Transition: Daoism, Magic, and Getting in Touch

I read Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching at 14. My father had it around the house in the old edition with the Chinese text. I sneaked a peak and was and remain fascinated. Taoism is still an underlayer in my work. It begins talking about what we can't talk about an old mysticism that intertwines with Buddhism and is practical and not theistic. Before and beyond God. There's a humorous and easygoing aspect to it that I like temperamentally and that fits in with anarchism. Pacifist anarchism and Lao-tzu have a lot of connection with each other, especially in the 20th century.

Possibly the best way into the worlds of Le Guin's Daoist and magical works is through the early short stories. ¹ I'll suggest the philosophical stories "Field of Vision" (1973), "A Trip to the Head" (1970), and "Darkness Box" (1963); the stories in the "marriage group" "April in Paris" (1962) and "Nine Lives" (1969); and the Earthsea stories "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names" (both 1964). ²

"Field of Vision" (1973)

The science-fiction story "Field of Vision" makes a useful starting place, logically, not chronologically since it handles very explicitly a question usually made moot or only handled indirectly in much of Le Guin's work until Always Coming Home (1985): God. The story also deals with the important themes of light and darkness, reason and certainty, literal and metaphorical touch, and with how we organize reality. ³

In "Field of Vision," God exists, "the one true God, immanent in all things. Everywhere, forever." Geraint ("Gerry") Hughes, the protagonist of the story has "learned to see God," at an archeological site on Mars, and Joe Temski, one of his colleagues, has learned to hear God. In the manner of prophets who've heard the Word, Temski goes off to preach and become First Apostle of the holy and universal Church of God, based on the Revelation of the Ancients who had visited Mars 600 million years ago (WTQ 239, 242-43). Before the Church can be formed, Hughes kills himself, and his motivation for suicide a negative act for Le Guin is important.

When Hughes looks at his therapist, Sidney Shapir he sees "A blot. A shadow. An incompleteness, a rudiment, an obstruction. Something completely unimportant." Shapir asks him what he sees when he looks at himself, and Hughes answers, "Just the same. A hindrance, a triviality. A blot on the field of vision" (241). ⁴ Hughes will not preach and refuses to be a missionary because he does not want God for himself and certainly doesn't want God for his world. The logic of the story is impeccable: If God is, then "Only God is" truly is, is in a meaningful way. Nothing about human beings matters except to know the truth of our worthlessness: "that we are trivial vehicles of the great truth" of God. "The earth doesn't matter, the stars don't matter, death doesn't matter, nothing is anything" at least nothing is anything significant (242). After his time in the "conversion" room on Mars, all Hughes has to do is open his eyes and look and he can "see the Face of God. And I'd give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree . . . a chair . . . . They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!" (243). He gets only his death.

Le Guin uses in "Field of Vision" a variation on the method of Reductio ad absurdum. Assuming the existence of God does not lead to literal absurdities in logic, but it does lead to conclusions Le Guin does not like, conclusions which will not go over well with humanist readers. Let's examine, briefly, the God here rejected.

First, this is less the transcendent Creator-God who says "Let there be light" (Genesis 1.3) than the immanent God who is Light. Le Guin may be alluding to the opening of the Gospel of John and to John 8.12, where Jesus proclaims himself "the light of the world." Still, it may be more useful to see the God in "Field of Vision" as the God who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and responded to Moses's request for a name: that God who calls himself "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh," with the short form of just "Ehyeh" ("I Am" or "I Will Be"). My most recent and textually sophisticated English bible refuses to try to translate the name of God, but notes the centrality to its meaning of the Hebrew verb for to be. The True Name of God may be, then: The One Who Can Say I Am and Have It a Significant Statement. That is, God is Being, immanent and eternal and such a God is a problem for humans when personified, when made one, given a personal name, and assigned a pronoun. Indeed, "Field of Vision" could even be seen to critique any of the schools of Buddhism that stress seeing the ground of Being. Ch'an Buddhism, Fritjof Capra writes, is the Chinese version of Zen, and the formula in Ch'an for enlightenment is "the vision of the Tao." Capra concurs, with reservations, with D. T. Suzuki's assertion that "Buddhist philosophy . . . ultimately points toward seeing reality as it is" (Capra 22; ch. 2, "Knowing and Seeing"). Capra can cite other Eastern sources to the same effect, so perhaps we should say that "Field of Vision" critiques all theories that stress seeing and relating to an Absolute One as opposed to living in the multitudinous world of everyday.

Later, I will deal in some detail with the rather overwrought confrontation between Jean-Paul Sartre's Orestes and Zeus in The Flies (1943), but a more decorous repetition of what Le Guin is getting at in terms of Western thought can be found in the quieter separation between God and at least part of humanity at the end of Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon (1961). About to follow the word of the Lord and kill the elders of Succoth, Gideon

Gideon wants a divorce. ⁵ The Angel reviews Gideon's position: "You would pretend God is not although you know that he is, so that you might be a significant creature which you know you are not. . . . And you do not love me!" (Chayefsky 64-65).

