Once Upon a Time

(originally published in print in February 2024)

Once Upon a Time

Fairy tales can really catch us sleeping.

Make us think:

We know, so we won't do it the same.

But fate has a far better imagination. It won't trap us with the same game in the same way.

We've made ourselves such fragile creatures by trying.

To avoid pain.

We're all liars. Even if we don't know it, because there are truths we refuse to receive or acknowledge.

And what do you do when you can't tell the truth?

You lie.

A fairy tale is a kind of truth and a kind of lie.

I mean, insofar as that the character is learning a difficult lesson with varying degrees of success or failure. There is a lived truth to it, even if the story didn't really happen that way.

And I would have thought of fairy tales for a long time as cautionary tales. Something meant to scare me, to tell me of something to avoid.

But now I'm learning that maybe these aren't things to avoid. They're not merely markers of the dangers of the road.

They’re road maps, identifiers of the obstacles so that you might know them when you see them and learn how other people dealt with them. Not that by reading them you will magically, blithely avoid them. Full stop.

Every fairy tale is a tale of a certain fate.

Of someone like us.

Who didn't know, who couldn't know, what they couldn't have known.

We see the price of experience and we think we can avoid having to pay just because we do know, ya know?

The thing about fairy tales is that they couch the truth in fantasy, in make believe.

In order to feather a distracting nest for the truth. Showing it to you only after you've been dazzled, been drawn into the reality of their world, because that is the power of a story. A form of such pure creation that people on both sides of the pen are doing it. Meeting in the work. And that is why we need more of them, because they are modes of thinking and understanding.

A way to walk in the shoes of another, tied with inexorable force to the choices they make or have made. We are their shadows. We go where they go.

And it's great and it's beautiful and it's all well and good, but it will not save us from our own fate, though we may learn much.

Experience is a requisite teacher.

We cannot escape its lessons.

So odd, isn't it, that we seem to believe something to the contrary.

That time is on our side. Or, is féider linn¹, or love conquers all?

That death and pain are names for places only other people go.

Strangely, it is our refusal to accept the fact of life’s end that seems to prevent us from truly living it.

So, what do we do?

I mean, it's entirely possible that this question is as far as we get with it.

That we wrestle for an answer without ever apprehending one.

And I'm not saying I don't enjoy these questions on some level, really on quite a meaningful one or else I wouldn't be here talking to you about them. I'd be somewhere else.

Still out gathering knowledge and experience, like a collector.

But I want to know.

If you think about this too.

It's why I've started this whole conversation.

I've invited you into my idea’s room like a hostess leading you through a vast house to her favorite parlor.

A chain, a knot, a stitch, a thread winding brightly through the maze to the trouble at the heart of it all.

You are finding your way in as I am mapping my way out.

We are here in the hall of mirrors using the ideas of others to reveal the distortions of our lenses.

On our lenses of perception and in each other’s through the nature of response and dialogue which I usually prefer face to face (or at least with some immediacy). But I'll make an exception here.

Because we need each other, we can't do this all on our own. To understand. We must trust and listen to each other.

Self-respect makes understanding easier, I think. Agency: a feeling of being in the seat of oneself.

And knowing that we are all fools who can't possibly know what we don't know.

In the words of the fox in The Little Prince, “One sees clearly only with the heart.

Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

I would ask you to suspend. (If you can.)

Your judgment and fear.

While you are here.

I would ask you.

I would invite you.

To sit with these questions.

To just let them roll around in the background.

And to embrace the contradiction that seems to be at the heart of everything.

That life is beautiful and horrifying.

All at once.

It's all happening, together.

We cannot separate it and have just one.

(mind map attempting to connect the ideas and experiences of my life, circa 2018)

1. “Yes, we can!” as gaeilge. Presumably popularized during former US President Barak Obama’s campaign visit(s?) to Ireland.