Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  Robert Chilson has published stories in sf magazines for several years, and is the author of the novels As the Curtain Falls and The Shores of Kansas.

  * * * *

  PEOPLE REVIEWS

  Robert Chilson

  Nothing stimulates the philosophy like a rainy day. On such a day as this, deep-buried thoughts rise to haunt us again. One wonders on such a day, Where have all the people gone? A depressing and melancholy thought on a melancholy and depressing day.

  Despite our vaunted technology, of all the miracles of the weatherconditioners, still a day of rainy-gray arouses such reflections. And not only the failures (or successes) of modem technology. The state of the recording industry alone would imbue with melancholy and depression the sunniest, rarest day in June. We seem to be living in the last days of the life recording.

  (It’s a rainy day and this month’s selections are rainy-gray. But how long has it been since you absorbed a great life?)

  The first item this month is from Avongarde and is intended for the dishwater religious element: One Nun’s Life. Even without the admiring quotations from cardinals and archbishops, Sister Angela’s life recording provides all the proof anyone needs that the religious establishment is dead, totally and irrevocably. Sister Angela has spent twenty years praying and contemplating the Eternal ache in her knees, and can only conclude that Heaven must be like this. The watery piety of the life—actually it’s an exercise in self-flagellation, not religion—is its distinguishing flavor. The whole twenty years of nunnery life blend together in a gray perspective in which time seems not to pass. This is evidently partly the fault of the publisher, who is noted for cutting recordings too short But Sister Angela’s own cuttings, necessary as they are to compress twenty years into two hours, are not convincing. We get the feeling that she has the same impatient thoughts and brief angers we all have, but has cut them out.

  For contrast, consider Cardinal Soubert, a deeply religious man with a finer understanding of the human mind. His life record consisted primarily of just these slips and lapses from his ideal, and of his repentances for them; we had a memorable and moving record of one man’s search for perfection. It is still a classic. Sister Angela’s clumsy attempt to demonstrate perfection will be forgotten by tomorrow night.

  It’s things like these that tend to shake our faith in the modern world—those of us who have any left on reaching maturity. Our artificial modern life simply does not produce the great lives of thirty to fifty years ago. The techniques of life recording have improved until anyone can play. We are flooded with them now. Yet, where are the great recordings? How often do we have to observe that it isn’t the recording, excellent though the techniques may be, but the life, that must be great? To make a great recording one must live a great life. It’s as simple as that.

  The “Sister Angela” syndrome is very common these days; indeed, it dominates the recording industry. It may be defined as a deliberate attempt to produce a great recording by duplicating the outward circumstances of life of those who recorded classics in the past. In this instance it is Wayne Hoyt Chen who is being copied, by Alberto Helding (All Gods Seasons, RCA). Chen was a natural, a man who had always lived on the land, had never thought of living elsewhere, and was not well-enough educated to confuse himself with Thoreau. Mr. Helding, by contrast, is a modem man, articulate, well-educated, and possessing the romantic modem attitude toward the soil and the life thereon. Herein lies the falseness of this work of life, a paradigm of the falseness of modem life.

  Chen’s recording makes plain to us the true attitudes of the sons of the soil: pragmatic, unromantic, yet with an underlying feel that the land has always been here and always will be. We who live so far from these our roots cannot share this latter conviction (particularly in view of current trends and the world situation). When one of our kind, as, say, Mr. Helding, attempts to bring his erudition to bear on the land, the result is either a painful disillusionment or a slickly shallow rationalization.

  Let me be specific. I recall particularly an episode in Wayne Hoyt Chen’s My Land and Me, a mere vignette at end of day. Chen had finished his barn chores and paused by the pumphouse to watch the sunset. I was conscious of a deep but not unpleasant ache in my leg muscles and back, and a feeling of pleasant lassitude. Chen’s work-hardened muscles did not ache easily, so it must have been a hard day’s work. But his thoughts were of pleasure, satisfaction, that so much had been achieved, that this day had not been wasted, that the sunset was so beautiful. Even so, he thought fleetingly of checking the meters to see if his sunpower panels had replaced the power he’d pulled in the day’s work.

  By contrast, Mr. Helding ends a day feeling a throbbing ache in every limb and muscle (even his eyeballs throb), thinking of his aches and how necessary and, somehow, important they are. “It’s always like this; if you want anything, you must work for it,” he thinks consciously and clearly, clearly aware of the recording headset. This is a piece of bucolic philosophy much in favor in liberal circles thirty years ago and not wholly displaced even now, a part of the egregious back-to-the-land movement that was, if possible, more artificial than the cities that gave it birth.

  Most of the back-to-the-landers dropped out when they found how much and what kind of work it entailed. Mr. Hel-ding has not spent enough time on the land to achieve this disillusionment, or to begin to acquire the deeper wisdom that lies below it. Be it noted that Wayne Hoyt Chen never philosophized. His attitude, shaped by a lifetime subject to the vagaries of the weather, of the universe he saw around him, was profoundly philosophic. But he was not, and true naturals are not, articulate. Their thoughts lie deep and rise slowly, not the facile flashes of wit that pass for wisdom in our shiny-surfaced circles.

