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Opinion ends reception.
outer and inner walls entirely covered with writing in the old ideographs, whitewashed over but showing through with a queer subliminal legibility.
It seemed that first the Mobile, then the Monitor, and now the Fertiliser, or whatever he was, had promptly and painlessly co-opted her, involving her in their intentions without telling her what they were.
The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past.
To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried. The writing that had preserved them was to be erased.
The tapes and dramas glorified this war against the past, relating the bombings, burnings, bulldozings in sternly heroic terms.
here it was all the reverse of what she had known, the negative: that here the believers weren’t the persecutors but the persecuted.
But they were all true believers, both sides. Secular terrorists or holy terrorists, what difference?
He sighed for the sufferings of bigots and puritans, the sufferings and cruelties.
One of the reasons she had specialised in Aka, had learned the languages, was that she and Pao had read in the First Observers’ reports that Akan society was not hierarchically gendered and that heterosexuality was not compulsory, not even privileged. But all that had changed, changed utterly, during the years of her flight from Earth to Aka. Arriving here, she had had to go back to circumspection, caution, self-suppression. And danger.
As for the Monitor, he was playing power games. It must be a thrill for a middle-weight supervisor of cultural correctness to find a genuine alien, an authentic Observer of the Ekumen, to give orders to: Don’t talk to social parasites—don’t leave town without permission—report to the boss man, me.
It was a small, poor, provincial city, dragged along in the rough wake of Akan progress, far enough behind that it still held tattered remnants of the old way of life—the old civilisation.
The Akan Corporation State wanted to forget, hide, ban, bury all that, and if she learned anything here, it would not please them.
The air was dry at this altitude, cold in the shadow, hot in the sun.
Somehow she had to learn to listen through that noise to what it hid, the meaning under it.
Was its ceaselessness its meaning? Were the Akans afraid of silence?
Sutty wondered if Aka was a guilt culture, a shame culture, or something all its own. How was it that everybody in the world was willing to move in the same direction, talk the same language, believe the same things? Fear of being evil, or fear of being different?
There she was, back with fear. Her problem, not theirs.
If every topic was a minefield, there was nothing to do but talk on through the blasts,
To achieve such a beautiful group meditation and then destroy it with this stupid muscle building—what kind of people were these?
The ban on servile address, on greetings, goodbyes, any phrase acknowledging presence or departure, left holes in the texture of social process, gaps crossed only by a slight effort, a recurrent strain.
His gaze was impersonal, appraising, entirely without response. The Corporation was looking at her.
felt her eyes flick over him with dismissive incredulity as if seeing something small, uncouth, a petty monster.
the Corporation had authorised him to prevent the Ekumen—her—from investigating and revealing the continued existence of reactionary practices, rotten-corpse ideologies.
She knew too many poets. She knew more poets, more poetry, she knew more grief, she knew more than anybody needed to know.
The corporative government of Aka, while driven to control everyone and everything, also wanted very much to please and impress their visitors from the Ekumen.
the Rule of the Fathers under which she had lived all her life had been a fit of madness.
Dalzul had only to set his finger on the scales to turn blind, bigoted hatred into blind, universal love.
they went on dancing the joyous dances of unbelief.
Nobody starts out that way, Sutty thought. There are no hard babies.
He was sincere. Most bigots are sincere. The stupid, arrogant fool, trying to tell her that religion was dangerous! But he was merely parroting Dovzan propaganda.
That he couldn’t control her was so intolerable to him that he’d lost control of himself.
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
a way of thinking and living developed and elaborated over thousands of years by the vast majority of human beings on this world, an enormous interlocking system of symbols, metaphors, correspondences, theories, cosmology, cooking, calisthenics, physics, metaphysics, metallurgy, medicine, physiology, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, calligraphy, numerology, herbalism, diet, legend, parable, poetry, history, and story.
Nonwords were useful markers of paths that might lead through the wilderness.
she defined the Akan system as a religion-philosophy of the type of Buddhism or Taoism, which she had learned about during her Terran education:
a religion of process.
took as models. They saw that religion is a useful tool for those in power. But there was no native theism or deism here.
Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one, or one in two aspects. No hierarchy of Nature and Supernatural. No binary Dark/Light, Evil/ Good, or Body/Soul. No afterlife, no rebirth, no immortal disembodied or reincarnated soul. No heavens, no hells. The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they’re exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. Right action is its own end. Dharma without karma.”
right action Is it's own end
Again and again in her notes, after every conclusion: Check this. Conclusions led to new beginnings. Terms changed, were corrected, recorrected.
She ended up calling it the Telling.
She had long debates with her noter about whether any word in Dovzan, or in the older and partly non-Dovzan vocabulary used by ‘educated’ people, could be said to mean sacred or holy.
any place, any act, if properly perceived, was actually mysterious and powerful, potentially sacred.
But these stories weren’t gospel. They weren’t Truth. They were essays at the truth. Glances, glimpses of sacredness. One was not asked to believe, only to listen.
might point out that that had been a good way or a right way of doing something, but they never talked about the right way. And good was an adjective, always: good food, good health, good sex, good weather. No capital letters. Good or Evil as entities, warring powers, never.
This system wasn’t a religion at all, Sutty told her noter with increasing enthusiasm. Of course it had a spiritual dimension. In fact, it was the spiritual dimension of life for those who lived it. But religion as an institution demanding belief and claiming authority, religion as a community shaped by a knowledge of foreign deities or competing institutions, had never existed on Aka. Until, perhaps, the present time.
among the Akans there were no foreigners. There had never been any foreigners, until the ships from the Ekumen landed.
No aliens. No others, in the deadly sense of otherness that existed on Terra, the implacable division between tribes, the arbitrary and impassable borders, the ethnic hatreds cherished over centuries and millennia.
Akans fought each other out of greed and ambition for power, not out of hatred and not in the name of a belief. They fought by the rules. They had the same rules. They were one people. Their system of thought and way of life had been universal. They had all sung one tune, though in many voices.
to the Dovzan reformers, that may have been the chief reason for getting rid of the old script: it was not only an impediment to progress but an actively conservative force. It kept the past alive.
