Umyazu - A Working Library

Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.

This, of course, presumes that what we are reading is the product of a mind, that the reading is itself a gathering of minds. For each writer is really many writers. When we read Le Guin, we are also reading Woolf, Kropotkin, Lao Tzu. We are reading Le Guin’s reading of Woolf, and Woolf’s reading of Shakespeare, and adding our own readings to theirs. But when we read a text created by fake intelligence, we find not a mind but a forgery, and a glib one at that—a thin, transparent skin wrapped around an empty void. We are right to be repulsed. That revulsion is our bodies asserting their right to reality, to the knowledge that there can be no mind without a body, anymore than there can be a body without a mind.

Yet in the stream we seem to lose that body. We dissolve, dissipate, spread the edges of our selves out until we lose integrity. Here is a curious paradox: when we read, we make ourselves vulnerable, open ourselves up to being changed in ways we cannot predict or control. But when we venture into the stream, we more often than not go armed and wary, aware that we are in a place of danger. We are vigilant, alert, attuned to the predators that lurk below our thumbs. Yet it is there that we are worn down and disintegrated, that constant vigilance like a vibration that shakes all our atoms loose and tumbles them ever downstream.

Maybe there’s a clue in the way we talk of paying attention, rather than giving it. An older form of that verb also means to appease. We pay attention to the angry gods of capitalism in the hope that they will turn their anger elsewhere. Like most gods, they refuse us. We pay and pay again: each refresh and reaction like a hidden fee or interest charged. We check the boxes and agree to the terms (which we do not read), because what are our other options? Coercion was long ago rebranded as consumer choice.

In The Telling, the last of Le Guin’s novels set in the Hainish universe, a young Terran observer named Sutty sets out for the planet Aka. In the forty years it takes for her to arrive, the main continent’s literary and democratic culture is supplanted by a capitalist state, intent on speed-running through industrialization. Books are pulped and writing banned; libraries are closed. The old languages and gestures are outlawed, along with homosexuality, home-cooked food, bartering. Citizens become “producer-consumers” and must orient all of their lives to those two actions. Ordinary life becomes subsumed into regimented, surveilled, and homogenized routines.

Bewildered and heart sore, Sutty finds life in the capital city to be difficult. Her skill in language and literature has no outlet, the need to hide her sexuality rankles, and the people all seem like smooth plastic surfaces which she can’t reach. But then the envoy makes an invitation: the Akans will permit her to leave the capital and visit the mountain villages, where she might learn if anything remains of the former culture. It’s a risky venture, but there’s nothing for her in the city; she boards a riverboat and is soon on her way.

In Okzat-Ozkat, she disembarks and wanders a while, the great white cliffs of Mount Silong rising above her. When she ventures to speak to some of the people, she finds inklings of the former Aka. A boy calls her “yoz,” a word that means fellow person, a common address in the old days, since banned. An herbalist works in a shop where writing, faded but still visible, adorns the walls. When she begins to speak the words, the old man slams one hand on the counter and covers his mouth with the other. “Not aloud, yoz,” he says.

Soon, Sutty is invited to join the maz on their evening gatherings. “Maz” means “educated person” or “teacher.” The maz are couples (of any gender) who dedicate their lives to the Telling—the recitation of story, fable, poem, song,...