The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Very much, baroness.”

  “I hope so. I know Severin has worked you very hard. And we’re so disorganised. We and the children and the visitors, we always seem to scatter so, and only meet in passing…I hope it hasn’t been distracting.” It was true; all summer in tides and cycles the house had been full or half full of visitors, friends of the children, friends of the baroness, friends, colleagues and neighbors of the baron, duck-hunters who slept in the disused stable since the spare bedrooms were full of Polish medieval historians, ladies with broods of children the smallest of whom fell inevitably into the pond about this time of the afternoon. No wonder it was so still, so autumnal now: the rooms vacant, the pond smooth, the hills empty of dispersing laughter.

  “I have enjoyed knowing the children,” Josef said, “particularly Stanislas.” Then he went red as a beet, for Stanislas alone was not her child. She smiled and said with timidity, “Stanislas is very nice. And fourteen—fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects…He handles it very gracefully. Paul and Zida now, when they get that age they’ll lump through it and be tiresome. But Stanislas learned loss so young…When will you enter the seminary?” she asked, moving from the boy to him in one reach of thought. “Next month,” he answered looking down, and she asked, “Then you’re quite certain it’s the life you want to lead?” After a pause and still not looking at her face, though the white of her dress and the green and gold of leaves above her filled his eyes, he said, “Why do you ask, baroness?”

  “Because the idea of celibacy terrifies me,” she replied, and he wanted to stretch out on the ground flecked with elm leaves like thin oval coins of gold, and die.

  “Sterility,” she said, “you see, sterility is what I fear, I dread. It is my enemy. I know we have other enemies, but I hate it most, because it makes life less than death. And its allies are horrible: hunger, sickness, deformation, and perversion, and ambition, and the wish to be secure. What on earth are the children doing down there?” Paul had asked Stanislas at lunch if they could play Ragnarok once more. Stanislas had consented, and so was now a Frost Giant storming with roars the ramparts of Asgard represented by a drainage ditch behind the pond. Odin hurled lightning from the walls, and Thor—“Stanislas!” called the mother rising slender and in white from her chair beside the young man, “don’t let Zida use the hammer, please.”

  “I’m Thor, I’m Thor, I got to have a hammer!” Zida screamed. Stanislas intervened briefly, then made ready to storm the ramparts again, with Zida now at his side, on all fours. “She’s Fenris the Wolf now,” he called up to the mother, his voice ringing through the hot afternoon with the faintest edge of laughter. Grim and stern, one eye shut, Paul gripped his staff and faced the advancing armies of Hel and the Frozen Lands.

  “I’m going to find some lemonade for everybody,” the baroness said, and left Josef to sink at last face down on the earth, surrendering to the awful sweetness and anguish she had awakened in him, and would it ever sleep again? while down by the pond Odin strove with the icy army on the sunlit battlements of heaven.

  Next day only the walls of the house were left standing. Inside it was only a litter of boxes and open drawers and hurrying people carrying things. Tomas and Zida escaped, he, being slow-witted amid turmoil and the only year-round occupant of Asgard, to clean up the yard out of harm’s way, and she to the Little Woods all afternoon. At five Paul shrilled from his window, “The car! The car! It’s coming!” An enormous black taxi built in 1923 groaned into the yard, feeling its way, its blind, protruding headlamps flashing in the western sun. Boxes, valises, the blue trunk and the two iron trunks were loaded into it by Tomas, Stanislas, Josef, and the taxi-driver from the village, under the agile and efficient supervision of Baron Severin Egideskar, holder of the Follen Chair of Medieval Studies at the University of Krasnoy. “And you’ll get us back together with all this at the station tomorrow at eight—right?” The taxi-driver, who had done so each September for seven years, nodded. The taxi laden with the material impediments of seven people lumbered away, changing gears down the road in the weary, sunny stillness of late afternoon, in which the house stood intact once more room after empty room.

  The baron now also escaped. Lighting a pipe he strolled slowly but softly, like one escaping, past the pond and past Tomas’s chickencoops, along a fence overgrown with ripe wild grasses bowing their heavy, sunlit heads, down to the grove of weeping birch called the Little Woods. “Zida?” he said, pausing in the faint, hot shade shaken by the ceaseless trilling of crickets in the fields around the grove. No answer. In a cloud of blue pipe-smoke he paused again beside an egg-crate decorated with many little bits of figured cloth and colored paper. On the mossy, much-trodden ground in front of it lay a wooden coat hanger. In one of the compartments of the crate was an eggshell painted gold, in another a bit of quartz, in another a breadcrust. Nearby, a small girl lay sound asleep with her shoes off, her rump higher than her head. The baron sat down on the moss near her, relit his pipe, and contemplated the egg-crate. Presently he tickled the soles of the child’s feet. She snorted. When she began to wake, he took her onto his lap.

  “What is that?”

  “A trap for catching a unicorn.” She brushed hair and leafmold off her face and arranged herself more comfortably on him.

  “Caught any?”

  “No.”

  “Seen any?”

  “Paul and I found some tracks.”

  “Split-hoofed ones, eh?”

  She nodded. Delicately through twilight in the baron’s imagination walked their neighbor’s young white pig, silver between birch trunks.

  “Only young girls can catch them, they say,” he murmured, and then they sat still for a long time.

  “Time for dinner,” he said. “All the tablecloths and knives and forks are packed. How shall we eat?”

  “With our fingers!” She leapt up, sprang away. “Shoes,” he ordered, and laboriously she fitted her small, cool, dirty feet into leather sandals, and then, shouting “Come on, papa!” was off. Quick and yet reluctant, seeming not to follow and yet never far behind her, he came on between the long vague shadows of the birch trees, along the fence, past the chickencoops and the shining pond, into captivity.

  They all sat on the ground under the Four Elms. There was cold ham, pickles, cold fried eggplant with salt, hard bread and hard red wine. Elm leaves like thin coins stuck to the bread. The pure, void, windy sky of after-sunset reflected in the pond and in the wine. Stanislas and Paul had a wrestling match and dirt flew over the remains of the ham; the baroness and Rosa, lamenting, dusted the ham. The boys went off to run cars through the tunnel in High Cliff, and discuss what ruin the winter rains might cause. For it would rain. All the nine months they were gone from Asgard rain would beat on the roads and hills, and the tunnel would collapse. Stanislas lifted his head a moment thinking of the Oak in winter when he had never seen it, the roots of the tree that upheld the world drinking dark rain underground. Zida rode clear round the house twice on the shoulders of the unicorn, screaming loudly for pure joy, for eating outside on the ground with fingers, for the first star seen (only from the corner of the eye) over the high fields faint in twilight. Screaming louder with rage she was taken to bed by Rosa, and instantly fell asleep. One by one the stars came out, meeting the eye straight on. One by one the young people went to bed. Tomas with the last half-bottle sang long and hoarsely in the Dorian mode in his room above the stable. Only the baron and his wife remained out in the autumn darkness under leaves and stars.

  “I don’t want to leave,” she murmured.

  “Nor I.”

  “Let’s send the books and clothes on back to town, and stay here without them…”

  “Forever,” he said; but they could not. In the observance of season lies order, which was their realm. They sat on for a while longer, close side by side as lovers of twenty; then rising he said, “Come along, it’s late, F
reya.” They went through darkness to the house, and entered.

  In coats and hats, everyone ate bread and drank hot milk and coffee out on the porch in the brilliant early morning. “The car! It’s coming!” Paul shouted, dropping his bread in the dirt. Grinding and changing gears, headlamps sightlessly flashing, the taxi came, it was there. Zida stared at it, the enemy within the walls, and began to cry. Faithful to the last to the lost cause of summer, she was carried into the taxi head first, screaming, “I won’t go! I don’t want to go!” Grinding and changing gears the taxi started. Stanislas’s head stuck out of the right front window, the baroness’s head out of the left rear, and Zida’s red, desolate, and furious face was pressed against the oval back window, so that those three saw Tomas waving good-bye under the white walls of Asgard in the sunlight in the bowl of hills. Paul had no access to a window; but he was already thinking of the train. He saw, at the end of the smoke and the shining tracks, the light of candles in a high dark dining-room, the stare of a rockinghorse in an attic corner, leaves wet with rain overhead on the way to school, and a grey street shortened by a cold, foggy dusk through which shone, remote and festive, the first streetlight of December.

  But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.

  The Diary of the Rose

  30 August

  Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.

  I promise to write in this notebook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.

  I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.

  As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:

  Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).

  Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior—Violent).

  Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before. I keep feeling as if I was really writing it for Dr. Nades! Perhaps if the diary is useful I can show her some of it, later, and get her advice.

  My guess is that Ana Jest is in menopausal depression and hormone therapy will be sufficient. There! Now let’s see how bad a prognostician I am.

  Will work with both patients under scope tomorrow. It is exciting to have my own patients, I am impatient to begin. Though, of course, teamwork was very educational.

  31 August

  Half-hour scope session with Ana J. at 8:00. Analyzed scope material, 11:00–17:00. N.B.: Adjust right-brain pickup next session! Weak visual Concrete. Very little aural, weak sensory, erratic body image. Will get lab analyses tomorrow of hormone balance.

  It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!

  I realised this first in Dr. Ramia’s class when we studied a tape from a very famous successful person, and I noticed that the subject had never looked at a tree, never touched one, did not know any difference between an oak and a poplar, or even between a daisy and a rose. They were all just “trees” or “flowers” to him, apprehended schematically. It was the same with people’s faces, though he had tricks for telling them apart: mostly he saw the name, like a label, not the face. That was an Abstract mind, of course, but it can be even worse with the Concretes, whose perceptions come in a kind of undifferentiated sludge—bean soup with a pair of shoes in it.

