One of the strangest aspects of Samuel Delany’s “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” was the notion of proportion. Certainly, the title is a powerful contributor to this theme. Comparing stars, massive balls of matter whose energy and size are beyond the comprehension of the human mind, to the matter which causes the lining of pockets to be uncomfortable, conveys the basic disconnect in the perception of proportion in the book. The descriptions continuously challenge the reader to conceptualize reality on a different scale than daily life promotes.
This challenge comes primarily in the form of the perception of size. The universe presented contains six thousand plus worlds where humans have settled, and the majority of those worlds contain on the order of hundreds of millions of people. This alone stretches the ideas of the proportional significance of humanity. As the world is today, it is difficult develop a notion of the whole of humanity. While I can understand the world as it is in terms of nations and social classes and environmental surroundings, any sort of categorization applied to such diversity over hundreds of light-years seems like it would break down in my mind. Yet, humanity has apparently adapted to the change in scale of the medium across which it operates. For example, Vondramach is a historical figure which shows the new potential for a megalomaniac. Her influence was on a completely different scale than what people are familiar with today. She controlled multiple planets, and somehow managed to gain notoriety throughout all of humanity, years and years after her death, as dispersed as it was. The magnitude of that kind of personality is incomprehensible. How can a single person have such a large effect on a system which I can barely comprehend?
This difficulty with size also appears in the discussions of cultural fugue. This disease/cultural state, is described early in the book as the series of events which leads to the elimination of all life on planet. When we first see Marq, he is performing his duties as an industrial diplomat on a planet inhabited by a strange gooey people, they ask him whether their planet is at risk for the cultural fugue, as if it is some natural disaster, with cause beyond their control. They seem like they are no more able to control it than we are able to control global warming. Yet, their fear doesn’t seem to be based on a scientific correlation, but on some pre-established notion of how planetary life-cycle. I believe this is also a reflection of the different proportion of perspective in this new universe. Rather than analyze the problems of any individual world within it’s own context, worlds are diagnosed the way the human body is. All six thousand provide a larger context such that an individuals planet’s problems no longer have the same significance, and can be compared qualitatively to the problems of others. This leader asking whether her planet will experience the cultural fugue is like someone with poison oak and a cold asking the doctor whether she’s got the bubonic plague.
Truly, I think that the issue of the cultural fugue is the most disorienting aspect of the story. Aside from the popular treatment of the issue, the destruction of all life on a planet is something incomprehensible, even to the characters of the story. This issue is represented in the issue of survivors. Marq latches on to the idea that there MUST be survivors of the scorched planet Rhyonon, but encounters difficulty in conceptualizing what that means. Japril challenges him to think about what a survivor means in the context of an entire planet, saying, “When a world is destroyed –a whole world, Marq—there are so many fuzzy edged phenomena,” (149). A planet is so large, and has such extensive influence, that to give the disaster any defined borders is impossible.