More emptiness

More reasons emptiness is a virtue:

Emptiness makes things useful. A pot is only good for something when it’s empty. A room is only good for something when it’s empty. When things are empty, you can use them as often as you want and never use them up. It’s like a renewable resource.

As far as people are concerned, emptiness makes it easier to follow the Way. An empty heart is an open heart, one that has room to take in its surroundings. Emptiness also is related to selflessness – a huge virtue for Taoists. Selflessness doesn’t mean always thinking about others, because in order to define who the “other” is, you also have to define yourself. A selfless person has no self. He becomes totally united with his surroundings and loses awareness of any separate identity. An empty heart has less self to get in the way of that. And sense the Way is all about becoming more in tune with Nature’s way of doing things, emptying your heart and losing yourself is a good thing.

Once again, I don’t understand why emptiness comes up as a bad thing in the Earthsea novels, but maybe I’m losing the big picture.

Emptiness

Here’s a really disturbing passage: “The wise soul governing people would empty their minds, fill their bellies, weaken their wishes, strengthen their bones, keep people unknowing, unwanting, keep the ones who do know from doing anything.”

When I first read this, I thought Lao Tzu wanted the government to keep people fat, happy and brainwashed. But that didn’t quite seem to fit with the rest of what I knew about him. For Lao Tzu, doing too much is  a bad thing. It upsets the balance of nature. People who have a whole lot of acquired knowledge crowding their minds are more likely to act rashly (in his opinion) and are therefore dangerous to the world. Those who have learned wisdom by subtraction (emptying their minds of facts and biases) are more likely to be in tune with nature and will therefore know better than to act. Nature knows what’s best. “When you do not-doing, nothing’s out of order.”

Names

I looked just about every place names (or namelessness) are mentioned in the Tao, and here’s what I’ve found:

 Basic creation myth: The unnamed gives birth to Name, and Name gives birth to Nature (“the ten thousand things”) The deepest, most eternal truth is the unnamed.

 The Way is also talked about as nameless or inexplicable. In that sense it is the ultimate beginning – and since Taoism is about returning to the beginning, the ultimate ideal. Naming – although necessary for human society - is dangerous when taken to the extreme. There shouldn’t be so many names that people no longer can no longer see the whole, the big picture.

 Another thing – real names can’t be spoken. (“The name you can say isn’t the real name.”) Often Lao Tzu will tell the reader to “call” the Way great, intangible, unformed, etc., but that isn’t its real name.  In a sense real names transcend language. I’m not sure if this is the same thing as namelessness, but it’s still a bit problematic for LeGuin. In the Earthsea novels, her characters talk about the “true names” of things which can only be said in a certain language. If names can’t be spoken, then whatever words Ged or Ogion use aren’t really true names.

The Tao Te Ching

I started reading LeGuin’s favorite translation of the Tao Te Ching with commentary last week. What follows in this category is just going to be reflections on what’s inside this book. I’m trying to pick out motifs like nature, the wise soul, and emptiness and discover how they play out in the the Tao Te Ching. You can comment if you want, but mostly it’s going to be me rambling. Cheers!

The Nameless Ones

In the Tombs of Atuan, Arha spends over a decade serving as high priestess in the dark temples of the Nameless Ones. The Tao Te Ching mentions names and nameless occasionally, and usually nameless is seen as the ideal. Names are human constructions, but they are not true or eternal. “The name you can say isn’t the real name. Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.”

So if namelessness, like emptiness and unwanting, is an ideal to be striven for, why is the temple of the Nameless Ones so vilified in the Tombs of Atuan? The only answer I can think of right now is that the people inside it, not the idea, were the real culprits. They were arrogant, sadistic, and power-hungry. And they weren’t really serving the Nameless Ones at all – they answered to the God-Kings (I think, I’m going to need to reread the book to make sure). So maybe it’s just an example of an ideal gone awry in human hands.

Naming isn’t mentioned as much some other ideas in the Tao, like nature and the wise soul. But names have a huge role in the Earthsea trilogy, and I’d kind of like to explore how names and namelessness play out.

The danger of a definition (or more Taoist babbling)

More on the duality of good & evil. I understand how action is dangerous – an action can have both good and bad consequences. I understand how abilities are dangerous – a person with the capacity to do good also has the capacity to do evil. But defining good is also seen as a reinforcement of evil, because you can’t define one without giving an implied definition of the other. Contrasts always define each other. You can’t understand light without darkness, you can’t understand joy without sorrow, etc, etc, etc.

 That said, is it bad to define evil? Based on what I’ve read, Taoists don’t like to enforce a universal standard of right and wrong that applies to everyone. And they have a point:  just about every law that tries to define good has unintended bad consequences, and can be understandably broken in drastic circumstances. Example: the Somalian government recently tried to restrict money coming into the country because they were afraid it would fund terrorists. However, this kept many humanitarian aid groups from giving help to tens of thousands of starving people.

It seems like good and evil are so situation-dependent that they’re almost beyond definitions. Taoism isn’t really about attaining knowledge or wisdom, at least not in the sense of learning more. It talks about knowledge through subtraction, gradually filtering out undesirable bits of information or biases, things that get in the way of free thought. It also praises stopping at what cannot be understood. Defining good and evil would probably fit into this category.

But LeGuin’s characters still have a sense of when something is wrong with the world, when the natural order is disrupted. Is that how an ideal Taoist understands good and evil: by unlearning so much that they’re completely in tune with nature and can sense the disruptions?

Power and Emptiness

I think I’m starting to realize why LeGuin dislikes power. It’s not just that the ability to do good goes hand-in-hand with the ability to do evil. Power also takes a personal toll on the one who wields it. Under Taoism you can only take as much as you give, and so everything has a price.

In the Lathe of Heaven LeGuin talks about the passive hero George Orr’s wholeness. He never wants to dramatically alter the world around him. He doesn’t want the responsibility. This lack of power allows him to remain complete, untouched, the ideal Uncarved Block.

In Tehanu LeGuin presents the polar opposite. A crude bully who torments a small child is likened to a starving man. LeGuin calls his power “an emptiness” (139), and says that he continues to torment the child in order “to eat.” (112) The power he has gained has left him empty and hungry, and the only way for him to satisfy that hunger is to terrify the girl even more, to re-exert his power over her. And so power is a vicious cycle that continuously feeds off the souls of those that wield it. Even the Tombs of Atuan, in order to gain her power as high priestess, Tenar had to lose her name and become Arha, the “Eaten One.”

Power – even the power to do good – can never truly satisfy. It is inherently destructive and will ultimately ruin even the best of intentions.

On that note, what does it say about Tenar that she is starving right after she learns of the girl’s brush with the sadist?

LeGuin and the Golden Rule

“Do not do to other what you would wish others not to do to you.” -Alien to Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven

Most religions and philosophies have some variation on the idea of reciprocity. The Christian version we were all taught in preschool reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” It’s a much more active command. For Christians, or perhaps Westerners, love involves action – helping others, fighting for justice, etc. To sit at home and do nothing, or “let things be” is vilified as apathy. Or in Churchill’s words, “All that is necessary for evil to exist is for good men to do nothing.”

LeGuin is much more cautious. Her morality is more about what people don’t do than what they do. I don’t think she would entirely disagree with Churchill. After all, Dr. Haber is a madman controlling his patient’s dreams to change the world. He has to be stopped. But she certainly doesn’t place nearly as much value on action as many of her Western counterparts. Taking action is a last resort. It’s better to leave an imperfect but tolerable situation alone than interfere and make it worse.

LeGuin and the anticlimatic plot (*spoiler alert*)

It seems that a crucial part of LeGuin’s work is the unresolved, or thoroughly undramatic, ending. The best example of this would be City of Illusions, where the main character manages to resist the government’s numerous attempts to brainwash him, discovers his true identity and returns to his homeworld to try to persuade his people to destroy the totalitarian regime on Earth. This is an example of a good unresolved ending: the point isn’t whether he succeeds, the point is that he made the decision to act.

Then take The Tombs of Atuan, the second volume of the Earthsea trilogy. The book can be divided into two parts. Part 1: Arha’s life sucks. Part 2: Arha walks around in the dark with Ged. There is hardly any plot at all. The climax involves the temple – her only home up until that point – collapsing. I think it would have been nice to see a little confrontation between Arha and her former captors (ahem…guardians), but that doesn’t seem to be part of LeGuin’s agenda. The important thing for Arha is her decision to help Ged; the reward is Ged revealing her true name and restoring her identity. And once again, we’re given a picture of Arha’s possible future, but we don’t see her actually accomplishing it. The story ends with her sailing off with Ged.

The unresolved ending fits well with her Taoist themes. Taoism, at least what I’ve seen so far, is very circular. Life is a constant cycle of setting out and returning. By closing her stories with a new beginning, she completes the circle.

Hello world!

Welcome to the home of all my English theses thoughts for the next eight months. I’m a sci-fi geek, so I picked up Ursula K. LeGuin because I figured that was the only way I could swallow a 60-plus page research paper without wanting to shoot myself in the foot afterwards. As it is, maybe I’ll just cut off a few toes.

LeGuin wrote fantasy and sci-fi in the 60s and 70s. She has a fetish for Taoism, and she loves to play up the don’t-interfere-power-is-dangerous message in her writing. Unfortunately this tends to make for very bad drama and runs the risk of paralyzing her protagonists. I want to discover how she pulls it off and when – if ever – she thinks action is justified.

Most of my posts should revolve around LeGuin, Taoism, or power. But I’m a nerd for all things sci-fi, so I may inadvertently start rambling about Battlestar Galactica or Neil Gaiman’s work. I apologize in advance to any who have not yet discovered these literary masterpieces.

Another side note: I only learned about LeGuin last spring, so I’m still very new to her work. If there are any diehard fans out there whom I run the risk of offending, I apologize in advance to you as well.

Enjoy!