Tolkien: the movie, the man, and words

Language As Doors

story can mesmerize:

for me, the last few years

have pulled me into the Game of Thrones,

first as books who unveiled character and plot

that challenged me to imagine, to empathize,

to feel fiction as real to what I know of the potential of reality,

to intrigue me, and make me larger,

the production values of the tv series

pulled me even more into the people and situations

so that story became Story,

The Lord of the Rings

enveloped me even more,

as this whole world of Middle Earth

throbbed with compelling logic, 

personality, conflict, and resolution,

the truth of the hobbits’ quests

truer than I can easily feel my life to be,

my every day battles to let my best self be and act,

a resonance, I hope, 

with the archetypal struggles in the story,

I watch a movie of J.R.R. Tolkien:

the greatest magic in it

is to watch the man create first a language,

then to follow, inexorably, the Word,

and to realize the world and the story 

cascading from the Word,

those of us who write, who seek to wed ourselves to words,

and, together, hold power and meaning with our scribbles,

we work to build structure

that can, maybe, hold the currents around us enough 

to let us touch the transcendence that calls to us.

by Henry H. Walker

May 19, ‘19