The Lord of the Rings Conundrum

The story fired my imagination like no other. As a 12-year-old, as a teenager, as a young adult, I immersed myself in J.R.R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Often I would insert an alter-ego of myself into the story, trekking across rugged wilderness, battling trolls in deep caves, visiting places of splendor, fighting the good fight against the forces of evil in the world. 

It was easy to identify with the characters -- the underdog hobbits persevering against great odds; Aragorn, the rugged ranger and reluctant king (who represented my youthful ideal of manhood); Gandalf, the wise but irascible wizard; the improbable friendship between Gimli, the dwarf, and Legolas, the elf; and many other compelling heroes, villains and monsters. It was all so transporting and felt so meaningful.

And that may be the core appeal of Lord of the Rings, how meaningful it felt. Creatures great and small had a role to play in the great drama of good verses evil. And evil -- while often a temptation to men and hobbits -- had a clear, unambiguous existence, and was represented most concretely by ever-present monsters: orcs.

Yes, there was Sauron, the dark lord; Saruman, the power-hungry wizard; the undead Nazgul, trolls and other monsters; but orcs were the numerous and constant threat to human beings throughout Middle Earth (Tolkein's fictional world). They were the product of the original evil of ancient times, a corruption and mockery of the unambiguously good elves. A decent person could only do two things with respect to orcs -- avoid them or kill them. The only good orc was a dead orc. This axiom was literally true in Middle Earth.

One day, while reading people's passionate views on a political forum, it struck me that many see themselves as living in a kind of Middle Earth where powerful, malign forces are hard at work to dominate the world and it is the obligation of good and noble people to stand up to them. And it also struck me that the desire to view the world in these terms came prior to the particulars of whatever views these people held.

People want to live in a version of Middle Earth, and want there to be tangible enemies, enemies that must be defeated. In other words, people want orcs. And religious and political ideologies (particularly extremist ones) are happy to oblige. The enemies of [fill in the blank] must be destroyed!

Why do people want orcs? Perhaps it has something to do with homo sapiens being *Immature Predators, a lingering instinct from our deep past when we were not the dominant species, when humans were prey and not top predators. But I suspect the main reason is self-esteem. Viewing oneself as a warrior against the orcs of the world is elevating and romantic. It provides a sense of purpose, a sense of being important. It provides meaning.

This leads to the conundrum: There are no orcs.

Other People's Poetry

I'm not a great reader of poetry but I tend to keep a volume handy and read a verse or two during off moments.  Currently, Mary Oliver's *Dream Work is within arm's reach. I like her stuff quite a bit.

But poetry, like music, is often best when it catches you by surprise. One poem has haunted me since I read it in a book called *The Immortalization Commission by John Gray, probably my favorite living philosopher. The book is about two projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to either prove human immortality -- via a soul or spirit that persists after the the death of the body -- or create immortality -- i.e., defeat aging and death with science. The former was associated with spiritualists, the latter with communists. Neither project succeeded.

Gray inserts verses from time to time to flavor the text including these by *Wallace Stevens:

                                        I am not,

Myself, only half a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man

Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

The beauty of the lines struck me and chilled me. I see why Gray put them them there. They represent what the immortality seekers feared most, not just the ceasing to exist but the fleeting, wispy nature of consciousness itself. People tend to value consciousness so highly (I among them) that it's a jolt when you run into something that suggests maybe it's not the most important of all things.

Some of the figures in Gray's book become despondent when the proof of immortality eludes them. An existence that is just temporary, material and Darwinian seems bereft of purpose or meaning. But Gray offers this verse from a Hungarian poet serving time in a labor camp which suggests meaning can be found elsewhere:

Drunk on the emptied wine-cup of the earth

I grasped at people, objects and at thoughts

as drunkards cling to lamp-posts for support,

And so my world became a lovely place,

became a gallery bedecked by stars

and draped with three-dimensional tapestries,

a warehouse stacked with bales of wonder where

my wrist-watch was a table laid for twelve

and seconds passed in heavy honeyed drops.

  -- Gyorgy Faludy, "Soliloquy on Life and Death," Recsk Prison, 1952

I won't try to add words to that passage. I did mention Mary Oliver so I'll leave off with a snippet from her poem, "One or Two Things:"

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life. An then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

"Don't love your life

too much," it said.

and vanished

into the world.

The Old Ones

Imagine hiking in rocky hills, a place you're familiar with, trails you've trod many times. But on this day's walk you see something out of place. A section of rock has crumbled, perhaps due to a storm or a tremor, revealing a shadow on the slope, perhaps an opening. You climb up to the spot, hoisting yourself over a fallen tree, and realize it is indeed an opening. You dig a flashlight from your day pack and slip through the narrow gap of rock. Nothing much, really, it seems at first, but you're jittery with the excitement of something new and possibly dangerous. Then a bend in the gap of rock opens into a cavern and your flashlight reveals walls covered with paintings comparable in quality to masterworks of the modern age. The paintings turn out to be 30,000 years old.

This, in effect, is what happened in 1994 when three speleologists --  Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet -- acting on a tip from another spelunker, Michel Rosa, explored a newly opened cave in southern France. It has come to be known as Chauvet Cave and it contains some of the most astonishing prehistoric art ever found.

The images stir the imagination, certainly my own, and that of filmmaker Werner Herzog. His movie, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," offers a fascinating and close view of the paintings, showing the mastery of form and pigment and the way the artist(s) used the textures and shapes of the rock to bring the forms to life. There's a 3-D version which I did not get to see.

The paintings are a record of a different world, a world where humans lived on par with other creatures and, as the images suggest, in awe of them. Not so much cowed, it seems to me (fearful and respectful, yes) but proud to be part of the great tapestry of life where humanity isn't necessarily the most elevated or important thing. It's telling there are no images of people in the cave art. Why?

I like the way Herzog tackles the inscrutable. Films like "Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man" and "Encounters at the End of the World" are good examples. He can be harsh and condescending at times toward the people who populate his movies, I think largely because he's irritated by the knowingness they pretend to have in the face of phenomena much bigger than they are.

In "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Herzog visits a researcher trying to put together how the people populating Europe 30,000 years ago might have lived. It's clear Herzog isn't impressed and the interview concludes with the researcher's clumsy efforts to use a spear-thrower. 

I think Herzog's point is that all the technical sophistication and academic abstraction brought to bear by the scientists is ultimately less interesting than the art itself.  It can seem trivial compared to the potent mind of the artist who is speaking to us from so long ago.

Woman Warriors as Characters

The Origin of Kaplea

When the idea emerged for my novel, *Delivered to the Ground, it was clear that in order for it to work, I was going to have to depict women characters as credible warriors in an ancient setting. I knew that women could be and often had been effective fighters or soldiers, but cultural tropes run deep; it's hard to step out of them when creating characters and hard to keep from slipping into stereotypes or caricature.

Women warriors these days are common in movies and television but one recent commentator in the New York Times noted they tend to be men dressed up in women's bodies. I'm not sure I wholly agree but the characters often don't have a truly organic feel to them. I had my work cut out for me.

I thought back to the women warriors of my youth depicted in movies and television who tended to be little more than scantily clad beauties brandishing weapons ...

Shahna in Star Trek episode, Gamers of Triskelion, played by Angelique Pettyjohn 

Being an adolescent male, I wasn't complaining about the beauties or the outfits, but the characters were unconvincing in the sense they weren't very intimidating. They didn't scare me.

I tried to think of the first instance in fiction or film where a female warrior type scared me, or at least would if I were to meet her in the proverbial dark alley. Size wasn't the key. Joe Pesci is a small man but his characters in movies like Goodfellas or Casino are very scary. To be convincing, a character has to project a certain inherent willingness to violence. Princess Leah in the original Star Wars was a great character but she really didn't have that edge that could make her physically intimidating. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien was closer, a convincing character but more of a reluctant warrior forced into the role.

Oh, yeah -- the sequel -- Aliens, and the character, Private Vasquez, a member of a space marine combat team. I remember looking at her doing pull-ups and talking trash and thinking, holy crap.

Pvt. Vasquez is magnetic in the film and an entirely convincing badass. The actor, Jenette Goldstein, showed the world how it could be done, how a female soldier might fit in believably with male ones. This was something I needed to bring to the ancient Scythian warriors I was trying to depict where 20 to 30 percent of them would have been women (see *Amazons and a Novel Idea). One of the woman warriors in the book needed to stand out as particularly fierce, so something of the soul of Vasquez had to be in her.

In thinking about all this, I recalled another movie, Monster, starring Charlize Theron who portrayed the real-life serial killer, Aileen Wuornos.

The portrayal was convincing to the point of being difficult to watch. Aliens was fun SiFi, Monster was gritty realism. The will to violence was there in a terrifying way and was brought on by horrifying events. It made me wonder. If Wuornos had been born into Scythian culture, her will to violence might have found outlets, guidance and discipline. Instead of becoming a homicidal deviant destined to spend her life in prison, she might have found belonging, usefulness and respect.

A character formed in my imagination: A bit Ripley, a bit Vasquez, a bit Wuornos, strong, supremely skilled, ferocious, a killer, a war leader, yet human with vulnerabilities and doubts. I thought long about a name and when it occurred to me, I knew it was right: Kaplea, tiger woman. Now all I had to do was bring her convincingly to life with words. It helped that she came to life in my imagination.

Marketing and Mindspace

My Struggle (Against Modern Marketing Manipulation)

The following scene has unfolded itself many times when I'm buying something at a bricks-and-mortar store:

"Would you like to become a member and save 10 percent?"

"No, thanks."

"Are you sure, you'll save 10 percent?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

The cashier looks puzzled.

"We can still put you on our email list so you'll get our great coupons."

"No, thank you."

That's a typical back-and-forth. Some have been worse to the point where I get snippy: "How many times do I have to say 'no'?" What should be a pleasant exchange becomes one that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and probably isn't too fun for the employee. It's the kind of thing that drives me to do my shopping online.

[Why don't you just sign up? You'll save 10 percent.]

Because!

Because the initial question the cashier asked is manipulative and underhanded. It's designed to make you feel stupid if you don't become a member because you're spending more money than you need to. But what's the real cost of becoming a member? Clutter in your inbox,  clutter in your phone, clutter in your mind, all adding up to a constant niggling to buy stuff you don't need.

Mindspace is valuable and limited. I don't want mine filled with marketing effluvia. If the effort to keep the clutter away means I end up paying more sometimes, then so be it, money well spent.

Fortunately, because of my iron will and perceptive powers, I'm able to remain uncorrupted by our consumerist culture.

[What kind of soap do you use?]

Soap? Why, I use Zest. You see, Zest rinses clean. When you clean with Zest, you're Zestfully clean.

[Ah]

Okay, My Struggle is probably a losing one. Hundreds of billions in the U.S. are spent on advertising and marketing annually. Many smart people are working hard to find ways to influence my habits and decisions. It can only be hubris to think I'm somehow immune to it all. 

Technology, too, is as hungry for our attentions as the marketers. And it offers the illusion that with this new smartphone or tablet or whatever, I am actually an improved human being, that I have progressed, and I am progressing with the rest of humanity. Just look at all we've done!

Well, maybe don't look too hard.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

  -- Henry Rollins

The Book: Published

Okay. It's done. It's out there. My one and only completed novel: *Delivered to the Ground (also a *Kindle version).

It's a time-travel adventure and a year ago I wrote about the inspiration for the novel here: *Amazons and a Novel Idea.

The book has a gender-swap angle and that was an older idea that I hadn't gotten around to. It emerged from a writers' group I participated in during the early 2000s. We had been discussing finding "your  woman's voice" (or man's voice if you were woman) and how some authors pull it off well and others not so much. I certainly wasn't very practiced at it nor could I claim I was in touch with my female side, so it occurred to me to write a sequence where an alter-ego of myself somehow gets transformed and is forced to experience the world as a woman. What would be different? What would be the same? Beyond obvious stuff, I wasn't sure.

I knew the idea wasn't particularly original. Some well-known authors had indulged it -- Virgina Wolfe with Orlando, Robert Heinlein with I Will Fear No Evil, Gore Vidal with Myra Breckinridge, Angela Carter with The Passion of the New Eve -- but none of those efforts seemed all that satisfactory in terms of exploring the experiential differences between men and women. Could I do any better? Probably not, but it might be fun and revealing to try.

I wanted the main character in my novel to be woman so I thought I'd experiment with the gender-swap angle as an exercise in finding my woman's voice. I figured once I was moving along with some confidence, I'd ditch the gimmick and proceed in a normal fashion. I grabbed a ballpoint and a composition book and started writing.

The problem was that, almost immediately, the story took on a life of its own. In previous fiction-writing efforts, I'd had things come to life for me but nothing like with the zing here.  My mind burned and the story seemed to write itself. I believe, for a few months at least, I had become genuinely manic. That kind of energy doesn't come around very often so I ran with it. In my spare moments, if I wasn't writing I was researching, if I wasn't researching I was thinking about characters, plot points, settings and so forth, and if I wasn't doing all that I was typing my scribblings into the computer.

The passion ebbed to a slow burn long before I finished but I had developed a  writing habit -- a couple of hours a day at least I was cranking away at the novel. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, I had the end in mind and I was determined to get there. About half way through the first draft, I felt like I needed some kind of feedback just to make sure I wasn't going totally bonkers.  So I enlisted the aid of my sister, Jenny, to whom I fed chapters one at a time. She thought the story was good and provided ongoing criticism and corrections (which was really rather awesome, actually).

A year and a month later, the first draft was done. That was May 2017. And so began the slow process of soliciting feedback and revision. That's stuff maybe for another post.

Did I succeed? Is it any good?

[The gurus of modern marketing and self-promotion instruct me to stuff my doubts, insecurities and self-critical nature into a can and bury it deep.]

Damn straight, I succeeded. It's a ripping good yarn and folks ought to get themselves a copy.

Insect Politics

I slap a mosquito and flick it off my arm.  I squish a spider and wipe it off the counter. I use a paper towel to grab a centipede, wad it into a tight ball and throw it into the trash. Ick. Good riddance.

But what is it I'm doing?

Occasionally when I'm reading a book, a passage will twang something deep. Hugh Raffles' *Insectopedia, a book that garnered some notoriety a few years back, contained a number of bits like that, but one in particular really hit home. Here Raffles is paraphrasing a popular Japanese science writer named Yoro Takeshi:

Each tree is its own world, each leaf is different. Insects taught him that general nouns like "insects," "trees," and "leaves" and especially "nature" destroy our sensitivity to detail. They make us, conceptually as well as physically, violent. Oh, an insect, we say, seeing only a category, not the being itself.

The being itself. An insect. Millions of years of evolution producing a biological marvel we don't fully understand and, I would argue, can't fully understand. It's just and insect.

How much more of the world and the beings in it do we diminish with our categories, our nouns?

This is a philosophical can of worms that goes back to at least Plato. I can't claim to have sorted it all out but, for my part, I have reached a peace accord with the insects and arachnids: If they don't bother me, I won't kill them.