Always Coming Home:

INTRODUCTION:

Bernard Selinger begins his discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home by saying that it "is like no other novel I have read" but "Still, it is patent Le Guin" ([127]). I'm not sure I'll call Always Coming Home a novel, although it says right on the cover, "Always Coming Home: a novel"; but, perhaps, Always Coming Home is best seen as one of Le Guin's major contributions toward the redefinition of the novel: a step toward the nonmasculinist novel. In whatever terminology, Selinger is correct: Always Coming Home is unusual and quite familiar, "patent Le Guin"; and also something unusual: clearly an ethnography but also what I'll call Le Guin's antiBible, or unBible.

I will work with Always Coming Home this far as I would teach the Hebrew Scriptures: at length, and as a work that should be covered "spirally," making several passes. I shall give some self characterizations by Le Guin and some statements relevant for her work she has offered in her own voice; and I shall then give some selected context: (1) some background on philosophy, (2) an important essay by Lewis Mumford on utopia and the historical rise of the royal city-state, (3) a historical instance of such a rise (and fall) of a royal city, (4) some American Indian background of Always Coming Home and Le Guin's rather radical variation there on a "typical situation, stock Le Guin plot" ("Legends" 9).^{[ 1]} Readers who don't need yet another introduction to Existentialism or to speculations on the rise of patriarchal civilization might skip the introductory sections and move straight into my commentary on Always Coming Home, "Some Short Works in Always Coming Home: Philosophy," starting with the play of Chandi, the Kesh version of the story of Job.

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In 1971, in The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin presented an effective intellectual attack on many of the premises of "The Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (82; ch, 6). In 1975, Le Guin described herself as "an unconsistent Taoist and consistent unChristian" ("Ketterer" 139), and on another occasion offered the alternative, "a congenital non-Christian" ("Dreams Must Explain Themselves" [LoN (1979): 55]). In her Introduction to the 1976 re-issue of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin presents the paradox, "I talk about the gods, I am an atheist" (n.p.; coll. LoN [1979] 158), and in the same year reacted to some comments in the special Le Guin issue of Science-Fiction Studies by rejecting use of "the word 'liberal' used as a smear-word" and saying that "If people must call names, I cheerfully accept Lenin's anathema as suitable: I am a petty-bourgeois anarchist and an internal emigree{sic}. O.K.?" ("A Response to the Le Guin Issue" 45). And speaking as guest of honor at the 19th Annual Mythopoeic Conference in the late 1980s Le Guin indirectly but very strongly characterized herself as an Outsider critiquing "the Judeo-Christian religion that informs our world view" and suggests that Always Coming Home offers a this-worldly alternative to "the City of God" that is "in the spirit only" and "not founded on this earth" ("Legends" 8).

The reference to "the Judeo-Christian religion that informs our world-view" was quite decorous in terms of Le Guin's subject and the original audience for the "Legends" speech. Le Guin focused much of her talk on the world-view of Native Americans, especially the California Indians, and the people who massacred the California Indians were Whites raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and Le Guin was talking to the Mythopoeic Society: a group whose very useful work centers on the Christian authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Still, I prefer the oldest of Le Guin's formulations and the least direct: the reference of the villainous Dr. William Haber to "The Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West." This formula may let Islam unjustly off the hook and may tempt us to forget that the Animist-Hindu-Confucian-Shinto-Daoist-Buddhist East has created its own share of horrors, but it focuses our attention on us -most of the probable readers of Le Guin's work -and our root problems.^{[ 2]}

The "Rationalist" part of "The Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" should remind us that such pagans as Plato and atheists as Jean-Paul Sartre were and are important for what I think is centrally the intellectualizing of macho culture.^{[ 3]} Indeed, the phrase "the One," stressed in Always Coming Home as mostly a monotheistic term, can refer also to the One of the radical monism of pre-Socratic Greek Eleaticism and its followers, or can be used more loosely as philosophical shorthand for the privileged, White, European philosophers of the Enlightenment with their lust for (totalizing) systems that would incorporate all knowledge, or for such slogans of unified total government as the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's "One empire, one church, one law" (Swain 2.613) or the Nazi variation, "Ein Volk, ein Fürher, ein Reich." A contemporary feminist identifying with all those "marginalized by the transcendental voice of universalizing theory," writes that the "nonbeing" of all those outside the rationalist world of the Enlightened served as "the condition of being of the One, the center, the taken-for-granted ability of one small segment of the population to speak for all" (Hartsock 170-71).

The "West" part of the phrase from Lathe brings in the traditional historical trinity of traditions for the formation of Western Europe: Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Germanic-Nordic; and we should add Islam and "The Empire of the Arabs" (Thompson and Johnson, title of ch 7). It is not just the One God that is at issue in the rise of patriarchy, but also the Heroes who worshipped Sky-Father Zeus (or Jupiter or Odin or Thor), or attempted on their agnostic own to win fame or assert their own personal, aristocratic worthiness and manliness (arete, virtus), their own Heroism.^{[ 4]} Fanaticism, though, there yes; Judaism and Judaism's daughter religions have been quite good at producing fanaticism: Eric Hoffer ends his True Believer noting that "J.B.S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D." (in The Inequality of Man, 1938). "It was a Judaic-Christian invention" (151, § 125; ch. 18). Still, the larger problem of the macho hero goes beyond the problems rooted in monotheism.

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Le Guin has been very consistent in her attack upon much of elite attitudes and values in "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LoH 82), and in offering repeatedly "a gentle antidote" -or sometimes not so gentle -to what she sees as problems in our culture that go to our Judeo-Christian-Rationalist roots. Le Guin is, in her own description, "an aging angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off" ("Carrier Bag" 168). Alternatively, though, one can see Le Guin, if not exactly wrestling with God, vigorously participating in a central Kulturkampf, and metaphorically wrestling with the issues of "ultimate concern" that define religion -as well as "with the angels of the feminist consciousness" (ER 11).

Le Guin denies a transcendent monotheistic god, but she is strongly concerned with issues of the human spirit, with what human people should do with our lives to live them well. She pays what most Americans understand as religious belief the great respect of arguing with it and against it, vigorously. If Le Guin is occasionally puzzled why her fans include some Anglican clergymen ("Dreams Must Explain Themselves," LoN [1979]: 55), she need not be: it's better to be attacked than ignored, and Le Guin's antipathy in fiction to much of the Western religious and intellectual tradition can be seen as an invitation by a worthy opponent to a necessary wrestling match.

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The stakes in that match are high. Getting rid of God can be "extremely embarrassing" (J-P Sartre, "Existentialism" 294). With no God, one might be left on a Sartrean plain, with each of us alone, trapped in our own skins and, in extreme cases, nauseated by the world. Or, in Matthew Arnold's more poetic vision of life after the death of God:

. . . the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night. ("Dover Beach," ca. 1851)

Far more people, though, study Arnold, and Søren Kierkegaard, and Sartre -or learn Fyodor Dostoyevsky's teaching that If God is dead, nothing is prohibited -than ever come to feel the fear, trembling, dread, and despair that Kierkegaard, Sartre, et al. say define the stakes in this issue. So for those for whom it's "'God is Dead' -Will that be on the final?"; or "Weren't the problems of death and futility solved by hermeneutics?" I would like to do some Kierkegaardian multiple passes at the implications for most Americans and a good many other people of a world without a transcendent and loving One.

Consider for a moment an old legend of the rise of drama in Greece, specifically of tragic drama. In the beginning, in this legend, there was a chorus singing a dithyramb (a wild "Goat Song" hymn) to and in praise of the god Dionysos; and then one Thespis, an ancient impresario, went over to the chorus leader and had him step out of the chorus and told him he would be a new thing under the sun: an actor. The new actor then exited and re-entered (or stepped back into the chorus and stepped out again) and said "I am ______ (probably Dionysos)." Thespis and his actor had given the world impersonation, dialog, the possibility of conflict and action: drama, specifically tragic drama. That's the legend, anyway, andI want to accept it as an origin story and read thaqt story allegorically. When drama arose, there was a chorus singing of "We" and the god, with the chorus hoping to merge with Dionysos, a kind of "Father Nature," traditionally pictured as androgynous or "effeminate." The actor says "I am," and this produces tragedy, which, in its typical Greek form, usually involved an act of tragic pride (hubris) producing divine anger (nemesis). Taking for a moment a Hebraic view, the hubris was always and necessarily implied in the character's "I am," whatever name followed it. "I AM" is God's line. When Moses very sensibly asks for some I.D., so to speak, from the voice from the burning bush telling him to take on Pharaoh, God responds with "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh": the Name of God is some sort of complex pun on "to be," or, for short, "I Am" (Exodus 3.14, Tanakh). Which makes sense. When I say "I am," it is a trivial statement: I was not here ten million years ago; I will not be here ten million years from now. I'm going to die and rot and return to the cycles of nature via worms and maggots, and however much that thought may please a Daoist mystic like Chuang Tzu, it does not please me.^{[ 5]} If God exists, on the other hand, God is, was, and will be, world without end (very nontrivially) -amen.

In taking that step out of the chorus and saying "I am," the newly-invented actor stepped out of society, out of nature, out of tribal "we"-consciousness into alienated culture, history, and an "I"-consciousness which is necessarily tragic: the isolated individual's inevitable history of birth-struggle-death, a death that he -almost always he in tragedy -must die, ultimately, alone.^{[ 6]}

Sartre's Orestes and Zeus in The Flies discuss this step into consciousness at some length and with some nicely melodramatic rhetoric:

Less militantly depressing but more specific are the series of questions and the single, somewhat depressing answer offered in the Jewish morning service immediately proceeding the Shema (the central statement in Judaism and Christianity of God's Oneness [Deut. 6.4, Mark 12.28-30]).

