Introduction

Throughout human history, stories have been the preferred form for expression of moral commitments.... Narrative is a primary means for testing with concrete particularizations the benefits and disadvantages of specific ethical decisions. Narrative retellability and rereadability ensure that such examinations will not too easily crystallize into mere dogma.

--Karl Kroeber, Retelling and Rereading (189; qtd. Le Guin, Norton 24).

One who does not honor the teacher . . . is greatly confounded though knowledgeable. (Tao te Ching ch. 27)

Coyote's Song is mostly a close reading of a large number of the narrative works of Ursula K. Le Guin. It does not exactly have a thesis, but it does have a title, some controlling ideas and, arguably, an agenda.

" In his title "Persuading Us To Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise," James W. Bittner is not only alluding to a line by W. H. Auden but also making clear that a significant part of Le Guin's project, from her first published work on, is teaching. Eric S. Rabkin has described Le Guin's The Left of Darkness as "clearly didactic" ("Determinism" 5), and other readers of Le Guin have noted what Elizabeth Cummins has called "the didactic Le Guin" (166). I accept Le Guin's didacticism as a given in her writing, but I knew enough people find the word "didacticism" negative that I avoided it in my title. I will avoid the word "didactic" in my text as well because Le Guin's works are didactic in a fairly unusual way, what we might call "dialogic didacticism," or "teaching by dialectics (i.e., argument)"; most simply put, Le Guin's works are usually good teachers. The problem with most didactic works I've encountered is that the teachers are cock-sure that they have Truth and are duty-bound to ram it down the throats of children and the unwashed masses. Le Guin has her certainties, but they are rare, and, ordinarily, she debates with herself. So instead of coming up with long phrases modifying "didacticism," I offer the image of this book's title: Coyote, the great Trickster figure, teaching in raucous antiphony and polyphony.

" The first controlling idea should not be controversial. Art means in contexts, contexts that includes its perceivers (in the scientific formulation, "The observer is part of the system"). I give my students the image of the rainbow. The colors are created by the interaction of a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with the vision of humans who can see colors. Different cultures define the colors differently. And there are an indefinitely large number of possible colors that can be perceived; still, somewhere along the way one gets into the ultraviolet or infrared one gets to colors merely normal humans cannot see. Similarly, there are an indefinitely large number of meanings we can legitimately perceive in works of art, and that meaning is created by an interaction of the work and its perceivers but some place along the line an interpretation can figuratively go into the ultraviolet or infrared (or beyond), and one's fellow perceivers can say, "I just don't see it." Changing the metaphor, even one perceiver is likely to see even one work differently in different contexts, as differing figures against different "grounds"; e.g., I read Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" somewhat differently in the context of the stories collected in The Winds Twelve Quarters than I read it collected in Buffalo Gals . . . . Much of the work I do in Coyote's Song is putting Le Guin in the context of Le Guin: closely reading her works individually I have publicly admitted to doing compulsively close readings and reading them as a canon, an opus, an interrelated set whose individual members are mutually illuminating and defining.

To a lesser extent, I read the works as historical documents. In the cliché of historical criticism of all varieties, every artistic work is produced in a specific time and place, and all literature needs to be read (in part) in terms of its historical contexts. Especially for younger readers, especially with the earlier works, Le Guin's work needs to be "historicized." Older readers, too, can be helped with historical context. E.g., almost all readers who were in the United States and at least teenagers during the 1960s will understand that Le Guin's The World for Word Is Forest comments quite directly on American warfare in Indochina, what was called in the United States, "The Viet Nam War." Until late in the first draft of this book, however, I missed the implications for American warfare in Viet Nam implicit in the Earthsea trilogy (1968-72). The trilogy deals extensively with the importance for using power without pride, with the importance of avoiding arrogance, of observing limits. I knew that. It took a long time, though and reading other critics for me to put that fact together with two well-known book titles from the 1960s: Sen. J. William Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power (1966/1967) and Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy's The Limits of Power: America's Role in the World (1968).

I hope to help younger readers a bit with historicizing Le Guin's earlier works, and some aspects of the later ones. But I refer all readers to the work done by James Bittner, Charlotte Spivack, Elizabeth Cummins, and others for offering different histories to form the context of Le Guin's work, including biographical material on Le Guin for the personal history of a very active and complex human being whose life is still very much a work in progress.

