You're Living in Your Own Private Hieroglyphs
The odd pleasure of not being able to understand your own notes so that you seem mysterious to yourself. Which, of course, you are ...
I’m about to attempt (just an attempt, just a play, it’s okay) to write an essay for Orion magazine after seeing their call for submissions about fairytales and the environment. Maybe I could write something about how I really hate, loathe, despise the term “the environment” and that until we despise it too much to use it, maybe we won’t be getting very far in terms of being able to switch off the incessant tap shitting on her. Not until we begin to understand how creepily removed and separated and non-intimate it is to refer to the big giant thing upon which we depend as “the environment” as if she’s a thing. It’s like having passionate sex with someone and then calling them Mr Phillips afterwards, you know? It’s weird. She has so much mystery to her, so much depth and wisdom, so much beauty, beyond the thin and creepy way we’ve come to relate to her, from here inside the polyp-ridden colon of the kali yuga.
Anyway, so I guess I could rant and rave about that but what else do I think about fairytales and the earth? My first thought goes to selkies, probably because I was chatting with my new bud Laura about them other day and also the other week. I think of Sealskin/Soulskin, the selkie story in Women Who Run With the Wolves, about the woman who is both seal and both woman, and who is lured onto land for love, and whose husband gives into his fear and turns into a dumbass who takes her skin away from her because he’s scared she’ll go back to the sea, but then she does anyway because it’s part of her nature to and he never should have stopped her in the first place. Then I think of the quote by GK Chesterton that I liked so much it was in my email sig for ages. It says:
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
It probably doesn’t really read very well these days, this quote, in the flattened new fuckfest of 2022, but there’s a lot of psychological wisdom in fairytales, a wisdom that can’t be gotten at if your first response is a bright fluorescent shiny Disney one, or the one social media has entrained you to have, which probably has something to do with worrying that there’s a suspicion that someone somewhere will think you’re a white supremacist if you think any further about this quote, that it might mean you’re a violent Nazi and you’ll get in trouble with PfizerUnileverAuthorityDaddy, rather than it being about the necessity of doing internal work. Lucky we don’t need to do any of that kind of stuff anymore, as the shiny uncomplicated children of the Stepford Society and God, isn’t everything so fucking tiresome at this tiresome fucking time.
Regarding dragons, I’ve seen this Chesterton quote use the terms “monsters” instead of dragons, which I think I kinda like better. Now that I’ve been consulting the I Ching for long enough, when I see the word dragons I feel a little startled until I remember this is the western dragon, the serpent; it seems a different creature entirely to the Chinese dragon, who is a creature of auspice, bringing creative yang force on his wings.
But I always liked that quote, and how it might appear at first glance to be just some call to violence Twitter will need to ban you from your account for, but which is really a call to arm children with non-Disneyfied, still-dirt-encrusted stories that give them psychological internal strength to battle the leering monsters of their childhood psyches and yell Babadook back.
I went to Joplin (like Evernote, but free) to see what notes to myself I’d recorded there about fairytales. I knew I must have made several in the past that I wished myself to be able to remember some time in the future about this topic. How wonderful that I found exactly what I wished to find. How often does that happen?
Unfortunately, it’s in hieroglyphics. Which is a shame because this is a most comprehensive note. I obviously had some idea there, and I really felt it important enough to splurt out all these things, to try to give a shape to the idea. The problem is, I now have no idea what the idea was:
Fishing (based on The Fisherman and the Jinny)
Four lots
Genie – four determinings – do good when release from bottle, ending in doing bad
Entice genie back into bottle with cunning – appeal to make himself smaller than able to stopper into bottle
Four tries to correspond with genie’s four intents to do bad
Earth – climate change
Hope
Genie – corresponds to environment
Corresponding anger of child to parent who deserts him:
# happy to think of seeing again, through to
# wanting to punish those who inflicted discomfort on him
In the original fairy story the fisherman gets
# dead donkey
# pitcher full of sand and mud
# potsherds and broken glass
# genie
Financial?
Image: sparkling water
Image: word image – net and net (fishing/financial)
Image: boat versus ship – global merchandise versus handmade local
Image: volcano in distance, active, scientific explanations
Image: connection, the scientific explanation (if there is one?) that we all are “one” made of the same thing
I have no idea what I am talking about here. I’m going to have to go back and read the fairytale again now, aren’t I? Which, ooh, that could be kind of fun. Sort of like getting sent by me-past on my own me-now treasure hunt so me-future can make something out of it.
Of course the problem, as it always is, is is is is is is with this terrible memory is that what if I go and read the story and I still can’t remember what me-past is talking about? I’ll feel bad then. I’ll feel bad that me-past went to all that trouble to try and capture, almost-impossible as it always is to do, those slippery little mercury drops that feel so big in your mind and so beautiful and such a gorgeous shape, that you want to make something of them. I always feel this sense of wanting to protect me-past when I read her notes that make no sense to me-now. I lumber along, me-now, like a galumphing elephant and go, duh, I dunno, ‘cause I’m feeling dull because it’s July, and CFS, and because life is very fucking hard at the moment, and because the ethers are full of angst, and I’m full of angst, and so it’s just all a bit quite angsty. And now I start getting a bit worried. I start feeling how fragile me-past looks, sitting up there, slightly caricatured, in a dusty room with bright light shining through the window, and she’s looking at me and she knows that because our memory is so shit that she is not going to be able to make the connection. That she tried, but she couldn’t get it through, couldn’t get it down well enough for it to be able to reach through time, to the time when me-now would make the time to make an essay at making an essay.
Still, there’s beauty in the trying.
And maybe even, if I take a breath and let it out slowly, a beauty too in the not-being-able-to-reach. A July one, with spindled branches, but a beauty all the same.