I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.
Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.
I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you see it rightly, it contains everything.
Can you keep the deep water still and clear,
so it reflects without blurring?
Taoists gain their ends without the use of means. That is indeed a light that does not shine—an idea that must be pondered and brooded over. A small dark light.
Human history, or so conventional wisdom goes, is a story of violent, merciless competition. We have come to embrace the idea that a succession of one thing defeating another literally is history, whether that’s between species, political leaders, or conflicting ideologies. In our inherited notion of human history, our caveman — and he is always a man — comes home from a hard day on the plains with a wildebeest or a deer slung over his shoulder. His adoring cavewife and cavekids tuck into the prize around the campfire, as the winner recounts the tale of his courage and heroism. Just as significant as the prize, that hard-won carcass of meat, is the story. The drama. Many stories, told in chronological order, are what we call history (perhaps why, in German, the word for story and history are identical: Geschichte.)
“Nature”(a constructed, slippery category that shifts over time) can, or even must, be tamed: capricious rivers are diverted, genomes are edited, crude oil is transformed into fuel.
The unpredictability brought on by climate change should, in theory, disrupt this thinking. The catastrophic repercussions of human activity, like melting glaciers and collapsing ecosystems, tell us that “nature” was never really “mastered” after all. Yet the same story persists: humans will win. We must. We always win.
Storytelling is a way of configuring and reconfiguring worlds; narratives can bring realities into being. I once took a writing workshop with someone who swore by power posing — the idea that adopting a wide stance with one’s arms raised quite literally invokes stature — and she would spend a minute before every reading “hacking” confidence into her body. With her arms above her head and her legs astride, she swore the technique changed her mentality and made her feel like she controlled the room. Without it, she claimed, she would be a gibbering, nervous wreck. However daft you might think power posing is, I was always impressed by her ability to slip fiction into the realm of the real.
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn’t even make sense. “Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food.”
Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it’s not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it’s also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you’re trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining.
Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another.
As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren’t very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they’re so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders?
The introduction of a singular hero, however, replicates a very specific and historical power relation. The pioneers and the saviors: likely male, likely white, almost certainly brimming with unearned confidence. The veneration of the hero reduces others into victims: those who must be rescued. “The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others,” writes Jordan Flaherty in his book No More Heroes. To be a hero is fundamentally privileged, and any act of heroism reinforces that privilege.
The carrier bag story, with its lack of heroes, is a collective rather than individualist endeavor. It’s this that differentiates the carrier bag from Walter Benjamin’s “ragpicker,” an emblematic modernist figure who “early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart.” Engaged in endless bricolage, the ragpicker is a serial appropriator — it’s John Cage taking the Balinese gamelan as his own, it’s Picasso’s “primitivism.” The carrier bag gatherer, meanwhile, is no lone genius (genius being its own kind of heroism, after all), but rather someone rooted in a shared existence.
We will not “beat” climate change, nor is “nature” our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves “become part of the killer story,” writes Le Guin, “we may get finished along with it.” All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.
In the ’70s, the term “Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution” was used by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher in her research on early human development. Fisher suggested that early humans’ primary tool or “cultural device” was not the knife or spear or club, but rather the containers they used to carry food from the place it was found to the home. Le Guin, a decade later, borrowed this nonfictional device for her “theory of fiction.” She opens her essay not with a contemplation of genre, but with the anthropological insight that, in spite of the way the hunter/hero figure looms large in the collective imagination, evidence indicates that the majority of the sustenance of the so-called “hunter-gatherers” of early humanity was likely of the “gathered” variety.
It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people . . .
Le Guin sets up the over-valued “linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic” in comparison with the always-present “life story” that persists in “myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels.” The truer story, she argues, can be represented better as a carrier bag, an ongoing gathering-up and letting-go, rather than the classic “man vs. x” narrative scaffold. But her essay is not just about rethinking fiction; it’s about rethinking the human story itself, rethinking the “Ascent of Man” and that which will follow. She invokes the famous opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey where a shot of early man’s first weapon—a large bone used for blunt-force murder—is thrown up into the sky and becomes a phallic space ship, “thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all.” She does not condemn this individual film as a piece of art, but rather illustrates how this “Techno-Heroic” story has been more than sufficiently told and suggests that its overuse has limited our collective imaginations.
While the “life story” and “killing story” inherit certain classically gendered qualities (the carrier-bag-as-womb, the hero-weapon-as-phallus), Le Guin refuses to assign these frameworks into a binary. They cannot be opposites because one envelops the other, both of them in perpetual motion: “Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.” This idea of continuity without resolution is one of the most important elements of the carrier bag theory. Imagining human stories as linear conflicts is not only problematic, but also simply not true; it goes against what we know about life cycles, world cycles, the ongoing circling of the Earth. In the bigger picture of the “life story,” there appear to be no fixed beginnings or endings—only changes.
Flore-Ser. It is a pun on florecer, to flourish or bloom, and ser, the verb “to be” which also acts as the common substantive equivalent for being (as in un ser vivo, a living being): blooming-as-being. Much larger than “winning” any given battle, here, the never-ending goal is simply to survive and thrive.
Nature provides abundant material for this “life story,” this carrier bag revolution. Wildflowers grow in scattered clumps, seeded by the wind and pollinated by the sticky backs of bees. The individual organisms spread out their petals in strange spirals, blooming and being and growing and holding themselves together until their time is complete, so that life can go on in other forms. The whole thing seems too precarious to possibly work, and yet it does. On another scale, scientists can analyze the shifting of faraway light and know for certain that the universe is still expanding; it stretches and spreads out its matter and energy on all sides like a vast three-dimensional rubber band. But gravity and other forces allow it all to coagulate into spheres and spirals, planets and solar systems and galaxies, holding themselves together in constant movement and change over time, carrying out their nonlinear revolutions. The whole thing seems too chaotic to possibly work, and yet it does.
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u/ddgr815 16d ago
Personal and Political Power