" The second, and related, controlling idea is continuity. Looking at various entities (things, objects, organisms, people) some people will see mostly differences; other people will see mostly similarities. E.g., in various works, Le Guin has used the symbol of "the Circle of Life" (an almost complete circle), the Yin-Yang, open and closed doorways, and the hinged spiral of the heyiya-if. One may note that Le Guin uses symbols, that they are similar symbols, that they are symbols familiar in but more often foreign to Western religions and attitudes: similarities and continuities; or one may note that Le Guin changes her symbols: difference and change. ¹ Some will value difference and change, others similarity and continuity. I tend to see and value similarities and continuities, and I will argue for a strong tendency toward continuity in Le Guin's work. In her poetry, picture books, and short stories, Le Guin is more experimental, but in her science fiction and fantasy novels up until the mid-1980s, Le Guin's works are analyzable in terms of a limited number of themes and patterns. ²

One continuity for Le Guin's writing, then, is the return to such perennial themes as the role of art and the artist and variations on the theme of (usually heterosexual) love, and varieties of friendship: human bonding. Another of her repeated themes is hard for many readers to accept in the world and therefore difficult to recognize in literature they like. As we will soon see, Le Guin denies a transcendent One-God and with that god Christianity and "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LoH 82; ch. 6). Very emphatically, Le Guin denies the separable soul as contemporary monotheists usually see it, and insists on the finality of death. Insofar as Le Guin allows an "afterlife" at all, it is a "Dry Land" like Hades, as the most ancient Greeks saw it, or Sheol as viewed by Job or Koheleth ("the Preacher" in Ecclesiastes) or it is "The Four Houses of the Sky," which also include abstractions and the unborn (ACH 44, [47]). Basically, when you are dead you are dead, for Le Guin, and this «mortalist» view makes very urgent her concerns with lethal violence generally and war specifically. ³ In ways that are varied and historically conditioned, but frequently, Le Guin returns to the theme of war and the problem of violence, leading in turn to the question of utopia: How might we get not The Great Society but a good society? What might make for, at least, a nonviolent society? Le Guin finds the best hope for human society in some variety of communist anarchy, with a feminist emphasis that increases from the earlier works to the later, and a Daoist emphasis most explicit in the earlier works but maintained throughout.

Le Guin's continuity, however, is flexible. If one sees Always Coming Home as central to Le Guin's canon and the motion of the Dao as her sustaining image (and I do), decorously central also are Le Guin's debates with herself. Her consistency lies less in taking position X or Y or Z than returning to the XYZ axis system, returning to these issue in a kind of reversal.

Le Guin's major patterns, by my count, are three or four in number.

I'll begin with the pattern of Romantic Comedy. In the Shakespearean form that permeates English-speaking culture, Romantic Comedy moves toward a new and better world younger, more flexible, more hopeful, more joyous coalescing around a central couple. That's Northrop Frye's formulation in Anatomy of Criticism, except that I have corrected his chemistry. (Frye had the new world crystallizing: too rigid an image.) ⁴ Using this pattern doesn't mean fulfilling it each time, offering an audience every work, "As You Like It." The movement of the pattern can be frustrated, with the plot moving toward tragedy. Instead of the wished-for happy ending of union, integration, renewed life, and rejoicing, there can be somber endings of isolation and separation. A newly integrated and peaceful world coalesces around Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but they are dead. Rocannon in Rocannon's World is able to destroy his enemies and bring to the League of All Worlds a great gift; and Rocannon in the Epilogue finds a home, hearth, marriage, and a people. But Rocannon's victory is at the cost of the life of a dear friend, and Rocannon is dead before he can be told his new home world has been given his name (135-36). ⁵ Rolery and Jakob Agat in Le Guin's Planet of Exile marry and will live more or less happily ever after, but they go home together only after the death and destruction of a major battle. And the potential Romantic Comedies of The Word for World Is Forest and in Stone Telling's story in Always Coming Home are utterly frustrated, yielding as happy an ending as we can hope for in Word for World, with the survival of the Athshean peoples, but for the point of view characters isolation, madness, and death. In Le Guin, "Patterns of Integration" epitomized by marriages are usually good things (Crow and Erlich), but, sometimes, the least bad upshot is integration's reversal: separation, divorce.

