Fairy Tales: East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Where is home, and whence our destination? The questions are basic. We conceive for ourselves beginnings and ends, but our goals remain forever contingent upon forces beyond our control. We owe a death at the moment of birth. Our hopes and dreams, it seems, repose east of the sun and west of the moon.

Where is that and how do we get there?

Andrew Lang recounts a fairy tale entitled "East of the Sun and West of the Moon:" A beautiful young woman lives with her family oppressed by poverty in a forest. One day a white bear knocks on the door and asks if he can have the young girl. The father relents, after being promised wealth and ease if she will go with bear.

Bear and girl arrive at a castle filled with opulence. Each night, when the lights are out, a man comes to the girl's bed. He is the white bear. She longs to see him, and she is homesick. She begs to go home to see her mother and her father.

The bear relents, but upon the condition that she never speak with her mother alone about the life she shares with bear. She agrees, but, of course, once home, tells her mother of the mysterious man-bear with whom she lives. The mother counsels use of a candle to sneak a peak at the man at night.

Once back in the castle with the bear, the girl looks at the sleeping figure and discovers he is a handsome man. He awakens and some of the wax from the candle stains his shirt. He is crestfallen and explains that he has been bewitched, condemned to live for one year as a bear by day and a man by night. Because the girl had looked at him, he must now return to castle of the witch who cast a spell on him. The castle is far, far away, east of the Sun and west of the Moon. The man-bear must now marry a woman with a nose three ells long. The girl cannot go with him. He vanishes, and the girl finds herself now alone in a forest, with no family, no friends and no one on whom to rely.

The girl searches for the man-bear. She enlists help of strangers, and then trusts her fate to the winds, arriving, after a long and exhausting journey, outside the castle where the man awaits his wedding to a woman he does not love. The girl's journey spent even the power even of the North wind, the most powerful force of all.

She longs to see the man-bear, but his captors deny her access to the castle. The man-bear is enchanted with a toxin each night to keep him from hearing the girl's forlorn weeping.

Finally, moved by the sound of her weeping, strangers tell the prince about the girl's presence. The prince avoids the toxin and resolves a plan. He is to marry the hideous long-nosed woman on the morrow. He decides his only hope is a ruse. He announces he will marry only the person who can clean the bed-shirt stained with wax from the tallow the girl spilled on him long ago. Of course, only a Christian can succeed in this task, trolls cannot. His betrothed tries to wash the shirt, but soils it further. The girl cleans the shirt, however, and the two marry, and set captive those poor souls held captive at the castle.

The tale is rich in symbol and frustrating in complexity. Device upon device is piled upon one another. Belief must not merely be suspended to follow this tale from beginning to end; normal moorings must be abandoned altogether, lest the story's incredible nature leave the reader cold. And yet, belief is so easily suspended; the heartache of the girl and her hope for comfort and love sustain and nourish the reader. When she searches for what she has lost, and rides the winds in search of her love, we are comforted by the very form of the genre: in fairy tales, dreams do come true: it is only really a question of how the the girl will find her hope redeemed. And what is that hope in the end? Simply love. Or, perhaps, a little bit more: faith, hope and charity, the great gifts Paul wrote of in his letter to believers in Corinth.

I've read this tale a few times before writing about it. My normal style is scornful in tone. It as though I no longer want the seduction of hope. I am old enough now to realize that illusion is necessary, and, yet, somehow, I don't want to succumb to the illusionist's siren song. But I must, as must we all. The simple facts of the life-cycle are too difficult to be borne: from nothing we come at birth, we acquire share and form during youth, we spend our energies in our prime in search of goals and dreams most often only inchoate in form, and then, as energy wanes, we sit quietly facing and inevitable and incomprehensible end. The bare bones of existence require more than this bleached out truths; we require hope. We are, really and truly, such stuff as dreams are made of.

Thus the appeal of those simple words that summon us to suspend critical moorings and float alone to silent hopes: "Once upon a time ..." Those words have power.

East of the Sun and west of the moon is nowhere and, hence, everywhere at once. It is where we find ourselves amid the poverty that comes of simple being: sentient beasts born to die, we require more, and so we hope. Like a white bear, illusions offer solutions. We accept these solutions because we must, and test them because we survival requires it. Yet, once tested, the illusions vanish, and then, alone, we are cast to a wide, wide world buffeted by strange winds and filled with omens and portents. If we are lucky, we find our way back to our illusions, although now we do not accept them at face value: a bear is not a bear, after all. With faith and hope and charity, we seize the truth behind our illusions and remember that without the gift of love, there is nothing. So we love those whom we find willing to accept our gifts, and go on, never really forgetting the painful truths that make fairy tales necessary, but accepting with an open heart the sting the world delivers, realizing, finally, the the truths worth knowing come from within. The wise among us, and I do not claim to be such, can truly say "come sweet death."

Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book.

The Magic Mirror

Once upon a time, a mighty man lived atop a windswept mountain. He was feared throughout the land. His words flew on death-dealing wings.

But he was alone when darkness fell. He filled his days with warring words and the press of combat. He lived by day, but at night he cowered. There were no battles to fight when darkness fell. The wind howled and he shuddered, a lamb alone.

The mighty man took a wife, a bride of prepossessing beauty. He took her to his mountain lair, and when the day’s battle was done, he filled his evening with loving conquest. But at night, when passion was spent, he cowered; there was neither battle nor desire by which to measure the soul within him. The wind howled and he shuddered, a lamb alone.

One night he found his wife’s mirror, left on a table where she would adorn herself with lover’s pearls.

"Ah," the mighty man said, "a mirror. I will not be alone any longer when the night wind howls." He held the mirror and looked into it, anticipating the sight; was he not a warrior mighty in love and war? But there was no image to be seen. The mirror reflected what was within the man. The glass was empty. And there was nothing, nothing when the man was alone and the wind howled, and he shuddered.

The man feared the mirror. But he was the master of his fear and he turned the mirror into a weapon. "My magic mirror," he called it. He learned to use the mirror to seduce others in gentler arts than war and love. As he grew old and time chisled tawny youth into pitted granite, he learned to conjure with the mirror, to bend others to his will.

"See, see how much I love you," he would say, and hold the mirror up so that another could behold their own satisfied smile. "You are great," he would say. "Like me, you are a mighty warrior," he would tell others. And they would look into the mirror, and know that all was well. They loved the mighty man for making them happy with his words and his presence. But they loved him most of all for holding a mirror tinged with the silent validation of their hopes.

The magic mirror became the mighty man’s prize possession. He created a castle in which to house it, and people came from far and wide to bask within the image it cast. All wanted to be like the mighty man, and when he sang sweet songs of praise to them while holding the mirror, each saw a better version of themselves, a version they could adore, much as they adored the mighty man.

But time steals vigor even from the mighty. The man grew tired of holding the mirror. He would try to put it away, but the quiet silence when there was no war, no love, no adoration left him empty. The winds would howl day and night, and he shuddered, a lamb alone. He needed to hold the mirror so that others could look at him and believe they were seeing themselves.

One day an admirer asked to hold the mirror. He wanted to hold it so that the masterful warrior could see the comforting image within. The admirer had taken the mighty man’s words to heart. "If I am loved, should I not love?" he said. "If I am great, should I not share the greatness?" He believed the mighty man’s words and wanted to return the things he had been given that the mighty man called gifts.

But the mighty man knew that the mirror was empty for him. And he recoiled in horror. He could not sit for a mirror held by another. He would lose his power if others knew that inside him there was not even wind, only a howling chasm that could only be filled by the conquest of another, whether in war, in love or fawning praise.

So the mighty man reached for the mirror, and as he did so it slipped from his grasp, shattering into tiny shards when it hit the dry dirt. The many who came to view themselves as he sang sweet songs of love were terrified. No magic mirror left them like the mighty man, empty and alone.

So they scurried, each of them, to find a tiny shard to cast a reflection. In a thousand directions they scattered. Each one struggled to find happiness in the wordless reflection of a fragment of the magic mirror. They had come to crave the mighty man’s praise. They sang to themselves but were not satisfied.

The mighty man now had nothing. No mirror to hold, no person looking toward him rapt as he held his magic tool before them. He withered, this man of oak. No war, no love, no one to beam at the sound of his voice. And the man died, becoming a silent wind, passing empty and alone over desolate places.

His admirers wept great tears the day the man was buried. They named the castle after him, and vowed never to forget how he made them feel. They put the pieces of the shattered mirror together and took turns holding it for one another. They pretended they, too, were mighty. But as days passed into weeks and then months, their tears continued and a great pond formed. They did not know what the mighty man knew: they were empty, so they poured themselves out in saline streams of sorrow.

The admirers would gather around the pool of tears and sing songs about the mighty man. They hoped he would return. They called him love and declaimed that love lasts forever. They vied for the honor of caring for the pond.

One day, an admirer bent to pick up a feather floating on the surface of the pond. As he bent, he saw his full reflection for the first time since the magic mirror was broken. The reflection was pure, there were no lines betraying the cracks of the reconstructed mirror.

"Look, look," he said to the others. "It is me. The magic is back. I am whole and I am alive," he said. His tears dried and he saw a smile, true joy on the water’s surface.

But the others saw only water from where they sat. Each looked away and then into a tiny shard of the shattered mirror. Each kept a tiny relic for themselves, savoring it. But in each mirror they saw only a silent reflection of what was once glory, and they hated their gleeful friend at the pond. They hated him because he was happy alone when the mighty wind came. The others did not want to be lambs alone; they preferred the comfort of the herd.

They sit still on the windswept mountain playing at might and cowering through the nights. And they are alone, forgotten when the winds howl. They sit still waiting for the mighty man to reappear with the magic mirror to make them feel as though they are alive. They sit waiting to die and not fearing death because they are not truly alive without the magic mirror and the mighty man to tell them how to live.

Fairy Tales: Prince Hyancinth and the Dear Little Princess

Once upon a time, a princess's beauty bewitched a king. He broke a spell to win her as a bride, but fell upon a curse all his own. The king and his betrothed would have a son. But the son would not find happiness until the son learned a painful truth: his nose was too long.

In due course, a son was born. And, as the curse would have it, his nose was far, far too long. But he was a king's son, and the courtiers surrounding the boy never let on that they knew the truth about his nose. The boy grew up among flatterers.

The boy became a full-blooded prince and finally fell in love himself. As the prince was about to kiss the hand of his beloved, she vanished, and was whisked away by an enchanter. The prince was crushed and wandered the Earth looking for his beloved.

The prince met an old woman, a fairy. He sought her aid. She could not stop talking, first about the size of his nose, then about anything that passed through her mind. She served the famished prince a meal and chattered to her servants. The servants pretended great interest in all the fairy, who was once a princess, had to say. The servants were flatterers, you see, and the old woman loved to talk. They hung on her every word as though it were wisdom and not mere wind.

"How stupid people are not to see their own faults!" the prince mused to himself. "That comes of being a princess: she has been spoiled by flatterers, who have made her believe she is a moderate talker." The prince thought how sensible he was never to have fallen under the sway of the flattering sort. But he was still blind to his enormous nose.

The fairy made the prince's long lost love reappear. His beloved was in a crystal palace. The prince rushed to kiss her hand, but his nose was too long and kept his lips from finding their mark. He realized the length of his nose, and he was force to admit, for the first time, that his nose was too long. At once, the crtysal surrounding the princess shattered and the two were united in love.

"You see how self-love keeps us from knowing our own defects or mind and body. Our reason tries in vain to show them to us. We refuse to see them till we find them in the way of our interests."

Lucky the prince was to have love of something other than self provide him a motive to see a truth shared by others. All are not so lucky.

----

This is a complex tale, although Andrew Lang, in the Blue Fairy Book, relays it in just eight pages. But the moral is pointed. Self-love and flattery blind us, and they can keep from us the things we want most. We see painful truths only when we must, and then the truth hurts. We will avoid this revealing pain as long as we can. Social psychologists call this cognitive dissonance.

Vanity serves both the flatterer and the flatterer's object of admiration. The object sees an image of his own glory reflected in the bended words of the flatterer. And the flatterer gets validation in return: does not a great one heed what he, the little one, has to say? A strange and symbiotic relationship emerges, a relationship of mutual deceit. Both master and slave, as Hegel noted, are imprisoned in the stilted image possessed by the other.

Imagine, if you will, a man who declared himself the finest tradesman in all the land. He invites other in the same trade to his home, and he lavishes them with praise. "I love you," he tells them, and to each he shines a loving smile. The others lavish gifts of time and money on the finest. They can bask in the glow of his love so long as they give without real question and generously. They are a peer to the mighty, and suddenly, they too enjoy a reflected sense of self worth.

But the finest gets more and more lonely. He needs more and more praise to fill the emptiness within. His soul is a dark pit. As praise rises in the depths of this pit, the hollow echo of an empty heart merely changes tone. He is never filled.

A little voice turns louder in his mind, and at night, when there are no smiles to reassure him, his bedclothes become leaden walls. The mirror tells a truth that adoration cannot change. His time is coming to an end. More, he bellows, more!

So he gives the form of love to all who will accept it, and more gifts he receives. The walls of the crystal palace surrounding him grow thicker and thicker. His admirers sense the great one's inchoate need and lavish greater and greater gifts upon him. A monument rises to his name. All smile in the day's bright light: Love they have discovered, and the finest, he, finally, has found an uncritical admiration. He is the finest and they are his beloved. All is well behind the crystalline walls of a secret place, a place at which only new admirers are welcome. The spiral grows ever more frenzied.

