This poem is a product of my notebook, where I jotted down the phrase “fairy tale of memory’ and then thought about the way in which we remember events, and just how far what we remember is real.  That last is one of my favourite words, mainly because it is such a tricky concept.  We are all story tellers, and I am aware that even that innocuous phrase ‘story tellers’ is capable of being taken in a number of ways to include a plain statement of the facts and also a completely fantastic rewriting of reality, in short a lie.  So the simple act of story telling can be either truth or untruth and is usually both.

     We are natural editors, no, instinctive editors because we can (and must) do it consciously and unconsciously.  Since it is impossible to give all the facts of an experience (time, place, direction, temperature, air pressure, light intensity and on and on and on for ‘real’ truth) we must edit, and each edit makes the retelling more of an approximation rather than the truth.  And we have faulty memories and I am sure that we smooth out inartistic incongruities (or the normal bumpiness of life) to make our narratives more pleasing.

     We have a category of ‘Fantasy’ in literature, but we do not assume that our narratives of truthfulness are part of that genre, but they are, they must be.

     The every day examples of the fantastic are fairy tales.  They are told to children and they feed the imagination, but they are presented as other.  The great fairy stories have lasted because, in spite of their fantastic and unreal basis, they seem to say something to the reader or listener; they comment in an unreal way on the realities of life.  Perhaps the early acquaintanceship with the fantastic is preparation for the fantasy that is an essential part of our reality: the making of everything into a coherent narrative.

     The poem opens with a rhymed section using elements of fairy stories in a jumbled recollection of essential elements of a variety of stories from the bland to the deeply disturbing.  So many fairy stories are vicious and bloody and it is only the aura of magic and unreality that make them acceptable to young minds – though given the every day horror that young eyes can access at the touch of a computer key (in spite of parental limits) fairy stories can actually seem quite mild!

     The jumbled nature of the first verses and their jolly rhyme is how I see our memories: we fit bits together to make something that works for us, while, at the same time asserting that what we remember is some sort of absolute truth – because it is part of our remembered personal experience.  It’s true.  Even a cursory study of evidence, be it forensic, historical, archaeological, judicial, personal or whatever indicates that reality based on ‘evidence’ is fluid pretend we ne’er so absolute!

     This poem has been a difficult one to write.  It started with something that I responded to quickly and felt that there was a poem waiting to be written and then descended into a welter of note making and a lack of direction – or rather too many directions.  I have started and re-started this poem and its eventual (draft) form is much shorter than I expected it to be.  It does encapsulate what I was thinking, but I suspect that this is one poem than will go through a number of drafts more before I am satisfied.

I remember

Ogres, princes, golden tresses,

hearts of ice and poisoned fruit,

genies’ lamps and just three guesses,

living dead and talking lute.

Moving statues, mystic jewels,

feet on swords, flesh torn by thorns,

truthful mirrors, magic duels,

golden circlets, rune carved horns.

Time is fluid, place elastic.

Who can tell just where you are?

Logic now is the fantastic,

in a land that is so far – far – far . . .

The page is turned, the volume’s shut.

And so the story’s at an end

A hand rests gently on the book,

then fingers press against the spine

to slide it firmly into place

among the other items shelved

within the library of Self,

where every time the book’s withdrawn,

the text and illustrations change,

while comforting, calm voices ask,

“and are you sitting comfortably?

Then we’ll begin.”

This is how it’s always been:

every time your tale’s retold,

lodged inside the Fairy Tale

that is ‘authentic’ memory.