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A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be
An inward journey into writing and philosophical temporality via myth, cosmology and literary criticism from the late Ursula K. LeGuin.
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin loosens the grip of Euclidean reason by taking a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place.
Drawing on Taoist thought, she shows a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias. Instead, she advocates for what is ‘cold’, yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction. If we return, go round, go inward, go yinward, the Golden Age is right here, right now – invisible only to the forward-oriented mind.
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. From alternative social imaginaries rehearsed within an anti-heroic literary style, utopia emerges as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin loosens the grip of Euclidean reason by taking a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place.
Drawing on Taoist thought, she shows a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias. Instead, she advocates for what is ‘cold’, yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction. If we return, go round, go inward, go yinward, the Golden Age is right here, right now – invisible only to the forward-oriented mind.
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. From alternative social imaginaries rehearsed within an anti-heroic literary style, utopia emerges as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.
20 pages, Unknown Binding
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
1,060 books31.3k followersUrsula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 20, 2025
An essay everyone must read and internalize . The centre of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere!
November 30, 2020
This essay gets into your head and maybe even down into your blood. Maybe it's because I assigned it as a companion text to a book my class is reading, which means I spent more time and attention with/on it than something that just struck my fancy, but LeGuin's essay is something to really get lost in and maybe found by? In the essay LeGuin separates out "cold" societies from "hot" societies and even nods at "warm" societies like those mentioned in Robert Nichols book, Daily Lives in Nghsi Altai and Austin Tappan Wright's tome, Islandia. I'm not going to explain these distinctions because explanations are the low road to understanding (actually, they might just be trompe d'oeils). I will say that both of these books contain communities that illustrate kinder, gentler (and more naturally in-tune and intuitive) worlds than the "hot" capitalist society that we live in today (and we are really a mindless lot!) and maybe that's the draw; LeGuin's ability to critique while she imagines alternative ways of living keeps the reader engaged with her thinking. Her ability to use multiple lenses--like the trickster, or the Tao, or the I Ching, or history, anthropology and literary texts--to think deeply about how we got here (and where here actually is) and how we might imagine a different kind of future left me wanting more. Donna Haraway once said that the beauty of good writing (and here I mean writing that makes you think) is that it "fucks with your head." Well, if you are looking for something to upend your worldview, then look no further.
Usà puyew usu wapiw!
Usà puyew usu wapiw!
January 16, 2023
It is always this essay at the end of the day
June 6, 2020
. . . Ideally, at its loftiest and most pure, the utopia aspires to (if it has never reached) the condition of the idyll as Schiller describes it — that mode of poetry which would lead man, not back to Arcadia, but forward to Elysium, to a state of society in which man would be at peace with himself and the external world.
November 30, 2020
"In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing and hot. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, circular, cyclical, peaceful, retreating, contracting and cold"
March 3, 2024
organized forgetting = discovery
what is a yin utopia?
missing california
what is a yin utopia?
missing california
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews