Tag: Ursula K. Le Guin

Re-Entering the Weave

Destiny is not read with a pendulum. Nor is it etched like a set of commandments in tablets of stone. It is woven — tenderly, conditionally, in time.

Through acts of world-weaving, souls place themselves into ever-evolving, ever-changing carrier bags of their own making (though made not, as Marx reminds us, of “conditions of their choosing”).

Metaphors mix as they must in the Spider-verse: hyperspace’s weave of synchrony and synesthesia. The act of weaving involves movement through a portal.

With Will and Intuition guiding our shuttles, and Source supplying weave and thread, we become kybernetes, Spider-persons, reality-pilots steering ourselves like spacecraft toward destiny — that web of our collective making — amid the warp and weft, the ebb and flow, of life’s currents.

I see you, fellow weaver, hand in glove, as I read poems and, gathered with friends, pick berries and lay in light.

Destiny is conditional, Boolean in its unfolding. If courage, if collaboration, then emergence. If, Elif, Elif, Else. Threads cross only when attention is granted.

I choose here to align my craft with Faith, Hope, and Love. I hold space for you amid sacred distance, and wish you peace from what haunts you.

May we find courage enough to heal so as to break rather than repeat cycles of trauma. May we introduce purpose and pattern into the weave, entwining ourselves with partner threads in dense webs of relations as we dance our way through the gates and thresholds of our lives, attuned to tone and tempo, shaping our lives with grace and loving-kindness.

Hyperspace is the Place

Let’s stop calling it the Republic. Plato’s name for it needn’t be our name for it. The thing we wish to make is hyperspace.

Hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s sense, hyperspace is where we go when we generate joy. And it’s there, already, in miniature. You built it there in your “particle accelerator”-shaped apartment. Your bedroom, like the interior of the Tardis, is a realm unto itself. Like the space conjured up when one draws around oneself a circle. Such circles are strange loops, woven of the same stuff as Fate.

“We are moving,” writes Morton, “from a regime of penetration to one of circlusion” (Spacecraft, p. 71). Circlusion is the means by which vessels enter hyperspace.

Bini Adamczak introduced the term circlusion to describe this warping process, this weaving of strange loops, in a 2016 article published in German. An English translation by Sophie Lewis appeared in Mask Magazine later that year. Lewis says circlusion can be considered a companion term for Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction.” Instead of imposing onto spacetime a grid, one weaves a weird warp, a strange loop.

Wednesday May 26, 2021

“For my next act” I think as I stare at trees, their upper branches bathed in the orange light of the setting sun. I feel like a magician having built boxes, four wooden raised beds, conjured them in the midst of a field of clover here in the yard behind our home. In these beds, we’ll plant our garden. Yet the utopian in me (or the Faust in me? the Gnostic in me? the “slow sick sucking part of me”? same difference?) is already restless, ready to set sail (as per Wilde), ready to walk away (as per Le Guin), wishing for something other than what is here, wanting in its stead some other bower of bliss (this not that): a vertical garden, say, in the midst of a food forest.

Saturday May 1, 2021

We row-row-row our boats gently downstream into what Ursula K. Le Guin calls the ever-deepening mystery of the real. Little red cabooses, chug-chug-chugging. So goes the tune of our getting together amid friends and comrades in celebration of Beltane and May Day. Picture us there, rallying, glowing in each other’s presence, friends leading us in song with handmade songbooks. We clap, we stomp our feet. We cheer, we feel elated.

Wednesday March 14, 2018

I imagine Sarah as Wonder Woman, jetting invisibly through the sky above Metropolis. We tour old neighborhoods with our nieces, sunlight flickering through the branches of an ancient tulip magnolia. Afterwards, I sit beside a staticky baby monitor, hypnotized by its bursts of low-volume noise, sensing in the experience some foretaste of life ahead. A portal opens, out of which emerge the drones, hisses, and pulses of The Von Einem Tapes. On the other end lies Robert Stillman’s Portals.

Dive into one of these, and George Orr and Dr. Haber, the characters in The Lathe of Heaven, appear as components of a single mind. The “improver,” animated by an ever-increasing will to power, enslaves the dreamer, turns the latter into an indentured Jinn.

Sunday March 11, 2018

I’m galloping along, clearing error code 4s, reminiscing about the past, contemplating workload, when out of nowhere bursts the opening notes to Lloyd Clifton Miller’s “Gol-e Gandom,” followed by a sequence of environmental sound: dog, blender, bird, down the block a team working at a downed tree with a chainsaw. “Jump to, take action!” And I’m up and about, anticipating future events. A muting occurs. Unscripted passage of time. In a moment of calm, I lose myself in flight between subjectively distinct galaxies. I advance in brief increments through Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, savoring each moment. The psychological establishment, like any establishment, corrupted by the Judeo-Christian Capitalist West’s False-Enlightenment Prometheanism, collapses into the state evoked by Sun Ra & His Arkestra’s “Lanquidity.”

Relax, drift free of the value-form, I tell myself. The reverb on my voice leads me into a trance. My face struggles to match my mood.

Thursday March 8, 2018

Passive Status’s “forest” uses sound to transport consciousness to an elsewhere. A murky cosmic dungeon.

The beam of the mind’s eye blanks in and out during vertical retrace, at the end of each scan of the proscenium and the great beyond. Aldous Huxley called this beyond a “luminous living geometry.” The self in its cat’s cradle, its Metatron’s Cube. The god-mind as it precipitates into objects. Forms appear as clear as daylight, awaiting incorporation into being. Bands, spectrums, vibrational fields. Clusters of energy. Patterns. Particles communicating across the Planck length. Seeds of life spinning into tube tori. “Mentation in s-sleep,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her novel The Lathe of Heaven, “is like an engine idling, a kind of steady muttering of images and thoughts. What we’re after are the vivid, emotion-laden, memorable dreams of the d-state.” What if, from this point forward, however, ancient rules of epic narration were to be faithfully observed? Answers would have to come with their own questions attached, with the whole designed to reveal reality for what it is: stroboscopic, multi-sensory class warfare.

Sunday September 3, 2017

Up step them, the members, and me, the leader of the Rubber Band. “We’re the members,” sing the members. “I’m the leader,” sings the leader. Why have I faltered (for there’s always a side door) when advised to read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”? The sky darkens and teen culture mutates accordingly. Next door at the bar, my theologian friend recommends that I read Deleuzian theologian Daniel Colucciello Barber’s book, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. What do we think? Is our aim to evaluate? Do we wish to classify worlds, or aspects of worlds, in terms of good and bad? At some point, the bartender leans into the conversation. He, too, recommends a book I’ve never read: Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. When I arrive home from the bar, I read the Le Guin story, in part because my mind is racing, and I don’t want to soil these recommendations with unnecessary comments and presuppositions. Of course, I would walk away. A grifter god who demands of us a theodicy in exchange for luxury communism in the hereafter is a pathetic god indeed. Or no god at all, really — for the being we’ve imagined remains placed amidst scarcity, and subservient to a logic of exchange. Nature as pointless engine — garbage in, garbage out. Even when this grand “system of systems” invents for consciousness an imaginary telos of the not-yet, it does so solely to prolong its own dumb metabolism, its balancing act atop scales of cosmic justice, with its components all still bound to their crosses in the name of some distant whole. God is only ever an invented persona anyway, a voice by which the self speaks to itself. God are you there? Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Like the Judy Blume novel. Except in this case, God replies, quite convincingly, with Meet the Residents.

As the sleeve notes state, “Soon you too will whistle the merry tunes.” Let this day forevermore be a day for celebration of first contact. How are children able to invent for themselves imaginary friends? And when and why must that phenomenon cease? “Pure art,” writes N Senada, “can only be made without consideration of the outside world.” Nobody can do the boogaloo like me.