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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
The entire life of a woman from ten or twelve through seventy or eighty has become secular, uniform, changeless. As there is no longer any virtue in virginity, so there is no longer any meaning in menopause. It requires fanatical determination now to become a Crone.
The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth.
only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition—the essential quality of which is Change—can fairly represent humanity.
The Left Hand of Darkness,
One of the essential functions of science fiction, I think, is precisely this kind of question-asking:
asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination.
A model for this balance, of course, exists on Earth: Chinese civilization over the past six millennia.
Men were inclined to be satisfied with the book, which allowed them a safe trip into androgyny and back, from a conventionally male viewpoint. But many women wanted it to go further,
to dare more, to explore androgyny from a woman’s point of view as well as a man’s. In fact, it does so, in that it was written by a woman. But this is admitted directly only in the chapter “The Question of Sex,” the only voice of a woman in the book. I think women were justified in asking more courage of me and a more rigorous thinking-through of implications.]
But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation—exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth.
Our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin [and the moralization of yang as good, of yin as bad]. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance. Divisions are insisted upon, interdependence is denied. The dualism of value that destroys us, the dualism of superior/inferior, ruler/ruled, owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity.
narrative does not normally use the present tense except for special effect or out of affectation. It locates itself in the past (whether the real or an imagined, fictional past) in order to allow itself forward movement.
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts,
If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be Wuthering Heights.
Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. T...
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All mystics say that what they have experienced in vision cannot be fitted into ordinary time and space, but they try—they have to try. The vision is ineffable, but the story begins, “In the middle of the road of our life …”
a vast amount of our life narration is fictional—how much, we cannot tell.
Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future.
the freedom open to those whose minds can accept unreality.
Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
Utopia is the application of man’s reason and his will to the myth [of the Golden Age], man’s effort to work out imaginatively what happens—or might happen—when the primal longings embodied in the myth confront the principle of reality. In this effort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time: he assumes the role of creator.2
the Golden Age, or Dream Time,
on the evidence of all myth and mysticism,
right here, right now.
Utopia is uninhabitable.
It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.3
non-urban peoples of the Americas had no history, properly speaking, and therefore are visible only to the anthropologist, not to the historian, except as they entered into White history.
With all our self-consciousness, we have very little sense of where we live, where we are right here right now. If we did, we wouldn’t muck it up the way we do. If we did, our literature would celebrate it. If we did, our religion might be participatory. If we did—if we really lived here, now, in this present—we might have some sense of our future as a people.
The symbol which Trickster embodies is not a static one. It contains within itself the promise of differentiation, the promise of god and man. For this reason every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew. No generation understands him fully but no generation can do without him … for he represents not only the undifferentiated and distant past, but likewise the undifferentiated present within every individual…. If we laugh at him, he grins at us. What happens to him happens to us.23
Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.
forcing their cells to betray their characteristic formula in order to obey its own and to manufacture beings like itself.
does our own civilization correspond to an animal or a viral type?
“Westernization” or “progress,” which is perhaps the central fact of our times.
Is it our high technology that gives our civilization its invasive, self-replicating, mechanical forward drive?
But at this point, here and now, the continuously progressing character of our technology, and the continuous change that depends upon it—“the manufacture of progress,” as Lévi-Strauss called it—is the principal vehicle of the yang, or “hotness,” of our society.
will bring us any closer to being a society predominantly concerned with preserving its existence;
The way that cannot be gone is not in the road atlas, or is every road in the atlas.
Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the White West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere.
Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
William Blake, The Book of Urizen,
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Book III, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell, line
Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.
Paul Radin, The Trickster
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia
Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose. Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely paraphrased.
I find my poetry quite often dismissed on the sole ground that it was written by “a novelist” and so cannot be taken seriously.
Poets have to defend poetry with fierce intelligence against the dead weight and corruption of non-poetry and anti-poetry,
