Atdtda23: [46.1i] A passionate heart, 653

[Dave Monroe]

On 12/13/07, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:

> [653.7-9] Old-timers on the crew ... when they first penetrated the
> mountain, prepared to fight frozen rock, had found instead a passionate
> heart, a teeming interiority...

>From Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other
Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics"
(1974) ...

Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association
What is Language?

This question, central to the science of therolinguistics, has been
answered—heuristically—by the very existence of the science. Language
is communication. That is the axiom on which all our theory and
research rest, and from which all our discoveries derive; and the
success of the discoveries testifies to the validity of the axiom. But
to the related, yet not identical question, What is Art? we have not
yet given a satisfactory answer.

Tolstoy, in the book whose title is that very question, answered it
firmly and clearly: Art, too, is communication. This answer has, I
believe, been accepted without examination or criticism by
therolinguists. For example: Why do therolinguists study only animals?

Why, because plants do not communicate.

Plants do not communicate; that is a fact. Therefore plants have no
language; very well; that follows from our basic axiom. But stay! That
does not follow from the basic axiom, but only from the unexamined
Tolstoyan corollary.

What if art is not communicative?

Or, what if some art is communicative, and some art is not?

Ourselves animals, active, predators, we look (naturally enough) for
an active, predatory, communicative art; and when we find it, we
recognise it. The development of this power of recognition and the
skills of appreciation is a recent and glorious achievement.

But I submit that, for all the tremendous advances made by
therolinguistics during the last decades, we are only at the beginning
of our age of discovery. We must not become slaves to our own axioms.
We have not yet lifted our eyes to the vaster horizons before us. We
have not faced the almost terrifying challenge of Plant.

If a non-communicative, vegetative art exists, we must rethink the
very elements of our science, and learn a whole new set of techniques.

For it is simply not possible to bring the critical and technical
skills appropriate to the study of Weasel murder mysteries, or
Batrachian erotica, or the tunnel sagas of the earthworm, to bear on
the art of the redwood or the zucchini.

This is proved conclusively by the failure—a noble failure—of the
efforts of Dr. Srivas, in Calcutta, using time-lapse photography, to
produce a lexicon of Sunflower. His attempt was daring, but doomed to
failure. For his approach was kinetic—a method appropriate to the
communicative arts of the tortoise, the oyster, and the sloth. He saw
the extreme slowness of the kinesis of plants, and only that, as the
problem to be solved.

But the problem was far greater. The art he sought, if it exists, is a
non-communicative art: and probably a non-kinetic one. It is possible
that Time, the essential element, matrix, and measure of all known
animal art, does not enter into vegetable art at all. The plants may
use the meter of eternity. We do not know.

We do not know. All we can guess is that the putative Art of the Plant
is entirely different from the Art of the Animal. What it is, we
cannot say; we have not yet discovered it. Yet I predict with some
certainly that it exists, and that when it is found it will prove to
be, not an action, but a reaction: not a communication, but a
reception. It will be exactly the opposite of the art we know and
recognise. It will be the first passive art known to us.

Can we in fact know it? Can we ever understand it?

It will be immensely difficult. That is clear. But we should not
despair. Remember that so late as the mid-twentieth century, most
scientists, and many artists, did not believe that Dolphin would ever
be comprehensible to the human brain—or worth comprehending! Let
another century pass, and we may seem equally laughable. "Do you
realise," the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, "that
they couldn't even read Eggplant?" And they will smile at our
ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the
newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's
Peak.

And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder
adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate,
transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less
communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic
poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the
earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of
space.

http://interconnected.org/home/more/2007/03/acacia-seeds.html