VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

By: Miranda Mellis
September 11, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | SAMUEL R. DELANY | 1984

Humans who have accepted the task of explicating the inertia within them find themselves forced by the course of experience to switch to the other side of their self-findings…. By noting how passions are working within them, they understand that they must reach the other side of passion so that they do not simply suffer from the passions, but rather become skilled at suffering.
— Peter Sloterdijk

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
— Thomas Merton

In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Rat Korga, who we are introduced to in a prologue that itself comprises a novella, is beset by dread, anxiety, depression (as one is). He is, then, easily alien-abducted by capital (enslavement, the most alienated of labor is always a matter of alien abduction) into giving up agency, in exchange for respite from his emotional pain. Here, agency is knowing and caring about the difference between suffering and freedom from suffering and acting accordingly. The moment Rat Korga’s awareness of his pain, and therefore his capacity to desire to feel better, is extinguished — the moment he no longer cares about himself or his fate — he is enslaved. Henceforward he is a laborer who labors in horrific conditions, indifferently.

The desire to feel better is a capacity! Not wanting to suffer is a prerequisite to the refusal of exploitation. If you don’t care that you suffer, you don’t suffer, and there is no need to rebel. This is not the same as being ascetically non-attached — that is, “skilled at suffering” — in the manner of, say, revered and storied Tibetan Buddhist monks whose meditation practice allowed them to, while being tortured by their Chinese oppressors, offer compassion to their torturers for what they were doing to themselves by torturing. In contrast, the dissolution of Rat Korga’s ability to care that he suffers is a procedure, a quick protocol done to him, not an insight into non-self, not nonattachment to self through contemplation. It is the difference, one might say, between medication and meditation. (Not that one rules out the other — I remember teachers saying, on 10-day silent meditation retreats, to those of you on medication, please don’t go off them here. In fact, for some, medication is a condition of possibility for meditation… but I digress.)

In lieu of him caring, we, the readers, care that Rat Korga suffers. Later, the procedure that had made him unable to care is undone, thanks to someone else’s passion. It is the proverbial kiss of love that breaks the spell.

Published in 1984, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand prophesies our present, including the linguistic evolution in changing pronoun usages. Here pronouns indicate contingent becoming, rather than categorized beings. In the same way one says, “I’m boiling” to describe oneself on a hot day, gender is, among other things, a way to describe transient states, for example of excitation and desire. In Delany’s vision, bodily state changes (from apathetic slave to liberated lover, from gender to gender to gender) are metonymic of multiplicities of countless worlds. What we still call planet earth is just one of these worlds, a distant memory.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

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