Next, is the pattern of two abstractly philosophical views of the world: immanence vs. transcendence. Le Guin has been an enthusiastic participant in the immanence vs. transcendence debate in the form that goes back, in the European tradition, to at least Augustine of Hippo and Boethius in the 400s-500s CE. Is Ultimate Reality Out There and Up in some transcendent God or Truth or Whatever, or inside things, over, under (especially under) around and through immanent in the world? Le Guin is consistently Daoist in mostly denying transcendence and emphatically denying a transcendent God and most Western people's ideas of an afterlife, and this profound denial of monotheism in a highly spiritual writer one who likes the Hindu deities Shiva and Kali is very important for her work and is a subtext in much of the analysis of Le Guin's works by others. ⁶ Less well recognized, by me certainly, has been more mundane, homelier, meaning for immanence and transcendence.

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In The Second Sex a book Le Guin cites in "Is Gender Necessary?" Simone de Beauvoir explicitly uses "immanence" and "transcendence" as central terms for her analysis of women's current situation and proposals for women's liberation ("Gender?" DEW 8).

Beauvoir nowhere defines "immanence" and "transcendence," but does say that "The domestic labors that fell to [woman's] lot . . . imprisoned her in repetition and immanence" to which the translator supplies a note that in Beauvoir immanence "always signifies, as here, the opposite or negation of transcendence, such as confinement or restriction to a narrow round of uncreative and repetitious duties; it is in contrast to the freedom to engage in projects of ever[-]widening scope that marks the untrammeled existent" (63). And earlier, in her Introduction, Beauvoir states:

And however much a human couple "is the original Mitsein" (friendly society) and "a basic combination" (35), nowhere is "woman" more trapped in immanence than reproduction and marriage. ⁷ To get out of that trap "woman" must "seek self-fulfillment in transcendence": i.e., "lose herself in her projects," becoming independent and free. "Woman" today "no longer seeks to drag [man] into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence" (51, 717; see also II.VII.xxv: 702, 715).

Le Guin wrote in "Is Gender Necessary?" (1976) that she considered herself a feminist at least by the mid-1960s and repeats her claim in her Introduction to Planet of Exile, concluding there, famously, and, she says, unfashionably, with "Once I was asked what I thought the central, constant theme of my work was, and I said spontaneously, 'Marriage'" (cf. Headnote "Good Trip", WTQ 109).

One way to help historicize the stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, especially her early short fiction, is to place them in dialog with Beauvoir's The Second Sex (and its philosophical tradition) and with themselves on issues of immanence and transcendence, broadly defined. In a number of works from Le Guin's first published story, "An die Musik" (1961), through Tehanu, in 1990, Le Guin works through the immanence/transcendence antithesis, literally re-evaluating the two terms and undermining the binary opposition between them. Quite emphatically, she looks at immanence in several forms, including domestic life, and at transcendence primarily as moving out of Being and nature into action, culture, and history: into conflict, art (including magic), saving people, and utopia building.

In Tehanu, the point-of-view character, Tenar, explicitly and consciously gives up studying magic with the great mage Ogion: "I left him," she says. "What did I want with his books? . . . . I wanted to live, I wanted a man, I wanted my children, I wanted my life" (51) not transcendence in Existentialist terms but simply life. Tenar's journey is away from "the powers of learning and skill offered her by . . . Ogion. She had turned her back on all that, gone to the other side, the other room, where the women lived, to be one of them. A wife, a farmer's wife, a mother, a householder, undertaking the power that a woman was born to, the authority allotted her by the arrangements of mankind" (Tehanu 30). Tenar gives herself to immanence, and does womanly, life-sustaining, things therein, and thereby helps change her world radically.

Or consider three clearly philosophical stories collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975).

