(From my cousin <a href=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=168884724&blogID=252744646&Mytoken=81CA045D-AC19-40AE-9094629B0A9D31E23647227” title=”myspace”>J™)
This reminds me of the Simpson’s Halloween Episode where Homer turns a toaster into a time machine, causing all sorts of havoc with causality.
There is a song in here somewhere
caught in the convolutions of my heart
the tortuous paths, the cliffdrops, the lonely summits
the bitter abysses, this vast desert of ruin
This wasteland of decay
My soul is scourged and flayed
This longing that wraps around itself
without a name, without a voice
soft sweet melody that I can’t seem to recall
I’m lost like a drunken fool in the wilderness
chasing fairies and grasping at stars
Tasting perhaps moonlight, and the briny sea
the wind whipping at me from all sides
this torrent, this deluge, this tempest, it rages
the lighthouse illuminates the sky for a brief moment
with a blinding flash
Was love (as I like to imagine it is called) just like that
a moment in time that soon passes
and is forgotten
the familiar darkness returns
as I turn my back upon the sea
draw my coat close and face the shadowy mountains
the faint electric glow of the sodium lamps
and the emptiness of a cheap motel room
this emptiness swirling, gnawing upon itself
biting at me, rasping and scraping
like vermin, like termites,
consuming my soul from the inside
until I am only a dessicated shell that crumbles in ash
With each breath, I am anesthesized
And the deep darkness of unconsciousness
mercifully wraps me in forgetfulness
only in this silence, this void am I whole
not knowing or caring, senseless and still
like a dead thing
breathless and cold
Am I doomed to stare longingly across that trackless sea?
in the dead of the night
surrounded by the crashing of the waves on every side
staring into the darkness
vainly hoping for some sign, some glimmer, some trace
a faint flicker of light on the horizon, growing brighter, coming closer
and that song, that faint melody that I can’t rememeber
and that voice, and maybe I would again know
who I am, and what I was meant to be
Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.
I immediately think of Borges’ masterful short story ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which described the madness inherent in invented an imaginary world, and the vast, purposeless scope of such an undertaking which spans generations.
And obviously, there is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda, which is in fact an act of universe-building. For most world-building nerds, this is probably the gold standard of worldbuilding. An otaku demands this level of detail, no matter how unnecessary. These are the people who obsess about the lack of continuity in Star Trek or Star Wars, who show up at comic-cons and gainsay the actual creators of various works of fiction. Think of Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” (Oh, I’ve wasted my life.)
The ironic thing is that what makes The Lord of the Rings seem to have so much historical depth is precisely because Tolkien didn’t spell out the whole damn thing. You only get faint glimpses of ruined Gondolin and lost Númenor, of drowned Beleriand and the doom of the Noldor. The tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren Erchamion and the story of Eärendil are mentioned only in brief, and are pretty much tangential to the story.
And Tolkien didn’t initially mean for The Hobbit (and by extension, The Lord of the Rings) to even be in the same world as The Silmarillion. It was just a good story he thought of one random day he got bored grading university test papers. Gildor Inglorion and Glorfindel were basically just names he randomly chose (and which continue to plague LotR otakus and continuity-nazis to this very day.) In many instances, he fit the mythology into the story and never really the other way around.
And I think what makes The Silmarillion interesting are the stories that Tolkien never finished writing, and which we get a better look at only by rifling through his notes which are now encompassed by the monolithic History of Middle Earth. I think the appeal in “The Fall of Gondolin” and The Children in Húrin lie in the fact that they’re good stories in and of themselves, and Tolkien didn’t necessarily have to invent the rest of Aman to make them so.
The bottom line is this: you may have an excellent and highly-detailed universe complete with a pantheon of gods and its own version of physics, but if your story sucks, no one will care and you’ve just pretty much wasted your life.
