Subscriptions, space travel, public schooling and Katy Perry

I’m going to ask you for money. Then I have another Gene Wolfe essay for you.

Valentina Tereshkova and the 'Vostok 6' spacecraft.

Well, we’ve hit 1,000 subscribers, which means it’s time for me to turn the paid subscription option on. I’m going to give you the hard sell this once.

Get Literate is a free publication. I believe in a democratic, universal, free literary education. You deserve that. The core of this project, the Reading is Writing series and other essays directly related to my education, is to my mind a sort of public property. It is a great honor of my life that people from Bolivia to Nigeria and the Philippines, to say nothing of my own countrymen, (but somehow no Vermonters) read this blog each week. When I started this, I thought some co-workers and some old classmates would read it and I would quietly stop publishing after it fizzled to polite disinterest.

But thanks to you personally, Get Literate is alive.

I have written fiction for 13 years and I have never been paid for it. I have written literary criticism for several years and have made exactly $100. I want you to change that. I would like you to kick in $5 a month to Get Literate. Click this button and upgrade to paid, please:

If all 1,000 of you converted to paid subscribers today I could quit my job and do this full time. You would get more and better work: Essays comparing books to their movie adaptations, polemics about Saving Private Ryan, reported/deeply researched literary and craft essays rather than off-the-dome musings. Probably some videos too. Maybe a podcast where I make my lovely girlfriend read Infinite Jest. Maybe even some political journalism. As it is, I will write approximately one subscriber only post per month, in addition to 3-4 (depending on how many Thursday there are) free posts.

I want this newsletter to be the anchor of my literary career.

Having a stable income would make novel writing much, much easier. In previous modes of publishing production, margins and sales were high enough that many authors could stay eating just from “potboilers,” to say nothing of bestsellers. But in the United States in the 2020s, the only way to be a professional fiction writer is to have another gig. I want you to make Get Literate that gig.

I won’t dissimulate. I won’t lie to you. I want this very badly. I do not want to give so much of my soul to making shareholders rich. I want to give it all to literature and to you, the reading public.

All of us deserve much more than we will ever get from this world. Though Gene Wolfe wrote the Ascians as a parody of Maoists, I think often of two proverbs from his Ascian storyteller in Citadel of the Autarch:

“Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let rats starve.” And “Let there be clean water for those who toil. Let there be hot food for them and a clean bed. Then they will sing at their work, and their work will be light to them. Then they will sing at the harvest, and the harvest will be heavy.”

I have hot food and a clean bed. I sing at this work and this work is light to me. But only you can make this harvest heavy.

Lol that was cringe.

Speaking of Gene Wolfe:

Holy Katharine of the Matachin Tower

Off the bat, this is probably my most disorganized essay to date. For that I apologize, I’m basically flying solo this earnings season and as a result am working overtime (this newsletter is late because I had to write five articles today), so my essays will be occasionally undercooked. But as this blog is a record of intellectual labor, I shall let it stand: Failure counts, too.

Last week a colleague asked me to write about Katy Perry’s trip to space. I had originally planned my alms-begging to be accompanied by a starter pack, as requested by another reader. But I didn’t finish it. This then is my attempt to honor my colleague’s request.

We have forgotten how to go to space, perhaps we should not try to remember.

“Memory oppresses me,” So says Severian, the protagonist of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun in the second chapter of the first volume.*

When I was in elementary school, Mae Jemison was an important hero. This was not long after the Columbia disaster, and Jemison was a sort of talismanic figure, for our teachers at least, representing the possibility of spaceflight and the dignity and achievement of black Americans. In this, she synthesized the utopian dreams of post-War U.S. liberalism: A cosmopolitan, meritocratic capitalism and cosmic ambition on the part of all humanity.

The core of what the right now calls ‘woke’ was long the unstated assumption that black Americans belonged in public life. The form of 2010’s liberalism against which the right is reacting was an attempt to take that proposition through to its natural conclusion. In a way, that type of liberalism sought to pick up the threads of history severed by the calamities of the 1980s and 90s and by tugging on them draw the great social movements of the midcentury into the 21st century. At least that’s what the people who fought for it around me believed. But there was a curious moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s where representational politics had won, in some small areas, a real (meager, incomplete) dignity, even as it failed to transform the political economy of post-industrial cities. ‘Woke’ as originally used meant an effort to take that project forward.

I am too young to know what that felt like for politically active adults, so I can say only what it felt like to me at a black school in the inner-city: I remember teachers in early grades reading us books about Mae Jemison, Harriet Tubman and Ruby Bridges. I remember feeling their loneliness on those pages. And I remember looking up to the stars and feeling certain that in time all of us would go there too.

