DYPK Transcript
Adventures in Neveryon
Remarks presented by Dana Kadison
Pecha Kucha Night Cincinnati, Volume 2
Friday, May 8, 2009 at The Art Academy of Cincinnati
I had a show images in this style. Eventually they will be very small details in other images. However, they and the process of making them had taken hold of my life. They are very lush and precise, and beautiful, if you like that sort of thing.
I had to get them out of the computer and onto a wall, in order to get them out of my head.
However, after the show, I was afraid to go back to work. I had the project, but I could not find the permission to start. Above all else, I questioned my entitlement.
I procrastinated: I cleaned my house, I even prepared my taxes; and then I actually ran away; and I came back no better.
As luck would have it, a friend invited me to share her current research by watching “Have Gun Will Travel” on DVD.
During a break, I made some remark about the Phaistos Disk, and she responded, asking: “Have you read Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryon series? I think, perhaps, you should. I wrote a long-short paper on it, which you can read when you finish book one, Tales of Neveryon. Then you will not have to read Derrida.”
I read Tales and then the other three books––1500+ pages––in about a week. (And, by the way, you do not need to have read Derrida to appreciate Delany.) At the beginning of Book 2, Neveryona, I read this:
This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensibility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook: an imaginative exploitation of nonwhite cultures, whose moral life it drastically oversimplifies, whose wisdom it plunders and parodies. To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for ‘another form of civilization’ refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models because they are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the grounds that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering . .
So it was not simply how Delany plays––how he tells, expands, bends, twists, fragments, reassembles the narrative––it was Sontag’s words that gave me permission to go back to the work I wanted to do.
Because if Sontag says it, and if Delany, a black, gay, SciFi writer and respected (and widely honored) professor who knows from “signs”, “signifying”, and “signifyin”, puts it out there for me to find, then I have permission to try it on.
What is so great about Delaney? A lot of Science Fiction descends directly from Asimov’s I Robot. It envisions a relationship between man and technology that is in the future, or another universe, or dimension; sometimes it asks “what if” and goes back a century or two to recast the present.
In Neveryon Delaney goes way back and meditates on how society is built, functions and mutates, in a very fresh way that is at once familiar and mysterious. It models the rules of sword and sorcery and then subverts them.
If Borges had taken Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and, instead of writing a thought-problem, had written a series of character-based novellas––weaving all his other Ficciones into them, he might have produced an epic this complex and refracted.
Although, with all due respect to Borges, he could not have produced characters as charming, compelling, intriguing and, often, as repellent as has Delany.
Nor would he have examined the nature of desire and enslavement as thoroughly.
Delaney created a world that mirrors ours and then departs. He is a very generous man, because above all Neveryon is an honest work. Neveryon is very personal to him––he writes from everything he knows, and invites us in. He hides as little as possible.
Now, we all bring everything to every utterance, every writing … every object we create. We may even purposefully examine every, single thing we create. Still we follow rules that we do not understand or even recognize as rules. We continue to reference the signs, rituals, and things of others. Which brings me back to Susan Sontag: we cannot recognize, analyze, or understand every “influence”.
We do not “grok”––to take issue with Heinlein.
We should go on anyway. We have permission to borrow things of value, if we return them invested with additional value.
My old-new project is a visual meditation, which I summarize this way:
Discourse is not possible unless we structure dialogue with rules upon which we all agree. Then discourse becomes a possibility, but only a possibility, because there are rules we cannot know and experiences we do not even know that we do not share. At that point, a picture is worth at least a thousand words, but it will not clarify anything.
Yet, we will find meaning in it or make meaning from it.