Grimm reflections

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who am I?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who am I?

During all the first half-century of my life, I barely encountered, contemplated or uttered the word hate. Maybe your first half-century was (or is being) different. We grow up as adolescents, learning to love trees, and the seaside and rock-climbing and rugby. (What’s not to love about rugby?)

We traverse puberty, which has many definitions, but which I define quite simply: when a child acquires passions. Then we go to university or college and we embrace our passions. We study the arts, or the sciences, or the social sciences, and socialising, because we feel a calling. It’s even called vocational training. Then we meet the perfect girl or the perfect boy and we feel real butterflies for the first time and we buy flowers and kiss and cuddle and get married and have adorable children, which we raise and cherish and prepare for their lives’ great adventure, and we send them out into the world to flourish as we did. And then, we start to hate. With passion.

Resisting that urge to hate comes easily to some, and less easily to others. Do you know which you are? Do you hate easily? Do you love easily? Do you both hate and love easily, switching like a solenoid between the two?

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was an American president a long time ago, once gave a speech in which he said, “We have nothing to fear except fear itself.” That’s inspiring, like “Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” That was Karl Marx. “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” Oscar Wilde at the New York customs depot. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway. They’re all quite clever, and they’re all quite succinct, which is why they’re clever. But I’ll stick my own oar in here: We have nothing to hate but hatred itself. For hatred and recrimination dehumanise us, and if we dehumanise ourselves, we render ourselves of no earthly use to anyone but ourselves. In short, we make ourselves satanists.

There’s talk, which I see occasionally, of evil and even of satanism, and these words get overused, because they’re everywhere, like the air that we breathe and the rustle of leaves in the wind. Just like hate, when you use words like evil and satanism as everyday expressions to describe things (even if they are evil and satanistic), you do not highlight them, you do not draw special attention to them. What you do is banalise them. You make them everyday, ordinary. We once used evil ironically, or wicked in the context of fairytales, such as with the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. The cartoonists and animators came and turned these household tales, as Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm called them, into stories of childlike fantasy. As any student knows, their tales were not theirs: they rewrote and tidied up tales that they collected on their travels—they did not write them from scratch. But Disney did. What he and others did was to rewrite ancient morality tales into modern pipe dreams. Whether wittingly or otherwise, Disney was part and parcel of a cultural wave that shifted attitudes away from the Victorians’ gothic fear of death and the hereafter, a culture of self-restraint, and made it acceptable, if not desirable, to believe in fantasy: fantasy that did not stop at the silver screen, and, by contrast, formed a culture of self-deception.

Take The Frog Prince, which the Grimm brothers published in 1812. There lives a princess who plays with a golden ball by a spring in the forest, throwing it up and catching it. Turns out she would have been a useless rugby player, because, all of a sudden, she fumbles it and it lands in the water. She asks a frog to dive into the water to retrieve her golden ball. And it asks, “What’ll you give me if I do?”

Was gibst du mir, wenn ich dein Spielwerk wieder heraufhole? A transactional frog. Well, the princess is so keen to have her ball back, she tells the frog, “Anything,” and this the frog muses over (as would anyone).

“Deine Kleider, deine Perlen und Edelsteine und deine goldene Krone, die mag ich nicht: aber wenn du mich liebhaben willst, und ich soll dein Geselle und Spielkamerad sein, an deinem Tischlein neben dir sitzen, von deinem goldenen Tellerlein essen, aus deinem Becherlein trinken, in deinem Bettlein schlafen: wenn du mir das versprichst, so will ich hinuntersteigen und dir die goldene Kugel wieder heraufholen.”

“I don’t much like your clothing, your pearls or jewels or your golden crown: but, if you’ll love me, if I should be your companion and playmate, let me sit next to you at your little table, and eat from your little golden plate, and drink from your little goblet, and sleep in your little bed: if you promise me that, then I’ll dive down and retrieve the golden ball for you.”

Beds and forests figure frequently in the tales of Grimm. Germany is, after all, famous for der deutsche Wald, its great forested areas. And forests are dark places, in which one can easily lose one’s way, so it’s logical that they’re renowned as places of mystery and the unknown and hidden forces. And beds are traditionally the place we retire to in order to snuggle down, warm and cosy, protected from the outside world, and where we enter the realm of dreams. And they’re where people … have sex. Goldilocks (who is British) lies in the bears’ beds without the bears. This king’s daughter is being propositioned. In a children’s fairytale, wouldn’t you know. If you think differently, how would you view someone making the same proposition to your daughter? What do you mean it’s okay if it’s a frog? Get real!

I speak German and I have a German edition of these fairytales, and, aside from these observations (and more), the tales are replete with something else that the English-speaker might not fully appreciate: huge tracts are narrated in the subjunctive, what in German is called der Konjunktiv. What the subjunctive does is remove the narration from the domain of the factual and place it in the domain of the hypothetical. And it is sometimes only that linguistic mechanism that separates fairytales from horror stories.

Fairytales are stories in which good battles evil, and there are surprisingly few of them that feature a fairy (you’ll recall Cinderella); when they do, the fairy represents good, and the witch represents evil, but it is not always good that wins, nor is it even clear, of all the characters, which of them are good and which are evil. The witch which is in Snow White is evil (she who asks the mirror on the wall who the fairest of them all is) and we know this because she is hateful towards Snow White; but when our princess is later hateful towards the Frog Prince, she ends up the heroine. Fairytales are stories in which the listener must imagine not only the unfolding of the plot, but how the characters and situations in the plot translate into real life—indeed, the listener must get real. Much the way that the Parables of Jesus need to be interpreted in terms of how the message relates to us, His modern readers. It is this requirement for input from the reader’s imagination that places huge responsibility on the illustrators of fairytales. Unlike Jesus, Walt Disney didn’t leave interpretation to the imagination, but presented us with his own, and made it standard fare.

When we look at the films of Walt Disney and his cohorts, goodness has no failings, unless it be in the form of innocence; and evil is imbued with no saving graces—we are induced to cower in our seats as it inveigles good into its grasp. “Don’t be fooled!” we want to cry out, just as children do at our Christmas pantomimes. “He’s behind you!” we call out to our hero, as his nemesis approaches from the wings. “Where?” he appeals to the audience. “Behind you!!!” come the cries. At last the danger is neutralised, not by the valour of the star, but by some comical intervention, which releases the tension by way of laughter. On the stage, it is laughter that saves the day. That, or an X certificate.

I once saw a play by Eugène Ionesco called La Leçon, which certainly carries such a certificate. It’s a comedy about a private lesson, given by a teacher at his own home. A pupil turns up, the lesson commences, and, in the end, she is murdered by the teacher. Ionesco was a leading figure in the theatre of the absurd, and this play may well sound absurd to you. It is absurd. It is so absurd as to defy credence, and therefore credence is the one challenge that faces the players. There are two ways in which the actor playing the teacher can depict the moment in which his patient correction of the student turns into a manic desire to take her life: he can portray it as exactly that—absurdity, like some impressionistic, far-off newspaper report, a headline we barely notice, sniff at, as we turn the page or click the next item; or he can play it as sociopathy; and what those who are intrigued by sociopathic films like Psycho or Se7en, The Talented Mr Ripley or Rebel Without A Cause see in La Leçon is a trait that we know resides somewhere deep within all of us, ourselves, and which we either refuse to confront, or try to conceal for fear of the recriminations that could follow before we have a chance to fulfil our self-appointed purpose. Like frogs in forest springs, patiently waiting until the right opportunity comes, and when it does, offering no end of seductions whilst securing what we truly want: that place in the young lady’s bed.

What is evil? Is it temptation in the form of inner demons, or seduction by the devil, as, like flies, we are wooed into a spider’s parlour? It’s interesting how we externalise the forces of evil. Even as inner demons, we anthropomorphise our own failings as coming from some outside influence, not from our own minds, heaven forbid! Evil is what they do, they who corrupt, who lead us from the true path, who deflect with their temptations and beguilements. So ubiquitous is it, that leading us not into temptation is our daily plea to God, along with our daily bread. The mere concept of temptation externalises our own faults. We characterise people as weak who succumb to temptation, and as strong who are able to resist it. And as victims, who suffer at the hands of others; and as culprits, those who inflict that suffering, except when we inflict it on ourselves.

Are you evil? Are you a satanist? Or are you Christian, or Muslim, Jew or Buddhist? Oh, how people wrestle with definitions when these questions are asked! Let me ask a simpler question: do you think it’s possible to get behind the wheel of a motor car and, assuming you know the principles on which to make it stop and go, you could drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh in perfect safety, without causing an accident or breaking a traffic regulation, and without ever having taken a driving lesson or passed a driving test? Do you think that is at all possible?

