Puppet Slam 2008

Finally, I’ve reread A Wizard of Earthsea. The first time I read the book, when I was 11, I enjoyed it immensely, but by the time I was in high school I had forgotten nearly everything in it. An image, a word, were about all that remained. I read it again only several years ago, in college, and was recently surprised to find I remember absolutely nothing more.

So this reading, I paused each time after closing the book to think over the events and emotions from the beginning to that point, to try to shore up my retention. I think I’ve got it this time. It’s hard to say why I remembered the book as “dreamlike”—places are grounded in detail, and events are coherent. Maybe it’s because LeGuin does her best to describe what defies description, which is the defining aspect of my dreams since early childhood.

My nightmares as a child were most commonly incommunicable, the ethereal meeting and conflict of shapes and figures that do not even want description, only terrible comprehension. I still can’t recall any actual images, only the ominous feeling of something slowly growing, and the certainty that it is related to each of my acute and irrational fears.

I sense something resembling that in LeGuin’s approach to fantasy, which is to describe by not describing. All authors do that, of course, books are supposed to stimulate the imagination, not just stock it. But in LeGuin, who worked on a translation of the central text of Taoism for decades, I detect in her people and places a more innate devotion to minimalism. She is dependent on her faith in you—that you, when reading her failed attempts at describing the formless and nameless, will not be confused or unmoved, but will have already created an image that imbues her wisps with either a terrible or beautiful gravity.

For that to occur, for you to project a sense of cosmic weight onto shadows and sunlight, requires two things: Your acquaintance at some level with the sacred and the profane, and an author who shares that acquaintance and can put you at ease to remember yours. The words “sacred” and “profane” have become code words for “mythology” for a great number of people nowadays, used to describe the dated concepts of people who haven’t yet freed their thought. While this is superior to the traditional dogmatic definition, it is equally dogmatic, and more incomplete. But I don’t think you don’t need a God or a Book to define it for you; I knew it namelessly in my dreams at the age of 4. I say that many in my demographic felt it from Donnie Darko, some without realizing it for what it is.

LeGuin, in her long life, has clearly had a long relationship with the mystic. Of all the things I forgot about Earthsea, the fact that all this time I too have shared this acquaintance is the most important one, and one I will not lose sight of again.

A Wizard of Earthsea, at Amazon
A Wizard of Earthsea, with a more pretentious cover, at Amazon