King Thrushbeard

So, I am living in the rather surreal world of change that I know so well, the world of taking the last drive to Castle Hill, of the last look of a friend out the door of the car after dinner in Sydney; the last few visits to the Sivanna Centre where I get my IVs; a house full of packing cartons. How many toilet rolls do we need for x amount of time? Should I give this huge container of olive oil away or just leave it? I remember buying it, not too long ago, with the assumption that I'd use it here in meals, after a day of school, a normal series of days, before that assumption was smashed to bits.

The 'last things' all feel so familiar to me, a rolling stone, an adventurer, and I keep forgetting--and then remembering with horror, humor, and some anger--that we've only just unpacked: It is as if my surreal world of moves is a record on too high a speed, and the packing has become life. I keep thinking that this is one of those weird, on-the-border bad dreams and I am now just hoping to wake up. Thinking of the curved driveway to the Orcas house, past the "Wrye 299 Nina Lane" sign made by Uncle Dwight helps a little.

The golden light in the eucalyptus that I looked so forward to seeing here has become a sick glare on monotonous flattened trees; the doors opening into Australia as a Place are sealing themselves up from me. I think we will not even leave a slight footprint in the minds of people here; like a ship blown back out to sea, we will fade from memory easily. Which is fine. And sad. It didn't have to be that way. Or did it? The space inside my heart, which I thought so full of relationship, is blank and empty.

Australia has truly been a nightmare in so many ways. I am waiting to wake up, looking for what to learn, but right now as we get ready to go it all seems so meaningless, such a needless waste. Woody Allen said something like, "Comedy is 30 minutes after sadness"--and I think there is truth in this. I understand why comedians seem often to have the unexpected, hidden, broken heart. I think they see more with the heart, more deeply into the heartache all around; they see deeply enough, are hurt enough, that they must find the incongruities, the ironies...in order to find meaning, in order for the broken heart to keep beating. I never understood the horribly tacky weeping clown pictures before. They are still tacky, even with their little truth. They will always be tacky. But I won't make so much carefree fun of them anymore. I have less of the mockingjay in me now after this trip-up. I feel like Bilbo except I only got as far as the trolls and did indeed get chewed on for a bit.

I think someday I will write to myself a little comedy about this...the sheer ridiculousness is all there, ready.

But I'm not. I'm still within the thirty minutes of sadness and surreal, though I know what we've been through here is nothing next to what others go through. And I'm trying to find meaning and not feel sorry for myself, and failing this time.

For some reason, in that deeper water in me, what keeps bobbing up is the fairy tale King Thrushbeard. Hans Christian Anderson, of course, poor Hans, has a version that is desperately depressing...but the Grimm Brothers is the one that keeps surfacing.

It is, as you will remember, the story of the proud princess who has everything, living easily in her father's house, confident of her ability to control her own destiny. Her faith in her father, in herself, is misplaced, because she does not know real life or herself. She knows the ropes and lives carefree.

She refuses a good man as a suitor, King Thrushbeard, because of his outward appearance and mocks him. Her father has had it and says he will give her to the next beggarman who comes along. She laments even Thrushbeard now, but it is still not in the right spirit...it is only regret for what she has lost, not true sight. So she must leave the palace and she is put through one trial after another, designed to break her spirit. The culmination is her working as a scullery maid in the palace she once danced in; there is a wedding on and she is looking round the corner at the festivities, a beggar in her own father's house. She sees her life as it was, from the outside, outside in the dark. She sees through a beggar's eyes.

A man pulls her out onto the dance floor, and she is humiliated and laughed at...it seems the height of cruelty, this man's actions, but it is actually King Thrushbeard, who is also the beggar, who has educated her out of real love--a love of her soul, not simply her physical beauty. He will not let her remain shallow.

For some reason, I feel like that proud princess who has taken for granted her father's house. I feel that my sight is somehow off, in the core. And now, after the washing machine we've been through here, I feel like the beggar in a house I thought I understood, even a little.

I feel, now, my tattered clothes and the little food jar for collecting scraps of hope tied to my belt; I feel the cold floor, the weird feeling of the little bits from dinner dropped off the waiters' trays, under bare and newly calloused feet; I feel the darkness of a closing kitchen behind me, the whiff of cold air sent up my spine as the garbage is taken out; I feel the doorjamb on my cheek, as I watch a celebration that I no longer have a place within, and I wonder if my life before, what I believed in, was ever real, or just what I wanted to see. I only see a nameless, mob-like crowd with no one I recognize. I think of the hovel and the daily grind and I know it was the dance, the belief in it, that kept me going. But now I see I wasn't seeing it as it really was, and so there is nothing to count on.

And I don't feel like dancing anyway.

My pots have been smashed by a bully, my pride has been wrung to bits, my faith in myself to understand what the hell is the point thrown down, and I am a beggar in my own father's house.

I feel it, in the deep water in me, and though I don't understand it, somehow Australia and all that happened to us here has brought King Thrushbeard up from the deep past, from the nights my sister and I leaned on my mother and listened to her read it. I remember feeling the princess' shame when she was pulled out onto the dance floor, as she thought, to be mocked. I just didn't know then what it felt like in real life. I didn't know, really, what it meant to live for awhile in that moment, not knowing what was meant to come next, not knowing the End. Like being chewed on by a troll without even your handkerchief for comfort.

But King Thrushbeard has given me a paradigm, of sorts, with which to deal with it, the beginning, perhaps, of the comedy--the classical sense of it, as an education. It is what literature is for, really.

But I still don't feel like dancing.