The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Then she drew back and sat down and took up the chant in a gnat voice, and old Uming, half blind, his speech thickened by a stroke, got up and talked about one of the poems.

  "That's by Maz Niniu Raying, five, six, seven hundred years back, eh? It's in The Arbor. Somebody wrote it here, a good calligrapher, because it talks about how the leaves of the Tree perish but always return so long as we see them and say them. See, here it says: 'Word, the gold beyond the fall, returns the glory to the branch.' And underneath it here, see, somebody later on wrote, 'Mind's life is memory.'" He smiled round at them, a kind, lopsided smile. "Remember that, eh? 'Mind's life is memory.' Don't forget!" He laughed, they laughed. All the while, out front in the grocery shop, the maz' grandson kept the volume turned up high on the audio system, cheery music, exhortations, and news announcements blaring out to cover the illicit poetry, the forbidden laughter.

  It was a pity, but no surprise, Sutty told her noter, that an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline should contain a large proportion of superstition and verge over into what she labeled in her noter HP, hocus-pocus. The great jungle of significance had its swamps and morasses, and she had at last stumbled into some of them. She met a few maz who claimed arcane knowledge and supernal powers. Boring as she found all such claims, she knew she could not be sure of what was valuable and what was drivel, and painstakingly recorded whatever information she could buy from these maz concerning alchemy, numerology, and literal readings of symbolic texts. They sold her bits of texts and snippets of methodology at a fairly stiff price, grudgingly, hedging the transactions with portentous warnings about the danger of this powerful knowledge.

  She particularly detested the literal readings. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. But she put it all into her noter—which she had now had to unload into crystal storage twice, for she could not transmit any of the treasure-and-trash she was amassing.

  At this distance, with all means of communication monitored, there was no way to consult with Tong Ov as to what she should or he intended to do with all this material. She couldn't even tell him she'd found it. The problem remained, and grew.

  Among the HP she came on a brand that was, as far as she knew, unique to Aka: a system of arcane significances attached to the various strokes that composed the ideogrammatic characters and the further strokes and dots that qualified them with verbal tense and mode and nominal case and with Action or Element (for everything, literally every thing, could be categorised under the Four Actions and the Five Elements). Every character of the old writing thus became a code to be interpreted by specialists, who functioned much as horoscope readers had in Sutty's homeland. She discovered that many people in Okzat-Ozkat, including officials of the Corporation, would undertake nothing of importance without calling in a 'sign reader' to write out their name and other relevant words and, after poring over these and referring to impressively elaborate charts and diagrams, to advise and foretell. "This is the kind of thing that makes me sympathise with the Monitor," she told her noter. Then she said, "No. It's what the Monitor wants from his own kind of HP. Political HP. Everything locked in place, on course, under control. But he's handed over the controls just as much as they have."

  Many of the practices she learned about had equivalents on Earth. The exercises, like yoga and tai chi, were physical-mental, a lifelong discipline, leading toward mindfulness, or toward a trance state, or toward martial vigor and readiness, depending on the style and the practitioner's desire. Trance seemed to be sought for its own sake as an experience of essential stillness and balance rather than as satori or revelation. Prayer ... Well, what about prayer?

  The Akans did not pray.

  That seemed so strange, so unnatural, that as soon as she had the thought, she qualified it: it was very possible that she didn't properly understand what prayer was.

  If it meant asking for something, they didn't do it. Not even to the extent that she did. She knew that when she was very startled she cried, "O Ram!" and when she was very frightened she whispered, "O please, please." The words were strictly meaningless, yet she knew they were a kind of prayer. She had never heard an Akan say anything of the kind. They could wish one another well—"May you have a good year, may your venture prosper"—just as they could curse one another—"May your sons eat stones," she had heard Diodi the barrow man murmur as a blue-and-tan stalked by. But those were wishes, not prayers. People didn't ask God to make them good or to destroy their enemy. They didn't ask the gods to win them the lottery or cure their sick child. They didn't ask the clouds to let the rain fall or the grain grow. They wished, they willed, they hoped, but they didn't pray.

  If prayer was praise, then perhaps they did pray. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertiliser's pharmacopoeia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. They described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything.

  Nor did they sacrifice anything. Except money.

  To get money, you had to give money: that was a firm and universal principle. Before any business undertaking, they buried silver and brass coins, or threw them into the river, or gave them to beggars. They pounded out gold coins into airy, translucent gold leaf with which they decorated niches, columns, even whole walls of buildings, or had them spun into thread and woven into gorgeous shawls and scarves to give away on New Year's Day. Silver and gold coins were hard to come by, as the Corporation, detesting this extravagant waste, had gone over mostly to paper; so people burned paper money like incense, made paper boats of it and sailed them off on the river, chopped it up fine and ate it with salad. The practice was pure HP, but Sutty found it irresistible. Slaughtering goats or one's firstborn to placate the supernatural seemed to her the worst kind of perversity, but she saw a gambler's gallantry in this money sacrifice. Easy come, easy go. At the New Year, when you met a friend or acquaintance, you each lighted a one-ha bill and waved it about like a little torch, wishing each other health and prosperity. She saw even employees of the Corporation doing this. She wondered if the Monitor had ever done it.

