Ellison, Harlan - Love ain,t nothing

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"These are the Fates, daughters of Necessity ... Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the

present, Atropos of the future."

Plato, THE REPUBLIC

FOR SHERRI, WHO PICKED UP THE PIECES.

FOR LESLIE KAY WHO ARRANGES THE PIECES.

FOR LORI, WHO IS OPTING TO BE ONE OF THE PIECES.

There is an inscription on the lintel over the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. It says:

Always look up.

Never look down;

All you ever see

are the pennies

people drop.

There is a seven-headed dog guarding the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. If you aren't

nice, it will bite you in the ass.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in

Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the

western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the

leopard was seeking at that altitude.

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO by Ernest Hemingway

INTRODUCTION

HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH A TROLL

One evening I met a young woman for whom I quickly developed carnal desires. We met at a party, I

think. I don't remember now. It was a while ago. And I cut her out of the crowd and finally we got

back to my house and it started to go wrong. Oh, not wrong in the way that once we were alone the

sexual thing didn't seem to be working out: quite the contrary. She began getting misty-eyed. I

could see that she was forming a fantasy view of the man who had swept her away to this strange

and colorful eyrie. She was thinking ahead: can this one be THE one I've been looking for? And I

didn't want that.

No point here in going into the reason I didn't want that; perhaps I was the wrong one for her on

more than a casual basis, perhaps she was wrong for me permanently, perhaps it was a hundred

different little things I sensed in the ambience of the evening. Whatever it was, I wanted to

discourage the fantasy, but not the sexual liaison. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.

But maybe there is. It depends where your concepts of morality lead you. For me, it was better to

be upfront about it, to say there's tonight, and maybe other nights, but under no circumstances is

this permanent.

And I tried to tell her, gently.

And that was wrong. Because it was hypocritical.

I wanted to have my picnic, but I didn't want to have to spend the time necessary to putting the

picnic-grounds back in the same condition I'd found it.

(That isn't a casually-conceived metaphor; and it's quite purposely not coarse in its comparisons.

To love well and wisely, I now believe, we must attempt to leave a situation with a love-partner

with the landscape and its inhabitants as well off, or better off, than they were when We arrived.

Like this:

(Walter Huston and Tim Holt and Fred C. Dobbs [sometimes known as Humphrey Bogart] are about to

leave the mountain from which they've clawed their gold. And Huston says to Holt and Bogart,

"We've got to spend a week putting the mountain back the way we found it." And Bogart looks

amazed, because they are running the risk of being set-upon once again by Alfonso Bedoya and his

bandidos. So Huston explains very carefully that the mountain is a lady, and it has been good to

them, and they have to close its wounds.

(And finally, even flinty, paranoid Bogart understands, and he agrees, and they spend a week

repairing the ecological damage they've done to the mountain that was good to them.)

So instead of trying to weasel and worm my way through an explanation that would have been no real

explanation at all, I asked her if she would mind my sitting down and writing something for her.

She said that would be nice, and I did it, trying to say as bluntly as possible with fantasy

images what words from the "real world" would not adequately say. And this is what I wrote:

She looks at me with eyes blue as the snow on Fuji's summit in a woodblock print by Hiroshige. She

says, "You're really different, really unique." Beneath the paleness of her cheeks the blood

suddenly rushes and she only knows her nervousness has increased in the small room, though nothing

has altered from the moment before. She does not understand that her skin and survival mechanisms

have registered the presence of an alien creature. Her blood carries the certain knowledge. Like

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the sentient wind, she perceives only that she has crossed an invisible border and now roams naked

and weaponless in a terra incognita where wolves assume the shapes of men and babies are born with

golden glowing eyes and the sound from the stars is that of the very finest crystal.

To her fingertips come the vibrations of flowers singing in silent voices, telling of times before

the watery deeps carried the seed of humanity. Her skin: absorbing the vibrations of unicorn's

hooves as they beat the molten earth into gold. Her nostrils: bringing to her the scents of dreams

being born. Her delicate nerve-endings: vital and trembling with expectation of oddness.

She sits with a troll, with another kind of creature, and her uneasiness grows. Cellular knowledge

assaults her in wave after wave, and she cannot codify that knowledge.

