HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH ALIENS

The wounded one

Doris Lessing’s benighted world of Shikasta, initially intended to carry the much more harmonious name of Rohanda, will be instantly recognisable to Earthlings as a twice-renamed version of their own home. This novel was written at a time of conflict, within revolutionary dream-space, and when the world was holding its breath and waiting for World War Three to break out and the end of everything to come.

In other words, the same time, all the time, every time. The Canopus in Argos series are something like science fiction, and Shikasta is a novel that you wouldn’t hold your breath before calling dated. And yet, if you were to make even a fragmentary read of it, you’d realise that it is the world itself that is dated. Repeating itself endlessly, like nothing ever happened before. That isn’t even a comforting thought because it repeats itself with more intensity and breathless excitement each time, shivering like a teenager at the threshold of apocalyptic orgasm.

I’m not saying that the end is nigh, or even nigher than it was before. Just that the repetition of a story without any sense of its past iterations is what makes the story banal. Until eventually the story becomes bullshit.

Back in Shikasta, though, right at the start, right at the heart, is the search for the primordial wound, the first cut, echoed in all the wounds that came after, internal and external.

Because one way to explain the wounded world is to say that it was wounded at the source. I don’t doubt that anyone who has been wounded or seen the wounded wants to know why. This is one way to process things. To blame it on the birth-story. 

Explanations

So it goes like this. Shikasta is being prepared to be Rohanda, the colony of the benevolent coloniser Canopus, who are preparing for a link and sharing of substance-of-we-feeling – the essential flow of mutual harmony and well-being, with the mother planet. There is an unseen interruption. The Canopians, focussed on their political rivals the Sirians, don’t notice that the evil Shammatians have snuck in and disrupted the link and flow.

We know that Shammat is evil because the Canopians tell us so, and also because they talk like archaic demonic entities from old horror novels. Substance-of-we-feeling, or SOWF as she calls it, is a lovely flowing name for that thing that keeps us engaged with our fellow humans and our environment, a reciprocal love and care that doesn’t fit within specific frameworks. Or at least, that’s what I hope it is.

After the benighting of Shikasta, the SOWF is broken, fragmented. The lordly Canopians are shocked, disturbed and vaguely responsible. They leave advisors, send agents, write reports and wring their hands. The Shikastans decide that the visiting Canopians are gods, and then start jostling around trying to be gods themselves. They spend the rest of their time fucking around, fucking each other and everything up, and producing the rare gem of a decent human for the Canopians to wonder at.

It is hardly to be wondered at, what with all these godly visitors and internal pushing and shoving that the Shikastans are speeding their way towards the third and final world war and the end of the world as we know it. 

At the end of the world there are wars, destructions, a virus that manages to wipe out the Shammatian contingent as well as various others, which was actually possibly a false diagnosis, and then the Canopians organise a godly clean-up.

Humanity is rendered small, shaken, manageable, and all is reasonably well for the time being.

Except for all the people and plants and things who died but some people are never satisfied, right? What’s important is that the Canopians are back in charge and Shikasta can be unbenighted and a few recognisable names make it to the end of the novel and the report-writing is done.

Shikasta/Rohanda/whatever

I don’t like Shikasta, the novel. Not because I don’t believe in Doris Lessing, the writer, or in this particular search for the source of the pain. But it is a book with nothing and no one to love in it, apart from one phrase. I don’t trust the Canopians at all. They are able to notice how the Shikastan saviours and the Shikastan overt villains are starting to sound remarkably similar, but they don’t recognise the sanctimonious pedagogy and disgust of their own report-writing tone. 

Their letters back home sound a little like Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, without the humour. The Shikastans are uniformly horrible, even the ones the Canopians like, which makes you even more suspicious of the Canopians. The Shammatians are just weird. There’s no one to love and nothing to hold onto by way of narrative, but this is an honest book, an honest effort to make sense of the world and to try and hold a little ugly ball at arm’s length. Hard to love and hard to hold. But useful.

Echoes

Lessing’s Shikasta suffered from:

Pollution

Overpopulation

Racism

Colonialism (though Canopian colonists apparently don’t count)

etc

The drumming intensity of talk around these subjects was also part of her focus. In a ridiculous-sounding Trial, bands of partially racially segregated groups accuse each other of things. It is something like a world council with a lot of speeches that go nowhere. 

She also noticed the way conflicts slowly started to shift into a different trajectory, one of the young versus the old. Young activists were anxious about their potential losses. Old, well, people had already capped their losses and were possibly anxious about being attacked. 

