Unseen beings

Now, it's strange enough to be talking to trees, but this is far from the strangest thing out there. People talk to spirits, ghosts and angels. There's a wonderful documentary, free to air, about an Icelandic woman who communicates with elves. Her interactions with the elves are ecological: they led her to protect a rare lava field from development. That's cool, surely? In Iceland, people seem to take elves sort of seriously. I think, for me, angels are the most... unsettling idea... they seem air spirits and I am interested in this earth. The earth gods not the sky gods. The sky gods - patriarchal, hierarchical, anthropocentric - seem to me to be related to all that ails us.

Anyway. Unseen beings. I wouldn't claim that there are these other beings. Maybe there are. But what I do believe is that there are other voices, messages, wisdoms... That it's possible to access "truth" in various ways not supported by the scientific consensus. By truth, I'm not taking of facts, empirical evidence, but an understanding of reality as - and here, thank goodness for the Tolkien essay I will quote from in a moment - we are meant to see it.

And the connection with unseen beings is that this kind of truth has been communicated in myth and fairy story. That is what J. R. R. Tolkien is discussing in this essay. He explains that fairy stories are about recovery, escape and consolation. Here's what he says about recovery:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear

view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I

might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart

from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiars are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.

I love this connection he draws to "appropriation". Once we say something is OURS, or in our power, or even "understood", we cease to value it fully. We cease to see its vitality. We disenchant the world by standing over it and thinking we have power, knowledge, control. The lesson of the unseen beings, like the lesson of fairy stories, is "No, you don't." The unseen beings encourage us to see again, and that draws us back into relationship. That relationship itself is a large part of the recovery.

Tolkien explains how stories can make the familiar unfamiliar and fascinating. He emphasises that descriptions are rooted in knowledge and affection for relatively ordinary things and beings - it is their setting that, as it were, re-frames and revitalises them, rather than those things and beings (always) earning some magical quality in the tale.

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental

things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their

setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature can be her lover not

her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of

the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.

One thing he takes issue with is the way in which we devalue the idea of escape. Yes, stories offer an escape, he says, an escape into a fantastic world of magic and fantasy - that we desire it, though, is the sanest thing in the world: who would not desire to escape from a smokey factory or a bleak prison? We seek to escape to recover our vitality.

And then, this:

There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things. On this

desire, as ancient as the Fall, is largely founded the talking of beasts and creatures in fairy-tales,

and especially the magical understanding of their proper speech. This is the root, and not the

“confusion” attributed to the minds of men of the unrecorded past, an alleged “absence of the

sense of separation of ourselves from beasts.” A vivid sense of that separation is very ancient;

but also a sense that it was a severance: a strange fate and a guilt lies on us. Other creatures

are like other realms with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from the

outside at a distance, being at war with them, or on the terms of an uneasy armistice.

The renewed relationship, the suturing of what has been sundered, is part of the consolation offered by fairy stories. But there is more:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good

catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which

is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,”

nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace:

never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow

and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face

of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting

glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

What he says about fairy stories is what I feel about talking to trees... my escape, recovery and consolation. "A sudden and miraculous grace."