Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 11
Now, this speech might have been made in the council of any non-Western nation or people at the time of its encounter with Europeans in numbers. This could be a Kikuyu talking, or a Japanese—and certainly Japan’s decision to Westernize was in the author’s mind—and it is almost painfully close to the observations of Black Elk, Standing Bear, Plenty-Coups, and other native North American spokesmen.
Islandia is not a hot but a warm society: it has a definite though flexible class hierarchy, and has adopted some elements of industrial technology; it certainly has and is conscious of its history, though it has not yet entered into world history, mainly because, like California, it is geographically marginal and remote. In this central debate at the Council of Islandia, the hinge of the book’s plot and structure, a deliberate choice is made to get no hotter: to reject the concept of progress as a wrong direction, and to accept persevering in one’s existence as a completely worthy social goal.
In how many other utopias is this choice rationally propounded, argued, and made?
It is easy to dismiss Islandia as a mere fantasy of the Golden Age, naively escapist or regressive. I believe it is a mistake to do so, and that the options it offers are perhaps more realistic and more urgent than those of most utopias.
Here is M. Lévi-Strauss once more, this time on the subject of viruses:
The reality of a virus is almost of an intellectual order. In effect, its organism is reduced practically to the genetic formula that it injects into simple or complex beings, thus forcing their cells to betray their characteristic formula in order to obey its own and to manufacture beings like itself.
In order for our civilization to appear, the previous and simultaneous existence of other civilizations was necessary. And we know, since Descartes, that its originality consists essentially of a method which, because of its intellectual nature, is not suited to generating other civilizations of flesh and blood, but one which can impose its formula on them and force them to become like it. In comparison with these civilizations—whose living art expresses their corporeal quality because it relates to very intense beliefs and, in its conception as much as in its execution, to a certain state of equilibrium between man and nature—does our own civilization correspond to an animal or a viral type?30
This is the virus that Lord Dorn saw carried by the most innocent tourist from Europe or the United States: a plague against which his people had no immunity. Was he wrong?
Any small society that tried to make Lord Dorn’s choice has, in fact, been forcibly infected; and the big, numerous civilizations—Japan, India, and now China—have either chosen to infect themselves with the viral fever or have failed to make any choice, all too often mixing the most exploitive features of the hot world with the most passive of the cold in a way that almost guarantees the impossibility of their persevering in their own existence or allowing local nature to continue in health. I wanted to speak of Islandia because I know no other utopian work that takes for its central intellectual concern this matter of “Westernization” or “progress,” which is perhaps the central fact of our times. Of course the book provides no answer or solution; it simply indicates the way that cannot be gone. It is an enantiodroma, a reculer pour mieux sauter, a porcupine backing into a crevice. It goes sideways. That’s very likely why it gets left out of the survey courses in Utopian Lit. But side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need, and in its very quality of forswearing “futurity,” of standing aside—and of having been left aside—Islandia is, I suggest, a valuable as well as an endearing book.
It is to some degree a Luddite book as well; and I am forced now to ask: Is it our high technology that gives our civilization its invasive, self-replicating, mechanical forward drive? In itself, any technology is “infectious” only as other useful or impressive elements of culture are; ideas, institutions, fashions too, may be self-replicating and irresistibly imitable. Obviously, technology is an essential element of all cultures and very often, in the form of potsherds or bits of styrofoam, all they leave behind in time. It is far too basic to all civilization to be characterized in itself as either yin or yang, I think. 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.
One need not smash one’s typewriter and go bomb the laundromat, after all, because one has lost faith in the continuous advance of technology as the way towards utopia. Technology remains, in itself, an endless creative source. I only wish that I could follow Lévi-Strauss in seeing it as leading from the civilization that turns men into machines to “the civilization that will turn machines into men.”31 But I cannot. I do not see how even the almost ethereal technologies promised by electronics and information theory can offer more than the promise of the simplest tool: to make life materially easier, to enrich us. That is a great promise and gain! But if this enrichment of one type of civilization occurs only at the cost of the destruction of all other species and their inorganic matrix of earth, water, and air, and at increasingly urgent risk to the existence of all life on the planet, then it seems fairly clear to me that to count upon technological advance for anything but technological advance is a mistake. I have not been convincingly shown, and seem to be totally incapable of imagining for myself, how any further technological advance of any kind will bring us any closer to being a society predominantly concerned with preserving its existence; a society with a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent; a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door. But that is the society I want to be able to imagine—I must be able to imagine, for one does not get on without hope.
