Philip Pullman – …Theresa Kishkan

redux: “Her grandmother lived in the woods.”

February 20, 2019 theresakishkan4 Comments

Last week I bought some finger-puppets, cunningly knit by Peruvian women, to have when my grandaughter comes to visit. (When her cousin Arthur comes — he’s younger! — I’ll find another set for a story to interest him.) We are a low-tech household and I’m sure there will be complaints when the grandchildren are older — “Oh, do we have to go to Grandma Theresa and Grandad John’s? They always want to read to us and their internet connection is so slow! Can’t we stay home and play on our I-phones?” But when I had a little Skype date with Kelly and showed her the puppets, she reached for the computer screen (in slow-motion, because of that connection!) to touch these beautiful little figures.

puppets I spent time this morning looking at versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”. The one I thought I remembered best was the Brothers Grimm tale, the one in which Red and her grandmother are both consumed by the wolf but then removed from the animal’s belly by a huntsman who just happened to be passing by. He filled the cavity with stones and the wolf stumbled and died from the weight of the stones. And pulling out my copy of Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm, I see that is indeed the narrative arc of the tale. But my little collection of puppets includes a woodcutter — he’s on the right, with the floppy axe — and it’s the French version that features a woodcutter. This would reflect the changing nature of European forests, I suppose — some of them owned by aristocrats as large hunting preserves and some in the process of being deforested for farm crops and cattle. I remember reading Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment perhaps 35 years ago and being intrigued by his analysis of fairy tales as important adjuncts to shaping the emotional lives of children. Red Riding Hood was an example of a story that allowed children, specifically girls, to grapple with the unsettling fears and dangers of puberty, among other things. I think it also situates a child in the force-field of generational responsibility. A girl is asked by her mother to take sustenance to an ailing grandmother and she moves from the safety of a village to the isolated forest, from her own home with her parents to the house where her mother had grown up. Although she’s been warned to be careful on the way, how could she ever know the specific dangers along the way? Her mother mentions a few things to be alert to but her concerns are more to do with etiquette once Red arrives at her grandmother’s cottage. Does she warn about a wolf? Or a well-armed hunter? A woodcutter?

I will search out the right story to go with my puppets and if we’re lucky, Kelly might hear wolves in the night when she sleeps at her grandmother’s house in the isolated forest. And when she’s a little older, she can help chop wood herself. Just so she learns to use an axe and doesn’t wait for someone else to do it for her.

Postscript: I wrote this post three years ago. Since then, two more grandchildren have been born and many stories have been read. I love how much these children want stories. A book is a spell. Hold one up and all the wild racing around comes to a halt. This photo arrived on the weekend, a testament to the call of of stories. One family was visiting the other in a snowy city. And the youngest grandchild? I suspect he was napping.

reading...

redux: Close enough to touch

February 1, 2019February 1, 2019 theresakishkanLeave a comment

Looking back to February 2, 2016 (because I didn’t post on the 1st), I was thinking about the moon and salmonberry blossoms. This year’s moon is a waning crescent, 11% visible, and it’s 26.50 days old. (Or, you know, millions of years old, depending on your perspective.)

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I was awake a little after six this morning and the moon was just visible in the trees sort of south-east of the house. Then, half an hour later, it was right in the trees due south, passing quite quickly. I have Renee Fleming’s gorgeous cd of jazz songs, including her version of this Jimmy Webb song, “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress”, and thought of it as I watched the moon pass my window:

See her how she flies

Golden sails across the sky

Close enough to touch

But careful if you try

Though she looks as warm as gold

The moon’s a harsh mistress

The moon can be so cold

It’s in its last quarter, 38% visible, and it’s 23 days old. Or millions of years, depending on your perspective…

February is one of those months in which anything can happen. This month last year, we went to Amsterdam for a wedding, then to Portugal to wander. The grey canals, the lemon groves. Yesterday, driving down to Sechelt, we saw a Japanese cherry tree in bloom and there were crocuses, many of them, in full flower outside the Bank of Montreal. Yet the full moon in February is the Full Snow Moon or the Shoulder to Shoulder Around the Fire Moon, (again) depending on your perspective.

