Part 1: Intro & Second Thoughts

Photograph © James Hart

The subconscious is a wild thing.

Some years back, I became aware that the original versions of the fairy tales I enjoyed as a child would have no chance of ever passing MPA censorship. Did the Little Mermaid really get turned into sea foam? Did Cindarella really cut off parts of her feet to fit them into the glass slipper? Did Rapunzel’s prince really get blinded after they both got it on after their first date? Just how metal were these stories?

Bewildered, I sought the original versions of these and other classics. While I was delighted to get more acquainted with my favorites, some of the stories I was previously unfamiliar with also struck a chord. One of these was “The Skillful Huntsman.”

I didn’t know why but I liked that story. Liked it a lot. It spoke to me in ways I wasn’t ready to understand. At the time, I chalked my enthusiasm up to appreciation for a fun fantasy yarn. Which, of course, it is.

But it’s something else, too.

It’s one of the few Grimm stories in which the hero and the damsel have, roughly, the same problem: they’re both victims of reasonable situations that, while comfortable, they’d rather risk their lives to avoid.

It’s also a story about the untamed. Where and how we encounter chance and gamble, and what constitutes the corners of the world we have yet to measure and deconstruct. Today, we tell ourselves that modernity or tradition can insulate us from its influence, but that’s more fantasy than any fairy tale.

What took me about a decade to figure out is that it’s also a story about myself. A cautionary tale about disasterous mistakes I narrowly avoided in the past—and how they like to reinvent themselves in the present. I didn’t know any of this when I first read the story, but it’s absolutely what drew me to it.

Aside from the story, which I very much hope you enjoy, this project is about comebacks. As I continue to share the draft with you, I would ask you to consider the following:

1. Fairy tales deserve a comeback. I believe they have a more important role to play in our culture than they ever have. Theirs is the dream-language of emotions, of feelings and signs and premonitions. We’re so starved for this exposure that we now expect the total opposite of fairy stories—what we call the news—to perform double duty by delivering emotional narratives masquerading as factual data. It would be healthier for us if we indulged in our need for imagination with the stories intended to host it.

2. Mystery deserves a comeback—because we’d be better off believing in an untamed reality, and also because that’s exactly what it is. The more we learn about the material nature of our world, the more we delude ourselves. We’ve named the genus, family, order, class, phylum and ecological grouping of every tree we use to print our books. We can peer not only into the atoms that make up the pages, but the quarks, leptons and bosons that make up the atoms. While staggering, all that analysis still can’t tell us what an afternoon reading of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” can about the corrupting influence of online culture.

3. Poetry deserves a comeback. It was never supposed to be about reductive critical theory or academic walled gardens. It was supposed to be a therapeutic medium to interact with the profound. It’s closer to medicine than media. It would be better for the form and for ourselves if we treated it that way.

4. We deserve comebacks. It’s the enduring story of our culture. And we all have one in us—as long as we’re willing to brave the unknowns to find it.

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1
Once, there was a warm and willing youth
Who, prudent in prospects, played well with numbers.
The fiscal futures of firms he could scry,
Helping them hedge for higher yields.
After learning the last of his longed-for trade,
He conferred with his father. His fortune, he said,
He was ready to realize, and arranged to leave
To find success in the city. Assenting, his father
Wished him well on his awaited path.
He made to move to the mains of metropolis,
To search for his start in the stream of commerce.
Fair work he wanted, and wandered each avenue,
But no firms were in need of a number-fixer.
He feared for his future, finding no placement
When a peculiar craving encroached on his thoughts:
Some mood or memory he missed or forgot.
Between the tedious taking of interviews,
He gazed at the ground and grudgingly knew
That while
His head made humble plans
His heart was in denial—
It sought more savage lands
To serve the open wilds.