Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
What is the Match Girl to do? If her instincts were intact, her choices would be many. Walk to another town, sneak into a wagon, stow away in a coal cellar. Wild Woman would know what to do next. But the Match Girl doesn’t know Wild Woman anymore. The little wild child is freezing, all that is left of her is a person who goes about in a trance.
Being with real people who warm us, who endorse and exalt our creativity, is essential to the flow of creative life. Otherwise we freeze. Nurture is a chorus of voices both from within and without that notices the state of a woman’s being, takes care to encourage it, and if necessary, gives comfort as well. I’m not certain how many friends one needs, but definitely one or two who think your gift, whatever it may be, is
pan
de cielo
, the bread of heaven. Every woman is entitled to an Allelujia Chorus.
When women are out in the cold, they tend to live on fantasies instead of action. Fantasy of this sort is the great anesthetizer of women. I know women who have been gifted with beautiful voices. I know women who are natural storytellers; almost everything out of their mouths is freshly formed and finely wrought. But they are isolated, or feel disenfranchised in some way. They are shy, which is often a cover for a starving animus. They have difficulty gaining a sense that they are supported from within, or by friends, family, community.
To avoid being the Little Match Girl, there is one major action you must take. Anyone who does not support your art, your life, is not worth your time. Harsh but true. Otherwise one walks right in and dresses in the rags of the Match Girl and is compelled to live a quarterlife that freezes all thought, hope, gifts, writings, playings, designing, and dancing.
Warmth should be the major pursuit of the Little Match Girl. But in the story it is not. Instead she tries to sell off the matches,
her sources of warmth. Doing so leaves the feminine no warmer, no richer, no wiser, and with no further development.
Warmth is a mystery. It somehow heals and engenders us. It is the loosener of too-tight things, it enhances flow, the mysterious urge to
be,
the maiden flight of fresh ideas. Whatever warmth is, it draws us closer, and closer yet.
The Match Girl is not in an environment where she can thrive. There is no warmth, no kindling, no firewood. If we were in her place what could we do? We could first of all not entertain the fantasyland the Match Girl builds by lighting matches. There are three kinds of fantasies. The first is the pleasure fantasy; it is a form of mind ice-cream, strictly for enjoyment, such as daydreams. The second kind of fantasy is intentional imaging. This kind of fantasy is like a planning session. It is used as a vehicle to take us forward into action. All successes—psychological, spiritual, financial, and creative—begin with fantasies of this nature. Then there is the third kind of fantasy, the kind that brings everything to a halt. This is the kind of fantasy that hinders right action (hiring critical times.
Unfortunately, this is the kind the Match Girl spins. It is a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. It has to do with feeling nothing can be done, or that a thing is too hard to do, so one might as well sink into idle fantasy. Sometimes the fantasy is in a woman's mind. Sometimes it comes to her through a liquor bottle, a needle—or lack of one. Sometimes the smoke of a weed is the transporter, or many forgettable rooms, complete with bed and stranger. Women in these situations are playing out the Little Match Girl in every night of
fantasies
and more fantasies, and waking up dead and frozen at every daybreak. There are many ways to lose one’s intent, to lose one’s focus.
So what will reverse this and restore soul-esteem and selfesteem? We have to find something very different than what the Match Girl had. We have to take our ideas to a place where there is support for them. This is an enormous step concomitant with focus: to find nurture. Very few of us can create solely under our own steam. We need all the pats from angel wings that we can find.
Most of the time people have wonderful ideas: I’m gonna paint
that wall a color I like; I’m going to create a project the entire town can be involved with; I’m going to make some tiles for my bathroom, and if I really like them, I’m going to sell some of them; I’m going to go back to school, sell my house and travel, have a child, leave this and begin that, go my way, clean up my act, help aright this injustice or that, protect the unprotected.
