Mandy Brown (same previous post):
IN THE THIRD BOOK in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish sequence, City of Illusions, Earth has been taken over by a people known as the Shing. Across the planet, humans live in small villages or else move nomadically with their herds, prevented from knowing their history or from rebuilding the ancient cities and knowledge that the Shing razed and erased. Meanwhile the Shing, themselves very small in number, live sheltered in an extraordinary skyward city, perched above a canyon in buildings made of semi-transparent material. When Ramarren, a visitor from a distant planet, arrives on earth, he awakens in this terrible place:
Quoting Le Guin:
He woke. It took a while, but he woke, and managed to sit up. He had to bury his acutely aching head in his arms for a while to get over the vertigo the movement caused, and at first was aware only that he was sitting on the floor of some room, a floor which seemed to be warm and yielding, almost soft, like the flank of some great beast. Then he lifted his head, and got his eyes into focus, and looked about him.
He was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his dizziness for a while. There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff, which appeared soft and undulant like many thicknesses of pale green veiling, but was tough and slick to the touch. Queer carvings and crimpings and ridges forming ornate patterns all over the floor were, to the exploring hand, nonexistent; they were eye-deceiving paintings, or lay beneath a smooth transparent surface. The angles where walls met were thrown out of true by optical-illusion devices of cross-hatching and pseudo-parallels used as decoration; to pull the corners into right angles took an effort of will, which was perhaps an effort of self-deception, since they might, after all, not be right angles. But none of this teasing subtlety of decoration so disoriented [him] as the fact that the entire room was translucent. Vaguely, with the effect of looking into a depth of very green pond-water, underneath him another room was visible. Overhead was a patch of light that might be the moon, blurred and greened by one or more intervening ceilings. Through one wall of the room strings and patches of brightness were fairly distinct, and he could make out the motion of the lights of helicopters or aircars. Through the other three walls these outdoor lights were much dimmer, blurred by the veilings of further walls, corridors, rooms. Shapes moved in these other rooms. He could see them but there was no identifying them: features, dress, color, size was all blurred away. A blot of shadow somewhere in the green depths suddenly rose and grew less, greener, dimmer, fading into the maze of vagueness. Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy. It was extraordinarily beautiful, this masked shimmer of lights and shapes through inchoate planes of green, and extraordinarily disturbing.
I haven’t read much Le Guin, but this is possibly the most haunting image I’ve read of the world we all seem to be staring down the barrel of, and the book was published in 1967.
“There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff…”
Brown more recently referenced, via Byung-Chul Han, chapter IV of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Here’s Arendt:
It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their “objectivity” which makes them withstand, “stand against” and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made world rather than the sublime indifference of an untouched nature, whose overwhelming elementary force, on the contrary, will compel them to swing relentlessly in the circle of their own biological movement, which fits so closely into the over-all cyclical movement of nature’s household.
As Brown and Han point out, the world of screens, and the larger modern world of The Machine (or what Wendell Berry called The Objective), lacks — and this is wildly understated — that durability, and is therefore starved, and starving us, of stability.
“There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff…”
On Le Guin’s City of Illusions, Brown continues (worth quoting at length):
The disturbances grow as Ramarren comes to realize that the Shing lie as easily as they speak. They even lie telepathically, as if their very being is a lie. They claim that they are humans whose forebears dressed themselves in the myth of an alien superpower in order to unite humanity and end, or prevent, a great war. But they have destroyed so much—every city, school, library, museum, network—that there is nothing to compare their lies to: every lie they tell exists on its own, unquestioned and unquestionable, not true but not false either. Isolated in time and space, with no referents to knowledge or history, the lies become a kind of anti-truth that, on contact with the truth, annihilates them both.
Among the Shing are humans known as “toolmen.” As children, the toolmen were identified as having “subnormal minds” and brought to the city to be plugged in to the psychocomputers, raised to become servants to the Lords, as the Shing are known. Mute and compliant, they seem a mere extension of the machines they operate: flesh-and-blood computers completing tasks to fulfill their program, with no thought or belief or desire to get in the way. A toolman is the perfect slave: he has no self to rail against his enslavement.
Ramarren seems at first to be treated as an honored guest by the Shing. He is given the comforts a body needs, and spoken to with a formalized, if stilted, respect. But he soon learns that the Shing have twice assaulted his mind, have hunted through it in search of the secret location of his home planet, as if his mind were nothing more than an encrypted storage device, a resource to be hacked and exploited. The Shing’s appetite for the acquisition and destruction of knowledge extends not only to his people but to his own thoughts. And their lies (their anti-truths) are their greatest weapon.
Ramarren—alone and unarmed—has but one small hope against their methods:
Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one quality no liar can cope with, integrity. Perhaps it would not occur to them that a man could so will to be himself, to live his life, that he might resist them even when helpless in their hands.
Integrity seems a meek defense against the Shing’s aircars and psychocomputers, the parahypnotic drugs, the gravity-defying city and deadly laser guns. And yet that integrity is what allows Ramarren to come back to himself, to finally see through the Shing’s lies, to briefly and decisively disarm them and make his escape. It is in his unremitting longing for life that Ramarren is finally free.
As Brown mentions in the more recent post above, the lack of stability, especially in the screen-world, requires more — and more, and more, and more, and more — vigilance; “and vigilance is exhausting.”
On the one hand, integrity also requires vigilance (more and more and more…), and is also exhausting. But saying that out loud makes it seem unsurprising and historically true to the nature of human integrity, though without diminishing the genuine and even currently increased exhaustion of it.
On the other hand, there is a kind of integrity that is a relaxing response to exhausting vigilance. I recently (just yesterday, apparently) quoted Steve Robinson, who at one point in his life decided to stop being so vigilant about his vigilance and instead focus on being what he knew he ought to be according to the knowledge he had. The weariness of vigilance led him to a kind of rest in integrity.
Maybe it’s a kind of every-day Sabbath. I’m aiming for that.