When she’d finished writing the book, Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined, so she asked her friend Todd Barton, a musician, composer and builders of synthesizers, to help her make an album of Kesh music and poetry.
“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” she tells us on the first page, with past-imperfect-future-maybe-pluperfect tenses swinging back and forth, making a mockery of our attachment to linear chronology. Le Guin is elegantly tricksy about when the book is set, although pretty specific about where it is. These are folk songs, field recordings and poetry from the Kesh, a people invented by Ursula K Le Guin and documented in her 1985 ethnography, Always Coming Home - 500 pages of stories, recipes, medicines, social systems, poems, songs, proverbs, a glossary, a bit of gossip. Which all sounds very abstract and slippery, but if you were to write a huge great anthropological, archaeological, nitty-gritty book about it, it might start to feel more concrete, more powerful and more useful. The world we have is defined by the worlds we do not have. So I’ve been walking around listening to The Music & Poetry Of The Kesh and thinking about my grandmas and my mum and my five-year-old niece, like I’m in a totem pole or an infinity mirror I think about all the beyonds, and the befores and the futures I think about missed possibilities and future responsibilities and what we might feel proud of how the life we live is defined by the lives we do not live.
Listening to this album, after reading the book, I’ve been reminded of Alice Coltrane’s ‘Going Home’ (and Paul Robeson’s version) and Jerry Moore’s ‘Life Is A Constant Journey Home’, where he sings “Sometimes I think if I could be back where it started, I’d be where I’m going.” In these songs and stories, home is not a sofa and a telly and some curtains, and home is not death either (or not only death) home is somewhere beyond, right here, in the past and in the future. Music and Poetry of the Kesh by Ursula K.
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