by Harvey Lillywhite
We are our stories (read: fairy tales). I begin this little test, this essay, with those words in case we forget the profound fictional quality of our beliefs or the equally profound necessity of those fictions that, while they do sustain us, also send us off to war. Knowing that we are our fairy tales helps us to handle the word Truth with greater delicacy of thought and perhaps with more tolerance for others’ stories (truth) and to discriminate more accurately between Truth and actual matters of fact. Also, let’s never forget how every single word we use to keep in touch with each other (and ourselves) is itself a little fairy tale.
The Sacré-Cœur Basilica at the summit of the butte Montmartre, the highest point in Paris, for example, is a fairy tale (one of my favorites) that we can walk through and one that walks through us.
BRIEF HISTORY LESSON: THE SACRED HEART
The original idea (to what extent are our ideas fairy tales?) of making a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart in the aftermath of the French Revolution among ultra-Catholics and royalists, finally became a reality in France after the Franco-Prussian War and the uprising of the Paris Commune of 1870-71. (It was Emperor Napoleon III’s failed war against what would become the German Empire.)
Sacré-Cœur was officially dedicated by a decree of the Assemblée Nationale, July 1873, in honor of the 58,000 who lost their lives during that war. But originally the idea for the basilica responded to a request by the archbishop of Paris, who asked that it be built to "expiate the crimes of the communards" (not the British pop duo! The Communards were members and supporters of the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune formed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and France's defeat.).
Montmartre was the site of the Commune's first insurrection. Many hard-core communards who’d hidden in former gypsum mines were buried when the Army of Versailles detonated explosives at the entrances. And hostages had been executed on both sides. The Communards executed Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, who became a martyr for the resurgent Catholic Church. His successor, Guibert, climbing the Butte Montmartre in October 1872, had a vision as clouds dispersed over the panorama: "It is here, it is here where the martyrs are, it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that it can beckon all to come."
After Adolphe Thiers and his government resigned in May 1873, François Pie, bishop of Poitiers, expressed a national yearning for spiritual renewal— "the hour of the Church has come"—that he hoped would be expressed through the "Government of Moral Order" of the Third Republic, linking Catholic institutions with secular ones, in "a project of religious and national renewal, the main features of which were the restoration of monarchy and the defense of Rome within a cultural framework of official piety." Sacré-Cœur is the chief lasting triumphalist monument (triumphalism or just the need for a new story?).
FAIRY TALES AS JUSTICE SENSORS
Of course fairy tales have existed for thousands of years. They feature goblins, fairies, elves, trolls, giants, basilicas, talking animals (my personal favorites), etc., and often involve enchantments and what we’d agree is a far-fetched sequence of events. Most, but not all, fairy tales end happily. And it’s important to note that a happy ending only requires that the main characters be all right. Millions of innocent background characters can die, but as long as the characters that the audience cares about survive, it is still pretty much a happy ending. Thank goodness for focus or short-sightedness or whatever it is that keeps us grounded sanely in our own backyards.
While I love fairy tales as much as the next guy (and live in one as much as anyone—though I swear it’s true), what intrigues me is how they help us build our collective memory (an act that depends on the universal human need to turn life into stories), and they essentially help us justify and blame—they’re little justice sensors. Do they create a sense of collective justice, or do they reflect an innately ethical conscience? Were the cave paintings at Lascaux shamanistic pleas for justice from the universe that could be at one and the same time so fruitful and so withholding?
Justitia (Justice—interesting that in our story it’s a woman) is a matron (the most senior nurse in a hospital) wielding a sword and measuring balances, and often blindfolded. These days we see her hanging around courthouses and courtrooms. Her image merges several goddesses who embodied Right Rule for Greeks and Romans, blending Roman blindfolded Fortuna (luck) with Greek Tyche (fate) and sword-flashing Nemesis (vengeance). I get the nurse part and the sword part of justice. And I get the blindfold, but not as it might relate to luck. And I’m not sure where fate comes in either. (Hmm. But that’s another story.)
In the stories we fabricate and tell and hear, we come to know the imaginable totality of what we and others can and cannot do, for good or evil, in the world. Our stories make clear who the bad guys and the good guys are, who gets justified and who gets blamed. Collectively deciding who gets justified and who gets blamed defines the boundaries of what we believe about the nature and possibilities of our life. And consensus about some story is what makes a nation into a nation, a religion into a religion, any group into any group. We identify as X because we believe X stories. (John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.)
EARLY ME AND THE FAIRY TALE STATUES
From the time I was about seven until I was ten, I had to spend weekends with my Dad, who lived across the street from the capitol building in Salt Lake City. It sits, by the way, at the far north end of Salt Lake City on a high hill, presiding over the people, much as The Sacré-Cœur Basilica at the summit of the butte Montmartre presides over Paris. (Yes, as a kid, Salt Lake City was my Paris. This speaks volumes about various holes in my education, in my personality, and in my very being.) Often my Dad was busy (it was just after his divorce from my mother after 16 years of marriage and three kids—he drank to excess a lot in the beginning and then slept it off and occasionally had a woman friend visiting), so I was sent to the movies or out to play (aren’t our stories endlessly fascinating?).
