Books |
Shikasta
Doris Lessing
By
Published: Nov 19, 2013
Category:
Fiction
Doris Lessing, a novelist “who swept away convention,” died a few days ago. Bad me: I’ve never read her. Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan reads everything. But then, he’s a triple threat: an award-winning actor, singer and playwright. I gratefully hand him the microphone.
Back in 1979, when first editions by famous novelists cost $10.95 and dust jackets were devoid of bar codes, I bought Doris Lessing’s “Shikasta.” The first of what evolved into the five-book “Canopus in Argos”series, it puzzled, disappointed and even outraged a critical establishment that was incapable of digesting this supreme realist’s excursion into mystically tinged science fiction. On the other hand, hippies everywhere — starting with me — loved it. Now that Ms. Lessing, a Nobel Laureate, has died, my thoughts have turned again to the brilliance of “Shikasta.” Few books have stirred me more.
Shikasta is the name of a planet where an attempt by interstellar visitors to educate the native population has gone terribly wrong. At home, the Canopeans have created a civilization that is not only technologically but ethically advanced, the mastery rooted equally in empathy and intelligence. Their previously colonized planets have developed highly successful, peacefully egalitarian cultures. Not so Shikasta.
The book purports to be a series of dispatches to the mother planet from the emissary Johor, who over many centuries documents the effects of the Shikastan disaster. It doesn’t take long to realize that Lessing is writing a history of Earth from a unique perspective. Why have these people failed to fulfill the evident potential of their species?
In exploring this question, “Shikasta” weaves together cosmological legends from a dazzling variety of traditions, Greek and Hindu mythology as well as the Bible. Tales of long-lived giants, Golden Ages, fiery chariots and world-destroying floods acquire substance and depth when linked to the story of Canopeans’ effort to awaken the consciousness of a gifted race of hominids (with intriguing parallels to the apes and monoliths of “2001”). They have taught the fundamentals of social organization, agriculture and architecture. And they have raised their willing disciples to a quasi-Neolithic village level.
But then the colonizers are forced unexpectedly to abandon the planet. An intergalactic cataclysm has interrupted the flow of SOWF from the mother planet. SOWF is an energy stream — short for Substance of We-Feeling — without which the Canopeans cannot survive. They are fed, essentially, by love.
Johor, who was present at this initial crisis, notes that the most receptive humans were instructed to condense the Canopean system of mutual aid and reverence for life into a few basic maxims to live by (Ten Commandments, anyone? Four Noble Truths?), until the time in the far future when SOWF returns and harmony will be restored (Second Coming, anyone?). Then, in scenes of desperate heartbreak throughout the globe, spaceships from home take the wise ones away and leave the confused, panicky humans to fall back on half-formed impulses that are quickly corrupted. [To buy “Shikasta” from Amazon.com, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
There are cosmic bad guys, too. Invaders from the rogue planet Shammat seize upon the Canopeans’ departure to spread greed, aggression, sexism and violence throughout the once-peaceful planet. When things get really nasty, Canopus sends emissaries to take human form and restore at least temporary local balance. (Johor offers a regretful rationale for why the majority of great spiritual teachers have had to incarnate as male.) An amazing scene portrays the astral confrontation between these idealistic Earth-bound emissaries and the exhausted refugee souls teeming starward, devastated by the suffering they have witnessed.
But the consciousness that most effectively pervades this book is that of Doris Lessing herself. A longtime Sufi, she possesses the trained mystic’s ability to see the whole of life with effortless compassion. To illustrate Shikasta’s need, Johor’s dispatches teem with stunning miniatures of earthly waste and sorrow: a self-destructive anarchist cell in London, an amputee Boer landholder enviously watching the lively dances of his “coloreds,” the numbing insipidity of pop culture. Lessing is equally alert to the suffering of oppressor and oppressed.
Peter Brook once observed that “tragedy teaches us what is essential by demonstrating the disastrous consequences of its absence.” In “Shikasta”, Lessing gives the teaching unmistakable global resonance.
To believe that visitors from other systems might be benevolent bringers of higher consciousness, first you have to believe that higher consciousness exists. Critics of every stripe were dubious. Others felt that Shammat was too glib an invention to account for the persistence of evil. But at least Lessing, unlike proponents of Original Sin or its Freudian derivatives, never suggested that human nature was cursed by an inherent flaw. Whatever deflections love may encounter on Earth, “Shikasta” affirms that it is always ready to flow again.
