More Than True

by Robert Bly

  * * *

  But back to the story again. When the Princess, wearing the iron claws the blacksmith had made for her, labored up the side of the Glass Mountain and arrived at the top, she was amazed to see an old-fashioned castle there, with cookhouses, dog kennels, a horse barn, and elaborate carriages. Inside the walls there was a terrace, the sort that tradespeople take over on holidays to exhibit their wares.

  The Princess laid out her magic tablecloth on a big table. Soon one could smell boiled beets and the odor of squash pies. One could see shrimp in black bean sauce, roasted pheasant, watermelon pickles, and oysters on the half shell. After twenty minutes or so, the Queen of All Selfishness appeared. Long tusks grew down over her jaw. She picked a yellow songbird out of the air and ate it whole. “What have you got here, honey? You’re some cook, aren’t you? You don’t dress worth a damn, but the setup looks good. I’m getting married three days from now, gloom-face. Can you work up a little food for the wedding?”

  “This tablecloth understands a lot. If I ask it for hors d’oeuvres, I get them, cured salami if I ask for that, wedding cake if I ask for wedding cake, the real sort, made in Paris.”

  “What can I give you? You’re here just in the nick of time. How much, honey?”

  “Money doesn’t work with the tablecloth. It’s a gift for a gift.”

  “All right, what’s the price? Let’s hear it.”

  “I want one night alone with the White Bear King Valemon.”

  “Oh, you’re something, aren’t you? It won’t do you any good, but if that’s what you want, dear, and you’re willing to pay for it, it’s a go. Come inside the castle at ten o’clock tonight, and my maid will show you where the White Bear sleeps. I’ll take the tablecloth now.”

  That’s the way it happened. The deal was made. It was a good deal. But we could guess that the Divine Opera Singer of Greed has her tracks covered, and she is not worried she will lose her White Bear fiancé. And now she has the magic tablecloth as well.

  Meanwhile, she went herself to the White Bear King’s room, and she said to him: “The wedding is coming up. Get lots of rest. Here’s a little apple wine that I made especially for you. It will help you sleep.”

  He drank it. It was a sleeping potion. When the Princess, full of hope, knocked later in the evening, no one answered. She walked into the room and found the Bear King sound asleep. No matter how much she talked in his ear, sang to him, and reminded him of their old days in his castle and their nights together, he showed not a trace of consciousness. He remained asleep. She waited beside him all night. At dawn she left.

  She guessed that the Divine One with Tusks would come out for a stroll on the terrace. This time she brought out her magic flask, and soon she had gathered coffee cups, and teacups, and wineglasses. Using the flask, she filled them with Turkish coffee, English tea, French cognac, good vodka, expensive Riesling, and so on. When the Tusked One arrived, she was delighted.

  “This is just what I need for the bridal dinner! Around here they serve you white piss and call it wine. Where’d you get all these goodies, honey?”

  “My flask is a magic flask. It pours whatever you would like to have.”

  “Let’s cut out the small talk. What do you want to get in return for this little jar?”

  “I want one more night with the White Bear King Valemon.”

  “That must be because you had so much fun last night.” Her tusks gleamed. “Give the flask to my maid at ten o’clock. She’ll give you a key to his room, sweetie.”

  As you might expect, the Shiny-Toothed One visited the White Bear King shortly after. He was in human form, and she talked with him a bit, and poured him a good-sized drink, and waited until he drank. Then she left.

  An hour or so later, the Princess—using her key—opened the door and found her lover asleep. No matter what she told him of the suffering she had gone through following his tracks, nor the old love they had had together, nor the trouble she had climbing up the glass-sided mountain, he heard not a word. Not even an eyelid fluttered. She cried until dawn came, and then she left.

  The White Bear King woke in the late morning, totally ignorant of being visited. But as he left, it happened that two carpenters, who lived in the next room, were passing by. One said: “Did you realize that a woman was crying last night in your room for a long time? We heard her through the walls.”

  He thought to himself, “It is possible,” but he said nothing.

  The Princess took her place as usual on the terrace later that morning. The Queen with Double Teeth and Chin Incisors came by as usual, smelling the air. This time the Princess took out her magic shears and, shortly after, lace veils were lying on the table, and velvet skirts, a Parisian wedding gown, black traveling gloves, even a Hardanger bridal crown. The Queen of Us All came by, nibbling on a live gopher, and said, “That’s perfect! I’ll take the whole goddamn thing. Make sure the veil is long. What do you require? What do you want for the veil and the wedding dress?”

  “One more night with the Bear King Valemon.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, honey. I don’t know what they taught you in school. I hope you have a hot old time.”

  So she left. When night had come, the Gobbler of Songbirds, the Darling of All the World came to the White Bear King Valemon’s room and brought him a nightcap in her usual way. He turned slightly to the side when she wasn’t looking and poured the drink down his shirt into a little bag he had tied around his neck. Then after a few minutes he said, “I’m sleepy now!” and he nodded off.

