Saturday, August 14, 2010

The Mother of Monstrosities

I can hardly believe that I used to read fairy tales when I was a child.  My recollection of them is as macabre narrations of deformity, brutality, and malefaction. Abductions and death threats, forced labor and unnatural entities with malevolent powers - these seemed to me, even at a tender age, poorly tailored for easing a child into peaceful slumbers.  Vivid nightmares seemed more likely, and I had my share of those, inspired by infrapontal gnomes and sentient farmstock and other malevolent denizens of an evil otherworld.

Kids’ books today don’t take that angle.  The books I read to the munchkins are brightly-colored cheerful little stories about cooperation, weather, recreation and fire trucks.  Well, that’s probably three or four different books, but they’re all brightly colored and cheerful.  They teach counting and the names of animals, and maybe contain cute jokes.  You know what they don’t have?  Ogres.  Ogres and terror.  Those have been left right out, and it’s not like I even wonder why.  The old books were scary.  In fact, they still are.

Lately these impressions have been refreshed and confirmed by my alternate-nightly read-downs to my son.  I’ve dug out my old Treasury of Children’s Literature, 500 pages of throwback bedtime fare, copyright 1955.  Some of the stories are classics from Aesop; some are excerpts from Defoe, Stevenson, and other icons of family-friendly lit - but a whole lot of it consists of graphically illustrated stories of angry giants and malicious elves.  Paging now through that well-worn tome, its cover frayed and spattered with the paint we applied to my bedroom walls when I was in the fifth grade, the same old familiarly lurid pages still ripped and torn out and taped back in again, it’s easy for me to recall the chill I felt as I perused it as a new small person long ago, tracing the sinews of a monster’s towering shanks, soaking up the impending execution of an enchanted goose, or just letting my eyes flit across the frolics of numberless pixies careening recklessly to their doom.  Even in their most benign incarnations, the tales of faeries were hardly children’s fare.  Grimm, indeed, and gruesome too.

My late return to these macabre morality stories with their inappropriately evocative illustrations has also brought to mind one sunny day in the mid ‘80s, a time when I’d long since put away my treasury of creepy stories.  I was pretty sure I was a grown-up and well beyond the gnarled grasp of bewitched and wizened fingers.  I was out on a grown-up excursion - at Hancock Park, where L.A.’s original (that is, paleolithic) culture, as preserved in the famous mid-town tar pits, meets its received culture, preserved in the several serene pavilions of the county museum of art. It’s a good-sized park, though possessed of scant appointments besides the museums - just broad flat lawns and plenty of vitamin D.  A friend and I were relaxing in the sunshine after perusing some art, allowing our minds to absorb the images and creations to which we’d exposed ourselves, when, with neither warning nor preparation, I saw Mother Goose.

I’d seen her before, of course, in sanitized artists’ renditions.  She’d always been cleaned up, gussied and prettified, a benevolent bubbeh with friendly feathered followers meandering along behind her.  A ruffled snood, a modest apron with decorative patches in complimentary colors - she never really evoked the dark scary imagery I associated with the stories I associated with her.  But when I finally saw her in the flesh, I realized quickly enough that the Mother Goose to whom I’d grown accustomed was, at best, a whitewash, if not a total misrepresentation.  She was not a “mother” in any sense of the word I’d ever known.  She was a mother of monstrosities, was she not?  - And seeing her in the flesh, I sensed viscerally that monstrous quality lurking under her wattled skin.

I don’t mean to be cruel here, I see a lot of people on a regular basis who are far from aesthetically pleasing.  But this woman was in a class all her own, so much so that I recall her to this day, a quarter-century on.  Her skin, as I said, was wattled, with deep flaps under her chin and wrinkles like geologic rifts cleaving her face into segments like some gothic revival woodcut brought to life.  Leathery and flaccid, her face drooped at brow, nose and chin, as if it hung loosely from her huge ears.  Her neck craned forward, a natural extension of a hunched back that dangled her head far ahead of her tottering feet.  She carried a sack - a crude bag stuffed with detritus and jetsam; the bits of its contents I could see through its gaping seams and flapping top could even only charitably be called garbage.  Her clothes were shreds of rough ripped fabric held together with dirt, and her shoes were mostly plastic bags she’d wrapped around her feet.  Her body was too thin but looked too tough as well, like a crooked man’s crooked cane; her fingers, gripping the straps of her suspicious sack, gleamed like gnarled branches.  And her eyes shone with bitter brightness, dark diamonds glinting with suspicion and anguish in the glare of the mid-day sun.  All the pain, abnegation, and sorrow that flowed through every tale of goblins and witches seemed to seep almost visibly from her clotted pores so I felt I could taste it in the air that stagnated in her wake.  And behind her, growling in the backs of their long greasy necks, a straggling gaggle of city-wise geese waddled with malign distrust.

Mother Goose, she obviously was, and the very personification of every dark musing that had haunted my childhood.  Of course, as a child it had all been antiseptically theoretical.  In the flesh, there was no mistaking what she represented.  To share such things with children seems tantamount to abuse.  It was pretty close to that for me as an adult, to tell you the truth.