The lettered sign on one of the suitcases read TO ILLINOIS.
The second one had the sign TO NEBRASKA.
And the third one had the sign TO TEXAS.
The Story of Little Briar-Rose
A Scholarly Study
Thorny-Rose Dreamer, you sleep as though dead: Worlds within worlds within worlds in your head.
—Heinrich Kleinwolf, Steep Dreams
The Dreamer is fifteen years old, and she has been fifteen years old for nearly a thousand years.
—Alesandro Leija, Fairy Tales of Aragon
We are investigating the story of Sleeping Beauty to see whether there are not hidden in it the seeds of fuller happenings than those that are usually narrated. Yes, there are indeed unused, hidden and explosive story riches in the Sleeping Beauty Story. But these riches must remain hidden and unused, if not forever, at least for a thousand years. For there would be world-wide turmoil in the hidden parts of it were made known.
“World-wide turmoil?”
“Yes, even wider than the world. There would be turmoil in one entire mind from one end of it to the other.”
But first, there are a couple of loose ends that must be dealt with. Have you ever noticed that most loose ends are found at the beginning?
We quote:
“In the tenth-century Europe and Near East, there was a general feeling that the world would end in either the year 999 or 1000.
The popular prophets finally settled on the date of April 1 of the year 1000. (April First was at that time the first day of the year, so it was the first All Fools' Day.) Many people, as the day approached, gave away all that they owned to whomever wanted it. They sang a lot of and laughed a lot and repented of their sins. Ninety-five percent of the people believed that the End of the World was nigh, and they were glad to see that great day coming. And five percent of the people believed that the world was not about to end, and they acquired land titles and property titles from all the True Believers. ‘What monumental fools they are!’ the skeptical five percent cried. ‘Oh, how the laugh is going to be on those fools!’
“But who was the laugh really on? For the world really did end at dawn of April 1 of the year 1000.”
—Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History
We quote again:
“In the year 410 of Restored Salvation, a Camel swallowed the entire world and retained it in its maw for a period of thirty-nine seconds. The beast then regurgitated the world again, and things went on as before. People had the feeling that something odd had happened, but they could not quite identify the feeling.
“In the year 785 BC a huge fish swallowed the entire Universe and retained it (not in its belly, but in a small space behind the pineal gland, the dreamer's gland, in its brain) for sixty-nine hours. A peculiarity of this manifestation was that each person in the world believed that he alone had been swallowed by the big fish, which became known as the Jonah-Fish in legend.
“Again, in the year 209 BC the pagan god Indra captured the entire Universe in his brain. As the Jonah-Fish had done, Indra set it in the small space behind his dreamer's gland (his pineal gland). The effect of this was that the Universe was existing only in the dreams of Indra and did not have an independent existence. But the experience gave Indra a headache, so after nine minutes he ejected the Universe again. Then the Universe teetered between an existence that was slightly more tenuous than its previous existence.
“These things really happened. They were not observational malfunctions. So what does the human community do when such massive and impossible things happen? It gives them a name and consigns them to being a footnote in the most obscure history it can find. The name given to these phenomena was ‘Universal Inversion’ or ‘Topological Inversion’, and mine was the most obscure history it could find.”
—Atrox Fabulinus
That takes care of the loose ends. They may not belong here, but it is a topological imperative that everything should be somewhere. Now we proceed to the story of Little Briar-Rose who came to be known as Sleeping Beauty.
The story presently is found in several different versions and forms. One of them is named THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS, by Charles Perrault who lived from 1628 to 1703. The story appears in 1697 in a book titled “Accounts and Tales of Times Past by My Mother the Goose.” In France of that day, ‘Mother Goose Tales’ had the same meaning as ‘Old Wives Tales’ had in England. But the “Mother Goose Nursery Rymes” published in London in 1760 owed nothing to Charles Perrault except the borrowed name ‘Mother Goose.’
A second more modern version of the story was written by the Brothers Grimm (Jacob who lived 1785-1863 and Wilhelm who lived 1786-1859). The story was in the “Household Tales” of the Grimms' that appeared between 1812 and 1822. It was named Little Briar-Rose (Dorn-Roschen). Though written more than a hundred years after the Perrault story, Little Briar-Rose is of an earlier recension. Using the technique of diffusion and parallelism, the tireless Brothers Grimm, sometimes employing as many as one hundred oral versions of a story from all Europe and the Near East, were able to reconstruct and to date approximately (so they believed) the original stories. They set the date-of-origin of Little Briar-Rose (its most popular name), or Sleeping Beauty (its second most popular name) as being close to, but not before, the year 1000.
The Brothers Grimm believed that the Story of Little Briar-Rose had a sort of predecessor in folklore named Noah and his Wonderful Ark.
What connection could there be between Noah and his Ark and the story of Sleeping Beauty? Oh, Noah was an enchanter, so he put all the birds and beasts on the Ark to sleep, and his wife and sons and his sons' wives too. “It's the easiest way to handle it,” he said, “the hay bill for the beasts alone would break me.” After he had put them all to sleep, Noah went up to the caboose (the little room with the window in the top of the Ark) and sat in the Captain's chair with his left eye open and his right eye closed in sleep. And he slept from the seventeenth day of the second month till the seventeenth day of the seventh month of what has been called ‘The Year of The Big Flood.’
