BOOK REPORT: 2 BOOKS AND A CUP OF COFFEE

IN THE OPENING OF HER REMARKABLE BOOK, Always Coming Home, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) suggests that writing about the future is like writing about the past: "The fact that it hasn't yet been written, the mere absence of a text to translate, doesn't make all that much difference. What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now." The formal narrative parts of the novel are the “Stone Telling” chapters, which are a woman's first-person account as she recalls her life in the Valley, set in a California hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in the future. We learn there have been environmental disasters, where great sections of the east coast have subsided into the sea. As well, there are areas of radioactivity and lands contaminated with chemicals that continue to cause birth defects in animals and humans. The world Le Guin envisions has altered drastically, with decimated populations, declining birthrates and civil strife. In the Valley, however, there is stability and social order. The Kesh have established a society that functions within ecological limits. It is a place of small towns and farms, strong communal and familial connections, and a deep spirituality that has its source in traditional First Nations’ practices and beliefs.

Stone Telling tells us how she grew up in the House of “Blue Clay”, in “High Porch”, part of the lodge kinship system, that is an important element weaving the Kesh into a tight-knit society. We see her restless spirit grow with the need to explore beyond Sinshan, the town where she was born, and to leave the  Valley, and travel with her father, who is of the distant “Dayao” people and a member of its “Condor” warrior caste. Le Guin provides details of the rituals and belief systems of the agrarian Kesh and she contrasts them with the militarist, expansionist society of the Dayao. The former culture is sustainable, living within the cycles of the natural world, with a strong animist ethos that underpins and informs every aspect of their daily lives. In contrast, the Dayao are restless and ever-questing, and come from a pastoral heritage. They are a nomadic, herding people who have recently established cities and hierarchical forms of government, and they believe in expanding their domains through war and conquest. They also believe in one all-powerful God, "The Great Condor" who rules over the world, and has them as His chosen people. How the Dayao and Kesh fare in this future world of Le Guin’s is fascinating, complex and informative.

Ursula K. Le Guin

But Stone Telling’s tale is only part of Le Guin’s “future history” novel. The work also contains poetry, biographies, “histories”, maps, descriptions of Kesh dances, their medical practices, their arts, science, literature, music, as well as their kinship and lodge systems. And as you read these sections (which are two-thirds of the novel), they seem like actual portraits of Kesh society--not fiction, but more like ethnography, so engaging and meticulous (perhaps even obsessive) is Le Guin’s writing.

It should be noted that the Kesh have (some) technology. For example, they have a train connecting the towns within the Valley; they have medicine, an educations system and town planning; they have guns, too. But their technology is tempered by their abiding spiritual connection to the land and the creatures living there.

In contrast, the Dayao amass armies and build weapons, including planes that can be used to bomb their enemies. They mean to conquer their enemies and expand their territory at any cost. They stretch the available resources of their society to the point of exhausting their natural and social capital, and by the book’s end teeter on extinction as they involve themselves in senseless and unwinnable wars.

We have much to learn from the Kesh (and the Dayao), if only we will listen.

 
Le Guin has some Kesh poems that I’d like to include here:

The Inland Sea

Spoken as a teaching in the Serpentine heyimas*

 of Sinshan by Mica

All there under the water are cities, the old cities.

All the bottom of the sea there is roads and houses,

     streets and houses

Under the mud in the dark of the sea there

     books are, bones are.

All those old souls are under the sea there,

     under the water, in the mud,

     in the old cities in the dark.

There are too many souls there.

Look out if you go by the edge of the sea,

     if you go on a boat on the Inland Sea

     over the old cities.

You can see the souls of the dead like cold fire in the water.

They will take any body, the luminifera, the jellyfish, the

     sandfleas, those old souls.

Any body they can get.

They swim through their widows, they drift down their roads,

     in the mud in the dark of the sea.

They rise through the water to sunlight, hungry for birth.

Look out for the sea-foam, young woman,

     look out for the sandfleas!

You might find an old soul in you womb,

     an old soul, a new person.

There aren’t enough people for all the old souls,

     hopping like sandfleas.

Their lives were the sea-waves, their souls are the sea-foam

     foam-lines on bown sand,

     there and not there.

*a building used for ceremonial purposes

From a selection called “Bone Poems”

The bones of your heart,

there’s mystery.

Clothes wearing the body,

there’s a good clown.

A Grass Song

A Red Adobe song for the Grass Dance in Wakwaha

(The meter is “fives”)

Very quietly

this is happening,

this is becoming,

the hills are changing

under the rainclouds,

inside the grey fogs,

the sun going south

and the wind colder,

blowing quietly

from the west and south.

