Eat, Drink, and Be Meriadoc

In the beginning there was Eru, the One, and he created the Ainur, and they made the world with their song. And then, some considerable time later, during the Fourth Age, someone posted this link on Facebook. And I knew that I had just been witness to The Greatest Idea Ever: a Lord of the Rings movie marathon hobbit feast. I knew I had all three extended editions of LOTR at Mom's, and that I would soon be there myself; and I knew that we would be watching the 2nd Hobbit film, and that I would again try to read The Hobbit to my nephew - which, given how little I see him and how quickly he falls asleep, is going to take FOREVER. Therefore I emailed my family and said "Make It So." And it was.

I'm sure my loyal readers need no assurance of my Tolkien Geek Cred. As the great link says, food is very important in Tolkien's world, a fact of which I'm well aware. Obviously food is important to the Hobbits, but as a theme it appears in very many places throughout both Bilbo's and Frodo's adventures. Whenever there is a respite from the toils of the road, there is a description of plain and simple food that makes "a loaf with honey and cream" sound like the most delicious thing ever. And when Frodo and Sam make it to Ithilien and Sam finally gets to use his pots and cook a brace of conies, and in the movie they never get a chance to eat it!, I just weep, knowing how starving they are and will be.

Sure, Mordor is terrible and the ring is a heavy burden, but having no food to get you there? How can a hobbit hope to go on?

Here follows an account of The Great Feast of 2014, in which we were too full and tired to even bother with the last course and skipped straight to dessert. We accompanied the food with (if I remember correctly) a sampler of New Belgium ales, red wine, and sherry. We couldn't find any decent mead, but at least we tried.

First Breakfast - 8am

Blackberry tarts from Bree. As the recipe says,

There was hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show.

Though I probably didn't put enough sugar in these, and the blackberries never quite liquified like I thought they would, the tarts were perfect and I want one now.

Second Breakfast - 9am, start FOTR

 

Fried eggs, tomatoes, crispy bacon, and ham. There is no recipe for this because who needs a recipe for this? I know how to fry an egg. Also, I'm assuming you all know what LOTR, FOTR, TTT, and ROTK mean because I expect a minimum of intelligence from my readers.

Elevenses - 11am

Elven Lembas Bread. This was the hit of the day. My nephew literally could not stop talking about it, and not being able to say "lembas" did not stop him.

Luncheon - 1pm, start TTT

Mushroom Soup from the Inn at Bree. Barliman really knows his cooking and apparently has access to a blender or food processor.

Afternoon Tea - 3pm

Lavender & Lemon Muffins, served with Portsmouth tea. The lemon extract we found in Mom's cupboard was probably less than 20 years old and totally okay to use.

Dinner - 5pm, start ROTK

 

Roast Mutton for the Trolls, with Shire pudding. (Get it? Yorkshire pudding??) OMG delicious. I'd never made yorkshire pudding before, and I decided it was like pancakes cooked in meat drippings. Lovely.

 

Supper - 7pm 

 

Daddy Twofoot's Eggplant Parm. There are no pictures because we never got around to this, plus we were at least an hour behind schedule. And since the 7th meal is technically outside the cannon, being part of the movie and not part of the books, we didn't feel obligated to follow our delicious lamb with some cheesy vegetables. Instead we went on to....

Dessert

We made ten cup ranger cookies, mostly because I really liked the description, "for Rangers in the field who only have one measuring cup with them." At this point we were done with pictures, so instead here's my niece, who had fun getting in our faces and messing with our food.

Open Spaces

THE ROCK

Burger King sat on top
of the sky
today.

A fugitive rock tried to speak
to the asphalt,
but the asphalt like a traumatized child
said nothing
and the rock died.

We were really stressed out
until we heard the rock speak.
The pine trees had a few things to say
that also quieted our nervous hearts.

They said, "Listen, be still."
And the rock answered,
"You're telling me."

But the hummingbirds and the crows
were living on top of Burger King,
singing a song of sadness.

~ Albert Markovski, fictional poet and community organizer

Today I am really glad that my favorite DVD was recovered from the clutches of HM Revenue and Customs. To celebrate I am sharing some poems! Here is another:

Nobody sits like this rock sits.

You rock, rock.

The rock just sits and is.

You show us how to just sit here
and that's what we need.

~ Albert Markovski of the Open Spaces Coalition

I could say something serious about the actual loss of our open spaces all over the world, but that would be a drag. Plus there are worse things to be bummed about.

Like a dialysis machine to keep us alive in this horrible hell we call earth that we seem to be so proud has evolved from the dinosaurs to our "higher" species when in fact, as with the dinosaurs, it has always been a wretched carnival of violence, consumption, suffering, and survival. Shall we talk about war? Children losing limbs or eyes? Don't feel like it? I didn't think so. Why would you? It is an unbearable drag, all of it. How about your boring job?

~ Caterine Vauban, fictional philosopher, French

Somethingness.... Nothingness.... I guess if I want to talk about actual nothingness I could get back to studying the distribution of voids in the large-scale structure of the universe. Open Spaces indeed! To end on a more positive note, here is another quote from my favorite DVD booklet:

There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity.

~ Bernard Jaffe, existential detective

Epistemology and the Media

A while ago I saw the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" about Noam Chomsky and recorded some thoughts as it was playing. Watch it yourself if you can, though it is rather long and rather old, or you can trust that my interpretation is a faithful representation of its main ideas - but be aware that these are not epistemically equal!

One of Chomsky's main tenets is that the media deceives and indoctrinates the public (though individuals in the media aren't consciously deceptive, and I think this is a misconception by critics). Anyway, soon in the documentary I realize that why I'm drawn to this subject and why I think it's so important is because I'm fascinated by epistemology, which is the study (or philosophy) of how we obtain knowledge. The dissemination of (mis)information through the media is another example of a process by which people learn about the world and how that information becomes biased, and how they come to believe things that aren't true. This is a lot of what fascinates me about politics, sociology, and religion, and as a scientist this is also what I'm interested in - not discovering the next big weird thing about the universe, but aiding the process by which that discovery can be made.

Process is important. Learning isn't about collecting facts, as if they're shells on the beach waiting to be picked up. The process by which one obtains information says everything about the quality, and even veracity, of that information. It is also important to be aware that you will never know all the facts about a situation. Most are buried beneath the sea, and the ones in view depend on where you are along the beach.

What follows is disjointed snippets of commentary, but hopefully not incredibly confusing to follow.

--

I like that Chomsky is a linguist. Tolkien was a linguist. I love languages and grammar but have never put in the effort to learn another language. (No, not even Elvish.)

... and then he said anarcho-syndicalism was the optimal way to structure societies and for some reason that is associated with Monty Python... yup, found it. Enjoy.

--

Is the "sinister view" of the media's control of information insulting the intelligence of those who consume the news? No. I think it's merely a description of how people think and judge and collect information, which is more often than not in a quick and inherently biased way. This is why understanding unconscious bias is so important to understanding discrimination - because people are often not meaning to discriminate, but merely making judgements they way they usually do when faced with little information, which is to resort to stereotypes and untested assumptions...

--

"More terrifying than the occasional Hitler..." is the "equanimity and the detachment" of observers...

This is quite a statement, but I think I might have to agree. Think about it in terms of the Sandy Hook school shooting (which happened after I saw this documentary, btw). How much more horrible would that have been if people had not been shocked by it, had not been deeply affected? As horrible as the daily atrocities which we ignore. As of this writing, there have been 489 gun deaths in the U.S. since the school shooting. The occasional tragedy shocks us and may start a dialog about aspects of our society, but if we remain detached we will continue to allow tragedies to happen. Why doesn't the nightly news say, "There were 15 gun deaths on January 3rd, 15 on the 2nd, and 39 on the 1st day of the year." Why don't we demand it to?

--

Media presentation of gulf war: "This is the people's war," so you need to know everything you can about it... i.e. we are going to war, there's no discussion to the contrary, we will help you deal with it. I remember MSNBC playing in the common area of my college residence hall with the title "Countdown to Iraq" on the bottom... the media just getting people used to the fact that we will go to war, neglecting their duty to inform people of the consequences, to question critically the politician's agenda, the evidence for WMD, etc...

--

This documentary is pretty old (1992) so it's talking about alternative media in terms of magazines, publishers, and radio instead of THE INTERNET i.e. blogs. But even back then, and more so now, it seems there is soooo much information out there - how does one take seriously the job of self-education and learning about the world when there is so much out there and hey I've been thinking all day I'd much rather watch TV ??

I wish I had an answer for that question.

Things

I had envisioned writing this months ago. I would arrive in England, unpack my boxes, re-discover what books I had decided to ship across an ocean, and write about what they mean. These are the books I could not live without (or could not fit into my storage boxes) - that meant so much to me I would pay serious money and cause myself serious mental anxiety to have with me.

It turns out they caused me even more mental anxiety when that box simply did not arrive in England! I had my few cosmology textbooks and a few books I put in my luggage, but not the bulk of my favorite books and DVDs. Apparently I did not need them enough to get over my calling-businesses-on-the-phone anxiety (yes, I have anxiety issues, and that makes me anxious...) so I just hoped they would show up and planned to buy them all again until miraculously, a few days before Christmas, they were returned to my mom's house. (Custom's thought I owed duty fees but never bothered to send me a bill. Asshats.)

All of this strongly reinforces what I already knew, and what made moving out of a house I lived in for 6 years so hard, which is that I love my things. A book is not just a book but the experience I had reading it, over and over for my favorite books. I like to look at my things and have special places to put them. Even in the game Skyrim, I love how I can display my books on a bookshelf, armor on a mannequin, and special weapons I no longer use on a weapon rack. Sometimes I try to arrange the books by theme, because what matters is not that I have a bunch of things, but that I have a place for the things I care about, even when they are fantasy things in a fantasy world.

So what about my real books? (And DVDs while I'm at it.) It will surprise no one that I have very special copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and even The Children of Hurin, two of which I brought in my luggage and the other two I packed, leaving the rest of my Tolkien books (you bet there are lots!) to storage. I'm actually glad The Hobbit was in the lost box because that means it is here now and I am reading it to my nephew. The DVDs were mostly movies that I don't have pirated copies of, but especially all 3 LOTR extended edition DVDs. Other fantasy books I brought or packed are the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman and all 7 Harry Potter books, plus The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I probably debated whether to pack Dune (all 6) or HP, deciding that HP belonged in England. To round out the fantasy genre I also packed Legend. (I will accept no criticism. It is awesome.)

Next I packed The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, a book on Guided Meditations by Stephen Levine, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, because, you know, deep thoughts and stuff. Then there's an awesome old book of the collected writings of John Steinbeck which contains my favorite, East of Eden. Deep thoughts in that one too. DVDs in this theme include I Heart Huckabees and a Joseph Campbell compilation, Sukhavati (I guess the Power of Myth was too big for the box). I will have to either find place in my luggage or download these in preparation for my next existential crises. I also packed The Matrix set of DVDs, which arguably goes here in the Deep Thoughts section, but that will take another blog post of explaining (and room in my luggage). I miss having my things!

The rest is a less meaningful hodgepodge of useful (Julia Child's French cookbook, Chocolate Desserts, French for Reading, Spanish phrase book, and a Guide to Madrid), not yet read (The World of Dreams (a collection of essays), volume one of Sandman by Neil Gaiman, and The House of Seven Gables), and awesome (Kung Fu Panda 2, Avatar: The Last Airbender volume 1, and Planet Earth). Maybe it's not as interesting as I thought it would be to learn that I like fantasy and metaphysics (and cartoons featuring martial arts). Sorry for boring you! But I do believe that the things people value tell a story about who they are.

I will have to figure out what I can fit on the trip back. Obviously I don't need these things. I can live without them. But I want my flat in England to be my home, "where the rooms are a collection of our lives," and for that I need my things.

Death

I decided to pull out some Tarot cards today, and the first card was Death.

Don't worry, it's just a metaphor. And a pretty accurate one too. A lot of things are changing right now and a period of my life is ending. I'm in the middle of figuring out what the next stage of my life is going to be like. And before anything new can happen, the old has to become old. It has to die. Only with death can there be birth; only with birth can there be death.

Death is not an evil thing, nor always bad, but it is often scary, and sometimes painful. We become comfortable in the life we have and start to fear that it won't always be so comfortable, that at some point something will be different. Fear of death is fear of change, for death is the first step to change. I mostly mean metaphorical death here, as in ending, leaving, or being destroyed, but physical death too. Physical death is the ultimate change from which there is no changing back (in so far as anything can really be changed back). But we forget we have already gone through such a transition: birth. We come into this world and we go out, there is no escaping this truth, for the nature of life is change. Creation and destruction are the two sides of that change and merely different ways of describing a single event.

I was at a funeral recently and as I listened to the pastor, I became convinced that the nature of religion is to address in some way the fear of death. And in my opinion, most do this the completely wrong way, which is to get rid of death entirely. When you die you go to heaven. Death is not real, you won't really die, the people you love won't die, everything will be perfect in the light of God. "Others have to say 'goodbye', we get to say, 'see you later'." To me that means no growth can occur, no moving forward but always looking back - eternal stagnation and sameness - the absence of change and so the absence of life. The absence of life indeed - the very thing that was feared - but also the absence of death. What is left? No, I would rather say goodbye. I would rather be able to feel loss and sadness and pain. How can one grieve if there is nothing to grieve? How can I rejoice in the new if I never let go of the old?

I don't mean to be too hard on the idea of heaven, though. I don't mind if people believe in what gives them comfort, and I don't mind interpreting heaven as a metaphor even though people take it literally. ;-) But I will continue to say goodbye. And hello! (FYI that means to babies, in this analogy.)

One of my favorite movies is The Fountain and its major theme happens to be death. As the husband struggles to cure his dying wife, he spends less time with her. By trying to have her forever, he loses her now. And the wife instead becomes fascinated with the story of the Mayan creator god, who plants the tree of life from his own dying body: "Death as an act of creation." "Death is the road to awe." (One could say, the road to "awesome!" But one wouldn't.) And in the picture on the Tarot card, the dead one is placed in the fetal position in the womb of the earth. The snake sheds its skin to permit new growth. Or, to put it a little grossly, phallic and wombic imagery come together to create new life. (They make baby imagery.)

Having said all that, I'm not looking forward to my own metaphorical death at all! But I have to remind myself that Fear won't help anything... and then I have to eat some chocolate and calm down.

P.S. Almost forgot to mention another thing about The Fountain. I remember thinking the credits looked a bit like cosmological structure formation, but I didn't take it quite this far. Pretty awesome.