I know what you’re doing now. Your mind is racing through all the situations: traffic lights, overtaking, the M8 motorway, keeping to the nearside lane, using turn indicators, switching the lights on when it’s dark, operating wipers when it rains (usually around Kirk O’Shotts), keeping distance from the car in front and watching out for pedestrians at bus stops. You’re asking yourself whether anyone could reasonably be expected to adhere to all the advice and rules relating to such things without ever having been taught them. Well, let me tell you this: there are thousands of drivers who make that journey every day and break at least one of the rules, and they have all taken lessons and passed the test. And some of them will breathe a sigh of relief that there were no repercussions from their inattention, and some won’t care whether they broke the rules, and some will get fined, and some will be dead because of mistakes they made. And some will be dead because of mistakes that others made.

Passing the driving test and earning the qualification of driver doesn’t make you perfect. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll never have an accident, or that you’ll never cause another driver’s death. All a driving licence proves is that, on the day your took your test, you achieved the requisite standard of proficiency, which ought to mean that there should never, ever be a motor accident. Imperfection is the essence of the human condition.

So, what does the qualification Christian betoken? Or Muslim, or all the rest? The standards imposed on Christians tend to be imposed by people who are not Christians, just as the standards imposed on drivers tend to be imposed on other drivers. And the standards imposed on Muslims are likewise frequently imposed by non-Muslims, and so on and so forth. Only other people are evil, not us. Ever. And those who sing, or write or shout out about how evil they are haven’t the first clue what evil means. Not one iota. They so desperately want to belong to a clan that either they’ll never be part of or, if they are, they’ll never escape from.

This week, a friend of mine asked me to go with them to a funeral. I didn’t know the deceased, and I had only met one member of the family many years ago at a local authority council meeting. That was my connection. It took place in a Roman Catholic church, and, for my friend (who’d asked), I sketched out the formalities, like the Lord’s prayer, responses at communion (there wasn’t one in the end), and the aspergillum, a water-shaker. “I won’t shake any water,” my friend said, “I’m not religious.” To tell you the truth, I don’t think many who were there, including the principal mourners, were either. Afterwards my friend and I joked that we were lucky not to have been struck by lightning during the mass. High church is odd. You can’t take part unless you’re a signed-up member of the club. If you haven’t been confirmed into the Roman Catholic church, you can’t take communion. But that wasn’t the question for me; instead, it was this: who is a funeral for?

Earlier in the week, I’d told my friend: “A funeral is where a group of people arrange to meet on a station platform to wave off a train that departed several days previously.” Muslims require to bury their dead within a day of death, and that is partly a legacy of the high temperatures in Muslim countries, such as in north Africa. It’s also far more logical.¹ I don’t know if the spirits of deceased Muslims are any closer than those of deceased Christians, but one thing’s perhaps clear from both: the funeral is not for the dead, it’s for the living. And whether it’s held in a church or another place of worship or a farmyard barn is really beside the point. Because it’s for those who mourn the loss of the deceased and, simultaneously, celebrate their union with their God. (And it’s also a bit of a parade.)

My point in all of this is in fact to home in on why evil is evil, why satanism is what it is and why we all deny we are either of those things. I’ve never worshipped in a mosque or at a synagogue, but I would like to, because that’s part of my quest to understand. There are no doubt customs I’d need to be briefed on by those in the know, but all these actions and responses and catechisms are external. What matters is my relationship to Him who is worshipped, as felt in my heart. Whether I feel that in a church or a mosque or a synagogue is really unimportant. It’s window-dressing. But satanism isn’t window-dressing. It’s control, and, the laugh is, those who think it trendy to aspire to satanism think it will make them the freest souls of anyone. Not so—they’ll be slaves.

Satanism is an outlook, not really a religion, even if there are temples and robes and blood-letting and sexual perversions galore, including some that entail murder. It’s a paradox, a true paradox: because what the great religions preach is love. That is devotion to others: it is always the benefit of others that should direct our acts. It’s as good as never fully practised, not one hundred per cent, because we’re all a little selfish, so we make excuses, or laugh things off, or talk about proportionality or reasonableness, and think that God knows what these things are. He doesn’t, but He knows what talking about them is.

Satanism, on the other hand, is where all conduct centres solely around the individual: love of others transforms into love of oneself. It doesn’t necessarily advocate cruelty to others but this gets elided over, the same way as reasonableness gets cited by Christians as an excuse for being selfish now and again, for, if being cruel to others is something that gives pleasure to the satanist, then they will indulge in it without compunction, because, in their view, they count more than does anyone else. There is a logic to this, like it or not, because, in a world of eight billion and one people, Christians have to look out for eight billion others, whereas satanists just need to look out for one, which is statistically a bit easier. Isn’t it? Excuses, damned excuses and statistics.

