https://youtu.be/nGeXdv-uPaw
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Dead Languages
A poem from the collection "Late in the Day" (2014), reflections from the long study
of language by a master writer.
Dreadful, this death, dragging
of language by a master writer.
Dreadful, this death, dragging
So many lives and lively minds along
After it into unmeaning.
Endless, imbecile silence.
The more ways there are to say Mother
The wiser the world is.
Never are there enough
Words for Well done! Or Welcome!
A line of verse revives lost Aprils.
In the name for Home lie whole nations.
The unused word may be the useful one.
Old nouns are in no hurry.
Old verbs are very patient.
The water of life is learning.
May elders ever tell the mythic origins
In the almost lost old language
To children cheated of knowledge
Of their own holy inheritance.
May myopic scholars scowl
Forever at fragments of inscription
So that the young may yawn
Log over grim grammars, learning
To speak the tongues unspoken
And hear a human music otherwise unheard.
https://soundcloud.com/92y/urs
Saturday, February 10, 2018
"Numina", and the Intelligences of the Living Earth
NUMINA: Spirit
of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage
By Lauren Raine MFA
"To
the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important
than its poetic dimension. In
traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own
identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."
R.F. Foster 1
The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by
intelligences they called Numina,
the "genius loci" of a particular place. I personally
believe many mythologies may be rooted in the actual experience of “spirit of
place", the numinous, mysterious, felt presence within a sacred landscape.
To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic
conversation”, a conversation within which human beings may participate in
various ways. Myth is, and always has
been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is
vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. “Mything place” provides a language
wherein the “conversation” can be symbolically spoken and interpreted, as well
as personified. Our experience, and
our relationship with Place changes when Place becomes "you" or
"Thou" instead of "it".
In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a
Goddess. In southwestern U.S., the
“mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona where
I live, Baboquivari, sacred mountain
to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there. This has been a universal human quest, whether
we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous
mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome: the landscape was once populated with intelligences
that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies.
 |
| "The Desert Spring", mask from 2013 performance with Ann Waters |
The Romans called these forces “Numina”. Every valley,
orchard, healing spring or womb-like cave had its unique quality and force -
its Numen. Cooperation and respect for the Numina, the
animating intelligences of place, was essential for well-being. And some places were regarded as imbued with special
power, they were special places of pilgrimage.
With the evolution of patriarchal monotheism and religions
that increasingly removed divinity from Nature and from the body, and, in the
past century, the rapid rise of industrialization, we have increasingly looked
at the world from a "users"
point of view instead of a participatory one.
This overview tends to view the natural world as an object to be used or
exploited, forgetting indeed that virtually all pre-industrial human cultures
have rich traditions that teach that the
world is alive and responsive. From Katchinas
to the Orisha, naiads to dryads, the Australian Dream Time to Alchemy's Anima
Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit
of place”, the Genius Loci.
In those reverent traditions, sacred places may be locations where
the potential for revelation, healing, or transpersonal experience is
especially potent, and many contemporary places of pilgrimage carry on this
mythos. It’s well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred
sites. An example would be the numerous
sacred wells that are dedicated to a Black Madonna in Europe, or a Saint in
England, in much the same way the Oracle of Delphi was dedicated to Gaia, the
primal Earth Mother of Greek mythology, and later to the God Apollo.
 |
| "Gaia", 2013 performance with Ann Waters |
There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places on our
planet that change consciousness, and can catalyze insight, healing, or visionary
experience, perhaps even, as the Oracle of Delphi believed, prophecy. Before they became contained and mythologized
by religions or designated by prehistoric monuments, these sites were
intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.
They touch all who visit, and ultimately, no
particular belief system is needed for them to have a transformative effect,
although human architecture and the accumulation of human psychic energy and
visitation may amplify this effect.
Roman philosopher Plinius Caecilius commented that:
"If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees
which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with
their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the
seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of
open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numina."3
Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one fall morning I
stumbled down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of
people about to visit one of Vermont's mysterious stone cairns on Putney
Mountain. Among them was Sig Lonegren 4,
a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in
Glastonbury, England. Through his
generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of
huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly
framing the Summer Solstice.
No one knows who built these structures, which occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River, but approaching the site I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as if I had antennas, quivering as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the top of the somewhat submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered", letting me know that this was the “crossing of leys”; a potent place geomantically.
