This is a story which deserves another look, having already reflected upon it here..https://andywhiteblog.com/?s=fisherman%27s+ It seems like a simple story of a greedy woman who then gets her just desserts. But there’s way more to it than that.
Once upon a time a poor Fisherman pulled in his net to find he had caught the King of the Fishes. He lets him go in return for a wish. The fisherman runs home to tell his wife who promptly settles on wanting a larger house, though no sooner is it granted than she wants a mansion and then a castle and then a palace and then…
The King of the Fishes becomes increasingly peeved with all this wanting more and more. So when she changes her mind for the umpteenth time and wants a galaxy with added neutron stars and a warp speed sleigh carved from a single flawless diamond to get about in…. he returns both husband and wife to their tumbledown cottage by the sea.
It seems like an ordinary moral tale not to want too much. Yet we might wonder at the wife’s eternal dissatisfaction. She seems grasping and yet you can’t help but think she is also fleeing from some unnamed horror. There is something avoidant about her discontent and beneath the bullish exterior one begins to suspect an underlying anxiety of cosmic proportions.
Her eternal wanting the next bigger and better thing has a manic quality to it, as though she were in flight from some dread prospect, manifest as the inability to settle, to engage with, to really take in and enjoy. It seems like she is wanting to avoid the cardinal rule of good things, which is that all good things come to an end. Her project is to be a step ahead of death and decay by making sure she never does more than dip her toe into the temporary arrangements that are the hallmark of life.
Victor Frankl calls this a ‘no-ogenic neurosis’, refusing the loan of life because of the debt of death. Something has impacted the Fisherman’s wife so severely as to make the prospect of ordinary life quite unbearable. She cannot sit still. She has to rush from one situation to another. She is the person you know who is always on the go, has a million things to do, whose diary overflows, who is forever having to love and leave you. She longs for peace and quiet but somehow cannot give it to herself for more than a moment. For all the business and excitement there is no real joy. She looks strained and exhausted all the time.
In our story the heroine hops from one situation to another, trying to stay ahead of the ravages of time, wanting to be the author of endings rather than being at the mercy of them. It looks like mania but actually its phobia. She is not greedy, she is conducting an anxious rearguard action against catastrophic loss. Anais Nin once said, ‘the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow.’ This euphemistic ‘as if’ pays only lip service to the harsh yet deeper truth that the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others knowing full well that they will not be there tomorrow.
It’s often puzzling to the casual observer that people stay in relationships which clearly do not work, or that they trade a poor relationship for another just as bad, or that a match which seems compatible is not allowed to last. You can’t help wondering whether the reason behind these vexing quandaries might be the same. The ill matched pair, whilst full of frustrated dissatisfaction, manage most effectively to avoid the heart ache of a truer love lost to the open grave and its handful of dirt. The gratuitous affair, or otherwise inexplicable devaluation of the beloved in a far better match, serves a similar purpose. A moment’s pain is traded against the horror of irreplaceable loss and grief further down the line.
Analyst HG Baynes gets to some of the underlying factors of our heroine’s attitude, her ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ mentality with its narcissistic preoccupation for all things bigger, better, brighter. Baynes describes such restlessness as ‘the provisional life.’ It is inculcated by early experiences of a mother who fills her child with apprehension. ‘Every attempt made to launch her [own] individual life [is] undermined by fear suggested to her by her mother.’ Such a pattern of mothering intrudes so vigorously into her daughter’s private life that she cannot enjoy or settle down with what she has since it is being eternally usurped, compared or spoiled. Mother is ‘a passionately interested eavesdropper in the erotic intimacies of her daughter.’ Nothing is allowed to be hers. Nothing is sacred. There is no privacy. So, of course she feels entitled to compensation kept safe from maternal intrusion by having it be firmly embedded in the safety of tomorrow, all too reminiscent of Dorothy’s longing in the Wizard of Oz.
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, its only a moment away…’
To invest in what she already has, her man and her little cottage by the sea, is to place her destiny in the service of the Self rather than in the service of the spell casting witch mother.
‘This means to be shaped and transformed by an unknown power’. This is the core of the neurotic fear of life, ‘that she might be seized, carried away and delivered over irrevocably to an unknown fate.’
The utter dread of such an eventuality must be defended against at all costs, just as strongly as the toxic domination of a possessive mother complex. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis she retreats into fantasy and magical thinking. If only this were a rarity. Sadly her wishes are those of everyone of us preoccupied with winning the lottery, having the ideal wo/man, the next house, the next car, the next gadget, the next ‘must have’ beauty product. It seems like rampant materialism, but is in the fact thinly veiled terror of being here, now.
