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Monday
Eleven months ago—while Joe Biden was still president—I turned to the Ursula K. Le Guin short story “Things” to better understand why certain North Carolina victims of Hurricane Helene rejected the governmental efforts to aid them. As I noted at the time,
MAGA thugs have been threatening workers from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in their rescue and clean-up efforts after the two hurricanes. Meanwhile Marjorie Taylor Green—she of “Jewish space lasers” fame—has informed us that Democrats are sending the hurricanes to devastate Trump areas.
In her end-of-days narrative, which bears certain resemblances to Nevil Shute’s 1957 apocalyptic novel On the Beach, Le Guin imagines hysteria seizing the population. We never learn what the impending apocalypse entails, just how the island population reacts to it. With the exception of the protagonist and a woman friend, everyone becomes either a “Rager” or a “Weeper,” either destroying “things” or passively retreating into lamentation.
The brick builder Lif, however, has a different response, which I thought of the other day after encountering an essay by fascism expert Tim Snyder. The historian wrote that, although the president’s attacks on American democracy represent a dire threat, even small actions can start opening up cracks in the assault, leading to its eventual and inevitable collapse. As he put it, “every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist.”
We have our own Ragers and Weepers amongst those rooting for a democratic future. Democratic Ragers are not necessarily attacking optimists like Lif, as the Ragers in story threaten to, but they are subject to panic. Meanwhile our Weepers include the “Eeyore Democrats” that I’ve described in a past post.
Lif responds to the end-of-the-world threat by building a brick causeway into the sea, which may seem as pointless as the small acts of protest, kindness, and solidarity that Snyder mentions. Lif escapes the wrath of the Ragers because they think he’s just throwing the bricks away:
Next day he went on carrying bricks down, load after load, and if the Ragers watched him they thought him busy on their own kind of work. The slope of the beach out to deep water was gradual, so that he could keep building without ever working above water. He had started at low tide so that his work would never be laid bare. At high tide it was hard, dumping the bricks and trying to lay them in rough courses with the whole sea boiling in his face and thundering over his head, but he kept at it. Towards evening he brought down long iron rods and braced what he had built, for a crosscurrent tended to undermine his causeway about eight feet from its beginning. He made sure that even the tips of the rods were underwater at low tide, so that no Rager might suspect an affirmation was being made.
So what hope for this affirmation? Optimism in the face of Trumpism can seem similarly hopeless. The situation in the story is certainly desperate:
By God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the end of it–I’ll swim there! Now then, don’t cry, dear heart. Would I leave you and the little rat here by yourselves?
And so they venture out:
As they went on the buffeting of the waves got stronger. The tide was coming in. The outer breakers wet their clothes, chilled their flesh, drenched their hair and faces. They reached the end of his long work. There lay the beach a little way behind them, the sand dark under the cliff over which stood the silent, paling sky. Around them was wild water and foam. Ahead of them was the unresting water, the great abyss, the gap.
A breaker hit them on its way to the shore and they staggered; the baby, waked by the sea’s hard slip, cried, a little wail in the long, cold hissing mutter of the sea always saying the same thing.
If you’ve marched in anti-Trump rallies and tried contacting your red-state legislators, perhaps you’ve experienced a version of the woman’s reaction:
Oh, I can’t! cried the mother, but she gripped the man’s hand more firmly and came on at his side.
Then the unexpected happens although Le Guin deliberately keeps it vague:
Lifting his head to take the last step from what he had done towards no shore, he saw the shape riding the western water, the leaping light, the white flicker like a swallow’s breast catching the break of day. It seemed as if voices rang over the sea’s voice. What is it? he said, but her head was bowed to her baby, trying to soothe the little wail that challenged the vast babbling of the sea. He stood still and saw the whiteness of the sail, the dancing light above the waves, dancing on towards them and towards the greater light that grew behind them.
And then:
Wait, the call came from the form that rode the grey waves and danced on the foam, Wait! The voices rang very sweet, and as the sail leaned white above him he saw the faces and the reaching arms, and heard them say to him, Come, come on the ship, come with us to the Islands.
Hold on, he said softly to the woman, and they took the last step.
Le Guin’s point with this ambiguous ending is that we can only do what we can do, joining our hands and stepping forth into the unknown. After that, who knows? The image of them in a broiling sea reminds me of one of Dickinson’s most beloved poems. After first comparing hope to a bird—“that thing with feathers”—the poet turns to other analogies:
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Sore indeed is the storm. Soldier on.