No one knows who built these structures, which occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River, but approaching the site I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as if I had antennas, quivering as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the top of the somewhat submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered", letting me know that this was the “crossing of leys”; a potent place geomantically.
Months later friends gathered in the dark to sit in that
chamber and watch the Solstice sun rise through its entrance way. We all felt the power of the deep, vibrant
energy there, and awe as the sun rose illuminating the chamber. None of us knew what to do, so we held hands
and chanted. We were all as “high as a
kite” when we left.
Earth mysteries researcher John Steele 5 wrote in the 1989 book EARTHMIND (in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubin) that
we suffer from "geomantic amnesia". We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”,
to engage in what he called "geomantic
reciprocity"; instinctively, mythically, and practically, to our great
loss. We disregard for short term
economic gain places of power, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on
places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious. Remembering, re-inventing, and re-claiming what inspired early peoples may be important not only to contemporary pilgrims, but to creating future human
societies that can be sustainable.
The act of making a pilgrimage to a sacred place is among the
oldest of human endeavors. The Eleusinian Mysteries combined spirit of
place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia. One of the most famous contemporary
pilgrimages is the "Camino" throughout Spain, which concludes at the
Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.
Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost", the fertile soil created from rotting organic
matter - the "dark
matter" to which everything living
returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new
life, new form. As researcher and
mythologist Jay Weidner has pointed out, pilgrims
finally arriving in Compostella after their long journey are being 'composted'
in a sense. Emerging from the dark
cathedral, and the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with
their spirits reborn.
In 2011 I visited the ancient sacred springs of Glastonbury,
the Chalice Well and the White Spring as well as participating in the international
Goddess Conference there. Making this
intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, personal sense of the
"Spirit of Place", what some call the "Lady of
Avalon". Pilgrimage opens one to blessing
and vision, and can take us out of the ruts of our daily lives into
transpersonal communion.
Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are
intrinsically geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of
human interaction with the innate intelligence of place, the Numina. “Mythic mind” further facilitates the
communion. Sig Lonegren, who is a dowser, has spent many
years exploring sacred places, and has commented that possibly, as human
culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we
began to lose mediumistic consciousness, a daily Gnosis with the "subtle
realms" that was further facilitated by symbolism, mythology, and ritual.
With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with
the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and
individual Gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered
spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God. The “conversation” stopped, and the language
to continue became obscure or lost.
Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning
to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and
re-discovering the mythic pathways to the Numina.
References:
1 Foster, R.F., The
Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen
Lane/Penguin Press 2001)
3 C. Plinius Caecilius
Secundus minor, Epistula 41.3, from Nova Roma, www.novaroma.org/nr/Numen
Monday, February 5, 2018
The Buddha's Eyes
I found this essay by my friend, Felicia Miller, who became a Buddhist, in my files the other day, something she wrote and shared with me toward the end of her life (she passed in 2009 ). And then I found a poem she gave me long before that time, when we were both young students during halcyon years at Berkeley. I just felt like sharing and pairing the two here as I remember my friend as well.
I think Felicia would see the connection. There are gaps in a life, but again, the same song, no gaps, just an open window.
THE BUDDHA'S EYES
This longing to
see the gaze of the Buddha, what is it? What would it be
to look into this ancient, ancient man’s eyes?
Like entering the tractor beam of a
powerful darshan? Perhaps, but not only, also something else. “The taste of
freedom is everywhere in my teachings,” the Buddha said. Maybe like looking through
a window to see a limitless sky.
My friend Claude
told me about a ritual that Korean priests perform to bind the
community to the temple and to each other. They go to the
temple hall and attach strings from the lanterns that hang near the ceiling and run these strings from each one around the temple, going from each to
each. All the strings converge at the eyes of the Buddha above the alter.
Like the tiny buddhas in a certain Tibetan practice that we picture streaming through
the practitioners’ eyes, back and forth moving along rays of light that connect us all. After the Korean temple ritual is completed, priests cut
the strings into threads of protection for others to wear. People tie them around their
necks or wrists and wear them until they disintegrate. Protected by the
community, the sangha, protected by the dharma, protected by the Buddha.
So what would I be looking for, if I could look into the Buddha’s eyes?
