Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  This is the text of a long singing held in the Yellow Adobe heyimas of Madidinou. It would not ordinarily have been written down, but the singer told me that writing it was considered unnecessary, not inappropriate.

  Heya kemeya

  ou

  imitimi

  ou-a ya

  A scholar of the Inner Sun was the leader, keeping the beat from time to time on a one-tone wooden drum, and leading the chant. Each of the four phrases or syllables was chanted for no less than an hour at a time, and often several hours at a time, except the “imitimi,” which was sung a relatively few times in succession, always in multiples of nine. The ability of the singers to follow the leader in the completely unheralded change to a new syllable or a new musical pattern was uncanny; two of them, evidently less gifted, did not sing, but maintained a barely audible keynote on the syllable o, and by spelling each other when they had to take breath maintained, or gave the illusion of maintaining, a perfectly steady unbroken sound, until they gave out after about eleven hours. The whole long singing lasted almost two days and two nights. When the leader’s voice gave out, which was only towards the middle of the second night, he kept up the beat on the drum, and moved his lips soundlessly in the chant, whispering aloud only when the matrix word changed.

  Long singings that went on for more than a night or two had several leaders, and might continue for four or five days and nights. Most older adolescents and many adults participated in at least one of the long singings.

  Most people practiced some degree of fasting and sexual abstinence during the Twenty-One Days, and more did so and to a greater degree as the period went on. The mood of the community grew increasingly tense and somber—“stretched” was their word for it.

  On the day before the solstitial sunrise, all the groups of seekers arrived back home, if possible before nightfall, and scattered families reunited, if they could, at the maternal household. Married men often returned to their mothers’ house for the Twenty-First Night. The towns drew in as if under siege. At sunset all doors were shut, all windows closed. The power sources had already been shut down, mills stopped, machinery halted; insofar as possible, domestic animals were brought into the pens, barns, and byres; and at sunset all lights and fires were extinguished. A hearthfire or a candle lighted before sunset might be allowed to burn out, but the custom, well reinforced by the children and adolescents, with their passion for tradition, was that no light should be relighted that night. If the fire went out, it stayed out. The longest night of the year was the darkest.

  During the afternoon of that day people of the Inner Sun had dug a hole or pit somewhere in the common place of the town, a couple of feet across and fairly deep. After sunset, people came by this small pit or grave, which was called “the absence,” and dropped into it a bit of ash from their hearthfire, or a bit of food wrapped in a piece of cloth, or a feather, or a lock of hair, or maybe a ring or a carving or a small roll of paper covered with writing, or some other thing of personal value or significance. Nothing was said or sung. People came by in a casual way to make this small private sacrifice. The silent and irregular procession went on until midnight or so. Each person returned alone in the dark to the dark house, or to the silent heyimas, where one spark of an oil lamp burned in the central room. Late in the night even that was put out. Some time in the dark hours members of the Black Adobe Lodge filled up the “absence” pit and swept over it to obliterate and disguise its place.

  Alder of the Black Adobe said: “It is like the memory of the town, there, under the surface where we walk in the common place, in the ground underfoot there, all the things that have been put there in silence in the dark, all the years, the forgotten things. They are put there to be forgotten. They are sacrificed.”

  The Twenty-First Night is passed in silence in the dark.

  At the first sign of dawn, about cock-crow, one song is sung. Four or five adolescent girls, trained by the Inner Sun, go up onto a high roof, or a tower if the town has one, and there stand to sing the Winter Carol, once only.

  Thorn said, “I always meant to stay awake and listen to the Carol when I was a small child, or to wake up and wait for it, but I never did. I begged my mothers to wake me up to hear it, but when they did it was over before I roused up enough to listen. But when I was older, and heard that song for the first time, it seemed I had known it since before I was born.”

  The words of that song are not written.

  Early in the morning, hearthfires and heaters are relighted, and the underground heyimas are illuminated with festival lights until the sunrise—an event which, central as it is to the entire festival, is not formally observed at all.

  Alder said, “At the center is the absence. It is so.” Speaking, he held his hands facing each other, slightly curved inward, about an inch apart, the left thumb pointing down and the right thumb up.

  The only event which might be said to mark the sunrise was a negative one: the disappearance of the White Clowns. At that sacred moment their power was broken, they vanished until next year, and the children were free of the lurking horror. The gift-trees were presented with much informal family ceremony. Some cooking had been done even during the fast in preparation for this morning, and during the Day of the Sunrise really heavy and impressive cooking got under way for the feasting which would be going on for four days in the houses and the heyimas.

  In the heyimas, the Morning Dances of the Sun began some time after sunrise and were held each morning for four days (five every fourth year). The singers were people of the Inner Sun. Certain dances were performed by masked Inner Sun dancers, others were danced by anyone who had learned the dance.

  Alder said, “If the dances are properly conducted and well danced, the sky people will be there dancing with the earth people. That’s why you never take hands, dancing the Morning Dances of the Sun. Between each earth person and the next a place is left for a Four-House person to dance. So also the songs leave a silence after every line sung for the other voices to sing, whether we hear them or not; and the drums beat only every second note.”

