What is to be my quest?
Chapter 3: Three is Company
Ruminating
My Substack subscriber count has tripled since January 5th, after I posted a photo of my crotch on Instagram with a caption containing juicy details about the near dissolution of my marriage. Meanwhile my Instagram subscriber count continues to decrease at a steady clip as I reiterate my support for a free Palestine and global liberation from Western hegemony.
It’s had me ruminating on two questions that I feel both bored of and burdened by: who am I writing this for, and why? Ruminating is a useful word for our Age of Anxiety, but it has always bothered me that when we talk about ruminating, we’re talking about this sterile, looping state of consciousness that feels constrained to a brain cage. Extremely disembodied. A wildly dissimilar felt experience than the action it’s shorthand for: chewing the cud. Much more saliva and stomach acid in chewing the cud. Anyway, however we came to use such a squelchy word to describe such a brain-based state of consciousness, I’ve noticed that when I ruminate I get constipated.
Who am I writing this for, and why?
I really don’t know, but last week I was writing from a fast flow of oozy slobber lava gushing from my heart and guts, and this week I’m writing from a one-inch brain cage with static in the speakers. It’s a stuck place, kind of itchy. I sit in it and I name it and I soften into it, until a new question comes into the foreground: What exactly are you doing here?
Asked sincerely, not accusatorially.
When I sit ruminating on that question I can’t answer, an honest, compound thought is surfacing: I’m scared to disappoint you.
“For where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest?”
Frodo Baggins Was Going Back to Buckland
Chapter 3: Three is Company is about having to start a perilous journey with absolutely no fucking idea where you’re going or what you’re doing. “You ought to go quietly, and you ought to go soon,” Gandalf tells Frodo. It’s June. Frodo decides he’s going to leave after he celebrates his and Bilbo’s birthdays, on September 22nd. Gandalf is supposed to go with him, but he has to leave unexpectedly after receiving worrisome news, and he doesn’t get back in time. Frodo has to head out without him, not knowing where he’s going, what to steer by, or what even is the quest.
Frodo is leaving the Shire because he’s being pursued by Ringwraiths—the servants of Sauron—sent to retrieve the Ring for their Master, but the hobbits of Hobbiton can’t know that. He sells his beautiful, comfortable, inherited home to the closest thing he’d ever had as an enemy prior, and devises an elaborate plane to get people thinking he’s moving back to Buckland, where he was born. But really he’s just trying to get theRing as far away from the Shire as he can, or else risk all out warfare and destruction to all life-loving creatures of Middle-earth. He’s very brave.
All that talk of Gollum and Sauron by the hearth in Chapter 2 is definitely heavier, but Chapter 3 always makes me feel anxious, lost, and kind of stuck. Like when I’m in a brain-prison and there’s static on the speakers. Tolkien takes Frodo, Sam, and Pippin up and down narrow rolling roads from Stock to Woodhall to Woody End to Yale, with twilight about them, wind sighing, leavings whispering, west wind darkening east. I’ve read the chapter probably 11 times and I still can’t envision a clear picture of their path. It always feels like relief then they hear the clear voices of the High Elves, who’ve wandered for 3,000 through Middle-earth and always seem to know exactly where they are, where they’re going, and which stars to steer by.
“Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt. The Elves all burst into song.” pg 107
PICK ONE. PICK ONE. PICK ONE.
The hardest part about this project so far is standing at the edge of the forest each week and figuring out which path to start down on. I get bummed thinking about the ones I leave behind, a whiff of the grief I felt for a long time about all the lives I’d never live.
I got sidetracked this week by a journal from 2009/2010. I was 24 living in Shelton Laurel and collecting unemployment from the State of New York. In November 2009 I met Alex and in December 2009 I fell in love with him and in January 2010 I moved in with him. He was making me boeuf bourguignon from Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Edna Lewis’ Bay Studded Pork Shoulder from The Gift, and rubbing my feet on an antique floral couch he said he got at an estate sale, which I’d never heard of before. It was so cold that winter. We sat by the woodstove and he showed me a picture book filled with beautiful celadon pots from Korea decorated with flowers, like the ones he planned to make, and a graph paper notebook with sketches of the workshop and kiln he’d build to make them in. It was a roadmap for the journey of his adult life and it seemed like it pleased him to show me. Later at Ingles he’d say, “I love buying dog food. It makes me feel like such an adult, having something to care for.” Strange boy, strange thing to say. I didn’t feel like an adult and I didn’t understand what it meant to love going to the grocery store to buy dog food, but I was fascinated by him and his clarity and “estate sale”, and all of his plans and that he loved to go to the grocery store to get dog food for his dog, because it made him feel like an adult. Me, though, I felt like an adolescent, and before I met Alex, I really liked that, because it meant feeling big and wild and free, with so many meandering paths with vines like beckoning fingers unfurling, luring, lulling, beckoning, calling. Fecund! But there was Alex, with his path picked and his dog and his graph paper notebook and his plans and suddenly the paths turned mean and shaming, screaming:
PICK ONE. PICK ONE. PICK ONE.
But I wasn’t ready, so I locked myself in a little brain cage and shackled myself to Alex’s ankle, with his strong and steady gait, and off we went, for so long that I forgot I was in a cage I’d put myself in, and forgot the key was in my hand. The wide world was all about me.
“‘The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’” Gildor to Frodo, pg 109
I’m Scared to Disappoint You
I woke up hoping that in twenty minutes I’d be able to pull together 7 paragraphs I’d written about The Fox, and Kali Yuga, and finding/doing your work, and the Tree of Life, and the Shire not really belonging to hobbits1, and Nabokov’s cradle rocking above an abyss. It’s not happening. I hit delete. I’ve spent way too much fucking time trying to translate this tessellating Dara knot of thought paths into something for you to hold in your mind’s eye, and just when I think the map is going to snap into clear focus, the whole thing dissolves.
I’m noticing how it feels to write from this stuck place of being scared to disappoint you. I’m noticing how it feels to worry I’ve picked the wrong path and to have no stars yet to steer by. I’m noticing how it feels to watch the snow fall and smell the short ribs in the oven and soften into the truth of feeling lost and stuck. I’m noticing the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees.2
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. pg 96
Been thinking on this one a lot: “I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings,’ exclaimed Frodo. ‘I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can’t a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?’
‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here agin when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’” pg 109
Pg 93
connie i think you're very cool and a really good writer :) you have mastered the art suspense that keeps me scrolling. thanks for being brave and continuing to write and ask and say the things that were once locked away.
Following you following Frodo 💚