Lord of the Rings readthrough - book 1

Since I figured I couldn't possibly get any more bored than I already am while unemployed during this pandemic, I thought I might settle down and re-read the Lord of the Rings. When I read it as a teenager I found it unbearably tedious - evidence of my longstanding lack of taste, maybe. I'm having a lot more fun with it now.

What struck me about book 1, which I've just finished, was how haunted the landscape was. Outside of Bree and the Old Forest, the hobbits and strider are wandering through a landscape filled with ruin fortresses and ancient tombs, and we get snippets of an ancient war. The struggle between the men of Carn Dum, who fell under the power of Angmar and its Dark Lord, and the men of the Northern kingdom, who left behind the barrows. The barrow-wights who despise the living reach out to grab them; the old stories and poems of ancient times keep them company.

The tragedy of Tinuviel comes out of an even earlier era, with an earlier Dark Lord, and so on. We hear also of an elf named Gil-Galad, with a star on his brow, whose journey into Mordor seems to be an echo of Frodo's. But his story is evidently not a happy one, though there are not yet any details. Between these two stories, we anticipate the journeys of both Frodo (towards doom, and Mordor) and Aragorn (in pursuit of an elf-woman who would choose death for him.) 

The group moves across history, starting with the primeval old forest and its master, who may be the first being ever to exist. Tom Bombadil has power over anything younger than him, within his domain, and everything is younger than him. His only match is his rival, Old Man Willow, with whom he has butted heads throughout the ages. It seems almost to be a miniature form of the overall conflict of the story, with Old Man Willow standing in for the various dark lords. 

There is a cyclical conflict embedded in the framework of Middle Earth, a seemingly endless confrontation between the acquisitive and power-hungry dark lords, and various groups of people who simply want to be left in peace. This is in line with what I know of Tolkien's anti-statist disposition (an unsurprising perspective, when held by one whose defining experience of state action was fighting in WWI). It is also consistent with the attitude of the books that draws from old germanic literature, which describes a world of doom, without any hope of salvation.

Indeed salvation, in the form of escape, is something the text holds in deep mistrust. Because this is the power of the ring: to escape your circumstances. Instead of rising to meet the way things are, or enduring through the pain that life gives you, the ring tempts escape from all that. Simply vanish and get away - you don't have to feel the pain life has in store for you. Bilbo puts it on to avoid running into the irritating Sackville-Bagginses. Smeagol puts it on to avoid the censure of his family. Both end up leaving society behind entirely, unable to participate in it do to their long avoidance of it. 

Escapism, the promise of salvation from the doom of the world, is thus rendered the fundamental evil that must be fought against. Frodo is tempted, in the lair of the Barrow-Wights, to put it on and escape, and leave his friends to die. But he does not. It is Frodo's ability to be willing to suffer through what the world gives him, without running away from it or breaking under it, that makes him remarkable.

 

should i stay or should i go now

Central to the model of premodern Southeast Asian padi-states that Jared Scott writes about in The Art of Not Being Governed is his notion of a porous boundary between state space and non-state space. 

State space consists of all those places where unmoving rice paddies are worked and taxed, people are subject to corvée labor and military conscription, and somewhere a king is ruling from his palace. It is typically marked by the presence of a salvation religion - usually Theravada Buddhism or Islam. 

Non-state space is basically everywhere else - usually (but not always) marked by swiddening agriculture, animist religion, less hierarchical social structures, and a vast plurality of languages and ethnic identities which people pass between fairly freely. 

Scott argues that for much of history, peripheral peoples had the choice of which to inhabit, and might as easily leave an unsuccessful state and go swiddening as they would join a successful state. The kingdoms of SE Asia were always fighting to hold people in against the draw of life outside the obligations and hierarchies that states imposed.

It's too bad that Scott evidently never read Melford Spiro's Buddhism and Society. Spiro's ethnography of Theravada Buddhism in Burma provides an interesting lens on Scott's leaking states. Spiro writes:

The Buddhist emphasis on redemption from suffering permits the monastery, in addition to its other functions, to serve as an institutionalized solution to the problems of all kinds of men including those who, from a secular perspective, are (or would become) misfits, neurotics, and failures.

Written in the 60s, his ethnography has many touches of idealism and psychoanalysis, which one should simply spit out like a cherry pits. It's the idea of the monastery as a kind of release valve for social pressures that I find particularly compelling. Instead of retreating to the mountains, where one would exist entirely beyond the reach of the state and where one's labor could never be compelled, the appeal of monkhood allows one to remain within the regimentation of state space and continue fulfilling prosocial functions within it even as one rejects the "worldly" tedium and toil of life as a paddy farmer.

