What was Really Happening in those Final Paragraphs?

[Zarathustra]

According to the Elohim the Worm was never a creative force. It ate up stars and it would eat up Elohim, Earthpower, etc. but the world was created from the concentrated Earthpower of the eaten stars.

To me the point of the Worm story was not to contest the Creator/Foul story per se but to illuminate an important point about it: Nothing is created from nothing. There is some sort of Conservation of Matter/Energy/Earthpower at work here. It wasn't enough for the Creator to think up a new world with unique Laws. He needed raw materials to make this world with and this raw material was the Stars.

Yes! This ties directly to a post of yours I resurrected in WF's Tale of Two Cosmologies thread. You said that Lord Foul didn't represent entropy/chaos/death. I think you're right; I was wrong in that discussion. Lord Foul represents one possible reponse (i.e. Despite) to entropy/chaos/death. It was the Worm all along which represented entropy/chaos/death. I'm not sure why I didn't recognize this long ago ... it seems so obvious now.

So the Worm was never the creative force in its own myth. The stars were. They were like the self-organizing forces in nature (our own world) which build up little pockets of order within a universe which as a whole is running down, becoming more chaotic, dying.

And you're right, the Worm (or entropy/death) doesn't contest Creator/Foul. It just is. Our response to it can take two (actually three) forms. 1) We can find hope in the example of the stars, in the example of natural forces which preserve order in the face of inexorable advance of entropy, the Power that Preserves. Creative forces. Or 2) We can lose hope and mimic the destructive force of the Worm itself, take part and hasten the destruction through Despite.

Or 3) we can be indifferent, which is what Covenant tried to do with the Law of Leprosy. Donaldson said in AATE that Despite wasn't actually the opposite of Love; Foul and Creator are just two sides of the same coin, counterparts, not opposites. Apathy was actually the opposite of Love. SWMNBN was the opposite (well, at least as long as she was hiding from herself and the world in the Lost Deep, refusing to take part in either destruction or creation).

Hmm.... these symbols are all starting to fall into place.

[Orlion]

Keep in mind, they call it the Worm at the World's End because, to the Elohim, its characteristic of causing the end of the world upon awakening is more important to them then whether it was used to fashion the Earth or they are children of it.

Are you sure? The World, if it was a segment on a timeline, would have two Ends.

Snap!

[shadowbinding shoe]

According to the Elohim the Worm was never a creative force. It ate up stars and it would eat up Elohim, Earthpower, etc. but the world was created from the concentrated Earthpower of the eaten stars.

To me the point of the Worm story was not to contest the Creator/Foul story per se but to illuminate an important point about it: Nothing is created from nothing. There is some sort of Conservation of Matter/Energy/Earthpower at work here. It wasn't enough for the Creator to think up a new world with unique Laws. He needed raw materials to make this world with and this raw material was the Stars.

Yes! This ties directly to a post of yours I resurrected in WF's Tale of Two Cosmologies thread. You said that Lord Foul didn't represent entropy/chaos/death. I think you're right; I was wrong in that discussion. Lord Foul represents one possible reponse (i.e. Despite) to entropy/chaos/death. It was the Worm all along which represented entropy/chaos/death. I'm not sure why I didn't recognize this long ago ... it seems so obvious now.

So the Worm was never the creative force in its own myth. The stars were. They were like the self-organizing forces in nature (our own world) which build up little pockets of order within a universe which as a whole is running down, becoming more chaotic, dying.

And you're right, the Worm (or entropy/death) doesn't contest Creator/Foul. It just is. Our response to it can take two (actually three) forms. 1) We can find hope in the example of the stars, in the example of natural forces which preserve order in the face of inexorable advance of entropy, the Power that Preserves. Creative forces. Or 2) We can lose hope and mimic the destructive force of the Worm itself, take part and hasten the destruction through Despite.

Or 3) we can be indifferent, which is what Covenant tried to do with the Law of Leprosy. Donaldson said in AATE that Despite wasn't actually the opposite of Love; Foul and Creator are just two sides of the same coin, counterparts, not opposites. Apathy was actually the opposite of Love. SWMNBN was the opposite (well, at least as long as she was hiding from herself and the world in the Lost Deep, refusing to take part in either destruction or creation).

Hmm.... these symbols are all starting to fall into place.

Thanks Z

You took my thoughts and run away with them. Very interesting stuff. You add another layer of meaning to this story.

Covenant as the representative of Apathy. Now there's a thought. You may be right. Though, he always seemed to be a bit preachy about his bleak beliefs in the 1st trilogy. He was always trying to make everyone accept that there was no hope in the world. And despite it all the people around him always were inspired to greater love and hope.

Obviously Covenant isn't as one-dimensional as all that. Maybe there's a chronology of central emotions to his story. At first there's Love when he was a successful married writer, then Apathy as he lived day to day checking his extremities, then Despite as a counter-reaction to the Land's gifts (and earlier, there was a lot of repressed hate to his fellow men at home) and finally Love again but one that is deeper and more informed.

