Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Go backward. Turn and return.

  If the word [utopia] is to be redeemed, it will have to be by someone who has followed utopia into the abyss which yawns behind the Grand Inquisitor’s vision.11

  The utopia of the Grand Inquisitor

  is the product of “the euclidean mind” (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.12

  The single vision of the Grand Inquisitor perceives the condition of man in a way stated with awful clarity by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in We:

  There were two in paradise, and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice.13

  No other choice. Hear now the voice of Urizen!

  Hidden, set apart in my stern counsels

  Reserved for days of futurity,

  I have sought for a joy without pain,

  For a solid without fluctuation….

  Lo, I unfold my darkness and on

  This rock place with strong hand the book

  Of eternal brass, written in my solitude.

  Laws of peace, of love, of unity,

  Of pity, compassion, forgiveness.

  Let each choose one habitation,

  His ancient infinite mansion,

  One command, one joy, one desire,

  One curse, one weight, one measure,

  One King, one God, one Law.14

  In order to believe in utopia, Bob Elliott said, we must believe

  that through the exercise of their reason men can control and in major ways alter for the better their social environment…. One must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible.15

  “When the Way is lost,” Lao Tzu observed in a rather similar historical situation a few thousand years earlier,

  there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost there is justice. When justice is lost there are the rites. The rites are the end of loyalty and good faith, the beginning of disorder.16

  “Prisons,” said William Blake, “are built with stones of Law.”17 And coming back round to the Grand Inquisitor, we have Milan Kundera restating the dilemma of Happiness versus Freedom:

  Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise—the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another…. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.18

  The purer, the more euclidean the reason that builds a utopia, the greater is its self-destructive capacity. I submit that our lack of faith in the benevolence of reason as the controlling power is well founded. We must test and trust our reason, but to have faith in it is to elevate it to godhead. Zeus the Creator takes over. Unruly Titans are sent to the salt mines, and inconvenient Prometheus to the reservation. Earth itself comes to be the wart on the walls of Eden.

  The rationalist utopia is a power trip. It is a monotheocracy, declared by executive decree, and maintained by willpower; as its premise is progress, not process, it has no habitable present, and speaks only in the future tense. And in the end reason itself must reject it.

  “O that I had never drank the wine nor eat the bread

  Of dark mortality, nor cast my view into futurity, nor turned

  My back darkening the present, clouding with a cloud,

  And building arches high and cities, turrets and towers and domes

  Whose smoke destroyed the pleasant garden, and whose running kennels

  Choked the bright rivers….

  Then go, O dark futurity! I will cast thee forth from these

  Heavens of my brain, nor will I look upon futurity more.

  I cast futurity away, and turn my back upon that void

  Which I have made, for lo! futurity is in this moment….”

  So Urizen spoke….

  Then, glorious bright, exulting in his joy,

  He sounding rose into the heavens, in naked majesty,

  In radiant youth….19

  That is certainly the high point of this paper. I wish we could follow Urizen in his splendid vertical jailbreak, but it is a route reserved to the major poets and composers. The rest of us must stay down here on the ground, walking in circles, proposing devious side trips, and asking impertinent questions. My question now is: Where is the place Coyote made?

  In a paper about teaching utopia, Professor Kenneth Roemer says:

  The importance of this question was forced upon me several years ago in a freshman comp course at the University of Texas at Arlington. I asked the class to write a paper in response to a hypothetical situation: if you had unlimited financial resources and total local, state, and national support, how would you transform Arlington, Texas, into utopia? A few minutes after the class had begun to write, one of the students—a mature and intelligent woman in her late thirties—approached my desk. She seemed embarrassed, even upset. She asked, “What if I believe that Arlington, Texas, is utopia?”20

  What do you do with her in Walden Two?

  Utopia has been euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine. I am trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can, that our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia. As this utopia would not be euclidean, European, or masculinist, my terms and images in speaking of it must be tentative and seem peculiar. Victor Turner’s antitheses of structure and communitas are useful to my attempt to think about it: structure in society, in his terms, is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

  Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured or institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency.21

  Utopian thought has often sought to institutionalize or legislate the experience of communitas, and each time it has done so it has run up against the Grand Inquisitor.

  The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relation is reversed in organisms—organic structure is determined by its processes.22

  That is Fritjof Capra, providing another useful analogy. If the attempt to provide a structure that will ensure communitas is impaled on the horns of its own dilemma, might one not abandon the machine model and have a go at the organic—permitting process to determine structure? But to do so is to go even further than the Anarchists, and to risk not only being called but being in fact regressive, politically naive, Luddite, and anti-rational. Those are real dangers (though I admit that the risk of being accused of not being in the Main Current of Western Thought is one I welcome the opportunity to run). What kind of utopia can come out of these margins, negations, and obscurities?* Who will even recognize it as a utopia? It won’t look the way it ought to. It may look very like some kind of place Coyote made after having a conversation with his own dung.

  The symbol which Trickster embodies is not a static one.

  Paul Radin speaking. You will recall that the quality of static perfection is an essential element of the non-inhabitability of the euclidean utopia (a point that Bob Elliott discusses with much cogency).


  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

  And he never was in Eden, because coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted their sad heads and saw Coyote, grinning.

  Non-European, non-euclidean, non-masculinist: they are all negative definitions, which is all right, but tiresome; and the last is unsatisfactory, as it might be taken to mean that the utopia I’m trying to approach could only be imagined by women—which is possible—or only inhabited by women—which is intolerable. Perhaps the word I need is yin.

  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.

  The ten thousand things arise together

  and I watch their return.

  They return each to its root.

  Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.

  Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.

  Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.

  To ignore the constant

  is to go wrong, and end in disorder.24

  To attain the constant, to end in order, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.

  Now on the subject of heat and cold: a reference in The Shape of Utopia sent me to a 1960 lecture by M. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” which so influenced my efforts to think out this paper that I wish to quote from it at some length, with apologies to those of you to whom the passage25 is familiar. He is speaking of “primitive” societies.

  Although they exist in history, these societies seem to have worked out or retained a certain wisdom which makes them desperately resist any structural modification which might afford history a point of entry into their lives. The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.

  Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.

  The way in which they exploit the environment guarantees them a modest standard of living as well as the conservation of natural resources. Though various, their rules of marriage reveal to the demographer’s eye a common function; to set the fertility rate very low, and to keep it constant. Finally, a political life based upon consent, and admitting of no decisions but those arrived at unanimously, would seem designed to preclude the possibility of calling on that driving force of collective life which takes advantage of the contrast between power and opposition, majority and minority, exploiter and exploited.

  Lévi-Strauss is about to make his distinction between the “hot” societies, which have appeared since the Neolithic Revolution, and in which “differentiations between castes and between classes are urged without cease, in order that social change and energy may be extracted from them,” and the “cold” societies, self-limited, whose historical temperature is pretty near zero.

  The relevance of this beautiful piece of anthropological thinking to my subject is immediately proven by Lévi-Strauss himself, who in the next paragraph thanks Heaven that anthropologists are not expected to predict man’s future, but says that if they were, instead of merely extrapolating from our own “hot” society, they might propose a progressive integration of the best of the “hot” with the best of the “cold.”

  If I understand him, this unification would involve carrying the Industrial Revolution, already the principal source of social energy, to its logical extreme: the completed Electronic Revolution. After this, change and progress would be strictly cultural and, as it were, machine-made.

  With culture having integrally taken over the burden of manufacturing progress, society …, placed outside and above history, could once more assume that regular and as it were crystalline structure, which the surviving primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition.

  The last phrase, from that austere and somber mind, is poignant.

  As I understand it, Lévi-Strauss suggests that to combine the hot and the cold is to transfer mechanical operational modes to machines while retaining organic modes for humanity. Mechanical progress; biological rhythm. A kind of superspeed electronic yang train, in whose yin pullmans and dining cars life is serene and the rose on the table does not even tremble. What worries me in this model is the dependence upon cybernetics as the integrating function. Who’s up there in the engineer’s seat? Is it on auto? Who wrote the program—old Nobodaddy Reason again? Is it another of those trains with no brakes?

  It may simply be the bad habits of my mind that see in this brief utopian glimpse a brilliant update of an old science-fiction theme: the world where robots do the work while the human beings sit back and play. These were always satirical works. The rule was that either an impulsive young man wrecked the machinery and saved humanity from stagnation, or else the machines, behaving with impeccable logic, did away with the squashy and superfluous people. The first and finest of the lot, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” ends on a characteristic double chord of terror and promise: the machinery collapses, the crystalline society is shattered with it, but outside there are free people—how civilized, we don’t know, but outside and free.

  We’re back to Kundera’s wart on the walls of Eden—the exiles from paradise in whom the hope of paradise lies, the inhabitants of the gulag who are the only free souls. The information systems of the train are marvelous, but the tracks run through Coyote country.

  In ancient times the Yellow Emperor first used benevolence and righteousness and meddled with the minds of men. Yao and Shun followed him and worked till there was no more hair on their shins … in the practice of benevolence and righteousness, taxed their blood and breath in the establishment of laws and standards. But still some would not submit to their rule, and had to be exiled, driven away…. The world coveted knowledge, … there were axes and saws to shape things, ink and plumblines to trim them, mallets and gouges to poke holes in them, and the world, muddled and deranged, was in great confusion.26

  That is Chuang Tzu, the first great Trickster of philosophy, sending a raspberry to the Yellow Emperor, the legendary model of rational control. Things were hot in Chuang Tzu’s day, too, and he proposed a radical cooling-off. The best understanding, he said, “rests in what it cannot understand. If you do not understand this, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.”27*

  Having copied out this sentence, I obeyed, letting my understanding rest in what it could not understand, and went to the I Ching. I asked that book please to describe a yin utopia for me. It replied with Hexagram 30, the doubled trigram Fire, with a single changing line in the first place taking me to Hexagram 56, the Wanderer. The writing of the rest of this paper and the revisions of it were considerably influenced by a continuing rumination of those texts.

  If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in the same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already.

>   I believe that it does:† most clearly as an element in such deeply unsatisfactory utopian works as Hudson’s A Crystal World or Aldous Huxley’s Island. Indeed Bob Elliott ended his book on utopia with a discussion of Island. Huxley’s “extraordinary achievement,” he says, “is to have made the old utopian goal—the central human goal—thinkable once more.”28 Those are the last words of the book. It is very like Bob that they should be not the closing but the opening of a door.

  The major utopic element in my novel The Dispossessed is a variety of pacifist anarchism, which is about as yin as a political ideology can get. Anarchism rejects the identification of civilization with the state, and the identification of power with coercion; against the inherent violence of the “hot” society it asserts the value of such antisocial behavior as the general refusal of women to bear arms in war, and other coyote devices. In these areas anarchism and Taoism converge both in matter and manner, and so I came there to play my fictional games. The structure of the book may suggest the balance-in-motion and rhythmic recurrence of the Tai Chi, but its excess yang shows: though the utopia was (both in fact and in fiction) founded by a woman, the protagonist is a man; and he dominates it in, I must say, a very masculine fashion. Fond as I am of him, I’m not going to let him talk here. I want to hear a different voice. This is Lord Dorn, addressing the Council of his country, on June 16, 1906. He is talking not to, but about, us.

  With them the son and the father are of different civilizations and are strangers to each other. They move too fast to see more than the surface glitter of a life too swift to be real. They are assailed by too many new things ever to find the depths in the old before it has gone by. The rush of life past them they call progress, though it is too rapid for them to move with it. Man remains the same, baffled and astonished, with a heap of new things around him but gone before he knows them. Men may live many sorts of lives, and this they call “opportunity,” and believe opportunity good without ever examining any one of those lives to know if it is good. We have fewer ways of life and most of us never know but one. It is a rich way, and its richness we have not yet exhausted…. They cannot be blamed for seeing nothing good in us that will be destroyed by them. The good we have they do not understand, or even see.29