laramie

This panel included Pat Wrede, Ruth Berman, mrissa, Jane Yolen and myself. It covered a lot of ground. These are a few points that struck me particularly:

In the ‘Careful What You Wish For’ panel discussion I found myself rebelling against the idea that magical gifts should necessarily only go to the deserving. That seems to be a culturally-based assumption, and stories from other cultures present differing values. I cited a pair of similar fairy tales. In one tale magical gifts are given to the young woman who performs acts of kindness, and in the other story very similar gifts go to a young trickster who extorts them from a trio of magical beings (old blind women who have only one eye between them) – and I cited the story of Abu Muhammed, Hight Lazybones – in which an incredibly lazy young man, who doesn’t lift a finger on his own behalf – or for anyone else, invests a small sum (similarly to the story of Dick Whittington and his Cat) which ultimately makes him wealthier than the sultan – totally unearned abundance.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m opposed to working and earning one’s way in the world. I was raised with a Protestant work ethic, and can be a real workaholic when I get going on a project that’s meaningful to me. I have noticed, though, that the world does not necessarily reward people in accordance with how hard they work, or how well, or how diligently, or in accordance with how kind, honest and decent they might be. There are a lot of other factors in play: personalities, relationships, luck…

Often the world is incredibly unfair. Dishonest people prosper, kind people suffer, even people who do work hard for the rewards they enjoy don’t realize how much they owe to luck unless their luck changes.

It makes sense to me that magic in stories be treated as a neutral force: magical gifts benefit the good and the wicked alike – with the real moral lessons found more in the consequences that flow from the choices that characters make in dealing with those gifts. (I did point out that much of the charm in the Harry Potter books was in just that: the magic in those stories was mostly a lot of fun, the problems with it were due to the misuses that evil people made of it.)

Having been raised in a Christian tradition, I’m thinking of the promise, “Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given unto you.” The idea being that the ultimate power in the Universe is the kind of love that is more concerned with what we need than with what we deserve. Think also of the character of Mr. Dolittle (Liza’s father) in ‘My Fair Lady’ who reminded us that the undeserving poor are just as needy as the deserving poor.

It seems to me that the world is a hard enough place on all of us that no one should be denied the benefit of what unearned abundance might come their way. The fact is that most of us enjoy many unearned benefits in our lives: the gifts of our senses, of the air that we breathe, the bounty and benefits of the natural world. How we use these gifts is an indicator of character, and character is a bigger determiner of happiness than is anything else.

During the discussion the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was also cited – the story in which the magical fish grants wish after wish, as the wife demands more and more: first a fine house, then a castle, then to be mayor, then king, then emperor, then pope, and finally to be god himself. Some people take the lesson from this story that the consequence of seeking beyond one’s place is to be put in one’s place. But it seems to me that there is another interpretation, which is that the woman’s final wish was granted after all – and the lesson is that God is found in ordinary life, among ordinary people and ordinary circumstances – more easily than in the halls of worldly power.