The Guessing Game

"Today I brew, today I bake,
Tomorrow the Queen's own child I take;
This guessing-game she'll never win,
For my name is Rumpelstiltskin!"

--The Brothers Grimm

Invention is no easy thing, and yet it's harder still to stop, innit? And so even on Saturday Wit will wake from some dream, head teeming, eyes streaming, a pile of ready gold right there spun so suddenly from Friday night straw. Mon dieu, the unconscious, and me in it, bobbing like Pip in the briny deep among the blue bedclothes, the horizon widening around me.

For the fields of my Michigan childhood were a kind of sea just as language is a lake, and Chergui by Serge Lutens is a dream of honeyed hay, hides, grass and small odd flowers.

And what of this metaphor of straw? Why, it's the Miller's daughter, dodo. You remember Rumpelstiltskin, the internal imp of the perverse who secretly fuels the strange female alchemy of creation, her baby and any domestic happiness the price that must be paid for seeing something where nothing used to be. Unless, of course, she guesses The Name.

At the quarry in July my cousins told me the water was "bottomless", and so I hugged the shore and learned to swim in the Lapeer library instead, suspecting already exactly what the limitless meant. Like the bright orange amber of Chergui old things might get suspended forever there, but we also go double deep where knowing a name will set everything free.

Drowning once in a fairy tale I too saw God's foot on the treadle of the loom. Ever after I knew all the haunted shades of meaning that were captive in other people's words. And for that they called me mad.

Link: Rumpelstiltskin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Let's have a little Anne Sexton on the topic (from the poem of the topic's name):

"There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn."