I’m finding some new stepping stones under my aging, sore and aching feet — I mean heart — as I’m re-reading Ursula K LeGuin’s astonishing book, Always Coming Home. At the same time, I’m reading and re-reading some of her critical essays from The Wave In the Mind.
As part of my own digestion and integration process, I’ve decided to read a few of her pieces aloud here. Doing this, I can honor her deep contributions to me and to the millions of other readers and writers who’ve found handholds in her stories and essays.
In re-reading of The Wave in the Mind I’ve taken to heart Ursula’s argument about the essential orality of poetry and how important it is for humans to rescue poems from the silence of a page of text and put them back into human speaking and listening. I think she’s about 1000% right about how important this is — especially right now.
Nevertheless, in addition to reading “Artists” aloud here (from Always Coming Home), I’ve also copied out the text. My apologies for the way the stanzas all flow together below. I can’t seem to make Substack replicate the spacing between them. I hate that. But using my fingers to plant the lines in my bodily experience, I’m both integrating it into my life today and doing what I can to share the wealth of Ursula’s powerful words here with anyone else who’s looking for a handhold in this relentless, excruciating disintegration of our American democracy.
Take heart, my brother and sister artists!
Even from the center of this collapse, we can still do our jobs. DOGE will always overlook us because we work for ourselves. We don’t count — and never have counted — in the arithmetic of extraction capitalism.
We artists have to do our jobs — as Ursula points out — because we have no other choice. Our jobs are what we were born for. We can and must continue to do them for ourselves and for each other.
Even when no one else seems able to hear us — or find space in the chaos to use our work to care for themselves — we can still do our jobs. Remember Anne Frank.
Artists
What do they do,
The singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?
They go there with empty hands,
Into the gap between.
They come back with things in their hands.
They go silent and come back with words, with tunes.
They go into confusion and come back with patterns.
They go limping and weeping, ugly and frightened,
And come back with the wings of the redwing hawk,
The eyes of the mountain lion.
That is where they live,
Where they get their breath:
There, in the gap between,
The empty place.
Where do the mysterious artists live?
There, in the gap between.
Their hands are the hinge.
No one else can breathe there.
They are beyond praise.
The ordinary artists
Use patience, passion, skill, work
And returning to work, judgment,
Proportion, intellect, purpose,
Indifference, obstinacy, delight in tools,
Delight, and with these as their way
They approach the gap, the hub,
Approaching in circles, in gyres,
Like the buzzard, looking down, watching,
Like the coyote, watching.
They look to the center.
They turn on the center,
They describe the center,
Though they cannot live there.
They deserve praise.
There are people who call themselves artists
Who compete with each other for praise
They think the center
Is a stuffed gut,
And that shitting is working.
They are what the buzzard and the coyote
Ate for breakfast yesterday.
You can find pre-owned copies of Always Coming Home on EBay priced between $6.19 and $220. The Wave in the Mind can run from $9 to $29.99.
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