Free Late in the Day by Ursula K. Le Guin

FOREWORD
Deep in Admiration
    Given at the conference “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” at UC Santa Cruz, May 2014, this short talk sums up ideas that many of my poems of the last few years have expressed or have been groping toward.
    I heard the poet Bill Siverly this week say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. The people at this conference are here to think about how to get outside the mindset that sees the technofix as the answer to all problems. It’s easy to say we don’t need more “high” technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new—pottery-making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.
    Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of oursense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to non-living beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things.
    Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back-and-forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.
    In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects.
    Descartes and the behaviorists willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance?
    One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources,” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.
    I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.
    What tools have we got to help us make that reach? In
Romantic Things
Mary Jacobus writes, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”
    Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river
is
, that is, to speak humanly
for it
, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.
    Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.
    By replacing unfounded, willful opinion, science can increase moral sensitivity; by demonstrating and performing aesthetic order or beauty, poetry can move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings, waste and cruelty.
    Poetry often serves religion; and the