If God is and is a person, God is all, and we are nothing. If there is no God, though, then there are other problems.

Le Guin will accept Shiva and Kali, especially Shiva Nataraja, dancing the worlds into being, and nonbeing, and Kali as goddess of creative destruction: these two deities nicely symbolize a mythologized Dao. But a monotheistic One, a "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist" God does not exist in Le Guin's work, with part of her rationale for this rejection stated plainly in "Field of Vision." Another part of the rationale of rejection is the way monotheism, especially with a transcendent God, correlates with macho, imperialist civilization but that is a matter for later. For now, Le Guin denies "the one true God" and writes as an atheist, as she ambiguously says in the 1976 introduction to the re-issue of The Left Hand of Darkness, and an honest and intelligent atheist; she knows that getting rid of God, singular, can be "extremely embarrassing" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 294). With no One, personal God, one might be left in the Sartrean vision: Man alone, abandoned on a vast plain, with each of us trapped in our own skins and, in extreme cases, nauseated by the world; most importantly for such a vision, "Hell is other people" (No Exit 47).⁶   In Earthsea, from one point of view, when Le Guin gets cosmological, she presents in part a metaphysical and physical universe not far from that of Sartre: a relatively flat world of human beings pretty much between an empty heaven and the Dry Land of the dead, with human people necessarily incapable of being part of nature in the unconscious way of leaves and whales and rocks. What we must learn in Earthsea is the Daoist lesson that one is either tossed about on the surface of the "stream" or one becomes the stream (or river or ocean or goes deep into the forest): i.e., one merges with the Dao.⁷   Le Guin, though, usually wants to keep such merging short-term. She wants us embedded in what is, indeed, but ordinarily what is in terms of everyday, domestic realities.

It is a central fact of Le Guin's work that she accepts the problem of "skin" as a real problem: it is difficult to really get in touch with another person, but it is by no means impossible.⁸   Indeed, as Gerry Hughes brings home quite clearly, the desire to get in touch with other human beings and with the world "just to see one human face again, to see a tree . . . a plain wooden chair" may be stronger than the desire to see God, to have the mystic vision and achieve certainty (243). Or, so it is for most people, the unsaved of Henry Vaughn's poem "The World" (1650), excerpts from which Le Guin uses to open and close the story. The Speaker of Vaughn's poem accuses worldlings of folly "thus to prefer dark night / Before true light"; but one of them replies in a whisper and implies that Eternity is, indeed, a divine gift only for the elect: "This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide / But for his bride." And the rest of us (the great "preterite" majority if Calvinist Christians are correct) may not want this Ring the transcendent God but prefer the physical world and other people. Le Guin would not have a Chayefskian divorce from God but would have us reject the Groom (if any Groom there be) and call off the wedding.

"April in Paris" (1962), "Nine Lives" (1969): First Pass

The problem of "skin" is stated succinctly by Kislk in "April in Paris" (Le Guin's first professional story) explaining why in 15,000 years of recorded history one magical spell and only one in one place over a brief period of time worked to bring together four strangers and a puppy. "People bored me," Kislk tells us. "All like me on the outside, all alien to me on the inside. When everything's alike," as it is in her world some 6500 years in our future, "which place is home?" However, in the late medieval Paris of the story she's met a man she likes, shorter than she is, "with bad teeth and a short temper. Now I'm home, I'm where I can be myself, I'm no longer alone!" (WTQ 35). Loneliness is the problem, a constant human problem. The first-time magician who has summoned three new friends (and a dog) tells us "Loneliness is the spell, loneliness is stronger .... Really it doesn't seem unnatural" (35; unspaced ellipsis mark in original). Loneliness may be even stronger than natural law, and a primary human desire may be to be where one is not alone but with friends and lovers: truly at home.

A similar point is made in "Nine Lives" (1969). The plot there shares a premise with Le Guin's future history for our Earth from "Nine Lives" through "Newton's Sleep" and the Hainish stories of the early 1990s: there has been a major ecological and social collapse on Earth. Some space flight survives the collapse in "Nine Lives," and early in the years of our expansion into the galaxy, a mining colony is set up on the planet Libra, manned, at the beginning of the story by Alvaro Guillen Martin, a healthy, extroverted Argentinean, and Owen Pugh, a scrawny Welshman (WTQ 123). To start the plot, in good dramatic fashion, Owen and Pugh soon must deal with the arrival of newcomers: the John Chow tenclone, all named John Chow, but having for middle names letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

And then Le Guin does something very undramatic; she interrupts the arrival scene with a paragraph of general doctrine, and then follows that with another paragraph applying the doctrine to the situation on Libra.

The plot works to set up the plausibility of a clone as "the first truly stable, self-reliant human being," a corporate individual like a beehive, that "would need nobody's help. It would be sufficient to itself physically, sexually, emotionally, intellectually" (WTQ 129). And then Le Guin stages a quake and a collapse in a mine and kills off all the clones except Kaph.

