The Cry for Myth (24 page)

The king, who would fain keep his dear child from the misfortune, gave orders that every spindle in the whole kingdom should be burnt. Meanwhile the gifts of the Wise Women were plenteously fulfilled on the young girl, for she was so beautiful, modest, good-natured, and wise, that everyone who saw her was bound to love her.

The king here is doing what every father is tempted to do, namely, to overprotect his daughter. To prevent her death he tries to hedge her in: he seeks to avoid the non-being by preventing being, to use Tillich’s definition of neurosis. We are afraid of non-being and so we shrivel up our being. The king thinks that he can protect her by blocking her growth: by burning all the spindles, stopping all activity, and keeping her simply shut up within the castle. But of course this shrinking never works; and we shall find Briar Rose very humanly, if not entirely judiciously, going out to explore the world, to look into the different rooms in the castle.

A rusty key was in the lock, and when she turned it the door sprang open and there in the little room sat an old woman with a spindle, busily spinning her flax. “Good day, old mother,” said the king’s daughter, “what are you doing there?” “I am spinning,” said the old woman and nodded her head. “What sort of thing is that, that rattles
round so merrily?” asked Briar Rose, and she took the spindle and wanted to spin too. But scarcely had she touched the spindle when the magic decree was fulfilled and she pricked her finger with it.

Here we see the growing girl moving out into the world. She does this when she’s alone, as she’s always bound to be at some time no matter how much her father overprotects her. The word “alone” here is especially significant, because this kind of development, this leap of freedom, must always contain some element of being done alone, taking responsibility for one’s own steps oneself. Going out into the world, she wants to learn the feminine tasks, the capabilities that go with what women do, such as spinning. Then comes the bleeding, biologically the point of menstruation and the harbinger since the beginning of time that she will be able to conceive a new being. “Becoming” now is becoming able to be impregnated.

Time then stops in this tale. Menstruation, indeed, is named time,
menses
being the Latin word “months.”
*
In our vernacular we refer to menstruation also in terms of time, one’s “period.”

And, at the very moment when she felt the prick, she fell down upon the bed and lay there in a deep sleep. And this sleep extended over the whole palace. The king and queen, who had just come home and had entered the great hall, began to sleep, and the whole court with them.

But round about the castle there began to grow a hedge of thorns, which every year became higher, and at last grew close up round the castle and all over it, so that there was nothing of it to be seen, not even the flag upon the roof.

In this stopping of time, even nature is quiet and comes to a halt. This is indeed what happens when human development is blocked: growth is frozen, the developmental level is fixated. But it
is
never possible for growth to stop fully: neurotic defenses
are required to effect the halt, and a vicious circle sets in. Figuratively speaking, nature takes part in the defenses of the girl, the hedge of thorns grows round the castle and every year grows higher, i.e., the neurotic pattern becomes more evident.

The shrinking into oneself characteristic of neurosis is symbolized in the fairy tale by this hedge growing around the castle. The hedge hides not only Briar Rose but the other people as well and covers the castle so that not even the flag on the roof can be seen. The identity of the palace is lost. The place becomes only a memory.

But the story of the beautiful sleeping “Briar Rose,” for so the princess was named, went about the country, so that from time to time kings’ sons came and tried to get through the thorny hedge into the castle. But they found it impossible, for the thorns held fast together as if they had hands and the youths were caught in them and could not get loose again, and died a miserable death.

The youths try to storm the thorns, to force their way in to Briar Rose before the time is fulfilled and she is ready to be awakened.

We can assume, now from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there will be rage in Briar Rose that she is so completely blocked off from life. I propose that her rage shows itself in the fact that the briars around the castle
kill the suitors
. In every neurotic pattern others are dragged down and made to suffer by virtue of the anger—in this case, Briar Rose’s anger. It may seem strange to talk of rage on the part of such a “sweet” creature as Briar Rose, but that is the unexpected effect neurotic patterns have on one’s world.

