because i was reminded of my love for ursula le guin, a woman wordsmith who stands equal to the best in a field of men. i bought a fisherman of the inland sea for a steal (Php 20!) at an old goodwill branch in buendia years ago and to this day, even when all i can recall is how dizzy good it made me feel, it affects me profoundly still.
-----------------------
originally posted 21 august 2009
this is for everyone who wishes she were an einstein, to comprehend even a pin's worth of that gargantuan blackness of space and fire, the neverendng births and deaths that we call the universe.
if i were ever to write a book or make a movie about something, it would be about -- time travel. yep, specifically, time travel of the geekiest science fiction exploding stars faster than the speed of light kind. i find it so pregnant with possibilities, with stories!, with the ever-looming worry of a miscarriage lending all of these a haunting quality. something that makes you look up at starry skies (minus any emo-ness, please) and prompts you to wonder... what if? what if??
-----------------------
"Listen, Isidri: I went to Hain, I studied there, I worked on a new kind of temporal physics, a new theory - transilience - I spent ten years there. Then we began experiments, I was in Ran'n and crossed over to the Hainish system in no time, using that technology, in no time, you understand me, literally, like the ansible - not at lightspeed, not faster than light, but in no time. In one place and in another place instantaneously, you understand? And it went fine, it worked, but coming back there was... there a was a fold, a crease, in my field. I was in the same place in a different time. I came back eighteen of your years, ten of mine. I came back to the day I left, but I didn't leave, I came back, I came back to you."
I was holding her hands, kneeling to face her as she knelt by the silent pool. She searched my face with her watchful eyes, silent. On her cheekbone there was a fresh scratch and a little bruise; a branch had lashed her as she gathered the evergreen boughs.
"Let me come back to you," I said in a whisper.
She touched my face with her hand. "You look so tired," she said. "Hideo... Are you all right?"
"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes. I'm all right."
And there my story, so far as it has any interest to the Ekumen or to research in transilience, comes to an end. I have lived now for eighteen years as a farmholder of Udan Farm of Derdan'nad Village of the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun, on Oket, on O. I am fifty years old. I am the Morning husband of the Second Sedoretu of Udan; my wife is Isidri; my Night marriage is to Sota of Drehe, whose Evening wife is my sister Koneko. My children of the Morning with Isidri are Latubdu and Tadri; the Evening children are Murmi and Lasako. But none of this is of much interest to the Stabiles of the Ekumen.
My mother, who had had some training in temporal engineering, asked for my story, listened to it carefully, and accepted it without question; so did Isidri. Most of the people of my farmhold chose a simpler and far more plausible story, which explained everything fairly well, even my severe loss of weight and ten-year age gain overnight. At the very last moment, just before the space ship left, they said, Hideo decided not to go to the Ekumenikal School on Hain after all. He came back to Udan, because he was in love with Isidri. But it had made him quite ill, because it was a very hard decision and he was very much in love.
Maybe that is indeed the true story. But Isidri and Isako chose a stranger truth.
Later, when we were forming our sedoretu, Sota asked me for the truth. "You aren't the same man, Hideo, though you are the man I always loved," he said. I told hiim why, as best I could. He was sure that Koneko would understand it better than he could, and indeed she listened gravely, and asked several keen questions which I could not answer.
I did attempt to send a message to the temporal physics department of the Ekumenical Schools on Hain. I had not been home long before my mother, with her strong sense of duty and her obligation to the Ekumen, became insistent that I do so.
"Mother," I said, "what can I tell them? They haven't even invented churten theory yet!"
"Apologize for not coming to study, as you said you would. And explain it to the Director, the Anarresti woman. Maybe she would understand."
"Even Gvonesh doesn't know about churten yet. They'll begin telling her about it on the ansible from Urras and Anarres about three years from now. Anyhow, Gvonesh didn't know me the first couple of years I was there." The past tense was inevitable but ridiculous; it would have been more accurate to say, "she won't know me the first couple of years I won't be there."
Or was I there on Hain, now? That paradoxical idea of two simultaneous existences on two different worlds disturbed me exceedingly. It was one of the points Koneko had asked about. No matter how I discounted it impossible under every law of temporality, I could not keep from imagining that it was possible, that another I was living on Hain, and would come to Udan in eighteen years and meet myself. After all, my present existence was also and equally impossible.
When such notions haunted and troubled me I learned to replace them with a different image: the little whorls of water that slid down between the two big rocks, where the current ran strong, just above the swimming bay in the Oro. I would imagine those whirlpools forming and dissolving, or I would go down to the river and sit and watch them. And they seemed to hold a solution to my question, to dissolve it as they endlessly dissolved and formed.
