Poems can and regularly do tell stories,-if usually short ones, nowadays-and those stories often teach lessons. Homer wrote in verse, and he told stories so pedagogically influential that Plato would call him "the schoolmaster of the Greeks" (Swain I.277). ² I will handle some of Ursula K. Le Guin's poems from her four collections (as of early 1997) before moving on to King Dog, which started as a long narrative poem and ended up "A Movie for the Mind's Eye" (7). Dealing with the poetry is important. As Patrick D. Murphy suggests, Le Guin may see "her audience for poetry . . . composed of a much large percentage of women and gender-sensitive men" than her prose. Murphy stresses that in much of Le Guin's poetry there is "a strong feminist perspective," and one "usually more explicit" than in her fiction, at least in her fiction to the time Murphy wrote, not long after 1985 (127, 129).³ Also more explicit are anger, a sexual theme or two and, related to that, Le Guin's interest in Shiva, Shakti, and Kali in the Hindu pantheon. Le Guin talks of how, in trying to (re)make her world, she "learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world . . ." ("World-Making," DEW 48). To oversimplify, the idea from China is the Dao, Daoism; to oversimplify greatly, the god from India is Shiva: Shiva-Linga with Parvati-Yoni, phallic god with vulva/mountain goddess; Shiva with Shakti as (male) quiescence and (female) creative energy; Shiva with Shakti, or Kali, the terrible, the destroyer; and, pre-eminently, Shiva as Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer, dancing into existence the worlds (see front and back covers of Hard Words).⁴ I wish to deal with the poems on anger, the Dao, dancing, and the gods.

*

As Le Guin says about Le Guin, "I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off," a project she continues in some of her poems, ranging from anger over women having to travel alone with the kids to US war crimes against the plains Indians. ⁵

In "Amtrak Portland to Seattle" (1988), the Speaker would like to cry and sees "the woman across the aisle / is crying / in silence." The Speaker then goes on to see other women, other children, "and no man" traveling "with a couple of children" on the train (Wild Oats 41)⁶ In "The Anger" (1975), we have an ungendered Speaker demanding entrance: threatening, shouting; if not shouting herself, calling for the smashing of door latches, seeing herself as "the exile," standing with empty hands "waiting in long anger / outside my home" (Wild Angels 28). In "His Daughter" (1986), we hear of the death in childhood of the daughter of Crazy Horse, "the true fragile hero / who lost what he won as he won it"; we learn that her name was "They Will Fear Her" (Wild Oats 48), as Ogion says of Therru/Tehanu in Tehanu.

"Apples" (1986) is still angry, but much less somber. In this poem, we are told, in Coyote's vein, that "Judeochristian men should / not be allowed / to eat apples," since these men have been "bellyaching / for millennia" that the Speaker's mother "made / them eat an apple / that gave them a bellyache."⁷ Henceforth, the Speaker decrees, apple-eating will be limited to women, and "nonjudeochristian men" who will eat apples "without whining"-plus children if their mother says it is all right to do so, or if they can "steal them and / get away with it." Also, women and snakes are to renew their old, strong relationship, with women wearing snakes "for bracelets / and her hair," Medusa style, if they wish.⁸ And women's snake-hair "is to hiss at any man / who cannot resist her" and strike him into a Sleeping Beauty state, in which he is to be put into "a glass coffin / like a bank"-a child's penny bank?-and stay there because "nobody will come to kiss him" (Wild Oats 34-35).

Unless they are pushing a political agenda that really demands the category, few men define themselves in terms of «Judeo-Christianity», and a fair number of women and children think of themselves as Christians or Jews. "Apples," then helps show that such categories are more or less arbitrary and externally imposed and shows that such categories may be useful. Serenity, the Narrator in the short story, "Solitude" thinks "a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit" (134), and she means, correctly, that such a distant view-the ground work for a nonimmanent critique-oversimplifies and thereby falsifies. Indeed, but a view from outside, and from a distance, can provide insight into similarities, including similarities missed by those embedded in the context. It is odd to lump together as "judeochristian men" a sixth-century BCE shepherd, a first-century CE centurion, a third-century mystic, a fourth-century emperor, a fifth-century saint, a tenth-century farmer, a twelfth-century philosopher-physician, a thirteenth-century beggar, a fifteenth-century Inquisitor, a sixteenth-century dramatist, a seventeenth-century revolutionary, a nineteenth-century slave or slave-owner (or Hassid or secular Jewish socialist or Methodist capitalist), a twentieth-century Chinese engineer, African bishop or American skinhead-but it can be instructive to do so. As "Apples" suggests, all these men may share a millennia-long belly-ache from accepting the ideology of the Fall and of patriarchy. As a political matter, "Apples" also suggests, it might be well for women, children, and (nonwhining) nonJudeo-Christian men to define themselves in those terms and against Judeo-Christian men-who often enough lump them together and define them as Other.⁹

In "My Hero" ([1994] Peacocks 58), the Hero of the poem might give up or turn her anger inward and become self-destructive-"drop the sword" or "behead herself"-but probably will not: "There are better things to do / with anger" and "with beauty" and also with "a headful of serpents / who can hiss wisdom." The hero here is imaged not as Zeus and Danaë's son, Medusa-slaying Perseus but Medusa herself, a young Medusa, as a "dear young hero" who will find a story. All we know of this future story is "It will not be the old story." The young Hero as woman does not have a set role to fall into but will have to tell her own, original story.¹⁰

A less optimistic but similar redirecting of myth appears in "Her Silent Daughter" (1994). In this poem, Le Guin combines a current event that has angered her with the old legend of Demeter and Persephone, plus the (masculinist) image of Justice. The poem is "For Tawana Brawley," and Le Guin's Speaker quite exactly states Tawana Brawley's story-the public story, the news story-as well as anyone not Tawana Brawley can know it:

Preceding this description, we are told that "They"-men-"have this statue: Justice," who is described in terms of the traditional image (as imaged by males). But "she's not Justice. Justice / is a man," a man who might listen to some men but who "has never heard / one woman say one word."¹¹ He also, more generally, just is not fair, just rational in a Utilitarian fashion, measuring (ratio) desire and income: "He weighs what he wants with what he gets / in these scales he made." Following this description, we have an instance of justice, for Tawana Brawley: four statement/questions from "the man" asking/telling Brawley "Why did you do this / to yourself?" and demanding an explanation, ending with, "What have you got to fear?" The final stanza has the Speaker presenting her own idea for a statue: Demeter, "blind with tears," looking the world over,

The daughter taken is Persephone, the Kore, the Maiden abducted by Hades, brother of Zeus and king of the underworld-as Pluto, the god of wealth. The Speaker reminds us of the rest of the old story: Until Demeter finds her daughter, "it will be winter" (Peacocks 30-31).

In "The Menstrual Lodge" (1986), the Speaker, the "I," is a traditional woman in a traditional society, who goes to the menstrual lodge while menstruating and avoids meat and eye contact and touching herself.

The "you" are the men of her village and men generally, including the plural "you" who beat her and raped her "and went to boast." The "I" has her child at Bear Creek and "in Bear Creek / I drowned it." "Menstrual Lodge" ends with both anger and the conditions for reconciliation. The woman says, "I am the dirt beneath your feet"-which may sound degrading but is not-and asks the men, "What are you frightened of?" She tells them to go off and engage in what I'll call transcendent projects; far more concretely and poetically, the woman tells the men to go fight wars, "be great in club and lodge and politics"-and come back when they find out "what power is," what power really is. The woman knows: her blood is power; she is power.

The menstrual-lodge woman identifies herself here with the earth and the Earth, and in that identification she is both ego-denying and very powerful. She can do without walls and roofs because she is emphatically in the world and hence is the world or, at least, the world's housekeeper. This is a Daoist view (see Chuang-Tzu ch. 6, in Giles pp. 79-80), and more generally a view of "The Perennial Philosophy" (Huxley chs. 1 & 2, 76-78 in ch. 4). This idea is very important for Le Guin's opinion of the world-and life in the world without walls-and for her ideas for the possibility of reconciliation between women and men, more generally reconciliation among peoples with two very different ideas of power, people who speak two, at least, very different languages.

