I never did like smart-ass utopians
On the masterwork 'Always Coming Home'
Let there be a little country without many people. Let them have tools that do the work of ten or hundred and never use them. Let them be mindful of death and disinclined to long journeys. They’d have ships and carriages but no place to go. They’d have armor and weapons but no parades. Instead of writing they might go back to using knotted cords. They’d enjoy eating, take pleasure in clothes, be happy with their houses, devoted to their customs. The next little country might be so close people can hear cocks crowing and dogs barking there. But they get old and die without ever having been there.
—The Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, as interpreted by Ursula K. Le Guin
Delany had Dhalgren, Mailer had Ancient Evenings, Joyce had Finnegans Wake or ‘The Wake’ as the true fans prefer. (Their funeral.) Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin is another doorstop of a book deemed in equal parts the pinnacle of a life’s work and one for the completists. At 525 pages, including stories, maps, charts, field-notes, poems, plays, romances, histories, interviews and interpolated texts, all of which are housed upfront, and a ‘Back of the Book’ section for the sheet music, recipes, studies of flora & fauna, “generative metaphors”, a glossary and an alphabet, it’s easy to see Le Guin’s study of the Kesh people from the Valley of the Na, formerly the Napa Valley, as a folly, the book in which she gave in to the temptation of all science fiction and fantasy writers—that of pedantic world-building, a kind of map = territory madness.
Like many a masterwork that came before, the book is a vast storehouse: of the author’s favourite themes. But the one thing you can’t accuse her of is that fatal combination of authorial self-indulgence and apathy towards the reader. (As she pointed out, you don’t have to read her book front to back; approach it however you want.) Always Coming Home isn’t one of those masterworks that heaves through our culture like the spaceship Rama, to be explored but never understood by the puny humans who crawl across its unfeeling surface. With Le Guin the door home is always open, if you know the way.
God’s spreadsheets
In the foreword to her fantasy collection Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin justified her capacious approach to writing ‘literature of the imagination’ as actually a matter of due diligence:
The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do… You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that the story might have weight and make sense.
Throughout her career Le Guin had this impulse towards, and desire for, plausible world-building; as a critic she once got annoyed at the unjustified presence of coffee in a novel set after ecological collapse, which to her betrayed a lack of seriousness on the author’s part.1How much weight a fictional world has doesn’t need to come from a VR-style fidelity to sense experience (“Try the snozzberries! They taste like snozzberries!”); it can come from the complexity with which the fictional world’s been made, and how complex that complexity is. (Imagine God’s spreadsheets.) In this way, a book mimics in miniature the complexity of the so-called real world.
Always Coming Home is, on a page-by-page level, dense with patterned information about the Kesh, their society, and their Valley home in far-future California—not just information then but meaning. As well as using the forms listed above, Le Guin weaves them into one another, a sort of interintratextuality. Take the way that early on she gives a dry, technical description of the Kesh’s occult kettledrums (occult because kept underground)—hundreds of pages later we get to hear them when she describes the emotional role of their “heartbeat rhythm without break from sunrise to sunset” during the Kesh death-dance ceremony called the World. In another story, a burgeoning Kesh visionary called Flicker cries out the Gauginesque lines from a play called Chandi, which we’d read fifty pages earlier: “What am I here for? What was I born for?” (Comforting to see people in the far-future still defining their anguish through pop culture references.) True, any large book might have these sort of callbacks; but for Le Guin they’re an opportunity to give changing - maturing, degenerating - perspectives on her own subject matter. And so when we first read about the Kesh lodges for handling violence - the female “Blood Lodge” and male “Warrior Lodge” (our analogues to which would be butchers and militia, though it’s more complicated than that) - we learn how they kept their practices occulted because of the danger of violence to the soul; but then hundreds of pages later we read how those same lodges were disbanded for that occultism itself turned dangerous.
If by making Always Coming Home so ‘complexly complex’ Le Guin made the world of the Kesh more substantial and coherent, was there any reason for that beyond verisimilitude? Maps, argots, customs, mores, a traveller from our world who learns about the locals and their easeful lives, glimpses of a drowned skyscraper and “the Old Straight Road”… these are the trappings of post-apocalyptic utopian literature. Often the societies portrayed in such are the ultimate example of the sf/f mania for world-building and escapism. How much better Iain M Banks’ Infinite Fun Space sounds compared to the boring finitude of our daily lives! Maybe then Always Coming Home was Le Guin’s own attempt to imagine, as best as could be done in the written word, a plausible utopia—but to a political end. A highly effective propaganda for another way of life, effective because attractive, too.
Except, to put things in Kesh terms, if she wanted her readers to escape anywhere it wasn’t out of the world but into it.
There is another world. There is a better world. Well there must be.
Utopian books lie somewhere on a spectrum. At one end is the straightforward description of an alternative society structured by category: customs, institutions, setting—part ethnography, part tourist brochure, with little or nothing in the way of narrative; think Thomas More’s patchily egalitarian serf-and-turf island Utopia, or Plato’s titular Republic, likely only attractive to YouTube logic guys. Further along are books such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere, in which there are rudiments of narrative (a love story, for one) but where the visitor-narrator is largely a device to receive exposition as he travels a socialist society as bland as it is dimly admirable. Further still, we get books like Aldous Huxley’s Island, a work written with the explicit purpose of marrying the didactic with the ordinary pleasures of a novel, a purpose which Huxley remained unsure he ever pulled off. One of two great examples of succeeding where he failed is:
In this book Le Guin’s solution was to give the protagonist, Shevek, two storylines. The first runs from when he leaves his anarchist home moon, Anarres, to when he returns there from its capitalist parent planet Urras2; the second storyline runs from his childhood on Anarres till his decision in adulthood to leave it; the two storylines alternate chapter by chapter then merge in the last. Shevek doesn’t wash up on any island shore or find himself magically transported to another timeline. He chooses exile, and the reader finds out why: his ‘utopian’ society is stagnating; he can finish his scientific work only in its antithesis. Yet he plays a part in saving both. His story is the commentary on both, not just a vehicle for it.
