…“Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the next was a quarter-inch gap. What had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished—or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolly sparks, the water—thousands and millions of drops of it—flowed below….” —Samuel R. Delany (Atlantis: Model 1924) *** In the tales of H.P. Lovecraft, fear is the primary, motivating emotion. All of his stories feast on dark sensations. It is focused on the unknown…an unspeakably dreadful thing as Howard P. is likely to call it. In such tales, the unknown is meant to be feared, to be shunned: The Other, a personification of the unknown is to be shunned as well. This exists in sharp contrast to the sentiments expressed by another of my favorite authors. Samuel R. Delany (perhaps my favorite author of all times, though maybe tied with China Miéville) delights in the unknown. He looks into darkened skies, for bat-winged beings and recognizes an intrinsic kinship with them. He listens—as many of his science fictional characters do—for the songs they may sing to one another, the bawdy laughter they may share in response to a wry, alien joke. Though Samuel R. Delany is known as a science fiction writer, he has moved away from the genre—at least in terms of recent, literary output. His newer tales are largely autobiographical and they focus (in calm, meditative ways) on particular experiences not commonly explored in contemporary American Letters: he was the first US-American author to incorporate HIV/AIDS themes into major works of fiction, and has garnered a reputation as an author of some of the world’s most thematically-dense and intellectually-satisfying super-graphic erotica. Samuel R. Delany is the quintessential outsider, the one who moves beyond the boundaries of the tribe (in both literal and literary senses) and finds things that delight him. He brings those things back to us, often gift-wrapped in stunning, muscular poetry, and our world is never the same, afterward. The City has always been a literary focus in Delany’s work. In his novelistic magnum opus, Dhalgren we wander the streets with an partial-amnesiac while all of reality comes unhinged. In his more recent, autobiographical novella: Atlantis: Model 1924 we find rough-edged, dinge-colored beauty in the subway, magic in crates of old newspapers, and eccentric, interpersonal exchanges on Brooklyn Bridge. We find skyscrapers, only glimpsed, because they are such a part of the city that they’re simply taken for granted. Even in 1924. There is darkness in the work of Samuel R. Delany, but this darkness is wholly, shamelessly human. It is never condemned and never explained away: it is simply shown. Honestly, and in what we see, we find beauty at its borders. I thought of H.P. Lovecraft in seeing Chicago, misted and muffled by fog; I thought of Samuel R. Delany as I listened to an el train rumbling overhead, as I ambled home from work. I saw rust and brick-work and light from windows and I felt the sheer, human-ness of Delany’s Atlantis: Model 1924 as a rat scampered across the sidewalk in front of an exclusive and horribly expensive art gallery. The rat, as any rat in a Delany tale, was not interested in art. It had more rat-ish business to attend to, and I, like any of Delany’s fictional or half-fictional characters, was content to share my city (and a moment in my city) with another of its citizens. This photo, without a rat in it, is a marker of that moment. It is a moment enjoyed in darkness. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.