Tolkien and McGilchrist

I am still glowing and somewhat lost (I miss the book’s companionship) after recently finishing McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. It feels a bit like having been let in on a secret about the world, but that person who let you in suddenly had to leave, and you find yourself left behind with ears ringing and holding emptiness: what should I do with that secret?

Well then, it gave me no little pleasure, no, positively warm feelings, when I came across letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in this great post which struck me as resounding strongly with the hemisphere hypothesis of McGilchrist. In fact, the whole epic of The Lord of The Rings now to me falls squarely into that most venerated category of beautiful myths about how we attend to (or should I say: meet?) the world. Tolkien wrote of myths in his letters:

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall – all stories are ultimately about the fall – at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.1

I remember writing down in my own notes somewhere that “all myths are metaphors for the Alexander technique state”, that state of mindful open awareness to “what is”. But that is only half of it. They rather seem to be about the loss of that state. Tolkien’s notion of the fall above is just one of the many foundational stories about the emissary usurping its Master, from the biblical apple leading to Adam and Eve’s demise to the ancient Iroquois legend McGilchrist recounts in Chapter 20 of TMWT. Loss of the hemisphere balance means loss of unity, or

it is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.2

In another fragment, Tolkien talks about the One Ring:

The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. If I were to ‘philosophize’ this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control. A man who wishes to exert ‘power’ must have subjects, who are not himself. But he then depends on them.3

According to this, the Ring of Sauron is a metaphor for the ways of the left hemisphere, and what happens when it assumes the role of the Master. It is intriguing that the word “potentiality” found a way into the letter… that very word being a central concept in McGilchrist’s philosophy. The metaphor of the One Ring is a beautiful way of wording how manipulation requires things to manipulate, but “there are no things” (McGilchrist) — or more plain, things are only models for their referents (me).

This brings me to another unexpected connection between Tolkien and McGilchrist. For some time during AT training I’ve been using “the gaze of Sauron’s eye” as a (too dramatic) metaphor for narrowing in on something, like leaning into a device’s screen. As we shrink towards our goal, the grasping action of the left hemisphere goes in overdrive, as it “unmakes” the world. Think Sauron’s searching gaze in that scene of the last movie when Frodo and Sam duck behind a rock, terrified and alone in the vast plains of Gorgoroth. McGilchrist compares it to the stare of the Gorgon in TMWT:

Closing down to narrow attention is what needs to be avoided, whether by depriving the serial-processing left hemisphere of time, or by distracting its Gorgon stare elsewhere.

I don’t think that Tolkien consciously crafted a masterful metaphor for the dualism embodied by the world views of the left and right hemispheres. But I do think that it inevitably slipped into his work, drawn in by the ingredients from other culture’s legends he used —

there was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me)4

— and these are for him inevitably bound up with the fall. Like many great works of art, it sprang forth not from a utilitarian drive (narrow) but from an aesthetic vision (encompassing):

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what the L.R. was all about, and whether it was an ‘allegory’. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentieimo…5

How beautiful is that.

Footnotes

  1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#:~:text=After%20all%2C%20I,and%20have%20them ↩

  2. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#:~:text=the%20fall.%20Again%2C-,It%20is%20a%20fallen%20world%2C%20and%20there%20is%20no%20consonance%20between%20our%20bodies%2C%20minds%2C%20and%20souls.,-almost%20like%20a ↩

  3. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#:~:text=The%20Ring%20of,depends%20on%20them. ↩

  4. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#:~:text=There%20was%20Greek%2C%20and%20Celtic%2C%20and%20Romance%2C%20Germanic%2C%20Scandinavian%2C%20and%20Finnish%20(which%20greatly%20affected%20me) ↩

  5. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#:~:text=Nobody%20believes%20me,s%C3%ADla%20l%C3%BAmenn%E2%80%99%20omentieimo ↩

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