Dreams of technological progress die hard, because often they fade into religious dreams. Gene Wolfe does this, mixing his second coming with his space-faring (apparent) forgetfulness, his aliens with his gods. This was to a literary end. And the midcentury liberalism that devoured the great liberation movements had its own spacefaring moments of transcendence: The Pale Blue Dot, and Armstrong (Whitey) on the Moon, Voyager with its golden records. Embedded in these symbols, and the great text that collated them—Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—one finds a sense that the immensity of the void would strip away nationality, sex, age, class. Something of our powerlessness before elemental nothing, perfect death, would make of us a community.

That this was bound to the arms industries of the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (and in my lifetime the Russian Federation) was merely an illustration of the dialectical opposition that moves faith and history alike. If the intercontinental ballistic missile was the Old Testament rod that would chastise man and destroy him, the space ship was something out of the new covenant, a thing which would force us to build the Republic of Heaven on earth by showing us the emptiness of the true heavens. We would see, up there, that the Kingdom of God was within man.

Severian, in Shadow of the Torturer lives in the tower of the Torturers Guild, called the Matachin Tower, an old spaceship. The patron saint of the guild is Holy Katharine, a dark haired woman who is killed afresh each year in the guild’s ceremony. The Matachin tower is a part of a larger citadel, which is constructed largely out of old spacefaring rockets and the tunnels and systems connecting them.

As an apprentice, Severian explores the citadel’s tunnel system while searching for an injured dog. During this search, he ends up in a courtyard full of sundials. Severian pounds on a door, and a young woman comes out of a different door in answer (Wolfe is always playing tricks of space, if I ever make enough from this to quit my job the first essay will be on the Waiting Room from Claw of the Conciliator). This girl, named Valeria, is a beautiful aristocrat whose family has waited for generations for the Autarch to lead them into space.

Severian and Valeria have a bit of freighted back and forth:

“You’re very brave. I have seen that hole since I was a little girl, but I never dared to go in.” [Valeria said of the hole Severian has emerged from]

“I’d like to go in,” I said. “I mean, inside there.”

And a little later: “She looked younger than I, but there was an antique quality about her metal trimmed dress and the shadow of her dark hair that made her seem older than [the oldest guy Severian knows], a dweller in forgotten yesterdays.”

Severian tells us that Valeria’s family is still in the citadel “because there was nothing left for them but waiting.” (34). She asks if he knows of the tower of the torturers, and he tells her that is a fable.

“The great days of these towers are more fabulous to me,” she said. “No one of my blood carries a sword now against the enemies of the Commonwealth, or stands hostage for us at the Well of Orchids.”

“Perhaps one of your sisters will be summoned soon,” I said, for I did not want, for some reason, to think of her going herself.

“I am all the sisters we breed,” she answered. “And all the sons.” (34)

In Shadow of the Torturer we understand that the hostages at the well of orchids are noble youths given to the court of the Autarch because it is an honor to go and to act as safeguards for their family’s political loyalty.

There’s a line in World At War, where Olivier, quoting Simonov in translation says: “Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.”

I come back to that line when I think of the problem of historical memory. Because I do think that remembering, memory, is the key to some sort of forward progression. Social memory, that is. I think the effort of the early 21st C. liberals (and radicals) to pull the midcentury liberation projects out of the ash heap was and is noble. But the danger is what happens when we stop forming new memories and stop incorporating changes in political economy, history and social organization into our worldview. When we cease to approach society scientifically.

Because when that memory formation process (call it self-criticism, call it theory, call it psychoanalysis) breaks down, all we are left with are the deformed memories of previous ideological formations, divorced from any social reality. These become individual fantasies.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are not going to space to dissolve the barriers between people. They are going to space to assert their individuality as something divine and everlasting, more than mere mortals. They look back down on us not with the fearful awe of citizen sailors sent forth to sacrifice themselves for the good of the people, but as masters who see a series of problems to be managed and ultimately escaped. That the problems on earth are largely their responsibility is yet more evidence of their grandiose divinity. They want to be autarchs.

Katy Perry said in a press junket (I decline to grant it the dignity of an interview) with Elle Magazine: “I’m flying for my daughter, Daisy, to inspire her to never have limits on her dreams and show her that any type of person can reach their dreams—no matter your background, your ethnicity, your economic situation, or your education level.”

This is obviously very stupid; Perry went up there because she’s rich and because she was willing to debase herself for Bezos’ greater glory. The others who joined her did so for the same reasons, or because, being politically inoffensive and interested in space, they made for good press in the company’s eyes. Hostages at the Well of Orchids.

Now, if this were a simple left-wing essay about how silly it is that billionaires are sending activists and singers to space for photo-ops, this is the part where I’d tell you that Bezos etc. are the reasons why we can’t properly fund NASA, can’t land on the moon, can’t send people to travel the stars.

The truth is more boring.

We went up to space and, rather than finding a realm of transcendent possibility, we discovered a zone that could be commercialized, filled with satellites and eventually integrated into the multi-dimensional imperial battlefields the United States envisions as deciding the fate of the next century. It’s the same story as earthly flight: the Wright brothers stole a gift from the angels, within a generation Howard Hughes was getting rich and we’d discovered it was possible to murder a hundred thousand people from the air in a single afternoon so long as you dropped enough jellied gasoline on them.

