Richard Chwedyk lives in Chicago, Illinois. Last year we featured his story “The Measure of All Things” in Years Best SF 7. This year he published a fine long sequel, “Bronte’s Egg.” He often reads in the Chicago area, most recently at the Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub. His poetry has recently been published in Tales of the Unanticipated and Tales from the Red Lion, but has also appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Oyez Review, Paul Hoover’s legendary Oink! (now called New American Writing), and The Best of Hair Trigger anthology, among even older publications. He teaches creative writing classes at Oakton Community College, but his day job is doing layout and copyediting for a chain of newspapers in the Chicago suburbs.
“A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt,” from Tales of the Unanticipated, is a lyric poem about one of the titanic figures of SF, who was given the Grand Master Award by the SFWA only after he had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. This poem is about the night he stood up in front of the audience at the annual Nebula Awards banquet to accept the award. I was there; the description is accurate. It is also about his powerful contributions to genre SF and to literature in the 20th century (note the allusion to Mishima).
An irony in physics rendered him mute
as he stood to receive his award
in the darkened arena.
He looked at the assembled audience with
gratitude, but also with undisguised
bewilderment, a little apprehension.
His eyes were liquid, opened wide,
forehead furrowed, confounded with
his inarticulation.
His speech was read for him by an old, good friend.
His wife stood just a step behind him.
His hair was combed straight back.
He dressed like an accountant and it was not inappropriate,
for it was this disguise that was his work.
It was not, in a word, original:
Plato, De Quincey, Borges, Christian mystics, Eastern monks,
all hinted at the notion that each object in this world
is a secret symbol for an object in another,
and nothing is in itself merely itself.
Of course, then, he wore the uniform of a “plain” man.
Of course, he wondered at the crowd
and what this all was really about.
He was looking, perhaps, for Cayle Clark,
or Jommy, or Gosseyn,
out there in the dark, the audience up,
out of their seats. He seemed to look past them all.
He’d torn open the bag that held his dreams
and let them all pour out
at a penny or two a word. And what a surprise
it must have been, when the contents fell
to the page, how many people recognized those objects
as their own.
It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t pristine.
At times his vessel seemed hardly seaworthy.
But to have made it so would have betrayed the secret:
There is a secret world one train stop further on,
across the highway, past the chain-link fence,
on the other side of the woods. A secret neighborhood.
A secret room. The fate of the universe, of time itself,
is weighed against this discovery.
There is something important at the other end of this gaze,
and we better find out what it is.
But for now, don’t say a word.
And he didn’t.
And when my dour, self-absorbed, ascetic, “literary”
friend asks me (and pronounces the name
like a gummy cough) “About this van Vogt,”
that he read of in a biography of Mishima,
I tell him nothing, betray nothing.
An accident of semantics, an irony of physics,
a brief attack of poetry, renders me mute.
The skeleton of the world I saw
when I left that dark arena
was a cast-off from the bag of dreams.
And Cayle, and Jommy and Gilbert Gosseyn
were standing by the newspaper boxes, in their dark suits,
each holding a finger up to his lips.