David Eddings and "the Will and the Word"

This Image created by Geoff Taylor

When I was growing up I was an extremely lucky city kid because my mom took me and my sister on great vacations for the whole summer. we had started in Martha's vineyard, then Vermont, and ended up in Tuscany when i was 15. But in the summer of 1985, we were living in a poet's small house on the side of a mountain, overlooking a bay in Ireland. There was plenty of time to just live there, make friends, and get into reading books from the local library. I found an author who shook my world. David Eddings. Before that, and that summer, I had been a fan of science fiction and fantasy fiction mostly, and a morbid fan of religion/Christian based fiction on things like witches and the anti-Christ. the Christian lore was especially tasty that environment. I could walk a mile or two and find an abandoned Abbey that was built eons ago, washed in the red light of the sun setting over the Atlantic. Inhabited only by nettle bushes, cow poop, crows, and the occasional rabbit or cat. Sitting in that place, in the shadow of such a structure, reading about the war of angels and Satan seemed much realer then it would have, if i were reading it in Central Park. My imagination loved to try and grasp worlds far different from my own, but similar to the one i was getting a chance to see, and creatures that were like humans, but more interesting, like immortal Elves.
Photo taken by Krystian Kozerawski

Before that summer, I was also a huge lover of D&D and all things Tolkien. I was reading the Hobbit as i was learning to read, in Vermont, where I could walk into the woods and easily believe i was in middle-earth. these epic tales, that created worlds with maps, are in a lot of ways, still affecting how i dream and sometimes day-dream. I still would love to be able to learn a spell, or get into a battle on a warhorse, armed with a two-handed 6 foot sword enveloped in blue fire. It's a dork's paradise in my head sometimes. one that might feel at home at a Comicon Convention, but oddly, doesn't.

So David Eddings managed to grab my imagination at a perfect time. He created a whole world, with kingdoms that vaguely resemble Earth's historic kingdoms, and intertwined it with a set of holy books that outline a war between gods and religions that end up centering around our child main character. It was a bit soap opera-ish and often formulaic, but the characters were great and the story was epic. He also created a set of physical and "magical" laws, that allowed for a blurring of reality. i.e. magic that could be explained philosophically. I walked around spewing that philosophy all day in my own head. i talked about it to myself, mostly, and my sister who has an equally vast appetite for alternate worlds and possibilities. Questioning the "realness" of what i see around me, or at least the perceived disconnect between my mind and my surroundings. and being more questioning of the mundane, and less questioning of magic, legend, and prophecy. as if the latter might be more valid then the former. I felt in my young heart that there was a good chance that life would get far weirder and more like these stories then what has actually transpired in my real life (I am not a powerful immortal sorcerer, I am an animator). I unfortunately never learned the magic or became a Pawn of Prophecy like i so thought was a possibility back then. Not surprisingly, I then turned to learning how to VISUALIZE magic on tv and film. There's no getting closer to it, in this reality, without being disappointed.

David Edding's main stories revolved around a boy who learns that fate and destiny, and the basic struggle of the universe was based solely on him. who WOULDN'T love that kind of story? especially a boy of about the same age who dared to believe in the possibility that everything might be an illusion and that really he creates everything, or that everything happens because of him. the idea that maybe the earth was created just so he would have SOMETHING TO WALK ON, while he did the deeds that gave the universe it's very reason for happening. just imagine how empowering that is to a kid who isn't even allowed to drive a car, or drink a scotch at the pub in town? It's the kind of narcissism that makes a young mind ecstatic, expanding into the infinite possibilities of the future. I thought i was just some dumb kid with learning disabilities for a while there, now i was learning that i could actually expand into a god.

It was perfect. the boy learns as he gets older that he is the absolute focus of all that is evil, and all that is good, and that his mind is expanding as he is put into danger. he learns that his Will alone can make things happen. very much like it would in a lucid dream, only it was reality. Mr. Eddings is genius in his descriptions of the abilities and how they make an almost real sense in how it works. I started believing that if i just concentrated hard enough that I too would be able to change into a wolf, or eagle, or to call down lightning strikes by just throwing my will at the sky. or be able to morph my own body with the image of a wolf. transposed for a moment as my cells bow to the weight of my sheer thought. he called it "the Will and the Word" and i really thought it could happen. it wasn't an elvish spell that needed to be recited, it wasn't some witches mixture of potions and frog's eyes. it made sense. You bend your consciousness at an object, the force that gives you the strength live and think, and then use a word to communicate to that object, to funnel your thought into the real world and make the thought become reality.

there's a part in the story where Garion, the main character, and of course, the boy i wanted to be, rolls a boulder over. he was a novice, and just practicing his new ability. the rock's weight feels like it is on his body and he feels exhausted like he actually physically lifted the thing. when he manages to fight off the extreme fatigue, he realizes that his body sank into the soft grass under the weight and he was now stuck. his mentor laughs at his mistake and wonders why he never considered the laws of cause and reaction. he needed to exhert force under the rock, AND force down against his own weight against the earth itself. because, logically, the weight goes SOMEWHERE, and logically he ends up taking on the weight himself. it makes sense in a the paradigm we find ourselves in everyday. My physics teacher, Dr. Chuckrow no doubt believes in it too (if you believe in telekenisis in the real world, of course..which he did :)

I did too, sometimes I still do. but then, i felt like i could do it myself. It was kind of a gut feeling or inate suspicion that i had it in me. all it would take was TOTAL CONCENTWATION. So, i spent an hour or so, on the side of that Irish mountain, trying to topple a pile of rocks, and to force the sheep a few yards away, to drop their guard and walk right up to me. I would command the thought, and then utter a word to make it real. I figured if i couldn't do one feat, maybe i could accomplish the other. as if they were different uses of "will" and maybe i had more of a knack with dumb mammals then i did with dumb rocks. I kept on saying "Fall" to the rocks, and "Approach" to the sheep. like a dork. thankfully, i was alone on that hill with the sheep so nobody saw how silly i was.

to my absolute chagrin, I couldn't bring about either results. the rocks remained still, and the sheep got no closer then the 5 or so yards that they always tolerated (they were a lazy bunch of animals, they would allow me to approach to a certain point and then they would move as fast as i would, always teasing and tantalizingly close, but never close enough to touch...something that maddens a boy who considers himself a fast runner, to the point that i must have spent days on those hills trying to just grab one of them...but never succeeding) so to get them to obey my thoughts would have solved a major problem for me at the time. moving the rocks would have been cool, but not as cool as controlling the sheep. either way. my mortal, limited, no "will" having ass, couldn't do any of it. that was a hard pill to swallow. very much like the pill of getting your first job out of college. i thought the world would fall at my 20 year old feet as soon as i told it i was ready. but instead, i had every adult letting me know how much i DIDN'T know, and how much i COULDN'T do...and just how much they weren't going to just fall at my feet. I guess you need to learn how to walk before you can run.

You start out HUGE and endless, then you get struck down to infinitely small. life happens when you decide to go from there. from Infitely small, to bigger then that. that's what "the Will and the Word" taught me.