Excerpt from 'Always Coming Home' by Ursula K. le Guin, 1985, Harper & Row, New York, NY, USA
"Towards an Archaeology of the Future
How the patient scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart - this the gateway - that was the granary - We'll dig here, and here, and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope . . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt, and cleared with the swipe of a thumb shows, stamped in fragile bronze, the horned god? How I envy them their shovels and sieves and tape measures, all their tools, and their wise, expert hands that touch and hold what they find? not for long; they'll give it to the museum, of course; but they did hold it for a moment in their hands.
I found, at last the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockheaded opinions - that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance - I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself upon me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for? What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of the creeks. And the sacred buildings and the dancing place not in the center of town, for the center is the Hinge, but over in their own arm of the double spiral, the right arm, of course - there in the pasture below the barn. And so it is, and so it is.
But I can't go digging there and hope to find the curved fragment of a roof tile, the iridescent foot of a wine goblet, the ceramic cap of a solar battery, or a little coin of the gold of California, the same, for gold rusts not, that was weighed out in Placerville and spent on whores or real estate in Frisco and then perhaps was a wedding ring awhile and then went hidden in a vault deeper than the mine it came from until all security proved illfounded, and now reshaped, this time round, into a curl-rayed sun and given in honor to a skillful artisan; no, I won't find that. It isn't here. That little sun of gold is not, as they say, dwelling the the Houses of the Earth. It is in thin air, in the wilderness that lies beyond this day and night, the Houses of the Sky. My gold is in the shards of the broken pot at the end of the rainbow. Dig there? What will you find? Seeds. Seeds of the wild oats.
I can walk in the wild oats and the thistles, between the houses of the little town I was looking for, Sinshan. I can cross the Hinge and come onto the dancing place. There, about where that Valley oak is now, will be Obsidian, in the northeast; the Blue Clay quite close to it, dug into the hillside, the northwest; closer to me, towards the center, Serpentine of the Four directions; then the two Adobes on a curve down towards the creek, southeast, southwest. They'll have to drain this field, if they build the heyimas, as I think they do, underground, only the pyramidal roofs with their clerestories elevated, and the ornamented ends of the entrance ladder sticking out of the top. I can see that well enough. All kinds of seeing with the mind's eye is allowed me here. I can stand here in the old pasture where there's nothing but sun and rain, wild oats and thistles and crazy salsify, no cattle grazing, only deer, stand here and shut my eyes and see: the dancing place, the stepped pyramid roofs, a moon of beaten copper on a high pole over the Obsidian. If I listen, can I hear voices with the inner ear? Could you hear voices, Schliemann, in the streets of Troy? If you did, you were crazy too. The Trojans had all been dead three thousand years. Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent - the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility?
There's no way to reach that lot by digging. They have no bones. The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers, and they did not bury here, and left no tombs or tiles or shards or walls or coins behind them. If they had a town here it was made of what the woods and fields are made of, and is gone utterly. They worked obsidian, and that stays; down there at the edge of the rich man's airport there was a workshop, and you can pick up plenty of chipped pieces, though no one has found a finished point for years. There is no other trace of them. They owned their Valley very lightly, with easy hads. They walked softly here. So will the others, the ones I seek.
The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or borrow a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home."
There are several shifts in awareness one could overlay on one's thought processes to gain an altered understanding of this excerpt and thus the whole book:
1) imagine all of time at once:
- past, present and future existing at the same time
- time as non-linear
- yourself as a product of your past AND yourself being the seeds of the future
- time shaped like the heyiya-if with you in the present existing in the gap between the two arms, the Hinge and one arm being the past, the other the future
- in the first line of the book: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long long time from now"
- the heyiya-if is shaped like a galaxy, which we barely understand in space-time-gravity and all that 'higher physics'
- when she switches tenses in paragraph 4 above: "They'll have to drain this field"
- then she totally mixes together past and future in paragraphs 5 and 6
- "The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers"
- "Perhaps the baby will see ... or hear ... or speak to somebody there"
- events in your past, your personal history, things that have influenced you
- the archaeologists of the mind - psychologists - examining your beliefs and how they were shaped = the shards, the seeds;
- the layout of Sinshan with this lodge there and that lodge here - the Five Houses of Earth and Four Houses of Sky - representing those corresponding aspects of individual human nature and consciousness and collective thoughts and traits that allow us to live as a species in groups, For example
- the Obsidian as your feelings about the moon, or your monthly rhythms, or what you do at night
- the Blue Clay as the methods you use to cleanse your thoughts - your strengths, that part of your brain that creates motivation
- the Serpentine as the brooding stones you carry around with you
- Think of how your brain feels and what part of yourself you are experiencing or sharing when you are:
- collecting food
- playing with the cat
- smelling a flower
- dancing
- talking with a friend
- being yourself and not being yourself
- taking part in a counseling session, or a seminar at work, kind of thing
- how you used to think one way, but now another
- your personality, at least the part you know
3) replace ideas with other ones and/or with symbols or archetypes
- the word "home" means "self" so that "see ... somebody from home" means seeing your true self or the part of you you are most comfortable with.
- So, some examples (in brackets):
- "How the patient scientist (person undergoing transformation) feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub (the map of the mind, the psyche) begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart (major denials) - this the gateway (new thoughts allowing us to move forward) - that was the granary (food for thought)... and after that I want to look at that lumpy bit on the slope (a memory of an event). . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt (the distractions from finding a truth) . . ."
Perhaps this mixing up of time, time as non-linear, is to get us thinking of what we are doing now to our home, the Earth, ecologically.
If humans as a species are to 'survive' our mess, they will have to have a different biology than ours, as a species. I suspect, that as much as the socially-inclined disciplines of science may want to deny or ignore it, our basic biologically-evolved instincts are very much at the core of our individual and group behavior; and awareness of these instincts needs to be invoked in examining even our well-though-out motivations.
Take your child or grandchild, not yet a year old in to nature and try to see what they see, hear what they hear, or understand what they say. We often say our children are our hope, and that we need to teach the children the right way to do things rather than the way we have screwed up. Ms le Guin is showing us a peoples living a possible 'way-to-be in the world' that could work to help us stay in balance with nature, with Gaia.
And another thing: I don't think the Kesh deny their past. They just realize at a basic level of thought, an instinct even, that what humans did in the past did not work, was not very good. The Kesh knew there was knowledge of technologies on their 'Exchange' (internet) that could lessen their labor but they didn't want to use it, had no need for it. The Condors did not know that, did not have that in their biology and social structure and so their heyiya-if was unbalanced.
I re-examine this because I have a grand-daughter now, and I desperately want to take her to a place she might be able to show me someone from "home". ... What is "home", anyway? Sometimes you choose 'home', most times you are a baby taken to the 'home' of your parents. Is home the 'place you grew up', or the place you feel most comfortable? It could be both. What is 'comfortable'? 'rooted', 'grounded', real, self-actualized? Mature enough to be able to recognize a place as 'home' and what it means to you? A place where all is well? Then, yes, we do need to mature as a species to recognize the Earth as 'home'. I guess we just need a self-maintaining central electronic knowledge and data system, hehe. Maybe we better build that now, for The Kesh.
