Contemplating Earthseed

Although we’ll keep drawing on and referring to it, I’ll mention that we’ve finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Sower in Religion and Science Fiction. There is so much to commend it and so much to say, and, before we move any further into The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I have a few items I’d like to highlight.

We’ve noticed that Lauren Olamina frequently declines to view Earthseed as a novel form or a peculiarly innovative turn in human history. She describes other characters, even those possessed by catastrophically toxic ideas about self, God, and others, as fellow pilgrims who’ve also “assembled” their conception of self, others, and divinity out of that which has traditioned its way down to them for better and worse. This has helped us understand sacred tradition—any sacred tradition—as a mixed bag, or many mixed bags, out of which we draw and make choices. “One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly,” Theodor Adorno tells us, and Earthseed is one way of conceiving what we each make of our own inheritance. What do we keep? What do we cling to? What do we want within our bandwidth, our canon, our quiver of essential intelligence? What do we need to rid ourselves of if we hope to access moral adulthood?

Before I home in on a particular exchange. I invite you to read Charles H. Long, something of a remote mentor I never met in person but who appeared in my path via Richard King and Jay Geller, on what those who who hope to study religion are up to: “We are attempting to find those existential structures of the life of human communities across space and time which concretely gave and give expression to who and what we are in the scheme of things.” Please read that sentence a second time and consider it’s loveliness. Is this not the good work to be done in thinking through the available righteousness, the cosmic plainspeak, handed down and passed around in and among us? There are so many existential structures to consider, treasure, and interrogate. Consider this one for instance.

But back to Parable of the Sower. Toward the end of the book, Lauren is getting to know a beautiful man named Bankole. Asking him about his religion, he notes that he doesn’t exactly have one: “When my wife was alive, we went to a Methodist church. Her religion was important to her, so I went along. I saw how it comforted her, and I wanted to believe, but I never could.”

Lauren notes that, while raised Baptist, she’s in a similar boat: “I couldn’t make myself believe either, and I couldn’t tell anyone. My father was the minister. I kept quiet and began to understand Earthseed.”

“Began to invent Earthseed,” Bankole interjects.

And this is where Lauren offers a beautifully nuanced take on what occurs when we thoughtfully take up the stories, images, and analogies that serve our human thriving. It isn’t invention exactly. “Began to discover and understand it. Stumbling across the truth isn’t the same as making things up.” Earthseed, she explains, is about discovering and acting upon “the essentials,” which will differ between people. Whatever lore helps you love yourself and others more is lore enough.

The lore, it turns out, is everywhere and all around us. Sarah Masen, for instance, is reading The Parable of the Sower for the first time right now, but she wrote and recorded a song about the process (Earthseed) Butler describes years ago. Hear this:

It was what

She thought

Was right

Through all the gloom and might

Of living in-between.

It was like she said,

A chance to learn instead

Of staying in the lines

And never knowing why.

Isn’t that Earthseed and deconstruction and leveling with oneself in a lovely little nutshell? Perhaps Taylor Swift should cover it. Give “She Stumbles Through The Door” a listen.