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In her youth, Myrgot had been called ‘an interesting-looking girl’; today she was known as a bottomless well of cunning and vice.
Quema, on the other hand, had the personality called in the inns and drinking places along the island’s docks (and in that long-ago distant language the term applied equally to men and women) a good sailor, which meant someone who could live easily in close quarters with others under swaying conditions.
For wasn’t it here that an eminently sea-worthy and seasoned woman really belonged, under the wind and the moon, with her own good boat rocking on the belly of the Great Mother, like a woman half dreaming on her back with her own sea-daughter astraddle her?
Later, she realized that, though none of them was backward, they were just more astutely sociable than most adolescents—more tolerant of a crippled old woman’s oddities.
‘There are certain thoughts,’ Venn said, dryly, ‘which, reflected by language in the mirror of speech, flatten out entirely, lose all depth, and though they may have begun as rich and complex feelings, become, when flattened by language, the most shallow and pompous self-righteousness.
A method of exchange that would be a reflection of money and a model of money without being money.
And suppose you wanted to get together a business. You could go to a lot of people and get each one to pledge just a little bit of their money on paper, and then go right off and act just as though you had it.
She had just learned, as every little girl does, that the more you open your legs, the lower the angle of the water. At the same time, she was trying to demonstrate to my boy that he, less economically constructed than she, had best use his hands to guide himself, otherwise things tended to flap and splatter, and that he did not aim naturally straight forward as she did.
‘“Arkvid,” I said, “That’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard. I mean, if you carried on about your … well, your gorgi,” which he was tugging at again, “the way you carry on about your rult, you’d have little girls jealous of that in a minute.” ‘“Now that is truly ridiculous,” Arkvid said. “Why would a little girl be jealous of a little boy’s gorgi when she has a perfectly good gorgi of her own, and more compactly built at that?
The rult is not just a piece of wood, you know. It’s the whole concept of distinction, of difference itself.
Your daughters will grow up strong and clever and your sons, handsome and brave.
Why do you bother your handsome head with these things that should only be the concern of women anyway. Now give us a smile and take yourself off to the Men’s House and dress yourself for the naven tonight in honor of our neighbors’ new dwelling.”
‘“But don’t you see, Ydit. This rult-jealousy of Arkvid’s is all out of his own overvaluation of the rult, and nothing more. Let me describe exactly what happened while you were out a few days back.” When I had, they all laughed.
Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended. Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.
Norema, as we have seen, was a young woman who knew the passions of analysis; today we say such people are more likely to place their energies behind an abstract cause than to work at untangling the everyday snarl of things.
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
‘Does it seem so strange to you, barbarian? You must understand; it is just part of the price one pays for civilization. Fire, slavery, cloth, coin, and stone—these are the basis of civilized life. Sometimes it happens that one or another of them gets hopelessly involved in the most basic appetites of a woman or a man. There are people I have met in my travels who cannot eat food unless it has been held long over fire; and there are others, like me, who cannot love without some mark of possession.
the web of money makes us all one!’
‘Yes,’ said old Zwon, for perhaps the seventh time that morning, ‘as far as I can see, money is an entirely good idea! As fine an idea as writing and public drainage systems, I’ll be bound. As fine as fibrous rope and woven fabric—indeed, as the stone chisel and the potter’s wheel itself.
You don’t know what the world was like without them. Levers and fulcrums, levers and fulcrums—that’s all there was and they raised stone walls and made cities look like cities. But for the common woman or common man going about a common day’s business, give me a piece of rope or a clay drainpipe any day.
The boat sails this afternoon, but I want you to be at least an hour early, since we have yet to invent an accurate timetable for shipping traffic in and out of Kolhari harbor. Go
And while we stand here brooding over why we can be happy neither in the sun or in the shadow, give a thought too to the brilliant notions on art, economics, or philosophy we are not now having because we are concerned instead with this!’
But the other explanation is this: to avoid being bothered, to avoid being annoyed, you have shut down one whole section of your mind, that most sensitive section, the section that responds to even the faintest ugliness precisely because it is what also responds to the faintest nuance of sensible or logical beauty—you must shut it down tight, board it up, and hide the key.
I have my serious doubts, Norema, about whether money is a good thing. I heard the other day from a woman who, though she is not at court, is a confidante of Lord Ekoris (who is) that a man approached Her Highness not a month back with a scheme for making money of vellum. The Empress would hold in store all the gold and iron from which we now make coins; the vellum, on which patterns would be embossed in rare inks and of a cleverness so surprising in their design that they could not be imitated by unauthorized means, would be issued to stand for specific amounts of metal, and would be used in
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Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing …
She stood quietly at the edge of the squatting men, her hands in the slits at the hips of her strange leg-coverings—internal storage pouches, apparently, which Bayle found himself insistently thinking of as little extra wombs that Norema, for some reason, had decided to carry about, an amusing thought that had added to his liking of her at the same time as his dislike of the Western Raven had grown.
‘But know that they will try to take it away from us, as men take everything from women in this strange and terrible land—for isn’t that why it is so strange and terrible?
And god modeled the animals all from the flesh of her body. And the fingers of god became the ten, great female deities of matter and process; and the toes of god became the ten, minor male deities of emotion and illusion—’
Jevim praised and adored god, and heard god’s words, and by inspection and reflection discerned the wonders of the
“Sand and nettles, grass and breeze, it is all one in the garden of god. We must sing the praise of god.”—which is, of course, not the way to praise the act at all—for the act is always manifest in difference, diversity, and distinction.
And so Eif’h bowed her hairy face and covered her poor, ropey genitals, and was called no longer woman, but ’man, which means broken woman.
Raven’s bloody knuckles slipped one on another as she stretched and flexed and stretched. ‘No. In this strange and terrible land, most men have hands like women.’
For the boy the collar is symbolic—of our mutual affection, our mutual protection. For myself, it is sexual—a necessary part in the pattern that allows both action and orgasm to manifest themselves within the single circle of desire. For neither of us is its meaning social, save that it shocks, offends, or deceives.’
Believe me, my friend, even though I have seen men fulfill it, captain is a woman’s job: and in our land it is usually the eldest sailor on the boat who takes the job done by your captain.’
He is a figure of prestige, yes, which explains his fancy dress; but he is not a figure of power.
