The Lathe of Heaven

 Source of book: Borrowed from my kid.

 

Three of my kids were in high school during the Covid pandemic, and each had different experiences and challenges. The one who seems able to thrive in any educational setting is my second kid, but she took issue with the fact that for one year, there were ZERO female authors among the books they had to read in depth. 

 

This did NOT make her happy, and as part of her protest, she chose to do her big paper on Ursula Le Guin, who was not only female, but strongly feminist. It was a badass paper (I read it), the result of my kid reading nearly everything Le Guin she could find, which included a few dozen novels that we inherited from a colleague when he downsized his library. (And yes, my kid pretty much appropriated the Le Guin collection…) She recommended I take this one on my recent flight to New York City as it is a small trade paperback. 

 

I have previously read three Le Guin books, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Gifts, which I listened to with the kids on one of our trips. The first two are set in the same universe, while the third is more fantasy than science fiction. 

 

In contrast to all of the others, The Lathe of Heaven is set on our own Earth, in an era that is a bit beyond ours, but still recognizable. Specifically, the events take place in Portland Oregon….or perhaps more accurately, on a few dozen possible future Portland Oregons. 

 

The title is derived from a mistranslation of the writings of Chuang Tzu - the lathe didn’t exist in China at the time, and the concept is better understood as “heavenly equilibrium.” But the title is still excellent, and the mistranslated passage (which is quoted at the beginning of chapter three) is thought provoking. 

 

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. 

 

The book, like so many of Le Guin’s works, is both a story and a philosophical argument. Her ability to imagine worlds built around ideas is amazing, because they are foreign yet incredibly believable and familiar in their own way. 

 

The premise of the book is that George Orr, a drug addict suffering from psychological problems, is involuntarily given psychiatric treatment. (The name may be a nod to George Orwell, or a play on the idea of “or” - the alternate realities in the book.) He is sent to be treated by William Haber, who he informs of the true problem behind his illness: he has “effective” dreams - dreams that change reality. His drug use is to try to prevent the dreams. 

 

Haber, who has good intentions, but few scruples, hooks Orr up to an “augmentor,” a device that allows Haber to control Orr’s dreams to a degree. He makes suggestions during hypnosis, then the machine immediately puts Orr into a dream cycle. 

 

It turns out that Orr isn’t crazy - his dreams really do change reality, but nobody notices because their memories are changed too. Only George can see it. And, it turns out, Haber. 

 

Haber decides to use George to change reality. For the better of course. Why not tackle overpopulation? How about racism? War? And, of course, climate change? (Yes, this book was written in 1971, and thinking people were well aware of the greenhouse effect and warned of continued pollution by fossil fuels. Le Guin gets so many of the details right about what we are now experiencing - fires, floods, extreme weather, drought - the whole thing.) 

 

The problem is, there are, shall we say, side effects. Changing the world isn’t simple or straightforward. So, overpopulation is cured by having a plague wipe out most of humanity. Racism is cured by making all humans the same color of grey, and food follows suit, losing color and flavor. War is ended by an alien invasion - common enemies make for common cause. 

 

And the more Haber tries to change things, the more messed up they get. 

 

Orr is horrified at what is going on, but he has no real choice - if he tries to escape, he will be arrested. What he does do is finds a lawyer, Heather, who is also able to see the world change, although she pretends not to have noticed when around Haber. 

 

From there, things spiral, and it is up to George to try to stop the meddling with reality. 

 

The ending of the book has been criticized for being either incoherent, unbelievable, or unintelligible. I didn’t find that to be the case. Le Guin had to end it somehow. She nods in the direction of the possibility that the universe could simply implode and everyone cease to exist, but instead pulls back to an ending that, while hardly the best case scenario, is better than the worst. I though it worked well, actually. 

 

At the core of the book is the question about some popular philosophies of our time. Haber is both a Utilitarianist (the most good for the most people) and a positivist (only knowledge from logic and reason through the senses is true.) Le Guin criticizes both. She also criticizes behaviorism, the reduction of human behavior to animal instinct. 

 

If she embraces anything, it is Taoism (see the title), but even that is embraced loosely. This is characteristic of Le Guin - every idea is examined and found imperfect in its own way. Her utopias are always flawed, and her dystopias always complicated. She embraces the idea that the human experience - perhaps even existence itself - cannot be reduced to a binary of good or bad, good and evil, happy or unhappy. It’s all complicated, and all interconnected. 

 

I am always pleasantly surprised at how nuanced Le Guin’s books are. There is a depth of thought that the best writers can attain that lesser lights fall short of. Long after the stories have played out on the page, I find myself mulling the ideas and the possible worlds. 

 

To be clear here, Le Guin isn’t arguing against working for social change. Indeed, her thought experiments are in the grand tradition of imagining what could be. But she is deeply skeptical about change imposed from without, of magical solutions. 

 

I love her use of this line from H. G. Wells (another science fiction writer who was incredibly thoughtful): 

 

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that last ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being.” 

 

I spent far too much of my life in a subculture that deeply believed in certainty, in attainable perfection, of solutions imposed on others in an appallingly pedantic way, and the denial of the inseparability of body and soul. What makes us human rather than mere machine is that degree of diversity, imperfection even, that resists reduction to mere naturalism. 

 

The idea of a formula that can “fix” people, typically imposed by those with privilege and power on those below them (think Prohibition, among other things…) has proven again and again to be a failure. And yet, they hold the attractiveness of avoiding the need to live in true community, to accept our interconnection with everyone else. This too was the attraction of the cult I was in. It promised that parents could impose the formula on their kids, and be guaranteed a magical result. That too was a lie, of course.

 

Another chapter has this quote from Lafcadio Hearn:

 

“It may remain for us to learn…that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, safe the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking; - that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past; - that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire; - and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.” 

 

Something to ponder. 

 

One thing I loved about the book was the way that Orr’s character evolved. While things happen to him, he increasingly discovers both how to embrace what he cannot control and how to assert himself where he can. Along the way, he has some interesting and progressive epiphanies. 

 

“Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber, that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time - only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough.”

 

Later, Orr finds himself even further along that line of thinking. He even goes so far as to wonder if the world had been destroyed in the post-nuclear-apocalypse that opens the book. Is everything a dream now? This gives him peace, unexpectedly for Haber.

 

He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be. He was suppressing fear. Or did he think, Haber suddenly wondered, that because he had dreamed the invasion, it was all just a dream?

What if it was? 

Whose? 

 

The problem for Haber is that he thinks in terms of the ends he seeks, and glosses over the means. 

 

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. 

 

This, to me, is one of the deepest truths I have discovered in my journey away from Evangelicalism. There are no ends, in that sense. There are only means. Loving your neighbor isn’t done because it is the means to some greater good, but because the means are all we have. 

 

Orr continues to grow. 

 

“We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.” 

 

Another epiphany comes to Orr as he surrenders his attempts to make sense of the changes in his world. I think there is a lot here that speaks to our present moment for the American Right. 

 

He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will. He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. 

 

George is in a tough spot, and he knows it, which is why he never succumbs to the loss of free will entirely. 

 

But what struck me most about this passage is that when we deny what is, we become increasingly obsessed with the fears and terrors which are not real, the fear of what doesn’t exist. I am reminded of the way that the Right has gone down the path of fearing everything - immigrants, feminists, atheists, and especially LGBTQ people, inventing phantoms that do not in fact exist. I might also note the obsession with demons and the perils of music by black people and books with magic in them that the 1980s and 90s brought to Evangelicalism. Phantom fears every single one, but powerful when you are in denial of the actual world we live in, with greed and racism and misogyny and the other systems of this world that perpetuate injustice. It is easier to stare at the void and invent fears you can control. 

 

Orr eventually has to face what drives Haber. 

 

You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you are doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to…be in touch. He isn’t in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. 

 

I couldn’t help thinking of Bill Gothard and other cult leaders here, but also of the choices my parents made at that point. They played God with my life - denying me the higher education and career choice I should have had - and the purity of their motives do not make that good enough.

 

They were not in touch with me in the sense of connecting with my needs and emotions and desires, and haven’t been since. They believe they were and are right, and that is all that matters to them when it comes to me, unfortunately.

 

I became a means toward the end. The end both of Christian Nationalism as Gothard desired but also of fixing their discomfort with cultural change I was to be an arrow in the quiver to fight against the modern world, and that hasn’t really changed since. My value to them has not been inherent, but based on whether me (and my wife and kids too) validate their choices and their goals. When we ceased to do things their way, to be means toward their end, we were no longer valued, just as George was discarded once Haber could accomplish his ends without him.

 

I’ll end with a scene from one of the alternate realities, in which George and Heather are married. It captures something from my own experience of marriage, and also stands as a rebuke to this idea of using people as means to an end. 

 

In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep. 

 

I think this encapsulates Le Guin’s view of how positive change comes. Love is made, organically, in connection. Change comes through working within the universe. Change comes through being in touch, in improvisation, in creation. 

 

For this reason, Le Guin’s worlds always feel plausible. She doesn’t need to change human nature - she works within it, imagining how the same raw materials could function differently given different systems and circumstances. 

 

The Lathe of Heaven is another example of her ability to imagine in this very concrete and interconnected manner.