*

Pride of place-the last word-in Le Guin's first collection of poems goes to "Tao Song" (1974), the last piece in Wild Angels (1975). This poem is four stanzas and a brief conclusion-all giving an elegant lesson in Daoism. The first and third stanza call upon a "slow fish," a "green weed" and the "bright sun" to show, grow, light the Singer the way. The second stanza makes explicit that

Nature's way-synecdochized in fish, weed, and sun-is the way that cannot be gone: "If one can choose it / it is wrong" (stanza 4), but a song can remind one that "No one can lose it"-the Way-"for long" (last lines). I.e., as Lao Tzu taught: one cannot name and consciously choose the Dao (Wilhelm 27; I.1); but if "Man conforms to Earth," he-we-can be in a series in which Earth conforms to Heaven and Heaven conforms to Dao (Wilhelm 37-38; I.25).¹²

In Le Guin's latest collection (as of my writing), Going Out With Peacocks (1994), the last poem is also Daoist, but more subtly, and with reversals: "The Hard Dancing" (1994).¹³ In the first sentence of "Hard Dancing's" two sentences, we learn that it is difficult, "hard," to dance on the sun; you burn your feet, of course, and "have to leap / higher and higher into the dark," finally somersaulting "to sleep." In the second sentence, we learn that there are steep mountains on the sun, "rising to shadow at the crown," and valleys, even as on Earth, but very deep ones, "and ever brighter deeper down" (Peacocks 82). On the sun, you must leap up to the darkness and go down into the light, keeping the traditional images, but reversing Up and Down. A transcending leap upward is necessary to reach the immanent darkness; the burrowing that on Earth takes one into the cool dark, on the sun takes one into more heat, more light. The sun is (obviously) an interesting place to visit, but an impossible place to live.¹⁴ Hard Words (1981) ends with a poem called "Uma," about "Beginning's daughter," who "sings to stone." Like Tehanu and Crazy Horse's daughter, "You do well to fear" Uma, although her singing is very sweet (79). Uma is the Hindu goddess Parvati, Daughter of the Mountain, and "Beginning's daughter" if we see the mountain in the east, making Parvati child of the dawn. Or if we see Parvati as a personification of the Goddess, she is "Beginning's daughter" as first child of the Mother (and the Mother herself), one mythological beginning of all-unnamable Dao and Pandora All-Giver, to conflate traditions (see Wilhelm 37; I.24). And I think Le Guin does conflate traditions in "Uma": she describes the goddess as "Clear water running / in a handhollow," which is an image of Dao (or close to Dao)-and then adds the line, "You do well to fear her" (see Wilhelm 29, 31; I.8, I.11) Dao is, and it inspires fear only for those who find themselves lost in it with insufficient practice in nullifying the ego. What scares most of us, or at least most men, is Uma as Kali. The last word in Hard Words, then, is about a Hindu goddess associated with Shiva. "You can't tell a book by its cover," usually, but the cover of Hard Words, with its dancing Shiva, is quite indicative.

I think Patrick D. Murphy and his source, Craig and Diana Barrow, are correct in seeing Le Guin willing to go farther in her poetry than in her early prose with ideas threatening to "typically biased heterosexual males" (Murphy 129). In any event, Daoism is clear in most of Le Guin's prose, the "god from India" not clear until we look at the poetry, and then King Dog-and then return to and reread the earlier fiction. And in Le Guin's poetry, in a gyring, reversing, widdershins sort of way, I think she moves from Daoism toward a bit more of the Dance of Shiva. Always, though-with the possible exception of the poem, "Some of the Philosophers"-there is a return to the concrete, the untranscendent, unChristian, the natural, the world, the Self, the "Perennial Philosophy," the Way.¹⁵ In "Ars Lunga"{sic} in Wild Angels, there is the assertion that the Speaker does not desire the "new heaven and new earth" promised to the saved in the Revelation to John (21.1), but "the old ones": the old heaven and earth of "Old sky, old dirt," some Walt Whitmanesque "new grass." And she wants not "life beyond the grave" but death and the threat of death, living

In "A Lament for Rheged," a "bondsman / bound to the land" is chosen to return "in the bitter weather / to the place of birth. And he has chosen to return, "having chosen / the heavy art": to remember and to praise everyday things-marriage, work, kindness, hearth-and to be true to "the bond of thing, / of stone, of earth" (Wild Angels 35-37). In "The Withinner," a man named Laurus picks up supplies from a coastal trade ship and then hurries back to his canoe, and "vanishes upstream" into the heart of a well-tree'd continent (Wild Angels 31), a standard image in Le Guin for moving within-"The Withinner"-into the subconscious, the Self, "the vast interior spaces" (e.g., "A Trip to the Head" [WTQ]).

The spirituality of "Rheged" and "Withinner" in Wild Angels (1975) is familiar in Le Guin's prose work, and such ideas can be found also in Hard Words (1981), in "The Man Who Shored Up Winchester Cathedral," in "Invocation," and in "Smith Creek." "Invocation" invokes "Mother," who will not be otherwise named, and promises to honor her, praise her, with "the great lies." The poem speaks of yin things, traditional female things: darkness, emptiness, and of the "silence of the valleys" and the "north side of rivers."¹⁷ It ends with a plea to let the Speaker speak "the mother tongue" and sing in it. And then moves to a vision of the Speaker becoming a Singer, of loud songs to which newlyweds and old women dance,

as the Singer sings down the walls (Hard Words 7). In "The Man Who Shored Up . . .," we have the Daoist suggestions of working "by touch" and touching "the foundations / in the old darkness of waters / under the earth.¹⁸ Under mind"-the man working "alone" shoring up rotten foundations: "When you come up to daylight / the cathedral stands" (Hard Words 6). Sort of a George Orr in a hard-hat, the mole in "Totem" (BG 134), aiding Christians-or a fine, old building-in a very elegant brief poetic narrative.

And in "Smith Creek" a creek flows to the sea, figuratively "counting aloud the ten thousand things" of the everyday world, "carrying heaven downward" (Hard Words 35). I'll take a stab at the meaning here, applying Lao Tzu (Wilhelm 37; I. 25) and James W. Bittner's discussion "the Neo-Confucian T'ai chi 't'u," a diagram relating the Supreme Ultimate (T'ai Chi) to everything else ("Approaches" 375-78).¹⁹ The creek, like Dao, both is and stems from the Supreme Ultimate ("heaven") and both goes "forward to" the sea and returns to the sea, in the process creating the multiple and mutable world by "counting aloud"-numbering here, not naming-"the ten thousand things."²⁰ And the creek remains a literal creek going to the sea, the mica in its mud reflecting the sun, and the creek providing a proper home for minnows.

In addition to Daoism, though, Hard Words, offers that god from India, useful in balancing philosophical Daoism, which, for all its valuing of water, is somewhat dry for a religion. Le Guin describes her "Epiphany":

To my ear, "Mama Linga" sounds like one of the Loa of Vodoun (voodoo), like Papa Legba. If so, however, she is still unlisted on the World Wide Web or made the List-of-Loa site. Until corrected, I shall read "Mama Linga" as the incarnation of the Goddess as "phallic" mother: Kybele or Kali-in Hard Words, it would be Kali.²¹ Or Kali/Shiva: an androgynous dancing god (see King Dog).

There is a lot of dancing in Hard Words, and a lot about God and the god/dess. The woman in "Carmagnole of the Thirtieth of June"-i.e., a song and street dance from the French Revolution-is "feeling mean" and dancing on the stomach of God, and on God's chest and guts and cock and eyes. This is Revolutionary Woman, going against the clergy of the old regime and all their works, including God, but rather more hopefully portrayed than the Revolution-as-Woman of French Revolutionary art; instead of leading the armed charge toward the Bastille and Liberty (and the Terror and betrayal), this woman calls upon all creation to "Get up and dance . . . !" (Hard Words 20-21). If this Revolutionary Woman is not allowed to dance, she will have nothing to do with the revolution. In "The Night," Kali herself appears. Children fear her-with good reason; Kali is destructive-until "Mother takes the fear away" and we have Kali as night: "the god appears between her thighs / stands in beauty, dances, dies," and the Speaker calls in the final line, "O Mother, comfort me" (Hard Words 17). We can identify Kali and the Mother here: Parvati, Shiva's consort, is both Kali and Amba ("Mother"); except here Kali is the Goddess, the Lady in the Hindu pantheon, Devi; and Shiva is consort to her, and, like Western consorts of "the Lady," dies.²² However we interpret Kali/Amba, it is clear that "The Night" introduces into Hard Words sex, the god, and the dance, and a series of poems on Kali and Shiva together (part II. The Dancing at Tillai).