The Ashkenazi text (eastern and northern European) then goes on directly to a major "But": "Howbeit we are thy people, the children of thy covenant" and moves very quickly from that rescue from emptiness into relationship with the Eternal, and to the happy duty of proclaiming God's unity. The Sephardic text (Spanish-speaking countries, Africa) adds another rescue: it modifies the conclusion that "all is vanity" by adding "except the pure soul which must hereafter give accounting before the throne of Thy glory" (High Holiday Prayer Book 31). We can all agree, I think, that we are transcendentally ensouled, or we are mud (EoH) or, as we will see, turds and words (ACH 168). Without a transcendent God to serve or defy, human life lacks any purpose beyond that of any other animal: survival, reproduction, and, generally, going about the business of being that animal. Without an immortal soul, we are our projects indeed, but mostly just dirt animated with lifebreath (ruach, anima, spiritus), or whatever less poetical images may be scientifically fashionable for explaining the mind-body "machine." Without a transcendent, acting, judging God before whose throne "the pure soul . . . must hereafter give accounting," there are neither strong, transcultural, trans-historical definitions of "good" and "evil" nor absolute rules for human behavior nor certain, ultimate sanctions for behavior good or bad.

Viewed imaginatively from outside the world, the world without God appears absurd: a "Turn, Turn, Turn" world of interlocking, meaningless cycles -cycles of nature, cycles of history -with human life the vision of Emptiness! Emptiness! responded to in the Hebrew prayer book.^{[ 9]} In the poetic vision of Koheleth ("the Preacher," "Ecclesiastes"):

Koheleth's is not the view of some gentle cynic -a comfortable, genteel sort, in my view -but that of a rigorous capital "C" Cynic, and a protoExistentialist to boot, who works his way to the obvious conclusion that human beings are not "divine beings"; hence, Koheleth must "face the fact" that humans "are beasts. For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust." (3.18-21, Tanakh).

One last quotation -from a work we can be sure Le Guin knew at least well enough to dismiss as "crap."^[10] In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey recounts a theory that had a very brief popularity in the early 1940s: The Illusion of Central Position. According to the theory, this illusion "is the birthright of every human baby." I'd say the illusion literally stems from perception; it's an immediate fact of perception that The World Revolves Around ME. In any event, a baby boy enters the world and "Bright objects appear for his amusement, bottles and breasts for his comfort. His groping consciousness finds no reason at all to doubt the world's consecration to his needs and purposes. His Illusion of Central Position is perfect," an initial given of awareness (Af. Genesis 144; ch. 6). With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things.

Or not. In a world of Emptiness! Emptiness!, where God is very distant and death is a trip to Sheol -the grave, Hades -and no more, Koheleth concluded "There is nothing worthwhile for a man but to eat and drink and afford himself enjoyment with his means" (2.24, Tanakh). And he advises his (male) readers to "Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he [God] hath given thee under the sun . . . " and, more macho-ly Existential, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest" (9.9-10, AV).^[12] Plus, of course, the teaching "Two are better than one," especially in the image, ". . . if two lie together then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?" (4.11, AV).

One of the major contexts for Always Coming Home, then, is Le Guin's answering Sartre and Ardrey -however indirectly, intentionally or not -and carrying on Koheleth's great quest to determine "what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven during the few days of their life" (Eccl. 2.3, RSV), and which her Job-figure Chandi reformulates, gender-neutrally, "How shall a human being live well, then?" (ACH 236).^[13] An obvious possibility for living in the world at all, and so getting a chance to "live well" is to lower one's expectations from life -stop hoping for some sort of purpose or cosmic significance -and intentionally, mindfully limit one's interests to the human world and limit the significant human world as much as possible to one's own people and attempt to build in whatever "green and pleasant land" one finds oneself in, not Jerusalem but a good society.^[14]

Another context for Always Coming Home, then, is utopia, plus the related questions of the origin(s) of the current mess of the human condition. Both issues are neatly handled in a classic essay by Lewis Mumford: "Utopia, The City and The Machine" (1965).

One possible reason utopias go wrong, Mumford suggests, "is that the abstract intelligence" that creates utopias, "operating with its own conceptual apparatus, in its own self-restricted field, is actually a coercive instrument: an arrogant fragment of the full human personality, determined to make the world over in its own oversimplified terms." But Mumford prefers to stress another alternative. Mumford finds that both the ideal of utopia for the Greeks and what I'll call (after Aristotle's hamartia) The Big Mistake stem from the same historical event: the rise of "the archetypal ancient city."^[15] In terms of utopian thought, the rise of the city in the ancient Fertile Crescent, is the relevant event; in terms of history, the move from the Late Neolithic village to Bronze Age city is relevant, whatever Old World rivers it occurred along, or New World forests or highlands it occurred in (see Mumford 10).

In the beginning, in the story Mumford accepts, the Neolithic village was (for one hand) composed of human people (in village-size numbers) who lived democratically, with "no ruling class" exploiting others, "no compulsion to work for a surplus the local community" couldn't use, "no taste for idle luxury," no private property, no "exorbitant desire for power," and nothing we would consider warfare: a golden age (Mumford 4), a variety of paradise (18). On the other hand, again in the story Mumford accepts, the common people of a Bronze Age city generally experienced city life in terms of "total submission to a central authority, forced labor, lifetime specialization, inflexible regimentation, one-way communication, and readiness for war." Mumford sums up their condition as that of a population of constantly scared people, "galvanized into corpselike obedience with the constant aid of the mace, the whip, and the truncheon" (17). Mumford's characterization may be somewhat sensationalized, but the analysis is convincing. The Hebrews in Egypt were ordinarily treated no worse than the native-born Egyptians, and my barely civilized ancestors saw themselves in Egypt as slaves.

The historical question is how did the kings and other elites pull off the transition from the Neolithic village to civilization -to city-life as we know it -and why did ordinary people go along?

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the first cities were made by kings "acting in the name of a god" and incarnating within themselves the will and immortality of the gods. "The king's first act, the very key to his authority and potency, is the erection of a temple within a heavily walled sacred enclosure. And the construction of another wall to enclose the subservient community turns the whole area into a sacred place: a city" (Mumford 12 and 19). To build the city and to protect the city the king needs raw, physical power, and getting it was a problem in a Neolithic world in which the high point of technology was the bow and arrow (15). Mumford's key point is that concomitant with the theological pretensions I'll return to in a moment, kings developed two great machines: "the labor machine and the military machine," both organized hierarchically and bureaucratically, both serving with nearly mechanical rigidity the will of the king, and both related almost mystically in cycles of building and destruction (18). For Mumford, the city and the army -an "Invisible Machine" (19) -are the two great images of civilization and for the earliest political states. And the military army will be used as much as the labor army; with all such states, though Mumford himself cites only Plato's imagined Republic, "Nietzsche's observation that war is the health of the state applies . . . for only in war is such stringent authority and coercion even temporarily tolerable" (Mumford 6).

Briefly, then, we can say with Mumford that the first city arose because kings were able to deify themselves and create armies of laborers and soldiers, with the soldiers able to capture more laborers and keep them in line. Once the system got started, it would be quite stable. If one king builds an army and a city and another king does so too, the (re)building and (re)arming of both places go on as one attacks or threatens the other. We need "our" army to protect us from their army, and we need to capture them as slaves to rebuild portions of our city that they have destroyed. And so on, unto the days of Roland and Rambo. Again, though, how did the system get started?

And here I'll digress from Mumford for a bit.

One theory for the mysterious rise of warfare and civilization in the Neolithic (an important theory for the origins and influence of patriarchy) holds that there is little mystery. If there is a will to power in people, there's also a will to submit, and there are always people who enjoy giving orders (especially, perhaps, young men) and people around willing to obey (especially, perhaps, older boys).^[16] As the Stone Age went on, human numbers increased enough that human groups met one another more frequently, and it is easy to picture occasional raids, where a man of the village led out the youngsters to revenge some offense, and maybe pick up some souvenirs: perhaps the head of a fighter from the Others, perhaps things of more everyday practical use. What changed in the Neolithic was the rise of herding and simultaneous rise of agricultural villages and the production of surpluses that could free some of the population from productive labor, and the production of surpluses worth the while of excess young men to steal. What changed also was that somewhere along the line people figured out the relationship between sexual intercourse and childbirth, and the concept of fatherhood was invented. With the concept of fatherhood -if Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, et al. are correct -would come the idea among men of "my children" and "the mother of my children," hence "my wife and children" and the idea of property, starting with property in people.^[17] With the idea of property as the right to keep and hold and bequeath to one's descendants what one has -not just use -the idea of theft becomes more attractive. With the rise of surpluses, people had more stuff worth stealing, and with the rise of slavery, enslaveable Others necessarily had something worth stealing: themselves. From this point, the rise of the military to get the theft organized and regularized as protection money (tribute, taxes) takes little more explanation than the Mafia or the depredations of pirates, freebooters, Conquistadors, slavers, colonial exploiters, and other practitioners of large-scale, highly organized crime.^[18]

Now, slavery can be quite pleasant for slave owners; but it is a pernicious institution for those who must compete with slave labor, and even the least vicious forms of slavery are horrible for the slaves themselves. A battle every now and then may be occasionally exhilarating for youngsters desiring a change of routine, but extended warfare is not pleasant for most of its practitioners, let alone its victims; for most of the men fighting, the formula is "Boredom punctuated by terror." So, we are still left with the question, Why did so many ordinary people at least acquiesce in the establishment of property, kingship, servitude, civilization, and the state?

Part of the answer may start with the straightforward archeological observation that the Cro-Magnons and all "neanthropic" humans "interred their dead in an elaborate and formal manner" (Swain I.22), so even in the Old Stone Age some people had the idea of death. By the late Neolithic, people were working -really working at drudge-jobs many of them -in the agriculture business and the related pastoral and industrial occupations made possible by agricultural surpluses. Many people, then, were living lives of drudgery, followed by death, a death of which they were conscious. And they were leading those lives of drudgery among large groups of people, most of whom necessarily remained strangers and amongst whom it would be difficult to maintain the illusion that one was special. They were immersed in what Simone De Beauvoir would much later call immanence. Arguably, these people needed some transcendent projects to break the boredom and futility. Especially among young men producing neither children nor art nor engaged in other useful labor, the destruction and killing of war might be the most obvious project to prove they significantly exist.

