He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. . . . From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron . . . . Revelation 19.13-16 (see also Matt. 10.34-36)

In her Introduction to Buffalo Gals (1987), Ursula K. Le Guin gives us a very brief Le Guinian unMessianic vision (so to speak), starting with the way things are now: a cat appears "And the cat will say," quoting Rudyard Kipling, "'I am the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to me!' And the Man"-colloquial "man," biblical Man and street-slang, the Man- "infuriated by this failure to acknowledge Hierarchy," by the Cat, animals, women, kids, unruly men, "will throw his boots and his little stone ax . . . at the Cat. Only when the Man listens, and attends . . . and hears, and understands, will the Cat return to the Cat's true silence." And this vision of the better world Le Guin ends with, "When the word is not sword, but shuttle" (BG 12).

Against the word as sword, dividing and (thereby?) killing, Le Guin places the literal image of a dancing woman-the printer's mark ending each section of Buffalo Gals-and the word-image of the word as shuttle, weaving the world. Both images are important for Buffalo Gals and Le Guin's work in the mid 1980s, but I am going to stress the shuttle (see my discussion of Le Guin's poetry and King Dog for the dancer). In City of Illusion and The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin could present the City and civilization at least ambiguously positively. By 1985, she could go along with a view Brian W. Aldiss presented in 1964 in The Dark Light Years, a satire of great brilliance and bitterness. After hard experience and some thought one of Aldiss's characters concludes "that civilization was the distance man placed between himself and everything else" (69). In The Dark Light Years, that setting up of civilized "barriers" turns out to be very dangerous. The idea of civilization as distance from the world, and the dangers of such distance, is the main moral of Always Coming Home (1985). Here I want to talk about a shorter, mostly gentler volume than Always Coming Home, making the same point about the Man and civilization, Le Guin's 1987 collection Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences, especially the beginning and ending pieces from 1985-87, and the general shifting in significance of the collected stories (and a poem or two) in the context of, as parts of, this particular collection.

Against myths of the word as sword and holiness and consciousness as separation, Le Guin again sets the worldview common in the stories of many "of the hundreds of Indian tribes that were once scattered from the tip of Florida to the Alaskan straits," where-as the editor of my undergraduate folklore collection put it, "the line between a grass plant, an animal, man, and the stars was very thin." In many American Indian tales, definitely including those collected by Le Guin's father, A. L. Kroeber, "The plant possessed a soul, beasts could speak, men changed into stars, and stars became men. Everywhere in nature there were spirits, both good and bad, who took an active, and occasionally . . . crucial part in human affairs. Everywhere, too, there were animal powers. Sometimes . . . the culture hero of the tribe is a bird. At other times, . . . he is a coyote . . ." (Rugoff 95). Or she is: a point we will get to shortly.

Coyote on one side, on the other side an opponent that that "unconsistent Taoist and . . . consistent unChristian," Critical-Romantic Ursula K. Le Guin has been taking on for years.

In 1969, in The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai says to Estraven, "Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species." Estraven responds, "The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity." And Ai says, of this exotic sect of androgynes, the Yomeshta, "Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures" (233; ch. 16). In 1987, the US Kulturkampfen, our "culture wars," were well under way and the Christian Right moving toward significant power; and in 1987, in the Introduction to Buffalo Gals, Le Guin was gracious about allowing exceptions, but far more explicit about which set of cults she had most in mind:

This is the beginning of Buffalo Gals, followed immediately by Denise Levertov's 1961 poem "Come into Animal Presence," which Le Guin calls the book's "true introduction." Then comes the important story, written for the volume, "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight." Buffalo Gals, the collection, ends with Le Guin's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Eighth Elegy" (1922) from The Duino Elegies and, the very last piece in the volume, Le Guin's mâshâl "She Unnames Them" (1985). The Rilke poem is important for Le Guin, but "She Unnames Them" is crucial.²  Le Guin says in her brief introduction to "She Unnames Them" in Buffalo Gals that "She Unnames Them" is the story "that had to come last . . . because it states (equivocally, of course) whose side (so long as sides must be taken) I am on and what the consequences (maybe) are" (191).

In its original context in The New Yorker, "She Unnames Them" appeared to me mostly a revisiting of Le Guin's earlier story, "A Trip to the Head" (1970), just with a female protagonist and a tone that was simultaneously quieter and lighter, more politically engaged-and funnier-than "A Trip to the Head." Or it was the inverting of parts of City of Illusions (1967): a book starting with a movement out of the forest and into civilization in a kind of birth into human consciousness-and a book ending with the finding of a true name and a blasting off into space (in an image, arguably, of phallic transcendence). Insofar as it was a mâshâl undoing the naming of the animals by Adam (Genesis 2.18-20), "She Unnames Them" in The New Yorker seemed to me a mâshâl in the sense of "mild satire" against Man-centered, word-centered civilization. As the last work and word in Buffalo Gals, however, "She Unnames Them" is mâshâl in the stronger sense of an (anti)Prophecy: the word doing work in the world, here, undoing the work of words. As the note in my Bible to Genesis 2.19 says, "Naming the animals signifies man's dominion over them . . . ." In the context of Buffalo Gals and doing much to establish the context of Buffalo Gals, "She Unnames Them" is a willing ("equivocally, of course") of the removal of names, the removal of dominion, which would make the animals at least seem "far closer than when their names had stood between" us and "them like a clear barrier" (195). Unnaming the animals becomes an unmaking of patriarchal creation, not just an individual return to namelessness and the unconscious as in "A Trip to the Head" (WTQ 165). It is an unbuilding of the first and thickest wall between humans and the world.

"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" is a familiar Le Guinian work in having two contrasting worlds; and it is somewhat like The Beginning Place (1980) in that one of these worlds is fantastic. What is different in "Buffalo Gals" is that its central character has just dropped into the world of fantasy at the beginning of the story and is just about to leave it at the end. Both technically and more figuratively, the point of view is almost entirely that of the main character, and she stays in the world in which she has landed. We have in this story the motif of a passage through a portal (looking-glass, back of the wardrobe, hole in the air), to there and back again, but the journeys in and out are only implied. What is a secondary world in most fantasy is the primary world in "Buffalo Gals."

And this is decorous. From the point of view of a stereotypical civilized reader, the world of the story is fantasy or, possibly at best, "magic realism," retelling a Kiplingesque Jungle Book story with a female protagonist: Mowgli in girl's clothes.³  >From the point of view of a more insightful civilized reader, "Buffalo Gals" is a fable: a story with talking animals that teaches some lessons. But from a quite different point of view, "Buffalo Gals" is an important story in the Coyote Cycle, also with variations, but a Coyote story: a wild-assed realistic tale, but realistic in terms of other realities than those of a stereotypical civilized reader.

"Buffalo Gals" is one of the Coyote stories where Coyote is the star but not the protagonist or hero. Coyote is a trickster-if you believe in archetypes, an embodiment of Trickster-given a local habitation and a name in the American West. "Buffalo Gals" is an unusual Coyote story in that Coyote is female: a she-coyote and a human woman. Unusual, as far as my knowledge of folklore goes, but not overly challenging even for a narrow-minded male reader. Coyote "cause[d] the world" in one character's formulation (BG 43), "made it," according to Coyote, "Every goddam{sic} sage bush" (22); and Coyote is a horny old coyote, roaming the world. Coyote's ontological status is heavily paradoxical; to worry about her sex or gender is definitely, as we said in the 1960s, to sweat the small stuff.

"Buffalo Gals" begins with direct address by a coyote: "'You fell out of the sky,' the coyote said" (17). The "you" is soon identified as a girl, and the coyote-still lower-case "c"-goes on to specify that the girl fell out of "a burned place in the sky." In realistic terms in our world, the girl was in an air-accident in a light plane. In realistic terms in Coyote's world, the girl has fallen out of "Civilization as we know it," "the City of Man," the dry land of "The backward-head people" (ACH 152-59) into a world of life.

The plot of "Buffalo Gals" starts with the conversation welcoming the girl, or Gal, Myra, into the world Coyote made; it ends with Myra going to see Spider Woman, called here "(the) Grandmother": the webster who weaves the larger universe of which even Coyote is part (50-51; § 5 [also 37, 42-43]). Grandmother tells Myra that she will be able to live her life well among the civilized, and that she, Grandmother, will "be there too"; she will be in Myra's dreams and ideas, "in dark corners in the basement." And the Gal turns away and "starts up the night slope towards the next day" and civilization, with Chickadee, for most of the way, flying before her (BG 51).⁴ 

That's the beginning and end of "Buffalo Gals." The incidents that make up the middle are, in linear order: Coyote bringing Gal into Coyote's town; Blue Jay's having a healing dance for her and replacing her missing, destroyed, or injured eye with one of pine pitch (BG 28-29; § 2)-as in one of the Native American tales of Coyote; Gal's learning to live with Coyote and bit by bit adopting her as a mother; Coyote's having her male friends over for sex (a repeated motif); Gal's forming a true friendship only with Horned Toad Child, and wanting-something (35); Horned Toad's advising her to see Horse; a ride on Horse to a human place (a ranch), with Chickadee scouting ahead (36-40; § 3); a talk between Gal and Chickadee about the nature of things once, and how times have changed; a trip with Coyote to a civilized place, where Coyote likes the action-e.g., getting shot at (47; § 4)-and likes the food, and in her greed accepts as an "offering" (48) a poisoned smoked salmon, which she eats and dies from; Gal's burying Coyote's body; returning to town; and being taken to Grandmother to learn that Coyote "gets killed all the time" and get sent back, acquiescing to what she must do, to civilization (50-51; § 5).

Woven into this linear plot, collected in a figurative carrying bag and laid out before us, are the conversations motivated by the plot and the associated symbols and motifs, all helping get across the point of the story.

The major symbol is, of course, Coyote, and the major motif what we may see as either transformations or double vision-Shakespearean, Blakean-Romantic, antiNewtonian double vision.⁵  At the beginning of the story, Coyote is "the coyote" and ungendered, seen with her one good eye by the as-yet-unnamed "the child" as a standard-issue, US coyote: "a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick" (17; § 1). Except that the coyote talks.