What are we offered by way of hope? Models, plans, blueprints, wiring diagrams. Prospects of ever more inclusive communications systems linking virus to virus all over the globe—no secrets, as Kundera says. Little closed orbiting test-tubes full of viruses, put up by the L-5 Society, in perfect obedience to our compulsion to, as they say, “build the future”—to be Zeus, to have power over what happens, to control. Knowledge is power, and we want to know what comes next, we want it all mapped out.
Coyote country has not been mapped. The way that cannot be gone is not in the road atlas, or is every road in the atlas.
In the Handbook of the Indians of California, A. L. Kroeber wrote, “The California Indians … usually refuse pointblank to make even an attempt [to draw a map], alleging utter inability.”32
The euclidean utopia is mapped; it is geometrically organized, with the parts labeled a, a’, b: a diagram or model, which social engineers can follow and reproduce. Reproduction, the viral watchword.
In the Handbook, discussing the so-called Kuksu Cult or Kuksu Society—a clustering of rites and observances found among the Yuki, Pomo, Maidu, Wintu, Miwok, Costanoan, and Esselen peoples of Central California—Kroeber observed that our use of the terms “the cult” or “a society,” our perception of a general or abstract entity, Kuksu, falsifies the native perception:
The only societies were those of the town unit. They were not branches, because there was no parent stem. Our method, in any such situation, religious or otherwise, is to constitute a central and superior body. Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided.
But it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization. If we are able to think socially only in terms of an organized machine, the California native was just as unable to think in those terms.
When we recall with how slender a machinery and how rudimentary an organization the whole business of Greek civilization was carried o
ut, it becomes easily intelligible that the … Californian could dispense with almost all endeavors in this direction, which to us seem vital.33
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.
Perhaps the utopist should heed this unsettling news at last. Perhaps the utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motorcycle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off looking thin, yellow, and dingy across the desert and up into the digger pines.
I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live. Increasingly often in these increasingly hard times I am asked by people I respect and admire, “Are you going to write books about the terrible injustice and misery of our world, or are you going to write escapist and consolatory fantasies?” I am urged by some to do one—by some to do the other. I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.
Back round once more. Usà puyew usu wapiw!
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, and who then has clambered out on the other side.34
Sounds like Coyote to me. Falls into things, traps, abysses, and then clambers out somehow, grinning stupidly. Is it possible that we are in fact no longer confronting the Grand Inquisitor? Could he be the Father Figure whom we have set up before us? Could it be that by turning around we can put him behind us, and leave him staring like Ozymandias King of Kings out across the death camps, the gulags, the Waste Land, the uninhabitable kingdom of Zeus, the binary-option, single-vision country where one must choose between happiness and freedom?
If so, then we are in the abyss behind him. Not out. A typical Coyote predicament. We have got ourselves into a really bad mess and have got to get out; and we have to be sure that it’s the other side we get out to; and when we do get out, we shall be changed.
I have no idea who we will be or what it may be like on the other side, though I believe there are people there. They have always lived there. It’s home. There are songs they sing there; one of the songs is called “Dancing at the edge of the world.” If we, clambering up out of the abyss, ask questions of them, they won’t draw maps, alleging utter inability; but they may point. One of them might point in the direction of Arlington, Texas. I live there, she says. See how beautiful it is!
This is the New World! we will cry, bewildered but delighted. We have discovered the New World!
Oh, no, Coyote will say. No, this is the old world. The one I made.
You made it for us! we will cry, amazed and grateful.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, says Coyote.
Notes
1. Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 100.
2. Ibid., pp. 8, 9.
3. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 22.
4. Ibid., pp. 234–35.
5. Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 4.
6. Howard A. Norman, introduction to The Wishing Bone Cycle (New York: Stonehill Publishing Co., 1979).
7. Ibid.
8. Elliott, p. 107.
9. Bean, p. 4.
10. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969), p. 129.
11. Elliott, p. 100.
12. Ibid.
13. Quoted in Elliott, p. 94.
14. William Blake, The Book of Urizen, lines 52–55, 75–84.
15. Elliott, p. 87.
16. Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, Book II, Chapter 38.
17. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Book III, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell, line 21.
