Ursula Le Guin, Mrs. Brown and Essential Consciousness

"I don't think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don't think man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware -- to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential. We are subjects, and whoever among us treats us as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, against nature. And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness. If we stop looking, the world goes blind. If we cease to speak and listen, the world goes deaf and dumb. If we stop thinking, there is no thought. If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness."

-Ursula K. Le Guin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown."

The Language of the Night, p.116

I need to remember this for class in the Fall. Dr. S agreed to do Atomic Holocaust Sf for Independent Study (the one I wanted!), and it might be useful to reference this quote when we read Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. 

"If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness," eh? There's something tricky about that sentence. It assumes that there is no other consciousness than the one that we humans perceive, and further, suggests that all the bones and flesh and rock and sea and ferns and so on need us to impose our perception upon them. The world is still the world whether we're around to think about it or not, but it wouldn't be our world anymore if we weren't here, it would just be a world, spinning in space around a sun, existing without a name or a physics equation or a mathematical sequence to explain it. These things don't need names and mathematical equations to go on carrying about their business, they just happen. It's we who need to name them, and so, yes, if we destroy ourselves, we destroy our consciousness, and all those names and equations will go down in flaming glory with us.

Le Guin touches on a phenomenon, though, that is equally tricky: In imposing our perception onto the objects that make the world, we transform those objects into something more -- into subjects, which is, according to Le Guin, what we are because we are conscious. We make the world into ourselves because we reflect on it, dream about it, are conscious of it, because we name it. 

There's a poem by Tennyson called "Ulysses," that describes the dissatisfaction and yearning Ulysses feels after returning home to his wife Penelope and his people after a lifetime of living for whatever waited beyond the horizon. One of his complaints is that he is a stranger to his people, and they are strange to him:

"It little profits that an idle king1,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me." 

-Tennsyon, "Ulysses" l.1-5

"...I am become a name; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."

 -Tennyson, "Ulysses" l.11-21

Here a name is not enough to give meaning to interaction; there must be a connection, a bond that has been forged through shared experiences for a sense of kinship or any kind of understanding to be achieved. Le Guin and Tennyson are talking about different aspects of consciousness, but Le Guin's fascination with consciousness and the importance of names (as is demonstrated by her Earthsea series) reminded me of this poem. In "Ulysses," the shared experience enables the individual to become "a part of all that [they] have met," but I think that those interactions would have been significantly different without his name.

It also demonstrates another aspect of my point, that we need to impose our perception onto the world, not the other way around. There would be one true language if that were the case, and many fantasy authors have explored this concept (including Ursula Le Guin). Naming is just a facet of imposing consciousness, a step towards transforming the object into a subject. Important for us, essential for us, because without it, conscious as we are, we are rendered strange, and a stranger, to everything we consciously perceive.