Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The cattle are in pure herds of Black Angus, Aberdeen, Santa Gertrudis, and some beautiful mixed herds, all shades of cream, dun, brown, roan. There’s a Hereford bull in with his harem and descendants, big, frowning, curly-headed, like an angry Irishman.

  In 1976 Nebraska commissioned ten sculptures for the roadside rest areas along Interstate 80, and going west you see five of them; we stop at each one to see and photograph it, as does the grey-haired man with two daughters who pose with the sculpture for his photograph. The pieces are all big, imaginative, bold. The one we like best resides in a pond a couple miles west of Kearny. It’s aluminum in planes and curves and discs; parts of it are balanced to move softly, without sound; all of it floats on the flickering, reflecting water. It’s called The Nebraska Wind Sculpture. “What is it?” says a grinning man. I say, “Well, the AAA tourbook says it looks like H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.” He says, “O.K., but what is it?”—and I realize he thinks it may be “something,” not “just” a work of art; and so he’s looking at it and grinning, enjoying the damfool thing. If he knew it was Art, especially Modern Art, would he be afraid of it and refuse to see it at all? A fearless little boy, meanwhile, haunts the pool and shouts, “Look! A lobster!” pointing at a crayfish, and nearly falls into the scummy shallows reflecting the silver Nebraska Wind.

  Down the road a town called Lexington advertises itself:

  ALL-AMERICAN CITY

  ALL-NEBRASKA COMMUNITY

  Those are some kind of national and state awards for something, I suppose, but how disagreeable, how unfriendly and exclusive they sound. But then, what other state of the union thought of celebrating the Bicentennial with big crazy sculptures right out for every stranger driving I-80 to see? Right on, Nebraska!

  We pull in for the night at a motel in North Platte, a town that has a rodeo every night of every summer every year, and we sure aren’t going to miss that. After dinner we drive out Rodeo Road to Buffalo Bill Avenue to the Cody Arena (by now we have the idea that that old fraud came from around here), and the nice cowgirl selling tickets says, trying to give us a senior citizen savings, “Would you be over sixty at all?” No, we can’t manage that yet, so she gives us full-price tickets and a beautiful smile. All the seats are good. It’s a warm dry prairie evening, the light getting dusty and long. Young riders on young horses mill around the arena enjoying the attention till the announcer starts the show the way all rodeos start, asking us to salute “the most beautiful flag in the world,” a pleasure, while the horses fidget and the flag bearer sits stern, but the announcer goes on about how this flag has been “spat and trampled and mocked and burned on campuses,” boy, does he have it in for campuses, what decade is he living in? The poison in his voice is pure Agent Orange. More of this “patriotism” that really means hating somebody. Shut up, please, and let’s get on with what all us Americans are here to see—and here to do, for ten bucks prize money.

  The first cowboy out of the chute, bareback bronc-riding, gets thrown against the fence, and another gets his leg broken right under the stands. Rodeos are hard on horses, hard on cattle, hard on men. A lousy way to earn ten bucks. Ladies, don’t let your sons grow up to be cowboys, as the song says. But the calf-roping is done for the joy of skill, of teamwork, horse and man, and the barrel-riding girls are terrific, whipping around those barrels like the spinning cars on a fairground octopus, and then the quirt flicks and the snorting pony lays out blurry-legged and belly to the ground on the home stretch with the audience yipping and yahooing all the way. By now the lady from Longview, Washington, with the six-pack on the next bench is feeling no pain. A bull is trying to destroy the chutes before the rider even gets onto him. The rodeo is one of the few places where people and animals still fully interact. How vain and gallant horses are, not intelligent, but in their own way wise; how fine the scared, wily vigor of the calves and the power of the big Brahma bulls—the terrific vitality of cattle, which we raise to kill. People who want matadors mincing around can have them, there’s enough moments of truth for me in a two-bit rodeo.

  Driving back after the show over the viaduct across Bayley Yard, a huge Union Pacific switching center, we see high floodlights far down the line make gold rivers of a hundred intertwining tracks curving off into the glare and dazzling dark. Trains are one of the really good things the Industrial Revolution did—totally practical and totally romantic. But on all those tracks, one train.

  Next morning we stop at Ogallala for breakfast at the Pioneer Trails Mall. I like that name. Two eggs up, hashbrowns, and biscuits. The restaurant radio loudspeaker plays full blast over the South Platte River roaring past full of logs and junk and way over the speed limit for rivers.

  We leave that river at last near where the Denver road splits off, and come into the low, bare hills across it. As the water dries out of the ground and air, going west, the blur of humidity is gone; colors become clear and pale, distance vivid. Long, light-gold curves of wheat and brown plowed land stripe the hills. At a field’s edge the stiff wheat sticks up like a horse’s mane cropped short. The wind blows in the tall yellow clover on the roadsides. Sweet air, bright wind. Radio Ogallala says that now is the time to be concerned about the European corn borer.