As the story progresses, "the coyote" becomes a "she-coyote" as the child notices her nipples (19: § 1), and then ambiguously "Coyote," without the article but as the first word of sentences (20-21), and finally and unambiguously Coyote when Coyote starts behaving like Coyote in some of the more vulgar legends: "'Piss on the fire!' she cried, and did so, standing straddling it. 'Ah, steam between the legs!' she said. The child, embarrassed, thought she was supposed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not. Bareassed, Coyote danced around the dampened fire," singing a chorus of "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" (21; § 1). In the meantime, the coyote's appearance has changed. One moment, "The child turned. She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried up carcass of a crow"; next moment, "She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire," cooking food in a pot (20; § 1).⁶  Coyote calls the child "Gal," and we learn that her name in our world is "Myra" (22; § 1). And then Gal and Coyote go to Coyote's town, where she is greeted as "new person" (23; § 1). This phrase is significant.

"Buffalo Gals" teaches that "Things are woven together"-everything-and that "When we lived together," human and nonhuman people, "it was all one place"; the world was one. As Chickadee goes on to say, things are different now: "But now the others, the new people, they live apart. . . . They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out.... Maybe after a while longer there'll only be one place again, their place"-our place, civilization. "Buffalo Gals" teaches the possible eventual complementarity (43-44; § 4) but the present definite opposition of us "new people" and "the old ones," the "first people." Coyote drives the point home with the (serious) old joke about two kinds of people in the world-the kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and the kind who don't-and then more earnestly goes on to explain to Myra that "There's the first people, and then the others." The first people are "Us, the animals ... and things. All the old ones." The others are "The new people. The ones who came." In Coyote's world, that would be the Euro-Americans. "We were here. . . . We were always here. We are always here. Where we are is here. But it's their country now. They're running it ... Shit, even I did better!" Myra says "They're illegal immigrants." Coyote disagrees. "What the fuck's illegal mean? You want a code of justice from a coyote? Grow up, kid!" But Myra doesn't want to grow up and become one of the others, a civilized adult human (32; § 2).

Myra can join with the old ones because she is a child and possesses a child's double vision: from the start she can hear the coyote, and she soon sees Coyote as a person, a coyote/human person. She can see the other non-human animals in the same way, from the first time she sees them. Still, her double vision gets itself an «objective correlative» in the healing dance Blue Jay performs for her. With an ungentle touch, Blue Jay replaces her bad eye with, he says, one of pine pitch (28-29, § 2; 47-48, § 4). Opening her eyes after the operation, what Myra "saw was confused, hazy, yellowish. She began to discover, as everybody came crowding around . . . that if she shut the hurting eye and looked with the other," her old, civilized eye, "everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep" (28; § 2). As in The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and in "Newton's Sleep" (1991), clear, one-eyed, "Newtonian" vision is limited, and to be replaced with vision "blurry and yellowish, but deep," vision that sees the animals and plants and rocks "and things." To quote me, drawing the moral of a fable I wrote in high school, "Both difference and similarity are in the eye of the beholder; it depends only on how long and how deep he cares to look." ⁷  Coyote tells Myra, "Resemblance is in the eye" and goes on to state, "It just depends on how you look at things"-and then Coyote and Myra go on to the "two kinds of people" discussion (31-32; § 2). The problem with us new people, at least with adults, is that we do not see things right. ⁸  We miss what some children can see: "With her wild eye," Le Guin writes as a literary critic, "Myra sees the wilderness as well as the human realm as her true home" (ER 23). This point on the simultaneous relativity and importance of vision is driven home in the rest of the episodes in the story, contrasting Coyote's world and ours.

Le Guin, however, does not sentimentalize her «primitives». Coyote has real problems as a mother, from a child's point of view, and ours, and from that of the more elegant Chickadee-and probably from Le Guin's. Coyote is pretty neat and clean about her person, but she's a lousy, or «flea-and-ticky» housekeeper. She's rather greedy about food, and she is not respectable. She pisses and shits where she wishes and uses precisely such terms-strongly contrasting with Myra's juvenile delicacy-for her actions. As Coyote does in Oregon Indian tales, Le Guin's Coyote talks to her turds, and they talk back to her. ⁹  (Coyote is not a civilized man, alienated from the world and trying to distance himself from his body and its excretions.) And she really likes to fuck. Not make love, maybe not even innocently copulate: she fucks (33; § 2). In her den, with Myra there, and with at least one of her sons and with one coyote/man who will come on to Myra. When Coyote wakes up and realizes what he's up to she "bit him hard, and kicked him out of bed." Coyote insists she has some standards, and she does-but the male who stroked Myra's belly spends the night again a while later. "You want a code of justice from a coyote?" You'll get one before you will get middle-class morality, or even much responsibility. And not everyone in Coyote's world is hospitable to Others. "Some persons in town made it clear that as far as they were concerned she [Myra] didn't and never would belong there" (BG 34; § 3). Hawk for one, and the young Skunks (who dislike her smell). Still, Myra loves Coyote, and her love is returned (however much Coyote would not say so); and the hostility Myra experiences motivates her to get advice from Horned Toad Child and then seek out Horse and then check out local civilization (34-35; § 3).

"Horses are weird," Horned Toad, says, because they are sexist and ageist-if viewed as humans. Horse's personal name is "Prince," and he's a young stallion waiting a while to take over from the local king horse: defeating him in battle and taking over the harem. Another possible reason why horses are weird is that they are newcomers, additional illegals who came to the new world with humans. When Horse asks Myra "Who are you," Myra "saw it was true: Horse had come here with her people, people who had to ask each other who they were." Horse is also an aristocrat, an heir apparent, and Myra and the Narrator see him as "vainglorious," but also "magnanimous," and Myra falls in love with him immediately (36; § 3). Le Guin has long been a Daoist-anarchist-Leftist-radical with strong respect for «nature's nobles», and horses have always looked aristocratic, especially, it sometimes seems, to girls.

In any event, Horse, for all his pretensions, is basically a nice guy: beautiful, responsible, and thoughtful, a newcomer who has fit in. When Myra asks him about "where the other people are," Horse carefully asks if she is referring to "the metal places, the glass places? The holes?" If so, Horse is wise enough to go around them: He sees human habitations as primarily walls, and walls in increasing numbers: "There didn't used to be so many." And in the first reference to Grandmother in the story, he adds, "Grandmother said there didn't used to be any walls" (37; § 3). Readers familiar with Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), will recognize this as an important line: that novel begins, "There was a wall" (1; ch. 1) and refers to us Terrans as "intellectual imperialists, jealous wall-builders" (224; ch. 8), and has a hero whose job is "to go unbuild walls" (267; ch. 10). Horse's putting together "walls" and "Grandmother" in the same breath, plus civilization as "holes" in the world, makes him (like Odo) a kind of hinge between Le Guin's earlier work and later, her early Hainish universe of future human cultures and her mid-1980s works set in an American West of animals and relatively time-less Amerindian cultures-and on to her 1990s works in a re-visioned Hainish universe. And this hinge-function is appropriate; Horse is liminal and a link: both a new person and one of the old ones.¹⁰ 

Myra "sort of" feels like she has to go to the dangerous "holes"; it seems to be something she must do (38; § 3), and Horse, with Chickadee chaperoning, takes her there. Horse points out the human place, "There."

And then a car comes-"something moving fast, too fast burning across the ground straight at them at terrible speed"-and they flee "away from sunrise, the fiery burning chariot, the smell of acid, iron, death" (40-41; § 3). In the vision of the animal people, the human world is associated with speed, burning, dawn, light, and a "fiery burning chariot" like unto the one that carried the Prophet Elijah into heaven (2 Kings 2.11-12)-and like the truck that ran over (with no serious harm) Alexander Furby, the feline male lead in Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings.¹²  For the first people, the Existentialist vision of the world as a truck or locomotive coming to run over ME is one of civilization's cultural aberrations; the civilized condition of radical individualists might be horrific, but the condition of sentient creatures truly in the universe is not. The horror for them is local and specific: us.

Later, Myra goes into town with Coyote, who finds human towns weird and fun: Coyote can move between the worlds without fear. Even more than Horse, Coyote is a new addition to Kate Spencer's gallery of "envoys," a new liminal character moving between worlds. From Myra's point of view, though, the human world is scary. The air is odd and so is time. Myra calls out for Coyote: "Mom!" and then "'Mother!'-standing one moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straight forward rolling her helpless as a twig in a race above a waterfall." And then a man and a boy appear, spot Coyote ("big as my wife's ass," in the man's words) and shoot at her. Coyote tells Myra, and us, that the townspeople are her "folks . . . . All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There's Coyote! Bang! There's my wife's ass! Pow! There's anything-BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!" (46-47; §4).

Coyote sings "one of the endless tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast" and "wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock's place and the earth together." And then Myra tells Coyote aloud that she loves her-and then Coyote finds her smoked salmon offering and dies (for a while) from the poison in it (48-49; §4). The sequence and section ends with Myra cursing humankind: "I hope you all die in pain" (50; §4).

The final scene of "Buffalo Gals" has Chickadee taking Myra for her trip to Grandmother's and seeing Grandmother "there at the center, at her loom."¹³  Grandmother greets Myra as a New Person, and Myra denies her people. Grandmother isn't so sure: "You got outside your people's time into our place; but I think Coyote was taking you back"-and without much trouble Grandmother convinces Myra to return to her father, who (with others) had been looking for her. The end of the story is Grandmother's promise to be in Myra's dreams and ideas and "in dark corners in the basement," and the possibility that Myra might see Coyote again-although Grandmother makes no promises about Coyote. Myra will return to her/our world, keeping her new eye, and the double-vision it symbolizes (BG 50-51; § 5).

