Magic Carpet Ride

The closing song on Love’s Forever Changes sets off a symphonic circle, looping around a set of macro and microcosmic rituals until arriving in indulgence in the circle itself. “You go through changes” turns into “this is the time” by the end, first beginning with the smallest observations and then ending in the largest overview. Within, as the spiraling-outward occurs, the rituals and prescriptions are laid out. The narrator speaks describing rules as laws, cause and effect strands of flow that carry behind the events. Water and burning are of particular interest, their status being controlled by the interactions between various characters described throughout, the chicken, the woman, the private, etc. The narrator identifies himself with their position in order to step outside, going through nodes, their relationships on networks (the man who can’t decide, man and father between ettiquetes), withdrawing eventually into the superior position. The song peters off into the simplest building blocks, blasting notes of horns and strings to a slowly fading tune, as the song becomes ever more simplistic, ever more macro scale. The village becomes the city becomes the nation becomes the planet, and etc, outwards until the All is known in the final stroke, closing out the song and the album.

Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit is twice invisible. Firstly made clandestine through the ring he finds in the cave and secondly when he’s knocked into sleep through the grand battle at the climax of events outside his interest or scope. It’s this pre-occupation with stealth that shows Bilbo’s place within the world he moves through. Bilbo slips through the world by making himself invisible, a proclaimed burglar. Each section of the book works in episodic fashion, an enclosed sphere of detail, location, etc, passed through as a non-entity by Bilbo. Bilbo’s power is his very removal from all things which the others are pre-occupied by, his ability to be within without entanglement.

For the nature of Gandalf, Minecraft holds the narratological pattern. The player in their quest (referring to the linear, official story of the game) moves through the world in manipulation, the game’s mechanics being all carefully worked and drawn together to lead to the player’s driving goal. The earth is manipulated in order to grant food, the deep ground shifted, stone brought up to built shelter while the minerals are used in making a sphere of tools around the self. Gandalf’s interactions with the dwarves through The Hobbit are always mysterious, with him often darting off onto wildly divergent paths in order to partake in this form of action. Gandalf goes through the adventure as the magician does, making the adventure an entity in itself centered around the person pushing forwards, drawing strands of flow into himself in order to carve forward.

This drawing works in reverse as well. The thirteenth century Quest of the Holy Grail displays eloquently this. In order for Gandalf to perform this magical work, he must first know how to read the world. As all reading, it’s in truth an act of writing which has already completed its work before the grunt work of the “writing” ever begins, the text to be inscribed already present in the reading. The Quest is a journey through a world wholly organized around the eyes and structuralisms of the mystic grail knights. Each pathway, each wood, each castle is seen to them only in their writing of the world, reading it into the structure which they are capable of manipulating. It’s this action which is the basic mindset that leads Gandalf forwards and allows the knights to access their grail. The adventure is done in order to make this writing real, to draw all things together in full realization, the scribing to the writing inherent in reading.