Consider this my apology. I've been gone a while. Sorry. This is the fruit of my spare time (and lack thereof), my thoughts these last two terms, my reading over summer break, and several lectures I've heard recently, most importantly a talk on Genesis 1 by Pastor James Jordan.
just so ya know: this post is long, ill-informed, and, like this note itself, startlingly self-important. welcome to blogging.
So I found this quote recently on the IMDB about the upcoming film The Hobbit, directed by Guilermo del Toro, everybody’s favorite Spanish director with a name that means “bull.” In said film, Ian McKellen will be starring as Gandalf the Grey. So, further ado aside, here ‘tis.
Not only will The Hobbit afford McKellen another chance to find his feet with one of literature’s greatest wizards, but the film will also allow him to return to the earlier incarnation of the character, Gandalf the Grey, who only appeared in the first of the trilogy, Fellowship of the Ring.
“Grey Gandalf is my favourite,” he told us. “Peter Jackson’s too, we always preferred Gandalf the Grey. Peter liked him because he got down and dirty. He slept in the hedgerows; he was closer to the earth and not quite so spiritual. He’s also funnier -- he’s got more variety to him. We thought there was more scope in that Gandalf.”
It struck me. I looked at it harder, and got struck a second time. Something didn’t seem right. Gandalf the White is without a doubt the greater, more powerful, and all in all stranger character in the Trilogy than Gandalf the Grey. Why is that?
I can’t accept the idea that it’s because he’s more other-worldly. That’s what McKellen is getting at here. Mostly we read Tolkien like the good gnostics the Enlightenment wanted us to be. We see Gandalf the Grey with stains in his beard and Gandalf the White as floating on a cloud. What we don’t realize is that Gandalf the White laughs more often, rides a better horse, and actually seems to use less magic than the old one. What gives?
I wonder if we can’t look at The Lord of the Rings as a struggle of elements. I mean, we can look at it as many, many things but I feel this is crucial. If we listen to Aristotle, the first are earth, air, fire, and water. The Nazgul ride dragons; they control the air. They themselves are vaporous spirits, and the evils of Mordor are described as “stenches” and “foul winds” coming from the place. What defeats the Nazgul? Water at the Ford of Bruinen, summoned by Elrond; fire, wielded by Aragorn at Weathertop and later at Bruinen by Glorfindel; and dirt. Aren’t the hobbits the people of the earth? And a hobbit (Merry) is the only creature who can break the spells holding the spirit of the Witch-King together.
Gandalf the White is no air-rider. He rides a horse, and the king of horses at that. He needs no spells to hold himself together (unlike his rival the Witch King); he is an actual living person with an actual body. He doesn’t really have epiphanies on the battlefield in which he hears angelic choirs going at it whilst he cavalierly looks at a moth (really, Jackson, really?). He fights and gets bloody and becomes tired and eventually gets in a boat to go off to the Western Lands, rather than floating out on a broomstick or some other such nonsense. In short, he is a very real, very earth-bound being.
What is it about dirt? I mean, what gives? We’re made out of dirt, right? And that has to have some significance. Wendell Berry discusses this a bit throughout the vast body of his writings, and in some poems especially. He talks about how it means that we are forever linked to this world, to the dirt under our feet; that it is like us because we are made out of it. This is good.
But as I read N.D. Wilson’s Dandelion Fire this summer, I started wondering if there was something more. In the world Wilson creates in the trilogy, those born with the second-sight, the seventh sons, all hold the power of some living thing (plants, as far as the series has gone). The protagonist Henry, for instance, has the power of the dandelion in his veins. And with that power comes the weaknesses and strengths of the plant. Just as the dandelion is easily broken, Henry gets knocked over again and again. But, like the weed, he gets right back up every time.
If you drop something onto dirt, granules of it go hither and yon. But it holds. Nothing goes right through dirt. It holds a 10 ton truck as well as it holds a feather. Even better, actually, cause most of the time you can’t get trucks out of pure dirt as easily as a feather. Dirt isn’t American. It doesn’t understand rugged individualism. A single grain of sand gets you nowhere. I can split it with a long fingernail. But get a few trillion or so of the whitest grains will hold half of Florida (and most of New York) on a hot summer day without breaking a sweat.
What happens when you burn dirt? Silicon, first. A weirdly silver sort of hard tinfoil that happens to conduct lightning really really well. We’re not too bad at attracting lightning ourselves. Except we don’t turn silver (what could have been, eh?). Keep heating that puddle of silvery goo in your crucible. Get it hot. Really hot. 2000 degrees is a good start. 4000 would be even better. Pour it on the end of a hollow stick. Breathe into it. You’ve made glass.
God calls us to remember that we are sons of Adam. Or, as we would say in English, Dirt-bag. God took the ground and shaped something in His image. He breathed into it. We are dirt. We have dirt’s weaknesses. Dirt gives way to everything. We have dirt’s strength. Dirt gives way to nothing. We have dirt’s ugliness. Regular old dirt ain’t much to look at. We have dirt’s beauty. Burn dirt and you get glass.
The world thinks dualistically. But be of good cheer. He has overcome the world.
“Did you mark how naturally – as if he’d been born for it – the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? … As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degredation of it! – that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange.… He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The princes of the power of the air look at us and sneer: “dirt-bag.” We laugh and say “sure.” We know the end of the story. Jesus already showed us. Life is full of torment and pain, but it ends with an emptied tomb. The water from His side keeps us from burning up in the crucible of life. He rose with a body that walked through walls but still knew good fish and good wine, and still wanted a good fire to keep warm by.
Out in the desert of the world, outside the gardens of Eden and Gethsemane, we get fires and knives. Trials and tribulations are as common as cole slaw at a Baptist church picnic. We’re burned by the fire, and shaped by the knife. We’re born dirt and sprinkled with water to keep us from becoming charcoal in the middle of it all. Then, like the apostles before us, we are showered in fire. Cover us in the Spirit. Call on God to wrap wet earth in tongues of flame like Elijah did on Carmel. Take even a child, cover it in water, and let the Spirit do His work, God says. And watch that child take on the world. Watch it all go topsy turvy.