  But aren’t I “going native”? I’ve been studying a depressive’s thoughts all day and have got depressed. Look, I wrote up there, “It is depressing.” I see the value of this diary already. I know I am over-impressionable.

  Of course, that is why I am a good psychoscopist. But it is dangerous.

  No session with F. Sorde today, since sedation had not worn off. TRTU referrals are often so drugged that they cannot be scoped for days.

  REM scoping session with Ana J. at 4:00 tomorrow. Better go to bed!

  1 September

  Dr. Nades says the kind of thing I wrote yesterday is pretty much what she had in mind, and invited me to show her this diary again whenever I am in doubt. Spontaneous thoughts—not the technical data, which are recorded in the files anyhow. Cross nothing out. Candor all-important.

  Ana’s dream was interesting but pathetic. The wolf who turned into a pancake! Such a disgusting, dim, hairy pancake, too. Her visuality is clearer in dream, but the feeling tone remains low (but remember: you contribute the affect—don’t read it in). Started her on hormone therapy today.

  F. Sorde awake, but too confused to take to scope room for session. Frightened. Refused to eat. Complained of pain in side. I thought he was unclear what kind of hospital this is, and told him there was nothing wrong with him physically. He said, “How the hell do you know?” which was fair enough, since he was in a straitjacket, due to the V notation on his chart. I examined and found bruising and contusion, and ordered X ray, which showed two ribs cracked. Explained to patient that he had been in a condition where forcible restraint had been necessary to prevent self-injury. He said, “Every time one of them asked a question the other one kicked me.” He repeated this several times, with anger and confusion. Paranoid delusional system? If it does not weaken as the drugs wear off, I will proceed on that assumption. He responds fairly well to me, asked my name when I went to see him with the X-ray plate, and agreed to eat. I was forced to apologise to him, not a good beginning with a paranoid. The rib damage should have been marked on his chart by the referring agency or by the medic who admitted him. This kind of carelessness is distressing.

  But there’s good news too. Rina (Autism Study subject 4) saw a first-person sentence today. Saw it: in heavy, black, primer print, all at once in the high Con foreground: I want to sleep in the big room. (She sleeps alone because of the feces problem.) The sentence stayed clear for over 5 seconds. She was reading it in her mind just as I was reading it on the holoscreen. There was weak subverbalisation, but not subvocalisation, nothing on the audio. She has not yet spoken, even to herself, in the first person. I told Tio about it at once and he asked her after the session, “Rina, where do you want to sleep?”—“Rina sleep in the big room.” No pronoun, no conative. But one of these days she will say I want—aloud. And on that build a personality, maybe, at last: on that foundation. I want, therefore I am.

  There is so much fear. Why is there so much fear?

  4 September

  Went to town for my two-day holiday. Stayed with B. in her new flat on the north bank. Three rooms to herself!!! But I don’t really like those old buildings, there are rats and roaches, and it feels so old and strange, as if somehow th
e famine years were still there, waiting. Was glad to get back to my little room here, all to myself but with others close by on the same floor, friends and colleagues. Anyway I missed writing in this book. I form habits very fast. Compulsive tendency.

  Ana much improved: dressed, hair combed, was knitting. But session was dull. Asked her to think about pancakes, and there it came filling up the whole Uncon dimension, the hairy, dreary, flat wolf-pancake, while in the Con she was obediently trying to visualize a nice cheese blintz. Not too badly: colors and outlines already stronger. I am still willing to count on simple hormone treatment. Of course they will suggest ECT, and a co-analysis of the scope material would be perfectly possible, we’d start with the wolf-pancake, etc. But is there any real point to it? She has been a bakery packager for 24 years and her physical health is poor. She cannot change her life situation. At least with good hormone balance she may be able to endure it.

  F. Sorde: rested but still suspicious. Extreme fear reaction when I said it was time for his first session. To allay this I sat down and talked about the nature and operation of the psychoscope. He listened intently and finally said, “Are you going to use only the psychoscope?”

  I said Yes.

  He said, “Not electroshock?”

  I said No.

  He said, “Will you promise me that?”

  I explained that I am a psychoscopist and never operate the electroconvulsive therapy equipment, that is an entirely different department. I said my work with him at present would be diagnostic, not therapeutic. He listened carefully. He is an educated person and understands distinctions such as “diagnostic” and “therapeutic.” It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust. He came with me docilely, but when we entered the scope room he stopped and turned white at sight of the apparatus. I made Dr. Aven’s little joke about the dentist’s chair, which she always used with nervous patients. F.S. said, “So long as it’s not an electric chair!”