The day of the butterflies
A long time ago, I was lying on a rock, watching a stream flow through a tiny canyon. It was a chilly-windy-rainy-sunny day, but this was a moment of perfect warmth and light. I was, literally, sunning myself on the rock. A butterfly landed on my arm. Not a big patterned butterfly – this was a tiny purple-blue butterfly. While I waited to start breathing, another one joined it, and then another, and I actually had a small host of tiny butterflies making a brilliant tattoo on my arm, my shoulder.
I don’t know why this happened. Maybe I smelled good. Maybe they also wanted more sun and I was an unusually soft rock in the perfect spot, on a perfect day. I don’t think I’ve had a dream image that looked more incomprehensible, was more a picture of absolute joy.
I was not precisely joyful, though. I felt a great rise, like being on the crest of that wave, and then absolute panic. I was not afraid of being eaten by butterflies – though from this close, they were not flashes of colour. Their insecthood was deeply visible, that alien nature, the antennae, the tiny legs. Their touch is light, but still very deeply, insistently odd. Unrecognisable.
I was afraid of the absolute fragility of the moment. Anything could dismantle it. A breath, a word, a movement.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Teetering on the precipice. When it became too much to bear, I finally did move, dislodge them. Though I had a very strong conflicting desire to stay there forever.
Cocoons
We know, since we are children, that caterpillars turn into butterflies. After all these years, it still doesn’t make sense to me. How does a thing that is as grounded as a caterpillar, that crawls on its belly, turn into a thing that flies? It all happens in the cocoon, I know, but what a secret place that is. What goes on inside a cocoon?
When the butterflies were sitting on me, I was frozen. They were not frozen at all. They flapped around and chatted like one of those social/grooming occasions where women gather on a staircase or balcony and do each others’ hair and exchange gossip.
Movement and stillness. Dynamic stillness. I think about a cocoon as being a temporary stop of time. Because I don’t know what happens inside it, I assume it doesn’t really exist. The caterpillar disappears and the butterfly appears, but they are not really the same entity.
What goes on inside a cocoon?
In A.K. Ramanujan’s A Flowering Tree, there is a story about a girl who can turn into a flowering tree. The story is simply structured. Girl becoming tree becoming girl, as Ramanujan says.
Sometime around puberty, Girl tells her sister she can turn into a tree. She describes a delicate ritual of prayer and care, which culminates in Sister pouring a pitcher of water over her body. When this is done, she becomes a tree rich in flowers. I imagine tiny white flowers like stars, because this is, after all, just the turn of puberty. Fragrant, beguiling, but not yet completely real.
Girls sell flowers in market. Queen buys them, Prince notices them, then the classic scene of fairy tale voyeurism – he follows the girls, hides in a tree and sees the transformation of the girl into the tree. Then goes home and does a princely sulk until he gets the girl. (Princes and princesses have a remarkable power for elongated, meditative sulks – no food no water – no ascetic can match their persistence).
He also sulks for a couple of nights in his marriage bed, until he finally asks the girl to turn into a tree for him, in the night. It’s impossible to be irreverent at this moment. The prince is anonymous, until this time. But this is when you get to know just what kind of prince we’re actually dealing with. The ritual is enacted, Girl is transformed, the flowers are plucked, they sleep and have sex on a bed of flowers, and every morning they toss the pile of dried flowers out of the window, making a small hill of flowers.
I thought about the hill of flowers. A wealth of flowers, an abundance of flowers, all the riches in the world, in flowers. An overflow of joy that looked so eternal that they could afford to toss them out the window without a thought.
Image: Painting by Kristian Al Droubi
Sadly, the story does not end there. That would be far too linear.
Prince’s sister is jealous. She gathers her friends and bullies the girl into becoming a tree for them. Do you only do that for your lovers? She asks. No, she did it for her sister, to sell the flowers, first. But the question still burns, it stings, and so Girl sighs and agrees to become a tree for entertainment. The girls are hasty, careless, mess up the ritual and break her branches. When they’re done with her, she’s lost her hands and feet, and she cannot speak or move. Now she becomes the Thing. (The Thing, not because of the loss of limb, but the loss of identity. Girl is lost, and there is no one to take her place).