Those kinds of projects need nurture. They need vital support— from
warm
people. Little Match Girl is tattered. Like the old folk song, she’s been down so long it looks like up to her. No one can thrive at her level. We want to put ourselves in a situation where, like th
e plants and trees, we can turn
toward the sun. But there has to be a sun. To do this we have to move, not just sit there. We have to do something that makes our situation different. Without a move, we are back out on the streets selling matches again.
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. When a woman, like the Little Match Girl, has no friends she also becomes frozen by anguish, and sometimes by anger as well. Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. They may give comfort instead of informing the woman about her increasingly frozen circumstances. They comfort her—but that is far different from nurture. Nurture moves you from one place to another. Nurture is like psychic Wheaties.
The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture.
A frozen woman without nurture is inclined to turn to incessant “what if’ daydreams. But even if she is in this frozen condition,
especially
if she is in such a frozen condition, she must refuse the comforting fantasy. The comforting fantasy will kill us dead for certain. You know how lethal fantasies go: “Some day...” and “If I only
had..and
“He will change...’’ and “If I just learn to control myself... when I get really ready, when I have enough xyz, when the kids are grown, when I am more secure, when I find someone else, and as soon as.
I...”
and so on.
The Litde Match Girl has an internal grandmother who instead
of barking “Wake up! Get up! No matter what it takes, find warmth!” takes her away into a fantasy life, takes her to “heaven.” But heaven will not help the Wild Woman, the trapped wild child, or the Little Match Girl in this situation. These comforting fantasies must not be ignited. They are seductive and lethal distractions from the real work.
We see the Match Girl making some kind of trade-off, some kind of ill-conceived commerce in the story when the child sells her matches, the only thing she has that might keep her warm. When women are disconnected from the nurturing love of the wild mother, they are on the equivalent of a subsistence diet in the outer world. The ego is just eking out a life, just taking the barest of nourishment from without and returning each night from whence she began, over and over. There she sleeps, exhausted.
She cannot awaken to a life with a future because her wretched life is like a hook upon which she hangs daily. In initiations, spending a significant period of time under difficult conditions is part of a dismemberment that severs one from ease and complacency. As an initiatory passage, it will come to a conclusion, and the newly “sanded down” woman will commence a refreshed and enwisened spiritual and creative life. However, women in the Match Girl condition could be said to be involved in an initiation that has gone awry. The hostile conditions do not serve to deepen, only to decimate. Another venue, another environ, with different supports and guides, must be chosen.
Historically, and particularly in men’s psychology, illness, exile, and suffering are often understood as an initiatory dismemberment, sometimes carrying great meaning. But, for women, there are additional archetypes of initiation that rise out of women’s innate psychology and physicality; giving birth is one, the power of blood is another, as are being in love or receiving nurturant love. Being given the blessing by someone she looks up to, being taught in a deep and supportive way by one older than she, all these are initiations that are intense, and that have their own tensions and resurrections.
The Match Girl could be said to have come so close, yet remained so far from the transitional stage of movement and action that would have completed the initiation. While she has the
materials for an initiatory experience in her wretched life, there is no one within or without to guide the psychic process.
Psychically, in the most negative sense, winter brings the kiss of death—that is, a coldness—to anything it touches. Coldness spells the end of any relationship. If you want to kill something, just be cold to it. As soon as one becomes frozen in feeling, thinking, or action, relationship is not possible. When humans want to abandon something in themselves or leave someone else out in the cold, they ignore them,
disinvite
them, leave them out, go out of their way to have to even hear their voice or lay eyes upon them. This is the situation in the psyche of the Match Girl.
The Match Girl wanders the streets and she begs strangers to buy matches from her. This scene shows one of the most disconcerting things about injured instinct in women, the giving of light for little price. The little lights on sticks here are like the bigger lights, the skulls on the sticks, in the Vasalisa story. They represent wisdom, but more importantly, they ignite consciousness, replacing dark with light, relighting that which has burned out Fire is the major symbol of the revivificator in the psyche.
