Skip to main content

The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship

A version of the story can be found here (a version of the story is also in Grimms Fairy Tales): https://www.worldoftales.com/.../Russian_Folktale_22.html...

The story starts out with the Tsar requesting a flying ship. This image puzzled me a great deal. However, I think it is something like the Tsar asking or looking for a kingdom, a vessel to hold his identity. A ship is generally feminine, and a flying ship is something like a very high version of the feminine.

Only a fool can construct such a ship, as the story shows. The reason is that such a kingdom must be able to contain the lowest and the highest.

The fool shows hospitality to the lowest person, and it seems that the old man was an angel, who in response revealed how to obtain a flying ship. The impossible task can only be accomplished with heavenly insight. Thus we have the fool, who is the lowest, reaching up to the highest.

The ship appears while the Fool was asleep, and in this respect is like the Elves and the Shoemaker: there is an implicit side to the making of the ship. That is, it is something to do with the flying ship requiring its appearance to be hidden.

If we are to think of a national body, it is mysterious in the way it comes together. Too much politicking, too much explanation does not build the body the way community ties do. The sleep of the fool seems to point towards this implicit, 'grassroots' and more mysterious side of how a body comes together. He merely gets the ball rolling by striking the tree with an axe.

The Fool is instructed to gather everyone he meets, and he meets those who represent the strength of the people. The ship has a lot of body by the end of the trip, being able to eat and drink insatiably, cover the whole world in a single step, move mountains, hear things on the other side of the world etc.

The story then focuses on a higher thing (the king) despising a lower thing (the ship of fools). The Tsar is too proud to accept the body he has been offered. He doesn't think his identity is worthy of it, and sets out to get rid of it by proposing a series of impossible tasks. The ship of fools accomplishes them all, until finally the Tsar sends out an army, which is then defeated by the army raised from the woodbearer's load. More particularly, we can see this as the Tsar subjecting the mystery of the flying ship, the feminine, to rationality, in an attempt to explain it (thanks to Lisa Parrott for this insight).

The story speaks to the problem when an identity asks too much, when the hierarchy overreaches. It is in this situation that the fool becomes king. In this, there are hints of Pharaoh and the Hebrews, and David and Saul.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of "The Language of Creation" by Matthieu Pageau

The problem we face today (and the problem that nearly all my reading, thinking and writing is centred on) is how to be the Church in the face of modernism. This was a really important book for me and I hope this essay goes some way to explaining why. I will say at the outset that I am simplifying here: pre-modern conceptions of the universe have persisted in the West, but nevertheless, the general trend has been towards abandoning such perspectives, and I am concerned with the overall downward trend, not exceptions. The general problem can be called scientism, that is, that matter is all there is, and thus the scientific method defines all there is to know. This is our basic outlook, and it manifests itself in many different ways, from ideologies as a concept, to consumerism and popular culture. In this way, all metaphysics, religion, spirituality and morality are seen as not based in material reality, and therefore not real, but rather imagined: they are social constructs, complet...
Post a Comment
Read more

My (current) map of reality

This is a highly condensed version of how my map of reality developed; much is left out, and clarity is sacrificed for a packed sentence. My journey began in a tradition that has a deep respect for scripture, especially interpreted 'materialistically' or 'literally'. While there's problems with this, it has the strength of honouring the word of God: I was never persuaded by liberalism, which thinks it knows better than the Bible. My thought has always been that if God has spoken to us through Scripture, perhaps he knows what it means and we don't always, and to hold something in contempt is to place yourself in a position where you cannot understand it. But before I get in really deep, I should explain the basic problem I had, which was essentially a feeling of cognitive dissonance with my experience of the world, knowledge of history, literature, art and science etc, and what the mainline reformed-evangelical protestant church (I will use the word '...
4 comments
Read more

Thinking imagistically

Icon of the Last Judgement by Fr. Luke Dingman Most of the time, we do not think using 'scientific', 'empirical' or 'rational' modes of thought: we do not think axiomatically or with pure logic. The reason is that such modes of approaching reality are extremely expensive: they require a lot of time, thought, rigor, training etc and most people do not have the leisure to learn to think in such ways. Instead, we mostly interact with reality in non-rational ways (not irrational): we attribute and assume cause and effect without 'scientific/empirical evidence'. That is to say, we use the language of story, symbol and imagination to approach reality most of the time. More than that, we make many decisions without fully thinking them through, that is, we make them according to habit or ritual or intuition. The reason, again, is that to think things through completely and in a fully rational way takes time, often more than a lifetime, because reality is comp...
Post a Comment
Read more