In "Shiva and Kama," we have a brief retelling of how Desire (Kama) came to Shiva, when Shiva was in an ascetic mood on a remote plateau in the Himalayas (Hard Words 18). In the legend, Shiva burns Kama to ashes with a glance of Shiva's third eye, "the eye of insight beyond duality"-as an austere ascetic should (Buitenen 8.931). In Le Guin's version, the Speaker tells Shiva to burn Kama so "that he may cast no shadow / being with you and before you" forever. Key roles of Shiva in Hindu myth demand renunciation of asceticism, and Le Guin, I think, has Shiva incorporate Kama-Desire-into his permanent entourage, if not his being. The highly unascetic Shiva appears in a very down-to-Earth avatar in "School" (Hard Words 22), where the ever-so-elegant Dancing Master can't keep his fly shut: "Black tie and gaping pants, / the Dancing Master laughs." And impresses at least one of his audience ("What is that thing? A cobra?") who passes on the gossip that "They say he uses cannabis." She-I assume a woman Speaker-will not trust her daughter at the school of the Dancing Master, but even this apparently conventional and cautious woman thinks, "O but how sweetly, / sweetly he can dance!"

The call to join the earth(l)y dance is repeated in the next poem, "Middle" (Hard Words 23). The title, I think, alludes to the idea expressed in "An Orgota Creation Myth" that all who are "born in the house of flesh" and have death following at our heels, "are in the middle of time" and will remain so until the end of time (LHD 239; ch. 17). The question is what we will do with our time of mortality. One possibility is the Modernist image that begins "Middle." "When the pure act turns to drygoods{sic} / and the endless yearning to an earned sum," then the time is long past for "the silly sniveling soul" to get itself post haste out of a Modernist wasteland and run "stark naked to the woods / and dance to the beating drums," a great turning dance. The dance is to be called, square-dance fashion, by the "master," and its effect will be to "dance the Great Year whole." Astronomically that would be to dance complete one cycle of the precession of the equinoxes (25,800 years). Mythically, we could follow Plato and an ancient tradition and have the Great Year, one cycle of the universe, after which, everything (possibly) recycles.²³ Alternatively-using Earthier myths Le Guin prefers-we have an annual world-renewal dance, as done in fairly recent times by the Indians of northern California (Le Guin, personal communication), which may have been done in the ancient Fertile Crescent (High Holiday Prayer Book 409 n.), and which may be the source of the Long Dance on midsummer eve in Earthsea: "You stamp the earth down and make it safe" Arren is told by the chief of the Children of the Open Sea-though the sea people dance over the abyss and have no safety (FS 117; ch. 8). Le Guin's "Middle" ends,

The "its" in the phrase "its end" may refer to the Great Year, or it may be the cosmic/human dance. Probably it is the dance and its sole conclusion the final combustion of the stars, and its telos (goal and purpose) is renewing the stars. In a world of "turning, turning," we should locate a partner, join the dance, and turn with it. In an Existentialist, Absurdist mood, one might join enthusiastically the dance at the end of the universe. Taking a more optimistic view, we should "dance the Great Year whole" in the sense of healing it, renewing it, renewing the world and with it ourselves.

"A Semi-Centenary Celebration" (Hard Words 25-26) refers to a turning in a woman turning fifty. Addressing her "terrible darling," she explains at first that she is "afraid of tigers / and in love with god," and it is time to change that. She is angry and wants a lover, "so little Joanie Yoni / found lovely Louie Linga": i.e., a contemporary, low-key avatar of Parvati, seen as the personified vulva (and the rest of the human female genitalia ["Yoni"]), found Shiva, concretized as the phallus (Linga). We are reassured, though, that the sexual action is "all esoteric / and strictly in the head"-with a Chorus coming in and repeating "Strictly in the head," for either emphasis through repetition or undermining by protesting a bit too much (methinks) and once too often. Now, the Speaker can tango and waltz and play a sitar and is "in love with tigers / and afraid of god." But not very afraid. She can joke about 33,000 choices for a "personalised brahman"{sic}; and the Speaker can image herself as Kali tiptoeing "through the tango," even if her "necklace-skulls" get alliteratively "tangled" and she scares people.²⁴ Ending the poem, she has a question for her "terrible dancing partner," her "dear dirty Louie"-with an allusion to the early 1960s hit, "Louie, Louie" and the phrase "dirty dancing"? She wants to know if he knows who she really is. The answer is that she is more than Kali, although Kali is still there and a major thing to be. More exactly, though, if figuratively, mythically, mystically, she says,

-and he is the drummer and the drum, but she is "the sound of drumming." The Speaker has lost herself in the dance so thoroughly as to become it-all: the dance, the tiger, the god at hand, and underlying all the drumming as the music, which is Brahman, which is the Dao.²⁵

"Pasupati" is a love song, from Parvati, consort of Shiva, about Shiva as Pasupati, Lord of Cattle, Lord of Beasts. He is not a respectable lover. He never combs his hair, which is "grey with ashes" (in the manner of the Pasupatas, worshippers of Shiva who smear their bodies with ashes); and he dances naked.

That is, he dances where the physical Ganges intersects the River of Time and Reality immanent under all that is, which in turn meets the transcendent, heavenly Ganges of myth. For those of us who didn't know about the heavenly Ganges: The Ganges, "personified as a goddess, originally flowed only in heaven until she was brought down by the king, Bhagiratha, in order to purify the ashes of his ancestors. She came down reluctantly, cascading first on the head of Siva, in order to break her fall, which would have shattered the earth" (Buitenen 8.932). Le Guin's Parvati praises Shiva as lord of "all waters * * * the silences the depths," but her last lines state her heavy-hearted tenderness for the more mundane male: "thinking of my husband the herdsman / who never combs his hair" (Hard Words 27).

The last poem in the section is "The Dancing at Tillai" (Hard Words 29-30), and it demands the most difficult faith or confidence-or mortification. It begins with an "I" saying she had "said the center / was a ring of stones" that made "a hearthplace"; she corrects herself: "I meant a place for bones and ashes." The next sentence identifies the center more specifically as "the burning ground," the place of death. The following stanza has young Percy Bysshe Shelley "burned by the sea," which "pleased Kali"-itself followed by a much large burning: Hiroshima, which also "pleased Kali."²⁷ The Speaker calls upon "mother" for comfort-and is told to "Find it in the ashes" and "in the bones." The mother (Devi, the Goddess in her more benevolent form?) tells her child, the Speaker to "Come to the drumming at Chidambaram," the place of the great temple of Shiva Nataraja: Shiva as the Cosmic Dancer. There, amidst the drumming and the fires, the mother explicates the text of the god, explaining the iconography of his statue.²⁸

Shiva also has a look on his face of utter serenity, utter detachment. For those familiar with Western art-the effect is similar to the look on the face of God in the whirlwind in the theophany in William Blake's series of watercolors (1818-21), and later plates (for graphic reproduction), for the Book of Job (1823-25). In Blake's vision of the theophany, Job sees God in the whirlwind; the sour, conventionally pious Comforters, see nothing and hear (I think) only the wind. Whatever "true religion" may be (see King Dog below), it will not include easy acceptance of poets dying at thirty or infants dying at all in bombed-out cities.

"The Dancing at Tillai" ends with a three-line stanza of the mother's direct address to the thrice-invoked child, inviting her to the drumming at Chidambaram, the dancing at Tillai. The lesson seems to be the traditional one of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism-the mystic tradition generally: If the child will let go of her ego and get in rhythm with the drum, if she will fully join in the dance and become the dance, then she will not necessarily be happy, but well. In the ecstasy of the dance, the Self-Atman-will know itself Brahman: "Self is universe" (LoH 138; ch. 9). In Aldous Huxley's words, ". . . the Brahman, who is one with the Atman, is not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the spirit is Joy" (Perennial Philosophy 106; ch. 6). No comfort is offered by the mother-not as Kali-Devi, become Death,destroyer of worlds-but only the possibility of the drum, the dance, becoming again the child, and experiencing the Dancer's offer of joy.²⁹

* * *

King Dog takes an episode from the Mahabharata ("Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty" [written ca. 400 BCE-200 CE]) and retells the epic tale in science-fictional and cinematic terms.

