The absent-minded traveler

(I’ve no idea how much sense this will make if you don’t know the book in question.)

I’ve read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home many times—annually from when I was 16 till my mid-20s, and at least six times (probably more) since then. This time I made an experiment and read it out of order: I skipped Stone Telling’s first two sections until I reached her final section, then with greater social context read it all together, in a single day, before continuing on to the end.

I expected this to not work, but I was curious just how badly it wouldn’t work. The answer is, nowhere nearly as badly as reading chapters of The Dispossessed in internal chronological order, which utterly fails—that story is built around experiencing events in the order given. There is some loss of experience, as between her first and last sections there are pieces expecting you to have read her story beforehand (including a poem by Stone Telling), but it’s not as catastrophic as with The Dispossessed.

And now I know.

One thing that struck me this time: Pandora’s informant about Kesh medical practice is Alder of Chumo and Sinshan—the name Stone Telling’s husband had when she was still Woman Coming Home, who presumably found his third name, Stone Listening, at the same time she did. We don’t know exactly how long Pandora spent on her field studies, but that she has just the one informant suggests it wasn’t years upon years. And yet, the Archivist of the Madrone, when Pandora had only experienced enough of the Kesh to find their concepts of time confusing, knew of Stone Telling’s written narrative. Not a gotcha, but a hmmm.

I want to know more about Giver Ire’s daughter and Ire herself. They reappear more than anyone. Along with Thorn of Sinshan, they may be enough to constitute a reasonable Yuletide request.

(I still wonder how homosexual marriages, which are mentioned in passing only twice, work in practice in a tightly matrilocal culture.) (Pro tip to readers: the soundtrack of music and songs of the Kesh, which was included with the original publication on a cassette tape, is still available on Bandcamp.)

---L.

Subject quote from Freedom! ’90, George Michael.