Tolkien and the elastic of mind
The present hype around LOTR has made some people ask why we seem to need this stuff and why people embrace stories like these. I’ll dare the statement that it is sheer necessity – a survival mechanism and a socialization process – a way to learn the ‘big lies of life’ that you simply cannot do without.
I’ll start with one of my favourite books: ‘The Hogfather’ by Terry Pratchett. Here Death has a talk with his granddaughter:
…’humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.’
‘Tooth faries? Hogfathers? Little..’
‘Ýes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.’
‘So we can believe in the big ones?’
‘Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.’
‘They’re not the same at all!’
‘You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet – ‘ Death waved a hand. ‘And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some… rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.’
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?’
‘My point exactly.’
Stories like LOTR are necessary to learn the ‘big lies’ which are absolutely necessary for mental hygiene. If you have never learned about justice, truth, courage etc. you cannot believe in them, and without this belief the world collapses into chaos and darkness. If you look at the world without any belief that somewhere there is some kind of meaning, some kind of justice, the world will be so desolate, so threatening, so random that you cannot live with it and you can choose between jumping in the river or going insane. The kind of insanity that shows itself as blatant evil or an all encompassing indifference. Growing up without fantasy we do not learn the basic lies of life.
And this is not it. Still, taking the mental hygiene aspect, fantasy provides places to rest the soul. Worlds where you can take a holiday in the mind, experience the tremendous, be a hero, dare the impossible and win the princess and half the kingdom. Worlds with a freedom, daily life doesn’t provide – worlds available to all who can lay their hands on a book or find someone willing to tell stories. And worlds where you can feel safe, as the stories have happy endings and you can join in without risking life and limb. Escapism – but necessary escapism. If you cannot take time off from the eternal cycle of starvation, wars and ecological disasters of the TV news, you get strange in the head. We need stories to rest our souls, stories providing hope, stories where the good guys win.
Fantasy like Tolkien’s teach tolerance. Tolkien’s world is like other fantasy worlds populated with different creatures, not just different races of the same species but very different entities. Creatures who must work together for a common good to make their world work. Pratchett’s Discworld is somewhat different as here there is no defined enemy – no orcs you can recognize as the evil ones. Here you find a mixture of people, dwarfs, trolls etc. being good or bad on an equal basis. Tolkien shows us the basic ideals, clear cut good and bad – the absolutely necessary basic lesson and a pictures you can return to when you need to make the shadows deeper and the difference of good and bad more defined. Discworld takes us further towards our own world – there are no ‘the good’ or ‘the bad’, so here the lessons in tolerance get somewhat more pedagogical – more directly transferable to daily life. And these lessons must come as fantasy. Only this way do we get the distance to allow for maybe rather uncomfortable truths about ourselves and bypass the defences of the mind. When the battle is between orcs and elves or trolls and dwarfs we can laugh at, feel pity for or be outraged by our own evils. Only this way we learn at all.
These ‘big lies’ and ideals are necessary beacons. If we haven’t got those – brightly shining and recognizable, we have no direction. We need to have things to strive for, need measures of right and wrong, need direction. I all situations in life there are many ways, many roads to take, many choices to make and to do that – to choose at all – you need to have signposts telling where those roads lead. For a society to function these signposts must be clearly visible in the landscape. Many think that laws do this. But they do not. Laws are nothing. Legislation only works by consensus. We agree upon facts like killing is wrong, stealing is wrong, but still some say ‘so what’ and do it anyway. And laws cannot prevent this. Only if all agree that there are roads to go and roads not to follow, law has a meaning. To agree on this, people must agree on the basic values like justice, truth etc. Only if the really big signposts are clearly visible on the horizon, can you agree on the direction, whatever is in between. And the really great stories, and the little fairy tales – and the latest worlds of fantasy from Tolkien to Pratchett all contribute to keep the road free and the signpost clean and remind us they’re there and that we need to believe in them and walk the roads together, otherwise the world crumbles and society fall into chaos.
And then there is another aspect too, that maybe now is extra important. Fantasy exercises the elastic bands of the brain. Fantasy exercises the mental muscles and expand roominess and flexibility. In our world where things happen in fast succession and the so called ‘progress’ is unstoppable and accelerating a flexible brain is a matter of survival. If you cannot adapt you get left behind and there is no way of joining in again, ’cause the train is accelerating. We live in a world that has grown beyond recognition in very few years and it’s still growing.
Modern physics talk of super strings and M-theory and all new theories contain multiple universes and more dimensions than 4. A lot of scientists have trouble themselves taking this in. [But funnily enough I have met a lot of other people having no trouble at all and for myself I can only say that finally scientists have started talking about the universe I have lived in for quite some time. A universe of possibilities rather than limitations. And I think that my readiness to embrace parallel universes and multiple dimensions have more to do with fantasy than physics. I have read fairy tales since I learned to read and I am – as you must have guessed – a true Pratchett fan. I absolutely love Discworld. Because Discworld contains the roominess of possibilities that I do not find in daily life. A world that – if you really go into it – can get you accustomed to parallel universes and the like, and because it’s ‘just fantasy’ you just eat it raw as long as you read. But.. even though you don’t ‘believe in it’ as such you still get the exercise of mind, stretching the elastics and pushing the boundaries of possibilities – in thought as well as reality.] When you have gotten used to walking the world of Discworld, M-theory is not all that strange and neither threatening nor impossible. To walk new paths you have to imagine them first. And fantasy is the best possible practice.
Many people have worried about role playing and computer games and such and I can join in worrying about the consequences of particularly violent ones and their effect on fragile minds but I’m totally convinced that to most people walking these imaginary worlds gives them a flexibility and roominess of mind that make them more adaptable to a rapidly changing world and more ready to cope with whatever life throws at them. And I am also convinced that the scientists of the future who can handle M-theory and what comes after and make good use of it will be the ones who grew up on fantasy and imaginary worlds. Those who will feel totally at home in fields rather than matter and who can break the mental barriers of physics today will be these kids. I think we’ll have another ‘great leap for mankind’ like the one that gave us quantum physics – a leap that will take us to farther horizons and maybe give proof of multiple universes or dimensions or at least prove their effects on our world. It takes a mental readiness. And stores from Twenty thousand leagues under the Sea to Starwars, from ‘east of the sun and west of the moon’ to Discworld will provide that space in the head to move the horizons far beyond the present boundaries.
And then we are back with Tolkien. His universe is necessary as a parallel universe. It’s a ‘practice’ universe. A place to expand the horizons, exercise the mental elastics and find the beacons we need to make our daily reality work just well enough – a place where we can refuel and find inspiration and see good triumph over evil, so we can raise our heads and fight for the things we believe in because there we have learned that you can beat the odds and that one man can truly make a difference. And if not there – where would we get the idea to try it in real life and how would we ever get people like Jean Henri Dunant or institutions like the UN?
To me Tolkien and fantasy in general becomes even more necessary. We need the mental flexibility ever more in a steadily more complex world. We need those beacons to remind us of what makes us people. I think that a lot of people feel this instinctively and embrace LOTR for that very reason be it as movies or books.
Anduin © 2004