“Fairy Tale”

“ Fairy Tale” is a story about Ego. I was thinking about ego and all of its aspects and how it is continually referred to as perhaps the biggest obstacle on the spiritual path. At the same time I was reading fairy tales and the lessons to us as children about good and bad, foolishness and the perils and pitfalls which await when we do not heed our good sense and the wisdom of our elders. So I thought I would illustrate Ego through a tale about a greedy King whose only ambition was to enhance his own pride and glory by way of adding more and more gold on to his crown making it the greatest in “All the land”. He did this by having his men steal and pillage the gold in every surrounding kingdom to bring back to his castle and melt on to his own crown. It was never enough and so he ordered more gold every year to be stolen, brought back and melted on to his huge crown. The only time he took it off was so that more gold could be melted on to it, otherwise he was always seen wearing it, even to bed! The crown grew larger and larger but also heavier and heavier so that eventually his neck bent over and twisted making it so he couldn’t hold up his head. This caused him agonizing pain. Still the king refused to take off his crown and insisted that even more gold be melted over it, so that its gleam could be seen from many kingdoms away. One day, when he was giving orders for another raid of a faraway kingdom, the kings neck snapped and he died a cruel death.

Our ego always wants to be right and to enhance itself. Its opposite is humility. I thought one way to speak about humility visually is through the pie in the face. Although it is an old vaudeville shtick, it also, in a humorous way, stops the ego if only momentarily. “The Three Sisters from Auld” have all been pied and are stopped in their tracks unable to carry out their night at the dance. This is not necessarily evident through the work but this can act as a symbol of a path to free us from Ego for whomever can see it through that lens. The path of Ego will only lead eventually to isolation and suffering but the path of humility might have us seem foolish yet will redeem us eventually.

The masks are the “Fools that Watch”. They are all of us who witness this play of egoism and foolishness every day in so many blatant and subtle ways. We are all a mix of both. However in Fairy tales we need examples that leave no ambiguity. They become the universal warning posts learned as children which we can take with us through the rest of our lives.