{"id":134325,"date":"2019-03-11T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134325"},"modified":"2019-03-11T11:29:17","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:29:17","slug":"the-laws-of-the-fairy-tale-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/11\/the-laws-of-the-fairy-tale-king\/","title":{"rendered":"The Laws of the Fairy-Tale King"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column, Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Children\u2019s book illustration of \u201cOld King Cole\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIf we didn\u2019t have rules,\u201d I say to my sons, \u201cwe\u2019d all be on the roof in our underpants talking to the clouds.\u201d \u201cBut what if the rule-maker is bad? What if he hates us for no reason? What if he hates kids and brown people?\u201d<\/p>\n

I learned about the Nuremberg Laws as a kid in yeshiva, and I learned how those original laws bloomed and spread like a virus into more and more laws: Jews are prohibited from buying cake. Jews must surrender their fur, wool, typewriters, telephones, bicycles, cars, radios, dogs, cats, and birds. Jewish children are prohibited from going to school. And, eventually, Jews cannot exist. I think I was nine. I had a dog. I would hide her, I decided. I\u2019d break all the laws. I\u2019d make sure my brothers always had cake. I\u2019d exist.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My relationship to the word law<\/em> has always been fraught. It\u2019s always reminded me of a yawn with jagged teeth. Or a large pink eraser that could rub me out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like belonging to another person\u2019s dream,\u201d says Alice in Through the Looking Glass<\/em>. The Red King, a chess piece on the checkerboard country, is asleep and Alice has a \u201cgreat mind to go and wake him and see what happens.\u201d More and more, it\u2019s like this country has become the endless dream of a Red King. Do we shake the king awake? Or is it best to let the Red King sleep, gently close the door, and tiptoe into the woods where things have no names, hold the trees, and pray we don\u2019t disappear? As Alice crosses squares that are brooks and streams marked by broken sentences and asterisks, the Red King never wakes.<\/p>\n

Fairy tales are perched on a shaky turret of laws that seem to be both drafted and passed by whimsy and appetite. What keeps fairy tales from toppling over is that once the law is passed, the inhabitants of the tale stay under its spell until the spell can be broken. Until the dreamer wakes up. The citizens of fairy tales have lived under these laws long enough to know the tale they\u2019re in has stitched a \u201cY\u201d to the end of \u201cFAIR\u201d\u2014it\u2019s a weirdly shaped wing that carries fairness away. Fairy, from fata<\/em>, is rooted in fate but lifted by magic. Here comes the wind.<\/p>\n

In Giambattista Basile\u2019s \u201cThe Flea,\u201d a king is bitten by a flea. When he picks the flea off, he is so moved by its beauty he places it in a carafe and feeds it daily with his blood. The flea grows and grows. At the end of seven months, the flea is the size of a lamb. The king has the flea-lamb skinned, and issues a decree: whoever is able to recognize the animal to which the hide belongs will be given the princess in marriage. People flock from all over. Is it a monster cat, a lynx, a crocodile? No, no, no. An ogre soon enters, \u201cthe most horrible thing in the world.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The ogre, because he\u2019s an ogre, guesses correctly, and since the king can\u2019t go back on his promise he gives him his daughter, Porziella. This is the law of fairy tale. \u201cEither you\u2019re a king,\u201d says the king, \u201cor you\u2019re poplar bark.\u201d Porziella\u2019s face turns yellow. Her home will now be the ogre\u2019s home, decorated with the bones of men the ogre has eaten. \u201cI can\u2019t go back on my promise,\u201d explains the king. We learn from fairy tales that utter<\/em> is both verb and noun\u2014what is declared is also absolute. The King\u2019s decree, not his daughter, is his offspring. Like a mother, the king nurses a flea. Unlike a mother, the king nurses a flea to grow into a guessing game that keeps him entertained at the expense of his progeny.<\/p>\n

