Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
To make love, if we are to love,
bailamos
con La Muerte
, we dance with Death. There will be flowing, there will be draining, there will be live birth and still birth and yet born-again birth of something new. To love is to learn the st
eps. To make love is to dance th
e dance.
Energy, feeling, closeness, solitude, desire, ennui, all rise and fall in relatively closely packed cycles. One's desire for nearness, and for separations, waxes and wanes. The Life/Death/Life nature not only teaches us to dance these, but teaches that the solution for malaise is always the opposite; so new action is the cure for boredom, closeness is the cure for loneliness, solitude is the cure for feeling cramped.
Without the knowledge of this dance, a person is inclined, during various still-water times, to extrovert the need for new and personal action into spending too much money, doing danger, roping reckless choices, taking a new lover. It is the dummling’s or fool’s way. It is the way of those who do not know.
At first we all think we can outrun the death aspect of the Life/Death/Life nature. The fact is we cannot. It follows right along behind us, bumpety-bump, thumpety-thump, right into our houses, right into consciousness. If in no other way, we learn of this darker nature when we concede that the world is not a fair place, that chances are lost, that opportunities come to us unbidden, that the Life/Death/Life cycles prevail whether we wish them to or not. Yet if we live as we breathe, take in and let go, we cannot go wrong.
In this story there are two transformations, one of the hunter, one of Skeleton Woman. In modem terms, the hunter's transformation goes something like this. First he is the unconscious hunter. “Hello, it’s just me. I’m here fishing and minding my own
business.” Then he is the scared and fleeing hunter. “What? You want me?
Oh,
I think I must go now.” Now he reconsiders and begins to untangle his feelings and finds a way to relate to her. “I feel my soul drawn to you. Who are you really, how are you put together?”
Then he sleeps. "I will trust you. I allow myself to expose innocence.” And his tear of deep feeling is revealed and it nourishes her. “I have waited a long time for you.” His heart is lent to create her wholly. “Here, take my heart and bring yourself to life in my life.” And so the hunter-fisherman is loved in return. This is a typical transformation of a person learning to truly love.
Skeleton Woman’s transformations take a slightly different trajectory. First, as the Life/Death/Life nature, she is used to having her relationships with humans end right after the initial hooking. It is no wonder she heaps so many blessings on those who will go the distance with her, for she is used to having humans cut bait and dash for land.
First she is thrown away and exiled. Then she is accidentally caught by someone who is afraid of her. She begins to return to life from an inert state; she eats, she drinks from him who has raised her up, she transforms herself by the strength of his heart, by his strength to face her... and himself. She is transformed from being a skeleton into a living being. She is loved by him, and he by her. She empowers him as he empowers her. She, who is the great wheel of nature, and he, the human being, now live in harmony with one another.
’ We see in the story what Death requires of love. It requires its tear—its feeling—and its heart. It requires to be made love to. The Life/Death/Life nature requires of lovers that they face this nature straight-on, that they neither faint nor feint from her, that their commitment to one another is far more than “being together,” that their love is based on their combined learning and strength to meet this nature, to love this nature, to dance with this nature together.
Skeleton Woman sings up for herself a lush body. This body Skeleton Woman sings up is functional in all ways; it is not the pieces and parts of woman-flesh idolized by some in certain cultures, but rather an entire woman’s body, one that can feed babies, make love, dance and sing, give birth, and bleed without dying.
This singing of flesh onto oneself is another common folk motif. In African, Papuan, Jewish, Hispanic, and Inuit stories, bones are transformed into a person. The
Mejícaña
Coatlicue
brings mature humans forth from bones of the dead in the underworld. A Tlingit shaman sings off the clothes of the woman he loves. All over the world in stories, magic results from singing. Singing brings increase.
Also all over the world, various fairies, nymphs, and giantesses have breasts so long they can throw them over their shoulders. In Scandinavia, among the Celts, and in the circumpolar region, stories tell of women who can create their bodies at will.
We see from the story that the giving of body is one of the last in the phases of love. This is as it should be. It is good to master the first stages of meeting with the Life/Death/Life nature and let the literal body-to-body experiences come after. I caution women, do not engage a lover who wants to go from accidental catching to giving body. Insist on all the phases. Then the last phase will take care of itself, the time of body union will come in its own right time.
When the union is begun in the body phase, the process of facing the Life/Death/Life nature can still be accomplished later... but it takes much more resolve. It is harder work, for the pleasure-ego must be dragged away from its carnal interest so that the foundation work can be done. The little dog in the Manawee story points out just how hard it is to remember what path one is on when one’s nerves are being thrummed by delight.
So, to make love is to merge the breath and the flesh, spirit and matter, one fits into the other. In this tale there is a mating of the mortal and immortal, and this too is true in a love relationship that will last. There is an immortal soul-to-soul connection that we have little ability to describe or perhaps even to decide, but that we experience deeply. There is a wonderful tale from India in which a mortal beats a drum so the fairies can dance before the Goddess Indra. For this service the drummer is granted a fairy wife. There is something like this in the love relationship too; something is awarded to the man who will enter into cooperative relationship with the psychic feminine realm, which is mysterious to him.
In the end of the story, the fisherman is breath to breath, skin to
skin, with the Life/Death/Life nature. What this means is different for each man. How he experiences this deepening of her relationship with him is also unique. We only know that in order to love we must kiss the hag, and more. We must make love with her.
But the tale also tells how to come into cooperative and rich relationship with what one fears. She is just what he must lend his heart to. When the man merges with the psychological and spiritual as represented by the Skeleton Woman, he becomes close as he can be to her, and this causes him to be close as can be to his female lover. To find this eminent life and love adviser, one only need stop running, do some untangling, face the wound and one’s own yearning with compassion, give one’s entire heart to the process.
So, in the end, in the fleshing-out of herself, the Skeleton woman enacts the entire creation process, but ratter than beginning as a baby, in the way Westerners are taught to think about life and death, she begins as ancient bones and fleshes out her life from there. She teaches the man to make new life. She shows him that the way of the heart is the way of creation. She shows him that creation is a series of births and deaths. She teaches that protectionism creates nothing, selfishness creates nothing, holding on and screaming effects nothing. Only letting go, giving heart, the great drum, the great instrument of the wild nature, only this creates.
That is how love relationship is meant to work, each partner transforming the other. The strength and power of each is untangled, shared. He gives her the heart drum. She gives him knowledge of the most complicated rhythms and emotions imaginable. Who knows what they will hunt together? We only know that they will be nourished to the end of their days.
CHAPTER 6
Finding One’s Pack: Belonging as Blessing
The Ugly Duckling
Sometimes life goes wrong for the wildish woman from the beginning. Many women had parents who surveyed them as children and puzzled over how this small alien had managed to infiltrate the family. Other parents were always looking heavenward, ignoring or abusing the child or giving her the old icicle eye.
Let women who have had this experience take heart. You have avenged yourself by having been, through no fault of your own, a handful to raise and an eternal thorn in their sides. And perhaps even today you are able to inspire them to abject fear when you come a-knocking. That’s not too shabby as innocent retribution goes.
See to it now that you spend less time on what they didn’t give you and more time on finding the people you belong to. You may not belong to your original family at all. You may match your family genetically, but temperamentally you may belong to another group of people. Or you may belong to your family perfunctorily while your soul leaps out, runs down the road, and is gluttonously happy munching spiritual cookies somewhere else.
Hans Christian Andersen
1
wrote dozens of literary stories about children who were orphans. He was a premier advocate of the lost and neglected child and he strongly supported searching for and finding one’s own kind
His rendering of “The Ugly Duckling” was first published in
1845. The ancient motif underlying the tale is about the unusual and the dispossessed, a perfect Wild Woman demi-history. For the last two centuries “The Ugly Duckling” has been one of the few stories to encourage successive generations of “outsiders” to hold on till they find their own.
It is what I
would call a psychological and spiritual root story. A root story is one that contains a truth so fundamental to human development that without integration of this fact, further progression is shaky, and one cannot entirely prosper psychologically until this point is realized. So, here is “The Ugly Duckling,” that I wrote as a literary story based on the eccentric version originally told in the Magyar language by the
falusias
mesélõk
, rustic tellers from my family.
