I’m honored that my high school junior invited me to read this humorous satiric essay (it’s below my story) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Le Guin cleverly shows the limitations of our culture and language for acknowledging diversity, then moreover how complexity and differences actually enrich rather than threaten Art and Life.

I noticed while we were working together how much agitation arose in my body around following his teacher’s highly demanding assignment of annotating the essay to describe Le Guin’s use of hyperbole, allusion, rhetorical questions, satire, mode of discourse and elaborative technique.

I got more and more flustered because I saw how much Le Guin packed into this piece, yet having to pick it apart to annotate it overwhelmed me. The teacher expects 16 & 17 year-olds to annotate this kind of a piece in 45-minutes, citing their evidence along the way.

After an hour I had to take a break because I was still spinning over how to compose a coherent opening sentence.

I graduated with a high honors BA in Humanities at Cal and have been a avid writer and reader since I was a child.

I told my son how much respect I have for his tenacity in persisting with his teacher’s demands.

I am far more interested in what provoking art elicits in our body and emotions than teaching students to describe rhetorical devices. I am so proud of the Creative Alchemists participating in my online class for NOT doing the practices I offer when they don’t serve.

My desire is for each being to be sovereign and self-governed in the name of wholeness and full creative expression.

I see a day when our education systems focus on encouraging students to become more self aware and expressed than articulate about literary terms.

I was super excited to learn that Ursula K. Le Guin published her own translation of the Tao. I can’t wait to check it out!

Here’s her essay that provoked this conversation:

“I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in A, and I own three bras, and I’ve been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details. But details don’t matter. If we have anything to learn from politicians, it’s that details don’t matter. I am a man, and I want you to believe and accept this as a fact, just as I did for many years.

You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it, an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Bronte were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time

.So when I was born there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am him, as in “If anybody needs to throw up, he will have to do it in his hat,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

Not maybe a first-rate man. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may be in fact a kind of second-rate or imitation man, a Pretend-a-Him. As a him, I am to a genuine male him as a microwaved fishstick is to a whole grilled Chinook salmon. I mean, after all, can I inseminate? Can I belong to the Bohemian Club? Can I run General Motors? Theoretically I can, but you know where theory gets us. Not to the top of General Motors, and on the day when a Radcliffe Woman is the president of Harvard University you wake me up and tell me, will you? And then, I can’t write my name with pee in the snow. I can’t shoot my wife and children and some neighbors and then myself. Oh to tell you the truth, I can’t even drive. I never got my license. I chickened out. I take the bus. That is terrible. I admit it, I am actually a very poor imitation or substitute man, and you can see it when I try to wear those trendy army surplus clothes with ammunition pockets from the Banana Republic Company catalogues and I look like a hen in a pillowcase. I am shaped wrong. People are supposed to be lean, and taut, aren’t they? You can’t be too thin, everybody says so, specially anorectics. People are supposed to be lean, and taut, because that’s how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that’s how a lot of men start out, and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established; and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I’m really lousy at being people, because I’m not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut. And then, people are supposed to be tough. Tough is good. But I’ve never been tough. I’m sort of soft and actually sort of tender. Like a good steak. Or like Chinook salmon, which isn’t lean, or tough, but very rich and tender. But then salmon aren’t people, or anyhow we have been told that they aren’t, recently. We have been told that there is only one kind of people and they are men. And I think it is very important that we all believe that. It certainly is important to the men.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I am just not manly. Like Ernest Hemingway was manly. The beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences. I do try. I have this sort of beardoid thing that keeps trying to grow, nine or ten hairs on my chin, sometimes even more: but what do I do with the hairs? I tweak them out. Would a man do that? Men don’t tweak. Men shave. Anyhow white men shave, and I have even less choice about being white or not than I do about being a man or not. I am white whether I like being white or not. But I do my best not to be, I guess, under the circumstances, because I don’t shave. I tweak. But it doesn’t mean anything because I don’t really have a real beard that amounts to anything. And I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after a ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.’

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death Sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. I did not stop. I have allowed myself to age and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.

What I mean is, if I had any real self-respect wouldn’t I at least have had a facelift or some liposuction? Although liposuction sounds to me like what they do a lot of on TV when they are young or youngish, though not when they are old, and when one of them is a man and the other is a woman, though not under any other circumstances. What they do is, this young or youngish man and woman take hold of each other and slide their hands around on each other and then they perform liposuction. You are supposed to watch them while they do it. They move their heads around and flatten out their mouth and nose on the other person’s mouth and nose and open their mouths in different ways, and you are supposed to feel sort of hot or wet or something as you watch. What I feel is like I was watching two people doing liposuction, and is this why they finally invented women? Surely not.

As a matter of fact, I think that sex is even more boring, as a spectator sport, than all the other spectator sports, even baseball. I mean, if I have to watch a sport instead of doing it, I’ll take show jumping. The horses are really good-looking. The people who ride them are mostly these sort of Nazis, but like all Nazis they are only as powerful and successful as the horse they are riding, and it is after all the horse who decides whether to jump that five-barred gate or stop short and let the Nazi fall off over its neck. Only usually the horse doesn’t realize it has an option. Horses aren’t awfully bright. But any case, show jumping and sex have a good deal in common, though you usually can only get show jumping on American TV if you can pick up a Canadian channel. Given the option, though I often forget that I have an option, I certainly would watch show jumping and do sex. Never the other way around. But I’m too old now for show jumping, and as for sex, who knows? I do; you don’t.

Of course golden oldies are supposed to jump from bed to bed these days just like the horses jumping the five-barred gates, bounce, bounce, bounce, but a good deal of this super sex at seventy business seems to be theory again, like the woman CEO of General Motors and the woman president of Harvard. Theory is invented mostly to reassure people in their forties, mostly men, who are worried. That is why we had Karl Marx, and why we still have economists, though we seem to have lost Karl Marx. As such, theory is dandy. As for practice, or praxis as the Marxists call it apparently because they like x’s, you wait till you are sixty or over and then you tell me about your sexual practice, or prams, you want to, though I make no promises that I will listen, and if I do listen I will probably be extremely bored and start looking for some show jumping on the TV. In any case, you are not going to hear anything from me about my sexual practice or praxis, now or later.

But all that aside, here I am, old, sixty years old, “a sixty-year-old smiling public man,” as Yeats said, but then, he was man. And it’s all my own fault. I get born before they invented women, and I live and I live all these decades trying so hard to be a good man that I forget all about staying young, and so I didn’t. And my tenses get all mixed up. I just am young and then all of a sudden I was sixty. There must have been something that a real man could have done about it. Something short of guns, but more effective than Oil of Olay. But I failed. I did nothing. I absolutely failed to stay young. And then I look back on all my strenuous effort because I really did try, I tried hard to be a man, to be a good man, and I see how I failed at that I am at best a bad man. An imitation phony second-rate him with a ten-hair beard and semicolons. And I wonder what was the use. Sometimes I think I might just as well give the whole thing up. Sometimes I think I just as well exercise my option, stop short in front of the five-barred gate, and let the Nazi fall off onto his head; if I’m no good at pretending to be a man and no good at being young, I might just as well start pretending that I am an old woman. I am not sure that anybody has invented old women yet; but it might be worth trying.”