The other day we were walking up on the Malaspina trail and we kept seeing pairs of ravens swooping around, chasing each other, some so close we could hear their wings — a strong beautiful sound. And we could see the buds swelling on the salmonberry bushes (Rubus spectabilis). In a couple of weeks, the first flowers will emerge from those buds, an unfolding of deep cerise petals that always reminds me of that fairytale Princess Furball, in which a young girl has dresses as lovely as the moon, sun, and stars stored in walnut shells; when the shells are opened, the dresses pour forth, impossibly beautiful. Like the salmonberry flowers, dresses of light, with the sound of black wings swooshing overhead…

Addendum:

We have — had — a copy of Princess Furball, illustrated by Anita Lobel. I looked for it just now and couldn’t find it. It’s kind of a version of Cinderella, or at least it seems to come from the same rootstock. As I recall, the princess is promised in marriage by her father to an ogre and she runs away in a cloak of many furs with her dresses and a few other treasures hidden away in nut-shells. Her beauty and her cooking skills help her to win the love of a good king. So I can’t find our copy but have just read a variant of the tale, “Thousandfurs”, in my edition of Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm, by Philip Pullman, in which he offers his favourite fifty tales as well as providing wonderful commentaries at the end of each. In this version, the princess is running from home because her father has decided to marry her himself after the death of his beautiful wife (her mother). So the plot thickens and grows gruesome with that particular gloss.

bitter greens

April 2, 2017April 2, 2017 theresakishkan2 Comments

bitter greens

This time of year, I think of Rapunzel. I think of her mother, pregnant with her, so desperate for the taste of a particular salad green, thought to be Valerianella locusta, known as corn salad, lamb’s lettuce, mâche, but also perhaps parsley, ramps or rampion, that her husband was willing to give her unborn babe to the woman whose garden he’d been caught plundering for the sake of his wife’s health.

In Philip Pullman’s wonderful edition of the Brothers Grimm, it’s lamb’s lettuce growing in a neighbouring garden owned by a powerful witch:

One day the woman was standing at that window, and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel. It looked so fresh and green that she longed to taste some, and this longing grew stronger every day, so that eventually she became really ill.

I also long for greens in early spring. Not the spring mix from plastic clamshells — somehow all those tiny leaves taste exactly the same and that taste is innocuous — or the bagged arugula, a most beautiful herb redolent of pepper and walnuts that needs sunlight and a bit of chill to really come into its own. I grow a couple of kinds but my favourite is one of the Diplotaxis spp., a wild-ish green with ferny leaves and a delicious spicy flavour. There are some 12th c. Italian texts called the Trotula, possibly the work of a woman doctor, that are considered the first specifically gynecological treatises and the wild arugula appears in them as a treatment for dysentery. So maybe arugula is a contender for the green that Rapunzel’s mother longed for? The garden her window overlooked, tended by that witch, was very likely a medicinal garden, and the witch was probably a herbalist. There was wisdom in the growing of a variety of greens. Science now “tells” us what gardeners have always known: these plants contain so many important vitamins and elements necessary for heart health, muscle health, digestive function, vision, and more.