Here we have the Match Girl in great need, begging to be given to, offering in fact a thing of far greater value—a light—than value received in return—a penny. Whether this “great value given for less value received” is within our psyches or experienced by us in the outer world, the outcome is the same: more loss of energy. Then a woman cannot respond to her own needs. Something that wants to live begs for it, but is not answered. Here we have someone who, like Sophia, the Greek spirit of wisdom, takes light from the abyss, but sells it off in fits and starts of useless fantasy. Bad lovers, rotten bosses, exploitative situations, wily complexes of all sorts tempt a woman to these choices.
When the Match Girl decides to bum the matches, she uses her resources to fantasize instead of act. She uses her energy in a momentary kind of way. This shows up in obvious ways in a woman's life. She's determined to go to college, but takes three years to make up her mind which one. She is going to do that series of paintings but since she has no place to hang
süch
a show, she doesn’t make painting a priority. She wants to do this or that but she doesn't take t
he
time to learn, to develop the
sensitivity or
skill to do it well. She has ten notebooks full of dreams, but is caught in her fascination with interpretation and cannot put their meanings into action. She knows she must leave, begin, stop, go, but she doesn’t.
And so we see why. When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to bum, instead bum up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.
This sort of conversion angst, wherein problems or issues are diminished by enthusiastically fantasizing unrealizable solutions or nicer times, does not only assail women, it is the major stumbling block of humankind. The stove in the Match Girl fantasy represents warm thoughts. It is also a symbol of the center, the heart, the hearth. It tells us her fantasy is for the true self, the heart of the psyche, the warmth of a home within.
But all of a sudden the stove goes out. The Match Girl, like all women in this psychic predicament, finds herself back sitting in the snow again. Here we see that this kind of fantasy is brief but intensely destructive. It has nothing to bum but our energy. Even though a woman might use her fantasies to keep herself warm, she still winds up in the deep freeze.
The Match Girl lights more matches. Each fantasy bums out, and again the child is in the snow and freezing. When the psyche freezes, a woman is turned toward herself and no one else. She lights a third match. This is the fairy-tale three, the magic number, the point at which something new should happen. But in this case, because fantasy overwhelms action, nothing new occurs.
It is ironic that the story contains a Christmas tree. The Christmas tree evolved from a pre-Christian symbol of life everlasting—the evergreen. One could say it is this that might save her, the idea of the ever-green, ever-growing, ever-moving soul- psyche. But the room has no ceiling. The idea of life cannot be contained in the psyche. The mesmerizing has taken hold.
The grandmother is so warm, so kind, yet she is the final morphia, the final dram of hemlock. She draws the child into the sleep of death. In its most negative sense this is the sleep of com
placency,
the sleep of numbness—“It’s all right, I can stand it”; the sleep of denial—“I just look the other way.” This is the sleep of malignant fantasy, wherein we hope all travail will magically disappear.
It is a psychic fact that when libido or energy wanes to the point where its breath no longer shows on the minor, some representation of the Life/Death/Life nature shows up, here portrayed by the grandmother. It is her work to arrive at the death of something, to incubate the soul that has left its husk behind, and to care for the soul
till it can be born
anew.
And that is the blessedness of everyone’s psyche. Even in the event of such a painful ending as the Match Girl’s, there is a ray of light. When enough time, discontent, and pressure have been brought to bear, the Wild Woman of the psyche will hurl new life into a woman’s mind, giving her opportunity to act in her own
behalf
once more. As we can see from the suffering involved, it is better to heal one’s addiction to fantasy than wait around
wishing
and hoping
to
be raised from the dead.
Renewing the Creative Fire
So now let us imagine that we have everything all together, we are dear about our intention, we are not drowning in escapist fantasy, we are integrated and our creative life flourishes. We need one more attribute; we need to know what to do not
if \
but
when
we lose focus; that is, when we wear down for a time. What? After all this, work, we might lose our focus? Yes, it will only be lost temporarily, but it is the natural order. Here is a fine tale about it, that
in
our
family
is called “The Three Gold Hairs.”