*

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

Our world in "Buffalo Gals" is presented as pretty bloody awful, but Myra returns to it in a somber but somewhat happy ending. Chickadee, Horned Toad, and Horse were fond of Myra, but only Coyote really loved her, and, for a while anyway, Coyote is unavailable, with the excellent excuse of being dead. Also, Coyote, as we have seen, has her limitations as a mother. Coyote is the great American incarnation of Trickster, and, again, if we don't expect law, justice, or morality from Trickster neither should we expect responsibility-and we should expect recklessness, imprudence, and occasional downright stupidity, as Coyote herself admits (e.g., 47; § 4). As I've tried to make clear, I find Coyote's vulgarity delightful in itself and an excellent reminder that much of what we civilized folk find refined comes from our denial of our bodies and is part of our alienation from the world. As even our Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Rationalist tradition will occasionally remind us, our shame at our animal desires and impulses is a sign of lost innocence. Still, Coyote's completely unalienated neighbors, in Coyote's world, find her a little gross, and I don't think we want to see Myra dropping her pants where she feels like it to defecate and then punningly communicate with her feces-"Dumb shit," Coyote calls them when annoyed (45); we probably do not want to see Myra getting pregnant from sex with Coyote men.

This far the personal and concrete is different from and more important than the abstractly political: Myra will personally and individually live better in our world than in that of the dead Coyote, so Le Guin returns her to us, however much the old world may be better than ours as a possible ideal. Note also that gender issues appear in "Buffalo Gals" but are not stressed. The world of the old ones, the original people is balanced toward the feminine, and female-gendered people are central: Coyote made the world; Spider Woman/Grandmother weaves the web of reality. In the world of the civilized, a boy threateningly rides a skateboard; but in the limen between Coyote's world and the civilized, Myra is given a ride by Horse, a princely male; and Young Owl and Blue Jay also have their niches, their respect, and their roles to play. "Buffalo Gals" is clearly one of Le Guin's feminist works, but in its gender balance and complementarity, it is also clearly in the line from the Daoist works. It is also emphatically Native American but still in the Daoist line with having the source of reality Grandmother: the Dao-that-can-be-named; "Name" itself, "Being" or "Existence" in the Tao te Ching is "the mother of individual things" (ch. 1, Wilhelm, Chen).

"Buffalo Gals": Final Dissonance:

There may be a momentary danger here of seeing Ursula K. Le Guin and the worlds she presents, as Odo just before her death fears she is seen: "as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb. . . . everybody's grandmamma . . . come worship at the womb. The fire's out, boys, it's safe to come up close" ("Day Before the Revolution," WTQ 271-72). We will be getting to Le Guin's poems and King Dog (1987) and "grandmamma" as Kali: the All-Mother goddess with a bloody attitude and a necklace of skulls. As a more gentle antidote right now, I wish to oppose to Spider Woman and Grandmother as Weaver a vision honest adult Westerners should go through first to come to Her. In Herman Melville's Moby Dick (which Le Guin has not read since 1947 ["Response" 46]), there is the skeleton of a whale in "A Bower in the Arsacides" as location and chapter title. The skeleton is slowly incorporated into the bower of green mosses and tall trees, while "the industrious earth beneath was a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures." It is a beautiful place, but-

As Selver reminds us in The Word for World Is Forest, "What is, is" (WWF 168; ch. 8); and what Is is not about to fit neatly into any human category or system of categories or images, and will appear as Spider Woman, Grandmother, Kali, or the weaver-god (and so forth) depending on our perceptions. Grandmother talks to Myra and listens to Myra, because Myra is a child, and one with special vision. Taking the view of an alienated adult Westerner from an industrialized culture, Melville's image of life and death enfolded and unaware of humankind can be disturbing; from the view of adult followers of Western religions, used to talking with God and assuming God listens, the idea of a deaf, skeletal god presiding over unceasing creation and destruction-a heaven and earth far from humane or humanity-should be frightening. Western adults are not children like Myra, and Le Guin's message for us is-or should be-a tough one.

* *

Stories can certainly be told in verse, and for a long time most stories were: poetry is older than prose for the formal telling of stories; and poems can certainly be used for teaching: the best English mnemonics, for example, are in meter and rime. Still, relatively short poems usually have only minimal narrative, and insofar as they teach, they teach differently from stories; so the same motivation that had me set off in a separate chapters Le Guin's picture books will have me separate off her film script and most of her poems; all are part of Le Guin's canon, but they are in or for different media. Some of the poems collected in Buffalo Gals, though, I want to discuss here and now, in the context of Buffalo Gals. First, because some of them tell stories; second because they fit into and help define the context of Buffalo Gals.

The poems come in five places in the book:

As Le Guin says in her introduction to the Three Rock Poems, there is one basic thing about rocks: I'll phrase it, they're basic. They are very old (basic in time), and they are the basis for everything else, for defining place: "Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything else in the world, dirt, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center" (BG 55).

The world-view established in "Buffalo Gals" is re-established here for the rest of the book, starting from the bottom up: in the Rock Poems "The Basalt," "Flints." In the third poem in the section, "Mount St. Helens / Omphalos" (1972), there is the idea of the rock as the center of the world-the world's navel, the omphalos at Delphi (or, in Eastern versions, Hanoi).¹⁴  Except this rock, Mount St. Helens, is a volcanic peak, until the spring of 1980, when eruptions reduced its height by some 400 meters, a very high volcanic peak (CIE "Saint Helens, Mount"), by my midwestern US standards, a mountain. The traditional advantage of central mountains is the liminality of their peaks, between heaven and earth; if you want to prepare to meet your God, O, Israel (or anyone else), a good way to do it is to climb a mountain. But not this mountain, not in this poem. In 1969, Americans went to the Moon, and returned; Le Guin suggests here that these children of Earth saw Mount St. Helens and returned, coming home to Earth, their "hearth, hill, altar," the "heart's home" with at its center "the stone" (BG 57). Perhaps, as in one character's belief in "Another Story" (1994), the astronauts are connected to Earth as "a mother is connected to her child by a very fine, thin cord, like the umbilical cord, that can stretch light-years" (FIS 173)-and got snapped back.

The first three of the Five Vegetable Poems, call our attention to trees, mostly: trees being a strong motif in Le Guin's work. ¹⁵  "Torrey Pines Reserve" is an earth-poem, a Daoist poem, and a woman's poem. Mostly it is a description of "A lizard place" where, if we listen, we "can hear the lizards / listening." Daoistically, it makes the point that sandstone, ultimately, is carved by water and wind, but this is not defeat but the aging proper to mortality, the decorous yielding to that which is strongest precisely in its yielding: water, air. More, the water (as ocean) hollows out circles that become eyes. In Ariel's song to Ferdinand in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ferdinand gets misled into thinking his father drowned and that his father's bones are becoming coral and "Those are pearls that were his eyes" (1.2.396-405). In a clever reversal, Le Guin's Speaker tells us the circles she sees "are eyes that were his pearls"-with "his" referring to either "the rock" or "ocean." The Speaker finds this a "gentle wilderness," and a vulnerable one, "fragile," where the rain comes rarely and hard, like the tears of an old woman. We're told to "Hold to the thread of way," and keep to the "narrow place" which we humans may occupy "in this high place between the still / desert and the stillness of the sea." That is, one needs to literally walk carefully in an ecologically fragile space, but one must follow the "way" in the sense of Dao, and the thin thread of Spider Woman, Grandmother, the folklore thread that leads home in A Ride on the Red Mare's Back (1992).

"West Texas" is set in one "of the terrible places," and Le Guin's Speaker tells us to look and see how life is brought there and honor those who bring it: the plants and occasional deer who break the hard ground. "Lewis and Clark and After" (1985) takes on the persona of Meriwether Lewis and/or William Clark (or any one or more members of the Expedition), who famously "walked across a forest continent" 1804-06 CE.¹⁶  The poem consists of two stanzas and three sentences. The first stanza is one long sentence summarizing the Expedition; the second stanza consists of "Ohone!" ejaculated twice, plus two exclamations praising the woods of Ohio and "the silent lives" of "the forests of Oregon!" Significant here is the admission by the Speaker(s) in the first stanza that they crossed a heavily wooded continent pretty much without seeing the trees. They didn't "think much about it" since trees are "by our tribe" only "seen with the one eye"-i.e., with what William Blake called Newtonian "Single vision."¹⁷  More specifically here, it would not only be the single vision of good Jeffersonian scientists (the Expedition was sent by Thomas Jefferson) but also less good American capitalists-Mr. Jefferson included-who would see the trees as potential lumber.

The poems "Xmas Over" (1982) and "Crown of Laurel" (1987) tell teaching stories, and are two well-placed salvos in the American Kulturkampf, religo-mythic theater of battle.

"Xmas Over" does not assume the persona of a tree, but tells the story in the third-person, limited omniscient point of view common in Le Guin; in this case taking the point of view of the tree: a young fir in a relatively large pot that had been used as a Christmas tree. The plot begins with the tree (I assume without the pot) in the back of a car, not admiring the scenery, and being taken out to be replanted, "trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge." The replanted tree's branches make soft sounds in the wind, but its trunk and roots are quiet. The "glass bubbles and colored lights" that had decorated the tree for Christmas are gone, and a hundred years hence the tree will have in its branches "rain, and owls." The poem ends with the Narrative voice telling us the tree "won't hear carols sung again. / But then, it never listened" (BG 78).

In A Wizard of Earthsea, the illusion of the Year-Tree was conjured for the Winter Festival (49-50; ch. 3). In "Xmas Over," though, we learn of the problem in our world with even so lucky a real tree as this one: not cut down, replanted in a beautiful place. Nice people in a Christian culture have used a tree-person (not a personified tree) for "Xmas." Eating "the First Salmon," who has offered himself to human and other people for food (BG 43)-that's one thing, as is Myra's accepting a ride from Horse (38); tricking out a handsome young fir tree in lights and bubbles, though, without permission, is something else again, and not something good. It is a self-separation from the oneness of the world, a sign of dominion especially bad in worship of an infant One-God who will grow up to claim, ". . . I have come not to bring peace," or a shuttle, "but a sword" (Matt. 10.34-36).