In the same way as God does not know what reasonableness is, He also doesn’t know what politics is. The fact that people act differently when they’re politicians, or, for that matter, when they’re CEOs, or corporate investors, or bureaucrats, or heads of state, to when they’re carpenters is something He cannot appreciate, and, to be honest, nor can I. Sometimes politicians need to be cruel to one person in order to be kind to someone else, and we temper this by setting out ground rules: social contracts or principles of fairness or notions of right and wrong, balance, equilibrium, who pays least tax and most kick-backs, that sort of thing. In the absence of such ground rules, however, that does not mean that people have no sense of what conduct would be expected of them were such rules to be in place (a little like when driving without a licence from Glasgow to Edinburgh). To cite the absence of rules as a justification to do whatever it occurs to one to do, without constraint, is to deny that man is a free-thinking creature, and, what’s more, it is in fact to deny that people who claim such justification from the absence of rules are, likewise, free-thinking creatures. Instead, they are a solenoid switch.

The reason why free speech is such a big issue is because those who complain it is in retreat in fact want to speak freely because, like in a satanist temple, that has the effect not of liberating people, but of enslaving them: those who can freely disseminate their hatred banalise hatred, whilst embracing it. And that enslaves them to their cult-masters, whilst they themselves believe that it liberates them. Free speech is not on the retreat in Europe; well, it is, but not terminally, as long as there remains an overarching concept of the ground rules, the bounds within which speech is free: as long as speech contributes to the community of which its speaker is part, then it is free. When speech seeks to advance the interests of the individual himself, to the exclusion of others, then restraint needs to be considered, even if the egotism thus expressed is purportedly expressed on behalf of a given group. This works in the interests not only of the community, but of the individual themselves, by protecting them from their potential slavemasters.

Any right, in order to be a right, must be constrained. It must be won and earned, and it must entail obligation. The requirement for speech to contribute to the welfare of others in order to be free is nothing but an extrapolation of that idea. And the restrictions imposed on free speech must likewise be imposed according to the same criteria under which speech was free in the first place, i.e. fairly. And, while God will not appreciate the extent to which either the exercise or restriction of free speech is reasonable, He will, again, know the motivations that impel people to speak, and to impose restrictions on speech. The question that then remains is whether we will.

The Frog Prince has an alternative title: Iron Henry. This is how the story proceeds: after getting her ball back, the princess waltzes off and forgets about the frog, despite her promises to give the frog what it asks. She is a bitch, and, when the frog turns up at the castle to claim its reward, her father tells her so: you must honour the promises that you have made. So she dines with the frog (almost gagging in the process); but in her boudoir, she refuses to allow the frog into her bed (unsurprisingly, the king is not present at this juncture, even though the frog and the princess are not actually, ahem, married). One gains the clear impression that the frog is barred from the bedclothes not out of virgin virtue, but out of the princess’s disgust at the frog’s ... whatever. When the frog later creeps surreptitiously into her bed, she ejects it by chucking it at the wall. Just like Pinocchio tried to kill the cricket by chucking it at the wall (but not in Disney’s cartoon, of course).

It transpires that trying to kill the frog has the effect of turning it back into the prince he was all along (why hadn’t he just said Hey, I’m really a prince, just chuck me at a wall and that’ll break the spell, and then I’m yours happily ever after, baby?). Anyway, he is such a handsome dude, that she swoons into his arms due to his much bigger size once the spell dissipates, she marries him, and, after the wedding, off they go in a carriage, with Iron Henry as a footman. So, who is Iron Henry?

When the witch turned the prince into a frog, Henry was the prince’s batman, and he was so heartbroken at the froggification that he had iron bands placed around his heart to prevent it breaking in two. (Why was he heartbroken? … No, I’m not going there.) As he rode with the happy couple to their honeymoon, the iron bands fell from his heart, so pleased he was at the happy outcome.

And if that doesn’t give the kiddy-winkies food for thought, I don’t know what does.

• The fickle princess married the prince whom she’d rejected because he was an ugly frog, but only because he was now handsome.

• She only let the frog into the castle because her dad ordered her to keep her word.

• Henry was pleased his master was released from the spell, but how did he get his name in the alternative title?

In real life, if we’re to get real, just about every last thing we do or desist from is dictated by laws. But, in fairytales, there is no law. There is authority and servitude, and there is action, motivated on the whole by impulses of good and evil. But there is no law—only morals. The Frog Prince is a tale that leaves the boundaries between good and evil very much up in the air. Like many fairytales (at least before Disney gets a-hold of them), it makes distinguishing good from evil very difficult, and it presents a host of moral dilemmas, thus making it a very close parallel to real life, where we nonetheless resolve these dilemmas not by reference to our consciences, but by reference to what is frequently a construct of self-interest and the product of man’s corruption of his fellow man—the law:

• Shouldn’t the frog have retrieved the ball anyway, without scheming for some reward?

• Why did it include sleeping in her bed as a condition for retrieving the golden ball?

• Why didn’t the princess get in the water herself to get her own ball? (It does say the water was very deep, but it doesn’t say she tried.)

• How would she have explained the dead frog to her father the next morning if it hadn’t been turned back into a prince?

• What if the frog had indeed turned into an ugly prince?

• Is there no penalty for not keeping your word when keeping your word is dependent on being disciplined by your father? Where was the princess’s contrition?

• Can it be that the reader’s sympathies only really go out to Henry in all of this, because, aside from the king (who plays the role of the princess’s conscience in a way, a little like the cricket and the lady with the blue hair in Pinocchio), he’s the only party who is pure of spirit in the whole tale?

Maybe that’s why he figures as the alternative title.

When I studied German language in Germany many years ago, my teacher, who smoked as did my American buddy and I at the time, would chat to us outside during the break. “Ich liebe Märchen,” she once told us, but she never told us why. As the course drew to a close, John and I wanted to buy her a gift to thank her for her devoted service to us, so we bought a nice, illustrated book of fairytales and presented it to her, for which she was very grateful. It felt a little, at the time, like giving a grown man a toy train: we had no idea what we were giving her, we just knew she liked them. Now, all these years later, I have an inkling. And I hope you do too.

Der Froschkönig, oder der eiserne Heinrich begins with the words In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, lebte ein König: In olden times, when wishing was still any use, there lived a king. The tale never returns to that idea: that wishing for things is useless. Whether the reader does, is up to them. You can dismiss The Frog Prince as a silly fairytale, and, if you do, I’m sorry: you have understood nothing. For fairytales require imagination, and it’s once you start to imagine that you start to see how real they are.

1. Here’s why: dead is dead. We embalm the dead not for the dead, but for us. It’s because we want to parade the dead, like lying in state. We embalm the deceased so that people can queue up and pay their respects, or, to put it differently, gawp. If we are so convinced of the great spiritual transformation at the moment of death, whereupon the deceased is unified with God, then what do we need a lying in state for? Why does the deceased need to be at the funeral? I have been to many memorial services where the deceased was absent, and they were no less moving and no less consideration was devoted to the departed.

Muslim funerals are not only practical, but they follow the spiritual logic consistently. And yet I have heard the speed with which Muslims bury their dead cited in a derisory fashion by supposed Christians.

Moreover, Christians deride the notion of Sharia divorce, whereby the husband may divorce his wife by declaring three times I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. King Mohamed of Morocco some years ago introduced a reform of that rule. He said the divorce is only complete if the wife consents.

That sounds like a cop-out: what wife would not consent after hearing those words from her husband’s lips? Yet western legal systems have a similar rule: irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, and that cannot be a ground for divorce if either of the parties objects. It is nearly the exact same rule, but couched differently, except for this, which is a vital difference: in the west, it is the lawyer who sues for divorce, on his or her client’s behalf. In Morocco, the husband must say these words himself. And he must say them three times. Not twice, not once, but three times, and I challenge the reader to say them now, out loud, and mean them and not to have considered by the third repetition how much you mean them. I know that women’s rights under Sharia law are not ideal. And I know that women’s rights in the west are, likewise, far from ideal: one difference is that, in the west, we pretend they are.

The church used to forbid divorce. Yet now, most jurisdictions, Sharia or western, allow divorce of some kind. I don’t think that marriage as an institution of God should allow divorce. But that doesn’t mean I’m against divorce. It means that people should not marry in churches if they think they may want to get divorced. And, if they do marry in church, they should forsake the right to divorce. Because it’s done in the eyes of God—let no man put asunder. But people always want an escape route, in case it goes wrong. Perhaps just getting rid of marriage altogether would be the solution.

Take a look here at why the principle of free choice and the idea of adopting duties oneself rather than imposing them on others mean I think it’s a good thing not to baptise your children till they’re 15:

If you would like a last example of how Muslim legal practice differs from western laws in a manner that appears at first blush to be very strange, but on inspection turns out to be very logical, I invite you to take a look at this: