It is good to put things in sandwiches.It is bad not to put things in sandwiches.
As maxims by which to live one's life, these at least have the virtue of simplicity and memorability.
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8 comments:
I suppose one might take these maxims seriously (as you've pointed out) as simple and memorable apothegms. If one doesn't put things into sandwiches (presumably, appropriate things), then the sandwich won't be a sandwich. The standard of good here is something like letting beings be or become who they are. Implicitly, that would preclude doing them harm. So perhaps these maxims resolve themselves into the age-old moral precept of helping as much as possible and refraining from causing injury.
Interesting that you (quite naturally) deployed an image of Dagwood to illustrate the notions which the post conveys. Dagwood is of course famous for his utterly distinctive, well-nigh titanic sandwiches. According to the criterion which the cited maxims supply, the angel is encouraging Dagwood to "make the sandwich", whilst the devil's advocating contrariwise. It's tempting to entertain the idea that the true sandwiches under consideration here are our very selves, understood as exercising a power of self-creation.
If you didn't put anything in a sandwich, it would be "bread alone," by which we are told man is not to live.
The word Sandwich originally referred to a "Sandy Harbor". I am thinking maybe Avallonde, here - the harbor of Eressea. The name in that form meant "Haven of the Gods". Following this train of thought, and thinking on your good vs. bad to put things in sandwiches definitions, all the way back at the beginning 96 out of the 144 first elves decided to go back to Eressea, arriving in Avallonde. This was good. The other 1/3 did not, staying outside of the 'sandwich', I guess. This was bad.
I think Hawaii actually is the symbolic connection for me that supports this guess as to the sandwich reference. The Hawaiian islands were named the Sandwich Islands by Cook, so in this particular link Hawaii = Sandwich. The name Hawaii is said to come from the polynesian word which meant "Place or home of the Gods". Since one definition of Haven/ Harbor is a "dwelling", the translations of Hawaii and Avollonde can be fairly synonymous.
Eressea itself is part of what we would call Aman, and at its root Aman means "good (morally), blessed, holy, unmarred, free from evil", and ultimately is the Blessed Realm which we would refer to as Heaven or the Celestial kingdom.
Given that Sandwich = Eressea = Heaven, I wonder if it being good to put things in sandwiches is tied in any way to Jesus' teaching to lay up treasures in heaven. Looking that up right now in the 3 Nephi version of Jesus' Sermon, it was interesting to note that Jesus immediately followed up that specific teaching about light and dark eyes (or at least single eyes associated with either light or dark) since a light and dark eye is a symbol you have been writing about here:
"The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"
Meant to write "followed up that specific teaching about laying treasures up in heaven with a teaching about light and dark eyes..."
Thinking on this more in the morning, I think replanting the lilies that were destroyed on Eressea by Pharazon is perhaps another direct interpretation of putting things into sandwiches being a good thing. That has been mentioned before as part of the restoration of Eressea and the repentance of the Numenoreans.
The Hawaii symbolic connection was another clue to this. The Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown via a coup, with the last queen of the kingdom named Lili’uokalani, or Lili for short. Interestingly, part of her name translates as “burning pain”, so combining languages we have a reference to the burning lilies. I had once referenced a dream which I linked the symbolic representation of a college girlfriend with Eowyn and the recovery of the Ithil Stone after events of LOTR. I had noted her name was Lillie. She was named after the Hawaiian queen.
Two additional thoughts:
First, tying to the Hawaii-Sandwich-Eressea symbolic thread, in Tolkien's early stories, the queen of the Tol Eressea was named Meril-i-Turinqi, which translates to "Queen of Flowers". So, it is interesting that I tied the Queen of Hawaii to Eressea via mention of the "Lili" in her name. I had mentioned Meril-i-Turinqin in a comment on your post, also linking her to Eowyn in that train of thought.
Second, I think the selection of Dagwood with the angel and devil on his shoulder is interesting. They are on opposite sides, but they do call to mind the light and dark lense imagery. But what came to mind was one of the common threads I had teased out in relation to Pharazon and King Noah. In both cases, these individuals had this experience of having to choose between good and bad voices that they could, at least for a moment, clearly discern. In Noah's case, he wanted to let Abinadi go at the end - some voice was telling him this was the right thing to do. But the other voice, as spoken through the words of his evil priests, ultimately prevailed and he murdered Abinadi. With Pharazon, at least in Tolkien's brief account of his assault, Pharazon almost turned back - again some voice seemed to have given him one last chance. In both stories, neither man was past hearing that good influence or recognizing the evil that their acts represented, before the moment passed and the window shut.
Dagwood Bumstead is an interesting name in this context, by the way. It looks like Dagwood gets at a "Shining Forest, Bright Wood, or Shining One's Forest" and Bumstead refers a "place where the reeds grow"... i.e., a swamp or marsh.
On swampy-marshy topics, the other thought that came to my mind on sandwiches was the account of Peter's vision of the unclean animals. He saw a large sheet held be four corners descending with all sorts of unclean animals in it. Given that the original sandwich was specifically thin slices of meats contained within bread, depending on the how the sheet was portrayed, I imagined this as either an enclosed or open-faced sandwich. That vision also inherently contained definitions of what was "good"... anything that God had cleansed and put into that sandwich.
No joke, I just now did an image search of how artists might have portrayed Peter's vision, and this is one of the first thumbnail images that came up, which caught my attention for obvious reasons:
https://americantorah.com/2018/11/20/white-sheets-creepy-crawlies-and-unclean-people/
I mean, in scanning the article, there is no mention of spiders at all in it, nor in Peter's vision, so what a random image selection to go along with the article and to come up in my search.
How bizarre! The spider pictured is even a jumping spider.
A pig would have been the natural choice to represent the idea of ritually unclean animals (and, via the Ham pun, people), which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the sandwich:
Why should no man starve on the deserts of Arabia?
Because of the sand which is there.
How came the sandwiches there?
The tribe of Ham was bred there and mustered.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2024/06/nautical-newts.html
Another sandwich that has been featured on this blog is the Elvis:
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2024/06/i-jowly-chim-chim-ate-elvis.html
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