The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. LeGuin was doing her thing in the 1970's, the years of the hippies and the exploration of Eastern philosophies. The daughter of an anthropologist father and a mother studying psychology, Ursula was coming of age in a family rife with speculative study, cultural observation, academics, feminism, and Jungian philosophy.
I'm jealous.

I have to admit right here and now that I had to go online to figure out what, exactly, I'd just been reading...  
Turns out it's about Taoism and Utilitarianism.
No, seriously.  ☯



The Lathe of Heaven opens up with a dream sequence, a dream of a jellyfish floating in a vast sea. I'm sharing that dream sequence here because the writing grabbed me immediately and I know you will love it:

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
(Bold text is mine.)

I'm starting with this quote from the very first page of The Lathe of Heaven because jellyfish seems to be a theme of the book because the main character, George Orr, is frequently compared to a jellyfish. A man moving through life, letting ebbs and flows carry him along, never quite making a plan or a choice. Yet, somehow, he becomes the hero; the strength of the whole ocean is behind him, afterall. 
Stay tuned.

∾

Ursula Le Guin

At the opening of the book, our main character, George Orr, is waking up from a strange dream (stick around, dreams play heavy in this book) and he is immediately confronted with medical first responders, and confusion. It turns out that George is being busted for overdosing on medication, medication designed to keep him awake at all costs. We soon learn that, in this strange dystopian age, George's medications are being monitored by the state and he is known to be using his medications incorrectly.

Because of this culturally gross abuse of medications, George is directed to see a therapist in order to avoid stronger punishment. While meeting with his new therapist, Dr. William Haber, a sleep and dream specialist, we learn that George's misuse of the pep pills is almost understandable. It turns out that George is taking the medications to avoid sleeping, not because he is afraid of nightmares or sleepwalking, but because sometimes when George dreams, his dreams come true. His dreams change reality.

At first glance, this sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? 
Who doesn't want to have their dreams become reality?
For example, just last night, and this is true, I was dreaming of Benedict Cumberbatch. Just as I asked him to come back to my hotel room and he said yes, my cell phone alarm went off. 

Long story short, I need a new phone...
😉

The problem, though, even with this sweet problem, George keeps finding himself making terrible things happen through his dreaming, even when he has the best of intentions. Thus, he tries to stay awake indefinitely.
Sadly, upon entering into the care of Dr. Haber, George does not realize that he, George, has come under the thumb of a power-hungry man who attempts to bring George's dream powers into his own control.

Image by  Eleanor Wood

Dr. Haber seeks, first, to control George's dreams by planting suggestions into the dreams. For example, each time George goes to sleep in the doctor's office, he wakes up to grander and grander office spaces occupied by Dr. Haber because Dr. Haber is using the dreaming as a way to improve his own life, in addition to trying to make improvements in the wide world. 

Unfortunately George's dreaming, in spite of Dr. Haber's direction and control, leads to greater and greater problems in the wide world, beginning with the town in which this book is set, Portland Oregon, which begins experiencing terrible volcanic activity from the formerly-dormant Mount Hood. The problems from the dreaming become more and more awful, including huge losses of the population, alien invasion, even the end of the world.
Did they even THINK of a dream catcher?

In his disgust with George being jellyfish-like, Dr. Haber works out some high-falutin' scientific device and plans to move the Trumped-Up dreaming from George's head to his own head, megalomaniac style. I'm going to leave the cute technologies to the reader to find out. Suffice it to say that this book was written in 1971 and computers were in their, what comes before infancy, zygote-hood. Dr. Haber's device is a bit hilarious, but deviously so. Lucky for us, George figures out the plan and saves us all from a fate worse than death...he rescues us from the end of All That Is.


Weirdly, even though George is quite depressed and sad, although he is quite wishy-washy, and although he is really quite dull, it is his propensity for mediocrity and the Middle Way that saves us all. He is quite exceptional for his mediocrity. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the book is when George is getting results back from the personality test administered by Doctor Haber. Here's a part of the test results, a short excerpt that actually made me laugh:

I believe it's time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly. Of course, I'm using the lay word 'sane,' which has no precise objective meaning; in quantifiable terms, you're median. Your extroversion/introversion score, for instance, was 49.1. That is, you're more introverted than extroverted by .9 of a degree. That's not unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. 

Furthermore, the doctor, in his case notes describes George as Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional.  
How Dr. Haber despises George's boring weakness, his jellyfishness.


Now what was that about Taoism and Utilitarianism?
 
