"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Visionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

dream, to breathe the lion's breath.
Much of each day on the Mountain I spent in the heyimas, and at times slept there. I worked with the
scholars and visionaries of Wakwaha at the techniques of revisioning, of recounting, and of music. I did
not practice dancing or painting much, as I had no gift for them, but practiced recalling and recounting in
spoken and written language and with the drum.
I had, as many people have, exaggerated notions of how visionaries live. I expected a strained,
athletic, ascetic existence, always stretched towards the ineffable. In fact, it was a dull kind of life. When
people are in vision, they can't look after themselves, and when they come back from it, they may be
extremely tired, or excited and bewildered, and in either case, need quietness without distractions and
demands. In other words, it's like childbearing or any hard, intense work. One supports and protects the
worker. Revisioning and recounting are much the same, though not quite so hard.
In the host-house I fasted only before the great wakwa; I ate lightly, with some care of which foods I
ate, and drank little wine and watered it. If you are going into vision or revision, you don't want to keep
changing yourself and going in a different way - through starving one time, the next time through
drunkenness, or cannabis, or trance-singing, or whatever. What you want is moderation and continuity. If
one is an ecstatic, of course it's another matter; that is not work but burning.

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

So the life I led in Wakwaha was dull and peaceful, much the same from day to day and season to
season, and suited and pleased my mind and heart so that I desired nothing else. All the work I did in
those years on the Mountain was revisioning and recounting the vision of the Ninth House that had been
given me; I gave all I could of it to the scholars of the Serpentine for their records and interpretations, in
which our guidance as a people lies. They were kind, true kin, family of my House, and I at last a child of
that House again, not self-exiled. I thought I had come home and would live there all my life, telling and
drumming, going into vision and coming back from it, dancing in the beautiful dancing place of the Five
High Houses, drinking from the Springs of the River.
The Grass was late in the third year I lived in Wakwaha. Some days after it ended and some days
before the Twenty-One Days began, I was about to go up the ladder of the Serpentine heyimas when
Hawk Woman came to me. I thought she was one of the people of the heyimas, until she cried the hawk's
cry, "kiyir, kiyir!" I turned, and she said, "Dance the Sun upon the Mountain, Flicker, and after that go
down. Maybe you should learn how to dye cloth." She laughed, and flew up as the hawk through the
entrance overhead.
Other people came where I was standing at the foot of the ladder. They had heard the hawk's cry, and
some saw her fly up through the entrance of the heyimas.
After that I had neither vision nor revision of the Ninth House or any house or kind.
I was bereft and relieved. That terrible grandeur had been hard to bear, to bring back, to share and
give and lose over and over. It had all been beyond my strength, and I was not sorry to cease revisioning.
But when I thought that I had lost all vision and must soon leave Wakwaha, I began to grieve. I thought
about those people whom I had thought were my kinfolk, long ago when I was a child, before I was
afraid. They were gone, and now I too must go, leaving these kinfolk of my House of Wakwaha, and go
live among strangers the rest of my life.
A woman-living man of the Serpentine of Wakwaha, Deertongue, who had taught me and sung with
me and given me friendship, saw that I was downcast and anxious, and said to me, "Listen. You think
everything is done. Nothing is done. You think the door is shut. No door is shut. What did Coyote say to
you at the beginning of it all?"
I said, "She said to take it easy."
Deertongue nodded his head and laughed.
I said, "But Hawk said to go down."