Ursula K. Le Guin
#onherbirthdaytoday
Always Coming Home | Sistopia | Ecotopia | Fictional Ethnography | Stone Telling | Compendium of a Future Culture | Towards an Archaeology of the Future
21st October
While alluding to the role of speculative works of literature, I had cited Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnum opus titled, Always Coming Home as an idealised, alternative world that aligns with the concept of a sistopia.
Indeed this magnum opus is a fictional ethnographic masterpiece! It’s a genre-bender as well, and as such it breaks the mould of a ‘traditional’ novel.
The book is presented in a non-linear narrative mode, as an anthropological study or a “compendium of a future culture,” presenting a fictional people, the Kesh, who live in a distant, post-apocalyptic Northern California.
The central, though fragmented, story is the autobiography of a woman named Stone Telling.
STONE TELLING IS my last name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.
In Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl,
says Stone Telling - the narrator, a Kesh woman whose life story acts as the main fictional narrative thread, detailing her experience growing up among the peaceable Kesh in the Valley.
There’s also this fictional ethnographer named Pandora, who serves as the reader’s guide/interlocutor to the Kesh culture.
Poems, songs, myths, folktales, jokes, plays, prayers, recipes, and proverbs are presented as cultural texts of the people of Kesh.
Interestingly, the Kesh culture is offered as a unique social model, often seen as an early example of Solarpunk or a nuanced Sistopia.
One interesting feature about the people of Kesh is their rejection of the “Sickness of Man” - the relentless, expanding industrial civilization of our own time.
They live in a peaceful, largely self-governed, non-hierarchical, and ecologically sustainable community. Moreover, their concept of wealth is fundamentally different; a “wealthy” person is one who is “able to give” and contribute to the community, rather than one who accumulates resources.
To them, “Judgment is poverty”.
And the most interesting and highly engaging part is the part titled, “Pandora Converses with the Archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na”.
Here, the character Pandora acts as a kind of ethnographer and commentator within the novel!
In fact, the dialogue explores the importance and the responsibility of archiving. It also foregrounds the political power embedded in who controls what knowledge is stored, preserved, and accessible - a theme very relevant to modern concerns about information architecture and digital culture.
Here goes -
PANDORA: Niece, this is a beautiful library!
ARCHIVIST: In the town at the Springs of the River, it is appropriate that the library be beautiful.
PAN: This looks like a rare-book cabinet.
ARC: Old books, fragile ones. Here, this scroll—what strong calligraphy. And good materials. Linen paper; it hasn’t darkened at all. This is milkweed paper, here. A good texture!
PAN: How old is the scroll?
ARC: Oh, four hundred years maybe, five hundred.
PAN: Like a Gutenberg Bible to us. Do you have a lot of such old books and scrolls, then?
ARC: Well, more here than anywhere else. Very old things are venerable, aren’t they. So people bring things here when they get very old. Some of it’s rubbish.
PAN: How do you decide what to keep and what to throwaway? The library really isn’t very large, when you consider how much writing goes on here in the Valley -
ARC: Oh, there’s no end to the making of books.
PAN: And people give writings to their heyimas as offerings -
ARC: All gifts are sacred.
PAN: So the libraries would all get to be enormous, if you didn’t throw most of the books and things out. But how do you decide what to keep and what to destroy?
ARC: It’s difficult. It’s arbitrary, unjust, and exciting. We clear out the heyimas libraries every few years. Here in the Madrone of Wakwaha the lodge has destruction ceremonies yearly, between the Grass and the Sun dances. They’re secret. Members only. A kind of orgy. A fit of housecleaning—the nesting instinct, the collecting drive, turned inside out, reversed. Unhoarding.
PAN: You destroy valuable books?
ARC: Oh, yes. Who wants to be buried under them?
PAN: But you could keep important documents and valuable literary works in electronic storage, at the Exchange, where they don’t take up any room –
ARC: The City of Mind does that. They want a copy of everything. We give them some. What is “room”—is it only a piece of space?
PAN: But intangibles—information -
ARC: Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it.
PAN: But that’s the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on - the central act of human culture.
ARC: “Keeping grows; giving flows.” Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence than keeping, perhaps. Disciplined people come here, Oak Lodge people, historians, learned people, scribes and reciters and writers, they’re always here, like those four, you see, going through the books, copying out what they want, annotating.
Books no one reads go; books people read go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.
PAN: This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that!
ARC: Well, I don’t know, aunt. What if I asked the questions? What if I asked you if you had considered my peculiar use of the word “safe,” and if you had considered the danger of storing up information as you do in your society?
PAN: Well, I—
ARC: Who controls the storage and the retrieval? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it “there” only for those who have the information that it is there, the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate?
How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems?
How much real information is available to ordinary, nongovernment, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does “classified” mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy?
In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?
PAN: Niece, you’re a damned Luddite.
ARC: No, I’m not. I like machines. My washing machine is an old friend. The printing press here is rather more than a friend. Look; when Mines died last year I printed this poem of his, thirty copies, for people to take home and to give to the heyimas, here, this is the last copy.
PAN: It’s a nice job. But you cheated. You didn’t ask a question, you asked a rhetorical question.
ARC: Well, you know, people who live in cultures that have an oral literature as well as a written literature get a good deal of practice in rhetoric. But my question wasn’t just a trick. How do you keep information yet keep it from being the property of the powerful?
PAN: Through not having censorship. Having free public libraries. Teaching people to read. And to use computers, to plug into the sources. Press, radio, television not fundamentally dependent on government or advertisers. I don’t know. It keeps getting harder.
ARC: I didn’t mean to make you sad, aunt.
PAN: I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.
ARC: But I have no answers
and this isn’t utopia, aunt!
PAN: The hell it ain’t.
and so goes on Always Coming Home…
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