I suppose I’m still in a phase of mental regression. For the past five weeks or so, ever since my cousin died and I went on vacation, I’ve found myself trying to recreate my childhood. Playing video games. Obsessing about fantasy worlds. Re-exploring Middle Earth. Even screwing around with emulators, trying to play old-school cRPGs from way-back-when. The Bard’s Tale. The Shard of Spring. Final Fantasy I.

I have always fantasized about breaking out of this material plane. Reality has never really done it for me, and I’ve always dreamed about wallowing in fantastic landscapes where magic actually worked, unicorns and dragons existed, and a nobody like me could actually make or break the world. Call it quixoticism. Call it mental illness. Who knows?

But, as always, my thoughts turn to the master himself, good ol’ J.R.R. Tolkien, who mined the mythologies of England, Germany, and Scandanivia and wonderfully synthesized it all to create a new mythology for a post-modern world.

It is said that Tolkien created Middle Earth because he felt that the modern English state had no authentic indigenous mythology, because the modern English state was really a hodge-podge culmination of the various waves of cultures that had come and conquered England and then in turn were conquered themselves. The Celts. The Romans. The Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings. The Normans.

In college I found myself yearning for a similar synthesis of for a Filipino mythology, or, I suppose, more accurately, a Filipino-American mythology. In the same way, Filipino culture is a palimpest of waves of colonization. The Ati. The Igorot. The Malay. The Arabs. The Spanish. The Americans. The Japanese. And in a way that is dissimilar to England (perhaps), it exists in a semi-fragmented state. The Philippines is an abstract colonial construct made real only through revolution, one that has never been allowed to completely succeed (and despite political independence, the Philippines still retains a client relationship to the American Empire.) And so the disparate tribal territories almost seem like more natural divisions. The Tagalogs. The Visayans. The Ilocanos. The Igorot. The Moro.

And it was a revelation when I came to understand that the Austronesian people of South East Asia share a common culture, and a common mythology. In the same way that England, Germany, and Scandinavia are connected, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the aborigines of Taiwan, the Micronesians, and the Polynesians are also connected.

I also owe an intellectual debt of gratitude to Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work seems to have taken root in my subconscious. Is it mere coincidence that Earthsea is an archipelago, populated by brown-skinned people whose way of life revolves around the forces of nature and the balance of energy? Ged is necessarily my favorite archmage.

But I find myself struggling to make manifest this new world that lives in the inside of my head, using it to make the various aspects of my life, my history manifest in a way such that mere description would be lacking. I realize the Tolkien disliked allegory. Le Guin is more free with adding a touch of politics to her work. Nonetheless, their first aim seems to always have been to tell a good story, and I’m not sure if I could assemble a plot even if pre-fabricated pieces were given to me with IKEA-like instructions.

What I have, mostly, is a map. And maybe a fragmented history, and a nebulous creation mythology. And I suppose there is this temptation to try to peg my time and space into this phantasmagoria, and try to make it “representative” of my life as a brown male born into a country that I can’t feel is completely my own, with an entirely different world tugging at my heartstrings, making me dream of ancestral roots in the “homeland.”

I can only make it represent me, and I guess that’s ultimately what it’s about. Telling my story, letting you see the world as I see it, refactored and reamalgamated. In this post-modern world everything that is worth doing has been done already, and all we can do is rearrange the pieces, and maybe incrementally mutate things here and there. I suppose there is always the magical realization that the sum is always greater than its parts. Despite Tolkien being more of a classicist and a throwback to a bygone age, his creation of Middle Earth nonetheless echoes a post-modern methodology and aesthetic, without which I’m not sure it would’ve flourished as well as it has. (Various critics will call him reactionary, but I think that is an overly facile reading.)

All this mental masturbation leads me to something that I found extremely interesting about Tolkien’s unfinished works. I was flipping through <p>The Lost Road</p> at the Borders the other day and read about one of Tolkien’s first ideas about the fall of Númenor and the breaking of the world. The part that he kept was that the Blessed Realm of Aman was rent from the earth and lifted into the upper sky, so that it was impossible to journey to it by sea. And despite this intervention by the Eru, the exiled Númenorians continued to try to reach Aman by constructing flying ships, still failing.

I realize that flight had been invented already by the time Tolkien had written all this, but I can’t help but think about the mythical airships that are iconic of the Final Fantasy series, and while Tolkien eventually axed most of this from his cannonical mythology, he did keep the Vingelot and Eärendil’s flight into the skies.

Which leads me to the curious coincidence (or is it?) found in Hayao Miyazaki’s excellent animated film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky.” The heroine of the film is from a place called Gondoa. When I watched Disney’s English dub version of the film, I kept thinking that the characters were saying Gondor.

Middle Earth and airships. I dig it.

If it’s the last thing I do, I will at least finish a Tolkien-clone novel. Screw being a famous writer. Hell, screw being an artist. If the best thing I ever finish is mere fanfic, so be it.