  This is of a piece with the whole “philosophy” of this false life: it is book philosophy, learned beforehand, the “life” merely lived to confirm it—like Sister Angela’s religion. On one occasion Mr. Helding sits down (feeling no aches or pains) and proceeds to ruminate about life and how to live it. This was done in a carefully chosen woody setting, and Mr. Helding, a natural teacher, seizes on every bird and squirrel to give his laborious thoughts an air of spontaneity. I say an air of spontaneity, for I am convinced that Mr. Helding sat down at his desk previous to this touching scene and outlined his thoughts on a typer, checking the best references and carefully memorizing his points in order. The whole soliloquy is patterned on Thoreau’s ruminations in Walden, particularly the conclusion, and Mr. Helding is at pains to contradict him to demonstrate his own independence. Throughout the performance—no other word will do—one is conscious of Mr. Helding steering his thoughts away from something taboo—no doubt his notes. One wonders how many takes were necessary.

  For an art form that promised us genuine spontaneity, untainted by artistic considerations, however, the perversions of a Helding are small potatoes. Happening 37/ (Columbia) is a lesson in forced spontaneity. The whole operation has the classic format: get together a group of glittery names, throw them into a party replete with novel sensations, and record their reactions. Should be good for a few million sales. ... In our view, it isn’t good for anything.

  This is the debasement of a great artistic medium to the production of cheap thrills, and those who lend themselves to it are prostitutes, glittering names or no. The whole shoddy performance (yes, the performance is as shoddy as the concept; the actors arrived braced and stimulated—and drugged— to be spontaneous) reminds us of a comment of Willis Lehman on an early erotic recording of an old hooker’s memories of her greatest tricks: “There is something vague and hazy about these memories. One does not doubt that the tricks were taken. One senses, however, that the memories are more thrilling.”

  Down among the rukh of “My Operations” and “My First Babys” and “How I Lost Mine,” one finds occasionally a small gem. The Moon Also Rises (Avongarde) is the deeply moving record of one father’s struggle to win his five-year-old daughter’s love over the affection of the prof
essional parents with whom she was placed at birth. This is a triumph, not for “natural” parentage, but for love qua love. Perhaps most moving is the young man’s realization of the harm his love might do to his daughter (he is eighteen): since he had literally no one else in all the world, he would tend to dominate her interests in an unhealthy manner. But in the end he has won over even the proparents, who now permit him to visit daily. Such small triumphs strengthen us all.

  “What we feel, we know.” But do we? I am reminded of the thriller in which a professional water-skier was driven mad by being forced to absorb, over and over, a recording of a tyro’s first attempt at water-skiing. Some few years ago there was a fad for lovable failures, born losers in the throes of humiliation. Hundreds of undistinguished young men and women wore recorders on dates, while teaching their first classes, etc., clearly hoping to produce a comic masterpiece. They merely contributed to the “rukh” mentioned above. We learned nothing important about them as individuals or ourselves as a mass; and the life recording after all was trumpeted as the greatest humanizing force in history, the “art of arts.”

  In retrospect it’s easy to see that famous golfers’ recordings of how they won tournaments would teach the average duffer nothing—unless he was of precisely the height and weight of the recorder, with the same length of arms, etc. Much the same is true of any other physical education. Granted, in some areas—swimming, for instance—true learning is possible, the life recording can impress the proper responses upon the scanner’s synapses. But of how much use is such physical culture in the modern world? Knowledge is what we need, and that cannot be implanted by life recordings. Any knowledge implanted deliberately simply remains there in an unconsulted heap of facts—brickbats, as Mark Twain would say. Knowledge absorbed as a part of another’s life is not integrated as a whole into the scanner’s personality; only bits and pieces of it are. Obviously, except in rare cases, the individual’s personality dominates (though affected by what he absorbs).

  Thus it would seem that the only way in which life recordings could be of aid to education is in studies of creativity, in letting the student experience the methodical putting together of parts, the surging unhappy feeling of something undone, forgotten, left out, the illumination of the final “inspiration,” and the sheer joy, looking back, of what one has done. But. Although creativity is a learned activity, one that can be and is taught, it cannot be taught by recording. The scanner is too passive, he does none of the work. This too should have been obvious in advance. Nor does it, it seems to me, teach us much about creativity, which for all our recordings of this strange phenomenon, remains as mysterious as ever.

  This “Queen of Arts,” this great humanizing force, is restricted, then, to teaching us how it feels to be “The Other Guy.” This is certainly a great force, and can be and has been used to teach us much we only suspected about ourselves before. But even here the most popular recordings are the most superficial, erotic recordings being the most popular. These teach us much about the shape and size and texture of each others’ bodies, but nothing of each others’ minds.

  There is a further hurdle. When one puts on a recording headset one feels an Immediate compulsion to feel something —something amplified. What do you say into a microphone? This contributes a sense of strain, often noted. Also, we do not spend our time wallowing in emotion; a rather dull or weary emotion is common to most people most of the time. But recordings consist of the peaks; the dull areas are cut because they slow the action, they take time, and they do not affect the development of the recording personality in any case.