The princes represent
wishing without mutuality
. Wishing becomes willful defiance when it does not take into account the needs and readiness of the other, when it is not genuinely
inter
personal. This storming of the hedge happens when the princes are driven by their own needs and desires without relation to the girl’s. Their behavior has the character of forcing Briar Rose, the attitude of rape rather than mutual love. Their behavior
presupposes Briar Rose as a love object to be attained rather than a woman to be loved. They represent what we call the
daimonic:
they are under the sway of the daimonic gone awry. True, the princes get caught in Briar Rose’s defenses; but otherwise she would become the mere victim of their desires. If the body is forced open before it is ready, there is the likelihood of considerable trauma, including the possibility that the body will never then open of its own accord.

There then occurs a new development in the story.

The many young princes had tried to get in but they had tried to get through the thorny hedge, but they had remained sticking fast in it, and had died a pitiful death. Then the youth said: “I am not afraid, I will go and see the beautiful Briar Rose.” The good old man might dissuade him as he would, but the prince did not listen to his words.

Here we have the beginning of the
courage of relationship
. It is one aspect of the “courage to be,” as Tillich would put it. The old man who tries to dissuade the prince reminds us of Jocasta in the famous drama of Oedipus. As Jocasta adjures Oedipus to rest, take it easy, not to bother himself, not to insist on being “present to himself,” the old man tries to dissuade the prince with the counsel of common sense and adjustment. But the prince refuses such advice: “I am not afraid. I will go and see the beautiful Briar Rose.”

But by this time the hundred years had just passed, and the day had come when Briar Rose was to awake again. When the king’s son came near to the thorn-hedge, it was nothing but large and beautiful flowers, which parted from each other of their own accord, and let him pass unhurt.

This is a beautiful denouement: the thorns become roses and the hedge becomes flowers by virtue of “creative waiting.” The fairy tale would have it that this occurs simply by waiting. I believe differently: it is inner growth, the external manifestation of
kairos
.

This mythic approach to time is opposite to the routine—and
often boring—concept of time as automatic passage of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” creeping on “in petty pace from day to day.” This demonstrates that this great change did not occur because of the special qualities of this prince (others were as courageous and died in the thorns). This prince, we assume, sensed the
kairos
, the moment when “all creation trembled and groaned.”

Briar Rose and everything in her world is asleep until the man in the form of the Prince comes to awaken her, and then the thorns become large and beautiful flowers which part from each other of their own accord. This is a very meaningful and graphic symbol of the hymen and other protections of the girl from sexuality, protections which now change into their opposite of their own accord. When the time is ripe, the thorn becomes a flower, a rose—a vaginal symbol as beautiful and exquisitely fitting as could be imagined. We are reminded that in mythology and cultural history the word “deflowered” is used for the intercourse in which a woman gives up her virginity in her first sexual relationship. A recurrence of the same symbol is present in such folk songs as “My Wild Irish Rose,”

This tale binds up in symbolic form not only the biological meaning but the psychological meaning of this significant experience. The prince is
present
when her time arrives in fullness. The tale says, “He could not turn his eyes away,” which indicates an interpersonal relation very different from the previous youths’ desire to storm the castle. He kisses her and she then awakes—specifically awakes sexually, but we may assume the meaning is an awakening in all aspects as well.

There now is an interpersonal relationship. There is love, we are told; there is capacity for creating new being in procreation, and there is, as in all fairy tales, the happy ending. They marry in splendor and live contentedly to the end of their days.

But we cannot help thinking at this point of the
Three Penny Opera
and its charming satirical song, “Happy Ending,” as well as another of its songs, “Sad To Say It Never Has Been So.” Now sad to say it never has been so that any woman’s development in real life is as simple as being asleep in the pre-adolescent age and then, on being awakened by the kiss of the prince, she then lives happily ever after. The vicissitudes of development and individuation are difficult in the best of ages, and particularly in our age of psychological alienation, when we are all to some extent emotionally displaced persons.

There are within this tale, nevertheless, deeper dimensions which make the myth more than a fairy tale. We see first of all the phenomenon of
presence
.

The loss of the presence means we are not fully alive to ourselves and so not fully alive to others. Thus the central issue in the myth is the presence of Briar Rose to herself. The spokesmen in contemporary Western civilization for this loss of presence to ourselves are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; they are the prophets who saw the consequences of our alienation from our culture, from our friends, and especially from meaning in life. Nietzsche was passionately concerned with the fact that we have become vapid, empty, powerless in ourselves. He represents the phase in the myth of these young men who try to storm the thorns and citadel, who try to take it by force but, since the time is not yet ripe, fail.

The next phase is that in which the sleeping girl’s presence can be restored only by waiting. Heidegger is the representative of this phase, for he was aware of the death of God—if we put it in a theological context—and he lived in the awareness that this presence is lost. Heidegger knew how to “wait for Godot,” to borrow the title of Beckett’s play.

Whether or not one likes this specific language and these illustrations, one must grant that the concept of
presence
is a fruitful one for understanding this tale and myth. “Man is only man,” writes Heidegger, “when he is spoken to by Being,” which is the enlarged, universalized form of what is going on
concretely in this tale. Woman is only woman when she is spoken to by her true being. She gains presence to herself when her feelings, passions, and capabilities are not only hers but are called forth by other people and by her community. The same thing is in W. H. Auden’s poem, “The Age of Anxiety”:

These are all endeavors to highlight a fundamental aspect of human relationship, namely, that the birth and development of the self take place in an interpersonal field. We call to each other, we awaken each other; hopefully we are present to each other, either through books, or art, or relationship.

CREATIVE PRESENCE

We return now to a topic broached earlier, the capacity for
creative presence
. We saw that the premature youths who stormed the hedges and “died a miserable death” were those who lacked the capacity to wait until the time of
kairos
, the time when Briar Rose’s sleep was fulfilled. I refer to waiting until something is ready to be born—whether it be a baby, an idea, an invention, or an artistic vision. This waiting is not passive and empty; the one who waits is an active participant in the gestation. Too much emphasis on conscious
intention
—like the active pushing of the premature suitors in the tale of Briar Rose—blocks the capacity to wait.
Intentionality
, the condition that everything has meaning which is given by our consciousness, is possible only when we have this capacity for creative waiting.

It is fascinating to compare the waiting of Briar Rose in the fairy tale with the lady Eliot evokes in “The Waste Land,” a
lady who is rich and beautiful but jaded, bored with everything, including sex, although she is with her lover. Both are waiting. The jaded lady says, “What shall we do tomorrow. What shall we ever do?”
*
Both are expressions of wishing for something. Both imply some hope that there may be a “knock upon the door.”
†
But Briar Rose is the waiting of innocence, the waiting of dreaming; she sleeps, her eyelids are closed. Whereas Eliot significantly tells us that his lady presses “lidless eyes”; her eyes are fixed open, she cannot close them. Now it is well known clinically that in anxiety a person’s eyelids tend to be distended, to be fixed rigidly open in the face of danger. Artists observe this; Michelangelo’s sculptures and his paintings of persons who are anxious have the eyelids distended, frozen open.

Briar Rose was in pre-awareness; Eliot’s lady is post-awareness, her tragedy being not that she has not gained awareness but that she has
lost
it. For Briar Rose the chance for awareness had not yet arrived and does so only with the coming of the prince; for the lady, the possibilities for awareness are present, but she is blocked off from seeing them, even though her eyes are pried open. She is in the state not of innocence but of despair; she is in the Waste Land. Briar Rose is asleep without consciousness. The lady is sexually emancipated, “free,” with all the riches of technology and culture at her fingertips; however, what she experiences is not gratification but the satiety of sex and appetite. Eliot is saying that one must wait through the age of despair for the gestation to occur which will lead us to a birth of consciousness on a higher level, that is, to
kairos
.