Summer of Stars

Charles Williams named one collection of his Arthurian poems The Region of the Summer Stars.  And there is something starry about August.  The skyscape differs from that of piercing stars in cold December clarity--and as well it should, as the tilting of the planet has everything to do with both stars and seasons.

Punchinello Punch of dA, Tanabata Myth

August 13th of this year was the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar and the day of the Double Seventh Festival--Qixi or the Magpie Festival, Tanabata in Japan.  It is the remembrance of the once-a-year reunion of two lovers over the river of light known as the Milky Way.

The story of the weaver girl and the cowheard is a tale belonging to Faerie through-and-through.  It originated in the stars and constellations, like the Greco-Roman myths, and there are at least a few similar stories accounted for in Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Orpheus comes close, but I can't think of a western myth quite as thoroughly fairy tale-ish as the one belonging to Qixi.  Perhaps the long delay of Christianization in the east kept the transition between Chinese myth and folklore fluid.  The motiffs of the poor peasant and the wicked mother figure; the stolen garment and the fairy wife; the enchanted speaking beast and the helpful animals--these are common and fondly thought of.  Indeed they are a signpost to any watchful traveler--to tread softly, speak kindly, not look directly into the eyes of a stranger, for the Otherworld is near.

AnHellica of dA, Tanabata, source

There are many versions of the myth, of course, but I have combined my favorite elements to tell the tale as follows:

ONCE upon a time, there was a poor cowheard named Niulang who lived with his elder brother.  His sister-in-law was very cruel to him, and she inevitably drove him out.  

Now the Queen of Heaven had seven daughters who descended from the sky to go bathing.  Niulang happened to be out tending his herd, when he saw them and retrieved one of their discarded robes.  When the fairy women finished their baths and dressed to return, the youngest could not find her clothing.  Then the cowheard emerged and asked her to marry him.  Her name was Zhinü, the weavergirl, and she saw that he was strong, kind, and handsome; and she agreed.  They had two children and lived in happiness.

Many years passed that were as mere days in heaven.  So when the Queen Mother noticed her youngest daughter missing, she was livid.  She retrieved her and set Zhinü to work, weaving clouds at her loom.  Niulang and his children did not know where she had gone, and were desolate.

artist unknown

It happened that the cowheard had an ox, who told his master to slaughter him and put on his hide in order to find his wife.  The cowherd wept bitterly but did as his loyal beast bid him.  When he put on the magic hide, he and his children flew to heaven and reunited with their wife and mother.  But the Queen of Heaven took out her hairpin and drew a line between them.  The line grew and became a silver river dividing the fairy weaver and her mortal family.  That river of light is the Milky Way; Zhinü is the star Vega; and her husband is Altair, with his two star-children, Beta Aquilae and Gamma Aquilae, flanking either side of him.

Once a year, the magpies take pity on them and fly up to heaven to make a bridge, so that the husband and wife may be reunited for a single night.

While maternal separation closes summer in the far east, it's appropriate that its opposite, maternal reunion, is celebrated in the western hemisphere.  Today, the 15th of August, is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, according to the Gregorian calendar.  Orthodox tradition holds that Mary, the mortal woman who became the Mother of God, was crowned Queen of Heaven by her divine Son upon arrival.  Where Zhinü and her goddess mother are at odds, the Virgin Mary reconciles.

artist unknown, source

The paradox of reunion and separation holds itself well; each element opposing and suspending each other, like two poles of a magnet--or perhaps different sides of the same sphere, for both heavenly women obtain a joyous meeting with their Beloved and Offspring in heaven.

artist unknown

I leave the last word to Masha:

August is a month for magic--a month of otherland wanderings and paths that may not come again . . . paths leading the Virgin each year back to her Son and me to the hidden places of wood and stream. . . 

. . . I can't help but feel sad to see the end and the beginning.

Guest Post: Familiar Otherness

By Edward Gardner

[Edward invited me to read his blog-published wonder-story, The Black Dionysia, which touches on so much of what we speak about here on Spinning Straw into Gold, so of course I asked him if he would like to contribute a guest post.  You can read The Black Dionysia for yourself here. -- Christie]

The strongest enchantment fairy stories cast over me is that feeling of 'familiar otherness' I have when I read them. It's that feeling so many readers have had of being transported half out of the ordinary flow of time and into a different sort of time we somehow feel we know, or half know. Maybe it is a time nestled back in our childhoods when the world was still infinitely vast and full of both wonder and dread, when night was still possessed with mythical awe and we believed the summer sunshine eternal.

