The Triumph of Gollum in the Land of Shut-Up

From the Fiery Forges on Hope Mountain, the political climate change, blowing winds of change over the land, whipped up a great fury.

‘Over the ages, it had blown regimes in and out of offices, in the gathering storm of a national sigh, that was meant to breathe life into nationhood,’ the Oracle had written in celebrating the end of one age and the beginning of another in the rebirth after the shattering of the glass ceiling. Her predictions over many millennium had won the faith of the people and with the degree of Chup came the censorship and constant harassment of recent times.

‘Though forged from the One Love of Liberty, in the fires of the
forge-smiths of the Mountain of Hopes and Dreams, where the people pounded out their iconic steelpan and tassa and other instruments of enjoyment in the 55th year, the dreams and aspirations of the people to aspire and achieve together, remained still-born. Dark clouds hung over the land casting a deathly shadow and the winds whipped up to mega hurricanes that quickly approach with sound and fury of the command, ‘attack with full force.’

The Twin Towers

‘The Twin Towers of Powers –The Tower of the Rising Sun and the Tower of the Raging Bull – under the command of the Lady of the Lagoon and the Captain of the Enterprising Corbeau Star Ship, respectively, reigned, with each maintaining an iron grip on their respective side of the One Ring,’ wrote the Oracle on the leaves of the whimpering trees, once filled with joyous life the people had named Leaves of Life.

‘Between the Twin Towers lapped the Ocean of Creative Milk on which had breastfed the several tribes. Each of the Twins were given a chance to lead, in turn, but both had become ensnared by the mesmerizing Power of the
Ring, forged in the fires of Mount Doom and Gloom, infused with the antra of the Mount:

One Ring To Rule Them All, One Ring To Find Them,

One Ring To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

‘Enveloped in complicity in the darkness, are they now. The reflection off the waters of the once milky, now murky ocean show a twin likeness. The dark obsessive power has for eternity, bound them, and as their predecessors, they gaze into each other’s eyes with fury and madness, shaking fists that echo across the hollow halls of the Parliament of Owls in their shouts of fury signifying nothing:

“As long as you are there, I will be here!” thunders one, or
the other, in turn.

‘From the Tower of the Raging Bull, it has been said, teacups bereft of their partner sauces were hurled out to whizz past to graze the face of the Swami and into the swamplands. Under the grip of the ring, in the hunger for power, each had in turn gnashed at and torn to shreds the national dreams
and maimed, mutilated and even killed those who chanted its anthem, forged from the One Love of Liberty, in the fires of the Mount of Hopes and Dreams.’

The Oracle Sounds a Suicidal Note

That was extracted from the archives of the Oracle after she designated
her collection of musings as her suicide note, turned on the music of the final soundtract of the Fellowship, May It Be by Enya, (linked here with lyrics below).

It was not yet her eleventy-first year as was the date established by Bilbo Baggins, the heroic Hobbit of her ancestral lineage, but she was ready to give up the office and pass it on to her successor in whom she had all confidence.

As the music played, mouthing her last appeal: ‘Oh! How far you are from
home/Darkness has come/Believe and you will find your way/ A promise
lives within you now,’ she calmly and purposefully threw a sheet over
the rafters in her bedroom, put her head through the noose and lifted her all seeing gaze to the awesome wonder of the united universe of musical spheres from which she had been banished when her eyes were gorged out, her heart pierced and she was left to drift into madness. All this is detailed in her eleventy-volumed autobiography including No Country to Die
For; Life, Hole Heartedly; Letters to Lizzie, Grain of Sand among a long
catalogue of illustrious elucidations that follow on the line of intellectual humanism established by her grandsire Baggins in his book of Hobbit life, There and Back Again.

