(urth) 3rd Cue's a Charm?

[Greg Jenkins]

Stupid text.  Third try. . . 

First of all, hello to everyone.  I've been lurking for years, reading all 
the posts from the beginning.  I'm now somewhere in 2004.  At the rate I'm 
reading, I should meet you in the present sometime around the year 2010. . . 
.

In any case, I wanted to give my take on Wolfe's Cues from Island of Doctor 
Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.  I've read the few posts that have 
touched upon this short short story, and although I feel some of the posts 
have gotten close to the heart of the story (with the exception of Borski's 
scatological reading, which, although I usually enjoy his readings, I feel 
was totally missing the boat -- you WERE joking, right Mr. Borski?), I feel 
like no one has written about what I feel the story is "really about".

Spoiler alert, although I doubt few here haven't read it already.  Oh, and 
I'll be using the terms "universe" and "cosmos" interchangeably (gets 
redundant, otherwise).

I think in general this is a story about Perception, sort of along the lines 
of Wolfe's obsessions with Memory and Identity.  It's about how a person can 
see virtually anything they want in objects or situations.  The story is 
about how one can choose what to perceive, and about the dangers in wishing 
to perceive things in ways other than the "truth", the way they "really are".

Specifically, the story is about a man who feels his life is passing him by 
(hence the oft repeated "not so young man, really", or nsymr,  moniker), and 
who hasn't yet been successful in his chosen career as a cartoonist.  No one 
seems to see the humor in his cartoons, at least not to the depth at which he 
sees it.  Or perhaps HE is the one who doesn't see the humor in things as 
others perceive it.

So, he looks up into the nighttime sky and wishes that he could perceive only 
those things in life that are humorous, or that he could perceive all things 
in life humorously.  As he wishes this, he's looking into the cosmos, peering 
up at the vastness of space, filled with light and dark areas.

And the cosmos responds, giving him this wish.  Immediately, he perceives 
what he's looking at as a bowling ball.  A dark, nearly black void, speckled 
with lighter colors, and dark areas that become the holes in the ball.  The 
dark areas or "holes", or at least one of them, we later learn is the 
Coalsack Nebula.

And he is choosing to perceive the cosmos not only as a bowling ball, but a 
talking bowling ball, one with a sense of humor.  The cosmos, or universe, 
begins explaining to him what's happening: the nsyr is looking into an 
infinity of perceptual cues, and from that infinity he's filtering out 
certain ones, and being left with only those that create humor.  And so the 
image of the universe has become an image of a bowling ball.

Wolfe goes to great lengths to explain this; he spends maybe half the story 
describing this process.  Essentially, the man is being assaulted by an 
infinite number of perceptual cues, and that even before his transformation 
he filtered these cues into a coherent meaning.  The cosmos says in 
explanation, "...you are incapable of reacting to or even noticing more than 
a very small fraction of the total.  By an unconscious process you heed these 
[cues] and ignore everything else."  I believe Wolfe spends so much relative 
ink on this because it's crucial to understand before you can understand the 
story as a whole.

Soon after, we get a supposed clue of the "identity" of the bowling ball.  
The ball says it is from "Deneb".  When spelled with a lower case d, we have 
deneb.  Although not strictly a palindrome, it's very close to being a word 
that is its mirror image.  This may be over-interpretation, but perhaps this 
is a tip of the hat to alpha and omega symbology, to the cyclic nature of the 
universe as it was understood at the time this story was written.  In other 
words, the cosmos is saying, hey, I'm just the ebb and flow that is the 
universe.  Regardless, the cosmos quickly dismisses the subject, saying it 
didn't matter.  (There's something hidden in this bit of the story, but I 
can't tease it out.  The nsyr man says, "I thought you said--", at which 
point the cosmos cuts him off.  I'm not sure what could have been said at 
this point, but I'll give my opinion in a moment.) 

And why doesn't it matter?  Because the universe wants it to be known that 
it, the universe, is not what's important, that's why, or at least that it 
doesn?t want that line of discourse to be explored.  And so we begin to get a 
peek of a conflict in our perception.  Is the universe an unthinking, 
"objective" object, or is this thing an actual sentient entity, with an 
agenda of its own?

Then the conversation moves to the writer's desire to be a successful 
cartoonist, and the universe tries to explain that in point of fact, it (the 
universe itself) has no sense of humor and therefore can't really judge the 
nsymr's work, because the truth of the matter is that the universe has no 
volition of itself.  It's just "there" in a sort of neo-buddhist way.  We 
see this again later on when the man asks the cost that must be paid for 
fulfilling his wish; the cosmos responds with a casual attitude that it could 
be nothing or it could be twenty five cents.  In any case, it doesn't appear 
to matter to the universe.  The question is moot.

At this point in the story, the reader begins to realize that Wolfe is 
playing with even our perception of the story, moving the POV into and out of 
the nsymr's point of perception, so that sometimes the story is written from 
his point of view, and sometimes from a more omniscient one (seemingly):
      "The not-so-young-man thrust a sketch in front of two of the bowling 
ball's holes.  As it happened, they were the wrong holes."
This is Wolfe gently poking fun at the reader, or maybe that's putting it too 
strongly.  Wolfe is poking fun "with" the reader, for here is a man, 
thrusting his work out to the night sky, saying "Hey, look at this!"  Toward 
what would you thrust a sheet of paper in this case?  Wolfe is jokingly 
saying that the nsymr misses the "correct" holes because there is no such 
thing.  

So now we come to the part where we're told the "truth", that the nsymr is 
perceiving the universe as a bowling ball:

     The cosmos says, "You are sketching me?"
         "I am," the not-so-young-man said.  "I've
     just gotten this idea for a sports equipment
     series."
          "If you think I'm funny," the bowling ball said,
     "you ought to see the tennis racket."
          "How did you know I thought you looked like a bowling
      ball?  I've been noticing it all this time we've been
      talking.  It's obtrusive, somehow."
          "Only to cartoonists.  Artists are likely to visualize
      us as dark spheres filled with stars."
          "What about the holes?"
          "Have you ever heard of the Coalstack [sic] Nebula?"

Okay, so here we have it.  The man is beginning to question how this is 
happening, because he doesn't even realize that his wish is already coming 
true.  And we begin to see the dark reality of what's happening, that his 
perception is becoming so limited that it's actually become noticeably 
obtrusive.  The cosmos explains that only he sees it that way, and that 
artists are likely to view it as a sphere with stars.  How many times have we 
seen artists depict the universe as a sphere, with sprinkles of light 
scattered about, some stars, some galaxies, and so on.  And when the nsymr 
asks about the holes of the ball, how are they formed, the cosmos explains 
that one at least is formed by a formation known as the Coalsack Nebula, 
which is a real formation, a dark "hole" formed in the sky from an area 
unusually less dense with stars.  Pictures on the internet show it as a near 
void in a background scattered with stars.  The misspelling is intentional, I 
think, because Wolfe is starting to warp our storyview into that of the 
nsymr's.  Instead of coalsack, we have coalstack, a rather bland pun with 
little value.  But as we learn later, the process is gradual, and so the 
humor becomes more pronounced and yet more bizarre.

And here we see another glimpse in the rather malign side of what's 
happening: the man brings up the cliqued story of someone who basically sells 
his soul to the devil and worries about this possibility.  Not to worry, the 
universe reassures, and then goes on to say that even the man's children will 
inherit this "ability".  And then this extremely chilling remark: "...from 
that time forward we guarantee that where others see duty or ugliness or 
pathos or even beauty, you will see only humor.  Good-by."

Why is this chilling?  Because at least two of the four fundamental 
perceptions are good: duty and beauty.  But instead of seeing these, the 
nsymr will see only humor.  I think Wolfe is a likely adherent to the 
Christian belief that "bad" exists in the world, in part, to act as a 
contrast to the good, that without evil we have no frame of reference to 
define good.  And so, to lose our ability to perceive even the bad, in this 
case ugliness and pathos, is a bad thing to Wolfe, and to lose our ability to 
perceive duty and beauty is very bad, indeed.

Now we come to the last part of the short story, and boy! what a compressed 
bit of writing.  Wolfe warps our perception to make us suspect more that 
perhaps the entity to which the nsymr speaks is not quite as objective as we 
had begun to think, and that maybe what is manipulating the man is truly a 
conscious, malignant "being".   The young man leaves the presence of the 
bowling ball, and a second ball comes in.  Whoa, how is this possible if 
there's only one cosmos?  Is Wolfe implying a metaverse or something?  We 
read further.  The entities perceive each other as fair blue words, 
surrounded by clouds and "rich with life".  A beautiful visual (primordial 
Earth), but is it the "truth"?  At this point we have become unsure that the 
description is truly objective.  Are we seeing the "author's perception" of 
the situation, the bowling balls' unconscious perception, or are the bowling 
balls capable of creating perception as they please, even as they've 
manipulated that of the nsymr?

Note that the first bowling ball is described in the beginning of the second 
to last paragraph as a "he" originally.   Let's look at that.  In fact, let's 
decompress this entire paragraph.  In a nutshell, here's the "action" that 
takes place in the second to last paragraph.  Bowling Ball 1 (BB1) and the 
nsymr are together.  The man leaves BB1.  A second bowling ball, BB2, comes 
in.  BB1 and BB2 look at each other and see fair worlds.  The man pops back 
in and asks for a quarter.  Another customer (let's call her NC for new 
customer) comes in.  (The nsymr has now been associated as a customer 
himself, and so customers are coming into some place where BB1 and BB2 are, 
and there is the implication that the customers are being served something 
from or by BB1 and BB2.)  BB1 begins to think, and here we have Wolfe playing 
with our perception again.  Wolfe has BB1 think "sexy", _as the NC would 
later phrase it herself_.  So now we're being yanked into the POV of the NC, 
and what does she want?  The NC wants to feel sexy.

And the NC thinks of BB1 as female.  She does so because the NC is herself a 
female, and so she is more likely to view a sympathetic BB1 as female.  
That?s suddenly how Wolfe describes BB1, saying "after an inventory of her 
mind".  Her in this case is BB1.  So we have, in the space of one paragraph, 
BB1 morphing from nsymr?s BB1 perception as male, to NC's BB1 perception as 
female.

And finally BB2 says the line about bedding pardon.  Again, we see this line 
from the NC's point of view, but also from the nsymr, because not only is the 
line "sexy", it's also a terrible pun.  And speaking of puns, we've come to 
fully realize the nature of the nsymr's wish and its fulfillment.  In classic 
demon style, we realize the wish has been fulfilled, but it's only the 
"letter of the wish" that's fulfilled.  For we see that the man will see 
everything humorously, but in a shallow form.  Puns are considered one of the 
lowest forms of humor by many, and throughout the story it's clear that's 
what the man is seeing.  Hence the pun earlier between "goblin" and 
"gobbling". 

The story finishes with an ironically scary line:  "And, still grinning, the 
not-so-young-man withdrew."  At this point we realize that he's grinning a 
hideous grin, a grin that's involuntary, an almost Lovcraftian grin of 
predestination and lack of free will.

So, that's about it.  I'm still a little confused about the actual identity 
of the bowling balls.  I'm thinking other members more versed in mythology 
could tease it out.  Are there any demons or spirits or such that make 
themselves perceived as images of the universe, or alternately as the 
primordial Earth?  I'm guessing there's something to Wolfe's image of the 
bowling balls seeing themselves as such.  Also, there's the bit about the 
bowling ball sitting on a chair of "massy gold and conform[ing] to an alien 
pattern of beauty and utility."  I took this as sun imagery.  A god sitting 
upon the sun as a throne, perhaps?  The bit about alien-ness I interpreted as 
one way to perceive the backdrop of the universe, that its pattern and 
function, whatever that may be, is unknown.

We see an evolution in our perception of just what, exactly, BB1 is 
throughout the story.  First, it's a bowling ball.  Then, it's the universe.  
Then, when seen by another like it, it's a fair world.  Finally, we know it 
as none of the above, but rather, some malignant "thing" for which we have no 
name.  There is the bit about "I beg your pardon", said by both BB1 and BB2 
at different points in the story.  Is there something in classic literature 
where a Mephistopheles-type character says something of the sort?

One last thought is that this story warns the reader against going out into 
the night and blindly wishing for something that isn't well thought out.  It 
turned out that the joke is that the man will spend his life seeing only bad 
jokes.  And it was because he prayed to a nighttime sky, a false idol, which 
was really a demon made manifest as such. 

So, any comments on this?  I dismissed this story on first reading, thinking 
it was one of Wolfe's throwaway jobs, but I'm currently re-reading 
TIODDAOSAOS and was struck by the sinister nature of this story which I 
completely missed the first time around.

Sorry for the rambling style.  Not on my A game today, lol.

-- Greg (until I decide to take an Urthian name)