On Tuesday as I was leaving for class, a
couple of older women were smoking and talking in front of the Coffeetime near
the “O’Hara Garden” at the corner. She said hello to me and I recognized her.
She asked if I knew who she was. I said I did. She challenged me to tell her
though. I recognized her as the vegetable lady from the foodbank. She declared,
“Your good! Most people don’t recognize me without my bandana!”
We spent the
entire two hours of Children’s Literature class talking about George
MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”. MacDonald’s life as a writer
corresponded to Victoria’s reign as queen of Britain. He was a
Congregationalist minister but the church let him go because he preached that all
faiths eventually unite with god. His books fell under the old definition of
the romance novel. He had eleven children and was a deeply engaged father. An
annual event in the family was a staged drama, such as a Shakespeare play, in
which all of the children would perform. He believed that children were an
important part of any adult’s self understanding and this was tied with his
approach to theology in that he saw god as a nurturing father as opposed to a
ruling king. He felt the same about both the appreciation of and the making of
art and that art was a lens that brought us closer to god. He thought that
there was no difference between the waking world and the world of dreams,
except that dreams are just a more powerfully charged reality, a glimpse of
spiritual reality, which is too intense to experience except in diluted form.
His thinking was influenced by German romantics such as Goethe, who strove to
combine philosophical thinking with the aesthetic experience of art. MacDonald
strove with his writing not to convey meaning but rather to wake it in a
personal way for the reader. He tried to convey moral teaching without a
particular lesson. He was the mentor of Lewis Carroll, who was a friend of the
family and took many photographs of MacDonald’s children, in particular, his
young daughters. It was because his readings of “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland” were such a hit with MacDonald’s children that he was encouraged to
publish it.
“The
Princess and the Goblin” contains many elements of popular fairy tales. Every
aspect of the story, every colour and object described and everything that is
done has spiritual symbolism behind it. The magical grandmother alludes to the
femininity of the human soul. There are three tiers to the story: the upper regions
of light, the lower realms of darkness and the middle ground where the Peterson
family live, their house perhaps representing the Christian church. Unlike
traditional fairy tales, feminine curiosity is valued and rewarded, rather than
punished.
Aristocracy
is presented as being more about behaviour rather than genetics.
The
grandmother challenges the conventions of age, and Professor Baker compared her
to Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” who “drives away
the Muses of poetry”. Another comparison was made with Lady Wisdom from the
book of Proverbs.
C.S.
Lewis said of George MacDonald’s “Phantastes” that it baptized his imagination.
On
my way home I stopped at Freshco. The young woman who often works the express
check-out these days looks the way an ordinary pretty girl would look if her
face was reflected on the back of a spoon.
As
I approached my place there was a guy walking and talking amicably on his hands
free phone: “Just stop! Stop! Stop it! Just stop! Just stop! Just stop!”
In
front of my place, Sue, from the foodbank was talking loudly with someone. She
said hi to me, and when a guy who she also must have known came by with a
walker, she shouted, “Give me that!”
I
watched the third episode of Cheyenne. This one had a much better story. Two
guys on their way to meet their partner to prospect a gold mine discover the
guy with the map dead. Cheyenne shows up and guides them to the mine after
being promised a cut. All the gold is in dust but they find a lot of it. One of
the men starts going crazy with greed and keeps thinking the others are after
his gold while he’s at the same time thinking about taking theirs. They get
attacked by renegades but some soldiers chase them off. They know the Natives
will be back and that winter will be coming soon so they decide to leave and
cash in, with about $30,000 each. One night some Natives approach their
campfire to ask for help with the sick wife of a chief. Cheyenne goes to help
them and asks his partners to take care of his gold. The next night the crazy
partner goes crazier, thinking that if he doesn’t kill his partner his partner
will kill him. He guns him down and leaves him but he’s still alive. The
Natives find him take him to Cheyenne, then they both go after the crazy guy. The
guy with the gold is at a watering hole when the renegades come, looking for
bullets. They think the bags of gold dust are full of bullets. The guy tries to
stop them and gets killed. As a wind storm picks up, the natives cut open every
bag looking for bullets. The gold means nothing to them and so it all blows
away in the wind. I liked this episode enough to give the show one more chance.
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