On Yoga and How it Will All End

[Zarathustra]

Reading about Yoga recently, I stumbled upon an answer to a question I've been asking for years now. The question has occurred to all of us, "How will the Chronicles end?" But for me, it has taken a very specific form, due to a 2004 quote from the Man himself:

... the story of the "Covenant" books so far describes a couple of (I believe) temporary solutions to what we might call "the problem of evil." And as long as those solutions ("power" in the first trilogy, "surrender" in the second) are temporary, Lord Foul *must* return. In "The Last Chronicles" my characters will be looking for a more enduring solution. (I, of course, already know what that solution is.)

(10/30/2004)

Those are the thematic endings of each Chronicle so far. Covenant defeats Lord Foul by fighting him in The Power that Preserves, and defeats him by not fighting (surrendering) in The White Gold Wielder. I believe these two solutions comprise the paradox of "being true" in a world where everything dies. We must fight for life, for beauty, for preservation of what is good or valuable, which means fighting against that which destroys those things. But we must also acknowledge that we have within us our own Despiser, our own potential to become a destructive force. Without such acknowledgment (which can take the form of guilt, the confrontation of already having done "evil" in our lives), we are as dangerous, innocent, and naive as Hile Troy. Without confronting the possibility of our failure, we make our failures more likely.

So if we could figure out the thematic solution to the problem of evil mentioned above in SRD's quote, we might be able to figure out how this translates into a narrative ending. Yeah, I know, bloody unlikely, but it's fun to try. In fact, I think I've take a step closer to that goal. I've never been able to predict what the third thematic solution would be until now. As I mention above, was reading an article on yoga and came across this passage[1]:

"Yoga is the union of two Sanskrit concepts: abhyasa and vairagya, or focused effort and surrender."

The article goes on to explain why you must balance these two opposites in order to practice yoga safely and effectively, so that you continue to make progress but also don't hurt yourself. You can't give up, but you also can't push too hard. Another quote sums this up nicely:

In yoga ... you're searching for that every-shifting edge between these two counterproductive extremes.

Which brings us back to the Chronicles. It's always been a story deeply involved with the paradox of life, and balancing extremes. In The One Tree, Donaldson writes:

In the thronehall of Foul's Creche, confronting the Despiser and the Illearth Stone, he had found the eye of his paradox. Balanced between the contradictions of self-abhorrence and -affirmation, of Unbelief and love--acknowledging and refusing the truth of the Despiser--he had come into his power. He felt it within him now, poised like the moment of clarity which lay at the heart of every vertigo.

This combines some very interesting contradictions. Self-abhorrence and self-affirmation. Both of these are a recognition of oneself, but each one "moves" in opposite directions as both denial (Unbelief) and acceptance (love) of that which one recognizes. Denying what is abhorrent and accepting what is lovable. This gave Covenant the power to fight Foul in TPTP.

But that wasn't entirely true, because that which is abhorrent can't be entirely denied without being inauthentic, which is why Covenant still had room to grow in the Second Chronicles as he learned to fuse LF's venom with Wild Magic and surrender to LF's attack. This constituted a similar union of opposites, but in a way that led to the counterpart strategy of confronting Lord Foul (i.e. the counterpart to the 1st Chrons strategy).

So this brings us to the Last Chronicles. The next logical step in this stepwise progression through the union of opposites is a union of both surrender and resistance. I'm not sure exactly what form that will take, but I feel certain that this is the obvious choice for a thematic solution. And given the need for a permanent solution (as per SRD above), and the fact that the Last Chronicles is about time and the essential necessity of sequential structure, I found this quote (from a yoga blog) to be interesting:

In our experience as temporal beings, opposites occur sequentially. In order to court the deep union between these opposing forces, we require a practice ground where we can apply them in turn, repetitively, observing the changes.

link

Repetition is the only kind of permanence we can hope to achieve in a world where All Things End. Cycles. Returning full circle. The oscillation of life and death and rebirth. Maybe somewhere in all this is a clue to the end.

[1] [Oddly enough, this quote is from the latest Men's Health magazine.]

[Orlion]

Endurance. I believe that the theme for the Last Chronicles is endurance. This is shown in the real world portions, where Linden continues to raise Jeremiah and treat the mentally ill even though there is no hope that either group will get better... and often there is no indication that the helped group are cognizant of what Linden is doing.

And so, that is what they are doing in the Land. Even though an army of Sandgorgons and Skurj would be impossible to defeat by anything less than a god, we'll have the Masters face them anyway. Even though any resistance to the Worm will only delay the end by mere moments, they'll resist the Worm anyway... if for no other reason then to spite the Despiser.

