Tolkien has a beautiful origin story for the world he created. In the beginning was Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme being. Ilúvatar made the Ainur, powerful spirits akin to angels, then offered them musical themes and invited them to sing. Together they wove an enormous, beautiful cosmic symphony: creative, harmonious, profoundly meaningful. Everything was perfect.
But one of the Ainur was not content. Melkor, the mightiest of them, wanted songs of his own, and tossed dissonance like a grenade into the cosmic choir. Ilúvatar doesn’t stop him. Instead, in the strange and beautiful heart of the story, he takes Melkor’s discord and weaves it into the greater Music, until the rebellion itself becomes part of a composition richer than it would have been without it.
“He that attempteth this,” Ilúvatar says of Melkor, “shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” And from that Music, discord and all, the world itself was made: Middle-earth, its Hobbits, Elves, and wizards, the whole nine yards.
This little myth is wrestling with one of humanity’s oldest questions. The fancy word for it is theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil, suffering, and injustice with belief in a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. At its widest, though, it’s a question that doesn’t even require God: can brokenness itself somehow serve something greater than its own intent? The hopeful answer involves a kind of spiritual jiu-jitsu — the good takes evil’s own force and turns it, until the very thing that meant to destroy becomes an instrument of something it could never have imagined.
It’s a powerful premise. It’s also one that can console or curdle, sometimes both at once. Because there is a world of difference between saying the wound was good and saying good can come from the wound. The first is a lie, and a cruel one to tell anyone in real pain. The second is the actual, harder hope.
But notice how much the traditions are claiming. Not merely that good outweighs the bad, or outlasts it, or wins in the end. Something stranger: that the darkness itself can be transmuted — that the very stuff of the wound can become the substance of the light. And yet this is never automatic, and never retroactive permission. The transfiguration is something achieved, not something that was quietly true all along.
The evil, while it was evil, was evil. What redeems it is the difficult work that comes after — and some darkness is never redeemed at all. The claim is not that everything broken was secretly whole. It’s that broken things can, sometimes, through great labor, become the source of a wholeness they themselves could never have contained.
This theme surfaces everywhere: in art, philosophy, religion, and, of course, in storytelling.
Kabbalah has its own creation story. In the beginning was the Ain Sof, the Infinite Light. To “make room” for something other than itself, the Ain Sof contracted — a withdrawal the Kabbalists call tzimtzum — until a nearly empty void remained, and within that void the Infinite created physical reality. But the vessels meant to hold the light of creation couldn’t withstand its force, and they shattered. The light and the broken shards tumbled downward and came to rest in the material world: countless sparks of holiness embedded in hardened shells that conceal them.
These dark knots of fallen reality are what we call evil. And in order to survive, evil feeds, in true vampiric fashion, on the imprisoned light within it. Humanity’s work is to break through these husks — in people, in circumstances — and redeem the lost remnants of Infinity trapped inside. When we do, the spark is freed and elevated, and the shell, now broken open and cut off from what fed it, withers and dies. A piece of evil has been transmuted into light. It is slow work, and mostly unfinished: the sparks are freed one at a time, and the world is not yet whole.
Rumi opens his masterwork, the Masnavi, with the Song of the Reed. The reed cries because it has been cut from the reed-bed, torn from its source. And yet, paradoxically, it is that very severing that lets the reed sing: the wound is the opening from which the sound emerges. The hole cut into it is the mouth through which the music comes.
Which raises a question about our own wounds. How many shattered, dark, and lost places in a soul turn out to be the springboards of genius, of artistic brilliance, of hard-won compassion? How many hopeless and sorrowful experiences carry, hidden inside them, a radiance that is only waiting, and struggling, to burst forth?
We have no shortage of reminders. Darth Vader is nothing but an angry, lonely Anakin Skywalker. Gollum is a corrupted Sméagol who has forgotten how to be anyone else. The Grinch is a lonely creature who has convinced himself he hates the very thing he most wants to belong to. Two of the three found their way back. We are like them, carrying our own discord, our own severed halves, our own missing shards. The music isn’t finished. How will it end for us?
The distinction between the wound being good and good coming from the wound is worth applying directly to language I use constantly, entropy and creative complexity as partners in one motion. That phrasing risks exactly the collapse this piece is warning against, making destruction sound quietly redemptive by default rather than something that requires actual, difficult, uncertain labor to become anything other than simply destructive.