In the original story, the Pandavas are five royal brothers contesting with their uncle Dhritarashtra and his son Duryodhana for the realm of the Pandavas' dead father, King Pandu.³⁰ Despite the jealousy and antipathy of Duryodhana (and a murder attempt), a compromise is reached whereby Dhritarashtra and the Pandavas divide the realm (23). The Pandavas get bad land, but they clear it, build a city, and make Yudhisthira, the eldest, the king. "Now the five brothers lived in triumph and splendour, and Duryodhana hated them more than ever. His jealousy hatched a new plot for their ruin. The pious and noble Yudhisthira had a dangerous weakness for gambling [i.e., dangerous in the short-term]. Duryodhana challenged him to play dice with a clever sharper named Sakuni, knowing that the king would feel bound in honour to accept" (Song, summary 24). Sakuni cheats, and Yudhisthira loses, finally staking and losing "his wealth, his kingdom . . . his brothers," the wife they share (or who is spouse to each in polyandry) and himself. They were all now subject to Duryodhana's enmity until the intervention of Dhritarashtra, who restores the kingdom to them. Duryodhana arranges another dice-match, with the stakes the kingdom and the provision that the "loser retire to the forest for twelve years," then live in the city unrecognized for a year. Yudhisthira again loses, and he and his brothers go off to the forest, where they practice "spiritual austerities" and heroism (Song, summary 25).

One adventure has the four younger brothers thirsty and tempted to drink water before they answer a series of questions from a voice. Each in turn drinks and dies. Finally Yudhisthira finds the bodies and laments. His lamentations are interrupted by a talking crane, who is actually the disguised Dharma, "the personification of duty and virtue" (plus other things: dharma is a complex word).³¹ The crane asks Yudhisthira, "What is the road to heaven." Yudhisthira replies,

The penultimate question is, What is the most wonderful of the world's wonders? The answer is that we see all sorts of people dying around us, and we still manage to think of ourselves as immortal. The last question is how people can find "true religion." The answer is, "Not by argument. Not by scriptures and doctrine . . . . . The path to religion is trodden by the saints." As in Daoism, only the way that is gone spontaneously and unconsciously an be the Way. Dharma being satisfied, he reveals his identity and resurrects the four dead brothers (26).

At the end of their exile, Yudhisthira asks for the kingdom back but is refused, then reduces his request to just a village apiece for himself and his brothers. This too is refused, and the poem moves to the great battle on the plain of Kurukshetra, where armies from all of India gather to fight. This is the setting for the Bhagavad-Gita: the conversation between Sri Krishna and Yudhisthira's brother Arjuna before the battle. After eighteen days of fighting, Duryodhana lies dead, and Yudhisthira becomes king of all India, which he rules well for thirty-six years (26-27). The end of the story shows a pilgrimage of the Pandavas and Queen Draupadi (wife to them all) to the top of the Himalayas to abide with God.

*

The «moral» of this story is very important for Le Guin. Even as Christians should not forsake their families and the world for heaven, neither should Yudhisthira forsake them for the Perennial Philosophy's "true Being of God."

King Dog is set, mostly, on a world that Le Guin explicitly says she wants ambiguous: it may be our Earth, or it may not. More specifically, the onplanet cinematic mise en scène is a high civilization during the Bronze Age. The government we see is monarchical, but less patriarchal than we might expect, and not at all tyrannical. The kingdom is long enough on the north-south axis to have a definite North and South, with the usual idea of the North as more rugged, less pleasant, and less civilized than the South (see Russ, "On Setting" 149). In the North there are mountains, and there is at least one significant river. Le Guin does not mention this in the script, but even as the planet might be Terra, so the kingdom might be India (and a Bronze Age Indian setting-with some mild surprises-is a temptation few film directors would, or should, resist). The religion in the South is leaving worship of the Lady for a high god more androgynous; the North still worships the Goddess. As with the Karhiders in The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, the culture here is still "more tribal than urban," even if "overlaid and interwoven with a later urban pattern." At least in the North, to push what we see just a bit, "the hearth tends to be communal, independent," as Le Guin describes Karhide, "and somewhat introverted." There are gaps between the social classes in King Dog but "no great gap between rich and poor. There was no slavery or servitude. Nobody owned anybody." And if there are great movements of peoples "that live by expansion and aggression against other societies" on this world, that is either in the past or future.³² The second world in King Dog is the Space Ship{sic: capitals} of a very high-tech, scientifically advanced civilization. It is "a huge ship, self-contained, a stable environment and a stable community, a very high level of technology, everything controlled: the acme of artificial environments. . . . Everywhere . . . we see bright whites and bright colors, cleanliness, comfort, order. Complex and beautiful machinery runs itself. . . . It is not a sterile, militaristic environment, but aesthetically rich, complex, even overloaded" (King Dog 112-13).

The film is divided into six parts, with a brief prolog to begin the film and a final coda.

Part One: The Stranger Comes-set in Aremgar, the capital city of King Ashthera (the film's protagonist).

Part Two: King Kammin's War-set in Aremgar and then the scenes of the war as foreign King Kammin conquers Ashthera's realm.

Part Three: Jogen-set in the North, in the royal fort at Jogen.

Part Four: King Ashthera's War-set various places in the Guerrilla War against the invader, ending in Aremgar, the capitol, and in Sova, a small city in the North.

Part Five: Eight Years Later-set in the Palace Compound and in the countryside.

Part Six: On the Space Ship-on the Ship, with the final sequence back in the Kingdom.

The Persons of the Film in King Dog are:

On/From the Ship:

*

King Dog starts with the arrival of Romond, the Traveller, to the realm of King Ashthera (the Yudhisthira-figure); the King will suspect that Romond is a god (corresponding to Indra and Krishna), but we know he is a visitor from another planet and will learn that he is an anthropologist.³³ If there are intimations of immortality with Romond-he doesn't age-it is a technologically mediated longevity, not the immortality of the gods. Romond travels to the court of King Ashthera. Until late in the script, Romond is an ethical anthropologist and courteous visitor: a participant-observer, but one careful not to interfere unduly with the locals, and the plot belongs almost totally to the King, not Romond.

The King and his court must deal with a demand by King Kammin for return of the Eastern Province, won by Ashthera's father in a great battle (15-16). King Ashthera wants to avoid war. He would prefer to fight Kammin in single combat, except Kammin won't accept that deal because Ashthera has a reputation as a superb swordsman (17); later we'll see him in action as a kind of Zen fencer (63-64; Part 3). What Ashthera would most like, though is to throw the dice (17), gamble for the province. Like Yudhisthira, Ashthera is a gambler, but in King Dog, as we might expect with Le Guin-for whom true life always involves risk-gambling is a virtue: "The Goddess loves a gambler" (18).³⁴

Ashthera bets on Romond and takes him into his private space: "The Inner Room." Aside from what appears to be a resident cat-joined by Ashthera's dog, who follows them-about all there is in the room is a book, a cot, and a tapestry. The tapestry is significant and is described in detail.

The figure is Shiva Nataraja, combined with Kali, the Goddess in her destructive mode: life bound to the Wheel, an artistic imaging of the First Noble Truth of the Buddha, "Existence is suffering."

As Ashthera is well aware, he is not going to throw dice with King Kammin for a province. There will be a war. The climax of Part One is a ceremony at the Great Temple of Aremgar; we're told there is a goat sacrifice (26), as in the rites of Kali, and we see the military leader, Harish Ashed, and King Ashthera exit the temple, Ashed's hands and wrists covered with blood. Ashthera gives a traditionally scripted speech on "the soldier's duty to kill or to be killed"-and gain glory in victory and a "right to heaven" the moment he dies for King and country: "So go forth gladly to this way{sic}, knowing that you dance the dance of God!" (27). Ashthera "holds out his arms in the same position as those of the figure on the tapestry in the inner room: his hands and arms are red with blood. The crowd shouts out its wild rhythmic chant of enthusiasm" (27). The scene at the Temple is followed by a wordless scene of Ashthera in his Inner Room, looking dejected, still bloody from the sacrifice, his expression "inward turned, but his gaze is steadily on the tapestry, on the feet of the dancing figure" (28). And then the images break up "into the meaningless textures of the warp and weft, and go dark," with a cut to the Palace's Inner Gardens and a domestic scene of Ashthera's family: his wife Tassalil primarily, but also their children and Fezat, the King's young brother. Tassalil tells Fezat that she is in her kingdom there, which Fezat characterizes as "The inmost garden of the Inner Lands," and they talk a bit of Ashthera, primarily of his disappearance for two days, "In that room." Fezat notes that as an improvement: "At least he doesn't run off into the forest anymore." And Tassalil adds, "Not even to the gambling house" (30).

The final scene of Part One is a dialog between Ashthera and Tassalil in the Inner Room. A little way into the scene, Tassalil brings water, some of which Ashthera drinks, the rest of which he uses to wash from his hands and arms the dried blood. Ashthera is upset by the prospect of war, which he'll lay five to three they'll lose, but more immediately he is upset by his lying to his people. "'Go kill and be rewarded, be killed and be rewarded, heaven and earth are yours by right of war!'" Tassalil objects that the words are scripted, "sacred. They're in the Book of Ashantari." But Ashthera lied because he did not believe the scripted words (32). They briefly discuss other philosophical matters, and Ashthera reassures his wife he won't give up his kingship to go off to the forest; he's "on the leash now" and will be a dutiful king. Most immediately and practically, he wants his wife and family out of the capitol and up north, at Tassalil's family fort at Jogen. The scene and Part One end quietly with Tassalil singing to her royal husband, inviting him to "dance life over . . . dance death forever."

Part Two: King Kammin's War starts impressively, with some hints of the "Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," to quote Othello, not Le Guin (Oth. 3.3.354)-until we get to medium shots of the actual fighting: e.g., "Hand to hand combat with short swords, footsoldiers{sic: 1 word} in armor of leather, wood, and bronze; the fighting is ugly, awkward, cautious, desperate. There is no way to tell which soldier is on which side, except that some of them wear a crude hawk figure on helmet or shield" (42). The sequence begins with Ashthera's side setting out from Aremgar in early summer. It ends in autumn, with King Kammin ascending Ashthera's vacant throne.

Part Three: Jogen is set in winter, in the mountains, with the King and a few surviving followers arriving in defeat. This is Tassalil's home and her space, far more than the pleasant gardens of the South can be. She is "very much the chatelaine and chief housekeeper, alert, calm, maternal" (48); when the warriors return, "the women give the orders" for their care (53). Ashthera is reunited with his old friend Batash, and with Romond, who has followed Tassalil and Shiros. Fezat is dead, we learn, and Ashthera tells his daughter that "We've lost more than I knew we had . . ."; but yet, Ashthera kneels to his daughter, tells her she is beautiful and "tenderly yet with formality" addresses her as "child who will be queen!" (57). Ashthera will fight no more battles; he wants nothing more to do with armies, but he intends to lead his people to war: "We have no army. I don't want an army. I want a rabble-thieves, cowards, robbers, cut-throats." He plans guerrilla war and total war, allowing Kammin and his followers "No subjects, no cattle, no grain, no rest. Dogs in the barren fields, dogs in the forest, dogs yapping at his heels. But no more victories. There are eight thousand dead besides the Ram [River] . . . . Those were victories. The river stank. Plague in the villages. . . . Well, the Dancer has had her dance on the battlefields. And now the dog will have his day" (59).

That is the action of Part Four: King Ashthera's War, which he and his people win. But we knew that. In terms of suspense, the interesting conflict isn't between Kammin and his newfangled army (hawk symbols, no less) defeated by Ashthera's guerrilla tactics; when democrats, let alone a communist anarchist write movies, the people's forces win. No, the suspenseful conflict here and in the script generally is a theological argument, and a philosophical one.

In a quiet, domestic scene at the Hall of Jogen, a soldier wounded in the war asks Romond if his god-like people "praise any gods." Romond says "Not with altars or sacrifice" but perhaps "by upholding the idea of truth, the idea of justice-" and is interrupted by Tassalil. Since Romond has just stated the philosophical ideal of truth and the prophetic ideal of justice, it is an important interruption. To Tassalil, even in the Bronze Age, Romond's line is "That old story. By righteous action God is praised.³⁵ So much the worse for your people, who have so much happiness and waste it! What's cold and hunger and sickness and fear of death, what's war, even, if one could be free of soul? But to endure all that and to give praise for it-that's slavery. That's the betrayal" (65; Part 3). Romond does not answer her, which is just as well since Tassalil is speaking less to him than to the household generally and to Ashthera very much in particular. She goes on to get said what she must say, before spring comes and renewed war and what she fears is total ruin:

And to clinch her point, she picks up on the one thing that has bothered Ashthera beyond even defeat: the lie he told his people. She says that it wasn't his but the god's. And then a final dialog:

Romond joins Ashthera and they go off to fight and win the war.

The war over, Romond goes off to visit King Kammin (much to the disgust of Batash, the old adviser), and Ashthera and Tassalil have something of a falling out or, at least-as foreshadowed-a parting of the way. Ashthera wants her to come with their daughter to the South; Tassalil wants to stay with their rather obnoxious, young, macho son Hantammad-or, more exactly, stay in his domain, and hers, of the North (86-88; Part 4). Ashthera and Tassalil part; three years or so in their future, Tassalil dies (97; Part 5).

The next scene is at the Great Temple in Aremgar. In the Courtyard, Ashthera renounces his name and all that he owns and is, and gains admittance to "A Small Inner Room of the Temple" (89; Part 4). There Ashthera encounters a priestess of the god/dess, whom he addresses as "Mother." Ashthera claims to have lost his way, when he was born. The Priestess sees no problem, then, since he will "find it soon enough. When you die." Meanwhile she tells him, with two meanings, that he lives "A good king's life": i.e., he leads (1) a good life, that of a king, and (2) the life of a good king. Ashthera finds it "A dog's life, Mother," but the Priestess tells him he has been "a good dog." Ashthera responds (with near-liturgical parallelism),

"Mother" thinks he asks a great deal, wanting to go alone. There follows a catechism of renunciation. Does Ashthera desire to give up "power, pleasure, wealth, will, and world"? He does. Speaking for the god/dess, the Priestess gives him the hard teaching that if he wishes to renounce, he must also, finally, "renounce renunciation" (91).

Renouncing the world is easy enough to understand: those who want to find God or go with the Dao or lose themselves in that which Is, must renounce "our preoccupation with 'I,' 'me,' 'mine.'" So we have the easily-enough resolved paradox that to truly possess the world we must renounce self and the world: "Everything is ours provided that we regard nothing as our property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's" (Huxley, Perennial Philosophy 108; ch. 6). In this view, you must come to the world (in Le Guin's formulation) "with empty hands." In the case of altruism, renunciation is more difficult to do but still fairly easy to understand. Aldous Huxley quotes Fénelon, Archbishop of Bambrai, in a letter advising a questioner that, "You have spent all your life in the belief that you are wholly devoted to others, and never self-seeking. Nothing so feeds self-conceit as this sort of internal testimony that one is quite free from self-love and always generously devoted to one's neighbours" (Perennial Philosophy 253-54; ch. 22). The goal, however, is total mortification: learning to have "unstudied reactions to events-reactions in harmony with Tao, Suchness, the Will of God. Those who have made themselves docile to the divine Nature of Things . . . who respond to circumstances . . . with the love that permits them to do spontaneously what they like"-they can say they aren't acting at all, "but God in me" (Perennial Philosophy 116; ch. 6). Altruism is nonspontaneous and consciously ethical behavior. The next step, though, is to give up all ethical ideals, including conventional, small "s" selflessness, finally even giving up the ideal of renunciation (Perennial Philosophy 252; ch. 21).