And even though helping She will lead just as inevitably to the end as if they blasted the Arch with white gold, they'll help her out anyway.

How this will translate plotwise? I do not know. I imagine Foul will not gain the freedom he craves. I imagine the ending will be a happy one... but without being able to return to the real world, I just don't know what the form will be.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The books may be titled "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" but the central character is really Lord Foul, not Covenant. First he tried to break the Arch through effort, then he tried to break the Arch through non-effort, and now he is trying through a combination of both--a little effort and a lot of non-effort.

I suspect that Foul already secretly hates himself because of who and what he is. Covenant and Linden's task now will be to try and convince him to accept himself. That seems a little...hokey, for lack of a better word...but it also seems to make sense. What was it The Oracle said--we're all here to do what we're all here to do.

[lucimay]

you may be onto something hashi.

zar, i so enjoyed reading your topic post.
i love how your brain connected to the chrons
while reading about yoga! i love it when my
brain does that.

"Repetition is the only kind of permanence we can hope to achieve in a world where All Things End. Cycles. Returning full circle. The oscillation of life and death and rebirth. Maybe somewhere in all this is a clue to the end."

i believe you are absolutely correct.
(the above statement is why i knew how
stephen king's Dark Tower series was going
to end, why i was not surprised or
disappointed at that ending.)

great post.

[Zarathustra]

Thanks, Luci!

Orlion, I'd be surprised if Linden's perspective at the beginning of Runes turns out to be the answer or solution. If that's the case, then she didn't need to return to the Land to work out anything. Her endurance didn't heal her patients or cultivate a relationship with Jeremiah. It was stasis, not life.

Hashi, that's an interesting perspective. I think he accepts himself just fine, at least his "dark" side. But Lord Foul might need to stop thinking of the Creator as his enemy, and realize it's part of himself, too. Creation requires destruction. I'm sure the Creator realizes this. But Destruction would have a harder time seeing the necessity of its own counterpart. However, LF *is* alive, and there is no life without creation and order, just like everything is stasis without destruction.

Maybe Foul is in the Land to learn a lesson, too. It is his "prison" until he learns it, and then it's okay if he leaves.

[Orlion]

Orlion, I'd be surprised if Linden's perspective at the beginning of Runes turns out to be the answer or solution. If that's the case, then she didn't need to return to the Land to work out anything. Her endurance didn't heal her patients or cultivate a relationship with Jeremiah. It was stasis, not life.

The reason I believe this is because the first couple chronicles had the answer in the real world portions as well. In the first, Covenant 'fights' against his imposed isolation. He's doing it even as we begin the story. In the Second Chronicles, he has all ready sacrificed himself (quite literally) to save Joan. So, since Linden started out enduring in doing what she thinks is right, I believe that will ultimately be the 'enduring' solution. Their experiences will put these real world events in a different light, but it will essentially be the same.

[wayfriend]

"Every weakness is a strength misapplied, and every strength is a weakness which has found its proper use."
-- Stephen R Donaldson, (12/31/2005)

After you fight Foul, and then accept Foul, you find a proper use for Foul.

You can't eradicate your inner despiser; you have to let it live. You cannot ignore your inner despiser; you have to acknowledge what it is, and that it's you. And you cannot beat your inner despiser; you have to channel it and use it for constructive ends.

So I think that the stage after acceptance, the final stage, is integration.

Which makes me wonder why so many things in the Land are devouring other things. Nom devoured a Raver. The Harrow wished to devour Linden, and Demondim if he could. SWMNBN wants to devour women. The Worm devours Elohim. And Covenant absorbed the power that Foul spent himself into...

All this devouring is not eating. It is becoming more. It is integration of disparate parts.

An integrated person is a person who is not at war with parts of himself, and is doing more than just acknowledging parts of himself. An integrated person has achieved balance and harmony with all of their parts. All their urges and feelings become positive and constructive.

I don't do yoga, but I hear it's a balance and harmony thing...

[wayfriend]

Double posting ... my own post set off a train of thought that, at the other end of my commute, I think has become worthy of a post.

Put simply, fantasy is a form of fiction in which the internal crises or conflicts or processes of the characters are dramatized as if they were external individuals or events. Crudely stated, this means that in fantasy the characters meet themselves - or parts of themselves, their own needs/problems/exigencies - as actors on the stage of the story, and so the internal struggle to deal with those needs/problems/exigencies is played out as an external struggle in the action of the story.