Now this is isolation: three men alone on a planet, under a dome under a Godless sky, over a planet that kills those who go beneath her skin. (I put the matter melodramatically but stay faithful to the imagery of the story.) The action of the plot is Kaph's isolation from his clone, and then learning to make contact, to touch, Pugh and Martin. ⁹   Kaph asks Pugh if Pugh loves Martin and, after a moment's anger, Pugh answers that Martin is his friend, and then realizes he has answered Kaph's question indirectly so does so directly: "Yes, I love him. Why did you ask that?" For later, note Pugh's anger at what he takes as a suggestion of homosexuality: it fits into Le Guin's wrestling with one orientation of the angels of feminist consciousness. ¹⁰   For now note Kaph's answer to Pugh's wanting to know why he asked; Kaph needs to know how people can love, how we do love. Pugh cannot answer such a question, but he can say that ". . . it's practice, partly. . . . We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?" (WTQ 146-47).

That's about all we can do, and that is what most of us try to do, with whatever success we find. And that, basically, is Le Guin's answer to J-P Sartre and the dozens of lesser thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s who (unlike Sartre) rather exalted in isolation and tragedy and irony and detachment and a sort of "manly" acceptance of what a small horde of social critics was identifying as the pathological alienation and "atomization" of people in technologically sophisticated cultures in general and the United States in particular.

But Le Guin was not quite finished with her respectable target, J-P Sartre; that came the following year in "A Trip to the Head," a story she describes in the headnote in The Wind's Twelve Quarters as "definitely a Bung Puller," a story that got her writing again.

"A Trip to the Head" (1970)

"A Trip to the Head" is a surreal, philosophical work, and I'm not sure it would be useful to try to talk about its plot, but the situation of "A Trip to the Head" is a man finding himself with another person at the edge of a never-named forest. ¹¹   The other is an Other a person the Self encounters and the forest both symbolizes and literally is the unconscious, plus nature and the Dao, as both Being and nonBeing. ¹²   The man is called "blank" at first by the Narrator, finally identified as Lewis D. Charles, who then becomes "blank" again. Somehow the man has stumbled out of the forest and into consciousness. There is some action in the head of the man, but much of the story is a dialog between this newly-conscious Self and the Other.

Blank's first question is whether or not he's on Earth, and the Other tells him he is with an allusion to the famous line, "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it" from Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (1.3.76). The allusion is apt since blank is there and the Other "the one beside him" is there and "As Jean-Paul Sartre has said in his lovable way, 'Hell is other people'" (Garcin's line in the last moments of No Exit, quoted by the Other). ¹³   Blank wishes to hell J-P Sartre and again wants to know where he is, to which the Other asks who he is. He doesn't know, apparently because they stand "at the edge of the forest" and in the forest out of civilization, again home in nature and Being things lose their names (see "She Unnames Them" and King Dog [1985]).

So blank is but remains unnamed: in good Existentialist fashion his existence precedes his personal essence. Nor does he know what type of thing he is, aside from similar to the Other; if there is no God to determine human nature (as Sartre asserts) it is up to men Sartre's is a masculinist theory to define "Man." Blank ask, "How can I say who I am when I can't say what I am?" and he determines to do something, to get the basics: ". . . it doesn't matter what name you're called by . . . it's what you do that counts. . . . I will exist. . . . I will call myself Ralph" (162). Existence precedes essence; human action (in Existentialist theory) creates human being, our only authentic, really real being.

And then, segue into a parody of a "women's romance" scene in which Yankee carpetbagger Mr. Ralph proposes to aristocratic, probably White, now-poor but always-proud Amanda, ending in a passionate kiss "But it did not seem to help at all." So jump forward in time a bit for a brief sex scene and a longer philosophical discussion afterward. The Self and the Other decide that gender is important; the Other is less sure about sex. "'Oh, Hell,' said the other with a flare of temper, 'brisleworms have sex, tree-sloths have sex, Jean-Paul Sartre has sex what does it prove?" And then a very important dialogue:

And here, Le Guin says in her headnote in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, here she stopped writing this story had "been stuck" in her writing for a year or so (159).

Shortly after blank had come to consciousness, he had looked at the also-nameless Other and wondered, "What good was it?" (161). Sex is one answer to that question: one utilitarian use of another is as a sex object. More important is the suggestion of sex as man's way of proving "his being": it would be the "intensest form" and primal paradigm of "having and acting." But should one make utilitarian demands on people insist that they be good for something, of use to me? Is sex always and necessarily "having and acting"? Is sex always that way even for men? Is "having and acting" the usual view of sex among women? "'Try being Amanda,' the other said sourly" and consider also the implications "if Amanda was black" (WTQ 163).

The rest of "A Trip to the Head" shows shadows coming over the world in what may be night, during or after which blank experiences a dream or vision. The Other asks blank to check his memory, and blank finds "old toys, nursery rhymes, myths, old wives' tales, but no nourishment for adults, no least scrap of possession, not a crumb of success" (164). Blank finds no comfort in being merely human, with "no name, no sex, no nothing. I might as well be a bristleworm or a tree-sloth," or, the Other significantly suggests, he might as well be Jean-Paul Sartre. "'I?' said blank, offended. Driven to denial by so nauseous a notion, he stood up and said, 'I certainly am not Jean-Paul Sartre'"; he is himself: Lewis D. Charles. Charles names himself in that moment and sees himself before a forest emphatically there, "root and branch," but the Other has disappeared.

