Mythic Unities in The Lord of the Rings - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

littlemanpoet · 11-11-2006, 02:10 PM

Somehow, subcreation seems to be an important piece of this whole thing. Writing or speaking story creates a new woven fabric of meaning and imagined (imaged?) reality, and one can be successful in such a subcreation, or not. Which links this thread to the one on "the wrong kind of details".

There are writers who just don't get it, but we read their hack anyway, and come away feeling unsatisfied. Why? Because they don't cause wonder, and they don't succeed in effecting a recovered view of reality. What is this recovered view? It is to more closely (certainly not completely!) have revealed to our perception the livingness of creation; which means mythic unities instead of seeing things piecemeal.

One way of keeping this kind of thing in mind is to look at the tree out your back window. Maybe it still has leaves. I just looked out the window at a tree in my neighbor's yard, just as a strong breeze was blowing through. It hit me, watching those leaves dance, that a tree is always interacting with its environment (a rather cold and scientific way of putting it, I admit); that is, leaves never just are. They are sprouting, moving, growing, changing in color, dying, falling, mouldering. Real life is always busy recreating. It's a work of art that never stops being made. I'm failing for words. Maybe you understand what I'm trying to describe in this cumbersome way.

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11-11-2006, 02:10 PM	#31
littlemanpoet Itinerant Songster Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Edge of Faerie Posts: 7,066	Somehow, subcreation seems to be an important piece of this whole thing. Writing or speaking story creates a new woven fabric of meaning and imagined (imaged?) reality, and one can be successful in such a subcreation, or not. Which links this thread to the one on "the wrong kind of details". There are writers who just don't get it, but we read their hack anyway, and come away feeling unsatisfied. Why? Because they don't cause wonder, and they don't succeed in effecting a recovered view of reality. What is this recovered view? It is to more closely (certainly not completely!) have revealed to our perception the livingness of creation; which means mythic unities instead of seeing things piecemeal. One way of keeping this kind of thing in mind is to look at the tree out your back window. Maybe it still has leaves. I just looked out the window at a tree in my neighbor's yard, just as a strong breeze was blowing through. It hit me, watching those leaves dance, that a tree is always interacting with its environment (a rather cold and scientific way of putting it, I admit); that is, leaves never just are. They are sprouting, moving, growing, changing in color, dying, falling, mouldering. Real life is always busy recreating. It's a work of art that never stops being made. I'm failing for words. Maybe you understand what I'm trying to describe in this cumbersome way.