But what we are familiar with about this fairy tale time is precisely the kind of otherness we encounter there, and it is a profound otherness. We are always put off our guard when we enter Faerie. We feel there a tangible presence of threat, a lurking possibility of real harm because something very big has to be at stake for any mortal who goes there. Children can be lost forever in fairy stories, or altered beyond recognition. I don't think of these stories as comforting, not at all. Rather they are by nature unsettling, and address unsettling realities of life, even if what some of them have to unsettle is our capacity to bore ourselves to death in a predictable and disenchanted world.

Anyway, I've heard great writers talk about this phenomenon of familiar otherness (I hear vague echoes of Tolkien and Chesterton talking about it now), so I'm under no illusion of having profound new insights to offer. Mostly what I'm here to do is talk about how this familiar otherness was my guiding principle when I wrote the prologue and first chapter of The Black Dionysia.

Michael Pape, Grace - Mute Swan, source

The book begins by revisiting that familiar old confrontation between clever weakling and threatening beast. In this case we enter the scene from the perspective of the beast, which is a Leopard. This Leopard has become hungry, but her appetite is for something she cannot quite express, a kind of complex longing that defies her every attempt to explain it. She sets out in search of this object but after long and fruitless hours she becomes exhausted, morose. She drops the hunt and looks for a quiet out of the way place to curl up. Yet just when she finds it the Leopard discovers something unexpected and yet familiar waiting for her. She finds an animal she could easily devour, a Swan, but who holds the possibility of giving her what she was looking for in the first place, an involved and complex story that will contain the Swan's true name.

It is no accident that the prologue of The Black Dionysia is a fable, or that it recreates a scene found in so many fables. We are already so familiar with the magic of fable, are we not? I find even mentioning the word fable awakens something very old inside me. Already that other time of Faerie is stirring, peeking through at me with animal eyes. Probably many of us can recall from childhood Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. One of my favorite recent adaptations is Huevos Rancheros: A Mexican Tale, in which a hen convinces a coyote not to eat her by scrambling up a delicious breakfast every morning. Whenever we see this encounter between the two animals, something inside alerts us that we have witnessed strange scenes like this before and we are drawing close to Faerie.

In the case of The Black Dionysia, the Swan is weary and forgetful and cannot offer any guarantee that her story will be very entertaining, let alone worth the Leopard's hunt. But of course the Leopard accepts the offer of a story, and of course we know she will. The powerful beast always listens. Besides, when one finds a beautiful creature sleeping in a four-poster bed in a remote cottage one already knows from various promptings and indications in the fairy tradition that a remarkable story is about to unfold. We are familiar with the scene already. We expect to hear how the Swan is really a princess, and perhaps how an enchantment was set upon her by a witch, maybe how she still has a family somewhere but cannot return in her present condition. Perhaps the reader is surprised when the Swan begins to tell her story in Chapter 1 and we find that she grew up in New England.

M.L. Ecclestone, Leopard, source

But although the Swan's story defies expectation, it remains quite remarkable and there are familiar elements within it. In the first place it involves finding a monkey in her grandmother's attic. Not that many of us will have had this experience, but something about it seems strangely familiar, does it not? Perhaps we have witnessed scenes like it in books or movies, scenes invariably set in England during the early part of the last century in which children find artifacts brought back by their eccentric uncles from expeditions to Egypt, India, or Borneo. Or perhaps we have explored attics ourselves and found odd things from other cultures that seem to have imported with them something of the spirit (or spirits) of that far away place.

In any case we, like the Leopard, probably expect the monkey to be one of these stuffed artifacts. It is not. It is alive. In fact it isn't even a monkey at all but a chimpanzee. And it speaks. The presence of this talking chimpanzee alerts us to the fact we are still in the strangely familiar realm of fable. But if we failed to see this, the chimpanzee himself has a fable to tell. And now we have the first framed story of the book, at which point we will at once recognize the familiar but exotic scenario of A Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade spins a maze of stories, adding a new layer each night to prolong her life.

There are many more framed stories to encounter in The Black Dionysia, even though they are not delivered in such a linear fashion as in A Thousand and One Nights. Indeed, we can from one perspective read the book as made up entirely of framed stories that take turns framing each other. But this first framed story is told by the 'monkey' for a reason. The story of a primate behaving like a human is obviously a special kind of fable, and one very familiar in popular culture ever since the work of Charles Darwin. I'm not even sure all that it means, or can mean, but my point is that the 'monkey' (which is how popular culture categorizes all primates) as a fabulous character is both familiar and strange. It is both human and other, and for that reason we might feel both welcoming and uneasy about it.

