That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.
So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible·
The carrier bag theory of fiction proposes an alternate narrative of human evolution:
…before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.
Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. It opens a portal to terra incognita: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.
Ursula K Le Guin “The carrier bag theory of fiction” and subsequent texts inspired by web trawling on Ursula.
Permeating characteristics, exchange of o’s and O’s, creating an ever changing vessel for the individual and collective desire. A vessel made out of flesh, fire – a living vessel. We are a vessel. We are the vessel. The vessel is not in between us. It’s not an organism outside of us. We are this amorphic organism. Or the carrier bag. We contain Us.
What is in the carrier bag of oracle?
Politics & ethics
Gut feeling
Vibrations
Ideology
Infinite vocal beings (an entire population)
Fatigue
The non-heroic
Closing off
Contradictions
Languages of an ancient time
Myths & Magic
Animals
Common story?
Techniques
Primordial soup
Friends
Oracle is a living book
Playfulness
Intrigue
Love of literature
Memories
Loss/ lostness
Uncomfortable moments (for a public & an oracle)
Time (less-ness)
Meaning
Decisions
Monsters
Emotional responses
Bravery
Uncensored waterfalls
Innovation of body/ voice /self-discovery
Intention
Here & now presence
Togetherness in varied ways
Women
Listening to
– Intuition
– Body
– Soul
Story telling
Body
Writing sound waves
Where we come from
Home
Live art
An uncontrolled archive
Pie & po
The room that I am in
Resources
– pens
– post-its
Inner resources
– ideas
– ways of working
– skills
tolerance to self
hardness
pain
individual interests
successful failures
a red scribble
support
Contradiction
– of oneself
– the other
– the world
silence
will – individual
monsters
publicity for the self
be – longing
spirit
food sharing
feeling
staging theatricality, performance
repetition
stealing, copying, infecting, contamination, resonances
harvesting – book making
the landscape that I am in
stories
reading what?
Love in what we do and how we do it
Voicing an entire universe
Character
Connect – ing
Breath
Showing an (alien) world
Space for disappearing
Collect collective
Co-existence
Together
The space that I am in
Resonance
Vibrations, trembles, oscillations
What is data?
Questioning
Scoring
Scoring what?
A live human