sqwook | The beautiful and terrible world of the fairytale

In (dreams) you can remember what it was like to be stupidly happy, when happiness wasn’t something you had to search for, when it knew where to find you by itself. You can remember how an object can be a talisman that you needed to hold close, how that new toy /had/ to be kept on the bedside table so that it would be there when you awoke. You can remember how it felt to have your mother’s arms around you when she was hugging you just because she loved you, and you weren’t too old to be embarrassed. You can remember why you used to run just for the sake of it, how it felt to have all the energy in the world, how it was to know that you would do the same things tomorrow, and the same the day after that, that nothing would ever change except for the better and that there was nothing that couldn’t be put right. For a little while you can feel yourself whole, feel all of your years, feel the child and the adult in you suddenly join hands and stand together, gripping each other so tightly that they melt into one. (…)
What do you think the important things in your life are about, the things that make you happy? Like loving someone, loving them so much that you reach out your arms to hold and be held. (…)
You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you.

-- From Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith

I just re-read Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith. It was one of my favorites. One of my good friends in college chanced to pick it up at the London airport coming back from foreign study, and loaned it to my best friend Adam & to me in turn. We loved it, read it over & over, stayed up all hours talking about it.

Why did I love it so much then? Do I love it still now? How has my reading of it changed?

I think the way the author describes childhood and the world of dreams in this quoted passage can be seen as a way of describing your inner self. I find myself ‘staring goggle-eyed’ in wonder at the world often enough even now. On a good day, I can get as startled by a red flower as by an exquisite painting. And… love. Yes. All of that is really fundamental to the person I consider myself to be.

I loved the story then, because it starts out funny, silly, and witty, and then shatters all your expectations. My first time reading it, I set down the book after reading almost half-way through. The next morning, I picked up the book again, starting with Chapter 11, and I felt like I must have somehow picked up the wrong book. The world of the book had shifted utterly, to the point that I had to go back to the previous chapter and read through to that point again, because the shear was so profound.

That feeling of are-things-what-they-seem is fundamental to fairytales. Fairytales, or maybe any powerful stories, are not all happiness and light. There is often serious darkness and tragedy. Consequences come inevitably if not swiftly, and they are often severe, seemingly irrevocable, and as arbitrary as many of the circumstances of so-called ‘real life’. Sometimes those consequences are also extraordinarily wonderful. The point is, the consequences are not predictable, and getting different results may require a huge amount of hard work by the protagonist and/or others.

(The musical ‘Into The Woods’ by Stephen Sondheim has the same motif: life as equal parts magic-and-wonder and tragedy-and-hard-work. And that you can (mostly) get through, if you can keep going. I’m a big fan.)

This time as I re-read the book, it made me cry, which surprised me. I think this time around, I may have been more focused on the interpersonal tragedy of the main characters as opposed to the wonder and mystery of the world. I found myself thinking that it was more difficult, emotionally, than I recalled, and that I might not be so quick to pick it up in the future for that reason.

So, ‘Only Forward’, fairytales, ‘Into The Woods’, and other stories that stop me in my tracks. What themes do they have in common?*

The world can be beautiful & magical & wonderful & powerful.
And still it can be dangerous, despite/because of all that.
Sometimes you, or someone else, will do something that will have a consequence, wonderful or terrible, that you can’t predict.
We all make mistakes. Dealing with consequences is appropriate. So is compassion.
You have the strength to go on. You are beautiful, magical, wonderful, and powerful, too. And you are telling this story.

tl;dr: The stakes in life are high, and utterly worth it.

*Interestingly, my favorite non-fiction authors, Kathleen Dean Moore and Annie Dillard, can /also/ be said to write along these themes. Whoa. Whoa.