*

"The Crown of Laurel" (1987) is a retelling of the metamorphosis of Daphne into a/the laurel tree, a story Edith Hamilton says is told only by the Roman poet Ovid among the ancients (Hamilton 114).¹⁸  In Ovid, though not in Hamilton's retelling, the ultimate blame for Daphne's plight lies with Venus's son, Cupid: the executive officer, so to speak, for Love. In Mary M. Innes's translation, Ovid says that it "was not blind chance" which brought about the disastrous love of Phoebus Apollo and Daphne "but Cupid's savage spite." Apollo had recently killed the Python monster, and, "still exultant over his slaying of the serpent," he makes the mistake of chiding Cupid for Cupid's pretensions as an archer. Cupid replies, "Your bow may pierce anything else, Phoebus, but mine will pierce you: and as all animals are inferior to the gods, your glory is to that extent less than mine." So Cupid, in Ovid's story, shoots Phoebus Apollo with his golden-headed, well-pointed arrow, enkindling love, and shoots Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus, with a lead-headed, blunt arrow, the arrow that destroys love. "Immediately the one fell in love; the other, fleeing the very word 'lover,' took her delight in woodland haunts and in the spoils of captured beasts, emulating Diana, the maiden goddess . . . ." (Innes trans. 41).

Daphne comes from an excellent family-her grandparents are Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaia)-and in Ovid and Hamilton, but not Le Guin, a very human Daphne is much desired in marriage, and an even more human Peneus, a single father it seems, reminds her gently but repeatedly, "It is your duty to marry and give me a son-in-law . . . . My child, it is your duty to give me grandchildren" (Innes 41-42). The point becomes moot when Phoebus sees her, falls in love "and wanted to marry her." Such is his love, that "Apollo's prophetic powers deceived him," and he tries to woo Daphne. Ovid compares Phoebus's feelings to fire, and, appropriately for a sun deity, ". . . the god was all on fire, his whole heart was aflame." Somewhat more flippantly, Ovid compares the moment of the welling up of Apollo's love to "when a Gallic hound spies a hare in some open meadow"; hare-like Daphne flees; hound-like Apollo pursues. Apollo eventually closes in on Daphne, and in Ovid and Hamilton Daphne prays to her father as the River Peneus: "O father . . . help me! if you rivers have divine powers, work some transformation, and destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well!" Peneus answers her prayer by changing her into the laurel tree.

And the tree "seemed to nod her leafy top, as if it were a head, in consent," although Ovid will not, one might say, go out on a limb pushing this interpretation of the movement of a tree (Innes 44).

In her introduction to the 1976 re-issue of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin had reminded us that "Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number-Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios{sic}, every now and then" (n.p.). By 1987, Le Guin would have people in the figurative bar with Dionysos{sic} more, or, and better, among the trees at the River Peneus with Daphne, Gaia, Persephone, Demeter-and Dionysos and his (orgiastic) followers "every now and then." In the context of Buffalo Gals, Apollo is not the potential danger he appears as in the 1976 Left Hand of Darkness introduction, nor the semicomic character of Ovid. In "The Crown of Laurel," Apollo is the immediate villain.

Le Guin's retelling starts at the end of things, with Daphne a laurel tree and then jumps backward. The unnamed Daphne tells us that an unnamed "He" once liked to feel her fingers in his hair. "So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them," which he wears "at parades and contests": her "dying fingers" amid his "sunny curls." We learn, very paradoxically if we do not know the Daphne and Apollo story, that "Sometimes he rests on me a while"-i.e., Phoebus as sun, apparently «resting» at the top of a laurel tree, and, with wordplay, «resting on his laurel(s)»; but "Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest" (BG 78).¹⁹ 

In the second stanza, the unnamed Speaker assures us that she didn't run to preserve her "'virtue,'" with virtue carefully placed in quotation marks: virtue is a men's thing, nothing for a nymph. Ovid had said nothing about Daphne's virtue, and Hamilton stressed the utter folly-the invitation to disaster for women-of sex with an Olympian (Hamilton 114-50). Still, the very popular Ovid was seized on early and Christianized and moralized, and we should accept as justified the concern of Le Guin's Daphne that people might think she ran from Apollo because she identified her virtue with her chastity, or was concerned with (masculinist) virtue at all. No, the Daphne here has naught to do with virtue; she just "wasn't in the mood," and it looked like her mood didn't concern Apollo, and that scared her. If she knew her Greco-Roman myths, it should have: rape is a motif, including by the gods.

Daphne develops her ideas of proper sexuality and intimacy for five verse paragraphs implicitly contrasting with Apollo's lust. Satyrs she calls "The little goatleg boys" and notes that they, unlike Olympian Apollo-still unnamed, mostly uncharacterized-"can wait till they can smell you feel / like humping with a goatleg in the woods." She tells us they can laugh, synechdochizes them as "poor little hairycocks," and says she misses them. She doesn't miss Apollo.

The next stanza describes Daphne with her sister nymphs, lying around in easy intimacy after sex with the satyrs; and then, moving down into the mortal world there is a long stanza on the men and boys she has seen. Mortal human males look at her and do not even dare to hope, not the hunters, poachers, or even "the deciduous shepherd boys." That last beautiful phrase brings together the human and vegetative: deciduous is most often used to refer to deciduous trees, dropping off their leaves each autumn, defining the season of fall, and the hope for spring: "New every spring, like daffodils, those boys." This thought moves Daphne to one exception in her relationships with human males: she once loved a mature man and met him on the hills for forty years, into his extreme old age. She kissed "his wrinkles, the ravines of time" she "cannot enter." Daphne even graced his funeral, walking behind the dead man's wife: "She could have been Time's wife, my grandmother"-i.e., Rhea as sister-wife to Cronus and identified with Gaia as Earth-mother.²⁰ 

With this set-up, Apollo re-enters the poem: "hard, bright, burning, dry, intent: / one will . . . no center but himself, the Sun. A god . . . " (BG 79-80). Daphne supposes a god "has to be" this way, but she had placed no requests to meet a god. And Apollo, here, is a putz: "a big blond blue-eyed god," so perhaps I should specify an Aryan putz. Such fastidious distinctions aside, Apollo thinks all women alike, having literally seen them all-Phoebus Apollo is the personified sun-but for some reason wants Daphne in particular. And he will not accept a "no," bringing us back to the inevitable in the poem-the metamorphosis-already given us (if subtly) in the opening stanza.

Daphne, still unnamed (never named in the poem), philosophizes a bit on why her metamorphosis happened: "I guess that maybe it was time for me / to give up going naked and get dressed." Le Guin gives Daphne a mother, though also unnamed-Demeter most likely-and has Daphne says that her mother just couldn't get her to put clothes on, so maybe it is well that a god made her to it.²¹  Maybe even an immortal needs to get on with her life and move to another stage. That's an important point for Le Guin: she doesn't fancy immortality nor hierarchy, so what may seem to lovers of hierarchy as a horrible metamorphosis in that a nymph moves down the Great Chain of Being into the vegetative may be just a good idea, however villainous Apollo was in bringing about the change.²² 

In a nice inversion on "Clothes make the man"-a literal statement in the original Latin (Vestis virum reddit)-Daphne becomes her clothing, "being what I wear." As a tree, Daphne has achieved wu wei, Daoist action through stillness, to an extreme degree. She runs no more and says "the winds dance me." Every April, her clothes get mended by her "sister, seamstress, sovereign" who "comes / up from the dark below the roots." The reference here is to Persephone, daughter of Demeter, wife to Hades, and (therefore by patriarchal theory) queen of the underworld. Here, though, I'd take "sister" experientially and politically as much as literally: Persephone and Daphne are sisters in their being part of nature and hurt by upstart kin of Zeus All-Father, sisters also, perhaps, in their both surviving-and surviving well-sexual attacks by males.²³  Or we can see Persephone's living at "the dark below the roots" by herself: Hades might be just an unpleasant myth spread by those who profit from the hegemony of the younger gods (however much Zeus and his generation are the eldest among the Olympians).²⁴  In any event, Persephone's being a seamstress relates her to Spider Woman / Grandmother, the weaver of the world; and Persephone's coming up from "the dark below the roots" is a nice restatement of Nameless Dao as the origin of things in the Chinese formulation, Void as the origin in Hesiod (Theogony 56; 2.116).²⁵ 

The last two stanzas return to the theme of the beginning: Phoebus Apollo with a laurel wreath. Apollo says he honors Daphne to wear her "fingers turning brown and brittle" in his "bright hair" when he sings. Daphne as the laurel thinks, for her last words, that her "silence crowns the song" (BG 80).

The Seven Bird and Beast Poems are enjoyable but less immediately relevant for Coyote. The introduction to this section, though, immediately does two things I wish to point out. First, it tells of Le Guin's seeing a barn the walls of which have "neat rows of little holes, each one with a long Valley Oak acorn stuck in, a perfect fit, almost like rivets in sheet iron." She assumes these are the winter hoard for the local acorn woodpeckers. "On the other hand, they might be a woodpecker art form," a matter we will get to with "The Author of the Acacia Seeds . . . ." Second, the Introduction notes that the social lives of acorn woodpeckers are familial or tribal, with cooperative raising of the young. There is no particular reason why humans should take acorn woodpeckers for exemplars for human social life, but, like wolves and ravens, the woodpeckers are good examples that a vision of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is true enough, but only a partial truth (Tennyson § 56). As Petr Kropotkin pointed out in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902, 1914), animals also cooperate, and if we are to infer a "social Darwinism" out of nature, we might legitimately infer cooperation as much as competition.²⁶ 

The poem "For Ted" (1973)-Le Guin's older half-brother-presents the image of a hawk's curving flight.²⁷  The hawk is a good hunter and human and/or hawk children watch him hunting. "The children wait," and when the hawk stoops "The children cry," either tears or they cry out. The hawk's fall is labeled "fell," recalling (for those who know it) Macduff's lament in Macbeth, when he learns of the slaughter of his family and household "At one fell swoop" (5.3.218-19). The Speaker, though, allows no sentimental condemnation, but insists in the closing lines, "To the old hawk / all earth is prey, and child." With a hawk hunting to feed his young, the yoking of "prey" and "child" is decorous. "Heaven and Earth are not humane," in the translation of Tao te Ching 5.1 that Le Guin uses for the headnote to chapter 8 of The Lathe of Heaven; but neither are Heaven and Earth cruel: the talons red with blood here are getting food.