  The more naive people that she came to know at the tellings and in the classes, and Diodi and other friendly acquaintances of the streets, all believed in sign reading and alchemical marvels and talked about diets that let you live forever, exercises that had given the ancient heroes the strength to withstand whole armies. Even Iziezi held firmly by sign reading. But most of the maz, the educated, the teachers, claimed no special powers or attainments at all. They lived firmly and wholly in the real world. Spiritual yearning and the sense of sacredness they knew, but they did not know anything holier than the world, they did not seek a power greater than nature. Sutty was certain of that. No miracles! she told her noter, jubilant.

  She coded her notes, got into her coat and boots, and set off through the vicious early-spring wind for Maz Odiedin Manma's exercise class. Silong was visible for the first time in weeks, not the barrier wall but only the peak above it, standing like a silver horn over dark storm clouds.

  She went regularly to exercise with Iziezi now, often staying on to watch Akidan and other adolescents and young people do "two-one," an athletic form performed in pairs, with spectacular feints and falls. Odiedin Manma, the teller of the strange story about the man who dreamed he could fly, was much admired by these young people, and some of them had first taken Sutty to his class. He taught an austere, very beautiful form of exercise-meditation. He had invited her to join his group.

  They met in an old warehouse down by the river, a less safe place than the umyazu-turned-gymnasium she went to with Iziezi, where legitimate health-manual gymnastics did take place and serve
d as cover for the illegal ones. The warehouse was lighted only by dirty slit windows high up under the eaves. Nobody spoke above the barest whisper. There was no hocus-pocus about Odiedin, but Sutty found the class, the silent, slow movements in darkness, hauntingly strange, sometimes disturbing; it had entered into her dreams.

  A man sitting near Sutty this morning stared at her as she took her place on the mat. While the group went through the first part of the form, he kept staring, winking, gesturing, grinning at her. Nobody behaved like that. She was annoyed and embarrassed until, during a long-held pose, she got a look at the man and realised that he was half-witted.

  When the group began a set of movements she wasn't yet familiar with, she watched and followed along as best she could. Her mistakes and omissions upset her neighbor. He kept trying to show her when and how to move, pantomiming, exaggerating gestures. When they stood up, she stayed sitting, which was always permissible, but this distressed the poor fellow very much. He gestured, Up! up! He mouthed the word, and pointed upward. Finally, whispering, "Up—like this—see?," he took a step onto the air. He brought the other foot up on the invisible stair, and then climbed another step up the same way. He was standing barefoot half a meter above the floor, looking down at her, smiling anxiously and gesturing for her to join him. He was standing on the air.

  Odiedin, a lithe, trim man of fifty with a scrap of blue cloth around his neck, came to him. All the others kept on steadily with the complex, swaying kelp-forest patterns. Odiedin murmured, "Come down, Uki." Reaching up, he took the man's hand and led him down two nonexistent steps to the floor, patted his shoulder gently, and moved on. Uki joined in the pattern, swaying and turning with flawless grace and power. He had evidently forgotten Sutty.

  She could not bring herself to ask Odiedin any questions after the class. What would she ask? "Did you see what I saw? Did I?" That would be stupid. It couldn't have happened, and so he'd no doubt merely answer her question with a question.

  Or perhaps the reason she didn't ask was that she was afraid he would simply answer, "Yes."

  If a mime can make air into a box, if a fakir can climb a rope tied to air, maybe a poor fool can make air into a step. If spiritual strength can move mountains, maybe it can make stairs. Trance state. Hypnotic or hypnogogic suggestion.

  She described the occurrence briefly in her daily notes, without comment. As she spoke into her noter, she became quite sure that there had in fact been some kind of step there that she hadn't seen in the dim light, a block, a box perhaps, painted black. Of course there had been something there. She paused, but did not say anything more. She could see the block or box, now. But she had not seen it.

  But often in her mind's eye she saw those two callused, muscular, bare feet stepping up the absent mountain. She wondered what the air felt like on the soles of your feet when you walked on it. Cool? Resilient?

  After that she made herself pay more attention to the old texts and tales that talked about walking on the wind, riding on clouds, traveling to the stars, destroying distant enemies with thunderbolts. Such feats were always ascribed to heroes and wise maz far away and long ago, even though a good many of them had been made commonplace fact by modern technologies. She still thought they were mythic, metaphoric, not meant to be taken literally. She arrived at no explanation.

  But her attitude had been changed. She knew now that she'd still missed the point, a misunderstanding so gross and total that she couldn't see it.

