Anima Mundi
It was the first day of second grade. A new friend marched up to greet me.
“What are you?”
I had no idea what he meant by this.
“I’m Jewish!” he announced. “It‘s a religion,” he confided. “What’s yours?”
This I knew. We were heathens going to limbo — a fact I’d explicitly been warned never to disclose. “Say you’re agnostic! You’re keeping an open mind. Not so open they want to help you figure it out, mind you. This struck me as sound advice, though not especially reassuring. I was being sent to a place where people wanted my soul.
But in reality, I was not agnostic. I knew the gods of legend and story were real. I was a true believer, fully apprenticed to the arcane scratches in back of Lord of the Rings. I could read and write a measure of Elvish — even a bit of Dwarvish, though the logic of their labyrinthian obsessions confounded me. It seemed there was more to being a dwarf than shared vocabulary. No surprise, since the English we spoke in our British home contained a
fundamentally different outlook on the world than the English at school.
For one thing, the words themselves were sacred.
Besides being expert in the written arts and history of Elves, Tolkien was the editor of our enormous well-loved and astonishing Oxford English Dictionary. That seemed a superhuman feat worthy of the greatest admiration. I pored through it night after night, the same way my children play video games, or some families read The Bible. Each word was an ancient spell — tumbled mouth to ear through generations of tellings, chipped of hard consonants and polished smooth through prayer until a shimmering patina dripped silent off the tongue in offering to the vestigial gods that littered the banks of the human psyche. It was an endless pool of well-worn delight.
“Give me a child for the first 7 years of his life and he will be mine forever,” said Lenin, in reference to the world’s organized religions — and Tolkien had me. All the proof I needed was on my father’s furry feet.
When did a parent first say the world? I wondered. How far back did the old stories go? England, Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland. Before that and before that? Sanskrit? Sumerian? Which ancestor spoke the tale? From ancient travelers to fathers and mothers and children, the impulse to track this impulse to its greasy black den compelled me. Maybe the stories bore
witness to a time when a hearth and a meal was shared with other kinds of human folk. Might Grimm’s alien tales contain forgotten threads of Neanderthal humor? It was Tolkien’s view that “the incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale” arose as a single spark of divine imagination — the defining essence of humankind. But when did the children hearing the tale
become human? Before that and before that… when was the threshold crossed?
I read Jane Goodall and In the Shadow of Man over and over. The chimpanzees of Gombe sought the same things we did: food, shelter, a mate. Safety and belonging. Respect.
Freedom. How were their impulses to make a living any different from our own? Or from the rabbits raising kits in the canyon, or limpets in the tidepools, or the steady wandering of the ants among the grass, for that matter? How were they fundamentally different from us? It was clear they were not. No magical threshold existed. Evolution’s delights had simply stumbled forward, through dark times and light, through kingdoms of plenty and of famine — miraculously finding a way. “Their peoples live by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants.”
We are animals too, seized by the same immutable impetus borne from parent to child since that first spark of life. The work of living churns on in us. The spark still unfolds. Tolkien’s spell held true far beyond the human realm.
What brought the roots of mountains and cracks of stone and soil to life? When, I wondered, did matter express its discontent, and nonlife endow itself with the irrepressible desire to make more? It seemed to me the stirrings had to have been there from the beginning — an expanding universe of possibility, spreading and changing course like a puddle of wax or a lava flow. The possibility of all that is was always there, obeying only the implacable gravity of the mortal dilemma. The task of a life was to bear and fashion a piece of the ancient tale, shouldering it from the heaving depths of the world to its ebbing shore. Evolution might meander aimless across the flats or thunder downhill, but always it found a way to grow the universe of possibilities.
In the end, I became an evolutionary biologist. I lived by turns in a remote tent by the swirling Awash river along the edge of the Sahara and a laboratory above a corner of Washington Square Park at NYU, where I studied the relationship between social structure and genetic speciation in Ethiopian baboons, using their gene flow as a model for early human populations.
Parsing life’s expanding protoplasm required slicing and dicing it, stuffing it into tidy Latin boxes. A poison apple, a sleeping draught administered without consent. Smudged handprints and a vial of stolen blood to find “things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their color, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”
This is dragon’s business.
The real world was too narrow for women and Elves, and slippery things like art and fairy tales were neither here nor there.
But “the shadowy marches of the Perilous Realm” defeat such walls.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale) is a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary; it denies (in the face of much evidence) universal final defeat, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Decades later, scattering the pale ash of my baby daughter’s bones into the sea as the fish sucked her in with maws agape, I mustered a stunted attempt at prayer — I don’t believe in angels, but a fairy I just might.
I didn’t know.
I abandoned myself to ocean, desert — to the shifting moods of wind and heat and sky. I went to the wildest places I could inhabit and struggled to remember what I had known before. That “the land of fairy-story is wide and deep and high, and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both sorrow and joy as sharp as swords.” Take heart, for everything you require has been in the minds and mouths of men and women since time began. Our fertile imaginations are locked in ecstatic conjugation with the earth itself, and every molecule of our being quivers to contain it.
All quotations are from “On Fairy Stories,” an essay delivered at St. Andrews in Scotland by J.
R. R. Tolkien in 1938.
