Coda
My wife called me at work on Tuesday to ask if I had heard the news.
She had been driving and had to pull over to the side of the road
when the report came on the radio. Ursula Le Guin had passed away.
My wife said, “It feels like the bottom has fallen out of the
world.”
For almost forty years Le Guin's writings have been touching my life.
I think the first one to do so was A Wizard of Earthsea
when I was in junior high school.
I remember on winter nights in Alaska
reading the tales of the wizard Ged who spoke with dragons, and who
knew the true name of every
reach of water in the
Archipelago, and every herb,
and with a word could call
the magewind into the sail of his little boat Lookfar.
It appealed
to me that his name was close to my own initials, and on one occasion
when I reached a high score on a quarter-eating arcade game I put
them in, GEC – and then tapped the button once more to make it GED.
A fitting tribute to Earthsea? Nope! But it does
show that
the story came to speak to me there where I was at age
eleven; and every time I have
revisited it since it has turned
a fresh face.
The nature and
power of names... the unwinnable battle against the darkness
manifesting out of
one's self... Those lessons
have only grown deeper. For
a long time I retained a mental image of Ged as a sandy-haired
white man, and it was many
years and many returns to the story before I realized that I (and, to
be fair, the cover illustrator) had been completely wrong – for the
story had always plainly described his appearance,
as coppery-skinned as a Navajo. A rueful lesson in the insidious
nature of presuppositions! The story one reads is not always
the story one thinks one is reading.
Once, while reading from Always Coming Home
at night on a city bus in Sacramento, I looked up to realize that
nothing around me – not the traffic on the road, not the city
lights, not the preoccupations of the people – would have
been carried
forward into the living world
of the Kesh so many millennia
from now. And that this city would be entirely lost, submerged in a
vast inland sea, remembered
only as troubling tales for children.
The bus drove onward into the darkness.
I read Le Guin's stories to my own children at bedtime when they were
young, and when they were no longer so young – Catwings, and
later the Earthsea books, and pieces from The Wind's Twelve
Quarters. Books that are good to read yourself are not always
the ones that are good to read aloud to others. But hers were.
On the way home from work on Tuesday I sat in a light rail car full
of commuters. Outside rain was dripping from heavy gray clouds, and
the sky was beginning to darken toward night. Around me under the
ceiling lights people tapped at their phones and paged through books;
a couple chatted and flirted. A teenager leaned his head sideways
against the window, eyes closed.
The car took the curve of the track and began to lift into the
crossing of the Willamette River. In the windows I could see the
illuminated space reflected, the passengers mirrored and appearing
half-real against the dimness outside as if they inhabited one of the
alternative iterations of Portland in The Lathe of Heaven, a
fragile contingency of history that might fall away into old chaos
with any waking of a dreamer. Nonetheless the gray river moved
below, regardless of any transient illusion of mine. A cormorant
beat across the surface of the water, laboring to take to the air;
and higher above a flight of gulls moved, long-winged, gray against
gray, trailing downriver to their night's roost.
I have lived in Portland for over twenty years. Ursula Le Guin and I
hardly crossed paths – I saw her only a couple of times at public
events, and once we did correspond by post, briefly but memorably.
But I always was aware of her presence in the city, and I have
appreciated having her here. And from time to time I would see her
speaking out on issues of the day as a private citizen, in the
Oregonian's letters to the editor; tart, witty missives that struck
to the heart. The touch of imagination and humanity that she brought
to our civic life has made Portland that much finer a place.
We have now lost many of the writers who created the speculative
fiction I grew up reading. I think of Tolkien, charting out his
great secondary world of Middle-Earth, its peoples, its tongues, and
its history, as around him Europe rose up from the slaughter of one
world war and then fell agonizingly into the next. I think of
Bradbury, shouting out the awe and terror of a twelve-year-old boy's
first encounters with the multifarious wonders of life. I think of
Wolfe, whom we have not yet lost, spinning tales that meditate upon
memory and divinity, with mysteries coiled up inside them, and
further mysteries veiled within.
But Le Guin had no peer for pure
narrative grace in the expression of wisdom and love.
She played with ideas, as so many science fiction writers do. She
played with manifestations of magic in this world and its shadows, as
so many fantasy writers do. But more than that, she was the one who
told it all. She told the stories of the not-heroes – the maimed
child, the persecuted scientist, the old woman forgotten, the grocery
store clerk. She illuminated their lives with a compassion and a
gentle humor. She did not fail to attend to the character and
sentience of beasts and birds. She saw that the world we find
ourselves in is not the only possibility.
From a barren desert a
band of exiles could build a new world without government or
property. Gender could become fluid in a world of frost. A team of
women could assemble a secret expedition and be the first to reach
the South Pole. Ants could write poetry upon acacia seeds. Her
stories demonstrate that a space exists for exercise of a radical
freedom; yet, as every citizen of Omelas learned in time, there is no
forgetting that such freedom exacts a price. Le Guin made new worlds
from the free play of imagination; and without flinching away she
grounded those creations in the pain and mortality fundamental to
incarnate existence.
This morning I looked at my bookshelf and saw my copies of Le Guin's
books, and I realized that they were now emissaries from a mind that
was no longer in the world, and for a moment I imagined their spines
fading and going gray with the loss. But
then, that is the special magic of books, that they can bring you the
voice of those who are far away, or gone out of this world. They are
not subject to the same mortality that governs us.
So, that
gray-fancy was a silly one. Instead, think of her books now
deepening in hue. Red sunset spreading across the oceans of Urras; a
brown owl gliding through the deep blue sky above the Valley of the
Na. After all, with their author gone they have come into their own.
They alone have the task of bringing her imagination and her heart
into connection with ours. And of course they've been doing it for a
long time already - there's no doubt that they are up to the job.
Her language was described as luminous, and I think the nature of the
light that fell from it was a sublimely clear sense of what was
right. But as Owen Griffiths said in the slim volume Very Far
Away From Anywhere Else, “She didn't mean morally right. She
meant right the way the music or the thought comes right, comes
clear, is true. Maybe that's the same thing as moral rightness. I
don't know.”
I am glad to have had the opportunity to know Ursula Le Guin through
her books, and in a small way to share this city with her. I wish
that I had known her more. But what I know of her from her writings
is what I have no doubt that her legacy will remain – the bravest
and most generous of friends.
[Note: This remembrance was also published on January 26 by our Portland weekly paper, Willamette Week.]
