Page 8 RAIN November 1981 One night this summer a friend and I were camped out in an alpine meadow on Mount Jefferson. We were beginning to drift to sleep, watching the stars, more numerous that I'd ever seen, counting satellites as they made their passages, when my friend launched into one of those irresistible meta-· physical m_onologues. "We are here in this mountain valley in Oregon, United States, Planet Earth, on the outer edge of our galaxy. That enormous moon is a miniscule member of the cosmic society. Our galaxyall the stars we can see and many times that number- is just a tiny part of the system of many,·many galaxies. ... The miracle is that we are at once more a marvel than we can let ourselves fathom and yet more minute than is comfortable to think about." The question I keep coming back to is why it-is so brain-wrenching for us to stretch our understanding in either direction. From where comes the prohibition against imagining and realizing our way into harmony and out of destruction? Coincidence brought me these three books at once, and as I read them I bega!l to move back and forth between them, recognizing threads that laced from one to the other and back again. Whether the subject is the mind! body, or the planet/person, or the fully imaginable cosmos, the questions and often the answers are the same. If I were to desig!l (l curriculum in, say, "Whole Systems Visualizing," I'd probably include each of these books-not because they are especially new and singular in their content, but because each of them synthesizes so much information so well. -CC Shikasta, by Doris Lessing, 1981 (paper- ' back edition),.365 pp., $4.95 from: Vintage Books-Random House 201 E. 50th St. New York, NY 10022 If you can make the psychic leap from our pinhead status in the astral plane to our systems management role on spaceship earth, and then can move back and forth in time from the planet's birthing to its return to dust, you will be able to accompany Doris Lessing on her accelerated journey through time. Shikasta, subtitled Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by ]ohor·(George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days is, as you can imagine from that "Last Days," not an optimistic book. It's about the fall from order and reason, the direction of the descent into mental confinement and planetary dissolution. It is almost too close to the bone to be fiction, only true science fiction in its supra-historical sprawl. It's the story of a planet, Shikasta, which en route to harmony and some perfection, is disturbed, turned back from its goal. It's the tale frO"m an early forgetting; I had to tell these unfortunates that due to circumstances entirely beyond their control and for which they bore no responsibililty at all, they would become less than shadows of their former selves . ... It was as if I had been given the task of telling someone in perfect health that he would shortly become a moron, but,that he must do his best to r.e..: member some useful facts, which were a . . . b .. . c.... . Through deliberate deceit; The qualities prized in "public servants" on Shikasta were, almost invariably, the most superficial and irrelevant imaginable, The Future lryiagining and could only have been accepted in a time of near total debasement and falseness. This was true of all sects, groupings, "parties": for what was remarkable about this particular time was how much they all resembled each other, while they spent most of their energies in describing and denigrating differences that they imagined e·xisted between them. To the planet-wide trial of the white races; I open this trial with an indictment. That it is the white races of this world that have destroyed it, corrupted it, made possible the wars that have ruined it: ... There is even the hint of a new beginning (a lead into volumes 2 and 3 of this trilogy?); I have understood that the vague blank look is from the past. It is not what we are now. Do you think it is not so much we forget things that are awful 1but that we never really believed in them happening? This book is so wide in its understanding of space and time, so ecological in its description of interdependencies, and so consistent in its pursuit of political histories that construct (or destruct) political futures that you will want to read it more than once. Lessing's artful elegance with words makes the-reading a joy. Your Body Works, edited by Gerald Kogan, Ph.D., 1981, 180pp., $9.95 from: And/Or Press, Inc. P.O. Box 2246 Berkeley, CA 94710 Margaret Mead listed, among the best things you can do for yourself, having yourself ana- , lyzed. I tend to agree, finding the journey across the continents of our personal pasts at least as exciting and educational as global or cosmic searches. But the trick to that journey (as in any travel) is finding a good guide (therapy, after all, comes from the word nurse, as in nurture). Given the amazing growth of therapy as an industry with all the brand-name competition of the marketplace, it is often difficult enough just to choose a "school," let alone a single practitioner. Your Body Works offers brief descriptions by
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