Surfing Amazon, I came across a book titled “To See the
Buddha.” An image of curious eyes accompany the caption, “Look inside this
book.” I look, and find: “the Buddha is an absent presence.”
Present and absent, yes. The Buddha is an act of the imagination,
really, an absence we fill with our desire to be ruled no more by desire.
In Sri Lanka
A gap. Bardos at
every level of being - at the end of life, and at the ends and beginnings of every
breath, if we can but look for them.
The Buddha is a presence that denotes absence. We stand and stare, but to see the gaze of the Buddha, one would have to look with the eyes of the Buddha. A shift somehow. A trick with incense and mirrors. What does one see through the Buddha’s eyes?
The Buddha is a presence that denotes absence. We stand and stare, but to see the gaze of the Buddha, one would have to look with the eyes of the Buddha. A shift somehow. A trick with incense and mirrors. What does one see through the Buddha’s eyes?
What is seeing when no one is looking? Nagarjuna
says “the horizon of enlightenment is the same as the horizon of samsara.” The
same, only different, but not.
Felicia
Miller (2009)
Someone was the Sun
calling
from across
the
little island fields
we turned, and took the last
glimpse of the closing lid
"Let's go, shall we?"
I could not answer
but only followed after
just someone's glance
along the rock path.
Felicia
Miller (1972)
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Carol Christ on Patriarchy, Ownership of Women's Bodies, and War
 |
| "Gaia" 1987, Oil on Canvas |
"Control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system. This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers. " ~Carol Christ
I never cease to be amazed that the contemporary versions of Biblical Patriarchs continue to fight for control the bodies and lives of the female population, even as they attempt to remove virtually all infrastructure to support or assist poor and single mothers who don't happen to be "owned" by benign, affluent men. Here's a brilliant article I felt like reprinting by feminist scholar and philosopher Carol Christ that takes a long look at the issue, so deeply embedded in our world, and so very crucial to change.
Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection
of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War
Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.*
In last week’s blog, I explained patriarchy as a system in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality with the intent of passing property to male heirs.
How did a system that identifies a man’s essence with his property and the ability to pass it on to sons come about? I suggest that the answer to this question is war and the confiscation of “property” by warriors in war. Patriarchy is rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.
My argument is that the origin of “private” property, defined as property owned by a single (male) individual, and as that which defines the “essence” of that individual, is the “spoils” of war, which are divided up by victorious warriors. The “spoils” of war are the tangible treasures “looted” or taken by the victors from the conquered, such as jewelry and sacred objects. The “spoils” of war include land “taken” as the result of warfare, along with the right to exploit resources, directly or through taxes and levies. The “spoils” of war also includes the right to “take” the women of the defeated enemy and to confirm ownership of them (and humiliate their fathers or husbands) by raping them. The “spoils” of war also include the right to “take” these raped women and their young children home to serve as slaves and concubines.
Though many people were surprised when the rape victims of the recent war in Bosnia began to speak out about the use of rape as a tool of war by Serbian soldiers, in fact, rape has always been an “ordinary” part of war. In the “great” epic known as The Iliad which is said to be the foundation of western culture, Achilles and Agamemnon are fighting over which of them has the right to rape a “captured” woman named Briseis. The term “spear captive” is used to mask the reality that Briseis and other women like her were “rape victims” and that the “heroes” being celebrated were their “rapists” and “jailers.” I believe that the institution of rape and the (twisted) notion that men have a right to rape (certain kinds or types of) women originated with war.
The institution of slavery also originated in war. Both the Bible and the Greek epics testify to the ancient custom of enslaving the women and children of the enemy. Slave women in every culture, like the slave women on plantations in the Americas, are at the mercy of their owners and his sons, who can rape them if they felt like it. The “custom” of taking slaves from the enemy and the “custom” of also taking enemy women sexually, is deeply intertwined with the history of war. The Africans who sold other Africans into slavery in the Americas were selling Africans they had taken as the spoils of war.
If we entertain the hypothesis that earlier matriarchal clan systems existed, then we can see that the notion of individual powerful men’s peri-ousia being defined as the treasures, land, and people they “stole” and then claimed to “own” would have involved a massive cultural shift. The shift to defining men by the property they owned required that men would also ”own” and absolutely control their wives and daughters, who had previously been free. Such a cultural shift could only have been instituted and maintained through violence.