Quietly, we shelved the dreams of space revelation. The individuals who wish to be autarchs—leading races to stride among the stars—are trying to find some way through the negative dialectics of the last 80 years. Capital can subsume any threat, and any space or tool can be a weapon. For the capitalist this is a productive fantasy, for the average person it is a bitter grief at the unredeemed promises of the 20th century.

There is nothing so vital in deep space as to require the vast expenditures of money, energy and time that would be needed to reach it. The godlike among us, particularly Musk, continue to insist otherwise, that we might terraform some other place rather than save our own. But the spreadsheet goons will stop that nonsense. Space matters only to the extent that it produces an appreciable return on capital. And if the spreadsheet goons fail to stop some tentative exploratory Mars mission, a few people will starve out in some hopeless rocket, the last believers in the possibility of a physical realm so large that one could really outrun evil.

But what of Valeria and the empty rockets turned to citadel towers?

Later in Citadel of the Autarch (the final volume of Book of the New Sun), Severian, now Autarch, returns to the Atrium of Time to take Valeria as his consort. I shall quote at length:

“The snow I recalled was gone, but a chill had come into the air to say that it would soon return. A few dead leaves, which must have been carried in some updraft very high indeed, had come to rest here among the dying roses. The tilted dials still cast their crazy shadows, useless as the dead clocks beneath them, though not so unmoving. The carven animals stared at them, unblinking still.

I crossed to the door and tapped on it. The timorous old woman who had served us appeared, and I, stepping into that musty room in which I had warmed myself before, told her to bring Valeria to me. She hurried away, but before she was out of sight, something had wakened in the time-worn walls, its disembodied voices, hundred-tongued, demanding that Valeria report to some antiquely titled personage who I realized with a start must be myself. (407).

This is what makes Wolfe a fantasist and a Catholic, rather than a hard scientist. Even in his dying world, there is still a grandeur that can be called back by the memory of human nobility, by God. It is what makes Book of the New Sun so beautiful, despite its many cruelties.

While I wish I could believe in Wolfe’s possibility of ultimate redemption, I have not found the requisite strength (or fear) within myself.

Instead, I think what happens is this: There are many thousands of Valerias. I once was one, as was every child when first they heard of Armstrong and Gagarin and Mae Jemison. They have heard the stories and see in steel girders and square touchscreens the promise of an industrial society that could make want vanish and put men far out into the stars. But no voice wakes in the time-worn walls to summon them. The would-be autarchs are not, as Severian is in the book, beings who move between times and dimensions, between deity and flesh. They are merely men. And the only promise in the night sky is what is actually there: A cold death in no place at all. The end of everything, eventually.

Cultural Senility (or Nostalgia) is not the act of forgetting. It is rather the remembrance only of things irrevocably past. It is the inability to form new memories.

Memory oppresses me.

What we see in so much of current politics and cultural production is not just the triumph of reaction, but the onset of this senility. We are refusing to create new memories, we are retreating into the fascist fantasies of an eternally past present. Even communists are guilty of this, debating endlessly about the mistakes of the Third International instead of organizing a new social force.

This retreat is not a temporal one, but a psychological one. A return to the childlike state in which difference and displeasure can be expelled by a bit of screaming and hitting, or by the mollifying pacifier of recycled IP. True senility.

I come back, again and again, to Book of the New Sun for precisely this reason: Wolfe imagines a future that is imperfect and degraded, even mortally stricken, but not one that is constantly seeking to return to its original condition, not seeking the bizarre comforts of suburban emptiness and the feeling of being a child again, playing video games for the first time and dreaming of spaceflight. No. Wolfe’s future has seen the stars, been among them, and has forgotten nothing. From there, Severian can march on.

If I were a vulgar marxist, this is where I would leave you with a reference to Benjamin and the Angel of History and how the task of the Communists is to sort out the heap of rubble thrown up by catastrophe.

But I will leave you instead with this image: A dark-haired woman in a blue suit recalling the space uniforms of yesteryear. She is a courtier of the richest man on earth. She brandishes a white flower. She has come back down to be among the mortals again. For an instant, maybe, she felt terror beyond fear up there. She could see the clouds and the ridges and the smoke trail of the rocket and in that arrangement of images, she knew that she was one of the torturers and despoilers of the land beneath her, that everything she did was vanity. That others had come before and finding nothing left the emptiness for the warm fires of home. But when she lands she cannot grasp this memory, it falters somewhere between eye and mouth, she cannot get it out. A tear, maybe, comes to the blue eye, and she says the line she has practiced with her actor fiance: “This is all for the benefit of earth.”

But the great days of those towers are more fabulous to me.

Next Week: Warfare: Alex Garland would make better movies if he was an explicitly reactionary.

-30-

*Getting worried you guys might catch on that I have like two references and Severian is one of them. Just wait until I mention The Cranes are Flying, the only other thing I know how to reference.