Homage to Ursula Le Guin — Dragon Queen of the mind
“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
A titan of sense thought nutrition. I think of Le Guin as a careful chef, continuously defining and refining a set of particular dishes that she wished her audience to take heart and mind to. Her Delicate balance between promoting ground breaking ideas of freedom of thought and maintaining a subtle demand for self exploration integrity is mesmerizing.
I admit that to write about Ursula Le Guin is a daunting task, the span of her works, in fiction, in poetry and in fantasy, in all literary outputs is huge. Her contribution to humanity is undoubted. She was without doubt a legend as testified by the fact that : “The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000” (W).
I pay homage and give tribute to Ursula Le Guin because she taught me how to live with uncertainty. More importantly perhaps, Le Guin, brought into my mind-home the message that to be free one must eliminate from one’s vocabulary the term ‘deserving’.
Freedom, Le Guin taught us all in her 1974 ambiguous (anarchist) utopia, masterpiece “The Dispossessed” starts with the elimination of ‘Deserve’.
“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
This blows the mind, for in these simple words, Le Guin eliminates in one sweep, the very foundation of the modern self, namely the illusion of deserving anything. For our minds to take thought as its shape we must be free, for freedom to be our foundational state we need eliminate ‘deserve’.
Ursula Le Guin is a giant among giants, and this is not a mistake, I write is and not was, for her legacy brings her alive again and again, with every reading. In this sense I think the likes of Le Guin are catalysts of the human thought processes.
On a more personal note, Le Guin, opened my mind to gender flexibility in her gedanken experiment in the book “ The left hand of darkness “, moreover in the same book she experiments with different forms of governance and social structures, a special point of interest for my future development of the Polytopia project.
I think of Ursula Le Guin as a warrior, a warrior poet, inspired and inspiring her readers to think as independent fierce creatures, to combat the banality of common thought and to forever try and invent options and manners of co-existence, exploring avenues of diversity and possibility.
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Finally, it gives an immense pleasure to know that minds like Ursula Le Guin exist, the very thought about minds of this kind, allow me the state of hope, that not all is lost for humanity. She was and will forever be an embodiment of the conscious aware revolution. An undaunted spirit, a true dragon queen of the mind.
“You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
This is my third installment in the series “Homage To”- Minds that changed my mind.