Image: Priyadarshini John
She is collected, stowed away in a different kingdom, in a different palace. The Prince, now having moved beyond sulks, becomes an ascetic for real, walking out of the palace to find his lost lover. He keeps walking until he finds her. His kindly hostess sends a host of women to his bed, to invite him back into humanity, and he rejects them all, until one night he is left with the Thing.
Unmuted. She suddenly manages to speak, and she tells him the story. Now, all he has to do is go through the ritual again, but differently. This time, he has to put back every branch, put together every torn leaf, and finally, she can become a whole tree again, and then she can become a whole person again, and the bed of flowers returns.
How to be a tree
A few years back, in a world where these things happened, I watched an interactive performance at a gallery. The artist, Seema Kohli, invited the audience to draw her outline as she moved across a large canvas. There was a lot of bad outlining, as the artist offered a new blank space to each participant. There was a lot of idiocy, like the art students who applauded when one of them drew the brush across her face. They probably thought that this was a moment of showing creativity, when it was actually just a moment of narcissistic projection. One man, though, really painted her outlines. He didn’t paint around her, he painted the very edge of her. The space between her fingers, the shadow of her hair. I remember the colour, after all these years, the deepest blue – traces of it remained on the canvas, on her skin. It was a stunning moment of intimacy, the warmest, kindest and closest contact that day, and made up for the horrifying noise of youth.
Later, wet, cold and standing before a riotous canvas, the artist said, I made these notes before I came here, I asked myself, do I have it in me to be the tree? Do I have it in me to be the forest? I realised at that moment how terrifying it was to become a tree among humans. A forest? That would take a lifetime, nothing less.
In another world, I watched performance artist Kristian Al Droubi lie naked on the stage, put a tree in his mouth and invite the audience to water him. Again, noise, narcissism, violence, stupidity. One person from the audience picked up the can, threw it into a room backstage and slammed the door. I couldn’t bear to watch it anymore, she said.
Both artists encountered fear and violent projection. On both occasions, I recognised one human in the audience, who was able to muster up a civilised and humane response. Maybe this is the ratio of what you might encounter in a lifetime, if you put yourself in the hands of humanity.
I noticed that I was afraid to touch the outlines of the artist, when it was my turn. I know why now – being human also takes confidence, an absolute presence, a sureness that when you touch someone you will not harm them.
Human, thing, human again
Ramanujan, in his beautiful and detailed essay on the story, makes many interesting points. Here are just two:
1. As a tree, she is at her most vulnerable.
Not able to speak, fight back, run. Do you do that only for your lovers? Not exactly, but only for people who love. It’s a crude reverse morality, this question. A kind of slut-shaming, that forces Girl to submit to what is essentially cruelty, under the pretext of choosing a more ‘moral’ submission.
2. Agency in these women’s tales is connected with their being able to tell their story, and with its being heard.
As Ramanujan points out, it takes a patient listening and a loving touch which has to come, again, when she is at her most vulnerable. She cannot be healed as a human, she must be healed as a tree.
What it means to be a Thing
Fairy tales and their tellers usually agree, across the world, that puberty is a dangerous and magical time. This is when the wolves take it upon themselves to learn to walk and talk, when lions and tigers make strange deals with wayward parents. When paths become extra winding, when trees start to point the way to distant cottages, when kings and princes turn into voyeurs, when sisterhood starts to show claws and teeth. Pointy teeth.
The tree, unable to speak, completely helpless, is also a kind of thing. But the Thing is different. The Thing is a metaphor. So is the tree, the flowers, the prince, and who knows possibly the girl herself. But the Thing is a metaphor for lost things. Missing bits. In the story, this manifests as missing limbs, the ability to speak. But as anyone who lives in the world knows, missing limbs and the inability to speak in themselves do not block wholeness, personhood.
When the girl was wounded, as a tree, a part of her remained there, in tree-dimension. She was, therefore, unable to heal. She needed to go back to that exact moment and place of hurt, to become a person again. You might say, to become a person at all, because she was still only discovering personhood at the time when she lost herself.
A thing that turns into another thing
In Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the metaphor of female puberty blazes forth in the book title. In the ruby-red stories within, girls turn into wolves turn into lions turn into tigers.
