What darkness holds

There's a violence there, in a blank space. A passive aggressive sort of violence, but passive aggression can still hurt you. Blank space goads the viewer to filling it with something, anything, as long as it gets filled. There be dragons on any part of a map that would be otherwise blank. I think that the sea monsters were just doodles by bored cartographers to start with. The human mind abhors a vacuum so it pours into the vacuum that which it has most of: imagination. Fairies lived in the forest and the past (with the dead), places where people couldn't enter (at least not safely). Now they live in space and mutilate cows. When space becomes boring, and astronaut just a job, then where will the fairies go next? the net? You could look at Ghost in the Shell as a future folk tale.

I'm writing about fairies a lot. As always. I'm reading about them as well, which, again, is pretty standard. English ones, incidentally, not the Germanic or Scandinavian ones. One of the thing about our ones is that the idea of fairies being girly isn't knew. They relate to women's things, and they inhabit women's spaces: they do domestic things well or badly; they adore children and babies, although this isn't necessarily a good thing for children, quite the opposite really.

I'm reading Troublesome Things by Diane Purkiss and she certainly sees the female part of them, but she's also big into psychoanalytic explanations for stories. That's fine of course, I'm much less militant over Freud's methodological issues than I used to be; he may not have been a scientist but as a philosophical doctrine it's perfectly valid to look at thing that way. What Purkiss' interpretations fall apart, for me, is when is when she's talking about mouths. I can't remember an exact example, but say she gives an example tale where as soon as the mortal says some a the fairies name or their secret, giving away their knowledge of the fairies, then retribution hits and the moral is destroyed. Purkiss reads this and goes, right, mouth - open orifice - exposing the inside of the body - sexsexsexsex - here is the what it's all about. She talks so much about The Body as important (which it often is) that she misses the words. I think it's the speech that's important. The social function of fairies relies on the way they let people talk about things that they can't talk about: infanticide and incest are common things, and women have often been limited on what they can say, how they represent themselves.

I'm back to fairies being about women again, but they are. Maybe because men had more say in the church. It's harder and bigger and more solid. Right, that's unbelievably phallic, but what I mean is that with all the theology and exegesis Christianity is a very boy's way of looking at the world: how does it work? What does it look like when I take it apart? Exactly how many levels of Angels are there and in what order are they ranked?

I really what to read fairy stories from a hundred years in the future. I wonder, as genders change and melt into one another, who fairies will relate to?