Consider when Le Guin was writing. 1971. She was living during a time when, culturally, the US was deep into the hippies (think counterculture and the sexual revolution), the Vietnam War (think of the war on TV each night and those fighting the war), Civil Rights (think MLK and his I Have a Dream speech), Women's Lib (think Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique), Space Exploration (think Apollos 1 and 11), Race Relations (think segregation and the protests to segregation), threats of nuclear war (think the Cuban Missile Crisis), protests in the streets (think Che Guevara, among others), and the Beatles.

As a result of these and many other influences, Eastern mysticism became hip and cool and trendy about this time. I remember it. So Le Guin explores her own Taoism journey right here in the pages of this book.
 

So what is Taoism?

According to about fifty websites, Taoism or Daoism, is a philosophy centered on the belief that life is normally happy, but should be lived with balance and virtue. Taoism is also known as The Middle Way or The Path.

Cool. So what is Utilitarianism? 

Utilitarianism is a theory in philosophy about right and wrong actions. It says that the morally best action is the one that makes the most overall happiness or "utility" (usefulness). The greatest good for the greatest number of people.

And how do these two concepts interact in this book?

Easy, surprisingly.
George is a walking, talking Taoism symbol, almost like Yoda (not). And, it turns out, the doctor represents utilitarianism, though a slightly messed up version of it. Although the doctor and George experiment with dreams about creating a happier, better world for us all, Utilitarianism, none of these dreams actually come to fruition without serious complications. It isn't until George insists on walking the Tao way, the center, the simple way, do we see some semblance of joy and peace. 

Is this simplified?

YES.
I'm no philosophy major.

But I'll keep trying:


☯
The yin-yang symbol fits here. In every good is an equal bit of bad...just like the stuff resulting from the good-intentions of the dream.
SEE, I'm getting it!

The greatest good for the greatest number of people—we can all get on board with that one, can't we? Utilitarianism seeks to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. While the principles of utilitarianism might seem pretty reasonable, in The Lathe of Heaven we see how things can go horribly, horribly wrong, even with the best of intentions. And even more horribly wrong in the hands of the ego-maniacal Dr. Haber.

Anytime these man seek to alter the reality of things, they unbalance things, move things from the center, and create chaos. It is only in the middle where we are safe, happy, productive.


Le Guin, in this tiny little novel, also explores subjects of race, love, power, good vs. evil, ...even freedom is explored right here in this tiny little book. And far better than this choppy blog post.
I'd say go and read it!

I'm giving this book a total of seven stars for the number of times I had to go online and remind myself about the various bits of philosophy that hid in the text. SO worth it.

Do you think you'll go and read it?

The Fifth Doll by Charlie N. Holmberg

I started wondering why I'm writing these blog posts about the books that I read. The internet is populated by so many wonderful and useful book sites. Goodreads, Literary Hub, Bookbub (recommended by my mother-in-law, Sharon), LibraryThing, and so many more book review sites exist, not even to mention Amazon.com, that it would seem that a teeny tiny little blog like this would be kind of ridiculous. But I have to be honest.

I don't write these book blog posts for you.
I write them for me.

I read so much that I actually forget my books, and quickly too.
These blog posts about books are almost entirely so that I can look back and think DANG, That was a great book; I'd forgotten!
😆

And I do do that! I've already forgotten about half of the books that I've reviewed already.  lol  I'll look back at a book and think, HEY, I forgot about that one!  Ridiculous and embarrassing to admit, but there you are.

So you, the reader, are the very fortunate beneficiaries of my terrible memory.

Before I look again at The Lathe of Heaven  by Ursula Le Guin I'm going to give you a quick taste of a quick little book I picked up from the library: The Fifth Doll  by Charlie N. Holmberg. Holmberg is fairly well known for her The Paper Magician series of fantasy books. I haven't read them at all and knew nothing about this author before this. If you've read The Paper Magician, I'd love to hear from you about it!

Instead, at my library, I was browsing and picked up The Fifth Doll, a small little book with the cover above with the colorful little matroyshka dolls. The description was so compelling I slapped it onto the pile of books I was bringing home to read...and it waited there on my living room table for about a week before I picked it up.

The Fifth Doll is fantasy or sci-fi, kind of a mixture. But even more, it reads like a Russian story of folklore or like a fable, which is cool. I've not always been a reader of sci-fi, and I certainly have not been a reader of fantasy. But as I get older, I enjoy the mind-stretching, the thought experiment of it all. In the case of this book, I read a couple of pages and thought, Nah, this isn't my cup of tea, and I started to put it down.

But I then thought, Wait a minute. What if it's a hidden gem?  Well, just a few pages later - I was hooked and could not wait to explore what was going on. Let me bring you in on a quick taste of the book.


Matrona is a very satisfied young woman living on the outskirts of a small, peaceful village with her parents. She and her parents had recently arranged a marriage with a young man from a good family in the village (Feodor) and Matrona was busy helping her parents with the milking of the cows and the churning of the butter and she was supporting her best friend who was about to give birth. A very simple and lovely life.

One day Matrona stumbles upon a paint brush on the street and she goes to return it to an elderly, rather isolating man in the village, Slava. Upon knocking on the door she hears sounds within the odd little house, though Slava does not answer her knocking, which cause her to be concerned for his safety. She enters Slava's house, going deeper into the house, as she hears sounds and fears that he is injured and in need of help.

What she finds, instead, is a bird making sounds. But also a peculiar little room with tables and shelves, all covered with wooden matroyshka dolls. Upon further inspection, she notices that each of the dolls is painted to resemble people in her little village. Matrona picks up a doll resembling her father and, accidentally, turns the two pieces that make up the doll...ever so slightly.

When she returns home, her father is behaving oddly, clumsily falling about, some confusion... After a bit, Matrona begins to wonder if the doll in his image has anything to do with her father's behavior.

Naturally she has to go back and open her own doll...so expect some magic, some dark magic, some secrets, and expect the whole down to blow wide open!



I'd love to give you another author to compare this writing style to but the only thing I can come up with is Æsop's fables. The deceptively simple writing, the pastoral setting, the magical surprises... The writing might also seem like a children's book at times, but maybe that is one style of fantasy writing...I don't know.

What I do know is that I was right. This book is a hidden gem!
I enjoyed it tremendously and recommend it! Plan on being surprised, plan on thinking you're figuring it out (you'll be wrong), and plan on finding it to be deceptively simple, but deliciously complicated too. Plan on enjoying a forbidden and surprising romance. Plan on having the entire village turned upside down. And plan on staying up too late to read just to figure out WHAT is going on!

For the simpleness of writing, for the surprises and the magic, and for the cool mystery, I give this book a rating of six stars. 
And that ain't bad, друг, Friend.

Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven

Well, I'll be darned, I found another one!

This book has been a total mind fuck in the absolutely best sense and I have to admit right here and now that I had to go online to figure out what, exactly, I'd just been reading...  😂

 
But let's look at the author first and I'll write about the book/story/etc tomorrow.

Ursula K. LeGuin was doing her thing in the 1970's, the years of the hippies, the war, the economy, rebellion of authority, overpopulation, nostalgia for a simpler time, and the exploration of Eastern philosophies. The daughter of an anthropologist father and a mother studying psychology, Ursula was coming of age in a family rife with speculative study, cultural observation, academics, moralism, feminism, and Jungian philosophy.
I'm jealous.

Having earned a master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies, but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the 1950s, and achieved major critical and commercial success with with her sci-fi writing, namely A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), two books that are now on my list. Ursula went on to win several writing awards, including the Hugo Award and Nebula award; she was the first woman to do that.

Her novels often explored themes of feminism, race, Taoism, and gender identity, making her, in my opinion, pretty cool in the 1970's. These themes do rear their provocative heads in The Lathe of Heaven.  And, get this one, The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000. (A Library of Congress Living Legend is someone recognized by the Library of Congress for his or her creative contributions to American life.) Is that cool, or what? With that honor, she joined the ranks with other Living Legends like Sally Ride, Yo-Yo Ma, I.M. Pei, and Fred Rogers, to name a few.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies.
We will need writers who can remember freedom.
Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.- Ursula K. Le Guin

...

A young Le Guin

I know that I will be reading more Le Guin at some point because I've requested about six of her books, including one that is her memoir, from my library. I've been pulled in by her writing, some of which was simply gorgeous. And I'm interested in her 1970's exploration of themes, some of which we are still exploring today. I love the little time capsule of books, giving the reader the chance to see, not only what is being written as the story or content, but also to be able to see the time and culture in which the book was written. In this book, The Lathe of Heaven, the decade of the 1970's was as much of a shady character in the book as any walking, talking turtle. It was quite fascinating to see the play of topics in her book.

And, interestingly enough, at least to me, this is the exact same reason I'm enjoying the old TV series "Room 222" right now.

Anyway, give me a few days to process the book a bit and I'll be back with some thoughts!

Have you read anything by Le Guin?
What do you recommend?
What do you think of her writing?