Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath
Because that she, as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child!
“Boy” again, see; which isn’t the half of it. Misinformation. The patriarchal version. No king had nothing to do with it; it was all between my mother and my auntie, wasn’t it.
Besides, is a child to be stolen? Or given? Or taken? Or sold in bondage, dammit? Are these blonde English fairies the agents of proto-colonialism?
To all this, in order to preserve my complicated integrity, I present a façade of passive opposition. I am here. I am.
I am Herm, short for hermaphrodite verus, one testis, one ovary, half of each but all complete and more, much more, than the sum of my parts. This elegantly retractable appendage, here … is not the tribade’s well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the other gender. So there.
Take a look. I’m not shy. Impressive, huh?
And I am called the Golden Herm, for I am gold all over; when I was born, wee, tiny, playful cherubs filled their cheeks and lungs and blew, blew the papery sheets of beaten gold all over my infant limbs, to which they stuck and clung. See me shine!
And here I stand, under the dripping trees, in the long, rank, soaking grass among draggletail dog-daisies and the branched candelabras of the buttercups from whom the gusty rain has knocked off all the petals, leaving their warty green heads bald. And the bloody crane’s bill. And the stinging nettles, those Portuguese men-o’-war of the woodland, who gave me so many nasty shocks when I first met them. And pease-blossom and mustard-seed and innumerable unknown-to-me weeds, the dreary, washed-out, pinks, yellows and Cambridge blues of them. Boring. In the underpinnings of the trees, all soggy and floral as William Morris wallpaper in an abandoned house, I, in order to retain my equilibrium and psychic balance, meditate in the yogic posture known as The Tree, that is, on one leg.
Bearer of both arrow and target, wound and bow, spoon and porringer, in my left hand I hold a lotus, looking a bit the worse for wear by now. My snake coils round my other arm.
I am golden, stark naked and bi-partite.
On my golden face, a fixed, archaic grin. Except when—
Atishoo!
Damn’ occidental common cold virus.
Atishoo.
The Golden Herm stood in the green wood.
This wood is, of course, nowhere near Athens; the script is a positive maze of false leads. The wood is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley, where the great decoding machine was sited. Correction: this wood was located in the English midlands until oak, ash and thorn were chopped down to make room for a motorway a few years ago. However, since the wood existed only as a structure of the imagination, in the first place, it will remain, in the second place, as a green, decorative margin to the eternity the poet promised for himself. The English poet; his is, essentially, an English wood. It is the English wood.
The English wood is nothing like the dark, necromantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live, and Baba-yaga stalks about in her house with chicken’s feet looking for children in order to eat them. No. There is a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference between this wood and that forest. The difference does not exist just because a wood contains fewer trees than a forest and covers less ground. That is just one of the causes of the difference and does not explain the effects of the difference.
For example, an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, cannot, by definition, be trackless, although it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found, to be committed against your will—or, worse, of your own desire—to a perpetual absence; from humanity, an existential catastrophe, for the forest is as infinitely boundless as the human heart.
But the wood is finite, a closure; you purposely mislay your way in the wood, for the sake of the pleasure of roving, the temporary confusion of direction is in the nature of a holiday from which you will come home refreshed, with your pockets full of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is haunted; this wood is enchanted.
The very perils of the wood, so many audio-visual aids to a pleasurable titillation of mild fear; the swift rattle of an ascending pheasant, velvet thud of an owl, red glide of the fox—these may all “give you a fright”, but, here, neither hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt your spirit because the English lobs and hobs reflect nothing more than a secular faith in the absence of harm in nature, part of the credit sheet of a temperate climate. (Here that, Herm? No tigers burn bright, here; no scaly pythons, no armoured scorpions.) Since the last English wolf was killed, there is nothing savage among the trees to terrify you. All is mellow in the filtered light, where Robin Wood, the fertility spirit, lurks in the green shade; this wood is kind to lovers.
Indeed, you might call the wood the common garden of the village, a garden almost as intentionally wild as one of Bacon’s “natural wildernesses”, where every toad carries a jewel in its head and all the flowers have names, nothing is unknown—this kind of wilderness is not an otherness.
And always something to eat! Mother Nature’s greengrocery store; sorrel for soup, mushrooms, dandelion and chickweed—there’s your salad, mint and thyme for seasoning, wild strawberries and blackberries and, in the autumn, a plenitude of nuts. Nebuchadnezzar, in an English wood, need not have confined his appetite to grass.
The English wood offers us a glimpse of a green, unfallen world a little closer to Paradise than we are.
Such is the English wood in which we see the familiar fairies, the blundering fiances, the rude mechanicals. This is the true Shakespearian wood—but it is not the wood of Shakespeare’s time, which did not know itself to be Shakespearian, and therefore felt no need to keep up appearances. No. The wood we have just described is that of nineteenth-century nostalgia, which disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or, rather, denaturing, castrating these beings until they came to look just as they do in those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle. It is Mendelssohn’s wood.
“Enter these enchanted woods …” who could resist such a magical invitation?
However, as it turns out, the Victorians did not leave the woods in quite the state they might have wished to find them.
The Puck was obsessively fascinated by the exotic visitor. In some respects, it was the attraction of opposites, for, whereas the Golden Herm was sm-o-o-o-th, the Puck was hairy. On these chill nights of June, Puck inside his hairy pelt was the only one kept warm at all. Hairy. Shaggy. Especially about the thighs. (And, h’m, on the palms of his hands.)
Shaggy as a Shetland pony when naked and sometimes goes on all fours. When he goes on all fours, he whinnies; or else he barks.
He is the lub, the lubber fiend, and sometimes he plays at being the nut-brown house-sprite for whom a bowl of milk is left outside the door, although, if you want to be rid of him, you must leave him a pair of trousers; he thinks a gift of trousers is an insult to his sex, of which he is most proud. Nesting in his luxuriant pubic curls, that gleam with the deep-fried gloss of the woodcarvings of Grinling Gibbons, see his testicles, wrinkled ripe as medlars.
Puck loves hokey-pokey and peek-a-boo. He has relations all over the place—in Iceland, the puki; the Devonshire pixy;
The tender little exiguities that cluster round the Queen of the Fairies do not like to play with the Puck because he is so rough and rips their painted wings in games of tag and pulls the phantasmal legs off the grey gnats that draw Titania’s wee coach through the air, kisses the girls and makes them cry, creeps up and swings between the puce, ithyphallic foxglove spires above Titania’s bed so the raindrops fall and scatter in a drenching shower and up she wakes. Spiteful!
Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of these sub-microscopic particles, his peers, yet there is something particularly rancid and offensive about his buggery and his undinism and his frotteurism and his scopophilia and his—indeed, my very paper would blush, go pink as an invoice, should I write down upon it some of the things Puck gets up to down in the reeds by the river, as he is distantly related to the great bad god Pan and, when in the mood, behaves in a manner uncommon in an English wood, although familiar in the English public school.
By the Puck’s phallic orientation, you know him for a creature of King Oberon’s.
Hairy Puck fell in love with Golden Herm and often came to frolic round the lovely living statue in the moonlit glade, although he could not, happily for the Herm, get near enough to touch because Titania forethoughtfully had thrown a magical cordon sanitaire around her lovely adoptive, so that s/he was, as it were, in an invisible glass case, such as s/he might find herself in, some centuries later, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Against this transparent, intangible barrier, the Puck often flattened still further his already snub nose.
The Herm removed his/her left foot from its snug nest in her/his crotch and placed it on the ground. With one single, fluent, gracile movement of transition, s/he shifted on to the other leg. The lotus and the snake, on either arm, stayed where they were.
The Puck, pressed tight against Titania’s magic, sighed heavily, stepped back a few paces and began energetically to play with himself. Have you seen fairy sperm? We mortals call it, cuckoo spit.
And no passing, clayey mortal, tramping through the wood on great, heavy feet, scattering the fairies who twitter like bats in their fright, just as such a mortal could never hear them, so he would never spot the unafraid Herm, sticking stock-still as a trance.
And if you did chance to spy him/her, you would think the little yellow idol was a talisman dropped from a gypsy pocket, perhaps, or a charm fallen off a girl’s bracelet, or else the gift from inside a very expensive cracker.
Yet, if you picked up the beautiful object and held it on the palm of your hand, you would feel how warm it was, as if somebody had been holding it tight before you came and only just put it down.
And, if you watched long enough, you would see the golden sequins of the eyelids move.
At which a wind of strangeness would rise and blow away the wood and all within it.
Just as your shadow can grow big and then shrink to almost nothing, and then swell up, again, so can these shadows, these insubstantial bubbles of the earth, these “beings” to whom the verb, “to be”, may not be properly applied, since, in our sense, they are not. They cannot be; they cannot cast their own shadows, for who has seen the shadow of a shadow? Their existences are necessarily moot—do you believe in fairies? Their lives lead always just teasingly almost out of the corners of the eyes of their observers, so it is possible they were only, all the time, a trick of the light … such half-being, with such a lack of public acknowledgement, is not conducive to any kind of visual consistency among them. So they may take what shapes they please.
The Puck can turn himself into anything he likes: a three-legged stool, in order to perpetrate the celebrated trick (“Then slip I from her bum, down topples she”) so beloved in the lower forms of grammar schools when the play is read aloud round the class because it is suitable for children because it is about fairies; a baby Fiat; a grand piano; anything!
Except the lover of the Golden Herm.