Ashthera does not do too badly here.

The Priestess addresses him as "Man born a king, as all men are born": i.e., of all people, it can be said, "Thou art That"-i.e., Atman is Brahman, Self is Universe, You are God, so definitely a king.³⁶ The Priestess calls upon him to give her his anger, judgment, and fidelity. "Give me your anger, your indignation against untruth, your hatred of the lie." Can this righteous king give those up? He gives up anger. "Give up your judgment on men, your knowledge of injustice and justice, give me that, righteous judge." He gives up judgment, making two God-like qualities he is willing to renounce.³⁷ Two out of three isn't bad, but Ashthera balks at fidelity, at what the Priestess renames as the very human virtue of Trust. "Trust is an empty thing. Can't you give it up to me?" As we might have expected from his dialog with Tassalil on fidelity, "Mortal love," and trust (66-67)-he cannot give these up to or for the god/dess; and the Priestess tells him to "Get up, King Dog. Get up, and take your crown, your throne, your sword, your wealth, your power, your collar and your leash. Be answerable, and be a king. There's no freedom for you on this shore of the River" (91-92; Part 4). That is, he must be King of Life and a faithful man until he dies. Or so says the local voice of organized religion.

Eight years pass, bringing us to Part Five, and Romond's return to Aremgar. Tassalil is dead. King Kammin has been deposed and is held prisoner by his nephew Morromin, who in turn is being pressed by "another pretender." Shiros rules as Queen, while her younger brother conspires in the North. She has married Zeham and made him prince consort; the gods apparently made him a fool: handsome but "perfectly stupid" (100). Zeham and Shiros have put old Batash in prison for some unwelcome scolding (98). And King Ashthera has gotten sick, crowned his daughter, and his finally gotten his wish and has gone off into the forest, giving up even his name: as in City of Illusions, "A Trip to the Head," and, with variations, "She Unnames Them": "A man in the forest has no name" (King Dog 96). Romond searches for Ashthera and finds him and offers him "The way to the new life" (105). Ashthera is a little incoherent from his illness, isolation, "old age and poverty" (106). Romond tries to explain to him that Romond is not the "guide to death" nor a god, just a man who wants to take him on a journey Ashthera cannot yet understand: "I'm taking you out of darkness to the light-to a new world, a new life. You must do as I say," which Ashthera does, except he insists on bringing the dog (108). In The Farthest Shore, Ged tells Arren he would advise a king to "do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble [or good] to do so; . . . do only that which you must do . . ." (67; ch. 4). We see in King Dog that much of the knack of being a king is knowing (also) what one truly must do as opposed to what other people tell you you must do. In Romond's trim little powerboat, the three go out to an island in the bay-in and a very long shot "a light rises . . . like a tower of silver," and they are headed toward space.

Part Six: On the Space Ship introduces us to a world where Ashthera can find life for another five to ten years, healed mostly, and with the dog fixed up very well (111). The space-farers have a translation device, so Ashthera can understand much of what the people say, but he is still confused, not being sure how to distinguish "dream from the not-dream" (114). One source of continuing confusion: King Kammin is there, and his brother Fezat is not. That makes sense in terms of studying Ashthera's ethics: King Kammin is a control for King Ashthera, a control insisted upon by Anduse and Romond's other colleagues in anthropology/psychology. It does not make sense in terms of the Ship as Heaven. "How can you bring Kammin here and leave Fezat out?" Indeed, from what we know of Kammin and Fezat, it makes no sense with the Ship as just a human-made refuge (115). Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata would not stay in heaven if his family and friends were in hell; for those of who know the earlier story, and who can feel "The awful greed to find out what happens next" (56; Part 3), a big question now is whether or not Ashthera will, in this, be like Yudhisthira.

Ashthera finally confronts Romond in the Ship's garden, accusing him of using Ashthera and Kammin: ". . . you juggle us like dice." Romond objects that "It isn't a game. . . "; Ashthera says it is indeed a game, but tells Romond that Romond is not the player; Romond only rolls the dice. "How does God play, Romond? Does God play fair, or cheat?"³⁸ Ashthera tells Romond what Romond thinks, which is, "You think I'll tell you that God plays fair. And you think perhaps Kammin will tell you, in his language, that God cheats at dice. And thus you're spared decision. You needn't even bet. No stakes, no losses. Safe" (119). Romond interjects, but before he can object or ask for an explanation-Why would Romond think Ashthera or Kammin experts on God? Since when is Romond a theist to care if God plays dice or not?-Ashthera brings up a very legitimate point: Ashthera has asked for "all sorts of impossible things, justice, peace-even freedom," but he has "never asked for safety!" (119).

Romond insists that he did not bring Ashthera to the Ship to play with him or control him: "I wanted to free you. To heal your body, to free your mind-to show you what life can be-" At which point Ashthera calls Romond "Lord Death," although he will back down on that one. Ashthera finds Romond's kingdom too small for Death's: "Two ex-kings and a dog." And then he turns to more personal matters, and to the possibility of an argument that can be resolved. Ashthera misses Fezat and Tassalil and "Even old Batash"-at which Romond tells him that Batash isn't dead but in jail (120). So Ashthera wants to return home and rejects Romond's objection that Ashthera is concerning himself with "gossip from a little world nine million miles away-a dustmote{sic: 1 word}. Quarrels no longer yours. Duties you've outgrown" (121). Ashthera responds regally, "I will go home now," but adds "more gently," that they can keep their other king (121).

Ashthera shakes hands with Kammin, reminding him that the people they killed are "dust now." He adds, "Everything's dust, the stars and all. Stay here and be free, among these gods who do without the gods. They don't get angry, they don't judge. They live in peace, and truth, and justice. They don't keep dogs, or cats, or even lice. They're free. Enjoy your freedom, brother enemy" (122). Romond's colleagues Anduse and more so Davdre, two women of the Ship, conclude that Kammin can stay if he wants to stay, and Ashthera may go if he wishes to go: "The whole trouble is," Davdre says, "Romond has been playing God," and they vary images of God-playing with "pulled the strings" and "threw the dice" (123). In this script, apparently, God does play dice with the universe. Romond tries one last time to convince Ashthera to stay, for the last philosophical dialog in the script, and almost the last lines. Ashthera should stay with them and not throw his life away on the chance that Batash is still alive and still in prison. In voice-over, Romond is heard:

The script ends with the images of Ashthera, the freed Batash, and the dog walking down the streets of Aremgar: "People watch, not speaking, intent, unjudging." The final shot is "A large landscape, fields, forests, mountains. The three, Batash, Ashthera, and the dog, are going away from us, small figures on a long dusty road" (125).

Along with the relevant episode in the Mahabharata, King Dog may be read with profit with at least one Shakespearean work and several of Le Guin's works: Rocannon's World (1966), for an anthropologist among a Bronze-Age people; The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Word for World Is Forest (1972), arguably Le Guin's most Daoist books; Always Coming Home (1985), her unBible and fullest elaboration of the West Coast as a non-Euclidean, nature-informed, place to be; "Newton's Sleep" (1991), a story about rationalists on a space station, and "Pathways of Desire" (1979), her earlier prose examination of a Hindu doctrine, and "Betrayals" (1994), a later one.

When Ashthera demands to be sent to hell with his brother and wife rather than live in the "heaven" of Ship with King Kammin, the dialog alludes to the Mahabharata while the stage direction has Ashthera stand "every inch a king" (116). The stage direction alludes to King Lear (4.6.106), and I think it should invite readers of the script to bracket King Dog with King Lear. Lear is an investigation in Western terms of questions of justice, divine and human, of the existence and relevance of the gods, of the meaning (if any) of human suffering; it asks, "How shall a human being live well, then?" in a world that can get very nasty (ACH; 236; Chandi).⁴⁰ Given the degree to which Lear loads the dice against assertive daughters and ambitious outsiders generally, though, it is well that Le Guin raises the same great issues in a manner that does not center on a woman but still works to include women.

Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata is a gambler, which causes problems; Ashthera is a gambler, but that is a strength, an unambiguous virtue. Le Guin values risk-taking in her fiction-dancing over the abyss can be fatal for humans-and that valuation remains the same in King Dog.⁴¹ Whether or not the world is a gambling operation in the Mahabharata, life is based on gambles in any worlds in which the Nature of Things is explicable through the I Ching or quantum mechanics, or where people in our daily lives necessarily guess at and play the odds-and/or where "Existence is suffering."

Neither Yudhisthira nor Ashthera will enter heaven without the dog, but heaven in the Mahabharata is heaven; in King Dog it is a spaceship. Both heaven and spaceships are above the world, though, and people both places may feel "superior to those on earth. Masses of dummies stay down in the dirt and breed and die in squalor, and serve 'em right, while a few people who know how to program their VCRs live up in these superclean military wordlets . . . and are the Future of Man" (FIS 10; Introd.). We should keep in mind, though, that the Space Ship is explicitly not military and is generally quite nice: a more rigorous proof for space-ship-as-bad-alternative (future) than some clearly dystopian ship of technologically advanced fools and militaristic technocrats. Yudhisthira for his goodness gets the highest good: he and his family pass "beyond the appearance of hell and heaven into the true Being of God" (Song, summary 27). Ashthera gets what may be in King Dog the most central good, the freedom to head off with a dog and a friend toward forest (or gambling house?) or, at least, "going away from us, small figures on a long, dusty road": like figures in a traditional Chinese or Japanese landscape, or characters in a classic John Ford Western shot: people figuratively embedded in the landscape, but free to move and moving away from the dead world of a camera and possibly us. And they do this in a world where the dog Dharma remains just a dog: the mundane, organic, and even flea-ridden preferred to the incarnation of a lofty ideal of duty and virtue. If Yudhisthira is a prefiguring of the compassionate Buddha, refusing Nirvana for himself alone, Ashthera is a more mundanely compassionate man, returning from the Ship to save from prison one friend (and, I would hope, to get the dog some decent place to play and hunt).

In Always Coming Home, the aggressive sorts recapitulating the invention of Terran warfare (and patriarchy, monotheism, and other bad things) are the Condor people. In King Dog, the most immediate enemy are King Kammin's army, with their "distinctive style of clothing" and "stylized hawk device" (70; Part 3). Opposing King Ashthera on another axis, and figuratively, is his friend Romond, and the high-tech world of the Space Ship. Romond is no Don Davidson in The Word for World, but he is a Rocannon or Lyubov crossed with a Davidson: an anthropologist and rationalist with what we think of as Western ideas of the superiority of high technology over low, highly developed cultures over the relatively-and from a distance-simple. Romond's is a way that can lead to long life, lasting health, exploration of the galaxy, comfort. His is not the way of the Kesh or Karhide or a way which Le Guin will go out of her way (or even cross the street) to endorse.

The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World Is Forest affirm the Daoist principle of wu wei, action in stillness, and see the world of explicit, willful action as a dry land, a wrong turning, a perversion that can destroy the world. King Dog makes similar points, but with a Hindu inflection, and it is far less explicit-as a script-in its teaching. A produced film will necessarily remove most ambiguities as characters get concretized in actors, and settings in the mind's eye become very specific mise en scène; where battles are romantic gestures or bloody messes as a director decides-etc. More exactly, we are to see the end of King Dog as a happy ending: King Ashthera gets what he wants, to leave the world of action and go at least toward the forest, where, with luck, he can lose his name and himself. As a sage in the forest, he can try to join his Self with the Universe, and possess, paradoxically, through loss and mortification, Brahman, at one with the Atman, thereby achieving "not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the spirit is Joy" (Huxley, Perennial Philosophy 106; ch. 6).

He can be at one, joyously, with Shiva/Kali dancing the universe.

The makers of an actual film, however, should find out from Le Guin how she wants an audience to feel about dancing with the god/dess in King Dog.

In the poems, Le Guin, I think, mostly, would have us join the dance. I will repeat that and stress it and remove some of the hedging: my impression of the relevant poetry is that, in voices close to her own, Le Guin values Shiva/Kali and the dance of destruction and creation. Even as the Daoist symbol of water, and literal water both image and perform destruction and creation, so Kali and Shiva recycle the everyday world. But a film or even a film script invites us to see the dance of destruction and creation, including our seeing horrors. How many of the episodes shown on the tapestry of the god/dess should be reproduced in shots of the two wars in King Dog? How positively or negatively should the Priestess of the god/dess be shown? To what extent should she be imaged as a representative of organized religion, allowing for more positive, personal approaches to a spiritual life involving the god/dess? And how positively should we feel about Tassalil, how much ethos should we allow to her side of the argument?

In the short story "Pathways of Desire" (coll. CR), certainly, and pretty clearly in the novella "Betrayals" (FWF), Le Guin accepts Tassalil's evaluation that fidelity and "mortal love" are to be valued more than anything else, perhaps more than even the joy Ashthera claims to have known. And Le Guin gives Tassalil a strong speech on the subject, ringing most of the Le Guinian chimes other than Joy. And Ashthera loves Tassalil-"winter . . . the north . . . the dark," his freedom-and will not renounce her. I see her as a very strong character, worthy of love, and I would reinforce her speech on "What god worthy of worship . . ." with images in the film of the horrors of the wars and their aftermath (66-67; Part 3).

I hope King Dog gets produced some day, with Le Guin consulting. I would also hope, though, that King Dog ended up a film like Patton (1970), or Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989): films which leave unresolved debates that should not and cannot truthfully be resolved. For what may be strongest about King Dog is the dialectic, its place in Le Guin's continuing argument with Le Guin over the issues she has her characters raise. Tassalil gets the great lines about "mortal love," but she stays in the North with her conqueror-in-training son; she doesn't go South to her daughter and to Ashthera, her husband. Ashthera gets the great lines about risk, but he never asks Romond about the possibilities for him, Ashthera, for five to ten years anyway, starting a new life exploring the galaxy. Instead, Ashthera holds fast to his fidelity: he stays loyal to his wife and family, and his wife dies, and his children have their problems. Even the favorite child, Shiros, marries foolishly and is cruel in the imprisonment of Batash. Significantly, in the rebuilt palace of Queen Shiros and her trophy consort, there is no Inner Room with a sacred text, tapestry, and resident cat. Ashthera is left holding fast to-he has traded the stars for-not a great romantic love or a fine family, but an old friend and a dog.

It could be a movie argued over for years-an excellent form of teaching.

1 Le Guin notes the "am" was inserted by a copy editor, changing the sentence rhythm (and making the punctuation questionable)—personal communication.   

2 Or they wrote stories, if you prefer "Homer" as a group of poets. 

3 Including in that "feminist perspective" philosophical and academic feminism: see "For Helene Cixous"{sic: no accents} in Wild Oats (1988): 60. 

4 In more Western philosophical terms, cf. the description of "Becoming" by Satosi Watanabe in "Time and the Probabilistic View of the World" in Voices of Time (1966): "Becoming is making of the yet-unmade.  Becoming is constant death and constant rebirth. It is a simultaneous destruction and creation" (560).   

5 The quotation is from Le Guin's "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (DEW 168).  See below for Crazy Horse: a Sioux Indian chief of the Oglala Tribe; the accusation of US war crimes comes from the US Army full colonel (Professor of Military Science and Tactics) who taught my Military Science 101 class at the U of Illinois in spring of 1961; he was expanding only slightly on the judgment of the official (if abridged) US Army history of the US Army that was our textbook.   

6 See also, "At the Party" (Wild Oats 45). 

7 In the Eden myth, Adam and Eve are under one prohibition: ". . . of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Genesis 2.17), plus additional penalties—when God finally judges—for women, men, and serpents, including patriarchy (Genesis 3.11-24).  In the folklore I know, the Forbidden Fruit has been identified with the pomegranate (a popular fruit of the Eden area), the pear (from its shape[female body; male genitalia]), and the apple. 

8 In the Greek tradition, there is not only Medusa and her two sisters (the Gorgones) with snake hair but also an association with a snake for the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, called the Pythia, after Pythian Apollo, from Apollo's slaying the great serpent Python—or as a rationalization under the Olympians of an older tradition of wise snakes and wise women.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the most famous encounter of a woman and snake is the usual picture of Genesis 3.1-6: the temptation of Eve and the Fall, with Eve tempted by a snake = the serpent, "the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made" (Tanakh).  Note also the healing snake: on the staff of Asklepios, god of healing, and as a bronze serpent on a pole in Numbers 21.8-9.  See below, "My Hero." 