Patriarchy is a system of male domination, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence. Warriors who have learned the methods of violent domination of other human beings—not only other soldiers, but also the women and children of the people they conquer—bring the methods of violence home. Violence and the threat of violence can then be used to control “one’s” wife or wives, in order to ensure that “one’s” children really are “one’s” own. Violence and the threat of violence can be used to ensure that “one’s” daughters are virgins who can be “given” to other men to perpetuate the system of patriarchal inheritance. Violence and the threat of violence can be used to hold enslaved people “in line.” In addition, violence and the threat of violence can be used to subdue those within one’s own culture who are unwilling to go along with the new system. Women who refuse to let men control their sexuality can be killed with impunity by their male relatives or stoned by communities as a whole.
How does such a violent system legitimate itself? By religious symbols. In Greece, warriors were “in the image” of the “warrior God” Zeus whose rape of Goddesses and nymphs was celebrated. In Israel, the power of warriors is mirrored in a male God who is called “Lord” and “King” and who achieves his will through violence and destruction. Sadly, this is not an exclusively western problem. In all of the so-called “highly developed” cultures defined by patriarchy and war, symbols of divine warriors justify the violence of men. Laws said to have a divine source enshrine men’s control the sexuality of their wives, permit some men to rape some women, and allow some people to own other people as slaves.
Patriarchy is not simply the domination of women by men. Patriarchy is an integral system in which men’s control of women’s sexuality, private property, violence, war, and the institutions of conquest, rape, slavery arise and thrive together. The different elements are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate one as the cause of the others. Patriarchy is an integral system of interlocking oppressions, enforced through violence. The whole of the patriarchal system is legitimated by patriarchal religions. This is why changing religious symbols is necessary if we hope to create alternatives to patriarchal systems.
The model of patriarchy I have proposed argues that control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system. This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers. The model of patriarchy as an intergral system can help us to see that in order to end male domination we must also end war–and violence, rape, conquest, and slavery which are sanctioned as part of war. We must also end the unequal distribution of wealth inherent in the notion of ”private” property, much of it the “spoils” of war, which led to the concept of patriarchal inheritance, which in turn required the control of female sexuality. As feminists in religion we must identify and challenge the complex interlocking set of religious symbols which have sanctified the integral system of patriarchy–these include but are not limited to the image of God as male. Ending patriarchy is no small task!
*I am offering a functional definition of patriarchy that does not address the separate question of why it originated. I will be publishing an expanded version of this dicussion in the future.
This Article is from Feminism and Religion, February, 2013
Carol P. Christ will be leading life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Join her and learn more about prepatriarchal woman-honoring Goddess cultures. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.
(Part 2), February 25, 2013
Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.*
In last week’s blog, I explained patriarchy as a system in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality with the intent of passing property to male heirs.
How did a system that identifies a man’s essence with his property and the ability to pass it on to sons come about? I suggest that the answer to this question is war and the confiscation of “property” by warriors in war. Patriarchy is rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.
My argument is that the origin of “private” property, defined as property owned by a single (male) individual, and as that which defines the “essence” of that individual, is the “spoils” of war, which are divided up by victorious warriors. The “spoils” of war are the tangible treasures “looted” or taken by the victors from the conquered, such as jewelry and sacred objects. The “spoils” of war include land “taken” as the result of warfare, along with the right to exploit resources, directly or through taxes and levies. The “spoils” of war also includes the right to “take” the women of the defeated enemy and to confirm ownership of them (and humiliate their fathers or husbands) by raping them. The “spoils” of war also include the right to “take” these raped women and their young children home to serve as slaves and concubines.
The institution of slavery also originated in war. Both the Bible and the Greek epics testify to the ancient custom of enslaving the women and children of the enemy. Slave women in every culture, like the slave women on plantations in the Americas, are at the mercy of their owners and his sons, who can rape them if they felt like it. The “custom” of taking slaves from the enemy and the “custom” of also taking enemy women sexually, is deeply intertwined with the history of war. The Africans who sold other Africans into slavery in the Americas were selling Africans they had taken as the spoils of war.
If we entertain the hypothesis that earlier matriarchal clan systems existed, then we can see that the notion of individual powerful men’s peri-ousia being defined as the treasures, land, and people they “stole” and then claimed to “own” would have involved a massive cultural shift. The shift to defining men by the property they owned required that men would also ”own” and absolutely control their wives and daughters, who had previously been free. Such a cultural shift could only have been instituted and maintained through violence.Patriarchy is a system of male domination, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence. Warriors who have learned the methods of violent domination of other human beings—not only other soldiers, but also the women and children of the people they conquer—bring the methods of violence home. Violence and the threat of violence can then be used to control “one’s” wife or wives, in order to ensure that “one’s” children really are “one’s” own. Violence and the threat of violence can be used to ensure that “one’s” daughters are virgins who can be “given” to other men to perpetuate the system of patriarchal inheritance. Violence and the threat of violence can be used to hold enslaved people “in line.” In addition, violence and the threat of violence can be used to subdue those within one’s own culture who are unwilling to go along with the new system. Women who refuse to let men control their sexuality can be killed with impunity by their male relatives or stoned by communities as a whole.
How does such a violent system legitimate itself? By religious symbols. In Greece, warriors were “in the image” of the “warrior God” Zeus whose rape of Goddesses and nymphs was celebrated. In Israel, the power of warriors is mirrored in a male God who is called “Lord” and “King” and who achieves his will through violence and destruction. Sadly, this is not an exclusively western problem. In all of the so-called “highly developed” cultures defined by patriarchy and war, symbols of divine warriors justify the violence of men. Laws said to have a divine source enshrine men’s control the sexuality of their wives, permit some men to rape some women, and allow some people to own other people as slaves.
Patriarchy is not simply the domination of women by men. Patriarchy is an integral system in which men’s control of women’s sexuality, private property, violence, war, and the institutions of conquest, rape, slavery arise and thrive together. The different elements are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate one as the cause of the others. Patriarchy is an integral system of interlocking oppressions, enforced through violence. The whole of the patriarchal system is legitimated by patriarchal religions. This is why changing religious symbols is necessary if we hope to create alternatives to patriarchal systems.
The model of patriarchy I have proposed argues that control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system. This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers. The model of patriarchy as an intergral system can help us to see that in order to end male domination we must also end war–and violence, rape, conquest, and slavery which are sanctioned as part of war. We must also end the unequal distribution of wealth inherent in the notion of ”private” property, much of it the “spoils” of war, which led to the concept of patriarchal inheritance, which in turn required the control of female sexuality. As feminists in religion we must identify and challenge the complex interlocking set of religious symbols which have sanctified the integral system of patriarchy–these include but are not limited to the image of God as male. Ending patriarchy is no small task!
*I am offering a functional definition of patriarchy that does not address the separate question of why it originated. I will be publishing an expanded version of this dicussion in the future.
This Article is from Feminism and Religion, February, 2013
Carol P. Christ will be leading life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Join her and learn more about prepatriarchal woman-honoring Goddess cultures. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Reflections on a Wise Woman by Maria Popova
Wonderful article about Ursula K. Leguin by Maria Popova on her blog: brainpickings.org
Most people are products of their time. Only the rare few are its creators. Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) was one.
A fierce thinker and largehearted, beautiful writer who considered writing an act of falling in love, Le Guin left behind a vast, varied body of work and wisdom, stretching from her illuminations of the artist’s task and storytelling as an instrument of freedom to her advocacy for public libraries to her feminist translation of the Tao Te Chingand her classic unsexing of gender.
In her final years, Le Guin examined what makes life worth living in a splendid piece full of her wakeful, winkful wisdom, titled “In Your Spare Time” and included as the opening essay in No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters(public library) — the final nonfiction collection published in her lifetime, which also gave us Le Guin on the uses and misuses of anger.
Two decades after her nuanced meditation on growing older, Le Guin revisits the subject from another angle, perhaps the most perspectival angle there is — the question of how we measure the light of a life as it nears its sunset. Like any great writer who finds her prompts in the most improbable of places, Le Guin springboards into the existential while answering a questionnaire mailed to the Harvard class of 1951 — alumni who, if living, would all be in their eighties. (What is it about eighty being such a catalyst for existential reflection? Henry Miller modeled it, Donald Hall followed, and Oliver Sacks set the gold standard.)
Arrested by the implications of one particular question in the survey — “In your spare time, what do you do?” — and by its menu of twenty-seven options, including golf, shopping, and bridge, Le Guin pauses over the seventh offering on the list: “Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).” She considers this disquieting valuation of creative work in a capitalist society where the practical is the primary currency of existential worth:
Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.