“Was the phenomena of Topological Inversion involved in either the Noah story or the Sleeper story?”
“How would we know if it was?”
A minor version of the Sleeping Beauty story is Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Ballet. The story is expressed more in the music and dance sequences than in its words and glosses. Another minor version of the story is found in two songs by Stephen Foster: Beautiful Dreamer and Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming. The story is found entirely in the music and not at all in the words of these two songs.
And then there are several paintings which show the Sleeper's Castle surrounded by its bramble-bushes which merge into clouds, for the whole thing is free-floating in the sky — well now, it is really free-floating in nothing at all, it is entirely outside space.
In the Perrault version there are eight fairies (seven good ones and one bad one). In the Grimm version there are no fairies at all. The two brothers, the crown princes of the fairy-tale industry, seldom used fairies. Instead of fairies, there were thirteen wise women, twelve good ones and one bad one.
The waking of the Sleeping Beauty Princess is contrived and artificial in all versions. Indeed, Jacob Grimm, in his old age and after the death of his brother Wilhelm, gave the opinion that the sleeping princess had not really wakened at all, that she was still sleeping after her ‘century’ had gone nine or ten times over. Jacob was even heard to mutter, “She must not wake, she must not wake. If she wakes up, then everything is finished.” But Jacob Grimm had gone a bit dotty in his old age, and nobody inquired too closely as to what he meant.
Little Briar-Rose was an incomparably intricate and spacious and wise person. Since she had no speaking parts in any of the versions of her own story, it is something of a mystery how we know that she was so intricate and wise and spacious, but it's always been known about her. She became ‘The Earthen Vessel Holding Treasure,’ one selected ou
t of many billions for the role. Was there something mysterious about Briar Castle, the home of Little Briar-Rose? There is something mysterious about every castle; that's one of the requirements of being a castle. Was Briar Castle unusually large or in any way impressive?
“Not too large to fit behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain,” says one peculiar voice.
“Be quiet, peculiar voice,” we say. What evidence have we.
It impressed one poet who wrote:
“It's an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.”
Was Sleeping Beauty really as beautiful as has been made out? Yes, she was quite beautiful in form and face. However, though quite beautiful, there was more strength and intensity and scope in her fifteen-year-old face than there was softness and gentleness. Or, as Belloc has it in one of his poems:
“Her face was like a King's Command
When all the swords are drawn.”
Even in her strange sleep, Little Briar-Rose was in command. This is especially evident in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Ballet, in its music and dance sequences, more than in its glosses and words.
She must not wake, she must not wake!
“Hey, old Arpad Arutinov, if the world ended on April 1, of the year 1000, on the first April Fools Day, as you say it did, how come we are still here?”
“You are not here, not quite here, not as you mean it. You are only here in a much more tenuous way, in a much more tenuous ‘here.’ ”
“Why would the Lord of Eternity leave us in a tenuous state for near a thousand years?”
“For fun, perhaps, since a thousand years is less than one eyeblink to the Lord of Eternity.”
“Hey, old Atrox Fabulinus, how much space is there behind the pineal gland in the human brain?” “Not much space behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain, not much space at all. Barely enough space to contain the Universe.”
Yes, of course the world ended at dawn of April 1 of the year l,000. That is proved by all sorts of evidence. No, there is nothing of the World remaining anywhere. There's a catch to that, however. To be completely inaccurate about the matter, we must state that one person has survived 'nowhere', outside of space. She is in a deep sleep, and has been in deep sleep in her ‘nowhere place’ for nigh on to a thousand years. But she has deep dreams in her deep sleep, and all of us are items in her dreams. Oh, don't carry on like that, folks. This isn't that bad at all. Consider the things that could have been.
What if the Camel that swallowed the entire World in the year 410 of Restored Salvation and retained it in his stomach for thirty-nine seconds, had retained it until the present time? What if all of us had been born and lived, and would die, in the crowded space of a camel's stomach! Anybody who has been in a camel's stomach for only thirty-nine seconds knows that it is a damnable place to be. The present circumstance is better.
What if, when in the year 785 BC a huge fish had swallowed the entire universe and retained it for sixty-nine hours, the fish had retained it all until the present time? The circumstance for all of us would long since have become a situation of delirious insanity. The present circumstance is better.
What if, when in the year 209 BC the pagan god Indra captured the entire universe in his brain, he had retained it there until the present time instead of rejecting it after nine minutes? Oh, the awkward, misshapen, totally hideous dreams of Indra that we would then inhabit! The present circumstance is much better.
As it is, we are being dreamed by a pleasant, variegated mind, by a person of quiet sanity and balance and, yes, sweetness.
If we had been able to select, out of all the persons ever, the person we would most like to be dreamed by, could we have made a better selection than Little Briar-Rose?
End of Scholarly Study
Along The San Pennatus Fault
The feathered race with pinions skim the air.
Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear.
—John Hookham Frere
And now the young dudes have all taken to wearing feathers on their faces. What next, Quinctius, what next?
—Cato the Younger
That was the summer they all had a lot of fun around the San Pennatus Fault Crest. “Here on the edge of the San Pennatus Fault we are on the ‘Edge of Monsters’ also,” the ever-rational Isidore Merriman said. “We can only hope that they will be hopeful monsters. Maybe. Some of the time. It's true that our experiments have been plagued by the ‘Unreality Syndrome.’ Well, such plagues are always among the things we have to deal with. We've had a bad streak of ‘hopeless monsters,’ and I don't know what we'll do if we have any more of them.”
“Oh, we'll continue to cover them up,” the elegant Merald Hilltop said. “Sometimes they're amusing. Sometimes they're horrifying. And sometimes they're simply not to be lived with. The Flying Turtle Sydney, what are we to think of him? He's sure to crash and be killed soon, and yet he seems to be perfectly designed for flying. Nobody could have dreamed of a more perfectly designed-for-flight turtle: and so, as we are the designers in this Institute, I suppose that we have designed him. It's no secret that our fondest hope at this breakthrough biotechnic college is that man may fly; that he may fly by a great and instant leap. So our ‘think flight, think bird, think feathers’ may have slopped over a little bit. It's just that Sydney is so clumsy at handling his flying muscles yet. And they do gall him where they come through his carapace. The ‘Unreality Syndrome’ is certainly strongly represented in Sydney, and yet he does fly! But how did it happen? And what have we contributed to his metamorphosis, except perhaps an enhanced anxiety threshold?”
“Likely an enhanced anxiety threshold is all that it takes. We are on the edge of the San Pennatus Fault waiting for genetic earthquakes to happen, and all instrumentation indicates that they are most likely to happen here,” Josef Prorok (always a resoundingly indecisive man) spoke strongly. “Put enough stress on a point and it will rupture. One more feather's weight added to the stress should do it. We're that close. All our anxiety meters indicate that the rupture point will probably be reached on the Fault today or tomorrow.”
“It almost seems as if somebody is throwing diversions in the way of it,” Anselm Salto commented. “However he has happened, Sydney the Flying Turtle is outrageous! But if he is a hoax, then how was he brought about and by whom? One day he was an ordinary (though very intelligent) slack-water turtle. And the next morning he had grown wings and was flying, though in a clumsy fashion. Was that only this morning? Yes, it was. And he's the same creature. I'd know those brown eyes and that ‘huk-huk-huk’ grunt of his anywhere.”
Meanwhile, while these six directors of the San Pennatus Fault College were discussing their incipient breakthroughs, several younger persons were visiting the same Flying Turtle Sydney.
“Turtle Sydney has dreams of flying,” Roxanna Dropforge said, “and they are possibly the most convincing dreams that any turtle ever had. He dreams that he is flying, and the people who see him flying in his dreams believe that he is flying, and an analysis of the facts divulges that he is indeed flying. But ‘indeed flying’ is a tricky business. Oh Turtle Dreams, Turtle Dreams!”
“We would have better luck if we called it ‘Quantum Eideticism’ instead of ‘Turtle Dreams,’ Roxanna,” Anatole Prorok said. Anatole was eighteen years old and Roxanna Dropforge was twelve. They had been in on ‘Project Turtle’ more than any of the others in their bunch.
Back to the Six Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College again! “Clumsy or not, Sydney's flying works,” Isidore Merriman said. “It's really something new in flying. I'd have said that the problems involved in turtle flight were unsolvable, but every one of them has been solved in the most amazing way I ever saw. What we have wrought!”
“Well, the ‘Showboat Syndrome’ has broken out in quite a few of our animals,” Masterman Jordan said. “Hermione the Anaconda is sporting one red eye and one green eye this morning. Of course
I suspect hoax, but in this case the hoax seems to be disavowed in advance. Last week, when the Calf Rob Roy showed up with American Flags on both his eyeballs, there was no doubt that it was a hoax. And it was. Contact lenses. An elaborate hoaxer had fitted Rob Roy with contact lenses. They were well-made, and they did correct his defective vision. And the American Flags on each eyeball did cut down on the light to which he was supersensitive. I blame your son for the hoax, Godwin, and you blame mine. Likely they were in it together. But it insured that contact lenses were the first thing we'd look for this time, and that's not what it is. It's much deeper. I believe that there has been very intricate gene tampering with that snake. I've run every possible test on Hermione and I can't find out the mechanism employed. It's a good thing she's a good-natured snake, but I feel that she's not on our side in this. Anyhow she won't, or can't, give me an explanation for the phenomenon of her eyes. After all, she has a vocabulary of only forty-nine words. ‘Hoke joke, Jord,’ she says, and that's all the explanation she'll give. Well, it's a sign that there's genetic energy burgeoning all over the place. Maybe the quake-and-break here at the San Pennatus Fault will come as early as today.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 325