labingi

I previously posted this as part of a longer post, and then I lost it! I just spent 10 panicked minutes running through all my files looking for it. So I'm putting it here as a separate post. (Side note: the search on my Mac STILL isn't working, even after doing the whole update thing that basically made no-to-worse difference in my Mac's operation.)

Why Frodo Makes a Good Ringbearer

Frodo was shaped, I think, by having an intense trauma in his youth within the context of a loving, healthy, and secure family in a healthy, secure society. The trauma was his parents sudden death in a boating accident, compounded by his being an only child and the only Baggins in a sea of Brandybucks, which necessarily isolated him in his loss. However, it’s clear that his Brandybuck relations loved and accepted him, while the Shire itself is a stable society, well-balanced with nature, where even the poorest have food and shelter and the richest are not so rich as to be divided from daily interaction with the common people. Pre-War, there’s essentially no precarity, no real insecurity. And, of course, Frodo is then adopted by Bilbo, with whom he has a warm and close connection.

As a result of all this, he grows up to be a well-adjusted, mature person who is neither inflated in his sense of self nor self-flagellating, who is conscientious and compassionate, and who knows how to love and knows himself to be loved. And he also grows up at arm’s length from most hobbits (partly down to native introversion), slightly avoidant in his attachment patterns and agile in rapidly adjusting to having his whole world ripped out from under him (verging at times into a tendency toward hopelessness). I think the reasons he’s able to agree to exile himself from the Shire with the Ring within, like, a couple hours of talking to Gandalf are threefold: 1) his true conscientiousness and love for the Shire; 2) the agency of the Ring, which makes him inclined to stick with it; 3) that ability to rapidly accept radical loss, which he learned from the death of his parents; [EDIT: 4) He wanted to follow Bilbo! I can believe I felt this out]. I could go on, but I’ll stop and say, this is a nuanced, psychologically realistic representation of a Very Good Person. Of course, I’ve had 45 years to think about Frodo, and not Maia, so I am certainly missing textual details.

I've been sorting through a box of mainly art supplies inherited from my dad. Conversation with Glenn:

Me: Do you want these dowels?

Him: Sure.

Me: Popsicle sticks?

Him: Okay.

Me: The giant safety pin? (Which I had showed him for interest's sake and he started to wander off with.)

Him: Mm hm.

Me: Should I just give you the whole box?

Him: Maybe.

(The safety pin about four inches long and almost one inch across. Why did my dad have that??)

A bit belated, here's a repost of my Substack post extolling Vienna Teng:

I’ve been sinking into Vienna Teng’s song cycle, “We Got You,” and drawing daily strength from it. The cycle is made up of two core songs, “Spark” and “Comfort,” both centered on the theme “we got you.” In “Spark,” the words are used in the sense of “You inspire us. You are our ally.” In “Comfort,” the sense is “We’ll keep you from falling.” Together, the songs describe the two necessary faces of activism or any movement committed to transformation despite the risk: we need strength and we need refuge.

She, then, combines the two songs into one track, encapsulating the totality of this kind of struggle. I highly recommend listening to all three and, if you like them, buying them: Teng deeply deserves the financial recognition for what she’s given us.

(See the rest and links to videos of her songs on my Substack.)

PSA: Someone is sending out phishing emails mimicking my Sonic email address. Please delete!

Hm, my attempt to embed this came through as a link. Well, if you feel inclined to click the link, you'll see photos and everything!

I just now read of Michael Keating's death. Seventy-nine is not a shabby age, but I am saddened.

Here are some more random thoughts up to roughly Helm's Deep: the Dealing with Mistakes Edition.

(LOTR spoilers, if anyone cares...)

Aragorn

Original (pre-Viggo) Aragon often gets described as too perfect, and I see why. I don't find him a super fascinating character either, but I had not clocked how protracted his inner struggle is over leading the fellowship after the fall of Gandalf. He has multiple iterations of the "we must do without hope" idea, which, in Tolkien's philosophy, is a clear sign you're not thinking properly. Admission: In an earlier entry on this, I unwittingly quoted Bakshi (facepalm)!

He recurrently talks about how his decisions as a leader have gone wrong--and he's not totally wrong about that. He fails to track what's going on with Boromir, fails to keep track of Frodo (and Sam). Interestingly, he loses Frodo and Sam, in part, because he decides to climb the Emyn Muil to check things out from its famous vantage point, and that's not a bad decision in itself, but it is explicitly driven, in part, by ego, by his desire to sit on the seat of kings, and that seems not accidental. Later, against Legolas's advice, he chooses to rest rather than keep chasing the Orcs, which may have quashed their chance of actually catching the Orcs.

That's a lot of struggle with fallibility, and it's fairly easy to miss because it's minor. It's minor because Aragorn operates from a place of good intention and time-tested knowledge and morals. This makes me think of karma as a seed that may or may not fall into fertile soil. Each of those little losses of hope or imperfect decisions would carry karma (in a Buddhist frame), but they don't fall into fertile soil because Aragorn has--to torture the metaphor--been consistently cleaning the shit so there's nothing for them to grow into.

Boromir( Read more... )

I've started rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time at least ten years, and I thought I would note some stuff that is popping out to me this time around:

Sam is character we almost always see surrounded by his social "betters" and in his humble servant mode, which makes it really interesting to me that the first scene he's in shows him in conversation with this social equals in a more comfortable and outspoken mode. This immediately sets up how calibrated his behaviors are to his social context.