  Between the wheat and corn fields scarped table-lands begin to rise, and dry washes score the pastures. The bones of the land show through, yellowish-white rocks. There’s a big stockyard away off the road, the cattle, dark red-brown, crowded together, looking like stacked wood in a lumberyard. Yucca grows wild on the hills here; this is range land. Horses roam and graze far off in the soft-colored distances. We’re coming to the Wyoming border, leaving this big, long, wide, bright Nebraska; a day and a half, or forty minutes, or a month in the crossing. From a plane I would remember nothing of Nebraska. From driving I will remember the willows by the river, the sweet wind. Maybe that’s what they remembered when they came across afoot and horseback, and camped each night a few miles farther west, by the willows and the cottonwoods down by the Platte.

  WHOSE LATHE?

  (1984)

  This piece was written for the “Forum” section of my regional major newspaper, The Oregonian, in May of 1984. The arguments made are local and specific; the problem addressed is national and general. Any author who boasts about freedom of the press in the United States should, perhaps, make certain that none of his or her books has been banned, dropped from a reading list as immoral or anti-religious or “secular humanist” (that bogey includes almost all science fiction), or weeded out or locked away by a public librarian or school librarian under pressure. The trouble is, its not a matter the author is likely to hear about. I would not have known that one of my books was to have a censorship hearing in Washougal, Washington, a town twenty minutes’ drive from my city, if a librarian in that school district had not alerted me the night before the hearing. Little as I wish to, I have to assume that censorship has been and is being imposed on my books, and on all literature, in school districts, schools, and libraries all over the country, and that there is nothing I can do about it except protest against it whenever and wherever I can; a protest I know other writers, and readers, will share.

  In a small town near Portland late this spring, a novel, The Lathe of Heaven, was the subject of a hearing concerning its suitability for use in a senior-high-school literature class. I took a lively interest in the outcome, because I wrote the novel.

  The case against the book was presented first. The man who was asking that it be withdrawn stated his objections to the following elements in the book: fuzzy thinking and poor sentence structure; a mention of homosexuality; a character who keeps a flask of brandy in her purse, and who remarks that her mother did not love her. (It seemed curious to me that he did not mention the fact that this same character is a Black woman whose lover/husband is a White man. I had the feeling that this was really what he hated in the book, and that he was afraid to say so; but that was only my feeling.)

  He also took exception to what he describ
ed as the author’s advocacy of non-Christian religions and/or of non-separation of Church and State (his arguments on this point, or these points, were not clear to me).

  Finally, during discussion, he compared the book to junk food, apparently because it was science fiction.

  The English Department of the school then presented a carefully prepared, spirited defense of the book, including statements by students who had read it. Some liked it, some didn’t like it, most objected to having it, or any other book, banned.

  In discussion, teachers pointed out that since it is the policy of the Washougal School District to assign an alternative book to any student who objects on any grounds to reading an assigned one, the attempt to prevent a whole class from reading a book was an attempt to change policy, replacing free choice by censorship.

  When the Instructional Materials Committee of the district voted on the motion to ban the book, the motion was defeated twenty votes to five. The hearing was public and was conducted in the most open and democratic fashion. I did not speak, as I felt the teachers and students had spoken eloquently for me.

  Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister. In this case, I saw something going on that worried me a good deal because it did not seem to be coming from an outside pressure group, but from elements of the educational establishment itself: this was the movement to change policy radically by instituting, or “clarifying,” guidelines or criteria for the selection/elimination of books used in the schools. The motion on which this committee of the school district voted was actually that the book be withdrawn “while guidelines and policies for the district are worked out.” Those guidelines and policies were the real goal, I think, of the motion.

  Guidelines? That sounds dull. Innocent. Useful. Of course we have to be sure about the kinds of books we want our kids to read in school. Don’t we?

  Well, do we? The dangerous vagueness of the term “guidelines and policies for the district” slides right past such questions as: Who are “we”? Who decides what the children read? Does “we” include you? Me? Teachers? Librarians? Students? Are fifteen-to-eighteen-year-olds ever “we,” or are they always “they”?

  And what are the guidelines to be? On what criteria or doctrines are they to be based?

  The people concerned with schools in Oregon try, with ever decreasing budgets, to provide good, sound food in the school cafeterias, knowing that for some students that’s the only real meal they get. They try, with ever decreasing budgets, to provide beautiful, intelligent books in classes and school libraries, knowing that for many students those are the only books they read. To provide the best: everyone agrees on that (even the people who vote against school levies). But we don’t and we can’t agree on what books are the best. And therefore what is vital is that we provide variety, abundance, plenty—not books that reflect one body of opinion or doctrine, not books that one group or sect thinks good, but the broadest, richest range of intellectual and artistic material possible.

  Nobody is forced to read any of it. There is that very important right to refuse and choose an alternative.

  When a bad apple turns up, it can be taken out of the barrel on a case-by-case, book-by-book basis—investigated, defended, prosecuted, and judged, as in the hearing on my Lathe of Heaven.* But this can’t be done wholesale by using “guidelines,” instructions for censorship. There is no such thing as a moral filter that lets good books through and keeps bad books out. Such criteria of “goodness” and “badness” are a moralist’s dream but a democrat’s nightmare.

