The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism

In the past two months, I’ve found myself thinking back to an essay Ursula K. Le Guin posted on her blog in November 2016. It was one of her last long essays, and she wrote it at a time when she—like many people now—was shocked, concerned for her country’s future, and wondering how best to respond.

“Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred, and those of us who oppose this politics are now trying to figure out how we can oppose it usefully,” she wrote. She wanted to defend her country but was wary of the potential of outrage to draw well-meaning people into vicious circles of action and reaction. “I’m looking for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior.”

For insight she turned to the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu’s ancient book of wisdom for troubled times. Following Lao Tzu’s paradoxical ideal of wei wu wei, “doing without doing,” she advised standing firm, “refusing to engage an aggressor on his own terms.” Instead of fighting back, she counseled patience, compassion, and courage. “Defending a cause without fighting, without attacking, without aggression,” she argued, “is an action. It is an expression of power. It takes control.”

She suggested looking to the force of water, which

gives way to anything harder than itself, offers no resistance, flows around obstacles, accepts whatever comes to it,…yet continues to be itself and to go always in the direction it must go. The tides of the oceans obey the moon while the great currents of the open sea keep on their ways beneath. Water remains itself and pursues its course, flowing down and on, above ground or underground, breathing itself out into the air in evaporation, rising in mist, fog, cloud, returning to earth as rain, refilling the sea. Water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element.

Although the image was beautiful, I longed for something less misty to attach to it. At a time when the high road had failed and fighting back seemed necessary, I couldn’t see how to translate her words into useful action. Infinite ways to do what? Go where?

If she had had time, Le Guin would surely have said more, and might well have changed her mind: she was always willing to argue with herself and take a different point of view. Still, as I’ve researched Le Guin’s life and learned more about the activism that ran alongside her writing, I have come to see how water might describe her own political practice.

She was formed by the 1950s, a decade of right-wing assaults on intellectual freedom and economic equality. At 24, in 1954, she followed the hearings that deprived her parents’ friend Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance and, in a letter home, called the president’s refusal to intervene “shameful and despicable.” Years later, to me, she recalled her disappointment when Eisenhower was elected in 1952. “I felt then, and have always felt, that that was a very significant choice that the country made,” she said. “‘Let’s forget all the stuff we now call socialism, and [that we] dismiss as belonging to the enemy.’ And boy, that was a huge thing. I know that we were always that way: I just [re]read The Grapes of Wrath and was reminded how violently antisocialist, anticommunist, anti-union, a huge portion of America has always been. But there was a liberal element that was also strong, and that’s when you began to feel that it was really under attack and really being weakened.”

In those years she looked to the Taoist embrace of yin, the feminine principle associated with water, for confirmation of a female strength that disregards authoritarian hierarchies. In 1962, when she was a mother of young children in Portland, Oregon, she heard nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project veteran Leo Szilard speak on the destructive potential of nuclear war. Amid tensions with the Soviet Union, the U.S. government had resumed nuclear weapons testing in the Nevada desert, and Portland residents feared radioactive contamination.

A few days after Szilard’s talk, Le Guin joined what she called a few “ill-assorted but well-intentioned housewives” in the first of a series of protests in the city. Portland Women for Peace were a small, middle-class group; some brought their children, and some held up black umbrellas, as if to ward off the fallout, bearing the slogan “Peace Is Our Shelter.” Le Guin demonstrated in a suit, hat, and heels, to look respectable, and when she saw a right-wing journalist taking pictures she defied him with a big, flirtatious wink.

She had mixed feelings about her activism, fearing that it would keep her from her writing or that it would make her writing didactic. In 1963 she wrote in a private note, “My job is to write well not to carry signs. You cannot do both at this point.” In the margin, arguing with herself, she replied, “Phooey!” She later saw that the antiwar movement gave her a way to channel her politics away from her writing, into a separate stream.

Inevitably, though, her ideas flowed back into her work. She read Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience,” which led her to King and Gandhi. Her thoughts on nonviolence helped inspire The Word for World Is Forest, which also reflects her opposition to the war in Vietnam. In October 1969, in the week of her fortieth birthday, she and her husband, Charles Le Guin, took part in a national day of protest. The next day she described to Virginia Kidd, her agent and friend, her alternating feelings of exhilaration and doubt:

Yesterday we went and peacewalked clear through downtown Portland and to the docks. Fantastic crowd, 3 to 5000 they think; much the largest I’ve ever been in in all the years I have been stumping morosely along behind banners saying Peace Now. Very impressive. I am always horribly depressed by being politically Active, but I must say there was one fine moment when everybody just sat down (right in front of the biggest downtown stores) and was silent for five minutes. Several thousand people sitting silently on Fifth Street has an unexpected Buddhist grandeur.—The college kids are so beautiful, too, with their splendid hair and velvet opera skirts and Wild Bill Hickok coats. But then I had to come home on the bus and listen to the audience reactions. The one that really struck home was an elderly, lean man: “If I had a son, and if he was in that peace rabble, I’d kill him.” That seems to sum up the entire situation, doesn’t it?