Blank's finding the thought of being J-P Sartre "so nauseous a notion" is a joke; Nausea (1938) is the title of Sartre's first famous work, a novel with a narrator radically alienated from other people, the physical world, and even his own body. The burning tigers in the last line of "A Trip to the Head" are lifted from William Blake's "The Tyger" (Songs of Experience, etched 1789-94). In the poem, Blake raises the question of what sort of God "Could frame" the "dreadful symmetry" of a tiger. We should not make too much of a joke and an allusion, but one thing is very clear in "A Trip to the Head": the movement is away from a utilitarian view of people and a macho Existentialism in the manner of Sartre and into a forest Le Guin has associated with shadows, myths, old wives' tales, and Blakean tigers and has identified as the unconscious, where names are lost. Such a trip may be very negative, as it is at the conclusion of Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964); in later works, it will be mostly positive.

Do not insist, then, upon an Existentialist either/or e.g., Sartre or Blake with the comfortable stasis of a fixed position. Definitely don't look for some sort of "golden mean": a grey blending of, e.g., Sartre and Blake. Do, however, note the movement, the vector toward the unconscious, toward so many things most people in the Western world have associated with the dark, the movement away from a supposed victory of culture and civilization over savage nature. Like Romantics generally, Blakean and otherwise, Le Guin would have us get back home to the forest, into relationship with tigers, Nature, trees, and the dark, labyrinthine wilderness.

Le Guin is different from most people in the West, different from all of us who've grown up in the tradition of revelation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in the rationalist tradition of Greece, the legalist tradition of Rome, in the tradition going back to at least ancient Egypt that validates the desire for immortality, that celebrates spirit over body, light over the dark. The difference will be more explicit some fifteen years later when Le Guin publishes Always Coming Home and, the complement to "A Trip to the Head," her (anti)myth of Creation and denial of separation, "She Unnames Them" (1985).

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For our first pass at Daoism I shall start with Sartrean Man, more specifically Orestes in his climactic confrontation with Zeus in The Flies. ¹⁵   With Zeus in front of him, Orestes will not deny the existence of God, but he does deny God's relevance. God is "the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man," because God erred and created us free; indeed, we are our freedom (120-21). Before achieving consciousness and the recognition of his freedom, Orestes had felt he had a purpose: serving the good by serving God; he felt gentle and a part of the Whole. And then, "Suddenly . . . . Nature sprang back . . . and I knew myself alone, utterly alone in the midst of this well-meaning little universe of yours. I was like a man who's lost his shadow. And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders. * * * [I am] Foreign to myself . . . . Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself. . . . Nature abhors man, and you too, god of gods, abhor mankind. * * * You are God and I am free; each of us is alone, and our anguish is akin (The Flies 121-22). Orestes claims one human connection: the people of Argos are his people, and he feels he must open their eyes with the gift of truth. Zeus says it's a gift "of loneliness and shame." They will see through the veils a merciful God has placed over their eyes and "will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon." What will they make of themselves, the people who'll accept Orestes's gift? Orestes says, "What they will. They're free, and human life begins on the far side of despair" (123).

So Man is out there, free, alone, utterly alienated. In theory and in the 1940s through the 1960s a very invigorating theory it was. Still, though, only a French philosopher living a stereotype could be totally content with a picture of the human condition that was both so bleak (if not pathological) and so obviously counter to a fair amount of human experience. We do make friends; we do form bonds with other people; we do love; and we do form human communities from time to time, and most of us, on at least rare occasions, can sense a relationship with Nature and the world, and feel at home in the universe. How does one return to the theory the experience of many men and, quite possibly, most women?

Allow God, and the problem had been solved long before Le Guin started to write, or Sartre, for that matter. In I and Thou (1923, 1937), Martin Buber argued that relationship with God, the great and eternal Thou, allows human relationship with one another and other creatures. Quite emphatically, however, Le Guin will not allow God. How, then, to make possible I-Thou relationships in a Godless world?

One way is to take the God who says "I AM" and delete the "I" get rid of the personal and transcendent in God and leave only immanence, the Being within things, that underlies things. And this was not something Le Guin had to do: the idea of immanent Being may well be far older than named transcendent gods, and is central to the religious and philosophical thought of the East and well developed in "The Perennial Philosophy" what Aldous Huxley sees as almost a «natural» approach to the universe perhaps most austerely embodied in philosophical and mystic Daoism.¹⁶   Note carefully (and again) that is the philosophical and mystical Daoism stemming from Tao te Ching ("The Classic of the Way and its Power") associated with the name Lao Tzu, and the later teachings of Chuang Tzu; the Daoist religion is more recent, different, and not relevant.

The Daoists are the source of the saying that "Those who know will not say; those who say do not know," so one should be reluctant to discuss Daoism: philosophically, the Dao itself precedes names and categories and can't be discussed, and true knowledge in a mystic discipline comes not from discourse but mystic experience. But the basics are easy enough if one recognizes throughout that any discussion of serious mysteries or ultimate metaphysics has to be figurative, indirect, and partly wrong. I'll tell the Daoist story as I explain it to my students, somewhat mythically and numerologically.

In such a view, human beings are part of the universe; even the most alienated of us dies and returns to the cycles of nature. That view of humanity as part of nature is a radical difference between Daoism and Existentialism, and the major source of radical differences between the ancient habits of thought preserved in Daoism versus most of the light-enamored thought of "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LoH 82; ch. 6).¹⁸   We will be returning to this theme, but for now note that if we are part of the universe we cannot get outside the universe to see how it runs, but we can get in touch with the universe (contact the Dao) and momentarily feel certain of the nature of things. In such a scheme, right action is never going against nature never trying to force people or things to one's will but always going with nature, going with the Dao.

Le Guin summarizes "THE WAY" almost at the end of Always Coming Home (1985), in her last entry of seven ". . . Generative Metaphors" at The Back of the Book (483-85):

Now for people who grew up in the macho 1950s and 1960s, or 1980s, Daoist philosophy may sound rather feminine, and the feminine emphasis (in terms of traditional patriarchal dualities) was insisted upon by the founders of Daoism, who lived during China's Warring States period and knew a thing or two about the costs of macho. More important, though, this quietism the celebration of wu wei 'inaction (action through stillness)' seems to put the lie to the title to Arthur Waley's explanation of Daoism, The Way and Its Power. What power?! Well, for one thing the power to know when to act and how to act so that one's action is in rhythm with the universe so a small human act could have great consequences, a touch on a Great Wheel that changes its direction (LHD 189, 192, 203). One might have, then, the power of the wise diplomat. Or of great athletes when they have entered the rhythm of the game, or dancers who momentarily embody the music and become the dance. Anna K. Seidel, however, suggests that "The philosophical notion of Tao expressed the religious sympathy and complete solidarity that unites nature and man. In the magical arts that influenced Taoism, Tao designated the magical feat of bringing Heaven and Earth, the sacred powers and man, into communication with each other. In this sense, Tao was an art and a power, specifically the power of the magician and the king" (1035). ²⁰

And I will use that observation as a transition to magic.

"The Rule of Names" (1964) and "The Word of Unbinding" (1964)

We will get powerful presentations of magicians and kings (if only one literal king) in The Lathe of Heaven and the Earthsea series, but I want to get to them by way of some transitional works, starting with the two promised Earthsea stories, "The Rule of Names" and "The Word of Unbinding" (both 1964). "The Rule of Names" is a nice bit of dark comedy about the dragon Yevaud and a treasure hunter. After the manner of dragons, Yevaud has picked up some treasure, but there has arisen a problem: peace has broken out in Earthsea, and the human people have formed a League that wants the treasure enough to send out a mage-equipped fleet sufficiently strong to threaten even an ancient dragon. So Yevaud goes off, possibly commits a murder to stage his own "death" at least some dragon other than Yevaud turns up conveniently dead to discourage the hunt and shows up on Sattins Island disguised as a mediocre wizard who picks up the usename "Mr. Underhill," since he lives in a small, Hobbit-style house under a hill. ²¹

While out walking, Mr. Underhill answers the question of the local school mistress why one must be careful to conceal one's truename: "Because the name is the thing . . . and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing" (WTQ 76). ²²   This point is illustrated, with a twist, later, when the current Sealord of Pendor, nicknamed Blackbeard, comes for the treasure that will make his title real and not a mockery. Blackbeard has a great advantage: he knows the truename of the thief and uses it at the climax of a wizards' duel to trap Yevaud in his true shape. The name of a thing, or person, is the essence of the thing, and to know the name means you can summon the thing and hold it there in its true shape. Unfortunately for the arrogant Blackbeard, Yevaud is right there and wants to be there, and Yevaud's true shape is that of a very large dragon with experience killing lesser thieves, like a Sealord and his garrison (79). Very shortly, all that is left of Blackbeard on the island is "a reddish-blackish trampled spot" (83).

"The Rule of Names" introduces Earthsea as an Archipelago (islands and sea: Earthsea) and gives us the rules for magic in the world of Earthsea. It's a rather generic sort of magic, by no means specifically Daoist, but it is a kind of magic compatible with Daoism (see Galbreath, "Taoist Magic . . ."). Most important, it teaches a strong lesson all the stronger for its being comic against using magic to force one's will on the world in the manner of Blackbeard: the world is much too complicated to be forced. The story also associates magic with the unconscious or subconscious: in psychoanalytic theory, "true speech" is the unconscious, and the language of dreams and symbols and other manifestations of the human unconscious is true speech. ²³   In psychoanalysis and more generally, the unconscious is the place of our primary thoughts/feelings; however uncanny, (unHome-y, unhiemlich), the unconscious may seem to our consciousness, it and its language may be basic to us and to our Selves being in the world and acting on the world. The language of the unconscious may be like art, irrelevant for power and still, paradoxically, provide great power.

*

"The Word of Unbinding" (1964) very specifically associates magic with homecoming (WTQ 70) and introduces us to the Dry Land, the land of the dead, far to the west in Earthsea (71-72). As Le Guin says in her headnote, "It also reveals a certain obsession with trees, which . . . keep cropping up in my work" (65). The quadruple association is significant.

The hero of "The Word of Unbinding" is a warlock named Festin, who, like Dante at the beginning of The Divine Comedy (ca. 1302, printed 1472) is "in the middle of his life" and in a woods. But it's a positive woods for Festin, since he wants to learn patience, and so has "gone to converse with trees, especially oaks, chestnuts, and the grey alders whose roots are in profound communication with running water" (66). Festin is captured by the wicked wizard Voll the Fell and imprisoned. Up to the final brief episode, "The Word of Unbinding" is the story of Festin's attempts to escape.

In the next to last episode, Festin is exhausted, injured, and very sad over his failure to protect his land and people: "Trusting his power too much, he had lost his strength." Unable to act, he wishes himself a fish "in the forest in the shadow of the trees, in the clear brown backwater under an alder's roots" and he becomes a fish. The Narrator tells us explicitly that "This was a great magic," but Festin hadn't exactly performed this magic no more than anyone else "in exile or danger" who "longs for the earth and waters of his home. . . . Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home. But Festin . . . gathered his will together till it shone like a candle in the darkness of his flesh, and began to work the great and silent magic" until "He got free. He was home" and then gets captured again, trapped by his own spell in the shape of a fish (WTQ 69-70).

Back in his dungeon, Festin wanders why Voll hasn't killed him, and makes a shrewd guess why Voll doesn't want him dead. If Festin chooses to live, it is as a perpetual prisoner, "But if one chose not to live?" And "So Festin made his choice," in one nicely Existentialist gesture and speaks the word of unbinding. "This was not transformation. He was not changed," and he walks "slowly down the far slope of the hill of being, under new stars" and summons Voll by Voll's name (71). Like Cob later, in The Farthest Shore, Voll and "death had found a way back into the other land," the land of the living, of fish and water, change and trees. Festin easily defeats Voll, forcing him to die truly, and then Festin waits for Voll's corpse to finally rot and thereby render Voll incapable of further evil. He waits "in the heart of the country which has no seacoast. The stars stood still above him; and as he watched them, slowly, very slowly he began to forget the voice of streams and the sound of rain on the leaves of the forests of life" (WTQ 72). ²⁴  

Renouncing his power as a magician abnegation, as it will be put in "Winter's King" (1969/1975) Festin comes into his strength, a strength associated with water ("The softest thing on earth / overtakes the hardest thing on earth" [Tao te Ching I.43; Wilhelm p. 47]). Renouncing still more, renouncing even his life, Festin gets the only victory he can get over his enemy. Summarizing "The Perennial Philosophy" on mortification and non-attachment, Aldous Huxley writes that "It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground" (106; ch. 6). Le Guin here is both more rigorous and downbeat: by losing his life, period, Festin joins with Being and gets as much as he can get: freedom, victory, and justification of his life as a wizard; he has, finally, protected the people he serves. Pure Being, though, in Earthsea is the Dry Land, devoid of "streams and the sounds of rain on the leaves of the forests of life," and Festin's is a somber victory for a tragic hero.

Impermanence, Le Guin is convinced, especially that of human mortality, is central to human life, and the source not only of our pain, but of love and joy (Huxley 106-07). And death is a terrible thing: "I have learnt that death exists," says Arren to Ged in The Farthest Shore (1972), "and that I am to die. But I have not learnt to rejoice in the knowledge . . . . If I love life, shall I not hate the end of it?" (136; ch. 9). It is a question Le Guin will continue to debate with herself into the 1990s.

gender (male/femaleness): 28

glory: 26, 56

God, gods (Dao preceding): 4, 39

greatness (including human): 25

home (as Dao): 62

ignorance / learning, knowledge,

cleverness (a bad idea): 18, 19, 20, 48, 64, 65, 71, 81

joy (gladness): 23

judging: 54

king (ruler): 16, 25

knowledge / wisdom (positive): 47, 52, (71)

left / right: 31, 34

life / death: 23, 38, 41, 50

light: 42, 52, 56

limits: 59

living well: 54, 56, 57, 59, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 77, 79

love: 8, 38, 56, 67

low(liness), baseness / humility: 39, 56, 66, 68

loyalty / promise-keeping, faithfulness: 38, 49

Mother (cosmic): 20, 25, 52, 59

Name(s) / nameless (Self-so) / true name: 1, 25, 32

nature: (Used by Merel and others for "heaven and earth," "the world," "Dao," and other words and formulations.)