To return to Mumford:

With the most impressive monuments the pyramids of Egypt: tombs guaranteeing the immortality of Pharaoh, plus functioning as huge symbols of the social structure, ideologies, and striving for transcendence that made such monuments possible and necessary.^[19]

As Le Guin implies with the off-stage rise of the "Godking" in The Tombs of Atuan (1971), the temptation of a King and the temptation of even vicarious immortality are very great (see Crow and Erlich 205). Initially, it seems, only Pharaoh got immortality. Later, though, immortality became possible for anyone rich enough to get properly embalmed; and finally -by the Middle Kingdom in Egypt -there developed the theory of a separable soul as a birthright in all people (Swain I.122), or, perhaps, all people one considered good enough to be people. Instead of God's animating Adam with breath, there was body -dust, dirt -as a temporary house or temple or prison for an immortal soul. The goal of fully human life, then, becomes fully separating the true human self -the immortal soul -from imprisonment in the body and in the mortal world; the enemies of the true human self, then, became The World, the Flesh, and, later, the Devil. And the world, flesh, and devil could incorporate everything Other to, not part of, the immortal soul: the masculine, world-transcending, heaven-aspiring ego. This Other would be women to start with, and everything associated with the ultimate "woman": "Mother Earth, the giver of life to her children," the Great Mother worshipped "over the whole Near East in neolithic times" and emphatically not "the Sky Father" worshipped by "the pastoral and patriarchal nomads": the Indo-European, or "Aryan," peoples (Swain I.51).^[20]

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I'll end this Introduction with a historical example of the rise and fall of a royal city with a briefly successful true king representing the One cosmic and transcendent God. Around 1372 BCE, Pharaoh Amenhotep ("Amon is satisfied") changed his name to Akhnaton ("Spirit of Aton"), and ordered built a new capital, dedicated to Aton, the sun. This religious reform moved Aton to supreme god and finally the One God. Akhnaton became a fanatic for Aton and "relentless toward critics. . . . He put himself forward as the son" of Aton, "the sole god of the universe, and demanded obeisance such as earlier kings of Egypt had never received" (Swain I.158-59).

Akhnaton didn't have a very spectacular fall: no armed rebellion with a satisfyingly gory ending as in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Akhnaton was deserted by his family, and his power, figuratively, drained away from him. A regency was established, and then Akhnaton soon died, and the dynasty petered out after Akhnaton's successor, Tutankhamen. Upon his death, the royal and divine city of Akhnaton had been abandoned; by the time of Tutankhamen's death, the sun-dried bricks had already begun collapsing, "and the place became the desert which it has remained to the present day." A military dictator succeeded Tutankhamen, and "The last vestiges of Akhnaton's revolution were stamped out" (Swain I.159-60). Not quite the image of futility of Ramses II, as ironically celebrated in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1817/1818), but Akhnaton offers an elegant paradigm for the rise and fall of a ruler who presents himself as son of the Sole God, demanding obeisance, and of a political movement based on those claims.

If you know Always Coming Home, all this -the philosophy, history, and historical illustration of Akhnaton -should sound familiar; indeed, Always Coming Home might appear a fictional re-viewing of this crucial "hinge" in human history: the moment when the ancestors of most of us did move into civilization and history in the ancient world, and do not move into civilization and history in the future-world of Always Coming Home. More exactly, Always Coming Home is a mâshâl of that event, an ideal configuration of humankind's not moving into LAWKI, "Life As We Know It" (Norton Introd. 34 f.). Such a reading is correct, and I'm going to recommend it, but I wish first to do a bit more contextualizing. The Big Mistake in human history is important here, but we can find contexts for the primary culture of Always Coming Home, contexts much more recent and closer to home for most of us than the Neolithic: Northern California until the Conquest, and earlier works in Le Guin's canon.

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As Elizabeth Cummins implies (Understanding 181-83) and Carol D. Stevens detailed in a paper at the 1989 Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, Le Guin would know of Neolithic people from, among other sources, anthropological work done with tribes in the area in which she grew up, tribal cultures gone with the wind by 1985 but sufficiently remembered early in the century that they could be described by Alfred Kroeber, and their stories retold by Alfred Kroeber, Theodora Kroeber, and others. In a sense, then, Always Coming Home is Le Guin's retelling of some of the Yurok Myths and Karok Myths, the story of Ishi as told by Theodora Kroeber and the stories Theodora Kroeber retells in The Inland Whale (Barr, "Other Hand" 115); in a sense, Always Coming Home is a fictional retelling of much in A. L. Kroeber's monumental Handbook of the Indians of California. But only -and this is an important point -in a sense; Le Guin is also abstracting from a number of "pre-Conquest cultures of the Americas" (LoN [1989]: 165): the Pueblo, for example -cf. "A Man of the People" (1995) -and the Navajo (Le Guin, personal communication). Always Coming Home is Le Guin's "gentle antidote" to "the Judeo-Christian religion" and the world-view of "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West," an antidote administered by the healers of the traditional cultures of several tribes and groups of Native Americans.

To anticipate and overstate: in its ethics, Always Coming Home is a response to a generally successful genocide in California, suggesting that the ultimate Western City of Man, the extrapolation to its endpoint of the macho-heroic/aristocratic, transcendent ideal, would be Auschwitz: a city of death, power, and the triumph of the will over the body and compassion, the subjugation of even mind to will.^[21] Le Guin, rooted in the American west, includes as a target for attack the contempt encouraged by the sort of "Judeo-Christian religion that informs our world-view" for not only the body but also the land and its sacredness in favor of sacralized history: the universe as divinely-scripted drama "acted by Man." In such a view the world, and especially the "New World" Europeans saw in the Americas, is only

In her earlier works Le Guin had opposed to this "City of God" of St. Augustine of Hippo and the Christian tradition, "the City of Man" of (more or less) the secular liberal tradition. In Always Coming Home, the City of God is subsumed into the City of Man, and the City of God/Man is opposed to places like "Dzil na' odili, the center of the world" in a Navajo emergence story ("Legends" 6, 8). The view we are asked to take to enter the world of Always Coming Home is that of people who are in the world, "'an integral part of it,'" as opposed to that of "People who look at the world from outside it, 'objectively'" ("Legends" 6).^[22]

In her "Legends" lecture, Le Guin presents two maps, both relevant for Always Coming Home. The first goes along with the Navajo emergence story, which tells how the First People were initially "all together," not yet separated into nonhuman animals and human animals (or nonhuman-people and human people, for a more decorous paraphrase).^[23] These First People move up through the worlds into our world (6) -for a number of motifs shared with California Indians, and which Le Guin will use in Always Coming Home. More important is a map very similar to the map of the "Ancient Yurok World" that precedes the introduction in Theodora Kroeber's The Inland Whale, in the 1974 edn.^[24] Le Guin tells her Mythopoeic Society audience,

With some expansions, this is the everyday world of the Kesh people in Always Coming Home: they know of the cosmos -the universe of billions of stars in billions of galaxies -but they mostly choose to ignore it. Le Guin presents this turning away from space exploration and the galaxy as prudent and mature and as only a turning away: the Kesh and their neighbors do not try to oppose the cosmos or conquer it, Flash Gordon style; nor do they walk away from it like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" to "go somewhere else." The positively presented peoples in Always Coming Home can't "go somewhere else" in terms of the universe; the universe IS; but they can purposely and mindfully image it in the Five Houses of the Earth and the Four Houses of the Sky and, for the most part (like most humans) turn their backs on its galactic portions and live in "a seamless, centered sphere, a wholeness" -but a wholeness that includes "the sun, the stars" in the Four Houses of the Sky, and electricity and convenient, chosen machines and electronic devices -appropriate technology. And a mystic like Flicker can get in contact with the universe very completely and very directly.^[26]

*

In spite of Le Guin's having written Always Coming Home by "a very different process from any other writing . . . [she] had done," Always Coming Home still includes the "typical situation, stock Le Guin plot" of much of her earlier work ("Legends" 8, 9). If the old Nordic scops had a "word hoard" for their poetry, Le Guin has her theme and motif hoard for her teaching works. We will see this in more detail shortly. For now, note that the ethnographic methods Elizabeth Cummins stresses in Always Coming Home have been hinted at in Rocannon's World (1966), The Word for World Is Forest (1972), and, most importantly, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). If Always Coming Home is Le Guin's rather new "Carrier-Bag" approach to structure pursued vigorously, it is also a reworking of ideas and techniques she used in Left Hand: in some ways Always Coming Home is a culmination of her work on patriotism, the State, and "people who didn't fight wars" ("Legends" 9), on extroverted, aggressive ways of life vs. the introverted, and on the momentary insight into Being in the mystic experience, Daoist style or as part of "The Perennial Philosophy." In terms of structure, compare "Flicker of the Serpentine" at the center of Always Coming Home (Cummins 187) with the Foretelling in The Left Hand of Darkness; compare and contrast "Flicker" and "Junco" with the vision of Meshe. Always Coming Home is, so far at least, the culmination of Le Guin's analysis and critical critique of the "Judeo-Christian religion" and its doctrine "that man's singularity is his divinity," making us "Lords of the Earth," rather than parts of the world, making the "Judeo-Christian religion" a cult -and the currently most important cult -underlying "dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures" (LHD 233; ch. 16).

Taking this view, we can find the philosophical centers of Always Coming Home in the sections, "Junco," "The Bright Void of the Wind," "The Dog at the Door" and "Flicker of the Serpentine" (four of the Eight Life Stories); "Time and the City," "A War with the Pig People," the play "Chandi," and "Some Generative Metaphors"; the figurative backbone to Always Coming Home is the three-part novella, "Stone Telling's Story." Significantly, "The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine of Telina-na" physically is near the center of the book (pp. 282-304 out of ca. 525 in the Harper and Row edition), but the other metaphorically central sections are scattered in various places in the book and "The Back of the Book." To place these chapters in context, I will now take a stab at describing just what Always Coming Home might be.

*

Always Coming Home is, first, a satura: a hodgepodge, a kind of literary stew or chop suey of many elements -a novella, poems, short stories, myths, dramatic works, legends, histories, romances, direct address by the author (in the guise of Pandora, an impossible anthropologist from our time, "now" working among the Kesh), recipes, song lyrics, insults, sanctifications (or, more exactly, praise of existing sanctity), and a utopia. As a utopian satire, Always Coming Home offers a fairly complete view of a good place, starting even as Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) started, with the physical place.^[27] "The people had to be the people who belonged to that place. Their stories would be the stories of that place, their legends would be the meaning of that place, their songs would be the voices of that place. If they didn't fight wars it would be because they lived in that place, because the way people do things and make things in the Valley does not include the making of war" ("Legends" 9).^[28]

So Always Coming Home is a very complete "Handbook of the Culture of the Kesh" -including music in the Harper and Row first edition -and a rather ahistorical, and antihistorical work, by Pandora "All-Giver" (ACH 147-48). A handbook is necessary rather than a historically-based narrative because the Kesh have managed fairly successfully to avoid progressing or falling back into history. If The Big Mistake of our ancestors was "stepping out of the chorus" into history, the Kesh have been smart enough to step back into the figurative chorus and stay there.

But who are the Kesh? They are the point-of-view people among the peoples who Pandora tells us "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California."^[29] So we are told in "A First Note," that seems to be Le Guin speaking in her own voice. The Kesh are not California Indians -the "cultures of the California Indians had been irreparably damaged or wholly destroyed" by the early twentieth century -but (as Stevens has stressed) our descendants.^[30] And somewhere between us and them, the ancestors of the Kesh decided to live like precivilization people who fit into their worlds without trying to dominate them: something like Neolithic ideology but with electricity, metals, rifles, a modest railroad (469-70), and a very high-technology computer network. The Kesh live in the Valley of the Na River, which we may picture as the Napa Valley in California, after earthquakes have "reshaped the western coastline" (Cummins 179), producing, perhaps, the body of water "big enough for a whale to live in comfortably" that Ninawa arrives at to become "The Inland Whale" of the Yurok story (T. Kroeber, The Inland Whale 29-30).^[31] The Kesh live in a post-cybernetic world, where the computing machines have split off from their human creators and proceed with their own evolution as the City of Mind (ACH 149-52), an entity that is expanding out into the galaxy quite effectively and holds the promise of "conscious, self-directed evolution" (150) until it can view the universe objectively and possibly holistically.^[32] The world of Always Coming Home is also post-catastrophe: the series of Terran catastrophes beginning "offstage" but alluded to in "Nine Lives," The Dispossessed, and The Word for World Is Forest, and seen, again in only their first stages, in "The New Atlantis" (1975) and "Newton's Sleep" (1991). There were not only "vast subsidences and local elevations" that had "left most of what we know as the Great Valley of California a shallow sea or salt-marsh" but also "the permanent desolation of vast regions," and equally permanent genetic damage to the human survivors (ACH 159). In the story of "Four Beginnings" told in Always Coming Home by Cooper of the Red Adobe, the human people who preceded the Kesh -the "woge" to them; to us: us -"were born wrong. They were crazy, they tried to make the world. All they could do was make it end again, all they could do was imitate what happened before. So what they did caused fires and smoke and bad air and then ice and cloud and cold, everybody dying again," with just a few surviving "the dark, cold time" (160-61), which in the mid1980s would suggest a nuclear winter (ACH 148; see below).

The Kesh incorporate much of the material culture of dawn peoples who have lived along rivers from the Nile to the Yellow to the Amazon to the Colorado, or such far-future people as those who live along the Oro in Le Guin's "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea"; as part of becoming "the people who belonged to that place" they would have had or developed customs appropriate to the place ("Legends" 9).^[33]

The Kesh live in a series of small towns along the River. Our archeologist of the future, Pandora, had assumed that the towns "must be walled, with one gate" (like a very ancient city/fortress, or a slave compound on Werel in Four Ways to Forgiveness). When she gets over her presupposition, Pandora finds "the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for?" No wall, and at "the center is" not "a heavily walled sacred enclosure" (Mumford 12, 19) but "the Hinge" and "the sacred buildings and the dancing place . . . in their own arm of the double spiral" of the heyiya-if (ACH 3): chaos is not kept out but invited in at the void at the center, and ritually encompassed as part of life. Cummins counts eight towns (179); it's nine if we count the town of Tachas Touchas. I'll count it. First to get to nine towns (the number given in "The Dog at the Door" [280] and the map on 374): not a magic number among the native Californians, but an important one for Le Guin, and a significant number in Theodora Kroeber's The Inland Whale. Second, "Tachas Touchas was (notoriously) settled by 'people from outside' -from the northwest, traditionally" (411). We are told that "The people of Tachas Touchas insisted, without offering evidence, that the name of their town in their forgotten northern tongue meant Where the Bear Sat Down" (412). I think this is a joke. Tuches is the Yiddish term for "buttocks," and the people of Tachas Touchas may be the closest we will get to a touch of multiculturalism among the Kesh. Otherwise for the Kesh, "The rest of the world was not a matter of urgent concern to most people of the Valley. They were content to know it was there" (ACH 453). The Kesh have a good culture, but a pretty homogeneous one, and we would do well to count what little diversity they have.

As indicated above, and to be discussed in more detail below, the basic Kesh view of things is integration into in a sacred and joyous whole, an antithesis to the vision of life of Koheleth standing outside the natural cycles, and equally antithetical to macho atheistic Existentialism, trying to live outside nature entirely.

The Kesh people are far more sane and rather less "quarrelsome, competitive and aggressive" than we, or the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness, but they do have their fights and ritualistic, "primitive" warfare, as we see in the important very small "History," "A War with the Pig People" (ACH 129-34).

Towns are small and "communal, independent" and not just "somewhat introverted" but very introverted. Rivalries are "channeled into a socially approved form of aggression," of the flyting, the insult contest. Authority is anarchic: accepted as custom, without appeal to patriarchal ideals of divine right, patriotic duty, etc. (Wytenbroek 331-32). Class structure is almost nonexistent, and there is "no great gap between rich and poor," nor "slavery or servitude. Nobody owned anybody. There were no chattels. Economic organization was rather communistic or syndicalistic" and not "capitalistic" or centralized. I quote and paraphrase and make a bit stronger for Always Coming Home Le Guin's description of Karhidish culture at its best in The Left Hand of Darkness ("Gender . . . Redux" in LoN [1979]: 165-65 [a section Le Guin would not have us read differently in 1989]). More precisely: as among Karhidish culture at its best in Left Hand, so were social arrangements on the far-future North American West Coast at the start of Stone Telling's story in Always Coming Home.

Threatening to repeat the Neolithic entry into history, warfare, slavery, and patriarchy is the Condor People, in their own tongue, the Dayao. The Dayao are descended, figuratively, from the Basnasska Nation in City of Illusions (1967).^[34] Falk is captured by these people and initiated as a Hunter of the Mzurra Society (67). Either paraphrasing Falk's thoughts or stating her own aphorism, Le Guin's Narrator in City observes or asserts that

Falk is made a member of the Mzurra Society "with the full initiations of a Hunter, a ceremony which involved whippings emetics, dances, the recital of dreams, tattooing, antiphonal free-associating, feasting, sexual abuse of one woman by all the males in turn, and finally nightlong incantations to The God to preserve the new Horressins [= the renamed Falk] from harm" (69).^[35]

The main story of the Condor is told by a woman best called Stone Telling, a familiar figure in Le Guin's narrative: a liminal character like Genly Ai, Estraven, Tenar, Lyubov, Falk, Luz, Irena -also an "internal emigree," or just an émigré or immigrant or alien.^[36] The change in Le Guin's method in Always Coming Home generally, is the scientific method, so to speak, of fairly exhaustive ethnography: having all those voices speaking the world of the Kesh. And in her novella, Stone Telling can tell us, like Belle in "The New Atlantis," just what she thinks, in her own words. This is important for reasons in addition to Cummins's point (176) and Marleen Barr's (114-15) on Le Guin's moving to female voices. Always Coming Home is strong satire and a long one, and profits from strong (and multiple) points of view.

Stone Telling is a woman of the Kesh, and her sojourn among the Condor makes for a Quest tale, with very significant variations, and is the main narrative in Always Coming Come. If one began study of Always Coming Home by reading Stone Telling's story straight through, one could see the rest of the book as background to the story, but background foregrounded by getting its own time in the book. If one reads Always Coming Home from beginning to end, Stone Telling's story comes in three parts, with material before and after it. I wish to start my discussion of Always Coming Home proper with the "background": some of the elements of the social and cultural world in which Stone Telling and her story are embedded, the important elements of the social and cultural world of Always Coming Home that Stone Telling's story helps illustrate. Viewing the works with an appropriate double vision, subject and ground are in dynamic cycling, what is foreground and what background depends upon the reader's choice of focus.

*

Chandi (226-38)

"Pandora," as editor/Narrator, tells us that "Like most Valley drama, Chandi is symbolical or allegorical, generalising{sic} life. The resemblance of the plot to one of the great biblical stories is striking; but so are the differences" (227).

