Some Thoughts on Narrative (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places), Ursula K. LeGuin

 Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of fact to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what you ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and no sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again. 

In recent centuries we speakers of this lovely language have reduced the English verb almost entirely to the indicative mood. But beneath that specious and arrogant assumption of certainty all the ancient, cloudy, moody powers and options of the subjunctive remain in force. The indicative points its bony finger at primary experiences, at the Things; but it is the subjunctive that joins them, with the bonds of analogy, possibility, probability, contingency, contiguity, memory, desire, fear, and hope: the narrative connection. As J. T. Fraser puts it, moral choice, which is to say human freedom, is made possible “by language, which permits us to give accounts of possible and impossible worlds in the past, in the future, or in a faraway land.”

From The Production of Space

 The apparent translucency taken on by obscure historical and political forces in decline (the state, nationalism) can enlist images having their sources in the earth or in nature, in paternity or in maternity. The rational is thus naturalised, while nature cloaks itself in nostalgias which supplant rationalities.

Epigraph - The Production of Space. Henri Lefebvre

 Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls

(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge

A landscape to be invented

To the South, reflective memory

To the East,  the mirror

The the West, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply.

Octavio Paz

Difference and Repetition

The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without connect, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. ( It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox.) Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. Repetition can always be ‘represented’ as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind.

On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. However law determines only the resemblance of subjects ruled by it, along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of law, particulars. It condemns them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their exchange. No doubt there are as many content as variables among the terms designated by laws, and a many permanences and preservations as there are flutes and variations in nature. However a preservation is still not a repetition. The constants of one law are in turn variables of a more general law, just as the hardest of rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions of years. So at each level, it is in relation to permanent large natural objects that the subject of law experiences its own powerlessness to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself condemned. Law unites the change of water and the permanence of the river. Elie Faure said of Watteau: ‘ He imbued with the utmost transitoriness those things which our gaze encounters vas the most enduring, namely space and forests.’ This is the eighteenth century method. Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, made a system of it: the impossibility of repetition, and change as a condition to which all particular creatures are subject by the law of Nature, were understood in relation to fixed terms ( themselves no doubt, variables in relation to other permanences and in function of other, more general laws). This is the meaning of the grove, the grotto and the ‘sacred’ object.      ………

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive as opposed to the ordinary, an instanteinity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition s a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality.

From  Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

(Excerpt) The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

Fit the Second

                      The Bellman's Speech

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—

   Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!

Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,

   The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

   Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

   A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

   Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

   "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out

   That the Captain they trusted so well

Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,

   And that was to tingle his bell.

He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave

   Were enough to bewilder a crew.

When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!"

   What on earth was the helmsman to do?

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:

   A thing, as the Bellman remarked,

That frequently happens in tropical climes,

   When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,

   And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,

Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,

   That the ship would not travel due West! 

The Telling, Ursula Le Guin

 “God is Reason, yes,” he said, rather uncertainly. 

“Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation.” 

He looked intent but puzzled. 

“Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ‘Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ‘Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, ‘Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ‘No, Shiva’s.’

 “All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ‘Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’ 

“And Uncle was listening, and he said, ‘Because Sati is Shiva, and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’ 

“So I decided if I had to be Sutty, it was all right, so long as I could be Shiva too. . . .” 

She looked at Yara. He was absorbed and utterly bewildered.

El Tim, Lucia Berlin

 The nuns laughed in the grade school, and the children laughed. The nuns were all old, not like tired old women who clutch their bags at a bus stop, but proud, loved by their God and by their children. They responded to love with tenderness, with soft laughter that was contained, guarded, behind the heavy wooden doors. 

Several junior high nuns swept through the playground, checking for cigarette smoke. These nuns were young and nervous. They taught “underprivileged children,” “borderline delinquents,” and their thin faces were tired, sick of a blank stare. They could not use awe or love like the grade school nuns. Their recourse was impregnability, indifference to the students who were their duty and their life.

(A Manual for Cleaning Women)