not native fruit

little miss by the day

"The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, 'get to meet.'  They slip out of countries, or towns - or rooms even - just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated or something that was rightfully and divinely ours.  That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day.  Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.  Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

"She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about her that I let her slip through my fingers.  She was just a little seamstress who had a 'vairee' odd way of speaking; it was quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice.  And then I noticed that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from.  I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived.  And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her.  She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house."

Little Miss By-the-Day was a novel by Lucille van Slyke, published 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Co in New York.  It belonged to my mother and I discovered it among our books as a child and probably read it when I was about ten.  It's the story of a French girl of old New Orleans, who's parents (of course) die, and she is taken away from their grand old mansion by her grandfather to another manorial dwelling that has become quite ramshackle somewhere in the country-side.  While there, she nurses her aged ailing grandfather, and recreates her mother's gardens, based on her mother's original plan for the gardens in a book which she finds among her mother's things.

Later, after her grandfather has passed away, she becomes aware that she has inherited the old mansion in New Orleans, travels there and finds it has been subdivided into rooms and apartments and let out to immigrants.  (Immigrants always seem to get short shrift in our country, and they do in this book too.) She is not pleased, but moves into one of the apartments and takes work as a seamstress by-the-day in order to be able to pay off back taxes and fines to fully repossess the house.  Slowly she is able to regain possession of her house bit by bit. 

In her travels she finds destitute poets and sculptors and other artists and brings them home with her, ensconcing them in rooms in her mansion and trying to encourage them not to give up hope, to keep writing, sculpting, drawing, whatever.  She adds little touches around the house that she knows will cheer them up.  She has a certain something about her that some people at her various day-jobs notice while others do not.  In the end she restores her home, creates a community of happy successful artists (quite an accomplishment! lol) and is reunited with her long-lost love.

I was simply mermerized by this book as a girl, and have read it several times as an adult.  To me, as a healer, it is such a great book about healing! I feel that I learned the value of patience and time and process and synchronicity from her finding of her mother's garden plan and her ability to reconnect with her lost mother by recreating her garden.  Then she applies what she knows to her next challenge which is 'out in the world' - the restoration of her family's house to a place that protects and nurtures artists.  Gad, I loved this book!  Just had to tell you about it.

Also, might mention that it seems like I am doing something similar in my own life, which is really just too weird!

harry potter

I went with my eighty-three year old friend, Elizabeth, to see 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' the other day, after having just re-read the book preparatory to beginning the new one.  (I've since finished re-reading 'The Half-Blood Prince' - is it Sirius? - and will begin the new book this weekend.)  We both enjoyed the film production.  My friend has been a therapist for many years, and I have the theological and pastoral counseling background, as well as my own healing work, so we approached the film from those angles. 

Up until this most recent re-reading and viewing, I was starting to feel that the books were getting 'too dark' - but now I realize I was wrong about that.  These books are just the most phenomenal creation!  Nearly every fairy-tale motif and folk-fantasy is represented within their pages, and the psycho-spiritual wisdom is simply astounding.  Not to mention the author's grasp on the psychology of the young, as represented by Harry in particular.  In fact, what she was doing in these later books escaped me until I re-read them.  So glad I did! 

den grimme aelling/the ugly duckling

i'm enjoying reading hans christian andersen again because i enjoy his 'story-telling' capacities.  He really draws you in, with a conversational sort of style.  My father was known among his small circle as a great story-teller.  Not flamboyant or dramatic - far from it - in a very quiet, confidential way he would 'spin his yarns.'  Being a sea-going man, the spinning of yarns was probably expected.  But there was something about his story-telling style that was similar to Andersen's.  I noticed, when I visited Denmark, that many other people also spoke in a measured, thoughtfully developed story-telling style of speech.  Maybe it's only because they were translating in their heads.  Of course, this was a long time ago.  It may all be different now.

Anyway, Andersen fills us in on details of time and place that make his little morality tales all the more enjoyable and informative about a particular time and place, Denmark in the mid-nineteenth century.  I'm enjoying the process of translating the Ugly Duckling and comparing my rough, literal translations to the English translations that are around.  Some are so 'English' that they lose the Danish humor, and become 'thoroughly' English.  On the other hand, some Danish expressions wouldn't make much sense in English, although i can see how they got there, so i'll make a note when i come to them.

And now, the Ugly Duckling...

frau trude and ursula hegi's trudi montag

I've been reading a very cool essay on 'freeing the ensorcelled world' by Dave over at Via Negativa, (the article is on his personal page, here) and it made me recall Marie-Louise von Franz' book 'The Shadow and Evil in Fairytales.'  In it she talks about the basic mistrust of 'village' people towards one who spends a lot of time alone or out in the wilderness on their own.  She has many 'tales' with which to illustrate the common attitude towards those who 'go their own way.' 

This topic actually fits in well with the previous topic about monks, and reinforces our awareness of the need for community in the monkish life, whether as a vowed community or a loose-knit community of friends, co-workers, church or other groups.  No one is a monk entirely alone.  Even Tenzin Palmo depended to some extent on others to do what she did.  Going far back in time we see that Anthony of Egypt had regular bread deliveries made by local church members to the tomb where he was initially living, and later when he removed to the 'inner mountain,' a colony formed around him, and many petitioners sought his counsel.  He also visited Christians in jail.