The grounds of the capitol were massive. I played in the gardens and on the endless lawns. But my favorite place was in the very front on the south lawn, the gigantic bronze statue of Chief Massasoit. It was sculpted by Cyrus Dallin, an internationally famous sculptor born in Springville, Utah and classically trained in Paris (ah ha, the Paris connection).
Dallin's dramatic, realistic style of sculpture includes nearly 250 known works. Some in heroic size (double life-size) are located in American's largest cities: Signal of Peace (1890), Lincoln Park, Chicago; Medicine Man (1899), Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909 in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Menotomy Indian Hunter (1911), Town Hall, Arlington, Mass; Scout (1914), Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, Missouri; Massasoit (1920) Plymouth, Mass. and State Capitol grounds, Salt Lake City, Utah; and Passing of the Buffalo (1929), Muncie, Indiana. With these works Dallin graphically portrays the dignity and evolving plight of the red man's struggle against the inhumane and unjust treatment of the intruding white man. (By the way, he also sculpted the Angel Maroni figure that sits on top of the Mormon Temple as well as the statue of Brigham Young that sits in the middle of a busy street at Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City—as kids we used to joke that he had his back to the temple and his hand held out to the bank: more stories.)
This statue I loved of Chief Massasoit was installed in 1959—two years before I discovered it—and was recently removed because of sensitivities about the depiction of American Indians. I used to climb on it and make believe I was a fellow Indian. I roamed the woods in the adjacent Memory Grove as one of his roving band. Massasoit, double life size and bronze, stood for stability and wisdom and peace (he held a peace pipe). He was a nice foil to my Dad, who wasn’t experiencing his best years at that point—his fairy tales were falling apart. It was for the greater glory of Massasoit and his just followers that I fought through the wilderness (of my emotions?), wielding my stick swords against the brambles and thornbushes that blocked my way.
MONUMENTS AS FAIRY TALES
In addition to TV and radio, magazines and newspapers, schools, and movies—all advertisements for our shared cultural story—one way societies create consensus on a collective narrative is by erecting war memorials (those great marble or bronze fairy tales). Every monument interprets the past, brings out some parts of the story and suppresses others. In deciding what stories we can tell and how to tell them, we struggle over meaning, building some consensus over what our history, our present situation, and even the future all mean. War memorials are part of the social glue that holds people together. Building the Sacré-Cœur Basilica requires some selective forgetting as well as selective remembering. On one side of the Sacré-Cœur, there is an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc. (Who was the little kid in 1961, consigned to his drunken, mourning father for weekends, who played around this statue, who felt the true nobility of humanity in the magnificence of this statue?) In downtown Baltimore, where I’ve lived now for many years, George Washington stands 178 feel high on a white marble Doric column, his arm outstretched to the city. In Moby Dick, Melville mentions this monument: "Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go."
WE ARE OUR MONUMENTS?
Maybe this seems a little far afield from fairy tales, but these monuments, like all others, capture a story we wish to remember, a story that shapes our world, and, as all the stories we share do, the monuments that we have shaped shape us. So we can walk through Sacré-Cœur and admire its whiteness, its size, its purity there at the highest point in Paris, but we are, of course, merely walking through ourselves.
The counter to fairy tales is supposed to be the Truth. But Truth is, finally, the story we believe. There are matters of fact, not to be confused with Truth. In my neighbor’s backyard this morning, a doe and her twin fawns were running through the sprinkler that was watering his back lawn. This is a matter of fact, though the language I use to convey the matter is heavily tinged with history, with stories, with the very stuff of fairy tales. But matters of fact don’t mean anything. They simply are. Truth, I think, is always concerned with meaning, which comes through interpretation (filtering), and meaning is what derives from our stories.
AN ASIDE ON PROUDHON AND ANARCHY
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was one of the first to declare himself an anarchist. A big influence on Karl Marx (before Marx denounced him), he wrote Property is Theft! and other famous tracts. He was involved in the uprisings of the revolution that created the Second French Republic (1848-1852). Thus he was an important forerunner of the stories that ultimately erected the Sacré-Cœur Basilica.
Proudhon's essay on What Is Government? is quite well known. In it he says,
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.)
Another famous quote was his "dialogue with a Philistine" in What is Property?:
"Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican."
"A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs – no matter under what form of government – may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans."
"Well! You are a democrat?"
"No."
"What! you would have a monarchy?"
"No."
" A Constitutionalist?"
"God forbid."
"Then you are an aristocrat?"
"Not at all!"
"You want a mixed form of government?"
"Even less."
"Then what are you?"
"I am an anarchist."
"Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the government."
"By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me."
Here in Paris at the beginning of worker’s rights, feminism, cooperatives, a voice speaking for the rights of the individual, is the seed of libertarianism and fascism. France backed the South in the American Civil War. The sudden conservative turn in France that led to Emperor Napolean III’s reign can be traced back to the stories that Proudhon and others were telling. But Proudhon also wrote that “The Jew is the enemy of the human race.” He called for the expulsion of Jews from France.
How is it possible to reconcile these stories? Just as our stories shape us and thus our world, we use them to justify our trespasses against others who have not been colonized by the stories we live by.
VIDEO GAMES AS FAIRY TALES
Video games are contemporary fairy tales. Contemporary fairy tales are often housed in video games—worlds we can enter and interact with. Massive multiple-player online role playing games. They create cyberdrama, an interactive fiction, that mirrors the dramas we live in, absorb ourselves in day by day. Luckily they offer a medium in which we get to become another person, and to act out in another world. But then, is that so different from our “real” lives? Are we not many people in many circumstances? And which is the main fairy tale we live in and which are merely our side stories? The socially relevant qualities of a video game are primarily determined by the underlying set of rules, demands, and expectations imposed on the player. Just as we invent our own rules of play, demands and expectations. From all of this comes our own emergent narrative, the storyline created simply by "what happens to” the player.
The term "platform" refers to the specific combination of electronic or computer hardware that, in conjunction with low-level software, allows a video game to operate. (The term "system" is also commonly used.) We, as human beings, have our own platforms. I’m sure we share many characteristics with the doe and the twin fawns running through the sprinklers in my neighbor’s back yard, but we can invent languages, build cities, and wage war. All of this is possible because we have different platforms. This view of us is distasteful. We are, we imagine, so much more than this. After all, my Dad had a Steinway in his living room, and spent hours and hours a day playing Chopin and Bach (when I was stuck indoors on those musical weekends with Dad, I’d draw pictures and color and make up games with cards and dice and little blocks of wood while my Dad spoke his sadness through his arsenal of baroque and impressionist composers—his favorites). But the Sacred Heart Basilica and the windmills and pantaloons at the Moulin Rouge next door, Salt Lake City, my Dad, Chief Massasoit, and the Angel Maroni, Memory Grove, not to mention WWII, the anti-Semites, the good guys and the bad guys, all of them are consistent with this platform.
FAIRY TALES AND A SPACE FOR MIRACLES
Through our fairy tales, perhaps, there is a sacred space we are allotted, where we can experience the miraculous, the essence of our existence, and determine, for ourselves, who we wish to be. After all, there is no special difference between the question we ask of our fairy tales—what does this tale mean?—and the slightly larger question we ask of existence—what does this all mean?
We are mammals, so we can identify with the troupe of five raccoons that march purposefully to the bird-feeder in the backyard. We can watch the second one climb on the first one’s back, and then the third climb the growing ladder, until, finally, the fifth one climbs to the top, shakes the feeder, emptying all the seeds on the lawn for all to eat. We are creatures, so we can identify with the spider spinning the unlucky fly into a cocoon for dinner. And we are life forms, so we can identify with the ancient lichen feeding on the granite boulders in Rocky Mountain State Park. And from all these we make stories. We hear music. We paint our joy and sadness. Merce Cunningham said, “Dance is a spiritual adventure in time and space.” Endless stories.
My favorite fairy tales are those in which a lucky soul is granted three wishes. Through these wishes we come to know our ultimate foolishness as well as those fond wishes and dreams with which we suture our torn lives.
From the famous Parisian sewers (Musée des égouts de Paris) to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart—Paris’ Taj Mahal on a hill, the shining white unicorn’s horn of that shining city—we live amongst our fairy tales, which give the illusion of real life, and, in fact, are real life, though, we must admit, the need to use the word “real” to designate one kind of life from another exemplifies how real that other kind of life is—imagined life. For as we imagine life, thus it tends to become?
TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF FAIRY TALES
So what do we want in our fairy tales? My wish is that we become aware of our fairy tales and that they have the power to transform us into the sheer joy of who we are. To paraphrase the eloquent Charlotte Joko Beck: we all want a shinier car, a new paint job, but maybe what we need is simply to participate fully in what life asks us to be—at this very moment, good, bad, or indifferent. The little kid, the little “I,” wants and wants and wants from his or her parents. I want the whole world to be my Giant, my Massasoit, my fairy tale parent. More money, more love, more comfort. Please, I’ll do anything for a happy ending. What heroic neediness—the witch who lives inside us all who eats fat little children for supper, the evil stepmother who tries to kill the children, the king who turns into a fire-breathing dragon. What breadcrumbs will save us? What talking animals will appear to give us wisdom? What unbreakable sword will we find to save ourselves?
As Ms. Beck and many others remind me, paying close attention to the center of the drama, marshalling all my curiosity and wonder, is the way to transformation (let me just admit it, there is no ultimate salvation), a miraculous transformation into who I really am, right now. Curiosity and wonder are the essential parts of my struggle just as they are the essential parts of my fairy tales. It is a wonder and a curiosity that the French would raise the great marble breast of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica on the highest hill in Paris to salve the horrors of the past and to confirm a life of joy. The Sacred Heart, Paris, the whole dramasphere in which I struggle, a fairy tale that demands my full curiosity and wonder so that, in the midst of lovemaking, giving birth, working, creating, sacrificing, killing, mangling, and dying, across the entire spectrum of what’s happening, I can live at the heart of my imagination smack in the middle of the everyday fairy tale that keeps getting richer and richer for me as the years go by.