On Personal Mythologies and story cores and circles of light

[permetaform]

I spent part of today trying to explain the story of The Little Matchstick Girl to someone who, in hindsight, I don't think ever had a childhood story. Or not the kind that The Little Matchstick Girl was to me.

I remember first hearing this story one night flopped on my parent's bed. My dad told me the story, and at the end of it...I did not have words, then, for how incredibly shaken that story made me. I don't think I have words for it now, even. I'd stumbled off to bed, and I don't remember sleeping.

The story, as it has made it into my personal mythology, as I remember it and perhaps not necessarily the way it was told, is this:

An orphaned little girl sold matchsticks that she made on the streets of a town solstice eve, as she had ever done to feed herself. They weren't selling well so she still had a lot and by and by her eyes fell on a the window of a home nearby. It was golden inside, family around a table and the light spilled out in buttery puddles and she could almost touch the warmth through the cold and the dark around her.

She lit a matchstick and then it was like she was in their circle of light and warmth for a brief moment, until the matchstick went out and she was alone again.

She lit another one and it seemed like they were closer and she imagines the smell of the food on the table and the voices around her and before that match went out she lit another one.

The next day they found her, frozen, with used matchsticks all around her; she looked happy.

This is the story I know; or rather, that I remember, that is part of me. I kept returning to the thought of this story, even though it made my stomach curl up on itself.

I mentioned to kintail yesterday about the heart of a story, and essential core that attacks the animal hindbrain of people, and that doesn't let go.

For The Little Matchstick Girl, for me, it's the image of that solitary little girl, in the darkness, with a match, and by wish or will or strength of imagination taking herself to a place where she's not so alone anymore.

Fiat Lux

let there be light
He didn't really understand, I think. We dropped the topic. And it makes me kinda sad and kinda frustrated because he stated that he doesn't really read for pleasure. I cannot comprehend this. Or rather, I can comprehend it, but I can never comprehend *myself* giving up pleasure reading. I can't imagine living without a personal mythology.

This is my creation myth, that once there was darkness, and then there was one spark, and then there was more and more and the universe exploded into something beautiful, ending one state to begin another, killing itself to create again.

And...and I'm trying to talk out, figure out, here, why this seems so important to me to say, to work out. And.

And I realize, what is this but a personal creation myth as well? What is this, but the way that *I*, speaking as a collected bundle of thoughts and ideas, was born? Not I-as-part-of-my-mother, not I-as-part-of-my-culture, not I-as-child-of-my-circumstances, but *I*, here, thinking, writing, feeling, tearing up, *I* as vidder, *I* which I came to be, here, now. A...reason to live, I think.

Or perhaps a mythology for living.

I don't think I got that across to him. I'm happy though, that at least I figured it out, for myself.


On that note: what are your myths?

Comments

[otterdemon.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know about my myths, but maybe the one that influenced me the most as a child? Probably that of the red shoes. It was...well, probably not one that I would ever, ever recommend to a child. It was a little too horrendous, though the message it sent will always be remembered by me (even if sometimes ignored).

[permetaform]

Ahhh, yes! I remember several people in my class saying that they thought it was a really scary movie when they first saw it too...

[myniamh.livejournal.com]

=)
I loved that story too.
A few years ago I saw an animated kids show which used the original story but changed it slightly.

It started out with a small match girl on the street watching the windows of a fancy, warm restaurant, lighting matches to keep warm.
Inside a violin player was asked over and over to play 'happy' music for the rich men and their girlfriends. He kept loosing himself in the music and bringing out the loneliness he felt, this got him fired.
The little match girl, so captivated by the music the violinist played while walking home, followed him. When he got home he was still playing and did not notice when the flame of his gas lights blew out. The little girl crept up the stairs to listen, lighting her last match as she went through his door.
BOOM.
The animation ended with the two of them floating up to heaven, the musician finally playing happy music on his own.

[permetaform]

oh huh! That sounds a bit familiar, was it the fairytale ones done by Nickleodeon?

[calicokat.livejournal.com]

"The Tinderbox."

I remember a lot of the original stories, but that story sticks with me, always. I'm not sure what it is about it that resonates with me. Sometimes I make up the ending for myself because I forget it.

The Secret Garden is like this for me, too. The words of the book and the images from the Hallmark verison (read: One True Version) sort of jumble together into something very real to me in retrospect.

Those are the big ones for me, I think. :) I totally feel what you're saying, tho.

[calicokat.livejournal.com]

While people are remembering back to childhood stories... This is as good a place to ask as any, I guess. There's also this story, and I don't know the name of it, and I want to say, like...

I think it's about a chick. And the chick goes on this quest. I think to see a king. Chicks are always going to see the king. And on the way he meets this turkey, and there's a bit about him getting stuck in the turkey's gullet with the rocks, I'm pretty sure, or something about the turkey's gullet -- this is the most outstanding feature to me -- and he meets some other characters, and I think something rather violent happens in the king's courtyard, but I could be confusing it with The Half Chick...

Does ANYONE know what story this is? I know it's not "The Half Chick." Is it some expanded version of Chicken Little? T_T This has been bothering me for like... six years. The bit about the turkey!

[permetaform]

Well the fact that you forgot the ending means that the ending didn't matter...what part of the middle do you remember the best? If you were forced to summarize essence of the story really quickly, which bits would you refuse to leave out?

And oh, the secret garden! I loved that book! Something about the fact of a hidden nook that one hides away and make beautiful is just...oh, dude, yes, I know what you mean! I would always pretend secret gardens in my make believes...

[aliaswestgate.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I think the one that always struck me as the closest to my heart is The Little Mermaid. Told as Hans Christian Anderson originally did, with the princess giving her life instead of living happily ever after. But in the end, she was still content. Prince or no prince, she made her own decision.

The disneyfied version's music will always be close to my heart. But there was one done back in the mid or early 80s. Half hour long animated special and it was so sweet, so softly done that it stays with me to this day. Even the music i remember, faintly. I'd know it if i ever saw it again. Just by a quiet little song, sung by a true light soprano while she was human. We used to have it taped on VHS. I think i nearly wore it out by the time i turned 18. I wish i could find it on DVD now. But for me The Little Mermaid and it's original tragic ending speaks volumes.

Go for what you want. If you can't, you can still make an independant decision no matter the cost. Yes, hers was essentially death. But she still ended up happy as a Daughter of the Air watching over others.

[permetaform]

was that other version with this really big pearl hair clip that she gave away?? ::bounces::

Re: thinking thinking singing

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Oh! I remember reading that story!

I can't for the life of me remember how it ends, though. Does he just die lonely?

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I read so many children's stories as a child. My parents had a large book a greek myths, a large book of Dickens' work, and two huge old comic anthologies. The Tin Soldier comes to mind as the first love story I ever read. He's a children's toy and falls in love with a ballerina doll. In the end he's thrown into the fire and they later find him melted into the shape of a heart.

I remember loving Thumbelina, and how she didn't want to marry that gopher and live underground in a dusty hole and she didn't want to live "comfortably" she just wanted to be free.

I also particularly remember the The Uncle Remus Tales (originally written entirely in African-American dialect) particularly "Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby," in which Brer rabbit pisses off Brer Fox and Brer Fox tricks him into getting stuck in this doll he made out of tar is about to kill him and Brer rabbit tells him, "Oh, skin me alive, shoot me, just don't send me to the briar patch!"

Of course, Brer Fox immediately sends him right there, and Brer Rabbit runs off laughing, "I was born and bred in the briar patch, suckah!!" (or, you know, something to that effect) ensuring I developed a love for trickster figures early on.

The whole story is here, and it's really short.

[permetaform]

Trickster figures. XD And oh yeah, thumbelina!

[nightengale.livejournal.com]

So there was this emperor, right? (He was Chinese but this detail only matters slightly.) And he was lucky enough to find a beautifully singing nightingale but botched his chance, 'cause he overworked and imprisoned her, and she flew the coop, never to return. And then his golden replica broke. Or they got sick of it, either way, he was screwed. As the emperor lay dying, the nightingale came back, he begged forgiveness, and depending on which version you know, she did or did not grant it.

The story, and my understanding of it, have been evolving (seperately and together) for me since the first day I heard it (only about 8 years ago, max), and through the use of it, or references to it, in various animes, media, chance encournters, the works...Now, I am the Eggman Nightingale. Several details about the story which are important to me now, but weren't necessarily visible to me when I first learned it:

- The emperor was one lucky bastard to find her, and wasted his chance.
- The bird was a her.
- She was the only nightingale. The *only* one.
- The mechanical bird was a good replacement only at first, only long enough for the nightingale to get the hell out of dodge before the Emperor realized he wasn't, in fact, better off with his gold.
- However, the mechanical replication *did* perfectly mimic her, if only for a little while.
- She, unlike the mechanical one, had a huge repetory of songs to sing, and constantly changed bits of them, which was what made them good.

Make of all that what you will.

[For your curiosity, the animes in which the nightingale is referenced, that I know of, are Otogizoushi (very obliquely) and The Big O (very directly, as part of the overall theme).]

