COMMENTARY

I do not know if [such verses] qualify precisely as dreams, since they occurred in the state between sleep and waking when one's conscious mind is a spectator or auditor of the fantasia of the unconscious rather than a participant in it; but they are certainly over on the dream side, because there was no conscious control of their development, as there is in the making of a poem when one is possessed by the Daemon but awake. Since the visual and kinetic predominate in so many dreams, I thought it might be interesting to offer examples of totally verbal dreaming or semi-dreaming, which may be commoner among writers, people whose work is all words, than anyone seems to have noticed yet.

[This] occurred... about midnight when I was rather keyed up from writing all evening... I was under the impression that I was making a poem: I memorised it deliberately before falling asleep. Only when I got up in the moming and wrote it down did I realise that I had no idea what it meant, that there were some odd leaps in the syntax, and that in fact I had exerted no conscious control over the thing at all...

I wish, when awake and writing poems, I could achieve as effortless a pattern of inner rhyme as this one has.

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.1, no.2, summer 1980) p.156-7). Poem untitled; "You Cannot Stay Forever" used as search aid only.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Le Guin comments as if the poem's pure wordplay. It's not. The setting echoes the Greek underworld, the model for the land of the dead in her early Earthsea books, written about this time. That first couplet "You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river" could be Ged speaking to Cob the Deathless (since he's already dead) at the climax of The Farthest Shore.

Yet to a reader of the last Earthsea book, The Other Wind, the poem seems a seed of her deep and controversial rethinking of Earthsea. By the final book she tackles metaphysics itself, arguing that men's fear and rejection of women, sex and death all fuse, fueling a hunger for control, freezing death as well as life. "Here they drink dust." Twisted desires twist thought; twisted thought twists physics. The Other Wind restores a pre-patriarchal recycling and reincarnation.

It's exactly the same theme Philip Pullman tackles in The Amber Spyglass, but Le Guin tackles it a decade earlier, with broader mythological scholarship, and, I think, more passion. Because for him it's just a metaphor. She means it.

That arrow fired across the river, that attack on sorrow, is, I think, Le Guin's very first challenge to men's immutable afterworld where all that remains is your name, your fame, your "bootprint on history's face", whether the men are Homeric, Platonic, Monotheistic, Norse, Nazi, Existential, or Atheist. And that opening shot's fired not by her conscious but by a dream, twenty years before the final battle, when Earthsea's dead see the sun at last. Dreams play long.

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