There is a variant on the Cinderella story, one of hundreds, called, ‘Donkey Skin’, which has some details in it missing from the popular version, details that might help us appreciate why it’s so difficult to get to the Ball with even the wiliest Fairy God Mother..
Suppressed details are always the juicy bit of the story, like the reporter’s question to Putin at the Helsinki summit, ‘Did you want Trump to win and did you help him?,’ to which the reply was, ‘Yes I did, yes, I did,’ being artfully airbrushed from the White House transcript of that hallowed meeting…
but I digress…
In the story of Donkey Skin, the heroine has to work as a swine herd and servant girl, taking on menial disguise in flight from a strange madness that has gripped her father, the king.
The Queen has just died of a mysterious illness and you might imagine that the king is smitten with grief. It certainly appears so. In his delusional state the despairing king imagines his daughter to be his next bride and so she is forced to flee, aided by the obligatory Fairy God Mother who knows to get out when craftiness fails, camoflaged in a donkey skin flayed by order of the king himself..
who now clearly has issues.
A Prince of a neighboring kingdom spies Donkeyskin one day and falls in love with her so deeply he collapses. In his delirium he shouts out that only a loaf of bread baked by the servant girl will save him. A ring lost in the dough gives away her true identity and everyone gets to win including her father, the king, whose madness is spontaneously lifted and his claim over her renounced when he first sees her as a bride…….
So not only does the Princess manage to escape the clutches of her mad father but he himself is redeemed by testifying to the fact of her separate destiny.
The king’s madness and it’s cure seem apropos in these days of deliberate nonsense and obfuscation. So how does the king’s madness unfold and what might we learn from the way it is resolved?
The king goes mad in stages. First there is the death of his Queen and you might suppose the madness of a broken heart but upon forensic inspection we see that though, ”the king’s happiness was shattered by the sudden illness of his dear wife,’… it was because, ‘she was so many years younger than himself that the idea she might die before him came as a great shock.”
It was not her death but the idea of it that drove him mad. Not her loss but that she had a destiny other than the bit part in his drama for which he had reserved her. His refusal to face her mortality is a denial of her humanity, in itself a form of ‘killing off’ the Other.
Rather than face the limits of his Narcissistic Omnipotence he collapses under the strain of denial, extending his treatment of others as stock to everyone else including his daughter who he now relates to as his date.
When the Princess runs to her FGM asking what the hell she can do, she advises her to ask the king for a dress made of the sky.
‘He won’t be able to do it and will have to let you go…’
But he somehow manages it so she suggests asking for a dress made of the Sun which she supposed would be trickier and it did indeed take death threats and staying up all night for several unhappy jewellers and gold smiths but by morning it was made.
The king’s madness increases as he doubles down. His incestuous desires join forces with out-of-this-world idealization of his daughter who he’s happy to experience as cosmic elemental force. But his depersonalization of her both as both sexual object and as goddess incarnate is then cemented by his response to her third and final attempt to appeal to whatever vestige of Relatedness remains in the old king by asking for the hide of his donkey which she’s sure he must refuse since he cherished the little donkey ‘above all his other possessions,’ thinking that he would never have the heart to kill his beloved pet and so she would be free…
But the skin is summarily delivered to her door and so she knows the king’s madness is complete, that the Other really doesn’t exist for him anymore. She can only escape, camoflaged by the skin, living out the arrogant king’s inferiority for him as Swineherd and Cinders.
Many a child is compelled to forgo their own destinies for the sake of an unstable parent who ‘knows best’ and overly steers their child in the name of ‘helping’. Such involvement has an incestuous quality because the unique destiny of the other, their person-hood, has been sacrificed in the process with the conviction that they shouldn’t trust their own thoughts and feelings.
Its a form of dumbing kids down that is not only mad but maddening. Poor Donkey Skin is made to feel that it is she who is the crazy one in the equation. Such enstupiding of others is easily done. If you treat people like donkeys they will soon bray, preferring to bend themselves out of shape than be incongruent with expectation.
So the danger is not just that the king is mad and can’t see what is in front of him but that the Princess feels it’s her fault and that she couldn’t think up something clever enough to keep her father’s hands off her and fool him into letting her go. So she begins to feel like a stupid donkey rather than realize she has been dumped on.
This process of enstupiding, so necessary to centralised power, is way more advanced than you might think. Of course there are the risible excesses of political correctness that compel shops to mark the Harry Potter broomstick on sale at Halloween with the disclaimer, ‘Does not actually fly,’ and sell salt with a serving suggestion….
But I only realized just how total we have become identified with our donkeyskins when I noticed today, for the first time ever and for your convenience, instructions on a toilet roll.
Apparently it’s a five stage process for which the kind manufacturers have provided a step by step approach to polishing your Nipsy, complete with diagrams, pointing arrows, when to wipe and when to pat, just in case you have become so addled with disinformation that you can’t recall, since last you crapped..
how to wipe your own arse.
Huzzah for the beacon of hope that is our proud civilization.
I suppose the thing is that if you are going to lie big, so big that not only did you not mean what you said,…
but that you actually meant the opposite of what you said,..and want us to take comfort in your being 180* out of whack
and then preface all this by saying that you hoped it would be perfectly obvious to everyone by now that you meant the absolute opposite of the tainted shite already pouring forth from your foul gob,…
then you need someone dumb enough to believe it and if they do not exist then they must be created. And where better to start than with the assumption that people are so out of touch with themselves that they need bathroom advice widely mastered by the average four year old.