[Zarathustra]

In the 1st Chrons, TC's starting point was Law of Leprosy, protecting himself from the dangers of hope by turning himself into an injury-avoidance-machine (VSEs), a survival machine. Reread that first page of LFB, all the descriptions of a "mechanical walk," VSE, etc. An emotionless survival machine is not the opposite of hope (despair), because he still has the stubborn will to live. But it's not exactly hope, either, because he learned at the leprosorium (sp?) how dangerous it could be to hope. He became a "realist," and unbeliever (in hope, fantastic salvation), but had not tipped to the despair side of the scales. He was on the razor's edge, as Donaldson once described.

And then his jourey in the 1st Chrons was to learn to care again, to have hope, despite his mortality. I don't believe he ever tried to convince people that there was no hope in the world. That's more like Foul. Covenant was trying to get everyone to not place their hope in him. That's a big difference. He thought their hope was his own subconscious desire to have hope, which he tried to shut down. He resisted their hope because it was too seductive, too destructive to his discipline which kept him alive and sane ... not because he had despaired and gave up.

[shadowbinding shoe]

I was thinking about the scene (in the second book) where Elena and the Lords show him this Rock Garden. It's not the only example but is one of the most obvious one.

Everyone thinks it's a beautiful and joyful work of art. It shows a marred face full of humor and laughter, if I remember the details correctly. For them it's a story about triumphing against hardships and imperfections to find the joy in life, a parallel to that Giant Tale about those two onerous Giants who became a happy couple eventually.

But Covenant don't allow them to have their joy and hope. He gives them a very different interpretation. He forces them by sheer fervor to see it from his leperish, hopeless viewpoint. He tells them that it is a depiction of foolish, blind hope in the face of an ugly reality. His story about the woman who ignored her dangerous illness so she could find joy in life while her condition continued to worsen unchecked, an allegory to how they are trying to find some happiness in their 40 remaining doomed years, is him telling them that they're not heroic but just pathetic. When he finishes his tale nobody laughs or smiles anymore.

If that's not preaching hopelessness I don't know what is.

[Zarathustra]

I'll have to reread that scene, but I stand by my position that "you shouldn't hope because it's dangerous" is different from "you should give up." I'm sure he thought that their hope was foolish, and he was struggling to learn where they got it (as in the classic Hope Discussion with Foamfollower), but his own stubbornness to keep living, even without hope, is indeed a precarious middle ground, and not quite despair.

I think the reason he was so bitter and flaunted his lack of hope was precisely because the Land was awakening his not-yet-dead potential for hope and love ... and he was resisting so that he could go back to his "safe" middle ground, which (again) is different from resisting because he despaired.

[shadowbinding shoe]

I'll have to reread that scene, but I stand by my position that "you shouldn't hope because it's dangerous" is different from "you should give up." I'm sure he thought that their hope was foolish, and he was struggling to learn where they got it (as in the classic Hope Discussion with Foamfollower), but his own stubbornness to keep living, even without hope, is indeed a precarious middle ground, and not quite despair.

I think the reason he was so bitter and flaunted his lack of hope was precisely because the Land was awakening his not-yet-dead potential for hope and love ... and he was resisting so that he could go back to his "safe" middle ground, which (again) is different from resisting because he despaired.

You're right of course that what he has isn't Despite but is hopelessness really the same as despite? All he be believes he can achieve when we meet him is to keep his body from deteriorating further and not be run out of his home by his former friends. That's hardly what I'd call a Hopeful outlook.

[Vraith]

I'll have to reread that scene, but I stand by my position that "you shouldn't hope because it's dangerous" is different from "you should give up." I'm sure he thought that their hope was foolish, and he was struggling to learn where they got it (as in the classic Hope Discussion with Foamfollower), but his own stubbornness to keep living, even without hope, is indeed a precarious middle ground, and not quite despair.

I think the reason he was so bitter and flaunted his lack of hope was precisely because the Land was awakening his not-yet-dead potential for hope and love ... and he was resisting so that he could go back to his "safe" middle ground, which (again) is different from resisting because he despaired.

You're right of course that what he has isn't Despite but is hopelessness really the same as despite? All he be believes he can achieve when we meet him is to keep his body from deteriorating further and not be run out of his home by his former friends. That's hardly what I'd call a Hopeful outlook.

In one sense, I agree, it is not what we really think of as "hopeful," by any definition.
And yet...I wonder often, even related to real life...isn't there a direct implication of [and often, as a result, an expression/reality of...even if that expression/reality is present/embodied by others] hope anyway? Isn't his grim determination to keep on living something foundational on its own? I'm not quite agreeing with Z's "middle ground" I don't think...I'm not precisely sure where I'm going. I simply have an intuition that, right now, the best way I can delineate, is that there is a difference between some aesthetic/viewpoint kind of "hope" as source of action/engagement with the factual, and action/engagement as a concrete source/creator of "real" hope.
EDITED to add: Because that is how he grows...recognizing, slowly, agonizingly, certain "facts," are true even if not real, and others even if "real," don't determine the true. He can, factually, be a leper, yet NOT be defined as only, hopelessly, that...in a way, he can never be healthy, yet he can be healed.