nothing: 11

One, oneness / undifferentiated unity: 10, 19, 22, 39, (60),

origins / continuity: 14

pain, suffering: 13, (16), 71

peace: (16), 31, 66, 68, 81

progress, advance: 41

return (circle, cycle): 16, 22, 25, 40, 52

rock: 43, 78

root: 6, 16, 26, 39

sea / brooks, streams, rivers (like Dao): 32, 66

Self (vs. «ego» ): 7, 13, 24

shame / purity: 41

simplicity: 19, 28, 32, 37, 57

soft(ness) / hard (soft better): 10, 43, 76, 78

Source (Dao as [older than God]): 4

stillness / quiet, silence (vs. busy-ness,

claiming to know, leading the world: 15, 16, 23, 26, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 67

strength (true strength): 55

things (hoarding them): 9, 44

thread: 14

traces (tracks): 27

use, usefulness / purpose: 11, 20, 40, 67

utopia (primitive, and small): 80

valley, gorge / Valley Spirit (valley stream): 6 32, 28, 41

violence, conquest (advised against) /

nonviolence: 29, 30, 31, (67), 68, 69

water / dryness: 6, 8, 43, 74, 78

weakness (advised): 28, 36, 40, 76, 78

wholeness: 22

words: 70

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Dao/Magic: End Notes

1 The word "Tao" is pronounced [dao], and is now often spelled with a "D," in the same reform that took "Peking" to "Beijing."  I retain the older spelling in titles and quotations. 

2 "The Marriage Group" is a term from Chaucer criticism, referring to the Canterbury Tales dealing with literal marriage.  In Le Guin's usage and that of her critics, "marriage" means close, life-long pair bonds: the close personal relationships of friends and lovers, of which legally married couples are a subset.  Again, Le Guin has said that most of he work deals with "marriage," but some works deal with "marriage" more directly than others, and I'll occasionally group together such works. 

3 For "Field of Vision" in Le Guin's canon, see Abrash, esp. 12-13. 

4 In Robert Browning's dramatic monolog "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1853/1855), the world is not a "blot" to the artist Fra Lippo but "means intensely, and means good" (see lines 313-15).  Le Guin agrees here with Browning's Fra Lippo, that it is wrong "To let a truth slip" of the wondrous details of everyday life (see "Lippo" lines 286-309).

5 I use "divorce" advisedly: the word is quite explicit in Gideon; it fits in with Le Guin's emphasis on marriage; and it is a Judaic point Chayefsky, significantly, would make and Le Guin would not.  Among the Jewish images for relationship with God are a wrestling match, betrothal, and marriage; Gideon's rejection of God is both intellectual and as emotionally laden as the breakup of a marriage. 

6 No Exit is useful background for some touches in Le Guin: e.g., the formulation "Hell is _____" (TD); and for "You are—your life, and nothing else" (45; "Existence precedes essence" in nondramatic prose), an important idea in the first three books of Earthsea.  Note, though, that Moby Dick is also useful for studying Le Guin, and it is not a book she has looked at since 1947 (Le Guin, "Response" 46): I am not suggesting Le Guin's sources here or most other places in Coyote's Song but readings useful for readers of Le Guin (who have their own work to do in establishing the meaning of Le Guin's texts).

7 For Ogion to Ged on becoming the stream, see WE 128, ch. 7; for Ged to Arren, see FS 122, ch. 8.

8 For touch imagery, see Remington, "The Other Side of Suffering: Touch as Theme and Metaphor. . ." and "A Touch of Different, A Touch of Love:.

9 The isolation of Kaph is implicitly compared to that of Ishi upon coming into the modern world in Maslen's essay, ". . . Theodora Kroeber and Ursula K. Le Guin" 67.

10 To anticipate: From 1970 through the 1980s, Le Guin had occasional problems with fellow feminists.  The publication in Playboy in Dec. 1990 of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Unlocking the Air" can be justified on feminist grounds: bringing unto the unconverted, the readers of a very slick, very high-class "girlie magazine," a strong woman character like "Air's" Fana Fabbre and a good, radical message.  The 1969 publication of "Nine Lives" in Playboy by "U.K. Le Guin," though, with a by-line disguising her identity, was an issue.  The bigger issues were Le Guin's use of male heroes (in "Nine Lives," all the female John Chow's are soon killed off) and an issue that seriously divided liberal feminists and radical feminists: lesbianism and heterosexism.  As of TD in 1974, Le Guin could present worlds in which consenting homosexual sex was accepted; it was not until ACH (1985) and really the 1990s, that Le Guin would write stories in which gay and lesbian sex would be praised.

11 The title, "A Trip to the Head," is a complex pun on "head trip," "drug trip," and "head" as a slang term (and fairly standard naval usage) for toiletroom.

12 For classic imaging of a forest as Self, especially the unconscious portions of the Self, note the forest near Athens in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1594-95) and the entry of Washizu into the labyrinthine forest in the fourth scene of Akira Kurosawa's Kumonosu-Djo (1957), The Castle of the Spider's Web, released in the USA as Throne of Blood (Jorgens 238, Davies 18 [after J. Blumenthal]). 