The ancient pathologist heard the music still playing when he came to take her mortal remains away two millennium later, as the stereo was in repeat mode. Burdened by the scourge of deaths and piles of bodies to work through and the accompanying pressures to censure his conclusions, he left this small detail out of the autopsy report in case there may be a new
dictum banning musical sounds that emanated naturally from people’s throats when they were sad. He found the music soothing to his troubled and weary spirit and felt himself lovingly fingering the sheet and nooze, but quickly caught himself. As he finished his task which was not much because the body was already significantly decayed and only the bones were left to scoop up and feed to the vultures who had hungered after her, he let the music play as he hummed along:

May it be an evening star

Shines down upon you

May it be when darkness falls

Your heart will be true

You walk a lonely road

Oh! How far you are from home

Mornie utulie (Darkness has come)

Believe and you will find your way

Mornie alantie (Darkness has fallen)

A promise lives within you now

May it be the shadow’s call

Will fly away

May it be you journey on

To light the day

When the night is overcome

You may rise to find the sun

Mornie utulie (Darkness has come)

Believe and you will find your way

Mornie alantie (Darkness has fallen)

A promise lives within you now

A promise lives within you now

They said this Oracle had a bright future as an orator – a lawyer or a parliamentarian as a distinguished Independent Senator – but it was the despairing thought of THAT future that nudged her over the edge to her final act of surrender, a close friend intimated during the long funeral march up the Mounting of Hope and Dreams where she was laid to rest among peers.

Everyone knew though that if she were to conduct her own funeral or her defense in a court of law or in a parliamentary debate, she would have cited the case of a former Mayoress and a long list of precedents of those who have confronted foxes, rottweilers, and beasts of every land and clime of the ancient world and the new, whose bodies lie mauled and mutilated in the Constitutional cemetery, kicked at, scorned, scoffed at, disrespected and spat at only for their desire to serve.

It was engraved in the culture of the land ruled by pitbulls, rottweilers, foxes and the like, and she knew to her dying day that having nurtured the hounds, they too would suffer the same humiliations from their hungry and bloodthirsty pack in the cycle of eternal returns. She would have, in summation, therefore, declared that hers was not suicide but a self-empowering resolution moved to take actions into her own hands, for in the stronghold of the aging and unwise, this was no country for creative youth.

One Love and Perpetual Partnerships

Much, indeed, had occurred in the millennium since the pledge
of One Love in the Piazza of Glowing Crowns that once was the Holiday retreat for many young lovers in the historic North, he chronicles detail.

Later too, the hopes and aspirations of nationdom was renewed and reaffirmed by solemn oath over the ancestral bones of Banwari in the accord signed at the juncture of the mythical Rivers Caroni, Oropuche and Nariva, overseered by the hovering spirit of Charlie – the revolutionary leader of free peoples, so called, though not a king by any measure. There was boundless faith in a collective destiny to stand side by side, pledging Fellowship to the Ring of Unity in Perpetual Partnership that was soon mauled by the ravenous Red and Ready rottweiler pack of hounds ravishing and relishing the jamettry. (See https://goo.gl/oCk1PB)

Odious Odes of Yore

The Ode to One Love, a prequel to the Ode to Jurisprudence
(See this page), found in her archives, were captured by the Oracle in an
incantation whispered in secret silences into the ears of the people of Chup
and Shut Up:

In the shadows of the sun, balisier blooms,

One Love ended. Had it ever begun?

In the dark and dangerous undergrowth

Lurk criminals, in forests, Wests, South, East, and North

With broken bottles murderers plunder,

While time closes in on those who blunder

The rising sun on its way down, setting,

Red glow on the balisier grow pale, dimming,

Empty ambition obscures the rainbow

Giant egos, blindness, cloud tomorrow.

Dr Kris Rampersad: In the Shadows of the Rising Sun

The Oracle would append to her suicide note as a parting gift, the Ode to One Love, as the Ode to JurisPrudence and her treatise on Cunstitutional Demokrissy and will her archives to the future enlightened nation that she knew would be spawned from the wasteland as the seeds were already planted, left drifting in the wind with the wishes and aspirations of
the silenced majority.

Snake Infested Lagoons and Balisiers

As the silent majority let the music of May It Be course through their veins, the winds of change whip-lashed through the land again, against the force-ripe Young forked-tongues of macajuels and infant warriors of the al Wari tribes. Though of illustrious roots, both had deviated from the savoury,
silken and spiced routes of their ancestors of the Orient and followed those ill-fated routes, succumbing to the mesmerising power pull in the circle of caballeros and sacrificing their souls to become – not the beacon of shining knighthood for which the people had prayed – but clones to the Dark Lord, the Captain of the Tower of the Raging Bull. Crawling out from among the balisiers that had buttressed and become rooted and mangled in the land, even creeping into the territories of the Lady of the Lagoon, they had been named as the successors of the fledgling kingdom rendering them but clones to the failures of the past.

