Went to an NYIH lunch organized by Ren Weschler. Writer Marina Warner talked about fairies.
Warner has written about mythology many times. This new book focuses on the “fairie faith” as it is called in Scotland and Ireland — the belief in tiny creatures, little people who are linked to the wild and evocative landscape. Sometimes these beings or spirits are benevolent, and at other times they cause mischief, steal souls or children.
I read a book some years ago called The Fairie Faith in Celtic Countries which was a kind of massive oral history of sightings, beliefs and suspicious goings-on. Evans-Wentz, who brought the Tibetan Book Of The Dead to a Western audience, was the author or presenter — Tibetan-Celtic — a somewhat similar enterprise of revealing a whole spiritual world.
There was a fair amount of laughter among the academics as instances of sightings and empty graves were mentioned; it all seems a bit like implying that some folk believe that the stories of childhood are real. We tend to view the Grimm’s tales and others as potent and psychologically powerful narratives passed on from generation to generation maybe because they are such good stories. But the truth is they were told because many of the events were believed to have actually occurred.
These beliefs are no stranger than that a man parted the entire Red Sea or that a man walked on water or that the creator of the entire universe wrote a book (or two).
Warner showed one of the famous 1917 Coddingley Fairie photos — a faked image of a Fairie and a Fairie cocoon taken by some young girls (who worked in a photo lab) and made by placing cut-out illustrations in a woodland landscape.
The girls, Warner said, never claimed these to be true photos of fairies — they created the images after all — but soon enough many others who saw the photos did. Grownups. Learned men and women. “Expert testimony”. Most famously, Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes — the detective who needed only his rigid foolproof rationality to solve any crime — testified that the photos were obviously NOT fakes and that here was proof that fairies were real. Other learned men and women came forward and all agreed the photos were not fakes — they were proof positive of the existence of the little creatures.
What surprises me now is how Conan Doyle and others could not see how fake the photos look — when to me and most contemporary people it is as plain as day. Anyone can see that they are cut-out illustrations, can’t they? It’s laughable, but also baffling how learned men and women could convince themselves to see things in a way that contradicts reality.
But maybe it shouldn’t be baffling. We tend to believe that it is the eye that sees, and the ear that hears. But those organs are merely the input devices — it is the brain that “sees” and “hears”. The brain can, in this case, choose to ignore obvious imperfections and evidence and see only what it wants to see. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical way — I mean it in an absolutely literal way — the brain only sees what it wants to see and disregards the rest. One can stare right at something and simply not see it. The contradictory information is simply not acknowledged. I don’t mean “seen and later denied”, but simply not seen at all. Denial is a built-in ability we have, it is essential for our survival, but sometimes, when applied to faked photos of fairies it seems pretty damn goofy. We do not all see or hear exactly the same things — key objects have been censored in the perceptions of some individuals…one wonders if objects could likewise be added to the world in other individuals. (See Happy Idiots, below.)
Anyway, Conan Doyle was maybe at the tail end of what is sometimes referred to as the Scottish enlightenment, a clumping of scientists and engineers in the mid 19th century to early 20th. This group had an extraordinary influence in the second industrial revolution. Here is Thompson’s (later known as Lord Kelvin) machine for predicting tides. He is most well knows for the Kelvin scale of temperature — absolute zero, entropy, etc. James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, was one of this crowd. Etc. etc.
Well, Warner threw out a zinger in passing that there might be a link between the belief in the uncanny and this scientific enlightenment. A kind of secret union of opposites.
Yeats claimed that the Irish were better writers than the English because of their belief in Fairie culture — that these irrational roots left the imagination less fettered. Whether or not he’s right about the 2 nations’ respective writing abilities, he might have a point re: the imagination. I could imagine that somewhere in the unconscious of Thompson, Watt, Doyle and others lay a buried belief, or non-denial, of sprits, forces and entities lurking in the barren misty glens to the north. Could these irrational suspicions have allowed the leaps of faith that are required in a scientific and engineering revolution? To imagine a concept like entropy or absolute zero must surely have seemed just as far fetched as the existence of wee folk. (I’m not saying these guys were literally Fairie believers, but that the deep cultural marinating soaks all parts.) (See Arboretum.)