9 If Theodor Adorno is right in arguing that all "critique" is immanent ("Knowledge" 260), then an external view that could set up a category like "judeochristian men"—or EuroAmericans, or European culture—is problematic.  If the more radically nominalist elements in poststructuralism have got us beyond abstract categories and Structuralist dualism, then setting up "judeochristian men" and a negation of them is wrongheaded.  Insofar as I suggest that the category may be useful, I'm trying to problematicize totally immanent critique and privileging some structuralist moves in feminism.  (Or, in an image I prefer, I'm sending Coyote in to nip at some ankles in a very minor skirmish on the left flank of a Kulturkampf.)

10 See ER 12 and my discussion of the Rer story "Coming of Age in Karhide."

11 Cf. the Master Windkey's not listening to Tenar in Tehanu (143-45; ch. 10).   

12 In other chapters, dealing with only one two or a few of Le Guin's texts, I've used different translations of the Tao te Ching (or Dao de Jing), using Le Guin's eclecticism with translations to justify my own search for the most convenient rendition.  I deal with too many of Le Guin's texts here for that to be courteous, so I will limit myself to "The Richard Wilhelm Edition": i.e., the 1910 translation into German, re-issued in 1978 and translated into English by H. T. Ostwald for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1985.  "Wilhelm" followed by a page number refers to a page in Routledge edn.; that is followed by a I or a II for Wilhelm's division of Tao te Ching into Part I: DAO and Part II: DE or LIFE, with the number after the period referring to the standard through-numbering of chapters.  So Wilhelm 27; I.1: is the first chapter of the Tao te Ching, found on p. 27 of the Wilhelm edn.; Wilhelm 57; II.66 refers to ch. 66, found on p. 57 in Wilhelm—etc.  

13 Reminder: In my usage, "subtle" is not superior to "simple"; "later" does not imply better than "earlier."   

14 See references to Apollo, "god of light," in the Introd. to 1976 reissue of LHD, and light imagery associated with Meshe (LHD ch. 12, esp. 164).   

15 "Some of the Philosophers" denies Utilitarianism and Positivism (chiding philosophers who must "use it" or "count it") but allows the creative "word" (Wild Angels 39).   

16 See Chuang Tzu ch. 6, p. 79 in the Giles trans

17 Yin of the Yin-Yang of Daoist philosophy and Chinese thought generally "is conceived of as Earth, female, dark, passive, and absorbing; it is present in even numbers, in valleys and streams" ("yin-yang," Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia).  One theory is that yin was originally the shaded valley, so the "north side of rivers" might be decorous here as the shady side.  

18 See Wilhelm 28-29; I.4, I.8.   

19 Bittner's Approaches, published by UMI, prints the first four chapters of the five in "Approaches," Bittner's diss.  I use here "Approaches," ch. 5: "Le Guin's Taoism, the Romance, and Utopia."  The diss. proper concludes with an appendix, "A Bibliographical Orientation to Taoism."  Students of Le Guin wishing to look deeper into Daoism in her works, should study her translation of the Tao te Ching (when it is available) and consult Bittner's 1979 diss.: University Microfilms 79-22108,   

20 Cf. the origin myth sardonically told by Atro, an old conservative Ioti aristocrat: "The religion of my fathers informs me with equal authority [to the tales of the Hainish Expansion], that I'm a descendent of Pinra Od, whom God exiled from the Garden because he had the audacity to count his fingers and toes, add them up to twenty, and thus let Time loose upon the universe" (TD 115; ch. 5).   

21 Linga (also "lingam"): phallus symbol, for Shiva.  Note also: "lingo": for specialized language, with "linga" available as a feminine form; and lingua: tongue (esp. if we read, "Yes, it's one of those relationships").   

22 Cf. Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis (Frazer 376 f.; chs. 29-43, esp. 378-80).   

23 See Lasky 199; 2.4.5 and Frazer, Voices of Time 67-68; Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return . . . .  

24 Part of the joke is that "Brahma" is the masculine form and refers to the personalized god; "brahman" is the neuter form and refers to the "eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, the spiritual source of the universe of finiteness and change" (Encyclopædia Britannica Micropædia)—good luck trying to personalize That.  A necklace of skulls is part of her iconography for Kali.   

25 See "Dancing to Ganam," esp. FIS 117.   

26 Note epigraph to BP: Qué rîo ésta por el cual corre el Ganges?"—J. L. Borges: Heráclito,  trans. Spivack (118), "Which river is it through which the Ganges flows?"  

27 On the orders of Pres. Harry S. Truman, the US bomber command dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 Aug. 1945, inflicting some 130,000 casualties (casualty count from "Hiroshima").   

28 Again, see the cover of Hard Words or any correct reproduction of the Shiva Nataraja statue. 

29 Cf. J. Robert Oppenheimer at the test of the first of the Manhattan Project A-bombs, the "Trinity" plutonium weapon detonated 16 July 1945: "After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita:  He said: 'I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.'"—From Project Guttenberg: TEXTS: ETEXT95: 1trnt10.txt" = Trinity Text, 1995.  The speaker quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita is Krishna (e.g. Song of God 94; ch. 11), but I think in epiphany as godhood manifest, incorporating ALL, including Kali (chs. 10-11: "Divine Glory" and "The Vision of God in His Universal Form).   I recall the Oppenheimer quotation as ending in "destroyer of worlds"and therefore used that phrase.     

30 I summarize from the "Gita and Mahabharata" introd. to The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (23-27), cross-checked with the "Mahabharata" entry in Encyclopædia Britannica 1974: Micropædia.   

31 In Hindu belief, ". . . dharma is the religious and moral law, governing individual conduct, and one of the four ends of life, to be followed according to one's class, status, and station in life"  ("dharma" in Encyclopædia Britannica 1974: Micropædia).  For the communicating crane, cf. and contrast Lev with the heroin, EoH 50-51; ch. 4).   

32 [1] During the 2nd millennium BCE, India was invaded (?) by a people or peoples speaking an Indo-European language, called by the handy phrase "the Aryans" until Hitler et al. appropriated the term and made it a problem.  The quotations are on Karhide in LHD, from the original and "Redux" versions of "Is Gender Necessary?" (1979: 164-65; 1989: 161-63). 

33 Romond et al. could also be visitors from the planet's future, and, in cultural terms, they probably are.  In terms of SF film protocols, however, he's an alien visitor from somewhere far. 

34 According to Robert D. Herman, "In the Mahabharata . . . gambling with dice is frequently and prominently described; the world itself is conceived of a gambling game."  Herman also notes that Le Guin's father, A. L. Kroeber, "tried to discover whether or not gambling was distributed among the cultures of the world in systematic patterns that might reveal a general association between gambling and other cultural traits" (7.867).  Kroeber devoted great effort to survey gambling, an extremely broad topic.   

35 Cf. "The Lord of hosts is exalted through justice, and the holy God is sanctified through righteousness," in the Amidah prayer in Judaism (from Isaiah 5.16—except in Isaiah the meaning is "In all he does, God is just and right" [note in Oxford Annotated RSV]).   

36 See Le Guin's poem "For June Jordan" (1988; Wild Oats 44).   

37 In Judaism (hence, necessarily, «Judeo -Christianity»), "righteous king" and "righteous judge" are epithets applied to God, e.g., "Blessed be the Eternal, the Righteous Judge."   

38 On God's playing dice with the universe, see discussion of "Schrödinger's Cat" and the comment by Einstein usually paraphrased, "God does not play dice with the universe."  On Ashtera's low regard for Romond's courage here, note that Romond chose a hazardous life with Ashthera at war—Romond has a gun, but no other protection—over a safe job on the Ship.   

39 "By nothing that I do can I attain a goal beyond my reach" is a "Direct quote from Mahabharata" (Le Guin, personal communication).   

40 Among the vast literature on Lear, see, e.g., Danson, and Erlich's chapter on Lear, central to "Wise Men and Fools."   

41 "The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss" (FS 121; ch. 8).   

 

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