The snippet of line comes to us from Mercutio’s speech about Queen Mab:
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.52-69
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.
As Mercutio’s language eases us from miniature into journey, the fanciful nature of the miniscule substitutions prepares the listener’s mind to consider the essence of vision and dreams. The way seems darkly familiar, like tumbling down a place where the road dips beneath the overhanging trees at night. So dark inside that for a moment, there may never have been stars.
We are the lolly men. Codpieces filled with slaw.
Our slanted marshmallow inability climbing up ourselves to eat our heart within.
Bad men in the streets. Bad men in the storm.
Bad men in the seats and out amongst the corn.
Bad men flying drying heat, arcing wingtips madly,
Bad men making riddles up, some of them are Daddy.
I am no viper, yet I feed
Pericles, Prince of Tyre 1.1.66-7
On mother’s flesh which did me breed.
Titus and Antiochus cook and dance in murderous and ravenous, eye glistening glee Threatened. Alert. Listening. See.
Crises beget by other crises. What a patchwork, what a motley we have made! Espousing narrow ideals at our own expense. O, how we await the snow, geese calling, falling through that ashen sky, smoke fostered by ourselves, seeking that last sigh when all conveys the answer to the riddle of the sands.
This is not the little cabins, smoke curling from an autumn chimney, discussions of the trout stream over tea and coffee. Breakfast at the local diner. This is no hometown, moantown, downtown, Hadestown, urinetown.
Have we been here? In bands? In bandits? In heat? In hate? Radios spewing filth across our minds, television/internet/motion picture turning us to dead. We shamble towards the middle distant house with light seeping from between its boarded windows. Duane Jones awaits us there and he will not teach us acting. It is too late for that too late. Too late the brothers and the dog coming through the misty twilight, open grave waiting in the garden, teawater cooling on the hob.
No one made the coffee. No one poured the tea.
Oh, we have seen them and they are us. Blond leaders, blocky in their blood, burning down the world against the unseen clocks of Fillory. Were we once kings and queens? Did we trade away the tools of honour for a tray of turkish delight? Rumpleminz. Our advertising loins thrown in a pond of fond. Water horses swimming in the lea. Aiee. Aiee.
Whoever would come over that ridge, scarecrows lined up against descending air, leaves rattering against the siding. Town captured by its own surety. Its own denial. River in Egypt. Dead people beneath the sand. In the swamp. In the front yard. Front garden. Necklace of dead toes. Jack’s sparrows, all that’s left of the once bird kingdoms of the air, far too small against the big wind.
Oh, Hayden, your Fry is French. Belgian, actually, although it might pain the far constituants to hear it. Your cheerleaders launched high in the air, cutting capers with your Mitterrand. Pyramiding for François. Johnson’s ‘new beginning’ starts today.
And I alone am escaped to tell thee. The devil walks amongst you. At your side. In your very shoes. Oh, would the headaches leave me. Would that they could. Lack of mercy to a poisoned soul. A poisoned soul journeying with nor wit nor weed.
Back to the country of your birth. County of your birth. Even if your country were untimely ripped. Vampires beneath a trailer home, working on ceramics all by touch. Everything gone like rockets in July. Her eyes that flash against a green wood. Then hammers. Tongs. Cerebus the Aardvark singing arias into the howling still. Red sword aglimmer. Tongs.
How we have sung the swords. Soul eaters, drinkers. Spies, tailors, soldiers, tinkers. Keeping us alive even as they whittle away the isnesses, the lanthorns, the shoes. Doc Martin loves his boots but hates the sight of blood. Keep it in the kitchen. Someone might get hurt.
By what? The fire? That tale of goblins already told. Long told, gone cold, then bold like snowflakes filtered from heaven that we cannot see. Sea? Though she be no bigger than an agate stone, forfinger of an alderman big, taste I the salt. Taste I the warm chocolate of her being.
All we seek is union, except for those who don’t. Those leavers, those wall builders–seeking to fortify imaginary barriers, to subjugate those they see as ‘others’. Those x men! Mutants dictating our policy. Stealing our healthcare and our jobs. Costing us money! Union? Onion. All seek it in the soup, mocking the turtle, the noiseless, patient spider eating curds and whey. Way out. Oh, Spiderman that tyger’s pacing behind his bars, burning bright in the forest, wrapped in a hide, singing in a Broadway show. Those cats, what do they know? They only no.
