The Wave In The Mind (2004) de Ursula K. Le Guin

"The Wave In The Mind" (2004) é uma coleção de ensaios sobre a pessoa que escreve, o leitor e a imaginação. Da autoria da conceituada escritora Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), que publicou mais de cem obras, entras as quais mais de cinquenta romances e dezenas de contos, ensaios e poemas, o livro convida a reflectir sobre a arte, sobre a ficção, sobre a imaginação, sobre a comunicação humana, a realidade e a necessidade que temos de a transcender, através da invenção. Vencedora de inúmeros prémios pelos seus trabalhos de ficção, a autora foi considerada pelo New York Times, em 2016, "a maior escritora viva de ficção científica dos Estados Unidos" mas mostra neste livro o seu lado mais real, considerando até que enquanto o escrevia não estava "a escrever". 

O livro inicia com a capítulo "Personal Matters", em que a autora se introduz a vários temas que marcam a sua visão do mundo. No capítulo seguinte, "Readings", faz uma reflexão sobre autores que a inspiram e uma análise detalhada de alguns dos seus estilos prosaicos, passando para "Discussions and Opinions", em que a autora faz uma análise da indústria cultural até chegar ao último capítulo "On Writing", em que fala da escrita e do processo criativo que a envolve. 

É um livro brilhante, repleto de metáforas e associações que nos dão uma nova perspectiva sobre a realidade do(a) escritor(a). Deixo algumas passagens, dos vários ensaios ao longo do livro, que mais me chamaram a atenção: 

"Fiction  as  we  currently  think  of  it,  the  novel  and  short  story  as  they  have existed  since  the  eighteenth  century,  offers  one  of  the  very  best  means  of understanding  people  different  from  oneself,  short  of  experience.  Fiction  is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs  nothing  (from  the  library),  and  comes  in  a  manageable,  orderly  form. 

You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than  reality  at  providing  useful  factual,  psychological,  and  moral understanding."

"But writers, especially  fiction  writers,  are  always  making  up  names.  Do  they  confuse themselves with their characters? 

The  question  isn’t  totally  frivolous.  I  think  most  novelists  are  aware  at times  of  containing  multitudes,  of  having  an  uncomfortably  acute  sympathy for  Multiple  Personality  Disorder,  of  not  entirely  subscribing  to  the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self. 

And there is a distinction, normally, between “the writer” and “the person.”"

"Splitting the personality in this way might signify in most people that they were  a  bit  daft;  but  all  the  writers  I’ve  been  talking  about  were  notably effective people in both incarnations, flesh and paper. Still, their paper selves, having long outlived the “real person,” might well ask, Which of us can claim to be real?"

Sobre a comunicação

"My  private  model  for  intersubjectivity,  or  communication  by  speech,  or conversation,  is  amoebas  having  sex.  As  you  know,  amoebas  usually reproduce  by  just  quietly  going  off  in  a  corner  and  budding,  dividing themselves into two amoebas; but sometimes conditions indicate that a little genetic  swapping  might  improve  the  local  crowd,  and  two  of  them  get together, literally, and reach out to each other and meld their pseudopodia into a little tube or channel connecting them. Thus:

Then  amoeba  A  and  amoeba  B  exchange  genetic  “information,”  that  is, they literally give each other inner bits of their bodies, via a channel or bridge which  is  made  out  of  outer  bits  of  their  bodies.  They  hang  out  for quite  a while sending bits of themselves back and forth, mutually responding each to the other. 

This  is  very  similar  to  how  people  unite  themselves  and  give  each  other parts of themselves—inner parts, mental not bodily parts—when they talk and listen. (You can see why I use amoeba sex not human sex as my analogy: in human hetero sex, the bits only go one way. Human hetero sex is more like a lecture  than  a  conversation.  Amoeba  sex  is  truly  mutual  because  amoebas have no gender and no hierarchy. I have no opinion on whether amoeba sex or human  sex  is  more  fun.  We  might  have  the  edge,  because  we  have  nerve endings, but who knows?)

Two amoebas having sex, or two people talking, form a community of two."

Sobre a comunicação assíncrona

"Primary orality refers to people who talk but don’t write—all the people we refer to as primitive, illiterate, preliterate, and so on. Secondary orality comes long  after  literacy,  and  derives  from  it.  It  is  less  than  a  hundred  years  old. 

Secondary orality is radio, TV, recordings, and such: in general, what we call

“the media.”

The  anchorman  on  the  six  o’clock  news  stares  out  of  the  box,  not  at  us, because he can’t see us, because we aren’t where he is, or even when he is; he is  in  Washington,  D.C.,  two  hours  ago,  reading  what  he  says  off  a  running tape. He can’t see us or hear us, nor can we see or hear him. We see and hear an image, a simulacrum of him. There is no relationship between us and him.

Conversation is a mutual exchange or interchange of acts. Transmission via print and the media is one-way; its mutuality is merely virtual or hopeful. 

Yet  local,  immediate  community  can  be  built  upon  both  literacy  and secondary  orality.  Schools  and  colleges  are  centers  of  the  printed  word, whether  on  paper  or  electronic,  and  are  genuine  if  limited  communities

Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with. Not a mental or spiritual one, wherever it may end.

If  you  mount  two  clock  pendulums  side  by  side  on  the  wall,  they  will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronise each other by picking up

tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall. 

Any  two  things  that  oscillate  at  about  the  same  interval,  if  they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment. 

All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time."

Sobre a imaginação

"I think the imagination is the single most useful tool humankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. 

I  hear  voices  agreeing  with  me.  “Yes,  yes!”  they  cry—“the  creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we  reward it!” In the marketplace, the word  creativity has come to mean the generation of  ideas  applicable  to  practical  strategies  to  make  larger  profits.  This reduction has gone on so long that the word  creative can hardly be degraded further.  I  don’t  use  it  any  more,  yielding  it  to  capitalists  and  academics  to abuse as they like. But they can’t have  imagination. 

Imagination  is  not  a  means  of  making  money.  It  has  no  place  in  the vocabulary of profit making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and the use, or nonuse, of all weapons depends on it: as do all tools and their uses. The imagination is a fundamental way of thinking, an essential means of becoming and remaining human. It is a tool of the mind. 

Therefore  we  have  to  learn  to  use  it."

"Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it—because they’re afraid of it. 

They’re afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. “Oh those awful Orcs,” 

they  bleat,  flocking  after  Edmund  Wilson.  They  know  if  they  acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is. And they’re too damned lazy to do it. 

What  the  majority  of  our  critics  and  teachers  call  “literature”  is  still modernist  realism.  All  other  forms  of  fiction—westerns  mysteries  science fiction  fantasy  romance  historical  regional  you  name  it—is  dismissed  as

“genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, so what?"

"But  why  should  moral  seriousness  matter,  why  do  probability  and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”? 

Well, moral seriousness is what makes a fantasy matter, because it’s what’s real  in  the  story.  A  made-up  story  is  inevitably  trivial  if  nothing  real  is  at stake, if mere winning, coming out on top, replaces moral choice. Easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless; but if it’s all a story has to offer, in the end it’s not enough. 

In  the  same  way,  the  purer  the  invention,  the  more  important  is  its credibility,  consistency,  coherence.  The  rules  of  the  invented  realm  must  be followed to the letter. All magicians, including writers, are extremely careful about  their  spells.  Every  word  must  be  the  right  word.  A  sloppy  wizard  is  a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but  they  know  that  careless  invention  kills  the  magic.  Fantasy  shamelessly flouts  fact,  but  it  is  as  deeply  concerned  with  truth  as  the  grimmest,  greyest realism."