A Mused (Part Three)

It was interesting to me to realize that the following quote from La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism by Barbara Fass, a volume of literary criticism, could just as easily have come from Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind by Graham Hancock, a book classified by my book distributor as "new age" or, even more intriguingly, "controversial knowledge."

In Supernatural Hancock draws a parallel between the folklore of fairy contact with humans, the shamanistic journey through the aether toward cosmic powers and contemporary alien abduction experiences. He fittingly finds the inspiration for the first known artists, the prehistoric cave painters, to come from the quest for knowledge in other dimensions, in much the same way that Fass presents the Romantic poets seeking inspiration in otherworldly muses.

But clearly, as both writers point out, there are problems in the alien sphere of Venusberg. Be they extraterrestrials or exiled gods, the denizens of this immaculate land of perfection, of pure sensation and no contradiction, where the laws of physics have no sway and time has been defeated, seem to need us. They want our stuff, the stuff that makes us human, our meat, our emotions, our sweat and jizz and even our very souls. As both Fass and Hancock note, the supernaturals seem to want us for amatory or breeding purposes, to combine with us in some sort of germinative effort. But somehow this effort cannot bear fruit in the other realm – for all its glories, it is sterile, incapable of generating, or perhaps sustaining, new life. So the fairies switch their babies with ours when the goblin spawn prove misshapen and moonstruck, and the aliens implant earth women when the fetuses in the incubators on the mother ship never turn out quite right.

(For me an analogy for this "other" realm, which may very well be one of the multiple dimensions that physicists now believe surround our own, would be the virtual world. Everything’s under control in video games, which seem "realer" every year, and within time and death exist in a radically different way, and it’s all about pleasure. The women are all beautiful and stacked, and you can be whatever you desire, a sports star, a knight, a super hero, and score, kill, consume and kiss indefinitely if you know the right moves. But you can never really grow, never create anything that isn’t in the game already, and in the end it’s a universe of no tangible consequence, one that an vanish instantly without a trace if, say, your son saves over your save file. There’s an essay in one of the Apocalypse Culture books that postulates that the traditional folkloric entities are trying to manifest themselves within video games and the internet, and I tell you, playing some of these games late at night and "inspired" I’ve felt that that might just be the case.)

Similarly, the Romantic artists seeks to produce poetry by escaping nominal reality and rising above, like a shaman, to fuse with the eternal. But, as pleasant as the higher realms are, he must return to earth to set his vision down. I had a roommate in college who had a mental breakdown senior year. Naturally, he talked a lot of nonsense, but he did have one rap that’s always stayed with me. He desperately wanted to be a writer, but realized that his mental problems were preventing him despite the inspiration he felt. He explained his dilemma this way – the ink you need to create with is in the freezer and you have to go inside to get it, but within the freezer the ink is frozen and useless. It’s not until you’ve gotten yourself back out of the freezer and given the ink a chance to thaw that you can actually write with it. This guy could never quite get himself out of the freezer, and the poetry he wrote that seemed to him to be so profound was just gibberish to everybody else. (The Army, however, was later able to find a place for him pruning trees along the DMZ in Korea, the perfect job for a crazy man if there ever was one.) Fass cites Nerval in her book as the rare writer who was able to make the trip to the fairyland of madness and return to our world with something comprehensible, although the contradiction between the two worlds ultimately proved enough to kill him.

Similarly Yeat’s Tannhauser figure, Oisin, has his harp broken in fairyland and, as Fass says, "in fairyland, the warrior is inactive; and more important, the poet is silenced." The supernatural, then, lacks something, something that makes it reach out to the human world, and in fact, in honor of the season, can’t it be said that God needed Mary in order to produce Jesus as much as Mary needed him?