we dash.
Now back to the hall, and not a moment too soon. Now listen! The orchestra pit is bustling, practicing the traditional clarion call of invocation (once upon a time!) and the flourish of finale, nearly always in a major key (happily ever after!). But if Northrop Frye has taught us to read literature as a seasonal progression — spring comedy, summer romance, autumnal tragedy, and winter satire or irony — once again the fairy tale eludes classification, for it can be all of these at once, and more besides. Midrash, parable, griot’s begats; pourquoi, koan, and cautionary fable.
And between these time-honored flourishes of salve and farewell, we’ll hear the many sounds of a story’s spell. The royal procession: a trumpet voluntary. The afternoon of a faun: a flute masquerading as panpipes. The score may include a glockenspiel-and-sitar cacophony or a maddened piccolo tarantella. It may feature the clicking of bamboo rods and harp glissades to suggest transformations, recipes, revelations. The kettledrum for war. The rattle of aluminum sheeting for jeremiad and storm. The cello for lament.
The woodwinds cover everything else — the oboe for the duck, the clarinet for the cat, as we remember. And always die Zauberflote for the sound of magic. The flute for the mechanical nightingale; the flute for a change in the winds; the flute for the riddle, the rhyme, and the moral.
What moral? What is all this for? The moral, about which we may argue long after we go home — we may argue for centuries — is sometimes a couplet, stapled upon the end like a gospel amen, and sometimes a secret, coiled and arbitrary and encoded within the syllables of the script, the syllables of what is said and left unsaid. Useful to remember what Erik Christian Haugaard, translator from the Danish of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, suggested: “The fairy tale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.”
We’ll have to take that on faith until we experience what follows, so hush, settle your coats under your seats. They are tuning up the magic. It’s almost time.
But what time is this? What is the time of the tale? Our program is cunning and obscure on the matter. Jane Langton, writer of evanescent and everyday fantasies for children, holds that the tale takes place sometime between the fall of Constantinople and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Accurate enough, or perhaps I mean vague enough; but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn’t hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.
Indeed — I’m gabbling now, in a whisper, for the houselights are dimming — the time of the tale, nearly upon us, is perhaps its greatest mystery. For, if anything else about it is dubious or nonessential, faerie’s agency stems from its capacity to be mysteriously non sequitur. It is equally at home when it struts as ancient myth as when it postures as Pre-Raphaelite faux medieval chanson or capers as nonsense nursery rhyme. We recognize faerie from a long time ago in a galaxy far away. We recognize faerie vitally alert on the island of Ariel and Caliban and the magician Prospero. We know faerie even when it goes viral, as we encounter it in Hollywood’s Cindergirl of the hour, caught this very moment on today’s blogs and tabloids. But put away that cell phone and stop Googling her. We’re attending deeper mysteries than Hollywood generally knows how to handle.
For, in faerie, how far are we, really, from the darkness brooding over the water and from the spirit of the Almighty breathed into the clay? How far from mistletoe and blood sacrifice, from the ancient transactions of scapegoating and ransom? How far from the flame-winged angel in a hundred biblical dreams, how far from Marley in chains or the phantom on the ramparts of Elsinore? How far from the savanna where the leopard got his spots or from the night sky of the frozen north, east of the sun and west of the moon, featuring the spangled celestial figures of myth? Faerie is born of the oldest question of our individual lives and of our species: why?
In faerie, how far are we from the golem? the reindeer on the roof? the lilies on the altar? the incense rising to the oculus? How far from the salt thrown over the shoulder, the blessing that follows the sneeze? How far from the presentation of our newborn to the village of life, how far from the presentation of our corpse to the necropolis of the lost? We cannot stop wondering why, and so faerie is nearer than we know.
Faeirie is origin and eschatology, writ cunning and runic. It speaks to darknesses on both sides of the glare of life, that glare brighter than spotlights.
We recognize it still — as adults — because our capacity to appreciate it was honed not only in the childhood of the race but in our own early years.
The stage before us will be shallow, its width limited. But how far from the raison d’etre of faerie lies that other infinity of magic, the unmoored tale for children? How many miles to Babylon? How far to the lamppost in the snowy wood, the hole in the ground in which there lived a hobbit, the academies for wizards and witches? How far to the nanny goddess with the parrot-head umbrella, to the white rabbit in its Wonderland, to the tin woodsman on its own yellow road, to the boy clad in oak leaves who won’t grow up?
How far from faerie to the wild wood, the greenwood, the Hundred Acre Wood; to the riverbank perfect for messing about in boats and to the Flood with its floating menagerie; to Mary Lennox’s secret garden and to the Kensington Gardens, to Primrose Hill echoing with the twilight barking, to the Parisian ascenseur at the old Samaritaine hoisting a green-suited elephant and an Old Lady, to the articulate and articulated spiderweb in the sunlit rural doorway? Every domesticated stuffed bear or bunny fallen beneath your child’s bed is related not only to Piglet and the Velveteen Rabbit but to the animals coiled in marginalia in medieval psalters, and to the animals at the manger memorialized in colored glass and in song, and the animals painted in black and blood on the walls of the ancient caves of the Pyrenees.
Turn off your cell phones, now. Sit back. Sit up. Pay attention or pay none. What will happen happens whether you pay heed or not, but what happens is sometimes called eucatastrophe — Tolkien again — or consolation. “The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation,” says Roger Scruton, the British philosopher with whom I disagree on many other matters, but not this — but enough of my quoting. The velvet curtains part, side to side, like a parent playing peekaboo.
Luminaires panning, tilting, candlepower intensifying. Color gels shifting: the red of riding hoods, the Turkish blue chalcedony of Ottoman beards, the Lincoln green of Sherwood Forest, the silver of that apple of the sun, the golden of that apple of the moon. Is that Hans Christian Andersen’s face projected on the scrim, with a saying in Danish scribbled in his own hand below? “Life itself is the most Wonderful of Fairy Tales.”
Maybe we should have brought that bubbly; but there’s something being served here more deeply inebriating than champagne. Hush.
The scrim rises into the fly space. An ancient skeleton approaches in a cloak of evergreen. Lean forward to hear what it says. “Now listen…” What will we make of it this time? What will it make of us?
JOY WILLIAMS. Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child
BABA IAGA HAD A DAUGHTER, A PELICAN CHILD. THIS DID NOT PLEASE her particularly. The pelican child was stunningly strange and beautiful as well as being very very good, which pleased Baba Iaga even less. It was difficult to live as a pelican in the deep dark woods, but the pelican child never seemed to think she belonged to any place other than here with her bony, ill-tempered Baba and the cat and the dog. They all lived in a little hut on chicken legs and they were not uncomfortable. Baba Iaga did not care for visitors, so when anyone approached, the chicken legs would move in a circle, turning the house so that the visitor could not find the door. This, too, was acceptable to them all.
When Baba Iaga went away — which she did frequently though she always always returned — she would warn the dog and cat and her beautiful pelican child against allowing strangers into the house. Even if they do not appear as strangers, don’t let them in, Baba Iaga said. And she would go off on her strange errands in her iron mortar, which she would row through the heavens with a pestle. Often she would return with little fishes which the pelican and the cat relished and the dog did not. The dog had his own cache of food which he consumed judiciously — never too much and never too fast — though he did not hoard it. He was generous and noble to a fault really, though he was shabby and ferocious-looking.
One afternoon when Baba Iaga was away, a tall, somewhat formally attired man approached the house. The chicken legs immediately went into rotation so that the door could not be found. (Really, the legs looked as if they weren’t even awake, but in fact they never slept.)
I have heard there is a beautiful bird here, the man shouted out, and I would like to draw her. He waved a
