Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Maybe we’ve had enough words of power and talk about the battle of life.

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.

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 denie...

the so-called man’s world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power.

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?

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.

consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives.

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.

Coyote

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Mircea Eliade

Coyote

He exuded himself, while absorbing nothing. From what inexhaustible source, since he never replenished it by drawing upon the rest of the universe, did he draw so much self to exude? When I found out (on the way home) that he was a Representative, I thought that that explained it: his inexhaustible source was power—power itself.

the future lies behind—behind your back, over your shoulder.

It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity.

You came here to college to learn the language of power—to be empowered. If you want to succeed in business, government, law, engineering, science, education, the media, if you want to succeed, you have to be fluent in the language in which “success” is a meaningful word.

His language expresses the values of the split world, valuing the positive and devaluing the negative in each redivision: subject/object, self/other, mind/body, dominant/submissive, active/passive, Man/Nature, man/woman, and so on. The father tongue

This word from its vocabulary, “ecosystem,” is a word unnecessary except in a discourse that excludes its speakers from the ecosystem in a subject/object dichotomy of terminal irresponsibility.

Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only, inevitably, to distance it—to exclude it. It is the other, inferior. It is primitive:

How, after all, can one experience deny, negate, disprove, another experience? Even if I’ve had a lot more of it, your experience is your truth. How can one being prove another being wrong? Even if you’re a lot younger and smarter than me, my being is my truth. I can offer it; you don’t have to take it. People can’t contradict each other, only words can: words separated from experience for use as weapons, words that make the wound, the split between subject and object, exposing and exploiting the object but disguising and defending the subject.

People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable,

violable. Men especially aren’t used to that; they’re trained not to offer but to attack. It’s often easier for women to trust one another, to try to speak our experience in our own language, the language we talk to e...

But you and I have learned to use the mother tongue only at home or safe among friends, and many men learn not to speak it at all. They’re taught that there’s no safe place for them. From adolescence on, they talk a kind of degraded version of the father tongue with each other—sports scores, job technicalities, sex technicalities, and TV politics. At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, they respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and...

I am trying to unlearn these lessons, along with other lessons I was taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work, works, and being of women. I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers—the feminist thinkers and writers and talkers and poets and artists and singers and critics and friends, from Wollstonecraft and Woolf through the furies and glories of the seventies and eighties—I celebrate here and now the women who for two centuries have worked for our freedom, the unteachers, the unmasters, the unconquerors, the unwarriors, women who have at risk and at high cost offered their experience as truth. “Let us NOT praise famous women!” Virginia Woolf scribbled in a margin when she was writing Three Guineas, and she’s right, but still I have to praise these women

and thank them for setting me free in my old age to learn my own language.

That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society.

Freud famously said, “What we shall never know is what a woman wants.” Having paused thoughtfully over the syntax of that sentence, in which WE are plural but “a woman” apparently has no plural, no individuality—as we might read that a cow must be milked twice a day or a gerbil is a nice pet—WE might go on then to consider whether WE know anything about, whether WE have ever noticed, whether WE have ever asked a woman what she does—what women

This family, which our media and now our government declare to be normal and impose as normative, this nuclear family now accounts for seven percent of the arrangements women live in in America. Ninety-three percent of women don’t live that way.

But the only alternative offered by the patriarchal mythology is that of the Failed Woman—the old maid, the barren woman, the castrating bitch, the frigid wife, the lezzie, the libber, the Unfeminine, so beloved of misogynists both male and female.

A Woman’s place, need I say, is in the home, plus at her volunteer work or the job where she’s glad to get sixty cents for doing what men get paid a dollar for but that’s because she’s always on pregnancy leave but childcare? No! A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can’t. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils

from the idea of sisterhood and doesn’t believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She’s a male construct, and she’s afraid women will deconstruct her. She’s afraid of everything, because she can’t change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she’s my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.

I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength. You’re going to need it. I hope you don’t try to take your strength from men, or from a man.

Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don’t let us sink back into silence. If we don’t tell our truth, who will? Who’ll speak for my children, and yours?

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control.

What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Books, 1978), p. 186.

What is false is the military image; what is foolish is the egoism; what is pernicious is

identification of “Nature” as enemy.

although thirty to fifty percent of books are written by women, what is called “literature” remains eighty-eight to ninety percent male, decade after decade.

Most women’s writing—like most work by women in any field—is called unimportant, secondary, by masculinist teachers and critics of both sexes; and literary styles and genres are constantly redefined to keep women’s writing in second place. So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Tillie Olsen,

There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman’s experience of life using a woman’s judgment.

Events aren’t reproducible.

Writing of any kind fixes the word outside time, and silences it. The written word is a shadow. Shadows are silent. The reader breathes back life into that unmortality, and maybe noise into that silence.

The oral text, verbal art as event, as performance, has been devalued as primitive, a “lower” form, discarded, except by babies, the blind, the electorate, and people who come to hear people give lectures.

We value the power of print, which is its infinite reproducibility. Print is viral. (Virile is now subsumed in viral.) The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

As for poetry, the Beats brought the breath of life back to it, and then Caedmon Records, with that first Dylan Thomas recording; and these days all poets tell you earnestly that they write to be heard.