  Now the Horror of the Blazing Eyes, being of great intelligence, became suspicious. He seemed to be asleep, but she said to herself, “Something’s not right in this room. I can smell it.” She decided to test him. After a bit, she took a thick darning needle and drove it right through his upper arm. He didn’t move. Not even a quiver crossed his face. “Well, I guess the handsome dog is asleep,” she said. She was satisfied, and left.

  This time, when the Princess entered the bedroom, the White Bear King was awake. How glad they were to see each other! They laughed and cried and told each other how terrible the waiting had been for them both. When a time of suffering is over, it seems charming to tell it all again, even if you are weeping. So they talked and talked. At dawn they heard the carpenters stirring in the next room. The Bear King thanked them for the detail they had told him, and he asked them to make a little adjustment on the wooden bridge over which the wedding party would walk. The carpenters said, “We think we can do that.”

  The wedding took place a few hours later. As you can imagine, it was a large production. The procession started with the bride in front, which is traditional in Norwegian weddings. The Great Mistress wore a veil over her tusks, but the winds that rushed past kept blowing it aside, and the fire coming from her eyes frightened the onlookers. The White Bear King followed behind. Many people wept. They had become fond of the Bear King and felt so sorry that he had to marry the Great One. But nothing could be done. The Queen of the Glass Mountain rules everything, and no one can say”No!” to her.

  A wooden bridge led from the palace to a church on the neighboring peak.

  The bridal procession walked along the path and onto the bridge. But when the Bride had just reached the midpoint, a strange thing happened. The boards gave way, for some reason, and the Queen fell with her wedding flowers down, down, hundreds of feet down. One of the carpenters had pulled a little rope, and that was that. No one should ever underestimate the power of carpenters. The sudden disappearance of the Hideous Bride was a big surprise to the onlookers. On the other hand, the wedding feast had already been laid out, the minister was ready, so why not have a wedding? So the White Bear King Valemon and his bride were married on the spot. The waiting people at the castle, and the nearby farmers and their wives, the hunters and their girlfriends, especially the carpenters and their darlings, had a great time drinking all the booze and eating the elaborate Italian dishes, chomping down the Romanian wild pheasant
s and Greek goat meat. After dinner they danced for hours. The wedding dance went on until all the wine and aquavit were gone; then they danced a few more hours on homemade cider and went home to their own beds.

  The White Bear King and his bride in the morning started their journey back to their old house in the forest, and on the way, they stopped at the three huts and picked up, one by one, the three children! You must have guessed that the three small daughters who gave the ragged Princess the tablecloth, the magic flask, and the abundant scissors were those very children who had disappeared soon after birth. When their parents folded them back into the family, they were so glad. Their mother could now be a real mother, and their father didn’t have to be a bear anymore. He could be a human person night and day.

  As for me, after that great party, I woke up finally with a terrible headache, but I was happy. I saved a bottle of wine for you from the wedding party, but it fell out of my bag and broke just when I was nearly home. So here we are, whistling through our teeth as usual, with only water to drink. I don’t know when we’ll have another party like that!

  * * *

  It is said that one distinction between the genuine “teaching story” and a folktale lies in the nature of the main character. Johnny Appleseed is a human being and takes his part in an honorable folktale. The Tusked Queen of the Glass Mountain can’t be contained in a tale. She is a relative of the fierce Hindu goddess Kali and belongs with the stories of excess, many of them fairy stories. The Russians like to call her Baba Yaga, or “Grandmother Yaga.”

  The story of the White Bear King offers us many glimpses into the divine world, which are difficult for those of us brought up in a culture that prefers not to talk seriously of spiritual excess. But the White Bear King, rolling on his back on the forest floor, tossing the wreath, and the Queen of the Glass Mountain voraciously eating everything in sight—those are some fine images of excess.

  But there is a presence of God in all things, and we shouldn’t be surprised then if it turns out that the Double-Toothed One is a part of God, too. After all, the golden wreath has led the King’s youngest daughter directly to Her. As Western civilization goes on, we have learned to draw smaller and smaller circles representing God, and only the comforting parts of the Divine are left in. But there is a certain aspect of God that does end life. Farmers, who are breeders of cattle, pigs, and sheep, have to join with this part of God for a while at the end of each year.

  The aspect of God that ends life lives on top of a glass mountain in this story, but the overeager climbers, who wear tennis shoes instead of climbing boots, fall off. The story says that you can see their bones lying all around the base of the mountain. It’s very hard for people to get their minds around an Eternal Being so dangerous, she’s like a nuclear power plant. Job had some sense of that, and his arguments with his three cheerful friends shed a lot of light on this matter: “Thine hands have framed me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me” (Job 10:8). Westerners don’t want to talk about a dangerous Divinity, but the Indian people have dealt with Kali for centuries. That particular Divine Mother, when she dances, wears a necklace of human skulls to remind us of some unsavory qualities of her ecstasy.

  The ability to be near danger and still feel secure comes up vividly in the early paragraphs of our Bear story. We recall that the two older daughters of the King, when riding on the White Bear’s back, are asked by the Bear: “Have you ever sat more softly than you’re sitting now?” They say their father’s lap was softer, and they get thrown off quickly. The third girl, the youngest daughter, is asked the same question, and she says, while she is sitting on the back of a wild animal, “Never.” So even with a wild animal or wild god beneath her, she can maintain that she has never felt so comfortable, nor seen so clearly, in her whole life.