18. Kundera, p. 233.
19. William Blake, Vala, or the Four Zoas, Book IX, lines 162–167, 178–181, 186, 189–191.
20. Kenneth Roemer, “Using Utopia to Teach the Eighties,” World Future Society Bulletin (July–August 1980).
21. Turner, p. 128.
22. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.
23. Paul Radin, The Trickster (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 168.
24. Lao Tzu, Book I, Chapter 16.
25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46–47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28–30. The version here is my own amalgam of the two translations.
26. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 116.
27. Ibid., p. 254.
28. Elliott, p. 153.
29. Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 490.
30. Lévi-Strauss, “Art in 1985,” in Structural Anthropology II, p. 283.
31. Lévi-Strauss, Scope of Anthropology, p. 49.
32. Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.
33. Ibid., p. 374.
34. Elliott, p. 100.
* When I was struggling with the writing of this piece, I had not read the four volumes of Robert Nichols’ Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (New York: New Directions, 1977–79). I am glad that I had not, because my thoughts could not then have so freely and fecklessly coincided, collided, and intersected with his. My paper would have been written in the consciousness of the existence of Nghsi-Altai, as Pierre Menard’s Quixote was written in the consciousness of the existence of Cervantes’ Quixote, and might have been even more different from what it is than Menard’s Quixote from Cervantes’. But it can be and I hope will be read in the consciousness of the existence of Nghsi-Altai; and the fact that Nghsi-Altai is in some respects the very place I was laboriously trying to get to, and yet lies in quite the opposite direction, can only enlarge the use and meaning of my work. Indeed, if this note leads some readers to go find Nghsi-Altai for themselves, the whole thing will have been worthwhile.
* “Heaven the Equalizer” was translated by James Legge as “the Lathe of Heaven,” a fine phrase, from which I have got considerable mileage; but Joseph Needham has gently pointed out to me that when Chuang Tzu was writing the Chinese had not yet invented the lathe. Fortunately we now have Burton Watson’s wonderfully satisfying translation to turn to.
† In Nghsi-Altai—partly.
FACING IT
(1982)
In December of 1982, the Portland Fellowship of Reconciliation held a symposium called Facing It. I was invited to join one of the panels and give a short talk about science fiction and how it faces the issue of nuclear war.
Modern science fiction begins with H. G. Wells, and as far as I know, it is also with Wells that the apocalypse, the end of the world, becomes a subject of fiction. The stories he called his “scientific romances” run the apocalyptic gamut, from a cometary Judgment Day followed by a very boring earthly paradise, to one of the most terribly beautiful nightmares of all fiction, the beach at the end of the world at the end of The Time Machine.
That great vision is the end as seen by science: entropy, the cold, dark chaos that is the target of Time’s arrow. Usually, since Wells, the speculative storyteller has chosen a livelier finale. The sun goes nova, or alie
ns invade, or we perish from overpopulation or pollution or plague, or we mutate into higher forms, or whatever. Round about 1945 a specific kind of apocalypse, not surprisingly, became common in science fiction: the After-the-Bomb, or Post-Holocaust, story.
In the typical After-the-Bomb story, the characters are survivors of what is typically referred to as the Five-Minute War. Some of the options offered these survivors are:
1. Not to survive at all. The characters all kill each other off in the shelters and the ruins. Or, more tidily, as in On the Beach, they commit suicide.
2. To survive by killing and dominating other survivors who happen not to be Social Darwinists.
3. To survive by digging in and hanging on and battling mutant monsters with strange powers in the ruins of Chicago.
4. To survive by being mutants—often living a pleasant, rural life, far from the ruins of Chicago; kind of like Grandma Moses with telepathy.
5. To survive by leaving the Earth and getting away just in time in a space ship. These characters may sit by a canal on Mars and watch the rest of us go incandescent, or dwell for generations in their space ship, or colonize other planets; they certainly have the best options.
Many, many stories using these or similar scenarios were written and published between the late forties and the present. I wrote some myself, in the early sixties. Most of them were trivial, inadequate to their terrible subject. Some, like Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, remain rich and durable works of imagination. The radioactive wasteland of glowing slagheaps populated by feral mutants is now a commonplace, perhaps a genuine archetype, available to beginners, hacks, film-makers, and the Collective Unconscious. Recently the Post-Holocaust story seems to be enjoying a revival, I should like to say thanks to President Reagan, but more honestly perhaps as a symptom of the world mood of which the Reagan presidency, and our presence here tonight, are also symptoms.