by Alan McGlashan
from talks given on BBC radio
originally published 1967 Houghten-Mifflin
F A I R Y - T A L E . W O R L D S
The mind of a child is a mystery and a paradox. Outwardly all clarity and innocence -- O ces voix d’enfants! -- all ignorance and dependence, all rainbow tears and laughter; inwardly the rapt secret communion with realities of another order, with opposites and correspondences of which the golden key is lost to us, with the world of witch and dwarf and monster: the archetypal Fairy-Tale World. A child lives largely in the Unconscious, and is more than a little mad.
Here is one playing alone in a garden: listen to the earnest dialogue with imaginary beings, watch the bizarre gestures and queer grimaces. For less than this adults have been put quietly away. And yet it is a madness which wisdom envies, for to a child the world is meaningful, is urgently alive with meaning. And this in the last analysis is wisdom’s goal. Having in childhood possessed it, and lost it again, there persists in the adult mind a forlorn sense of estrangement.
John Keats once said that the life of a man of any worth is a continual allegory. It is the corroding certainty of having lost the key to this translucent kind of living, that eats the heart out on quiet summer evenings. In such an hour men and events seem contingent, pointless, formless; and Reason, that tireless choreographer of “the bloodless ballet of concepts,” grows sick of its own success.
Three paths there are that lead out of this wilderness. One is a fatal path, with a fatal fascination. Through the iron gates of War man suddenly reenters the fluid and phantasmagorial world of the child and the madman. With what helpless dread and what infinite weariness the rational part of the mind, critic of millennial sad experience, watches the old stock figures strut confidently on to the stage, as the curtain rises yet again on the deadly, dreary drama! With what enormous distaste it foresees the futile finale before the opening word is spoken. Even the protagonists’ names are hardly altered -- Khan, Caesar, Kaiser, Fuhrer -- though the players’ stature seems to shrink, the crown and robes to sit more grotesquely, with each preposterous reenactment. Everything is stale, false, seen-before, senseless. Beauty vanishes, darkness falls from the air. One man finds the perfect phrase: “The lamps of Europe are going out,” said Sir Edward Grey in 1914; “they will not be re-lit in our time.” To the eyes of reason War is the total eclipse of meaning.
Exactly here lies the inevitable paradox. While reason cries out on the insanity of War, feverishly searching out its causes, shuffling and rearranging its determinants, the Unconscious sees only this: that War allows the reappearance on earth of certain meaningful figures. Like Walpurgis Night it is a privileged occasion, when the portals of the Unconscious swing wide. And what a nightmare throng streams up through those unguarded gates! Monstrous and unreal they are, yet charged with a terrible energy: Fuhrers and Duces with the implacable faces of blood-loving Baal and child devouring Moloch; women spies, the Lamias of the twilight hour, sliding like jeweled snakes through the ruined cities; Renegades, loaded with infamy and shame, whispering dark secrets to the enemy; and here and there, crawling up from remotest swamps of the archaic psyche, furtive bearers of unnameable evil, men who make bonfires of living bodies, women who make lampshades of human skin.
Jostling these grisly figures come the shining band of Saviors: hero generals haloed with go]den legend; Unknown Warriors; triumphing martyrs; divinely compassioned Mother-figures like the Lady with the Lamp. The qualities of all things good and evil are fiercely intensified. Opposites collide to form new truths and new falsehoods. Faith blooms, born of despair; at Mons once, ten thousand hopeless eyes see Angels close above them. The whole world suddenly brims with clear and terrible meaning. Silenced and appalled, the conscious part of man looks on, while the Unconscious eagerly releases these tremendous avatars of good and evil, each one a secret but immortal aspect of the human psyche.
War is the punishment of man’s disbelief in these forces within himself. It is the cruel reaffirmation of those powers which the ego can never command or subdue. And disastrous as the cost may be, something in the depths of man is mysteriously assuaged by this release of daemonic and destructive energies. There is a fierce satisfaction in living under the rule of the Early Gods. There is a dignity in facing powers beyond us, and indifferent to us. To be blind to this, to fail to grasp its difficult meaning, is to let slip the golden Ariadne’s thread that may lead man at last out of the stinking labyrinth of War.
In The Green Table, that terrifying ballet of the nineteen-thirties, the cause of War is shown to lie in the criminal futilities of power-politics. The intolerable blame is comfortingly projected on to wrangling statesmen. It may well be so. But causal chains belong to the conscious level, while War springs from the Unconscious, which is concerned not with causes but with meanings. And meaning, as Lao Tzu has said, is that which exists through itself: it is the Secret of the Golden Flower. War has causes -- social, political, and economic -- but it also has a meaning. To reach this meaning in time may be man’s last and best hope. For in the moment it is reached, a question rises urgently in the heart: is there no other way to release these primordial powers, no other path to wholeness?