If internal elements of yourself become external actors in a story, what does confronting those actors accomplish?

Well, ideally, you change, and the actors change, and this represents your resolving your crisis or conflict.

But then what?

What is the opposite process? It seems to me the opposite process would be to take those external actors and internalize them.

This is remarkably like the "devour" concept so prevalent in the Second and Last Chronicles. You eat it, absorb it, subsume it ... and then it's a part of you.

In this light, it seems to be that "devour" completes the circle of internal resolution. Your inner processes become externalized. In that state, you work it out. Now you have changed, and the external actor has changed, to bring forth this new, resolved state. But now you have to bring these changed things back together again. You need to become whole. Become integrated.

As I mentioned in Epic Vision, Donaldson points out that epic stories need to be connected back to our reality in order to provide a vision that is useful to us. The Chronicles were designed so that lessons from the Land were brought back. The broken circle doesn't provide anything meaningful - the circle has to be made complete so that what we ventured forth to obtain can be brought home.

This concept of integration as devouring, as internalizing externalized processes, is another way of providing the same thing. The circle is completed. The resolution is re-internalized. The victory is brought home.

Donaldson continues on to say

A somewhat oversimplified way to make the same point is by comparing fantasy to realistic, mainstream fiction. In realistic fiction,
the characters are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expressions of the characters.

Characters are an expression of their world / The world is an expression of the characters.

To come full circle and connect a fantasy to "the reality of who we are and what we do", perhaps fantasy has to become, before the end, realistic fiction. The world begins as an expression of the characters, but before the end, the characters become an expression of the world that they have saved.

So: The final phase is integration.

[Zarathustra]

Orlion, that's a pretty good rebuttal. I was too quick to dismiss your idea. I honestly forgot that the characters exhibit their positive qualities from the very beginning, mixed with their primary conflict. The trick, I suppose, is separating them. I think the things you pointed out about Linden comprise her conflict. There's a dark side to her "endurance." It's almost like the Land's Oath of Peace: something that seems admirable on the surface, but ultimately limiting them, keeping them from their true potential. [I've argued this point in detail here, on page 2, Fri Jun 25, 2010 3:32 pm post. ]

So if not her endurance, the question becomes which other part of her initial experience presents the solution. I'm going with my theme here: balance. In the thread linked above, I argue that Linden made a choice both for the Land and for Jeremiah. She balanced her Linden the Chosen persona with her Linden the Mother persona. This wasn't an easy task; indeed, she was prepared to leave the Land to its own defenses in favor of protecting Jeremiah ... until the Creator didn't show up this time. She was going to protect Jeremiah and abandon the land no matter how many people died or how much beauty was lost. But because she waited and didn't flee with her son, these choices collapsed into a unified goal: saving Jeremiah ends up putting her in a position where she promises to answer Wildwood's Question. So now saving beauty and saving her son are dual goals, as opposed to her first impulse.

Maybe it's all about children ... maybe that's how we achieve our cycles of rebirth. We save the world and we protect those we love by sacrificing ourselves in the fight for our kids.

Wayfriend, excellent post. I like where you're going with that. It's a different direction than I've taken, but it still has its own logical progression for the three Chronicles: resist, accept, integrate. While that seems to invalidate previous solutions--or at least the first one--I do like how you've supported it with the devouring examples. I think there's certainly something to that. Devouring isn't merely defeating, it is taking something into yourself and making it part of you. It's also sustaining, life-enabling, but at the same time an act of violence, taking a life. But that's the circle of life, of course. Our participation in the dance of creation/destruction. Previous generations feed the next. Lower lifeforms feed the higher. And life slowly spirals out like the Celebration of Spring, circles within circles, the parts making a larger pattern.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

"Every weakness is a strength misapplied, and every strength is a weakness which has found its proper use."
-- Stephen R Donaldson, (12/31/2005)

After you fight Foul, and then accept Foul, you find a proper use for Foul.

You can't eradicate your inner despiser; you have to let it live. You cannot ignore your inner despiser; you have to acknowledge what it is, and that it's you. And you cannot beat your inner despiser; you have to channel it and use it for constructive ends.

So I think that the stage after acceptance, the final stage, is integration.

Which makes me wonder why so many things in the Land are devouring other things. Nom devoured a Raver. The Harrow wished to devour Linden, and Demondim if he could. SWMNBN wants to devour women. The Worm devours Elohim. And Covenant absorbed the power that Foul spent himself into...

All this devouring is not eating. It is becoming more. It is integration of disparate parts.