Fathers in fairy tales are not good fathers. In \u201cThe Juniper Tree\u201d by the Brothers Grimm, they eat their own children without realizing they are eating their children and throw the bones under the table. \u201cWife,\u201d says one father, \u201cthis is the best stew I\u2019ve ever tasted \u2026 Give me some more.\u201d Only after the children return from the danger their fathers left them in do the fathers repent. Unlike the stepmothers who pay with their lives, the fathers are usually forgiven. They are ineffective at best. Their hearts are clogged with forgetfulness. They are sleepwalkers. They wish to marry their daughters. Meek and docile, they obey the evil stepmother\u2019s wishes. Porziella laments, \u201cOh, better if my mother had suffocated me, if my cradle had been my deathbed, my wet nurse\u2019s tit a bladder of poison, my swaddling nooses, and the little whistle tied round my neck a millstone, considering that this calamity was to befall me\u2026\u201d \u201cEnough with your anger,\u201d her father replies, \u201csugar is expensive \u2026 don\u2019t try to teach a father how to have daughters.\u201d If she doesn\u2019t shut her mouth, he threatens to \u201csow the earth with her teeth.\u201d The fairy tale father is myopic. He cannot see the larger picture his daughter is standing inside. He can only see the flea. Why is this? Why is the fairy-tale father a void? A hole an entire family might fall through? The hide of a forgotten law? If all the fairy-tale fathers were gathered into a moonlit field it might look something like this: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, a doctor found a black spot inside my husband. We send the report to my father, a doctor as well, for a second look. The black spot is a law inside my husband\u2019s body I could not read, so I asked my father to read it. What does it say? I prayed the black spot had broken the law of what I feared. Maybe it was just a small black flower growing inside my husband. Or the first letter of a story he was about to write. \u201cThe bottom line\u2026\u201d said my father. He always gives bottom lines. From my father, I have hundreds of bottom lines. Whenever he gives me the bottom line, I imagine the last three layers of ocean: the midnight zone, the abyss, and the trenches. Lack of light, continuous coldness, and few nutrients make it difficult, but not impossible, to live inside the bottom line, and yet the bottom line is a strange comfort. It\u2019s a place I can sleep when I\u2019m drowning. And some simple, beautiful organisms do occur there, like snailfish and sea cucumbers. Bottom lines are the cousins of laws, their long, cold bodies stretching out like the only correct answer to a world we will never fully understand.<\/p>\n

Fairy tales are filled with bottom lines: the stepmother is evil, the mother is dead, the lamb is a flea, the boy is a bird, the Red King is sleeping, with a kiss the spell can be broken, and whoever is able to [fill in the blank<\/em>]\u00a0can marry the king\u2019s daughter. The fairy tale breathes in the spaces above and around the bottom line. The figures in fairy tales live not because of the laws, but despite them, outside of them.<\/p>\n

In Kafka\u2019s parable, \u201cBefore the Law,\u201d a man from the country \u201cprays for admittance to the Law.\u201d The door is open, but there is a doorkeeper who warns him that through the door is a long hallway filled with more doors and more doorkeepers all more powerful and terrible than the next. The man sits on a stool and grows old. He has come to know the doorkeeper so well he even knows \u201cthe fleas in his fur collar,\u201d and he begs the fleas to help him change the doorkeeper\u2019s mind. He never gains admittance to the law, and yet the door is always open. I imagine Kafka\u2019s fleas and Basile\u2019s flea passing notes back and forth:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is a law?\u201d
\n\u201cIt is as naked as it is clothed. As wide open as it is shut.\u201d
\n\u201cLike the naked emperor from the fairy tale?\u201d
\n\u201cYes! And the cheers of the crowd?\u201d
\n\u201cYes, and the parade, too!\u201d
\n\u201cAnd the emperor\u2019s shame?\u201d
\n\u201cYes. The law is the emperor\u2019s shame and the boy calling out and the father telling him to shush.\u201d
\n\u201cAnything else?\u201d
\n\u201cAnd the noblemen holding up high the emperor\u2019s train that was never there. That, too, is a law.\u201d
\n\u201cAre we done?\u201d
\n\u201cOne last thing.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat is it?\u201d
\n\u201cThe law is a fictionless fiction which, like us dear brother, depends on its hosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fairy-tale father and the fairy-tale law are the same. The seed of the father, like a law, only grows once it leaves the father\u2019s body. I sniff the father\u2019s pelt. It smells like a country before its inhabitants arrive. I sniff the law. It smells like everybody is always missing.<\/p>\n

