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Le Guin, Barton team up for reading Performance is part of `One World' By BILL VARBLE One day when she was 14, Ursula K. Le Guin found her father taking notes on the Tao Te Ching. He told her the 2,500-year-old spiritual classic from China was one of his favorite books, and he was picking the parts he'd like to have read at his funeral. More than half a century later, the famed writer has produced her own version of the Tao Te Ching (Shambala, $12). It's also available as a book on tape, the result of a collaboration between Le Guin, of Portland, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival composer Todd Barton, of Ashland. Le Guin and Barton plan rare public appearances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Southern Oregon University's Music Recital Hall. Le Guin will read, accompanied by Barton's music. Tickets are $19 (children $8) at Cripple Creek Music in Ashland, or call 552-6461. Le Guin and Barton also plan a book and tape signing from 2 to 4 p.m. in the SOU Bookstore. The appearances are part of the SOU Program Board's award-winning One World series. Le Guin says in a telephone interview that her work with Barton dates back to the early 1980s, when she was asked to do an original drama on Jefferson Public Radio, and Barton did the music. "We liked each other," she says. "Todd loves to improvise, so we played around. I'd read and he would play. It seems to me like he responds to the meaning of the words instantly." On the tape, Barton's intuitive percussion seems to underscore and comment on Le Guin's reading of the text. Le Guin's publishers are billing the book as a "version" of the classic, not a translation. She says she used her own very old copy of the book as well as many other translations (the book has reportedly been translated more than any other spiritual work except the Bible). "I've lived with it all my life," she says. "The original text is short and mysterious. Every translator has a right to pick her meaning." The Tao Te Ching expresses the philosophy/religion called Taoism. Little is known about its legendary author, Lao Tzu, "the old fellow." Taoism teaches that humanity is part of a far vaster order of being, and that there is a "way," or Tao, that can be found by those who seek a deeper integration of humankind with nature and all being. The tradition abounds in paradoxical sayings like, "The way you can go/isn't the real way./the name you can say/isn't the real name." Le Guin says Taoism has been a guide for her for most of her life. She was born in 1929 in Berkeley, Calif., the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, the author of "Ishi." She married historian Charles A. Le Guin in Paris, and by the late 1950s the couple had settled in Portland. Since then Le Guin's work has been notable both for its quality and its quantity. She has published fiction, poetry, children's books and essays, selling millions of books and winning too many awards to count. In works such as the "Books of Earthsea" and "The Left Hand of Darkness," she added a moral and literary complexity that stretched the boundaries of the fantasy and science fiction fields. In "The Lathe of Heaven," her hero acts in a way that's quite, well, Taoist, doesn't he? "He stops something not by doing, but by not doing," Le Guin says. "You can find it in all my books. It got so deep in the way I see the world." Le Guin doesn't think Taoism seems as exotic today in the West as it once did. "It's a lot more corner-drugstore than it was in the '40s," she says. "What amazes me is how Asian thought has slipped into American minds. Tai Chi and martial arts are an easy way. You `get it' in your body." She says it was easy to translate without gender. "He's talking to and about men," Le Guin says. "That's OK. He was talking to the people who could hear him. But it's funny how irrelevant that seems. Their pronouns don't have gender anyway." But she figures even in ancient China Taoism was the radical fringe of spiritual thought. "Confucius was for the guys in power," she says. "The little guy riding backwards on a water buffalo, that's how the Taoists were seen. The eternal hippies." Le Guin's Tao is in two parts. The program she and Barton will present Friday focuses on part one of the book. The second show is part two. Barton's music will be live. There won't be any fancy lighting or other effects. "Being Taoist, we try to keep it simple," Le Guin says, laughing. Or as Lao Tzu puts it in Le Guin's version, "Empty yet structured, it moves, inexhaustibly giving." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA