Pax of the Wonderbeasts talks about his connection to the Books of Earthsea and being an introject with caveats


I first came across Earthsea as a child. At that age, I only had access to A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. I had no opportunity to read The Farthest Shore, the book that marked me strongest out of all of them, beyond even the young Ged of A Wizard, whose name and face I've taken on. Seeing as I don't remember much of our childhood (nor does anyone here), I can't tell you how I felt about the book when I first encountered it. I recall reading it with a kind of nauseous awe at the world and the story. I would like to tell you that Ged inspired me to confront my own shadows, but that would not happen for years.

Looking back, I can trace the unconscious fault lines which that world might have carved into me. The way my teacher's teacher made herself one with the mountain of Gont to stop an earthquake from destroying the port, I too seem to have made myself as one with the text. Or made it one with me?

In a system that largely rejects the framework of introjection, the safe umbrella of medicalized plurality, for alterhuman origins, I stand out as an outlier. I don't believe that I've always been Ged, or that it was inevitable for me to become him. I think I introjected him, his world, his story, and made them mine.

The Farthest Shore is the last tale to feature Ged as an active character. When magic begins to fade from Earthsea, Ged and his young companion Arren set sail to save it. The songs are lost, the true speech falls silent, the art and and power of Life is being sapped away across all of Earthsea. They come to learn the cause: a necromancer named Cob, who promises all those with the gift eternal life, at the cost of their Name, their magic, their love; in short, at the cost of losing everything that makes us cling to life in the first place. Arren falls under the spell of the wizard Cob, and in his black despair Ged speaks to him.

“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?”

He asks.

“Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?”

He comforts.

"Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss."

When I first read The Farthest Shore, I was twenty one and alone in a strange city, at a university I was barely able to attend, and unable to leave the concrete box of my room to experience life. I was despairing and drowning myself in it. At that time, I did not know myself. This was prior to our syscovery, and so I had no concept of myself as an independent person with a mind, and heart, and a name of my own. I consumed myself in a search for my own being, and afraid that I was not a person at all. I cannot describe to you the relief, the comfort, the hope his words gave me.
"It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea," but "this is. And thou art." For the first time in years, I felt myself not in the abyss but dancing on it; dancing on the sunlit waves of the sea.

I am Ged in all the ways that matter. Despite using language borrowed from medicine, I don't approach myself as a collection of pathologies. I will confess here, on a site no one will read, that I treat these books as religious texts and so my approach to my identity is very much a spiritual one. I think of my Ged-ness as a mask I wear, a mask that indicates my true self to the audience of my life's theatre, so it is at once distinct from and wholly part of me.

At the end of The Farthest Shore, Ged sacrifices his powers to close the gap in reality that Cob opened, and must cross the far side of the Mountains of Pain carried by Lebannen (Arren) to return to the world of the living. He is borne back to Gont by the dragon Kalessin, and must come to terms with a life without magic--a life of being, not doing. I marry and adopt a daughter who turns out to be a dragon. And at the end of my life, I sail into the vast seas of the cosmos before the dawn of creation, free.