What is life like when you don’t know what it is you’re marrying? Harshly put, it implies you are naive. Gullible. Didn’t read that small print. A terrible deal occurs in the fairy tale The Handless Maiden, when a father barters away his daughter to a demon by not realising who he’s talking to when the deal is struck. In the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros, it is clear that the centre of each wedding requires a death. Psyche has black banners at her wedding to the serpent, out-of-tune fiddles and swooping vultures; the scene is clear. This needs a woman’s clarity, not a girl’s hopes.
We may end up as crumbling bones in the hay before we literally wise up. Any scene that repeats itself against our better judgement has a touch of this story in it. We can be gobbled up almost a dozen times before, finally, we retrace our steps a little. There has to be a different way of doing this. It appears that although it was an elegant and touching scene when the musicians and poets brought back the serpent into the castle, much deeper work was still to be done. And for a while it remains ugly. We are seeing that simple trust is not enough to negotiate with darkness. Fingers crossed and a big smile will get us incinerated.
The detail that the servants are leaving the castle is interesting. People are losing faith, or even running scared. A community notices that sort of thing. Folks talk, and the giddy sheen of marrying a prince has long, long left the invitation. It’s no longer a magnetic proposal; the rumour is that it’s grievously dangerous. And into the danger comes the daughter of a shepherd.
A shepherd’s daughter, though we may romanticise the thought, is not usually in the running for marrying a prince. Complex strata of class stand between that possibility. Maybe if she’d applied at the beginning, she would have had no hearing. But now this marginal, unusual figure is given an audience, and even has the smarts to negotiate a year and a day to prepare. That’s extraordinary, shows leadership.
Leadership and chutzpah. The girl’s got front. The story tells us there’s a tree in the forest she likes to sit by. A place she can deepen. There is already some move towards interiority. The story wants us to presume that this is the same crone that spoke earlier to the queen; she is a baseline energy that emerges now and then to keep the story rolling. She is a still small voice that can be trusted.
When an ancient energy wakes up in you, it’s likely to rattle your cage with image not concept; that’s how it’s always been done. Images seem to be how the soul carriages its messages to you. To move and confound you, to unsettle, to get you to work. These lively impulses are going to broker instructions that are to be carried out, and it’s only in the carrying out that you will come to find quite why you were doing it in the first place. I know that takes some pondering as an idea, but I hope you’ll entertain it. Walking blind a little. Falling into the nettles.
She doesn’t wink at the young girl and slip her an ABC-type map for the journey. She just gives the instruction. Up ahead are countless hours of frustration as we learn to construct wedding shirts, pricked fingers, patience and that attention to the heart.
I first started to work on the wedding shirts in my twenties. It looked to the outside world like a scruffy kid buying Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses and scuttling off to my tent to learn by heart one of the poems. I loved Neruda’s understanding of the dark side in those poems to his wife, how he wore his shadow like a cloak. Jealousy, aggression, domination, all of these unmentionable capacities were writ large in the book. They sung their true sound and his angels scuffed their boots in the eager pollen of my mind. The book had many other tones, but he let the rough squalls and scudding clouds of grief into his praise words. He let it all hang out. He wasn’t embarrassed. This wasn’t persona. He didn’t edit his weather patterns.
This was the beginning of education, what the troubadours would think of as an educated heart. Whenever sewing is featured in a fairy tale, it implies that the one who sews is weaving their life to the Otherworld. The needle draws in close an intelligence secreted in the Milky Way, and then draws out the deep keening of our own heart for understanding, knowledge, maybe, one day, wisdom.
It could be that every shirt she sewed mourned the death of an earlier bride. Maybe she pricked one drop of blood into the deep red patterning around the heart. This shirt-making is about not getting incinerated, not fetishising ashes as the only way to depth. It’s not. We don’t need to set fire to our lives or marry a psychopath to deepen. I mean, it happens, but it’s not a recommendation.
It’s back to a word I’ve written about many times. Tempering. You get complicit with the whorls in the wood you lathe and the many temperaments of love’s engine, rather than joyriding the thing and crashing into a wall over and over again. That provides a lot of drama but little nourishment for those around you. It doesn’t give life, rather ends it.
I try to limit my public forays into etymology, others do it far better, but connections to tempering are: temper – from the Old English temprian, meaning ‘to moderate excess, to regulate’. The Latin tempus has a possible route of ‘stretch’, and an example often given is of tuning an instrument, to make it taut.
Every time I have wrestled either an angel or a devil, I have been usefully but catastrophically defeated. But I have always had the distinct impression of being tuned, of something being burnt off, of giving libation to the god of limits. I see tempering as a more useful word than initiation in many cases. It brings up fewer associations with particular age ranges and a more circular, more regular encounter. And one that makes us hum like the taut string on a lyre. Tempering, if we are really paying attention, will be a constant our whole life. We live in a speedy world, with a kind of faux-Hermes urgency to communication. Just do it. To hang back like the shepherd’s daughter does, to learn a skill, to befriend solitude (remember, the old woman leaves again), shows her capacity to do something very rare – to delay gratification. Culture is defined not by what you gained but by what you were prepared to live without. This emphasis on sacrifice is not sadism; it’s one of life’s essential currencies.
When is enough, enough?
