“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.
“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.
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
More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin
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, no
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
"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is.
You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication. (Anastassia Makarieva (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1UtHRBcG4 - min 30:05))
I was…a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.
…the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day…a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego.
I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it…Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades..I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.
…my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time...And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.
Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves...When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates.
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety...You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away...Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.
...our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.
The Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath — the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity — was a collective imposition of relative silence, a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries — only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past couple of decades. It reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are. But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination...This changes us. It slowly removes — without our even noticing it — the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties. And the smartphone has all but banished them.
I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.