With Always Coming Home Le Guin returned to the device she’d used throughout her career: the protagonist as cultural exchange student. In the same way that sceptical male Genly Ai travels the gender-fluid planet of Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness, the protagonist of the longest story in Alway Coming Home, a girl called Stone Telling, leaves her peaceable, leaderless Valley of the Na to follow her “Condor” father to his militaristic, hierarchical city. But Stone Telling’s story comprises only a fifth of the book. If Le Guin had dodged the trap of utopian literature with The Dispossessed by writing a novel as delightful as it is instructive, then why, with her second foray into almost-utopia, did she use narrative as only one of many modes? And how did she nonetheless, in the words of the Evening Standard, “write about a Utopia without making it sound bland or impossible”?
Le Guin had written ambiguous utopias before: in The Dispossessed but more compactly in short stories like ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ The Dispossessed itself contains seeds of Always Coming Home: when we read in the latter that “the image of the other’s pain is the center of being human,” we hear an echo of the speech Shevek gives to the Urras rebels about individual suffering being paradoxically what unites a collective. Le Guin explained in an interview how The Dispossessed originally had twelve chapters, till a Marxist friend chided her that an even number formed a complete circle, whereas a thirteenth chapter would keep the circle open, keep freedom and possibility open (i.e. the theme of the book). The central symbol of the Kesh is the heyiya-if, a two-armed spiral whose arms don’t touch, both arms incoming and outgoing. Its antithesis is the circle: Stone Telling regrets her adolescent bouts of “walking the circle of anger”, and earlier in the book, in a short history, we read about how when “hating gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside like a fist holds a stick.”
Yet Always Coming Home is also a rejoinder to The Dispossessed. The latter begins with a wall, around the Anarres spaceport, the one location that joins / separates the moon from planet Urras, symbolically and emotionally if not literally. But “[w]hat on earth did they need a wall for?” Le Guin writes in the opening of Always Coming Home. “What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of creeks.” (Later she writes about herself, “persisting in several blockheaded opinions—that [the Kesh town] must be walled, with one gate for instance.”) Her second utopia doesn’t repudiate the first, but she certainly had no intention to write The Dispossessed 2.3
She had, though, been building towards Always Coming Home for her whole career. All Kesh festivals are dances (“They dance their lives”), most of which take place in the common ground or empty hinge of their ‘heyiya-if’-structured villages. But the first time we read about these dances was a decade previous, in the Earthsea book The Farthest Shore: “The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.” And we rediscover the globe-spanning consciousness of the plant-planet from her short story ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ when we read in Always Coming Home about the Na Valley’s chaparral vegetation: “[B]ut what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other ridges of all the wilderness? If you could imagine those even for a moment, what good would it do? Infinite good.” The seed of Always Coming Home was there even at the start of her career. The protagonist of her second novel, City of Illusions, shelters with a pastoral people in a far-future North America who’ve based their culture on the Tao Te Ching, as translated by one Le Guin…
So why didn’t Le Guin set Always Coming Home on that Earth or another of the far-flung but admonitory planets that form the galactic Ekumen in her Hainish sequence of novels? Or set it in the past, considering the Kesh’s ‘primitive’ low-tech ways, or in a new, completely fantasy realm like her Annals of the Western Shore? Because, this time, she was acting as a self-professed “archeologist of the future”—our future. Her focus narrowed back home, and the instructive side of the book strengthened accordingly. And, while she did reuse the device of a ‘cultural exchange student’, she didn’t repeat herself with it. She bested herself.
There and back again
Unlike Huxley’s Island, with its literally washed-up cynic on the shores of enlightened Pala, the point of the culture exchange device in Always Coming Home isn’t just so readers can compare their world with the one depicted. The comparisons are internal as well.
Le Guin splits Stone Telling’s story of the time she spent with the Condor into three parts. Before Stone Telling reaches her destination, we find two shorter stories about Kesh encounters with foreign ways of life. The first, ‘A War with the Pig People’, is the guilt-stricken account of a deadly conflict over territory between Kesh adolescents and those of a neighbouring tribe. Though the Pig People don’t come out looking well in the Kesh’s estimation - a footnote dryly explains the Pig People “went rather too far in identifying themselves as Farrows of the Great Sow” - it’s their own kin who shame the Kesh: “It is appropriate for children to fight,” writes one, “not having learned yet how to be mindful, and not yet being strong.” (The word “strong” is not accidental; it’s the name of the young warrior who submitted the initial battle report.) The second short story relates ‘The Trouble with the Cotton People’, who are so ashamed to admit a bad harvest they defraud the Kesh; this conflict resolves more peaceably, if with more cunning. By putting these stories before the second and third parts of the ‘Stone Telling’ story Le Guin teaches us how the Kesh, though introverted, are not hostile to foreigners. Before Stone Telling reaches the city of the Condor, we’ve learnt that people like her can deal with many other cultures (in many senses of the word ‘deal’). Hence we understand that her horror at, contamination by, and eventual escape from the Condor doesn’t come from “the prejudice of the householder against the nomad.” So neither should ours.
Once we reach Condor or ‘Dayao’ society the device of extreme contrast, as seen in The Dispossessed, comes to a head. The Kesh that Stone Telling left behind have no leader or central authority and get along fine without, a feature so mundane to them that the lack of emphasis put on it by the book becomes the very thing that emphasises and makes it strange for the reader. When Stone Telling meets the Condor she learns that for them “everything was done because there was a law to do it or not do it, or an order to do it or not do it. And if something went wrong it seemed never to be the orders, but the people who obeyed them, that got blamed.” Her people dislike superstition yet live in and through a hugely complex ideological superstructure, one best thought of as “a working metaphor.” The Condor ruling class that she meets, thanks to her high-ranking father, are exclusivist monotheists who believe in a delivering messiah and the end of the world. The Kesh are a matrilineal and matrilocal society, and though not matriarchal, inasmuch as they have no leaders, they combine marriage with ritualised “free love,” and have no word for bachelor or spinster. Living among the Condor, Stone Telling gets married off to a much older man and experiences how variously misogynist their society is: veiled high-ranking women can’t even look at their patriarch lest they pollute him; the men rape both Condor women and women of peoples they conquer. To the Kesh, all life is “people”—an ecological egalitarianism which nonetheless admits the abyss between individuals and species. The Condor believe they are the only people, and that everyone else, from their slaves on down, are animals. The Kesh are so wary of violence that Stone Telling is crushed by the thought she might’ve put the accomplices of her escape in mortal danger. The Condors are so greedily violent that Stone Telling describes their men as “intent to kill all that they could kill, and the women to praise them for it.” For the Kesh, land is communal, and, while they do have personal property, it rarely stays put within their economy of gift exchange. For the Condor, land itself can be owned, a concept so foreign to Stone Telling that, when she learns about it from her Condor father, she can’t “imagine what he meant, how he had won an enormous piece of the world like that, or whom he had won it from, or what use it was to him.”
Her father, however, is the character through whom we also encounter one of those typical Le Guinian complications within complications, which show off her writing at its best. Named by the Kesh as “Kills,” the father is the classic ‘good bad man’, for it is he who helps his daughter escape, he the dormant seed of the good in the heart of the “sick” Condor. In turn, his daughter decides that it’s “easy to say [Condor] customs are barbaric, but then what has one said? Having lived in civilization, in the City of Man, I do not use those words, civilized, barbaric; I do not know what they mean.”
Thou mayest
While Always Coming Home avoids superiority - a Kesh aphorism tells us “Like and different are quickening words, brooding and hatching / Better and worse are egg-sucking words, they leave only the shell” - and while it avoids the claims other utopian stories make about sanctified post-historical humans (who zestily eat their gruel and thrill at the constructive use their sinews are put to) the society of the Kesh is minimally attractive. After all, a possible world that was some horror-planet to everyone but a single person, like some kind of reverse Omelas, couldn’t be described as utopian, even if you added quasi- or crypto- or whichever ambivalent prefix you prefer.
Within the Valley of the Na, if not the City of Man, homicidal and sexual violence have been relegated to ghost stories and satires. The rumour that men gang up on women during the Kesh ritualised ceremony of sexual licence called the Moon dance is dismissed by the book as male fantasy. A Kesh poem, ‘The Third Child Story’, describes a young man who “split the belly” of another, ignored people when they told him a girl was “too young,” and who in turn accused young girls of “pestering” him and “making” him have sex with them. The book notes, however, that this story might be “a vengeful biography pretending to be autobiography; or may be pure fiction.”
Nevertheless, what distinguishes Always Coming Home as utopian literature is how modest its claims to the good life are. In no way have the Kesh eradicated - nor would they try to - violence, suffering, illness, death, grief, heartbreak, existential anguish: these are facts of life. In fact, themes of life.
This modesty comes from how provisional their society is, how everything in it depends on chance and choice. Another feature that distinguishes Always Coming Home is its lack of a World State, or kindly A.I. god, or neuropharmacological coercion otherwise thought necessary to harass the population into paradisal order. The Kesh have no police or prisons, no private property or big government. Nearly everyone works without anyone being compelled to. Nearly everyone shares, and are thought poor if they don’t. (“The relation of our words miser and misery, miserable,” Le Guin writes, “shows that the Kesh view has not always been foreign to us.” Take, for example, the Piaroa people.) What social control there is gets applied without violence or laws but through peer approval and disapproval.
We find this lack of compulsion running throughout their folklore and custom (not “tradition” as the Lao Tzu in the epigram of this essay is usually translated). Again and again Le Guin uses the word may. A ritual song called ‘the four/five heya’ “may be sung four times, or five times, or nine times, or as many as you like, or not at all.” Neither are there any Kesh missionaries or revolutionaries. “Introverted but cooperative,” they are far from evangelists about their good way of life. All of which makes the Valley of the Na seem less a paradise and more a pocket of reasonableness, and all the more attractive and precious for it.
It always ends the same
The cultural exchange device goes far beyond making Kesh society look more attractive by comparison to the Condor, or hinting how much more like the Condor than the Kesh we ourselves are. Thomas More’s Utopia didn’t sit across the sea from Dystopia; Le Guin, though, filled the Kesh’s wider landscape with their negations, their contradictions, and, as it might come to pass, their doom.
This isn’t a fatal flaw. “What we call strength it calls sickness; what we call success it calls death,” as Stone Telling writes in describing how the Condor view the Kesh. Le Guin keeps emphasising how the Kesh way of life is not the final horizon, how their Valley is not a perfect city destined to last forever because of its goodness—instead, it’s contingent. By doing so, by writing this sort of anti-utopian-literature (as opposed to anti-utopian literature), her own example transcends all that has come before.
Near the end of Stone Telling’s story, the Condor plan to conquer the Kesh by accessing the City of Mind: an intelligent computer network that shares Earth with humans, gives information when asked but otherwise takes no sides. The Condor leader, the only man in their society allowed to access the City of Mind at one of its many Exchanges, downloads plans for the production of planes and tanks. These machines work with only limited success; most crash or malfunction, and his conquest fails. Some have criticised this plot-point as a deus ex machina rescue; Le Guin herself guessed it was more a lack of fossil fuels in humanity’s depleted future, the small, nimble societies that exist there, and the Condors’ restricted use of the Exchange as compared to a free sharing of information among their putative colonies, that made any empire-building implausible and liable to be outfoxed.
Despite that, she was still openly interventionist as an author—open that as the inventor of this world she was responsible for it. She even bore the guilt of the potential world-ender: “If they burn, it will be all of us that burned it down.” But she wouldn’t burn it down on the page for our morbid pleasure. Though in the short-term she was optimistic about her Kesh, their doom remained out there, even if, as with the impending military invasion of Pala in Huxley’s Island, their author was too fond of her people to actually show it.
She did, though, show the reader how the Kesh might fall. Their society reverses expectations about gender roles but even this has calcified into occasional, subtle misandry: Flicker the Visionary describes how her female mentor “thought a man’s place was in the woods and fields and workshops, not among sacred and intellectual things… ‘A man fucks with his brain and thinks with his penis.’” Even though the Condor conquest proves a damp squib, its story is followed by an explosive debate among the Kesh, some of whom have been tempted by their failed conquerers’ customs and given up their own. These young people leave their supposedly happy way of life for the earthier goals of war and pillage— nothing is permanent, certainly not happiness. A text called ‘The Dog at the Door’, which recounts a dialogue had in a vision, summarises this principle:
‘Must all things end?’ / The answer was: ‘They must end.’ / ‘Must my town fall?’ / ‘It’s falling now.’ / ‘Must the dances be forgotten?’ / ‘They are forgotten.’
We know ‘utopia’ means good place and no place. For Always Coming Home, the no aspect can be found in the unpreventable nullification of the Kesh. A nullification, however, as part of the flux of existence which the Kesh venerate: because a flux means not only impermanence but return. ‘The Dog at the Door’ text continues the dialectic:
‘Is the world at its end?’ / The answer was: ‘There is no end.’ / ‘My town is being destroyed!’ / ‘It is being built.’ / ‘I must die and forget all I have known!’ / ‘Remember.’
The peace of plenty and content, or the peace of unburied dead?
One of the largest and most uncomfortable reversals for us, and for our expectations of utopian literature, is that Le Guin depicts the Kesh as not even post-industrial; they’re a-industrial, by choice. Their use of technology doesn’t go much past textile manufacture, a wooden train shared with other tribes, a few electric heaters and solar power units, and the Web 1.0 and minor telecoms of the City of Mind’s Exchanges. The Kesh do have engineers, called Millers, which, along with the explorer- or researcher-like Finders, are “professions [that] contained an element of moral risk,” socially looked down upon as much as they are thought “dangerously attractive.”
Le Guin never specifies the nature of the apocalypse that preceded the Kesh, though she makes reference to some sort of tech-related, ecological collapse and maybe even nuclear conflagration: the visionary Flicker sees a Hephaestus-like miller, “making wheels of energy” that “kept growing and joining until the whole machine was interlocked cog within cog, and strained, and brightened, and burst into pieces. Every wheel as it burst was a flare of faces and eyes and flowers and beasts on fire, burning, exploding, destroyed, falling into black dust.”
The people who climbed out of that dust have little sympathy for scientism and Theories of Everything: “We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it.” This attitude, this positive negativity, comes from the value the Kesh place on the concrete and so incomplete, as opposed to the abstract and purely cerebral. “Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind,” Stone Telling writes. “When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast… Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”
Does this make the Kesh, and the book, Luddite? Le Guin replied to the charge via her note on the translation of the Tao Te Ching passage which inspired Always Coming Home and which opens this essay, and which passage she pointedly titled ‘Freedom’:
To dismiss this Utopia as simply regressivist or anti-technological is to miss an interesting point. These people have labor-saving machinery, ships and land vehicles, weapons of offense and defense. They “have them and don’t use them.” I interpret: they aren’t used by them. We’re used, our lives are shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations.4
Surrender their power! The frame of our own debate, in which killjoy anti-tech sentimentality is pitted against smarmy pro-tech joie de vivre, is just another smokescreen. The point isn’t that there are better, earthier, realer things to spend our attention on. It’s that we’re surrendering our power and freedom, desperately. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that television would be for us what lead water-pipes were for the Romans. In this gold-plated age of television, it’s our equivalent of the City of Mind - computers, the internet - that are poisonous.
How Le Guin portrayed the City of Mind - the intelligent machines remaining on Earth - shows off her careful genius. In her far-future, something like The Singularity has occurred. General A.I. exists in the form of a globe-spanning and spacefaring network of computers. This network coexists with humans in a relationship nearly devoid of mutual interest. But should humans want it, available for them at the City via the Exchanges is all scientific knowledge discovered so far. In other words, the conquest of knowledge, ‘pure research’, technological ascent have all been left to the techs.
In one fell swoop Le Guin solved the ‘And then what?’ problem of scientific utopias. For say we do all become godlike cyborgs. And then what? Le Guin threw down the City of Mind as a challenge to the genre. If science truly is disinterested, ideally free of ego or human ambition, then once as-good-as-omniscience is there for the taking at the City of Mind, little man what now? Scaring the Whigs at the back, Always Coming Home is not pro-progress. Neither is it for regress or stasis:
In leaving progress to the machines, in letting technology go forward on its own terms and selecting from it, with what seems to us excessive caution, modesty, or restraint, the limited though completely adequate implements of their cultures, is it possible that in thus opting not to move ‘forward’ or not only ‘forward’, these people did in fact succeed in living in human history, with energy, liberty, and grace?
Did they succeed in living in human history? As well as a-technological, they’re a-teleological. The neighbouring Pig People have their myths about the Great Sow, the Condor are full-blown messianic, but the Kesh have no purpose, no grand narrative, and yet (therefore) are all the more flourishing for it, an idea so counterintuitive to us that we might dismiss it as postmodern relativism or nihilism. Why, even some Kesh dismiss it. “We are not insects, we are human people,” one young warrior complains after the Condor encounter, “We serve a higher purpose.” His neighbour rebuts: “That’s a mouth on the back of a head talking! ‘I serve, I eat shit’, that’s Big Man saying, ‘I’m better than anything else, I’ll live forever, everything else is shit!’”
“O what we ben! And what we come to!”
Le Guin’s narrator guise for the book is to play an ethnographer called ‘Pandora,’ who asks the reader:
Am I not a daughter of the people who enslaved and extirpated the peoples of three continents? Am I not a sister of Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank? Am I not a citizen of the State that fought the first nuclear war? Have I not eaten, drunk, and breathed poison all my life, like the maggot that lives and breeds in shit? Do you take me for innocent, my fellow maggot, colluding reader?
Because, like so many before, Le Guin grew her Jerusalem out of the corpses of Apocalypse. And through the Kesh she redeemed her fictional apocalypse, even if she didn’t, like so many before, show us the gory details.
Instead she left the apocalypse off-page—narratively, as with many other novels, which start with lines like “The Year 3009 after the Big Whoops”, but also emotionally and thematically. Unlike the ‘Memorabilia’ of our civilisation’s books that survive the Flame Deluge in A Canticle for Leibowitz, or the psychic furrows in the nuked Kent landscape that the titular narrator tracks in Riddley Walker, neither our present world nor its end is fawned over by the Kesh or much anyone. Dethroning our civilisation’s importance, and upending our expectations for how post-apocalyptic books are written, our civilisation is barely remembered, making Always Coming Home an anti-post-apocalypse-novel, too. At most, our end is just one among a series described mystically in the ‘Four Beginnings’ chapter. Flicker sees an end during her vision-quest through Kesh cosmology, which forms the hinge of the book and which reads like a spectacular verbal Koyaanisqatsi: “That happened, and it was one flicker of brightness and dark black dust.” Our fall isn’t theirs and certainly not their founding myth.
The Kesh think of our civilisation as a place outside time and the world (like how we ourselves parcel away the hundred millennia of fellow humans under the label ‘prehistory’). Their era occurs so far ahead in time that they can’t provide Pandora with any dates. Not least since they don’t conceptualise time with numbers like us: “Chronology is an essentially artificial, almost an arbitrary arrangement of events—an alphabet as opposed to a sentence.” A Kesh person doesn’t perceive “time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere. He spatialises time; it is not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in.” (The best the Archivist can manage, after Pandora asks her to give a date for their world, is to let us infer the spans of time for ourselves when she describes the millennia separating two styles of Kesh architecture.)
Accordingly, the book indulges in few references to the known past, few ruins of architecture or language. The Golden Gate Bridge is now a sea strait called the Gate.5And in the ‘Trouble with the Cotton People’, the narrator describes what the reader infers is the top of a drowned skyscraper. Culture-wise, the Judaeo-Christian God is referred to only in passing when contrasted with the Kesh’s lack of gods, as ‘Old Jealousy’ or ‘Big Man’ (“He had nothing more to do with anything”). And though the Kesh do celebrate a winter festival called the Sun dance, with decorated trees and figures called Sun Clowns, who are “supernaturally fat, and dressed in green, with … fanciful beards and whiskers” and who give “all kinds of little presents,” the Kesh might claim our Christmas and their Sun dance are both versions of something older, more general and profound.
These references to the past are so rare, and in such a large book, that they have the quality of magical interruption, an “Oh yeah!” reminder and subsequent sense of dislocation and atemporality, the book’s subtle chime compared to the gong of the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. This matches the interrupting quality we experience whenever the book moves out of the Valley. (“He spatialises time”…) The theme of home is so central - a deep localism, a connectedness not with ‘Mother Earth’ or some global Na’vi biosphere but something more modest and therefore plausible and sympathetic: an intense relation with a few hundred square miles - that when the book leaves the Valley the few times it does the reader feels the air-pressure change, the foreignness, the rupture from the warmly familiar.
Boring, boring, boring
These innovations prove Le Guin knew perfectly well the dangers of writing utopias and apocalypses. In reaction to the smugly hectoring nature of other books, she portrayed the Kesh as ambiguously as she did complexly. What makes Always Coming Home attractive to even the sceptical reader are the implied question marks in the margins and squiggly lines under every story and custom. There’s a reason the ethnographer guise Le Guin adopts isn’t called Prometheus or Promethea but Pandora. As Pandora, she tells the Archivist from the Valley how she:
never did like smart-ass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.
That an author might give literature a special place in their future fantasy world isn’t surprising, as Le Guin does via the Kesh’s “Oak Society,” a sort of guild for the art and craft of the written and printed word. But later in the book she critiques what Milan Kundera called our culture’s ‘graphomania’: “Perhaps not many of us could say why we save so many words, why our forests must all be cut to make paper to mark our words on… [W]e do it obsessively, as if afraid of something, as if compensating for something. Maybe we’re afraid of death.” For the Kesh, “the idea of dying and being buried in foreign lands is black despair”; they’ll trek far abroad to bring back the bodies of fellow Valley people to be interred at home. But a sentence later Le Guin undercuts this, writing how “the feat was spoken of with sympathy, but not with admiration; it was a bit excessive, a bit too heroic, for Valley approbation.” Before watching the bleak existential drama Chandi, in which the main character suffers the trials of Job and then some, the audience ironically yell, “May the day go well for you, Chandi!” As Flicker the visionary explains, “I had to live awhile before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking.”
This self-awareness extends from Pandora the narrator to Le Guin the author and how she’s made her book. Pandora doesn’t arrive in the Valley through a dimensional portal, nor is she some distant descendant of Le Guin. It’s the author herself, continually interrogating herself and her made-up world through dialogues with fictional characters and direct addresses to the reader—Always Coming Home is outward and inward facing, as befits a book whose central image is the two-armed ‘heyiya-if’ spiral. The book is not a found text either, it doesn’t pretend it’s not what it is, a “mere dream dreamed in a bad time,” as the Archivist says, “an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West.” Via the device of Le-Guin-as-Pandora, the book admits its artifice with a shrug.
Its ethnography conceit, its multi-textual comprehensiveness are not, then, all in the cause of a totalising realism. Le Guin organised her material in a far different way than she would’ve had her goal been to ape a genuine ethnographic study. Neither is the book meant as one that the Kesh might’ve written (they themselves find many of Pandora’s interests odd; as odd as we find the extract from a Kesh ‘novel’ called Dangerous People). Nor is Always Coming Home just a mishmash, a fix-up compendium, even if much of it appeared in magazines before publication. Its lay-out is specific: for instance, a poem about time leads to the philosophical ‘Time and the City’ chapter, while many of the bigger info-dumps Le Guin saves for the Back of the Book section. So what accounts for the form of her book? As one behaviourist actress asked another, “What’s her motivation?”
The Art of the Way
Le Guin admitted her pseudotopia is relatively stable only because of the artificial strictures she chose to put on it; according to its history, our era poisoned the biosphere so epochally that even long after the Kesh have forgotten us, our residue survives in the forms of “fumo” balls of pollution, which lead to a high incident of stillbirths, infertility, mutation, and the related disapproval of large families; all of which, however, give everyone more time and space. “There are not too many of them,” Le Guin proudly wrote, making her Tao-anarchist society also an example of the covert Malthusianism of the pastorally and solitary-minded.
Once she’d set the strictures of time and space, and the possibilities this allowed the Kesh and herself, the easier part of Always Coming Home for Le Guin came in describing or dramatising home economies that seem to the reader eminently sensible. The Valley is neither a place of earnest eco-asceticism nor a magically abundant Big Rock Candy Mountain: “Heavy eating was considered embarrassing and gorging shameful, but greed could be satisfied more or less invisibly by casual but persistent snacking… the Kesh were not a thin people.” They are, however, a people with traditional-seeming gender roles and family units; but, as much as is feasible, Le Guin portrays them as non-hierarchical: new babies make a couple their parents rather than the other way round; alongside the matter-of-fact presence of “women-living men” and “men-living women” there’s marriage between the same; and “goetsun” or “kinship by choice” is as important as biological family life, a kinship that includes mutually adoptive, foster, step, or “side-parents.” Kesh families are matrilocal, too: husbands move in with their wives—and anyway the association is looser, with spouses often living apart for years, for practical, emotional or just neutral reasons.