Manyness of rain

falling quietly:

manyness of grass

rising into air.

The hills become green.

This is happening

 very quietly.

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge

Please bring strange things.

Please come bringing new things.

Let very old thins come into your hands.

Let what you do not know come into your eyes.

Let desert sand harden your feet.

Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.

Let the paths of you fingertips be your maps

and the way you go be the lines on your palms.

Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing

and you outbreath be the shining of ice.

May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.

May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.

May the spring of a foreign river be you navel.

May you soul be at home where there are no houses.

Walk carefully, well loved one,

walk mindfully, well loved one,

walk fearlessly well loved one.

Return with us, return to us,

be always coming home.

.................

“Come on you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?"

(Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, USMC, Belleau Wood, 6 June 1918, to his men before the battle.)

Sorry, I couldn’t resist putting that quote in. Well, that just about says it all, don’t it?

Or not. In War, a book that I happened to be reading at the same time as Always Coming Home,  author Gwynne Dyer provides another view of the human animal as seen through the lens of what is arguably one of the world’s oldest profession. He looks at the origins of war, of violence, and how our natural inclination toward peace can be manipulated until we are able to perform the most horrendous acts of violence and mayhem, and even to accept them as right and necessary.

I found most interesting his speculation on war/violence as something that occurs as humans developed cities and societies. When hunter-gatherer groups gradually took on more settled, agrarian practices, there arose conflicts between farmers and herders, and a land-use problem (we can’t have those goats of yours nibbling away on our wheat!) Herders gradually migrated to the periphery of farming settlements, and developed pastoral lifestyles. As settled farming communities developed surpluses, they became tempting targets for herder cultures (who, as nomads, had less stuff). So, a clash of cultures began, walls went up, and defensive and eventually offensive strategies developed in villages and towns following the end of the last ice age. I find it fascinating to think that there may have been a time when humans solved problems and settled disputes without resorting to organized violence and mayhem. There is certainly evidence to suggest that armies, fixed battles, and so on were things that developed over millennia, and were not intrinsically part of the human way of doing things; war and killing are not necessarily part of our makeup. They were skills we had to learn and work at, and hone over time.
Dyer quotes primatologist Frans de Waal in his study of chimpanzees and baboons: “The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?” (Frans de Waal, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University).

Gwynne Dyer

Dyer looks at how societies developed their militaries, from small bands of shouting farmers waving pick axes to armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands. He looks at how military strategy developed over the centuries, and how technology has come to play an important role in how wars are fought, and how, using modern psychological methods, raw recruits are transformed into efficient killers in a matter of weeks. He details the brutality of ancient wars and comments how they pale in comparison to the horrors of modern warfare. He notes the processes and efficiencies wrought by the Industrial Revolution produced mechanized armies that were to use trains, mass-produced weapons and the mobilization of whole populations toward their country's war efforts. He details this horrific ‘progress’ in his overview of the last century's two great world wars. And he provides a sobering reminder of what could happen if there were a third. As Einstein darkly warned: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Trench warfare WWI

Dyer ends his book by reminding us that warfare and violence are behaviors partly hard-wired in our evolving, primate-based brains, but mostly they are learned, social responses to outside variables such as the acquisition of a mate or the need for resources. And yes, Dyer says, we are indeed capable of adopting other ways of resolving our conflicts. Given the time ahead, where there will be the pressures of resource depletion, forced migrations, climate change, and increasing political,  economic and social instability in the world, I hope Dyer is right. If baboons can do it, why can't we?

Alberta's Tar Sands

I thought I would add a short note on a webzine article I was just reading: Chris Hedges’ column at Truthdig.org, appropriately called, “The Last Battle”. Chris details his visit to the BEAVER LAKE CREE NATION, Treaty No. 6 Area, Alberta, Canada. It is a First Nations’ settlement near Alberta’s tar sands development, and whose people face dire days ahead. Hedges’ outlines the shameful treatment native peoples of Canada received in the past, and the iniquities and inequalities they suffer with today. They are Canada’s colonized peoples, who are struggling to retain their autonomy in opposition to the Canadian polity. Hedges details the effects the tar sands has on the environment across vast swaths of forest and wetlands, as well its effects on the social, psychological and physical health of the people living there. Many First Nations’ peoples stand in opposition to the vast oil fields and pipelines that create such environmental destruction both locally and globally. Hedges grimly notes: “Former NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands oil is fully exploited, it will be ‘game over for the planet.’” Indeed, the battle against climate change could very well be the “war to end all wars.”

So, two book reviews, about two books with two takes on our future. There is still room for optimism. And a bit of a chat over a cup of coffee, I should think.

Cheers.