#errantry

by Erin Manning

Errantry (errance)

18- errantry does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment.

- The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.

21- The thinking of errancy conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it.

20- The thought of errantry is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings.

Rhizomatic thought / rhizome

18- the rhizome- prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation.

Poetics of Relation

11- each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other

20- in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer a traveler, discoverer or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this - and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.

Relation

34- What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock... a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and errantry.

131- The thing recused in every generalization of an absolute, even and especially some absolute secreted within this imaginary construct of Relation: that is, the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solitary and solitary there.

154- the thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought

155- The other of Thought is always set in motion by its confluences as a whole, in which each is changed by and changes the other.

157- Distancings are necessary to Relation and depend on it: like the coexistence of sea olive and manchineel.

Identity

141-142 The old idea of identity as root, whenever it proves hard to define or impossible to maintain, leads inexorably to the refuges of generalization provided by the universal as value.

142- Identity as a system of relation, as an aptitude for "giving-on-and-with" (donner-avec) is in contrast, a form of violence that challenges the generalizing universal and necessitates even more stringent demands for specificity.

Creolization

34- carries along...into the adventure of multilingualism and into the incredible explosion of cultures. ... It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing.

89- only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the "contents" in which these operate.

-Creolizations bring into Relation but not to universalized the principles of creoleness regress toward negritudes, ideas of  Frenchness, of Latinness, all generalizing concepts, more or less innocently.

Creole

69- in addition to this obligation to get around something, the Creole language has another, internal obligation: to renew itself in every instance on the basis of a series of forgettings. Forgetting, that is, integration, of what it starts from: the multiplicity of African languages on the one hand and European ones on the other, the nostalgia, finally, for the Caribbean remains of these.

93- The Creole language is a fragile and revealing écho-monde, born of a reality of relation and limited within this reality by its dependence.

-Echos-monde are not exacerbations that result directly from the convulsive conditions of Relation. They are at work in the matter of the world; they prophesy or illuminate it, divert it or conversely gain strength within it.

Plantation

65- one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation.

67- socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy.

74- The Plantation, like a laboratory, displays most clearly the opposed forces of the oral and the written at work - one of the most deep-rooted topics of our discussion in our contemporary landscape. It is there that multilingualism, that threatened dimension of our universe, can be observed for one of the first times, organically forming and disintegrating.

Earth

13- Relation to the earth is too immediate or too plundering to be linked with any preoccupation with identity - this claim to or consciousness of a lineage inscribed in a territory

   There was a merry passenger

   a messenger, a mariner:

   he built a gilded gondola

   to wander in, and had in her

   a load of yellow oranges

   and porridge for his provender;

   he perfumed her with marjoram

   and cardamom and lavender.

~

   He called the winds of argosies

   with cargoes in to carry him

   across the rivers seventeen

   that lay between to tarry him.

   He landed all in loneliness

   where stonily the pebbles on

   the running river Derrilyn

   goes merrily for ever on.

   He journeyed then through meadow-lands

   to Shadow-land that dreary lay,

   and under hill and over hill

   went roving still a weary way.

~

   He sat and sang a melody,

   his errantry a-tarrying;

   he begged a pretty butterfly

   that fluttered by to marry him.

   She scorned him and she scoffed at him,

   she laughed at him unpitying;

   so long he studied wizardry

   and sigaldry and smithying.

~

   He wove a tissue airy-thin

   to snare her in; to follow her

   he made him beetle-leather wing

   and feather wing of swallow hair.

   He caught her in bewilderment

   with filament of spider-thread;

   He made her soft pavilions

   of lilies, and a bridal bed

   of flowers and of thistle-down

   to nestle down and rest her in;

   and silken webs of filmy white

   and silver light he dressed her in.

~

   He threaded gems and necklaces,

   but recklessly she squandered them

   and fell to bitter quarrelling;

   then sorrowing he wandered on,

   and there he left her withering,

   as shivering he fled away;

   with windy weather following

   on swallow-wing he sped away.

~

   He passed the archipelagoes

   where yellow grows the marigold,

   where countless silver fountains are,

   and mountains are of fairy-gold.

   He took to war and foraying,

   a harrying beyond the sea,

   and roaming over Belmarie

   and Thellamie and Fantasie.

~

   He made a shield and morion

   of coral and of ivory,

   a sword he made of emerald,

   and terrible his rivalry

   with elven-knights of Aerie

   and Faerie, with paladins

   that golden-haired and shining-eyed

   came riding by and challenged him.

~

   Of crystal was his habergeon,

   his scabbard of chalcedony;

   with silver tipped at plenilune

   his spear was hewn of ebony.

   His javelins where of malachite

   and stalactite - he brandished them,

   and went and fought the dragon-flies

   of Paradise, and vanquished them.

~

   He battled with the Dumbledors,

   the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees,

   and won the Golden Honeycomb;

   and running home on sunny seas

   in ship of leaves and gossamer

   with blossom for a canopy,

   he sat and sang, and furbished up

   and burnished up his panoply.

~

   He tarried for a little while

   in little isles that lonely lay,

   and found there naught but blowing grass.

   And so at last the only way

   he took, and turned, and coming home with

   honeycomb, to memory

   his message came, and errand too!

   In derring-do and glamoury

   he had forgot them, journeying

   and tourneying, a wanderer.

~

   So now he must depart again

   and start again his gondola,

   for ever still a messenger,

   a passenger, a tarrier,

   a-roving as a feather does,

I’ve been playing around with this AI that completes stories, and I fed it a few Tolkien starters:

An Ordeal is an Errantry on which the Lone Power seeks to have the Wizard betray her oath with the best of intentions.

I think I’ve figured out how an Ordeal differs from an ordinary Errantry. Some spoilers for the series will follow.

An Ordeal is an Errantry on which the Lone Power seeks to have the Wizard betray her Oath with the best of intentions. It’s not enough to just die, or to give up and renounce your Wizardry, or to make a mistake. What he wants is for you to see the situation and say “Yes, I know, but,” to feel like this is the practical, sensible thing to do. Because if he can do that, he can prove the Oath is just a joke, that Wizardry is pointless, that he wins, forever.

Dairine’s Ordeal has a really good example of this. She thought giving the mobiles Wizardry would be good, and then they very nearly stopped Life — an ultimate violation of the Oath — because the Lone Power used her logic against her and they didn’t have enough experience with Life to know why it was good.

And, by this theory, Nita and Kit’s Ordeal wasn’t over with at the end of book 1; it started there but didn’t end until book 2.

For a well-sung Song, Nita was, well, not exactly willing, but content to go ahead with the plan to sacrifice herself. But what about an already-sabotaged Song? In such a case, surely the reasonable thing, the practical thing, was to find a new solution. To find some way out, so you can make things better later. And Nita spent some time considering that option.

Ultimately the Lone Power failed there for the same reason he failed with Dairine and the mobiles; he couldn’t comprehend why someone would hold that Oath higher than their own reason, and choose to give themselves away.

A long-form poem by first published in 1933, Errantry was written in a custom meter, using many euphonious, archaic words. Though Tolkien would never reattempt the difficult style, it inspired the later Song of Eärendil in the Lord of the Rings canon. Errantry was later included as a Hobbit poem born from the song, in an ironic twist of origins.