The equal place pledged to every creed and race was no longer guaranteed unless every creed and race swore allegiance to the death to the One Ring and to let the darkness bind them, to utter not one bark, nor to break the
oath.

The Oath of Silence

The Declaration Maximus, as the oath was called, passed down from the Winner Takes All to the Loser Gets None Principles of WestMinster. It contained only two words – whispered at first, but as a collective anthem, it
soon became a shout, SHUT UP! The tribes of the lagoon translated it into their own language in one word, Chup! Thus it is passed on for generations to generations by word of mouth only, since it was posthumous to the dearly departed, dead and long forgotten Articles of Association of the Peoples Participatory Civic Movement.

Deadlocked 18-18

‘It originated with the founding forefathers against whom no man – nor woman, nor child either – dare bark,’ the Twins from the Towers claimed,
as if with one voice, in their defense, when one soldier, whipped up the spirit to draw in the last breaths from the waning courage of the wounded and dying civilisations around him to speak with their collective voice out loudly of the letter and the spirit of – Horror of Horrors – Article 18!

At the sound of the banished number 18, a collective shudder rose through the land recorded by the Seismic needles which broke in the frenzy of the tectonics upheavals. The collective breaths held in suspension rippled through the bones of all at this soldier’s daring to violate the sacrilegious oath of Shut Up. The elders quavered and trembled at the thought of his anticipated fate, could only say ‘Chup’ to the young ones with a finger over their lips, as the name of the creed, itself forgotten, had survived in practice of habit only. They had heard of the many more like him who had been relegated to the political cemetery

About Gollum

This habit of Chup or Shut Up was characterized by the sound made when words and thoughts and ideas are stuck in one’s throat and cannot get past one’s tongue. It emanated in the sound Gollum, Gollum, the only surviving
word in what used to be a rich and diversified language and celebrated tongue invented by Tolkein, a renowned linguist and scribe of the last era.

‘Gollum Gollum,’ they collectively utter in horror. They thought – because they could not utter the words – ‘He wants our Preciousss! Must have our Preciouss! We must not let him have it. We must guard the Preciouss for our master.’

The Gollum agent of Anti-Health

It is the same utter they have stuttered time and time again when the occasional one or the other raised a hand to express a new idea, that
may help evolve out of the rotting wasteland that lay around them, before they are relegated to the political cemetery on Calvary Hill. But each time a
thought or idea surfaced it got stuck in their throat even before it could move past their tongues and out emerged instead, gollum.

Some thought the Gollum infection was injected into the millimeter of green glob they were made to swallow daily as their liquid ration. The suspicion
arose because the chief proponent of Gollum once held the portfolio as the
Agent of Anti-Health in the department of infectious diseases. With fear
resonating like pools in their hollowed-out macabre eyes, whatever they tried to say came out only as:

‘Gollum Gollum.’ Those in the know, interpret it silently as, ‘He wants our Preciousss! She wants our Preciouss. Must have our Preciouss! We must not let them have it. We must guard the Preciouss for our master. It is ours. My Preciousss.’

The master proponent of Gollum, promoted from the department
of diseases to spread the scourge through higher channels, carried the name with what dignity he could muster from his miniscule dwarfish stature.

‘Gollum,’ was his response, when the Chambers of Trade raised
a finger to question the new tariffs.

‘Gollum,’ he gloated to the International Mouth Feeders, called in to discipline the overexuberance of the Happiest People Alive, gleefully
declaring he make them sing his anthem Gollum, for their breakfast-es, lunches and suppers to the last dayses, which will have neither bread, nor cake, but excessive doses of heavily taxed gas.

‘Gollum,’ he goaded, as the Spin Wheel dancers gathered outside his home, waving their ginormous buttocks and substantive boobs like the Dame Lorraines of the traditional myths of yore.

‘Gollum, Gollum,’ he hissed at the elfin yoked-folks of the swamps whose emaciated bodies and pained eyes poked at him for attention.

