"Wraithing"

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy every few years since I was a little kid.  And I've been an avid follower of all the extra behind-the-scenes information about exactly how they made the movie adaptations, with a particular interest in what story they thought they were telling.  On the DVD extras, this one man kept making the most interesting points about Tolkien as a person.  Since I first sat down to the watch the extended Fellowship of the Ring DVD with all the extras, I've been seeing Tom Shippey, author of J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, talking about Tolkien and I've been impressed by the insights in his points.

    The older I get, the harder time I have getting drawn into new things.  Music, books, television, movies, whatever.  And I find that in the information age, I can get an almost limitless supply of information surrounding the old stuff I already like. I watch every interview or documentary about favourite books, movies, albums and TV shows.  So I bought the Kindle version of Tom Shippey's book.  Pretty into it.

    The idea that is interesting me right now is something Shippey termed "wraithing."  He explained that he feels the very best, most lasting, most widely read and quotable books of the twentieth century, are George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and Tolkien's writing, along with people like Kurt (Slaughterhouse Five) Vonnegut and Joseph (Catch 22) Heller.  He feels that these books, more than any others, are quintessentially twentieth century.  He says that the reason why these books were so ground-breaking is that these men had first-hand experience of the new realities of war and abuses of government power that heralded the twentieth century.  He says that as a result, they chose to (needed to, really) create works of imaginative fiction to try to solidify the new stuff that was going on all around them.  To make portraits of it so it could be clearly looked at for the first time.  Because they needed new ways of viewing courage, honour and evil and corruption and tyranny.  Nothing quite like what they were now seeing had ever happened in the world, and had, consequently, never been written about before.

    Tolkien's really frightening evil characters, Shippey argues, are "emptied" figures, barely corporeal at all, faceless, heartless and cold.  They are shadow.  He talks about Gollum, Denethor, the Nazgul, and Sauron (and even Frodo and Bilbo) as beings that were once genuine, vibrant, fully-realized people.  Walking around, knowing how to respond with joy to nature, to food and drink and music and the company of others.  But then, somehow getting drawn into something that subsumed/consumed them.  Hollowed them out.  Made them at first empty shells, and eventually, wraiths.  Barely there at all.  Never dying, never living.  Feeling like butter scraped over too much bread.  Forgetting what strawberries tasted like.  Hiding from the sun. Ceasing to be themselves.  Being placeholders.  Empty spaces with nothing really to offer to the world but resentful, jealous, toxic, destructive malice.

    Giving all there is of themselves to a cause, an agenda, a goal, an ideology, until there is no "them" left to give, and no longer any "them" left to be.

    I never gave my identity and my life to follow Hitler or Stalin, of course.  But I do know a bit about being asked to sacrifice everyone I was or would ever be, to a system.  To a religious collective.  To a job, also.  Or to a cause.  I know that feeling of being used up.  Of no longer being full of whatever it is that is supposed to make me be myself.  Of feeling hollow. With nothing but a thin, sour, cold venom flowing in my veins, some days.  Spattering venom everywhere I go, because love's not going in, and not flowing out.  Walking around and having jokes and sunsets and food and music kinda go past me. Over my head.  Heart tightly closed.  Alone.  Forgetting what I even like to do. Leaving poison footprints.

    I think it's a real danger for working people.  Working middle-aged people especially. Forgetting who you once were and becoming a Gollum. A mini-Sauron.  A driven, desperate, hateful Denethor.  All the while giving very sensible, logical, knowledgeable Saruman-style reasons why there's no other path to take.  Why nothing else is possible or important.  Why you're just being sensible.  Why there are, really, no other choices but self-abnegation.

    Sometimes I feel very, very used up.  It's not something that gets better with age.  And that's when I have to remember what makes me most myself.  I was raised to sacrifice who I was, because who I was, was "bad."  Well Tolkien and Lewis and Orwell all knew that there's something worse than being full of yourself and self-centred and arrogant: not being yourself.  Being an empty, sour shell, shambling around in the shadows, just like you were still a person.

    In times like these, it's important to remember what and who makes me myself. And to reach out and recharge.