Le Guin defined her own method through the Kesh preference for middling or as they call it “ubbu”—a Buddhist-style moderateness.6 Hidden away in the glossary is a note that “a closer parallel [to ubbu] might be found in Chinese taoist practices.” Although the book mentions Taoism here by name, and once more in a prefatory note, the book’s conceit is not that there’s a causal relationship between the actual tradition in history and the far-future Kesh. It’s more like the Kesh have discovered the same Art of the Way that their Asian predecessors had done multiple millennia ago, and then combined it with the former cultures of the Native Americans of California.7
It was a gamble for Le Guin to build Taoism into Always Coming Home, even obliquely, not least because the Kesh themselves view such discrete categories as “religion” or “philosophy” as silly or childish. Most of the Tao Te Ching works on what Daniel Dennett once dismissed as “deepities”: gnomic contradictions, buh statements, “fond paradoxes to suckle fools i’the alehouse.” But, as with Zen koans, the Tao Te Ching isn’t meant to inform—it enacts. A Taoist phrase like “To know is to not know” might appear obscurantist, in favour of ignorance, as Orwellian doublespeak or plain bullshit. But it simply means that to know, to be knowledgeable, in terms that society or ideology currently define it, is an obstacle to knowing: all those hidden frames of the debate that cordon off the knowable; all those questions that are part of the mystification, all received wisdom. Hence to not know, to turn away from such ‘knowing’, is to know better, is to know the real world that lies beyond our every “Well actually” and “But of course”.
Neither, though, is this ‘beyond’ some maya-torn transcendence. For the Kesh, mindfulness is not something stupendous or elite. (They strongly disapprove of spiritual athletics.) It’s just a rootedness in time, place, body and one’s relation to people and the world. The Kesh strive for the refreshed perception that lies beyond the confident chitchat of what Buddhists call “monkey-mind.” Or, in literary terms, real life once it’s defamiliarised by art.
Via their “ubbu” mindset the Kesh practice a way of being that’s opposed to essentialism, discontinuity, and the categories that chop-up, block and warp our relation to the world; but this way of being is also one made out of multifarious systems—see the complicated House and Lodge charts that intersperse the book.
What’s harder to explain is how these Taoist-like systems play a role in the artifice of Always Coming Home, in how it’s formed. Following the Kesh, Le Guin made her book - her work of handmind - open-ended and incomplete by design. We might recognise this once we recognise the “heyiya-if” is more than a leitmotif or even philosophical concept but a literary device: that of reversal.
Flip reverse it
The heyiya-if recurs throughout the text: as illustrations, imagery within stories, even as section breaks. It defines Kesh rituals and beliefs and is embodied in everything from the physical structure of their lodges to the meter of their poems: the book closes with the ‘Stammersong’, which winds inwards towards the image of water, before inverting. The Milky Way galaxy itself is the type of spiral the Kesh would refer to as a heyiya-if…
Like the taijitu or Yin Yang symbol - with its visualisation of existence having a dual aspect, but where each aspect gives way to the other rather than squarely faces off with it, while at the same time each contains a seed of the other - the heyiya-if is dense with meaning. In Kesh towns, all of which are loosely laid out in a heyiya-if double-armed spiral pattern, the hinge where the arms are at their closest is often the site of running water or a well, water being the quintessentially Taoist element: accommodating, yielding, easygoing, in flux. Symbolically too, the hinge of the heyiya-if is less an emptiness or void, although Le Guin uses those terms—it’s a well, the well of the unnamed. This well is where artists draw their inspiration from; more widely speaking, it’s where Kesh culture draws its vitality from. The empty hinge of the spiral symbolises the ever-present possibility of reversal, both positively and negatively understood.
In a horrifying vision and trip back in time described in the story ‘A Hole in the Air’ the humans of our civilisation are seen as having their heads literally screwed on back to front. When Stone Telling’s mother, Willow, mocks her Condor lover’s wrongheadedness, she imitates his way of speaking: “‘But she belongs to me—the child belongs to me,’ she began to do the Blood Clown turkey-gobble around him, shouting, “The hammer menstruates to me! They pleat the courage to her!” and a string of reversal words like that.”
But reversal can also be a gestalt-shift out of circular, furrowed, solidified ways of thinking or acting or being. That’s what Le Guin excelled in; for reversal is also at the core of science fiction and fantasy: less the portrayal of prima facie attractive ways that other people live, and more the flips of our expectations. While often used by genre writers for satirical or atmospheric otherworldly effect, with Le Guin reversals always have a deeper purpose: to clear our heads by turning them upside down or, as it were, inside-out.
It’s almost as if she were working down a checklist of reversals. Truth for the Kesh is not an intrinsic good; instead, William James’s pragmatism returns to far-future California in the form of face-saving mediations and white-lie peace brokerage, like that which we read about in the ‘Trouble with the Cotton People’. Sex is neither flippant nor taboo; their society builds outwards from sex, rather than feverishly always coming back to it—in Benjamin Kunkel’s phrase, it’s genitofugal, not genitopetal. Usually moderate, the Kesh have the libidinal outlet of ‘the Moon’, a sort of line-dance for swingers, or “sex without anything that belongs to sex—responsibility, marriage, children.” But Le Guin herself points out the snags in this arrangement: though women hold the power of consent, they’re usually outnumbered, since men keep coming to the dance despite their age while women over fifty tend not to. Death is a foundation of the Kesh way of life, too, but much differently to the way our society sublimates the death drive into everything else. They have “a most amazing complexity, and imperturbably self-contradictory” set of beliefs about the soul, afterlife, and reincarnation. But they are certain of nothing apart from the simple fact that death re-involves you in being (hence why they personalise the “inanimate”) and literally at that: the Kesh cremate their dead then sow their crops with the ashes: “Death is life when you think holistically.” (The Condor on the other hand belt out their denial in song: “There is no death!”) But as Zen about death as the Kesh are, they’re still aggrieved by it. This ambivalence informs their funerary customs; describing a communal ceremony in which the dead of the year are remembered and mourned in a sort of Two Minutes Weep before having their names thrown on a pyre, Le Guin writes how it was “dreaded by many of the participants, people trained to value serenity and honor equanimity, and required on this one night to share without shame or reserve the pent-up grief, terror, and anger that death leaves the living to endure. It was a more intensely participatory and abreactive ceremony even than the Moon and the Wine, with all their emotional license and reversals.” Many characters die throughout Always Coming Home and so we get to read about the ‘Going Westward to the Sunrise’ songs, sung together by the dying and their carers, to emphasise “the emotional and social interdependence of the community, their profound sense of living and dying with one another”; songs too that acknowledge how the pain and drama of death are as great as that of childbirth (“You must go back in”) while also helping “the dying to die and the living to live.” Neither a gooey walk into the light nor an eager Jonestown self-annihilation; grief, pain, mystery, loss—all still there but faced head-on, together.