In one glittering version of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty rages in her room, after a bad deal and a wayward father put her in a position of entrapment. All the Beast wants, is to see her naked. Refusing, consistently, to do anything at all, she receives a gift of two diamond earrings. Each is formed by a tear of the tiger Beast. Like all presents from a captor, they mean nothing to her, until one day she realises that she might just have found her mate, possibly even her match. And then the naked Beauty and the naked Beast meet, but only one of them is transformed. An abrasive tongue licks her skin and reveals the glowing striped fur beneath, and the diamonds turn back to water, that she shakes off her fur.
Each time Girl turns back into human from tree, except the time she was wounded, she shakes the water off her body and I remember this mirror image of absolute power and presence. Vulnerability assimilated.
All the beasts and flowers within
There are a thousand versions of the same fairy tale. There are thousands of transformations to be made. You might become a tiger, a bird, a phoenix, a dragon, a wolf. You might encounter a thousand mirrors, you might even encounter humans.
You might encounter Sisters, Princes, Princes’ sisters. You might encounter all three in the same person. You tell some stories, bits of stories. Each time, you might have to go through that painful process of becoming the Thing that is something in between. Each time, you might have to become the animal of the moment.
There is a reason why the same story is told so many times, in so many ways. Because you might have to be a multitude of them, in your lifetime.
I’ve noticed, as I get older, that it is a lot harder to admit to being some animals than others. It’s easier to admit to being a wolf than a dog, because you have all these women who run with wolves and they seem to have had a lot more space. It was easier to admit to being a dog when a kindly Pratchett told me that at the end of the day, we’re all someone’s dog.
At the same time, you might not have realised that you were missing space until you turned into an orca which was kept like a water-inhabiting dog in a tiny pool-kennel.
If you watch carefully, when you tell your stories, you might just see your shadow shifting on the walls behind you, expanding, shrinking.
Why is it so hard to be a flowering tree?
It’s not that trees are weak, they’re not. They survive storms, floods, bugs, bears, leopards. However, they are remarkably helpless against humans. They cannot run away from axes, they cannot fight back with a well-aimed branch. Cannot or will not, who knows?
And still, out of all the beasts you might have been and encountered, humans might possibly be the most dangerous. The hardest thing to be, is absolutely helpless before another human. Even a very well-trained obedient dog might still pull on its leash or grab its dinner a beat before the command.
As Ramanujan pointed out, each time Girl turned into a tree she pleaded with the other person to treat her gently. The very insistence on prayers, ritual, all mark a circle around the spot – that this is a sacred space. Tread softly. When Prince asked Girl to turn into a tree that night, I held my breath. And yet it all turned out so wonderfully – playful, intimate, heaps of flowers gathering outside the window.
The encounter with Prince’s Sister was a lot more like I would’ve expected things to turn out.
Storytelling
I always thought that telling a story was a lot like whatever it is that goes on inside a cocoon. A magical act that could create, and recreate, whole new beings. Miracle transformations. I didn’t realise, until Ramanujan pointed it out, that the act of storytelling was also necessary. A part of becoming whole. One step to achieving humanness.
In that sense, every encounter offers the space to tell one part, one story, and slowly bits of you start coming back though you might not recognise them because it has, after all, been so long.
Eventually, you might even have the opportunity to take the black stone that sits right over your heart and hand it to someone. And possibly, at that moment, you might see the shadow of a tree on the wall behind you.
The shadow of a tree
Image: Priyadarshini John
I hid from the image of the flowering tree for many years. The flowering tree, the missing pieces, the broken branches, the wounded Girl, the inability to speak. They were all too much to bear.
Now, looking back again at the same story, stories, I notice, as I never did before, the moment when she shakes the water off her body and rises to be human, to be a whole person. I think about the tears that fell dripping off Beauty’s fur.
I don’t know if this moment will come for me, but I have a hazy idea of what it could be. It is the most fragile thing, the subtlest of sensations, like having a tiny host of butterflies sitting on your skin. There is the faintest noise, a whisper, that might be the breeze made by all those little purple-blue wings. The sound of white flowers like stars falling on grass. Even smaller sounds, insect-speak, tiny hair-like legs moving on your body. Details upon details. This is not the tree itself. It’s the outlines of it, transparent, leaves trembling at the touch of a light wind on a sunny day.
If you’re lucky, you might get roots, branches, a trunk, a whole sky within your grasp, and then all you need to do is shake the water off your body and rise.
