When someone walks out of Bluebeard’s closet
There is a scene in Pulp Fiction which rises out of the darkest chamber in most women’s nightmares. The owner of an unassuming pawn shop, a seemingly innocuous and forgettable human being, runs a basement of horrors. Unwittingly, a gangster and a double-crossing boxer, played by Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis, walk into this Bluebeard’s closet and are captured, and one of them is raped. Some fighting, a sword and a couple of gunshots later, both the gangster and the boxer walk away.
When you go into the darkest chamber of your mind, it’s good to bring along a sword and a well-known action hero. Or a bear. Or an orca. Or an intelligent black panther named Bagheera. When I was a child I really wanted friends just like Mowgli’s, especially Bagheera, a friend like a shadow of the night. A wolf pack would be useful, as well.
On a youtube tarot reading a few years back, and the reader said, everyone says that scorpios are vengeful, but I don’t think that it’s vengefulness, actually. You just have a very strong sense of karmic justice.
When someone walks into Bluebeard’s closet, it’s nice to see them walk away alive. Retributive violence does have power, but there’s an earthquake-like tremor that rises out of transforming a narrative.
I watched Pulp Fiction at a young and impressionable age, and though I was transported by that scene, it was only many years later when I watched Django Unchained that I understood why.
Nobody knows how big a phoenix really is
I had a similar feeling when I watched a phoenix rise, at the end of a novel.
In Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum, a group of very clever vampires convince entire villages and kingdoms that they actually represent the greater good, and a small sacrifice of blood is nothing to pay for the overall security of not being ripped apart into little pieces. A stunned, befuddled populace queue up and offer their necks.
Performer: Kristian Al Droubi
Image: Priyadarshini John
At the beginning of the story, one of them attacks a phoenix. Much later, at the end, like karmic justice, the phoenix comes back to haunt them, except that it is not the size of a hawk or an eagle or even an albatross. The returning phoenix is as big as a house, with a wingspan wider than a castle.
Image: Priyadarshini John
I’ve lost the ability to watch any kind of violence, retributive or otherwise. I remember these feelings, and I remember the bird. The feeling is like the bird, actually. Too big to contain, too big to even see in its entirety, its wingtips edged by flames.
The worm that turns
Everyone distrusts a worm that turns. The dog that bites the hand that feeds it. The trodden bee that stings with its last tiny dot of life. There is a ghost there, of the worm that turns into its oppressor. But these stories are not about worms turning. They are fantasies of karmic justice. Of the world, the gods, the fates, of universes, that are not on the side of oppressors.
There are other kinds of fantasists in the world. Like Gaspar Noé, who imagines that a group of dancers who accidentally drink a spiked punch turn into demonic entities that torture and rape and kill each other within the space of a few flashes of strobe. Think of the punch as Pandora’s box, the unleashing of violence as all the trouble in the world, and the curious, the young, and the not-Noés as Pandoras. This is a work of fear, and a moral work, whose moral is that bad things happen if you do almost anything. This is also a kind of retributive violence, and the retribution is simply for existing, or for doing anything the fantasist wouldn’t do.
Red shoes, matchsticks and snowballs
It has something in common with Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes. I read this story when I was a child, and there are still few things that I find more shocking than the end of this story. A little girl is enchanted by a pair of red shoes, dances in them, wears them to church even though she’s not supposed to, and is cursed to dance in them forever. For a moment, you’re carried away by this breathless magical dancing, but very soon you’re trapped and hysterical, like the girl. Finally, her feet are cut off, to remove the shoes, and she’s given a pair of wooden feet to replace them.
I’m not a child any more, not by quite a few years, but I still can’t bear it. All she did was wear a differently coloured pair of shoes, my heart screams. How could you do that?!
Like the dancers, the girl in the red shoes didn’t do much more than be happy, dance, be young, and be exuberant. A certain kind of fantasist finds this so terrifying that they can’t wait to bring acid rain down on their own protagonists.
Long after I’d walked away from Hans Christian Anderson’s chamber of punishment, I read Terry Pratchett’s retelling of another Anderson story – The Little Match Girl. In Anderson’s version, the little match girl is cold and starving in the snow on Christmas eve, tries to warm herself up by lighting matchsticks, dies in the snow and is carried away to heaven by her grandmother, who is already there. The girl in the red shoes is also carried away to heaven.
In Pratchett’s version, from Hogfather, the little match girl is cold in the snow on Hogwatchnight (a pig-shaped Christmas eve). Death, forced by circumstance to become Hogfather (a wild boar-turned Santa), finds her in the snow, brings her back to life, hands her over to a couple of Watchmen and tells them to give her food and a warm place to sleep.
When a host of affronted-looking angels appear to carry the little girl away to heaven, Death’s henchman, Albert, throws snowballs at them till they go away.
In my head and in my heart, he’s throwing snowballs at Hans Christian Anderson, or the spectre of his fears, until he/it goes away. And at every other story that likes to carry little girls off to heaven.
Red dresses and the forest at night
Image: Priyadarshini John
I bought a red dress, with a hood. I didn’t think of the connotation until around midnight, when I looked again and again at the colour, a toasty red, tomato red, they used to call it. A vulnerable, inviting red, unlike say a post-box red which is pretty much a warning sign. The kind of red that makes you feel warm on a cold day, or on a lonely path in a dark forest. Strangely, the first story I remembered was the red shoes, because there is something about this colour that still feels like that breathless wilderness of dancing. Then, I thought about Red Riding Hood, another story with retributive morals, though, being an ordinary fairy tale, without Anderson’s delusions of grandiosity, she does get rescued in the end.
There are two retellings of this story that I’ve held on to, all my life.
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One is Angela Carter’s. In The Company of Wolves, the growth of the unfamiliar beast of puberty is mirrored by the fear of the waiting ‘other’ beast in the forest. Red Riding Hood is not eaten, she just finds a mate. She has an intimate encounter with this animal, picks lice out of his fur, and when she hears the baying of the pack in the night, throws her head back and says I love the company of wolves.
The other is Pratchett’s version (in Witches Abroad), where the wolf is pitied for being forced to think like a human, is put out of his misery and given a decent burial. The grandmother is rescued, an army of woodcutters is pressed into service to help her out, and kindly suggested to that it really isn’t a nice thing to leave an old lady to live alone in the forest. Pratchett could let go of very few of his characters, and he definitely wasn’t going to lose a grandma.
Both these retellings warm my heart on a cold day in a dark forest.
All you need to do is nothing
There are many many discussions on violence. Violence is the peak, the tip of a great underwater mountain that can sink a ship. Catching just the very edge of it, just the hint of it, gives you a terrifying sense of the great mass beneath. There have been useful and irrelevant discussions about retributive violence, cathartic violence, gratuitous violence, violence-violence and so on. Eventually, for many people, like the last chapter of A Clockwork Orange, appetites shrink and all these dramatically coloured shades of it go pale, turn grey.
When I thought about the colour red, the red shoes, the red hood of a dress, I thought, not of violence, but punishment. Like Noé’s modern version, Anderson’s stories are punishing stories. Stories of punishment have power, and there is definitely something familiar about the needlessness of the violence in the Red Shoes. All you need to do is nothing at all. Tap into the fear of a terrified snivelling creature/person, and you end up without feet. This does sound something like the world.
It’s easy, in some ways even safer to expect the worst. It keeps you from the dangers of crushed hopes, broken dreams and all those things that they sing about, endlessly, in a litany of disappointed humanity. Darkness is easily achievable. For some, all you need to do is turn the lights off. For others, you don’t even need to bother with that.
When I spent winter in a temperate country, I felt surprisingly warm. The days were dark, most of your energy was spent keeping warm, your feet never touched the ground, you were encased in protective layers all the time. Only the snow, if you looked right into it, sparkled dangerously, like crystals, and brought an unseasonal lightness into the world.
Image: Priyadarshini John
On the other hand, I hated spring. It made me feel like I’d come out of a tunnel into a wild storm of chaos. Buffeted by warmth and cold, wind and rain, sun and clouds, tossed and unable to huddle like in winter, I was enraged. I felt cheated by poets, and I imagined that if I was a flower I would reject this world completely, stay deep enough underground to imagine it was still winter.
I carried, somewhere inside me, the seed of Anderson’s thought – that life itself brings punishment. I was afraid of the springtime. I had a similar blanket over me for many years, the thought that punishment was just reality asserting itself, the world turning as it was supposed to. When I was happy, excited, and most worryingly, when I felt most alive, I kept looking over my shoulder.
A retelling, a reteller, or just a black panther
I was lucky that I had, over my shoulder, two writers who insisted on going back to punishing stories and retelling them. I felt them like friends, right behind me when I was about to slip. A lot like walking into the jungle with a bear and a black panther by your side. I was still afraid, but I could keep walking.
Maybe the kind of fantasist you turn into depends somewhat on who your friends were as a child. A thrower of snowballs at officious angels, a sympathiser of wolves? Or just a guillotine?
Satisfaction
When you arrive at the last chapter of Clockwork Orange, at whatever age it is, 21 or 200, the kind of story that can give you satisfaction does not end in a pool of blood. That doesn’t mean your desire for karmic justice has ended.
The vampires in Carpe Jugulum drink the blood of Granny Weatherwax, an old witch. Everyone waits for her to turn, to become a vampire. Instead, in the grand finale, the vampires find themselves unable to harm a child. They find themselves longing, just longing for a cup of hot sweet tea. I haven’t been vampired, she tells them. But you’ve all been Weatherwaxed.
That’s a satisfying ending.
There’s another, distant ending, that is also very satisfying. Being a snail, watching your fellow snails being crushed under a boot, and watching a great black shadow looming over the boot-wearer.
Both these endings are temporary. The vampires aren’t permanently Weatherwaxed and the wearers of boots aren’t disappeared from the world. Fairy tales, however, are endlessly retold, and there’s a reason for it. They’re not meant to be permanent, or perfect.
They’re just meant to keep you going.
