If you have the time, this is *so* worth reading... I found myself in tears, as I read what I had been trying to say...
Eric Peters
1/8/04
Were the pen mightier than the sword, the glut of my words would amount to no more than the high-to-heaven smelling carcass of a dead and decaying corpse. So let the pollution begin…..
An admitted sapster, I viewed the final piece of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy one recent afternoon at the local movie theater and somehow, poignantly saddened, I spent the remainder of the day moved, pushed as it were, to a state of utter helplessness. It was as though a part of me - the same adventurous life that I wish were my own - had reached the ending and I, like the gentle elves, Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf the White, had sailed away to the faraway lands never again to meet the hungry, pallid eyes of wishful thinking that remained bolted to the shore.
Maybe it's the time of year, maybe it’s something I drank or ate, maybe the interstices of my working mind, maybe it's just the salt that’s in my wounds, or maybe it's a collated reflection of my general disposition in this era, but I gather more from Tolkien’s grandiose concoction than that of a colloquial, grandfatherly tale-telling. The story collapses upon me like a cold, damp, dark night. I believe it points me somewhere or to some thing, but I don't know exactly who, or what, the hordes of whistling arrows are aimed at nor can I fathom what all these little neuro-shiftings imply. It is as familiar as my own mere presence, but one to which I know I am inextricably tied: the fabled epic of a dawning Tomorrow.
The story of the Fellowship, like all well-told ones, is just as much my own as are these letters I now write. I am blind to the imperial paintings that hang on massive canvases before me, and yet, for what little I deserve, I can still see far too wide the traces of history and peer too often and too deeply into this swampy little heart of mine. The ground beneath my hobbled feet swallows me down with the groans of warp and tincture only to let me rise amid the detrital ashes of dust to dust with a face full of hope and a mouth full of praise for both life and its inseparable brother, death. Even if the timekeeper’s Tomorrow is all that’s left to live, it still roars with possibilities, it hunts the soul with a predatorial singularity and it laps at the shore-strewn stones with replenishment, removes the debris - and hubris, no doubt - and leaves its own penetrating marks of a quiet conquering. And just when it seems that all hope is lost, when the colluvial ground before me lurches in agony, when every ounce of sky is torched and burning black, when the songs of old are no longer sung or have been forgotten, when the yet-to-be-written psalms are nonetheless decimated in the flash of a wintry instant, when no bird dares feed on the paltry grains of abhorrence and betrayal, I pray with the sinew of my soul: let no earth absorb me, let no man harm, let no doubt befoul me, let no grievous realm beseech, lest I, a holy adventure in flesh, would fall to my tender, unused knees and allow the Lord of faith to entrench himself at my waning, faithless side. Before an eye flickered, before springs were sprung, before skies were hung, the fighter, warrior, compatriot, poet and lover of all that was created while the grass was still young and green and untrampled, there was Breath itself, the base remainder. And it was there that my life began – life which no death defeateth – but still remains to this tomorrow day, a mere breath away.
By the very spectacles of the human heart we endeavor to enlist this holy One: the Immaculate Miracle, the Glory, the Quiet Believer, the Man of Sorrow, the Bright Morning Star, the Understanding, Pater Nobilia, Alpha, Omega, Harbor of Good Hope, a Leg to stand on, the Harvest, the Mystery, the Fear, the Balm of Birmingham, the Scapegoat, the Cradle of Treasure, the Song to be Sung, Hope for Tomorrow, our Priest, our Samwise Gamgee, the Name which was, and is, and is to come, the Storm, the Love, the I Am.
Pray you, grace us in the garments of nobility, for that is who we are, who we were created to be and what glory we are to one day finally attain. We, the last lonely riders, muster the courage to enter through the foreboding cliffs which fly forth from the Hell-mountains we so intensely fear with all the pent-up Hell inside us like some filthy disagreeable curse. We pray: return to us our rightful names, the very names stolen from us by Yesterday at much too young an age and what were subtly replaced by cloaked and marvelous Lies, those things which are not. The wool pulled over our eyes and the Oz-veil hoisted, there we stood broken, terrified, facing an adventure we could not possibly comprehend underneath Heaven, and one we feared, with all fear itself, facing head on. We sunk like stones. But today, formerly tomorrow, we awaken like once great and powerful Rings to reclaim the identities that were burgled, thieved and kept hidden in the secret swamps of all our might-have-been’s. The bounty is summoned. Freedom now becomes the inheritance of a long-suffering people: a people long-laden with guilt, much over-burdened with antiphonal songs of distrust, layered in the soot of a battle we cannot see, yet wanting, at long last, to reach the palatial home of our prodigal Tomorrow. For all that I am unable to see, I can faintly make out the day when the proud shall be humbled, the wronged vindicated, the failed succeed, the down-trodden at last witness glory upon everlasting glory, and we, the mysterious hobbling creatures, who scarcely know when to be silent, shall put toil and trouble behind us like a weathered yesterday of rotting tomorrows.
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