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The dark times in your life can turn you right back around once you understand them. And turn into light.

And The Two Towers is the dark midpoint of Lord of the Rings - a midpoint upon which I became fixated, in 1971, because it represented the root of my deep depression that year.

But it also hinted at its cure.

In 1971 I was blindly self-obsessed, and because of that vulnerability had been checkmated and rendered hors de combat by the forces of salubrity. Frodo is captured, though, by an evil force.

Golum is the reverse of good health. He represents the quality of evil self-obsession and is up to no good. So Frodo becomes the captive of Golum's evil.

Before 1970 I had been ignorant of such evil. I had lived for the day - then, this.

I had been captured by my own gruesome Golum. The shrinks have a label for that - but that's OK - my interlocutors know I've thereby seen more than most.

Whose fault was that? My own. In reaction to correction, I became morosely resentful of all the forces of Good. Golum had commandeered my soul.

I just didn't get it then. Later I would see that good and evil are mixed in us all.

But back then I chose a world of self, like Golum. In a dark cave.

Jesus, at one point of the Gospel says He came to make all things new. To see that vision of newness in our own lives, we have to accept the entire mixture of good and evil that is ourselves - and our world.

The world is round - we have to utterly Flatten our private world through self-knowledge to see we are ourselves at the heart of the round World we see around us - a part of its good, and its largely unconscious evil.

Frodo doesn't wear white, and neither does Golum wear black. We are ALL culpable, but we are all Free.

Frodo is not free now, in The Two Towers - but Lord of the Rings is the story of his eventual freeing from the knots of good and evil.

To be free, he must freely cast his fate to the wind:

And his Precious Ring into Mount Doom.