What breaks the enchantment?

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

If our encounter with the secondary world feeds back into our experience of the primary, & that new experience of the primary affects out later experience of the secondary, does that increasingly enhance & deepen our experience of both? Or does it at the same time make the primary world more 'enchanting' (woods in the primary world seeming 'overshadowed' by Lorien, so that almost we expect to see Elves wandering under those once familiar trees but also make the Golden Wood less 'enchanting' by being too similar now to our experience of primary world woodland, so that we can't shake the memory of that pile of trash someone dumped under the trees?

I'm sure this says far more about me than it does about broken enchantment (which is afterall a very subjective thing). I do have a reverence for trees, clouds, woods, ancient ruins, and open seas, that I might not have if I had never read Tolkien. On the other hand, what I tend to feel about the primary world is an emptiness, a lack of vitality, of enchantment. As wondrous and beautiful the "real world" is, I can't help feeling like something's missing, something that can only be grasped by the imagination. And it's not just the human stain of trash, suburbia, crime, what have you. It runs deeper than that. Arda is flawed by the designs of Morgoth. That is, the Secondary world Tolkien subcreated partakes of so much Real Life to do the degree that it is as flawed as the primary world. The world of the Fourth Age has lost much of the lustre. Light has been splintered. The Elves are leaving and enchantment is waning. I feel that both in Middle-earth and in our world, where the Elves are long gone and bereavement is the order of the day.

Yet, if this world was once Middle earth, perhaps our reading will make us wish to do what we can to heal the natural world?

Alas, we are fighting the long defeat, every bit as much as Galadriel and the Elves in the late Third Age. Arda must be remade. The Myth must be literally, primarily transformed. That's my belief, anyway.

So, its not (in my opinion) about finding out 'how' Shelob or Galadriel came to be created, & what raw materials were used in their construction. They both stand or fall by what they are & the role they play in the story, & our experience of them.

I agree. Thus, I think the disenchantment runs deeper. Light continues to splinter. The end of the Third Age was a time when those who lived then grieved the loss of so much that had thrived in the First Age. And now we are that far removed again from the Third Age, and have lost still more. It is as if the remants of Eden fade further with each passing year. And maybe it's just me wrestling with getting older.

[davem]

It is as if the remants of Eden fade further with each passing year.

But the memory & the yearning remain. So what does that tell us? Aren't those things as much 'Eden' as the physical trees & rivers that were 'once upon a time'? In fact, isn't that phrase. 'Once upon a time' (& 'over the hills & far away' - or as I prefer 'over the hills to faraway') part of the little bit of Eden that we all carry in our hearts?

The Elves haven't gone - not really - they still live, like the Hobbits, in that place. And its not all that far away, either - like the man said, 'Still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate, & though I oft have passed them by, a day will come at last when I, shall take the hidden paths that run, west of the moon, east of the sun.'

Have you never looked at a distant horizon & felt that 'pull', that 'sense' that its just over there, & that if you set off, right then, you'd get there?

Of course, you can't just set off, because you have responsibilities here, things you have to do. But one day you will, because, just like Bilbo, you want to see 'Mountains again, mountains!'

Anyway, if you feel the way you say you do, I don't think you're all that 'old' - not really....

[littlemanpoet]

Heh. Not all that old, but sensing time slipping away, as if through the fingers like sand.

Oh, I'm glad Eden is in my heart, and thanks for reminding of the poem with the secret gate. That's very much a piece of my own writing - how could it not be, if Tolkien baptized my imagination, to borrow a phrase from CSL?

I used to feel like 'that place' is just over the horizon, but I always knew I was just kidding myself because flat now is too sapped of faery.

davem, I have to smile sometimes how you communicate with the rest of us on this and other threads, as if you have found the Gospel According to Tolkien and are trying with all your might to communicate the evangelium, trying to get us all to believe. On this thread you have presented a powerful principle, that belief is necessary before its object can be accepted. That has nothing to do with whether it was experienced - I think of CSL's dwarfs in The Last Battle, for example. I for one wish I could go back to the way things used to be for me, and just believe, but it's not in me to do so anymore. I'm going to have to struggle through to the next "whatever". I sense that maybe Fordim and Bêthberry may be facing the same dilemma as I? A pure guess, that.

[davem]

Originally Posted by LMP

davem, I have to smile sometimes how you communicate with the rest of us on this and other threads, as if you have found the Gospel According to Tolkien and are trying with all your might to communicate the evangelium, trying to get us all to believe.

I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe you're right. I'm not consciously trying to convert anybody, though. I just say what comes to me.

I for one wish I could go back to the way things used to be for me, and just believe, but it's not in me to do so anymore. I'm going to have to struggle through to the next "whatever". I sense that maybe Fordim and Bêthberry may be facing the same dilemma as I? A pure guess, that.

I think that happens when you try too hard. I think enchanment happens when you stop trying to be enchanted - when you stop analysing yourself, & the story, & the author - all the whys & wherefores, the metaphors & tying yourself up in knots with textual analysis & deconstruction & sundry other forms of literary mumbo jumbo. I can't help thinking of Tom & Goldberry, laughing, singing & dancing, living in a constant state of wonder & enchantment. No 'evangelium' there, no desire to convert. Try to analyse Tom, to 'explain' him, & he'll vanish with a wink & a laugh, but accept him, follow him, &

'You shall come home with me! The table is all laden with yellow cream, honeycomb, and white bread and butter.

Then another clear voice, as young and as ancient as Spring, like the song of a glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them:
Now let the song begin! let us sing together
Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!
And with that song the hobbits stood upon the threshold, and a golden light was all about them.

(See that? I'm doing it again....

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

I think enchantment happens when you stop trying to be enchanted - when you stop analysing yourself, & the story, & the author - all the whys & wherefores, the metaphors & tying yourself up in knots with textual analysis & deconstruction & sundry other forms of literary mumbo jumbo.

I'll plead guilty to analyzing myself, but not the rest. I'm just not objective enough for all that other stuff. What I do analyze (perhaps to my own enchantable demise) is myth and story in general. Perhaps (hah! who am I kidding?) .... It has to do with having a story to tell and fearing that I am unable to adequately ... to which the obvious answer is .... Write the d**n thing! Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all. But if I write, I won't be here as much. Lousy excuse, since I enjoy the company here. But its part of why I started this thread in the first place. Here I am running off at the mouth, using y'all for my own purposes. Thanks, you've been kind enough to be an (maybe) unknowing, brain-picked sounding board.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

davem, I have to smile sometimes how you communicate with the rest of us on this and other threads, as if you have found the Gospel According to Tolkien and are trying with all your might to communicate the evangelium, trying to get us all to believe. On this thread you have presented a powerful principle, that belief is necessary before its object can be accepted. That has nothing to do with whether it was experienced

Interesting that you cast the discussion this way. And interesting that you smile at davem's zealous proselytising. I can't smile at it because it too much insists that there is only one way to read, one way to enjoy, one way to find that Other Land just over the next page whose scent you just might carry back with you to the waking world. Such fundamentalism I find limiting and even somewhat scary, however eloquently or kindly or sincerely meant. Or however truely or meaningfully experienced by one reader.

But even more interesting, littlemanpoet, is your contrast here between "accepted" and "experienced." That's a nice way of handling the differences on this thread, I think.

So, how or what will you take back to your writing? That you can provide the experience for the reader, but not necessarily the belief?

[davem]

Such fundamentalism I find limiting and even somewhat scary, however eloquently or kindly or sincerely meant. Or however truely or meaningfully experienced by one reader.

This is only a literary discussion. Being scared by anything I've said seems a bit of an over reaction. I'm stating as honestly as I can my own feelings & understanding. If I was advocating firebombing the 'scapegoats', I could understand your reaction, as it is, I can only say I think everyone needs to lighten up. I'm beginning to suspect the halls of accademe are haunted by professors & students in bullet proof gowns & carrying cans of mace, keeping a safe distance from one another in case an idea goes off & everyone gets hit by the shrapnel.