"Darkness Box" (1963) is a Pandora story, but here the Pandora-figure is male and a prince, and the gods are replaced by the sea, a female witch, and a little boy. It's not a bad world in the story: a world of high fantasy, where the exiled prince returns to lay siege to the royal city and be defeated by the loyal prince, true soldier to their father (WTQ 59). It's a world with unicorns and witches' familiars and at least one griffin. But it is a grey world, with no sun and no shadows and no darkness, a world of stasis where the clocks always read 9:50 a.m. It is a world of immanence but, in this world, the "narrow round of uncreative and repetitious duties" is precisely the heroic project of loyal warfare. The prince serves the king, fighting off again and again and again the attacks of the prince's brother. "Serve and be served," the witch tells him, "rule and be ruled. Your brother chose neither to serve nor rule ..." and then breaks off and warns the prince to take care. Perhaps he does. For whatever motivation, the prince releases darkness from the box, and so Time and shadow, chance, change, and death enter his world. And this is a happy ending (WTQ 64). There may be some Martin Heidegger or Rainer Maria Rilke in there; there are certainly ideas consistent with Le Guin's Daoism. Still the main point here is that in 1963 Le Guin asserted in her fiction that the violent project of heroic warfare was what was repetitive and boring. And she did so while associating warfare with subjugation and rule and suggesting the need for an alternative to the subjugation/rule antithesis. ⁸

Undoubtedly Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus are around in two stories from 1970, with maybe a touch of Søren Kierkegaard: "Things" and "A Trip to the Head," juxtaposed in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

"Things" is a story of "The End" (the title under which Damon Knight ran the story). In a very low-tech country by the sea, The End is expected, and the people divide into the Weepers up in Heights-Hall and the Ragers down in the fields (148-49), all except for three: a brickmaker named Lif, an unnamed widow, and an unnamed baby. Lif dreams of the Islands, and if this were a «hard», technological SF story, the plot would involve his invention and building of a boat. But the Ragers have destroyed everything Lif can think of to build a boat. In social SF, the plot would move toward an allegory where the Ragers = the Weathermen and other young rebels (153) and the Weepers were "The Great Silent [Christian] Majority," and the world would die with a bang and a whimper. Within the story, that doesn't happen either. Lif takes up with the widow and her child, and they live together for a while; he learns to float and swim a bit and lays a causeway with his remaining bricks, a causeway heading away from the country and its madfolk and toward the Islands. And then Lif and the widow, with the baby, walk into the sea upon his causeway, going as far as it goes and the taking the last step. Perhaps with a ship rescuing them and taking them to the Islands, but probably not.

Heidegger, my encyclopedia tells me, said that Man "stands out" from things, a project who will be occasionally absorbed back into things, becoming "nobody in particular" (740). In "Things," two elderly men coming from a Weeping say, "It is well to be free of Things" (sic: T, 154). Maybe. Le Guin was to say so in The Dispossessed. But the bricklayer is "a builder, not a floater" (152), and I think the line has symbolic meaning, and the widow accounts for their (temporary) survival with "you had your things your bricks and I had the baby...." (156). Lif's labor, while they're waiting for The End, was Sisyphean: load after load of bricks. But he did his own thing, and he produced a straight, heavy, earth-bound road in the right direction, one leading away from the pointless and repetitive Weeping and Raging. To apply a song from the period: they found an "also" in "a world of Either/Or." And Le Guin supplies here an "also" to the antithesis of immanence and transcendence, feminine domesticity and manly, heroic projects: the most free and creative work we see is housekeeping, childcare, and hauling bricks. In the midst of madness, where one cannot do much good, heroism may be impossible, and heroism may be one of the sources for the madness, not the solution but part of the problem; the best one might do, then, is just keep going with the everyday, or just walk away. To mix some of Le Guin's metaphors, when nothing remains to be done, one can be done with doing and walk away to rejoin the sea (or forest) of Being.