The next year, Portland’s draft office was firebombed. Two weeks after the Kent State shootings, a student occupation of Portland’s Park Blocks was violently broken up by the police. And in November 1972, McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

So much of politics is taking action but not getting what you want. I can identify with Le Guin’s increasing frustration as the war went on, her despair over the polarization, her gloom after McGovern’s loss. And as I registered voters this fall, I felt encouraged by knowing that she had also done the unglamorous work of getting out the vote. After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern. She told Kidd, “They like me because I spell right & know how to count characters so the columns don’t straggle, a skill I picked up 4 years ago mccarthying.”

After the Democrats’ loss that fall to a corrupt president, she withdrew from politics in the world for a while to imagine alternatives in her fiction. She invited her readers to reflect on power and justice in her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which she imagines a society whose happiness rests on the suffering of one child. If the child were spared, all would suffer. In the published version, most can live with this condition on their happiness, while a few choose to leave Omelas for an unknown destination. But in her original notes, she refused the bargain: she planned to have visitors to Omelas save the child, knowing they were dooming all.

Published in 1974, The Dispossessed grew in part out of her reading on civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. That led her to pacifist anarchism, and to the question of what a society would look like that had no private property and no state. Le Guin wasn’t convinced that such a radical lack of hierarchies was compatible with human nature. But rereading the novel this fall, I felt comforted by her vision of people governed not by numbers of votes, but by a sense of responsibility to each other. To travel to that world, Anarres, in the imagination is to be shaken out of the assumption that capitalism and elected authority are normal. To enter it in October was to take a restful vacation from billionaire oligarchs and election stress. On Anarres there are no politicians, no bosses, no wages, no police, “no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals” and “no government but the single principle of free association.” Its goals aren’t in the future—what we can achieve someday, when we run the perfect campaign or elect the perfect candidates—but in the process itself. Its people practice a politics of means, not ends.

The Anarresti have only one word for “work” and “play.” But there is a word, kleggich, that translates as “drudgery,” the necessary tasks that keep households and societies running. Le Guin never gave up demonstrating and demanding change, impatiently, sometimes confrontationally. But she also devoted herself to small actions to support her city and its communities. She wrote to the local paper, asking readers of The Oregonian to save Star Trek in the 1960s and approve library bonds in the 1990s. When the city cut down a beloved chestnut tree in front of her house, her letter of protest drew eager responses from community groups who embraced her as a champion of urban ecology. When a national ad agency asked to record a radio spot for the Smokey the Bear campaign—“Only you can prevent forest fires”—she was happy to oblige.

She served for years on committees at Portland’s public library, always with the goal of making books, information, and the building itself available to the people of the city. When a new director proposed moving the periodicals section to a spot less inviting for the homeless, Le Guin wrote in protest, “For years the use of that room by sleepy old men with nowhere much else to go has been a battleground between the Respectable and the Compassionate—often within a single soul. The fact that heretofore compassion has always prevailed is not one to be dismissed lightly.” For a while she edited the Friends of the Library newsletter, contributing news items, illustrations, and cartoons.

She spoke to Portland pro-choice groups. She served on the board of arts organizations. She did many, many benefit readings: for bookstores, writers’ retreats, a women’s shelter, against hunger, censorship, AIDS. Learning all this, I thought the “way of water” might look a bit like this: the housework or kleggich of a concerned citizen.

There is a limit to what one person can do. In 2008, Le Guin was asked what gave her hope for the future. She answered, “The age, and the vastness, and the vast complexity of the earth and all its creatures. No matter how we try to cut it down to our size, we’ll fail; and in our failure lies our hope.” The greatness of the universe and the relative modesty of human influence are truths acknowledged by both Lao Tzu and science fiction, though only the former perhaps fully embraces the paradoxes of hope in failure, success in judicious inaction.

In 1982, an interviewer for a science fiction magazine asked Le Guin what she would do to save the world. She answered impatiently: “The syntax implies a further clause beginning with if…What would I do to save the world if I were omnipotent? But I am not, so the question is trivial. What would I do to save the world if I were a middle-aged middle-class woman? Write novels and worry.”

If “worry” can be translated as “care,” then she combined her vision for the future with tending to what is worthy of care in the here and now. I think this may be part of an answer to her question of how to get control without fighting for it: through local commitment to local projects, while still writing and listening to the voices of writers who “can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society … to other ways of being.”

Le Guin believed an author had a moral obligation not to counsel despair. As the politics of anger and fear return to power, I try to find encouragement in what she did, and to find hope in the end of her essay, where she writes of placing her faith, not in water’s destructive power, but in its nourishing beauty. “The sound of rain. The sound of a fountain. The bright dance of the water-spray from a garden hose, the scent of wet earth.”