The biblical story is that of Job, and the similarity is that Chandi loses all, gets sick, gets argued with and bad-mouthed by choruses of uncomforting comforters -unjustly, absurdly suffers -and gets as good an answer as he can get to a couple of central questions on life for most humans. There are four major differences. First, the Adversary (Satan) in the prose introduction to the Book of Job raises the question, "Does Job fear God for nought{sic}?" (1.9, RSV) -and argues quite cogently that Job has a good deal with God: Job loves and fears and worships God and in return profits. Should people love and worship a God who fails to deliver? Second, in the poem of Job, Job accuses God of injustice in God's inflicting suffering and horror upon the innocent:

Third, the climax to the poem of Job is a theophany: God reveals himself to Job -and to Job only, not the comforters, as William Blake stresses in his great illustration of the scene -and shifts the argument from Job's blameless (1.8) "Illusion of Central Position" and upright (2.3) accusations against God to . . . something else. If we make a leap of faith, God shows Job a universe in which God is somehow justified: Job sees his beloved God in the whirlwind. If we decline to make that leap of faith, we are pretty much left with the whirlwind and Job intimidated by raw power. Last, in the prose finale of the Book of Job, God pronounces Job right and his conventionally pious comforters wrong and restores Job to prosperity and his family (with Job getting new children in the conventional biological manner).

One crucial difference between Job and Chandi is that Chandi takes place in a universe of immanent sacredness/connectedness: no God, no Sons of God, no Satan. Another difference is that it takes place in a social world where human people take care of their own.

The play starts with Chandi as a "handsome man in the prime of life, magnificently dressed" and energetically chanting "Heya hey heya!" and going on to "dance the Summer," practicing for a performance planned for that night. The play's dialog ends with Chandi repeating the heya chant and then the lines,

The play itself ends with the tune of the Heron Dance: "Stooping and half-naked, stiffly and painfully, Chandi began to dance the dance which he practiced in splendor in the first scene: but all the motions and turns were reversed, so that the dance carried him across the stage to the right," apparently to his death. The cast vanishes into darkness, and then the musicians "held the Ending Tone" on their instruments "until it died away very gradually into silence" (237-38). Like much else in Kesh culture, but perhaps more directly, Chandi illustrates that these people "had no god; they had no gods; they had no faith." They are a culture with "a working metaphor. The idea that comes nearest the center of the vision is the House," a multivalent metaphor for Le Guin, including in its suggestions "STABILITY" and "Selfhood" (484); "the sign" of this working metaphor "is the hinged spiral or heyiya-if; the word is the word of praise and change, the word at the center, heya!" (49; "The Serpentine Codex").^[37]

On a less cosmic level, Chandi illustrates that many people will die "in pain," as an audience member observes after the show (238), and, as we see in the play, often live in pain. In Chandi, suffering is not a mystery requiring "theodicy": attempting to explain the presence of evil in a universe created and ruled by a good, just, and omnipotent God. Chandi is about pain and suffering in any human world: as a constant in human life from the once upon a time of Job in "the Land of Uz" (1.1) and Ged and Arren in the Dry Land, to the time of Shevek on the planets Anarres and Urras to "a long, long time from now" among the Kesh. Shevek on Anarres allows that "Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain" (TD 48; ch. 2). The same with the Kesh as we see in Chandi: Chandi has his people, "the House of Summer, the Serpentine," and they will, of course, take care of him: "Well, of course we'll go on looking after you. But" -but they don't have to like him much or like being around him; they will still, like Job's Comforters, add to his suffering. In such a world -even in utopia -"How should a human being live well, then?" (ACH 236).

*

"How to Die in the Valley" (83-94)

To live well, perhaps, one must learn to die well, once an important theme for instruction, but now unpopular.^[38] We do have heroic works, teaching heroic death, but such works are irrelevant for most of us eminently nonheroic people, and the Kesh would (and Le Guin does) find such works misguided. Even the best of our heroic deaths might be, to reapply a phrase, "a bit too excessive, a bit too heroic, for Valley approbation" (90). The Kesh of the Valley of the Na learn to die, their way, with their ceremonies and rituals, from the members of the Black Adobe Lodge (87); the nonhuman people presumably know their own ways to die, but no animals are killed -not even a mosquito -without the "death-words" being spoken, or at least one word of the formula (90-93).

The Kesh do not, believe in «Pie in the sky when you die». They do not believe in a heaven of reward nor in a hell of punishment: not in their vulgar forms nor in the philosophical ideas of eternity with God (heaven) or infinitely removed from God (hell). They do believe in a soul or souls, but, as among the ki'O in "Another Story," their religion is "godless, argumentative, and mystical" (FIS 175 [1994]), or, perhaps more exactly, not a religion as a set of doctrines but a Way, a far-future version of The Perennial Philosophy. In any event, "Valley beliefs and theories concerning the soul were of a most amazing complexity, and imperturbably self-contradictory. One might as well try to pin Valley people down to one creation myth as to get a coherent description of the soul out of them. This multiplicity, of course, was in no sense of the word accidental. It was of the essence" (ACH 89 [see also 92]). Along with generic Humanity, the unborn, "most birds, sea fish, shell fish," and most animals not hunted by humans, the dead inhabit the Four Houses of the Sky, at least metaphorically, at least in the system given in "The Serpentine Codex" (here 44, [47]). The main thing about the Kesh view of death is that it is part of their intense "sense of community, of continuity with the dirt, water, air, and living creatures of the Valley" (90). It is encompassed in human community at "the World Dance at the equinox of spring" -a cosmic reversal time, a turning from Yin to Yang, a time of power in Earthsea and elsewhere. This "First Night of the World was a community ceremony of mourning and remembrance for all who had died" in a Valley town that year. "The long night ceremony of Burning the Names was a fearfully intense, overcharged excitation and release of emotion," and could be tough going for those placing high value on equanimity, "required on this one night to share without shame or reserve the pent-up grief, terror, and anger that death leaves the living to endure." Most important, the commemoration ceremonies, preeminently, give substance to "the emotional and social interdependence of the community, their profound sense of living and dying with one another" (88-89), their embeddedness in human society and the world.

"Junco" (267-71)

In a universe without a transcendent God, where "there is nothing between the stars," seeking an ultimate truth is futile and potentially dangerous. This issue is developed directly in the life story, "Junco," told in the third person, male singular -the first word of the story is "He" -by Junco himself. Even as the Lord of Shorth asked a wrong question with "What is the meaning of life?" (LHD 60, 70; ch. 5), so Junco seeks "the eternal truth."^[39] Junco quotes Junco's saying that he wants Truth over "'the souls, the forms, the words,'" of the world, and quotes his promise: "'I will give my life, if I may see before death what lies behind life and death, behind word and form, behind all being, the eternal truth. . . . The gyre of the buzzard, the history of the rocks, the silence of the grass, they were all there, but he would not have them, desiring the eternal truth'" (ACH 267-68). Against good advice, Junco follows his quest, partially under the name "Sungazer"; "It was a name that others had given him; he had not chosen it. Now he thought that he must do what his name said." At the top of a mountain, "He looked up and gazed at the sun" (268). Junco would be ignorant of Le Guin's telling us that "Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun" (LHD, 1976, Introd.); but commonsense, a bluejay, and an owl tell him to stop looking. He doesn't, and comes to see "wheels": "black wheels and very bright wheels, turning one within the other" (268): the most memorable part of the vision of Ezekiel (1.15-21) -and a memorable part of some migraine headaches -and a significant part of the vision of Flicker (ACH 291).^[40] The wheels are wheels of power, contrasting with going with the world in gyres.

The earth and "everything" tell him "'Go down!'" off the mountain, which he does, and tries to get "below the Valley." He's been up the mountain: sign of Yang, place of revelations; now he'll go beyond the Valley -an embodiment of Yin -and go into a group or series of caves, "back to where springs seep out of the rock in the dark." It is a dark place, but still he can see "the bright wheels turning under the ground." Junco dances and cries out, "'Let me know the truth!'" (ACH 269). Junco is rescued by the vintners who use the caves, and they feed him and take him to his mothers' house. He refuses to stay and starts a fast to the death. He gets close, when he sees a shining person who says to him "'Take the gift!'" Junco thinks he will get truth, and he does: "The young man waited for the gift, for the truth." And nothing happens. He gets taken home and is healed, except for his eyesight. He "can see things only by looking sidelong at them." Looking straight ahead he sees nothing (270). And Junco returns to the world.

As "Sungazer," Junco was excessive even by most ascetic standards, which is part of the point. Junco's story is an exemplum, an example of a very wrong answer to the question "How shall a human being live well, then?". Junco is crazy, but logical, and his logic is important: his craziness reduces to an absurd his premises. If there's a transcendent Truth out there, one might well strive to find out what it is; if Truth is outside the world and our flesh shackles us to the world (see, e.g., Romans 8), then mortification of the flesh makes sense for the experience of transcendence. No transcendence, no experience -and Le Guin offers little transcendence in her works. Junco gets the gift of truth about transcendent reality: nothing. There is no esoteric eternal reality in Always Coming Home for there to be Truth about. Junco just harms his body, permanently -and ironically -affecting his vision. He could do worse: strivers after absolutes that transcend the body often produce high counts of other people's bodies.

No transcendence, then, but might there be "the experience of Immanence" accepted by the Handdarata (LHD 58; ch. 5)?

*

"The Bright Void of the Wind" (271-72)

Juxtaposed to Junco's story is "The Bright Void of the Wind," a life story told by Kulkunna of the Red Adobe of Telina-na. If Kulkunna is gendered in the story, I missed it: the personal pronoun s/he uses is the gender-neutral first person. The name itself is a combination of the Kesh words for "mountain" and "river" (especially The River: the river [na] the Kesh live along); na can also mean "To flow as or like a river" (518). Mountains are usually male symbols for us, but looking up kulkun in the Kesh Glossary one finds the parenthetical note on "Ama Kulkun, Grandmother Mountain" -a suspiciously useful note, I think, for blurring the gender of mountains. And rivers are always potentially androgynous: (traditionally) feminine water in a (traditionally) masculine shape. So I'll accept the name Kulkunna as androgynous, and will refer to per using third-person, neutral pronouns modeled on the system Marge Piercy uses in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).^[41]

Thirty years back, Kulkunna had a serious illness and eventually per heartbeat and breathing stopped. Pe had a near-death, out-of-body experience. In a vision, Kulkunna starts "inside a dark house," which has a door pe opens. "At once the wind blew it wide open . . . and the house shriveled up behind me like an empty bladder. I stood in a tremendous place of light and wind. Under my feet was only light and wind, the force of the wind bearing me up." Pe falls, of course, and "was terrified. I closed my eyes in fear, but it made no difference: there was no darkness there." Soon, though, Kulkunna begins to feel like a feather -an important symbol in Always Coming Home and, at least in Egyptian religion, associated with judgment after death, light, air, and supporting the sky ("Egyptian Religion" 505). In any event, Kulkunna says "I began to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light, and joy" and would just as soon stay there (ACH 271).

Kulkunna feels called back, and goes, and the vision continues, seeing with "mind's eye that all my senses could perceive was themselves, that they were making the world by casting shadows on the bright void of the wind. I saw that living was catching at shadows with hands of light. I did not want to come back to that. But the doctors' art made me come back, pulling at me, and their singing drew me back, calling me home" (ACH 272). This is a rather solipsistic vision, related to recent ideas in our culture on the construction of reality. It may not fit in well with the general view among the Kesh that human people are part of a larger whole that, I would think, can exist without us (see, e.g., 297). Still, this vision is appropriate to the "many voices" structure of Always Coming Home and the idea of different truth for different people. Also, this vision fits in with the premise of Le Guin's "Pathways of Desire" that we do indeed create worlds between our ears -and with the internal debate on the social construction of reality in the Churten group stories in Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994). Most important, Kulkunna's vision presents imagery of shadow, void, and light that is a Le Guinian constant.

The end of this very brief story? The main song Kulkunna hears is Blackfern of the Black Adobe's calling per back "to walk here now," not go with the "shining." Blackfern died when Kulkunna was a child, so pe listens and obeys: "I became my ashes. I became my dark body and its illness once again" but goes on to get cured and, taking care, remaining well and becoming a doctor (272).

Male Junco wants Truth before he dies, a certain, absolute Truth; and he gets nothing. Kulkunna dies and sees perhaps what Meshe saw in trying to see the meaning of life: "no darkness," "bright void" (ACH 271, 272 [LHD ch. 12]). Perhaps what Meshe saw is true enough and the ultimate truth and sole certainty. In Left Hand Faxe the Weaver asks Genly Ai to tell per, "What is sure, predictable, inevitable -the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine." Ai responds as we should expect: "That we shall die" (71; ch. 5). Ungendered (for us) Kulkunna returns to life, even if life is living in a "dark body" that may become the "ashes" of a body diseased; life is darkening snow with our footsteps and shadows (LHD), "casting shadows on the bright void."

Between Kulkunna's story and "The Dog at the Door" are two «mundane» pieces. "White Tree" is a beautiful little memorial by a grandchild to a grandfather. The grandfather's last name -i.e., name picked last in life -was White Tree, and we learn the he learned with (not from, Pandora notes) his uncle and worked with pear trees to produce a variety that would grow better in the Valley and produce a better pear for the Valley people to eat. His grandchild hopes "that he may be remembered for a while when pear trees are planted or orchards praised" (273-75).^[42] "The Third Child's Story" by Spotted Goat of the Obsidian of Madidinou, is the life story of a loser and a nasty trouble-maker, but one who writes lively verse, with a darkly-comic tone. "Third Child" is his poem, beginning with his birth to a mother named "Careless" and ending with his decision after a life as a "superfluous person, / a low-quality person" with a small soul to stay where he is because "all the towns are just the same, / people are just the same": no damn good, and Spotted Goat will stay where he is just to spite them. If a map without utopia is not worth looking at, as Oscar Wilde said, a utopia inhabited only by the smugly wise is also not worth looking at: Homo sapiens sapiens -the Wise, Wise Man -is a grim joke as the name of our species, so a culture of the wise is not immediately relevant for us; and smug utopians are boring. Spotted Goat is a runt from one of Coyote's litters, who has lived an unmindful, irresponsible life; he (ironically) enriches Kesh culture, and his yapping prepares well for the earnest matters to follow.

*

"The Dog at the Door" and Flicker of the Serpentine (280-304)

"The Dog at the Door" is a very brief "record of a vision" submitted anonymously; the Narrator has no gender, no name, no house. This person follows a dog to "a deep well lined with stone" and looks down into the well and sees the sky. "I stood between the sky above and the sky below": in a center, then, as in Meshe's vision (LHD ch. 12) or "An Orgota Creation Myth" (ch. 17), with a daylight version of the main image in Le Guin's short story "The Stars Below" (1973). In what may be "overdetermined," as some psychologists say, by the center location, the story-teller asks, "Must all things end?" and gets the answer,

The dog reappears, with a bag in its mouth with "the souls of the human beings of the world." The teller takes the bag and went along with the dog. The sky clears and the tellers sees "that the mountains had fallen. Where they had been, where the Valley had been, there was a great plain." There are people on the plain, each with a bag full of either seeds or little stones. "The stones in the bags made a whispering as they moved together, saying, 'In the end is no end. To build with us, unbuild with us'" (281).

I'm not sure what this all means, but it does show a humans-only Sartrean plain and a universe of impermanence combined with a kind of ultimate stability. As with Koheleth and Heraclitus, Kali and Shiva, Yin-Yang and the movement of the Dao (or with D. H. Lawrence): the reality of things is a cycle of cycles of dissolution and re-creation. A very mortal world, and simultaneously, unending.

And then comes the linearly last and thematically central story in this section of Always Coming Home: the story of "The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine of Telina-na," a woman -very much a female speaker -who has had "the experience of Immanence," very much capital "I" Immanence.

Like a reversed mirror image of the male protagonist of "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" in Joanna Russ's story, as a very young child Flicker had seen people in rooms, people invisible to everyone else, getting her mother to think that Flicker might have "the third eye" and should use it by becoming a doctor (ACH 282-83). Flicker turns away from these people only she sees, and they leave her, and she becomes a fairly normal teenage girl-woman: in love with horses (286), an occasional thief of booze, in with a group of dopers (287). She "did not want the world to be as it was" and began "making up the world." Most specifically, she nurses an infatuation for a forbidden love: a young man of the Serpentine of Chukulmas, her own house -a "brother," with whom sex would be incest (284, 287). Flicker wants to die (287), and at this low-point she has her central vision. It's a complex one.

It begins with her looking at Black Oak, an ordinary enough man, and seeing not him "but the Serpentine. It was a rock person . . . ," a human being made of serpentine. Serpentine hits her, or she falls -or undergoes something that hurts her head -and she is stunned (288). When she can look up again, she sees Serpentine put hands to navel and pull apart the body, opening "a long, wide rent . . . like the doorway of a room" that she is to enter. Flicker tells us she thinks "the rest of the vision all took place in the stone; that is where it all happened and was; but because of the human way human people have to see things, it seemed to change, and to be other places, things, and beings." Flicker finds herself "in the earth, part of the dirt," feeling the feelings of dirt. Rain starts and she could "feel rain coming into the dirt," feeling "in a way that was like seeing." Waking and sleeping, Flicker perceives. "I began feeling stones and roots, and along my left side I began to feel and hear cold water running, a creek in the rainy season. . . . Near the creek I began to feel the deep roots of trees" and other life (289).

The vision shifts here, but I want to deal with this passage, since it so powerfully invokes both capital "I" Immanence and the great fear with which those who will fully accept immanence vs. transcendence must deal: death, the grave, being in and becoming dirt. Or mud (see EoH 116-17, ch. 8; 176-77, ch. 11, and passim). The passage can be put in useful dialog with what I'll call the "Erdschweinhöhle" -"Aardvark hole" -meditation in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a section that deals with a number of motifs of great interest to readers of Le Guin (although Gravity's Rainbow has not been read by Le Guin).^[43]

Part of Pynchon's meditation includes a bit of ethnography about the poorest group among the Herero people, whose totem animal was "the Erdschwein [earth-pig] or aardvark." Leaving the area of these people, a White might be able to perceive a

In the Zone (the spreading War, the metastasizing Western world), the point-of-view character feels, "The Erdschweinhöhle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of word made flesh, flesh moving toward something else...." (321).

Flicker's vision is more optimistic. Pynchon's Hereros see a binary choice: they can choose "between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense" (318) and Pynchon's Hereros will complete the Germans' job of extermination begun in Southwestern Africa by committing tribal suicide (317-18, 323). They will not attempt a return to tribal life and wholeness after the time of European sickness. They won't try to get back to the Immanence symbolized by the aardvark-hole. As Stevens stressed in her 1989 SFRA presentation, Le Guin offers no opportunity for "restitution" to massacred Indians. In Le Guin's words, "The people who lived in the Valley are silent, now and forever. We did not listen to them. We -my people -killed them without hearing one word they said." In Le Guin's view, "at the very root and center" of Always Coming Home "there is that: a silence, and an act of contrition. Not of reparation. There is no reparation. But inside my dance of celebration of humanity set in the dreamtime future [of ACH] there is another dance, a spiral going the other way into the past, not touching; a dance for the dead, in silence" ("Legends" 10). In my prosaic words, much of Le Guin's point in Always Coming Home is creating a mâshâl in which exterminated tribes do return insofar as their cultures are recreated in words and imagination.^[45] And among the imagined Kesh and their neighbors there is a returning to life.

