When Peter Met the Wolf

It starts with an old woman

It starts with an old woman, in a village, in a remote part of the world, where life was a lot harder than we remember. Her pregnant daughter lives higher up in the mountains, closer to the edge of wilderness. The old woman makes her way up, when she knows it’s close to the due date. When she arrives at the daughter’s house, she finds her corpse, very minor traces of her husband, signs of a birth, and a missing baby.

Let’s say, then, that it starts with a missing baby.

The old woman also has a son, who gets married and gives birth to a boy, so let’s say the missing baby has a brother. His name is Peter.

Or maybe it starts with wolves. There is wolf-dung in the house where the daughter once lived, and of her husband, only a foot remained. Out in this cold and lonely place, there are two kinds of packs – human-packs and wolf-packs, and they’re at war.

It starts like this: an old woman, a missing baby, wolves, a boy named Peter. The unmistakeable signs of the story of a feral child, and this one, Peter and the Wolf, is told by Angela Carter.

Peter sees the wolf

Peter sees the wolf three times:

1. The first time, when he is seven years old and out on the hills, herding his goats. He sees two wolves, up close, for the first time. He sees their pelts, their colours, and with them, he sees a little wolf. A bald wolf. A wolf not like the others, but a wolf nonetheless. He is almost eaten for his curiosity, for his childlike awe at this first encounter with the other dominant species of the hills. He is rescued by his goats, who know better than to stare in awe at the predator, as Pratchett would say. 

2. The second time, he is still seven years old, but he has already turned hunter, even tracker, just by being a little smarter than his father, who is not too thrilled by his son’s precociousness. He finds the mysterious pawprint, decodes it, and the little bald wolf is found, sleeping. Its mother is shot, the terrified creature trussed and brought home. Except home is not home.

The little wolf bites the hand of her grandmother, plays dead when she is tied, runs riot across the house when she is untied, trashes the place and craps everywhere – the strange, unguessable smell of wolf-shit is in the air. She is untouchable, untameable. Finally, she knocks over the soup-pot, scalds herself and sits back to howl. 

A moment of silence. Everyone is stunned by the howl. It is not the sound of a feral child, not the sound of a human child, it is, literally, the call of the wild. And from high up in the hills, they hear an answering call, joined by the chorus, and soon everybody knows that the wolves are descending upon the village. The wolves are coming!

And what is Peter doing, in the middle of this riot? He is staring at the sex of the wolf-girl. When she howls, it opens up, and, Carter says, he sees a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh – his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity.

First intimation of infinity

Because, after all, you can never see up to the end of a vagina. The labia open in layers, and they could seem to open endlessly. Each layer is a different shade, a smaller version of the previous one. They do lead you somewhere, but only to a place that is no longer visible. 

I saw the infinite for the first time in a photograph of a frozen mountain reflected in a lake. The photographer said, turn the photo and look at it vertically, now you see the yoni. When you turn the photo, the place where the mountain meets the lake meets the earth turns into a dark and yet invisible slit. The mountain and its reflection explode in opposing directions from the slit. An icy explosion, paused for a moment in time that lasts forever, holding its breath, infinite whorls of white. You are captured by it, you cannot breathe while you watch it.

Like Peter, I was mesmerised.

Peter sees the wolf for the third time

3. The third time Peter sees the wolf, he is back up on the hills, but on his way to a seminary. In this remote place where being wild is always only half-held at bay, Peter has become remarkably civilised. Since the second time he met the wolf, much has changed.

His grandmother has died, possibly from her bitten, infected hand. He has shied away from the world, has disappeared into a solitary, penitential faith. Still intelligent, he has become a reader, but locked within the folds of an invisible wound. Caught somewhere between shame, guilt and fear. Did he not cause the riot? Did he not find the little wolf who bit his grandmother? Did he not almost bring death upon the village? And most importantly, did he not stare right into the heart of the abyss, without looking away?

Anyway, Peter cannot repent enough. He has decided to disappear into the white world of the seminary. On the way, he stops to drink at a river. And then he sees her for the third time.

Crouched at the other side of the river, she is lapping up water so full of mauve light that it looked as if she were drinking up the dawn, says Carter, vertiginously. No longer a feral child, no longer a child, she is covered in hair, lost to the human world. She has breasts, too, now, which a pair of wolf-cubs attach themselves to.

Peter, in a moment of divine ecstasy, tries to cross the river to join her in her marvellous and private grace. He scares her off, she runs away. But he is not a hunter anymore, he doesn’t chase, he probably never sees her again, not in this lifetime. He experiences the opposite of his first private nameless terror. He is free, finally. No guilt, no fear, not even a home – he has only memories now. 

The question the youngest reader in me always asks is what happened next? Where did he go? What did he do?

The answer is, anywhere, anything. Freedom is not even an open road. It is an open world.

Imprinting

Imprinting, a very neutral dictionary definition: a rapid learning process that takes place early in the life of a social animal and establishes a behaviour pattern.

Peter learnt, very early, that there is an infinite, unknowable source of shock and pain. He also learnt that there is an absolute otherness in the female body, and that wolves cannot be tamed. The early learning established a behaviour pattern of fear, shame and receding, withdrawing from the world. He learnt, a few years later, that anything is possible, he learnt not to be afraid. Possibly, a new behaviour pattern was established, beyond the pages of the story

A few years ago, at a poetry reading, a poet described a similar moment, when he introduced his poem. He told us that when he was a child, his mother, who was suffering from a mental illness, showed him what we will call for the sake of continuity her sex. Following him from that moment of terror and trauma, to the last line your cunt is my face, I recognised the absolutist language of imprinting. I also conflated his story with Peter’s and I had a vertiginous feeling of freedom, when I arrived at the end of the poem.

I read imprinting in many ways. Two of these are this – one, that we are stamped and marked by early encounters of terrifying and uncontrolled otherness, that they inform our behaviours, whether they are patterns of fear or patterns of shame and rage. Two, that revisiting that place, looking back into that face, can open up the possibility of new patterns.

I never imagined a return to a pristine state, pre-imprinting, because there is no such thing.

Both Peter and the poet had to navigate their own sexuality very cautiously, after those primary and primal encounters. The poet lived in a world where he could communicate his experience. Peter lived in a world where it stayed hidden, and he tried to stay hidden, navigating in a tight little pattern of fear, before he was miraculously released.

A fear-based map of the world

Some time back, I discovered the existence of the incel-cults. I still don’t understand them, but I have learned (sort-of) that the incel is a person who calls himself an involuntary celibate. 

I find it hard to believe that there is anyone in the world who has not been involuntarily celibate at one point, and for most people, at many, many periods in their lives. I have already collected a few thousand experiences of being involuntarily celibate. It takes a lot of colliding factors to not be celibate – luck, interaction, interest, motivation, environment, safety. On rare occasions you might get everything, mostly you get a few of those things and manage, somehow. It takes nothing at all to be involuntarily celibate. Waking up in the morning can offer you the experience of involuntary celibacy.

But the incel appears to believe that his experience is uniquely entrapping, understandable only by his collective. This leads me to believe that the incel is a person who does not, cannot see the world as it is. 

Possibly this lack of sight is clouded further by the uni-dimensional films (Fight Club, Joker) that register the feelings of entrapment/rage/shame/isolation that eat into men’s lives, express those feelings cathartically, but never acknowledge that there is still the option of accessing other feelings.

But I wonder about the incels – it could be one or it could be a hundred experiences that made this being that walks through the world surrounded by wolves, hemmed into a private world of misery. All the while, life, like a river, skirts around him, around them, navigating through just the next street, the next corner.

Wolves at every turn

Narrative convention says that if you wander off alone into the forest, you will meet a wolf.

Beyond that, there are many ways the stories could go. The wolf could turn out to be a talker. The talker could turn out to be a wolf. The hunter could be a werewolf. The grandmother herself could be a wolf. You could find yourself a wolf, and run off with your pack.

But a life without forests is as grey and banal as those films they make about frustrated doormats. And who knows, maybe if you wander in forests long enough you might just meet that missing piece of your heart?

Stories of feral children

There are many stories of feral children, real and imaginary. Many of those stories involve wolves. There is a compelling heartbreak about them, the closer they come to reality. Successful socialisation is extremely rare, almost unknown, and a normal, long-lived human life even rarer. 

The feral child is like a tribe member who wandered into a different tribe, learnt a different language and customs. His or her consciousness is shaped differently, and the human response is we have lost one of our own. The animal response might well be but it lives, it is alive, it is eating, it is living, what are these noisy creatures going on about, why are they stealing it from us?

But when I read the story again, for possibly the hundredth time, I felt a different kind of heartbreak. I was heartbroken for Peter, who was almost lost to the world. This near-loss was not witnessed, not seen in his life, because he remained, though unusually pious, an industrious boy, a hardworking boy, an intelligent boy. Even he only saw it, acknowledged it, on his third encounter with the wolf.

The wolf-girl is lost to the human world, but Peter almost lost the world, at the moment when his fear overtook his willingness to enter it, be a part of it.

Infinite whorls, infinite worlds

There is a school of thought that otherness is beautiful, fascinating, and we should embrace it. There is a school of thought that otherness is terrifying, alien, polluted, and that we should shun it. But otherness itself is entirely subjective. The easiest way to see it is to map out what you think of as yours. Your sex, your cult, your race, your social network, your school of thought, your family, your grudge. Other is everything that is not yours. 

In that old world of fairy tales, wolves embodied the threatening otherness. The upward moving trend now is otherness as pathogen. Like everything else that could cause infinite harm, I can see it catching on, growing like a giant wart. There is less room for embracing in the world, less opportunity for contact, even for interaction, let alone non-celibacy, and who knows how many glimpses of the infinite we are missing, in this time?

The incels have a clouded view of the world, but while the view might not be universal, none of us get to escape clouds. It seems vital, then, to retain something of that gaze of naked curiosity with which you might have looked at others when you were a child.

Just like, once upon a time, a boy looked at a bald wolf. Like another time, when a boy looked right into the heart of the infinite part of a wolf-girl, and could not look away. Like that other other time, when a boy looked at a wolf across a river, and learnt that anything is possible, and that the world is waiting for him to rejoin it.

I found the story of Peter and the Wolf in Black Venus/Saints and Strangers, but it might also be a part of other compilations.

Author: Priyadarshini John