"Totem" (1979) is in praise of Mole, as totem animal to the Speaker and possibly to Le Guin. It is also a brief compendium of symbols important to Le Guin. Mole is presented here as a "mound builder," which is both literally true of moles and associates them with Amerindian mound builders, and as a "maze maker," which associates moles with the imagery of mazes and complexity Le Guin usually associates with forests and the human subconscious.²⁸  Noting Mole's "tooth at the root" identifies one of the reasons gardeners get cats or other engines of destruction to kill moles. It also associates Mole with the serpent brood at the roots of the World Tree in the place of the goddess Hel in Norse mythology: an image of mortality for even the universe (Hamilton 312-13). Mole is a Yinnish animal, living in darkness, in the hollow of earth and following the way, but simultaneously a maker, shaper, like adept dreamers among the Athsheans of The Word for World Is Forest, or like a poet (old term: Scop, "Shaper") who both follows and makes the Way. And Mole is also a destroyer, reinforcing the connection of destruction and creation. Yin-Yang-like, then, Mole is "shaper of darkness / into ways and hollows." Unlike Apollonian intellectuals, Mole is alive in the grave, "heavy handed / light blinded." Like George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Mole must feel the way to solutions. Like The Creation of Éa, Mole suggests "only in dark the light, / only in dying life" (headnote to WE and Tehanu [1968 / 1990]).

"Sleeping Out" (1985), is punctuated as two sentences, the first giving the order, "Don't turn on the flashlight" in spite of strange things going on in the area the kids (?) are sleeping out in. The second sentence gives the philosophical/practical reason not to have the beam of a flashlight stab ancient darkness: "The light will make a hole / in the air" and their fears will be there all the more, around the hole, "in the dark brush and the old dark mind," the mind that fears anything outside of the bright, daytime world (BG 136).

*

Le Guin's Four Cat Poems introduce, appropriately. "Schrödinger's Cat," "The Author of the Acacia Seeds . . . ," and "May's Lion."

The last poem in the group is "For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson" (1982) and has an "I" who is reading and a cat "aware of," if not exactly reading, "the writing / of swallows" on a "white sky." Then the Speaker is writing and the cat sleeping, and the Speaker asks, "Whose poem is this?" The potential reading of the swallows' writing is important for the tone of "The Author of the Acacia Seeds"; the question of whose poem this might be anyway moves toward collapsing distinctions among the cat and the woman (?) writing as subjects of the poem and Le Guin, the nonfictional woman writing, as author. Readers may see this poem as a nicely Theoretical thought appropriate to an evolving Le Guin in the early 1980s; readers may see this poem in the line of thought that led to Chuang Tzu dreaming of a butterfly and awaking to wonder if he might be a butterfly dreaming itself Chuang Tzu-a line of thought and development that included Le Guin's 1971 The Lathe of Heaven.

Her short poem "Tabby Lorenzo" (1984) stars, I assume, "Lorenzo, who is called The Bean" in A Visit from Dr. Katz. The poem is like a long haiku, presenting a Speaker, with a male cat on her knee. Or his knee; the poem doesn't specify the human's gender. The cat rests there, trusting completely the human and the situation, and at the same time "entirely strange" to the speaker. "His ears are scarred": this cat has been in some battles. Lorenzo is another of the envoys Kate Spencer identifies. Like Ged almost trapped in the hawk-shape in A Wizard of Earthsea (124; ch. 7), like Shevek and Genly Ai and the Mobiles and Envoys and Ambassadors in Le Guin's 1990s return to the Hainish universe-like these humans Lorenzo is both messenger and message. In this homelier case ("homely" as in heimlich), Lorenzo is "a messenger to all indoors / from the gardens of danger." There is a time to take risks and a time to lie in a lap "entirely trusting," feeling some sense of safety.

"A Conversation with a Silence" (1986) is a dramatic dialog with three characters, one more silent than the other two. The first voice asks the wife's/parent's question, "What kept you out so late my love?", as we later learn even unto a rainy dawn. The answer is that the second speaker was out "running in the dark," among and up the trees, which serve as "clouds and roads." The second speaker goes along "the sweet dirt-darkness in the rain" and climbs the trees up to where "chirping sleep-warmth / nestle their blood for me." I.e., the cat climbs trees looking for, and, it seems, occasionally finding, nesting birds: the cat knows about the blood. Below, the cat meets enemies: "the White One" and "the Singer." The cat has been out in an uncomfortable and rather dangerous world-including a feline social world-doing feline macho or macha things: hunting, fighting.²⁹  The first speaker, whom I'll call the Woman, then asks the Cat about what the Cat's brother might be looking at through the window, a major mystery for those of us who deal with cats. The Cat tells the Woman the other cat watches "Ghosts in the other garden": some literal other garden, some ideal garden of feline imagination, or both-or some other meaning. The speaker-Cat does not see ghosts. S/he goes "farther / along the cloud-roads" (farther than the brother?) to go up the trees and "kill where darkness branches in the rain," i.e., literally, at the crotches of trees where birds build nests. Even in her picture books, Le Guin avoids sentimentalizing nature; she gentles up nature's even less for readers sophisticated enough to read poetry.

The fourth poem is "Black Leonard in Negative Space" (1978) and it most closely fits the theme of "Buffalo Gals." The poem establishes first, "All that surrounds the cat" and then specifies that that "is not the cat." There is the cat, then, and there is the world, radically separated: cat and "not the cat," that is "everything, except the animal." Upon death, the cat and "all" will "rejoin without a seam." So far so easy: as Chuang Tzu and Genesis agree, after death we-feline people and hominid people-return to the earth, to the dirt and dust, and get recycled. But what of before death? The rest of the poem is brief but difficult, and I'm going to quote it in full.

The "no-space," I think is time, human civilized world-time. It's the time Myra falls out of and then moves to return to at the beginning and end of "Buffalo Gals." Our time. That literal time is the figurative space for human love and human pain: the pain coming in large part from our alienation from the world, the human love being our major compensation for the pain of our alienation. And that human love is made possible by alienation: love is between individuals, and a totally integrated individual is a contradiction. The Speaker tells us that this cat doesn't need such compensation. The young Shevek tells his friends that "It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self-ceases" (TD 48; ch. 2); the cat is already in that place, having no human space but not needing it.

The last poetry in Buffalo Gals is Le Guin's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Eighth Elegy," the original German poem completed prior to July 1922.³⁰  Le Guin in her headnote says that this elegy "is the poem about animals that I have loved the longest and learned the most from" (BG 191).³¹ 

In basic structure, the Elegy is a comparison and contrast between the world-perceptions of nonhuman animals and our own, a contrast signaled by the opening lines

And that will be my last effort at my own translation. Readers familiar with Le Guin's Always Coming Home will recognize here a variation on the image of people with heads on backwards and, perhaps, one of the sources of that image in Always Coming Home. The poem continues the contrast of beast and human, or at least human adults. Beasts are free from death; we see only death (lines 9-10). And because of this freedom from death, beasts move «in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen» (lines 13-14), which Le Guin renders with a Daoist spin: the beast's "way / is the eternal way, as the spring flowing" (Leishman and Spender have the "creature-world" moving into eternity in a comparison with running springs). Contrasted with the way of "The free animal" is our refusal to have even for an eye-blink "pure space before us"; instead "Always it's world" for us and «niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht»: "never nowhere-nothing-not." With us, it's never the total Void; it's always the world; beasts are free to deal with openness/nothingness, the "nowhere-nothing-not."

Children may approach that "silence" and get lost there-and get pulled back. Or people die and are that silence or, in Le Guin's rendering, "one dies, and is" (« jener stirbt undist»). Close to death we may finally turn our vision outward and see (lines 19-21). Like children, lovers can "come very close to it," but for each lover the other blocks the vision. Finally, though, no human ever really gets beyond a mere reflection of freedom.

For Rilke and for Le Guin, we adult humans are trapped in time. Primarily, we look to the future, but also to the past while beasts see "all, / and itself in all," a healing vision (lines 41-49). One of the reasons we look to the past (and deny the present and Presence in the world?) is a kind of profound nostalgia. We have a kind of memory

Outside of what I take to be the cosmic womb, Nameless Dao, the world before individuation and civilization-we are literally on the outside looking in on what is. And as spectators, we can only try to arrange things from the outside, and this won't work; « Wir ordnens. Es zerfält.» Le Guin translates "We control it. It breaks down" (lines 67-69).

The beast's condition, then, is something like always being at home in the universe, still in the womb. Our current condition is like that of a traveler about to leave "the home valley," who "runs, and stand, and lingers." Like that traveler, "we live forever"-«immer», always-"taking leave" (end of poem). And, of course, Le Guin would have us instead, "Always Coming Home": that is, living in the universe consciously and carefully-as Ged and George Orr and the Kesh would have us-but living in the universe and coming home to the womb of Dao, the Mother, Grandmother.

*

The final prose works in Buffalo Gals are "May's Lion" (the one work in § X) and "She Unnames Them," which follows the Rilke poem and ends § XI and the volume. In her introduction, Le Guin tells us she did "May's Lion" while writing Always Coming Home and trying to find a way "to get from the Napa Valley of [her] childhood and the present to the 'Na Valley' of the book" (179). This story came with Always Coming Home, and helped Le Guin write that book, but it didn't belong there: May belonged "in her own house," not in Le Guin's valleys of Napa or Na; "It is only the lion who crosses between history and dream unchanged." So, Le Guin says, "in this story" she followed "the lion's tracks"-those of a direct beast-"not Coyote's," not the Trickster's. I.e., this is not to be a story where the highest art is the hiding of art, but where the connection between actual and fictional would be explicit (BG 179).

The first part of "May's Lion" tells what really happened, in the story of May's lion, the story that "May gave to us" repeated by Le Guin's Narrator (she tells us) "as truly as I could" (183)-allowing that May is a good story teller, and good story tellers will occasionally make the story "suit" themselves "or get the facts to fit the story better" (179). As Genly Ai said back in 1969, "Truth is a matter of the imagination" and facts can change with the teller's style (LHD 1; ch. 1); except Genly Ai gave us mostly implicit connections between "the actual and the fictional, fact and imagination" (BG 179).

What really happened was that some time back in the 1940s a mountain lion (or maybe a bobcat, but May told it as a mountain lion)-was that a mountain lion showed up under May's fig tree. May had quit keeping chickens, as the Narrator finally assures us, and her cranky fox terrier was long dead, and the "black cats who lived in the barn kept discreetly out of the story": so the initial persons of this little drama were May and the cow Rosie, alone on a fairly isolated farm with a lion under a fruit tree (180-81). "'It just laid there looking around. It wasn't well,' says May." May "had lived with" and had taken care of animals her whole life, and had "earned her living for years as a nurse," so she puts out water for the lion, carefully, and returned to the house. "'After I went back in[,] it did get up and tried to drink some water. Then it made that kind of meowowow.'" May thinks the lion came "here because it was looking for help. Or just for company, maybe." Rosie needed to be milked, and "May didn't like being shut in," so she tries to shoo it away. (And the lion is still ungendered here-"it"-May hasn't yet observed its sex.) The lion stays, perhaps allusively, perhaps not, under his fig tree (182), the "silent wild creature" watching May with his eyes, but otherwise without moving..³² 

May talks to a friend, Miss Macy, on the telephone and is warned the lion may have rabies and advised to call the sheriff. Given her circumstances-shut in by a lion that may have rabies, a cow to milk-May calls the county police, who show up in force. "I guess there was nothing else they knew how to do. So they shot it." May regrets the shooting: she hadn't been scared, and the lion was a full "seven feet long, all stretched out . . . . And so thin!" (182). A magnificent seven-foot lion, and all the cops knew to do was to shoot him. Coyote, in "Buffalo Gals," has a point about humans (especially men) and guns.

After a white space, Le Guin retells May's story "as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history" (183).

The style of the retelling is slightly more elegant than was decorous for the version mostly from May, with "elegant" here meaning mostly "simpler." In the retelling, the re-visioning (as Adrienne Rich's useful neologism has it), "May" becomes "Rains End," living alone in her summer house in the hills about Sinshan town.³³ We're no longer in the Napa Valley but the Valley of the Na, and the changes are appropriate to the new setting, a healthier, more real world: Rains End is childless but rooted in her land and community: the fig tree is one "planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother"; she "feels herself an aunt to all the children" in the area, even though the young ones avoid her. She thinks it "natural for children to shrink away from somebody part way dead." But they'll come 'round when older, for her stories. Instead of having earned a living as a nurse as May, Rains End "was for sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge." And, like May, Rains End finds a mountain lion under the fig tree (184), and, like May, she gives him water (BG 185).

But Rains End also sings to the lion what she remembers from the Puma Dance Song, which is little except, "You are there, lion," but that is something. More important thematically, Rains End can also do a more complete job than May at giving meaning to the appearance of the lion; Rains End

Rains End considers going over to tell her neighbor Valiant and her family, or go over to Buck's on Baldy Knoll. She hesitates because one course of the other might take her where she'd have to tell her story to "four or five adolescents . . . and one of them might come and shoot the lion, to boast that he'd saved old Rains End from getting clawed to bits and eaten" (186). Such an immediate threat and heroic rescue indeed might have happened-if Le Guin had a different lesson to teach. In this valley, (good old) boys with guns are the threats, not lion-messengers of the Seventh House.

Rains End gives the lion milk, which he declines to drink, but no solid food. She gives him mostly her presence and what spiritual comfort she can: she sings to the lion "the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying. She did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did not know his songs" (187). The lion dies quietly before sunrise, stretching himself out his full length (which no one measures), and Rains End gets help to carry "the body of the lion off where the buzzards and coyotes could clean it" (188).

"May's Lion" ends with direct address from the Narrator to May:

*

"She Unnames Them" is a mâshâl in the sense of a light-toned, highly serious comic satire. "She Unnames Them" ends Buffalo Gals, and, again, it is, in this context-and helping greatly to establish the context-an (anti)Prophecy, a mâshâl of unmaking: a figurative unbuilding of walls. In this beautiful funny little story, Le Guin is as sincere as the authors of the "J-Code" in their story of the making: the myth of the Creation of Eden.³⁴  Initially, in the J-Code version of Creation, you have a pretty sterile world, because Yahweh had not yet created farmers and gardeners nor watered the earth. So the Eternal gathers up dust ('adamah) and animates it with "the breath of life," making 'adam, "man . . . a living being"-i.e., dust plus breath (ruach, anima, spiritus). The body/soul business is a later importation, and, I strongly agree with Le Guin, a very bad idea. Then,

In the more sophisticated P-code (or E-code) version of creation, God makes men and women together (and perhaps hermaphroditic) and just comes right out and gives us rule, dominion, mastery (Gen. 1.26-28). The more primitive Eden story is more subtle and yokes together consciousness, dominion, and an ambiguous marriage, soon to become fully patriarchal (Gen. 3.16).

"It is not good for man to be alone," and in the J-code version of the creation story, there's just Adam, in the beginning, and the garden. So the Eternal makes the beasts and birds, and in the first act of human consciousness Adam names them. Which gives him dominion over the beasts: "Because the name is the thing . . . and the true name is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing" ("The Rule of Names" [1964], WTQ 76).³⁵  The naming, however, does not give him a proper companion and "fitting helper," so the Eternal does the rib trick and gives the man a woman. The woman is an afterthought and created to be a helper, but is still accepted by a rather poetic and punning Adam as "bone of my bones / And flesh of my flesh." And, in an image of innocence, "The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame" (Gen. 2.24).

The Hebrew for "naked, " though, 'arummim, leads to 'arum, "shrewd" in the next verse, where we learn that ". . . the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made" (3.1). And the rest of the story is the Fall and the establishment first of explicit patriarchal rule of Adam over Eve then expulsion from the Garden, then the birth of Cain and Abel-and then murder and, by Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel, civilization, and civilization's hubristic discontents.

The first act of complicity, then, with the monotheistic Father/Creator God was Man's unilaterally naming the beasts. Woman undoes the job, in Le Guin's version, and does it democratically, indeed, with good anarchistic participation: "Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element"-water, the favorite element of the Daoists, perhaps, in its yielding strength, and large bodies of water, representing Being, the Dao that can be named (if we weren't giving up naming). There is a problem with yaks for a bit: "Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who have been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name." But it's a name "The council of elderly females finally agreed that . . . might be useful to others" but was totally "redundant" from "the yak point of view": they didn't need a name for themselves and had never used it (BG 194).

Pets were a problem, especially among the "verbally talented individuals" like "some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs" who "insisted that their names were important to them." The solution here was getting them to understand "that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou . . . or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so." What she unnames is not the personal name any animal likes to name itself but "the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot, dog, or bird and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail." The insects and fish give up their names easily, especially the fish, whose names "dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans . . . without a trace" (195). All this work of unNaming done, she feels closer to the beasts,

In fairness, she, the Woman, will not make an exception for herself, so she goes to Adam and says, "You and your father lent me this-gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful." She is embarrassed (it is awkward to return gifts), but, fortunately perhaps, Adam "was not paying much attention," and responds to what I'll call The Great Divorce with only "'Put it down over there, OK?' and went on with what he was doing." One of the reasons she, the Woman, leaves is "talk was getting us nowhere," but she had been prepared to talk things over. She "fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing"-doing being what one with dominion does-"and take no notice of anything else. At last I said, 'Well, goodbye, dear. I hope that garden key turns up.'" And Adam, oblivious, asks "When's dinner?"

Eve has given up her name, her share of dominion, and Adam and the household of 'adam, returning to the woods or forest or line of trees she cannot dismissively name "forest," or whatever. She has given up the taxons and binomial nomenclature of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78), and, more deeply the universals and categories of Western thought going back to at least Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Most deeply, she has redone the Western myth underlying all such naming in the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist West. Now she must face the world face to face-a truly radical Nominalist-without abstractions, and Le Guin values such immediate, unmediated contact with the world, however much to the rational (masculinist?) mind, this relationship with what is may seem like unconsciousness.³⁶ 

Eve's act, seen this way, is also a mâshâl for women's giving up the ease of writing that comes with working within a tradition they have grown up with: "The beauty of your own tradition," Le Guin has written, "is that it carries you. It flies, and you ride it. . . . It frames your thinking and put words in your mouth. If you refuse to ride, . . . you lose that wonderful fluency." If women are to create their own tradition, they must drop men's categories, which means, for at least a while, " . . you have to stumble along . . . like a foreigner in your own country, amazed and troubled by things you see, not sure of the way, not able to speak with authority." I think the lesson is that, like this re-visioned Eve, women must make the attempt in order to "to speak your own wisdom" (ER 12).

* *

In her introduction to the two stories, Le Guin states that she has "learned to explain before I read them to an audience that "The Wife's Story" [1979] is not about werewolves, and that "Mazes" [1975] is not about rats" (61). In Buffalo Gals, though, "The Wife's Story" is about werewolves, and "Mazes" is about rats, in part.

As Lillian and, more so, Leonard Heldreth have pointed out in conversation with me and in conference presentations, werewolves are a kind of allegory of human adolescence: hair starts to grow where it hasn't been before, the body changes, hormones rage, moods swing, coordination gets tricky, wild urges erupt, and, generally, one's body-not all that long ago brought under one's conscious control-seems to go off on its own projects. From what I've seen of female adolescents, it seems sexist and biologically silly to focus the legend on men, but, usually, it is an allegory of male adolescence: the wer-wolf story, from Old English wer for "man," "male person." The fear represented by werewolves is an ironic one. Adolescence is a transition from an arguably lower stage to a higher. At the very least, a healthy boy becomes fertile, achieving the primary male status in nature of a sperm-delivery system. Still, though, there is the fear of losing control, of being reduced to a beast (see "Coming of Age in Karhide" 477-78).

In this sense, the author's explicit denial notwithstanding, "The Wife's Story" is indeed about werewolves: about the (male) human fear of being "reduced" to a mere animal.

The Wife in the story comes through to my ear as a lower-middle-class or working-class woman, who could be telling her story on Oprah. And a sensational story it is: her good, gentle husband, during the time of the dark of the moon (BG 67-68) becoming a monster, with the "little one," the "baby" of the family, recognizing the horrible change first (69). As it had to happen, one time the change comes on at home, right outside the doorway in the "hard sunlight."

The rest of the pack come to the rescue, though, led by the Wife's sister, and the man is efficiently dispatched. The Wife goes over to look, hoping "the spell, the curse" to be done and her husband, her true love to be there "in his true form, beautiful." But there's just the "dead man" there, "white and bloody," and the wolves "turned and ran, back up into the hills . . . back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight," out of the sunlight and into "the blessed dark" (71, end of story).

Dante Alighieri had called the wolf "the beast without peace, " and "Man is a wolf to man" has been a common expression from the Latin cliché to the last speech to the court by Bartolomeo Vanzetti before he and Nicolo Sacco were convicted and hanged in the early twentieth century (ODQ 551: 13). Konrad Lorenz has argued that we humans would be better off if we did treat one another more wolfishly: "And so we find the strangely moving paradox that the most blood-thirsty predators, particularly the Wolf, called by Dante the bestia senza pace, are among the animals with the most reliable killing inhibitions in the world" (On Aggression 124; ch. 7). Similar sentiments can be found among most people who have studied real-world wolves with their pack loyalties, family loyalties, "chivalry" and "politeness" (e.g. Lorenz 117-18, 129-30, 232-33). And Le Guin has given some of these sentiments in her contrasting the relatively wolfish Athsheans-with their pack hunting and (culturally conditioned) aggression-inhibiting posture-vs. the civilized Terrans in The Word for World Is Forest (1972), where, of course, the Athsheans are the good people.

"The Wife's Tale" is about werewolves insofar as it reverses roles and the "polarities" of our sympathies, and privileges wolves: Man acts humanly toward wolves in this story, with "human" and "wolf" natures closer to natural history than to human prejudices, our flattering ourselves that "wolfish" is bad and "human(e)" is good. If we must play favorites, Le Guin in this story (as other places in her canon) favors nonhuman animals over the human variety, dark dens and woods over the human plane of glaring light, the traditionally feminine dark of the moon to the full moon as a manwolf's time to howl.

In Buffalo Gals such a reading of "The Wife's Tale" is almost inevitable, as is a reading of "Mazes" in which the subject of the horrible experiments could be-except for some of the details of the story-a Terran rat. In any case, "Mazes" begins with the word "I," and the "I" takes on what I would consider the Rat-condition in a sparse, existentialist story, somewhat in the manner of Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett's plays like Endgame or the Act Without Words (1958).

From the point of view of the protagonist-narrator, he/she/it is kept in a prison by a monstrous alien, and frequently brought out to be tortured by what should be the joy of speaking-dancing-running mazes-a positive symbol in Le Guin. The "I" realizes that "It"-the captor-"is intelligent, highly intelligent . . . . We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders; surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do now know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture" (BG 62).

A major part of the immediate problem is that the "I" communicates through dance, and may be deaf, while the human-monster-captor communicates, we may infer and assume, orally/aurally. Another problem is a fairly typical misunderstanding about the food requirements of the "I": s/he-it likes "greenbud leaves" and would gladly eat them, but only juveniles among its species eat picked leaves, and s/he-it could get no nourishment from them (62). However, there are deeper problems, beyond mere difficulty in communication or understanding nutritional requirements. The "I" says,

The speech of the protagonist-narrator here is technically and literally "I"-"it": the captive "I" talks about the captor "it." More profoundly, though, the "I" is trying to establish communication, relationship with the captor as a "you," even if it is "You-my Enemy," while the human or humanoid captor has an (un)ethically "I"-"it" relationship with the protagonist-narrator, studying the "I" as if the "I" were a thing, a mere animal from the point of view of an exalted human. To the "I" of "Mazes," the "it" torturing it is a kind of monster. To us, human readers, with some privileged information, the captor comes through as an ordinary-enough, indeed banal lab worker-some near-future graduate student perhaps, going for a degree in some near-future curriculum combining exobiology and xenopsychology. In the context of Buffalo Gals, however, civilized Man, as 'adam, the alienated human species, is also "solitary . . . totally self-absorbed"; and the cruelty to the "I" comes from the widespread civilized lack of appreciation of anything nonhuman as capable of being an "I." The captor-experimenter, then, is engaged in a project deserving in its surface ordinariness-«rat running»-Hannah Arendt's damning phrase, "The Banality of Evil": the experimenter is guilty of "the barbarism . . . of treating lives as things" (LHD 95; ch. 7 [1969]).

After the "I" defecates on the knobs of a device for a knob-pushing experiment, the experimenter understands the "I" is upset by the experiment. "The alien took me up at once and returned [me] to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it. But how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its amusement": an electric shock, nothing, or the picked greenbud plants the stubbornly ignorant experimenter thinks would be a reward for the starving subject. And, finally, we come to agree with the "I" about the captor-experimenter: "Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then"-since the return to the "knob room"-"I have known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel" (BG 65).

As a representative of us, civilized humans, the experimenter is quite familiar: I'll fill in the silences and sketch this captor-experimenter "it" as some graduate student, desperately working on a project on alien intelligence, trusting in reports on what The Alien eats and frustrated that this alien won't behave and demonstrate its obvious intelligence in ways neatly quantifiable in terms of the experimental model. Or an older version, of the "it": an assistant professor trying to get the near-future equivalent of tenure, or desperately trying to avoid getting fired because there is no job security of any kind in the near future.

Or you can fill in a stereotypical Mad Scientist.

Part of the point of the story is that it doesn't matter. If the subject beast is sentient, is an "I," the upshot is the same no matter what: the treatment of the "I" is "unmistakably and grossly cruel."

*

"Schrödinger's Cat" (1974) is also a somewhat Existentialist story featuring an experiment, but it is of the comic-absurdist variety, not J-P. Sartrean grim, even if Samuel-Beckett sparse.³⁸ 

The story is set in a world gone fast-forward: entropic but from too much energy. Stylistically, it is a very punny place, in which married couples come apart and people go to pieces-literally, in a nice mockery and use of the SF (and satiric) device of literalizing figures of speech. There is no direction to take even a story, but the Narrator has "a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica"-the puritan Work Ethic-"or Adam's Disease," which is curable but only "by total decapitation" (BG 158). The Narrator even likes to dream and recall dreams : "it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just lying there" (159). So even in a world going to the dogs, there will be dreams and stories-with this Narrator, anyway.

The going to the dogs part is put off a moment by the arrival of a cat: "All this cat can say is meow, but maybe in his silences he will suggest to me what it is that I have lost, what I am grieving for. . . . That's why he came here. Cats look out for Number One" (159). And then we learn of the increasing heat of everything, except in the immediate area of the cat: "A real cool cat." An animal with presence (161).

Then the story goes to the dogs, or more exactly one dog-or Coyote-style dog/person-whom the Narrator feeds and names "Rover."³⁹  Rover recognizes that the cat is Schrödinger's Cat, the cat owned by "Erwin Schrödinger, the great physicist" (BG 162), the cat of the famous thought-experiment (163). Rover-simultaneously a dog and a human person-is carrying around with him paraphernalia for the experiment and concludes "It can't be mere coincidence. It's too improbable. Me, with the box; you, with the cat; to meet-here-now." While he sets up the experiment, the cat washes himself, and Rover explains: You put the cat in the box with a gun (in this version) and a triggering device for firing the gun at the cat inside the box.

Rover's main point may be the Modernist one in the last line: If we want certainties, we must create them. Or the Daoist/Handdarata point that other than death and until death there are no certainties. Anyway, we look inside the box, collapse the probability wave, and the cat at that moment is either dead or alive. Or, alternatively, two different universes come into being, one with a live cat, the other with a dead cat. But Le Guin doesn't handle that second option.

What Le Guin does do is have her Narrator make a very subversive suggestion. By looking in the box, we "involve ourselves in the system . . . [S]o when we came to look, there we would be, you and I, both looking at a live cat, and both looking at a dead cat" (164). Rover is upset by this idea and says "You must not complicate the issue. It is complicated enough." And the Narrator asks significantly "Are you sure?" The whole purpose of experiments-especially thought experiments-after all, is to simplify things, to abstract a situation out of a reality far too complex for scientific investigation. And if uncertainty is the point, and certainties at best created by sentients, how can he be sure?

Rover is very upset now: "Listen. It's all we have-the box. Truly it is. The box. And the cat. And they're here. . . . Put the cat in the box." The Narrator pities "the poor son of a bitch" but is about to refuse-when the cat walks over to the box, sprays an outside corner, jumps in, and brings the lid down with his tail." Rover's response is "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow" and then a deep silence. "Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing would ever happen until we lifted the lid of the box" (165). The Narrator thinks, "Like Pandora"-and I'll add, also like the Prince Rikard, in Le Guin's "Darkness Box" (1963), who also is closely associated with a cat (WTQ 62-63).⁴⁰ 

The Narrator demands of Rover "Just exactly what are you trying to prove," and Rover responds, "That the cat will be dead, or not dead." What he wants is "Certainty. All I want is certainty." What he sees as the one possible certainty: "To know for sure that God does play dice with the world." Rover isn't as bad as the Yomeshta in The Left Hand of Darkness, or any other enthusiasts after some transcendent certainty; he wants only the minimal security of the « stochastic universe», where at least we can depend on probabilities, even when they are Schrödinger's maddeningly 50/50 probability.⁴¹ 

In a dramatic gesture, Rover flings back the lid of the box: The cat has disappeared. Then the box disappears. Then, as with the climax of Archibald MacLeish's "The End of the World" (1926), ". . . the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of the box, letting in the unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars" (BG 166).⁴² 

From wherever, the Narrator tells us that s/he has "identified the note that keeps sounding." It's an "A, the one that drove the composer Schumann mad. It is a beautiful, clear tone, much clearer now that the stars are visible," in part because the roof is gone, and, perhaps, the walls, too are down (though that's not in the story). "I shall miss the cat. I wonder if he found what it was we lost" (166). In the universe of Buffalo Gals, and I think in Le Guin's universe(s) more generally, the cat never lost what we lost: connection with the universe that allows us place and presence, not certainty. What we have lost is embeddedness in the world that would not have as one possibility a universe gone mad with speed on one side (the beginning of the story) or isolating and cold on the other (story's end).

