QUEST
FOR MEANING
by Aubrey Cole Odhner|
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Conference of Elves and Fairies Welcome All, to our Conference of Elves and Fairies! Here all are: Fairies, Sprites, Nymphs, Sylvans, Leprechauns, Pans, Satyrs, Elves, Dwarves, Tointes, Goblins. Do we feel a bit sheepish about being here? Sheepish is a good innocent word, remember it. Is our adult interest in this something to be a lillle embarrassed about, something childish that should be suppressed? C. S.Lewis, in his whimsical way, quips: "To have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulations than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally our hopes." We who are here seem to know that in exchanging our childish sense of wonder for some of the assumed marks of maturity, (practicality, objectivity) we might lose something immeasurably more valuable; in fact many writers have expressed the exquisite sadness of this sense of loss. Do we sustain the sense of wonder and innocence of childhood over the long periods of youth and into middle age, and hold on to it in the old age innocence of wisdom? What is it? Does this innocence remain with us? Should it remain with us? Fortunately there are other spirits who are with us at this conference who encourage us with their sage advice. We have the ancient idealist philosophers, represented by Plato. We have the Romantic poets represented by Wordsworth. We have later beloved writers of children's stories like Kenneth Grahame and George MacDonald, and a few kindly critics like C.S.Lewis, and educators like Bishops Benade and de Charms .....and many, many others, even more wise and more important, who, though they may not speak in audible voices, yet whose benevolent spheres are unmistakably with us, smiling on this conference. Plato says we have been going down hill spiritually since childhood, that the human mind is always losing its primordial spiritual awareness. He talks about getting advanced truths out of children if they are asked the right questions, in the right order. He says the proper education of children does not involve mathematics and philosophical things, but should be found in myths and folk tales. He proposes that the great statesmen and responsible rulers will start with these tales. The Romantic Poets of the 19th Century reinforce our strong belief that the real world of spirit is better seen by the imagination than by this worldly eye. It is ironic that Wordsworth is called a nature poet, when nature is so obviously but a springboard for his preoccupation with that to which nature corresponds. He reiterates the message of Plato, in poetic form, in his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood: "There
was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, Later writers and critics of the 19th and early 20th Centuries also express poignant loss of the wonder of childhood, and yet within it, the wondrous hope: C. S. Lewis talks of the "longing for fairyland" Longing is such a lovely word, laden as it is with sweet sorrow. Lewis speaks of it as unsatisfied desire which is in itself more desirable than any satisfaction. He recalls the first time he was "surprised by Joy:" "The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering current bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of — It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss of Eden" -It was of course a sensation of desiring desire for what?" And in another connection he says "All joy reminds, it is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still to be." And later recalling his joy in "Northernness" as conveyed by Norse Myths Lewis says: "From these books, again and again I recall the stab of joy. And again, I think that all things, in their way reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not the least. "Reflect" is the important word." Lewis continues:" this lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image...But it still had at ever so many removes, the shape of the reality it reflected." Later, when Lewis was trying desperately to recapture that blessed feeling, he concluded that the Lord was the only reality behind this feeling of Joy. George MacDonald, ( whom Lewis declared to be his Master) in Phantastes. the book that hooked Lewis on MacDonald. reflects deeply about the nature of various kinds of fairies and questions his fairy guide: "Are the trees fairies too, as well as the flowers?" "They are of the same race," she replied; "though those you call fairies in your country are chiefly the young children of the flower fairies". — and then a profound thought: "I may as well mention here," MacDonald continues, "that the conclusion I arrived at from the observations I was afterwards able to make. was. that the flowers die because the fairies go away; not that the fairies disappear because the flowers die; The flowers seem a sort of house for them, or outer bodies, which they can put on or off when they please." Of MacDonald's work Lewis says: "The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round-in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from "the land of righteousness, "never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire-the thing(in Sappho's phrase "more gold. Those we see here at this conference appreciate fully the power and the importance of Remains and the prominent place of imaginative literature and art for children. Who are some of the other unseen participants at this conference? Going back to 1797, about the time that Coleridge was associated with Robert Hindmarsh' New Church group, he wrote of fairy tales: "I know of no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole." Stephen Larsen notes in his Mythic Image that Blake thought the human imagination was the only remedy for Plato's downward path and that Coleridge assumed a faculty called the "Primary Imagination," defined as the living power and prime agent of all human Perception. Larsen also said Yeats 'knew that in order for his own poetry to find its richness and its true voice, he must steep himself in the myths and folklore of his native land". And in Hard Times, remember when Dickens deplored the utilitarian extremists and their merely factual education: "No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle. Twinkle little star". He went on to say: "The dreams of childhood-its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, human, impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to come in the midst of it." In his 1981 book, Promise of Happiness, Value and Meaning in Children's Literature, Fred Ingles, writes: "The music of fairy land is played by its instrumentalists just over the hill of history and buried deep in the next valley glade....it intends no grander consequence for its beliefs than that the lives of its children be given the sense of mystery, magic, fairy, and supernatural dread, without which those lives will be ungentle and dried up, coarsened by the vulgar calculus of market-place utilitarianism.' As Spring comes round the corner some of us will cruise down the river with Rat and Mole and try to ignore Mole's prosaic ways. Remember? "A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity. "It's gone!" sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. "So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!" he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound. "Now it passes on and I begin to lose it," he said presently. "Oh. Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on. Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us." The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. "I hear nothing myself, "he said, "but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers." Compare this to C.S. Lewis again : "I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days".."I saw that all my waitings and watching for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, "This is it" had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find would be either an image, or a quiver in the diaphragm. I shall never have to bother again about these images and sensations. I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy-not the wave but the wave's imprint on the sand...Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature ached for at that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had, but that we were, a dream." How similar to Lewis' arrows are Bishop deCharms' "offshoots of the Divine Love:" "- loves, desires, longings aspirations, offshoots from the Divine Love, particular rays of that Love, received and deflected by human minds. This wisdom inherent in love; this wisdom imparted to every affection by the Divine Love Itself, is, according to the teaching of the Writings, the force that produces ideas in the imagination. ..When any affection, whether good or evil, presents itself to our consciousness by means of an imaginative idea, that idea is nothing but a picture of the end, the good for which the affection yearns." deCharms goes on to say: "With children under the impulse of these affections the mind pictures them, not as they actually are, but in forms that embody, symbolize and make perceptible these affections. This fanciful visualization is governed by definite laws-the laws of influx and of correspondence under the Divine Providence, which has regard to the nurture of spiritual life. It greatly enriches the memory in preparation for rational thought and understanding in later years. At the same time the Lord by means of il is imparting to the child a perception of celestial affections with their delights, and storing them in the interior memory as remains." What more beautiful image can we have than that Bishop deCharms reminds us of, that of Jacob's Ladder, described in TCR 24. representing the human mind and the angels ascending and descending, reaching to heaven with the Lord standing above it. In infancy and childhood are not the celestial and spiritual angels the fairies that the children among us saw and with poignant longing remember, and now, in our later years, give us hope? "0 light of the boundless world, Phoebus, my father/'
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