"A Trip to the Head" (1970) is no story to try to summarize, but it clearly moves away from "possession . . . [and] success," away from a utilitarian view of people away from macho Existentialism and equally macho sexuality. The story moves from defining oneself outside the world naming oneself and willing oneself out of nature into culture and dominance toward a forest Le Guin associates with shadows, myths, old wives' tales, and Blakean tigers. As we will see, "A Trip to the Head" moves toward a forest that Le Guin associates with philosophical Immanence, with Being. And in "A Trip to the Head," Le Guin contrasts that immanence with a relationship that could lead to a traditional heterosexual marriage. Fifteen years later, Le Guin tells a similar story in "She Unnames Them" (1985). The protagonist-narrator there is Eve, and the action is far more cosmic, but Eve, too, like the naming character in "A Trip," ends up among trees, heading "down the path away from the house," into immanence. It has been Eve's transcendent project to increase immanence: she consciously unnames all the animals and then consciously unnames herself (discussed in Khanna).

One last set of stories of the Immanence/Transcendence Pattern. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974), and "Sur" (1982; see Khanna 50-55).

Carol D. Stevens reminds us that the Omelites are "us" (30), and Elizabeth Cummins reminds us of a slogan from our recent history: "America Love It or Leave It" (22). I'll add Peter Biskind's reminder that in many Cold-War era Hollywood movies, "the U.S.A., ca. 1955, was utopian enough for anyone" (115). "The Ones Who Walk Away" is a most rigorous examination of the highly transcendent "Let's get out there and perfect things, damn it!" utopian project. Omelas is a good place, mostly almost entirely: a place of happiness and joy, a place, it first seems, without guilt. What the story turns into is a scapegoat fable and a reduction to the grotesque of the hyper-rationalist, measuring, utilitarian doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number. The story attacks the ideal of the "Rationalist" part of "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West: it attack the benevolent desire "to make the world better for humanity" (LoH 82-83); the story attacks idealism insofar as idealism seeks an Archimedean point outside the world, from which he can shove it toward an abstract, transcendent Good (see NA 88). The Omelites, however much they are "mature, intelligent, passionate adults" (WTQ 254) are gravely mistaken or, as Rebecca Adams suggests, a little crazy (41). Either way, we can help privilege Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by associating them with Lif and the widow and child in "Things," and Eve in "She Names Them." If will and reason have created a transcendent project in Omelas, then it might be well to leave Omelas. If some "transcendental power" has dictated the "sacrificial 'terms'" shown in the Omelas story (Adams 41), then it would also be well to leave Omelas, rejecting such transcendental powers.

"[O]ne of the ones who walked away from Omelas," Le Guin tells us in the headnote, is Odo from "The Day Before the Revolution" (260), and so positive a revolutionary should give pause in privileging immanence over Beauvoir's transcendence. What could be a more transcendent project than developing the theory for a utopian revolution? Three points. First, at least into the 1970s, the utopian question was, "What will things be like the day after the Revolution?" i.e., what are the goals of the Revolution? Le Guin's story is about a fairly ordinary day, the day before the revolution. Second, the story is about Odo, "the famous revolutionary," except it is not just that, because Odo is not just that: Odo is also a woman who had married and loved her husband. She was and is her whole history, which included being, a "swimmer in the midst of life": an image of immanence in the world (275). Third, Odo is the theoretician of people on the bottom, at "the foundation, the reality, the source"; her wisdom comes from knowing people are, at bottom, mud (WTQ 274), part of the Earth. ⁹

Finally, let's look at the great project of polar exploration and making of a temporary utopia in "Sur" (1982; see Khanna 51-55).

In "Sur," nine women we will see many nines in Le Guin's work nine women in 1909-1910, are the first people to reach the South Pole (although they probably shouldn't have made that last part of the trip [WTQ 267-8].) They select leaders in case of grave emergency, but never have an emergency, and so act in near-perfect anarchy (257); they practice good housekeeping, "the art of the infinite" (260); Berta creates beautiful sculptures (262-3); and Teresa has a baby (269-70). They have their goal and "success crowned our efforts." They are world-class explorers, and they are very responsible wives and mothers: "those who wished to evade" the claims of family "were not the companions we wanted in hard work, risk, and privation" (256). They claim no reward, not even fame. They achieve their transcendent goal, but they renounce any sort of victory and don't leave at the South Pole for a memorial so much as a single human footprint.