In his spare moments, when he was not off about his Master’s various businesses, the Puck, wistfully lingering outside the Herm’s magic circle like an urchin outside a candy shop, concluded that, in order to take full advantage of the sexual facilities offered him by the Herm, should the barrier between them ever be removed—and, unlikely as this eventuality might be, the Puck’s motto was “Be Prepared”!—if there was to be intercourse between himself and the Golden Herm, then the Herm’s partner would require a similar set of equipment to the Herm in order to effect maximally satisfactory congress.
Then the Puck further concluded that the equipment of the Herm’s hypothetical partner would need, however, to be attached in reversed order to that of the Herm, in order to procure a perfect fit and no fumbling; the Puck, a constant inquisitive spy on mortal couples come to make the beast with two backs in what they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handedness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the preliminaries to the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no account of foreplay, which alone distinguishes us from the beasts when we are being beastly.
Try, try as he might, try and try again, the Puck could not get it quite right, although, after strenuous effort, he at last succeeded in turning himself into a perfect simulacrum of the Herm and would, at odd moments, adopt the Herm’s form and posture and stand facing him in the wood, a living mirror of the living statue, except for the fierce erection the satyromaniac Puck could not subdue when in the presence of his love.
The Herm continued to smile inscrutably, except when he sneezed.
But all of them can grow BIG! then shrink down to … the size of dots, of less than dots, again. Every last one of them is of such elastic—since incorporeal—substance. Consider the Queen of the Fairies.
Her very name, Titania, bears witness to her descent from the giant race of the Titans; and “descend” might seem apt enough, at first, to describe the declension when she manifests herself under her alias, Mab, or, in Wales, Mabh, and rules over the other diminutives, herself the size of the solitaire in an engagement ring, as infinitely little as her forebears were infinitely large.
“Now, I do call my horned master, the Horn of Plenty, but as for my missus—” said the Puck, in his inimitable Worcestershire drawl.
Like a Japanese water-flower dropped in a glass of water, Titania grows …
In the dewy wood tinselled with bewildering moonlight, the bumbling, tumbling babies of the fairy crèche trip over the hem of her dress, which is no more nor less than the margin of the wood itself; they stumble in the tangled grass as they play with the coneys, the quick brown fox-cubs, the russet fieldmice and the wee scraps of grey voles, blind velvet Mole and striped Brock with his questing snout—all the denizens of the woodland are her embroiderings, and the birds flutter round her head, settle on her shoulders and make their nests in her great abundance of disordered hair, in which are plaited poppies and the ears of wheat.
The arrival of the Queen is announced by no fanfare of trumpets but the ash-soft lullaby of wood doves and the liquid coloratura blackbird. Moonlight falls like milk upon her naked breasts.
She is like a double bed; or, a table laid for a wedding breakfast; or, a fertility clinic.
In her eyes are babies. When she looks at you, you helplessly reduplicate. Her eyes provoke engendering.
Correction: used to provoke.
But not this year. Frosts have blasted the fruit blossom, rain has rotted all the corn so her garland is not gold but greenish and phosphorescent with blight. The acres of the rye have been invaded with ergot and, this year, eating bread will make you mad. The floods broke down the Bridge of Ware. The beasts refuse to couple; the cow rejects the bull and the bull keeps himself to himself. Even the goats, hitherto synonymous with lechery, prefer to curl up with a good book. The very worms no longer agitate the humus with their un
The wonderful giantess manifested herself with an owl on her shoulder and an apron-full of roses and of babies so rosy the children could scarcely be distinguished from the flowers. She picked up her defunct friend’s child, the Herm. The Herm stood on one leg on the palm of Titania’s hand and smiled the inscrutable, if manic, smile of the figures in Hindu erotic sculpture.
“My husband shall not have you!” cried Titania. “He shan’t! I shall keep you!”
At that, thunder crashed, the heavens, which, for a brief moment, had sealed themselves up, now reopened again with redoubled fury, and all the drenched babies in Titania’s pinafore coughed and sneezed. The worms in the rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.
But the Queen stowed the tiny Herm safe away between her breasts as if s/he were a locket and herself diminished until she was a suitable size to enjoy her niece or nephew or nephew/niece à choix in the obscurity of an acorn-cup.
“But she cannot put horns on her husband, for he is antlered, already,” opined the Puck, changing back into himself and skipping across the glade to the heels of his master. For no roe-buck now raises his head behind that gorse bush to watch these goings on; Oberon is antlered like a ten-point stag.
Among the props of the Globe Theatre, along with the thunder-making machine and the bearskins, is listed a “robe for to go invisible”. By his coat, you understand that Oberon is to remain unseen as he broods magisterial but impotent above the scarcely discernible quiverings among last year’s oak leaves that conceal his wife and the golden bone of contention that has come between the elemental lovers.