And once you realize how many people have had these experiences (and are you sure you are not one of them?) and keep them a secret – because, as a culture, we don’t have a way to make sense of them – you will realize another thing, which I never cease to find alluring and terrifying.
Those who have met fairies have a rock-solid certainty that they have had a real encounter, and yet you know that this is not possible, you are certain of that. But how many of your own rock-solid certainties are in fact as gossamer-thin as you find theirs?
Are you sure you have come to terms with not getting a first-class degree?Are you sure that the first boy you kissed had black hair?
And are you certain that your colleague made that hurtful comment that you think you remember so clearly?
Are you sure you are awake?
When fairies come into play, such questions stop being abstract philosophy. You might well be a no-nonsense person, but other no-nonsense people are just as certain that they have met fairies as you are of being awake now – and, please remember, there is a good chance that you are no more clever or more sensible than they are. Your biases make you think so, and I know how hard it is to suppress them, but please, just as a game – can you try? We cannot stretch our reality without making it uncomfortable.
Fairies are fickle, often cruel. They show us on what shaky grounds our lives rest. As soon as we leave the path at the centre of the forest, the true path, the certain path, the one we take for granted, they come, and snatch us, and take us away with them.
*
The girl was thirteen. She was with her family in Cornwall, on the first day of their holidays, and she was very excited. She loved coming here, for the freedom from school, for the scenery, and also for the Little People. On a previous trip, her family had told her some of the fairy stories and strange local legends for which Cornwall is famous. She was already too old to believe they were true, but she enjoyed them nonetheless.
When the girl went for a walk with her mother and sister, along a remote path, she dashed ahead of them. She was thrilled, in love with life, and why walk when you can run?
She saw a gnome.
He was sitting close to the track, with a ‘nut brown wizened face’, a ‘mossy brown beard’ and ‘dark brown shining eyes’. His peaked hat was brown too, his trousers tinted in shades of ochre and brown. He grinned at the girl.
The girl stood speechless. She did not feel any wonder or awe, she only felt confused. She did not believe in gnomes, and yet, here there was one.
The gnome cocked his head, turned his back, and changed into a tree stump.
Only now did the girl find her voice. ‘Mum! Look…!’ she called, but there was nothing to look at any more. Only an old tree stump.
She mumbled something inconsequential, and they continued on their walk. But the girl was shaken. She knew how it looked: everybody would say that she had mistaken a tree stump for a gnome. But she knew she hadn’t. She couldn’t explain and she never tried to; until, years later, she found Simon Young’s Fairy Census.
The girl had been impressionable, overeager. Her head was full of fairy stories. The encounter lasted only a few seconds. What is more likely – that a thirteen-year-old crossed paths with a gnome who became a tree stump, or that a thirteen-year-old saw a tree stump and briefly thought it was a gnome?
To this day, she swears that she saw a gnome.11
*
What we call ‘reality’ is a web of connections. For example, for your debit card to exist, an enormous number of connections must be in place: your card can buy you food and books now, but in a post-apocalyptic world in which society had broken down, it would be a useless plastic rectangle. The power of your card is, to use a scholarly term, a ‘socially constructed’ reality. Which means that it is entirely real, but only as long as we believe in it.
To an extent, everything is a socially constructed reality. Think of a simple and wholesome herb – say, mint. Of course we did not invent the herb, and the herb would do fine without us. In a sense, mint is more fundamentally real than money is.
And yet when you and I think of ‘mint’, we do not have in our mind an image of the plant as it would be if no humans were around; no, we have a highly contextual image of a delicious aromatic herb that we can use to make a sauce to go with lamb and also distil into a syrup that is the basis for a popular Italian summer drink. My image of mint is of my maternal grandfather drinking an old-fashioned mix of milk, ice and mint syrup on a skin-meltingly hot July day, telling stories of his wife (my grandmother), whom I never got to meet; yours might be infused with the aroma of roast lamb for Sunday lunch at your parents’ place in Devon. If you and I disappeared today, ‘mint’ in this sense would disappear with us. A plant would still exist, but it would not be the ‘mint’ of syrup and sauce.
Social realities require our negative capability, even though they pretend they don’t: to make them work, we must accept them without asking questions. If people stopped believing that your debit card is worth something, your card would lose its value, and if people stopped believing that mint is delicious, it wouldn’t be delicious any more. The intricate, occasionally frustrating but also often beautiful web of connections that our society created for us, and that we create with our society, is what we call ‘reality’. We live inside this web.
As human beings we are the spider weaving the web, and also the fly trapped in its centre. This is a lesson that countless philosophical and spiritual traditions have passed down: don’t take the web too seriously, or it will trap you. You made the web yourself. You can, with some effort, undo it, or make it better.
Language, culture, memory, and the drugs that our laws define as either legal or not so – all are tools that we use to weave this web. We consider ‘real’ a world perceived by someone under the influence of caffeine, and ‘not real’ a world perceived by someone under the influence of morning glory seeds, for no better reason than we decided one can be bought in a supermarket and the other cannot. You join the dots of morning glory, partying and an otherworldly encounter, and the shape that emerges is that of a ‘hallucination’. But a shaman would join the same dots and would say it is a ‘vision’. Or they could select different dots to join. Perhaps the weather was a factor in the sudden appearance of that strange festival dance? The fact that it was Midsummer, traditionally one of the most enchanted nights of the year, surely needs to be taken into account.
Fairies are ‘supernatural’ because we have been trained to see ‘nature’ as a mechanism, a finely tuned watch, and you cannot stick a fairy inside a watch.
But sometimes stuff happens: a malfunction, a tear in the web. It might be you being on different drugs, it might be you having listened to too many fairy tales, it might be a chemical imbalance in your body, it might be just because. What happens is that all of a sudden, a new way of joining the dots dawns on you, something so new and unexpected that you cannot make sense of it. You feel awe, dread or confusion, you could even be sick; reality crumbles beneath your feet and you fall over. And you encounter a fairy.
Back when Natura was a goddess and it was taken for granted that she had a soul, fairies were a legitimate shape we could discern in the landscape: seeing a tree stump as a brown gnome was allowed. Fairies were not beyond nature, they were within it. Then again, humans were not beyond nature either. When we decided we were not part of the landscape, we took fairies with us: we expelled them from the natural world while we were expelling ourselves. From then on, the grid was the only shape allowed.