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This was written around January 25th, 2004, and originally posted to my blog. It is a reflection upon a story that has been dear to my heart since I was a small child and which continues to echo throughout my life.
Through Transformation, Cross the Borderline*
or
Meditations Inspired by The Last Unicorn
I'm changing shape. This isn't the first time it's happened, but this is the first time I've been perfectly aware of it. In some small way, I'm choosing who I am instead of reacting to the things that are thrust upon me.
"Nikos himself never could turn a human being into a unicorn-- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after."
... "Yes," said the Lady Amalthea. "That is my wish."
But at the same moment, Prince Lir said, "No."
The word escaped him as suddenly as a sneeze, emerging in a questioning squeak-- the voice of a silly young man mortally embarassed by a rich and terrible gift. "No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice: not Haggard, but a king whose grief was not for what he did not have but for what he could not give. **
I just finished rereading The Last Unicorn, a story which means so much to me and never fails to make me think in new ways. I remember once that a counselor
of mine bade me name my favorite childhood story and then taught me how elements of that story manifested in how I see my own life. She was wise to do so, just as this story is wiser than I remembered and more than I hoped.
I can feel things changing all around me. I seem to be moving forward and nothing is touching me. This is not precisely true: it's just that things which have meant so much in the past no longer touch upon me as I sail toward the future. Previously, my mind has always felt so grounded. I was hemmed in on all sides by definition and other's desire, so much so that within I shrank from these strictures as bars and felt horribly trapped. But I have been freed by my own imcompetent magician, my bumbling will, and I have set forth once more into the Wood.
It has come to me that I am at a crossroads in my journey. I settled at this crossroads long ago, and I learned things from the people that have come likewise to where I sat at this juncture. Some of these travelers, these teachers of mine-- they've stayed and I've grown up friendships with them. The appearance of my small town also attracted the other sort: the thieves, and cutthroats, the touched, the mentally ill, and the world worn as towns are wont to do. They have become cumbersome and begun to hide the road. And I will not be trapped in a town of my own making; I will not be that girl out working her trade and losing a little of herself each day.
Again, I say, I am reminded that it is a crossroads which I face. The wind has changed, and I can feel in my bones that the time for a new life is coming. This knowledge is quietly growing in me, changing my behavior. I'm closing up shop, I'm preparing for this wind of utter change. I am preparing for and enacting the rituals of chrysalis. Even now, as I begin to change, I learn which of those never knew me as well as they thought and which ones will never recognize me again.
The unicorn touched him a second time, over the heart, letting her horn rest there for a little space. They were both trembling. Prince Lir put his hands out to her like words. She said, "I remember you. I remember."
"When I was dead--" Prince Lir began, but she was away. Not a stone rattled down after her, not a bush tore out as she sprang up the cliff: she went as lightly as the shadow of a bird; and when she looked back, with one cloven foot poised, and the sunlight on her sides, with her head and neck absurdly fragile for the burden of the horn-- then each of the three below called to her in pain. She turned and vanished; but Molly Grue saw their voices thump home into her like arrows, and even more than she wished the unicorn back, she wished that she had not called. **
People get lost and left behind, in the Wood, at crossroads. Stories diverge into separate and cohesive truths. This has happened to me-- as the unicorn, I have moved out of some people's stories and into other stories, and always I am my own story. I still have companions with me along the road, and I am glad for that. But I can't hobble myself to stay with those whose paths diverge from my own and who would keep me from moving at all and who would see me as other than I am. I am wiser than the mirror people put before their eyes, inside their skulls and facing in... even if I do sometimes get lost in illusion, I always find my way out again.
"I know exactly how you feel," Schmendrick said eagerly. The unicorn looked at him out of dark, endless eyes, and he smiled nervously and looked at his hands. "It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is," he said. "There is such misjudgement in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream." **
Yea also, though the landscape through which I walk may change, it is still peopled by rocks, trees, animals, and spirits who resemble those from before. Though your importance and seeming form may change, I do still move among you. There never will be a time when I can't recall what these things represent, or when you ask me that I won't know.
At last I think I am through begging others to drown out my dreams, through preventing myself from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. I am through allowing others to change my shape. I am moving freely and I am choosing my next form in a foreign land. May I have the strength to carry me through...for my quest has no end, only pages in a book that will come to an end in this physical world only to open in another.
* The title is a nod to a line from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem.
** Each of these excerpts, I feel, not only help further my point but say some things that I can't find better ways to say. All excerpts from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, of course.