  Censorship, here or in Russia or wherever, is absolutely antidemocratic and elitist. The censor says: You don’t know enough to choose, but we do, so you will read what we choose for you and nothing else. The democrat says: The process of learning is that of learning how to choose. Freedom isn’t given, it’s earned. Read, learn, and earn it.

  I fear censorship in this Uriah Heepish guise of “protecting our children,” “stricter criteria,” “moral guidance,” “a more definite policy,” and so on. I hope administrators, teachers, librarians, parents, and students will resist it. Its advocates are people willing to treat others not only as if they were not free but were not even worthy of freedom.

  * Currently (1987) a textbook written for Oregon schools called Let’s Oregonize is going through this process on the state level. The arguments against it were brought by environmentalists and others who found it tendentious and biased towards certain industries and interests. From my point of view it certainly sounds like a rather bad apple. But it is getting a scrupulously fair hearing.

  THE WOMAN WITHOUT ANSWERS

  (1984)

  Invited to come to the Cooper Union for a New School conference, The Presence of Myth in Contemporary Life, I asked if instead of preparing a paper I could participate on a panel as a respondent. As the date of the conference (in October of 1984) drew near, impressive lists of speakers were issued; but I had received only one of the several papers to which I was supposed to respond, and that one was a short story, a kind of statement not ordinarily considered to need a response. I began to panic, and did what I generally do in a panic: I tried to make my situation make sense, to make it into a story—in the circumstances, inevitably, a myth. Among all the various presentations given during the three days of the conference, it is distinguished by being the only one not meant to be taken seriously. Nor will it be found in the handsome volume of the proceedings of the conference issued the following year, in which the subject of myth is approached from practically every direction except, perhaps, the direction Coyote comes from.

  There was a woman from the town upriver from where the Willamette comes into the Columbia. She wasn’t so young any more, and she said to her husband, “I’d like to go east a while and see our son who’s staying there.” So she started out and went east for a long way but a short time, till she got to that island where her son was. He was doing fine there. After she saw him she saw a big, old, strange house there among all the other houses, and she said, “I’ve heard of this place.” So she went in and found a lot of people there having a meeting, talking together. Some of them knew her and said, “Come on in, Little Bear Woman! We’re playing a game here. We tell stories and then you have to answer what we said.” She said, “All right.” She was afraid of them; it was their territory, and some of them were really big people. So she said, “All right, I’ll try.” Then they began talking again, telling stories and telling stories about the stories, and Little Bear Woman got to feeling smaller and smaller. The ones that talked were almost all men, and they mostly talked about men, so that she wondered if there was a shortage of women in the eastern part of the country; but then she saw lots of women listening to the men talking. By then she was feeling a good deal like running away back west, but she was too old to run well, so she stayed. And besides, these people weren’t malevolent, they were generous people. So she sent her mind in the six directions and back to the center and invoked her Ancestors, especially those of the Boas Totem: “Please help me, Ancestors! I am a respondent and I don’t know what to respond.”

  Over there in Illo Tempore her Ancestors said, “Listen, that one’s in trouble again,” and they decided to send some people across to help her.

  The first one came—it was Claude Lévi-Strauss riding on a jaguar. And Claude Lévi-Strauss said, “Myths get thought, myth thinks itself, in humankind, unbeknownst to humankind…. And my own work gets thought in me, it thinks itself in me, without my knowing.” The woman agreed with that. Then the Ancestors sent Mircea Eliade riding on the east wind, and he said, “In myth the Cosmos is articulate: the world reveals itself as language.” She agreed with that, too. Then Lao Tzu came by riding on a dragon and laughed and said nothing at all, and the woman agreed with that, too. Then finally Coyote came along, Coyote who made everything, even if maybe she didn’t make it quite the way she meant to or the way we’d like it, and she said,
“What’s wrong?”

  Little Bear Woman said, “I said I’d respond, and I have no responses.”

  “So, what else is new?” says Coyote.

  Little Bear Woman thought, “She’s right. It happens all the time. The dream where I stand up to play the viola concerto, only as I stand up it occurs to me that I have never learned to play the viola. The voice in the silence of three in the morning that says inside my head, Why did you say that to the dean’s wife at dinner? The supermarket checkout where you open your bag to pay and your wallet isn’t in it. The child that asks you, But do the soldiers want to kill me? The jailed poet in a foreign country whose silence asks you continually, How long will you, who are able to speak, be silent? The Sphinx that asks you what goes on four and two and three legs in Greek and you don’t speak Greek so the Sphinx eats you. The labyrinth you can’t get out of because you aren’t the one with the sword and the thread, you aren’t the hero but only the monster, the animalhead, the dumb one who doesn’t have the answers.”

  “Happens all the time,” says Coyote. “That’s what myths do. They happen all the time. Presence of myth in contemporary life, and vice versa. You are a Myth who married a History, and you both have to make the best of it. Think yourself: articulate: be still. Each at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place. Have you seen any mice around this house?”

  “No,” the woman said, “I haven’t seen any mice.”

  So Coyote went on along, and the Woman Without Answers and the others went on playing the game according to Coyote’s rules, by which you always get yourself into trouble.