The Green Wave

You know, I need mermaids in the world.

I need talking trees.  I need foxes that transform at dusk.  I need enchanted apples.

Though he is wicked, I need Blue Beard.

I require the 13th fairy, meddlesome as she is.

I cannot do without the white deer that flashes through the darkening trees.

Selkies and sea-witches are a necessity.

The moon who recognizes me as a sister and a friend?  Absolutely essential.

And I need company in these requirements, and help seeing my world in its most beloved shapes.

This week, I’ve been reading Amanda Adam’s lovely book, The Mermaid’s Tale.  She’s a wonderful writer and she’s done all of us mermaid-lovers a great service by including reproductions of some of the most splendid fairy-tale art ever created.  There we find Arthur Rackham’s beguiling mermaid, sitting atop what looks like a huge carp while the blue-grey sea boils around her and meteors blaze down behind her.  She is a dangerous beauty, stirring up the storm in her own heart and by extension putting sailors into peril.

I stared at that picture for such a long time, just as I once stared at the sea-witch in my childhood copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales.

The longer I looked, the more I thought, “Thank you, Arthur.”  I felt increasingly grateful that Arthur Rackham bothered to portray what other people would deem so much pish-posh but which I myself find essential.  And the same goes for Edmund Dulac, William Morris, Kay Nielsen, Aubrey Beardsley…  All of these artists looked away from the smokestacks and the scandals, from the drab and the mundane.  They followed their own tastes and visions and loves, and they gave us a world that glows with enchantment, with promise, and yes, with beautiful peril.

The real world.

Yes, friends.  This beauty IS the real world – or a part of it that awaits our gaze.  Yes, smokestacks and drab scenes are part of the world, but while some people insist – yes, insist as though their lives depended on it – that this is the ONLY world, I cannot agree.  There is ugliness and cruelty, but always close by, there is beauty and kindness.

We make the world with our thoughts and especially with our habits of thought.  This week, looking at fairytale art, I felt grateful that Rackham and Dulac and their fellow artists used their thoughts to create a world of singing queens and trooping fairies, of banners flying over castles under twilit skies.

And I realized, almost with a start, that I am doing the same thing.  I am giving voice and space to the real world as I see it when I make a poem or song, when I write my novel or even when I give a lecture and share my loves and enthusiasms, my particular way of making meaning.  As much as I need Arthur and all of his visions, it struck me that someone in this world might require me and my visions.  Just thinking such a thought is like drinking from the Well at the End of the World, feeling all of my strength and courage return.

And friend, that goes for you, too, and for everyone we know.  It’s our world while we live in it.  We are the ones who can stir up the seas and endow every star with a freight of wishes.  We are the ones who can sing, talk, write, meditate on, engage with, summon, enlarge:  beauty, love, truth, honesty, honor, and possibility.

We are making this world, so let’s make it everything we love best.

To enchantment!