SUBLIMATION

by Jack F Speer

Obviously, the stefnistic urge is as basic with me as sex is with you ordinary mortals. One can find traces of it in my life as far back as the age of six, and it emerged in definite form when i was turning thirteen, reaching a peak at seventeen.

What has happened to this vital instinct in the last year or two, since i utterly disappeared from stefdom at large? Have i been frustrated, or has the drive itself weakened as I approach thirty? Neither is the case. I have discovered how to sublimate it.

This urge once channeled thru the direct but narrow outlet of publishing for FAPA and corresponding and attending conventions, has now been long-circuited thru a vast array of constructive activities. Let us examine some of these, and ferret out the sublimation in each.

Take politics. What am i really doing when i sit in on the caucus of the liberal faction of the King county Young Democrats, which controls the King county Young Democratic club, which in alliance with labor elements and other liberals dominates the Democratic organization in Seattle and environs, which is the hub of the majority party of the state? Why, i am symbolically leeping my fingers in all the fannish political pies, writing constitutions for fan organizations, picking candidates for office and getting them to run, forming secret alliances with elements in the Turgid Triplets' camp, anticipating the moves of the Futurians, getting myself the glory of an officer's commission in the First Staple War, or making a valiant protest against Palmerism.

That is all very well, but what is there in politics to satisfy the desire to read an amateur magazine critically, make marginal annotations in my copy of aSF, and broadcast my reactions to a letter in VoM? We have little time for or need of discussing issues in either the Party or ADA. To gratify the discussing aspect of the Urge, i must turn elsewhere, and i confess that i have not found a thoroly satisfactory substitute for the real thing. But as one of the secondbests which has kept me from baying the moon and snapping at tablelegs, i may mention the Great Books discussion groups. During the past season i have kept up. more or less, with both first- and second-year series groups, as well as a leadership training course, and have made a great impression on the other members of them with my incisive observations, ready replies, and trenchant criticisms. Of course Plato's Meno or Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil can never compare in profundity with Methuselah's Children or The Man Who Could Work Miracles, bit i can play with them in the same way, and these biweekly meetings have the immeasurable advantage that they don't call flr hours of typing and crankturning to lay my opinions before an appreciative audience (though not as appreciative as FAPAssociates), and the lost advantage of time to ponder the proper formulation of a remark before stenciling it is somewhat compensated by the feasibility of insisting on answers.

I suppose my legal practice is to some extent a sublimation, in several ways, but i think its chief function in balancing my inner equation since i withdrew from the microcosm is in its absorption of the instinct to activity, or as much thereof as remains after putting in eight evenings a week at other interests. The situation alluded to means that the only chance i have to pursue my old hobby, indeed the only time i am within thirty miles of my typewriter, is during office hours. Aside from the difficulty, soon to be removed, of pawing thru piles of fanzines and getting hektograph-carbon smudges on my face in my lobby location, there is the constant annoyance of people coming in or calling up to transact legal business with me, and frequent having to go out over the valley or into Seattle to attend to things. Like somebody has said, when one keeps extremely busy with healthy sports and such things, there is little chance for dwelling on darker impulses.

For whatThe Nation called the feeling of animal warmth -- for which my only full satisfaction is a typewriter rapport with fine minds all over the Englishspeaking world -- i have the Tanrydoon club, a group of people my own age with whom i run around over the Puget sound area, explore common interests such as playing Monopoly and hearing speakers on social questions, and carry on endless discussions involving non-Aristotelian logic and neo-Freudian psychology. There is a saying with us that every Tanrydooner either has been psychoanalyzed or is planning to be. This makes me a little bit peculiar in the group, being normal, but they tolerate me because they couldn't get along without me. I edit the weekly sheet, which means if there is nothing planned for next weekend i have to plan it. The Tanrydoon Times is run off on those yellow secondsheets in that purple ink you know so well, with a notice of coming events and copious reports on what we did in the past week. The various items are separated by interlineations, consisting chiefly of members' brilliant remarks wrenched out of context to make them twice as brilliant and three times as puzzling. The Tanrydoon club, as its name implies, is the one place where i feel most at home now that i am parted from my beloved fandom.

But one feels a yearning for the old familiar things, and i should add a postscript on The Nameless Ones, though i feel this is too near direct gratification to properly belong in an article on sublimation. Those of you who have a mother church may know the feeling of returning to it and feeling the half-forgotten atmosphere, hearing the hymns whose words you know so well and whose meaning troubles you so little, and looking up from your pew to a pulpit where a man stands who can take from you the burden of figuring out your proper relationship to the world, by giving you all the indubitable answers, straight from the hero's mouth. And the worst of you must have felt some sentiments tugging at your hearts (all two of them) when you've heard again the popular songs of your childhoods. I had something of that nostalgic feeling, something of that yearning for an irretrievably lost state of grace, when i entered the Wolf Den Book Shop in Seattle one evening last winter to find a horde of ectomorphic young men standing around with an eager air, and caught a word from that sacred language which had not caressed my outward ear for many a wandering moon, "Norwescon".

See you there.

"I wanta borrow 'Science and Sanity' with key to the scriptures."

"After William of Normandy had conquered England, he sent his agents thruout the realm to make a record of the land and the people, which was so complete that they call it the Doomsday Book.... Ladies and gentlemen, i think that you and i are compiling a Doomsday Book...." This is the spiel that i had in mind to open my census class with; but somehow, when faced with the actual situation, i didn't use it. Coward.

Text versions and page scans Judy Bemis

Data entry by Judy Bemis

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