But it is appointed unto all men, even the finest, to die. And in that revealing moment the bonds of flattery dissolve. The finest is no more, and what passed for the love he offered is vanished. The flatterers remain, alone, each with their thoughts and one another. But a flatterer without an icon is so much like a brooding hen without an egg. The flatterer clucks, scratches at the Earth, and frets. Such hens are masterless slaves.

How much better it would be for flatterer and flattered to be told a simple truth. There is no finest, and they are not elect because they have learned to feed another's need. Both lover and beloved live an illusion, an illusion in which love of self prevents them truly from seeing the other. Master and slave are bound, two halves forming less than a whole, wound forever in mutual wounds that no dressing can make into a thing of beauty.

Self-love is a poison. It hurts to purge a toxin. This is a pain all avoid until their interests force them to endure it. And only in fairy tales are there truly happy endings. Or in those lives fortunate to find a gentle love that gives without demanding tribute in return. A true beloved does not need her lover to call her the finest: her lover knows she is the finest without being told.

Fairy Tales: The Bronze Ring

Trial lawyers are story tellers. The great ones are master story tellers. And the best stories, the stories that resonate deepest in the minds of ordinary folks, are folk tales, also known as fairy tales. I have a hunger to review the tales we tell our children to learn what I can about how better to communicate, and how best to recognize the simple archetypes that lay beneath the apparent diversity in the "fact patterns" that comprise my practice. Where best to find these stories now?

I had the pleasure not long ago to discover Andrew Lang's works. Lang was born in Scotland in 1844, and was trained in classics at Oxford. He is renowned for his so-called "colored fairy books," compilations of folk tales that were extremely popular in the United States at the time L.Frank Baum wrote about the Wizard of Oz. The first of these books is the Blue Fairy Book, first published in 1889. The first fairy tale in that book is "The Bronze Ring."

This simple story is scarcely 12 pages long, yet it contains everything. Enchantment itself opens the tale: "Once upon a time," we are told. And I am reminded at once of the mystery of origins: Romulus and Remus, Helen at Troy, Adam and Eve. The narrative impulse defines us and every story has a beginning, so we start in places we have never been and cannot go out of the necessity to sing of the day's events. Once upon a time is an invitation to dream. The words are irresistible.

A king's garden lays fallow. He wants it to blossom. A humble gardener is recruited. The gardener tends the Earth and it blossoms. The gardener's son and the king's daughter fall in love. Hope leaps across the great divide of class, status and power. The king wants his daughter to marry the son of his Prime Minister, but she loves the gardener's son. So the king sets a contest that only the Prime Minister's son should win: the two suitors will travel to a distant city and return. The winner will take the hand of the king's daughter.

Sorrow descends on the reader. Surely the king's son has every advantage. But didn't the story begin with words of magic: "Once upon a time ..."? We know these are hopeful words. If we but have the courage to persist and risk all, even our ordinary expectations, hope will be redeemed.

And so it is. A magic ring brings power. Fortunes are reversed. Bad men surface and triumph for a time. But innocence is redeemed in the end. The king's daughter and gardener's son marry; evil is vanquished and destroyed; hope is redeemed.

I read the story yesterday morning and all day and into the night I brooded. I was bidden to suspend disbelief in the implausible, and I responded by doing so. I read, and then re-read hungrily. What sustained me was not so much doubt as the inevitable outcome. The form of the story carried with it the guarantee of success. The hunger I experienced was the need to nourish hope in the face of realism's despair. Yes, the world is darkness and I believe that darkness claims us in the end. All die.

But this death seems less compelling, less real, less sustaining and alive than the need to believe. It would be a silent sort of death to stop hoping. I found myself revising Descartes: "I hope therefor I am." Or perhaps Shakespeare meant this when he reminded that we are such stuff as dreams are made of.

The reality of our days are made of such dismal straw. We struggle, we break, we rage, we err, and, in the end, we simple become undone by time and pass into nothing. But these hard meager truths inspire nothing so much as a passivity at once at odds with a stirring I cannot stop: the stirring that is me, and than must be expressed. Fairy tells give content to my hidden hopes.

I cannot claim to understand the deeper significance of "The Bronze Ring," but I know that each day in countless ways I reach for a ring of my own. The odds are against me. There is danger everywhere, and my hopes are foolish. But, oh, how I love to hope, and, oh, cynical fool that I am, how much of a hypocrite I am and willingly remain. This simple tale nourishes a flicker I want to transform into a flame. I believe this tale although I know it is folly to do so.

Perhaps that is the power of fairy tales: their ability to fire the illusions necessary to live fully.

There is magic in these tales, I tell you it is true. I will try to understand the magic better and share what I can discern here in an occasional series appearing under the banner: Fairy Tale Project.

Next: "Prince Hyancith and the Dear Little Princess"