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rfmcdonaldToday, on lunch break, I bought a copy of Doris Lessing's Shikasta. It was paperback, but a nicely-bound paperback, so 20 dollars Canadian plus tax.
Shikasta is an interesting book, if flawed by a narrative style that is opaque and confusing--even if Lessing intended that, it still hinders communication and understanding. It is a science-fiction novel based on the assumption that the miracles which our ancestors defined as divine were actually manifestations of alien presence. Lessing has a multi-civilizational environment, including a Manichaean split between the malevolent empire of Puttiora and the relatively benevolent Canopeans. This split has ensured, as one reviewer puts it,
The narrative takes the form of reports issued by a Canopean observer about the different forms of ingrained, institutionalized collective insanity that many of us take for granted or cannot even perceive because of our cultural curtain of lies in civilization, at least as Lessing's narrators describe the situation.
It is an apocalyptic text: The past millennia of human development, in Lessing's narrative, is a horrible mistake, forced upon a prelapsarian world by cruel beings from beyond. Liberation is impossible through collaboration in any of the political scripts that we know about; it's only through a convenient apocalyptic Third World War that puts the world to the sword that we can begin to repair ourselves and build saner cultures.
I reject this philosophy. Civilization might be, as Lessing's protagonists would have it, unnatural and foreign to our natures, but then everything is foreign to us: If we were to be natural, we'd be a race of hunter-gatherers scattered across the Old World (likely not the New, given our lack of maritime technology). It's in our particular nature, though, as flexible language-and-tool-using creatures, to strive for relatively unnatural things (in the sense of not being derived from nature), to suffer and inflict suffering en route it is true, but still, to be something different.
Even so, in a war-ridden time like today's, a corner of my mind can't help but wonder what if Lessing and Shikasta might be right.
Shikasta is an interesting book, if flawed by a narrative style that is opaque and confusing--even if Lessing intended that, it still hinders communication and understanding. It is a science-fiction novel based on the assumption that the miracles which our ancestors defined as divine were actually manifestations of alien presence. Lessing has a multi-civilizational environment, including a Manichaean split between the malevolent empire of Puttiora and the relatively benevolent Canopeans. This split has ensured, as one reviewer puts it,
that the development of humankind has gone very wrong and that the horrors of the current human condition are due to a massive longstanding disruption in the normal spiritual state of things. Through astral conditions, the Earth disconnected from the culture that initially developed and sustained it, then human life has atrophied, shortened terribly and become dangerously unbalanced
The narrative takes the form of reports issued by a Canopean observer about the different forms of ingrained, institutionalized collective insanity that many of us take for granted or cannot even perceive because of our cultural curtain of lies in civilization, at least as Lessing's narrators describe the situation.
It is an apocalyptic text: The past millennia of human development, in Lessing's narrative, is a horrible mistake, forced upon a prelapsarian world by cruel beings from beyond. Liberation is impossible through collaboration in any of the political scripts that we know about; it's only through a convenient apocalyptic Third World War that puts the world to the sword that we can begin to repair ourselves and build saner cultures.
I reject this philosophy. Civilization might be, as Lessing's protagonists would have it, unnatural and foreign to our natures, but then everything is foreign to us: If we were to be natural, we'd be a race of hunter-gatherers scattered across the Old World (likely not the New, given our lack of maritime technology). It's in our particular nature, though, as flexible language-and-tool-using creatures, to strive for relatively unnatural things (in the sense of not being derived from nature), to suffer and inflict suffering en route it is true, but still, to be something different.
Even so, in a war-ridden time like today's, a corner of my mind can't help but wonder what if Lessing and Shikasta might be right.