An integrated person is a person who is not at war with parts of himself, and is doing more than just acknowledging parts of himself. An integrated person has achieved balance and harmony with all of their parts. All their urges and feelings become positive and constructive.

I don't do yoga, but I hear it's a balance and harmony thing...

Pure genius. He also said it better than I would have.

[Vraith]

Heh, I've started posting here several times, then folk have posted while I was and I got interested/distracted by what they were saying.

Because of this,

"Repetition is the only kind of permanence we can hope to achieve in a world where All Things End. Cycles. Returning full circle. The oscillation of life and death and rebirth. Maybe somewhere in all this is a clue to the end."

I kept starting with...

I hate circles.
I don't believe they are "real."
And if they are, they are the perfect symbol of
meaninglessness, futility, a-life, non-growth.
[which are not the same as death, and much worse than it]
Nor in repetition.
I love spirals.
I do believe in resemblance;
Similarity, but never congruence.
Symmetry is fine for Gods.
Living requires symmetry breaking.

I was on a path similar to WF's "integration," and "devouring," too, though I was calling them dissolving and consuming.
But also, as in solving x-squared, there are two solutions. +/-. [although I really mean two "families" of solution, with a number of variations/storylines/character-actions to achieve them.]
The physical/belonging beings undergo the dissolving/integration.
The Metaphysical are separated out to where they belong...the cancer of the world is cut out. The conceptual beings are disembodied.
There is no Creator or Love or Despite IN the world.
Only living beings who...though they can conceive of those Ideas, may either bow down or reach up [or both] to them...are beings who create, or love, or despise [or some/all of those].

It occurs to me there's a path I hadn't thought of, that might partake a bit of both the + AND - solutions [might]...and I might like it a lot, though I'll have to think on it...

The Metaphysicals [voluntarily? are made to?] lose their Eternal/Ideal form/identity and dissolve into the physical realm.
[Recall the becoming and the "near sentient" of the second Staff]

Anyway, the Yoga quote and inspiration was cool.

[Krilly]

The books may be titled "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" but the central character is really Lord Foul, not Covenant. First he tried to break the Arch through effort, then he tried to break the Arch through non-effort, and now he is trying through a combination of both--a little effort and a lot of non-effort.

I suspect that Foul already secretly hates himself because of who and what he is. Covenant and Linden's task now will be to try and convince him to accept himself. That seems a little...hokey, for lack of a better word...but it also seems to make sense. What was it The Oracle said--we're all here to do what we're all here to do.

Wow, I never thought of it that way... and the way you put it made me think of something. Is it possible Lord Foul is the Creator? Maybe all this time the Creator didn't angrily imprison his "brother". What actually happened is he overlooked his capacity for Despite like every other character and placed these evils in his works himself. Then in abhorrence of his mistake and for what he had done or perhaps for reasons we do not yet know, he trapped himself in his own creation and became the being we know as Lord Foul.

I could see the grand tragedy now. Foul spends countless milennia to be "free" and wreak revenge on the Creator only to find that no one is there waiting for him... That all this time he hated only himself. The ultimate solitude. Only now with no longer the capacity of creation to remedy it.

Thus, perhaps, the third theme is redemption. Overpowering and surrendering are temporary solutions, but redeeming evil and turning it on its head is what's ultimately called for. The theme is already prevalent. Just look at Stave and Kevin's redemption or Elena's lack thereof. And like SWMNBN, perhaps the Despiser just needs to be reminded who he is...

[Savor Dam]

That is a very interesting theory...

[wayfriend]

Is it possible Lord Foul is the Creator?

Well...

"Then he understood or remembered. Perhaps he found Despite itself beside him, misguiding his hand. Or perhaps he saw the harm in himself. It does not matter. He became outraged with grief and torn pride. In his fury he wrestled with Despite, either within him or without, and in his fury he cast the Despiser down, out of the infinity of the cosmos onto the Earth.

By these words, Lord Foul might be an aspect or a part of the Creator -- rather than the Creator himself.

If so, then the Creator externalized something internal in order to deal with it -- which is, as Donaldson describes, what fantasy is about. (Author as Creator, Creator as Author: it has been mentioned before.)

If so, then it may be that "re-internalization" - a reunion of what has become seperate - might be the natural conclusion. Predicated on successfully dealing with that externalized part - Foul can't escape his prison, but if he is rehabilitated, he may be let free.

The end result is partially the same as you suggest, Krilly. On becoming free, Foul would discover that he had only hated himself all along. However, rather than finding nothing in the end, he finds the rest of himself, and becomes whole. Rather more uplifting, I think.