In his first one hundred days in office, Trump signed more executive orders than any president since World War I. The orders allow the President to act on his own, bypassing Congress, and flying solo. He is like the mythical weejy weejy bird, whose single wing causes it to fly in tighter, faster, and smaller circles until it disappears up its own ass, and then disappears entirely.\u00a0 The executive orders range from the approval of pipelines to cutting down forest trees to promoting artificial intelligence. Hours after being sworn in, he signed an order to reverse the Affordable Care Act. And now, like the wolfless boy, he is declaring an emergency. Tomorrow maybe he will order a guessing game: Sniff the fabric of America. To which people does its skin belong?<\/p>\n

At the end of \u201cThe Flea,\u201d Porziella is saved by seven sons who are \u201cseven jewels, seven oak trees, and seven giants.\u201d When she is returned, her father \u201cnever stopped declaring himself a thousand times guilty to Porziella for having placed her in such danger on account of a mere whim, without a thought to how big a mistake is made by those who go looking for wolves\u2019 eggs and fifteen-teethed combs<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hasn\u2019t Trump read the fairy tale about the king who builds a wall so high between his country and the country that manufactures wolf eggs and impossible combs that his people, their hair all knotted and tangled together, slowly starve?<\/p>\n

Hasn\u2019t Trump read the fairy tale about the king who every morning crows from his castle \u201cEMERGENCY, EMERGENCY,\u201d causing his citizens to flee and his country to grow cold and dark and empty?<\/p>\n

Many things set this president apart from other presidents, but one in particular is how tweet and burst and whim turn foreign and domestic policies into scribble. What Trump intends to do, is already doing, or would never do is ever-shifting. It is erased, written over, written over again, and then erased by a sudden \u201ccaw, caw\u201d or \u201claw, law.\u201d Bafflement ensues. \u201cWhat is government?\u201d asks my five year old. I want to say, the thickening smudge of a bird falling from the sky, but instead I say, \u201cIt\u2019s who\u2019s in power.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Twitter called Trump Draws superimposes drawings of steel slats, pickles, dinosaurs, bunny rabbits, the nuclear launch code (\u201c1234password\u201d), Mr. Lincoln, a leak, and chocolate cake over the executive orders. Except for the one that reads \u201cI\u2019m scared of dying alone,\u201d the words are usually misspelled. Other than the replaced orders, the rest of the scene remains intact: Trump\u2019s serious three-point display, the applause behind him, and the shaking of hands. \u201cThank you,\u201d he mouths. \u201cThank you.\u201d Like any good joke, it reveals an important truth: What\u2019s being ordered first and foremost is not the actual order. It\u2019s the symbol of his solitary reign and, of course, the applause behind him.<\/p>\n

This morning my seven year old tells me he had a nightmare in which a crumpled-up piece of paper and a pencil were floating, and it was his job to keep both up in the air. \u201cIf they fell,\u201d he said, \u201ca ghost would appear.\u201d And then he gets very quiet. After a long while, he says, \u201cI feel so invisible. It\u2019s like no one sees me.\u201d I feel a small crack in my heart beginning to spread into the shape of a boy. \u201cWhat can we do,\u201d I ask, \u201cto make you feel visible?\u201d Silence. And then he says, \u201cI like being invisible. It gives me time to think.\u201d \u201cMe too,\u201d I say. \u201cI get it,\u201d I say. I think of Italo Calvino, who said he wrote If On a Winter Night a Traveler<\/em> to see how well he could write if he did not exist. My son is the floating paper and pencil, and he is the boy keeping it up in the air, and he is also the ghost. He is the law of himself. We all are. So often we forget this, I think. We peer down the long hallway filled with doors and doorkeepers, looking past ourselves, hoping to be told who we are.<\/p>\n

And even further down the hallway there goes America, like a darkening parade. And here come the floats: the Sleeping Red King, the Emperor Growing Cold, and a Presidential Tweet. Everything is covered with ticker tape dotted with fleas mistaken for words. And there goes the boy in the crowd, crying, \u201cBut he hasn\u2019t got anything on!\u201d He is a large, beautiful boy and he is growing louder and louder and louder. He is so loud he wakes himself up. He is so loud we wake ourselves up, too.<\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column, Happily, here.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many things set this president apart from other presidents, but one in particular is how tweet and burst and whim turn foreign and domestic policies into scribble.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45325],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happily"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Laws of the Fairy-Tale King by Sabrina Orah Mark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 11, 2019 \u2013 Many things set this president apart from other presidents, but one in particular is how tweet and burst and whim turn foreign and domestic policies into scribble.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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