Haunted

King’s Carrie was a girl

though her mother

thought more like a whore

Little Carrie liked to twirl

In her head she liked to whirl

And her story

we all know well

how she rose

and up rose hell

Dearest Prince,

(Epilogue of Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye by Madonna Kolbenschlag)

the legend

The frog is an amphibian . . . that is an animal with two types of life, a fishlike life as a tadpole and a (predominantly) land life as a frog. This animal, therefore, is an excellent symbol of the gradual metamorphosis from one world to another, or for a messenger from the sphere of the more fluid soul-world to the solid, material world.

--- Julius Heuscher, Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales

My guilts are what

we catalogue.

I’ll take a knife

and chop up frog.

Frog has no nerves.

Frog is as old as a cockroach.

Frog is my father’s genitals.

Frog is a malformed doorknob.

Frog is a soft bag of green . . . 

At the feel of frog

the touch-me-nots explode

like electric slugs.

Slime will have him.

Slime has made him a house.

--- Anne Sexton, “The Frog Prince”

In a way this story tells that to be able to love, a person first has to become able to feel; even if the feelings are negative, that is better than not feeling. In the beginning the princess is entirely self-centered; all her interest is in her ball. She has no feelings when she plans to go back on her promise to the frog; gives no thought as to what this may mean for it. The closer the frog comes to her physically and personally, the stronger her feelings become, but with this she becomes more a person. For a long stretch of development she obeys her father, but feels ever more strongly; then at the end she asserts her independence in going against his orders. As she thus becomes herself, so does the frog; it turns into a prince.

--- Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

 Youth Knows No Pain

Integration of S.B.

So much has changed since 1979. For starters, I’m like twelve times heavier and three times as long! Not to mention the annihilation of the nuclear family, the disappearance of the modest girl as well as the search for something more than resources: i.e. food, clothing, shelter. Modern man finds himself in search of something he took for granted for most of his human existence: meaning.

And modern woman fights for the right to be equal to her male companion, to have her pronoun as the generic form of human, or at least to be recognized as part of the human race.

But what is it we really want? To be less than? To be something we are not? To leave behind the complications of being a woman and jump on Dick and Harry’s boat? To tell the guy’s what losers they are? They’ve been telling us since the beginning of time.

Women claim to have surpassed the status of their grandmothers. They see their predecessors as softies who never fought for their independence like modern girls. They fail to see how their fight for their families was in fact a fight for themselves. They fail to see how the current rebellion against everything and for nothing is a clumsy waste of resources, a mistake their grandmothers would not afford.  

And in the irony of the tornado we find ourselves spinning in, women have in fact become their very own worst enemies, attacking themselves first and each other next. Practically forgetting about the boys altogether until he becomes the one who leaves one for another one.

Some might argue the world has changed too quickly in the last century, especially the last several decades, and that a book about women from three or four decades ago is too out of touch with modern women. I would argue, first and foremost, “Where IS Modern Woman?!?!?!?” and secondly, the complicities of modern times make it necessary to dig deeper to our roots, our core, our beginnings.

Fairytale