’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
First quatrain of “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Caroll
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Trouble is that those damned slithy toves get everywhere. A bit like garden slugs, only much bigger, gyring and gimbling in the wabe really ends up being about the least ominous thing that they could do. And so close to the house. What the hell? Best not leave anything valuable on the front porch. Certainly not a bicycle.
Sound and almost-sense words combine to make the poem effective. It lends a feeling of falling off the map, of being in kind of narrative without definitive reference points, or without reference points that we can understand. “But when worlds collide,” said George Pal to his bride, “I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a science fiction (ooh, ooh, ooh) double feature.”* Elements combining dangerously one evening out back of the Warbonnet. Bruce King would tell us just enough, but maybe not the whole truth–at least not until the end.**
We combine things when we write. Ideas, aspects, perspectives. Gets damned boring when we don’t.
The vernacular may vary. We can tell if it’s an American novel. “It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws if full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you.”*** Someone might be swearing, either externally or internally, and events complicate around plain, simple, often rural actions.
Russian novels may move in identifiable ways as well. “I thought today’s fête had been cancelled. I confess all these festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome.”**** As happens in Chekov, Tolstoy’s characters tire of having things the way they are. Ennui becomes a plague that can only be relieved, sometimes, by tea or by a final gunshot. The thick air of disillusionment and brewing tension tends to be both political and personal.
Yet, in any language, the most highly regarded works tend to be those that juxtapose mundane human life with eternal considerations. Novelist Lady Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014) wrote The Tale of Genji around the year 1000, apparently to address what the Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga termed ‘mono no aware’, or the sadness at the ephemeral nature of, and the great beauty of human life. Having lost his great love, Murasaki, to a tragic early death, Prince Genji mourns for her ceaselessly:
I long to melt like snow, to disappear
From this world of sadness…but snow
still falls
And I still live on against my wishes*****
Beauty and Sadness (also the title of a famous novel written in 1964 by Yasunari Kawabata) have always walked together. The aspen leaf flickers everywhere at the margins of life’s borders. Life and eternity seem to be two sides of the same leaf. The brevity of mortal life, the comparatively long slow speech of the trees.
Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats. fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John of Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!******
Not all juxtaposition, not all our daily tasks, roll our lives into days and afternoons, chatterweeping us into trees. Do we root in place even as our individual selfhoods vanish? Languages muttering, breeze pattering leaves? Does all finding ultimately lose the self?
We perpetually become our myths, intertwining with them, bedding down with them, their fingers always in our sleeping hair. We fashion myths out of our own living flesh, our skin a parchment to our own blood. We hear the eight directions in the wind, see the ancestors gathering above the sacred mountain, watch the mounds for torchlight in the dark. This is why the Diné (Navajo) skinwalkers may be so dangerous. They can rewrite what has already been written in us, already written for us. They recode the DNA of our spiritual existence.
That robin tapping at our window has a rider whom we both can and cannot see. Or whom we sometimes see, and sometimes cannot see. The universal contracts complicated as listening and hearing. In listening, we may hear what others do not hear, or they may hear some other something. Footfalls, breath, storms. The unsteady earth beneath our lives is, in a sense, encoded in the meeting of Shakespeare’s fairy monarchs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
OBERON
(1.3.60-8)
Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.
TITANIA
What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence.
I have forsworn his bed and company.
OBERON
Tarry, rash wanton. Am not I thy lord?
TITANIA
Then I must be thy lady. But I know
When thou hast stolen away from Fairyland
And in the shape of Corin sat all day
Playing on pipes of corn and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest steep of India,
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskined mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity?
In the shifting contract of Titania and Oberon’s relationship. ‘Am not I thy lord?’ proposes a definition in terms to which Titania almost seems to agree. ‘Then I must be thy lady.’ Her ‘must’ then undercut by ‘But. . .’ The initial stated agreement becomes a feint, and all subsequent passages fall to wrangling, to negotiation.
Fairies are this way. Famously, infamously liminal. Furzing the wooded edges of the world, hazing once clear boundaries into indeterminacy. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. A here and not here, king and no king kind of quality. And the fairy immortals often display a distinct taste for mortal lovers. Of course, the caveat is that, in a mortal world, mortality and immortality cannot mix together successfully–at least not for very long. For while fairies remain young forever, mortals grow old and infirm, and they eventually die. Still, we roll this immortality into ourselves.
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta Iolanthe, the fairies have a strict law against marrying mortals, and this law sustains the tension in the plot. The titular character, Iolanthe, is the pride and joy of fairy kind. Beautiful, vivacious, joyous.
A fairy amongst fairies, Iolanthe has long arranged the fairy songs and dances, but she has also committed that most serious of crimes, marrying with a mortal. She has a son by her marriage, the shepherd Strephon, who is immortal from the waist up. Mortal and immortal juxtaposed, combined impractically, comically, in a single being.
Because all the fairies so love Iolanthe, the Fairy Queen commutes her death sentence to eternal banishment, on the condition that she never see or communicate with her mortal husband again. The problem is that, after several years without her joy giving presence, the other fairies come to miss Iolanthe so much that they plead with the Fairy Queen to let her come back.
Of course, the Fairy Queen acquiesces, summoning Iolanthe back out of the swamp where she has been living.
Fairy Queen: Iolanthe! From thy dark exile thou art summoned! Come to our call– Come, come, Iolanthe!
Celia: Iolanthe!
Leila: Iolanthe!
Fairies: Come to our call, Iolanthe! Iolanthe, come!
Iolanthe rises from the water. She is clad in water weeds. She approaches the Queen with head bent and arms crossed.*******
In her banishment, Iolanthe has been living at the bottom of a frog pond where her immortal nature blends with the most basic generative aspects of life. Clad in water weeds, she has come to embody a kind of underlying life force for the world of the play. She symbolises life itself.
Here is a recording of the invocation, by the Columbia Light Opera:
The operetta sets mortality and immortality at odds, in effect lifting a chord that Shakespeare makes in passing. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen, Titania, is at odds with the fairy king, Oberon, over the custody of a mortal child, a “changeling” boy. While Oberon says that he wants the boy as a retainer, Titania claims guardianship based on the fact that the boy’s mother was her votaress and friend who did not survive childbirth. “But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;/ And for her sake do I rear up her boy;/ And for her sake I will not part with him.” (2.1.135-7)
Again, mortality is supported by immortality, the two worlds operating (with the immortal world largely unseen) side by side. A principle tenet of the ancient fairy faith holds that the parallel world of immortality goes on much like our own (in spite of sometimes operating under somewhat different rules), and that it can, and sometimes does affect the workings of our own world. Yet, it also seems to be a combination of elements, mortality and immortality, that may augment aspects of existence as well as creating friction. The capriciousness of fairy nature is repeated in countless stories, and they may either help or harm the mortals and their world, sometimes doing both in succession.
This current of immortality represents a kind of underlying spark, something glimmering beneath the fairy mound or at the bottom of the frog pond. (In the Epic of Gilgamesh, when Gilgamesh finally finds the herb that confers immortality, it is a weed that grows under the sea.) Whether we regard the idea of an ultimately achievable physical immortality as absolute fiction or not, it remains a compelling idea, a part of our collective psyche and understanding with which we cannot dispense. Of course, our religions tend to reassure us–the countless scriptures affirming that our lives persist beyond our deaths. Religious or spiritual promises of immortality after death aside, however, in our literature and our thinking, we never abandon this idea that there may well be something else, some potentially achievable facet of life that is both everlasting and unseen.
The old fairy faith, especially in the Celtic countries, held this always to be so. Fairies’ enduring popularity in literature provides evidence that we have never really abandoned this hope, this spark that we seem to perceive with our internal eyes. For this is what fairies really seem to be, a kind of hope. A hope that mishaps might be warded off, but also a hope that another kind of enduring life might exist.
There are the stories of people being trapped in fairyland–dancing forever, passing years in a minute in the company of the immortals, returning to worlds where everyone they ever knew has long since passed away. But this too is a kind of barrier, showing us, cautioning us, how dangerous and out of synch immortal being may be with ours. The compelling may often also be dangerous. Still, it is there. Shining.
Our literature so often blurs standing lines. Mortality, immortality, tones, ideas, and the very stuff of life. The slithy toves get into everything, crawling everywhere, changing our ideas and our thoughts, merging them into new shapes that nonetheless reflect the old ones. They steal our bicycles right off the porch in every culture. Lightning striking the tree. Strong growth carpeting green in the fire’s wake. Sometimes we become the trees and sometimes they are us. Springs rivulet the rocks or forest floor, our lives rife with muttering vanishings and risings. Immortal life around a bend ahead of us, or in a glimpse of meadow under moonlight. We may not reach it yet, but we perceive it. Feel it breathing us.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania famously has a liaison with Bottom, who may be the most mortal of mortals, who, in his blundering fallibility, embodies a kind of quintessence of mortality. In subsequently giving her changeling child to Oberon, Titania, in one sense, acquiesces to the changes inherent in mortal existence, to the ideas of changing placement and station that accompany maturation. Titania returns to a harmonious amity with Oberon, and Bottom goes on his mortal way. The contested child, however, as a kind of representation of human future potential, remains with the immortals, having simply moved from Titania’s camp to Oberon’s. Possibility always has at least a hope of living forever.
In Iolanthe, the fairies (who, in the operetta, are female) eventually all marry mortal husbands with whom they cannot help but fall in love. Immortality and mortality always attract each other in some way, and in order to save both the fairies from the impracticable doom of fairy law, the law is permanently changed to state that any fairy who does NOT marry a mortal must die. In this way, the fairies come to fulfill their function as the representation of our immortal aspect. They are the more beautiful, more youthful, more magical reflection we hope to see in the mirror. They are that sparkling drop of life that we hope will never leave us, and which never really does.
*From The Rocky Horror Show. “Science Fiction/Double Feature” music and lyrics by Richard O’Brien.
2*King, Bruce W., and Hanay Geiogamah. Evening at the Warbonnet: And Other Plays. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2006.
3*Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: the Corrected Text. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990, p. 14.
4*Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford University Press, 1965, p.4.
5*Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji (unabridged). Translated by Dennis C. Washburn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016, ch. LXI.
6*Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin Books, 1996, pp. 215-6.
7*Iolanthe by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. https://gsarchive.net/iolanthe/web_op/iol02.html. (While the costumes ideas reflect the optimistic projection of the immortal, most of the illustrations from this website are also included because they are so lovely.)
8*Ibid.