I completely agree with you when you speak of a creation story of your independent self. (The Nightingale did that for me.) I feel it's the same theory as that behind renaming yourself. Your birth 'given' name could feasibly become equalled by one you give yourself, in terms of self-identification-connotation. In fandom, I find that's often the case with screen names, or if not the actual names, then the proper name from which the 16-character-long, underscores allowed, SN is culled [Thirteenth Nightengale becoming th_nightengale; the series of permutations and languages which ended with your nickname of Perma]. To put this all in simpler terms and less runons: I answer to Nightengale as easily as to Emily. I have re-named myself, but that doesn't make my newest name any less accurate. Simply contains/explains different aspects of my self than Emily can encompass. [Perhaps 're' name is wrong because it implies a replacement...I'm trying to convey a duality, or multiplicity, of cooexisting and equally accurate names which can be applied to one person; moreover, the 'additional' names being equal to the given first, or rather the name chosen as preferredaddress, and not subordinate like middle names tend to become. And I may not be making any sense, forgive me.]

[permetaform]

Actually that does make sense, sort of as you grow older you aquire more names and some names become stronger than others??

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Before I can even give this conscious thought with all its reasons and rationalizations and justifications, before I can protest that I remember too little of my childhood clearly, my hindbrain immediately answers "The White Cat."

Oh...

Oooh. Ghods, no wonder I'm so completely taken with Goujun and Hakuryu. Good grief I'm slow on the uptake sometimes. Oooh.

*takes a few minutes to catch breath, choked up and shaken*

Oh.

While most of my brain is too busy reeling over that gutpunch connection to even begin to explain yet (though I would definitely like to explore it), I want to say that "The Little Matchstick Girl" is definitely a close second as personal mythology for me. I'm pretty sure I read that in an illustrated story book, because I immediately get an image in my mind's eye of a picture of the girl being so desperate not to lose the image of family and food and warmth that she lights all the matches she has left to make one last big fire -- I see her with the bundle of matches on fire, held in both hands and not caring that it's about to burn her hands and catch fire to her ragged gloves, and all the things she's seeing in the firelight gathered are around her. And I think in the version I read, it was a case of "evil stepmother" issues too, where she was not allowed to go home until she's sold all the matches and had the money for her stepmother, so she knew if she couldn't sell them she'd freeze to death that night anyway. Definitely another aspect of my own personal mythology, and one I'd considered very seriously and thought furiously about as a child, so maybe this one rather than The White Cat is the one I first tried to really consciously pick apart and recognize as mythology.

Perhaps that is also where I picked up the understanding that creation and destruction go hand in hand, something has to end for something else to begin, and so on, even if what is ending or being destroyed is darkness, cold, void. And the power of the image of a fire cupped in the hands, without fear.

The idea of not only imagination corrolating with creation, but that imagination can connect to a different world that is as real in its own way as this one (which is not really one reality but a collection of consensual realities), is another very important aspect of my own personal mythology. What I read for pleasure, and what I aspire to write, is connections with those other worlds.

[aliaswestgate.livejournal.com]

You know The White Cat as in the old french fairy tale? Third son on a quest and all the usual parts. Yet it's the ending of it that makes it hurt the most?

If we're talking about the same fairy tale, you'll be the first person i've met besides the ones that compiled the fairy tale book that i read it in that knows of its existance.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

I love fairy tales and myths. Have you read the series of rewritten myths by Ellen Daltow and Terry Windling? There are several collections by tons of great authors: Silver Birch, Blood Moon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380786222/qid=1118720041/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-1477603-3523243?v=glance&s=books&n=507846), Snow White, Blood Red (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380718758/ref=pd_sim_b_6/002-1477603-3523243?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance), Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380778726/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-1477603-3523243?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance), Black Heart, Ivory Bones (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380786230/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-1477603-3523243?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance), and more. They're all amazing.

There's a great version of the match girl story by Anne Bishop in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears. It's terrifying, and definitely not for the faint of heart, but very very good.

I'm not sure what my favorite myths are. I love Greek myths a lot, especially the ones about the gods. The story of Psyche might be my favorite, especially because of how C.S. Lewis did it in Till We Have Faces.

I cannot understand people who don't love reading the way I do. I just can't relate to that at all. Reading is maybe my favorite thing in the world, so I just don't get how anyone couldn't adore it.

[permetaform]

Oh yeah! I love browsing through those revisitations of the fairytales, a bit like fic, even, with how sexual some of the stories became.