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If indeed there were none, mankind could well yield to despair. But, another does exist; a curious path, this one, that winds its secret way through very different regions, but leads there no less surely. Children, the preelected freemen of the world of the Unconscious, stray along this path -- or perhaps are blown along it like brightly colored leaves. Swayed by intimations from an unknown source, the games and groupings of children left entirely to themselves have an unmistakable air of ritual. They seem to be half remembering something, and their movements, made often with the tranced certainty of sleepwalkers, awaken memories that have slept for centuries in the adult human heart. Absorbed and serious, they draw a circle in the dust that may be a quaint copy of the necromancer’s temenos, or of the circular furrow cut by plough to mark the founding of some rose-red city of the pagan world. They weave little dances, secret and ritualistic, whose original patterns lie buried with the lost religions. And they sing strange meaningless snatches of songs that may be time-altered echoes from Eleusis or the Nile. “Nor you, nor I, nor anyone know, How corn and beans and barley grow,” sing the children, intending only to find who pays the forfeit; not guessing, or indeed caring, that Demeter listens in the shadows with a warm motherly smile.
And not children only: kings and queens, priests and mystics, the very wise and the very simple, have always intuitively sought and found this path that leads to the fourth-dimensional world of meaning. From Delphos to Westminster Abbey, from shrouded oracle to impeccably laundered Archbishop, from primitive fertility rite to the crowning of a young and radiant Queen, the magic of ritual binds and releases the soul of man and reveals to him the world of meaning that logic can never reach.
In their final significance the forms of ritual are far more than forms: they are the intricate beautiful patterns, the delicate temporal webs, in which man has striven to enmesh that which lies outside his space and time. And sometimes with their help (as also sometimes without it, a sheer, lovely irrelevance) a door suddenly opens, revealing for an instant the timeless world of primordial images in whose depths the meaning of life is contained. As in the monstrous instance of War, the forces of the Unconscious surge eagerly through the momentary opening, and something in the heart of man responds, as always, with the deep, indefinable sense of assuagement.
How subtle a thing is this feeling of assuagement! The thirst it allays, the terrible thirst to find a meaning in life, is one of which a man is at first only obscurely aware. He feels only a vague deepening sense of discomfort, of missed harmonies as faint as the wave-music in a small seashell -- which Science reassures us is nothing but illusion. O keep still, keep still, and listen. Once the inner ear is attuned to this music, there is no other it will wish to hear; no other reality in the world of time and space that compares with this “illusion” -- this sweet assuaging harmony -- heard only on that Everest-peak of inner experience where the temporal touches, however briefly, the eternal. “Man has come into this world,” said William Law, “on no other errand than to arise out of the vanity of time.”
There is no alternative. The more ingenious and determined the attempt to assign to life a purely rational value, the more cruelly and viciously will the irrational burst through to reestablish its own neglected values; on the social level by War, on the individual level by neurotic conflict, on the intellectual by such epileptic reactions as the Surrealists and the neo-abstractionists. Humility is the key. “Man must return to his origins. personal and racial, and learn again the truths of the imagination. And in this task his strange instructors are the child, who has but half-entered the rational world of time and space, and the madman, who has half escaped from it. For just these two are in some measure released from the remorseless pressure of daily events, the ceaseless impact of the external senses, which burdens the rest of mankind. They travel light, this curious pair, and go on far and solitary journeys, sometimes bringing back a gleaming branch from the Gold Forest through which they have wandered. “Nor you, nor I, nor anyone know,” sing the wise children. “I know more than Apollo,” cries foolish Tom o’Bedlam, crooning to himself his mysterious Song,
I know more than Apollo,
For oft while he lies sleeping
I behold the stars at mortal wars,
And the rounded welkin weeping.
Such things as these, the fantasies of the child, the intuitions of the madman, are more than moonshine. Concealed within them are realities, though of a different order from those of which guns and computers are made.
It is no accident that John Custance, who has written a travel book of a new kind, has given it the curious title of Wisdom, Madness, and Folly. It records a grim, heroic journey of the spirit through the fear-haunted realm of lunacy; from which he is perhaps the first modern ever to return strengthened and enriched. Time and again on his wild Odyssey he comes to perilous regions where the madman and the child are the only companions that Wisdom has, or can have. For these three know, what we have fatally forgotten, that we carry within us that which must, at however tragic a cost, keep its contacts with the world of myth and fairy tale, the world beyond human space and time, beyond human cause and effect. It is man’s chief aim. We have come into this world on no other errand.
There is a third path -- unfashionable now, and unfrequented -- along which dark elements of the soul, the monstrous apparitions and wild pageantry of the inner world, are allowed for a few dream-like days and nights to irrupt into conscious life. For that brief period law and order abdicate, and all the forces of the irrational make hasty holiday. In Catholic countries this strange interlude in men’s lives has been christened Carnival, and its culminating day -- Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday -- is a shrewdly permitted license to the faithful on the eve of Lenten austerities. But its origins are worldwide, and more ancient by many centuries than Christian belief.
Carnival is a phenomenon of cultured societies. Primitive man had no need of it, for the return of chaos loomed over him every hour of his life. But as soon as men began to create for themselves conditions of stability and some measure of the rule of reason, at once the necessity for a compensating period, however brief, of anarchy and license became manifest. In all ages and in all parts of the earth, from China to the Amazon -- with the sole exception of the petrified, death-obsessed culture of Dynastic Egypt -- the most intelligent societies have recognized this need and tried to canalize it, to contain it within the specified dates of their local calendar.
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The history of Carnival is the history of the socially unacceptable impulses in human nature, and their insistent demand to be admitted into life. In the Western world the response of Authority to this demand -- by the institution of cannily controlled Festivals -- has been only partially successful. For these Festivals had a disconcerting way of either turning themselves into a seething “cauldron of unholy loves” or petering out in childish fun which offered no release to the rebel impulses in man. They refused to stay as their originators intended, and swung through the centuries from one extreme to the other. It is, in fact, possible to trace the movement of this peculiar pendulum, to observe to what extraordinary excesses it can carry the human spirit, and to note that in the contemporary world it is once more, disquietingly, on the turn.
When first caught sight of, emerging in uncertain outline from the legendary past, the pendulum was already in an extreme position. The Dionysiac Revels, perhaps the earliest expression of the spirit of Carnival of which we know, was a pretty brutal affair, hardening finally into the far-famed annual orgy of the Bacchantes; when bands of maids and matrons streamed out of the civilized city of Athens in strange disguises and roamed the mountains for days and nights on end, tearing to pieces with their bare hands any living animal they met -- including, it was whispered, man.
In later times the sophisticated rulers of pre-Christian Rome transferred this primitive cathartic device from conquered Greece to their own country, softening it to the Saturnalia, a festival for both sexes celebrated at the turn of the winter solstice. The emphasis here was laid on fun and reckless spirits rather than destructiveness, a humorous reversal of roles and hierarchies -- slaves, for example, being served by their masters -- and a general loosening up of the proprieties.
When Christianity was accepted by Rome the early Christian Fathers -- then as now -- tried to mitigate for the masses the shock of the sudden change by continuing many of the old pagan festivals as Christian feast-days. Saturnalia became Carnevale -- farewell to flesh -- and was moved to the days preceding the fasting period of Lent. But then a curious thing occurred. Carnival became too successful. In the wake of Christianity it spread like flaming oil on water through the ancient city-states of Italy, and within a few centuries Rome and Venice, Milan and Naples became the centers of an annual festival which took on wilder, madder and more menacing forms in each succeeding year. The Church had innocently touched the lock and once more Pandora’s Box flew open.
Swelling up from the Unconscious came horrid shapes that walked the streets -- giants on stilts with hideous grinning masks, crudely fashioned dragons and misshapen beasts, children in the guise of evil dwarfs, men as painted and bejeweled ladies, women swaggering in the clothes of men. Carriages rushed by crammed with drunken revelers throwing flour and mud and dung in the faces of passersby. Maddened horses were set free to trample down the rioting crowds. Anthony Munday, a medieval traveler (quoted in Rattray Taylor’s remarkable book, Sex in History, from which these scenes are taken), records how in Venice during Carnival he saw murder committed in the open streets with no one “taking any accoumpt either of the murtherer or of the slaine gentleman.”
The Christian Fathers, dismayed, issued edicts and threatened punishments; but the pendulum was on the move once more, and for centuries no human power could stay its swing. The spirit of Carnival now began to spread more widely -- to London, Paris, Madrid -- and to assume an even more sinister form. In the Feast of Fools, condemned by the Council of Toledo in A.D. 635, obscenity and blasphemy were added to the general license. Priests and clergy themselves took part, electing a Pope of Fools, and appearing at divine service in masks, or dressed as women or panders. While the drunken celebrant was saying Mass they danced, played dice, and sang indecent songs.
By the thirteenth century it had become the Feast of Asses, An ass, or a man wearing as ass’s head, was introduced into the religious revels, and during Mass the bawdy Song of the Asses was sung, accompanied by the congregation chanting “Hee-haw, Hee-haw.” How far matters were out of hand may be gauged by the fact that the Chapter of Sens in 1444 issued a strict ruling that those couples who wished to copulate during divine service should go outside the church before doing so. A not unreasonable injunction.