Even so, as a kind of mystic microcosm. Flicker does not get trapped but gets "moving toward something else." Le Guin has Flicker have it that the "human way human people have to see things" causes perception of change. So Flicker sees the rain -a classic symbol for revival, new life, renewal -as "ladders of rain" and climbs them out of her version of the aardvark-hole to the "stairways of cloud" and on to the "path of wind," where she gets a crucial helper: Coyote (289), the totem animal of the Eighth House (the House of the wind) and the Kesh symbol for change ([47], 49).^[46]

Coyote asks Flicker if and then where Flicker wants to go, and Flicker says she wants to go to the Sun, taking her from the Eighth House (associated with Coyote, wilderness, "across") into the Ninth (Hawk, Eternity, "out" [47]). Going across then out, Flicker sees a jerky history of the world, one which is hard to describe: "Seeing with the hawk's eyes is being without self. Self is mortal. That is the House of eternity." Where there is no self, "When there is no I nor she{,} there is no story" (290). What Flicker can tell us about her hawk-vision is that she saw "the universe of power" -as power -as decorous for the daughter of an electrician and an apprentice electrician herself (in our job descriptions). In its purest form, this ultimate world was and is -if the more mystical interpretations of modern physics are correct (Capra chs. 13-15) -a "network, field, and line of energies of all the beings, stars and galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust, the lace and foam of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected, every part part of another part and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed." In her moment of vision, "the electrical mental network of the City" of Mind, "that vast web" of cybernetic high technology in all its light-year magnitude immensity "was one momentary glitter of light on one wave on the ocean of the universe of power" -not being this time but "the universe of power" (ACH 290-91).^[47]

Atman is Brahman. Self is universe. A human being cannot maintain the vision of Being for very long, nor can the Real be described at length without falling into bathos. Both Flicker and Le Guin move on into "a descent or drawing away" where things are describable. Following what seems like Buddhist tradition, they move from Being-as-Power to a "lesser place or plane, which was what might be called the gods or the divine, beings enacted possibilities{sic}. These I, being human, recall as having human form." The gods, however, are not Buddhist deities or Native American woge. The one Flicker remembers is a form of Hephaestus (Vulcan) the Greco-Roman metal-smith to the gods. Flicker applies the categories of the Kesh and sees the Hephaestus figure as a member of the Miller's Art; this is decorous for her, and also useful for Le Guin, elegantly alluding to literal milling of grain, the saying "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but very fine," and to William Blake's great vision of "dark Satanic Mills" destroying "England's green and pleasant land," and people (Preface to Milton [1804-08]).

Hephaestus in the vision "shaped the vibrations of energies, closing their paths from gyre into wheel . . . . making wheels of energy closed upon themselves, terrible with power, flaming. He who made them was burnt away by them . . . but still he turned the paths of energy and closed them into wheels, locking power into power." These wheels of the god grind slowly, perhaps, but turn all around them "black and hollow." Other beings appear, looking like birds,

We have in this Vision, I think, a recapitulation of our history and a foretelling of the outcome of Stone Telling's story: the outcome of the crisis approaching the Kesh. Haephestus/Vulcan is one of the possibilities that may be enacted out of the infinite possibilities inherent in Being; he is an appropriate god to represent our civilization, a civilization that did, in Always Coming Home, keep "growing and joining until the whole machine was interlocked cog within cog," finally "burning, exploding, destroyed, falling into black dust" (291).

The rest of Flicker's story is Flicker's learning to live with her vision, learning "to speak sky with an earth tongue," approaching "the condition of living in both Towns," of "being oneself in the world" (292-93), learning "the techniques of revisioning, of recounting," of "recalling" and music (298).

She also has to learn to deal with Milk, an ungentle, celibate woman who works with words and has little respect for Flicker's male teacher, Tarweed, who "worked with words, drum, and matrix chanting." She also contemns Tarweed because he is a man. Flicker recalls that Milk "In the Lodge" had said "the old gibe" that "A man fucks with his brain and thinks with his penis." Flicker thinks that Tarweed knew what Milk thought, "but intellectual men are used to having their capacities doubted and their achievements snubbed . . . ." Flicker tries to defend him, but her own freedom from sexist attitudes only goes so far as, ". . . he thinks like a woman!" (293-94). These are reversals probably of use to young readers; for older readers, the more interesting part of this section of the story is Flicker's coming to understand that Milk is tough on her because Milk envies her for "going ahead," being ahead of her in the visionary calling (302-03). There is a moral here, I think: A great soul like Ged, teaching and using Arren in Farthest Shore, can willingly encourage a young person to lead; most people can't. Flicker also has to learn how to avoid a return to "making up the world" (300) as she had done with her infatuation with her Serpentine brother. Interestingly, she gets her name, Flicker, and important but bad (William Blakean? Sadean? D. H. Lawrencean?) advice from an old woman in a vision: "What are you sulking about? Why don't you go fuck with your [House] brother in Chukulmas? Desire unacted is corruption. Must Not is a slave-owner. Ought Not is a slave. Energy constrained turns the wheels of evil. . . . How can you gyre, how can you handle power, chained like that? Superstition! Superstition!" (295). Flicker may accept that "Vision is transgression!" always and necessarily (294), but she is not going to violate her people's incest taboo. She gets better advice from Deertongue, "A woman-living man of the Serpentine of Wakwaha." He tells Flicker to follow Coyote's advice "at the beginning of it all": to wit, "take it easy"; he also gets her to admit that her vision in the Ninth House is the center of her life, which she needs to recognize and, probably, let go (299).

It is significant that Le Guin does not idealize women in the "Flicker" story and that she presents without comments on any need to change his life, a male homosexual (?) or transvestite. Not a gay man in our sense, but, apparently, closer to the "One in every several hundred Yurok men, on the average" who "preferred the life and dress of a woman," a tendency, A. L. Kroeber tells us, that was "not combated, but socially recognized by the Indians of California . . . probably by all the tribes of the continent north of Mexico" (Handbook 46).^[48] This is significant for Le Guin's later work; for now we can follow Flicker down from mystic vision -backward in Always Coming Home as a physical book -to the world of myth, and thence down toward mundane considerations of war and peace, politics, and family.

*

Time and the City section (149-72)

"Big Man and Little Man" starts with a retelling of a Japanese creation myth, I think, combined with Genesis (1.1-2.24) and the Western mystical idea that the first act of creation was God's withdrawal, to allow space for a creation to take place in. "Big Man and Little Man" starts with Big man having created the stars with his semen (or so "they say") and filling up all of the universe outside the world: "There wasn't room for anything else" (ACH 157), an image for gods and men too full of themselves. ^[49] Big Man sees "the world inside, and he wanted to be in it, get it pregnant with himself, or maybe he wanted to eat it, get it inside himself," anyway, get possession of it. Big Man couldn't get into the world, though, "He could only see it backwards." So he sends across "a Little Man," with "his head on backwards." Little Man doesn't like the little world, "So Big Man put him to sleep and while he was sleeping made a thing like a woman out of dirt, out of red adobe, they say. It looked like a woman, it fooled Little Man . . . ." Big Man tells Little Man to "go there and breed," which he does: Little Man "took the thing and went back inside the world. He fucked it and it made copies. He kept doing that until there were as many of him as mosquitoes . . . . All the same, no matter how many of him there were, he didn't like it there. He was afraid. He didn't belong there inside the world, he had no mother, only a father. So he killed whatever he was afraid of" (157-58), which is pretty much everything. "He was really afraid of water, because of the way water is" (158). That last point refers to Daoist ideas on water, but primarily to the American Indian idea that "The white people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth. The rocks say, 'Don't. You are hurting me.'" But water "can't be hurt. The white people go to the river and turn it into dry land. The water says, 'I don't care. I am water" (qtd "Legends" 5).^[50]

Anyway, with the exception of water, Little Man and his descendants -we, civilized humanity -managed to destroy most of the world, finally poisoning the sea. So the world is corrupted, and Big Man declares, "It's nothing but corruption, that world!" and turns away and leaves. The vermin of the world come sneaking back and eat the dead: "They made it food." Some human people had somehow gotten born, "born with mothers," even, and survived (158). These new human people "weren't afraid" but were low enough, hungry enough, and smart enough to ask "the coyotes to help them," which brings Coyote herself. "Where she walked she made the wilderness. She dug the canyons, she shat mountains" and the world is renewed. "Things went on, people went on," leading to the world of Always Coming Home, "Only Little Man didn't go on. He was dead. He died of fear" (159).

The story "A Hole in the Air" works a major variation on the Karok/Yurok motif of the sky hole: changing a vertical trip into the sky world above into a temporal trip back in time to our civilization. In Le Guin's allegory, a man finds a hole in the air, "up near Pass Valley," we're told, "in the Range of Light" (154), a symbolically appropriate place for a kind of time-portal to an age in some ways (as the saying has it) "blinded by the light." The man goes "through the hole to the outside world," i.e., outside the world, into our world: civilization, "Life As We Know It" (Norton 35). This is the land of "The backward-head people," where the food is poisoned, and roads with fast-moving automobiles are everywhere, where there are very few people around besides human people and all seems to be "walls and roofs, . . . roads and houses." The human people there "had electrical wires in their ears, and were deaf. They smoked tobacco day and night, and were continually making war." The Kesh man tries to "get away from the war by going on, but . . . they lived everywhere" (156).^[51] The Kesh man "died of grief and poison," and his people "took the pole house down and let the wind blow" away the hole in the air (157).

Again, from a Kesh point of view, we are the woge, the first people, who prepared the world for them by perversely unmaking the world, and we are outside the world, dangerous, and insane. That's the MORAL, and in case we don't get it, these stories are part of a kind of exposition sandwich.

