I wanted to post a general update about the ongoing activity of our Samuel R. Delany Reading Group for the broader community. The group is very small - currently, there are just three of us who meet each week - but the encounters continue to be highly fruitful and, indeed, to some extent addictive! We are slowly working our way through Delany’s seminal work Dhalgren, at a rate of one chapter every two or three weeks (there are seven chapters altogether). This followed earlier readings including the novellas The Ballad of Beta Two and Empire Star, which set the stage, followed by Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection and Nova. All of these are science fiction, although Dhalgren while still perhaps resonant with science fiction is a bit of a different kind of story. The earlier works in many ways set the stage for a kind of rethinking of how to function in the world, very much in line with the broader goals of Cosmos Coop as a whole. Delany talks about three levels of engagement with the world, what he called (in Empire Star), simplex, complex and multiplex, and the later subsequent books explore these in different ways. Dhalgren takes this exercise to a whole different level.
One of the things we have been doing is learning from John Davies to understand and put into practice what is called Clean Language. This is a technique for communication that removes our projections of our own ideas when listening to someone talk about aspects of their lives. It was developed in the 1980s, initially by David Grove, but later broadened to an extensive group of psychotherapists. John, who learned the techniques decades ago and put them to use in his own practice, has been working to extend the use of Clean Language to discussions of literature and philosophy. Our discussions of Delany have been guided in part by our own growing interest and understanding of Clean Language. Clean Language itself is a kind of “multiplex” way of communicating, and Delany’s fictions lead the reader into multiplex thinking through the many intersecting layers of meaning that are woven together. Much of this learning is unconscious; it is one of the strengths of Delany’s writing that he gives us access to modes of being that are visceral rather than intellectual (although there is also much of the latter too!).
We are currently beginning the sixth chapter of Dhalgren. For readers who may be familiar with the text there is much of interest here. We are reading “deeply” if not quite “closely” in the traditional sense of that term. We would welcome other participants. We are quite willing to continue as a threesome, but it seems a shame to limit the exchanges and developing understanding to such a small group. We still record our conversations, although we have been using a private zoom channel following some difficulties accessing the dedicated Cosmos channel. The zoom link is provided each week on the general forum topic for Dhalgren. But even if you are behind in your reading, come and join us and learn more about Clean Language 