Ursula K. LeGuin - The Visionary

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Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

THE VISIONARY

by URSULA K. LE GUIN

from Omni October 1984

My mother and aunt said that when I was learning to talk, I talked to people they could not see or

hear, sometimes speaking in our language and sometimes saying words or names they did not know. I

can't remember doing that, but I remember that I could not understand why people said that a room was

empty or that there was nobody in the gardens, because there were always people of different kinds,

everywhere. Mosty they stayed quietly or were going about their doings, or passing through. I had

already learned that nobody talked to them and that they did not often pay heed or answer when I tried to

talk to them, but it had not occurred to me that other people did not see them.

I had a big argument with my cousin once when she said there was nobody in the wash house, and I

had seen a whole group of people there, passing things from hand to hand and laughing silently, as if

they were playing some gambling game. My cousin, who was older than I, said I was lying, and I began

to scream and tried to knock her down. I can feel that same anger now. I was telling what I had seen and

could not believe she had not seen the people in the wash house; I thought she was lying in order to call

me a liar. That anger and shame stayed a long time and made me unwilling to look at the people that

other people didn't see or wouldn't talk about. When I saw them, I looked away until they were gone. I

had thought they were all my kinfolk, people of my household, and seeing them had been companionship

and pleasure to me; but now I felt I could not trust them, since they had got me into trouble. Of course I

had it all backward, but there was nobody to help me get it straight. My family was not much given to

thinking about things, and except for going to school, I went to our heyimas only in the Summer before

the games.

When I turned away from all those people that I had used to see, they went on and did not come back.

Only a few were left, and I was lonely.

I liked to be with my father, Olive of the Yellow Adobe, a man who talked little and was cautious and

gentle in mind and hand. He repaired and reinstalled solar panels and collectors and batteries and lines

and fixtures in houses and outbuildings; all his work was with the Miller's Art. He did not mind if I eame

along if I was quiet, and so I went with him to be away from our noisy, busy household. When he saw

that I liked his art, he began to teach it to me. My mothers were not enthusiastic about that. My

Serpentine grandmother did not like having a Miller for son-in-law, and my mother wanted me to learn

medicine. "If she has the third eye, she ought to put it to good use," they said, and they sent me to the

Doctors Lodge on White Sulfur Creek to learn. Although I learned a good deal there and liked the

teachers, I did not like the work and was impatient with the illnesses and accidents of mortality,

preferring the dangerous, dancing energies my father worked with. I could often see the electrical

current, and there were excitements of feeling, tones of a kind of sweet music barely to be heard, and

tones also of voices speaking and singing, distant and hard to understand, that came when I worked with

the batteries and wires. I did not speak of this to my father. If he felt and heard any of these things, he

preferred to leave them unspoken, outside the house of words.

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Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

My childhood was like everybody's, except that with going to the Doctors Lodge and working with

my father and liking to be alone, perhaps I played less with other children than many children do, after I

was seven or eight years old. Also, though I went all over Telina with my father and knew all the ways

and houses, we never went out of town. My family had no summer house and never even visited the hills.

"Why leave Telina?" my grandmother would say. "Everything is here!" And in summer the town was

pleasant, even when it was hot; so many people were away that there was never a crowd at the wash

house, and houses standing empty were entirely different from houses full of people, and the ways and

gardens and common places were lonesome and lazy and quiet. It was always in summer, often in the

great heat of the afternoon, that I would see the people passing through Telina-na, coming upriver. They

are hard to describe, and I have no idea who they were. They were rather short and walked quietly, alone,

or three or four - one after the other; their limbs were smooth and their faces round, often with some lines

or marks drawn on the lips or chin; their eyes were narrow, and sometimes looked swollen and sore as if

from smoke or weeping. They would go quietly through the town, not looking at it and never speaking,

going upriver. When I saw them I would always say the four heyas. The way they went, silently, gripped

at my heart. They were far from me, walking in sorrow.

When I was nearly twelve years old, my cousin came of age, and the family gave a very big passage

party far her, giving away all kinds of things I didn't even know we had. The following year I came of

age, and we had another big party, though without such lavishness, as we didn't have so much left to

give. I had entered the Blood Lodge just before the Moon, and the party for me was during the Summer

Dance. At the end of the party, there were horse games and races, for the Summer people had come down

from Chukulmas.

I had never been on horseback. The boys and girls who rode in the games and races for Telina brought

a steady mare for me to ride and boosted me up to her back and put the rein in my hand, and off we went.

I felt like the wild swan. That was pure joy. And I could share it with the other young people; we were all

joined by the good feeling of the party and the excitement of the games and races and the beauty and

passion of the horses, who thought it was all their festival. The mare taught me how to ride that day, and

I was on horseback all night dreaming, and the next day, rode again; and on the third day I rode in a race,

on a roan colt from a household in Chukulmas. The colt ran second in the big race when I rode him and

ran first in the match race when the boy who had raised him rode him. In all that glory of festival and

riding and racing and friendship, I left my childhood most joyously, but also I went out of my House, and

got lost from too much being given me at once. I gave my heart to the red colt I rode and to the boy who

rode him, a brother of the Serpentine of Chukulmas.

It was a long time ago and not his fault or doing; he did not know it. The word I write is my word; to

myself let it be brought back.

So the Summer games were over in our town and the horse riders went off downriver to Madidinou

and Ounmalin; and there I was, a thirteen-year-old woman and afoot.

I wore the undyed clothing I had been making all the year before, and I went often to the Blood

Lodge, learning the songs and mysteries. Young people who had been friendly to me at the games

remained friends, and when they found I longed to ride, they shared the horses of their households with

me. I learned to play vetulou and helped with caring for the horses, who were stabled and pastured then

northwest of Moon Creek in Halfhoof Pasture and on Butt Hill. I said at the Doctors Lodge that I wanted

to learn horse doctoring, and so they sent me to learn that art by working with an old man, Striffen, who

was a great doctor of horses and cattle, I would listen to him. He used different kinds of noises, words

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