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The last pattern is the political complement of the immanence / transcendence antithesis: a pattern of opposition and political philosophy had been worked out by the Daoists and which appears in Le Guin's work as early as A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and continued into Always Coming Home (1985), A Fisherman of the Inland Sea and "Solitude" (1994), but not, significantly, Tehanu (1990). Le Guin herself implies most of the opposition in her very important essay "Is Gender Necessary": not only in the original 1976 version but retained in the 1988 form, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux." In this social opposition, the people on the right path are in some sense anarchistic: "communal, independent, and somewhat introverted." Their populations are stable and they tend not to "move in large masses, or rapidly. Their migrations have been slow . . . . They have no nomadic peoples, and no societies that live by expansion and aggression . . . . Nor have they formed large, hierarchically governed nation-states, the mobilizable entity that is the essential factor in modern war." Competition is ritualized, and, when ritual breaks down, any resulting violence "does not become mass violence, remaining limited, personal." The people going wrong are organized into "hierarchically governed nation-states" or their future analogs, and they will organize for war (DEW 10), modern or premodern war. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the culture farthest along the wrong way tends toward transcendent belief. In Always Coming Home (1985), the wrong-headed people are explicitly defined as monotheists, worshipping the transcendent One and basing their social structure on or at least justifying it in terms of their theology and cosmography.

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Le Guin is not a formulaic writer in any derogatory sense, but she is a highly prolific popular artist with a strong ethical sense and strong interests. Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and other popular writers who are producing high art making problematic, and interesting the old forms she has used both generic patterns and more personal patterns; like Shakespeare and, more recently with some film auteurs, she has looked at some recurring issues from different angles in different works, sometimes "arguing" different sides of a question. Most important, like the Greek dramatist Euripides and some of the inventors of American literature, she has performed the highly radical work of moving society toward change by examining and shifting archetypes and (re)inventing myths, trying to "re-vision" our inherited formulas (ER 1993), to find new "Legends for a New Land" (1988).

Introduction: End Notes

1  The heyiya if is from Always Coming Home (ACH); analogs to its open spiral form may be found in (unhinged) Keltic gyres and Jewish Havdalah candles.  The open and closed doorways are from The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, using a symbol from, among other places Western places, Rome: Janus bifrons has his two faces because doorways and gates necessarily "look" in two directions.

2 For continuities nd consistency in Le Guin's works from a contemporary psychoanlytical point of view, see Bernard Selinger, Le Guin and Identity.   (see esp. Selinger 145).

3 The 4th edn. of The MLA Handbook . . . (1995) calls for "quotation marks around a word or phrase used in a special sense or purposefully misused" (§ 2.2.8).  Since the close reading I do requires extensive quotation from Le Guin (and others), and I want to differentiate real quotations from special senses, I shall use for special senses European-style quotation marks: « ».

4 ". . . the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another.  At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play's society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers.  At the end of the play . . . [a] device in the plot  . . . brings hero and heroine together [and] causes a new society to crystallize around the hero . . . " (Frye 163).

5 Cost is a major issue in Le Guin.  Cf. and contrast the death of Mogien in RW with the death of Estraven in LHD (1969) and with the intentionally deformed life of the imprisoned scapegoat child in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973). 

6 Shivais the creative Destroyer in the Hindu pantheon, gendered male, who dances the worlds into being; Kali is the creative Destroyer gendered female.  Following Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, and Capra on creation/destruction in The Tao of Physics, we can see Shiva/Kali, along with the goddess Shakti (also Sakti), as the mythic figuring of the Dao, as the Being and nonBeing from which all things come and to which all return.

7 See e.g., in Second Sex 147, 173-5, 187; II.V.xvi: esp. 429-30, 447-48, 451-54, 456; II.V.xvii: 513, 521; 555-6, 594; II.V.xxi: esp. 598-99, 602 (see also 618-21).

8 For Heidegger, Rilke, et al., see Bitner, Approaches, Index: Dinge.  Cf. and contrast the dialog between the prince and the witch in "Darkness Box" with that between King Ashthera and the Priestess in Le Guin's 1985 film script King Dog (90-92; Part 4).

9 See Tzu Yu on death: Chuang Tzu, ch. 6 (Giles 79), and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Cat's Cradle (1963):  § 99, "Dyot meet mat" ("God made mud" [149]).