The Telling (Hainish Cycle, #8)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“The margin between collusion and respect can be narrow,” Tong said. “Unfortunately, we exist in that margin, here.”

and drinking akakafi, a native hot drink rebaptized with a semi-Terran name. The Corporation brand of akakafi was called Starbrew and was ubiquitous. Bittersweet, black, it contained a remarkable mixture of alkaloids, stimulants, and depressants. Sutty loathed the taste, and it made her tongue furry, but she had learned to swallow it, since sharing akakafi was one of the few rituals of social bonding the people of Dovza City allowed themselves, and therefore very important to them. “A cup of akakafi?” they cried as soon as you came into the house, the office, the meeting. To refuse was to offer a rebuff, even an insult. Much small talk centered around akakafi: where to go for the best powder (not Starbrew, of course), where it was grown and processed, how to brew it. People boasted about how many cups they drank a day, as if the mild addiction were somehow praiseworthy. These young Educators were drinking it by the liter.

One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune. A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance.

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.

if the Telling was a religion it was very different from Terran religions, since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, deferral of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry.

The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one’s life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.

She particularly detested the literal readings. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

If prayer was praise, then perhaps they did pray. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertiliser’s pharmacopoeia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. They described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything.

Poststructuralism

“It’s all we have. You see? It’s the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don’t have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. We’d tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment. We’d be like a baby. A baby can do it, but we’d drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there’s nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is.” “Memory?” Sutty said. “History?” Elyed nodded, dubious, not satisfied by these terms. She sat thinking for some time and finally said, “We’re not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is there in our world?”

Hypernormalisation and poststructuralism

But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world. We’re lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take care and tell it truly.

“You did no wrong. Sotyu Ang did no wrong. There is no fault. Things are going badly. It’s not possible always to do right when things are difficult.”