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

Milk worked with words, Tarweed worked with words, drum, and matrix chanting. They had me go
very slowly, telling very little at a time, sometimes one word only, and repeating what I had been able to
tell, singing it with the matrix chant so that as much as possible might be truly recalled and given and
could be recalled and given again.
When I began thus to find out what it is to say what one has seen, and when the great oomplexity and
innumerable vivid details of the vision overwhelmed my imagination and surpassed my ability to
describe, I feared that I would lose it all before I could grasp one fragment of it and that even if I
remembered some of it, I would never understand any of it. My guides reassured me and quieted my
impatience. Milk said, "We have some training in this craft, and you have none. You have to learn to
speak sky with an earth tongue. Listen: If a baby were carried up the Mountain, could she walk back
down, until she learned to walk?"
Tarweed explained to me that as I learned to apprehend mentally what I had perceived in vision, I
would approach the condition of living in both Towns; and so, he said, "there's no great hurry."
I said, "But it will take years and years!"
He said, "You've been at it for a thousand years already. Gall said you were an old soul."
It bothered me that I was often not sure whether Tarweed was joking or not joking. That always
bothers young people, and however old my soul might be, my mind was fifteen. I had to live a while
before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time. I had to
come clear back to Coyote's House from the Hawk's House to learn that, and sometimes I still forget it.
Tarweed's way was joking, shocking, stirring, but he was gentle; I had no fear of him. I had been
afraid of Milk ever since she had looked at me in the Blood Lodge and said, "What are you here for?"
She was a great scholar and was Singer of the Lodge. Her way was calm, patient, impersonal, but she
was not gentle, and I feared her. With Tarweed she was polite, but it was plain that her manners masked
contempt. She thought a man's place was in the woods and fields and workshops, not among sacred and
intellectual things. In the Lodge I had heard her say the old gibe, "A man fucks with his brain and thinks

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with his penis." Tarweed knew well enough what she thought, but intellectual men are used to having
their capacities doubted and their achievements snubbed; he did not seem to mind her arrogance as much
as I sometimes did, even to the point of trying to defend him against her once, saying, "Even if he is a
man, he thinks like a woman!"
It did no good, of course; and if it was partly true, it wasn't wholly true, because the thing that was
most important of all to me I could not speak of to Tarweed, a man, and a man of my House: and to Milk,
arrogant and stern as she was, and a woman who had lived all her life celibate, I did not even need to
speak of it. I began to, once, feeling that I must, and she stopped me. "What is proper for me to know of
this, I know," she said. "Vision is transgression! The vision is to be shared; the transgression cannot be."
I did not understand that. I was very much afraid of going out of the heyimas and being caught in my
old life again, going the wrong way again in false thinking and despair. A half-month or so after the Sun,
I began to feel and say that I was still weak and ill and could not leave the heyimas. To this Tarweed
said, "Aha! About time for you to go home!"
I thought him most unfeeling. When I was working with Milk, in my worry I began crying, and
presently I said, "I wish I had never had this vision!"
Milk looked at me, a glance across the eyes, like being whipped in the face with a thin branch. She
said, "You did not have a vision."
I sniveled and stared at her.
"You had nothing. You have nothing. The house stands. You can live in a corner of it, or all of it, or
go outside it as you choose." So Milk said and left me.
I stayed alone in the small room. I began to look at it, the small warm room with earth walls and floor