Foolish & Deluded

Chapter 8: Fog on the Barrow Downs

At this point I just have to get this over with. I’ve been writing around the Barrow-downs in circles. 47 pages. Every word enshrouded in a Fog of Rage.

It’s 7:48 am on Thursday, September 5th as I set this intention: I have to get out of here. By 10 am, today, this morning, I have to get this over with.

I’ve been in a fog since the beginning of August. I haven’t wanted to admit it to myself or to my husband, because I want to keep the peace. Or I want to seem evolved. A combination of both, I think. The fog I’ve been in has a flavor that I’m sure many of you are also familiar with: blinding rage toward Men. 

I’ve been reading Chapter 8: Fog on the Barrow-downs for 4 months, walking in circles. Walking in a Fog of Rage toward Men. This is my least favorite chapter in all three books because, despite LotR being fantasy, I find that most of the story’s big moments have lessons to be gleaned that feel directly applicable to real life, useful in overcoming obstacles, making meaning from loss and suffering, and posing answers to questions that vex me. But in Chapter 8, the lesson that seems to be lit up brightest on the marquee says A Man Will Come to the Rescue When You Need Him Most. Which, by my witness, just isn’t fucking true.

In Chapter 8, Frodo and the Hobbits leave Tom’s house and pass through the Barrow-downs. Barrow meaning an ancient burial site. Downs meaning a treeless landscape of rolling hills. Here in our text, a storied and feared expanse between the Old Forest and Bree. Once it was the resting place of the great men of Arnor. Now it's haunted by malevolent spirits sent by the Witch-king of Angmar.

The Hobbits have been warned to stay focused and take caution; instead they stop for a long lunch and a nap until they find themselves ensnared and entranced by a Barrow-wight, until Frodo remembers that he can just sing a little song and Tom Bombadil will show up and poof away the bad guys. Frodo sings, Tom comes, the Hobbits are all freed, everyone pilfers a sword and jewels from the tombs. Naked and unafraid, they prance with their ponies on the hillside.

Nonsense.

There are other lessons I could wiggle out of the chapter: thoughts on heeding the warnings and staying the course. Or how the past comes back to haunt us. I could write about fear being a prerequisite for courage. Or campaign for us to normalize asking for help.

It feels disingenuous. My project set out to share the active dialogue between myself and the text in front of me, and my dialogue with Chapter 8: Fog on the Barrow-downs has been indignant, terse, defensive, circular.

8:30 It’s so hard to get out of here. I’m thinking back to lessons we’ve already learned from Fellowship of the Ring about getting stuck in fog, or in the dark, or in a dense forest. It’s scary in there. You get separated. You can’t see the way out. You can’t see the face of the person in front of you, even the faces you know and love and trust the most. I know it doesn’t serve me to stay stuck in here. I want to get out.

I take a deep breath and let my eyes soft-focus on the trees. “Softening” has been my Big Work the past four years. Sometimes I resent it and am suspicious of it, but I can’t deny its efficacy.

By 8:45 I see a small light. I’m surprised when Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet show up in my mind. They are walking around and around a spinney of larch trees, hunting for Woozles. Pooh sees his and Piglet’s own footprints, mistakes them for Wizzles, and thinks they must be on the right track. I let myself sit here in this different-flavored take on walking in circles.

At 8:55 I’m almost back to remembering that I can only be accountable to my own next steps. I think about how rage can be like a fog that’s blinding me from seeing the way out. I want to get out. I allow myself to well up with compassion and love for Men. “You seem depressed,” Alex told me in the kitchen on Tuesday while I watched milk drip off the marble counter and into the open drawer below it. “I’m not depressed,” I said. I’m really fucking mad I thought. I don’t want to be mad anymore, though. I have a huge to-do list and being mad is getting in the way of making progress on it, and that thought’s making me more mad. I spent most of my late-20s and 30s being made, and I think it made me stupider. Big, stormy feelings clouding up my neural pathways. This morning I woke up thinking, This fog of rage toward men is valid, yes, but it’s making me brainless.

Pooh and Piglet keep walking in circles until Christopher Robbin shows them that the footprints are their own.  “I’ve been Foolish and Deluded” Pooh says. “I’m a Bear of no Brain at all”.  Is that how I’m acting? Like a Bear of no Brain at all?

By 9:00 am I see clearings through the fog. I get the courage to tell you about how, when I was 16 and under my own ego’s Authority, I issued myself an edict—to build a ministry devoted to the salvation of Men & Boys. I’m sure together we could come up with a good list of ways that did not serve myself or others well. And still, at almost 40, a voice still follows me around that softens me to Men in a way that I think is pretty different from people who share my worldview. 

Voice like vox, like vocare meaning “a calling”. Last year, in a fog, I called on a mentor to help lead me out. I called her specifically because she’s the fiercest, most committed to liberation, most radical thinker I know. Some people in my orbit—mostly men—are closed off to learning from her, because her words can be sharp, and she’s got this bit about how there’s no such thing as a Good Man, which men really don’t like to hear. What she means by that is that sorting humans into categories of Good and Bad is fundamentally antithetical to the work of Liberation. But men’s hackles go up too quickly to see that.

Rage can be blinding. Bitch is a word that men use to describe a woman who does things that are disagreeable to them.

I called her because I trust her, and I know that all of her work is rooted in Love. I wanted to see what she thought about whether or not I should heed this call to help men out of the shadows. “You could” she said. “But that’s powerful work. That’s dangerous work. You gotta be careful out there.” 

In August I walked in circles in the Fog of Rage, knowing that men weren’t coming to the rescue, but I also heard myself say out loud to friends and to colleagues:

Loving men is my cross to bear.

I think it actually is my job to give cookies to men who are trying.

My heart just breaks open when I think about men.

I love leading my Girl Scout troop but sometimes all I can think about is who’s out there taking care of the boys?

This world is so unfair to men.

At 9:15 I’m imagining a cold room made of stone. On one side of the room, a Maiden with her skirt gathered in her clenched fist with her cheeks flushed calling, “Please, Sirs! Do something! Save us!”. On the other a Hag, gazing out the window, picking her teeth, sitting very still. “Stupid child,” she says, slowly. “You’re wasting your breath.” In the hearth is a pile of ashes, and one small ember, still burning. One last hope for the Men of the West to step out of the dark.

I imagine the ember like the light of the Evenstar and this thought gets me really excited. A light that doesn’t wax or wane. I try to catch this thought like a firefly in a jar, so I can use it to guide me out of here, but I reach out for it and it’s already gone. It doesn’t add up to something I can hold onto. The ember in the fireplace, the last hope for the Men of the West, is theirs to tend, not mine.

It was a dream, but it was a good dream.

At 9:20 Alex texts me: “Another fucking shooting” he says. “I can’t take this” I say. I start to shake. And then I start to cry.

At 9:25 I pick up my phone for distraction. The Olympian runner Rebecca Cheptegi has been burned to death by her boyfriend. A young Palestinian girl has been killed by an Israeli bombardment while she was roller-skating in northern Gaza.

At 9:55 I’m wondering where the fuck are the men who care so much about being sorted into the “good” pile? What the fuck are they doing? This message is for you: GET YOURSELVES TOGETHER AND FUCKING DO SOMETHING. WE SHOULD NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR CLEANING UP AFTER YOU! THE WORLD IS BURNING AND IT IS YOUR FAULT. WHY IS IT ANYONE’S JOB BUT YOURS TO FIX IT?

It’s 10:00 am and the fog that had cleared has rolled back in. I’m imagining the treacheries of Men stacked up in a pyre, like a mountain touching eternity. Fuel enough to keep the rage-fires burning until the whole world is swallowed up in flames, eaten by smoke, all of us pulled down forever into the world of shadow.

Men aren’t coming to save the day. And so, what’s next? From here in the fog, I’ve lost sight of the path.