Hello friends, some amazing insights in last week’s comments. Really wonderful. We now take a breath with Sunday Stories before jumping next week into a new essay, The Woman Who Married A Bear: Old Arrangements with the Wild. This week’s recording was another late one at the desk with a good cigar and a glass of Ardbeg, recommended by our own parish’s Nigel Ball.
The little sketch of words below will make no sense without listening to the story first!
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A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE GOOSE GIRL
If it happened to the Goose Girl, then it’s likely happened to us.
Fairy tales are always crash bang and walloping into our own lives. The Goose Girl suggests we are originally from some other realm but are destined to marry into this reality of hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. We leave the royal dance and enter the mosh pit. Like the Yakut story The Red Bead Woman, a substantial betrayal is coming on the way to our wedding, a wedding to a human who hasn’t learnt to see clearly yet. It’s going to be bumpy, the terms are about to entirely change.
We all wince at betrayal: it’s the pebble in the slipper or the pea under the mattress we can’t shrug off. Of course, as we will see in a moment, what we may label as betrayal (by the maid), can also be discerned as a hard education in the new world. A rugged kind of passport.
And what kind of sailor are we if we never encountered a storm?
But it does get particularly tough. When the river of human time washes away the cloth with the three drops of mother-blood, we fall into amnesia. We can’t recall coming from royalty, or that we possess much agency in this unsettling new dynamic. There’s a distinct lack of fairy dust. We make nervy choices and our shoulders slump. Everything’s shifty and we’re vulnerable, caught under the dusty swirls of a bull’s hoof. Picasso and Hemingway watch from the stands and bellow like gorillas. Something like this happens to most teenagers. It’s often a savage time. We only have to think of The Handless Maiden to locate another tale of what the world can do early on, and quite how we grow our hands back.
Entrance to this world from elevated spiritual planes seems rarely elegant. When we lose the queen’s cloths our powers are subdued, and our talking horse doesn’t talk much, at least not enough to save the bad marriage from taking place.
Because within the dream-logic of the story it’s meant to take place.
