Wk 3 // notes: interview with Ursula le Guin

After seeing Teresa Peters' work at the Portage Ceramic Awards this week and her referencing Ursula le Guin, I wanted to look into her writings - I haven't read any of them before, so my reading list has now grown a bit longer...

Thinking a lot about rocks...

"Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet"

- May 18th 2014, Santa Cruz, California

"There's something about a rock. It is a little entity. You hold it in your hand, it's there, it's got weight, it's got presence, it's got colour and dignity. And it's going to outlast you... You're holding this thing... how old is it?... They were here before and they will be here after."

"There are times that I sort of feel the parts of me that are star or stone or dust...want to go back and be what they are. What came together to make me...the stuff of life...it's the same idea. That one is almost an accidental concatenation of a lot of stuff getting together and becoming an anything for a while."

"The tree burns slowly, while we are running around brightly... There really are different historicities... The birds it's known, the fires it's survived..."

"This earth is a rock in this enormous space, and [that has] a different temporality...planetary..."

"We cannot really imagine very long periods of time. We really are not equipt... The brain is sort of a practice thing and it has got to think quickly about now, and spread out some when it has the leisure to. But I cannot imagine how long ago the Jurassic era was... I cannot imagine it, but maybe that's why I value this contact with something like a rock that's older than the Jurassic, that's been there. It carries in it that time that it's been here."

"I get tired...about people talking about technology...and there's a complete obliviousness to most of our basic technologies like bricklaying, building, carpentry, sewing clothes... are technologies... A wooden flood is a masterpiece of technology."

"When I write a poem I am a poet...you're not giving directions, you have no instructions... You are just trying to strike a spark, but what fire that spark lights is up to the person whose spark it is..."

“...close up, a world's all dirt and rocks... The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia