Charles de Lint’s story “Pixel Pixies” in Tapping the Dream Tree (Tor) was inspired by a friend’s suggestion that spirits now live in the wires, even more than the trees, travel through the internet, take up residence in computers and “live on electricity and lord knows what else”.
In the story, a used bookstore owner finds her computer playing up. She can’t exit her browser, and can’t switch to another window – and can’t log off without losing important data she had been working on but has failed to save. When she tries switching to sites on the drop-down “Favorites” menus she is switched to totally unrelated sites. A striking fey woman comes in and suggests she should try turning her sweater inside out. What has she got to lose? The bookstore lady tries it, and the problem disappears. The fey lady says, “If you’re lucky, they’re still on the internet and didn’t follow you home.”
This sets us up for a wild, entertaining story in which mischievous, vandalizing pixies – who can appear either as tiny men or as dancing lights the size of “the mouth of a shot glass” – come spilling out of the computer screen. What is to be done? The fey lady – identified now as an “oak king’s daughter” – has the solution: the primal, pre-church version of Bell, Book and Candle. The ritual requires a book that has never been read – in this case, a book with uncut pages. The bookstore lady finds one in her locked cabinet of first editions. And it is:
The Trembling of the Veil by William Butler Yeats, number seventy-one of a thousand-copy edition privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd in 1922.
The uncut book is placed on the sidewalk and used to trap the pixies – who are finally driven back into the computer and flushed into cyberspace when the bookstore lady boots up.
Yeats observed (in the preface to a collection of fairy tales gathered by his friend Lady Gregory) that pixies and similar “wild creatures and green things” tend to “creep towards our light by little holes and crevices”. So why not the passage of a computer screen – or even an incoming email?
"Pixel Pixies" gave me delicious shivers when I first read it, because on that same night I had been writing about Yeats for my Dreamer's Book of the Dead and had decided to give the prologue to that book a title curiously similar to that of the uncut book in the story: "The Night When the Veil Thins." In my night study, I felt the workings of a shelf elf, more than that of pixel pixies.
Charles de Lint has gone on to write a larger-scale treatment of this theme in Spirits in the Wires, one of my favorites among his Newford novels, in which he has developed a Canadian mode of magical realism. But I am sure he has noticed that pixies keep up with human technology - when they are not ahead of it - so a title for today might be Spirits Go Wireless.
13 comments:
Charles De Lint is a favorite. I'm reading this collection now, but haven't gotten to "Pixel Pixies" yet. During a dorveille on the evening of the Fourth of July I had an itch to write a letter to someone who is going through a rough patch. I was then inspired to photocopy and stuff his story "The Buffalo Man" -from the same collection- into the envelope. (This featured the Crow Girls and Jilly Coppercorn, and the Harper doing a soul retrieval.) De Lint opens us up to the magic of the world, and perhaps by spending some time in it through reading, we will be able to bring some of it into our own lives. And, though Pixies may now be wireless, they sometimes still travel by post.
My search for Charles de Lint, who has been evading me in Vancouver bookstores, continues... (I may have to track him in the Other Vancouver - or the Library). Charles's friend must be right. I always suspect the cyber elves must have had a little snack when email attachments go missing, and this post had an bit of a coincidental echo... Exploring the streets of Providence with dream friend Michele a few weeks ago I was struck by a horizontal spiral structure of narrow wooden strips fanning out from an electrical pole, toward the top. It looked like an art installation but no... So we speculated perhaps it was meant to prevent raccoons from getting tangled in wires, or it was a stairway to the home of the electricity elves. Glad I can put that question to rest now...
I'll also take this as notice from the shelf elf to redouble my efforts to get a hold of De Lint sooner than later, thanks!
What a wonderful story! By the way, I began to suspect a while ago that my computer is a living being, because within years it gave me a lot of coincidences. It usually glitches when I'm not supposed to do something that I am not aware of, or when I need to pay attention to something. Although, I've never thought that it's some kind of "Pixel Pixies" :-) I used to have a very interesting relationship with my old sewing machine, too. - That one was definitely a being with a soul and attitude. What was really fascinating, it always reacted my speech. :-)))
Alla - Well, if we live in an animate universe (as is my everyday observation) why shouldn't a sewing machine, a computer, and/or what passes through them be alive and conscious too?
Savannah - I hope you took a photograph of that intriguing "spiral staircase" atop the electricity pole. I'm smiling over the notion that it may be a kind of Jacob's ladder for the spirits of the wires.
Justin - I've had members of my advanced trainings in Soul Recovery techniques read some of de Lint for fictional points d'appui on the nature of soul loss, especially his novel "The Onion Girl".
Ruefully, the thought occurred to me but...
Next time elven stairways appear, I'll be right on it!
Savannah - The "thin places" aren't easy to capture with a camera!
Alla - your comment about the sewing machine reminded me of a very colorful turn of phrase from the 19th century proto-surrealist writer Comte de Lautreamont in his Les Chants de Maldoror: "Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella".
Justin - Ah, but don't forget the critical first word: "BEAUTIFUL as the chance meeting" etc. There's the surprise that is crucial to Surrealist wordplay.
BEAUTIFUL, yes...
...also, I do plan to read "The Onion Girl" as Jilly Coppercorn is a wonderful character, and I'm keen to learn her backstory. And it does seem like de Lint's work is a type of fictional (or shall I say "Imaginal") guidebook for many of the things discussed in this blog. Over the weekend I read "Embrace the Mystery" also in "Tapping the Dream Tree". It was interesting that I read that story in conjunction with this post, and your recent posts on the afterlife over at the Dreamgates blog. The main character in the tale travels through dreams to a dream city known as Mabon to talk with a best friend who had terminated her own life. Personal healing and a bit of closure is achieved.
What I find so remarkable about de Lint's work is how, through a story is how he is able to pass along important truths of everyday magic to readers. Not only is he an entertaining, but he opens up vast territories of the soul, which is what any great bard should do.
Have you ever taken or led Imaginal journeys to Newford? It might be an experiment worth trying.
Justin - A journey to Newford (or a pathworking based on its geography) might be an interesting enterprise, leaving us to discover whether the writer's imagination has produced a transpersonal imaginal construct. Not as interesting, however, as what we have done & continue to do in my advanced workshops: which is to continue to grow and expand our very own dream cities. These are gated communities, of course. You only get to them by invitation.
Robert and Justin - I ALWAYS enjoy your magnificent dialogs rich in quotations and easy references... :-) The only minus is - it makes me want to plunge into the source right away, and recently I had to prohibit myself from any side reading (with an exception for this blog), focusing only on a few software manuals, otherwise, my main actual goal would, probably, never be accomplished... You tempt me every time to get provoked by your wonderful erudition and elegance of style. I love you, people. :-)))))
Post a Comment