Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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of their respectability. They have also explored the sacred literatures of the world in the same bold way they take scientific and social possibilities to their logical conclusions, so that we may examine them. How very much we do all owe them!
Shikasta has as its starting point, like many others of the genre, the Old Testament. It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker. H. G. Wells said that when man cries out his little ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ to God, it is as if a leveret were to snuggle up to a lion on a dark night. Or something to that effect.
The sacred literatures of all races and nations have many things in common. Almost as if they can be regarded as the products of a single mind. It is possible we make a mistake when we dismiss them as quaint fossils from a dead past.
Leaving aside the Popol Vuh, or the religious traditions of the Dogon, or the story of Gilgamesh, or any others of the now plentifully and easily available records (I sometimes wonder if the young realize how extraordinary a time this is, and one that may not last, when any book one may think of is there to be bought on a near shelf) and sticking to our local tradition and heritage, it is an exercise not without interest to read the Old Testament – which of course includes the Torah of the Jews – and the Apocrypha, together with any other works of the kind you may come upon which have at various times and places been cursed or banished or pronounced non-books; and after that the New Testament, and then the Koran. There are even those who have come to believe that there has never been more than one Book in the Middle East.
7th November 1978
Doris Lessing
Johor has been chosen as suitable to represent our emissaries to Shikasta – of whom there were many, carrying out a multiplicity of functions – in this compilation of documents, selected to offer a very general picture of Shikasta for the use of first-year students of Canopean Colonial Rule.
JOHOR reports:
I have been sent on errands to our Colonies on many planets. Crises of all kinds are familiar to me. I have been involved in emergencies that threaten species, or carefully planned local programmes. I have known more than once what it is to accept the failure, final and irreversible, of an effort or experiment to do with creatures who have within themselves the potential of development dreamed of, planned for … and then – Finis! The end! The drum pattering out into silence …
But the ability to cut losses demands a different type of determination from the stubborn patience needed to withstand attrition, the leaking away of substance through centuries, then millennia – and with such a lowly glimmering of light at the end of it all.
Dismay has its degrees and qualities. I suggest that not all are without uses. The set of mind of a servant should be recorded.
I am a small member of the Workforce, and as such do as I must. That is not to say I do not have the right, as we all have, to say, Enough! Invisible, unwritten, uncoded rules forbid. What these rules amount to, I would say, is Love. Or so I feel, and many others, too. There are those in our Colonial Service who, we all know, hold a different view. One of my aims in setting down thoughts that perhaps fall outside the scope of the strictly necessary is to justify what is still, after all, the majority view on Canopus about Shikasta. Which is that it is worth so much of our time and trouble.
In these notes I shall be trying to make things clear. There will be others, after me, and they will study this record as I have studied, so often, the records of those who came before. It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
Things change. That is all we may be sure of.
Of all my embassies, that first one to Shikasta was the worst. I can say truthfully that I have scarcely thought of it between that time and this. I did not want to. To dwell on unavoidable wrong – no, it does no good.
This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes. But poor Shikasta – no, I have not wanted to think about it more than I had to. I did not make attempts to meet those of the personnel who were being sent (oh, many thousands of them, and over and over again, for no one could accuse Canopus of neglect of that unfortunate, Shikasta, no one could feel that we have evaded responsibilities), who were sent, and returned, and who filed their reports as we all did. Shikasta was always there, it is on our agenda – the cosmic agenda. It is not a place one could choose to forget altogether, for it was often in the news. But I, for one, did not ‘keep myself in touch’, ‘informed’ – no. Once I had filed my report that was that. And when I was sent again, on my second visit, at the Time of the Destruction of the Cities, to report on the results of such a long slow atrophy, I kept my thoughts well within the limits of my task.
And so, returning again after an interval – but is it really so many thousands of years? – I am deliberately reviving memories, recreating memories, and these attempts will take their place in this record where they may be appropriate.
From: NOTES on PLANET SHIKASTA
for GUIDANCE of COLONIAL SERVANTS
Of all the planets we have colonized totally or in part, this is the richest. Specifically: with the greatest potential for variety and range and profusion of its forms of life. This has always been so, throughout the very many changes it has – the accurate word, we are afraid – suffered. Shikasta tends towards extremes in all things. For instance, it has seen phases of enormousness: gigantic lifeforms and in a wide variety. It has seen phases of the minuscule. Sometimes these epochs have overlapped. More than once the inhabitants of Shikasta have included creatures so large that one of them could consume the food and living space of hundreds of their co-inhabitants in a single meal. This example is on the scale of the visible (one might even say the dramatic), for the economy of the planet is such that every lifeform preys on another, is supported by another, and in turn is preyed upon, down to the most minute, the subatomic level. This is not always evident to the creatures themselves, who tend to become obsessed with what they consume, and to forget what in turn consumes them.
Over and over again, a shock or a strain in the peculiarly precarious balance of this planet has called forth an accident, and Shikasta has been virtually denuded of life. Again and again it has been jostling full with genera, and diseased because of it.
This planet is above all one of contrasts and contradictions, because of its in-built stresses. Tension is its essential nature. This is its strength. This is its weakness.
Envoys are requested to remember at all times that they cannot find on Shikasta what they will have become familiar with in other parts of our dominion and which therefore they will have become disposed to expect: very long periods of stasis, epochs of almost unchanging harmonious balance.
For instance. They may care to stand in front of the Model of Shikasta, Scale 3 – scaled, that is, to roughly present sizes. (Dominant species half of Canonean size.) This sphere, which you will see as they see it on their mapping and cartographic devices, has the diameter of their average predominant-species size. You will observe over the larger part of the sphere a smear of liquid. It is on this film of liquid that the profusion of life depends. (This planet knows nothing of the little scum of life on its surface: the planet has other ideas of itself, as we know; but that is not our concern here.) The point of the exercise is this: to understand that the proliferation of organic possibilities, the harvest of potentiality which is Shikasta, depends, from one point of view, on a scrape of liquid that could be drunk in a moment by a rogue star, or shaken off like puddle-mud from a child’s ball during a game if a comet came in from elsewhere. Which event would be, after all, not without its precedents!
For instance. Adjust yourself