The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (17 page)

For
my road had become a busy one; it worked all day long under almost continual
traffic. It worked, and I worked. I did not jounce and bounce so much any more,
but I had to run faster and faster: to grow enormously, to loom in a split
second, to shrink to nothing, all in a hurry, without time to enjoy the action,
and without rest: over and over and over.

Very
few of the drivers bothered to look at me, not even a seeing glance. They
seemed, indeed, not to see any more. They merely stared ahead. They seemed to
believe that they were 'going somewhere'. Little mirrors were affixed to the
front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then
they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of
Progress. Beetles are always rushing about, and never looking up. I had always
had a pretty low opinion of beetles. But at least they let me be.

I
confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness with no moon to
silver my crown and no stars occluding with my branches, when I could rest, I
would think seriously of escaping my obligation to the general Order of Things:
of
failing
to move.
No,
not seriously. Half-seriously. It was mere weariness. If even a silly,
three-year-old, female pussy willow at the foot of the hill accepted her
responsibility, and jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for
each motorcar on the road, was I, an oak, to shirk? Noblesse oblige, and I
trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty.

For
fifty or sixty years, when, I have upheld the Order of Things, and have done my
share in supporting the human creatures' illusion that they are 'going
somewhere'. And I am not unwilling to do so. But a truly terrible thing has
occurred, which I wish to protest.

I
do not mind going two directions at once; I do not mind growing and shrinking
simultaneously; I do not mind moving, even at the disagreeable rate of sixty or
seventy miles an hour. I am ready to go on doing all these things until I am
felled or bulldozed. They're my job. But I do object, passionately, to being
made eternal.

Eternity
is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do
it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds
are fewer, and the wind's foul. But long-lived though I may be, impermanence is
my right. Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

It
was taken from me on a rainy evening in March last year.

Fits
and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both
directions. I was so busy hurtling along, enlarging, looming, diminishing, and
the light was failing so fast, that I scarcely noticed what was happening until
it happened. One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need
to 'go somewhere' was exceptionally urgent, and so attempted to place his car
in front of the car in front of it. This maneuver involves a temporary slanting
of the Direction of the Road and a displacement onto the far side, the side
which normally runs the other direction (and may I say that I admire the road
very highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult
for an unliving creature, a mere making). Another car, however, happened to be
quite near the urgent one, and facing it, as it changed sides; and the road
could not do anything about it, being already overcrowded. To avoid impact with
the facing car, the urgent car totally violated the Direction of the Road,
swinging it around to North-South in its own terms, and so forcing me to leap
directly at it. I had no choice. I had to move, and move fast - eighty-five
miles an hour. I leapt: I loomed enormous, larger than I have ever loomed
before. And then I hit the car.

I
lost a considerable piece of bark, and, what's more serious, a fair bit of
cambium layer; but as I was seventy-two feet tall and about nine feet in girth
at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My branches trembled with the
shock enough that a last-year's robin's nest was dislodged and fell; and I was
so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said
anything out loud.

The
motorcar screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow, squashed, in fact. Its
hinder parts were not much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and
knurled together like an old root, and little bright bits of it flew all about
and lay like brittle rain.

The
driver had no time to say anything; I killed him instantly.

It
is not this that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore
have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this: as I leapt at
him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen
before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things.
He saw me whole, and saw nothing else - then, or ever.

He
saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because
he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am
caught in it, eternally.

This
is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion. If the human creatures will
not understand Relativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness.

If
it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars, though
killing is not a duty usually required of oaks. But it is unjust to require me
to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I am not death. I
am life: I am mortal.

If
they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine.
I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If
that is what they want to see, let them look into one another's eyes and see it
there.

THE
ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS

(Variations
on a theme by William James)

The
central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoyevsky's
Brothers
Karamazov,
and
several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to
William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky muck as
I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the
idea. But when I met it in James's 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life',
it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how James puts it:

Or
if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs Fourier's and
Bellamy's and Morris's
Utopias
should all
be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition
that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it
be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us
to clutch at the
happiness
so offered, how hideous a thing
would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a
bargain?

The
dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated. Dostoyevsky was
a great artist, and a radical one, but his early social radicalism reversed
itself, leaving him a violent reactionary. Whereas the American James, who
seems so mild, so naively gentlemanly — look how he says 'us', assuming all his
readers are as decent as himself! - was, and remained, and remains, a genuinely
radical thinker. Directly after the 'lost soul' passage he goes on,

All
the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves
jar less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable
causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons
it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

The
application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and
to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as 'the probable
causes of the future experience' — that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!

Of
course I didn't read fames and sit down and say, Now I'll write a story about
that 'lost soul'. It seldom works that simply. 1 sat down and started a story,
just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word 'Omelas' in mind. It
came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs
backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas ... Salem equals schelomo equals
salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas, Omelas. Homme helas. 'Where
do
you get your
ideas from, Ms Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs
backwards naturally. Where else?

With
a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to
the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor
sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted
walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great
parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people
in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women
carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music
beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing,
the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising
like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions
wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow
called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with
mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive
horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without
bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They
flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly
excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his
own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling
Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning
the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under
the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that
marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the
broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets,
farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air
that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the
great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous!
How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They
were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the
words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a
description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a
description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a
splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden
litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use
swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and
laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did
without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange,
the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these
were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland Utopians. They
were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit,
encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something
rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible
boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But
to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of
everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy
man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of
Omelas? They were not naive and happy children — though their children were, in
fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were
not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could
convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago
and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as
your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I
cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there
would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the
fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just
discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive,
and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the
unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc, etc. -
they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing
machines, and all kinds of marvellous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources,
fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it
doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up
and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before
the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the
train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though
plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear
that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades,
horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate.
Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and
priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or
woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood,
although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any
temples in Omelas - at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no.
Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about offering themselves like
divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh Let
them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and
the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point)
let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by
all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should
there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For
those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of
drooz
may perfume
the ways of the City,
drooz
which first
brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after
some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana
and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex
beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think
there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The
sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without
clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is
not the right kind of joy; it will not do, it is fearful and it is trivial. A
boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some
outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all
men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the
hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.
I really don't think many of them need to take
drooz.