And they lived happily ever after

I returned home from vacation and immediately became sick. This is the theme this year: I have been sick in one way or another every single month since February in a way that’s taken me out for, at minimum, a week at a time. It’s been very hard and exhausting. I can’t seem to get healthy.

At first I thought it was altitude sickness. I was in the Canadian Rockies, in a lodge that can only be accessed by helicopter with no cell service (it was awesome), and my symptoms were similar to arriving back in Scottsdale after driving around Sedona and up to Page on New Years’ Eve. Then the coughing started. I finally caught COVID.

Somehow, M never got sick and was stuck taking care of me again. When I wasn’t napping, I’d try and tinker with a typeface, and then when my brain got tired of the screen, I’d make him read to me. I’d tried this before, when I was healthy and we just moved in together, thinking it would be romantic if we read poetry to each other at night before bed, but it turns out most of the poetry I like to read is about war and death so that quickly fizzled out.

Fairytales—the old school folk tales, not the modern Gregory MaGuire psychoanalytical twists—are short. They’re all plot: this happened, then this happened, and this, and this. Don’t get me wrong, I love the modern adaptations of the old myths: Circe is one of my favorite reads this year and I flew through Song of Achilles on the retreat. But those are books you curl up with, are meant to be cocooned in. The “original” fairytales are mostly transcriptions of a sort, a translation of stories that were meant to be told aloud around the hearth. Perfect for a bedtime (or pre-second nap) story.

I have a lot of books, and an entire stack is devoted to fairytales, both the stories themselves and their scholarship. I’ve also started to slowly bring my childhood collection from my parents’ house to Brooklyn. I always loved them, from the classic European stories to Filipino mythologies and Native American legends from northern Michigan. What kid doesn’t like magic? 

These stories stayed with me (physically, literally), and even when I was studying English, I twisted and finagled my major requirements to include more children’s literature and fewer canonical classics. When I started my capstone project for my design degree, my thesis advisor was horrified that I wanted to explore the social implications of authorship and ownership through the retelling of Snow White (I did it anyway). My friend T found The Turnip Princess, a recently unearthed collection by the Grimms’ Bavarian contemporary Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, in the stacks of discarded books in the Atlantic office lunch room and handed it to me across our shared cubicle wall. This is what I gave to M to read me two weeks ago.

The stories are fundamentally absurd. There’s a certain amount of psychoanalysis we’ve come to expect in our narratives, some inkling of motive from our hero, if not also the villain. These tales are blunt. This happened, then this, and this, and this. Some stories feel at least a little familiar—Ashfeather and Thumbnickel are clearly related to Cinderella and Tom Thumb. A jealous monarch asks for proof of death via deliverance of organs, a kind huntsman spares the child and kills an animal instead. Sometimes I wish I knew why, because the whys make the stories so much richer. But as we make our way through the collection, I find that it sometimes doesn’t matter: Hans set the barn on fire because he’s stupid or because he’s a malicious little shit, but the barn is still on fire. It doesn’t matter how or why I got sick, I’m still coughing my lungs out.

There’s something to be said too about allowing the listener to fill in the gaps between this and this and this. Another book I read this year, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (recommended by my favorite design professor that I finally returned to and finished a decade later), references how ancient Hebrew didn’t have letters for vowels, the sounds of breath. The reader had to figure out the sounds based on context. At the same time, this left texts open to interpretation. And they were meant to have multiple interpretations. The dynamic, living story was the point. As writing systems proliferated in the West, Greeks added vowels, Gutenberg mass produced text with the printing press, stories became codified. Permanent, preserved yes, but also static.

I’ve noticed, both in myself and in others, the desire for certain things to be fixed, as in unchanging (I am a Leo after all). There’s a higher value placed on the “original,” authenticity and legitimacy awarded by a place in the canon. I don’t think this is inherently bad, I find craving for original-as-novelty to be perfectly natural, innate even. And I also think wanting fixed points from which to orient an intuitive and logical way of being in the world and situating ourselves in history. I do wonder, however, what gets lost, what we give up, when we fix ourselves one way or another. When we don’t understand intent or motive, we lose nuance, perhaps even a bit of the humanity. When we fill all the gaps in the story, there’s no space to breathe.

I keep coming back to fairytales because they are a bottomless well of curiosities. I’m interested in how certain stories, plot points, motifs survive over the centuries, while others don’t. I wonder about who really owns these stories, and whose stories we’re telling when we repeat them. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how I’m so grateful that someone preserved these stories and wrote them down, but I also regret that the art of storytelling at the heart of oral cultures is dying. I have questions about how this affects how we remember things—our stories, our histories, but also how our memories and neurology are wired and rewired. And I ask these all from the seat of someone who has devoted her education and career to the written word and visual culture. 

I also simply find comfort in fairytales: their straightforwardness, their familiarity, their happy endings. There’s a certain amount of faith required, but even in the darkest fairytales, things seem to work out okay in the end.