  A telling is not an explaining.

  Can't see the forest for the trees, the pedants, the pundits, Uncle Hurree growled in her mind. Poetry, girl, poetry. Read the Mahabharata. Everything's there.

  "Maz Elyed," she asked, "what is it you do?"

  "I tell, yoz Sutty."

  "Yes. But the stories, all the things you tell, what do they do?"

  "They tell the world."

  "Why, maz?"

  "That's what people do, yoz. What we're here for."

  Maz Elyed, like many of the maz, talked softly and rather hesitantly, pausing, starting up again about the time you thought she'd stopped. Silence was part of all she said.

  She was small, lame, and very wrinkled. Her family owned a little hardware shop in the poorest district of the city, where many houses were not built of stone and wood but were tents or yurts of felt and canvas patched with plastic, set on platforms of beaten clay. Nephews and grandnieces abounded in the hardware shop. A very small great-grandnephew staggered about it, his goal in life to eat screws and washers. An old 2D photograph of Elyed with her partner Oni hung on the wall behind the counter: Oni Elyed tall and dreamy-eyed, Elyed Oni tiny, vivid, beautiful. Thirty years ago they had been arrested for sexual deviance and teaching rotten-corpse ideology. They were sent to a re-education camp on the west coast. Oni had died there. Elyed came back after ten years, lame, with no teeth: knocked out or lost to scurvy, she never said. She did not talk about herself or her wife or her age or her concerns. Her days were spent in an unbroken ritual continuity that included all bodily needs and functions, preparing and eating meals, sleeping, teaching, but above all reading and telling, a soft, endless repetition of the texts she had been learning her whole life long.

  At first Elyed had appeared unearthly, inhuman to Sutty, as indifferent and inaccessible as a cloud, a domestic saint living entirely inside the ritual system, a sort of automaton of recitation without emotion or personality. Sutty had feared her. She was afraid that this woman who embodied the system fully, who lived it totally, would force her to admit that it was hysterical, obsessional, absolutist, everything she hated and feared and wanted it not to be. But as she listened to Elyed's tellings, she heard a disciplined, reasoning mind, though it spoke of what was unreasonable.

  Elyed used that word often, unreasonable, in a literal sense: what cannot be understood by thinking. Once when Sutty was trying to find a coherent line of thought connecting several different tellings, Elyed said, "What we do is unreasonable, yoz."

  "But there is a reason for it."

  "Probably."

  "What I don't understand is the pattern. The place, the importance of things in the pattern. Yesterday you were telling the story about Iaman and Deberren, but you didn't finish it, and today you read the descriptions of the leaves of the trees of the grove at the Golden Mountain. I don't understand what they have to do with each other. Or is it that on certain days a certain kind of material is proper? Or are my questions just stupid?"

  "No," the maz said, and laughed her small laugh that had no teeth to show. "I get tired remembering. So I read. It doesn't matter. It's all the leaves of the tree."

  "So ... anything—anything that's in the books is equally important?"

  Elyed considered. "No," she said. "Yes." She drew a shaky breath. She tired quickly when she could not rest in the stream of ritual act and language, but she never dismissed Sutty, never evaded her questions. "It's all we have. You see? It's the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don't have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. We'd tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment. We'd be like a baby. A baby can do it, but we'd drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there's nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is."

  "Memory?" Sutty said. "History?"

  Elyed nodded, dubious, not satisfied by these terms. She sat thinking for some time and finally said, "We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is there in our world?"

  She was trembling, little spasms of the hands and mouth that she tried to conceal. Sutty thanked her with the mountain-heart gesture, apologised for wearing her out with talk. Elyed gave her small, black laugh. "Oh, yoz, I keep going with talk. Just the way the world does," she said.

  Sutty w
ent away and brooded. All this about language. It always came back to words. Like the Greeks with their Logos, the Hebrew Word that was God. But this was words. Not the Logos, the Word, but words. Not one but many, many.... Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened in it? Anything, everything—tales of heroes, maps of the stars, love songs, lists of the shapes of leaves.... For a moment she thought she understood.

  She brought this half-formed understanding to Maz Ottiar Uming, who was easier to talk with than Elyed, wanting to try to put it into words. But Ottiar was busy with a chant, so Sutty talked to Uming, and somehow her words got contorted and pedantic. She couldn't speak her intuition.

  As they struggled to understand each other, Uming Ottiar showed a bitterness, almost the first Sutty had met with among these soft-voiced teachers. Despite his impediment he was a fluent talker, and he got going, mildly enough at first: "Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we're animals with no nature. Eh? Animals with no nature! That's strange! We're so strange! We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. Eh? We're born to be reasonable, so we're born ignorant. You see? If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost on the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold. So. So." He rocked his body a little.

  Maz Ottiar, across the little room, knocked on the drum, murmuring some long chronicle of ancient days to a single, sleepy, ten-year-old listener.