Ten minutes on June 4, 2008

Ten minutes on June 4, 2008

" Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."

I want to talk about phantom ring, and mundane cyborgs, and the way the words cyborg and cybernetic have evolved, devolved, and revolved. But I can’t talk about those things now, I just can’t. So first, a word from our writer.

I went up to Calistoga with Claire for her 50th birthday party, and we stayed in a little cluster of doll houses for people, very nice, and Kevin and Claire brought their espresso machine, and we went to Groth and Plump Jack (the loser!) and Cuvaisson and a place called Ovid (more of that in another post) and ate at the Martini House on Friday night which might have been one of the top five dinners I’ve ever eaten in this particular life cycle.

In the way of the Fates, not that I believe in fate but in happymaking accidents that keep happening to me, we strolled out of Martini House feeling oh so wonderful but also late for our date with Cat’s friend. Oh well let’s go so we arrived house is dark downstairs but we ring anyway and down comes Janet in her bathrobe and graciously invites us in and we all begin to talk about wine and her husband Lester has a paper from Iceland. So I say it looks like Old English, and he mentions the Eddic sagas, and I mention I teach Beowulf, and he mentions the translations of the sagas by that Victorian writer, and hands me the tale of Howard the Halt, in a beautiful edition, and I mention Tolkien, and he asks me if I’ve ever read On Fairy Stories, and off we go.

Lester is remarkable. He can talk about Yeats, and in a moment switch to yeasts, as in industrial yeasts vs. European yeasts, alcohol conversion rates, and the micro-ecology of wine. He has eyebrows like Gandalf, and come to think of it, similar eyes and expressions. Separated at birth? Not impossible!

Anyway we talked about Tolkien’s notion of how the fairy story and faery. Tolkien hated the way fairy stories had become cutesy stories about diminutive folk who could hide behind a pansy. He blamed not only the Victorians, but also the Elizabethans like Shakespeare. And he went on to contemplate the pre-shrinking of the faery, the world where all sorts of beings lived, and where humans wandered when a-mazed and under spells, often to their doom, always at their peril.

I sat there, having eaten a meal from Another World, ready to be transported into faery by Lester, and so it wasn’t long before all sorts of ideas came into my head.

I talked with Lester. The next day we drank wine starting at around 10:30, had wine with lunch and dinner, and in general were all wandering across that invisible line between Regular Life, which has a lot of tooth brushing but not nearly so much imbibing and general hilarity, and Something Else, very different, magical, where other sorts of things can and do happen on a regular basis. We explored caves deep in the earth, sang three part harmonies and heard the walls give us back our own voices; some of us found ourselves up to our necks in mud, or hot water, eyes closed, far away from all our own personal Kansases. We ascended up above the valley, above the world of mere mortals, up to the land of metamorphosis, of Giant Rocks lifted from the ground, of a mead hall made of glass perched like an eyrie, looking across at the heavens and down at the world below. We drank wines whose grapes reigned hundreds of years ago; we drank wines not yet released to the world, as in anywhere, that danced on the tongue and made me want to compose songs praising the lord of this manor, and the noble vintner, and the company, and the writings of Ovid.

We traveled, that is, to the places where change happens, and change itself seems changed, magical, metamorphosed into something rich and strange.

And I wanted to write about faery, the world Tolkien defended so angrily and with so much energy, in the face not only of the disempowered fairy story, but also in the face of industrialism (it would take a very unimaginative reader not to read the scenes of orcs tearing trees up by their roots and throwing whole forests into the fires, to forge the weapons of Saruman’s army, and not see Industrialism tearing down whole forests to forge the weapons of war and the weapons of peace, suburbia in all its imagination-blasting, same producing glory). That is I wanted to see how the world of faery that Tolkien wrote into being and studied and saw as real in the past but irreal in the present, mapped onto my world.

I saw a circle. Inside it is always already the world of what is real and rational to most people of a particular time and place. What is inside the circle is always changing, and certainly so over long historical stretched. But the relation of inside to outside seems to stay the same. Some would call it reason vs irrational; others, instrumental reasoning vs metaphysical reasoning; others, science vs art; and so on.

As I thought about the world of faery, and Tolkien, and talked to this or that person, over a week or so, I realized that it was a wildly productive idea for me. I felt it in my own life: the desire to be enchanted, to allow for enchantment whatever that might mean. I like my life, toothbrush and all, my nice house and the network of friends and family that I help keep real and alive each day. And a part of me longs to be transported, to be a-mazed, to enter the realm of the sublime and powerful.

And as the idea kept growing I got writer’s block, or got lost in too many meanings, or not enough meaning, and didn’t write.

So this is my first crack at it. What do you make of it? Tolkien clearly didn’t mean Lord of the Rings to be about the atomic bomb, or Hitler, or even about hippies going back to the land with banged-up copies of Return of the King and jokes about pipe-weed. And yet in the world of the nuclear weapon and massive rationalization of work and edge cities of suburbian tsunamis, people flock to see the hobbits on the Big Screen, and Harry Potter and friends in their parallel to the muggles universe, encountering faery everywhere. He Who Must Not Be Named – is it faery?

And if so, what is the relation of this clear need of humans to find alternative places to be, and the parallel need of humans to gain more control over the impacts of our technologies, our world-eating appetites? Is the former simply a flight from Reason? Or a flight from reasoning fed on too much junk food and 64 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew?

I want the world to right itself, humans to find the middle way and use our technologies, those fires stolen from the gods, wisely. I want humans to realize that science is not opposed to imagination, that what we think about the cosmos and the origin of life is as stunningly sublime and wild as any creation myth, and ought to have the same effect of humility and magic on us. I want love, friendship, food, drink, music, inspiration, grace under pressure, the re-enchantment of the everyday.

”Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
"Everything which I said could not happen will happen now.”
Ovid