A review of No Time to Spare

From 2010 to her death in 2018, Ursula Le Guin composed blog posts for her website and a selection of these have been collected into a wonderful book, No Time to Spare. Many of the essays are beautiful accounts of moments in her life, with, for example, a most intense appreciation of the art of eating a soft-boiled egg for breakfast that serves as a lesson in mindfulness. Here, though, I want to focus on the political ideas of Le Guin that are explicit and implicit in many of the features.

In one essay where she addresses the question of socialism directly, Le Guin does so in the context of a comment about the alternatives to capitalism:

Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism — the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world.

Ursula Le Guin on socialism, from No Time to Spare

In this one, short paragraph are four hugely important ideas. Firstly, that socialism still has the potential to provide an alternative to capitalism. Second and third, that the reasons previous efforts to create socialism have failed are a) the desire for power and b) the infection of global capitalism. Fourthly, the gender of those who ran socialism off the rails was male.

Of these ideas the first is essential. Almost certainly the majority of people living on the planet right now would agree that the current economic system is deeply flawed. Hardly anyone, however, can agree on what the alternative should be. And this is largely due to the fact that socialism has been discredited. Yet unless the idea of socialism is revived our species is in great trouble, because anything other than a fundamental, radical, reorganisation of the world by workers will succumb to the pressures of trying to co-exist with capitalism.

The second, that it was the seduction of power that wrecked previous socialist projects, is entirely consistent with Le Guin’s core political beliefs, which were those of anarchism. Ursula Le Guin was always wary of defining herself politically, not through fear of alienating people by sounding too radical, but because she felt she lacked the expertise and devotion to activism to be a political authority. Her main passion and her decades of experience were in writing, both in composing beautiful works but also teaching and analysing literature.

The setting for one of Le Guin’s early novels, The Dispossessed, is that of a utopian world. In order to research that world, Le Guin read widely into anarchism: especially Kropotkin and a modern anarchist thinker, Murray Bookchin.

And it was the pacifist, rather than destructive, element within anarchism that appealed to Le Guin the most, as she explained in an interview.

I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity.) It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would.)

In Jacobin’s obituary of Le Guin, the novelist is described as being a historical materialist but this is too much of a stretch. An anarchist emphasis on the importance of power in politics is very clear in Le Guin’s thought. Even here, in this discussion about whether Le Guin was a socialist, it’s no accident that she puts the issue of power before the question of structure in signalling what went wrong for socialism in the past.

As an aside, many on the left interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy juxtapose the work of Le Guin, radical, feminist, anarchist and Tolkien, who they see as conservative and anti-working class. China Mieville, whose critique of Tolkien derives from the essay of another anarchist fantasy writer, Michael Moorcock, has been the standard bearer for this approach.

In my view, it is utterly mistaken. Le Guin herself was a huge champion of Tolkien and often spoke up for the literary merits of The Lord of the Rings, a book that despite enormous public enthusiasm, is usually under-appreciated by critics. And in The Lord of the Rings is a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power that is as pure as any in literature. The One Ring is the ultimate test of character and only those wise enough to reject it have any integrity, those who try to use it are doomed to become hollowed-out husks of their former selves.

Having placed an emphasis on the question of the destructive effects of the possession of power, which remains an important issue for the left, Le Guin also sees global capitalism as a key contributor to the failure of previous attempts to create socialism. This is a vital observation for the future too. Any attempt to introduce socialism in one jurisdiction is doomed: either pressure to compete in the world market or direct overthrow will end the effort. Fortunately, today, our world is so integrated globally that a socialist movement that really went down to alter the fundamentals of society would have an immediate and massive international impact, making it much more likely to transform the entire planet.

In unpacking Le Guin’s observation on the previous failure of socialism, one more point remains to be made, which is that she highlighted the fact that it was men who led the movement away from utopia. This is an historical observation as well as a reflection on Le Guin’s ‘steady, resolute, morally committed’ role in the feminist movement. She explicitly defined herself as a part of second wave feminism — the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s — and her writings throughout her entire life, both fictional and non-fictional, constantly returned to the subject of gender inequality.