- "Another Story" from A Fisherman of the Inland Sea; Ursula K. Le Guin; bought for a mere P20 at the Goodwill Buidling in Buendia more than a year ago (o ye.)
-----------------------
originally posted 21 august 2009
this is for everyone who wishes she were an einstein, to comprehend even a pin's worth of that gargantuan blackness of space and fire, the neverendng births and deaths that we call the universe.
if i were ever to write a book or make a movie about something, it would be about -- time travel. yep, specifically, time travel of the geekiest science fiction exploding stars faster than the speed of light kind. i find it so pregnant with possibilities, with stories!, with the ever-looming worry of a miscarriage lending all of these a haunting quality. something that makes you look up at starry skies (minus any emo-ness, please) and prompts you to wonder... what if? what if??
-----------------------
"Listen, Isidri: I went to Hain, I studied there, I worked on a new kind of temporal physics, a new theory - transilience - I spent ten years there. Then we began experiments, I was in Ran'n and crossed over to the Hainish system in no time, using that technology, in no time, you understand me, literally, like the ansible - not at lightspeed, not faster than light, but in no time. In one place and in another place instantaneously, you understand? And it went fine, it worked, but coming back there was... there a was a fold, a crease, in my field. I was in the same place in a different time. I came back eighteen of your years, ten of mine. I came back to the day I left, but I didn't leave, I came back, I came back to you."
I was holding her hands, kneeling to face her as she knelt by the silent pool. She searched my face with her watchful eyes, silent. On her cheekbone there was a fresh scratch and a little bruise; a branch had lashed her as she gathered the evergreen boughs.
"Let me come back to you," I said in a whisper.
She touched my face with her hand. "You look so tired," she said. "Hideo... Are you all right?"
"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes. I'm all right."
And there my story, so far as it has any interest to the Ekumen or to research in transilience, comes to an end. I have lived now for eighteen years as a farmholder of Udan Farm of Derdan'nad Village of the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun, on Oket, on O. I am fifty years old. I am the Morning husband of the Second Sedoretu of Udan; my wife is Isidri; my Night marriage is to Sota of Drehe, whose Evening wife is my sister Koneko. My children of the Morning with Isidri are Latubdu and Tadri; the Evening children are Murmi and Lasako. But none of this is of much interest to the Stabiles of the Ekumen.
My mother, who had had some training in temporal engineering, asked for my story, listened to it carefully, and accepted it without question; so did Isidri. Most of the people of my farmhold chose a simpler and far more plausible story, which explained everything fairly well, even my severe loss of weight and ten-year age gain overnight. At the very last moment, just before the space ship left, they said, Hideo decided not to go to the Ekumenikal School on Hain after all. He came back to Udan, because he was in love with Isidri. But it had made him quite ill, because it was a very hard decision and he was very much in love.
Maybe that is indeed the true story. But Isidri and Isako chose a stranger truth.
Later, when we were forming our sedoretu, Sota asked me for the truth. "You aren't the same man, Hideo, though you are the man I always loved," he said. I told hiim why, as best I could. He was sure that Koneko would understand it better than he could, and indeed she listened gravely, and asked several keen questions which I could not answer.
I did attempt to send a message to the temporal physics department of the Ekumenical Schools on Hain. I had not been home long before my mother, with her strong sense of duty and her obligation to the Ekumen, became insistent that I do so.
"Mother," I said, "what can I tell them? They haven't even invented churten theory yet!"
"Apologize for not coming to study, as you said you would. And explain it to the Director, the Anarresti woman. Maybe she would understand."
"Even Gvonesh doesn't know about churten yet. They'll begin telling her about it on the ansible from Urras and Anarres about three years from now. Anyhow, Gvonesh didn't know me the first couple of years I was there." The past tense was inevitable but ridiculous; it would have been more accurate to say, "she won't know me the first couple of years I won't be there."
Or was I there on Hain, now? That paradoxical idea of two simultaneous existences on two different worlds disturbed me exceedingly. It was one of the points Koneko had asked about. No matter how I discounted it impossible under every law of temporality, I could not keep from imagining that it was possible, that another I was living on Hain, and would come to Udan in eighteen years and meet myself. After all, my present existence was also and equally impossible.
When such notions haunted and troubled me I learned to replace them with a different image: the little whorls of water that slid down between the two big rocks, where the current ran strong, just above the swimming bay in the Oro. I would imagine those whirlpools forming and dissolving, or I would go down to the river and sit and watch them. And they seemed to hold a solution to my question, to dissolve it as they endlessly dissolved and formed.
- "Another Story" from A Fisherman of the Inland Sea; Ursula K. Le Guin; bought for a mere P20 at the Goodwill Buidling in Buendia more than a year ago (o ye.)
No comments:
Post a Comment