13 Le Guin compliments Philip K. Dick by saying that in his work ". . . other people are not (as they are to Sartre) hell, but salvation" ("The Modest One," coll. LoN [1979] 176).  Sartre on Justice comes across better: Orestes's line "Justice is a matter among men" is presented in paraphrase in King Dog (16) and just possibly alluded to by Ged and Arren in their ignorance of who might allow or forbid human actions (FS 137; ch. 9). 

14 See Dena C. Bain, "The Tao Te Ching as Background to the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin" for a brief summary of relevant Daoist doctrines.  For an excellent brief bibliography, see Robert Galbreath, "Taoist Magic," 267-28.  See passim in James W. Bittner's Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, and his ch. 5 and appendix on Daoism in his 1979 U of Wisconsin diss. "Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin."  I have not seen it, but Susan Wood's 1992 MA thesis, "Taoism: a Study of Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin"  from San Francisco State University is now listed on WorldCat on the Internet and, I assume, available. 

15 We will return to Orestes in my discussion of ACH, where being "Outside nature, against nature" is central to what I call The Big Mistake in the development of civilized cultures. 

16 See Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1944, 1945), Introd.  (Huxley credits Philosophia perennis as a phrase to Leibniz [i.e., the Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1646-1716]).  For the «naturalness» of connection and Daoist ideas on the complexity of all action, note the maxim of the 1970s Ecology Movement, "Everything is connected to everything else" and the corollary, "You can't change just one thing."  (Even in the Eden myth, the natural state of humanity is in close connection with the ground, plants, and animals; alienation and separation is the heart of the Fall: Gen. 2.4-3.19). 

17 From various sources, including Waley (esp. Tao te Ching, ch. 42), Bittner diss., Seidel.  See also FS 137; ch. 9. 

18 For an imagined (very negative) critique of Americanism by Lao Tzu, see Holmes Welch, Parting of the Way (1957), Part Four: "Tao Today," esp. 169-74 and, for evolution, 187.  Le Guin refers to this book in "Response" (45). 

19 "In Tao the only motion is returning; / The only useful quality, weakness": Tao te Ching ch. 40 (Waley trans. 192).  In Wilhelm's trans. (45; II.40), conflated with Chen's trans.

Return is the movement of DAO.   

Weakness is the effect of DAO.    

All things under Heaven come about in existence

[Chen: "are born of being (yu)"]

Existence comes about in non-existence 

["Being is born of non-being (wu)"]

20 A. L. Kroeber had a lower opinion of magic.  Though insisting upon what many today would call the historical construction of the theory of progress, he suggested some criteria for objective ranking of «progressed», "higher cultures" and "lower cultures," retarded in their beliefs.  "The first is the criterion of magic and 'superstition.'  In proportion as a culture disengages itself from reliance on these, it may be said to have registered an advance.  In proportion as it admits magic in its operations, it remains primitive or retarded.  This seemingly dogmatic judgment is based on the observation that beliefs in magic, such as are normal in backward societies, do recur in cultures that by profession have discarded magic, but chiefly among individuals whose social fortune is backward or who are psychotic, mentally deteriorated, or otherwise subnormal" (§ 127, Culture Patterns . . . 106; ch. 7).

21 Adult dragons in Earthsea are talking, intelligent creatures, so a human's killing one is always at least "dracocide" and a bad act—if usually justifiable.  Yevaud's killing another dragon to hide his (her?) tracks, though, definitely is a murder (the killing of a member of one's own [intelligent] species). 

22 For ancient belief in the power of names, see Gen. 32.24-30: Jacob's getting his name changed to Israel, and the refusal of the divine being Jacob wrestled with to give Jacob his name.  Oxford Annotated RSV notes: "In antiquity it was believed that a person's self was concentrated in his name. . . .  Jacob's new name signified a new self. . . .  The divine being refuses" to tell Jacob his name "lest Jacob, by possessing the name, gain power over him (compare Ex. 3.13-14, Jg. 13.17)."  For the power of an adept at Daoist Quietism "to move and transform matter" see Waley 46. 

23 Vivian Sobchack refers to "the 'true speech' that [Jacques] Lacan sees as the unconscious" ("Virginity" 57).  The idea, of course, is general to psychoanalytic views of what is truest in human personality (although usage of "unconscious" and "subconscious" varies—and I apologize if my conflating of the two gives offense). 

24 I'm not sure what to make of "no seacoast" beyond the obvious: you can't just sail off to the land of the dead.  Note that in the Revelation of John at the end of Christian Scriptures, there's a new heaven and new earth, "and there was no longer any sea" (21.1).  Contrast more generally the forest as a place for human life, with John's vision of a city for eternal life: a square (21.16) world of eternal day (22.5) done in gold and jewels and semiprecious stones (21.11-21).  Le Guin prefers water, a central Daoist symbol—and popular among Native Americans (see Le Guin's "Legends" 5)—and she prefers life, trees, and forests. 

 

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