World councils, trials, revolutions, the formation of dictatorships by leftists, tiresome unsubtle spokespersons – if there was anything extraordinarily self-defeating coming up in the future, she’d predicted it. I guess you could call her a prophet now.

This was a book to make the spokespersons of her era uncomfortable. If the spokespersons of this era were reading Lessing it might make them uncomfortable. Or maybe not. Maybe feelings of discomfort have also become obsolete.

The benign envoys of Hain

Ursula Le Guin created a more evolved entity than the Canopians, though there is some similarity. The eternally guilty, cautious Hainish are original settlers rather than colonisers. A more humble word. They came back after millenia to find what became of their planet babies and found that many of them looked a lot like Shikasta, especially Earth, or Terra as they call it. They came in ones, with a principle of non-interfering presence. 

They reasoned that in ones, envoys can be impacted as much as they impact, to balance the shock wave that interplanetary visits would cause. They established peaceful embassies that renegades could escape to, depending on what was going on in the planet at the time. 

The Hainish have the very civilised ability to establish what looks like a neutral presence, while reminding everyone that there is no such thing as a neutral presence. They look harmless. 

Thankfully, I haven’t come across the Terra/Shikasta/Earth visit. Hopefully there isn’t one. We do get a depressing precis of it in The Dispossessed: they came, they saw, they were horrified, they helped out, planet limped back to something like functioning.

It’s funny how much interplanetary visit looks like politics. The Left Hand of Darkness actually digs into this politics of new presence. Genly Ai arrives in the kingdom of Karhide. There he has to: 1. make friends 2. get used to the cold weather 3. convince everyone that he is a genuine bonafide alien and not a spy from the neighbouring country 4. ask nicely for his companions to visit as well 5. ask nicely to set up an embassy.

It turns out to be a long and painful quest. Across miles of barren icy landscape. It is a delicious story, like the adventure stories I read as a child. The politics is as boring as politics everywhere – though she did create, in Estraven, an unusually likeable politician.

Karhide and the alien

Karhide is one of two respectably-sized countries in the planet of Gethen, or Winter. The thing about the planet and the novel that everyone remembers is alien sex. The people of Gethen are without gender, or somer. Gendering happens in phases, called kemmer, where the Gethenian is almost miraculously sexually awakened and can turn either male or female, depending on the closest other-gendered person around. Sex happens in twos, threes, or tens, or in lifetime partnerships.

This sounds so alien but there is something vaguely familiar about it. While none of us get to be physically somer or kemmer, there are periods when we have been both.

In some sense, kemmer is the extremity of sexual awakening, a real physical change. 

Genly and Estraven, when they meet, don’t immediately get along. They’re bound by diplomacy, by ordinary and extraordinary events. So bound that they end up crossing that barren wasteland of snow together and eventually become friends. But one night, in the camp, Estraven is unusually reserved. When Genly tries to figure his way around it, Estraven says that s/he is in kemmer, and needs to maintain a distance from him. Kemmer looks like an explosion, but it can be contained within something like a meditation.

At that moment, Genly realises that he has been avoiding seeing something all along – that Estraven is not a man friend, or even a man. He withdraws and there is a moment of silence in the novel, in that world, the dropping of a black veil.

To me, this is the true alien encounter in the story. The point of meeting. The realisation of unavoidable otherness. Differences in language, customs, clothes, fluff – these are negotiations we make all our lives. However, even without aliens, we have these rare opportunities, in this world, to meet absolute difference.

If I was Genly, I’d have had sex with Estraven. I was outraged that it didn’t happen. It seemed like a missed opportunity. Thankfully, Le Guin is a much more restrained writer and I got instead this real moment of silence and recognition, almost like a prayer. Though they might not be looking at each other at the time, this is what it actually means to see someone.

The ugly ball

Gethen is an unusually peaceful planet. There is conflict but there has never been a war. In some circuitous way, Urusula Le Guin says that when she tried to imagine a world without war she found herself imagining a world without clear gender divisions. Maybe to escape this overwhelming shock of recognising otherness without prejudice, fear or hostility. And yet the most magical moment in The Left Hand of Darkness is Genly discovering that Estraven is not his kind. 

Most of the other planetary visits, however, land in a place of war, turmoil, violent revolutions, smouldering embers. No doubt world councils, wars, famine, viruses and well-negotiated and ethically argued cruelty are the typical byproduct of alien visits. I don’t doubt that Earth/Terra/Shikasta will be ready to meet its ‘end’ when it meets aliens.

And yet, I can’t help wondering, what counts as an end? The thing that I don’t see ending is the world. Humans, yes. Many species of animals and plants, yes. Maybe, going by the way the word ‘overpopulation’ is being thrown around as a potential explanation of ethically argued cruelty, humans will be the first on the list to be erased. Not all of them, of course. Just the ones that didn’t realise that the world was ending and needed to be saved (from them).

I do wonder whether the human desire to save the world is simply a desire to save their own little bubbles of humans that they interact with. While grass sprouts within the cracks of the things they made and abandoned.

Only Lars von Trier, in Melancholia, took the trouble to imagine a real ending of the world. Earth is to be crashed into by a mirror planet of almost the same size. In this film, nobody and nothing is saved. What can you do with a real apocalypse? Absolutely nothing. Can’t make a profit out of that, for sure. 

That ugly little ball they hold in their hands, looks to me like nothing more than a bubble. What is actually being saved? 

Encounters

1. When I was a child, standing at the door of my parents’ house, I heard something crash into the cage door next to me. I looked around and saw a white owl had landed in the front garden. Crash landing. For just a few seconds, we looked right into each others’ eyes. Frozen. Then it flew away, chased by a terrifying noisy gang of crows. It is not that nothing was communicated. Many things were communicated but they stayed in the air. 

2. Far away, in Angela Carter’s Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Golden Herm stands in a dripping wet forest on one leg. Herm short for hermaphrodite. One ovary, one testis, reproductive erectile tissue, openable and closable aperture below, he says. 

Puck wants him. Puck is Puck; the phallic orientation marks him as a child of Oberon, Carter says. Puck is Puck so he can be whatever he wants. He decides that to be the perfect fit, the perfect lover, he has to be the Herm, but in reverse order. With all the magic of creation and quite a bit of error and mismaking, he finally turns himself into a living mirror of the Herm. He stands outside the magic circle in a perfect imitation of the Herm’s posture.

Like Genly and Estraven, the Herm and Puck don’t do it. But to me this is also a perfect encounter, aided by some magical intervention. The creation of similar opposites, facing each other while the rain falls and the forest breathes. 

Aliens

Maybe when the aliens do land, they will turn out to be former colonisers or settlers. Maybe they will be something like funding agencies for NGOs, handing out powerful new tools to the state or corporate which is best at lying through its teeth and papering over the pile of bodies it’s standing on. Maybe there will be some shaking of tentacles or feelers or whatever on raised platforms. Maybe they will hang around looking sad while we kill each other. Maybe they will save the world from ending or save Lars von Trier from the world. 

Maybe they’re already walking among us. Terry Pratchett says, in the footnote to end all footnotes, that the reason governments are so good at hiding alien encounters – surprisingly good, given their track record at everything else – is because the aliens themselves are embarrassed about it. He said that Earth is so full of aliens pretending to be humans pretending to be something else that it’s been temporarily banned for intergalactic travel until they can figure out how many actual natives there are left, or if there are any at all. It is gloomily rumoured, he says, that there is only one actual earthling left, and it has very big feet.

In which case the opportunity for encounters is all around you. All you need to do is look.

Even if they do turn out to be something like the benevolent and sighing Hainish and Canopians, though, even if they turn up in batches of one, even if they give us nothing but a good shouting, or a few new diseases, one would hope that there is still the opportunity for a real encounter.

The reason why Genly and Estraven got to have one, the reason why The Left Hand of Darkness worked, is because Estraven lost his home. In exile, they had to meet in ones. Estraven was a politician, but his real meeting with Genly happened when he had lost his power, his position and his connections. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, there was a meeting place, and within it, charged air, silence and so many things communicated, but suspended, not landing. Like arrows frozen in mid-flight.

To have a real encounter you have to be faced with real difference. Even with only one planet to travel in, opportunities abound. 

I would hope that whatever shape of alien we get, somebody, somewhere, gets to have this. A meeting point and a meeting place. A minute or two of silence, discomfort, register, things unsaid. A minute where nothing happens at all, and all you do is see. While rain falls, the forest breathes, bugs crawl, and things continue to grow, all around you.

Author: Priyadarshini John

I found Overture and Incidental Music to a Midsummer Night’s Dream in Saints and Strangers.

Terry Pratchett’s footnote on aliens can be found in Hogfather.