Spirits in Place
And a reason to laugh at yourself
The Spirit of Woman in Bohemia by Kate B. Palmer and Laugh and Grow Wise by Frederick J. Pohl
It is dark outside, but it is bright somewhere.
In the forests there are spirits. Spirits of place, possibly. Spirits of nations. And spirits of women. There are always spirits of women in the forests. Things change but yet the forests, which are fringed by civilisation, do not change. The fashions change; generation succeeds generation; but the essence of place, the essence of people yet displaced, remains the same.
In the forests those subjected by nature consider nature. They wonder if they might approach nature, seduce it, bend nature to their wills.
Each new generation must approach. Approach nature, approach the spirit of the forest and the place. That is how it has always been, in Bohemia.
Sometimes, it is said, the young women of the village will disappear into the night. They will return later — perhaps a day late for their duties, perhaps longer — and they will never tell what it was they did while gone. All the village knows they were observing some ritual. These practices live long in the heart and remain in the mind for a lifetime. No one ever tells, in later years, what it was they all disappeared to do.
It was not a Bacchae, a great bloody scene of horror. Such things do not happen in Bohemia. But it may as well have been. The spirit of the forest and other spirits of place do not believe wholly in restraint and decorum. This spirit of place believes in elaboration and vivid fancy.
In the forests, the spirits become as the real thing. The spirits can be seen; they talk of those who would defy them, seek to change them. The spirits tell each other that they fear nothing; those who trifle with them are fools. They will not change. They will never change as long as the forest remains free of the tread and print of man.
On occasion, at these gatherings, the spirits of nations, of modern countries, come out to play. They perform, in national costume, giving observers sight of natural characteristics. They dance and sing. They whirl around. They make of themselves great spectacle.
It is quite natural that they do this. Countries have animal spirits; they have characters. It is only fit that they be characters, when got together in an appropriate setting.
The spirits of modern woman and the cloud maidan meet and frolic. They each have some words for each other.
Why do the spirits behave in this way? Modernity does yet move all around them. The times, they are changing. It may be possible that the spirits be forced into rearguard fighting, into desperate self-defence, to preserve their forest, their tradition, their ways and their signal patterns of life.
Time cannot, after all that, be halted; the movements of history affect everyone and everything eventually. It is never the time to change, to be defeated, until that day comes. As it inevitably will.
Spirits may wish to perform their functions, to demonstrate their powers, while they still may. But performances fade and languish in the memory. The written word might last a little longer, might serve to memorialise a moment in time, a brief moment soon eclipsed, a spirited point never to be approached again.
This one was a ‘playlet written and staged by Kate B. Palmer at a dinner given at their home by her husband to some of his bohemian friends on the eleventh day of September Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen.’ A time long past, a time of spirits, but still remembered.
In Frederick J. Pohl’s comic play, meanwhile, the king and the jester are characters. A vizier who wishes to rule the kingdom believes there is nothing to learn from comedy, from spirit. Not too subtly, he is finally humiliated by the jester, who teaches those proud men around the king and court (and the proud woman the queen), at least in theory, that trying to appear strong or noble or wise is not a substitute for the real thing. Nor is any substitute for wisdom. And the jester and his marvel teach, too, that spirit, and being spirited, matter a great deal more than the fruits of front and pretence.
Humiliated by the court, the jester makes use of the marvel supplied by new acquaintance, a merchant. There is all the more reason, the jester says, to be glad to laugh at yourself in its reflection.