  Mirabai, who was a devotee of Krishna, didn’t court her own safety as she worshipped Him:

  No one knows where to find the bhakti path, show me where to go.

  I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood and you set a torch to it.

  When I’ve fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest.

  Mira says: You who lift the mountains, I have some light, I want to mingle it with yours.

  In our Norwegian story, the daughter searches everywhere through an unfamiliar landscape for the White Bear, giving and receiving kindnesses roused by her love for Him. She will undergo deprivation, solitude, starvation, and time spent in the wilderness, where she’ll gather strength of spirit and the courage necessary to be close again with the divine. In an antique version of Amor and Psyche, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, some of the themes are not so different from those in “The White Bear King.” Apuleius shows that the heroine, Psyche, in order to fit herself for the relationship with Amor, goes through elaborate initiatory tasks, such as separating black and white seeds or gathering wool from the hazardous sheep of the golden fleece. Still, as soon as the youngest daughter has taken her place with the White Bear in his underworld castle, they simply make love. They are symbiotic, they merge; they don’t need words, so they don’t talk. That is lovely, and yet the lifted candle in the story implies that lovers aren’t meant to live long in an unconscious way. They need some light, even if allowing light means they will have to part.

  In both The Golden Ass and “The White Bear King Valemon” versions of the story, after the youngest daughter leaves her deliciously sensual underworld to visit her parents’ home, her sisters urge her to find out more about her lover. Perhaps he has despicable habits. The two rejected and envious older daughters, still living with their parents, are eager to hear that the monster leaves hair all over the house, that his teeth are too sharp for lovemaking. They suggest that their sister get a good look at him by a good, strong light. Her mother gives her a lamp or candle and advises her to use it. The Norwegian tale adds a delicate grace note, namely, the father’s advice: “I think it would be best to let things remain as they are.” That advice turns out to be wrong, but it catches us for a few moments, and we can all feel our own ambiguous opinions as to whether the daughter should or should not risk the candle. The mother’s advice, though, is to take the candle home with her, and some night, when the Mysterious One is asleep, lift it and see exactly who is there in her bed.

  Marie-Louise von Franz, in her book The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and Erich Neumann, in Amor and Psyche, write extensively on the matter of the lifted candle, describing this desire of the soul to increase its consciousness. After time in the dark, the soul pushes for light. In human life this illumination can cause a painful break that ends a relationship for a while. The story asks what the soul is willing to pay for the increase in vision.

  In the story, we have the sense that we are looking at a process that in human culture took thousands of years to transpire. We assume that in some earlier period of human life, many events—or unions—remained in the dark. We each recall memorable events in our childhood—a brother’s violence, a mother’s humiliation, a mysterious absence of the father, some disaster that put an uncle in prison, events that simply remained unexplained. No one spoke of those things, and if they did, there was no wit or shrewdness in the telling. Probably that darkness, that forgetfulness, the storing of frightful information somewhere else in the brain, helped early people to survive. Early people tended to live, we are told, in self-sufficient groups of forty or fifty individuals. Strangers might come and kill ten or fifteen of the clan. Some scientists believe these events are stored in the memory in such a way as to avoid serious disruptions. Brain researchers say that the amygdala sends these memories to the hypothalamus for storage. Once there, the memory is difficult to access. This “forgetting” or “storing” would allow the tribe to continue with their essential tasks for survival.

  How do we know that many religious and ecstatic experiences in our youth similarly dropped down into forgetfulness? Possibly fairy tales themselves are ways to keep the early jo
ys of our life concealed and yet not lost. To write poetry means to lift Psyche’s candle, as Emily Dickinson did. She wrote:

  Exultation is the going

  Of an inland soul to sea,

  Past the houses—past the headlands—

  Into deep Eternity—

  Bred as we, among the mountains,

  Can the sailor understand

  The divine intoxication

  Of the first league out from land?

  Did we want the candle to be lifted above our experiences? In a relationship dominated by the moon, by night, by the deep delights of night-joys, we would rather not be disturbed. But if we don’t lift the candle, we never know more than the one inchoate part of the one we love.

  In this story, the Princess watches in horror as the Bear rushes out of his own palace and plunges madly into the forest. She clings desperately to his fur, but the branches and sharp twigs in the forest finally pull her away. A girl who has been living with a divine being must return to the normal, boring, bitter, limited, and sad human state. Scratched up and wandering, she will move through years of spiritual poverty and loneliness. Perhaps this stage will take up twenty years in the middle of her life. These days, busy in a career, a man or woman feels left to wander alone in the forest, with no food and no companionship. As the Persian poet Hafez wrote: “The light in the hermit’s hut goes out in the earthly church.”

  Those of us reading those words know that we, too, have been walking along, getting scratched up in the woods, the light gone out of us, unable to imagine an end to the wandering. University degrees don’t really help with this problem. We have to experience the desperation that comes with not being fed before we can enter the next part of the story. César Vallejo said: