Ursula K Le Guin Just Made Me Cry

As I was waiting for my laundry to be finished, I picked up a book off the shelf in the common lounge of my building. There is a small collection of books there, vagrant books, abandoned books, surrounded by a vast wall of empty shelves. One of them is called The Compass Rose and is a collection of short science fiction by the legendary author Ursula K Le Guin.

I've long been a fan of short science fiction. I think the challenge of creating a speculative or imaginative thought-world AND saying something important, within the confines of short literature, takes a certain economy of language and creativity of imagination that I find appealing. It also requires a high level of trust in the reader. You can not write a good sci fi short story without leaving lots of room for the reader to fill in the blanks, and that takes trust.

The first piece in The Compass Rose is called "The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts From The Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics." Le Guin sets up a world in which the science of linguistics has been extended so that it encompasses messages left by ants and the kinetic performances of penguins. Those first two articles from the "journal" (the ants and the penguins) are brilliant, but it was the third article, an editorial, that brought tears to my eyes with its sheer beauty and potential.

The editorial begins with a basis for linguistics: language is communication. And, following Tolstoy, art is also communication. Therefore, any creature that communicates has language (such as ants and penguins).

Plants don't communicate, so they do not have language. But do they have art? Is there an art that is not communicative, but something else?

"Ourselves animals, active, predators, we look (naturally enough) for an active, predatory, communicative art; and when we find it, we recognize it... The art [of the Plant], if it exists, is a non-communicative art: and probably a non-kinetic one... We do not know. All we can guess is that the putative Art of the Plant is entirely different from the Art of the Animal. What it is we cannot say; we have not yet discovered it. Yet I predict with some certainty that it exists, and that when it is found it will prove to be, not an action, but a reaction: not a communication, but a reception. It will be exactly the opposite of the art we know and recognize. It will be the first passive art known to us... and after [that], may there not come... the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space."

There are a number of places where I resonate very strongly with this passage. I hold both the word and art as sacred, and to imbue the plants and rocks with these qualities is to give them a portion of the great sacred reality that has always been theirs but which we have tragically failed to respect. Could models of Christian leadership have something to learn from the Art of the Plants? Might we be seeking a receptive, non-predatory, art of our own? To be still and silent is not to be disengaged or disinterested. To be atemporal is not to be amoral.

The art of the plant is an art that I will be studying further. I invite you to join me.