On Behalf of Athena

All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns - the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river - both of them hurt - and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, "Kill them, kill them!" It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain't a-going to tell all that happened - it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of them - lots of times I dream about them...

When I got down out of the tree I crept along down the river bank a piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and tugged at them till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got away as quick as I could.  I cried a little when I was covering up Buck's face, for he was mighty good to me.*

This spring I spent a lot of time with Schiller's ballad The Cranes of Ibycus (best ever [and possibly only!] German Romantic/Ancient Greek murder mystery in verse).  In the pivotal scene, a rowdy Greek audience crowds into an open theater to watch a performance.  On the stage, singing their song of vengeance, is the chorus of Furies, torch-bearing, gaunt, their heads crowned like Medusa's with writhing serpents.  By the illusion of the theater they seem to stand at a scale larger than human, and the audience half-forgets that they are actors as they channel their divine role.  And under that spell the relentless pursuit of vengeance to which the Furies dedicate their song suddenly has unexpected consequences in reality.   

The play being performed here is, presumably, Aeschylus' The Eumenides, climax of the Oresteia trilogy.  Right now the whole story's worth a closer look.

As the Greeks assemble their fleet to embark for the siege of Troy, the goddess Artemis sends unfavorable winds and prevents them from sailing.  A seer reveals to their war-leader, Agamemnon, that the only way to appease Artemis is for him to sacrifice the life of his eldest daughter, Iphigenia.  At length he agrees, and does so.  This act is to mire the fate of his entire family in a recurring cycle of revenge for many years to come.  But the winds shift, and the Greek fleet sets sail. 

Ten years later, when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, his wife Clytemnestra stabs him to death in his bath in revenge for their daughter's killing.  Years later again, Orestes and Electra, the surviving brother and sister of Iphigenia, agree that by Apollo's order Clytemnestra must also die for murdering their father.  Orestes kills his mother, and her ghost incites the Furies to hunt him down and wreak their vengeance. 

The Furies, the old goddesses of retribution and vengeance, track down Orestes and demand that Athena and Apollo give him over to them.  Instead, Athena yields the judgment to the people of Athens, instituting the first-ever trial by jury.  The Furies and Apollo each make their cases to the jury for prosecution and defense.  The jury votes: tied at six to six, so Athena casts the deciding vote in favor of Orestes.

So Orestes goes free.  The Furies have not won their victory.  But Athena tells them that they have not lost, either.  By putting their drive for vengeance in subordination to the process of law, they gain a permanent place of honor in the city, and the right to dispense blessings to its people.  The Erinyes, the Furies, have become the Eumenides, the Gracious Ones; and the city of Athens becomes the stronger for it. 

 

Anger is natural.  Anger at someone who has hurt you; has hurt your friends; your family.  So it's easy to fall into a cycle of retribution.  Nobody is immune to that risk.  Not in Greece, not in America.  When Huckleberry Finn stayed at the house of the Grangerfords they were hospitable, kind hosts to him -  well-mannered, keeping a lovely home, loyal to family, generous to strangers, raising quirky and likable kids.  None of that meant they wouldn't let their feud with the Shepherdsons drop them right into the same fate as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

And vengeance propagates itself over generations, like an ivy-vine grasping out for one tendril-hold after another - Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, some Grangerford who killed some Shepherdson.  Or maybe it was the other way about, who knows by now?  Young Buck and Joe.  A big stem of ivy choking off a maple can easily get as thick as your arm.  Looking at the process analytically, you'd have to say it's got what it needs to keep itself going for a good long time.  That's what the Oresteia is all about - using the new idea of impartial law to break the cycle and give a new generation a chance to live fresh lives without the weight of the past dragging them down.

Of course, this all depends on the rule of law staying... lawful.  Due process.  Equal protection under the law.  Right to a fair trial.  As Athena says, the agreement's a two-way street, and those who enforce the law have particular obligations that had better be met.  Otherwise you're liable to end up back with the Furies.  And in the end that doesn't work out well for anyone.

Now for the first time, people of Attica,

Judge a murder-case, and hear my words.

For ever from this time for Aegeus' children

This court will sit for justice to be heard,

On Ares' hill, this Areopagus...

So in this place will reverence for the law

And kindred fear of doing injustices

Restrain the people of Athens, day and night

Provided they themselves do not pollute

With evil influence their justice code.

Would you quench your thirst in Justice's healing stream?

Then do not foul it - keep it flowing clean.**

     

Athena put a lot of work into this project.  Let’s not mess it up.

*Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  Chapter 18

**The Eumenides, by Aeschylus.  Translation by Timothy Chappell

Παλλας Άθηνα

παρθένος γλαυκῶπις

Pallas Athena, 

Gray-eyed maiden.

Άτρυτώνη

Πρόμαχος

Coda

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.]