"... into the ocean..."

This is one of those late-night pseudo-rambling entries. Tonight, I've just been sort of ambiently hanging around, reading, looking at stuff online, checking out how the gentoo bugzilla thing works, doing calf-lifts, and listening to The Pixies. Marty lent me two albums from them, very nice.

I got my ebuild submitted. Hopefully somebody gentoo-related will look at it, decide that it's brilliant, and immediately stick it in the Portage tree :) The interface for their submission system is pretty well laid out, although the documentation is slightly misleading -- perhaps they've changed things around recently.

I didn't end up running tonight, yet, but I'm considering getting up with the sun, considering that to still be "tonight", and running then as well as tomorrow afternoon. I talk a lot about how I'm going to run. Sometimes I talk about how I've just gone and run. It's important.

There's a reason for this particular instance of Not Running Yet... I was hanging around waiting for Esther to call... apparently one of her associates was Really Sick and needed to go to the ER, so that's where Esther and her associates have been tonight... she called, which was good and happy and joyful, and I was glad to get to talk to her, but it's come to my attention, again, that I'm essentially a puppy, and I'm not always sure about how I feel about that. Just kinda waiting around for when she might or might not call. This didn't happen until 2 AM, and I'd originally thought that I'd go at about 11... so at 11:30, having talked with Marty for a while, I think to myself "eh, I said I'd be back by around midnight..." so after that I just waited. *blinks*

Why was that more important than my own desire to take my evening constitutional?

Eh. I finished the Silmarillion and got an ebuild submitted while I was sitting 'round the room.

Tolkien literature is interesting, in and of itself, but also on the level of considering why it's interesting. I'm sure there've been papers and theses and entire careers dealing with this idea... but I haven't read them. Tolkien's created this gigantic, sprawling, epic sort of mythology, and I think the really important bit there is "epic". The Silmarillion reads like history, really, or sometimes like scripture... and LotR is still in a very high sort of register. Despite the parts of the LotR story focusing on how "help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise shall falter" (hobbits, yo)... it's still a story about big-ness, about people who work with huge tracts of land and populations and armies and magical artifacts. Battle is generally portrayed, especially in the Silmarillion, as sort of two waves of energy coming up against each other, very abstract. People don't get stabbed and gangrene to death, they're hewn down. They grow great in stature and in mind. They lead peoples and make decrees and pronounce dooms and forge great works and witness the most fair sight ever seen in Beleriand.

So clearly we have a need of this sort of thing. Tolkien's world is one of entropy, in which control/focus is handed off from the Very Great (Eru) eventually down to humankind, and throughout all of it, things keep on getting screwed up by people with a bit of pride, a bit of fear, and maybe more ambition than they should have -- they try to take control from the Rightful Ruler, screw things up, and cause Great and Fair Things to Pass From The World Forever. Magic fades, gradually. The past is bright and shiny and the future is gray, even if at the end of everything Sauron is thrown down and the One Ring is destroyed... then a lot of the magic of the world is spent, and you can't get that energy back. Close to the beginning of it all, Feanor realizes that he's pretty much spent and he's not going to be able to make any more Silmarils. Even though he's one of the Eldar and supposedly not going to age any, he's clearly past his prime, he's now Old.

I think... that our need for epic-type literature/mythology has to do with childhood passing away... the elves stay forever young-looking, and as such, they have no place in the post-Third-Age world... they have to flee. The magic's gone. Childhood's over. No more time for elves or Dark Lords, or even exceptionally strong, long-lived folks with lineage that you can trace back to the Cutest Elf-Chick Ever and a Maia if you like. Even the Little People are hard to see these days. You can think about this sort of thing if you feel like it, but they're conveniently Gone down the Straight Road, something that we can't really believe in, let alone find, but can certainly spend a lot of time looking for.

Is everyday life that depressing? We feel the need to escape into this sort of place every so often... things are so small, so meaningless, so petty -- we sit at desks, we do laundry, we drive cars to places, then come back... when was the last time that you pronounced a doom or went to found your own secret city?

I think Mim the Petty Dwarf is the most real character in the Silmarillion. He's afraid, he keeps on getting thrown around by unpleasant circumstances, members of his family get whacked for no particular reason, he's often feels abandoned and yet keeps a bit of pomp about where he's coming from, he keeps having to sell out in order to survive... and he's got that little bit of pride, that urge to press his advantage when he thinks he has one. That's a real human being... real people don't deal with dragons and great strongholds of iron in the Icy North. Boredom and apathy are much more common problems. Or hunger.

There's a conflict here, or maybe two completely orthogonal arguments going on. Just because real people have to do laundry and maybe occasionally just nuke a veggieburger instead of declaring a Great Feast, perhaps that doesn't mean that real life isn't important. Or perhaps real life /is/ completely meaningless and we just use fantasy to take our minds off that sort of thing. Or maybe people like Tolkien (and Neil Gaiman, and Cervantes, and... hrm. Don Quijote is really meta-fantasy more than anything else) are trying to infuse real life with an epic-ness that we can choose. Maybe there's nobility independent of aristocracy; maybe walking to the bank is just something that one has to do, not the entire focus of life. This is a reaction against the idea that the Meaning of Life is "chop wood, carry water"... I suppose it sort of requires people to actually be trying to do something other than washing dishes, though. The other end of this is being loud and pompous, I suppose. Then again, there are some extremely boring, petty people who are nonetheless loud and pompous.

*laughs* One of my mother's friends lists her occupation as "princess".

Although there are definitely some bits in the Silmarillion that one can definitely relate with, on a very personal level... this is important, I think. I had tears welling up in my eyes at a few points, actually. Particularly the parts about Huan, helping out Beren and Luthien... Tolkien understood dogs, I think. Huan is Dog-ness. Huan is your dog(s) back at home, who couldn't come with you to university, and the dog that you'd like to have living in your house when you get a place of your own. Also, on the voyage of Earendil, when Ulmo doesn't let Elwing off herself and instead sends her flying in the form of a bird out to his ship, where she falls asleep in his arms... that was really and truly beautiful. Tolkien understood waking up with someone you love next to you.

Eventually... hrm.

Eh, I dunno. Maybe I'll go pass out for a bit.