Recall also that in Theravada Buddhism, monkhood is not necessarily forever. All young Burmese men are briefly ordained as a rite of passage in their early teens, and throughout adult life men may leave the monastery and return to it. One would not expect the same from the people who leave to swidden in the hills.

Additionally, those who flee the state into the hills of Zomia to swidden would likely flee as families, not as individuals. Only men have the option of joining the monastic orders, though. Monkhood is described by Spiro as a thoroughly individualistic pursuit. He writes of monks as being paranoid and jealous of their peers, suspecting them of falsehood and constantly claiming their own attainment.

Ultimately, I'm not sure where this synthesis leaves me. Am I smarter now, because I noticed a connection between two books and wrote about it (poorly) on a blog no one reads? Difficult to say. The issue will make me neurotic. Maybe I should join a monastery.

soft reboot

i lost track of this blog after the election. i guess writing seemed especially futile right around then. the digital media boom ended with the obama presidency, and it became obvious how useless all our posts were in the face of simple power.

i remember how it felt like so much time and energy was spent on uncovering the subtext to every popular work of media, figuring out the social critiques of every superhero movie and pulpy tv show. as if we could go through with a fine comb, untangle all the knots, and find ourselves in semiotic utopia.

well, i'm a bit older now. i see how little words are worth compared to action. but every once in a while i think of something i'd like to write up and share. so every once in a while, i might post it here. that's all for now.

what america is

in march of this year i remember noting how warm it was. it was nice - sun on my skin, walking outside without a jacket. i thought that this is what it would look like: summer starting earlier and earlier until we reach the long summer at the end of the world. summer was long, stretching out an endless campaign until i was numbed to its depravity and senselessness.

this morning in minneapolis we had our first frost. for a few weeks i've enjoyed on my walk to work leaves lingering in the trees that looked like weightless flecks of gold, but they're gone now. around augsburg, the landscapers were weed whacking the flowers that the frost killed.

we know what america is now

kanye the mystic

my first few listens to the life of pablo left me disappointed that there wasn’t more kanye on it. in retrospect, i think what i meant was more of kanye rapping. i’m often guilty of not taking him seriously enough; this album is probably kanye’s most introspective, most reflective.

my position first changed when my friend gabe pointed out the lengths to which kanye had gone to obscure his voice. he seems to be almost hiding, composing collages of sounds behind the scenes. but then he doesn’t make the sounds either, does he. kanye’s great ability from my beautiful dark twisted fantasy on (as my friend adron told me) was to bring together great artists.

like with beyonce’s music, this mode of production draws the auteur question of filmmaking into music. this is a distinctly digital way of working, unique to a mode where recordings are assembled into music on computers. how much responsibility can we give kanye for the final product? is he actually creating, or is he just curating sounds?

kanye is a tastemaker. if not necessarily in fashion but in music his ability to make these collaborative albums renders kanye a kind of henry the navigator for the sonic landscape of the next few years. this tastemaking ability reminds me of two people: his wife, kim kardashian, and the man to whom he has frequently compared himself, steve jobs. both of these people take what has been made by other people and assemble it into something that people never knew they wanted until they had it.

consider, for tastemaking proofs, frank ocean’s distorted voices across blond(e). or perhaps look at the way frequent kanye partner justin vernon’s voice slowly transitions from vocoded distortion at the start of 22, a million, into clarity at the end. consider, again, the mystical adornments on the album cover.

there is something mystical about pablo. it begins with the ultralight beam, which can be understood as pure experience of divine and simultaneously as the overwhelming spotlight of fame. the troubling overlap of these things: the pursuit of mystical truth (resonating with aesthetic truth) and the pursuit of fame. can they be distinguished?

this tension pulls the album into its deeply introspective space. in doing so, it seems we retreat back to the very earliest episodes in the kanye myth. understanding the album requires an entire genealogy. there are many references to college dropout and late registration throughout the album, culminating in the story told on thirty hours. this story seems outside the kanye canon, about a long-distance relationship that didn’t work out. kanye’s verses, smooth at the beginning, break down into an aimless freestyling.

the beating heart of the album is probably i love kanye, though. an ironic reflection on the persona he has constructed, delivered in a raw beatless way. the attempt to reconcile celebrity culture and aesthetic mysticism is driven by his wondering about what is left when he attempts to transcend this persona, and whether or not he is trapped by fame.

impermanence and the digital word

i’ve been crawling through walter ong’s Orality and Literacy for a while now, savoring it a few pages at a time. this is one of many luxuries being out of carleton has provided (though the tradeoff, that i have to wear business casual for 40 hours a week, has me wishing i could go back.)

