We are all hugely blessed to have had Ursula K. Le Guin with us for so long. Her work and example deserve to linger long in our cultural memory, and will, should that memory itself long continue. My biggest worry is that it won’t. Ensuring that it can and will, and in good health, is, in my view, the very work that she greatly advanced and that we all must carry on—a work that must never end, as once ended it is unlikely ever to begin again, here on Earth or anywhere in its immediate vicinity.
—social media post, 24 January 2018
In 1987, during an evening’s informal chat with her students at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin answered my question about composer Pauline Oliveros with a story. At a summer retreat for women in the arts some years before, Le Guin told us, Oliveros had served as the passive moderator for a group discussion: she sat silently meditating in the center, while the rest of the women sat in a circle around her, talking. After a time the conversation became heated, contentious; tempers started to flare. Folks were making bald assertions based on the conclusions they had abstracted from their experiences rather than sharing the experiences themselves. As they started interrupting one another, and their voices began to rise in volume, suddenly Oliveros cleared her throat, not loudly; but instantly everyone fell silent, and Oliveros said, softly and distinctly, “Let your experience be your truth.” After a long silence, the conversation started up again with a new grace note, women sharing their experiences in a way that was inspiring and healing and revelatory, and soon everyone was smiling and laughing and the energy in the room became incredibly positive.
—from §8 of “Thirteen Improvisations in Seven Senses,” 31 May 2012
I was walking through a terraced city, climbing up through transparent stairwells from level to level, and I came to a stairwell that, after several flights, brought me to a landing that opened out into a large room filled with bookcases. A young black woman, who had also been climbing the stairs, asked me if I knew where she could find a certain trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin. I told her that all of the books here were by Le Guin and that if she looked through them carefully, she would probably find the ones she sought. She thanked me and started looking as did I at another bookcase, out of my own interest, recalling that this was indeed a Le Guin memorial book exchange, though I was unsure if the books were free, or that a book taken was to be swapped for a book left, or if indeed they were meant to be paid for, and as I started looking at individual copies I saw very low prices written on them, yet there seemed to be no one there to give money to, and soon I forgot all about that, and the room seemed to grow larger as I browsed, and it became a proper, multilevel bookstore, and Le Guin’s books proliferated, becoming books by everyone else too, and the prices grew greater and the books became new and the store filled with other patrons and staff, and eventually I found the first two books in another Le Guin trilogy, this one telling the stories of a cello’s life and the lives of the cellists who played it; I remember holding the two books up together and reading their spines. The second book was called And Music Is at the Very Heart of God.
—dream of 27 September 2011
All of us—all who have ever lived, all who are alive now, all who will ever live—we are, in each and every moment, in all places and at all times, both present and absent. This is in the very nature of things: presence and absence are infinitely intertwined, and the center of the universe is everywhere.
—letter to a friend, 22 July 2014
Ron Drummond lives in Oakland, California.
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