The key words are spare time. What do they mean?To a working person — supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress — spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such. But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time? I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been and am proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to a more respectable category, but I rather doubt it.
Virginia Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, illustrated by Nina Cosford for Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Biography by Zena Alkayat.
A century and half after Kierkegaard extolled the creative value of unbusied hoursand ninety years after Bertrand Russell made his exquisite case for why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, Le Guin examines the meanings and misconstruings of “spare” time in modern life:
And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.
Two millennia after Seneca placed the heart of life in learning to live wide rather than long and a century after Hermann Hesse contemplated how busyness drains life of its little, enormous joys, Le Guin examines the vital difference between being busy with doing and being occupied with living:
An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters is a wonderful read in its totality, replete with Le Guin’s warm wisdom on art and life. Complement this particular portion with German philosopher Josef Pieper on why unoccupied time is the basis of culture, English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on why a capacity for “fertile solitude” is the basis of contentment, and two hundred years of great thinkers on the creative purpose of boredom, then revisit what I continue to consider Le Guin’s greatest nonfiction masterpiece: her brilliant essay on “being a man.”
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Ursula Leguin
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
terrible boredom of pain. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to
embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost
lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any
celebration of joy."
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
I am profoundly saddened to hear of the death of Ursula Kroeber Leguin on January 22, 2018 at the age of 88. I cannot express how important this wise mentor has been to me from the first time I opened one of her novels. It seems very strange, the thought of living in a world that she is no longer in, where her voice is no longer heard.
Back in December of 2015 I sent a photo of the painting below to her, along with a letter expressing my appreciation. I was pleased to at last be able to thank her.
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| "Ursula Leguin as Spider Woman, Weaving the Worlds Into Being" (2015) |
Here is a post I wrote about Ursula Leguin back in 2011 - I felt like sharing it again.
December 17, 2011
There is a kind of synchronistic personal mythos in this for me. As a young art student at Berkeley, almost every day I trudged past the Anthropology exhibits, fascinated by the magical arrowheads and woven fabric in display cases, on my way to the painting studios in Kroeber Hall. Kroeber Hall was named after her famous father, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. I was not to discover Ursula Leguin's worlds until many years later - but in every novel, I always see the eye of the anthropologist's daughter, creator of the star wide "Ecumen", with it's many complex cultures. Alfred L. Kroeber is especially known for his study of Ishi, the last survivor of the California Yana. Ishi's story was told by Ursula's mother, the writer Theodora Kroeber, in her famous book Ishi In Two Worlds. "We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains"
Reading "Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences", or "Always Coming Home" I always see the anthropologist, her profound respect and understanding for the lost worlds of people like the Yahi, and her insight into the complexity, creativity, and infinate possibilities of human cultures.
One of my favorite stories is "May's Lion". Here the author contrasts the experiences of two old women, living alone in the same land, but in different eras. Each is visited by a dying mountain lion. "May" lives out on the edge of some small town, perhaps in California. She talks to her cow, she loves her bit of land. "Rain's End" lives there too, but she is a native woman from an earlier time. The lion has come to both women to die. Rain's End knows this, and sits with the lion, offering prayers for it's journey into the next world, understanding the honor the lion has given her. May also sits with the lion, transcending her fear. But her grandson arrives and shoots the lion. And in some way she cannot fully understand, May knows that something important has been lost, something sacred.
"There are no right answers to wrong questions."
To add a footnote to (my own story) I returned to Berkeley to open a gallery in 1997, and became friends with Arjuna, a storyteller and Tuva singer who had opened a performance space just a block away. He created a powerful play and songs based on the story of Ishi, and for years gave performances on the anniversary of his death. Arjuna continues to make his music in the California desert (for information visit his website Harmonic Fuzion). When I left Berkeley in 2000, he gave me a tape of "Ishi" and a Tibetan singing bowl, and I left him a copy of "Always Coming Home", by the daughter of the man and woman who inspired his music.
Circles. Sometimes I wonder, how are the stories we love and the stories we end up living really separate? Thank you, Ursula Leguin, for weaving me into the Great Story.
"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerant uncertainty: not knowing what comes next"
Ursula K. Leguin
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