I have always related to this writing at the deepest level of someone who saw right through me. I came across this again, and thought it appropriate to post it here on my Fairy Cafe blog. Enjoy.
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| Eleanor of Aquitaine by Kinuko Y Craft |
AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE WHEREABOUTS OF
GNOMES AND ELVES, FAUNS AND FAERIES, GOBLINS, OGRES, TROLLS AND BOGIES, NYMPHS, SPRITES AND DRYADS, PAST AND PRESENT
by Buck Young
A long, long time ago, the Earth belonged to the creatures of the wood. By
creatures of the wood I mean gnomes, elves, faeries, etc. They tended it and
took care of it, played in it, danced and sang in it, cared for wounded
animals, worked out disputes between species, sat on mushrooms discussing
matters of importance and drinking Labrador tea, rode down streams on leaves
and bark, parachuted from trees on dandelion seeds. This was the world into
which mankind was born. These early days, when man was but a newly arrived
dinner guest who hadn't yet taken over the house, are fairly well documented in
the literature and folklore of the world, so there's no need to go into it
here. What I am interested in, and what I am asking you to be interested in, is
the question, "Where did all the gnomes, elves, faeries, etc. go?"
The friction between man and the wood creatures began with the discovery of
agriculture. With this discovery civilization arose and spread. The forests
were cleared to provide wood for shelters and fields for pastures and crops.
Mankind had set up camp. No longer just a visitor in someone else's world, he
pushed the wild back from his newly built doorstep. At first, this wasn't a
problem. There weren't that many people and everyone else felt that it was only
fair to allot them their own half-acre to do with as they wished. Some of them
even decided to help out. Gnomes moved into the barn houses and helped with the
gardening chores. The devic spirits of the vegetables helped humans better
organize their crops and plan rotation; taught them the correlation between
planetary and lunar cycles and the agricultural year. They taught them to plant
radishes when the moon is in Cancer, harvest when the moon is in Taurus. Many
trolls felt that the heaping piles of manure were a change for the better, and
decided to stick around too.
The rest of the wood creatures just backed off into the wood, occasionally
playing tricks on the new settlers, like turning the milk sour, rearranging
furniture, tipping cows, tickling people's faces in their sleep and once in a
while stealing babies and leaving bundles of wood in their place.
But man's dominion spread (and spread and spread and spread) and the forests
got smaller and smaller and smaller. Things got real crowded in the woods, and
things were getting worse in civilization. Most farmers weren't listening to
the devic spirits anymore. People found they could increase their output by
disregarding the needs of the earth. They were raising productivity and killing
the soil. Petrochemicals were just a step away. Most of the devic spirits and
gnomes fled. The trolls stayed. Today, they live mostly under bridges and in
the shallow mucky ditches beneath the metal grating on farm roads that cows are
afraid to cross. Be sure to honk your horn before driving over one of these. A
troll may be hanging from the grate, swinging over its living room, as they are
apt to do after rolling in muck and manure. If you don't give a warning honk,
you may run over its fingers, and it's not a great idea to get either your name
or your license plate number on a troll's shite list.
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| Betrayal by Mario Sanchez Nevado |
Now, there is little wild land left at all, and even that is shrinking at an
unprecedented rate. There is simply not enough wild space for all the gnomes
and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs,
sprites, and dryads.
So where are they?
Are they dead?
No.
So, where did they go?
The answer is a bit surprising. They didn't go anywhere. We did. Early
humans had an intuitive knowledge of their role in nature, just as bears and
raccoons and mice and every other critter does. They understood, from the ways
of the wild around them, that nothing ever comes from nowhere and nothing ever
just disappears. Things change form. Death is necessary for life to continue.
They offered up their kills as sacrifices to the gods of nature. They offered
praise, prayer, sacrifice and song to the spirits of the wild, to brother
buffalo, brother deer, and brother tree.
Now we know that everything that ever existed continues to exist, in one form
or another, and as far as we can tell, they were more aware of that back then
than we are now. So, the sacrifice, song and prayer did not ensure the
immortality of the slaughtered, either in body or spirit. That was already
taken care of. What it did ensure was the continuance of the connection
between the spirit of the slaughterer and the spirit of the slaughtered.
Killing is risky business. The membrane separating the internal from the
external is not necessarily as thick or as clearly defined as we have come to
believe. Every time we kill, we risk killing the reality of that thing inside
ourselves as well as outside. We risk breaking the connections that lead in
and out of the membrane. Taking a life to feed life requires a keen
understanding of the natural law of give and take. When we lost that
understanding, gave up the songs, the sacrifice, the prayers, we lost the
connection. Saying grace is not enough.
When we lose those connections, everything becomes dead - fish, rivers, frogs,
mice, even each other. There is no way they can reach inside us any more. The
five senses we are left with are not enough. We have given up those
connections in exchange for the freedom to clear-cut forests with skidders,
turn cows into milk machines and chickens into egg factories. We can experiment
with animals, club seals, wear fur, and exterminate entire species. Not a
twinge of guilt. The lines have been severed.
And we are all under the impression that it is the forests, the creatures, the
spirits and the wild lands that are disappearing from the universe and not us.
This is not so. Thinking like that is like thinking that if you stand on the
end of a limb and saw that limb from the tree, that the tree will fall and you
will remain standing. Bugs Bunny might be able to get away with that, but we
can't.