  Fifteen-year-old Upstream Fish said, “The Morning Songs of the Sun aren’t gloomy like the songs of the Twenty-One Days, they’re mysterious, beautiful. They make your heart light, they make it easy to sing, they make you feel as if everyone singing, the living and the unborn and the dead, were all together in the Valley, that no one was lost, that nothing was wrong.”

  Thorn said, “Although I know it takes the singers of the Inner Sun years and years to learn and remake the Morning Songs, again, when I hear them sung I know that I know them. I know them as I do the sunlight.”

  In the afternoons of the four Sun Risen days, clowns came into town—not tall and white, but supernaturally fat, and dressed in green, with no mask, but fanciful beards and whiskers pluming and curling and trailing, made of white wool or tree-moss. The Sun Clowns often led, and tried to ride, billygoats, and they gave all kinds of little presents, mostly sweets, to the younger children. All fasts were broken, and food was set out in every household for visitors. Thorn said, “A lot of people celebrate with grape brandy or hard cider, along with all that eating, so they get drunk, and there’s a good deal of fooling around, but nobody gets angry or wild, because the children are having a good time, and because of the Four House people still being with us. You always set aside some of the food you serve or eat for them, and pour out the first draft of anything you drink. And in the heyimas they’re still singing the half-silent songs.”

  Slowly during this four or five days of the Sun Risen, the two Arms of the World separated, the Four-House beings returning to their plane of existence, earthly people to the daily concerns of mortal life. Thorn said, “Working in the house, cleaning up or cooking, working in the workshops, people sing songs that go along with the rainbow people, as they go away, and keep going slowly farther away, back to their Houses. We sing those songs, and send our breath partway with them, breathing out.” Alder said, “Breathing
out, singing, we follow them, walking after them for a while, seeing the world as they see it, with the sun’s eyes, that see only light.”

  About the Train

  The Milling Art and the Finders Lodge worked together on tracklaying, repair, and maintenance. Under professional direction, young people who were not Millers or Finders often worked for a season or two on the “Line” as an adventure. The leaders of these crews and the men and women whose chief work was driving the mule and oxen trains or the engine were notable, romantic, and “dangerous” characters.

  The train tracks used and maintained by the Kesh ran from Chesteb, a depot south of Clear Lake, over Ama Kulkun to Kastóha, down the Valley past Telína and the great wineries south of it, then east through the Northeast Ranges to the port town of Sed on the Inland Sea coast in the territory of the Amaranth people; probably less than eighty miles in all.

  The track was a single line, with short spurs to the lading warehouses and wineries, some twenty-two sidings along its length for passing or for holding cars, and turnaround loops for the engines at Kastóha and at Sed (and at Clear Lake by the town of Stoy, where there were connections to a north-running train line and to road haulage east).

  The rails were of oak, heavily treated against decay, termites, and rodents; they were laid on cross-connected redwood sleepers in a creek-cobble roadbed. No metal was used in the rails, which were fastened in short sections by wood-pinned lock joints. The Wood Art, under Yellow Adobe auspices, provided these rails and was in charge of the ceremonial aspects of tracklaying and repair.

  No tunnels were built; in hard grades and canyons on Ama Kulkun and the Northeast Ranges the looping switchbacks were innumerable. Trestle construction was massive, since it had to support a solid roadbed for animals hauling trains.

  The cars or wains ran on hooped oaken wheels, two pair on a swivelled truck at each end of the car; the couplings were braided, laminated leather, sometimes reinforced with chain. Goods wains or heavy cargo were roofed boxcars; those carrying wine were insulated, with clamps and mountings to anchor the casks. There was one roofed boxcar fitted out with bunks, window panels, and wood stove, for people travelling by train—the height of luxury, according to the author of “Trouble with the Cotton People.” Other wains were roofless and of light construction: a flatcar with socketed poles was common, the load lashed on under a canvas covering. No car was over nineteen feet long; axle width (standard since time immemorial on all roads in the region) was two feet nine inches (the Kesh meter or yard—the hersh). The wains were so narrow that they somewhat resembled boats, which was what the Kesh called them.

  At the period this book is concerned with, two engines were in use in the Valley, one owned by the Kesh and the other by the Amaranth people. Both ran only between Kastóha and Sed. They were woodburning steam engines of (my guess) about 15 to 20 horsepower. The Kesh engine was built, maintained, and operated by members of the Millers Art in cooperation with other Arts and Lodges that used the train in their commerce with neighboring peoples. They called the engine The Grasshopper for its high-angled pistons, its jointed look, and probably for its habit of starting with a flying leap. It was built of pegged and fitted wood and riveted sheet iron; tubes were rolled up from the flat and seam-welded by hammering over a false core. The firebox and boiler sat up on little bolted legs well away from the carriage, and the high, narrow smokestack was topped with a complicated and unreliable spark baffle. The risk of forest fire in the dry grass and chaparral of the mountains was the main drawback to use of the engines; in dry years they were not run at all between the Water Dance and the beginning of the rains. At such times, and for short runs within the Valley, for single-wain hauls, and for all traffic north from Kastóha over the Mountain, the trains were pulled by oxen or mules: the tracks and roadbed served to make the hauling easier for those who did it.