And yes, Psyche as Soul become sacred through Love. ::adores also::

[xoverau.livejournal.com]

I remember that story. *shiver*

[permetaform]

::glomps and highfives::

[scarletseraph.livejournal.com]

Allah said to the South Wind: "Become solid flesh, for I will make a new creature of thee; to the honour of My Holy One, and the abasement of Mine enemies, and for a servant to them that are subject to me."

And the South Wind said, "Lord, do Thou so."

Then Allah took a handful of the South Wind and He breathed thereon, creating the horse and saying: "Thy name shall be Arabian, and virtue bound into the hair of thy forelock, and plunder on thy back. I have preferred thee above all beasts of burden, inasmuch as I have made thy master thy friend. I have given thee the power of flight without wings, be it in onslaught or retreat. I will set men on thy back that shalt honour and praise Me and sing Hallelujah to My name."

As far as faerytales go... When I was very, very young - probably before I could even read the book myself - my aunt and uncle gave me 'Fairy Tales from Around the World'. It was set around East of the Sun, West of the Moon - divided into four sections, with each Wind telling a different set of stories to the young girl who was searching for her Prince.

Then my grandmother found a huge, ancient book of faerytales at a yard sale, and brought it home for me. It was full of the old stories; the gory, morbid stories. Grimmies and Andersen and Lang and things I can't even identify. The Snow Queen. My favourite, though, was always The Colony of Cats. I wanted to be Lizina so very badly. ^^;

I don't know what happened to that one. *Mourn* I found a complete illustrated Grimm's at Goodwill a few months back, though.

[permetaform]

oh man, that was a GREAT story! I've never read the Colony of Cats before! Maybe it's searchable on Amazon?

[tiggymalvern.livejournal.com]

This is what I love so much about your posts (oh, and your excellent pimping, of course XD) - you make me think. I don't believe I have a single childhood story that has affected me so deeply, but that feeling that you evoke with your words, your description of it, I know that so well. And I'm absolutely with you on one thing - how can you not read for pleasure? How can you not read to become involved in other worlds, in other people's lives, in experiences that you will never have? That's been such a big part of my existence since I was five.

This is my creation myth, that once there was darkness, and then there was one spark, and then there was more and more and the universe exploded into something beautiful, ending one state to begin another, killing itself to create again.

That's exactly it. The living come from the dead, and dead is gone, but that doesn't matter. Our society is all wrapped up in fear of dying, and it comes to everyone, it's the way it is. But in the meantime, I'm me, and there has never been a me before and never will be again. I enjoy what I have, I want to be the most I can be, and do the things I want to do, and at the end of that I will have enjoyed just being me, and creating and being different. I steer my life towards the things I want, and I can't lose, I can only win, because I'm here.

[permetaform]

This is what I love so much about your posts (oh, and your excellent pimping, of course XD) - you make me think.

::beams and glomps::

I steer my life towards the things I want, and I can't lose, I can only win, because I'm here.

god, but that's beautiful, and it's something that I have to remind myself of. You express it so well. =)

[maymorning.livejournal.com]

The Little Matchgirl is a sad but sweet story. Mine is The SnowQueen. I've always felt sad for her. She was so lonely in her ice palace that she had to kidnap a boy to keep her company. But he wasn't hers, he belonged to Gerda. I always wrote my own ending, where she lost Kay to Gerda, but then she found a grown up boy who was lost in the snow. And she looked after him, instead of trying to turn him into hers by putting ice in his heart, and he loved her. I like my ending! (And of course, there was that alternate version I wrote!)

I feel so sorry for your friend, who doesn't read for pleasure and doesn't know those old stories. I can't imagine not enjoying reading, it's as vital as eating or breathing.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ah, you too? Snow Queen was one of my very favorite fairy tales, and I always felt sorry for her, too. I tended to feel sorry for most villains and would mentally invent happy endings for them. The Ice Queen in Narnia, too...Narnia influenced much of the landscape of my childhood fantasies.

Thinking back, one of my own personal mythologies was actual mythology - I read a lot of Greek myth as a wee thing and Galatea and Pygmalion always struck me deep, partly because it was one of the few myths with a happy ending, and partly because I understood it so completely, what it is to fall in love with your own creation, and as a creator how desperately one can wish for one's creation to actually breathe and live.

[guede-mazaka.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say I've had a personal myth, but something that's always stuck with me is the evolution sequence in Disney's Fantasia. When I first saw it, I was old enough to know it was science, but the facts were made alive and intimate (the way everyone's head turned when the T. rex walked in was exactly like some moments in grade school) in a way that was fantastic. That did allow breadth and depth for imagination, and faith (the fish crawling onto land, getting legs; the dinosaurs plodding through the desert thinking that there's a better place somewhere), and life and hope and survival with change. It wasn't bony weird skeletons in some museum anymore. It's like...history once happened and was the present, and wasn't always text in books, regardless of whether we're talking fossils or the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

[permetaform]

ohhh, nice. yes, yeah, I can totally get that! Like, that surreal feeling where you're like, "It's happening, it happened and is STILL happening...and it is now."

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

My response got so long that it didn't fit in a comment post, so it's in an lj entry here.

Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Match Girl" story (and his other stories) always had a vivid effect on me, too. So many of them, upon a second reading (or first reading, sometimes), are essiantally sad, about characters who aren't wanted or don't belong, who generally die or suffer for this in the end. Getting their feet cut off because they can't stop dancing. Freezing to death alone. Dying, voiceless, because the prince chose another woman, even after all her sacrifices and pain. Granted, most fairytales are violent, and most fairytale heroines suffer extensively, but Hans Christian Anderson's versions are often minus the "good guys get rewarded and evil is punished" ending of many fairytales.

[lindra.livejournal.com]

Mm. I have a book of Grimm's, and Hans Christian; and a collection of tales. I think one that struck me was The Juniper Tree (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm047.html), and Iron Heinrich (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm001.html), I think it was, and one called Mother Hode(Hedda? Hove?), three lazy daughters (or two?). There was one where there was a girl, and she cut off her horse's head and nailed it to the stable, and she talked to it.

My mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister Marlene,
Gathered all my bones,
Tied them in a silken scarf,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I. is still in my head, and the millstone. I don't know why I loved that story so much. And there was the one with the woman who was forced to dance in red-hot slippers until she died. All the Grimm stories have largely influenced me, I think - a book of Grimm's was, literally, all that I read for months, and I read them over and over.

Here's the link to the directory of Grimm: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html It doesn't have all of them, but I can type up requests from my book if you require one that's missing.

Also, this one influenced me quite a lot: The Lazy Spinning Woman (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm128.html), and that last line has been burnt in my mind forever, because the sheer conversational tone of it just made me recoil. It's so casual, that last line, but so very true.

Fairytales are very close to my heart, actually, since they look innocuous - 'once upon a time', etc., and they can be read on the surface, but when you look at what the words mean, it's quite different. I read 'The Juniper Tree' to someone a while ago, and they said 'What a lovely story!' when I told them it was a fairytale, but when I repeated several lines to her, she looked horrified. There's something lulling about them that sort of... sticks them in one's mind, especially when you idly consider them afterwards (as you do) and realise what it is actually saying.

[maymorning.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I was reading a piece about Hans Christian Anderson in a newspaper recently. Apparantly, he was disgusted by grown up women and preferred little girls to befriend because he thought that sex was revolting. He tended to have schoolgirlish crushes on young men and wanted to hug and kiss them. Odd, that some of the best writers of children's fiction are people who never grew up out of childhood. They never developed emotionally.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I have one, exactly. I have several stories that hit me that deeply, and most of them are tied up with two concepts: "enough", and complicity.

Dayenu, the Passover song, "it would have been enough" as refrain, was always very resonant for me as a child, although I don't think I hear it the way a lot of people do. For most people that is either a song of abundance -- or a song of cringing gratitude.

For me, though, "enough" is a key word, and I took the words as literally true -- tracing the path of less and less and less until you find the place past which you cannot go, where "enough" starts. It sounds self-abnegating but it doesn't feel that way to me, it feels liberating, because the whole concept that there can *be* a place where you stop feels liberating to me.

I'm always most interested in stories of enough. Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, is probably the most archetypal of them. Or, conversely, of stories of "not enough". It has to really be enough, though. Enough to really be yourself, not just get by. Substinence is not what I mean.

The complicity stories that come to my mind are all somehow related to Orson Scott Card -- he wrote two and edited the short story collection that contained the other. In spite of the fact that our politics could not share a room without spitting, he and I must have *something* in common. They're about the complicated relationship of smart and self-aware children to powerful grownups with disturbing agendas -- how you go along with them knowingly or how you cope, later, with not having known what you should have, or with having known on one level and denied on another, how you resist them covertly, how you manipulate them and take on responsibility in the process, how you get sucked into the conspiracy of silence, the people coming behind you that you fail to save.

I realize, writing this, that part of my personal mythology is the very concept of personal mythology -- that stories matter, that they can sometimes save you, or change you, and that even when they can't, just to have had the story, shared it, kept it alive, and maybe added to it -- is enough.

[permetaform]

oh huh! Yeah, that *is* compelling, thank you for sharing this!