Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

“Tell on,” quoth the King, who chanced to be sleepless and restless, and therefore was pleased by the prospect of hearing her story. So Shahrazad rejoiced; and thus, on the first night of a Thousand Nights and a Night, she began with the…”

Alf Laylah Wa Laylahí,

translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton (1884)

A long train held up by page on page.

A hard reign held up by rage.

Once a railroad,

Now it’s done…

Sisters of Mercy,

“Lucretia, My Reflection” (1987)

INTRODUCTION

This is the second introduction I’ll have written for this collection. I wrote the first in October, and here in February, I’ve thrown it away. It spent too much time prattling on about
what’s
in this book, and hardly any time at all talking about what this book
means
to me, which is, so far as I’m concerned, what it
means
. And it means snapshots, because that’s what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fitional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I’m rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I’m even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it’s a falsehood I’ve never learned to spin. Eliot wrote:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

“Burnt Norton” (1935 – 1936)

And, in
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
, Mary says, “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

This
I understand.

I wasn’t always a storyteller. I was something else and someone else before, and then there were a number of years as surely amounting to apocalypse as any seven shattered seals or blaring trumpets, a tumult of private war and famine, earthquakes and locusts and poisoned rivers. Becoming a storyteller was a necessary reinvention of myself from the ashes of who I was and who I might have been. In the aftermath, it’s what was left to me, and somehow, somewhy, I decided it was better than lying down and dying. One age ended and the next began, and in the new age I was a storyteller. I laid out plots, characters, and adjectives against the ruin, and moved on. And now I’ve traveled to the future. We are all time travelers until the day we die. From this vantage, I survey the tales I’ve told, and I wince and I smile and I wonder at all the other ways it might have gone if I’d been unable to tell my tales. Or if I’d written them, but no one had ever listened. I wouldn’t be here and now. I would be some other me – some other me – some other when and where, instead – if I were anywhere at all.

Retrospective is a hazardous affair, which seems fairly fucking obvious. Sorting through the faded Polaroids and contact sheets and negatives, letting them stab at me all over again, picking scabs I thought were scars. Wanting to be kind to them, but sneering and snarling and regretting I couldn’t have been who I am now when I was busy being who I was then so that I could reach now. How easy it is to suppose posthumous is merciful, and I’d be luckier had this task fallen to another, very many years from the now that isn’t yet the now to come.

You’ll turn the pages and read stories of distant planets, of secrets and parallel worlds glimpsed at perilously high prices, passion plays amid industrial decay, the aliens we are, fancies of would-be hells and heavens and purgatories, nightmares turned inside out only to be turned right ways round again. You’ll see angels imprisoned behind steel bars, fairies on city sidewalks and in filthy backrooms, lost children, adults no one will ever find, cannibals, ghouls, penny-dreadful plagues and dimestore vampires, futures as bright as I could scry.

But when I turn the pages, that’s not what
I
see.

I see the procession of me.

At the start, there are long nights in squalid Southern bars that once might have been bowling alleys or gas stations before they fell to secretive battalions of queers and addicts. Birmingham. Pills and drag, my face so, so impossibly young and watching from dressing-room mirrors, taking for granted that life will be short and ugly, so live hard, live fast, fuck carelessly, remain drunken, steadfastly self-destructive and gentle with the lovers for whom these prescriptions and prophecies would prove fatal before the fullness of their teens and twenties were spent. Vodka and Vicodin. Here’s a night in the company of the pretty man who shot heroin into my arm, and held me while I puked. Here’s the day I splintered a bed frame with a claw hammer. Here, I wrap myself tight around you, neither of us knowing you’d take your life just five years farther on. The salvation of smoky dance floors and music so loud it almost stopped my heart.

The procession, the parade.

I trade one city for another, Birmingham for Athens, a transition right here in black and white. I could have gone down, almost did, embracing what I took to be my shitty finest hour; no one’s more surprised than me to learn I’m too angry to drown. Sour memories and premature death have set me afire. Sure, I didn’t survive in one piece, but I survived all the same. I got away, when too many others didn’t. And in this next new age of me if I’m not typing, I’m in coffeehouses, tattoo parlors, bars that serve drinks in glasses instead of plastic cups. I pick up a microphone and scribble lyrics and sing on stages. I batter myself bloody against the bulwark of new lovers with whom I’ve nothing in common excepting desperation and despite, and that never ends well. The months all reek of vanilla, PBR, magnolia blossoms, cassette tapes, hot coffee, sweat, cigarettes, sex, black-eyed peas, marijuana, comic books, hot parking lots at midnight, band members who can’t be bothered to bathe, bad teeth, the tiny room where I write. I smear my eyes with black and paint my face white, having traded the role of Death’s concubine for the role of Death’s howling jester. I type, and scream, and wake up in unfamiliar places. Friends pierce my flesh with sterile, autoclaved needles, and I wear a face-full of stainless-steel fuck you.

I type. Mostly, I type.

But this age has an expiration date, like every other before and every yet to come, so I’m hauled squinting out of the sticky, tear- and beer-stained shadows by other typists, book-bound heroes I didn’t dare imagine would ever pause to give me the time of day. And to a man, to a woman, they tell me to keep typing and maybe this reforged storyteller me will go places. She does. I walk the streets of London, Los Angeles, Dublin, Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, always coming home. I see my name on the cover of a book for the first time, and am only slightly ashamed for wanting to rub it in the face of everyone who ever told me how far I’d never go, that I was nothing but the sum total of their failures and my own shortcomings. For a time, these little victories even prove a halfway decent antidote for the self-loathing and addiction and insanity, real and metaphorical. Still, I can’t ever pretend it wouldn’t have meant infinitely more, if my dead were my living and here with me. And I keep typing.

That’s not all, of course. There’s a decade more that I won’t belabor here. I only wanted to say this is what I see whenever I look at this collection’s Table of Contents. The procession, the parade. Because the past is the present, isn’t it? And I keep it safe in story-shaped boxes.

Excerpt from the first introduction (because I never
really
throw anything away; I’ve kept every ticket stub from every movie I’ve seen since 1994, no fooling):

I once had a creative-writing instructor – an oxymoron if ever there were one – who chastised me repeatedly for writing “oblique” fiction. He also chastised me for being lyrical, and for writing colorful prose. For having a
voice,
which I allowed to color, and sometimes obscure, the clarity of my prose. He seemed to cherish clarity above all else, as though fiction might be no more than a sermon, or a monograph on barnacles, or a shopping list. He was fond of quoting George Orwell, who once wrote, “…and yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
¹Now, I’m very fond of Orwell, and I’m well enough aware this passage is sacred to writing instructors everywhere and to those who preach the doctrine that, above all else, fiction must be bland and forthright and readily accessible. But I take issue with this, believing as I do that an author must never, ever “efface one’s own personality” from her prose. Indeed, to do such a thing is entirely antithetical to good prose. Our fictions, if they are sincere and authentic, must be all but indistinguishable from our personalities. They must be the distillation of our essences, the world seen through our eyes. If I believed in the soul, I would say good prose must be no less than the purest expression of our souls. Therefore, I will be so arrogant as to amend Orwell’s famous and tiresomely quoted statement. Yes, good prose
is
a window. He got that part right, in that it allows us to look out upon the world and into other minds. But good prose is a
stained-glass
window, and the pigment in the glass becomes the voice of the author.

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