  A signalling system was maintained during periods of frequent operation (that is, more than once every nine or ten days). Lineswomen and men operated the signals, and travelling crews kept up the wood and water supplies along the line. The signals were connected to the Exchanges in Wakwaha, Sed, and other towns in the trade network, where schedules of runs and arrangements for shipments were made and posted.

  Some Notes on Medical Practices

  Most of the little information I have concerning Kesh medicine was given me in conversation by Alder of the Serpentine and the Doctors Lodge of Chúmo and of Sinshan. He said that a doctor did four things—prevent, care, cure, and kill.

  Preventive medicine included immunisation, public and personal hygiene, teaching and advice about diet, work habits, work places, and exercise, counselling for psychic strain and distress, and a wide variety of kinds of massage, manipulation, music, and dance—“bodywork” in our terms.

  Care or alleviation involved treatment of fevers, aches, infections, and communicable diseases, and the care of people suffering from handicaps and incurable disorders.

  Curative practices included bonesetting, the use of a large and complex pharmacopoeia, therapeutic bodywork, and surgery. I do not have a list of surgical operations the Kesh considered feasible; Alder at one time or another mentioned having performed amputation, curettage, appendectomy, removal of an abdominal tumor, removal of skin cancers, and an operation to close a cleft palate. Anesthesia for a major operation was induced by herbal drugs taken for a period of days before and after surgery, and by “the lances,” a system of thin bamboo needles inserted according to a body chart which—to this ignorant eye—looked a good deal like an acupuncture chart. (I did not hear about anything like therapeutic acupuncture.)

  As our medicine makes no place for killing, considering itself in binary opposition to death, we have only the slightly suspect “euthanasia” to name practices the Kesh considered part of any doctor’s work and a serious element of medical theory and morality: castration of animals; human abortion, which was considered neither a minor nor a reprehensible operation; and the killing of monstrous births, both human and animal.

  There was no distinction by caste of the “veterinary” from the “doctor,” though physicians usually specialised to some extent according to their knack and the community’s need. There seemed to be no dentists as such, probably because most Kesh had good teeth and ate a low-sugar diet.

  GEDWEAN: BRINGING-IN.

  This most characteristic of Kesh medical practices could be called a “healing ceremony” if it’s understood that a coronary bypass operation could also be called a “healing ceremony.” Current high-technology medical practice in well-equipped hospitals includes the latter, Valley medicine included the former; both are cases of a specialised technology used by trained professionals, reflecting a certain moral stance and embodying certain judgments on the means and ends of medicine. Statistics comparing rates of alleviation, short-term cure, long-term cure, and failure would be interesting, but inappropriate.

  Since each bringing-in was created for an individual in particular circumstances of illness or stress by a particular doctor or group of doctors, I can’t give a general description; and a description of an actual bringing-in would violate Kesh standards of personal and sacred discretion. In the abstract, then: a bringing-in involved two parties, the goddwe or brought, and the dwesh or bringers. The goddwe—usually one person but sometimes a married couple or a child with a parent or sibling—lived for the four-, five-, or nine-day period of the gedwean in their heyimas or in the Doctors Lodge building. They were looked after attentively, given a special diet or fasting pattern, and followed a carefully prescribed regime of activity and rest; their body and face were marked or painted, and they wore special clothing, a long, loosely belted shift of wool challis. (Such a garment was the gift of a weaver to the Doctors Lodge in exchange—payment or prepayment—for medical attention. Contrary to the theory and practice of shamanistic and psychiatric curing, where the cost is an essential ingredient of the cure, Kesh doctors charged nothing; their practice was an integral part of the
continuous exchange of services and goods that formed the Kesh village economy. The cost of successful practice to the doctor may be glimpsed in what Stone Telling mentions of Alder’s patients in Chúmo and Sinshan.)

  The dwesh or bringers, one of whom had to be a “singing doctor,” worked out the treatment/ceremony, which might include drug therapy, use of trance-inducing drugs, hypnosis through drumming and singing, massage, bathing, exercises, the teaching of symbols and figures drawn in sifted dust or painted or marked on the skin, and the discussion of the meaning of such symbols and also of songs, stories, and events in the life of the person being brought in; the performance of rituals, some of them traditional and some the private property of the doctor, obtained in vision or from another doctor as a gift; and the invention and performance of songs, dances, and drum patterns by patient and doctor together. The goddwe left the bringing-in with recommendations for further treatment if necessary and a routine to follow to maintain the healing effects of the gedwean itself.

  Alder told me that he believed the beneficial effect of a bringing-in lay to a great extent in attention—the attention paid to the goddwe, who was the center of everybody’s interest in a supportive, comforting, unstressed environment of warmth, rest, soft drumming and singing; and the attention which the goddwe must pay to his or her life and thinking and the mystical or intellectual or practical insights arrived at by the combined work of the people involved in the bringing-in. It was a pretty good example of what the Kesh meant by uvrón, carefulness, taking care.