one thing that has alternately amused & frustrated me is Ong’s focus on western scriptures and literature. i suppose it’s only to be expected - he was a jesuit priest and his book was published in the 80s. but my rudimentary knowledge of buddhist history gives me the sense that the development of this religion both tests and demonstrates for ong’s ideas.

the historical buddha lived sometime around the 5th century BC. we don’t know for sure, because nothing was written down. for four hundred years, the sayings of the buddha were maintained through recitation. the role of monks was always to maintain the teaching of the buddha for as long as they could. as the religion developed, becoming institutionalized and state-sponsored under the ashokan empire, its practices of recitation grew more sophisticated. no one monk could recite the entire canon - instead, it was scattered among many monks.

the stability of recitation that buddhists achieved meant that sutras could be effectively treated as texts. this enabled a kind of abstract analysis that ong associates with textual study, and resulted in the creation of the abhidhamma. where the sutras are essentially colloquialisms, the abhidhamma are the product of sustained, systematic philosophical thought. they take the teachings which were orally situated in the lifeworld of siddartha gautama and render them abstract, infinitely applicable, replicable. but this philosophy is still essentially oral in character: its written form isn’t treatises and arguments, but summaries and lists - what ong might call a memory aid.

once the scriptures get written down and buddhism develops into a more literatre religion, shit gets WILD. this is the origin of mahayana buddhism: the greater vehicle, which states that there are an infinite number of buddhas and bodhisatvas teaching in an infinite number of universes which are eternally going through cycles of growth and decay, anyone can write a new sutra and say it was revealed to them by a buddha, and so on and so forth. essentially: an already fruitful culture of oral abstraction, given widespread literacy and prosperity (and cultural contact with hellenism), rapidly blossoms into something bold and strange.

but even before this blossoming was the doctrine of impermanence. it’s pretty straightforward, as far as doctrines go: there is nothing permanent. everything material is subject to change. (the corollary being: don’t get too attached to what you’ve got.) as a metaphysical position it seems closely linked to, specifically, the transience of the spoken word. Ong attributes Plato’s philosophy of permanent metaphysical forms giving rise to our physical world to his literacy, but the illiterate religions of south asia took a different route

text isn’t as stable in 2016 as it was in plato’s day. the digital word can change when you’re not looking at it; it is produced and discarded on a whim. the physical referent for the word isn’t ink held on paper - it’s a sequence of stored charges that can only be interpreted by an elaborate device. we have very suddenly come into this paradigm, where written language can be treated with the disposability of spoken language. it has brought us to this churning boil of an election; who knows what other repressed demons it will bring forth.

authentically irrational

“we were struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material from which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document!”

the novel dracula ends on this ominous note. the vampire is eradicated, england is safe, and transylvania has become a pleasant tourist destination. but the authenticity of the record of the conflict is left hauntingly ambiguous.

“the vampire is dead, you idiot,” a man made entirely out of straw attempts to tell me. “that’s all that matters.” you don’t know how wrong you are, straw man. after all, documentation is central to dracula. the entire novel is composed of documents composed by the main characters. they’re created chaotically at first but the latter half of the novel sees them regimented and used as the first line of defence against dracula. documentation, in this novel, is control.

this regimentation, however, also changes the form of the documents they produce. they move away from modes that more thoroughly or purely capture their subjective experience: Jonathan Harker writes a diary in a shorthand script that only he & his beloved can read; Dr. Seward speaks into a phonograph that records his voice on wax cylinders - but is totally unsearchable, and illegible without mechanical interpretation.

one part of the action of regimentation is mina’s transcription of these documents. she converts unreason into reason with her typewriter, translating every encoded word or emotion-imbued phoneme into the controlled, interchangeable letters of type. she also duplicates the records several times.

replication and interchangeability: the hallmarks of reason. atheistic materialism organizes desire through these rational principles. if it can’t be replicated and sold somewhere else, to anyone else, then it can’t exist. but like jonathan harker, reviewing the copies without origin, ppl have grown anxious about authenticity.

to a degree the idea of a product or place or experience being ‘authentic’ is a construction of savvy marketers. but they didn’t make the anxiety about authenticity; they’re only responding to it.

the craving for what is authentic is a craving for what cannot be or has not been replicated; something that has an origin beyond the black box of mass production. it is a desire for a feeling of location that reflects subjectivity. it is a desire for a truth born out of history, not engineered by marketers. it is irrational and undefinable precisely because it exists to demarcate a space where reason cannot enter and begin making copies.

recommended reading Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer) Mass Authentic (Rob Horning) Village Atheists, Village Idiots (Sam Kriss)