laughing, too. To my surprise, so was I. I laughed until my face and sides were hurting, like I remembered doing sometimes when I'd smoked grass.
And that was * * * ing.
I can see that I've only given a surface view of Kelley. And there are some things I should deal with, lest I foster an erroneous view.
Clothing, for instance. Most of them wore something most of the time. Pink was the only one who seemed temperamentally opposed to clothes. She never wore anything.
No one ever wore anything I'd call a pair of pants. Clothes were loose: robes, shirts, dresses, scarves and such. Lots of men wore things that would be called women's clothes. They were simply more comfortable.
Much of it was ragged. It tended to be made of silk or velvet or something else that felt good.
The stereotyped Kellerite would be wearing a Japanese silk robe, handembroidered with Page 22
dragons, with many gaping holes and loose threads and tea and tomato stains all over it while she sloshed through the pigpen with a bucket of slop. Wash it at the end of the day and don't worry about the colors running.
I also don't seem to have mentioned homosexuality. You can mark it down to my early conditioning that my two deepest relationships at Kelley were with women: Pink and Scar. I haven't said anything about it simply because I don't know how to present it. I talked to men and women equally, on the same terms. I had surprisingly little trouble being affectionate with the men.
I could not think of the Kellerites as bisexual, though clinically they were. It was much deeper than that. They could not even recognize a concept as poisonous as a homosexuality taboo.
It was one of the first things they learned. If you distinguish homosexuality from heterosexuality you are cutting yourself off from communication-full communication-with half the human race.
They were pansexual; they could not separate sex from the rest of their lives. They didn't even have a word in shorthand that could translate directly into English as sex. They had words for male and female in infinite variation, and words for degrees and varieties of physical experience that would be impossible to express in English, but all those words included other parts of the world of experience also; none of them walled off what we call sex into its own discrete cubbyhole.
There's another question I haven't answered. It needs answering, because I wondered about it myself when I first arrived. It concerns the necessity for the commune in the first place. Did it really have to be like this? Would they have been better off adjusting themselves to our ways of living?
file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (18 of 24)
[2/17/2004 11:43:30 AM]
file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt All was not a peaceful idyll. I've already spoken of the invasion and rape. It could happen again, especially if the roving gangs that operate around the cities start to really rove.
A touring group of motorcyclists could wipe them out in a night.
There were also continuing legal hassles. About once a year the social workers descended on Kelley and tried to take their children away. They had been accused of everything possible, from child abuse to contributing to delinquency. It hadn't worked so far, but it might someday.
And after all, there are sophisticated devices on the market that allow a blind and deaf person to see and hear a little. They might have been helped by some of those.
I met a deaf-blind woman living in Berkeley once. I'll vote for Kelley.
As to those machines...
In the library at Kelley there is a seeing machine. It uses a television camera and a computer to vibrate a closely set series of metal pine. Using it, you can feel a moving picture of whatever the camera is pointed at. It's small and light, made to be carried with the pinpricker touching your back. It cost about thirty-five thousand dollars.
I found it in the corner of the library. I ran my
And that was * * * ing.
I can see that I've only given a surface view of Kelley. And there are some things I should deal with, lest I foster an erroneous view.
Clothing, for instance. Most of them wore something most of the time. Pink was the only one who seemed temperamentally opposed to clothes. She never wore anything.
No one ever wore anything I'd call a pair of pants. Clothes were loose: robes, shirts, dresses, scarves and such. Lots of men wore things that would be called women's clothes. They were simply more comfortable.
Much of it was ragged. It tended to be made of silk or velvet or something else that felt good.
The stereotyped Kellerite would be wearing a Japanese silk robe, handembroidered with Page 22
dragons, with many gaping holes and loose threads and tea and tomato stains all over it while she sloshed through the pigpen with a bucket of slop. Wash it at the end of the day and don't worry about the colors running.
I also don't seem to have mentioned homosexuality. You can mark it down to my early conditioning that my two deepest relationships at Kelley were with women: Pink and Scar. I haven't said anything about it simply because I don't know how to present it. I talked to men and women equally, on the same terms. I had surprisingly little trouble being affectionate with the men.
I could not think of the Kellerites as bisexual, though clinically they were. It was much deeper than that. They could not even recognize a concept as poisonous as a homosexuality taboo.
It was one of the first things they learned. If you distinguish homosexuality from heterosexuality you are cutting yourself off from communication-full communication-with half the human race.
They were pansexual; they could not separate sex from the rest of their lives. They didn't even have a word in shorthand that could translate directly into English as sex. They had words for male and female in infinite variation, and words for degrees and varieties of physical experience that would be impossible to express in English, but all those words included other parts of the world of experience also; none of them walled off what we call sex into its own discrete cubbyhole.
There's another question I haven't answered. It needs answering, because I wondered about it myself when I first arrived. It concerns the necessity for the commune in the first place. Did it really have to be like this? Would they have been better off adjusting themselves to our ways of living?
file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (18 of 24)
[2/17/2004 11:43:30 AM]
file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt All was not a peaceful idyll. I've already spoken of the invasion and rape. It could happen again, especially if the roving gangs that operate around the cities start to really rove.
A touring group of motorcyclists could wipe them out in a night.
There were also continuing legal hassles. About once a year the social workers descended on Kelley and tried to take their children away. They had been accused of everything possible, from child abuse to contributing to delinquency. It hadn't worked so far, but it might someday.
And after all, there are sophisticated devices on the market that allow a blind and deaf person to see and hear a little. They might have been helped by some of those.
I met a deaf-blind woman living in Berkeley once. I'll vote for Kelley.
As to those machines...
In the library at Kelley there is a seeing machine. It uses a television camera and a computer to vibrate a closely set series of metal pine. Using it, you can feel a moving picture of whatever the camera is pointed at. It's small and light, made to be carried with the pinpricker touching your back. It cost about thirty-five thousand dollars.
I found it in the corner of the library. I ran my
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