The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin and her works.

A bit of divergence from my regular postings… Which have been thin on the ground as of recently. I have a couple of siblings who have been experiencing very ill health and have been wrapped up with that. I think there is some improvement, at least with one of them. Seems to be the territory as of late.

Hopefully back on track soon.

G

(Commercial Break!) Also, have been busy with the launch of the Invisible College #12 “Psychedelics & The Occult”. Very excited about this!

Contents:
Introduction
Dedication – Diane Darling
Hakim Bey
On The Forthcoming Publication of Divine Inebriation Part 1
from Silsila (Book Two: The Cywanu Trilogy – Whit Griffin
Auntie Etha’s Cow Lip Tea (“An Early Case of the Use of a Coprophilous, Possibly Entheogenic, Fungus in African American Folk Healing”) – P.D. Newman
The Golden Path – A. Andrew Gonzalez
Hymn For The Azure Soul – Dalton Miller
Egungun Of Benin – Michael Landau
Absinthe: Artemisia absinthium – Dale Pendell
Nepenthe – Gwyllm
Acacia: the philosophical mercury of Zosimos, Paracelsus, and Newton
– Khalil Reda
Thoughts Upon the Bacchae
The Dream & Divinities Tarot – Liba Stambollion
Coda
Adios Will Penna

Truly an amazing volume of the Invisible College. 160 pages plus, with art, psychedelic mysteries revealed, poetry, and much more.

More Information here: Invisible College #12 "Psychedelics & The Occult"

Bunches of pictures and a Sample PDF as well!

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Gwyllm-Art.Com Changes!

New Offerings! New pieces from various projects, now available for the discerning art collector.

We now have a Gallery Page that is growing! Digging through several years for the rarities and other well-known pieces.

New Website design changes as well. Let us know what you think.

“Sorceress” One of our new pieces!

And onto the article for this posting.

Ursula K. Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. First published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories…

I first stumbled upon Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing in 1968-69. Perhaps it was a short story that led me to purchase a copy of “Left Hand of Darkness” when it came out in paperback. There are books that changes lives, and this one was perhaps the one that had me questioning the dominant form of consigned gender in the waning years of the 20th century. I fell in love with her ideas, her prose style and the opening up of awareness that her writings brought.

Around the time that this book came out, androgyny had become quite the topic, with such cultural artifacts in cinema as “Performance” with Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, James Fox and the book written by Gore Vidal, “Myra Breckinridge” being turned into a film… to Lou Reed, David Bowie, the whole glitter period of music, Marc Bolan, etc. These examples are just that, remember at this time Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation/Stonewall became a thing. Though it seems distant and remote now, the present as always was seeded in the past.

The trend picked up again in the 1980’s with the Eurythmics, Boy George, Marilyn, Prince and numerous others.

The Left Hand of Darkness still resonates with the observations she made… I mean look at how the world has changed, and the discussion revolving around gender today. I look at our grown child and their friends and they have such diverse identities around gender. It is a wonder, and delight.

Le Guin’s other writings are even more prescient, especially “The Dispossessed”, her explorations on Anarchism and cultural shifts changed my life. Through reading this my personal politics jelled; and to this day I give thanks that I found that book. I read it in 2 days, skipping work to finish it, and when I was done, I sat and wept at the beauty that she had laid out.

I have been moved over the years by her writing again, and again. She was in the neighborhood in a sense, living up in Northwest Portland near Forest Park. In my running days I would run from SE Hawthorne & 22nd up past her home to Forest Park and all… Usually on the weekend some 22-26 miles for that run. Ah, those were the days.

Here is a Speech she gave back in the early 80’s. Amazing stuff:

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Left-Handed Commencement Address

delivered 22 May 1983, Mills College, Oakland, California:

I want to thank the Mills College Class of '83 for offering me a rare chance: to speak aloud in public in the language of women.

I know there are men graduating, and I don't mean to exclude them, far from it. There is a Greek tragedy where the Greek says to the foreigner, “If you don't understand Greek, please signify by nodding.” Anyhow, commencements are usually operated under the unspoken agreement that everybody graduating is either male or ought to be. That’s why we are all wearing these twelfth-century dresses that look so great on men and make women look either like a mushroom or a pregnant stork.

Intellectual tradition is male. Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course, women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man’s world, so it talks a man’s language. The words are all words of power. You’ve come a long way, baby, but no way is long enough. You can’t even get there by selling yourself out: because there is theirs, not yours.

Maybe we’ve had enough words of power and talk about the battle of life. Maybe we need some words of weakness. Instead of saying now that I hope you will all go forth from this ivory tower of college into the Real World and forge a triumphant career or at least help your husband to and keep our country strong and be a success in everything -- instead of talking about power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if -- only if -- you want kids, I hope you have them. Not hordes of them. A couple, enough. I hope they’re beautiful. I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing.

Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success?

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself -- as I know you already have -- in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

Well, we’re already foreigners. Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the only direction is up. So that’s their country; let’s explore our own. I’m not talking about sex; that’s a whole other universe, where every man and woman is on their own. I’m talking about society, the so-called man’s world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power.

If we want to live as women, some separatism is forced upon us: Mills College is a wise embodiment of that separatism. The war-games world wasn’t made by us or for us; we can’t even breathe the air there without masks. And if you put the mask on, you’ll have a hard time getting it off.

So how about going on doing things our own way, as to some extent you did here at Mills? Not for men and the male power hierarchy -- that’s their game. Not against men, either -- that’s still playing by their rules. But with any men who are with us: that’s our game. Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him? Why should she live her life on his terms?

Machoman is afraid of our terms, which are not all rational, positive, competitive, etc. And so, he has taught us to despise and deny them. In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean -- the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life. All that the Warrior denies, and refuses is left to us and the men who share it with us and therefore, like us, can’t play doctor, only nurse, can’t be warriors, only civilians, can’t be chiefs, only Indians. Well so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers’ tales about it, we haven’t got there yet. We’re never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by going our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country.

So, what I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you’re good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is.

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing -- instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth, we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula Le Guin 2009. Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch

In the early 2000’s, Mary my life partner and I were shopping in Fred Meyers/Kroger up at Hawthorne & 39th. We were upstairs, sitting on some deck furniture discussing purchasing some… Up the escalator comes a ball of energy, it is Ursula Le Guin, with her husband in tow. “Come on, come on we have to get home” she was saying. Out the door they sallied, and me sitting there probably with my tongue hanging out.

I had always planned to write her to thank her for her writing, and to let her know that it changed my life. I had planned to attend one of her talks at Powell’s or elsewhere... 2018 came along, and she passed away.

So, this is a love letter to Ursula in a way:

Ursula, you helped shape my view(s) on gender and anarchism. You wrote of possible worlds, and liberation of the sentient spirit, in humans and others. Thank you for the writing, and the deep love you had for the world. You never knew me, but still, you shaped my world view.

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“How It Seems To Me”

In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.

• Ursula K. Le Guin

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  This is one of those songs from long ago when I first discovered Ursula. It fits the times, then and now:

Here is to a future we have not even dreamed yet. Here is to an event horizon that brings love, unity, and a new way of being to us all.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

―Ursula K. Le Guin

Thank you for visiting!

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm