"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. "
For so many years, the writer Ursula Leguin always spoke to the core for me. I've visited numerous times every world she has shown us, and one thing she has always shown are the infinite possibilities of the imagination and human culture, brilliantly reasoned out through the eyes of the anthropologist's daughter that she also was.
I have travelled with her through worlds of vast introverted solitude, where a young girl must travel alone to "make her soul" in "The Birthday of the World" collection. I've visited a world in the midst of an Ice Age, and come to love a pragmatic hero who is also a hermaphrodite, neither male nor female on a world without gender, in "The Left Hand of Darkness". I've visited Earthsea many times, and watched the coming of age of the mage Ged, who can talk with dragons, and must learn not only about power, but far more importantly, he must learn about the uses of power, about maintaining the Equilibrium, becoming attuned to the balance of the world. And in "Four Ways to Forgivenesss" I've seen two worlds come apart and re-form as the long era of slavery is ended, and former slaves and owners must find their personal salvation in the midst of a vast human revolution.
In "May's Lion" I saw the visit of a lion, coming to the home of an old rural woman in order to die, from the perspective of not only an old American woman, but from an old Native woman as well, perhaps a woman who lived long before in the very place old May now lived. But May only sensed the honor a lion had given her, where as the woman who came before her knew, knew it well.
Thank you, Ursula, thank you for making it possible for me and so many others to visit those worlds, to escape my own when I needed to, to see with your words the infinite possibilities of human experience. Her "view from the Ecumen" has helped me time and again to gain a view of life here on Earth, intimate and unique, and yet always part of a vast imaginative whole.
I wanted to share her 2014 National Book Awards speech, because the call she made to visionary writers (and artists and other creatives) is important. She says what I have so many times thought, especially recently - how "money sick" everything has become. We have lost the Equilibrium of consciousness of the whole, of a "webbed vision". And yet, that, whether we speak of cosmic entanglement and physics, or social systems, or ecology, or just about anything ........... is what is revealed to us as the underlying paradigm, the solution for a civilization humanity must build in the future, if we are to continue at all.
"But the name of the beautiful reward", Leguin says, "is not profit. Its name is freedom." The freedom to create uncensored, internally or externally, by the demand that what is created somehow be justified, it's "value" determined, by how much money "it" can make.Which is no "real" evaluation of success at all, any more than the "success" of corporate oligarchs has, clearly, anything to do with preserving our planet's future or our nations welfare and democracy. Indeed, capitalism has become an oppressive force indeed, a profoundly destructive, even genocidal, force in it's soulless quest for profit. We need to put money "values" outside the door when we enter the house of creative integrity - otherwise it's like a loud cacophony of endless commercials, nattering away, obstructing any capacity to hear, see, know, be "en-souled".
My house, of course, is full of art, 45 years of it, and basically supporting myself as an AIRBNB host, I'm always amazed at how very rare it is that those who come here comment or even acknowledge the presence of the collection that is everywhere. A painting is a window into the worlds of the artist.......... how is it so few people pause to even glance through that window? I've often said to myself that I could hang mops on the walls to replace the artwork, and most of the people who live here wouldn't notice.
Would the same works be treated differently if they were in a gallery, with a large pricetag on them? Yes, they are, because the magic "symbol of worth", namely a $ sign, is attached to them. And then there is Trump and company, ending the NEA and the NEH without so much as a cringe of embarrassment. I reflect that what I am witnessing in the face of that great loss is the utter triumph of mediocrity.
But I often find I'm disappointed for another reason. Those who do notice the work so rarely seem to notice the "window". Most ask about shows, what kind of prices I get....... how, in other words, did I or do I make money from my work. I've never said this out loud, but how can I make people from such a capitalist paradigm as our see that Artwork is a Conversation. Paintings are doors into some other dimension, they are windows into story. In the babble and preoccupation with money, so many voices are never heard.
What wealth, if money was left outside the door like we leave our shoes outside the door so as not to soil the space........what wealth might be found in the creative language being spoken on the walls or streets of many places, what dialogues might be shared about the impulses from which they sprang? And what riches might be unearthed in exactly such conversations among "realists of a larger reality" as sustenance, as "pollination", for those who are yet to come, for those who face a very uncertain future?
Bill Moyers Blog praised Leguin in a 2014 post, noting that:
" In accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2014 National Book Awards, eminent writer Ursula Le Guin made a knock-out speech about the power of capitalism, literature and imagination that, as she put it afterwards, “went sort-of viral on YouTube.”
On the same blog post is a video of Leguin giving her famous speech, as well as an 2000 interview Moyers did with Leguin about her 1971 book, The Lathe of Heaven, that became the most requested film ever in the PBS archives. The plot revolves around the main character’s dreams altering reality.
Transcript of speech by Ursula K. Leguin:
I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)
Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)
Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds.
But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom."