The swing of the pendulum had reached its term. In Elizabethan England the Feast of Fools was at last suppressed, and its energies directed into the milder ceremony of the election of a Lord of Misrule, or Abbot of Unreason. He and his followers, mounted on hobbyhorses, proceeded to the local churchyard, issuing absurd commands to all who met them on the way; and there the Leader set up his crazy Court, where they feasted uproariously and libidinously for a short season. In France the Feast of Fools was similarly replaced by a ceremony called the Société Joyeuse, led by a man, often a priest, known as La Mère Folle and dressed in women’s clothes.
In passing, it is interesting to notice how constantly Carnival is connected with the phenomenon of transvestism. The interchange of clothes between the sexes is part of the essence of the Carnival spirit and reveals a curious link between Carnival and one of the earliest ideas to enter the mind of man. For in many primitive societies the primordial gods and the first human beings were believed to be androgynous, and only after the fatal separation of Heaven and Earth -- the Fall of Man -- were the sexes set apart. Primitive festal rites were often designed to undo this “inferior” arrangement and restore the original state of completeness, in order to make possible a new beginning, a transcending of one’s everyday self. Many centuries later this strange concept was still alive, and still related to festive occasions. Plutarch recorded with astonishment that in Argos a bride wore a false beard for the marriage night, while in Cos it was the husband who put on woman’s clothes to receive his wife. In the fragment of a lost play by Aeschylus, the bisexual god Dionysus is greeted by cries of “Where have you come from, man-woman? What is your country? And what is that garment?” -- questions which incidentally might well be addressed to a contemporary teenager. This deliberate confusion of sexes is also part of the basic aim of Carnival which seeks, however crudely, a dissolution of the stiffened traditional order, a reversal of all accepted values, and a reactivation of the boundless power and creativity of the Beginning.
To return to the image of the pendulum: by degrees even the relatively harmless excesses of the Lord of Misrule and La Mere Folle -- still frowned on by the strengthening forces of law and order -- quieted down, and slowly developed into such innocent customs as the Christmas Mummers, whose antics entertained our rude forefathers and provided an outlet merely for rough jokes and bucolic buffoonery. With the nineteenth century came April Fool’s Day, and, at Christmas, paper hats, crackers and charades -- pale survivals of the masked daemonic figures of medieval Carnival. The pendulum had touched its opposite extreme.
But it will swing back. The claim of the irrational forces for recognition will recur -- must recur. In the contemporary world there are already signs of this among the adolescents of many countries. Boys with feminine haircuts and gaudy clothes, girls as masculine and bizarre as they can make themselves, are appearing in the streets, the harbingers of masquerade. Their outbursts of violence -- still vaguely connected with public holidays -- against each other and against the community and the police are, of course, an ebullition of youthful high spirits; but not simply that. There is also present, for those who dare to look for it, an unmistakable flavor of the sinister. What these adolescents are rousing is the sleeping urge to anarchy that hides not only in their hearts, but in ours. And we must somehow make room for its reawakening demands. It is a task of enormous difficulty. To crush these anarchic impulses by superior power is to invite catastrophe. Yet to handle them indulgently and “understandingly” is to risk, as in the past, the release of vicious mass frenzies of a kind that is fortunately peculiar to the human animal.
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We are compelled, nevertheless, to take the second of the two risks. For the truth is that these recurrent irruptions of unconscious imagery into everyday life express in their own fantastic terms a not unworthy aim: to fling in the world’s face the Dionysiac challenge -- life lived like a mountain torrent, sparkling and tumbling in the sunlight, carrying all before it, crowned with beauty in the instant of its own destruction . . . Over against it forever stands the Classic attitude, marmoreal, calm, clear thinking; verbalized once and for all in the sonorous syllables of St. Augustine -- PAX, ORDO, LEX, SOCIETAS; the four great pillars of Apollonian life.
No one in his normal senses would wish for the total victory of either side. A world of Romantics would end in unendurable chaos, a world of pure Classics in a static perfection; and “perfection,” as Kenneth Clarke has said, “closes the door.” Both attitudes are valid and indeed complementary. What is deplorable is that each, in its brief moment of victory, can treat the other with such savagery and lack of comprehension.
Perhaps after all, Carnival, the answer given by so many earlier civilizations, is the best we can do. For all its look of lunacy and its inherent dangers, it is an answer that rises up from the deepest levels of the psyche. The giant phantoms of Carnival are direct, unmediated creations of the dreaming mind. Set free for a time they release and act out its negative, non-conforming aspect. Swaying monstrously past startled eyes, the figures of Carnival grant us a warning glimpse of the iconoclastic impulses of man’s unconscious mind -- as War reveals its homicidal madness, and Ritual hints at its fragile and inexpressible beauty.