Actually, the potential of the 'monkey' first occurred to me while sitting at the Nimbus brewpub in Tucson, Arizona. For years Nimbus has been using the 'monkey' (usually a chimpanzee) as its mascot, in the process commissioning all sorts of fascinating art that replaces the human subject in classical and pop art with a chimpanzee. So the chimp appears as Michelangelo's David, as Che Guevara, as Neil Armstrong, etc. It was this sort of thing that gave me the courage to put the chimpanzee into a suit of samurai armor, which is itself a kind of pop culture symbol.

Jonathan Vair Duncan, Sun Wukong, source

But there was also something older and more authentic behind my eastern warrior 'monkey'. While researching world legends in search of inspiration I came across the character of Sun Wukong in the Chinese epic The Journey to the West. Sun Wukong is an immortal being of fascinating powers who is punished by the Buddha for rebelling against Heaven. However, after his 500 year punishment he joins the monk Xuanzang on a journey towards enlightenment and atonement for his past sins. Some elements of Sun Wukong's character come through in my own 'monkey' fable and I believe this contributes a layer of mythic feeling to the story. Not that most readers would recognize Sun Wukong himself, but I think when writers feel the great span of time behind a character they can reach into the legend and write with a borrowed authority or consciousness.

As for the rest of The Black Dionysia I'll say only this: It is an unusual book encompassing a range of literary styles, all of them imaginative and some informed more by the classic elements and experience of Faerie than others. I am only now in the process of sharing it publicly and am eager for feedback, criticism, and conversation, so read this as an invitation.

The Nature of Conditions in Japanese Folk Tales

You may not know them by this name, but they are a common element in fairy tales and folklore.  I call them Conditions.

You know what they are.  Be home before midnight.  Don't glance behind.  Take nothing with you.  Eat of every tree but one.

Cross these Conditions, and the magic dies.  The promise evaporates.  The garden is shut.

Japanese tales frequently make use of them.

Hoichi and the Ghosts, Kelley McMorris

In Hoichi the Earless, the blind monk's body is painted in sacred words, but he must be painted all over.  The servants fail to cover his ears.  When a ghost samurai comes at night to fetch Hoichi to the court of the dead, it sees nothing: except for the ears.  So it rips them from Hoichi's head to take them to its masters.

A vegan priest is granted two days as a fish but warned not to eat any food from a baited hook.  When he neglects the warning, he is caught and cooked.  Fortunately, his consciousness returns to his sleeping body, and he lives to tell the tale.  Thus goes the tale of Kogi.

In these two stories, the reasons for the conditions are obvious.  Where the sacred words touched skin, they made Hoichi invisible and protected him from his ghoulish escort.  The fish Kogi is tempted by bait and subsequently caught.  He thinks he will be able to speak to his aquaintances and explain but discoveres he cannot.  Alas that his wish-granters did not clarify: "By the way, Kogi, you'll be a fish, and fish can't talk.  At least not in any language men can understand."

Other conditions, however, are more mysterious.  The direct connection between the taboo and the result of breaking it are faint but strong as cobwebs.

One of my favorites is The Crane Maiden (also The Crane Wife), in which an old couple adopts a mysterious daughter.  The girl weaves beautiful cloths that bring in a handsome income, but she begs her parents not to watch her weave.  When curiosity gets the better of them, they see that their adoptive daughter is not a girl but a crane, plucking her own feathers from her breast to weave.  Though they believe they cannot be seen, she instantly knows.  And, without further explanation, she tells them she must go and bids them farewell.

The Crane Wife, janey-jane of deviantART

In the tale of Urashima Taro, the kind fisherman marries the daughter of the Dragon King.  They depart to an enchanted island.  When he asks to return, his bride gives him a box that he is not to open during his visit.  Upon finding his loved ones gone and his home much changed, he opens the box, ages rapidly, and turns to dust.  He has been away for hundreds of years.

These last two types are, I think, of most value to us. 

In this world, there are many shadowed corners in which shapes and figures are only glimpsed.  Life is a precarious phenomenon.  One moment, it is impenetrable and fierce, surviving disease, famine, natural disasters; the next it is fragile, and a nick in the flesh can end it with the dispassionate finality of a shutting door.

Still, the sun goes on rising.  The spring always returns from the dead.

Modern science aids in the understanding of our relation to the universe.  But attempts to dissect the nature of love or the root cause of miracles fail to satisfy the soul.  And we know this because fairy tales still speak to us.  Because we do not question why it must be that Orpheus loses his wife if he turns toward her.  Or why Love must flee when the Mind tries to shine a light on it.

Something within us clicks, like a key fitting a lock.  And we know that these things are true, though we do not fully understand.