So there was support, and there was also, of course, its opposite.  I remember Pir Vilayat, the late head of the Sufi Order of the West, saying that he had to endure a long period when people criticized him and expressed their belief that he was not good enough to head up the Order, but that eventually, he probably evolved more, and the people around him became more able to 'see' him and to accept him in that role. 

But anyway, that's not really what I want to talk about in this post.  I'm more fascinated with an instance of conflated identity I've stumbled across by re-reading portions of two of my most all-time favorite books.  In my perusal of Marie-Louise's 'Shadow and Evil', I came across this story, which made me think of Ursula Hegi's protagonist, Trudi Montag, in Stones from the River, (who is also a central character in the collection of short stories, Floating In My Mother's Palm.) Trudi is a dwarf who grew up running the village's local pay-library, the place where people came for paperbacks, novellas, 'stories.'  She continues this work into her middle-age and is 40 years old at the time of this passage.  Here is Ursula Hegi - (her narrator is an adolescent girl who has been forbidden to visit the pay-library):

"By the time I was twelve, Trudi Montag had inherited the pay-library.  Though she was in her early forties, she was less than one meter twenty tall.  She knew everything.  As soon as it happened.  Before it happened.  She had the dubious gift of guessing what went on behind closed doors.  These insights she embroidered into stories which she circulated around town.  Bearer of news - good and bad - she walked through the streets of Burgdorf on O-shaped legs, wearing cardigans that never quite closed over the wide bosom of her striped housedresses, moving with the assurance one usually sees in women who are truly beautiful.  To each encounter she brought her friendly curiosity; yet, when people saw her advancing toward them, they expected the worst; even good news barely made up for that first sense of dread they'd felt at the sight of her.

"On the surface Burgdorf was a town of great virtues while  underneath all kinds of transgressions were hushed up.  Herr Pastor Beier, who listened to the confessions of countless sins, could be counted on to whitewash them all through absolution, but Trudi Montag would not let the town forget any of its flaws.  Every day at noon, as soon as the bells from St. Martin's rang, she closed her library for two hours, and set out to carry the morning's gossip through town.  Like an ancient trader, she bartered until she had extracted a piece of gossip from her listeners. In her pay-library Trudi Montag told me that my mother had stopped going to church after my brother, Joachim, had died, and that our housekeeper's son, Rolf, was illegitimate.  [more scandalous stories, such as the suicide of the narrator's uncle.] 

"In front of the pay-library stood an old chestnut tree that carried huge blossom candles in the spring.  I'd flatten myself against its trunk, scanning the street to make sure my father wouldn't see me before I entered.  The kitchen behind the library led into a living room with a huge gold fish tank and a blue velvet sofa.  If I sat next to Trudi Montag on the sofa, I'd find myself sliding towards her along the slope created by her weight.  Instead of pictures, she had mirrors on her living room walls, small mirrors of all shapes in ornate frames.  I'd lean my head against the velvet and listen to her stories." (pp. 20-22, with apologies to the author for leaving out delicious details in the interest of brevity.)

And here is Marie-Louise, discussing how fairy tales account for 'spirit possession' in disobedient children, but my real point is the similarity between this character, called Frau Trude, and the character of Trudi Montag:  "Grimm story (No. 43) called 'Frau Trude'.  'There was once a little girl who was obstinate and prying and rather impertinent, and she didn't always do what her parents told her.  One day she said to her parents that she had heard so much about Frau Trude she would go to see what she was like.  People said that she looked so funny and that everything she had looked so wonderful, and that there were such strange things in her house, and the girl was very curious and wanted to see it.  Her parents forbade her to do this and said that Mrs. Trude was a very bad woman who did evil things and that she would not be their child any longer is she went there.  But the girl paid no attention to what her parents said and went all the same.  When she got there Frau Trude asked her why she was so white...[it turns out the child sees things there that frighten her, like the blood-soaked butcher, the hewer of trees, and so forth, and then Frau Trude "turned the girl into a block of wood which she threw onto the fire and when it was glowing red she warmed herself by it and said, 'That gives a good light!'  "  (pp.139-140)

Anyway, I'm wondering if Ursula Hegi intended Trudi Montag to possess echoes of Frau Trude, or if it is just one of those strange coincidences, or better yet, an unconscious dip by Hegi into the collective unconscious, producing an instance of synchronicity.  Anyway, this bit of apophenia enriches the character of Trudi Montag for me even more!  I happen to feel that this is one of the best books of fiction in the world, or rather the two of them together, and in non-fiction, 'Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tale' is way way up there too.

I guess the point is that when we stray outside the perspective of innocence, a perspective that is reinforced in 'polite society' and in the neat and tidy life of the 'middle-class' village, we may become frightened, we may suffer, but all of that is just a source of energy to the 'old earth mother,' the 'baba yaga' or whatever we want to call her.  Frau Trude.  She's seen it all.