*

In Buffalo Gals, "'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" (1974) is in part corrective, in part reinforcement. The corrective part comes first from the whole idea of a Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, i.e., a journal devoted to the linguistic communications of animals. It may be that all things speak, even as all things dream, as George Orr says about dreaming in The Lathe of Heaven (LoH 161; ch. 10).⁴³  It may be that the rocks themselves speak the words that make the Earth (BG 175). On the other hand, the Association of Therolinguistics sounds like a classical group of loonies of the kind Northrop Frye called philosophus gloriosus: the cousin of the braggart soldier (miles gloriosus), the "learned crank or obsessed philosopher" (Anatomy 39). That nonhuman animals may have their art is an idea Le Guin wants us to take seriously, and plants and maybe even the rocks as well-but that is seriously, not so somberly in earnest one cannot joke about it.

There is also a useful corrective in the "MS. FOUND IN AN ANT-HILL," which may be "an autobiography or a manifesto" (167). Human people should, indeed, get embedded back in nature, but not in the manner of ants in an ant-hill. Or at least not in the way of your usual conformist ant, but only in the way of the rebel Author of the Acacia Seeds. The ant Author declares her personhood and independence and/or urges others to do so, seeking individuality and community (BG 167-68; seeds 1-13). She then moves on to the philosophical statement that "Long are the tunnels. Longer is the untunneled. No tunnel reaches the end of the untunneled. The untunneled goes on farther than we can go in ten days [i.e., forever {the article authors helpfully add}]. Praise!" (168; seeds 14-22). I'd interpret this epistemologically, in terms of the known («tunneled») and the unknown ("untunneled"). The "Praise!" I'd take in the sense of "Heya!" (ACH passim): i.e., general praise for the world. However, the "Praise" is the first part "of the customary salutation 'Praise the Queen!'", so the word is not only philosophical / religious but highly political (and theological). Few queens would be pleased that specific praise of their Majesties became a cry of general joy (168); "Heya!" is different from "Hallelujah!" because "Praise!" without an object is different from "Praise the Lord!".

The philosophical daring of the ant Author continues when she notes that an ant stumbling into a foreign colony is killed and even "so the ant without ants dies"; but, in spite of this, "being without ants"-alone in the gloss of the article-"is as sweet as honeydew" (168; seeds 23-29). That is, the ant Author desires solitude. Even as she cries out for personhood, independence, and community (seeds 1-13), she also wants solitude, at least as often as she wants honeydew. Even so with Stone Telling in Always Coming Home, Serenity in "Solitude," and Ogion and (eventually) Ged in the Earthsea trilogy; solitude, community, independence, and solidarity must be part of the rhythm of a life going with the world, which means occasionally going without other people.

The final two seeds (30-31) read, "Eat the eggs! Up with the Queen!" The human authors resolve what seems to be a contradiction between the blasphemous "Eat the eggs" and the patriotic "Up with the Queen" by pointing out that "up" has mostly negative meanings for ants; they conclude by suggesting "that this strange author, in the solitude of her lonely tunnel, sought with what means she had to express the ultimate blasphemy conceivable to an ant, and the correct reading of Seeds 30-31 in human terms is: 'Eat the eggs! Down with the Queen!'" (BG 169).

Le Guin agrees it is anthropocentric to assume that "Up" is good. For ants Up is the direction food comes from, indeed, but it is also the place of "the scorching sun; the freezing night; no shelter in the beloved tunnels; exile; death"-as opposed to Down, the place of "security, peace, and home" (BG 169). Even so with humans. For us, Up has been the direction of the sky gods, transcendence, immortality-and all the ills those bad ideas have brought. Down is the direction into immanence, dirt, Earth (the Mother).

Further reinforcement of the general theme of Buffalo Gals is the acceptance in the Journal as scientific fact that all animals, and plants and the Earth itself, do indeed talk. And Le Guin wants us to believe that the world will indeed talk to us, if we remember how to listen, and this is true however cracked the therolinguists or phytolinguists or geolinguists (175). Perhaps it is true even given our deafness: If a tree talks in the forest, and no human hears, the tree has still talked. Within Buffalo Gals, nonhuman animals do talk, so the beasts may very well have their art, and the plants as well. "Can we in fact know it? Can we ever understand it?" (174-75). Maybe-but probably not through the sort of cognition that gets into learned journals. (Perhaps human art can't be understood through the sort of writing that makes it into learned journals.) Le Guin's therolinguists give us some good hints as to what we might look for in animal, plant, and rock art, and the crucial concern of Time. And the President of the Association instructively editorializes that the assumption that art communicates may get in the way of our appreciating plant and rock art that just is (173-75).

The therolinguists are probably crazy; in the world of Buffalo Gals, they're also mostly right.

*

"Direction of the Road" tells the story of change from the point of view of a large oak tree (genus Quercus) at the side of a road that became a highway. It's also the story of an accident.

The first point of the story is precisely that of point of view-the literal Relativity implied in point of view. In direct address to the reader, the Oak asks if

Well, I am sure I hadn't thought about that. Which brings us to the second point. Having very efficiently defamiliarized what we see when we pass trees as we drive by them, our arboreal Narrator tells us that few of us humans really see at all. Most of us, driving our cars, "merely stared ahead. They seemed to believe that they were 'going somewhere.'" The drivers on the tree's road have these small mirrors on "their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress" (89), and beetles at least leave the tree alone.

Which brings us to the third point.

There has been an accident, which the Oak very precisely describes (90), and the Tree has to hit a car and kill the driver (90-91). This is not what the Oak is protesting.

Elsewhere in Le Guin, it is good to see the Other, and see the Other whole (e.g., LHD 248; ch. 18). What is not good is getting a vision that sticks, where you think you can be in eternity: e.g., Meshe in The Left Hand of Darkness (ch. 12). The Oak agrees to kill "If it is necessary to the Order of Things," but refuses to play death: "For I am not death. I am life; I am mortal" (91).

The last tree I ran into that was so philosophically inclined was the tree that became the cross of Jesus of Nazareth in Old English poem, "The Dream of the Rood."⁴⁴  The Rood Tree, though, was in favor of eternity; the Oak here makes some of Le Guin's favorite points: Relatedness requires being in the world and does not let you go outside it; Relatedness makes "Progress" a difficult idea, since one needs to stand outside the world to be sure which direction is right for "Progress."⁴⁵ Relatedness implies mortality, and quests for immortality destroy relatedness. The Tree angrily ends, "I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another's eyes and see it there" (BG 91).

*

I have discussed "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) above but will take a second pass at it here in the context of Buffalo Gals. Le Guin in her introduction to "Direction of the Road" and "Vaster . . ."-paired in Buffalo Gals-notes that they are different from most SF in taking a serious interest in plants and, simultaneously, "both stories . . . are quite conventional science fiction," with "Direction" as "yet another point-of-view shift" story (but with emphasis on Relativity) and "Vaster" as "a story about boldly going where, etc. In it I was, in part, trying to talk about the obscure fear called panic, which many of us feel when alone in the wilderness" (BG 84). Le Guin recounts very briefly her losing the trail on a mountain in Oregon and having her "individual relation to the trees and undergrowth and soil" and her "relative position in the earth-and-ocean-wide realm, as an animal and as a human . . . brought home" to her, hard. She immediately goes on to note how absurd it is to be afraid of a tree and how easily we humans can (and possibly will) wipe them all out. But there was that "obscure fear," the moment of panic.

Here I want to note that "Vaster" is the most familiarly science fictional story in Buffalo Gals; and I want to talk about panic and about the opening four paragraphs of "Vaster" as it appeared in its original form in New Dimensions I (1971). The science-fictional aspects of "Vaster" can be reviewed very quickly: a crew of ten humans go by Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) travel where, indeed, none have gone before and make First Contact with a totally vegetative sentience. One of the crew separates himself from the others and ends up attacked by-something-in the forest. The something turns out to be another crew member, and the humans themselves turn out to be in a way responsible for what hostility they really do feel from the vegetable sentience. All standard SF, out of Star Trek, God and the bibliographers know how many First Contact stories, and the classic 1950s science fiction movie, Forbidden Planet (1956).

I will assume my readers have a bit less background on minor Greek gods.

Our word "panic" comes from the Greek god Pan, son of Hermes; Pan was a god of fertility, goatherds, and flocks and a rural god. If his father, Hermes, was a protector of travelers, Pan could be a problem for them: "He was dreaded by travelers whom he sometimes startled; hence sudden fright without any visible cause was ascribed to him and called panic fear" (Smaller Classical "Pan"). Edith Hamilton lists Pan as chief of the Lesser Gods who lived "in the world," upon Earth All-Mother. He is both god and animal, "with a goat's horns, and a goat's hoofs . . . . All wild places were his home . . ." (40). The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974) entry for him (1974) gives him the legs and ears of a goat as well as horns and hooves. More to the point for me, it adds that "Pan" is a Doric contraction of paon, "pasturer," but the name in antiquity was "commonly supposed . . . to be connected with pan ('all')."

The people in "Vaster than Empires" go into a planet-wide vegetative system and feel very uneasy, eventually feeling panic; and the vegetative world, too, panics. The forest and other plants panicked because of the people. The team Biologist describes life on the planet as "a network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctions between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electrochemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking . . . . But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational immortal, isolated ..." The team's empathic Sensor picks up on "isolated" and solves the main mystery of the fe