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Heaven and Earth in Lazy Jack



A version of the story can be found here: http://www.authorama.com/english-fairy-tales-30.html


The story involves a lazy guy called Jack who lives with his mother. Eventually, she is fed up with his laziness and gives him the ultimatum: work for your keep or get out. So Jack goes off to work. There follows a week of him being paid, but every day losing his pay, and it is always in a consistent manner. For instance, he brings home a cat, but it jumps out of his hands. His mother scolds him and tells him he should have walked it home on a string. The next day, he is paid with a leg of mutton and drags it home on a string, ruining it. Things flip around the next week, however, for the last instruction his mother gave was to carry home the mutton on his shoulders. He is paid with a donkey, which he carries home on his shoulders. On the way, there is a girl who cannot speak or hear, and the doctors have said this will be so until she laughs, and her father has promised that whoever makes her laugh will marry her. The sight of Jack carrying the donkey sets her laughing, so she and Jack are married, and they live happily ever after (especially since the father is wealthy).


We can see the beginning of this story as a disconnected heaven and earth. Jack is not properly manifesting his role as man, and there is an intuitive feel that this is due to the absence of his father. When he does begin work, he cannot manage the fruit of his labour. He is a body without a proper identity, who cannot master the potential in his care.


Despite failure after failure, however, he keeps trying. When he finally succeeds, it is almost by accident. It seems to me that there is a strange pattern in the archetype of the fool, where they succeed only in a world so upsidedown that the seemingly craziest thing turns the world right side up again. When Jack carries the donkey on his shoulders, it shows that he has at last mastered his lower passions, since the donkey specifically represents the wild passions.


We see the opposite problem to Jack in the girl who cannot speak or hear. She has an identity from her father, but cannot express that identity in the world of manifestation. In a normal world, it might be expected that Jack would be providing an identity and the girl would be providing a body, but things are upsidedown here (the poverty in Jack and wealth in the girl is also the reverse of the usual pattern of wealthy prince and poor girl, eg Cinderella). And in an upsidedown world, the fool turns things the right way up, because the fool's job is to flip everything around. Jack has fixed one thing, and provides a platform for the girl to connect with earth, and laughter ends the old world.


Heaven and earth are finally able to meet properly, and the world returns to balance.

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