"Let me tell you a story," I say, and in few words explain the horizons of the land into which she

has wandered.

Will she understand that mortals and trolls cannot mate?

It didn't go well with her. It was a sour relationship from the start. I wound up doing her

damage, hurting her; she didn't hurt me. I don't brag about it, I'm certainly not proud of it,

there was no notch cut in the stock of the weapon from the encounter. Machismo wasn't part of it:

I hurt her and she didn't hurt me only because it didn't mean as much to me. I was a hard thing.

Colder. She was vulnerable. It had to happen, I suppose. If I'd been a nicer person I'd have

forgone the sex and sent her away at the start. I explain it now, by way of justification, by

saying she is a born victim: someone waiting to be savaged by love. But the truth is simply that I

am precisely like everyone else when it comes to love ... I am a child. I want my picnic, and I

hate cleaning up the mess.

Pause. Go back to the start of this book, just before the beginning of this new introduction. Read

the quote from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Do you know what it was the leopard was

seeking? Do you understand why the creature climbed to that altitude and what happened to it? The

answer to the riddle is the answer, I think, to understanding how to travel the road of love. I

put the quote there, what has become a powerful literary metaphor since Hemingway first wrote it

exactly forty years ago in 1936, because it seems to me to contain the truest thing one can know

about traveling that difficult road. Friends of mine, around this house as I assemble this book

for a publisher's deadline, don't seem to understand why that little parable, riddle, metaphor,

whatever the hell it is, seems so eloquent, and so right for this book of kinda sorta love

stories. I hope these words will clear it up for them. Probably not, though. I'm not too clear on

this subject of love myself.

In fact, some years ago, when I was writing the introductions to the stories in an anthology I

edited called DANGEROUS VISIONS, I found myself writing these words about myself and Theodore

Sturgeon:

"It became clear to Sturgeon and myself that I knew virtually nothing about love but was totally

familiar with hate, while Ted knew almost nothing about hate, yet was completely conversant with

love in all its manifestations."

That was in 1966. Ten years ago. I've revised my estimates of both Ted's and my understandings of

hate and love. It's been an interesting ten years for both of us, and if I were to take the toll

today I'd have to admit grudgingly that I've had some of the parameters of the equation of love

drilled into me by experts. And so now, ten years later, I set down these first few tentative

thoughts about the subject, offering as credentials the stories in this collection.

I can tell you many things love is not. Telling you what it is comes much harder to me. When one

feels like a novice, it becomes an act of arrogance to pontificate. Much of what I think changes

from day to day. And I suppose by the accepted standards of success, I'm a poor spokesman. It

seems the more experience I get, the less sure I become about anything where love is concerned.

(I'm not talking about my three marriages and divorces. That's another thing, and peculiarly, it

has less to do with my caution about this subject than more "informal" relationships.)

Lori and I were talking about this several weeks ago, and with what I take to be the normal

curiosityof anyone merging his or her life with someone else's, she asked me how many women I'd

been with. For a few days I wouldn't answer her. I wasn't hiding anything, I just didn't think

she'd care to hear the real answer. Finally, I told her. "I tried to count up, one time about six

years ago," I said. "And I used snapshots and correspondence and phone lists I found lying around

in old files and desk drawers, and I had to stop when it got over three hundred. I suppose I've

been to bed with maybe five hundred different women."

She didn't say anything for a long while, but I could see she was shocked. When I'd tried to take

the tally half a dozen years ago, I'd been shocked, too.

I realize there will be guys out there who'll read that figure--five hundred--which I think is

pretty accurate, and they'll react in one of several different ways. There will be assholes who'll

think that's pretty terrific. There will be amateur Freudians who'll think it's sick. There will

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be professional sympathizers who'll feel sorry for me. There will be guys who can't get laid

who'll think I'm lying, trying to trumpet some kind of bogus swashbuckler image.

Each view has some validity going for it.

But mostly, since I went through all those days and nights and people, since I was there (or as

much of me as I had control of was there), I subscribe to the view that I was looking for

something very hard, perhaps with uncommon desperation. I think I understand the psychological

reasons I was on that endless hunt, and I submit there was less of deviation, perversion or

obsession than of loneliness and a determination to find answers. I'm constantly perplexed at the

dichotomous position of people who laud a student's seeking everywhere to find the answers to

life, or creativity, or the existence of God, or the direction of the student's career ... who

cluck their tongues and badrap the same attempts to discover the answers to interpersonal

relationships by those who seek in every area that presents itself. If the true purpose of living

a fulfilled life is in establishing meaningful liaisons with people, if it's part of that

fulfillment to seek and find and give and accept love, then why should the search be looked on

with such moral disapproval?

Perhaps I'm advocating profligacy, but I don't think so. Discovering the nature of love is

infinitely more complex and exhausting than, for instance, learning how to be a brain surgeon. But

the smug, self-satisfied moralists think it's precise and proper for someone to spend fifteen

years learning how to ease a subdural hematoma, yet twisted, sick and sad for someone to spend the

same fifteen years learning how to ease his or her loneliness. Answers to the former can be found

in medical textbooks and in O.R.s all over the world; answers to the latter slide and skitter and

avoid discovery save by chance and steady application to all possibilities.

The search is as important as the discovery.

(And therein lies the core of the answer to Hemingway's riddle about the leopard.)

Lori seems to feel as I write this, that even if I don't have the answers. at least I've had a

greater opportunity to find the answers than those who deny the search, settle for whatever's

handiest, and then spend the rest of their lives with secret thoughts and open frustration.

On the basis of her view, and the fact that I trust her opinions most of the time, I'm plunging

ahead with this essay on love. I hope to God she's right. If she's wrong, and I've been merely a

profligate, indulging myself in adolescent sex-antics, I'm going to look like a righteous schmuck

by the time this introduction is completed. If I don't already.

Ambrose Bierce has two definitions of "love" in THE ENLARGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (Doubleday, 1967,

and a sensational book). Bierce, a cynic beside whom I look like Pollyanna, writes this:

Love, n. The folly of thinking much of another before one knows anything of oneself.

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences

under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is

prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations

breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal,

but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

People reading my books, most particularly the introductions in my books, think I am the

reincarnation of Bierce: that I am a mean, pugnacious, constantly depressed or alarmed sonofabitch

into whose life the sunshine of affection has never cast its effulgent glow. Fuck you, I say

politely.

Even the most drooling of the Jukes or the Kallikaks* should be able to perceive that someone who

manifests such volatile feelings about injustice, racism, stupidity, mediocrity and general

negative bullshit in the Universe has his times of joy and happiness and noble dreams that soar

aloft as one with the greatest aspirations of the human race. Those who read my works and remember

only the stories and essays that deal with blood, lust, violence, death, disfigurement, pain,

depression, smarmy sex and ka-ka do me a disservice. Also, they are sick and ought to be "put

away," if you catch my drift. I have written dozens and dozens of kind, gentle, happy, funny

stories and introductions. But do they remember those? Do they? Huh, I ask you, do they!?! Not on

your cryonic crypt, they don't! All they remember are stories such as "I Have No Mouth, and I Must

Scream" or "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World." All they recall when my work is

mentioned are the shrieks of torment coming from my characters.

When the truth of the matter is that I'm basically a very happy fellow. Funny, too. I adore small

children, dogs of all breeds, Barney Miller and Richard Pryor and George Carlin and M*A*S*H,

noodles, the humorous novels of Donald Westlake. (Noodles have always seemed hilarious to me, go

figure it.) For instance, I got a letter today from Debe (No Last Name Given) at Millikin

University in Decatur, Illinois; and she went on you wouldn't believe about being a fan of my

writing, but how disturbing it all was, how I always seem to write sad or mean stuff. "Is there

another side?" she asked. "We all have our demons. But tell me more of you. You must have some

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light, some happiness, something good that you cherish?"

Now, see! There you go. A perfect example. Here's this young woman (I presume she's fairly young

from the writing and the content) who encounters me in a series of books and gets all grunched out

of shape because she thinks I'm downcast, and she wants me to spill the beans on myself, to tell

her what makes me smile and laugh and love.

And apart from wanting to keep some personal feelings to myself--Gawd, you're a greedy bunch, no

matter how much I blather and reveal, you're never satisfied--the things I do unleash are

frequently as happy as they are miserable. But when I try to look on the bright side, and pass

along the lucent limbus of my personal joy, everyone who remembers those screams of anguish comes

down on me like a tsunami, accusing me of being maudlin and saccharine.

So if the observations I make about love seem just a tot on the pragmatic, even cynical, side ...

well, it's purely an attempt to walk the tightrope: to indulge an uncommon (to my readers)

softness of spirit without slopping over into Rod McKuen-ism; to be as tough-minded as possible

(and thereby useful) about something as intangible as love, without sounding bruised or

discouraged; to avoid cliché without purposely wandering in the glades of perversion.

I've included two of those tightrope-walking routines in this book. Originally, they were

installments of a column I wrote for Art Kunkin when he was editor of the Los Angeles Free Press

and later, when legitimate-thugs-turned-illegitimate-"businessmen" screwed him out of his own

newspaper and he started an abortive, short-lived competitor, for Art's Los Angeles Weekly News.

Though they're true, not stories, they read like stories--I've listed them on the Table of

Contents as Personal Reminiscence I and II--and it's in the story-form that I feel most at ease

writing my views of love. Unless one is Shelley, a Nuñez de Arce or La Rochefoucauld, one has no

business publicly shooting off one's mouth about something as mysterious and ethereal as love.

Unless one is le Marquis de Sade, in which case one has a personal vision of love that defies all

strictures.

But in fiction, even a groping dullard like myself can stumble upon a truth or two; or at least a

rule-of-thumb that seems to work in certain situations, among certain kinds of people. So when I

pass along these remarks, I'll try and couch them in anecdotal terms, all the better to entertain

you, my dears, and not coincidentally to alleviate my own nervousness in this area.

So here is just about all I know concerning love. Some of it light and happy, some of it cynical,

perhaps some of it even accurate and truthful. One never knows, do one.

The minute people fall in love, they become liars.

You'd think such good feelings in the gut and other places would make people want to ensure the

continuance of those feelings. But their fears overcome their good sense, not to mention their

ethics. They begin to lie, virtually from the first moment they feel the stirrings in the aorta

... or wherever it is love is supposed to make itself felt.

They lie in a hundred different ways. From the first tentative social conversations that bore them

silly, they lie by pretending to be interested in inanities. This is a generality, but I think it

holds: if it's guys, they listen to banal bullshit just on the off-chance they'll get laid. If

it's women, they listen to the blown-out-of-proportion nonsense of men so they can reinforce the

guy's need to be a Big Man. They lie to one another with looks and with words, and only the body-

language tells the truth.

They lie to keep the upper hand, even before they're threatened. The fear of rejection is so

ingrained, from the schoolyard, from the locker room, from the parties, from the Homecoming Dance,

from the years of seeing lithe tanned women in bikinis and feral muscular men with shirts open to

the sternum up there on four-color billboards; they fear the unknown outer darkness of someone

saying, "No."

So they lie to one another. Granted, it's akin to the social lying we all do at parties, in

restaurants, at social events: putting up with trivia to be politic or civilized or "gracious,"

whatever that means. Nonetheless, it is lying. And by feigning interest in that which bores or

turns one off, they set up artificial grounds for a potential relationship that they have to

maintain all through the rest of the association. I know a young woman who met a guy at a party.

He turned her on, and he started voicing some of his rustic views on busing. She had worked for

the integration legislation as a regional attaché to one of the senators pushing the facilitation

of busing. She came out of ten years of hard and thankless work trying to achieve racial balance.

He was a divorced businessman with two kids, who was, at heart, a man who feared and hated blacks.

Though he would have gone to his grave swearing there wasn't a scintilla of bigotry in his well-

clothed body. But they turned each other on, and she listened and nodded, and said nothing. They

started dating. It lasted six months. Then it fell apart. When his narrow view of the world became

too much for her, she started to fight back. Now he tells everyone she was a "castrating bitch"

and she harbors guilt feelings for her own intransigency. False and untenable rules for the

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relationship had been the order of their mating from the git-go. It was doomed to fail.

