[wordup] Ursula Le Guin - The Horsies Upstairs

[Adam Shand]

This is long but beautiful, and I think, important.

Adam.

Source: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2011.html#horsies

The Horsies Upstairs

On the eve of Christmas Eve the family was all out in the forest where
my daughter and son-in-law and three dogs and three horses and a cat
live. Three of them live in the horse-barn and the pasture at the top
of the hill, five of them in the log-cabin-style house at the bottom
of the hill, and one of them in great style in a studio cottage with a
heating pad all her own, which in winter she deserts only to hunt mice
in the woods. That afternoon it was raining, as it had been all
December, so everybody was inside, and the kitchen-living-dining room
was pretty full of people, the eldest eighty-three and the youngest
two.

The two-year-old, Leila, was visiting with her mother and her
step-aunt from Toronto. Seven of us had come over for the afternoon,
and six were staying there — the hosts upstairs, the Torontans in the
study, and one hardy soul out in the trailer. (There is no bed in the
studio cottage and Mimi does not share her heating pad.) The dogs were
circulating freely among us and there were many good things to eat,
arousing much interest in the dogs. For anybody as young as Leila, it
must have seemed pretty crowded and noisy and full of strangers and
strangeness, but she took it all in with bright eyes and sweet
equanimity.

That morning, when it stopped raining for a while, she had gone up the
long, steep driveway with the women to the horse-barn and riding ring.
They played with pretty Icelandic Perla, and Hank, who stands a
stalwart ten hands high and is convinced of his authority as the only
horse (as opposed to mare) on the premises. Leila sat in the saddle in
front of Aunty Cawoline on Melody, the kind, wise, old cutting horse,
and very much enjoyed her riding lesson. When Mel picked up her pace,
Leila bounced up and down, up and down, and softly sang “Twot! Twot!
Twot! Twot!” round and round the ring.

So, then, that afternoon, indoors, at some point among the various
conversations, somebody said it would be dark before you knew it. And
somebody else said, “Pretty soon we’d better go up and feed the
horses.”

Leila took this in. Her eyes grew a little brighter. She turned to her
mother and asked in a small hopeful voice, “Are the horsies upstairs?”

Her mother gently explained that the horsies were not up in the loft
but up in the pasture at the top of the hill. Leila nodded, a little
disappointed perhaps, but acceptant.

And I carried her question away with me to smile over and to ponder.

It was both charming and logical. In Toronto, in the limited world of
a two-year-old, when somebody talked of going “up,” it would almost
always mean “upstairs.”

And to Leila the log-walled house, which is very tall though not
really very large, must have seemed immense, labyrinthine,
unpredictable, with its doors and staircases and basement and loft and
porch, everything unexpected, so that you enter the back door at
ground level, walk through the house, and go down a long flight of
steps to get to ground level … Leila had probably been up the loft
stairs to the bedroom only once if at all.

Anything could be up those stairs. Melody, Perla, and Hank could be
there. Santa Claus could be there. God could be there.

How does a child arrange a vast world that is always turning out new
stuff? She does it the best she can, and doesn’t bother with what she
can’t until she has to. That is my Theory of Child Development.

I wrote a short story once, all of which was true, about going to a
conference on the Northern California coast among the redwoods, and
having not the faintest idea I’d ever seen the place, the cabins, the
creek, before — until I was told, and realised it was true, that I’d
lived there for two intense weeks of two summers — that this very
place was Timbertall, the camp my friends and I went to when we were
thirteen and fourteen.

At that age, absolutely all I had noticed enough to remember about the
location of Timbertall was that we all got on a bus and rode north for
hours and hours talking the whole way, and got off, andwere there.
Wherever there was. There was where we were. With the creek, and the
cabins, the huge stumps, the high dark trees, and us, still talking,
and the horses.

Oh, yes, there were horsies up there, too. That’s why we were there.
That was what mattered, at that age.

I was a kid who, thanks to a wooden jigsaw puzzle of the U.S.A., had
the states fairly well located, and had been taught enough geography
to acquire some notion of continents and nations. And I knew the
redwood country was north of Berkeley, because my parents had driven
with me and my brother up that coast when I was nine, and my father
was always clear about compass directions.

And that was all I knew at fourteen about where Timbertall was, and
all I cared to know.

I am appalled by my ignorance. Yet it had its own logic. I didn’t have
to drive the bus, after all. I was a kid, carted around by adults the
ways kids are. I had an adequate arrangement of the world, a
sufficient understanding of my position, for my needs at the time.

No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they arethere.
It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this
huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to
get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they
can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are.

It takes years to learn to live between, and thus to get the
relationships between things arranged, to make sense of them.

It probably takes the weird adult human mind, too. I think animals are
where they are in the same way a baby is. Oh, they know the way
between places, many of them, as no baby does, and far better than we
do — horses for sure, if they’ve been over the ground once. Bees, if
another bee dances it for them. Terns above the trackless ocean….
Knowing the way, in that sense, is knowing where you are all the way.

At fourteen, unless I was in a very familiar place, I had very little
idea where I was. More than Leila, but not that much more.

But at fourteen I knew the horses were not in the loft bedroom. I knew
Santa Claus was not at the North Pole. And I was giving a good deal of
thought to where God might be.

Children have to believe what they are told. Willingness to believe is
as necessary to a child as the suckling instinct is to a baby: a child
has so much to learn in order to stay alive and in order to be human.

Specifically human knowledge is imparted largely through language, so
first we have to learn language, then listen to what we’re told, and
believe it. Testing the validity of information should always be
permitted and is sometimes necessary but may also be dangerous: the
little one had better believe without running any tests that the stove
burner could burn even when it isn’t red, that if you eat Gramma’s
medicine you will be sick, that running out into the street is not a
good idea … Anyhow there’s so much to be learned, it can’t all be
tested. We really do have to believe what our elders tell us. We can
perceive for ourselves, but have very little instinctive knowledge in
how to act on our perceptions, and must be shown the basic patterns of
how to arrange the world and how to find our way through it.

Therefore the incalculable value of true information, and the
unforgivable wrongness of lying to a child. An adult has the option of
not believing. A child, particularly your own child, doesn’t.

A scenario: Leila, instead of contentedly accepting the information,
begins to wail in disappointment, insisting, “No, the horsies are
upstairs! They ARE upstairs!” A soft-hearted grownup smiles and coos,
“Yes, dear, the horsies are upstairs, all cuddled up in bed.”

This is a lie, though a tiny, silly one. The child has learned
nothing, but has been confirmed in an existential misunderstanding
which she’ll have to sort out somehow, sometime.

That “up” means up the stairs, up the hill, and a whole lot of other
places too, and that its meaning may depend on where you are at the
moment, is important information. A child needs all the help she can
get in learning to take that vast variety of meanings into account.

Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup
might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank
hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying Where’s
the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know
that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth
to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child
has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by
our honesty.

I brought in Santa Claus for a reason. I’ve always been uncomfortable
with the way we handle him. We had Santa Claus in my family (in fact
my mother wrote a lovely children’s book about Santa Claus in
California letting his reindeer graze on the new winter clover.) When
I was a kid we read “The Night Before Christmas,” and we set out milk
and cookies by the fireplace, and they were gone in the morning, and
we all enjoyed it. People love pretense, and love ritual, and need
both. Neither of them is counterfactual. Santa Claus is an odd,
quirky, generally benign myth — a real myth, deeply involved in the
ritual behaviors of the one great holiday we still have left. As such
I honor him.

Very early in my life, like most kids, I think, I could distinguish
“Pretend” from “Real,” which means I knew myth and fact were different
things and had some sense of the no-man’s-land that lies between the
two. At any age I can recall, if somebody had asked me, “Is Santa
Claus real?” I would, I think, have been confused and embarrassed, and
blushed red in case it was the wrong answer, and said No.

I don’t think I missed anything not thinking Santa Claus was real the
way my parents were real. I could listen out for reindeer hooves with
the best of them.

Our kids had Santa Claus; we read the poem, and left milk and cookies
out for him; and so do their kids. To me, that’s what’s important.
That the bonding ritual be honored, the myth re-enacted and carried
forward in time.

When I was a kid and other kids started telling about “when they found
out about Santa Claus,” I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is
unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be
lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people — adults! — mourning
over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

To me what’s awful is not — as it is usually presented — the “loss of
belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend
to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting
of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth,
actuality with ritual symbol.

Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief, but of
realising that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something
they didn’t believe? Or is it that in losing literal belief in our fat
little Father Christmas, they also lose love and respect for him and
what he stands for? But why?

I could go on from here in several directions, one of them political.
As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however
well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on
people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered
confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol.
Like, say, the Third Reich. Or Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Or
Mission Accomplished.

But I don’t want to go there. I just want to meditate on the horsies upstairs.

Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as
it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes
negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it
diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increases.

There are areas in which we have no knowledge, where we need belief,
because it’s all we can act on. In the whole area we call religion or
the realm of the spirit, we can act only on belief. There, belief may
be called knowledge by the believer: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
That’s fair, so long as it’s fair also to maintain and insist upon the
difference, outside religion, between the two things. In the realm of
science, the value of belief is nil or negative; only knowledge is
valuable. Therefore, I don’t say I believe two plus two is four, or
that the earth goes around the sun, but that I know it. Because
evolution is an ever-developing theory, I prefer to say I accept it,
rather than that I know it to be true. Acceptance in this sense is, I
suppose, the secular equivalent of belief. It can certainly provide
endless nourishment and delight for mind and soul.

I’m willing to believe people who say they couldn’t live if they lost
their religious belief. I hope they’ll believe me when I say that if
my intellect goes, if I’m left groping in confusion unable to tell the
real from the imagined, if I lose what I know and the capacity to
learn, I hope I die.

To see a person who’s only lived two years in this world seeking and
finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded
with truth, and accepting it — that was a lovely thing to see. What it
made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between
our birthday and last day — from where the horsies live to the origin
of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies
around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

— UKL
Jan. 26, 2011