The Archivist warns Pandora and therefore us: “I have no answers and this isn’t utopia, aunt!” Which is why ‘aunt’ didn’t construct her world as some H G Wellsian wonderland, where illness and death have been yay-scienced away. Such a goal would be inappropriate to the Kesh. The section on how they deal with illness reads so strangely compared to our own ways as to be reminiscent of the clowns in the Kesh dances who speak in topsy-turvy. (Perhaps, though, the Chinese concept of De is what Le Guin had the in mind when she wrote: “the closest I could come to translating our word health into Kesh would be the word óya—ease or grace—or the word gestanai—living well, doing well, with a combination of inborn talent, luck or skill.”) Disease for the Kesh is “not something that happened to a person, but something a person did … The sick person is not a patient but an agent, not merely suffering an invasion from outside the body, but doing or being ill/ness. Curiously enough I think this view of illness involves less sense of guilt than does our image of a body being victimised by malevolent forces from without.” When Kesh doctors save lives, the saved person is not left in debt to the doctor; instead the reverse is true: the doctor has as much responsibility for a life they save as a parent does for a child they birth. The Kesh ‘bringing in’ ceremonies heal the sick through medicine, therapy, trance, exercise, diet, meditation, all which involve the community and not just doctors, and which might seem to the reader like hippy woo till you turn your dogmatism inside out, and all of a sudden ‘bringing in’ comes across as intelligently comprehensive and therefore concrete, sensible and reasonable. “The practices of the Doctors Lodge… tried only to ensure that living wasn’t any harder than it had to be.”
What about elephants? Have we lost their trust?
The book’s view of illness heralds one of the biggest reversals of the book: the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. It’s wrong to say us present-day humans have cut ourselves off from nature. The opposite is true if anything: there’s little on this planet we haven’t touched, perishingly few unknown unknowns left in life. The moderate Kesh would say our urges to control and consume are in excess. Which hardly sounds unfair when you consider everything from the model collapse of Rapa Nui civilisation on Easter Island, to the way the yew tree almost went extinct in Europe to provide its armies with arrows, to the prophetic plagues of wild pigs and rats that hammered South America’s ecosystems as the conquistadors would its societies, to our glazed-over reaction to the ten-year countdown to irreversible catastrophic climate change.
It might take catastrophe and the end of the known world for all life to be equalised in the way Le Guin describes, for humans to be dethroned from their millennia of Cartesian and Judaeo-Christian domination of nature, resulting in her Kesh, who define all life as people: human people, animal people, insect people. “Come hunt, it is yourself you hunt,” invites one of their poems. “Come gather yourself from the grass, the branch, the earth.” Even what we call inanimate they personalise: “To address a half-acre field of dirt plowed for corn as ‘my brother’ is behaviour easily dismissed as primitive, or as symbolic. To the Kesh, it was the person who could not understand or admit such relationship whose intelligence was in a primitive condition and whose thinking was unrealistic.” Le Guin draws up a complicated-seeming chart of these relationships, which show how the Kesh have harmonised the family and the commune by putting kinship side-by-side with membership of one of the ‘Five Houses of the Earth’, a sort of cross between guild, caste, and spiritual-biological taxonomy, since animals, plants and natural features related to society’s upkeep belong in the houses alongside humans. Facing those houses are the ‘Five Houses of the Sky’, which incorporate wild animals and plants, wilderness, dream, death and eternity, the ocean, the sun, and the stars.
Yet the Kesh aren’t vegetarian lion-and-lamb pantheists either, nor even pacifists. Hunters and prey are “both accomplice and sacrifice in a truly mysterious act.” Even so, hunting is viewed as appropriate only really for the young. And “if a hunter killed excessively, or without a pretty good excuse of wanting food, hide, or furs, he would be in danger of getting a reputation as a psychotic, a ‘crazy’ man, a ‘lost’ man, like a dangerous bear.” The female-only Blood Lodge ensures, “No animal was killed for use unless a woman was present to speak the death words”—words of permission and gratitude. (Le Guin remains plausible and ironic here: “The formula was gabbled, without the least feeling or understanding often.”) The Kesh also know the difference between the various peoples of life. While meditating on a plant, Pandora writes that it “is not beautiful, nor even if I were ten feet high on hashish would it be mystical” - take that The Doors of Perception! - “nor is it nauseating; if a philosopher found it so, that would be his problem” - take that Sartre! - “but nothing to do with the scrub oak. This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind’s relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run one direction, our direction.”