Earlier, I passed along a generality. There are, of course, exceptions. There are women who listen

to the crapola put out by guys at parties because they want to get laid, and there are guys who

put up with women's inanities because they want to be polite. It happens. But the point still

holds. They do it because they want to be liked. They lie and listen to lies so they'll be

accepted. The first faint stirrings of love--barely codified, still inarticulate--force them into

the role of liar.

And then the lies, once having been freed from Pandora's Hope Chest, begin to breed. They multiply

like maggots and riddle a relationship like a submarine hit by a depth charge. Consider just the

most obvious ones we've all either used or been victimized by:

You walk into a room and she (or he) is brooding.

"What's the matter, something wrong, something bothering you?" That's what you say.

Then he (or she) replies, "Nothing."

A lie, a bald-faced lie. You know damned well there's something wrong. The way the legs are

crossed, the way the arms are folded, that telltale pursing of the lips, the vacant, abstracted

stare, the peremptory way the words are bitten off. There's something wrong. But she (or he) says,

"Nothing."

Is it because the brooding party really has something heavy to brood about and, out of love,

chooses to lie rather than to lay it on the other person? Is it (more likely) that the brooder has

been brought down by something the other party did, and wants to whip a little unconscious, free-

floating guilt on the perpetrator before spilling the loadof shit being carried in the gut? Is it

part of the stylized ritual of hide-and-seek so many lovers play? Is it a physical manifestation

of the brooding party's having done something they mutually consider "wrong" (like going out and

getting laid on the sly), and getting him or herself set to rationalize it in such a way that the

other member of the team feels like the criminal, using the brooding dark mood as a kind of head

start in the argument that will follow?

What does it matter? What we're dealing with here is dishonesty, cupidity, misdirection, acting-

out ... lying.

Here's another one. And you've all been on one or the other end of this one:

"No, I have a headache."

"No, I'm tired."

"No, I'm a little inflamed."

"No, I have a hard day tomorrow."

"No, it isn't right."

"No, I'm still in love with [fill in appropriate name]."

Now none of those oldies but goodies is being spoken by a man or woman on a first date. I'm

talking about their use in an already ongoing relationship. But a relationship in which one of the

partners has been turned off, and won't cop to it! So he or she lies. Again and again and again.

Instead of simply saying, "You have bad breath," or "I'm not sexually turned on by you any more,"

the lies are ranked like Mirv missiles and fired off, one each time an enemy approach is sighted.

Here's another one. Before they met, he was attracted to medium-height, auburn-haired females

between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight with high conical breasts and very thin legs. She

was attracted to guys with tight little asses and an almost total absence of chest and arm hair;

guys with blue eyes and heavy torsos and English accents and thin, aquiline noses. But one time he

made the error of going on admiringly about one of those fantasy-women just a few seconds too

long, as they sat there watching the hair coloring commercial in which the woman appeared, and she

got extremely uptight. And one time she made the error of spending a half hour in a corner at a

party talking to a guy just like the kind she lubricated for, and he (her boy friend) went into a

towering Sicilian machismo rage about her flirting.

So now, they purposely turn away from the somatotypes that attract them, when they're out driving,

when they're walking in the shopping mall, when they go to the movies, when they spend an evening

at the bowling alley, when the tv camera pans across the bleachers at the football game, when

they're at a party. She'll test him by drawing his attention to a girl he's already clocked and

turned away from, by saying, "Do you think she's attractive?" And he'll glance over quickly, and

with feigned disinterest mumble, "Legs're too skinny." But he has a stack of beaver magazines

hidden away in his work bench, each magazine containing 372 unretouched shots of girls just like

the one he dismissed. He'll test her by introducing her to a guy at the office party who fits her

secret sex fantasies, and later asking, "What'd you think of Ken?" And she'll go right on basting

the roast or drawing up the blueprints for the new museum wing or finishing the sketches for that

children's book, and she won't even look up as she says, "He's nice enough, I suppose. Not very

bright, though, is he?" But half the time when she's fucking him, she's envisioning Ken.

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Ellison, Harlan - Love ain,t nothing

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