It seems to me to be clear that Ursula Le Guin was very sympathetic to all alternatives to capitalism and while more inclined to describe herself as anarchist was definitely open to being persuaded about socialism. The revolutions and socialist movements she saw in her lifetime did not, however, provide a lot of evidence for the potential of socialism to deliver utopia. Personally, I think that potential is evident in all the great working class uprisings of the twentieth century, but you have to really drill down to the detail of the particular variants of socialism active in them to understand why, ultimately, none of them led to the disappearance of capitalism in favour of a sharing society.

Ursula Le Guin on dialectics and Taosim

In No Time to Spare there is another subject that connects Le Guin’s intellectual makeup to socialism and it is the question of dialectics. For socialists, to be able to analyse political systems that are in motion and which can dramatically hit transformative tipping points is essential and the tool for doing this, dialectics, comes to us from a western tradition, originating with the early Greek philosophers and being developed especially by Hegel and Marx. But there is an even older tradition of dialectical thought rooted in ancient eastern societies.

When Le Guin wanted to explain some underlying connections between utopian and dystopian societies in literature, she first needed her readers to understand dialectics and she helped them do so by drawing on her deep engagement with Taoism. An interpreter of Lao Tzu’s sixth century BC Tao Te Ching, Le Guin used the yang-yin symbol to illustrate her point that every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia a utopia.

In the yang-yin symbol each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol presents not a stasis but a process.

In the many appreciations of Ursula Le Guin that have been written since her death (22 January 2018) this aspect to her thinking has usually been neglected, yet in my view it is fundamental to her thought.

The presence of a powerful and playful mind is evident throughout No Time to Spare and always Le Guin’s writing is informed by a sense of development and change, even in her own sentences as she formulates them. That’s why they are rich, truthful, convincing. When reading Le Guin, you feel the presence of someone who is not satisfied until she has expressed herself exactly as she intends. Someone who weighs the meaning of every word, every punctuation mark even.

Le Guin’s dialectical way of approaching any subject, even that of the behaviour of cats (she was a great cat lover and if you are the same, you’ll read some of these essays with enormous pleasure) means we never get a dry, linear, didactic essay. Always, they are rich, fecund and humorous.

Was Ursula Le Guin a socialist? She was. And she wasn’t.

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin attended the National Book Awards in the US where she was the recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. During her speech she made a powerful point to those who feel there is no alternative to capitalism:

The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula Le Guin on resistance and change

Review of the gig of 21 December 2019, Vicar Street, Dublin, by Aislinn Wallace and Niamh McDonald

Damien Dempsey has been a powerhouse on the Irish music scene for nearly two decades. He brings a voice to the struggles of those suffering in Irish society and beyond with poetry and sincerity. 
Damien’s Christmas Vicar Street gigs have become part of the Christmas calendar for many of his devoted fans. Saturday’s performance was no exception, with a packed-out venue. 
Damien has never been ambiguous about his politics and his music reflects this. The crowd in the gig represented all ages, with an overwhelming working-class representation and with people from all corners of the island. Hearing the whole audience sing out songs such as Colony highlights the level of consciousness Dempsey has raised in his loyal fans over the years.

From the stage: Damien Dempsey live

From the stage, Damien spoke openly about his own mental health struggles; he creates a space with his music to help break the stigmas around mental health and encourage people to talk openly about their own struggles. As two people in the middle of a crowded floor we observed so many resonating with this message as they openly sung along to Sing All Our Cares Away.

Not only does Damien sing about the scourge of mental health and its destruction to so many, he also brings a message of anti-racism and the importance of the power of women to his songs and gigs. His music talks about the gentrification of Dublin and beyond in the guise of a housing crisis at the expense and displacement of the working class.
Damien is known for his activist and solidarity work, from supporting the anti-water charges movement, to singing at the Moore Street occupation, as an activist in Apollo House and supporting Repeal. 
The range of influences in Damien’s music includes reggae, R&B, and Ireland’s folk tradition, fused to create a multi-dimensional sound, one that is accompanied by lyrics that convey a strong message of class politics in a way that everyone can relate to. 
The value and influence of an artist such as Damien Dempsey to working class struggles can’t be underestimated: like many others before him, Damo’s sincere and simple music raises issues that affect us all and vocalises the social and economic issues in a way that resonates widely with people.

It’s accessible and revolutionary at the same time. 

Damien Dempsey’s Soundcloud.

By Ciarán O’Rourke

‘I know the simple life / Would be right for me’, wrote Derek Mahon in Ovid in Tomis, ‘If I were a simple man.’ A glad complexity, it seems, is the order of the day; a dynamic interweaving of expression and insight evident throughout Mahon’s work, lending the poems both a clarity and a frequent mystery. ‘It is not sleep itself but dreams we miss’, Mahon posits (with aphoristic aplomb), ‘We yearn for that reality in this.’ Known for his intellectual force and technical fluency, and admired as a translator from multiple verse traditions, the Belfast-born poet was universally recognised in establishment literary circles as a leading figure of his generation and moment. Less mentioned, however, is that – in its breadth, emphasis, and overarching perspective – his work invites celebration and cultural co-optation by socialists, anarchists, and every species of utopian realist in between. For although formally traditional, his poems are critically incisive and, in brief, radically human to the core.

It’s a point that’s seldom heard, and so, perhaps in a small way, worth reiterating. Insofar as the ethical compass and content of Mahon’s poetry are discussed at all, the conversation tends to be couched in a discourse of reflexive academic qualification: so that the specific details of Mahon’s political commentary and commitment, at any one point in his poetic career, are presumed to be offset or made redundant by his aesthetic, philosophical, or even formal concerns at another. We are left with a ‘poet of divided affiliations’, who maintains ‘a cautious distance from schools and groups (whether literary or political)’, his stylistically graceful poems ‘characterised by indirection and obliquity’, even as they depict (occasionally) a ‘humanity… powerless against the inevitable forces [that] shape human life.’ We end up, in other words, with a political poet, but one whose work is said to exceed its own politics: thus transforming the latter into an empty category, rimmed by abstractions such as The Force of History or The Demands of his Time.

Such a trend, of course, arguably relates to culture in general, and not to the work of Mahon alone. It would certainly be a tempting thesis to explore: that in a neoliberal society, art and literature are circulated in order to be owned, to placate, or to make life as it is (exploitative and miserable as it may be for many) more liveable and not to subvert the tenets by which that society is organised. In which scenario, what we think of as literary criticism would in fact amount to nothing else than a series of discursive adjustments and revisions, a sort of academic vanishing trick whereby whatever creative radicalism was identified in an art-work, oeuvre, or historical moment would disappear as soon as it was declared. Sound familiar?

At any rate, for gentle-hearted heretics of all stripes – anti-establishmentarian in their politics, but nevertheless in need of the emotional and critical sustenance that literature provides – there is surely some merit in re-examining the work of poets, great and mighty, and the inherited assumptions that frame our encounters with them. In Mahon’s case, moreover – a writer who calls himself an ‘aesthete’ with a penchant ‘for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere’ – doing so helps us to reach a fuller and clearer understanding not only of his literary back-catalogue, but of the power systems that rule and rack our present world. This may seem like high praise for one of Ireland’s more canonical of recent poets; but it’s also true.

Derek Mahon’s An Autumn Wind

Take Mahon’s book, An Autumn Wind, in which we find the artist’s inward vision turning to survey, with searing perception, a global vista defined in the main by corporate theft and murderous imperialism (headed by the USA). ‘The great Naomi Klein’, he wrote,

[…] condemns, in The Shock Doctrine,

the Chicago Boys, the World Bank and the IMF,

the dirty tricks and genocidal mischief

inflicted upon the weak

who now fight back.