Gollum was the standard bearer of the Dark Lord of the Tower of the Raging Bull, the keeper of the Treasury and Budgets and the Habits of
Spending Hobbits who decided who could dip in and who be left bereft.

Article 18 and the DREADED 18-18 DEADLOCK

And so ‘Gollum Gollum Gollum Gollum,’ was the only word that emerged from the people inducted in the principles, practices and habits of Shut Up in the land of Chup as they were petrified in the horror-struct moment
when the soldier who had suffered through many of the regimes in silent
complicity cited Article 18.

The ancient pastime of intellectual pursuit, along with academic discussions had also been deemed by Gollum as sterile, infertile, null, void and of no consequence and thus outlawed along with cellphones, cited as the cause for sodomy and indiscipline in schools. In secret study circles,
however, where the ancient ones recalled the Oracle’s Glass Ceiling Chronicles of the Clash of Political Cultures, that there was precedent too about this Article18 and how certain generations were able to rise above its pitfalls and in the darkness uphold the light of the Rising Sun, but it was now secret knowledge, censored with the punishment listed in the equally ominous Appendix 18 with the fates that befell those who dared violate it.

Those Chronicles along with all other works by the Oracle had since been banned and banished even by the guardians of democracy and from the
seats of learning, high and low and in between. The people held their tongues.
Those who knew where the remaining copies were vaulted, maintained a stony silence about in which madman’s, or madwoman’s mind was secluded the secret sacred mantra that would unlock the invisible doors to access it. The Oracle had mentored many successors, though that was one act expressly disapproved off in Article 18.

The Unholy Dread of 18 that had acquired the resonance of myth, conjured up the horror and turmoil of the dead years of the 18-18 DEADLOCK that had lasted through twice-ten millennium when the ancestral Twins
locked horns and Tabanca Gripped the Rings of Power (See image this Page).

It was only the discovery of the trident power of the feminine, the power that resided in the rural people and power of cultural diversity that were vested by the elevensmiths in the three lost rings that surfaced among
the hobbits of Lagoonshire that had broken the mettle of the curse of the
dreaded DEADLOCK. But no one knew that and if they knew they would have forgotten had it not been inscribed by the Oracle in the Universal List of the enduring Practices and Practicums of the Illustrious Tribes of Ancient Times.

Feasts of the Matikor

Thus was the ancient origins of the elaborate ceremony preceded
by the feasts of Matikor when the Lady of the Lagoon sailed along in her garden boots, flanked by Orcs who rowed her canoe, and Dwarfs who held down the flaps of her lifejacket, waving as the waking sun rose and shone its golden light that sap up the waves that had flooded and marooned the riverine people.

For the honour of her presence – as they would do too for the honour of his gracious visit, when the Lord of the Tower of the Raging Bull as Captain of the Enterprising Corbeau Star Ship sailed in five millennium later –
they willingly took the oath of Shut Up Or Be Banished that was decreed by a single minority for the silent majority.

Each millennium, for the renewal of the vows, they would gather around silently over the two who would sit as dulaha and dulahin over the brass plate filled with water, to grab, five times at the Ring. The solemn ceremony was presided over by the ageless Gollum, who with each ritual was evidently more and more emaciated and pock-faced mirroring his internal meanness and miserliness, the visual symbol of what the nation of once-plenty, had become (as told in the Oracle’s Chronicles). For the past ten millennium, the results had been the same. They were each left hanging on to one side each and so they continued, bounded in the collective darkness of the 18-18 DEADLOCK.

One Ring To Rule Them All, One Ring To Find Them,

One Ring To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

Tolstory, Lord of the Rings

It was to be her Doom, as it would be his Doom. Just as the janjees cast deepening shadows to eclipse the rising sun, in the darkness, the orgy of snakes kept council in the Balisier too. The Twin Towers, one as fair
as the other was dark; as kind as the other was mean, became discoloured as the silhouette of snakes extended the dark tower which, as time passed, lengthen the ominous shadows over the light of the rising and the setting sun, to merge and disappear into the darkness of the skies.

