Showing posts with label Death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Death. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

The EarthSea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin: The Masterpiece of the Century


 

It is rare that an author is given the privilege of creating a work that defines a whole age. It happened to Dante with his "Comedy," but I think that Ursula Le Guin had the same privilege when she wrote his "EarthSea" cycle, starting in 1968. It is a cycle that encompasses and defines the whole 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. 

It is especially impressive how in the last volume of the first series, "The Farthest Shore," Le Guin managed to describe exactly the current situation, where humans are so desperate to avoid death that they can renounce to everything that makes them human for a false hope of immortality

Versione in Italiano.

More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin

The End of Music - The End of Magic

How we lost the silence: what's the Web doing to us?

The Magic is Back: Reading Novels Again

Earthsea: the Soul and the Machine

Geology of Planet Earthsea. 

Ursula K. Le Guin: 1929-2018. The Magic and the Beauty.

The Word for World is Forest

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead

Saturday, December 26, 2020

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead

 

 Earthsea: image source


 
Ursula K. Le Guin: "The Trilogy of Earthsea"

They came then into the streets of one of the cities that are there, and Arren saw the houses with windows that are never lit, and in certain doorways standing, with quiet faces and empty hands, the dead.

The marketplaces were all empty. There was no buying and selling there, n
o gaining and spending. Nothing was used; nothing was made. Ged and Arren went through the narrow streets alone, though a few times they saw a figure at the turning of another way, distant and hardly to be seen in the gloom.

All those whom they saw -not many, for the dead are many, but that land is large- stood still, or moved slowly and with no purpose. None of them bore wounds. They were whole and healed. They were healed of pain and of life. Quiet were their faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope. 

Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, it was not for himself, but for all people. For he saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those who had died for love passed each other in the streets. 


In the end, all literature, all science, all knowledge, are travel reports. Sometimes reports from remote lands where one has actually been, sometimes from lands of pure fantasy, sometimes from realms that science can create although nobody could ever go there: the inside of stars, remote galaxy, the great black holes. 

And here is a story of a travel of these strange days of Christmas of 2020. This travel meant walking in a this foggy city, nearly empty of people, with the few Christmas lights looking lonely and useless. And the people: all masked, all looking at each other suspiciously, all walking on as if they had nowhere to go. It was a place that looked very much like the description of the Land of the Dead that Ursula Le Guin gave us in her "Wizard of Earthsea."

That real fog and that real silence that enveloped the city were just the background of a virtual travel to another foggy land: the land of truth that doesn't seem to exist anymore. I started this trip by looking at the scientific literature about the coronavirus pandemic. Reviewed scientific papers are supposed to be the very source of truth. What I found were plenty of contradictions, of contrasting results, of evident bending of the interpretations, of attempt to be politically correct to appease the all powerful watchers who take the form of editors and reviewers. 

There is a kind of fog that pervades everything in the scientific literature. You are always under the suspicion that it would take so little to corrupt scientists. And I know it happens. I have seen it happening. Scientists turn out to be so cheap to corrupt, all what it takes is the promise of a research grant, but let me not tell you a few sad stories I know. In any case, this is what science is today, and that is supposed to be "Science" starting with a capital letter and on which you must believe. And if you don't, you are, what? A conspiracy theorist? A science denier? An enemy of the people?

It is a fog that surrounds everything in science. And even if you can trust the authors, when the data look good, the conclusions sound, you see that what we call science has no impact on the debate on the pandemic. Have you tried to argue in a public debate on the basis of data and rational arguments? You know what happens: you find yourself pelted with links by people who use them as if they were stones launched by medieval catapults. It is not just fog: you find yourself in a house of mirrors, you see multiple reflections of everything staring at you from all directions. And every reflection claims aloud "I am the truth! I am the truth!"

Surfing the web, I stumbled into another case of mirrors reflecting into each other. Do you remember the Rwandan massacre of 1994? You probably remember it as the story of how the evil Hutu (the majority) massacred the poor Tutsi (a minority), as told in the emotional film "Hotel Rwanda." But I found myself facing a report titled "Hotel Propaganda" that proposed the exactly opposite interpretation. The ones massacred were the Hutu when Rwanda was invaded from Uganda by an army led by the Tutsi and supported by the Western powers in order to gain control of the mineral resources of central Africa. 

Did Cain really kill Abel, or was it the opposite? How can we know? What do we know about Rwanda? Could you pinpoint Rwanda on a world map? Have you ever met a Rwandan? Have you ever seen anything of Rwanda that didn't appear in one of the Western propaganda channels? What is truth, as Pilate said?  Mirrors everywhere, the truth is everywhere and nowhere, and the fog pervades everything.

Still roaming a strange and foggy land, I stumbled into something even stranger and foggier -- an article by Thorsten Pattberg on the Saker blog -- (Yes, I know that it is one of the most subversive sites of the internet) It is strange how I arrived there: I was writing something about Caligula, the Roman Emperor. You know, the pervert, the madman, the one who made a horse a consul and who forced people to worship him as a God. Yes, we all know that, but is it true? And as I was asking myself that question, I stumbled into Pattberg's post that mentioned exactly the same subject: was Caligula a monster or a maligned hero?

The fog of history is truly thick if we try to pierce it across the nearly 2 thousand years that separate us from Caligula. And yet, we think we know something about Roman Emperors, don't we? But what do we know about Roman Emperors? How do we know that such people even existed? How do we know that there existed such a thing as the Roman Empire? Sure, you can find great walls and half-crumbled buildings, but what are they for? Who built them? The Romans? The Atlanteans? Aliens from Betelgeuse? Or who?

Pattberg's piece is a nice trip into the land of nihilism. Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we going? It contains such gems as

 "Since something can exist without being existent (interest rates, gross domestic product, French cuisine, the billion-year commitment and unicorns), soon our planners will introduce the realm of non-existence – and harvest it accordingly. It is a bit like discovering the concept of negative numbers. The notion of humans who are actual burdensome “minus-people” will capture imaginations. We will compute trillions of them."

And so it goes. In these foggy days, in a city populated by masked ghosts walking while suspiciously watching each other, the impression is that nothing is real, except for the fact that maybe we do live in Le Guin's Land of the Dead as she describes it in her Earthsea cycle. And maybe Earthsea really exists somewhere, except that we, the dwellers of the Land of the Dead, cannot see it. 

It is more than just a similarity, because the way Le Guin describes her fictional world, she seems to have been prescient of what would have happened to the world we deem to be real: the refusal of death leads to nothing but the loss of life. In the story, Ged the Archmage says to the sorcerer Cob: 

You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.

And that's how a promise of immortality had become worthless in the fictional (or maybe real) world of Earthsea. And so it is for us, in our ghostly world of today that we think is real. We sold everything we had, including our freedom and our dignity, for a false promise of immortality. 

But, as the Japanese poets would say, the world is made out of dew, just condensed fog. And as long as we can walk, we walk with our feet and we walk with our minds. Someday, maybe we'll get somewhere. Or maybe not. But we keep walking. 


More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin

The End of Music - The End of Magic

How we lost the silence: what's the Web doing to us?

The Magic is Back: Reading Novels Again

Earthsea: the Soul and the Machine

Geology of Planet Earthsea. 

Ursula K. Le Guin: 1929-2018. The Magic and the Beauty.

The Word for World is Forest

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead