Harlan Ellison - Love Aint Nothing But Sex Misspelled

"These are the Fates, daughters of Necessity ... Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future."

Plato, THE REPUBLIC

FOR SHERRI, WHO PICKED UP THE PIECES.

FOR LESLIE KAY WHO ARRANGES THE PIECES.

FOR LORI, WHO IS OPTING TO BE ONE OF THE PIECES.

There is an inscription on the lintel over the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. It says:

Always look up.

Never look down;

All you ever see

are the pennies

people drop.

There is a seven-headed dog guarding the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. If you aren't nice, it will bite you in the ass.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngje Ngi," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO by Ernest Hemingway

INTRODUCTION

HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH A TROLL

One evening I met a young woman for whom I quickly developed carnal desires. We met at a party, I think. I don't remember now. It was a while ago. And I cut her out of the crowd and finally we got back to my house and it started to go wrong. Oh, not wrong in the way that once we were alone the sexual thing didn't seem to be working out: quite the contrary. She began getting misty-eyed. I could see that she was forming a fantasy view of the man who had swept her away to this strange and colorful eyrie. She was thinking ahead: can this one be THE one I've been looking for? And I didn't want that.

No point here in going into the reason I didn't want that; perhaps I was the wrong one for her on more than a casual basis, perhaps she was wrong for me permanently, perhaps it was a hundred different little things I sensed in the ambience of the evening. Whatever it was, I wanted to discourage the fantasy, but not the sexual liaison. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. But maybe there is. It depends where your concepts of morality lead you. For me, it was better to be upfront about it, to say there's tonight, and maybe other nights, but under no circumstances is this permanent.

And I tried to tell her, gently.

And that was wrong. Because it was hypocritical.

I wanted to have my picnic, but I didn't want to have to spend the time necessary to putting the picnic-grounds back in the same condition I'd found it.

(That isn't a casually-conceived metaphor; and it's quite purposely not coarse in its comparisons. To love well and wisely, I now believe, we must attempt to leave a situation with a love-partner with the landscape and its inhabitants as well off, or better off, than they were when We arrived. Like this:

(Walter Huston and Tim Holt and Fred C. Dobbs [sometimes known as Humphrey Bogart] are about to leave the mountain from which they've clawed their gold. And Huston says to Holt and Bogart, "We've got to spend a week putting the mountain back the way we found it." And Bogart looks amazed, because they are running the risk of being set-upon once again by Alfonso Bedoya and his bandidos. So Huston explains very carefully that the mountain is a lady, and it has been good to them, and they have to close its wounds.

(And finally, even flinty, paranoid Bogart understands, and he agrees, and they spend a week repairing the ecological damage they've done to the mountain that was good to them.)

So instead of trying to weasel and worm my way through an explanation that would have been no real explanation at all, I asked her if she would mind my sitting down and writing something for her. She said that would be nice, and I did it, trying to say as bluntly as possible with fantasy images what words from the "real world" would not adequately say. And this is what I wrote:

She looks at me with eyes blue as the snow on Fuji's summit in a woodblock print by Hiroshige. She says, "You're really different, really unique." Beneath the paleness of her cheeks the blood suddenly rushes and she only knows her nervousness has increased in the small room, though nothing has altered from the moment before. She does not understand that her skin and survival mechanisms have registered the presence of an alien creature. Her blood carries the certain knowledge. Like the sentient wind, she perceives only that she has crossed an invisible border and now roams naked and weaponless in a terra incognita where wolves assume the shapes of men and babies are born with golden glowing eyes and the sound from the stars is that of the very finest crystal.

To her fingertips come the vibrations of flowers singing in silent voices, telling of times before the watery deeps carried the seed of humanity. Her skin: absorbing the vibrations of unicorn's hooves as they beat the molten earth into gold. Her nostrils: bringing to her the scents of dreams being born. Her delicate nerve-endings: vital and trembling with expectation of oddness.

She sits with a troll, with another kind of creature, and her uneasiness grows. Cellular knowledge assaults her in wave after wave, and she cannot codify that knowledge.

"Let me tell you a story," I say, and in few words explain the horizons of the land into which she has wandered.

Will she understand that mortals and trolls cannot mate?

It didn't go well with her. It was a sour relationship from the start. I wound up doing her damage, hurting her; she didn't hurt me. I don't brag about it, I'm certainly not proud of it, there was no notch cut in the stock of the weapon from the encounter. Machismo wasn't part of it: I hurt her and she didn't hurt me only because it didn't mean as much to me. I was a hard thing. Colder. She was vulnerable. It had to happen, I suppose. If I'd been a nicer person I'd have forgone the sex and sent her away at the start. I explain it now, by way of justification, by saying she is a born victim: someone waiting to be savaged by love. But the truth is simply that I am precisely like everyone else when it comes to love ... I am a child. I want my picnic, and I hate cleaning up the mess.

Pause. Go back to the start of this book, just before the beginning of this new introduction. Read the quote from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Do you know what it was the leopard was seeking? Do you understand why the creature climbed to that altitude and what happened to it? The answer to the riddle is the answer, I think, to understanding how to travel the road of love. I put the quote there, what has become a powerful literary metaphor since Hemingway first wrote it exactly forty years ago in 1936, because it seems to me to contain the truest thing one can know about traveling that difficult road. Friends of mine, around this house as I assemble this book for a publisher's deadline, don't seem to understand why that little parable, riddle, metaphor, whatever the hell it is, seems so eloquent, and so right for this book of kinda sorta love stories. I hope these words will clear it up for them. Probably not, though. I'm not too clear on this subject of love myself.

In fact, some years ago, when I was writing the introductions to the stories in an anthology I edited called DANGEROUS VISIONS, I found myself writing these words about myself and Theodore Sturgeon:

"It became clear to Sturgeon and myself that I knew virtually nothing about love but was totally familiar with hate, while Ted knew almost nothing about hate, yet was completely conversant with love in all its manifestations."

That was in 1966. Ten years ago. I've revised my estimates of both Ted's and my understandings of hate and love. It's been an interesting ten years for both of us, and if I were to take the toll today I'd have to admit grudgingly that I've had some of the parameters of the equation of love drilled into me by experts. And so now, ten years later, I set down these first few tentative thoughts about the subject, offering as credentials the stories in this collection.