or recognizing a genuinely new sound when he heard Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” played on AM radio, or—my favorite—feeling a jolt of fear upon receiving undeniable visual evidence of the reality of gay male society when he witnessed a police raid that sent scores of men fleeing from the cruising ground of trucks parked on a West Side pier: “Institutions such as subway johns or the trucks, while they accommodated sex, cut it, visibly, up into tiny portions….No one ever got to see its whole….And any suggestion of that totality, even in such a form as Saturday night at the baths, was frightening to those of us who’d had no suggestion of it before—no matter how sophisticated our literary encounters with Petronius and Gide….”(293).

I don’t know, of course, what my students are really making of all this. What could I possibly say that could help them understand the extent to which we, in our supposedly show-all, tell-all, see-all, camera-studded age, are actually living another version of the closeting, the fragmentation, the dismembering of the body politic that Delany describes? While there are surely plenty of sex-related examples out there, the ones that come immediately to mind are of another order: for instance, the police pens that now regularly vivisect New York marches and protests. (During one recent, massive demonstration for immigrants’ rights, my partner walked from his office on Rector Street, near the former World Trade Center site, all the way north to Canal Street and was unable to join the demonstration at any point along the way because Broadway was completely blocked off with police barricades; approaching the rally site from the north, I finally managed to join up with the crowd but got herded into one of the pens and remained nearly stationary for over half an hour, unable to move toward the actual rally or leave the penned-in area, although pedestrians moved freely just beyond the barricades—it was, not let us say, an experience designed to make anybody feel very “empowered” despite the excitement of such crowds, primarily working-class people of color, out in the streets yelling, “Sí, Se Puede!” .)

I think, too, of what’s currently occurring at the New School as students, faculty, and staff respond to the announcement that Senator John McCain will be our commencement speaker. Perhaps in a future column I’ll enumerate some of the more ridiculous excuses that scared citizens offer for not signing a simple petition calling on President Bob Kerrey to withdraw the speaking invitation because the senator’s record flies in the face of the New School’s progressive traditions. Suffice it to say that, despite widespread dismay at the prospect of having commencement turned into a platform for a right-wing Republican in full campaign mode, way too many members of the New School community (I’m primarily talking about faculty here) seem content to plan nothing more vigorous than grumbling in twos and threes, keeping their heads and voices down in public, and waiting for it all to be over.

All citations are from:
Delaney, Samuel R. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.