Adapted from and with apologies to Oscar Wilde.
Every afternoon, when school was over, the children went to play in the Giant’s garden. It was a large, lovely garden, with soft green grass, blossoms like stars, and twelve peach trees that were covered with delicate flowers in spring and in autumn bore rich fruit. Birds sang in the trees, and the children laughed as they played.
One day the Giant returned from visiting his friend, the Cornish ogre. When he saw the children playing in his garden he grew angry.
“What are you doing here?” he cried, and shook his fist. Then he built a high wall all around it and put up official and threatening notices to…
Keep Out.
He was a very selfish Giant.
Soon, spring came. All over the country there were little blossoms and birds, but in the Giant’s garden it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing there, as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom.
The only ones who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried, “so we will live here all the year round.” The Snow covered the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he roared all day long and blew down the chimneys.
“I cannot understand why the spring is so late in coming,” said the selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden.
One morning he heard some lovely music. It was a little linnet singing outside his window. He jumped out of bed and looked out. Spring had come at last—but only into one corner of the garden. The children had crept in through a little hole in the wall, and wherever there was a child, there was spring. The trees were covered with blossoms, and the birds were singing happily.
But in one corner it was still winter. There stood a little boy who was so small that he could not climb up into the tree. He wandered round, crying bitterly, while the tree remained covered with snow and frost.
The Giant’s heart melted as he looked out. “How selfish I have been!” he said. “Now I know why the spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground forever and ever.”
He crept downstairs and went out quietly into the garden. When the children saw him, they were so frightened that they ran away. All except the little boy, who was crying so hard he did not see the Giant coming. The Giant took him gently in his hand and put him up into the tree. At once the tree broke into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it. The little boy stretched out his arms and kissed the Giant.
When the other children saw this, they came running back, and with them came the spring. The Giant knocked down the wall, and in the afternoon, when the people were going to market, they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.
All day they played, and in the evening the children went home. But the little boy did not return. The Giant looked for him everywhere, but he could not find him. He loved him best, because the boy had kissed him.
Years went by, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could no longer play, so he sat in a great armchair and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden.
One winter morning he looked out and saw the little boy again, standing under a tree in a far corner of the garden. The tree was covered with white blossoms. But the boy had wounds on his hands and on his feet.
“Who has dared to wound you?” cried the Giant. “Tell me, that I may take my great sword and slay him.”
“Nay,” answered the child. “These are the wounds of Love.”
The Giant knelt before him. “Who are you?” he asked with strange awe.
But the child smiled at the Giant and said, “You let me play once in your garden. Today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”
That afternoon, when the children came to play, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.
………………………………………
Sometimes stories tell us about what has happened. Sometimes they are about what’s needed. But what is it about an apology that makes it so necessary? Why should another’s contrition matter so much? Are we not grown-ups and responsible for our own reactions to life…?
Oscar Wilde’s story shows us that there is much more here than meets the eye, moral restitution certainly but also the healing of self-estrangement, a feeling of fulfilment and a sense of spiritual redemption.
Unacknowledged hurt not only leaves the wound open, it begins to deny its existence. Only the enlightened need no co-determinant of truth. The rest of us require some kind of mirror to our experience without which it is too burdensome to hold onto oneself and becomes lost. Restorative justice programmes like the Sycamore Tree Programme, where offenders learn about the impact of crime and may make symbolic amends including apologies, have been as successful as they are because they focus on the principle that personal stability and peace depends on whether you are square with the world. Participants have described the experience as life changing, citing a renewed sense of purpose and confidence.
Facilitation of such a programme is based on the understanding that witnessing and symbolic gesture fulfil a developmental need which has been internally walled off.. If a parent walls themselves off from the child, then the child will become walled off from their own emotional self, ‘by a similarly rigid and impervious wall.’ (Wright)
This walling off is, paradoxically, part of the instinct for self-preservation.. It operates to diminish dissonance and the epistemic anxiety of being out of step with a powerful other. Analyst Sandor Firenczi called it, ‘identification with the aggressor’, later developed by Fairbairn who emphasised that the assumption of guilt is protection from feelings of helplessness. Such a strategy is profoundly effective, agency is restored, but the price is self recrimination and being eternally out of kilter with yourself.
Reality is a consensual thing. Our earliest learning and instinct is to look for ourselves in the eyes of others. ‘The mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there.’ (Winnicott 1967) So, if what he sees is impassive, or dead, that’s what he takes himself for. Sense of self is rooted in what others mirror back to us which is why being isolated is so frightening. Without outer reference points one’s internal way markers are also lost.
This makes being at odds with one another rather loaded. Having your perspective challenged can feel as though reality as well as pride were at stake. Likewise, proper restitution can feel soul restoring as well as mere vindication.
Interpersonal reparation, the recognition of oneself in the other is, at one and the same time, an intrapsychic process. Each party walks away returned to latterly estranged aspects of themselves by the encounter. The plaintiff, by virtue of having their honour realised is given back value which had in effect been stolen. Remorse, however, gains far more. Conscience is not only unburdened but atoned. There is a new reality as well as a new perception because repair to the other also initiates into wider and more benevolent internal landscapes.
The experience of recognition is ‘to know again’. Its first linguistic cousin is ‘reconstrue’, sharing a grandparent in the old French, ‘reconuistre’, to acknowledge, to be real to the other. Being real to the other reconstrues the world into one now brighter, more solid underfoot.
From our story it is clear that apology is transformational as well as restorative. The selfish Giant experiences himself in a whole new way. He realises the winter of his discontent is of his own making. This embodied humility releases him from the icy grip of moral rectitude and superior unrelatedness into a burgeoning spring of shared meaning and enriched identity. The Selfish Giant is more than sorry, he has crossed a threshold in himself beyond which other people’s feelings are not just his responsibility but his treasure.
What if the selfish giant, whilst personified by Trump, isn’t actually something that infects and possesses us all in some measure? What if the answer was not so much to eject/impeach the man but to reflect upon how he is an emblem of our age, not an aberration at all but the logical conclusion and expression of something which runs through the soul Western Civilisation and has its say around the breakfast table as well as emanating from the halls of corporate greed. How might the echelons of power evolve if we collectively developed the habit of checking with ourselves to see if we are square with our neighbour. What if loving your neighbour as yourself were not so much a moral injunction as a whispered secret of happiness?
You must be logged in to post a comment.