After our author/editor Pandora has lamented killing off our civilization -imaging the death of a culture is far from genocide but less than innocent -and implicating us (147-48), we get "The City" section of Time and the City. This section subdivides into exposition on Yaivkach: The City of Mind, Wudun: The Exchanges, and Tavkach: The City of Man. The City of Mind and the Exchanges are the extraordinarily evolved computer network in the world of the Kesh and their neighbors, descended from human technology but now mostly outside of the human world. The City of Man is civilization:

In the middle of Time and the City, there is "A Note on the Backward-Head People," the most terrifying "ghoul" in the Valley; because we are the horror folks who gave the Kesh and the other survivors on Earth those "vast regions" desolated "through release of radioactive or poisonous substances, the permanent genetic impairment from which they suffered most directly in the form of sterility, stillbirth, and congenital disease" (159). Our legacy to them has been "war, plague, famine, holocaust, and Fimbul Winter" (148) -of the nuclear variety, apparently, not the one out of Norse legend. Which brings us back to war, a central metaphor for our activity from a Kesh point of view: "They" -we -"smoked tobacco day and night, and were continually making war" (156).

"A War With the Pig People" and Commentary (129-34)

In his "Reactionary Utopias" article, Gregory Benford accuses Le Guin of an "aversion for violence" and avoiding in her work both violence and "the problem of evil" (16-18), in Benford's context, the practical problems caused by human evil. (There is no "problem of evil" in a theological sense for Le Guin, nor for Benford in his article.) I think one could say with equal truth, and equal error, that Le Guin is obsessed by the problem of warfare as large-scale, organized violence. Set as they are in Europe, however modified by an imaginary country, Malafrena and Orsinian Tales have war, insurrection, and the threat of war as a recurrent theme. And in Le Guin's SF and fantasy there is organized fighting, outright warfare, the threat of warfare, or repression through institutional violence or the threat of violence in Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions (agents of the Shing destroy Terrans who seek to organize), The Word for World Is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven ("offstage"), The Left Hand of Darkness, King Dog, "The Matter of Seggri," The Eye of the Heron, A Wizard of Earthsea, and The Dispossessed -i.e., most of Le Guin's major works and some minor ones. As I have stressed, Always Coming Home is very much concerned with war, and I will be getting into the question of war in detail in the discussion of Stone Telling's narrative. First, however, we need to get back to the accusation against our culture that we smoke tobacco and make war continually. How does the man in "A Hole in the Air" know about warfare, and what does warfare have to do with nicotine addiction? The Gethenian languages don't have a word for war; how is it that Kesh does?

The short and simple answer is that the people of the Valley of the Na, like their Indian predecessors along the Klamath River and "primitives" most places indeed had warfare; it's just that what they mean by "war" is very different from our meaning. That difference is made clear in "A War with the Pig People" by Strong of the Yellow Adobe of Tachas Touchas (ACH 129-34).

This narrative is significantly called a "History": to say nothing of the negative implications of "history" in Always Coming Home, it is still an old insult that conquerors make history, plus widows and orphans; and much of what is thought of and taught as history is about wars. In this brief history, an unusually large number of Pig People stay around Tachas Touchas longer than usual, and "Their pigs were all over the hunting side." A man from both the Bay Laurel Lodge and the hunters of the town -after due consultation -goes over and politely asks the Pig People to keep their pigs out of the hunting area.

This response angers the Bay Laurel people and the hunters. They meet and "agreed to have a war with the Pig People after [the celebration called] the Moon. Nobody spoke against it." Three people of the town go to the Pig camp and eat with them. "After everybody had eaten we sat around being polite, until Dream Eagle fetched out the tobacco and the pipe. He said, 'Will you smoke with us?'" Some thirty-one of the Pig men but no women smoke with the three people from town (129). "Four women and thirteen men" from the town "had agreed to fight the war." They negotiate when and where the war is to occur, then the townsfolk go home, with Strong noting that he was drunk and sick from smoking: smoking tobacco was not mere recreation or a bad habit among the California Indians, and, except for problem people under the influence of the Condor, isn't a common activity among the Kesh and their neighbors.

The ad hoc warriors from the town prepare weapons and ammunition "and people who had fought wars before talked to us and trained us"; and, of course, they all perform the proper rituals (130). Dream Eagle is chosen as "the war chief so he could tell us what to do and not do," but we are not told the method of selection. When the war begins, "Most of the Pig men stayed high up in the brush and shot from there. I think all of them had guns, but they were not all good guns. We had three very good guns made by Himpi the Gunsmith, and eight good ones. The rest of us had chosen to fight with knives or without weapons" (131). Dream Eagle is killed; Black (a young woman) is killed; Sun's Son is killed; and a fourteen- and fifteen-year-old behave bravely: running after the Pig People and shouting insults at them (132). A Pig man signals for peace, "and people called out, 'It is over, it is over'" (133). The Pig People move on, and the victors, more or less, of Tachas Touchas "went through purification ceremonies." Strong ends with what seems to be a compliment for both sides: "They were brave and true warriors in that war" (133).

Well, someone my age would call it a "rumble," except that when the word "rumble" was used, guns were usually not used (see West Side Story [film: 1961]). Clear of the Yellow Adobe of Tachas Touchas calls the war much stronger things and is angry at its adult participants.

Counting coup, in the fashion of the Plains Indians, is obviously a kind of game; California Indians usually raided to avenge an affront they took seriously. I agree with Clear, though: rumbles have rules and, ideally, clear winners and losers; from an anthropological point of view, they are games for the rowdier among two or more groups' adolescents. What the Kesh lack is "large, hierarchically governed nation-states, the mobilizable entity that is the essential factor in modern war" ("Is Gender Necessary?" LoN [1979]: 164), nor do they have hierarchically governed city-states that were the essential factor in early ancient warfare. So their violence remains fairly personal, small-scale, and regulated. Violence is not celebrated as the defining act of manhood; war is not seen as the highest vocation of gentlemen or the noble man, or the greatest, most meaningful, most value-bestowing activity of a civilization. Warfare among adults, to Clear of Tachas Touchas, is "mindless, weak, and shameful" -and, in the Valley, literally ludicrous.

A hierarchically governed city-state and the glorification of war are exactly what the Dayao, the Condor people, have, and we get to see it in detail in the three parts of Stone Telling's story, and appended material (ACH 7-42, 173-201, 340-86).

Stone Telling is a "liminal" person, one of Le Guin's "Exiles and Envoys," to use Kathleen L. Spencer's suggestive phrase and highly useful analysis. Her mother is Kesh, her father Dayao, and her quest for her self, for Home, takes her from the Valley to The City of the Condor -a City of Man -and then (fulfilling the quest pattern) back again, re-integrated into her world and, in Always Coming Home, the world: "To be whole is to be part; true journey is return" (Odo's tombstone, TD 68; ch. 3). Her movement "There and Back Again" allows her to see and show us not only her utopian world of the Kesh but also the imperialist dystopia of the Condor.^[53] In the movement between utopian and dystopian worlds, she is somewhat like the protagonist in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), or the "J's" in Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). "Genre writers and readers," as Le Guin has written, "share a common stock of concepts, icons, images, manners, and patterns, precisely as the musicians and audiences of Haydn's and Mozart's time shared a materia musica which the composer was expected, not to shatter or transcend, but to use and make variations on" (Norton 21). So Stone Telling joins other women travelers from one world to another and back again, helping to answer the question, "How shall a human being live well, then?" In the context of Always Coming Home, the question includes how we might set up cultures and societies that actively encourage -and avoiding creating cultures that discourage -good living.

The most relevant analogy for the politics of Stone Telling's journey may be an earlier work that Always Coming Home reflects in a reversing and distorting mirror image: Yevgeny Zamyatin's modernist dystopia, We (ca. 1920).^[54] We starts in dystopia and mostly stays there, with a test of a space vehicle turning out to be no way out of dystopia and only a quick trip beyond the City's quite literal Wall. "Man ceased to be a wild animals," We's male protagonist-arrator, D-503 tells us, "only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a savage only when we had built the Green Wall, when we had isolated our perfect mechanical world from the irrational, hideous world of trees, birds, animals ..." (93; Seventeenth Entry), enclosing "infinity behind a wall" -outside it, I think -"terrified to glance outside the wall" (40-41; Eighth Entry). D-503 is a man of the City, initially well-integrated into his world. The plot of We has him meeting I-330, a sensual woman and revolutionary, and being led by her to discovery of transgressive sex and politics, and losing his integration: i.e., going insane. D-503 finally is captured by the authorities and cured by having his imagination excised, but there is a chance the rebellion of the forces of energy and change will defeat the City and its stasis.

In the background of We is

It turns out that a "small remnant" survived also outside the Wall, to become the wild, savage Mephi -as in "Mephistophilis" (C. Marlowe) or "Mephistopheles" (Goethe) or "Mephisto." These savages are the "half" that must unite with the civilized for full humanity (163); in any event, they represent nature and energy. I-330 tells D-503 "There are two forces in the world -entropy and energy. One leads to blissful quietude, to happy equilibrium; the other to destruction of equilibrium, to tormentingly endless movement. Entropy was worshipped as God by our -or rather, your -ancestors, the Christians. But we anti-Christians, we ..." (165; Twenty-eighth Entry). She never finishes the sentence, but that doesn't matter much for We and is irrelevant for us. What's relevant here is the City/Village split and Always Coming Home's literally re-evaluating some basic terms of Zamyatin's formula. Le Guin indeed puts her protoJudeo-Christians within the walls of the City and the people integrated into nature into wall-less villages in the shape of the double-spiral heyiya-if (ACH 3); but it is the Condor who hold the promise of action, destruction, and "tormentingly endless movement," or at least busy-ness.

Le Guin is revisiting and re-visioning, I think, her own City of Illusions (1967). There she had tried to balance "The forest of the mind" (inhabited by humans in households) with the City and civilization: civilization "not as a negative force -restrain, constraint, repression, authority -but as an opportunity lost, an ideal of truth. The City as goal and dream" (LoN [1979]: 147). In her introduction to the 1978 re-issue of City of