Yesterday I planted a bed of early greens. I have kale already and some miner’s lettuce —

miners lettuce.jpg

— as well as a blood-red sorrel. There are dandelions appearing by the garden paths and I planted their wild cousin, Cicoria selvatica da campo, for a reliable source of those bitter leaves. A newly-planted bed looks both plain and hopeful. Tiny seeds lovingly strewn in a shallow furrow, soil pressed over, labels tied onto bamboo sticks, a daily visit (or maybe even hourly) to see if anything has sprouted yet, and then one day, this:

greens

And the greens are easy to grow. Many self-seed. That miner’s lettuce is growing in a tub on a deck by my kitchen so I can snip leaves for small dishes and there are seedlings coming up in neighbouring pots too. I also planted a row of it so we can have larger amounts of it in salad. The arugula self-sows and that Diplotaxis is a short-lived perennial in my garden; I’ve planted more because I never know how many of last year’s plants will have survived the winter (and this winter was severe). Kale — well, it’s everywhere. I’d like to grow watercress but I don’t have a damp enough area. I do know several places to gather it though. And it’s another contender for the plant Rapunzel’s mother craved. Which makes me wonder by Rapunzel’s father didn’t have a small garden patch of his own?

“Her grandmother lived in the woods…”

February 25, 2016February 25, 2016 theresakishkanLeave a comment

I spent time this morning looking at versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”. The one I thought I remembered best was the Brothers Grimm tale, the one in which Red and her grandmother are both consumed by the wolf but then removed from the animal’s belly by a huntsman who just happened to be passing by. He filled the cavity with stones and the wolf stumbled and died from the weight of the stones. And pulling out my copy of Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm, I see that is indeed the narrative arc of the tale. But my little collection of puppets includes a woodcutter — he’s on the right, with the floppy axe — and it’s the French version that features a woodcutter. This would reflect the changing nature of European forests, I suppose — some of them owned by aristocrats as large hunting preserves and some in the process of being deforested for farm crops and cattle. I remember reading Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment perhaps 35 years ago and being intrigued by his analysis of fairy tales as important adjuncts to shaping the emotional lives of children. Red Riding Hood was an example of a story that allowed children, specifically girls, to grapple with the unsettling fears and dangers of puberty, among other things. I think it also situates a child in the force-field of generational responsibility. A girl is asked by her mother to take sustenance to an ailing grandmother and she moves from the safety of a village to the isolated forest, from her own home with her parents to the house where her mother had grown up. Although she’s been warned to be careful on the way, how could she ever know the specific dangers along the way? Her mother mentions a few things to be alert to but her concerns are more to do with etiquette once Red arrives at her grandmother’s cottage. Does she warn about a wolf? Or a well-armed hunter? A woodcutter?

Close enough to touch

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016 theresakishkanLeave a comment

See her how she flies

Golden sails across the sky

Close enough to touch

But careful if you try

Though she looks as warm as gold

The moon’s a harsh mistress

The moon can be so cold

It’s in its last quarter, 38% visible, and it’s 23 days old. Or millions of years, depending on your perspective…

The other day we were walking up on the Malaspina trail and we kept seeing pairs of ravens swooping around, chasing each other, some so close we could hear their wings — a strong beautiful sound. And we could see the buds swelling on the salmonberry bushes (Rubus spectabilis). In a couple of weeks, the first flowers will emerge from those buds, an unfolding of deep cerise petals that always reminds me of that fairytale Princess Furball, in which a young girl has dresses as lovely as the moon, sun, and stars stored in walnut shells; when the shells are opened, the dresses pour forth, impossibly beautiful. Like the salmonberry flowers, dresses of light, with the sound of black wings swooshing overhead…

Addendum:

We have — had — a copy of Princess Furball illustrated by Anita Lobel. I looked for it just now and couldn’t find it. It’s kind of a version of Cinderella, or at least it seems to come from the same rootstock. As I recall, the princess is promised in marriage by her father to an ogre and she runs away in a cloak of many furs with her dresses and a few other treasures hidden away in nut-shells. Her beauty and her cooking skills help her to win the love of a good king. So I can’t find our copy but have just read a variant of the tale, “Thousandfurs”, in my edition of Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm, by Philip Pullman, in which he offers his favourite fifty tales as well as providing wonderful commentaries at the end of each. In this version, the princess is running from home because her father has decided to marry her himself after the death of his beautiful wife (her mother). So the plot thickens and grows gruesome with that particular gloss.