Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Nonfiction works by Ursula K. Le Guin:

  Essays and Talks

  Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

  The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

  The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

  Cheek By Jowl

  Poetry

  Wild Angels

  Walking in Cornwall (chapbook)

  Tillai and Tylissos (chapbook with Theodora Kroeber)

  Hard Words

  In the Red Zone (chapbook with Henk Pander)

  Wild Oats and Fireweed

  No Boats (chapbook)

  Blue Moon Over Thurman Street (with Roger Dorband)

  Going Out With Peacocks

  Sixty Odd

  Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country (with Roger Dorband)

  by Ursula K. Le Guin (Author), Roger Dorband

  Incredible Good Fortune

  Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

  Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014

  Words Are My Matter

  Writings About Life

  and Books, 2000–2016

  with

  A Journal

  of a

  Writer’s Week

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  Copyright Information

  This book in any form or format may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means including present or future media without written permission from the publisher.

  Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016 with A Journal of a Writer’s Week Copyright © 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin (ursulakleguin.com). All rights reserved. Page 319 functions as an extension of the copyright page.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  smallbeerpress.com

  weightlessbooks.com

  info@smallbeerpress.com

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929- author.

  Title: Words are my matter : writings about life and books, 2000-2016 with a journal of a writer’s week / Ursula K. Le Guin.

  Description: First edition. | Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press, 2016. |

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016029895 (print) | LCCN 2016035410 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618731340 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781618731210

  Classification: LCC PS3562.E42 A6 2016b (print) | LCC PS3562.E42 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029895

  The Mind Is Still

  The mind is still. The gallant books of lies

  are never quite enough.

  Ideas are a whirl of mazy flies

  over the pigs’ trough.

  Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone

  for thirty years and still it is not done,

  that image of the thing I cannot see.

  I cannot finish it and set it free,

  transformed to energy.

  I chip and stutter but I do not sing

  the truth, like any bird.

  Daily I come to Judgment stammering

  the same half-word.

  So what’s the matter? I can understand

  that stone is heavy in the hand.

  Ideas flit like flies above the swill.

  I crowd with other pigs to get my fill.

  The mind is still.

  (1977)

  Foreword

  I seldom have as much pleasure in reading nonfiction as I do in a poem or a story. I can admire a well-made essay, but I’d rather follow a narrative than a thought, and the more abstract the thought the less I comprehend it. Philosophy inhabits my mind only as parables, and logic never enters it at all. Yet my grasp of syntax, which seems to me the logic of a language, is excellent. So I imagine that this limitation in my thinking is related to my abysmal mathematical incompetence, my inability to play chess or even checkers, perhaps my incomprehension of key in music. There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.

  So the nonfiction I read is mostly narrative—biography, history, travel, and science in its descriptive aspect: geology, cosmology, natural history, anthropology, psychology, etc., the more specific the better. And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing—the beauty of it.

  This means I’ve set myself an awfully high standard when it comes to writing nonfiction. And if it isn’t narrative, it’s going to be hard work, and hard for me to judge as good or bad. Writing fiction or poetry is natural to me. I do it, want to do it, am fulfilled in doing it, the way a dancer dances or a tree grows. Story or poem is spun directly out of my entire self. And so I consider myself without question the primary judge of its accuracy, honesty, and quality. Writing talks or essays, however, is always more like doing schoolwork. It’s going to be assessed for style and content, and rightly so. Nobody knows better than I do what my stories are about, but my essays may be judged by people who know a lot more than I do about what I’m talking about.

  Fortunately, studying French and other Romance literatures, I got good training in scholarship and in writing critical prose, which gave me some confidence. Unfortunately, I also showed a gift for the snow job—not the kind that buries fake facts under a blizzard of statistics, but the stylistic snow job, expressing incomplete ideas with such graceful confidence that they are perfectly convincing until examined. After all, a fluent style isn’t altogether dependent on the thoughts it expresses—it can be used to skate over gaps in knowledge and conceal rickety joints between ideas. When I’m writing nonfiction I have to be very aware of my tendency to let the words take their own course, leading me softly, happily, away from fact, away from rigorous connection of ideas, toward my native country, fiction and poetry, where truths are expressed and thoughts connected in an entirely different way.

  As I got old and my total store of energy began to shrink, I began to travel about to give speeches less often and less far, and was less willing to take on a big talk or essay topic that would eat up weeks or months of research, planning, writing, and rewriting. So there are fewer talks and essays in this book than in my earlier nonfiction collections, and proportionately more book reviews.

  A book review is usually pretty short, under a thousand words, and naturally limited in topic; it has certain requirements of description, but allows a lot of leeway as to pronouncing judgment—even though it involves the writer’s conscience pretty directly. It’s an interesting and demanding form. And one can say a good deal in a review that has to do with wider matters, literary and otherwise.

  I like writing reviews except when I dislike the book I’m reviewing. When it comes to reading reviews, of course the best is one that sends me right to the bookstore, but I also treasure a hatchet job well-written and well-deserved. The pleasure of reading a killer review of a bad book is guiltless. The pleasure of writing one, however, is darkened for me by all kinds of compunctions, fellow-feeling for the author, shame at enjoying inflicting shame. . . . All the same, so long as I’ve tried to understand what the author tr
ied to do, and have no illusions of my critical infallibility, condoning inferiority isn’t an option open to me. For this reason the only real killer review in this book presented me with an intense problem. I had considerable respect for the author but thought the book almost incredibly bad. I had no idea how to review it. I appealed to my friend the novelist Molly Gloss—what to do? She suggested that I simply tell the plot. It was an excellent solution. Supply enough hemp, and the problem vanishes.

  As for what writing an essay or talk demands—the expense of time and energy on research, thinking out, rethinking—this of course varies according to the subject. One of the longer pieces in this book, “Living in a Work of Art,” was not written as most of them were as a talk to a group or on commission by a periodical (though it ended up happily in Paradoxa). It was something I wanted to write, purely on the principle of E. M. Forster’s lady who said, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?” It didn’t take very much research, and once it got going it was a pleasure to write. When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn’t know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly. So that one is probably my favorite of these pieces.

  I am often asked to deliver a message, and quite capable of doing so. But I seldom find it easy or particularly pleasant. One of the shortest pieces in the book is my speech on receiving the National Book Foundation medal in 2014. I was informed in June that this honor had been awarded me, so long as I’d come to New York to get it and make an acceptance speech lasting not more than seven minutes. I accepted, with much hesitation. From June until November, I worked on that little talk. I rethought and replanned it, anxiously, over and over. Even on a poem I’ve never worked so long and so obsessively, or with so little assurance that what I was saying was right, was what I ought to say. I was daunted, too, by the ingratitude of insulting the people who printed my books and were giving me an award. Who was I to spit in the publishers’ punch bowl at the annual industry party?

  Well, I was, in fact, the one to do it. So I did it.

  I’ve never been so nervous before a speech since junior high school commencement. I’ve never been so surprised by an audience reaction (though the Amazon table sat predictably, glumly, mute). The viral flurry on the internet and my ensuing fifteen Warhol minutes of celebrity status were encouraging: people do care about books, some of them worry about capitalism. How much good it did in the long run is another question. But at least I ended up feeling that getting what I had to say said right in six minutes was entirely worth six months of work.

  This confirms my sense that I have been allowed to use my life well, in work that was worth the time spent on it. Many people might see my two principal occupations as incompatible: being a middle-class American intellectual/wife/housewife/mother of three children, and being a writer. I won’t say that doing both jobs at once was easy, but I can report, from very late in the life in question, that I found some inevitable conflict but no incompatibility between the two. Little abnegation was demanded, and no sacrifice of life for art or art for life. On the contrary, each nourished and supported the other so deeply that, looking back, they all seem one thing to me.

  Talks, Essays, and Occasional Pieces

  These are, really, all occasional pieces, addressed on various occasions to various audiences. Their subjects range through animals in books, invented languages, sleep, the house I grew up in, anarchism, how to read a poem, and a poem about a plinth. The most useful way to arrange them was chronologically. Many of them were revised slightly for this book; their original versions can be found in the original publication or on my website.

  Only two of them are overtly political; but as we learned from Robin Morgan and others, the personal and the political are inseparable. A good many of them present a defense, sometimes a fairly belligerent defense, of certain aspects of literature—imaginative fiction, genre, women’s writing, reading as distinct from experiencing media.

  All through the past fifteen years there’s been a steady and increasing shift of critical interest and understanding towards imaginative fiction and away from a rigid view of realism as the only fiction worthy the name of literature. I’m delighted to know that my arguments in defense of genre were becoming unnecessary even as I made them.

  Gender in literature, however, remains a vexed issue. Books by women continue to be marginalised or segregated, receive fewer “major” literary awards, and are more subject to terminal inattention following the writer’s death. So long as we hear about “women’s writing” but not about “men’s writing”—because the latter is assumed to be the norm—the balance is not just. The same signal of privilege and prejudice is reflected in the common use of the word feminism and the almost total absence of its natural counterpart, masculinism. I long for the day when neither word is necessary.

  The Operating Instructions

  A talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in 2002.

  A poet has been appointed ambassador. A playwright is elected president. Construction workers stand in line with office managers to buy a new novel. Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills. Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end.

  . . . Well, maybe in some other country, but not this one. In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

  I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.

  Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.

  We have to learn to use it, and how to use it, like any other tool. Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. Such teaching, training, and practice should begin in infancy and go on throughout life. Young human beings need exercises in imagination as they need exercise in all the basic skills of life, bodily and mental: for growth, for health, for competence, for joy. This need continues as long as the mind is alive.

  When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs.

  Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.

  Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its childre
n how to be people and members of their people—Hmong, !Kung, Hopi, Quechua, French, Californian. . . . We are those who arrived at the Fourth World. . . . We are Joan’s nation. . . . We are the sons of the Sun. . . . We came from the sea. . . . We are the people who live at the center of the world.

  A people that doesn’t live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.

  A child who doesn’t know where the center is—where home is, what home is—that child is in a very bad way.

  Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.

  Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.

  All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

  Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.