Harlan Ellison - Paingod and Other Delusions

One night, some years ago, maybe five or six, I woke up in the darkness and saw words burning bright-red on the ceiling of my bedroom.

ARE YOU AWARE OF HOW MUCH

PAIN THERE IS IN THE WORLD?

I crawled out of the rack and felt my way through the house to my office, sat down at the typewriter, put on the light andstill asleeptyped the words on paper. I went back to bed and forgot all about it. That night I had programmed my dreams for a Sergio Leone spaghetti western with score by Morricone. No cartoon, no short subjects.

The next morning, coffee cup in hand, I went to my typewriter and found the question waiting for me, all alone on a sheet of yellow foolscap. Rhetorical. Of course I knew how much pain there was in the world is in the world.

But I couldnt quite bring myself to rip the sheet off the roller to get on with what Id been working at the night before. I sat and stared at it for the longest time.

Understand something: I am not a humanitarian. I distrust selfless philanthropists and doers of good deeds. When you discover that the black natives of Lamborene hated Schweitzer, you begin to suspect noble individuals have some secret need in them to be loved, to look good in others eyes, to succor themselves or dissipate their guilts with benevolent gestures. Rather than the sanctimonious bullshit of politicians about the good people of this fair state, I would joyously vote for any candidate who had the courage to stand up and say, Look, Im going to steal from you. Im going to line my pockets and those of my friends, but Im not going to steal too much. But in the deal Ill give you better roads, safer schools, better education, and a happier condition of life. Im not going to do it out of compassion or dedication to the good people of this fair state; Im going to do it because if I do these things, youll elect me again and I can steal a little bit more. That joker has my vote, no arguments.

(Rule of thumb: whenever you hear a politician call it the United States of America instead of simply the U.S.you know hes bullshitting you. Its like the convoluted syntax of college textbooks. When they start writing in a prolix manner that makes you read a paragraph seven times to get the message See Dick and Jane run, oh oh oh! you know someone is trying to flummox you. Same for politicians; if they start running a fast ramadoolah past you, instead of speaking simply and directly, theyre trying to weasel. This lesson in good government comes to you through the courtesy of a man who was snookered by Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.)

So what Im trying to tell you is that Im last in the line of noble, unselfish, golden humanitarians. What I do for the commonweal I do for myself . I am a selfish sonofabitch who contributes to good causes because I feel shitty if I dont. But if the truth be told, Im the same as you: the deaths of a hundred thousand flood victims in some banana republic doesnt touch me one one-millionth as much as the death of my dog did. If you get wiped out on a freeway somewhere and I dont know you personally, I may go tsk-tsk, but the fact that I havent had a good bowel movement in two days is more painful to me.

So those words burning on my ceiling really threw me.

They really got to me.

I had them printed on big yellow cards so theyd pop, and I started giving them to friends. I had one framed for my office. Its up on the wall to the right of my typewriter as I sit here telling you about it.

But if Im not this terrific concerned human being, whats it all in aid of? Well, its in aid of my coming to terms with my own mortality, something thatll happen to all of you if it hasnt already. And it speaks to what this collection of stories is all about, in a way. So well talk about pain.

Here are a few different kinds of pain I think are worthy of our attention.

The other night I had dinner with a good friend, a woman writer whom Ive known for about ten years. Though weve never had a romantic relationship, I love her dearly and care about her: shes a good person, and a talented writer, and those two qualities put her everlastingly on my list of When You Need Help, Even In The Dead Of Night, Im On Call. Over dinner, we talked about an anguish she has been experiencing for a number of years. Shes afraid of dying alone and unloved.

Some of you are nodding in understanding. A few of you are smiling. The former understand pain, the latter are assholes. Or very lucky. Weve all dreaded that moment when we pack it in, get a fast rollback of days and nights, and realize were about to go down the hole never having belonged to anyone. If youve never felt it, youre either an alien from far Arcturus or so insensitive your demise wont matter. Or very lucky.

Her problem is best summed up by something Theodore Sturgeon once said: Theres no absence of love in the world, only worthy places to put it. My friend gets involved with guys who do her in. Not all her fault. Some of it iswere never wholly victims, we help construct the tiger traps filled with spikesbut not all of it. Shes vulnerable. While not nave, she is innocent. And thats a dangerous, but laudable capacity: to wander through a world that can be very uncaring and amorally cruel, and still be astonished at the way the sunlight catches the edge of a coleus leaf. Anybody puts her down for that has to go through me first.

So she keeps trying, and the ones with long teeth sense her vulnerability and they move in for the slow kill. (Thats evil: only the human predator destroys slowly, any decent hunting animal rips out the throat and feeds, and thats that. The more I see of people, the better I like animals.)

She is a woman who needs a man. There are men who need a good woman. Theres nothing sexist in saying that, its a condition of the animal. (And just so I dont get picketed by Gay Lib, there are men who need a good man and women who need a good woman. There are also men who need a good chicken and women who need a big dog, and thats nobodys business but their own, you get my meaning, so lets cut the crap and move on.) Everybody needs to belong to somebody. Sometime. For an hour, a day, a year, foreverits all the same. And when youve paid dues on a bunch of decades without having made the proper linkup, you come to live with a pain that is a dull ache, unlocalized, suffusing every inch of your skin and throbbing like a bruise down on the bone.

What to tell her, what to say? Theres nothing. Ill try to find her someone who cares, but its a pain shell have to either overcome by guerrilla attacks on the singles bars and young-marrieds parties, or learn to love herself sufficiently well that she becomes more accessible to the men shes turning off by unspoken words and invisible vibes. People sense the pain, and they shy away from it, because theyve felt it themselves, and they dont want to get contaminated. When you need a job and hunger for one openly, you never get hired because they smell desperation on you like panther sweat.

But its a pain you cant ignore. I cant ignore.

Heres another one.

What follows is one of hundreds of letters I get from readers. I hate getting mail, because I dont have the time to answer it, and I get a lot of itprobably due to writing introductions like this where I expose my viscerabut more of that and what Avram Davidson says about it later onand most of the time I send out a form letter, otherwise I wouldnt have time to write stories. But occasionally I get a letter that simply cannot be ignored. This is one of them.