Only as myth do even the oldest and the wisest know in the depth of memory buried in their DNA that The Tower of the Rising Sun had once been a beacon of light, welcoming all who had been cast out by the Tower of the Raging Bull. It had offered food and shelter and comfort and support and was a place for a diversity of tribes with convergent or divergent minds, all teeming with plan and new ideas. Opinions flowed as freely as the locally produced brew, and bashing was liberally dished out even to one another as the babashing was heartily distributed and imbibed. Those were the light years, full of fun and laughter. But those emotions too had been banished to the underworld whisperers with the Age of Glum and Gloom that descended when Article 18 was desecrated.

It was claimed that it was done in the darkness by the secret council, on the
instructions of He, or She, Who Would Not Be Named.

Now still, this many millennium later, the Twin Towers that were hoisted in a ceremony of such national chest-thumping declaration of the Commonness of Wealth of All stand still in darkness and have become strangers, enemies and alien to the inalienable rights of the peoples. More and more are thrown out and shut out and sent to build their own kutiyas, on stilts, if they wished, in the wastelands beyond the lagoonshire. The land united by one people with a common destiny is now dotted with bois-wielding moko jumbies, dodging the descending deluge of garbage and sewerage pouring out from what was once the Mountain of Hope.

The Ocean of Milk that flowed betwixt and between is turned into
a sluggish tar pit. There, strangled dead and dying fish whisper ghost tales of a mysterious OilGate spilling corruption from the Enterprising Corbeau Star Ship allegedly owned by the Captain in the Tower of the Raging Bull.

The horror intensifies when shredded documents surface among the
discarded wastes and plastics and laptops – that had been given to
schoolchildren but had fallen into disuse when the schools closed – comes
cascading down the hills, through the rivers, diverted to protect the private
property of the Gollum tribe, and hence broke their banks to flood the plains enroute to the sea which too, has lost its illustrious lustre, black and blue from such abuse.

In the gathering mist over the setting sun, scattered bones, streaks of suicidal blood trails linger over the whore houses at the riverfront – the WHARF, reputed as the Houses of Inequity despite an old etched engraving on a nearby boulder that reads, Houses of Parliament. They are mere derelicts and wrecks of those who tried to forge a bridge over the troubled waters between the Twin Towers, even brave swimming with the sharks, who – though already sated by the spills seeping through the OilGate – greedily snapped and swallowed up the materials for the bridge even before they had time to touch the ground.

Dreams of National Wholeness

The dreams for a national wholesomeness powered by governance
through engagement and inclusion of the increasingly dissatisfied elements have been thrown to the wind. Loud celebratory laughter and triumphant chest thumping carry across the waters as the minority Twins faded focus stay fixated only on consolidating the power of their increasingly diminishing fractioned tribal one-percenters, and all the rest and the remainders, and the rest of the remainders are left with no place to call home.

Shivering in fear, scarred and scared they would be sent packing into the howling rains and raging floods, without employ or food or healthy supplies for their undernourished children, many adopt the creed of Chup, and just simply Shut Up!

The silence creep and spread like poison ivy, coiling and twisting and looping and strangling all the once-spaces for discussion or reasoning or advancement of new ideas. The Twins, clutching their ends of the rings, grow old and increasingly deaf. Their once-intellects that exist only in
the chronicles have withered and whittled. Their eyes intensely gaze on
nothingness for they could see no future having created a path to none. Before them the silence hang like a great big void of the legacy of their reign. The ring, sensing their declining power, gets ready to claim its new owner. It knows that it is only a matter of time before the Twins would themselves be mauled and mutilated and sneered at and scoffed at and they will be pushed into the eternal burning flame of shamedom and disrespect that have been part of the morality of the political culture they fostered and upheld.

In the vast and bigly ensuing silence, with the regularity of breathing, only the One Word is heard emanating from either side of the Twin Towers, rippling outwards with the waves, whirling with the wind and echoing
off the stones:

‘Preciousss Preciousss Preciousss MyPreciousss Preciousss. Must
have my Preciousss’.

To those listening below, in the echoing and reverberating silence,
it had a familiar Ringggggg.

(To Be Continued)

See Prequel: Book 1: See: Tabanca Grips the Rings of Power Image,
This page.

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