More than once I have pondered the symbolism of the Ring. It is not quite evil, outright. It is more subtle than that. What it feels like to me is compulsion, the spirit of compulsion. It is a muscle that spasms and never releases, but to which you become addicted.
It is the spirit of monomania, of thinking one thought over and over and over.
It is sending on only one frequency. We are meant to wander here and there, in spontaneous ways with deeper orders. As I have said often, what is unnatural is a planned and unspontaneous order–the chopped down/groomed forest, in the Taoist idiom–which is ordered only in conditions of coercion, which has no staying power, no longevity. It lasts only as long as the muscle spasm is in place.
Now, I have been making good progress over the last month or two in personal growth. I have reached a point where I am willing and able to let some part of me fall away, as a sort of snake skin, or covering, that I no longer need.
And some part of me I would identify with the ring keeps feeding me news of death and disaster. There’s no point. Go back now. Live in a permanently curtailed, small world, and wait for direction there. Thoughts that, in short, make me tense, make me worried. Heart attack, heart attack. Business failure, business failure.
Why are the Shirelings so resistant to the power of the Ring? Because they lead relaxed, natural lives, surrounded by and tending to life, and are thus as opposite of the power of the Ring as they could be.
To my way of thinking, what is natural is an open meadow. What is unnatural is a skyscraper built upon it. Why should it matter 1,000 years from now if people remember what we built?
The “I” of Ayn Rand is in my view a sort of nervous tick, a momentary disruption. I mention her specifically since the skyscraper represented everything manly she wanted, including her own penis (OK: that’s going a bit far, but my kids, having seen a picture of her, refer to her as “the woman who looks like a man”.)
What she wanted was hard and enduring, and difficult to craft and build. The ascent up the skyscraper represented the literal and figurative high point of “The Fountainhead”.
But is it natural for a flower to desire to blossom alone, so that its glory can be greater? Paradoxically, Ayn Rand wanted the admiration of others for not wanting the admiration of others. She wanted recognition, but only for doing it her way. She wanted to be seen as an absolutely unique genius, but did not tolerate any dissent from this view among her admirers.
Can we not ask: is the pleasure of feeling above others really superior to the feeling of connecting with others, and having the ability both to generate spontaneous joy and to receive it? Do we not in the end want our feet in earth, and not concrete and glass?
Few wandering thoughts. If it doesn’t make the images go away, I’ll have another go after a while.