I HAD A DREAM THE OTHER NIGHT. I was at university
with my girlfriend. It was a busy day in the administration building, with a
warren of activity in crowded hallways and overflowing offices. She needed to see
one of her professors, so we eventually found her office and went in. The prof was sitting
at her desk in a small, crowded room with books and boxes and stacks of I don’t
know what all. My girlfriend began talking with her in a casual,
matter-of-fact manner—up-close, personal, engaging in such a natural—such a human—way. They reminded me, when I
thought about the dream afterwards, of monkeys when they groom together,
picking the nits and fleas from each other’s body. Sociable. Caring. Natural. |
| Trilanders |
But their relationship excluded
me. I stood apart in an alcove and I felt like I always do in such
circumstances: jealous and envious, resentful, bitter, and of course guilty for having such thoughts
and feeling such destructive emotions. I knew I would shortly be drawn into a
conversation that would—unintentionally on their part—act like an
interrogation, where I would be exposed and displayed before their eyes. And,
of course, be found wanting. If you've ever had this kind experience it's a bit like being in a lifeboat when the
beam of a searchlight from the destroyer that just sunk your ship finds you. (I
say it was the destroyer that sunk my ship. But it was really me. I’d opened
those shuttlecocks long ago and sank myself. Or so it seems.)
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| Returned of the King |
In my dream, I wait for their
conversation to end and the ‘searchlight’ to be turned on me. Waiting for their
intimacy to envelop me was something I
just needed to get through, like
bloodwork or doing my taxes—not something to be enjoyed and honored, not
something that was necessary and natural, but something to be endured. Like I
always do.
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| Oil Welled |
I woke up with the image of wires
connected to my chest, like the wires they attach to your chest with those
sticky suction cups when you go in for a cardiogram. (My hairy chest always
gave the techs grief!) The wires were intrusive but I knew they were temporary,
and the image I was left with was from the movies—one where the hero wakes up
in the emergency ward, connected to IVs and whatnot, and then proceeds to unclip
them so he could leave and go do whatever it is that heroes need to do….
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| Weeee! |
Sooo…anyhoo, that was one dream with waay too much peeling away the onion
skins—where you end up getting down to a tiny, rather uninteresting bit in the
end.
Perhaps I can blame Tolkien for my
nightmare? I’m reading Lord of the Rings
right now—each night I read it in bed till the wee hours. And yes, the good
characters are mostly goody-two-shoes and the bad are badd-baddies; it’s all a
bit too black and white. Still, if I had to put myself onto Tolkien’s grading
scale, I'd be more Gollum than Aragorn, more
on the Orc side of things than the elf. And I think, for the most part, that I’d
make a lousy hobbit. They’re a welcoming race of wee-folk and cheerful to a
fault. They’re optimistic and content with their lives, and they live happily in
their Shire, not needing much else from the wider world other than to be a good
neighbour.
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| "Bend and stretch! Work it! You go girl!" |
The “Ring” is interesting, of
course—it can be viewed many ways: One is as a representation of the
technological “monkey-trap” we find ourselves in, especially with the problem
of nuclear weapons; or the Ring can be seen as a symbol of our over-weaning pride
or selfishness, or our greed, perhaps the rest of the Seven Deadlies, as well.
It can be seen as an example of turning away from life, of going to “the dark
side”, as it were. And so on.
LOTR was written between 1937 and
1949, so it would be foolish to assume the war years and the dropping of the
atomic bomb did not influence Tolkien, who was himself a veteran of the First
World War. (He once said of all his college friends from Oxford who went to war
with him—none survived.)
Today, “The Bomb”, atomic power
is the genie-in-the-bottle that’s been let out and we’ve yet to figure out how
to get it back in. Like the Ring that Frodo is burdened to carry into Mordor,
destroying it somehow seems like the only option, for the power gotten by splitting atoms apart
is too great, and like the “One Ring” that controls all the others in Tolkien’s
epic fantasy, it is far too tempting to own. It
seduces all who possess it into thinking they can control it. In
the tale, even Gandalf (“Mithrandir! “The White Rider!”) is afraid to touch the Ring, fearing he
would be corrupted by its promise of limitless power. The Ring’s power, like nuclear
fission, poisons—distorts and twists—the owner’s nature, eventually turning them
into mad, possessed creatures like Gollum or else into despotic monsters like Sauron
and Saruman, who end up ravaging their lands and peoples in the process….
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| Fading Away |
Well, if that don’t beat all!
So that’s the
monkey-trap we’re in, the prize we just can’t let go of, and it may shortly prove
to be our downfall (with monkeys turning into bush-meat and the rest of us into
dead-meat.)
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| A Divided Sky |
In the
novel, one solution might have been to take the Ring and sail to the deepest
part of the Sundering Seas and toss it overboard, and hope that time and vast
geological processes will render it powerless or at least beyond grasp of
mortals. Sam, I think, once proposed such a venture, so worried he had become
about the Ring’s effect on Frodo and their seemingly impossible task of taking
it to Mordor’s Mount Doom, thereby returning it from whence it came. So the same
story goes with our own Ring of Power: atomic energy. (And here, we might
include other “Rings”—industrialism, or more generally, technology; our
economic system; our political system; our vast, cult-like belief in the ideal
of “progress”, etc. Take your pick.)
Oh, boy! So, what do we do? As Gandalf says as they
approach the fortress of Isengard to parley with the evil wizard, Saruman:
“The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not
been. But to such days we are doomed. Let us now go on with the journey we have
begun!” (573)
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| Frog By My Window |
Of course, “doom”, here, means fate
or our lot in life. The word is from Old English whose original meaning is “statute”
or “judgement”. The evil released by Sauron will always exist now, to one extent or
another, Gandalf tells his companions, and the people of Middle Earth must accept
this as a fact of life. Evil, he suggests, is something that must be endured and fought against, and not be allowed to overwhelm us. Thus, the interrupted journey continues. There is a ray of hope in the murk of Mordor!
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| Pornography for Dummies |
Another ‘Ring’ we have created that can never be controlled
but only destroyed is the one that has allowed us our profligate use of fossil fuels, which drives an economic
system that has as its premise infinite growth on a finite planet--something
which mandates an unquestioning belief in “progress”, and consumption and population levels far
in excess of the carrying capacity of our biosphere. In LOTR, descriptions of landscapes ravaged by the denizens of Mordor
resemble scenes from war-torn lands of today that we see regularly on our
television screens. Depictions of Isengard and Mordor suggest William
Blake’s “satanic mills”—and are places of hellish
industrial wastelands, where the only sounds are the roaring of vast machineries for ecological exploitation. And there are many such hellscapes on Earth.
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| Bactou Lake region, Mongolia, China |
As well, the “built environment”—suburbs and the like—is
today another wasteland of growing dystopia and despair. How we live our lives is important, but so is what we live our lives in,
and much of the housing and cityscapes today are increasingly places that act to harm us. I won’t go into detail here but I refer you to James
Howard Kunstler’s blog post of December 22/19, where he discusses the holiday movie classic It’s A Wonderful Life, staring Jimmy Stewart*. Kunstler, somewhat
tongue-in-cheek (though he’s being quite serious, as well), describes the scene
where Stewart’s character experiences his hometown of Bedford Falls transformed into the decadent “Pottersville” that results when he is shown what would
happen if he had never been born. And Kunstler doesn't give the new burg an entirely failing grade! He makes the important point that, compared to
many cities and small towns that have had their main streets hollowed-out by
the Walmarts of the world, downtown Pottersville is quite lively—albeit replete
with gambling, prostitution and drinking!
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| Cartoon Bird Burial #1,349,821,037 |
But then I thought about the investment that George
Bailey’s small savings and loan bank makes at the movie’s happy ending:
financing a small suburb in the town. This is true to the reality of the American suburban movement that began as developements to provide housing for returning soldiers after WWII. Of course this growth metastized into today's suburban sprawl we are familar with.
I couldn’t help fast-forwarding a half-century or so, to wonder if Bedford Falls wouldn't be like thousands of other towns and cities in the United States (and Canada, let’s not be complacent), with hollowed out city cores, surrounded by suburbs and box-chain stores. Point is—it’s another “Ring” we thought we could control. Suburban sprawl has come back to bite us big time, as blow-back for short-term, short-sighted profiteering instead of ensuring the long-term liveability of our towns and cities. (That's progress! I guess.)
I couldn’t help fast-forwarding a half-century or so, to wonder if Bedford Falls wouldn't be like thousands of other towns and cities in the United States (and Canada, let’s not be complacent), with hollowed out city cores, surrounded by suburbs and box-chain stores. Point is—it’s another “Ring” we thought we could control. Suburban sprawl has come back to bite us big time, as blow-back for short-term, short-sighted profiteering instead of ensuring the long-term liveability of our towns and cities. (That's progress! I guess.)
And finally, to make this post even longer, I’m
reminded that the “Rings” we have taken up to empower and enrich our lives
often have the opposite effect. And, as I suggested earlier from LOTR, the
"Rings of Power" might represent some or all of the Seven Deadly Sins we’re all
so familiar with, pride being foremost. When we can’t control that, nothing
else really matters.
And also finally, the latent Hobbit it me that likes to
‘splain things to the nth degree thought this scree might be a good
place to slot in some cartoons and doodles purely for the reader’s enjoyment. Enjoy
them like Merry and Pippin enjoy a good smoke after witnessing the
destruction of Isengard by Treebeard and his fellow Ents [Below]. And as Gandalf observes:
"These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and
discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers,
and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you
encourage them with undue patience.” (581)
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| "If you're going to light the fuse, at least do it with a smile!" |
Cheers, Jake.
“Three
Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”
—For one
of the most depressing descriptions of a toxic future nightmare and ecological
ruin, read: “The People of Sand and Slag”, in the SiFi short story collection, Pump
Six by Pablo Bacigalupi:
—Here’s
an additional essay by JHK on the failure of urban design in modern America:
* Read an essay by the excellent blogger Maj. Danny Sjursen about Jimmy
Stewart’s struggle with PTSD and how he came to make It’s A Wonderful Life:
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