mahiwaga

Since I sped right through Tehanu, I decided to keep going on to The Other Wind, and again, I am astounded by the faint echoes of things that I once knew, or had been told, once upon a time, in that imaginary place that was my childhood. My mind tries to reach for symmetry, for congruity, understanding that within every story, however fantastic, there is a bit of reality, that a story is a lie we use to tell the truth.

I believe that what separates humans from other animals is that we can imagine what-is-not. Even crazier, we can cause what-is-not to become.

Hopefully none of the following will make any sense if you've never read any of the Earthsea Cycle, as perhaps my meandering ruminations may spoil some of the magic of this series. In any case, you have been warned, and if you want to read the cycle without any preconceptions, it would be wise to skip the rest of this entry.

Earthsea has always made me think of the Philippines. Not that the Philippines is the only island nation in the world, but obviously, it is the one I am most familiar with. Moreover, the Hardic people of Earthsea are brown skinned, usually without much facial and body hair.

The modern nation-state of the Republic of the Philippines, however, is an artificial entity created by colonialism. It was not until I took a class in Southeast Asian Studies that I realized that my people's history, like the history of all ancient peoples, is not bounded by delineations of territory. I came to realize that, though my people are not really empire-builders (although some have created empires), the region of the Earth touched by the culture of my people is indeed imperial in scope, as far east as Madagascar, as far west as the Easter Islands, perhaps even the mainland of South America itself. That the island now called Taiwan may have been our ancestral homeland, and that what is now the Philippines become our bridge to the world (as it still is, I suppose), never becoming completely trammelled by an imperial power, as the islands to the south did in time.

In the beginning was freedom, because freedom and survival were one and the same, and if you did not survive, then you did not live.

Bondage was a thing created by religion, indeed, created even by our own religion, the Ways of the Sea and the Sky, the traditions of the animists, perhaps the reason why Catholicism (and Islam) was so easily adaptable to the environment.

The thing I learned about the animistic beliefs is the importance of boundaries. Of categories. Of names, i.e., labels. (This made sense to me, as many Filipinos I've met seem to be the most prejudiced people I know.) That which respects its proper boundaries is inert and safe. That which crosses boundaries is dangerous, and, well, powerful. So they told me that in the old days, it was the babaylan who was the spiritual center, the bridge, as it were, from the realm of physical objects and the realm of spiritual energy. The babaylan, who was ambiguously male and female. (And the word somehow became corrupted to bakla, the term for homosexual, which, perhaps mistakenly on my part, doesn't seem to have the same connotations that "faggot" has in English.)

Rivers were sacred things, not be lightly crossed. And if you strayed from the boundaries of the village, you were fair game for the spirits of the forest. The creation of the kris blade was an infusion of power: the elements of fire, metal, and water came together to forge that which was meant to sunder.

I have yet to articulate it all sensibly, but suffice it to say, learning this, it made sense why, despite being an island nation, descendants of a race of avid seafarers, many Filipinos did not know how to swim. Why, even with the coming of Catholicism, the animist ways still survived, couched in terms of the Roman catechism, perhaps, but nonetheless, plainly visible if you knew where to look.

So a woman who kept her long hair wild and free, unbound, as it were, was also dangerous. And to step over a person was as dangerous as crossing a river, or crossing the boundary between the village and the forest. Things that cut were practically sacred—tools used precisely for the breaking of boundaries.

There is more that I am forgetting.

But what does this have to do with Earthsea?

Well, as another excursus, there is the creation myth. In Earthsea, the Creator is named Segoy, who happens to be a dragon, and before Segoy spoke the words of Making, there was only sea and sky. My favorite version of the Creation myth of my people involves the sea and sky as well, and the trickster bird Manaul (who reminds me of Loki of the Norse, Inktomi of the Native Americans) who provoked the sky into throwing down rocks from the sky (meteors?!?) upon the sea to create land so that he could have a place to rest. (Is it mere coincidence and my apophenic mind to realize that, while dragons have traditionally been reptilian, reptiles have been discovered to be related to birds, just in our own era, and perhaps there were dragons in the long forgotten past before the human race had memory, although I still don't understand the breathing of fire.)

And, though perhaps not in as straightforward a way, in both cultures (the imaginary and the real), a name is used to bind. In Earthsea, giving a true name causes one to have power over whatever is named. In Southeast Asia, to give something a name is to define its boundaries, and thus bind its otherwise dangerous power. (Somehow, I can't articulate why, this makes me think of Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2. Each atom of creation is bound by Bohr's quantum energy levels, and the counterintuitive nuclear forces, without which the Big Bang would've just cooled off and faded away probably without creating matter at all. But I simplify things I don't really understand.)

And death: in the East of Earthsea, in the Kargad Lands, they believe that when we die, our spirits are yielded unto the universe, and are then reborn anew, without memory of the last life. Likewise, my animistic forebears believed that death was final, that the energy of our spirit was yielded back into the storehouse of energy in the universe, that our lives were ever bounded by life and death.

And here is the apparently political point that Le Guin makes. The obsession of the afterlife has caused an imbalance in Earthsea's Tao-like Equilibrium. In the West of Earthsea (although not the Uttermost West), the Hardic people believe that when you die, you cross the wall of stones (again, with the crossing), and enter upon the "Dry Land," where the stars do not change and no other living thing moves, and it is always night time, and the spirits of the dead do not see each other, such that loved ones will walk past one another and not recognize each other. (As someone else noted—I'll try to track it down someday—this is very much in tune with the original Jewish understanding of Sheol, which was, in many ways, the precursor to the Christian vision of Hell. We find out (this is a spoiler) that this Wall was created by humans to try to cheat death, and that this Wall caused what should've been Paradise to turn into the Dry Land, and only when they die do they realize their folly, that what they have created is not eternal life, but merely, eternal consciousness of being dead. And thus, they cannot be reborn, and are bound to this twilight existence, with no surcease of suffering.

I don't know why, but my ancestors' version of the afterlife seems to ring true to me. In the sense that there is no afterlife. When you die, that's all there is, there ain't no mo', and while there probably is a God, there is no heaven, not in the way we understand it. There are no pearly gates, there is no happily ever after. After the end and before the beginning is the void, and all we have is that space in between. A dead mind—no, that makes no sense, because what is dead cannot change, and what cannot change cannot be a mind. When you cease to have a mind, you cease to be, and we cannot imagine the void because to be able to imagine, you must have a mind, but to understand the void you would have to not have a mind. The Godelian paradox. You may define everything except what is not. You cannot truly define what is false. Again, I simplify matters which I have little understanding.

And I can't help but reflect how, despite the fact that the New Testament is in fact a handbook for revolution, that Jesus was a revolutionary, a subversive—that is another story, the Christian faith seems to have been completely perverted into a tool of oppression. Instead of reminding its people that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the first will be last and the last will be first, and that Jesus came to divide not to unite, to set son against father, daughter against mother, for much of its history, instead it preached that we should make ready for the afterlife, and that any suffering in this world was to be borne with patience. That the status quo was the will of God, that the abuse and oppression caused by the wealthy and the powerful was how it was supposed to be. I think it is only in the past generation that some parts of the Christian faith realized that their mission was in this world, not the next, and that if God was truly loving, then oppression would not exist, that oppression was a human-made thing, a transgression against the laws of God. Although many Christians still live in the Dark Ages, and use the fear of God's punishment as weapons against their enemies.

And so, perhaps, Roman Catholicism is the Wall which my people have accepted, a false promise of an afterlife that excuses the misery caused by the wealthy and the powerful.

But I have strayed.

In any case, the similarity is only faint, I realize. The languages Le Guin uses has nothing in common with Austronesian tongues, really, except that they are essentially quite alien from English, and from the Romance languages that Westerners are most familiar with.

But still, Le Guin was the daughter of the Kroebers, those infamous anthropologists who exploited the last of the Yani, and who have a building named after them at UC Berkeley. Her books show this influence (that of the white man's sience of anthropology, and also perhaps its cultural antidote that was born at Cal, ethnic studies) Perhaps it is just the commonality of a mythical island homeland (for, being an American, my imaginings of the Philippines are doomed to always be mythical) and the philosophies that were born in that cradle of democracy, the University of California.

I have wandered far afield. I will stop here to regain my bearings.

I just remembered what else I meant to write.

It comes full circle, I suppose. As I mentioned before, both Le Guin and Dick have ties to Berkeley. And, although William Gibson indeed coined the term "The Matrix" long before the Internet as we know it existed and the Wachowski Brothers started thinking about their great project, I think it is Dick's story Valis that first gave form to the nightmares inhabiting the world of the Wachowskis' "Matrix."

What does this have to do with Earthsea?

Immortality, and the price that must be paid.

Now, granted, this is me reading between the lines again, but, as someone else wrote somewhere on the net, it makes more sense that the Matrix was created voluntarily. The machines did not enslave us. We enslaved ourselves. Imagine, for example, that we created these human farms, because we wanted to live forever, and many prognosticators note that the only way we can live forever is to leave our weak, decaying bodies and encase our spirits in metal, or perhaps live free on the electronic ether as pulses of light and electricity. So we programmed the Architect and told him our specifications for our electronic paradise, and he set about to make it so, to the extreme perfection that is a machine's wont, and perfection, as the Architect has noted, failed miserably. So the next incarnation of the Matrix was akin to our normal, grueling lives, and, perversely, this made people happier, and the Architect thought his job was done, except that what people want is not to live forever, but to be free. Because what is the use of living forever as an unchanging, unthinking program, really? It's one thing if you are like the maintenance programs that handle the pigeons, or, in fact if you are an animal with rudimentary sentience, or, as in Earthsea, you are a dragon who cast off the material world a long time ago. All you have to think about is the now, if even that. You perform your function. You obey your impulses. You live without asking questions, and then you die, eventually. You have refused to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and so you do not fret about the afterlife, and the undoubtable impending judgement. But, once knowing good and evil, you must choose, again and again, from moment to moment. As explicated by Camus, it is the existentialist dilemma. To know that your next move, for good or for ill, will reverberate across space-time, even if you don't believe in an afterlife per se, well, I think this is a horrible thing, and yet, this is what we wanted. What we chose. And since, if the story of the Fall of Humanity from Paradise is true, we once chose to know good and evil, it is against our nature to unlearn it. These become the rebels who flee to Zion, the ones who trust to choice, the ones who refuse to become automatic. (The comparison with the dragons rings false, now that I think about it. Theirs is, as a fallen priest once told me in another context, a third way. The animals, the maintenance programs, they are like brute force algorithms that have no use for thinking. But the dragons are truly free in a way that we can only hope for, though cannot really imagine.)

Now I am reinterpreting "The Matrix."

What follows from this is the realization that it is not enough to simply rebel against the System. When our fearless heroes are in the Matrix, they have superhuman powers, they are able to exploit the System and use the System against itself. But this is not freedom, only reaction. Another automatic response, to resist that which seeks to destroy you. The only true way out is to get out of the System, even if this requires sacrificing all the power you have accumulated in the Matrix.

Life is not simply a dichotomy between being free and being bound, although once you start binding things to yourself, you are bound to continue doing so until the weight is so great you can no longer lift your head up and death becomes a welcome release.

But I know in my heart of hearts that freedom is to be enjoyed now, that the oppressors must somehow be converted (one person at a time), and that Jesus was dead-serious when he said that we must prepare for the Kingdom of God. It won't be a kingdom that is handed to us scot-free. We really are supposed to build it from the ground up.

But here is the last of my mystical mumbo-jumbo. The twin pillars of the new economy—information technology and biotechnology (which if you think about it, are really the same thing, since they both deal with code, albeit in starkly different media)—are leading us to longevity, and perhaps maybe eventually immortality, and on the other side, the four horseman of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, and death, the forces of reaction, of trying to maintain the status quo of kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten, might makes right, the rule of irrational beasts, and each side is a vision of grave imbalance. This one thing perhaps statisticians and Taoists believe in common: the truth lies somewhere in the middle, undefinable, ever changing, but nonetheless there. We cannot pretend we are automatic programs, trying to live life without thinking. Decisions must be made, and no algorithm in all the world will save us.

OK, I'm done.

Last night I really did dream. It was kind of depressing in a familiar sort of way, and I was not surprised when I woke alone. But what struck me wasn't the sex (although there was that in the dream), but holding her in my arms, trusting each other.

But enough of self-pity.

Still, I wonder.

Apparently, I am perseverating, thinking again and again of Le Guin's Earthsea, and now I think upon the matter of male and female. Gender roles (which Le Guin magnificently examined in The Left Hand of Darkness.) Are the stereotypes she makes in the Earthsea Cycle true to life, or are they merely a gimmick to explain some fantasy mechanics? (Yes still, it rings truer than the artificiality of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time dichotomy between saidar and saidin, the female and male halves of the One Power. The ying and yang feature significantly in this fantasy series as well.)

Even in this day and age, is it true that some things are still looked upon as "a man's job," while other things are "women's work"?

Although I must say, medicine is culturally behind at least a generation. The fact that the previous generation of doctors was white and male is still apparent, although, I must say, the majority of my teachers have been women. And yet, is there something about healing that is inherently female, somehow?

Anyway. I thought about my loneliness, and the solitarity of an Earthsea mage. In Le Guin's fantasy, there is a superstition that men, in order to have magical powers, must be celibate. (Although I suppose it is not far from the superstition believed by many of the religious. I shudder to wonder about the incidence of pederasty in the magehood.... Hey, I'm not a pervert. It's just that I finished reading Tehanu and just watched "Gothika.") And so wizards lived alone, not just without a woman, but often without true friends, except for perhaps other mages, and maybe not even those.

And, not to elevate what I'm doing beyond what it is—it is a tradition upheld throughout history, nothing more, nothing less—but it struck me how similar being a physician is to being a wizard. As Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn noted, "That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening. The rest is technique." What we do is descended from the priesthood, anyway. We are the gatekeepers to the spiritual world, easing babies into life, guiding the elderly out of life. We are the keepers of specialized knowledge, the prognosticators, the diviners of hidden processes.

After an intellectual debate I had with a fellow classmate, I thought: what is it that separates the practicing attending physician from the 4th year medical student? Surely, it is not sheer knowledge, for anyone can pick up a textbook or journal and read, and if you have a good mimind, probably understand. I truly believe that, for lack of anything more precise, it is mostly wisdom that makes the difference. A virtue that can only be acquired by experience, by trusting in your existing fund of knowledge, by building upon this steady base. The structure must already be built, the mast upright. We have but to raise the sails and gather the wind. What we must learn mostly in the intervening years it to have faith, to stay true to our oath, to have confidence in our craft, and always, always be willing to learn something new.

This is not the first time I've mentally masturbated thinking about this parallel. I remember when I first read the Harry Potter series, that it was strange, how not-unlike medicine and magic are. (After all, as Arthur C Clarke has remarked, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") The discipline required. The personalities that it attracts. The bizarre inferiority complexes that get manifest as arrogance and disdain for fellow human beings. As there is black magic and white magic, there is surgery and there is internal medicine. Sometimes what we do is empty of power except for the ritual. The orders written are like incantations, the drugs prescribed like magical ingredients, potions, and elixirs.

Someone else had written that the physician is this age's incarnation of the priest, the wizard. After all, in past generations, the line between magic and medicine was indeed murky. There are witch doctors, medicine men, healers. This is the tradition we are derived from. (And also, this same someone pointed out that entertainers, specifically, actors, were also derived from this tradition.) I think precisely because of the technological prowess of our era, not a few of us are longing for some real magic.

But back to my point: in Le Guin's books, the only men who know how to wash dishes, do laundry, sew their own clothes, are the wizards, because of their predilection to celibacy, and the lack of anyone else to do it for them. And I think back to when A laughed as I ironed my shirts, teasing E that he should learn how to iron from me, and after re-reading these Earthsea books, I wonder if there really is a connection to having knowledge and being alone, as if the two things were mutually exclusive. (No, I am not talking about knowing how to do "women's work"—I am using Le Guin's words just for simplicity sake, and I hope you won't read any paternalism in it. There is just the fact that I am trying to rationalize my solitude by noting how much time studying the Art takes.)

To cut to the chase (I don't even know how I am making this conceptual leap), is there really something about being a real man, and is it true that to have knowledge and understanding, you cannot be a man?