It is we who have fallen away from the real world into a world where we may
carry out our twisted sterile dreams without threatening the earth and its
inhabitants. Ever wonder why the trees, stones, rivers and streams, birds,
bears, frogs and snakes no longer talk to us as they did in the early tales of
Native America, the Hindu, the Africans, the bible? It's because we're not
around to talk to anymore. Every clear-cut, every vivisection, every mechanized
slaughter of cow, pig or chicken moves our dream world further and further from
the tree, making a reunification, which is still possible, more and more
difficult.
Somewhere not so far from here, in the real world, the ancient forests are
still standing, the buffalo roams the prairies, the sky is full of condors, the
deer and the antelope play, and dodo birds still wander the sandy beaches,
bumping into things.
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| Nature Boy by Josephine Wall |
Where there are still wild lands in our dream world, strong connections still
exist. Bridges, tunnels, portals. Occasionally a traveler will get lost in
the wilderness and find himself in the real world, returning the next day to
find that a hundred years have passed, or never returning at all.
There are more ephemeral connections as well - brooks and waterfalls where you
can still here voices from the other side, if you listen carefully enough...
When they sit by these waters, they hear loud clanking and screams. When they
eat magic mushrooms, everything STOPS glowing and condos rise where forests
stand. Our children can see their world in their dreams. Their children see our
world in the nightmares.
And there is another connection. Sometimes agents from the other side
infiltrate our world in an attempt to expedite reunification. Believe it or
not, they miss us over there. Sometimes - more often than you might think -
they send souls over to our world to be born as human babies. There are
quite a lot of them actually - gnomes, elves, faeries, sprites, etc. running
around in human bodies, doing crazy things like writing on walls, working in
co-ops, running inns in the mountains, talking to themselves in the streets,
making pottery, practicing witchcraft. They are planting biodynamic gardens,
sitting in the back yard naked, arguing with satan. They are in asylums pumped
full of Thorazine, in a classroom on Ritalin and lithium. They live with
Indians. They run recycling centers. They are starting revolutions,
corrupting the young, inventing paranoid conspiracy theories, making up
religions. They're directing movies, gobbling acid, drinking heavily and
writing poetry.
The transition from their world to ours is not an easy one. It's not easy on
the soul and much is lost. They may have no idea who or what they are at first.
They may or may not find out.
They WILL know they are not like other people.
They will know that this world is not theirs. They will faintly remember
something better, where things made sense and worked like they ought to, where
love and magic had the power to heal.
They will know what makes other people happy does not make them happy, and that
what makes them happy makes them happier than anyone else alive.
They will see things others cannot see, hear things others cannot hear, feel
things others cannot feel, and know things others do not know.
They will laugh a great deal or cry a great deal or both.
They will love humans individually, but have a hard time with humanity as
whole, and that will occasionally approach loathing.
They will have a handful of very close friends, and often be very lonely.
They will be unhappiest when forced to act like a human and do things that
humans do, want what humans want, or when they are convinced that they actually
are one.
Things will not be easy for them. Because of their memories of the other side,
the world will seem to them a wondrous calliope with just a few teeth missing
on one of the cogs. Because of this tiny deficiency, the music is off key, the
horses are crashing into each other and the children are frightened, bruised
and crying.
The solutions will seem obvious, but no one will listen.
They will repeatedly be punished for shouting FIRE! in a crowded theatre, when
the buildings really are in flames but no one else can see....They will get
slapped on the wrist for pointing to the EXIT signs when everyone else is
running around screaming and trampling one another.
They will be zealous, fanatical and didactic in their beliefs. They will feel
utterly confused.
They will have ecstatic visions and babble incoherently. They will be extremely articulate.
They are prone to long periods of silence. They have no idea how to say what they really mean.
They spend a lot of time with children and animals.
They will become drunkards and dope fiends, organic gardeners, soap makers,
carpenters, madmen, magicians, jugglers and clowns, lunatic physicists, painter
and scribblers, travelers and wanderers...
They will dress in bright colors, frumpy sweaters or all black.
They will smoke too much and drink too much. They
will eat only macrobiotic foods. They will develop addictions to
Mountain Dew.
They will often be accused of living in their own fantasy world.
They will make great lovers. Yeah, even the trolls.
They will spend too much time either making love or thinking about it.
They will speak to inanimate objects. They will have much brighter eyes than
everyone else. They will expect their magic to work in this world and their
love to heal, and will be crushed by this world, and often won't expect it.
It will come close to killing them.
They will visit the places where the connections still exist: the waterfalls,
the mountains, the oceans, and the forests. They will draw on all the power
they have, and sometimes, sometimes, the magic will work. And everything will
be wondrously easy. The teeth will grow back on the cog on the calliope, the
tune will right itself, the horses will bob gracefully up and down, around and
around, and the children will giggle and sing with cotton candy stuck to their
cheeks and noses.
They will spend their days trying to reconnect a branch that millions are busy
sawing away at. Often it will be more than they can bear.
While the rest of humanity is busy working on new and more efficient ways to
lay waste to the Earth with the push of a button, they are saving it. A handful
at a time.
They will share a common conviction that they are the only sane individuals in
a world gone mad.
They are right.
© 2004 Buck Young