Not Far Enough From Mount Doom
To my mind, everything came from food, you see. You could say fire, I’ll grant you that. Fire what gave us light in darkness, what chased away shadows in the caves, what gave movement to the animals we drew on the walls, sure. But we would have stayed there, in the caves, staring at the movement of the flames flickering across the stones, might have starved there, enraptured, had we not had stomachs that said in no uncertain terms, “Oi, you! Get you to hunting! Taste them berries, that fungus, that grass. Fill this ache inside your gut else you’ll never fill the ache in your heart.”
S'pose it was when we saw the fire was hungry and gave it meat and herbs, when we cooked our foods and thereby fed our brains, that is, as far as I can reckon, when everything started. Cooked foods fed us better, that’s the truth. And better fed meant we spent less time hunting and gathering and more time with our paints. Better food meant we had time to spend and we did. Time is the ultimate of riches, time not worrying over empty stomachs could be used to think beyond the next meal, you see. Time to wonder if a kept animal would be easier than a hunted animal, a kept field better than hoping for a harvest. Kept food led to prosperity and therefore the possibility of scarcity. Food gave us a future, and with it the worry and anxiety that went beyond a grumbling tummy.
Do you know why we started writing things down? It was for counting the grain. After the harvest, we’d set up storage to keep it for the winter. And since we knew winter would end, we knew the cycle would keep going, we could prepare, but that meant counting to make sure we had enough to last. We may have had words for eons already, but it wasn’t until we had harvests to count that we thought of writing it down. So, then we didn’t just have the future, we had the past, old words that lived after the writers were gone. I reckon with the knowing of the past came the idea of fame, of being known beyond the limits of spoken words, being known in the future by people you would never meet. Imagine that. Infamy, legend, myth, immortality coming about because we needed to count the grain.
Now I reckon that the whole of civilization came about because of food and I see you doubting me but just think. We may have prayed to the darkness, the spirits of animals or earth or sky to bring about food in our desperate hours. We may have wept salt tears upon finding fresh berries or an unsoiled corpse upon which to feast in the dark of winter. But it wasn’t until we began planning, thinking in seasons, that we began to realize how small we are, how little power we have over the big world. And that smallness led to making ourselves bigger on the inside, you see. We may have started feeding the fire, but we didn’t end there. We began feeding the gods and from there the gods decided we might be worth notice.
It might have been better if we’d let the gods alone to sleep, to forget their old grudges and let us alone. It might have saved us the long wars, the droughts, the famines, the weeping of the widows clawing at the sky. P’raps the mountain would have lain quiet, its heart of fire doused for all time, rather than stirred to flame and greed by the Dark One. For us, it don’t matter much, do it. The smoke what comes is just as deadly as the blades of orcs or elves. The sulfur and brimstone don’t care if we call to Morgoth or Manwe or even to the One that is all. Which is to say, it brings a hard death that cares not which god we claim nor what lives we’ve led nor whether are hearts be pure as Silmarils or black is the bones of the earth. And since there is naught that will divert it, I says we drink deep of my best beer and let the sleep come that we may walk in greener pastures in the next times.
We can hope that the next peoples will have the sense to keep to their harvests and worry not the gods and wizards about noticing their small worries, lest the big worries devour them afore they know what’s come.