The Compass Rose

Preface

By calling this book The Compass Rose I hoped to suggest that some pattern or coherence may be perceived in it, while indicating that the stories it contains tend to go off each in its own direction. They take place all over the map, including the margins. It is not even clear to me what the map is a map of. A mind, no doubt; presumably the author’s. But I expect there is more to it than that. One’s mind is never simply one’s own, even at birth, and ever less so as one lives, learns, loses, etc.

The four directions, NESW, of the Rose of the Winds, our magnetic compass, converge into or arise out of an unspoken fifth direction, the center, the corolla of the rose.

Many of the American peoples who were dispossessed by the compass-guided invaders from the East structured their world upon the four wind directions (or half-directions) and two more, Above and Below, also radial to the center/self/here and now, which may sacramentally contain the other six, and thus the Universe. This is the compass in four dimensions, spatial and temporal, material and spiritual, the Rose of the New World.

As a guide to sailors this book is not to be trusted. Perhaps it is too sensitive to local magnetic fields.

Within it, various circling motions may be perceived,as between the first and last stories, and the fourth and seventeenth. It gives rise to apparent excursions outward which are in fact incursions inward, such as the eleventh story; while the only piece describing a place whose objective reality may be confirmed on a present-day map of present-day Earth, the seventh, is perhaps the most subjective one of the lot.

As for the reasons why a particular story is assigned to a particular direction, they are not very serious. Nadir may be down underground, for instance, or in the depths, or simply downhearted. The organising principle may be historical, or poetical, or literal. Surely one of the means of learning to know the world as alive with symbol and meaning is to cultivate the art of taking things literally?

The title of an earlier collection of my stories was The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, a compass borrowed from A. E. Housman. To this one, let me set as motto a French poem of Rainer Maria Rilke, from the group Les Roses.

In English, Rilke asks the rose something like this:

—Ursula K. Le Guin