Frodo's first line is "Has he gone?" This sets up nicely the association of his character with loss.

People in Hobbiton tend to call things "queer"; people in the East Farthing tend to call things "funny," though they also use "queer." Merry calls things "funny"; he is a true Bucklander.

Frodo is really quite witty. Hobbits are, in general, and this isn't new news for me about Frodo, but it is striking me what a high percentage of his dialogue has some sort of wit or irony. I think this was largely lost in Jackson's script, which tends to go for terrified or generically nice.

Happy Downfall of Sauron Day, Middle-earth denizens! I will be honest, this year it's a feat just to remember to post. I've had zero brain cells to spare for Middle-earth.

I usually get to spend March 25 in my hometown, which is usually lovely at this time of year, but this year, the dates were such that I spent all day driving from California back to Oregon (about 8 hours), so no commemorative hike. My town is still lovely, but it's really showing the effects of climate change this season. It looks more like May than March, the grass already quite dry and peas already out in full force. So that was depressing.

Not a bad thing but a very emotionally trying thing: my hopes to get our family property situated in some form that would protect it long-term, hopefully in concert with Indigenous people of the region blew up spectacularly. Basically, my mom (who is the owner) overrode it with another plan, and it will be okay. It's fine, but it's requiring a huge cognitive shift on my part after years of trying to figure out land-back. It has also been, by turns, embarrassing, humbling, disappointing, and contentious, which has left no mental space for Tolkien.

So if I have anything to say about LotR today, it may be that I feel a little bit like Frodo saying that the Shire has been saved but not for him. Except thanks to rabid necrophilic (just recently heard that adjective) imperialism driving climate collapse, I can't really say it's been saved, but it has been put in nearly as favorable a position as the necrophilic empire allows. But not for me, not as the home it once was. As with Frodo, it's still there, and I'm still welcome, and (unlike Frodo) I'll still be around, but I can't really go home again.

Well, as my mother put it today, "It would be nice if Sauron had actually fallen." We can only hope.

(Copied from my Substack)

Disclaimer: I’m not claiming my story is important. It’s just the story I have to tell.

One of my best friends lives in Baghdad, which is among the many, many places now bombed in this regional war started by my government. As I write this, she and her family are probably all right. As far as I know, there have been no strikes near where they live and work. They’ve survived worse. They survived being bombed by my country during the war over obviously fake WMD’s. But as the days go by and I don’t hear from her, I can’t help reflecting that they might soon die because my country is run by lunatics and cowards.

And I keep thinking I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

My own senators and representative already oppose the was on Iran, even heavily pro-Israeli Ron Wyden. I’ve already written to thank them. But they are outnumbered by the cowards in Congress. I could sign petitions. I could write or call other legislators. I could stand in the street with a sign, but what can I do that would have real impact? Where do my strengths lie for taking action?

I don’t have a good answer for what to do about this war. But broadly, thinking of my life on Earth, my mind turns toward my writing, and as that’s a focus of this Substack, I’ll share a thought about it. In my science fiction, I write messy situations, and I write with sympathy toward virtually all my characters. I sometimes feel this puts me at odds with the prevailing values of my own progressive comrades in current social science fiction circles. The Zeitgeist there seems to favor sharp divisions between right and wrong: the oppressed are in the right; the oppressors are in the wrong. This must be clearly driven home in the name of real-world justice.

I think I respectfully disagree. Not with the premise about oppression being bad, but with the narrative prescription of moral simplicity. I’m not saying straightforward moralizing stories shouldn’t exist. Many value them and get validation of their own struggles from them. Those stories have their place. But I occupy a different place. I try to write (almost) everyone with sympathy: oppressed, oppressor, dictator, soldier, abused, abuser, the broadminded, the dogmatic.

What does this have to do with the war in the Middle East? This war has been enabled by simplistic morality narratives: Iran has a harmful regime (true); therefore, it’s fine for “the good guys” (us/US) to drop missiles on them because they are “bad guys.” The same rationale supports ICE, excuses January 6th but deports people for a school protest, excuses kidnapping the president of Venezuela while defending “Our President” tooth and nail. It’s American exceptionalism on steroids: “We are Good, and they are Bad, so anything we do to ‘get’ them is Good.”

This kind of mindset, even if it’s not even close to this level of stupid, makes it easy to label groups as deserving punishment because they do bad things. Iran’s government is oppressive; it does fund attacks that kill civilians. This eclipses the schoolgirls, the families going about their business, the people doing the hard work for decades of trying to resist a reactionary theocracy. It makes a bomb seem like an easy answer.

My friend, whom I dearly love, could die in this war. She’s an English teacher just trying to live her life.

What can I do? I’ll go on trying to figure that out, imperfectly, often ineffectually, and sometimes irresponsibly, as I learn how to be a citizen under fascism. But one thing I will surely keep on doing is writing characters with sympathy. With the exception of a few very minor walk-ons, it will be every character, every time: the murderers, the rapists, the wealthy, the colonizers, the trampled, the sacrificed, the raped, the ignored, the destitute, the elite, the insightful, and the lacking in insight. I’ll do it because this world needs more sympathy, and that’s something I can do.