Mahon’s praise (indeed, rather pointed name-dropping) of Naomi Klein surely gives credence to his self-proclaimed status as a political Leftist. But it also draws a question mark over the standard critical narrative outlined above. Far from deploring modernity in the abstract, shaped by some equally vague ‘inevitable forces’, Mahon’s verse here associates directly the neoliberal economic doctrines of ‘the Chicago Boys, the World Bank and the IMF’ with crimes against humanity, while also acknowledging both the theory and the praxis of resistance that such doctrines inadvertently generate (typified by Klein and by ‘the weak who now fight back’, respectively). It is difficult to imagine Seamus Heaney or Michael Longley, the two most-fêted of Mahon’s Irish contemporaries, even coming close to advancing such a perspective.

Derek Mahon the poet and the opponent of neoliberalism

It is notable, also, that the much-touted ‘concern for the ecological’ in Mahon’s later work exists, in the poem above, within an explicitly anti-capitalist paradigm. Close-focusing on a ‘hare in the corn / scared by the war machine / and cornered trembling in its exposed acre’, the piece in its closing stanza switches to a wide-angle lens, so to speak, and urges that in the next ‘spring, when a new crop begins to grow, / let it not be genetically modified / but such as the ancients sowed / in the old days : a possible retort to the criminal agri-policies of Monsanto. What’s certain, however, is that this is a poetry that arrays itself against (and takes aim at) neoliberalism per se – or what Mahon termed, in his resonantly titled poem, ‘Trump Time’, ‘the bedlam of acquisitive force / That rules us, and would rule the universe.’

Without wanting to over-extend the argument, there’s also a refreshing contemporaneity and excursive quality to Mahon’s range of reference here. Although he was indeed a literary practitioner combining ‘classical structure with contemporary concerns’ in his work (read great, white and male) – his ‘precursors’ including ‘Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, the poets of Rome and Greece’ – in this instance Mahon openly, and quite self-consciously, took his cues from a feminist critic of modern capitalism, herself writing of a number of (highly gendered) grassroots movements, primarily in the Global South. Feminist icon he was not, but Mahon’s work at the very least pointed towards an intersectional understanding of economic exploitation and political struggle: as companion poems in the same volume (such as ‘Water’) arguably also testify.

None of which is meant to create a further barrier between the so-called aesthetic merits and political commitments of Mahon’s work. If anything, it’s to argue that these qualities exist in continuity with one another, and to suggest some ways in which the overtly political interventions of Mahon’s verse may be seen to sharpen what one authority has described as the ‘crystalline clarity’ of its intellectual make-up, giving heft and consequence to the ‘sophisticated sound-patterning’ for which his poetry is so often admired. After all, Mahon’s bright-soaring, early imagination of an art drawn ‘From the pneumonia of the ditch, from the ague / Of the blind poet and the bombed-out town’ – one envisaged as bringing ‘The all-clear to the empty holes of spring, / Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new’ – was always grounded not just in the sensations of a literate intellect, but in a sensibility disposed to compassionate identification with the realities of other people’s lives: in a word, to solidarity. For Mahon, equipped as a writer with the same ‘light meter and relaxed itinerary’ so beloved of countless literary fence-sitters, the urge that recurs most persistently is in fact ‘To do something’ – or ‘at least not to close the door again’ on those condemned to live ‘in darkness and in pain.’

On a final note: this short sketch has tried to claim Mahon was a poet of and for the political Left: a loose but very real community, whose existence is rarely questioned except by a few faction-feasting personages who are already in it. In doing so, however, we would do well to remember that the democratisation of power so often promised and struggled for by activists holds exciting possibilities for poetry, too: its creation, its reception, and (again) its circulation. As Mahon’s homage to Shane MacGowan implies, the list of great poets can and should be appreciated ‘together with the names Seeger and MacColl’: dissident troubadours both, generally lacking from Mahon’s academically prescribed influences. Art is what we make of it, in short, and the broader the field of shared endeavour, the better. So let the task be to reap and sow the commons of poetry and song, if for no other reason than to pay tribute to Mahon’s work and in the same spirit that the work itself proclaimed.