  Thus we have a whole generation of people who believe that they are not really alive unless they are continuously at peak (or under a life playback). The milder, human emotions get cut along with the dull ones. Who notices a recording of the guy next door, the guy whose life is as dull as ours? Ah, but his thoughts? his moods? his emotions? This is the life we should be learning from life recordings, the inner life that is the most truly human thing about us.

  There can be no question about it. Life recordings must return to this human channel if they are to survive as an art form. This month’s most interesting recording is a collection of minor pieces, “essays” he calls them, of the great critic and man-of-men, Willis Lehman. Me, Myself, and I (Columbia) exemplifies just the cultivation of the inner life mentioned above, and for all the unimportance of these fragments of Mr. Lehman’s fleece, they are far more interesting and informative than anything else we have seen this month. Here is a fascinating piece from the early days of life recordings and of Mr. Lehman’s youth. In it Mr. Lehman simply reads the scene in Henry IV where Ancient Pistol keeps slapping his hilt and roaring, “Have we not Hiren here?” and Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly are half fainting. Shakespeare does not tell us what Falstaff’s mood or expression is throughout this scene, and we are fascinated by the young Mr. Lehman’s mental glimpses of the old man’s contemptuous amusement at Pistol’s antics and the women’s fear, of his sudden rage and the shrewd calculation with which he realizes that kicking Pistol out will endear him, Falstaff, to the women. Of course Falstaff is now known not to have been the cowardly blatherskite he was generally believed to be in the twentieth century.

  Here, too, is Mr. Lehman’s attempt to cook a meal of wild plants according to the instructions in H. Morgan Morgan’s life recording, the horrible mess he makes of it, and—in the humiliation comedy school of life recordings this possibility is never considered—here is Mr. Lehman’s analytical approach to his mistakes and the brilliant improvisations by which he extracts himself to produce a tolerable meal. For sheer joy-of-life and the gusto of living, this “essay” alone is worth the price of the recording.

  The bulk of the life recording is Mr. Lehman’s reactions to famous life recordings he has absorbed and on which he has written: recorded while he was absorbing them, a technique new to us and one that opens whole worlds of ghastly recordings. Will a recording of someone’s reaction to Mr. Lehman’s reactions to these recordings be marketed next? —Despite these forebodings, the trick is a huge success, again because of that warm and human inner life of Mr. Lehman, which shines through his reviews and makes him more interesting than the people he reviews. Here is his reaction to such classics as The Destruction of New Orleans, Death of a Saint, and Dr. Koenig’s close passage of the Sun, A Descent into Hell.

  Mr. Lehman’s reactions here suggest to us the failure of the younger generation in the recording of lives. So few of them are educated except via the haphazard manner produced by absorption of many recordings that they have no strong skeleton of knowledge to compare with what they learn, either firsthand or through recordings. Indeed, since opinions rather than facts are most easily implanted, opinions learned under the playback may prevent their accepting facts learned at first hand. Further, since they have commonly begun absorbing lives, even adult ones, at age seven and eight, their development has been fragmented; they are merely walking, ill-integrated heaps of castoff bits and pieces of other and stronger personalities. Such people are capable of nothing original, not even emotions. They have no life of their own.

  But Mr. Lehman’s own strong, unique personality is evident at every moment, even amid the destruction of a great city, even among the outreaching flames of “Hell,” not merely his emotions but his intellect. We feel him observing, wondering, wishing the recorder would turn his head a little to take in a detail; we feel his immediate critical reaction to any false note, any studied effect, any stereotyped or clumsy emotion. He is never lost in the welter or flow of emotion, and when he lifts the playback he suffers no confusion of identity.

  One minor piece is I think a perfect example of the sort of spontaneity we expect whenever we plug in a new recording, as well as of that inner life mentioned above: his hearing of Mather’s Second Symphony. At first he is attentive to the music, with which he is not very familiar, then his mind wanders to the life of Mather (with whom he was acquainted), then to music in g
eneral; is recalled to the symphony by a sudden flourish; wanders again over heroic music, then into the problem of creativity, and from there to the problem of genius, and twenty minutes later awakes with a start when the record clicks off, having heard only the opening. Note especially his wry reaction to his weakness.

  Now this by Cod is life recording as it should be, and if anyone, by what prodigies of cutting and splicing don’t matter, succeeds in producing a full two-hour, many-year record like this, it will be a classic that will outlive this century—yes, and many others to come. It’s all here: the strong, fascinating mind, his thoughts, interesting in themselves, his feelings about the things he thinks about, his sudden realization of how he has lost control of his thoughts, and the wry realization of humanity at the end. There are no “peaks” here, but who could wish or hope to be more alive than this man at this time?

  The record closes with Mr. Lehman’s reactions to Theodore Wertham’s review of Lehman’s famous book of life-recording reviews, In Search of Life, recorded as he read the review the first time. All that has been said about this recording, Me, Myself, and I, can now be repeated about this one final essay. It is Mr. Lehman at his warmest most delightful best.