The Everyday Anarchism podcast had an episode, Tolkien’s Romantic Anarchy, that gave me very many thoughts & feelings that I’m going to barf out here.
Yes, Tolkien is a Catholic fossil who built a world of eugenic-flavored world of racialized and patriarchal hierarchy, but you can tell he didn’t want to live in Minas Tirith with the courtly remnants of the Numenorians. He wanted to live in the Shire, where the fanciest gentlehobbits still had relationships with their farmer neighbors and gardeners.
They were talking about how most people, conservative, liberal, or progressive, idealize that village life with lots of relationships and nature. (Put a pin in that.) Because obviously that’s how the fascists reel em in, the weaponized airbrushed fairytale picture of the free, good life, where the men are men, and the slurs and the scapegoats are pushed out.
But in trying to avoid that pitfall, we leftier people lose out on that joy of second breakfasts and frolicing around in waistcoats and dirndls. I am that bitch whose algorithm is narrowed down on all the hobbitcore and cottagecore and crafting content and is dangerously close to the tradwife pipeline. I live in the tension where I’m next door to the fun cosplay queers but also the conspiracy theorists who want me trap me in the kitchen as a pregnant household appliance.
But because the people yearn for the village life, we need that playful imagination to apply to urban living. We need a nice version of RETVRN in small towns where they have the freedom from car dependence (choo choo MF) and aren’t desperate and scrabbling to afford the cheapest shit shipped in from overseas. My ass is from a long line of sedentary dirtstratchers, but I’m fascinated with how long humanity lived (and is sometimes currently living) in semi-nomadic patterns for millions of years and what that might look like in the modern age with a preference for plumbing and lugging all the sweet, sweet modern gadgets around. (I’m not in the camping hobby, so I don’t know what kind of hobbyist infighting they have about low-tech or high-tech.)
I need people to do more of this creative play with me, preferably people who are better about getting them words out and published on AO3 or other platforms. (I quit Wattpad a million years ago, and I don’t know what good options there are for original fics.)
I grew up outside a large town, and I lived in a village of about 300 people for a few years. Mud hut, water from the well, farming millet to survive. It’s hard work to be sedentary dirtscratchers, and it’s a simple and exhausting life. I liked it when I had energy for it, but I liked it when I was able to escape from it sometimes as well.
The thing about village life is it’s rarely interesting, and it’s very insular. It’s simple life because things rarely happen that deviate from the norm. Changes are slow and often points of friction because once people settle into a groove, dealing with change takes energy. Gossip is the news and the news is gossip. Even in larger villages, modern villages a 20 minute drive from a highway, humans require a lot of work to get to a point where a resilient community can run on autopilot to some degree. Someone is always pissed about something, or paranoid about something. If you don’t spend time and energy to get along with everyone, and you’re not already cool with everyone else, then you quickly become the outcast, untrusted, uncared for, and unable to participate in regular community building.
But when shit hits the fan, everyone is up to help everyone else. The pent up energy of 2 months of monotony being released through ritual and music and dance is amazing.