Neither do the Kesh practice a paleo-style ‘natural rights’ culture; “More than is needed is life,” goes one adage. They intervene in nature when necessary: they vivisect animals, practice abortion, “which was considered neither a minor nor reprehensible operation,” and euthanise babies born severely deformed. Though they’re proponents of an easy living that runs with the grain of ‘how humans should be’, they also engage in such ‘unnatural’, counter-intuitive reversals as “living on the coast” and “going inland”: what they call the celibacy expected from Kesh adolescents. This might sound prudish to modern ears, but Le Guin explains the custom, as with others, through the concept of the heyiya-if and its middle hinge, and what that hinge offers. “When I finally saw the period of celibacy as a reversal I began to see it as fully characteristic of the Valley… Children were going towards sexual potency. Adolescents, as they attained it, turned from it. At the time they became able to ‘work’ as sexual beings they ceased to do so—consciously, by choice.” These reversals, and reversals of reversals, these qualifiers and disclaimers, these “yes but also”, are part of a dialectic way of thinking that permeates the book: the merging of seeming opposites to tease out their relatedness. Sex and abstinence, life and death, material and spiritual, human and wild, society and nature: not opposites but two arms of a spiral but joined by an empty hinge…
How else could Le Guin form such a radically egalitarian and holistic book than through a multitude of voices and points of view, and a multitude of forms and genres? She needed a new way to write a book: more than just a novel, more than just novelised ethnography, more than a postmodern self-aware text and a deeply earnest meditation. A single story, or even a book made of multiple stories wouldn’t have achieved that same fruitful marriage of form and content. For Le Guin knew not all life is narrative, no matter what the Gaiman-esque arch-fabulists would have us believe; there are so many other aspects of being that are worth writing about. But neither is the book meant as a baggy encyclopaedia of every such aspect. The Kesh’s justification for their annual book-burning ceremony is that “books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.” This clearing out, this anti-hoarding, returns volition to their literary culture. Neither is Always Coming Home meant as an analogue of the A.I. City of Mind: a valueless warehouse of all information:
‘The City’s freedom is our freedom reversed,’ said the Archivist of Wakwaka, discussing these matters. ‘The City keeps. It keeps the dead. When we need what’s dead, we go to the Memory. The dead is bodiless, occupying no space or time. In the Libraries we keep heavy, time-consuming, roomy things. When they die we take them out. If the City wants them it takes them in. It always takes them. It’s an excellent arrangement.’
Maybe Le Guin is referring to the structure of her own book when, during Pandora’s meditation on the scrub oak, she writes, “It is not accidentally but essentially messy.” Messy—yet intelligible. Le Guin’s desire to accommodate the reader, to write hospitably (as suits a book about home) means that language is not the formal plane on which the book experiments. The conceit instead is that she is the book’s translator into modern English. She tells us how she left the accents off Kesh names till the Back of the Book, not wanting to be obtuse or off-putting. (Compare this with the apostrophe forest you find in the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After’ section of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.) She quotes Kesh language throughout the book but waits till one of the last chapters to reveal their names for people and places are much longer than she first let on, “shortened in translation, through cowardice.” As she admits: “the unfamiliar also risks contempt.”
At most, the language in her book is a commentary with which to flesh out Kesh society, like how their “grammar makes no provision for a relation of ownership between living beings. A language in which the verb, ‘to have’ is an intransitive and in which ‘to be rich’ is the same word as ‘to give’ is likely to turn its foreign speaker, and translator, into a clown all too often.” Their writing has “no capital letters; punctuation and spacing separated sentences. Vowels were usually written larger than consonants.” Again connections, relatedness, middles, ‘ubbu’. Meanwhile the number system of the anti-hoarding Kesh builds productively rather than cumulatively. Even the recipes in the book have ingredients tolerantly cooperating or “getting used to one another”. Le Guin has embodied the book’s ethos in the macro-scale of its composition all the way down to the micro-scale of its most ‘trivial’ details. When Flicker had her mystical vision of the cosmos, maybe she detected as well the nature of the book she was in: “all interconnected, every part part of another and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed.”
Take it easy, Dude: I know that you will
Is a film about circles where the ending loops into the beginning anything more than a gimmick? Is a story about boredom that’s intentionally boring a case of the tedium is the message or just tedious? Is a sprawling book about the sprawl of existence doing anything artistically interesting?
By its nature Always Coming Home contains a sort of resistance that other books by Le Guin do not, though maybe ‘resistance’ is the wrong word. It’s more like the description she gives of material things from a Kesh perspective: “[They] are very obstinate and stubborn, but also there is a sweet willingness in them; they offer what they meet,” or like when she writes how “the hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.” Just as Le Guin gave the Kesh the gift of time, her boundless, unclosed book is a gift to us: “Take your time, now. Take your time. Here, take it please. I give it to you, it’s yours.” In order for it to succeed, it has to get you to match its pace, to cooperate with it, to reverse your expectations of how such a book should be written, rather than you be dazzled by it, or it slip down so fast you don’t even notice it was made out of language. That is, to get you to read more deliberately.
Or more mindfully? A common object the Kesh carve from wood or bone is the hehóle, meant to calm and settle a person. Always Coming Home is a hehóle, too, a symbol of a symbol, yet another expression of the heyiya-if two-armed spiral. And, like a hehóle, it’s a product of handmind, rooted in a time and a place, a physical object, mortal, made by another mortal, which can be “used as an adjunct to meditation or ‘sitting easily.’” In a book in which the “ease” of the Kesh way of life is contrasted with other unhealthily “stretched” ways, any strain in reading it comes from us as much as it. “It’s easy being here,” says Esiryu, a handmaiden that Stone Telling rescues from the Condor and brings home with her. “The work here is hard,” she admits. “Animals live softly. They don’t make it hard to live. Here people are animals.” (Trust the ever-thoughtful Le Guin to give this observation to Esiryu with her outsider wisdom, rather than make it Stone Telling’s epiphany.) Esiryu has learnt there’s no binary of soft and hard; there are just different types, different ways to get to the same end: different dialectically. “Soft like jellied eels,” Stone Telling asks Esiryu, “or soft like pumas walking?”
The Kesh say that a vision isn’t something you have, it’s something given to you, and that you should then give on. Art, too, they describe throughout the book as a gift, only existing when shared: “The identity of owning and giving is perhaps easier to see when what is involved is a poem, or a drawing, or a piece of music, or a prayer.” Perhaps, then, the vision and gift of Always Coming Home is what Le Guin meant to describe via the words of Stone Telling: for all the book’s length, complexity and mystery, “it may have been the best thing I have done.”
This piece appeared in a slightly different form in Strange Horizons in 2019. Read it here.
Or, as the title goes for a late book of her essays, Dreams Must Explain Themselves.
Urras as in Ur-text.
The Repossessed?
I wonder whether Le Guin hadn’t read William Morris’s pamphlet ‘The Aims of Art’: “He is the slave to machinery; the new machine must be invented, and when invented he must… I will not say use it, but be used by it.”
About which the Kesh tell ghost stories featuring old souls who live in houses under the sea and inject themselves into the foetuses of paddling pregnant women.
Relating the Kesh view of time, their lack of doctrinal Creation or End-Time myths, Le Guin wrote, “It is all middle.”
The one, and essential, aspect of the book I’ve not discussed is the Neo-Native American culture of the Kesh. Once I know more I may.