Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Night of Swirling Stars

I’ve already laid out the set-up - six years old, in England with my family, six months abroad and trying to keep up in school.  My first try didn’t work so well, but my second matriculation was rather better.  Sunnymeade House was near to home and dad’s bus downtown, as I recall, so he escorted me daily to school - a big old rambling place with a backyard and an upstairs.  The kids seemed mellower; we easily found a way to coexist if not even perhaps to get along.  I got the sense that my teachers viewed my educational shortcomings as opportunities rather than inherent deficiencies, and I began to feel more at home with academic exercise.  Wasn’t this the place where they ordered me to get my awesome little dictionary and my hip little satchel?  Sunnymeade House was okay in my book.

“My book,” I mean in the most important way: my principal advantage seemed to lie with reading, which I did with avidity and proficiency.  I read some weird stuff, too - those German mutilation nursery rhymes, and Grimm, and creepy stuff like that.  I’d read fairy tales about pixies and trolls and goblins and such… so it wasn’t like they’d unleashed some new concept to me when they asked me to read Rumplestiltskin to the class. 

Regardless, I was totally freaked.  Freaked in a way I don’t think I’d ever been at my previous school, where I’d been treated roughly.  This was a class assignment - everybody had to do it; we’d just go a few a day till we’d all had a chance.  At my prior school, I’d been able to deal fairly well with every incident that had befallen me at the hands of my peers, whether malicious or neglectful.  I’d just go through it and move on.  It was usually over before I’d had a chance to think about it much.  But now I had days to anticipate my impending public exposure.  An oral exhibition.  Front and center.  My exotic twangy voice and slightly “different” clothes and obvious anxiety would be impossible to hide… I might as well go to school naked for all the attention I’d be drawing to myself; I had a target on my back already and there I was passing around arrows… all my instincts urged me to flee from this spotlight, from this order to real aloud to English schoolchildren....

to read to them ... Rumplestiltskin. 

The name alone made my skin crawl.  Hell, it’s got “skin” right in it.  Then “Rumplestilt” - what a compelling evocation of brokenness, nominal determinism, a life trapped in fetters of twisted flesh, inhuman, both greater and lesser than those beautiful, cruel, weakling humans among whom he eked his pitiful existence; reduced, despite unimaginable powers, to petty extortion for his begrudged share of happiness, taught by bitter experience to trust neither the word of men nor the smiles of women; a soul so tortured and marginalized that he was prepared to resort to whoring out his extraordinary gift of transmutation to bind a maiden to his embrace, and to to take his pleasure from her since he rightly dispared of sharing it with her.  Quasimodo.  Hopfrog.  Deformed, unfinished, stranded in a world not his own....

And then, beyond the litany of tragedies constituting his essence, my mind was drawn with fascination to the vile abuses he perpetrated on that waifish strumpet of a knitting girl who verged on being more willing to to suffer a courtyard execution than to endure his kiss, she who owed her survival to taking credit for his work: a “maiden,” repulsed by the thought of him; she, the quintessence of a beauty of which he could never honestly partake.... From dross did he weave pure gold for her, yet his body and being were too wretched for her to see the value of his soul or to test the purity of his heart.  She knew him only for the goblin he was, even as she made him into be the troll she knew him to be.  In a sense, she could hardly even be faulted for fulfilling her role in this saga, vapid and cruel though it may have been - no more than he deserved the ignominy heaped on his own stunted shoulders for being what she made him.  So what.  I blamed her anyway.  Bitch.

I felt badly for Rumplestiltskin.  But, more importantly, he scared the piss out of me.  I feared his power, his subterfuge, his devilish bargaining and his physical grotesqueness.  The whole package just freaked me out, way more than any prior tale or fable had ever done to me before.  The very idea of reading the story at all was enough to make me woozy and short of breath.  And let us not forget that I was expected to read this hideous legend of exclusion and recrimination out loud, in front of everybody.  Of course I had no qualms regarding the technical aspects of the task - I was entirely capable of doing the reading, intellectually.  In fact, that worked to my disadvantage.  My reading skills had progressed to the point that I could think other thoughts at the same time as I read.  I could think about what I was reading, where and how I was reading it, and why, and to whom.  The story flew out of the book so smoothly that it could take on a life of its own, in the real world, surrounding me as I read it.  I would have the luxury, while standing before my classmates, of identifying with my anti-hero very personally indeed.  I would know my madness to be madness even as I sank into it. 

Time skulked past, day after musty day, and the appointed hour grew ever closer.  My limbs felt heavy and my pulse raced as I waited for my my destiny to claim its due.  Finally came the night before my presentation, and the fear was so intense and personified that it had itself become the homunculus haunting my bedroom.  Rumplestiltskin had me where he wanted me - just where he’d had that maiden fair I so detested.  I was beyond the ability to recognize where I ended and my fear began.  Reading aloud, Rumplestiltskin, in front of everybody.  And here was I, just a frail grub of a boy, lacking any ability to turn the gnarled finger of fate that swept inexorably toward me, my dark little bedroom now a weaver’s hutch, a dungeon, a hole out of which would crawl my undoing, and my undoing would be at my own hand, myself both Rumplestiltskin and his maiden, an evil committing itself upon itself, saving and sacrificing in one fell swoop.

I lay in my bed as all this passed through my mind, repeating itself, renewing itself.  Frantic to to escape my own cogitation, I turned my gaze to the window beside me.  Out it, as I knew well, was the courtyard, upon which I looked out from the fourth of six floors.  The night sky above that patch of lawn held no mysteries to threaten me; a well-surveyed scattering of stars decorated the heavens, and I looked to them for constancy and a sense of connection, those same stars having spangled my nights back home in California as well.  Familiar constellations greeted my anguished eyes… But as I watched them, they began to spiral around the sky, huge beautiful circles that terrified me utterly.  Silently and in despairing confusion, I hallucinated a broken heaven.

That vision of the cosmos cut adrift wrenched from me my last clasped shred of rationality.  In my bed, I wept - both for Rumplestiltskin, and as him.  The next morning found me indisposed; I stayed home from school and read friendly stories quietly in bed.  I think my mom may have spoken to the teacher; the assignment may never actually have been completed.  For about a dozen years after that night I had difficulty finding my rest at night.  I’d lie awake in bed most evenings, trying to relax.  Eventually I overcame my fear of public speaking, and then my insomnia.  I even eventually outgrew my neurotic anxiety about Rumplestiltskin.  But it’s not like I’ve forgiven him or anything. 

Well that was fun.  Just thought it was time to put something non-stoat-related up here for a while.  Birthday poem is coming up soon - gird your loins!