Living in the Märchenwald
The other day I drove over three mountain passes with my Mom to see the aspen in their fall glory. We stopped by a creek that roiled and rollicked along, despite the dry season, almost blue from presumably glacial runoff somewhere far above. We stopped at a small waterfall on a different creek, where the water spilled and bubbled over ancient boulders spotted with mosses and lichens. And we drove through forests of Subalpine Fir and Bristlecone Pine, the trunks so numerous, so tightly packed together that no path was possible.
I had recently re-read Neal Stephenson’s three tomes on the period between 1660 and 1714, the Baroque Cycle. Among many, many other topics and historical characters, it touches on the early life of Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who later become Queen Consort of Great Britain. Stephenson describes her childhood as taking place in a real-life Märchenwald.
How could it not occur to me that I, too, am living in the Märchenwald?
In German, the fairy tales that have become so familiar to the world, thanks to the Brother’s Grimm, take place in the Märchenwald. It is the fairy tale forest where Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the Big Bad Wolf, and her rescue comes via a brutal caesarian section. There, Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters cut off their heel and toe, respectively, in their attempt to fit into the glass slipper. The wicked queen instructs her huntsman to bring back Snow White’s heart. Sleeping Beauty, and her entire household, fall into comas. And you have to look out for candy houses.
But, of course, it is also there that Fairy Godmothers intervene. The huntsman defies his queen. A prince penetrates the thicket of thorns and slays the dragon. And the animals talk, and the dwarves delve, and the witch who would cook you goes into the oven herself, and you can go to the ball in squash conveyance pulled by transmogrified mice. The original versions didn’t always have such happy endings or characters who were paragons of good and evil. They were far more ambiguous stories, and the world they took place in reflected that ambiguity with its vast improbabilities, that were somehow still starkly real.
The Märchenwald might be akin to the Dreamtime in Australia, a term that is likely a mistranslation by a genocidal colonial power, yet wildly evocative enough to persist in popular culture. It is the time outside of time that is always happening. And the Märchenwald is the eternal forest that can’t be found by GPS, but is still, nevertheless, visible out of the corner of our eye.
So yes, it makes sense that driving through the woods would remind me of this ur-woods that is the world behind the world. When I get tired of explaining the family fluke that allows me to live in an area generally far outside the reach of my socioeconomic status, I tell people I live in the woods. So I do, in a way, live in the Märchenwald. So do we all.
But what does it mean?
Perhaps it means that it is time to remember our myths as they were before the Victorians sanitized them. We live in a time when everyone seems to be calling for moral purity of an extent that seems even more improbable than unicorns. If we insist the public square be exclusively available to those who have never said or done anything stupid, or who conform to a growing number of litmus tests, we’re setting ourselves up for a discourse of demagogues who have the resources to hide their mistakes.
Perhaps it means that we are living in a time of existential crisis, not just for our people, for all people. And all the animals. If ever there was a time for heroes, surely climate change calls for them urgently. Even heroes with feet of clay can save the world. Heroes without them seem unlikely to emerge. And make no mistake, nothing less than the world needs nothing less than saving.
Perhaps it means that we need to reclaim the place of mythology and ritual in our lives. According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, the United States is the…
[…] world’s largest consumer of cocaine (shipped from Colombia through Mexico and the Caribbean), Colombian heroin, and Mexican heroin and marijuana; major consumer of ecstasy and Mexican methamphetamine; minor consumer of high-quality Southeast Asian heroin; illicit producer of cannabis, marijuana, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, and methamphetamine; [and a] money-laundering center.
Around the world, addiction rates are highest in westernized democracies (and Russia). What is it about our modern lives that makes us so vulnerable? Have we been asking the wrong questions, the whole time we have been fighting the drug war? Should we be focusing on addressing the demand rather than the supply side of the problem?
Mythology and ritual seem to be ingredients in thriving human communities throughout history, binding together tribes and fostering a sense of belonging. And we have significantly sanitized our mythology and bypassed our ritual lives. Loneliness is an epidemic. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect 18.1% of the population in the US. And the more we learn about anxiety and depression, the more apparent it is that mental and physical health can’t be separated. People who are anxious and depressed have a lot of physical problems, and ultimately mental health disorders cost our society dearly, not only in the anguish of individuals and families but in medical costs.
Is there a link between these two things? The loss of myth and ritual in our lives and the growth of a disaffected, alienated, lonely, depressed, anxious, and potentially prone to addiction segment of society? It’s a hard thing to marshal evidence about, and an even harder one to find demonstrable causation for, but there does seem to be a correlation. Perhaps our connection to the Märchenwald is crucial to our success as humans. Perhaps my abrupt certainty that I am living there for the nonce is a sign of mental health rather than a quirky rabbit hole in my thinking.
I’m already a pretty credulous individual in a lot of ways. I believe in infinity, and once you swallow the implications of infinity, and boggle yourself with multiple worlds theory, unicorns seem significantly less improbable. So I think, as I go on hikes and runs in the woods, stopping to take pictures every so often, I will keep my eyes open. I will look out, not just for bears and the local mountain lion, but for the charming wolves and bread crumb trails. I’ll try to take pictures of the little black squirrels that have recently come back to our area after a long absence, but I’ll stay open to the idea that I might catch a pixie out of the corner of my eye when I do it.