2
=====
The Ugly Duckling
It
was near the time
of harvest. The old women were making green dolls from com sheaves. The old men were mending the blankets. The girls were embroidering their white dresses with blood-red flowers. The boys were singing as they pitched golden hay. The women were knitting scratchy shirts for the coming winter. The men were helping to pick and pull and cut and hoe the fruits the fields had brought forth. The wind was just beginning to loosen the leaves a little more, and then a little more, each day. And down by the river, there was a mother duck brooding on her nest of eggs.
Everything was going as it should for this mother duck, and finally, one by one her eggs began to tremble and shake until the shells cracked, and out staggered all her new ducklings. But there was one egg left, a very big egg. It just sat there like a stone.
An old duck came by and the duck mother showed off her new children. “Aren’t they good-looking?” she bragged. But the unhatched egg caught the old duck’s attention and she tried to dissuade the duck mother from sitting on that egg any longer.
“It’s a turkey egg,” exclaimed the old duck, “not a proper kind of egg at all. Can’t get a turkey into the water, you know.” She knew, for she had tried.
But the duck mother felt that she had been sitting for such a long time, a little longer would not hurt. “I’m not worried about that,” she said, “but do you know that scoundrel father of these ducklings hasn’t come to visit me once?”
But eventually the big egg began to shudder and roll. It finally broke open, and out tumbled a big, ungainly creature. His skin was etched with curly red-and-blue veins. His feet were pale purple. His eyes, transparent pink.
The duck mother cocked her head and stretched her neck and peered at him. She couldn’t help herself: she pronounced him ugly. “Maybe it is a turkey after all,” she worried. But when the ugly duckling took to the water with the other offspring, the duck mother saw that he swam straight and true. “Yes, he’s one of my own, even though he’s very peculiar in appearance. But actually, in the right
light...
he is almost handsome.”
So she presented him to the other creatures in the farmyard, but before she knew it, another duck shot across the courtyard and bit the ugly duckling right in the neck. The duck mother cried, “Stop!” But the bully sputtered, “Well, he looks so strange and ugly. He needs to be pushed around.”
And the queen duck with the red rag on her leg said, “Oh, another brood! As though we don’t have enough mouths to feed. And that one over there, that big ugly one, well, surely he was a mistake.”
“He’s not a mistake,” said the duck mother. “He’s going to be very strong. He just laid in the egg too long and is yet a little misshapen. He’ll straighten out though. You’ll see.” She groomed the ugly duckling’s feathers and licked his cowlicks.
But the others did all they could to harass the ugly duckling. They flew at him, bit him, pecked him, hissed and screeched at him. And their torment of him grew worse as time went on. He hid, he dodged, he zigzagged left and right, but he could not escape. The duckling was as miserable as any creature could be.
At first his mother defended him, but then even she grew tired of it all, and exclaimed in exasperation, “I wish you would just go away.” And so the ugly duckling ran away. With most of his feathers pulled out and looking extremely bedraggled, he ran and ran until he reached a marsh. There he lay down at the water’s edge with his neck stretched out and sipped as he could from the water now and then.
From the rushes two ganders watched him. They were young and full of themselves. “Say there, you ugly thing,” they sniggered. “Want to come with us over to the next county? There’s a gaggle of young unmarried geese over there, just right for the choosing.”
Suddenly shots rang out and the ganders fell with a thud and the marsh water ran red with their blood. The ugly duckling dived for cover and all around were shots and smoke and dogs barking.
At last the marsh became quiet and the duckling ran and flew as far away as he could. Toward nightfall he came to a poor hovel; the door was hanging by a thread, there w
ere more cracks than walls. There
lived an old raggedy woman with her uncombed cat and her cross-eyed hen. The cat earned her keep with the old woman by catching mice. The hen earned her keep by laying eggs.
The old woman felt lucky to have found a duck. Maybe it will lay eggs, she thought, and if not, we can kill it and eat it. So the duck stayed, but he was tormented by the cat and hen, who asked him, “What good are you if you cannot lay and you cannot catch?”
“What I love best,” sighed the duckling, “is to be ‘under,’ whether it is under the wide blue sky or under the cool blue water.” The cat could make no sense of being underwater and criticized the duckling for his stupid dreams. The hen could make no sense of getting her feathers all wet, and she made fun of the duckling too. In the end, it was clear there would be no peace for the duckling there, so he left to see if things would be better down the road.
He came upon a pond and as he swam there it became colder and colder. A flock of creatures flew overhead, the most beautiful he had ever seen. They cried down to him, and hearing their sounds made his heart leap and break at the same time. He cried back in a sound he had never before made. He had never seen creatures more beautiful than they, and he had never felt more bereft.
He turned and turned in the water to watch them till they flew
out of sight, then he dove to the bottom of the lake and huddled there, trembling. He was beside himself, for he felt a desperate love for those great white birds, a love he could not understand.
A colder wind began and blew harder and harder through the days, and snow came upon frost. The old men broke the ice in the milk pails, and the old women spun long into the night. The mothers fed three mouths at once by candlelight and the men searched for the sheep under white skies at midnight. The young men went waist-deep in the snow to go to milking and the girls imagined they saw the faces of handsome young men in the flames of the fire while they cooked. And down at the pond nearby, the duckling had to swim faster and faster in circles to keep a place for himself in the ice.
One morning the duckling found himself frozen in the ice and it was then that he felt he would die. Two mallards flew down and skidded onto the ice. They surveyed the duck. “You are ugly,” they barked. ‘Too bad, so sad. Nothing can.be done for such as you.” And off they flew.
Luckily a farmer came by and freed the duckling by breaking the ice with his staff. He lifted the duckling up and tucked him under his coat and marched home. In the farmer's house the children reached for the duckling, but he was afraid. He flew up to the rafters, making all the dust fall down into the butter. From
the
re
he dove right into the milk pitcher, and as he straggled out all wet and woozy, he fell over into the flour barrel. The farmer’s wife chased him with her broom, and the children screamed with laughter.
The duckling flapped through the cat’s door and, outside at last, lay in the snow half dead. From there he straggled on till he came to another pond, then another house, another pond, another house, and the entire winter was spent this way, alternating between life and death.
And even so, the gentle breath of spring came again, and the old women shook out the feather beds, and the old men put away their long underwear. New babies came in the night, while fathers paced the yard under starry skies. During daylight, the young girls put daffodils in their hair and young men studied girls’ ankles. And on a pond nearby, the water became warmer arid the ugly duckling who floated there stretched his wings.
How strong and big his wings were. They lifted him high over the land. From the air he saw the orchards in their white gowns, the fanners plowing, the young of all of nature hatching, tumbling, buzzing, and swimming. Also paddling on the pond were three swans, the same beautiful creatures he had seen the autumn before; those that so caused his heart to ache. He felt pulled to join them.
What if they act as though they like me, and then just as
I
join them, they fly away laughing? thought the duckling. But he glided down and landed on the pond, his heart beating hard.
As soon as they saw him, the swans began to swim toward him. No doubt I am about to meet my end, thought the duckling, but if I am to be killed, then rather by these beautiful creatures than by hunters, farm wives, or long winters. And he bowed his head to await the blows.
But, la! In the reflection in the water he saw a swan in full dress: snowy plumage, sloe eyes, and all. The ugly duckling did not at first recognize himself, for he looked just like the beautiful strangers, just like those he had admired from afar.
And it turned out that he was one of them after all. His egg had accidentally rolled into a family of ducks. He was a swan, a glorious swan. And for the first time, his own kind came near him and touched him gently and lovingly with their wing tips. They groomed him with their beaks and swam round and round him in greeting.
And the children who came to feed the swans bits of bread cried out, “There’s a new one.” And as children everywhere do, they ran to tell everyone. And the old women came down to the water, unbraiding their long silver hair. And the young men cupped the deep green water in their hands and flicked it at the young girls, who blushed like petals. The men took time away from milking just to breathe the air. The women took time away from mending just to laugh with their mates. And the old men told stories about how war is too long and life too short.
And one by one, because of life and passion and time passing, they all danced away; the young men, the young women, all danced away. And the old ones, the husbands, the wives, they all danced away. The children and the swans all danced away ...