Obviously, people feel different about division, with many believing strongly that dividing people remains a terrible mistake, a colossal blunder. Some people believe that discarding ideas for which others fought so hard can only lead, ultimately, to disaster.
For yes is the empowering word, the bridging word, the inclusive word, the noble ideal. I take your hand and then am pulled away from you until I alone am left to tell thee. Howling. Patient. Green. Best minds of my generation moving, flag above them remaining still. Lovers, poets, madmens’ seething minds, their urgency dismissed by Theseus, voice of authority and law.
I never may believe
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.2-23
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to
heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
Theseus, a little brief authority, has no need for these ideals. These lofty thoughts. These cherished human notions. Business is business, after all. Running things has no relation to fairy toys.
It’s all ok. It’s safe and so are you. It’s only a movie about ‘so called’ high ideals. Hush, my little one. I would not lie. To you I will tell every truth. Every bit of truth that would not hurt you and yet some that may. There are no bears. Not anymore. Truth rakes razors against the tonguetip. Truth hurts like glass shards, like social change. A ghost with no more commerce in the world, you can trust my words:
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma penciocche gammai di questo fondo
Non torno viva alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo*
O, full of scorpions is my mind, my world. They hang from leaves like fire against the sunset. Fire fairies divebombing the safelocks, slipped for havoc, vengeance for their lost existence. No one believed in Tinkerbell, who’s not merely jealous but enraged! Angry tiny little fairies, abuzz like bees, hoping that locusts might finally inherit the earth. Fallopian night bringing forth no more issue. Things gone viral. Best stay home and go to bed.
After the Feast (my Shapcot) see,
–from “Oberon’s Palace” by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
The Fairie Court I give to thee:
Where we’le present our Oberon led
Halfe tipsie to the Fairie Bed,
Where Mab he finds; who there doth lie
Not without mickle majesty.
Which, done; and thence remov’d the light,
We’ll wish both Them and Thee, good night.
The world crushes us closed into tiny fists. Moon lowering over our beds, glowering over our heads, our crowns, our diadems slipping to the mud. We lose ourselves in arcing nakedly across the night, calling to diamonds that we never knew.
All the Gretas come too late. Or are we the late guests–feasting into wee hours pretending that the birds and bears still roam? Watching not watching. Hearing not hearing. Lalalalala. Hahahaha. Darl gone mad and laughing while we fiddle and Rome burns?
How we hope across the plains and hills, through the mountain forests and the rolling lands, now all on fire. She awakens to a fresh new morning, bridging her dawn with tea. Still in a robe, raising the kitchen shade, she looks out upon her orange new day. Trees bursting into flame. Walls of lava, of injustice, human cruelty. Where are the rainbows of yesteryear? Our larder and our teacups full? Where is that plenty? The banquet warm against the glistening snow?
Where are those scones? Our biscuits? Our jam? O, this bread. It will not rise. It will not find us in this morning as we scramble for the car keys and stumble, panicked to the car. Roads obscured by smoke lie ahead of us, our households abandoned to flames, tornadoes, storms, flooding, drought. Where shall we go? Gig economy leading us precariously into newer and deeper nights, as long as we escape the present flames.
For they have not stayed still, the moving fires. Coiled and curious. Hungry ghosts, licking with lascivious detachment at our fleeing heels. We Achilles. Inadequate with rage. World grown too too small and violent because we trusted leaders while we sat too long at tea.
The world will not thaw, melt and resolve itself in dew as others may do. This flower garden fancy grown up rank with weeds, and only deep among them a nodding violet unto a fairy queen, vanished from where she might have been, leaving no orbs where once was green.
*From Dante’s Inferno, canto XXVII, lines 61-66. Borrowed by T.S. Eliot as the prologue for “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Translation below:
“If I believed my answer were
to a person who might ever get back to the world,
this flame would remain still, moving no further.
But since, if what I hear is true,
no one returns from these undergrounds alive,
I answer you without fear of infamy.” (The ghost’s approximation)